WASHINGTON,
D.C.
Largo Kealey didn’t recognize air travel. He didn’t even recognize the cab he was in, with video streaming into the backseat.
Arriving at JFK International, he felt like a two-liter bottle on a cola assembly line being shuttled along rollers to be filled and capped. He had bought his ticket online—he could do that—but he still went to the counter where he was told he could go right to the gate after listening to a series of questions that could not really and truly have been designed to ferret out terrorists. He waited in a long security line, even at this hour, since many European flights tended to leave late, he discovered. So did flights out west. So did flights with children, whose parents hoped they would sleep while airborne . . . because they surely weren’t in the line. He chose to be body scanned rather than patted down because at his age, what the hell were a few X-rays? He knew about taking off his shoes, expected to have to remove his belt with its big U.S. flag buckle, but he didn’t anticipate the hustling and banging he took at the end of the line while he tried to get his clothes, keys, overnight bag, comb, pen, and eyeglass case from the plastic bin. Of course, the scanner missed the plastic credit card he kept in his wallet, with one end sharpened to a razor-fine edge. Valley Stream had changed over the years, and a mugger trying to take his wallet would get, instead, a slit throat.
All of that was just the preamble to a hurried boarding that finally took place fifteen minutes before their scheduled flight time. Largo entered a small cabin with a seat that barely had a cushion or a recline or the width to accommodate anyone larger than a child. The overhead bin was full with someone else’s carry-on before he got to it, so he asked the stewardess for help. The flight attendant—she was no longer “a stewardess,” the young woman sitting beside him gently but firmly reprimanded him—hurriedly and with a tense smile offered to check his bag for him.
Largo said he would put it under the seat.
The flight attendant said it wouldn’t fit and she would gladly check his bag. The woman had a script from which she didn’t diverge.
Largo removed a sweater and tied it around his shoulders, over the sweater he was wearing. Now it would fit, he told her. She left—not to make the preflight announcements but to turn on a recording that did that while she mimed all the movements.
There were no earphones in the seatback. There were no beverages during the flight. The only thing that hadn’t changed in about two decades was the pilot still said “uh” every few words. When they deplaned after the short flight, Largo and the others were reminded to take their personal belongings. He wanted to ask what other kind there were—and decided he would take a train for the return trip. There
had
to be a more civilized way to travel.
There was no one waiting at the gate for him. He had to go to the baggage claim area to find Allison Dearborn. Where was the magic in that, the memories for kids waiting at the big windows, waving to the plane as their grandparents left or arrived?
“Didn’t Benjamin Franklin say something about the uselessness of sacrificing liberty for security?” he asked as he approached the paper with his first name written on it.
The woman holding it was a tall, slender blonde with hypnotic blue eyes. It was funny how Largo realized just then he’d become an observer of women, not as a shopper but as a browser at a museum. He was old and they were younger. Yet when he saw Allison, he was twenty years old again, seeing lovely young women in France and remembering his own beauty back home. How he so very much wanted to return to her and say that he was never tempted, even by the live-for-today Partisans who wanted him. He had always felt that so many of them wanted anyone who wasn’t German . . . wanted a Resistance fighter to rub away the stench of having been with the enemy.
Which was one reason he greeted her with a handshake and Benjamin Franklin: it spared him from possibly making a bigger fool of himself.
“Freud or Jung, I’m right there with you,” she said. “Founding Fathers? I’d have to cheat and look it up.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I made it, somehow, through the gauntlet.”
She offered to take his carry-on bag. He assured her he was fine. She turned and he followed.
“When was the last time you flew?” Allison asked.
“Let’s see. They were showing
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. On a TV suspended over the aisle.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. You were probably still watching cartoons.”
She smiled. “I did not see that movie on its first run, no.”
It struck Largo how tired he was as they walked toward the exit. He remembered how it used to be, long ago, gearing up for a mission and not realizing how much energy he’d expended until it was over and he crashed. They enjoyed a brief get-to-know-you talk as they went to the car, though Allison could see he was tired and, while not offering overt support, backed off pushing him too hard.
She drove Largo to the Archstone at the corner of First and M Street NE and showed him to the fourth-floor one-bedroom apartment kept by the Department of Defense. She had purchased some groceries, which she brought up with her: bottled water, fruit, crackers, instant coffee, microwavable biscuits and jam.
“I’ve cleared the morning schedule,” she said. “Call for you at nine?”
He nodded, and she hugged him lightly and left. When she was gone, Largo sat on the hard bed.
“Oh, God,” he sighed and shuddered into a gentle sobbing release of whatever was inside him that prompted him to make this trip. Missing his wife, missing his old life, missing a reason for getting out of bed when the sun rose.
He lay back and fell asleep with his extra sweater still tied around his shoulders. But he woke with the sun as he always had and was ready for Allison when she arrived.
CHAPTER 14
FÈS, MOROCCO
B
y the time Kealey arrived, the area around the school was blocked by police and firefighters. The school had been evacuated—without injury, it appeared, save for smoke inhalation, for which seven children and one teacher were being treated.
He paused and looked around. Kealey spotted Rayhan by his car, but not Yazdi. She was standing by the trunk, talking to a medical technician. Her hair was still down around her face, so he could not see her expression. Kealey noticed that there was blood on her blouse. He waited, wanting to make sure the medic’s suspicions weren’t aroused.
The young technician ducked his head down, looked up into the woman’s eyes, checked them, nodded, and headed back to the cordoned-off area around the school. He said something into the radio he was wearing and then left.
Kealey took a moment to place a call before jogging over. Rayhan was holding a cell phone—Yazdi’s, he noticed.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“They thought I might have been injured and in shock,” Rayhan said. “I assured them I was not.” She looked at her right hand. The palm heel was flecked with dry red spots. “I told them the blood belonged to someone I tried to help.”
Kealey didn’t bother reminding her that she did help someone: him. After a kill, the brain did not process information as it normally did. It shut down. It was literally drained by that moment of commitment when the body and brain teamed to override their mutual stop reflexes to pull the trigger or use the knife or detonate the bomb. In a terrorist, that decision was propelled by hate, an afterburner that mowed down all other considerations. In a rational human being the urgency of the moment served that function. The collapse of inhibitions left the individual drained of will and decision-making capability. Allison had told him that was the reason so many crimes of passion were solved quickly: the killer just sat there, unable to move after committing the crime.
Kealey knew that feeling. He had been there. All he could do was move Rayhan along until she got her feet back under her.
He took Yazdi’s phone from her, saw the photo of the van. There had been no messages since that one. They had his keys, and his car was still parked where they had left it. “Have you seen him?”
“No.”
Kealey looked around. The police were photographing the license numbers of the vehicles in the area. They would get to the bike Rayhan had taken. This would be connected to the dead man. Kealey and Rayhan needed to stay ahead of the local investigation. He didn’t want to have to put in calls to his INTERPOL contact again.
“We need to get out of here,” Kealey said. “When you can, charge the phones in the cigarette lighter.”
He put her in his car. There was a police helicopter in the air, but they wouldn’t have any idea who they were looking for—not yet.
“What about Yazdi?” Rayhan asked as Kealey stood looking at the road, planning their exit.
“I don’t know. He may be gone, imagining that we’ll just sit here and wait for him.” Kealey shut the passenger door and went to the driver’s side. He was angry at himself again. He’d let the bastard get away. This whole thing had slipped through his fingers like water. At least he knew which way the terrorist headed and he had the make of the car. He had sent the photos of the Daewoo to Clarke, followed by the images of the dead man. Something would turn up.
Kealey was about to get in the car when he spotted a familiar figure down the street. It was Yazdi. He was walking slowly so as not to attract attention. Kealey snapped his fingers at Rayhan to get her attention. “I need you,” he said and pointed at Yazdi.
Rayhan got out. Yazdi came to her side of the car. He glanced at her hands and clothes.
“I saw a body and police on the other side of the school,” he said. He noticed the gun bulging under Kealey’s shirttails. “Your doing?” he asked Rayhan.
“My doing.”
He didn’t have to ask if it was her first. The virgin blood was on her hands and the no-longer-a-virgin look was on her face.
“Where were you that you could see it?” she asked.
“I went where your colleague could not,” he answered. “Up into the minaret to try and see where our quarry was headed.”
“And did you?”
“If he was driving a silver Daewoo rather hurriedly, yes.”
Rayhan translated. Kealey asked, “Is he going to tell us?”
“No,” Yazdi answered, anticipating the question. “I will tell you as we go. And you will return my cell phone.”
Rayhan translated. Kealey hesitated.
“There may be other mosques you wish to enter,” Yazdi told him, “some of which place restrictions on women, segregate them.”
“No phone,” Kealey said.
Yazdi didn’t like that. “These people will not be attacking Tehran with the device.”
“These people will not be attacking anyone,” Rayhan said. She looked at Kealey across the car. “Let him walk after the Daewoo.”
Whatever latent anti-Iranian feeling lay deep inside Rayhan was not inside any longer. Kealey understood from her tone and from Yazdi’s stony reaction that she’d reinforced what he had said. Rayhan got in the car. Kealey followed.
So did Yazdi.
“Which way?” Kealey asked through Rayhan.
“Drive,” Yazdi said. “I will tell you as we go.”
Kealey didn’t trust him but he had nothing else at the moment. Just before starting the car, he had a message from Clarke.
THE DEAD MAN IS PROFESSOR
MUSTAPHA BOULIF, NUCLEAR
PHYSICIST. GOOD KILL. SUSPECTED
AFFILIATE OF TAHEHLIB GROUP.
LOOKING FOR AREA CONTACTS.
“What is ‘
Tahehlib
’?” Kealey asked.
“Foxes,” Rayhan replied.
“Mean anything to either of you?”
Rayhan translated. Yazdi said, “It’s not a real alliance.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that your poor superiors have bought a lie.”
“I still don’t understand,” Rayhan said. “What’s the lie?”
“Groups who name themselves after animals are not actual terror groups,” he said. “They are distractions. Decoys. They are two or three radical sympathizers who run around suspiciously and do nothing but tie up countless resources on your side.”
“This man meant to kill,” Rayhan said.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. We’ll never be sure.”
Rayhan felt a little ill. If this were true, killing a man was bad enough. Killing one who was no threat, merely bellicose, was worse. But real or not, he was allowing a terrorist to get away.
“How do you know these Foxes are not also members of other groups, groups who do
do
something?” Rayhan asked.
“Some are,” Yazdi admitted.
Kealey asked Rayhan what was going on. She held up a hand to ask him to wait.
“If the individuals were recruited as Foxes, then whoever did the recruiting may have been a terrorist.”
“That is also true,” Yazdi said. “Again, we will never know now. A skilled agent would have taken the man prisoner, not dispatched him.”
“I’ll remember that for next time,” she said angrily.
Yazdi snickered and Rayhan turned around. If he were trying to bait her, he’d failed. If you play this game you run the risk of injury. The blood on the side of her hand belonged to the man who was holding a gun on her partner. It did not belong to her. Kealey would probably tell her that made it a good afternoon.
Rayhan translated the conversation for Kealey, who took it in without comment. He started to pull out—just as a compact police vehicle drove up behind them.
“This is interesting”—Yazdi grinned as he turned and looked at the car. “I spoke to the local police when I left the mosque, said I might have a lead on the bomber. Maybe they’re coming over to talk? What if I tell them you’re an accomplice? Who will they believe, me—or an American?” The smile faded. “Give me the phone and my keys and I will tell them only about the Daewoo.”
Rayhan translated.
Kealey looked at Yazdi in the rearview mirror. He also saw two officers emerge from the vehicle.
“You won’t tell them anything,” Kealey said. “A few minutes ago I called my contact at INTERPOL. I told him I needed an escort out of the city. I sent him a photo of the Daewoo to forward to the police. I believe they’re here to help
me
.”
“I don’t believe you,” Yazdi said.
“I don’t care.”
Rayhan had been translating as he spoke, her mood brightening visibly.
The men walked toward the driver’s side. They were only a few feet away.
Kealey said to Yazdi, “You tell me where the car went or I swear to God I will tell them
you
are the accomplice.”
The officers reached the window. Kealey rolled it down. One of the policemen saluted. He spoke briefly.
“He wants to know where we would like to go,” Rayhan translated.
Kealey glanced at Yazdi in the mirror.
“Northwest,” the Iranian said to the officer at the window. “I believe it is the A2.”
The officer saluted again, and they went back to the car. Kealey rolled up the window. He did not look back again. He didn’t have to. Not every tactical play needed to end with an awl in someone’s neck.
Its siren breaking the quiet that had descended on the site, the police car made its way through the barricades, Kealey driving close behind. The showdown with Yazdi had been a small triumph, but right now Kealey would take that.
Kealey did not see Yazdi smile. At some point— very soon, in fact—they would give him back his phone. And his autonomy.
They would have to. It would be the only way they would be able to find out which information they were receiving was valid . . . and which was not.
And then, finally, he would have the device.