COLONEL STANLEY REICKEN, WHO HAD BEEN denying that his men ever fired on Iraqi insurgents in the middle of surrendering (“While I’m certain my men are innocent of these charges, at the same time, we want to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible, in order that . . .”), first learned of the photographs when he saw them on Al Jazeera television, at which time he told reporters they were fabrications, adding, “It’s simple to doctor photographs using computers these days—our people in counterintelligence do it all the time.” DeLuca would have slapped himself in the forehead if he hadn’t thought he’d pass out from the pain.
When the various experts began to authenticate the photographs, stating that they were images from the United States’ own satellites, Reicken called for an investigation into leaks coming out of the IMINT office, only to learn that the photographs had been made public by the judge advocate’s office, whereupon Reicken changed his tune and said that while he had no personal knowledge of the events transpiring at the house of Omar Hadid, it was his responsibility as commanding officer to make sure those who did know were held to account, no matter how high the rank.
Later that evening, Al Jazeera broadcast a tape recording, purported to be Reicken’s voice, saying, “I don’t give a shit what he’s waving in the air—I want the house taken down, do you understand, Captain?” Reicken denied that it was his voice, adding that it was as easy to edit and doctor a tape recording, taking words out of context, as it was to doctor a photograph, and who could believe anything they saw or heard on Al Jazeera anyway?
DeLuca had been working hard to get better ever since he’d read Gillian’s e-mail. He would grieve for her later, he decided, but for now, she was the inspiration he needed to get back on his feet and do whatever he could to give her death meaning. Thanks to her, the thing was real now. Nobody could dismiss what he was telling them or ignore him or write him off as some inexperienced Guardsman. The CIA had to listen now. CENTCOM had to listen. The Pentagon and the White House had to listen.
He was on his feet when LeDoux found him. He’d ditched his hospital johnny and was having some trouble getting his pants on when LeDoux walked in on him. He knew someone important was coming down the hall by the number of “Attention!”s and “As you were”s he heard.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Phillip asked.
“Mooning you, apparently,” he said.
“Get back in bed, and that’s an order,” LeDoux said. “Your doctor told me it would be two or three weeks before you’d be walking.”
“He told me that, too,” DeLuca said. “Phil, there’s no time. After we fucked up at Sinjar Jebel, Al-Tariq has gotta be moving up his deadline . . .”
“Sit! And don’t make me talk to you like you’re a goddamn guard dog. All right?”
“I’m really much better,” DeLuca said, sitting gingerly in the chair and grimacing slightly when he tweaked his neck. “Not quite at full speed, but it’s not a big deal.”
“I’ll let the doctors tell me how big a deal it is,” LeDoux said. “I suggest you do the same. Your friend Evelyn called me for a quote about Reicken.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said we were taking care of it. I didn’t tell you this but we were already looking at him for how he was handing out no-bid contracts to Halliburton for work at Anaconda, and elsewhere. He’s not the only one doing it, but it looks like there may be some quid pro quo involved.”
“Kickbacks?”
“Something similar,” LeDoux said. “It’s being handled. How did she get those tapes? What was this guy’s name? The one who made them?”
“Yaakub,” DeLuca said. “Richard Yaakub.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Not exactly,” DeLuca said. “I guess Evelyn’s powers of persuasion were better than his interrogators’. Can we talk about something that’s actually important?”
“I’m sorry about your friend Gillian.”
“She was brilliant,” DeLuca said. “In thirty years, I don’t think I ever once bluffed her off a hand. She beat me like a redheaded stepchild. So what’s happening?”
“Well,” LeDoux said, “thanks to her, I think we’re going to get the support we need. Don’t expect to see any of this in the papers, but things are moving. The people who matter are on this. What’s the word on Al-Tariq?”
“Still working,” DeLuca said. “We think the CI HQ thing is working, but it might take time. They want more from him. My boy Adnan lost his family—you don’t get more motivated than that. I’m meeting with him day after tomorrow.”
“You think he’s up to it?”
“He was undercover with the Republican Guard for years,” DeLuca said. “He thought we didn’t know. He knows the tricks. We make him an asset to them and they’re not going to look too closely at the rest of it. They might be paranoid, but in the end, everybody sees what they want to see. I don’t have to tell you that.”
“CI’s just a state of mind, right?” LeDoux said.
“He’ll come through,” DeLuca said. “He knows we’re in a hurry, but I don’t want to force it and tip his hand.”
“Speaking of force,” LeDoux said, “we’re looking at another option. We’re going back to Sanandaj. In numbers, this time. With permission from the Iranian government, by the way—they don’t like these guys any more than we do, but don’t be surprised when they bitch about the violation of their sovereign territories and the whole nine yards. We need family members to talk to us. Right now, it could be our best shot.”
“Not a problem,” DeLuca said. “Now that I’m a HALO expert.”
“David,” LeDoux said, “that’s not how we’re going, but more to the point, I’m sorry, but you’re not part of this. You’re not even supposed to be sitting in that chair, goddamn it.”
“You’re going to need somebody who’s been there before . . .”
“That’s not as high a priority as . . .”
“You can’t hospitalize someone against their will. Everyone has the right to refuse treatment.”
“Maybe in a civilian hospital, Sergeant DeLuca,” LeDoux said. “I’m not going to jeopardize the mission as a favor to you. Fair enough? Healthy, you’re the first guy I want, but injured, you’re a liability. I know that’s harsh. I’m sorry.”
At that moment, Captain Thomas appeared in the doorway with DeLuca’s chart under his arm. The doctor snapped to attention and saluted when he realized there was a general present.
“Doctor?” DeLuca said. “Just tell me something—what would I need to do to get out of here? You’ve got stronger painkillers than this, right?”
Dr. Thomas looked at DeLuca, then at the general, wary of coming between them in a dispute.
“Lift your arms as high as you can,” Thomas said. DeLuca complied. He wasn’t quite ready to do the wave yet, but he could get his hands up even with his ears. “Rotate your head as far as you can,” the doctor told him. “First to the right. Then left.” If he moved slowly, DeLuca could move his head with about 50 percent of the flexibility he’d had before.
“So?” DeLuca asked. Thomas put his hand on the back of DeLuca’s neck and pressed.
“The swelling is down, but it’s not gone. I could prescribe pills that will take the pain away completely,” Thomas said.
“But?” LeDoux said.
“But,” Thomas said, “you don’t necessarily want to be pain-free. People with back or neck injuries take pills that take the pain away and then they do more than they should, because they’re not feeling anything, and they reinjure themselves. You could be fine, or you could hurt yourself and be looking at anything from bed rest for a few months to being in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.”
“Well then it’s a no-brainer,” DeLuca said. “I go. Write the prescription.”
“Stop,” Phillip LeDoux said. He paused. DeLuca waited, knowing he’d pled his case and would have to abide by whatever LeDoux said. LeDoux knew it, too. “The mission is in three days. At which time we’ll review. In the meantime, David, you do what you can to rehab. And then we’ll talk. I meant what I said.”
LeDoux moved toward the door, then stopped.
“By the way—I got Sadreddin’s people on the governing council. Took a bit of doing. All but one. The rest checked out.”
“I appreciate it,” DeLuca said. “It’s going to pay off. How about Omar Hadid?”
“Not this round,” LeDoux said. “He’s second generation. I had a long meeting with him. I was impressed. I’d hate to play cards with that guy.”
“I have to call him,” DeLuca said. “His nephew’s doing great, by the way.”
“That’s good to know,” LeDoux said. “He’ll be happy to hear it.”
The general saluted them both, turned on a heel, and left, his departure accompanied by the same “Attention”s and “As you were”s that had attended his arrival.
DeLuca addressed the doctor.
“So can I go now?” he said. “Where do I get the drugs?”
“I at least want you to meet with a physical therapist to show you some exercises to help with your flexibility,” Dr. Thomas said.
“Deal,” DeLuca said.
DeLuca spent another day in the CASH and then checked himself out. He hated nothing more than wasting time. Given the scenario Kaplan had painted for him, that was truer now than ever before.
MacKenzie was in the team room. She looked surprised to see him.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“I was bored,” DeLuca said. He wore a foam collar around his neck that made him feel utterly dorky. Dr. Thomas had suggested a firmer plastic neck brace. The foam collar had been a compromise. DeLuca figured he’d wear it while he slept.
“You okay?” she said. “You need a back rub or something?”
“Muy bueno. Maybe later,” he said. “I just came from the physical therapist and I need to sit down.”
He grabbed one of the desk chairs and rolled his way over to her. He’d decided to take his pills in half-doses, to keep the pain level high enough to avoid being oblivious of it, but low enough to function. For now, it lent a certain stiffness to his bearing, and probably looked worse than it was.
“What have you got for me? Where’re Dan and Hoolie?”
“Waiting at the gate for Adnan and Khalil,” she said. “I think Adnan has something for us. He and Khalil are becoming quite a pair. It’s nice to see they don’t hate each other’s guts anymore.”
“There’s hope,” DeLuca said.
“How were you planning on getting together with them?” she asked. “The CASH was off-limits. And now you’re here . . .”
“That’s a good point,” he said, thinking. “I don’t want them to know I’m not 100 percent. Maybe the Oasis,” he said, referring to a spot in the middle of Camp Anaconda where a half-dozen hammocks had been strung between palm trees in a small grove that afforded the only natural shade on the base. There were lawn chairs, a card table, and a barbecue grill, too, an idyllic scene, if it weren’t for the occasional random mortar round that passed overhead.
“I’ll go make sure it’s available,” she said. “So do you want the good news or the weird news, or the weird weird news first?” she asked.
“Good, then weird,” he said. “Then I’ll see if I’m still in the mood for the weird weird.”
“Good news—remember I said I had the name of the only obstetrician working in the hospital where Al-Tariq was born?” she said.
“Where his birth records were missing?”
“Yeah, but it had to be this guy. Ahmed Shahab was his name. Still is his name.”
“You got him?”
“We got him,” Mack said, swelling with pride. “Dan and me. He’s in a nursing home in Kut. He’s eighty-three years old. So Dan and Hoolie and Smoky and I went and talked to him.”
“And?”
“He remembers the birth,” she said. “He said he delivered a lot of babies but this was the only one where there were men with guns waiting outside the delivery room. Al-Tariq’s family was powerful in that region—I guess the expectant poppa was expecting trouble, too. Anyway, Shahab was working under duress. And something happened all right.”
“Twins?”
“Yup,” she said. “The first baby, Mohammed, came out just fine, but the second, Dawud, was not okay. He was alive, but he was blue, with an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The doctor said Mohammed tried to strangle his brother in the womb. At any rate, infant Dawud spent too much time deprived of oxygen for Dr. Shahab to do anything about it. That meant an IQ of somewhere between sixty and eighty. Retarded, or whatever the politically correct term is for it.” She took a long pull on her water bottle. “Now you want the weird news?”
“Okay,” DeLuca said.
“So Dr. Shahab was Al-Tariq’s pediatrician, too,” Mack said. “He said this was something he knew he could never tell anybody, but now that the regime has fallen, he can talk. So when Al-Tariq is fourteen years old, he comes into the doctor’s office and the doctor diagnoses him with syphilis. How do you get syphilis when you’re fourteen?”
“Any number of ways,” DeLuca said. “Not all of them voluntary.”
“Father wheels the kid right out of the office and they never talk about it again.”
“They didn’t treat it?”
“No telling,” she said. “Shahab was afraid to bring it up again, and then they changed doctors.”
MacKenzie took another draw on her water bottle.
“Still want the weird weird?”
“Sure.”
“So Jaburi grew up in the United States, right?”
“Until his family moved back when he was fourteen,” DeLuca said. “The father had a mosque in D.C.”
“Well, close,” Mack said. “Jaburi’s family went back when Jaburi was fourteen, yeah, but his father sent young Mahmoud home two years earlier, when he was twelve, to begin his religious studies. So guess what old family friend the twelve-year-old Mahmoud stayed with?”
“Who?”
“Mohammed Al-Tariq and his family. Al-Tariq’s father and the Imam Jaburi were tight. Mahmoud Jaburi and Mohammed Al-Tariq were like stepbrothers.”
“Interesting,” DeLuca said. “Good work.”
“When you’re feeling better,” Colleen said, “would you tell me about your friend Gillian? She sounds like a remarkable person.”
“I’ll do that,” DeLuca said. “How are you and Dan . . . doing?”
“Good,” she said. “Did you know he’s engaged?”
DeLuca wasn’t sure what to say.
“I knew that,” he said.
“Thanks for not telling me.”
“How did you find out?”
“Have a look,” she said, taking the mouse to her computer, logging on to the Internet and clicking on a web page she’d bookmarked, a website dedicated to the forthcoming nuptials of Sergeant Danforth L. Sykes, Jr., and one Sidney A. Prescott, with a picture of the two of them smiling brightly and toasting each other with tilted champagne flutes. The exact date of the wedding wasn’t set, pending Sergeant Sykes’s return from the war in Iraq. “Don’t tell him. Apparently his bride-to-be is planning this as a surprise.”
“This is how you found out?” DeLuca asked.
“Dan told me, but this is how I found out—I already knew.” She spun around in her chair and looked at him. “I was just Googling him to pay him back after he showed me how he found my prom picture. Plus I found sixty thousand hits for Dan Sykes Senior—did you know Dan’s father is a senator?”
“I knew that, too,” DeLuca said. “He asked me not to tell anybody. He didn’t want any special treatment.”
They were interrupted when the phone rang: an MP, telling them there’d been an incident at the south gate. Someone named Khalil Al-Penjwin had been apprehended trying to sneak a bomb onto the base.
Mack drove. This time, DeLuca remembered to fasten his seatbelt. The gate was a hardened shed between the inbound and outbound lanes, ringed in concertina wire, where vehicles were forced to zigzag between pairs of thick iron rods set into the roadway, leaving no way for a speeding vehicle to crash through the barricade. Outside the gate, there was a truck, manned by MPs, where Iraqis could exchange weapons for cash.
Three MPs with rifles surrounded Khalil, who lay spread-eagled on the ground, face down, and one had his foot on the young Kurd’s neck. Hoolie was holding Smoky back as the German shepherd continued to bark at the man on the ground. Nearby, two MPs knelt on the ground, searching through the backpack that Khalil always carried, strewing the contents in the sand before them. Khalil was shouting something in Arabic. Dan was with Adnan and another MP, who held Adnan firmly by the arm.
DeLuca asked what was going on.
“Smoky started barking,” Dan said. “Right when these guys pulled in.”
DeLuca saw a beat-up black Mercedes parked outside the gate, a car that Khalil sometimes drove.
He crossed to where Hoolie was trying to restrain the dog. Vasquez told him they were about to bring Adnan and Khalil across when Smoky went ballistic and started barking. The MPs immediately searched the two Iraqis and found a quarter-pound of C4 plastique, attached to a detonating device devised from a car door opener. The MPs had been unable to find the sending unit that could have triggered the bomb. They’d disarmed the bomb as soon as they found it.
“They didn’t search his bag before they let him in?” DeLuca asked.
“I guess we vouched for them,” said Vasquez. “We said we were expecting them.”
“You guess?” DeLuca said. There was no need to criticize. He knew Julio was aware of what he’d done wrong.
He crossed to Khalil.
“For you—I bring it for you, Mr. David. Tell them. I’m your friend. I bring it for you. To show you.”
“Let him up but hold on to him,” DeLuca told the MPs, then went to see the IED they’d found in his pack. The chunk of C4 was slightly smaller than a cigarette pack. The door opener was something you could buy from any auto parts supply house, attached to a common nine-volt battery.
“What do you mean, this was for me?” he asked, returning to where the MPs held the smaller man. “You still hoping to collect the reward? Khalil?”
Khalil was terrified. DeLuca told Hoolie to take Smoky away.
“No no no, Mr. David—a boy gave it to me. I swear I swear. He found it on his uncle’s table. In his house. He was afraid.”
“A boy said, ‘Here, take this bomb and bring it to the Americans’? With a remote detonator on it? And you put it in your backpack, without knowing where the remote was? Whoever had it could have blown you up any time they wanted to. That’s just too stupid for words.”
“I don’t know. I am sorry. I thought I would show you. Maybe you could find who has done this.”
DeLuca crossed to Adnan.
“Did you know anything about this?” he asked.
“No, I did not,” Adnan said calmly. “He picked me up half an hour ago. This is first time I see this.”
DeLuca looked back to Khalil, then gestured for the guards to release him.
“You know what I think?” he said to Dan. “I think he’s telling the truth. It really is too stupid a story, so it has to be true. Khalil’s too smart to try something like this. But he is naïve. Load ’em up and bring ’em to the Oasis.”
“Whussup with that?” MacKenzie asked DeLuca when he got back in the Humvee.
“He was just bringing me a present,” DeLuca told her, climbing into the vehicle.
“You’re looking pretty spry,” she said.
“Adrenaline,” he told her. “Best painkiller in the world.”
At the Oasis, DeLuca eased himself into a lawn chair, just as Dan and Hoolie arrived with the informants. The slightest sliver of a moon hung in the sky. It would be gone soon, and when it reappeared, Ramadan would be over and a night of celebration would ensue, with much feasting and revelry. While DeLuca and the others got comfortable, Mack and Dan went to the mess hall and returned with a cooler full of soda, hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato chips. Khalil decided he’d try a hot dog, even though it contained pork. Adnan stuck to beef. They ate in a circle. Khalil described a wedding feast he’d attended as a child that had lasted for days. Adnan was more reticent, but that was nothing new. DeLuca could see, on Adnan’s face, the times he was reminded of the family he’d lost. DeLuca thought of Bonnie, wondering if he’d truly lost her, and then he thought of Evelyn and wished he could see her again, somewhere far from Humvees and Bradleys and young men risking and losing their lives.
“So Adnan, my friend,” DeLuca said, as the chit-chat dwindled and Hoolie lit a small fire, using the grill as a fire pit and igniting scrap lumber from a pile nearby, “tell me—what have you been up to?”
The night was supremely quiet, stars twinkling against a black canvas. DeLuca wondered how many of them were satellites.
“Mukhaberat,” Adnan said at last. “I think it still operates. The man I spoke with, after the bombing . . . I am sorry you lost your friends.”
“We gave you the location because we thought we could protect it,” DeLuca said. “We miscalculated. It’s not your fault.”
“The man said he wanted me to meet someone, so he took me. I was blindfolded, so I don’t know where, but he took me to Abu Waid.”
“And they mentioned Al-Tariq.”
Adnan shook his head firmly.
“They said I am not to mention this. Not to ask. I deal only with Abu Waid. If I ask who is above me or who is below me, they will kill me, they said. So that no one can betray the others. So I don’t know.”
“What does Waid think?”
“I don’t know,” Adnan said. “He wanted to know if anybody suspected I was the one who gave the information about the building. I said no, I was certain that no one did. He knew about that man, the one who was giving information . . . the American.”
“Richard Yaakub?”
“Yes,” Adnan said, “so I told him Yaakub was the one who was suspected, not me.”
“That’s good,” DeLuca said.
“He told me he had a special thing for me to do,” Adnan said. “I don’t know what. He wants to meet again tomorrow. I think this thing will happen soon. Whatever attack they are planning.”
“How soon?” DeLuca wanted to know.
“I don’t know, but they were saying, ‘Id Mubaraq.’ When they would greet each other, ‘Id Mubaraq.’”
“Which means?” DeLuca asked.
“‘Blessed Id,’ or ‘Happy Id,’” Khalil said. “It is how Arab people greet each other on ‘Id al-Fitr. The last day of Ramadan.”
“When was the last day of Ramadan? I thought it was still going on?”
“It is,” Adnan said. “So why do these men say ‘Id Mubaraq’? I don’t understand.”
“Because that’s the day,” DeLuca said. “That’s the day they’re planning to attack.”
“People say ‘Merry Christmas’ for weeks before it’s actually Christmas,” Dan said.
“Yeah, but they don’t say ‘Happy Birthday’ before it’s your birthday. Or ‘Happy New Year’s’ before it’s New Year’s Eve,” Vasquez said.
DeLuca looked up at the sliver of the moon and asked, “When is it, exactly?”
“Two days,” Khalil said.
“Do you agree?” DeLuca said, turning to Adnan. “Was that what you thought?”
“I think this could be,” Adnan said. “They gave me this and said to drink it. They told me that those who drink it will be well and have no reason to be afraid.”
He handed DeLuca a small glass vial of a pale green liquid. DeLuca held it up and looked at it against the illumination from a distant floodlight. It was clear, with a slight brown or greenish tint.
“You mind if I have somebody look at this?” he said. Adnan shrugged. DeLuca called Hoolie over and handed him the vial, pulling him down to whisper directly into his ear. “Get this to Dr. Kaplan at the CASH immediately. If he’s not there, find him. Tell him I think it could be the vaccine we’re looking for. I don’t care if he’s in the middle of open-heart surgery—tell him to drop what he’s doing and have this tested. He’ll know how important this is. I want to be notified as soon as he learns anything.”
Hoolie took a Humvee and drove off.
“Khalil has told me you wanted to know about Al-Tariq’s family,” Adnan said. “That you wondered if he had a twin brother. I think this could be so. I met a man once who worked in the household, a servant. He said he used to take food to a room, upstairs, where the door was never opened. He would take the food and slide it under the door. But he never saw who ate it. He believed it was a person, someone mutakhalef . . .”
“Retarded,” Khalil translated.
“Mu’aq, yes,” Adnan said.
“That is very interesting,” DeLuca said. It corroborated what Dr. Shahab had reported, the mentally retarded sibling, apparently kept in a room in the attic. A twin would be the perfect body double. What interested him more was this—he’d asked Khalil about Al-Tariq’s family, but he never asked anything about a twin brother.
So where had Adnan come up with that?
“Did you hear anybody talking about Alf Wajeh?” DeLuca asked. “Or maybe al-Hallaj?”
“No,” Adnan said. “I think tomorrow I will know if I am one of them. They are still suspicious, a little, but I think they will accept me.”
“Let’s hope,” DeLuca said.
Something else about the last day of Ramadan rang a bell, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He went to the team room, after the others had gone to bed, logged on and searched his files for the word “Ramadan.” He found it in an e-mail Walter Ford had sent him, a report containing a translation of a telephone call between Mahmoud Jaburi and his wife. Jaburi had said he would take his family sailing to celebrate the end of Ramadan. The safest place to be, once the plague hit, would be an island. Was that what Jaburi was doing? Was he moving his family to a safe place?
He e-mailed Ford and conveyed his suspicions, telling him they were thinking the attack could be planned for the last day of Ramadan, two days hence, and to follow up on the possibility that Jaburi was going sailing.
Not sure what island—Martha’s Vineyard? Nantucket? Something off the coast of Maine, like Monhegan? I could be wrong, but look into it. Find the boat.
David
While he was online, he received an e-mail from his brother-in-law, Tom, from his office at Homeland Security.
David,
I’m so sorry to hear about Gillian. Words fail me. Again. Her work was flawless. We’re on it. Expect potential vaccine in two to three months.
We also have a match on the face you sent me, the guy your boy Ibrahim was meeting with in Sanandaj. He is a former employee of the Biopreparat facility in Novisibirsk named Sergei Antonov, Russian/Muslim from Tajikistan, home town a few miles from the border with Pakistan. Believed to have worked with BW. Fired for spending too much time on the job praying. We might be looking at a disgruntled-former-employee/
religious-zealot combo situation. Antonov last reported in London. Will ask MI6 to pick him up.
The kids want to know when their uncle Dave is coming home. I suppose you’re wondering the same thing.
Tommy
He was about to log off when he saw the flag go up immediately on his e-mail box. He’d received a reply from Walter Ford, who’d written:
David,
I’m drumming my fingers over this one, but I gotta tell you, Jaburi’s not the guy. I had a talk with some people in Washington, and anyway, to make a long story short, I was wrong about Jaburi, so I’m off the job. Sammy and I are going fishing on the Cape. A little vacation would feel good, right now. You should call Sammy one of these days. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.
Walter
DeLuca read the e-mail twice to make sure he understood it. Walter was trying to tell him someone, probably the “people in Washington,” was watching his e-mail, so that he could no longer talk freely. He knew by the reference to “drumming my fingers” that Walter meant the opposite of what he was saying, because drumming his fingers was his poker tell, the thing he sometimes did, without knowing it, when he was bluffing. “I gotta tell you . . .” meant “I’m being forced to say this,” again probably by “people in Washington.” The reference to going on vacation and fishing was wrong, too. Walter Ford hated fishing, nor had Ford taken a vacation in forty years. “You should call Sammy” suggested he suspected his phones were being tapped, and that if he wanted to communicate, he should do so through their mutual friend, and he’d probably misspelled Sami’s name on purpose. The specificity of mentioning the Cape probably meant they really were going to the Cape.
A quick call to Sami confirmed his interpretation.
“I don’t know what he’s up to, but he told me to get my boat ready because he was going to take me up on that offer to go fishing,” Sami said.
“Didn’t you tell him he was the last guy you’d ever want to take fishing?” DeLuca said.
“Exactly,” Sami said. “This guy Timmons sounds greasy to me. Instead of saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, we got it covered,’ he starts waving his dick in the air.”
“I wish I could say you got nothing to worry about,” DeLuca said. “I got a few friends in high places, but not that many and not that high.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sami said. “We’re big boys.”
“Yeah, but they’re bigger,” DeLuca said.
Walter Ford was in his office when he received the report on Mahmoud Jaburi’s DNA. The report consisted of pages of numerical sequences in rows and columns that meant little to Ford, but the statistical analysis of those numbers was revealing. The results of the lab report had been broken down into seven files, with the note added: “Presume sample 1 is Mahmoud Jaburi. Cannot identify the other six.”
Other six?
“Where did you get this sample from?” O’Leary asked Ford. He’d driven to the local Stop and Shop to use the pay phone to call his friend at the FBI.
“A hairbrush,” Ford told him.
“From where—the locker room at the YMCA? This thing had seven different people on it. Who lets seven other people use their hairbrush? I’ll get back to you,” O’Leary said.
“It’s better if I call you,” Ford said. “How long do you think it might take?”
“Couple hours,” O’Leary said.
Ford knew only that Jaburi would be on Cape Cod, at the end of Ramadan. “On Cape Cod” needed some narrowing down. He asked for volunteers among his students to help him search property titles on the Cape. Nothing came up using the name “Jaburi.” His best student, Eli, suggested calling every house-cleaning service in the phone book, since Jaburi had asked his wife to arrange for having their summer place cleaned. When a Yellow Pages survey failed to produce results, Eli and his girlfriend and a couple of friends spent a Saturday visiting every village and laundromat bulletin board from Buzzard’s Bay to P-town, writing down the numbers of private entrepreneurs who’d put up signs advertising cleaning services. Sure enough, Eli eventually found a woman from Senegal who’d put up a sign in a laundromat in North Eastham. She said she’d received a call from a woman named Aafia Jaburi, who’d asked her to prepare a home in Wellfleet, on Nauset Road. She told Eli the address, after he promised to keep her name out of it, since she was technically an illegal immigrant working for cash only.
A call to the harbormaster in Wellfleet confirmed that a forty-four-foot sailboat, Aafia’s Ark, was registered to one Mahmoud Jaburi, who had a year-round slippage rented in Wellfleet Harbor. He also had private slippage at his home out on Indian Neck, across the harbor from the downtown area.
“Why two slips?” Walter asked him.
“I guess he keeps one in town for when he wants to sail across the bay instead of drive,” the harbormaster said. “Maybe he just wants a place to show off his boat—it’s a beautiful boat. Cherubini ketch, bronze hardware, teak decks, gorgeous brightwork. He’s a good guy. Solid taxpayer.”
“Yeah?” Ford asked. “How so? The ‘good guy’ thing?”
“Just in general,” the harbormaster said. “Tips the kids at the fuel dock. Files float plans when he’s going to be gone for a while so we can rent his slip out to the weekenders. That sort of thing.”
“Uh-huh,” Ford said. “He file one recently?”
“Let me look,” the harbormaster said. Ford could hear him shuffling through a sheaf of papers. His hunch was that if Jaburi made a practice of filing float plans, he wouldn’t vary his routine now, lest that raise suspicions. He was right.
“Yup,” the harbormaster said. “He left this morning. Due back . . . that’s funny.”
“What’s funny?” Walter said. “Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?”
“Funny peculiar,” the harbormaster said. “It’s just that he left the return date open. Maybe he didn’t know and he was going to call it in later.”
“He say where he was going?”
“Well,” the harbormaster said, sounding puzzled. “Nowhere around here, I can tell you that. Just the coordinates—39.70 north and 44.28 east. That’s about due east from here, but . . . Jesus, 44 east is halfway around the world. He must have meant west, which is . . . hang on . . . halfway to the Azores. That can’t be right. Huh.”
“Because why?”
“Well, that boat’s not weighted for open ocean,” the harbormaster said. “Last I heard, anyway. Sailing to the Azores is not exactly a family outing.”
“Just out of curiosity, where exactly is the first place you said, whatever it was?” Walter asked.
“Let me get my atlas,” the harbormaster said. Ford heard a further shuffling of papers, pages turning. It took the harbormaster a few minutes before he came back on the line.
“Well,” he said, laughing. “Either the guy is making a joke or he thinks the world is ending.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because 39.70 north and 44.28 east are the latitude and longitude for Mount Ararat.”
“Thanks for your help,” Ford said.
He called Sami, who said he could have his boat ready in fifteen minutes. With traffic, it was four hours to Wellfleet by car or two by boat, and Walter didn’t think he had that much time to spare.
Sami ran flat out, glad that he’d gone ahead and had a new diesel engine put in before he’d deployed to Iraq. He’d figured he’d find a way to pay for it when he got back. The new engine was a 635 HP Cummins electronic diesel with less than two hundred hours on it, still in its first service interval and under warranty. The new engine’s 635 horsepower drove The Lady J as fast as any in the sports-fishing charter fleet, while its large beam made it a well-behaved vessel even in heavy seas. All the same, Walter found the four- to six-foot swells of Cape Cod Bay to be nauseating, the problem only slightly ameliorated by the Dramamine patches Sami kept on board for his seasick customers.
They passed the P-town ferry where it turned toward Wood End Light and steered a course to the southeast, rounded Chequesett Point and headed north into Wellfleet Harbor. Walter had used Sami’s cell phone to call the local sheriff, who met them on the dock, which would have been difficult to find from the sea without his assistance. He told them Jaburi’s summer house was all closed up.
“No sign of anybody around,” he said.
“Did you look inside?” Ford asked.
“We’d need a search warrant for that,” the sheriff said.
“Of course we would,” Ford said. “Unless we thought someone inside might be injured.”
“That would, of course, be the exception,” the sheriff agreed.
“Somebody hurt so bad that they’re unable to call for help,” Sami said.
“You guys have reason to think that might be the case?”
“Well, I don’t hear anything,” Sami said.
“Neither do I,” Ford said.
“We’d better have a look inside, then,” the sheriff said.
The house was a red cedar-sided cottage with white trim, with cedar shakes on the roof, a deck, and a manicured lawn where the dune grasses and beach plums left off, with beds of tiger lilies bobbing in the wind. They looked in vain for a spare key, then broke a pane in the door to the kitchen and let themselves in. Everything inside was tidy, the beds made, nothing in the refrigerator that looked like it was going to spoil or go bad soon. The trash outside the kitchen door contained the shuckings from sweet corn and lobster shells that stank as only lobster shells could. It looked like the Jaburi family had had one last shore dinner.
Upstairs, on a shelf above the bathroom sink, Ford found four small vials of a clear, slightly brown liquid. He put them in a ziplocked evidence bag, put that bag in another bag, put those two in a third, wrapped a large pillow around the vials and tied the pillow tight with a pair of shoelaces he took from shoes in the closet, inserted the pillow inside four sealed garbage bags and placed the entire package inside a garbage can, which he sealed with duct tape. He wasn’t sure, of course, what could be in the vials, but he had an idea that it could be something very bad.
Sami had searched the car in the driveway, a new-model Cadillac that was clean, save for two pieces of evidence. The first was a small strip of paper, about six centimeters long and a centimeter wide, perforated at one edge with holes punched every half inch or so, which he found beneath the accelerator, as if it had been stuck to the bottom of the driver’s shoe. Walter said it looked, to him, like the end strip from a Federal Express shipping invoice. The second piece of evidence he’d found was the plastic case for a .38-caliber Colt automatic, which Sami had found under the driver’s seat. Empty.
Walter and Sami stood on the deck, where they were joined by the sheriff. The sun was setting in the west, the sky a riot of reds, oranges, and pinks blazing on the horizon. A dozen seagulls had landed on the lawn, which Sami said meant bad weather was coming.
“Look,” Ford said to the sheriff, a man named Svoboda. “I appreciate your help here, but given that I don’t have any jurisdiction, I’m going to need a little more help, I’m afraid.”
“Just tell me what you need,” the sheriff said.
“First,” Ford said, “we’re going to need the phone records of all calls going in or out of here for the last month or so at least.”
“Not a problem,” the sheriff said.
“Second,” Ford said, “I don’t want to worry you, but you’re going to have to call your wife and tell her you’re not coming home. I gotta go inside and make some calls, but before I do, I’m really sorry, but we’re all quarantined. Nobody leaves until we get the all-clear, but I’m sure that we will, so as I said, don’t worry about it. There’s beers in the fridge if anybody wants one. I’ll be out after I make my calls.”
Inside the house, he called the New York Homeland Security office, where he informed Tom Miecowski of what he’d learned and what he’d been up to. He called the Centers for Disease Control and explained the situation, that he might have exposed himself to a biological warfare weapon, and he gave them the location where they could find him. He gave the same information to the Boston FBI office, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Then he called David DeLuca, reaching his voice mail, and told him if it was at all possible, that maybe he could have Scottie send one of his satellites over that part of the Atlantic Ocean to help look for a forty-four-foot sailboat named Aafia’s Ark, make Cherubini, color white, two masts, main and mizzen, three sails including the jib, teak decks, and bronze metal stuff, if that helped, currently within one day’s sail from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, somewhere out there in the big blue ocean, but maybe Scottie could help narrow it down a bit. Finally, he called his wife, Martha, and told her not to wait up for him because he wasn’t going to be able to make it home tonight. After he hung up, he uttered a brief prayer, hoping he’d be well enough to see her one last time before the disease took him, if that was what fate had in store for him.
Before he made any of these calls, he’d dialed *69 on Jaburi’s phone. The last call Jaburi had received came from a number in Virginia, at 703-482-0623. When Ford dialed it, a receptionist answered with the words, “Central Intelligence Agency, may I help you?”
DeLuca slept fitfully and woke when he felt someone gently jostling him. He opened his eyes and saw Dan standing next to him.
“Hey, Chief,” Dan said. “I woulda let you sleep but you said you wanted to hear as soon as we heard from Kaplan.”
DeLuca sat up, surprised to discover, after a few moments, that his neck actually felt better. He looked at his watch. It was 0900 hours. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept that long. He looked at his sat phone and realized it had come unplugged from its recharger while he slept. He cursed, plugging it back in. Goddamn technology. He’d missed three calls while he slept. Before he checked his messages, he read the note that Dan had brought him. It was from Kaplan. The note said:
Mr. David. Sorry. Your “vaccine” sample is nothing more than green tea. They say it’s good for you, but it’s not going to stop a plague, I’m afraid. Keep me informed.
Kaplan
It made sense. If Al-Tariq were supplying a thousand agents with what they understood to be a deadly toxin, then the more people involved, the greater the odds that one of them was going to lose his or her courage. Give them what they think is an antidote, tell them they’re not going to be hurt, and they’re going to feel invulnerable.
“By the way,” Dan said. “FYI, you know how I said I was getting out, as soon as my two years are up?”
“Yeah?” DeLuca said.
“Well, that’s changed,” Dan said. “I’m reenlisting.”
“May I ask why?” DeLuca asked.
“The way I see it,” Sykes said, “I can do more good here than I could anywhere else. For now, anyway.”
“That’s how I saw it, too,” DeLuca said.
“My old man’s gonna shit the bed when I tell him.”
“How about your fiancée—what’s she going to say?”
“I already told her,” he said. “She dumped me.”
“I’m sorry,” DeLuca said.
“I was, too, at first,” Dan said. “But then I thought, what kind of person would break up with somebody because they’re doing what they love? Not to mention something that’s really important. What kind of love is that? How small can you be?”
“I know what you mean,” DeLuca said. “But it’s not small. It’s just big in a different context.”
The first missed call was from Walter Ford, who told him Jaburi was on a sailboat somewhere within one day’s sail of Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Walter wondered if they could get any help finding the boat with some of those satellites the army had up there.
When DeLuca called Sami’s number, an FBI agent named Peterson answered the phone, explaining that Mr. Jambazian was unavailable. DeLuca identified himself and told Peterson Ford and Jambazian were working for him. Peterson said Ford, Jambazian, and a local sheriff named Svoboda had been quarantined in a mobile CDC decontamination and isolation unit while tests were being conducted. DeLuca was horrified—what had he exposed his friends to?
“They seem healthy, but we’re going to have to wait and see,” Peterson continued. Peterson’s superior, a doctor named Colonel Seligson, told DeLuca they’d found four small sealed vials in the bathroom of Jaburi’s house.
“About the size of a tube of Chapstick?” DeLuca said. “Clear brownish-green liquid? Black screw on cap?” Seligson said yes to all three questions. “It’s tea. Check to see if it’s green tea. It’s a placebo. Jaburi didn’t bother with it because he knows it doesn’t work. Tell Walter to call me when he’s out of quarantine. And tell him I’m calling Scott now.”
Scott agreed to talk to his superiors at Image Intelligence immediately about Walter’s request. It was only a question of what satellites were available and how long it would take to reposition them. There were G-Hawks in Washington, D.C., and a few down in Florida, but they weren’t designed to get anywhere quickly.
The second call in DeLuca’s voice mailbox was from Evelyn.
“Hello, David, Warner here in sunny Basra, checking in. How are you? I hope you’re well. I’m quite looking forward to seeing you again. I know you’re busy, but if you could find the time, could you call me and help me with a story I’m doing on that terrible bombing at CI headquarters. I don’t think you chaps have gotten anywhere near your due, so, I thought I might write obituaries for your friends, if that’s possible. I think the world should know what they did and what they died for—you chaps really are the only ones actually winning hearts and minds, as far as I can see, and I’m not just blowing smoke up your arse saying that. Know you’re busy, but call me when you get a chance. You have my number.”
DeLuca felt bad, but there was no way around it. Someday, the story would come out, but until then, he had to let her swing in the wind.
The last call in his mailbox was from Adnan, who wanted DeLuca to call him immediately. He left a number. He had something urgent to discuss.
“I told him who you are and what you have done,” Adnan said.
“You told who?”
“Abu Waid,” Adnan said. “He wants to meet with you. Just you. Not with a convoy to come to him. The others would know he is doing this and they would kill him. I can take you to him, though. I told him I could do this.”
“Why does he want to meet with me?”
“He will give Al-Tariq to you,” Adnan said. “He said he would do this. He knows that Al-Tariq is crazy. So he will give him to you, to stop this thing. We must move quickly.”
“What does he want in return?” DeLuca asked.
“He wants to be governor of Irbil. I told him you were the one who got Imam Sadreddin’s men on the governing council. I told him you were a powerful man in the occupation. Can you do this?”
“Of course I can do this,” DeLuca lied. “That’s the deal? Al-Tariq in exchange for the governorship of Irbil? Tell him I will meet with him. And that I would like it to be soon. Today.”
“I will tell him,” Adnan said.
At sea, 150 miles east of Cape Cod, Mahmoud Jaburi stood the night watch. It was a calm evening, and there was little to attend to, the boat adrift, with a mild breeze blowing down from the north, suggesting that the first storm of autumn was approaching. There were things he needed to do to get ready, so he placed a bookmark in the book he was reading (Moby Dick, for the third time) and moved to the barbecue grill at the taffrail. There, he removed twenty-four receipts from his briefcase, Federal Express “sender’s copy” invoices, which he placed in the grill. He turned on the propane, pressed the ignition button, and burned the receipts.
He watched the flames. When the flames died, he dumped the ashes in the Atlantic, and then the only light onboard was the glow from the old-fashioned brass oil lantern he used to read by, and not another light or human being in sight, in any direction. This was what he liked about the sea, what Melville and Captain Ahab seemed to understand, the way the sea returned man to his original world, where he could be alone and face to face with God in the most intimate of ways. The only evil at sea was the evil you brought with you in your heart (Ishmael understood this), but at sea, where there were no temptations, that evil had no power.
He looked at his compass to locate where Mecca was, said one last evening prayer, then went below, to where his family slept. They’d had a great day, even managed to chase a whale for a few leagues before the beast submerged and lost them. His children looked so peaceful. He went to the galley, where he’d left the gun he’d bought, then returned to the cabin where his children were. Using a pillow for a silencer, he put the barrel of the gun to his son Asgher’s temple and pulled the trigger. When nothing happened, he chided himself for failing to chamber a round, did so, then fired a shell into his son’s brain. He quickly did the same to his daughter, Nesreen. The noise woke Aafia up, causing her to come running. He let her see what had happened, because she needed to understand, then fired a bullet into the back of her head.
He could not explain to them the suffering they were avoiding, but he would do so when he met them again in Paradise, and they would thank him.
Few people truly understood how large the ocean was, and how much of the world was covered by water, and how hard it was to search for something on the sea, even something as large as a forty-four-foot sailboat, even with the latest satellite technology. Scott DeLuca had been watching his screen for over an hour, patched into an old NSA Lacrosse bird that, for the last fifteen years, had been tasked to watch for Soviet nuclear submarine traffic. All the registered ships in the North Atlantic quadrant could be accounted for, a fleet of purse seiners out of Gloucester, the Coast Guard cutter Cuttyhunk on its regular patrol, a number of private boats, but nothing remarkable. Then he saw something of possible interest, a sudden flare of light and heat in an otherwise cool, dark sea, in the approximate area where Ford had asked him to look. Scott marked the spot, to have a closer look at first light, and then, on a hunch, called the Pentagon to ask them to launch a G-Hawk to make a flyover. It would take a few hours for the UAV to arrive on scene, but it could be worth it.