THE RENDEZVOUS took place as planned. There were three vehicles, each with a driver who spoke scarcely a word, and that in Spanish. The drive was pleasant, and distantly reminiscent of home. The driver was cautious; he didn’t speed or do anything else to attract attention, but they moved right along in any case. Nearly all of the Arabs smoked cigarettes, and exclusively American brands, like Marlboro. Mustafa did as well, and wondered—as had Mohammed before him—what the Prophet would have said about cigarettes. Probably nothing good, but he hadn’t said anything, had he? And so, Mustafa could smoke as much as he wished. The issue of dangers to his health was a distant concern now, after all. He expected to live another four or five days, but little more than that, if things went according to plan.
He’d expected some excited chattering from his people, but there was none. Hardly anyone spoke a word. They just looked blankly out at the passing countryside, speeding past a culture about which they knew little, and they would not learn more.
“OKAY, BRIAN, here’s your carry permit.” Pete Alexander handed it over.
It might as well have been a second driver’s license, and it went into his wallet. “So, I’m street-legal now?”
“As a practical matter, no cop is going to hassle a Marine officer for carrying a pistol, concealed or not, but better to dot the I’s and cross the T’s. You going to carry the Beretta?”
“It’s what I’m used to, and the fifteen rounds make for security. What am I supposed to carry it in?”
“Use one of these, Aldo,” Dominic said, holding up his fanny pack. It looked like a money belt, or the kind of pouch used more often by women than by men. A pull on the string ripped it open, and revealed the pistol and two extra magazines. “A lot of agents use this. More comfortable than a hip holster. Those can dig into your kidneys on a long car ride.”
For the moment, Brian would tuck his into his belt. “Where to today, Pete?”
“Back to the mall. More tracking drills.”
“Great,” Brian responded. “Why don’t you have invisibility pills?”
“H. G. Wells took the formula with him.”
CHAPTER 9
GOING WITH GOD
JACK’S DRIVE to The Campus took about thirty-five minutes, listening to NPR’s Morning Edition all the way because, like his father, he didn’t listen to contemporary music. The similarities with his dad had both vexed and fascinated John Patrick Ryan, Jr., throughout his life. Through most of his teenage years, he’d fought them off, trying to establish his own identity in contrast to his button-down father, but then in college he had somehow drifted back, hardly even noticing the process. He’d thought he was just doing the sensible thing, for instance, to date girls who might be good wife candidates, though he’d never quite found the perfect one. This he unconsciously judged by his mom. He’d been annoyed by teachers at Georgetown who said he was a chip off the old block, and at first taken some offense at it, then reminded himself that his father wasn’t all that bad a guy. He could have done worse. He’d seen a lot of rebellion even at a university as conservative as G-Town, with its Jesuit traditions and rigorous scholarship. Some of his classmates had even made a show of rejecting their parents, but what asshole would do something like that? However staid and old-fashioned his father surely was, he’d been a pretty good dad, as dads went. He’d never been overbearing and let him go his own way and choose his own path . . . in confidence that he’d turn out okay? Jack wondered. But, no. If his father had been that conspiratorial, Jack would have noticed, surely.
He thought about conspiracy. There had been a lot of that in the newspapers and pulp-book media. His father had even joked more than once about having the Marine Corps paint his “personal” helicopter black. That would have been a hoot, Jack thought. Instead, his surrogate father had been Mike Brennan, whom he’d regularly bombarded with questions, many of them about conspiracy. He’d been hugely disappointed to learn that the United States Secret Service was one hundred percent confident that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated Jack Kennedy, and all by himself. At their academy at Beltsville, outside Washington, Jack had held, and even shot, a replica of the 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that had taken the former President’s life, and been fully briefed on the case—to his own satisfaction, if not that of the conspiracy industry that so fervently and commercially believed otherwise. The latter had even proposed that his father, as a former CIA official, had been the final beneficiary of a conspiracy that had gone on for at least fifty years for the express purpose of giving CIA the reins of government. Yeah, sure. Like the Trilateral Commission, and the World Order of Freemasons, and whoever else the fiction writers could make up. From both his father and Mike Brennan, he’d heard a lot of CIA stories, few of which bragged on the competence of that federal agency. It was pretty good, but nowhere near as competent as Hollywood proposed. But Hollywood probably believed that Roger Rabbit was real—after all, his picture had made money, right? No, the CIA had a couple of profound shortcomings . . .
. . . and was The Campus a means of correcting them . . . ? That was a question. Damn, Junior thought, turning onto Route 29, maybe the conspiracy theorists might be right after all . . . ? His own internal answer was a snort and a grimace.
No, The Campus wasn’t like that at all, not like the SPECTRE of the old James Bond movies, or the THRUSH of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. reruns on Nick at Nite. Conspiracy theory depended on the ability of large numbers of people to keep their mouths shut, and as Mike had told him so many times, Bad Guys couldn’t keep their mouths shut. There were no deaf-and-dumb people in federal prisons, Mike had told him many times, but criminals never quite figured that one out, the idiots.
Even the people he was tracking had that problem, and they were, supposedly, smart and highly motivated. Or so they thought. But, no, not even they were the Bad Guys of the movies. They needed to talk, and talking would be their downfall. He wondered which it was: Did people who did evil things need to brag, or did they need others to tell them they were doing good in some perverse way upon which they all agreed? The guys he was looking at were Muslims, but there were other Muslims. He and his father both knew Prince Ali of Saudi Arabia, and he was a good guy, the guy who’d given his dad the sword from which he’d gotten his Secret Service code name, and he still stopped by the house at least once a year, because the Saudis, once you made friends with them, were the most loyal people in the world. Of course, it helped if you were an ex-President. Or, in his case, the son of a former President, now making his own way in the “black” world . . .
Damn, how will Dad react to this? Jack wondered. He’s going to have a cow. And Mom? A real hissy fit. That was good for a laugh as he turned left. But Mom didn’t need to find out. The cover story would work for her—and Grandpa—but not for Dad. Dad had helped set this place up. Maybe he needed one of those black helicopters after all. He slid into his own parking place, number 127. The Campus couldn’t be all that big and powerful, could it? Not with less than a hundred fifty employees. He locked his car and headed in, remarking to himself that this every-morning-to-work thing sucked. But everybody had to start somewhere.
He walked in the back entrance, like most of the others. There was a reception/security desk. The guy there was Ernie Chambers, formerly a sergeant first class in the 1st Infantry Division. His blue uniform blazer had a miniature of the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, just in case you didn’t notice the shoulders and the hard black eyes. After the first Persian Gulf War, he’d changed jobs from grunt to MP. He’d probably enforced the law and directed traffic pretty well, Jack thought, waving good-morning at him.
“Hey, Mr. Ryan.”
“’Morning, Ernie.”
“You have a good one, sir.” To the ex-soldier, everybody was named “sir.”
IT WAS two hours earlier outside Ciudad Juárez. There, the van pulled into a vehicle-service plaza and stopped by a cluster of four other vehicles. Behind them were the other minivans who’d followed them all the way to the
American border. The men roused from their sleep and stumbled into the chill morning air to stretch.
“Here I leave you, señor,” the driver said to Mustafa. “You will join the man by the tan Ford Explorer. Vaya con Dios, amigos,” he said in that most charming of dismissals: Go with God.
Mustafa walked over and found a tallish man wearing a cowboy-type hat. He didn’t appear very clean, and his mustache needed trimming. “Buenos dias, I am Pedro. I will be taking you the rest of the way. There are four of you for my vehicle, yes?”
Mustafa nodded. “That is correct.”
“There are water bottles in the truck. You may wish to have something to eat. You can buy anything you like from the shop.” He waved to the building. Mustafa did, his colleagues did much the same, and after ten minutes they all boarded the vehicles and headed out.
They went west, mostly along Route 2. Immediately, the vehicles broke up, no longer “flying formation,” as it were. There were four of them, all large American-made SUV-TYPE vehicles, all of them coated with a thick coating of dirt and grit so that they did not appear new. The sun had climbed above the horizon to their rear, casting its shadows onto the khaki-colored ground.
Pedro appeared to have spoken his piece back at the plaza. Now he said nothing, except an occasional belch, and chain-smoked his cigarettes. He had the radio on to an AM station, and hummed along with the Spanish music. The Arabs sat in silence.
“ HEY, TONY,” Jack said in greeting. His workmate was already on his workstation.
“Howdy,” Wills responded.
“Anything hot this morning?”
“Not after yesterday, but Langley is talking about putting some coverage on our friend Fa’ad—again.”
“Will they really do it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. The Station Chief in Bahrain is saying that he needs more personnel to make it happen, and the personnel weenies at Langley are probably batting that back and forth right now.”
“My dad liked to say that the government is really run by accountants and lawyers.”
“He ain’t far wrong on that one, buddy. God knows where Ed Kealty fits in that, though. What does your dad think of him?”
“Can’t stand the son of a bitch. He won’t talk in public about the new administration because he says that’s wrong, but if you say something about the guy over dinner, you might end up wearing your wine home. It’s funny. Dad hates politics, and he really tries hard to keep his cool, but that guy is definitely not on the Christmas card list. But he keeps it quiet, won’t talk to any reporters about it. Mike Brennan tells me the Service doesn’t like the new guy, either. And they have to like him.”
“There are penalties for being a professional,” Wills agreed.
And then Junior lit up his computer and looked at the night traffic between Langley and Fort Meade. It was a lot more impressive in its volume than its content. It seemed that his new friend, Uda, had—
“Our pal Sali had lunch with somebody yesterday,” Jack announced.
“Who with?” Wills asked.
“The Brits don’t know. Appears Middle Eastern, age about twenty-eight, one of those thin—well, narrow—beards around the jawline, and mustache, but no ident on the guy. They spoke in Arabic, but nobody got close enough to overhear anything.”
“Where’d they eat?”
“Pub on Tower Hill called ‘Hung, Drawn and Quartered. ’ It’s on the edge of the financial district. Uda drank Perrier. His pal had a beer. And they had a British plough-man’s lunch. They sat in a corner booth, made it hard for whoever was watching to get close and listen in.”
“So, they wanted privacy. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad guys. Did the Brits tail him?”
“No. That probably means a single-man tail on Uda?”
“Probably,” Wills agreed.
“But it says they got a photo of the new guy. Not included in the report.”
“It was probably someone from the Security Service—MI5—doing the surveillance. And probably a junior guy. Uda isn’t regarded as very important, not enough for full coverage. None of those agencies have all the manpower they want. Anything else?”
“Some money trades that afternoon. Looks pretty routine,” Jack said, scrolling through the transactions. I’m looking for something small and harmless, he reminded himself. But small, harmless things were, for the most part, small and harmless. Uda moved money around every day, in large and small amounts. Since he was in the wealth-preservation business, he rarely speculated, dealing mostly in real-estate transactions. London—and Britain in general—was a good place to preserve cash. Real-estate prices were fairly high but very stable. If you bought something, it might not go up very much, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to have the bottom drop out. So, Uda’s daddy was letting the kid stretch his legs some, but not letting him run out and play in the traffic. How much personal liquidity did Uda have? Since he paid off his whores in cash and expensive handbags, he must have his own cash supply. Maybe modest, but “modest” by Saudi standards wasn’t exactly modest by many others. The kid did drive an Aston Martin, after all, and his dwelling was not in a trailer park . . . so—
“How do I differentiate between Sali’s trading his family money and trading his own?”
“You don’t. We think he keeps the two accounts close, in the sense both of being covert and near to each other. Your best bet on that is to see how he sets up his quarterly statements to the family.”
Jack groaned. “Oh, great, it’ll take me a couple of days to add up all the transactions, and then to analyze them.”
“Now you know why you’re not a real CPA, Jack.” Wills managed a chuckle.
Jack nearly snarled, but there was only one way to accomplish this task, and it was his job, wasn’t it? First, he tried to see if his program could shortcut the process. Nope. Fourth-grade arithmetic with a nose attached. What fun. At least by the time he finished, he’d probably be better at entering numbers into the numeric keypad on the right side of the keyboard. There was something to look forward to! Why didn’t The Campus employ some forensic accountants?
THEY TURNED off Route 2 onto a dirt road that wound its way north. The road had seen a good deal of use, some of it recent, judging by the tracks. The general area was somewhat mountainous. The real peaks of the Rocky Mountain chain were off to the west, far enough away that he couldn’t see them, but the air was thinner here than he was accustomed to, and it would be warm walking. He wondered how far that would be, and how close they were to the U.S. border. He’d heard that the American-Mexican border was guarded, but not well guarded. The Americans could be lethally competent in some areas, but utterly infantile in others. Mustafa and his people hoped to avoid the former and to make use of the latter. About eleven in the morning, he saw a large, boxy truck in the distance, and their SUV headed toward it. The truck, he saw as they came closer, was empty, its large red doors wide open. The Ford Explorer came to within a hundred meters and stopped. Pedro switched off the engine and got out.
“We are here, my friends,” he announced. “I hope you are ready to walk.”
All four of them got out, and as before they stretched their legs and looked around. A new man walked in their direction, as the other three SUVs parked and disgorged their passengers.
“Hello, Pedro,” the new Mexican greeted the lead driver, evidently an old friend.
“Buenos dias, Ricardo. Here are the people who want to go to America.”
“Hello.” He shook hands with the first four. “My name is Ricardo, and I am your coyote.”
“What?” Mustafa asked.
“It is just a term. I take people across the border, for a fee. In your case, of course, I have already been paid.”
“How far?”
“Ten kilometers. A modest walk,” he said comfortably. “The country will mostly be like this. If you see a snake, just walk away from it. It will not chase you. But if you get within a meter, it can strike you and kill you. Aside
from that, there is nothing to fear. If you see a helicopter, you must fall to the ground and not move. The Americans do not guard their border well, and, oddly enough, not as well in daylight as at night. We have also taken some precautions.”
“What is that?”
“There were thirty people in that van,” he said, pointing to the large truck they’d seen coming in. “They will walk in ahead of and to the west of us. If anyone is caught, it will be them.”
“How long will it take?”
“Three hours. Less, if you are fit. Do you have water?”
“We know the desert,” Mustafa assured him.
“As you say. Let us be off, then. Follow me, amigo.” And with that, Ricardo started walking north. His clothes were all khaki, he wore a military-style web belt with three canteens attached, and he carried military-style binoculars, plus an Army-style floppy hat. His boots were well worn. His stride was purposeful and efficient, not overly fast for show, just to cover ground efficiently. They fell in behind him, forming a single file to conceal their numbers from any possible trackers, with Mustafa in the lead, about five meters behind their coyote.
THERE WAS a pistol range about three hundred yards from the plantation house. It was outdoors, and had steel targets, a set just like those at the FBI Academy, with head-plates, circular and roughly the size of a human head. They made an agreeable clang when hit, and then they fell down, as a human target would do if hit there. Enzo turned out to be better at this. Aldo explained that the Marine Corps didn’t emphasize pistol shooting too much, whereas the FBI paid particular attention to it, figuring that anybody could shoot a shoulder weapon accurately. The FBI brother used the two-handed Weaver stance, while the Marine tended to stand up straight and shoot one-handed, the way the services taught their people.