A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “I think you’ve had more fun this week than you ever had in Austin. Spreading disinformation, evading surveillance, recruiting Khamisi as an agent. You want more, don’t you?”

  He didn’t deny it, though he tried to sidle around the implications. “It’s certainly been a change of pace. But I’m not selfish enough to want children put in danger just so I can run around being a field officer again.” His hand skipped over the strings holding my bikini top on and massaged the back of my neck. I tried to concentrate despite the move. Trust Brad to redefine that as an erogenous zone.

  “No, of course not, that’s not what I mean. But there’s enough trouble in the world to keep you fully occupied without wishing for more.”

  “You maniacs at the Center for Applied Topology certainly find enough trouble for yourselves.” His touch became more of a gentle squeeze.

  “Are you deliberately missing the point?”

  “How would I know? Point me at it and we’ll find out.” He shifted location again, pouring lotion onto the backs of my thighs, and I tried not to purr.

  I pillowed my face on my crossed arms. “I think you’re happier as a field officer than you have been since you were posted to the Center.”

  “You’ve got a very strange definition of happiness. I myself would have put our wedding day somewhere near the top of my list of peak moments. Have you forgotten that already?”

  “By no means.” It had only been a little over a month. I would forever treasure the memory of Lensky wearing a traditional Greek “wedding crown” wreath of pearls and porcelain roses, staring straight ahead while a tiny vein jumped at his temple. And I totally melted when I remembered him holding me close at the end of the ceremony, and the love and tenderness I’d seen in his eyes. “But there’s personal happy and then there’s career happy. The more I see of you in this environment, the more trouble I have believing you feel truly fulfilled in Austin, riding herd on a bunch of topologists.”

  “That’s not all I do there.” His hands stopped moving over me.

  “No. You also fly around the Southwest interviewing professors and executives who’ve recently traveled to global hot spots, getting their perspective and persuading them to act as your agents. Not exactly a thrill a minute.”

  “I also get to help break up terrorist cells in the United States. Destroying the network that hired Sandru Balan was extremely satisfying.” He slipped one hand under my face and bent to kiss my cheek. “Thalia, stop looking for trouble where there is none to be found. I’m a grown-up; I don’t need every single moment of my professional life to be a thrill. What I do need is…”

  I turned so that I could see his face. He was staring out to sea.

  “What you need…” I prompted.

  “Oh. I need you, Thalia. I need to know that you’re as safe as possible despite the complete lack of caution with which you insane topologists pursue your research. I need to know that I’m doing my job and protecting you and the rest of the Center.”

  It was very sweet of him to say all that, but I took it with all the salt in the Indian Ocean. Brad just wasn’t the sort of man to be satisfied with a career as a glorified bodyguard. And if I knew that much about him, he had to know it too.

  What we found when we got back to the city, though, put the whole conversation out of my head for quite some time.

  13. Child soldiers

  “They’ve released what?”

  “You heard me. Another video. And this one is… worse than the first one.” Ben was slumped over the dining table, looking ill.

  Lensky went white to the lips. “The children?”

  “I think they’re all right… physically anyway. The guy who’s talking claims they’re in this video. I suppose Omar felt he needed to prove he had them. But I don’t know what they look like, and anyway it’s hard to follow on the phone screen.”

  “What did he do to them?”

  “You’d better see for yourself.” Ben passed his phone to Lensky, who stabbed his fingers at the screen, then swiped them across, then scowled and complained that the screen was too small to make out details. “You should have called me immediately,” he grumbled.

  “I tried,” Ben said. “Funny thing about that: you and Thalia both left your phones in the bedroom.”

  Little patches of red appeared on Lensky’s white face.

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “Does it? We’ll need to use the CIA computers to get a good look at this.”

  Lensky looked at the screen and groaned. “It’s after six.”

  “So? Since when do you guys punch a clock?”

  “I’ve never been able to get hold of Finch this late.” He dialed anyway, got bumped to voice mail. “I don’t dare leave a message about this on voice mail. He’s gone slack.” He stopped and shook his head. “No, that’s not fair. Finch had no reason to expect we’d need him after hours.”

  It seemed to me that if Nelson Finch had had the slightest respect for Lensky, Harrison, and the current crisis, he would have volunteered to work twenty hours a day to help find the missing children. I bit my lip. It wouldn’t help anybody for me to start bickering with Brad about his dear old buddy Finch.

  I did think of something that might help, though. “What about Mr. Prajapati?”

  Lensky and Ben both stared. “What about him?”

  “He seems to have everything you can imagine tucked away somewhere in that shop downstairs. Who knows, maybe he’s got a laptop we can borrow. Or,” being more realistic, “he’ll know where we can get one.”

  “Borrow a computer – Thalia, you’re brilliant! No, never mind Prajapati; we’ll go use the Royal Court Hotel’s business center. I knew I had a good reason for not checking out of there yet.”

  First we had to get respectable again – Brad and I did, anyway; Ben seemed to have navigated the crocodile farm without becoming any more disheveled than usual. It didn’t take long to shake the sand out of our shoes and throw on respectable clothes; then Ben and I took Brad’s hands and said, ‘Brouwer.’

  That maid didn’t need to make such a fuss about our arrival in the room. What was she doing in a guest’s room so late in the day, anyway? I bet she’d been pretending to dust while watching a soap; the TV was on. Oh, well. I expect she’s calmed down by now.

  “I thought the point was not to frighten the locals by popping out of thin air,” Brad complained.

  “We do our best.”

  The business center had wi-fi, computers with nice big screens, and, best of all, privacy. There’d been a couple of dapper gentlemen tapping away at computers when we entered, but they decided to leave after Lensky started prowling up and down the room. He frequently has that effect on people, even when they don’t know about the Glock on his hip or the snub-nosed derringer in his ankle holster.

  I had a belated thought. “I’m surprised Nelson Finch isn’t available. After he sent us this video, he had to know we’d want to use the resources at his office to analyze it.”

  “Oh, he didn’t send it,” Ben, bent over a keyboard, informed me. “Jimmy DiGrazio did. I’d asked him to put some virtual trip wires out on the Internet, let me know if anything related to this case turned up.”

  I should have thought of that. Asking Jimmy, I mean. Just because our colleagues were on the other side of the world didn’t mean they couldn’t help. This was the twenty-first century.

  On a full-size monitor, the video was grainy, dark and jerky. It seemed to have been shot outdoors with a hand-held camera, maybe at twilight. What it showed, though, was mesmerizing. Tiny figures marched in lines, threw themselves down on their stomachs and shot rifles nearly as tall as themselves – presumably at the targets which the video showed flying apart in splinters, but I had my doubts about that. Anybody could take one video of child soldiers shooting and another view of targets being shot to pieces and splice them together – I mean, not that I could, but I was sure Jimmy DiGrazio would have been able to do it.

  “Pa
use it! That’s Sam Harrison,” Brad said hoarsely, tapping the face of a tall, thin boy frowning over his rifle.

  “You’re sure?”

  He handed me his phone. “I was at his birthday party last year. And Steve sent me a slew of recent pictures. And now – oh, God! He’s been dragged into some kind of child soldiers’ training camp.”

  I glanced at the pictures on his phone. Yes. Tall for his age, with brown curls over eyes the same gray as his father’s; even without these pictures I might have been able to pick out Sam as Steve Harrison’s son.

  “He doesn’t seem to be completely with the program,” I said when they restarted the video. To me, the boy’s movements said complaisance, not enthusiasm.

  Brad exhaled. A long, shaky breath. “You think not?”

  I cast my mind back to my kid brother, who had never had much interest in sports but whose height and coordination had inspired innumerable gym teachers and coaches to pursue him. “I’m sure not. He looks like Andros did when the sixth grade coach forced him to try out for basketball. He’s just going through the motions.”

  “He’s only just finished third grade…”

  “All the same.”

  Another shaky breath. “You could be right. He’s a good kid. Almost as sharp as Linda, you know?”

  Brad considered his niece Linda to be the best, smartest, most talented child in Texas, and she regarded him in a similar light. I just hoped this happy relationship would survive her upcoming teen years.

  “They may not have had time to completely indoctrinate him,” Brad mused now, squinting at the grainy images. “God, I hope not! It’ll kill Steve if we get him back and he’s turned into a brainwashed little warrior against America.”

  “We’ll get him back,” I said with absolutely no basis for that other than the need to stabilize Brad, “and they haven’t brainwashed him, no matter what the claims on that damn video.” There was a voice speaking over the shots and yells in the background; a smooth, creamy, satisfied voice with what I now recognized as a strong Swahili accent. The speaker claimed that all three of the kidnapped children had seen the light and had embraced their true destiny of fighting with the Rashiduni to bring down the foreign imperialists. They would be raised as good Moslems and some day, when their training was complete, they would strike at America.

  “He’s lying.”

  “If he can keep them long enough –”

  “We aren’t going to let him do that. You aren’t going to let that happen,” I corrected myself.

  “What about the other two?” Lensky muttered. He squinted, reversed the video, ran it forward again at half speed. “There, that’s Bobby Navarro.” He indicated a younger boy, a blond, who was running forward and throwing himself down in the mud to slide even farther, shouting something unintelligible. “He seems to be quite enthusiastic.”

  “He’s – what? Five years old? He doesn’t know what it’s all about. Of course he likes running and yelling and playing in the mud, he’s five,” I said with somewhat more conviction than I actually felt. My principal concern right now was Brad’s psychological state, not the children’s. We could worry about the children’s degree of indoctrination once we actually had them back, and our chances of getting them would only decrease if Brad went into a guilt fugue about what had already happened. “What about the little girl? Rosie Jamison? I didn’t have the impression this bunch were looking for women soldiers.”

  “No. You must have missed the part where Omar – or whoever that is, talking – said that her destiny was to marry a leader of the Rashiduni, to be a reward for extraordinary service. I got the feeling he was the extraordinary leader he had in mind.”

  “Ugh. But – she’s only six, right? He’d have to wait a few years.” Like ten, at a minimum.

  “The Prophet,” interrupted a croaky voice down at floor level, “married his last wife, Aisha, when she was six years old.” Mr. M. rose and hovered over my shoulder. “But,” he continued, “the marriage was not consummated until she was nine.”

  I felt sick. Brad grabbed my shoulder – the one Mr. M. wasn’t using. “We will have all the children out of there before anything like that happens. That is a promise.” He leaned over the table and squinted at the video again. “We need to get hold of Khamisi. Maybe he can figure out exactly where this children’s training camp is. I’m betting on one of the offshore islands, but it would be good to know which one, and exactly where on the island.”

  Getting hold of Khamisi was impossible at night and not easy the next day. Ben grumbled that the man should have given us a cell phone number. Didn’t he know what century this was?

  “Says the man who refused to get himself a cell phone until Annelise talked him into it last year.”

  “Cell phones,” Lensky said, “are too easily compromised. The classic techniques really are the best.”

  The classic technique in question required me to fork over my new orange beach towel so that we could hang it in the window overlooking Grand Mosque Road to get Khamisi’s attention. Then Lensky drifted down that street to another, looking as inconspicuous as a square, blond man in a Swahili neighborhood could hope to look, and chalked a “10” on a graffiti-covered cement wall that too many cars had already scraped. My part of the job was to show up at the perfumer’s at ten o’clock, in the hope that Khamisi would have got the message. If he didn’t, Lensky said grimly, I’d just have to return once every hour.

  “I’ll stay there for a while, wander around to the shops in that square and keep checking at the perfumer’s,” I decided. “It’ll be less disruptive than trying to teleport there repeatedly; somebody would be bound to notice eventually.” Under our original protocol, of course, Khamisi would have been the one requesting a meeting and I’d only have had to go at the time he indicated. We hadn’t really given enough thought to making it work the other way.

  In the event, I only had to wait long enough to have a mango milk shake at the dairy bar, pick out some cute little glass bangles like the ones Fadiya had worn, overpay for a handful of sickly onions at the vegetable stall, and buy a raffia hold-all for the stuff I was accumulating. Khamisi turned up, looking pale and worried, just three-quarters of an hour after the time we’d been shooting for, while I was debating the merits of an orange-and-blue striped coverup over a more sedately traditional blue-and-white one. I grabbed my purchases and drew him behind the billowing shades at the side of the perfume shop.

  “What took you so long?” Brad was pacing again, in the apartment.

  “What do you want?” Khamisi asked. “Do you think I can make new information overnight?” He was even paler than he’d been in the market. I thought he had been so shaken up by teleporting that he hadn’t even noticed I’d forgotten to bring Mr. M.

  “Onions?” Ben asked. “You’re going to take up cooking?”

  “I was running out of things to buy.”

  “The Rashiduni have put out a new video,” Lensky told Khamisi. “We want you to look at it and try to figure out where it was made.”

  Ben and Lensky hadn’t wasted their morning; they’d bought a laptop and had paid Mr. Prajapati for access to his wi-fi.

  Khamisi asked us not to hover over him while he worked, which seemed reasonable enough. The guys took chairs out onto the terrace and sat in the shade of the big tree that rubbed against the side of the building, talking in undertones. Me, I decided to be a nice traditional little woman; I brought Khamisi a cup of coffee and then sat down very quietly behind him, in a good position for over-the-shoulder peeking. It worked. Evidently Khamisi’s nervousness wasn’t enough to override the invisibility of women in his world.

  He studied the video intently, running it over and over, stopping at various points and stepping through the frames with infinite patience. One spot in particular seemed to affect him strongly; he went pale when he first saw it, and replayed the surrounding frames half a dozen times before moving on. Finally he made a number of screen shots and tapped his phone.
>
  “I am not sure… I do not know the islands well,” he apologized when he had finished and Brad had come back inside. “I will show these pictures to some people I know.”

  “Natives of the islands?”

  Now Khamisi flushed dark. “And… others who may know. Do not send for me again; I will notify you when I have more information. This may take several days.”

  Lensky took down his cell phone number, promised not to use it except in dire emergency, and let him go with that unsatisfactory resolution.

  “I probably will not use his phone in any case,” he told me. “As I said, cells are too easily compromised.”

  “Can I see the video again?”

  “Why?”

  “He seemed extremely interested in one particular spot. Around 5:14.”

  Brad tapped the computer screen, swiped, and tapped again right at 5:10. We studied the next ten seconds of grainy footage several times.

  “There must be something in the background that could narrow down the location,” he sighed, “but damned if I can pick it out. But that’s got to be it; none of the children we’re interested in appear in those ten seconds.”

  Some older children and possibly some very young teens did appear, though, going through similar maneuvers to what Sam Harrison and Bobby Navarro had done. And I wondered if 5:14 might hold a clue to why Khamisi was being so extremely cooperative. He was taking some terrible risks for not very much reward, and I didn’t think it was just because Zawadi liked me.

  I didn’t have a chance to run my extremely shaky theory by Brad, though, because Nelson Finch banged on the front door just then and shouted at us to let him in. Brad headed for the door; I tapped the computer and shut off the display.

  “About time!” Finch was sweating and looked somewhat less dapper than he had at the hotel. “It’s too damned hot today to keep people waiting at your door, Lensky.”