Lensky was firing too, holding the Glock out two-handed. While I stared stupidly and shook, while Bobby Navarro and Rosie Jamison wailed, while Mr. M. engaged in lively conversation with something I couldn’t quite see clearly, he fired one last shot and holstered the weapon.
“Out of ammo,” he said, very calmly.
“The riches of the New World would be fitting ornament for your beauty,” Mr. M. told the quivering shape of flames and shadows.
“Thalia, can I have my derringer back?”
My hands were empty, except for the neck of a broken bottle.
“I think I dropped it when I broke this.” I dropped the useless piece of glass and shoved my right hand into the pocket of my shorts. I was going to need all the help the stars could provide if I had any hope of pulling this off.
“The Daughter of Stars has fulfilled the promise which I made to you.” Mr. M. was beginning to sound testy.
“Oh, well. Time to improvise, before the boys empty the rifle magazines.” Lensky sounded unreasonably cheerful. He took the black ceramic knife out of his other ankle holster and began whittling at one of the loose strips of driftwood on the pier. One of the rifles stuttered into silence.
“I owe you nothing,” the shadow of flames told Mr. M., “but these pets of yours are amusing.”
A cold fire, an invisible smoke wrapped around us and I felt it drawing us northwards. I opened my hand and sent a dancing funnel of stars in the general direction of Mombasa. The sounds of people on the beach were swallowed up by silence.
20. Termination
We slid down a blue funnel of wind into someplace dark and still. The blue light vanished and moonlight revealed a dim indoor space. I took a cautious step forward. There was something like coconut matting underfoot, but this didn’t feel like our apartment. For one thing, it had air conditioning.
There was movement around me and I slowly picked out the figures of my companions. Lensky, Khamisi, Tabari, and Sam Harrison were standing around me. Mr. M. was around my neck. Lensky was holding Rosie Jamison, who was still crying, and Khamisi had the little Navarro boy.
Wherever we were, it was crowded, not designed for this many people. As my eyes adjusted, I made out bulky rectangular shapes that looked like office furniture: a desk, a filing cabinet, a bookcase.
Lensky cleared his throat. “Thalia, where have you brought us?”
“I didn’t. And I don’t know.” I might have been reaching for Mombasa, but my efforts had been augmented by a breathtaking surge of power that had nothing to do with topology. Whoever had determined our destination, it hadn’t been me. And I didn’t think it was Mr. M. either; he wasn’t actually that good at teleporting, not that he’d ever admit it.
A switch clicked, bright light flared and I blinked. We appeared to be standing in an office, all right, and the furnishings looked similar to some I’d seen quite recently. I opened the door nearest me. Yes, the next room was Nelson Finch’s office. “Brad. Do you have LeShawn Taylor’s private number?”
“I – oh, yes, I guess I do. He was out of town when we got here, so I never used it. I just talked to Finch.” He hoisted Rosie up a little farther on his shoulder and fished out his phone.
“Well, just this once,” I said, “please contact Taylor first, and wait on Finch?”
“You still don’t trust him, Thalia?”
“Do you?”
Lensky called Taylor at home.
Once the circumstances were even partially explained, Mrs. Taylor insisted that we all take a taxi to their home. We couldn’t possibly take care of those poor, traumatized mites in an office!
And so, as a new day dawned in Mombasa and all fifty-seven mosques turned on their loudspeakers to inform the faithful that prayer was better than sleep, we had a brief council of war while sitting around an American Colonial style table and eating Wheaties from white plastic bowls. The younger children had been tucked up in a guest bedroom; Tabari and Sam insisted on sitting up with the grownups, but from the way their heads were nodding I thought Lensky would wind up carrying them to bed sooner rather than later.
“I cannot believe that nice-seeming Nelson Finch was in cahoots with the Rashiduni. And trying to get LeShawn killed!” Mrs. Taylor said indignantly. “More sugar, Thalia?”
I had already embarrassed Lensky by pouring most of the contents of the sugar bowl over my cereal. Too bad. I might not have been solely responsible for that last powerful teleportation, but I’d done plenty of paranormal work before that to lower my blood sugar, and I needed a refill fast.
“No, thank you, Mrs. Taylor.”
“Alicia.”
“Thank you, Alicia.”
“I am afraid there is no escaping it,” Taylor said heavily. “I’ve known for some time that something was wrong. Drinking, sloppy tradecraft, the usual signs that an officer is losing it. I had planned to recommend he be transferred back to the States…” He fell silent, shaking his head.
The betrayal was clearly hard for Lensky and Taylor to stomach, but it was undeniable now that they’d finally compared notes. Finch had dined with the Taylors on the night before Khamisi set the bomb in the CIA office, and both of them were clear that he had not said one word of warning to either of them.
“He wanted LeShawn killed,” Alicia said, “and he would have been if not for you, Thalia!”
She looked as if she might hug me, or cry on me, or both. “The Semtex might have decayed on its own,” I mumbled, and concentrated on spooning up the last of the cereal until she looked elsewhere. “Oh, Tsenga!” she called, and a young man appeared. While she was quietly instructing him to do something or other, Lensky tried to steer the conversation into less emotional channels.
“I was wondering, Taylor…. Can you tell me where you’ve been? Finch implied that you were laid up with a fever, but…”
Taylor looked as abashed as was possible for a very big, very black, very healthy man. “Yes, well, that was what I told him. I had to take some personal days and go to Nairobi, and, well, the reason was kind of embarrassing.”
“Idiot,” Alicia Taylor said fondly.
“You wouldn’t say so if it happened to you!” Taylor protested. “Actually, it was…”
“Wisdom teeth,” his wife said when he stopped there. “All four at once, and all impacted.”
Lensky whistled. “That must have been fun! But aren’t you, ah, a little…”
“Kind of old for wisdom teeth? That was the embarrassing part,” Taylor said. “I’m forty-eight. Can you imagine the jokes? So, me being specially trained by the CIA in working undercover, I figured I would just keep this little secret to myself. Trouble is, the only dentist I trusted to have excavating my mouth to this extent was in Nairobi. I thought the simplest thing would be to take a solid week of personal time and claim a touch of fever. Possibly not, in retrospect, my best decision ever.”
“Oh well,” Lensky said, “it worked out all right in the end.”
Taylor looked sad. “Yes, but I missed all the fun.”
Strange definition of fun, but Lensky was nodding sympathetically. Me, I would have voted for more beach-and-shopping days and fewer crawling-through-mangrove-swamp days, but that’s just me.
Tabari and Sam were about to fall asleep with their faces in the cereal bowls. Alicia Taylor enlisted Khamisi’s help to get them settled in the room with Bobby and Rosie, which apparently had enough bunk beds to accommodate everybody. The Taylors’ servant, Tsenga, brought in a bamboo tray piled high with wonderful things I recognized – mahamri, those coconut doughnut triangles, and kachori smelling of curry – and other things that I didn’t recognize but was totally willing to try. Yes, I was tired and sleepy, but not dozy enough to pass up fresh-fried mahamri. I helped myself to another mug of coffee and dug in. LeShawn excused himself and Lensky, saying that they had boring business to discuss and would take it to the study. I was able to translate that – “boring business” meant “CIA secret stuff” – but it was fine with me as l
ong as they didn’t take the mahamri with them.
As they left the dining room I heard Taylor saying, in the rumble that was his best imitation of a discreet murmur, “Does she always eat like that?” and on Lensky’s assent, saying “Amazing!”
Yeah, well, he should try teleporting two adult males and four children before breakfast. Even if I’d had some kind of help on the big jump, I’d burned plenty of energy during our visit to the Island of Devils.
I wondered if Jumanne had chickened out and abandoned us there or if something had happened to him and his little boat. I made a mental note to ask Lensky if somebody could check up on that. As a mere woman, I could hardly go down to the waterfront myself and interrogate dhow captains. I’d be happy to let Taylor or one of his minions have that bit of ‘fun.’
Alicia Taylor had yet another spare room for Lensky and me. I made a mental note that there were some perks to being a field officer stationed in a Third World country. I was willing to bet she hadn’t personally laundered the dazzling white sheets that I eventually crawled between, wearing a borrowed nightgown.
At some time during my morning doze Brad joined me. He gave me a bone-crushing hug, complained that it was too hard to locate me swimming inside Alicia’s nightgown like that, and fell asleep in mid-complaint with his mouth still open.
The day was well into official siesta time when I felt perky enough to rejoin the world. The shorts and shirt I’d worn under my bui-bui had been restored to some semblance of respectability while I slept; some stains had defied the laundry, but at least they no longer smelled like a mangrove swamp. Lensky, when I found him, was in a similar semi-presentable state, and working on his third cup of coffee. Tsenga, who appeared to have powers of telepathy that the Center for Applied Topology really should investigate, brought me a very cold Diet Coke and a new kind of little triangular pastry pockets. These were deep-fried and filled with curried veggies. He told me they were called samosas.
While I investigated the samosas Lensky caught me up on the current state of affairs. The American children were already on their way to Washington, being escorted by Taylor’s secretary Mashika. He and Ben and I were to leave in a couple of days, after the State Department got us temporary papers; there was, he said, no question of returning to the apartment in Old Town for anything we might have left there.
“What about Nelson Finch?”
Lensky looked so sad I regretted the question. But we did need to settle the matter of Finch. Didn’t we?
“He has not returned to the office. Or to his apartment. He may have – that is, I hope he has left the country.”
“Why?”
“He knows too many operational details about all our African field offices. We have agents and case officers operating in less friendly environments than Kenya. If that information got into the hands of the wrong people, their lives could be at risk. So yes, I hope Finch’s activities were no more than a misguided attempt to get the promotion he felt he deserved, and that he’s now content to escape. And will stay far, far away from anything involving the intelligence community in future. Otherwise.” He came to an abrupt halt.
“Otherwise?” It seemed to me that trying to get your boss blown up went beyond the “misguided attempt” category and right into “attempted murder,” but Lensky was looking so grim that I didn’t want to push him.
“Dammit, I knew he was disaffected!” he said suddenly, pounding a fist into his palm. “That time he went off in our apartment, complaining that the CIA was washed up, that there was no place for a real man of action any more. I told myself it was the beer talking, that everybody has gripes about their job. And there’s more. I brushed aside all your warnings, everything that seemed off key about him. I should have caught and stopped him much earlier.”
I went around the table to hug him. “Brad, how would you have stopped him? LeShawn Taylor was in Nairobi getting his wisdom teeth removed, you had no official authority here, the Mogadishu office didn’t support you.”
“There are ways,” he said.
Ways he probably should not, for his own mental health, be thinking about.
“He was your friend once. The only thing you did wrong was, you were too loyal to that memory to let yourself see that he had changed.”
He let his breath out with a huff. “Yes. My friend. Now I’m wondering if I misjudged him all along. Was he a back-stabbing traitorous son of a bitch when I teamed up with him at the Farm?”
Quite possibly, in my opinion, but saying that wouldn’t make him feel better now. “People change,” I said. “I’ve changed since I met you.”
I was going to go into more detail about that – I had something to say that would almost certainly have distracted him – but Lensky wasn’t through grieving the loss of his friend yet.
“You realize he could have been working with the Rashiduni?”
Of course I did. “I wondered,” I temporized. “That demand for Khamisi to bomb the CIA office? It happened right after Finch found out we were using Khamisi as an agent. Perhaps he thought it was a win-win situation. Either he’d get his boss out of the way, or our agent would be discredited with the Rashiduni.”
“And that’s why you didn’t tell me about your plan to neutralize the bomb. As you said, you couldn’t trust me.”
And I couldn’t stand the pain in his face. “Brad, I didn’t have the right to trust you with that. If Finch was working with the Rashiduni, it could have got Khamisi killed. I’d trust you with my own life in a heartbeat. But I couldn’t decide for Khamisi that he should do the same.”
Finally Lensky’s body relaxed slightly and he put an arm around me, returning my hug.
“I hope you were wrong about that, but I do understand why you couldn’t risk telling me. The thing is… if Finch is working with a terrorist group, with all the information he has…”
He sighed deeply and started over. “LeShawn and I were discussing whether the Company should terminate Finch.”
“Well, obviously they have to fire him!”
“Terminate,” Lensky repeated, heavily, and this time I got it.
“Oh.”
“It won’t be our decision. Higher will have to make the call.”
But might it be their task to carry it out? I prayed that our papers for repatriation would come through before anybody had a chance to convey that order to Lensky.
I had a chance to say goodbye to Khamisi and Tabari later that day. It had been decided that it was too dangerous for them to stay in Mombasa, so Taylor had made arrangements for them to go to Mogadishu. That didn’t sound like a net improvement to me, but at least they were going to be housed in the CIA compound inside the fortified perimeter of the airport.
“If you get lonely there,” I suggested to Khamisi, “there’s a girl from Mombasa staying in the compound… a widow, now.” There’d been no official confirmation of Omar al-Zanji’s death, but I knew what I’d seen. “I’m sure she’d like to see somebody from her home town.” And Khamisi could do worse than spend some time with a nice girl like Fadiya. I wasn’t exactly match-making, just giving events a tiny push. Two people who couldn’t go home… It would be pleasant to see something good come out of all this.
Just a few days later we caught a flight out of Nairobi for America, meeting Ben and Annelise at the airport. Traveling under State Department auspices was definitely pleasanter than going it on our own; shorter lines, and fewer of them, before we stumbled into Bergstrom Airport and, by mutual consent, teleported to our own places.
Lensky recovered from jet lag faster than I did, which is totally unfair considering that he’s eight years older than me. I had to put up with his usual comments about the virtues of exercise, vitamins, and sobriety during the phase where he was watching the news and I was alternating between Diet Cokes and involuntary naps. Fortunately, I wasn’t alert enough to be irritated.
When I did find myself wide awake and bright eyed, it was the middle of the night – some night; I had a fe
eling it wasn’t the first since our return. Lensky wasn’t in the bed. I padded out to the kitchen and found Mister Sobriety sitting in front of an open beer, with two empty bottles on the table beside that one.
“Trying to drink yourself to sleep?” I insinuated myself between him and the table, perched on his knee and put an arm around his neck. If we were both awake at this hour, whatever it was, I could think of better ways to get relaxed than drinking.
“You haven’t been watching the news.”
“Of course not.” I hadn’t been doing anything except alternately sleeping and stumbling to the kitchen for another Diet Coke.
“Terrorists have murdered an American in Mombasa.”
“Not LeShawn Taylor?” I had liked the big man who was so embarrassed about his very late wisdom teeth.
“No. Nelson Finch.” Lensky hoisted his current beer and drank most of it. “He was – beheaded. By the Rashiduni. They made a video.”
“You watched it?” I was horrified.
“Yes. Not on TV, of course. Internet.” He finished off that bottle with another long pull. “They made a statement. Said he was a traitor.”
“Well, he was, but…”
“A traitor to the Rashiduni,” Lensky interrupted me.
“How did they get that idea?”
He lowered the bottle with a thump. “Possibly from the press conference the ambassador held two days before we left, crediting Finch’s undercover work with the Rashiduni for our recovery of the kidnapped children.”
I hadn’t been aware of that either.
“Why…?”
“If Finch had left the country, he would have been all right, and crediting him might keep the Rashiduni from going after Khamisi. If he was still in Mombasa, hiding out with the Rashiduni and giving them information, then he had to be terminated… and this way, the CIA wouldn’t be blamed for his death.”
A Creature of Smokeless Flame Page 21