“I’d really like to talk to that preacher,” said Beth.
“So would we all. As soon as planes started flying again after nine-eleven, he was on the first one back to Saudi Arabia.”
“Anything else on Muhammad?”
“He was pretty quiet after that. Auto theft was looking at his garage as a chop shop, but they were a long way from making a case.”
“This fills in a lot for me,” said Beth. “I really appreciate it.”
“That was a nice interrogation you did the other day.”
“I took a gamble and got lucky,” said Beth. So that’s what got her invited to sit down.
“I understand you know Harry Lime,” Weaver said out of the blue.
“At the academy,” Beth said, surprised.
“What did you think of him?”
“Harry’s my mentor,” Beth said simply. “Taught me everything I know.”
“We worked together in Miami. I was just talking to him the other day.”
“Oh?” said Beth.
“Yeah. He was telling me you decided right from your first day not to take any crap off anyone. And that was why he liked you. I told him the word around the office was you still had that philosophy.”
Beth didn’t reply to that, hoping to start a rumor that she could actually keep her mouth shut.
“Harry and I don’t look like your basic FBI poster boys,” Weaver said, smiling at his own wit. “But we’ve done all right for ourselves. We never wanted to be one of the drivers back at headquarters anyway.”
Beth decided to continue her policy of keeping her mouth shut.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Weaver. “There’s a difference between not taking any crap and running around looking to give it out. I’m going to meet one of my C.I.’s this afternoon. Want to come along?”
“I’d love to,” said Beth, a little stunned at having the old boy network work in her favor for once.
Weaver picked the location for the meeting in Rochester Hills, north of Detroit. At 1:00, while they were driving there, he said to Beth, “This guy is very devout. You know the deal, I’m sure. Don’t try to shake his hand.”
Without a word, Beth opened her purse, took out a silk scarf, and tied it over her head, covering her hair.
“Didn’t know if you’d balk at that,” Weaver said approvingly.
“To make a case, I’d wear a burka,” said Beth. “I just wouldn’t wear it to the office.”
“My kind of attitude,” said Weaver.
Beth quickly appreciated Weaver’s deceptive attention to detail. He wasn’t laid-back about meeting his informant. His choice of location left less chance of accidentally bumping into someone who might recognize either party. A diner was a nice mix between public and private, a place where no one noticed unfamiliar faces.
They arrived early, circling the area, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Weaver even sent Beth inside the diner to check it out. But he made sure she came back to the car. You never wanted to be sitting at an agreed-upon meeting place for an informant to show up.
“Agents get comfortable around their C.I.’s after a while,” said Weaver, like the best ones, always teaching. “Too comfortable. A C.I.’s not your buddy; a C.I.’s at least half a crook, or he wouldn’t be a C.I. in the first place. Maybe he woke up this morning feeling bad about himself and not wanting to be a snitch anymore. And because he’s a stupid mutt the only way he can think of how to do that is to shoot you. Maybe he was running his mouth, and instead of him a few people show up who want to kill themselves some FBI agents. Doesn’t pay to be careless. We’ll wait for him to sit down, make sure he’s alone; then we’ll go in.”
From a parking lot farther down the street, they watched a young Arab man in his mid-twenties enter the diner.
“Bassam’s from Yemen,” Weaver said, seemingly in no hurry to go in. “Illegal, of course. Cabdriver—the usual entry-level immigrant jobs. Fell in with the group who tried to take over the mosque, but those baseball bats scared the hell out of him. After that he kept his distance from that group, but he didn’t lose touch with them. Got picked up for credit card fraud. Wife and baby, so he rolled over. Okay, I’ll go in first. Give me five minutes, then come in. I’ll do the talking, right?”
“He’s your guy,” said Beth.
After five minutes by her watch, Beth took the walk. The lunch rush was over, and Weaver and Bassam were sitting in a booth off by themselves. Beth sat down next to Weaver.
“This is my colleague,” Weaver said.
Bassam had a scraggly beard that was as thin and wiry as he was. He snuck a quick look at Beth, then, being in close quarters with an unmarried woman, kept his eyes down on the table. “I want to see her identification.”
Beth was just about to reach for it when Weaver went from fatherly warm to fatherly cross. “If I tell you she’s all right, she’s all right.”
Establishing control, Beth thought. And doing it well.
Now Bassam really kept his eyes down on the table.
The waitress came over, shutting everything off. “What can I get you, hon?” she asked Beth.
“Just coffee please,” said Beth. “Black.”
They all waited until she came back with it. Then Weaver was much softer, following the formula of bringing the carrot back after the stick. “You know why we’re here.”
“Muhammad al-Sharif,” Bassam said.
“That’s right,” said Weaver.
“He told the men at his garage he was closing,” said Bassam. “They were shocked. They questioned him, he said business was bad even though they knew it was not. He gave them their pay and sent them away, letting them take whatever tools they wished. They talked much of this. Two went to his home, to ask him to reconsider. And if not, to let them take over the lease. He was gone. No one knows where he is.”
“Then why are we here?” Weaver demanded.
Bassam took another quick look up, and decided that he was losing his audience. “Two others have disappeared with him.”
Weaver was skeptical. “Two others are gone somewhere, or two others are gone with him?”
“These two, they would be with him.”
“Who?” said Weaver.
“Omar and Dawood.”
Now Weaver was interested. “Both of them?”
“Both of them. If one is gone, they are together.”
Okay, keep the poker face, Beth ordered herself in the face of rising excitement. The more coconspirators, the more chance that careful interviews of their family and friends might bear some fruit.
But if Weaver was showing Bassam some love, it was tough love. “We know they hang together. Tell us something we don’t know.”
“Dawood borrowed his brother-in-law’s boat,” said Bassam. “He said he wanted to go fishing.”
“What kind of boat?” Weaver asked, keeping his cool.
Bassam shrugged. “A fishing boat.”
Beth knew she would have raised her voice, but Weaver still asked the questions as if he were barely interested. “A canoe? A rowboat? A sailboat?”
Because informers were informers, it was very important that this be a one-way transaction, that they not give Bassam any information that he could sell to anyone else.
“With a motor on the back,” said Bassam. “Maybe four, five meters. I do not know boats,” he said apologetically. Then, trying to be helpful, “They drive it on a trailer, towed behind a car.”
“Did Dawood say where he was going fishing?” Weaver asked.
“He said the Upper Peninsula. Something white.”
“Whitefish Bay?” said Weaver. “Whitefish Point? White Pine?”
“This is all I heard,” said Bassam. “In this situation I must be silent. If I ask more questions everyone wishes to know why I am asking more questions.”
“Did Dawood say how long he was going to be gone?” said Weaver.
“A week perhaps. His brother-in-law did not want to give him the boat, but he
did.”
“Omar and Dawood,” said Weaver, “did they make the same kind of exit Muhammad did—just up and leave everything?”
“Yes,” said Bassam. “Except Dawood. But he lived with his sister and brother-in-law.”
“Did you hear anything else?” Weaver asked. “Anything small, anything you didn’t think was important at the time.”
“Nothing more,” said Bassam.
“It’s not much,” Weaver said grudgingly. “If you hear anything else, if anyone gets a call from one of them, you give me a call right away.” He passed an envelope under the table.
Bassam turned toward the window and stuffed it into his belt. “I will,” he said. Then he looked up at Weaver—a different look, full of knowledge. “Muhammad has said that he will never go back to prison, Mr. Ted. Please be careful.” As he got up he nodded his head at Beth, almost a little bow.
“Are two Arabs and an African-American going to stick out up North?” Beth asked after Bassam had left the diner.
“They are if they’re traveling together. And if they really are traveling up North. I don’t see why Dawood would tell his brother-in-law the truth.” A pause. “You can do a lot of things with a boat. Lot of big ships travel Superior and Huron.”
“You mean like the Cole bombing?” Beth asked.
“Or using a little boat to hijack a big ship. Or anything.”
“At least now we’ve got relatives to talk to.”
“My guys better go out and do that, though,” said Weaver. “It’s not a turf thing. We go out and do interviews in the community all the time, keeping tabs on people. If different agents start doing it, agents no one’s ever seen before, there’ll be talk.”
Beth saw the wisdom in that.
“The only link they left to anyone they knew was the boat,” said Weaver. “And that was because they obviously had to have it.”
“Do you have to register a recreational boat in the state of Michigan?” Beth asked.
“Yes, you do. A physical description and registration hull number will help, even though there’s thousands of boats in this state. But that’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant that all three of them left their lives behind. They aren’t planning on coming back. Just like the nine-eleven hijackers.”
“I know,” said Beth.
15
“We could have rented a plane, and jumped, and been there by now,” Lee Troy complained, the bouncing of the SUV making the words rattle on their way out of his voice box. “You can find a clearing in any jungle.”
“It hasn’t come up until now because it’s way down on my list of rules,” said Storey, behind the wheel. “It’s a two-parter. Don’t parachute unless you have to. And even if you have to, figure out something else. Too many things can go wrong.”
“Yeah, I’d much rather drive until I need a kidney transplant,” said Troy, sitting back in his seat, arms folded across his chest, the classic body language of pouting. “If we’re going to drive, why not drive straight through?”
Storey glanced over at him and smiled. “If I’m a Malaysian border guard, and I’m looking at two guys pretending to be tourists who just drove twenty hours straight from Bangkok and didn’t stop off anywhere, I’m going to take their car apart down to the last bolt and strip search ’em, because they sure as shit ain’t tourists. We’ll take at least a couple of days and build ourselves some cover.”
Storey actually would have preferred to save time by flying to the resort town of Phuket and renting a car there. But they were transporting a few items it wasn’t advisable to try and carry onto a plane.
They’d rented a Honda CRV out of Bangkok, using one of their alternate identities. And gone to four different agencies, Storey passing up various four-wheel-drive vehicles because they were all in light or bright colors, until he found the black pearl CRV.
They left Bangkok heading west and then down the southern peninsula, skirting the border with Burma. The road shifted between single and double lanes, with the second lane under varying degrees of construction in most places.
There were police roadblocks on the highway at regular intervals. Some manned, some not. Some manned by alert cops who flagged them down, and some who just wanted to stay in the shade. The roadblocks were there to check for illegal immigrants, so after a quick check of their passports they were always waved right along. None of the police spoke any English.
Outside Bangkok the Thais weren’t crazy drivers. Most of the traffic in the country was pickup trucks, cargo trucks, and motorcycles. The bikes were everything from little 100cc Hondas to big road cruisers, and they took a little getting used to since their drivers were in the habit of motoring along the shoulders of both sides of the road, and in the wrong direction. The rest of Thailand drove on the left. The truck drivers were cool, though. If you were stuck behind them they’d flash their turn signals when it was safe to pass.
The terrain varied from jungle to cultivation. Rice paddies, of course. But also plantations of coffee, pineapples, and oil palms. And slender rubber trees with pale, almost white trunks that from a distance reminded Troy of New England birches.
The humidity was as high as the heat, and the air-conditioned vehicle was a sanctuary. Every stop meant leaving its cocoon, and they always returned dripping sweat.
The highways went right through most villages, and Troy and Storey often had to slow down. It was the Third World quandary. You could build a modern highway, but you couldn’t keep the barefoot kids and chickens off it.
There were other hazards. Troy was driving and Storey sleeping, and a road empty of traffic practically demanded more speed. Coming around a curve at a good clip, Troy found himself zooming up on a large black object. He cut the wheel and stomped on the brake.
Storey awoke to the sound of screaming tires. He found himself in midair, restrained by his seat belt, then slammed back against the seat. The CRV was skidding across the highway. Even though he didn’t have one, Storey automatically put his foot down on the brake.
Troy was still fighting with the wheel. To keep from going into the trees on the other side of the highway he finally used the emergency brake. They halted in a cloud of brown clay dust.
“What the hell just happened?” Storey asked slowly, carefully enunciating each word.
Troy was still a little breathless, but he managed to get out, “Water buffalo.”
“Water buffalo?” Storey said, just as slowly as before.
“Who the fuck grazes their livestock in a highway median?” Troy demanded, having recovered sufficiently to be pissed off. “What kind of mental fucking defective would even think of something like that? And then think it was a good idea?”
“Just off the top of my head, I’m guessing that median grass doesn’t get chawed on very often,” Storey observed calmly.
“And there’s a good fucking reason for that!” Troy shouted. “I came around the corner and one of the fuckers was right in the middle of the road.”
“Good thing you didn’t hit it,” Storey said, still mildly.
“No shit,” said Troy, still loudly. “Be as bad as hitting a moose. We’d be looking for a new ride, if we lived.”
“I’m not going out that way,” Storey informed him. “You know what kind of shit I’d have to take in Valhalla if I got killed by a water buffalo?”
Troy had calmed down enough to grin at that.
“So try not to let it happen, okay?”
“No shit,” said Troy.
Storey opened his door. “I’ll take over driving. I’m awake now. Oh, and while you’re going around, crawl underneath and see if we dislodged anything.”
After frequent stops at tourist attractions whose tickets they bought but whose sights they never visited, they overnighted at the beach resort of Phuket. Adding to the collection of restaurant receipts and tourist brochures they were painstakingly assembling though haphazardly scattering throughout the vehicle.
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“You check out the red-light district?” Storey asked Troy in the morning over breakfast.
“No, I didn’t make the scene.”
“You ordered in then?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t let Big Lee out to play last night. And you on such a roll?”
“No way, man. I’m one with the monks for the rest of this trip. Not pushing my luck anymore.”
As they drove farther south the culture changed gradually. The wats became mosques, and the wailing calls to prayer could be heard in the villages they passed through. Women’s clothing became baggier—long sleeves and skirts down to the ground. Most were wearing white head coverings like cowls that draped over the shoulders and down to the chest, with only a small oval for the face to emerge from. The sight of them gave Troy a tingling feeling of alertness, a realization that they weren’t as safe as they’d been.
The terrain was hillier, and the mountains that had been in the distance drew closer. It was mostly tropical rain forest now. At the commercial town of Hat Yai the highway turned into an expressway that shot right down to the border. Very soon they were at the Sadao crossing.
Storey had timed the drive to make sure they arrived during daylight. Darkness always made customs agents more suspicious.
The road was lined with trees and neatly bordered by beds of flowers. The Thai crossing was a large open-air metal roof on pillars, the top painted in strips of red, white, and blue that the rains had faded. Under the roof the road spread out into a number of lanes, and along each lane were small booths that housed Thai officialdom.
Storey was driving. As they entered through the gate Troy jumped out to pick up the forms they needed at the little kiosk. He filled out the arrival/departure cards as Storey followed two trucks to the immigration checkpoint. Troy jumped out again to join the line at the immigration booth.
The passports were checked and the forms stamped. A constant of border crossing is that little attention is paid to people leaving a country. Customs waved them through.
They left Thailand and after a drive of a couple hundred yards through no-man’s land were welcomed to Malaysia and pulled under another metal roof. They felt no call to stop at the duty-free shopping complex. Storey pulled over and sent Troy to the first booth for more forms. A Malaysian arrival/departure card and currency declaration form. Again filled out while waiting in line.
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