Blind Eye; Silent Waters; Janus Effect

by Jan Coffey

  Austyn hadn’t forgotten what he’d promised Fahimah. She wanted her sister to go free. A lot of that depended on what the younger sister’s involvement in all of this was. Austyn guessed even Fahimah didn’t really know. She’d spent five years in prison, and it was pretty unlikely that there had been any communication between the two.

  No matter what happened, Austyn was determined not to allow Rahaf to become lost in one of the CIA’s black sites like her sister. One way or another, he would make sure that she was treated fairly.

  Austyn saw Fahimah close the laptop. There were so many questions he had for her. At the same time, he knew that only a very thin line of trust connected them. There was certainly no comfort zone.

  He undid his seatbelt and stood up. Matt had taken the last seat on the same row as Fahimah. He was constructing possible scenarios on Rahaf over the past five years based on history of the fighting in Iraq and on possible identity changes she might have undergone. Upon seeing Austyn stand, the other agent shook his head. Nothing yet, he mouthed.

  Austyn moved over to Fahimah. The leather case for the laptop was on the seat across the aisle where she’d placed it.

  “Do you mind if I sit down here?”

  She glanced across at the leather case before looking up. “Would it matter if minded?”

  He nodded. “Yes, it would.”

  “Then I mind,” she told him.

  Austyn nodded, forcing himself not to push it. She needed to be able to trust him. If he bullied her, they would never develop the rapport they’d need when they reached the Kurdistan region of Iraq. He took the step back to his seat. He was about to buckle himself in again, when she turned her head around.

  “Very good. You pass the test,” she told him. “You may sit here.”

  “Just like a teacher,” he said wryly. “I should have known there would be tests.”

  She said nothing and picked up the computer case off the seat. Austyn sat down as she turned her head away.

  She had both hands resting on the computer, and she appeared to be looking out the small airplane window at the passing banks of clouds. He watched her profile for a few moments. In spite of all she’d endured, she was still very attractive. She turned and glanced at him. Those green eyes startled him, oddly disconcerting him when she looked at him.

  “All caught up with your reading?” he asked, motioning with his head to the computer.

  “Hardly at all,” she replied. “I only read bits and pieces of things. Most of the headlines or the first paragraph or two.”

  “Can’t stomach more than that?”

  She shook her head. “I have missed a great deal.” She paused. “But you have a valid point. It is a great deal worse than I could have imagined.”

  He wanted her to open up to him more. “In what way?”

  “In every way. The world appears to be coming apart,” she retorted. “To begin with, the war in Iraq. From these articles, it is clear that you have created a situation that has resulted in a civil war dividing my country. It seems that it has become a way of life for the Sunni to be killing the Shiaa and vice-versa.”

  Austyn started to reply, but she waved him off.

  “It is not just there,” she said, continuing. “Look at what is happening in Africa. In half the continent, continuous genocide is being practiced. Even these Western journalists point to the role of self-serving financiers of the West in supporting these murderous regimes. And the Saudis play a huge part in that, as well. It always was and still is amazing to me how blind the people of democratic western countries continue to be about the special interest groups that ruin countries in order to exploit them. So long as their gas prices are low, they care nothing about how these groups, with their government’s support, put a murderer in power in a country. In my own country, so long as Saddam was fighting Iran and selling oil cheaply to America, he was a good friend.”

  She looked at him. “I can go on and on. Would you care to debate any of this?”

  “You’re the political science professor. I’m not going head first into any argument with you unless I have time to prepare.”

  A hint of softness touched her expression. She was obviously pleased to be acknowledged for the profession she had before.

  She leaned her head back against the seat and looked out at the patches of clouds again. “And there is so much filtered news.”

  “Filtered news?”

  “Of course, filtered. These are American publications…or funded by their interests,” she said. “Before your people put me in prison, the censorship in your papers was so transparent. Nothing has changed.”

  Austyn wasn’t going there. It wasn’t censorship in the strictest sense of the word, but he knew sections of Homeland Security monitored what they called ‘sensitive information.’ It was no secret that mainstream news had adopted a new ‘sensitivity’ about the way information was presented after the September 11th attacks back in 2001.

  “I saw you doing some searches on the university where you used to teach.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “You were watching what I was doing?”

  “You knew I was watching,” Austyn said matter-of-factly, keeping eye contact. “You also know that we’re keeping track of every search you do on that computer.”

  She shrugged and looked out the window again. “I was hoping you would not be so blunt about it.”

  “I thought we were dealing honestly with each other.”

  “You can think whatever you want.”

  Austyn enjoyed her quick tongue. It was admirable that after so many years of silence in prison, she hadn’t lost it.

  “Did you find anything useful about where you used to teach?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “A report of bombings on the campus.”

  “The world thought you had died in one of the early attacks,” Austyn told her.

  “It seems that whatever parts of the university your missiles and troops didn’t destroy in the initial attacks, the civil war and suicide bombings since have leveled.” She reached out and pressed the back of her hand lightly against the glass window. “Who knows, but I might have faired better than many of my colleagues.”

  “I assume that your sister doesn’t know you survived the taking of the lab,” Austyn asked. “You had her keys. You were wearing her badge. She must have known that you were there.”

  Fahimah nodded slightly.

  “After the bombing, reports were circulated that no one in the lab had survived. Do you think she believed them?”

  She did not respond, keeping her eyes fixed on the clouds outside. The files indicated that Fahimah had been allowed no contact with anyone outside of the prisons over the past five years. Austyn wondered if he could trust those reports.

  “It would be a nice surprise for her to hear from you,” Austyn continued.

  “I am sure she will be very happy,” Fahimah replied under her breath.

  “How do you know she’s still alive?”

  Her hands fisted and returned to her lap. “Faith. I would have felt it, known it in here—” she touched her heart “—if she had died.”

  Austyn was a man of science. He didn’t believe in those kinds of things. “I don’t know anything about that, but I hope you’re right.”

  The green eyes looked into his. “You don’t think you’re a believer, Agent Newman. That’s fine. In time, you’ll prove yourself wrong.”

  There was no reason to argue and explain that in his thirty-eight years of life, he’d relied on facts and figures to find his way. They were never going to be friends. She was only helping him to find her sister. The less she knew about him, the better.

  “I do hope you have something more substantial than ‘faith’ to lead us to your sister and her files.”

  “Don’t ask any more about the details of our journey,” she told him flatly. “I will lead you to what you want.”

  Fourteen

  Washington, D.C.

  The steady diet
of vending machine Twinkies and old coffee was making him sick. He needed some wholesome, high-protein nourishment. Something like a Big Mac and French fries.

  Faas Hanlon crossed the parking lot, got into his car, and put the key into the ignition. Glancing up 1st Street as he started the car, he could see the dome of the Capitol Building rising in the distance. The McDonald’s was three blocks north to I Street and two blocks west to S. Capitol. That’s what you call fast food, he was thinking when his cell phone rang.

  “Crap,” he muttered, answering.

  They wanted him back upstairs. The reports from Arizona were in.

  Locking his car, he strode across the lot and took the stairs up rather than wait for the elevator. Food would have to wait.

  Faas walked into the conference room and threw himself into his chair. It was still warm. The six agents were spread around the long table, working on their laptops just as he’d left them. Photographs of two of the Sedona victims were on the large screen at the far end of the room. Teenagers.

  “Who do we have?”

  “On the right, Leonard ‘Lenny’ Guest, age 18. On the left, Tyrone ‘Ty’ North, age 19. Both graduated from Red Rock High School in Sedona this past June. No criminal records, no arrests, no DWI. Normal, good kids. Always hung together. Described by friends we interviewed as being practical jokers. Lenny was supposed to start at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff this coming September. Ty was headed to Los Angeles at the end of the summer. He had a job prospect to work at an uncle’s body shop.”

  “What happened?” Faas asked.

  “They spent the afternoon at Lenny’s house next to the pool,” one of agents explained. “They were supposed to go to a party at another friend’s house, but they never showed up.”

  “Was anyone else home at Lenny’s?” Faas asked.

  “The mother came and went. She says the boys were fine when she saw them. Ty was fighting a summer cold, so they were taking it easy.”

  “From taking it easy to stealing a car, what happened?”

  “The accusation about stealing the truck has been dropped,” the same agent told him. “The owner of the red pickup was a friend of theirs that they were going to meet at the party that night. It seems that this was another one of their practical jokes.”

  “The owner hasn’t come out and said it, but there’s speculation that this is a regular thing, swiping one another’s cars,” another agent explained. “The two boys have done this before. They were driving the vehicle with the valet key.”

  “Drugs in the car?” Faas asked.

  “Marijuana. It seems as they never had a chance to use it, though.”

  “Are we certain about that?” he asked. “We could be talking about some bad weed spreading the bacteria.”

  “There’s nothing in the autopsy report about that.” The agent to his left started typing an e-mail as he was speaking. “The chance that the two families in Maine were smoking pot is really slim, but I’ll check back with our offices in Phoenix again for a toxicology report.”

  Faas looked up at the young faces. They were graduation pictures. “I want to know how many hours they were unaccounted for.”

  “I have that right here.” One of the agents pulled out a sheet. “Eleven and half hours.”

  “Twenty minutes to drive to where they were found. An hour or two to die.” Faas was speaking to no one in particular. “Why the hell didn’t they call someone when they first felt sick? Wasn’t there a cell phone in that truck?”

  “Yes, sir. There was. Each of them had one,” someone offered. But beyond that there were no answers.

  Faas leafed through the faxes and e-mail they’d just received from Sedona. Lenny’s home was under quarantine, as was every location that the boys had been and every person they’d been in contact with during the week prior to their deaths.

  They had nothing so far. No one in the area was showing any indication of the disease, including Lenny’s mother, who had been in the same room with them the day they died. There was no sign of the bacteria anywhere, except in the corpses in and around that pickup truck.

  It just didn’t add up. Faas stared at the pictures, his appetite suddenly gone.

  Fifteen

  Erbil, Iraq

  It was only mid-afternoon, but they weren’t going any farther today.

  Fahimah insisted that she wanted to stay the night in a hotel in Erbil. It didn’t matter to her which one, and she wasn’t telling them what they were going to do or where they were going tomorrow. Two army personnel joined their group at the airport, replacing the pilots. One of them, Ken Hilliard, had been stationed in this area of Kurdistan in northern Iraq since the beginning of the war. He spoke the Kurdish language fluently and knew all the ins and outs of the place.

  Rather than take the group to the Erbil Sheraton, officially the Erbil International Hotel, Ken directed them to the smaller, far less conspicuous Shahan Hotel. Unlike the Sheraton, with its six-inch-thick concrete walls and armed soldiers searching everyone coming near the hotel, the Shahan simply offered security and clean rooms. Centrally located in the city, the whitewashed building with the tinted glass front had a growing reputation with foreign business people, many of whom had started switching to smaller hotels like this one.

  Erbil was a dusty city that sprawled outward from a mound of earth called the tell. As they rode in from the airport, Ken played tour guide, informing them that what they could see atop the tell itself was an ancient Ottoman fortress, with its ancient walls dominating the city. Saddam’s forces had completely destroyed the inside of the fortress, but Kurds had rebuilt there since. While Fahimah listened in silence, he told everyone that Erbil was said to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, with some of the artifacts found there dating back to 23 B.C. Erbil, in addition to being one of the larger cities in Iraq, housed the Kurdish Parliament.

  Austyn had been surprised to see, while they were still in the air over this capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, that Erbil was obviously in the midst of a construction boom. When they landed at the International Airport, they were met with a huge billboard—written in Kurdish, Arabic, and English—welcoming them to Kurdistan.

  Driving toward the Shahan Hotel, Austyn could see the new construction projects everywhere. The landscape was peppered with them, and Ken told them that investors were pouring their money in, eager to get a piece of the boom.

  After Fahimah was given a room and two guards were stationed on the outside of her door, Austyn and Matt met with Ken for tea.

  Chairs and tables were set up on the shaded sidewalk next to the hotel. The afternoon air was still hot, but it was almost comfortable here in the shade. Although it was too early for dinner, the smell of roasting lamb mingled with the normal smells of a city. The steady stream of people, cars, delivery trucks, and an occasional horse-drawn cart kept the air vibrant with noise and activity. Other guests of the hotel, Iraqis and foreigners alike, were seated at the tables, drinking tea as well. There were no gates or dividers stopping pedestrians from weaving between tables as they went by.

  Matt, inseparable as always from his computer, opened the laptop. “No signal here, either,” he said.

  “No wireless Internet, at all, unless you’re on the base. The cell service is shaky, too. From what I hear, the Kurdish government has had a hand in scrambling the signals.”

  “What about a dial-up connection?” Matt asked.

  “Maybe. You’ll want to check with the attendant in the lobby,” Ken suggested. “And I’d be careful.”

  There were a few leads on Rahaf that Matt had told him about at the end of the flight. Austyn knew that the other agent was impatient to report the information they’d gathered back to the team in Washington and get someone working on it.

  As Matt went back inside, Austyn looked around him. A white SUV with large light-blue UN letters on the hood and the side was parked across the street. A couple of peace-keepers wearing soft caps were laughing with a stree
t vendor selling pistachios a few steps down the sidewalk. Austyn realized that the soldiers weren’t armed.

  “Your first time here?” Ken asked.

  “My first time in Iraq,” Austyn answered.

  “You’re lucky. This is a good place to start.”

  There were no questions asked, no menus brought out. Not even a minute after they’d sat down, tea served in small clear glasses sitting on white saucers appeared before them.

  “You have to tell them specifically if you want coffee,” Ken told him.

  “Tea is fine with me.”

  “And they won’t bring out any sugar, either, since it’s rationed, unless you ask,” Ken continued.

  “This is fine, the way it is,” Austyn said, taking a sip of the hot tea. It was strong. He noticed that the saucer under Ken’s tea had a couple of sugar cubes on it. A regular customer, Austyn figured.

  A cart carrying propane tanks on the back slowly went by.

  “I assume those tanks are empty,” Austyn said.

  “No, they’re probably full.”

  Every news report from Iraq, it seemed, had to do with some bombing and a rapidly growing number of fatalities. Austyn looked around them, thinking about security. Those tanks could cause a pretty good explosion.

  “It’s hard for outsiders to believe, but this is absolutely the safest area in Iraq.”

  Austyn decided he’d been too obvious. He leaned back in the chair, watching the bicycle-drawn cart take a right at the next intersection as a small car careened around the antique vehicle and sped off out of sight.