“Car accident in Zagreb,” Lincoln said. “The Croats are crazy drivers.”
“Where were you treated?” Daoud was looking for details he could verify.
Lincoln named a clinic in a suburb of Trieste.
The Egyptian glanced at Leroy and shrugged. Something else occurred to him. “What did you say the title of your book on Fredericksville was?”
Leroy corrected him. “It’s Fredericksburg.”
“I didn’t say,” Lincoln replied. “Title was the best part of the book. I called it, Cannon Fodder.”
Apparently Leroy was still fighting the War of Secession because he blurted out, “Cannon fodder is sure as hell what they was.” His normal drawl, pitched a half octave higher, came across loud and clear. “Federal cannon fodder, fighting to free the niggers and legitimize intermarriage and dictate the North’s way of thinking on southern gents.”
The Egyptian repeated the title to make sure he’d gotten it right, then muttered something in Arabic to the fat boy piecing together the jigsaw puzzle on the linoleum-covered table in the alcove. The boy, who was wearing a shoulder holster with a plastic gun in it and chewing bubble gum that he inflated every time he fitted in a piece, sprang to his feet and rushed out of the room. The Egyptian followed him. Lincoln could hear their footfalls on the staircase of the ramshackle building as the boy headed downstairs and Daoud climbed up one flight. He let himself into the room overhead and crossed it and dragged up a chair as a telephone sounded. Lincoln guessed that the Egyptian was phoning abroad to get his people to check out details of the Dittmann legend.
The DDO’s people in Langley had anticipated this and laid in the plumbing. If someone nosed around the Trieste clinic, he would come across a record of a Lincoln Dittmann being treated by a bone specialist for three days, and paying his bill in cash the morning he was discharged. As for the book, Cannon Fodder had a paper trail. The Egyptian’s contact would discover a 1990 reference to the publication of the book in Publishers Weekly. If he dug deeper he would come up with two reviews, the first in a Virginia junior college student newspaper praising one of the school’s own teachers for his Civil War scholarship; the second in a Richmond, Virginia, historical quarterly devoted to the War of Secession, accusing Lincoln Dittmann of having plagiarized great chunks of a privately printed 1932 doctorate treatise on the battle of Fredericksburg. There would be a small item in a Richmond newspaper repeating the plagiarism charge and reporting that a committee of the author’s peers had examined the original treatise and Dittmann’s Cannon Fodder, and discovered entire passages that matched. The article went on to say that Lincoln Dittmann had been fired from his post teaching history at a local junior college. Chain bookstores would have reported modest sales before the book was withdrawn from circulation. If anyone hunted hard enough, copies of the first and only edition (what was left of the original five-hundred-book print run) could be found in the Strand in Manhattan and several other second-hand bookstores across the country. On the inside of the back jacket there would be a photograph of Dittmann with a Schimelpenick jutting from his lips, along with a brief biography: born and raised in Pennsylvania, a Civil War buff from the time he started visiting battlefields as a youngster, an expert on the Battle of Fredericksburg, currently teaching Civil War history at a Virginia junior college.
Waiting for the Egyptian to return, Lincoln plucked a Schimelpenick from the metal tin in his jacket pocket and held the flame of a lighter to the end of it. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke gush through his nostrils. “Mind if I smoke?” he inquired politely.
“Smoking,” Leroy remarked, “poisons the lungs. You ought to give it up.”
“Trouble is,” Lincoln said, “to give up smoking you need to become someone else. Tried that once. Went cold turkey for a while. But it didn’t work out in the end.”
After awhile the Egyptian returned to the room and settled into the wooden chair set catty-corner to the sofa. “Tell me more about what you did in Croatia?” he instructed Lincoln.
Croatia had been Crystal Quest’s brainchild. For all her imperiousness, she was old school: She believed a good legend needed more than a paper trail to give it authenticity. “If he’s supposed to be an arms merchant,” she’d argued when she dragged Lincoln up to the seventh floor at Langley to get the director to sign off on the operation, “there’s got to be a trail of genuine transactions that the opposition can verify.”
“You’re proposing to actually set him up in the arms business?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Whom would he sell to?” the director had demanded, clearly unsettled by the notion of one of the Company’s agents establishing his bona fides by becoming a bona fide arms merchant.
“He’ll buy from the Soviets who are running garage sales from their arsenals in East Germany, and deliver to the Bosnians. Since U.S. policy tilts toward the Bosnians, our Congressional oversight commissars won’t give us a hard time if they get wind of it, which they won’t if we’re careful. The idea behind this is to put Lincoln in the path of one Sami Akhbar, an Azerbaijani who buys arms for an al-Qa’ida cell in Bosnia.”
“As usual you’ve covered all the bases, Fred,” the director had noted with a flagrant lack of enthusiasm.
“Sir, that’s what you pay me for,” she’d shot back.
Lincoln had spent the next four months tooling around the Dalmatian coast in a serviceable Buick, avoiding the Serb undercover agents like the plague, using a fax to contact a shadowy Frankfurt entity and purchase truckloads of the Soviet surplus arms being sold off by Russian soldiers soon to be recalled to the USSR from East Germany, meeting the drivers at night on remote back roads as they came across Slovenia, then arranging for delivery at crossing points on the Dalmatian coast between Croatia and Bosnia. It was at one of these pre-dawn meetings that Lincoln first felt the fish nibbling at the bait. “Could you get your hands on explosives?” a Muslim dealer who went by the name Sami Akhbar had casually asked as he took possession of a two-truck convoy loaded with TOW antitank missiles and mortars and handed Lincoln a satchel filled with crisp $100 bills bound in wrappers from a Swiss bank.
Lincoln had dealt with Sami five times in the past four months. “What do you have in mind?” he had inquired.
“I have a Saudi friend who is shopping around for Semtex or ammonium nitrate.”
“In what quantities?”
“Very large quantities.”
“Your friend looking to celebrate the end of Ramadan with a big bang?”
“Something like that.”
“Russians aren’t peddling Semtex or ammonium nitrate. It would have to come from the States.”
“Are you saying it is within the realm of possibility?”
“Everything is within the realm of possibility, Sami, but it will cost a pretty penny.”
“Money is not a problem for my Saudi friend. Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich.”
The Muslim had produced a scrap of paper from a shirt pocket and, pressing it to the fender of the truck, had printed out with the stub of a pencil the name of a town and the street address of a mosque, along with a date and an hour. Lincoln had crouched in front of the Buick parking lights to read it. “Where in hell is Foz do Iguaçú?” he’d asked, though he knew the answer.
“It is in Brazil right across the frontier from Paraguay at a place called Triple Border, where Brazil and Paraguay and Argentina meet.”
“Why can’t we get together somewhere in Europe?”
“If you are not interested, only say so. I will find someone else who is.”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong, Sami. I’m interested. I’m just worried that it’s a long way to go for nothing.”
Sami had coughed up a laugh. “You guys who deal arms tickle me. I do not call two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. nothing.”
Lincoln had glanced again at the scrap of paper. “Are you sure your rich Saudi friend will contact me if I am standing outside the mosque on Pale
stine Street at ten in the morning ten days from today?”
Sami had nodded into the darkness. “A person will contact you and take you to him.”
In the small room over the bar, the Egyptian listened in silence to Lincoln’s account of his dealings in Croatia. In the alcove, the boy, working again at his jigsaw puzzle, blew bubbles with the gum until they burst against his fleshy lips. Leroy cleaned the fingernails of his left hand with a fingernail of his right hand. When Lincoln reached the end of the story, the Egyptian, lips pursed, sat without moving a muscle, weighing his next move. Finally he announced, “Leroy will take you back to your hotel in Foz do Iguaçú. Wait there until you hear from me.”
“How long will that take?” Lincoln asked. “Every day I’m away from the Balkans costs me money.”
The Egyptian shrugged. “If you become bored, you are free to yawn.”
“How did it go?” Lincoln asked Leroy when the two were alone in the car and heading toward the bridge and Foz do Iguaçú.
“The fact that you’re still alive can only mean it went well.”
Lincoln glanced at the Texan, whose face flashed in and out of the light as cars passed in the opposite direction. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Fucking A, I’m serious. Get it into your skull,” he said, drumming a forefinger against his own. “You’re associating with tough customers down here.”
Lincoln had to swallow a smile. Felix Kiick had used much the same words as he wound up the briefing back in Washington. “Holy mackerel, watch your ass when you get to Triple Border,” he’d said. “You’ll be rubbing shoulders with mighty ornery folks.”
The briefing in Washington had taken place on neutral turf, a nondescript Foggy Bottom conference room that had been swept by Company housekeepers and then staked out until the principals showed up at the crack of noon. From word one, the tension had been as thick as the fog Lincoln had braved driving to work that morning from the safe house in Virginia. It wasn’t so much the FBI briefer, a short, stumpy veteran counterterrorism maven named Felix Kiick with the low center of gravity of a NFL linesman; the CIA had dealt with him on any number of occasions (most especially when he directed the FBI’s counterterrorism team at the American embassy in Moscow) and considered him to be a straight shooter. The tension could be traced to the clash of cultures; to the mistrust J. Edgar Hoover (who had run the FBI with an iron hand until his death in 1972) had sewn into the agency’s bureaucratic fabric during his forty-eight years at the helm. The fact that the FBI, acting in obedience to a formal presidential “finding,” was being obliged to pass on to its arch competitor at Langley an operation and the assets that went with it, or what was left of them, only made matters worse. Kiick put the best possible face on the situation in his opening remarks. “Triple Border,” he told Lincoln as Crystal Quest and several of her wallahs looked on, “which is the nickname for the zone where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet up, is a cesspool filled with scum from Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatist group ETA, Colombia’s FARC, all of them operating under false identities or false flags. The FBI’s interest in Triple Border goes back roughly ten years when a large expatriate population fleeing the civil war in Lebanon gravitated into the area. The local authorities, some of them bribed, some of them intimidated, turned their backs on the sharp rise in crime in their backyard. You could buy and sell almost anything down there—passports for two-thousand dollars a clip, including the mug shot and the official government stamp; stolen cars; cheap electronics; along with the staples on any lawless frontier these days, drugs and arms. Several terrorist organizations set up guerilla training camps in the mato graso—the outback—to teach recruits how to rig car bombs or shoot the Soviet hardware that anyone could purchase in the back alleys of the border towns using money conveniently laundered by the banks at Triple Border.”
“Sounds like your people have a handle on the problems,” Lincoln said. “Why are you backing off?”
“They’re backing off,” Crystal Quest said, “because the director has convinced the White House that American interests would be better served if the CIA held the Triple Border action.” Quest fingered some crushed ice out of a bowl and began munching on it. “Drugs, contraband cars, a black market in computer software or pirated Hollywood films are small potatoes. We have reason to believe that Triple Border has become a staging area for Muslim fundamentalist groups working in the western hemisphere; at Triple Border they can purchase all the arms their hearts desire and launder the money to pay for it. And their fedayeen can get some R and R at the local bars, out of sight of the mullahs who expect them to remain chaste and pray five times a day. The mosques in Foz de Iguaçú on the Brazilian side and Ciudad del Este on the Paraguayan side are filled with Sunnis and Shiites who in other parts of the Muslim world don’t give each other the time of day. In Triple Border we suspect that they’re plotting to attack the United States and kill Americans.”
Kiick spoke up. “Despite what the CIA thinks of our collective abilities, the FBI did manage to run a handful of assets in Triple Border. With some persistence one of them struck pay dirt, pay dirt being the Egyptian named Ibrahim bin Daoud who runs the fundamentalist training camp called Boa Vista. Daoud, whose real name is Khalil al-Jabarin, has a record—al-Jabarin was convicted of being a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and served serious time in a Cairo military prison. He has the physical and mental scars to show for it; electrodes attached to testicles are said to be the torture of choice of Egyptian jailers. No doubt about it, Daoud himself is a cold-blooded killer—whether it’s the result of his suffering or his genes we don’t know. What we do know is that last month he snuck a crocodile into a swimming pool in São Paolo and then pushed in a man accused of being a police informer while some local hookers holding paper plates filled with defrosted hors d’oeuvres looked on. Money was spread around and the murder was hushed up. We know the story’s not apocryphal because one of the hookers was a collateral asset. The dead informer was our principal asset in Triple Border.”
“So the FBI has gone blind out there?” Lincoln asked.
“For all intents and purposes, yes.”
“The principal asset who got close to Daoud didn’t have an understudy?”
“We didn’t get around to it in time,” Kiick admitted.
“What else can I expect to find at Triple Border besides ravenous crocodiles?”
Kiick—Lincoln had a nodding acquaintance with him from having sat in on several of the rare joint CIA-FBI coordinating sessions—slid an FBI briefing book across the conference table. “What we’ve picked up is all in here,” he said. “You’re likely to come across a Texan who goes by the name Leroy Streeter. He’s what we call a crossover—in his case, an Aryan nationalist nut who is making common cause with the Muslim fundamentalists. Mind you, the mix is potentially lethal. If and when Muslim terrorists do attack the United States, the white supremacists could provide infrastructure support and eventually hit men, since it’s easier for an American to gain entrance to public places than an Arab from the Middle East. Leroy Streeter may or may not be the Texan’s real name, by the way. The guy you’ll meet—he’s five foot two, a hundred and thirty pounds, speaks with a Texas drawl—travels under a passport made out to a Leroy Streeter Jr. Leroy Streeter Sr. was the führer of a Texas-based white supremacist splinter group called the Nationalist Congress; he died of cancer in Huntsville while he was serving time for blowing up a black church in Birmingham. State Department consulate in Mexico City issued a passport to a Leroy Streeter Jr. four years ago, but Argentina’s Secretariat for State Intelligence thinks that he drowned on a Rio beach two years back; as far as we know, no body was recovered. Which means that Leroy Streeter Jr. has risen from the dead or someone is using his passport. Either way, he’s high on the FBI’s most wanted list. “
“Don’t let yourself get sidetracked,” Crystal Quest told Lincoln. “Leroy Streeter is
not the target of this operation. The person we’re after down there is the Saudi.”
“Does the Saudi have a name?” Lincoln inquired.
“Everyone has a name,” Quest snapped. “FBI just doesn’t know it.”
“From what our principal asset was able to tell us before his untimely death,” continued Kiick, unfazed by Quest’s dig at the Bureau, “we understand the Saudi is the kingpin of a fundamentalist group that recently surfaced as a blip on our radar screen. It’s been operating out of Afghanistan since the Russians were evicted from the country two years ago and calls itself al-Qa’ida, which means ‘The Base.’ The Saudi appears to be organizing al-Qa’ida cells across Europe and Asia and running them from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.”
“How do I get to this Saudi?”
“With any luck, he gets to you,” Quest said. “He’s in the market for explosives, lots of it. The FBI asset picked up rumors that the Saudi is shopping around for a truckload and is offering a small fortune if it can be delivered to an address in the United States. The explosives may be the tip of the iceberg—the Saudi may have his heart set on acquiring something that will render the explosives more lethal.”
“You’re talking about a dirty bomb,” Lincoln guessed.
“He’s talking about gift wrapping the explosives with plutonium or enriched-uranium radioactive waste,” Quest said, “which would result in the contamination of a wide area when the charge is detonated. Hundreds of thousands could be effected. It’s because of this threat that the president decided to bring the CIA into the picture.”
Kiick said, “Mind you, Lincoln—I understand that that’s the name you’re using now—the business about a dirty bomb is a worst-case scenario, and pure speculation.”
Quest ignored the FBI representative. “We’re going to come at the Saudi obliquely,” she told Lincoln. “We know of an al-Qa’ida cell in the Balkans that’s been running guns and ammunition to the Muslims in Sarajevo in the belief that war between the Serbs and Bosnians is inevitable. Guy who directs it is an Azerbaijani who uses the name Sami Akhbar. Our plan is to hang you out to dry on the Dalmatian coast, which is Sami’s stamping ground, and let him stumble across you. Once you’ve established your bona fides and whet his appetite, you reach the Saudi by working your way up the chain of command. In Triple Border, he’s said to use Daoud as a doorkeeper; nobody gets to the Saudi without getting past the Egyptian.”
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