by Fritz Galt
Khalid had explained earlier that his family had even gone to the extraordinary length of refrigerating his body in a local meat-processing warehouse long enough for the mourners to arrive.
Khalid turned to look at her. Although he exhibited no overt signs of grief, his face was long and solemn beneath the shadow of his cowl.
The slow, doleful procession followed a mullah from the local mosque. The old cleric led them southward out of town. Locals lined the street to show respect.
Natalie’s attention was drawn to one woman earnestly scanning faces in the funeral party. The woman let out a cry when she located Khalid. Carrying a young grandchild on her back, she jumped off the curb and fell upon Khalid with distraught pleas.
It took two policemen to tear the distressed woman away. Straightening his robe, Khalid trotted ahead to rejoin his friends in the procession.
Natalie caught a glimpse of the woman being dragged away, her face red, as a policeman clamped his hand over her mouth.
The train of people finally stopped at a high wall. A gardien in a turban and shirt sleeves stood a respectful distance away as the mourners passed through the arched doorway.
As soon as she stepped inside the holy grounds, Natalie understood why the cemetery had a wall and a guard. There were no caskets, no mausoleums, no burial vaults. Just mounds of stones marking the graves. The gardien’s role was to patrol the enclosure for dogs and other beasts that might dig up the remains.
On top of certain graves, there fluttered what appeared to be rags. Survivors had written prayers on the scraps, trusting the wind to carry them to Allah.
But the Skah family had prepared more than the ordinary gravesite. An ornate headstone, decorated with a blue and white tile mosaic, was lavish and conspicuous. He was a fallen hero.
As mourners gathered around the slab, the mullah consecrated the body with a qiraah, a liturgical chanting of the Koran. Shrill cries dulled to mere grieving so that others could hear the highly improvised musical prose. The rhythm in his deep voice had no particular meter. However, he punctuated the qiraah with long and short silences in which Natalie heard nothing but wind howling emptily across the cemetery. Then the singer would resume on a completely different pitch and cadence.
When the song came to an uncertain end, several men gently removed the corpse from the litter for burial.
A small disturbance broke out among the men at the front of the group. It appeared to be the two white-clad sheiks protesting something about the body. Khalid and others tried to restrain them and calm them down.
The younger sheik slipped free just before the corpse entered the earth. The man tried to rip the head cloth off the face. People gasped. More men rushed in to subdue the sheik as the litter bearers quickly lowered the body, still fully concealed, into the soil.
“Different customs,” a woman whispered to another in French. “They don’t cover the face.”
The shrieking and high-pitched trilling resumed with renewed vigor. Veils grew damp with tears. Mustapha’s right side was turned to permanently faced toward Mecca.
Mourners took turns throwing stones and dirt on the form below. The crowd was pushing her forward. Soon it would be her turn to help bury the body.
Behind her, someone pressed something into the palm of her hand.
What was that?
It felt sharp like a knife. Was she doing something wrong? Had she been exposed?
But it didn’t feel like a single point. Rather, there were two. She felt the object more carefully. It was a pair of envelopes, which she took.
A man pushed some women aside and circled in front of her. He raised a finger to his lips.
It was Mick.
His alert, gray eyes burned through the dark shadows of his cowl. Her heart began to pound like crazy, thudding in her ears. Her cheeks felt flushed with happiness.
“You came back,” she whispered.
She wanted to reach out and touch him with her free hand, but before she could move, he grabbed her by the wrist. He squeezed her so tight that the ends of her fingers grew numb.
She sucked in her breath.
His pointed hood swept over the mourners to indicate caution. Then he slowly released his grip.
“What was that for?” she asked.
He turned sideways, his face averted.
Okay, be that way. He was acting out that undercover crap again.
Then she remembered the envelopes. “What are these?” she whispered.
She read the return address.
“The Women’s Clinic? We can’t open this now.”
“And a note for Proteus,” he added. Through the thick fabric of his cowl, his voice was cold and even.
“Proteus,” she repeated. The name jumped out at her. She had been warned about it in “Alec’s” final words. She had seen the name scrawled in blood at Alec’s apartment. And Khalid had mentioned working for Proteus in the conversation she had just overheard that morning.
She had to learn more, but Mick was in her way.
“Mick, you’ve got to get out of here. I’m getting close to the center of things, and I don’t want you muddying the waters.”
He looked around to make sure all heads were turned away. “You’re no spook,” he whispered fiercely. “The Proteus jihad are cold-blooded assassins. You’re out of your league.”
His comment cut her to the quick. It wasn’t the feminist in her that reacted, or the career diplomat. She just didn’t like an outsider interfering with her work.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said sternly.
Women turned to look at her.
“Do you really?” he asked under his breath.
Boy, if she only had the opportunity to tell him what she knew.
He took a deep breath. “Come with me.”
The vision of the president being assassinated, lying dead on the street, haunted her. She couldn’t abandon her duty. There was no way Mick or any other Johnny-come-lately could infiltrate Khalid’s ring in time to save the president’s life.
“I can’t come with you. Not just now.”
“We’ll make a break for it,” he said steadily, and sure of himself. “Follow me.”
He turned his back and strode slowly away.
She had received more impassioned offers in her past. He didn’t exactly sound like a suitor asking her to “Be mine” on Valentine’s Day.
She watched his brown robe weave a path into the throng. Perhaps he wanted her to follow him out of the cemetery as if he were some knight in shining armor. But did he really want her?
She didn’t need some Sir Gallahad rescuing his old hag in distress.
Her feet were planted firmly. She was sorry to disappoint him.
Then, among the perspiring women who pressed her toward the grave, she smelled the cool scent of Aramis. For an instant, she took her eyes off Mick.
Khalid stood beside her with his mother.
Natalie slipped the envelopes up her sleeve.
“I want you to help me,” Khalid said earnestly.
“Sure,” she said. “What can I do?”
“I would like you to take care of my mother.”
Great. So he needed a baby-sitter.
She looked up beyond the old, bent woman. She had lost sight of Mick in the crushing crowd.
“There will be much food to deliver,” Khalid said.
Then she spotted Mick again. His back was turned. He still trusted her to follow him. Then he slipped through the arch, and was gone.
In a second, Mick would turn around and realize that she wasn’t there. He had left her stranded in a graveyard in Morocco.
No, that wasn’t fair. She had let him go.
She looked down at the mother, then at Khalid. Her lips were dry. Her heart was empty.
“You want me to deliver the food,” she repeated.
She hadn’t only lost her appetite, she felt nauseous. She looked about for a private place to be sick.
Gazing sympathet
ically into her eyes, the old woman grabbed her hand and pressed something cold and heavy into it.
Her grip was strong and supportive.
Natalie slid the rough object around her palm. It was a stone to help bury the body.
Leaning against the old woman, her knees weak, and blinded by tears, she stumbled with the group toward the grave.
Chapter 33
Eli Shaw had been awoken by a phone call that morning. As Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA, he normally didn’t rush to the office. This morning he did.
Now at his desk, he leaned a short, precise finger on his speakerphone and asked his assistant to put a call through to Mick Pierce in Bern.
Eli was a good friend of Mick’s, but hadn’t seen him since the week they had tackled a crisis in Hong Kong, several years ago. Now it looked like Mick was in trouble again.
Earlier that morning, the security officer at the American Embassy in Bern had called the State Department’s European desk and created a significant bureaucratic ripple throughout Washington. But it was the kind of ripple that didn’t shock those who had been through the process before.
In the large and austere Foggy Bottom headquarters of the State Department, the European desk officer had logged the call and dutifully phoned around the State Department. He alerted the directors of the European Regional Bureau, the Diplomatic Security Bureau, the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and the Bureau for Science and Technology, which was coordinating the presidential visit to Geneva.
The Diplomatic Security Bureau then immediately contacted the Secret Service, over at the Treasury Building beside the White House, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from Treasury.
In turn, the FBI had contacted the CIA for leads on the international ring named the Proteus Jihad.
As director of covert operations at the CIA, Eli Shaw had been alerted as a matter of course.
He didn’t intend to react, expecting the Directorate of Intelligence to produce the necessary information, until he noticed that Mick was involved.
“Pick up for Bern,” Eli’s assistant said over the intercom.
Glancing down through his half-lenses, Eli grabbed his phone. He wiped away a speck of dust off the keypad as he waited for the call to connect to Switzerland. Dusting his desk was an old habit that was no longer necessary. He had an entire staff to clean his office, while his old friend Mick, who was the more deserving of the two, still labored away in a back closet of a CIA station.
There was a familiar whistling sound on the high-security line, then a man picked up on the other end.
“Bern,” was all Eli heard.
“This is Eli Shaw at Langley. Is Mick Pierce there?”
“Mick’s not here, sir,” the man said. “But I’ll take the call. I’m Everett Hoyle, Station Chief. How may I help you?”
Eli tried to keep the tension out of his voice as he recited the entire story of the assassination threat over the phone.
When he had finished telling Everett all about Proteus, he heard a laugh on the other end.
“Yep, you’ve got the details right, sir, even though it must be third-hand.”
“So you already know about the threat?” Eli asked.
“I’ve been at all the meetings. Now, what’s Washington going to do about it?”
“Unfortunately, there’s not much that the Agency can do to help you out on your end, or on Mick’s end. As you know, the unique responsibility for safeguarding the president’s life rests with the Secret Service. I just want to put a few pieces together.”
“Okay, what pieces would you like to start with?”
Eli looked over some questions that he had jotted down on a memo pad. Then he took off his reading glasses and looked at family photos scattered around the walls of his office. “Mainly, I want to know how Mick, Natalie and Alec got involved in all of this.”
“To tell you the honest truth, I don’t know,” Everett said. “They seem to have stumbled onto it. Natalie phoned in some useful information just now. She seems to have narrowed the planned attack down to somewhere in Switzerland.”
“What’s the president’s itinerary in Switzerland?”
“Sight seeing, I believe, and CERN.”
“The particle accelerator? Why there?”
“He’s planning a big speech there. I don’t know what the substance is. Natalie and Alec were working on membership issues with CERN.” He paused. “Why membership is so goddamned important that the president has to make a speech about it, I just don’t know.”
“Are we members?”
“We are now, thanks to Natalie and Alec’s work over the past year. It appears that Proteus has been based at the lab. But I don’t think he set out to kill the president. He must have been setting up shop in CERN for some time, and the president’s decision to visit was just recent. Initially, Proteus might have been staking out CERN for some other reason, possibly in anticipation of our membership.”
“I see,” Eli said slowly.
The gears were spinning quickly in his mind. Indeed, why was CERN important to the president? Why was it important to Proteus? It was a low-level breakthrough in relations with an international organization. Why was someone so interested in America’s presence there?”
“Let’s move on to my next question,” Eli said. “Assuming the president holds true to form and won’t change his plans, how are we going to identify this assassin?”
“First of all, the president has got to cancel his trip. It’s crazy not to. I’ve seen all sorts of stuff happening here in the past forty-eight hours. There’s been a string of murders, all connected to this visit. My secretary’s dead, for God’s sake. Everyone I know is mobilized on this issue. This assassin is for real.”
“That’s part of the problem, isn’t it. We need to establish that there’s a credible threat to the president’s life.”
“Take my word for it, sir. The threat is real.”
“Not until we find ourselves the assassin.”
“With all due respect, sir, that’s circular reasoning,” Everett said. “Anyway, I thought it was the Secret Service’s business. We’re not trained detectives.”
They had reached an impasse.
Eli cleared his throat and continued. “What are you doing on your end?”
“Today, my goal is to track down a new name that Natalie gave us: Brahim Abbad. If that leads me somewhere, I’ll let you know.”
“Please do. Use Interpol. Call Morocco. Do whatever it takes.”
“Within our new budgetary restrictions?”
“Huh?”
“Sir, within our latest SATO guidelines?”
“What’s SATO?” Eli said, stumped by the acronym.
The line went silent for a moment. “I received this cable from the Agency to discontinue operations with State due to budgetary cutbacks.”
Eli frowned. “The CIA sent no such directive. And there’s no SATO, as far as I know.”
“Strange. I took it seriously.”
“Give me the cable number, and I’ll look into it.”
It took Everett a moment to hunt for the cable. Then he read it off over the phone. “The sender line says it’s from the CIA,” he added, somewhat defensively.
“One moment, please,” Eli said. He wrote the number down and cupped his hand over the phone. He pressed the button on his intercom and Dwight Goode, his assistant, entered the office.
“Look up this cable number,” he said in a low tone, handing over the note. “It looks suspicious to me. I think someone has hacked into our communications system.”
The young man took the note and left.
“Okay, Everett,” Eli continued into the phone. “That leaves me with one line of inquiry. I’ll try to find out what this new relationship with CERN is all about. We seem to be missing some crucial facts here.”
“And I’ll see where the Brahim trail leads.”
“Good luck, and press on,” Eli said. �
��We’ll get the president to change his plans yet.”
He heard Everett heave a sigh of relief. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”
Eli hung up the phone. Suddenly it wasn’t the assassin’s plans that intrigued him. He could rely on Everett to track that down. It was the nature of America’s new relationship with CERN that occupied his thoughts.
He found the right extension and called across the Langley campus to his counterpart in the Directorate of Science and Technology.
“Henry,” he said when the phone picked up. “I need to talk with you and your scientists about why we joined CERN.”
“Joined what?”
“You know, that laboratory in Switzerland. The accelerator.”
“Oh,” Henry said uncertainly. “I’ll put you through to DI. I don’t think we have anything to do with them.”
Eli waited for half a minute before he found himself speaking with Daniel Pryor, the head of the Directorate of Intelligence, the CIA’s research and analysis division.
“I should have called you in the first place,” Eli said. “Who over there does the intelligence on scientific developments around the world?”
“Let me think,” came back the heavy Southern accent. “Might be someone down in Research. I’ll transfer you.”
Eli waited a full minute. At last a timid voice came on the line. “Yes, sir? This is Research, Jeremy Watts speaking.”
“Mr. Watts, this is Eli Shaw. What do you know about our effort to join CERN in Switzerland? What’s our reason for going in there?”
“Sir, I didn’t catch your name.”
“I’m Eli Shaw, deputy director of operations.”
“Let me just verify that, sir. Please hang up.”
The line went dead. So he hung up.
Seconds later, Eli’s phone rang, and he picked it up.
“It’s me, Jeremy,” the man said.
“Wonderful.” Eli rolled his eyes. It was nice to know that his own Agency didn’t trust him, and that they relied on such low-tech solutions.
“I just don’t want to lose my security clearance, sir.”
“So what’s so important about CERN?”
There was some hesitation. Then Jeremy spoke. “You’ve heard about the superconducting chip?”