by Fritz Galt
Chapter 7
Keri Butler soaked up every bump of the road with increased excitement and grabbed her mother’s arm. The U.S. Consulate minivan was pulling up to the well-lighted portico of the Taj Mahal Hotel.
“Isn’t it like a palace?”
“Yes, dear,” Linda replied while she looked nervously across the street. The dark hulk of the Gateway of India, an enormous stone arch erected on the quay to welcome King George V, sat unlit at that hour.
“Shukriya,” Keri said to the driver as he pulled to a stop.
She stepped outside. The odor of horse droppings from various wooden carriages parked before the hotel masked whatever fragrance emanated from the marble interior of the brightly-lit lobby.
She turned to Peter, and asked, “Will we see you tomorrow?”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said, and handed her his business card without missing a beat. “I’m your control officer and guide. As I understand you’re here on pleasure, I’d like you to call me whenever you want a real tour of this town.”
Keri flipped over the card and saw that he had jotted down his home phone number. She fanned herself with the card and beamed at her parents. Her father responded with one of his plastic smile-for-the-camera grins.
White-uniformed men dressed like ship’s stewards carefully counted the Butlers’ bags then took them off with great care.
A willowy receptionist wearing a colorful blue sari welcomed Fred and his family. Keri marveled at her soft, straight hair with its lustrous sheen, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the traditional red bindi dot in the center of the woman’s forehead.
The woman smiled at her. “Have you enjoyed your trip so far?”
“You bet,” Keri replied, jumping all over the chance to forge a new friendship.
A bellhop took the room key, and Fred encouraged Keri to come to bed, but she insisted that she wasn’t tired.
Long after her parents had left for their suite, Keri chatted in the empty lobby with the young woman.
Leaning over a map, the woman showed her the best discos and pubs in town.
Slowly, Keri began to relate the woman’s appearance and demeanor to the staff at a hotel where she had once stayed in southern Thailand. The woman had the same slow and graceful movements.
Under her father’s wing, Keri had traveled the world widely. She had been open to each new culture and had tried to learn its ways before arriving. She felt confident that her experience with a self-enlightened guru in Berkeley that summer, in addition to having poured over several guidebooks, had prepared her adequately for her maiden voyage to India.
During her brief midnight ride into downtown Bombay, she had tried to connect her observations to previous experiences in other countries. Little of the outside world seemed to have influenced Indian society and culture.
She looked around the ornate, arched lobby and sighed. Then her eyes returned to the young woman telling her about how to approach men in India.
“Aren’t Indians given away by their families in arranged marriages?” Keri asked, prepared to tout the benefits of such a different, but enlightened approach.
“We have our ways of getting around that,” the woman confided under her breath.
Such a mystery. Such mystique. The woman exuded such peace and lightness. Who was her spiritual leader? What allowed her to break through her own cultural taboos?
She would have to dig a little deeper if she had any hope of getting to know Indians in the next four and a half days.
Osama bin Laden’s men steered Abu out of the camp in the direction of Jammu City, and left him to fend for himself in the forest.
Stumbling along, scarcely able to believe his luck at holding such a highly providential meeting with Osama bin Laden, Abu ignored reason and allowed his head to fill with glory.
He fell to his knees and touched his forehead to the soil, his head pointed in the general direction of Mecca.
He hadn’t prayed so emotionally in years, but that night was different. He was filled with a holy mission.
As a child, he had impressed adults with his religious zeal. By the time he was ten, he was broadcasting instructions on prayer over Bombay radio. Three years later, barely a teenager, he began airing his own advice on prayer, ignoring the writings prepared by his Koranic instructor.
During Indira Gandhi’s second rule in the early Eighties, his interests veered toward politics. The Sikh community, a large religious group that held beliefs similar to both Hindus and Muslims, was pressing boldly for greater autonomy within India. Then, to his horror, Indian security forces assaulted the Golden Temple in Punjab, crushing the Sikh uprising and killing hundreds of militants. All across northern India, Hindus began razing ancient Sikh and Muslim holy places and building Hindu temples in their place.
The final affront to his religion and himself that made him set down his prayer book and take more forceful action came during the ’92-93 communal riots on the streets of Bombay. Sectarian strife turned to bloody pitched battles. Once again, Abu witnessed the brutal hand of right-wing Hinduism in action, and he despised it.
To escape the violence, his parents, who had achieved a comfortable prosperity dealing in diamonds and had built a mansion in Goa, immigrated from the former Portuguese enclave to Portugal itself. As a young man, Abu joined Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, called ISI for short, the fearsome covert arm of the government that was already hard at work recruiting young men off the strife-ridden streets of India.
Promoted for his good work on the streets, Abu was relocated to Pakistan, where he traveled frequently to Afghanistan. There, he helped train Kashmiri youths bent on restoring the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to its rightful independence from India. He had grown close to rebel leaders at the Afghan camps, and soon became a commander himself, making frequent forays on his Indian passport into Kashmir and staging bombings, attacks on soldiers, and recognizance for Pakistani troops shelling Indian positions.
His father became his major benefactor and paid for his frequent flights between Bombay, Kashmir, Dubai, Karachi and Islamabad. Furthermore, his father had become an important communication link between Abu’s Kashmiri militant group and other Muslim nationalist groups funded out of the West. In fact, his father had even forged a connection with a firm in London that served as a front for bin Laden’s group. It was through his father that Abu had obtained the microlight airplanes from a British manufacturer.
Yet the evening’s events had set him on a new course. It was not his hard work and steadfast devotion to Allah that had paid off. It was a strike out of the blue.
Osama bin Laden’s interest in him had been manna from Heaven.
It was long past midnight for Mick. The half moon, lying on its back like a sad smile, had set an hour earlier.
Mick’s head felt light from the beer and cognac.
He returned home to find the nurse asleep.
He climbed into a hammock at the water’s edge and listened to the suck and whoosh of his daughter’s medical ventilator through her open window. It seemed to synchronize with the waves.
He found himself pressing his fingertips together.
He missed Natalie’s touch. She would be leaning against him on a night like this.
She was the vivacious energy behind their marriage. She had had the sharp tongue and biting insights. Ten years her senior, he had let the loose cannon of her soul define the parameters of their relationship. Having flexibility in career and character and tolerance, he let her make most of the important family decisions, even though she seemed to think that the decisions were mutual.
Then he had pulled the plug on her enthusiasm. He had stepped beyond the limits that they had established. He had overruled her, and she had let him have it with both guns. Silent guns.
He recalled the week when she had visited them on the island. Her eyes were vacant, her words, unconvincing. She had tuned him out.
On any normal day, she would tolerat
e his grouchiness and cynical remarks. Now those remarks were the unwarranted venom of a bitter man. She no longer brought vitality and humor to their relationship. She no longer cared enough to call him.
He had seen a lot of alcoholism and divorce in the Foreign Service, personal friends going over the edge. He had never imagined it would happen to him.
While he had lived overseas, problems arose each day that threatened the groundwork of his entire existence. He had survived terrorists, social disorder, economic collapse, epidemics, destructive forces of nature, political posturing, evacuations and even department shuffles. He was destined to play the part of the pawn forever.
Such threats had tried to derail him from his foreign assignments and his career with the CIA, but he was just flexible enough to keep on track. Each adjustment or move caused him to revamp his self-image and purpose in life, but he had survived.
He had shouldered each development and dealt with the hazards effectively, eventually creating what he knew was a false sense of security that nothing could truly shake him.
He had never come unglued over a marital spat. Thank God his family had never failed to get a medical clearance to move to another country. Nor had he been obliged to care for an ailing relative back home.
Still the threat of a sudden end to his career was always there, pursuing him.
Suddenly a terrifying thought struck him. If Mariah wasn’t a dying relative, what was she?
Perhaps too much experience had hardened him past the point of recognizing the true needs of his family. Had he delayed too long in getting Mariah proper medical treatment? Had he done her more harm than good?
Like those who formulated America’s foreign policy, he had failed to listen, to know when to help and to know when to keep his mouth shut.
For a puzzled moment, he wondered where he was.
No, he had listened. For the first time in a long while, he had known exactly what to do. He had taken his limp daughter to safety. He had left India, and he had left the treadmill of the CIA behind him. His daughter lay serenely in a caressing breeze beside gentle waves.
He looked upward. The night sky bristled with stars. He listened to the oceanside sounds of the Maldives.
He closed his eyes and felt his hammock swing like a pendulum over the gravitational center of the earth. He felt as if the forces of nature could exactly triangulate his location.
For the first time in years, he knew where he was and why he was there.
Chapter 8
The antique pistol against his forehead came as a complete surprise.
Alec Pierce stared at the gun in the woman’s delicate hand. She pressed the cold barrel against his sweaty blond hair. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lake Sale below. It was the largest active volcanic crater in the world. One mile in diameter, it was one big, ugly hole.
He glanced past his khaki shorts and down his long legs. His boots teetered on the rim of Mt. Karthala, 7,700 feet straight over the sea.
What the hell was he doing there?
In all directions, he could make out the fuzzy shoreline of Grande Comore, the main island in the Comoros archipelago. The chain of islands seemed adrift in a forgotten sea between Mozambique on the mainland and island of Madagascar’s northern tip. The shadow of Tanzania’s Dar-es-Salaam, with its bombed out American Embassy, darkened the horizon, 450 miles to the northeast.
He had come to Comoros knowing that the “Coup-Coup Islands,” as they were known, with their eight governmental coups in fifteen years, presented the risk of civil strife, rioting and other cuckoo behavior. But it seemed hardly the place for murder.
“Camille, is this a joke?”
“No, it’s real.” Her French accent drifted among the sweet aroma of the indigenous trees.
Then the realization hit him. “That’s your perfume. You wear a perfume made from the ylang-ylang trees. You’re from Comoros.”
Behind the pistol, a smile softened the tense muscles of her deeply tanned face. Her beautiful, almond-shaped eyes sparkled like emeralds. “My father was Comorian. My mother was French.”
“Was?”
“They are both dead.”
He frowned in sympathy. “I hate death, don’t you?”
She withdrew the muzzle from his forehead, only to jab it more forcefully into his abdomen. He nearly stumbled backward, the steep slope dropping off behind him down to the toxic lake.
“C’mon, Camille. We’ve spent a great two days.” They had hiked together up the trail and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. He had enjoyed making love to her in a tent with snakes in the grass and lemurs swinging from the trees. “So let’s not ruin things.”
“Alec Pierce, you aren’t who you say you are. You aren’t an American businessman. You aren’t expanding your investments into tropical resorts. I know what you’re doing.”
Holding his hands over his head, he felt his shoulders begin to ache. He rolled his eyes and sighed. “Is this the right moment to bring this up?”
“Why do you think I took you here?”
“I guess I thought you had more romantic reasons. I didn’t know you had murder on your mind.”
“Romantic reasons?” She lowered the pistol to his shorts. “I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Well, that comes as a relief.” He began to lower his hands.
“Up,” she said, and prodded the muzzle sharply between his legs. “You can take a swim in that lake if you want.”
His hands shot higher than before.
“So you’re onto me,” he conceded. “Let’s start with what you know. What do you know?”
“You work for the American government,” she said.
“Okay, you’ve found me out. Now get that thing out of there.”
“You work for the State Department.” She jabbed harder.
State Department? Since when did he work for the pinstripes? Oh well, it sounded better than being on the payroll at Langley. “Okay, I admit it. I’m a diplomat. Now, Camille, this is going too far.”
“Why did you lie to me?” She squeezed the words through a constricted throat.
“Look, I’m from the American Embassy. We all lie.”
At last, she lowered the pistol, and the sharp pain eased, leaving a dull, throbbing ache.
The safety catch clicked back in place. At last, he allowed a smile. “Camille, you are a woman of passion.”
She turned away and walked morosely along the crater’s rim. Her tight tank top showed firm shoulder muscles. She had shoved her lovely legs into baggy camouflage pants and a pair of leather boots. And her long black hair formed a bushy tangle.
Despite a moist northerly wind off the Indian Ocean, the mocha brown skin of her arms glistened with perspiration.
He watched her carefully as she checked the safety and slipped the pistol back into her pocket. She scraped a foot across the path and knocked a pebble over the edge. An eternity later, it slammed with a “plunk” into the bottomless lake and generated a fizzing cloud of sulfur fumes.
He looked down to the other side. Solid black lava flows from past eruptions bounded like a superhighway a mile and a half straight down to the ocean.
He closed his eyes and fought for composure. Danger lurked in all directions. He had to back off. Yet, when he opened his eyes, he was drawn to the woman with the seductive eyes and the pistol.
He also heard the voice of wisdom in his head. “Get your damn prick out of there.” That would be the counsel of his older brother, Mick.
The wind sang clearly and brought the magical scent of the island.
“Lord, forgive me,” he said, and approached Camille, an arm gently extended in affection.
Abu stepped onto the stripped-down Jet Airways Boeing 737-400 at Jammu’s airport. To his disgust, all the “Club Première” seats were taken. He tried his best to settle down in the cramped coach cabin for a two-hour flight to Bombay.
Cufflinks shining, suit coat pressed, beard neatly trimmed, and wearing a borrowed
Sikh turban, he looked like any other business passenger aboard the flight. He didn’t mind the trappings of wealth. Although financial profit was not his goal, it would be a welcome reward for having unified India under Islamic law.
He grinned as he considered how lucrative that particular trip would be for him. How many businessmen seated around him could boast as much profit as he would gain in one trip? Granted, they weren’t kidnapping the daughter of an American congressman. His fellow passengers were mostly business managers. Few in India thought as big as he did, and fewer still had his particular blend of panache and meticulous planning.
On that thought, he reviewed a final checklist.
In one pocket he felt his falsely obtained identity card. It listed his name as Harnarinder Singh, a Sikh, and his birthplace was the Punjab. After the question asking his occupation, he had inscribed “quality control engineer.” He patted his other pocket and smiled as he felt the folded yearbook page containing Keri Butler’s photo.
What would he do to avoid mosquitoes, the diseased insects he had released in India over the previous few months? It was already late November, he reminded himself. The monsoon and rain would have long since passed, bringing an end to that year’s mosquito season.
Last on his checklist, he had used a moderate bribe to personally place a shipment of weapons rolled up in several large silk carpets in the cargo hold below him. Money well spent.
He watched an airport policeman stroll through the cabin, while another passed under the wing of the airplane. No day in Jammu-Kashmir State was safe from terrorists. No police check was routine.
He had concealed the explosives and rifles in the carpets, and bagged and tagged them with the name of an export company unrelated to him in any way.
He was slightly concerned that he had to take the same flight as his shipment, because nitroglycerin was very sensitive material, and flights could be jerky. However, his friend the guru Swami J.P. Nilayam, from his isolated little Temple of Higher Peace in Kerala, had forced him to advance his timetable several days.