by David Stone
“And I will go with him. Gladly. But if it is Tangier, before we dock, radio the port, ask for a man named Tariq Ibn Zuliman. He’s one of the harbor police. A secret Hebrew. If I am dead, tell him that Daniel Roth said Shālōm. Do we have money at all?”
“Better,” said Levka. “We have gold.”
“Good,” said Roth, weaving. His hawkish face suddenly took on an abstracted glaze, and his color altered for the worse.
“You will . . . excuse . . .”
“Dear God,” said Mandy. “Go!”
Roth went stumbling down the stairs. Mandy leaned down and called after him, “Mind, you make it all the way to the head. If you don’t, you’re the one who mops it up.”
She straightened up, registered the disapproving looks.
“I am not well suited,” she said with dignity, “to the caring professions. Sick people make me angry. I want to smack them.”
“She doesn’t approve of blood either,” said Dalton.
“Fine on the inside,” said Mandy, “where it belongs. But people who get some minor flesh wound and then go tottering about the terrain, moaning and wailing, spouting and gouting, ruining the rugs and draperies, well, they’re just . . .”
“Inconsiderate?” suggested Nikki.
“Exactly,” said Mandy with a thin but approving smile.
DAWN light was slowly rising up the crowded slopes of the Medina, and already hundreds of people were out in the streets and swarming the crowded, dumpy little harbor. A small, neat brown man, in a starched tan uniform, a Sam Browne harness, and gleaming riding boots, was standing on the mole, watching with an amused smile, as their boat cruised slowly along the quayside.
He bowed as they came level, tipped his kepi when he saw Mandy and Nikki in the pilot cabin, adroitly caught a line from Ray Fyke, pulling briskly on the rope until their port-side bumpers rolled, squealing, up against the wooden dock.
“Mr. Roth is with you?”
Dalton stepped up to the taffrail.
“Mr. Roth is . . . unwell. Are you Ibn Zuliman?”
A cavalier bow, a sardonic half smile, eyes bright.
“I am he. We received your radio message. Are you intending to disembark? There will of course be . . . formalities . . .”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “We have the ‘formalities’ in hand. May I introduce Miss Mandy Pownall and Miss Nicole Turrin, both of America. And the large unshaven gentleman with the lime-green skin is Raymond Fyke, a British national. We have some tea brewed. Will you step down and join us?”
“Tea? Tea would be wonderful!” he said, stepping lightly through the gate and down onto the teak decking, He looked around at the boat with an experienced eye and then came back to Dalton.
“A very fine craft, Mr. . . . ?”
“Dalton. Micah Dalton. Yes, she is.”
“But perhaps a little narrow in the beam to cross such waters. She would toss about a bit if the swells set in.”
“She tossed about more than a bloody bit,” said Roth, stumbling up from the lounge deck like an undead corpse rising from a crypt, shirtless, his face wet, a damp towel around his neck. He was holding on to the bulkhead and weaving, but less than usual. “She tried to kill us all, Tariq. I’m very glad to have lived to see you again.”
The officer’s dark face broke into a broad, teasing grin.
“I have always said you are no sailor, Daniel. Welcome to Tangier. Welcome, all of you,” he said as Joko and Levka climbed up to the pilot deck. “And your . . . borrowed . . . boat.”
“You know this boat?” asked Dalton.
“Oh my yes. A most famous boat, here in Tangier. We see her all the time. A Chris-Craft, built in 1967. A classic. She belongs to Margaret Llewellyn Woodside—”
“Woodside?” Roth asked. “As in—”
“As in Captain Dugald Woodside. I take it she is a friend?”
“Oh my yes,” said Mandy with a dazzling smile. “For-simply-ever. We were Head Girls together at Queen Ethelburga’s. Such happy times. I wonder, Major Zuliman, if you would consider keeping her lovely boat safe here in Tangier. I’m sure dear, darling Maggie will be along very shortly.”
Dalton sent Mandy a quick sideways look.
Maggie?
Queen Ethelburga’s?
Mandy ignored him, turning her powers of enchantment loose on the dapper little major, who crumbled before them as men usually did.
“It will be an honor, Miss Pownall. An honor. But please, you are not staying in Tangier? I would love to invite you—invite all of you—for a luncheon. The café there, close by the sea. The lovely aspect. Tea, perhaps something pale and sparkling, a priorato? We have, fresh from the Levant . . .”
“Sadly, no,” said Mandy, looking over at Roth. “I do so wish we could. But . . . I’m afraid . . .”
“There’s a jet waiting for us at Boukhalef,” said Roth.
The major managed to tear his attention away from Mandy, visibly disappointed. Nikki Turrin, apparently invisible, sighed.
“Then we must not delay,” said the major. “I can lend you our Mercedes and driver. You must be away! So let us quickly conclude the . . . formalities . . .”
Dalton handed over the . . . formalities.
Two were required.
IN a battered and overcrowded antique Mercedes, as they were speeding along the rue Ibn Zaidoun, the green peak of Cape Spartel dominating the northern horizon, about ten klicks from Boukhalef airfield and the waiting Israeli Legacy, Nikki Turrin’s BlackBerry finally rang. She picked it up, listened intently for a while, and then made that universal handwriting gesture meaning I need a pen and paper. Fyke, on whose lap she was sitting, after a pleasant interlude that involved some incidental contact with Nikki’s thighs while he ransacked his pockets for a pen, finally found one in his coat pocket, and Dalton handed back one of the limo driver’s business cards. Nikki, head down, her long auburn hair blowing in the hot wind coming in the open window, wrote furiously for about two minutes. She finished writing, saying something low and intense that no one could make out over the rush of wind and the rumble of the tires on the uneven blacktop, and ended the call.
She looked around at the faces, all of which were staring back at her with varying expressions.
“Yes,” she said. “He got it. But not—”
“Not here,” said Roth, agreeing completely.
Casablanca
ISRAELI LEGACY JET, FIVE THOUSAND FEET, APPROACHING ANFA AIRPORT, NOON LOCAL TIME
Roth and Joko Levon were up front with the pilots, engaged in a low-level but heated discussion with their people back at Tel Aviv, trying to give them a plausible reason for asking the Moroccan authorities to allow a Mossad plane to land at Anfa and not be placed immediately in quarantine while the two governments worked out the ramifications over the following weeks and months.
Dalton, on the starboard side, was watching the coastline of Morocco unwind beneath the silver wing, an undulating ribbon of sand and rock, the long rollers of the Atlantic looking like lacy white ribbons as they crashed into the coast five thousand feet below him. There were boats in the water—tankers, stubby little trawlers, a large schooner far out beyond the sandbars in the deep blue, heeled over hard, trailing a widening V of wake a half mile long. Small craft, motorboats, what looked like a Zodiac. But nothing that looked like the Blue Nile.
He was aware of Mandy at his shoulder, craning to see the water through the small round porthole. Her face was set and tense.
“Anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“I’m not seeing any marinas,” she said, shading her eyes from the glare off the wing and the glare fracturing the water.
“No. Fort Meade had the location of the boat—”
“Or of Levka’s cell phone anyway—”
“Or Levka’s cell phone, at 33 degrees 36 minutes north and 7 degrees 36 minutes west. That’s basically in the middle of those dockyards coming up right underneath us. If the boat is there, it’s underneath
one of those corrugated-tin shelters.”
He checked Mandy’s BlackBerry, still not using his own, and saw that they were approaching the sector very fast: they’d be over it in thirty seconds. In the cabin behind them, Fyke and Levka were pressed up against the porthole doing pretty much the same thing: looking for any sign of the Blue Nile.
Nikki Turrin was sitting on the opposite side, looking down at Casablanca. A flat, meandering city, streets and lanes laid out in no particular order, it looked to her like an aerial shot of Gary, Indiana. So much for Bogart and Bergman.
She felt the jet banking, and her coffee tilted. She heard the crackling voice of the copilot up front.
“We have been denied permission to land at Anfa. We are to leave Moroccan airspace at once. If you care to look out the port-side windows, you’ll see how serious they are about this.”
Everyone went to the port side. Everyone except Dalton, who was suddenly riveted by something that was passing below them right now. He could hear Fyke’s low growl from across the aisle. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Mikey, they’ve scrambled a fucking Mirage. He’s sitting right off our wing.”
“Give him a wave,” said Dalton as the Legacy did a slow bank to starboard. Dalton’s attention was fixed on something large and rectangular, set out on what looked like landfill, right on the rim of the coast. It was some sort of palace or public building, with a blue roof, a square tower. The grounds around it were a complex pattern of inlaid stone. He picked up Mandy’s BlackBerry.
“Mandy, does this thing have a camera?” he asked.
“Yes. A good one.”
“Thanks.”
He held the BlackBerry up, found the trigger, and snapped a picture just as the coast fell away and they were passing over the muddled maze of downtown Casablanca.
He held the screen up for Mandy.
“Look at this.”
She studied the image in the little screen.
“Bloody hell,” she said, her gray eyes widening. “That’s the Hassan II Mosque. It’s the largest mosque in the world, I think. They’ve been working on it for years. Where’s that card?”
She started ruffling through the pockets of her leather jacket, emerging with one of the ID cards Dalton had taken from the bodies of the men he had killed on the road to Staryi Krim.
She held the card up, tapped the symbol they had assumed was a Serbian unit badge . . .
“This is what they’re going at. The mosque. It has to be. They put it right out there on the Web too. Like a piece of a puzzle. So they could brag about it later. The sods. What bloody cheek.”
Dalton, his face paling as the enormity of the thing went home, stood up, slipped by Mandy, who was still staring down at the ID card, shocked, stunned, silent.
“Danny. Joko,” he said, standing at the door to the cockpit.
Roth and Levon turned around.
“Come back into the cabin. Both of you. There’s something you need to see.”
ROTH slammed the microphone back on the cradle, stared out at the desert below. The harsh, arid terrain was slowly rising into a chain of ancient mountains, ground down to rocky slopes by a hundred million years of wind and sand.
“Fucking Moroccans,” said Roth. “They don’t believe us.”
“Then screw ’em,” said Levon. “We did what we could.”
“What about Vukov and the rest? What about Galan?”
Roth looked at Joko and then around the cabin at the rest of them, everyone looking either angry or depressed or both.
“They’ve pulled the Mirage off. But you can bet they’re watching us on the radar. If we do anything but leave Moroccan airspace, they’ll force us down. Everyone in this cabin will end up in a Moroccan prison. Joko, you and I know what will happen to us. We’re not only Jews, we’re Mossad. Look, everybody, it was one chance in Hell that these dumb-ass carpet jockeys could see past their hatreds even to save their own fucking mosque. They can’t. So I’m going back to Tel Aviv. I’m sorry about Galan, but you all know what these people do to captured Israeli soldiers. I’m not up for being tortured to death in Meknes Prison.”
“Or being handed over to Hezbollah or Hamas,” said Dalton. “No. You two have to get out of this now. But I’m staying.”
Roth and Joko looked across at Dalton.
“Lovely,” said Joko. “What are you going to do? Open the door and step out, hope you land on a camel?”
Dalton pointed to the four-lane blacktop running north along the coast. “Put me down on the A3. Touch and go, I’ll manage from there.”
Roth and Joko stared down at the tiny ribbon snaking along the coast, a perfect picture of bloody nowhere.
“You, my friend—and I say this with the greatest respect—are totally fucking nuts,” said Levon with nonetheless a touch of reverent awe in his voice. “Totally, utterly, completely bat shit. And the pilots would never agree to it. It’s a rat fuck from the get-go.”
“Yes it is. Ask them anyway.”
Roth looked at Dalton for a while, shaking his head.
“Fine. You’re nuts. But I will. And I know what they’ll say.”
Roth was wrong.
THE pilot turned out to be an ex-fighter pilot from the IDF. Grinning like a loon, he pulled a hard left bank, dropping down through the heat haze like a falcon diving on a wren, lining up on the A3, choosing a straightaway and heading right at it.
“I crash this thing,” said the pilot over the intercom, “I’m sending the bill to Langley.”
He didn’t. He touched down, bounced twice, taxied to a stop. Dalton, grabbing a leather bag full of borrowed guns and ammo, along with his own Anaconda and his gold, popped the latch. The door swung upward, a hot blast of desert air and grit flowing into the cool of the cabin. He turned around in the doorway and saw Mandy, Levka, Fyke, and Nikki all up and getting ready to go.
“No,” he said, hardening up. “This is no—”
“Dear God,” said Mandy, brushing past him and jumping to the pavement. “This is no time to stand in the door and pose for the Oath of the Horatii. Hand me my bag, Dobri.”
Fyke was on the ground a second later, and then Levka. Nikki was about to step off when Dalton put a hand on her shoulder. “No, Nikki. I’m sorry. One of us has to stay.”
She shot him a ferocious look, but he pressed his point.
“Nikki, listen. It has to be one of us. You know everything we know, Nikki. If we don’t pull this off, you’re the only one who can do anything for us back in D.C. I know you want to go—”
“No! I’m not going to end up as a . . . goddamned REMF!”
Dalton, in spite of himself, had to grin at that.
“Where’d you get that phrase?”
“Hank. He used it all the time.”
“Where is he? Where is Hank right now?”
Her face changed, softened a bit.
“He’s on his way down to Fort Meade.”
“Good. What about Briony?”
“She’s . . . staying . . . in Garrison.”
“Then go see him, Nikki. Tell him everything that went on. If anyone can find the other end of this crazy tangle, it’s him.”
She was still in the door, struggling with it.
“Truck coming,” said Fyke from the ground.
Nikki looked at Dalton for a moment longer, her eyes hot and her breathing short and sharp. Then she reached out, put her hand behind his neck, pulled him in, and kissed him hard on the mouth. She broke off, shoved him out the door, slammed it down, and the engines began to spool up immediately.
They all stepped back out of the Legacy’s wash and watched as it gained speed and rose into the air only a hundred feet in front of a large tractor trailer, which plowed into the shoulder and shuddered to a stop in a cloud of dust. As the jet climbed, it became a glint of steel in the sunlight, a booming roar that shook the sky. And then it was gone, and they were left on the ground in the grit and heat of the desert, the pavement smelling of tar and kerosene.
&n
bsp; “How sweetly romantic, a farewell kiss from a devoted fan,” said Mandy, shouldering her bag. “Remind me, if we ever meet again, to put something truly horrid in her tea.”
They watched as the truck jerked and stalled and then started up again, a column of smoke belching from its stacks.
“Here he comes,” said Fyke. “What do you think? Should I show some leg?”
“No,” said Dalton, pulling out a couple of gold bars. They glowed in the sunlight, little slabs of heat and fire. “This is prettier.”
THE night had come down on Casablanca by the time they reached the center of town. The trucker, a Sephardic Jew who had noted the Israeli flag on the Legacy’s tail, grinned and swore that God was smiling on their enterprises, whatever they were, since not only had they survived a landing on a crumbling highway, but the first person to come along was a Jew, not some Moroccan thug with a cell phone. In exchange for three “formalities”—Dalton’s Crown Royal bag was getting lighter—he happily drove them all the way into the center of Casablanca and then out along the Boulevard Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, circling the roundabout and pulling to a halt about a quarter mile from the Hassan II Mosque. It was, he explained, adopting a solemn, professorial tone, “the largest mosque in the world, capable of accommodating twenty-five thousand worshippers inside and another eighty thousand on the grounds. It was seven epic years in the making, the most awesome wonder of the Islamic world. Whatever you are doing here, I trust that it will meet with the favor of whatever gods you follow. In your case, Mr. Blondie, I suspect he is Thor or perhaps Odin. Good-bye to you all. And know that you have made an old man happy today.”
He gazed down upon them, a wizened, leathery old scoundrel with a silver tooth, grinning hugely, jiggling his little bag with three solid-gold wafers in it—he had just collected thirty thousand dollars. He slammed his door, shoved the gearshift forward. There was a clash of gears, a burst of compressed air from his brakes, and the truck jerked forward, lumbering away into the rush and clamor of the streaming traffic, the smoke from its stacks rising up and spreading out and losing itself in the generalized yellow haze of smog and coal dust and sea-salt mist that hung in the humid air.