by David Stone
Ten minutes later, with Dalton at the controls, they were climbing, at forty degrees and full thrust, into the increasing cloud cover of a southbound storm system boiling out of Malaysia and Singapore was receding into a green delta, with its core of spiky towers, and the South China Sea was opening up before them.
Mandy Pownall was in the main cabin with a Sobranie and a glass of scotch on the rocks, staring out at the island of Singapore as it rolled away into the west. She felt able to cope with the parting, although the Marines had failed to find—or failed to find the nerve to find—her very expensive underthings, which was going to present some wardrobe problems down the line. No doubt the concierge would FedEx everything to London. It would all be waiting for her, if she ever got back to London alive. Miss Lopez was in the galley, not at all resigned to being the goddam Filipina help, staring at the microwave and wondering what the hell all those buttons meant. Fyke was in the copilot’s seat, staring out at the muddy brown shoals at the southern end of the Strait, his battered face solemn.
“Jeez, Ray. Cheer up. You’re out of Changi.”
Fyke nodded, keeping his hooded gaze out on the broad, green, rippled plain of water. A lone containership was steaming into the east, heading for Borneo, trailing a long white V in her wake. He had a glass of scotch, held awkwardly in his injured hand, but, so far, he hadn’t touched it.
“How you feeling?”
Fyke glanced over at Dalton, flashing an oddly shy smile.
“Well, between you and me, I feel like shit.”
“Take some morphine.”
Fyke shook his big, shaggy head.
“No. No more drugs. I need to stay clear.”
Dalton checked the altimeter and leveled them out at twenty-one thousand feet. The plane rose and fell on a current like a sailboat cresting a wave. The engines—four Pratt & Witneys, clustered around the tail section—thrummed a deep, harmonic vibrato right through the airframe, and the cold air whistling over the windshield put beads of condensation around the rim of the glass.
It was a good plane, easy to fly, and he could feel the knots and cords of tension in his back and chest beginning to slip. Even the knife wound in his side had been reduced to an irritating itch, and it hadn’t bled in two days. Fyke was getting ready to say something, and Dalton was content to let him get there on his own. Which he did, after an hour, after Miss Lopez had brought them a tray of tuna sandwiches and a pot of hot coffee, which she served without a smile, and, after she had gone, the planet had continued to roll under them, and the green mountains of Borneo had slipped away under the starboardwing, and the long, ragged volcanic archipelago of Indonesia began to unfold along the southern horizon. When he did speak, Fyke’s tone was wary and cautious, a man stepping carefully over tricky terrain:
“Mikey . . . I was talking to Miss Pownall . . . ?”
“Call her Mandy.”
“Mandy. She says you had a friend in Venice . . . a woman.”
“Cora Vasari. She’s in a coma in Florence.”
“Jeez. What happened?”
“A man named Branco Gospic had a hitter named Radko Borins shoot her in the head.”
“Crikey. Why?”
“You never heard of Branco Gospic, Ray?”
Fyke went inside for a time.
“In Pristina, we were looking at a network that we figured was shadowing Stefan Groz. I think the name Gospic came up. That the man?”
“Yes. We never made him at the time, but his name was in the wind.”
“Why’s he trying to kill your lady friend?”
Dalton looked across at Fyke.
“Mandy hasn’t told you about my status?”
“Not a thing. What about your status?”
“Let’s say I was on leave for a while there.”
Fyke knew better than to ask for details. Questions bounce around, and, sooner or later, you’ve got your own explaining to do. He let that slide.
“But now you’re back?”
“Yes. But while I was off the grid, I had a run-in in Venice.”
“With who?”
Dalton told him about Milan and Gavro, the two Serbians who had tried to mug him near the Palazzo Ducale. Fyke listened without comment until Dalton finished up with the connection to Branco Gospic in Kotor.
“So, now this Gospic character, he’s coming after you?”
“No. I’m coming after him.”
“And you’re saying that this same lad had something to do with the taking of my ship?”
“Yes. I am. Vigo Majiic was a Serb. There are Serbian hands all over this. And there are only two Serbian gangs with the projectable resources to pull off the hijacking of a five-hundred-foot tanker ship in Southeast Asia—”
“Stefan Groz and—”
“Branco Gospic. And I think it’s Gospic.”
“Did Cather know this? Is that why he picked you to come get me?”
“I think so. But I don’t know his whole game.”
“Mandy says that Cather pulled you out of Venice to break me out of Changi. In the first place, given how I fucked up and went dark, I can’t imagine why that old gravedigger would give a dingo’s dangle if I rotted in Changi for a hundred years—”
“Tony Crane was afraid the SID would work you over until you gave up some kind of operational details.”
“Such as what? Did they happen to say?”
“Cather wouldn’t tell us.”
“Now that my head is clear, I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell those lads anything but my name, rank, and serial number. I took my beating—God knows, I earned it—and, as far as I can recall, I gave those gooks nothing.”
“Cather was afraid of something. Any idea at all what it could be?”
Fyke was quiet for a long time.
“Yes. I have,” he said, with a sigh. “But it’s not about protecting an asset or blowing the cover on a SigInt receptor somewhere. It’s more along the lines of one more counterterrorism fuckup being laid at the door of the Agency.”
“You care to tell me what it is?”
“I wish I didn’t have to. Your good opinion was worth having.”
Now it comes, thought Dalton.
“You never asked me why Kuta, Mikey.”
“Okay. Consider it asked.”
“In Changi, when I was getting beat, I took it like a penance, Mikey, because I think I owed it to God. Like doing the rosary and the Stations, making up for my sins, only this time doing it while hanging from a meat hook upside down and naked, which, leaving out Father Lundigan back at Christ the Redeemer Parochial, was hardly ever required.”
“What sins, Ray?”
Fyke sighed, sipped at his now-lukewarm scotch.
“Christ. It was always gonna be Kuta. I could feel it coming.”
Dalton said nothing, thinking that Fyke would pick it up again when he was ready. But five minutes passed with nothing further, so he pushed it.
“Ray. Why was it always gonna be Kuta?”
Fyke jumped at the sound of Dalton’s voice, as if he’d been a long way gone, which he was.
“Back there, in that pool house, you asked me why I went dark.”
“I remember.”
“You know what I was doin’? In those days?”
“Sure. You had a trapline laid out along the archipelago, working out of Manado, I think. The Celebes? Now called Sulawesi?”
“Yeah. The mysterious Celebes Sea. You know, that’s where Conrad set Lord Jim. That’s who I was playing. Lord Jim Beam. Had me an office over a bar in downtown Manado. Routine HumInt and SigInt stuff. Nothing high-level. Just listening to people talk in the towns, Drums Along the Mohawk, I used to call it. I had stringers reporting in all the way from Port Moresby to Jakarta. Pirates. Gun-runners. Opium trading. Money laundering. Corruption in all its inviting forms is the rushing red blood of the East, Mikey, as you well know, and wasn’t I deep in the thick of it? Wading belly-deep, with my arms spread wide, and drinking it all in, Lord Jim come am
ong the Bugis, and am I not sending my com-moon-e-kays up the line to a zipped-up little prig at the Singapore Station who would, I don’t doubt, send what he liked up the line with my station code blacked out and his grubby thumbprints and initials all over it? Scut work, it was, Mikey, because they thought I was a burned-out case, and, I admit, I got tired of it pretty fast, which, lookin’ at the outcome, I sincerely wish I hadn’t.”
“You were better in the field, Ray. Desk work was not your thing.”
“Nor yours, I recall. You mind that fat buck we carted all over Pristina, must have weighed three hundred pounds. Up and died on us? What was the name of the club? Where we left him in the toilet?”
“Kozy’s Krazy Kit-Kat Klub.”
“That was it. Back there, in Changi, I tried to keep my pecker up by remembering all those good times. We were the pair, weren’t we, Mikey . . . ?”
He trailed off into silence, losing himself in the past.
“So, what about the trapline?”
“Eh? What? Oh, right. Well, I had this stringer, ran a dry-cleaning service in Kuta, face like a billy goat’s scrotum, all wizened up, bright, little black eyes stuck into a nut-brown face, had three teeth up and two down, but he was an old Indochina hand and had seen the Frenchies get butchered at Dien Bien Phu, and a lot more since then. He was a good source, and when he told me about this guy Amrozi, not connected to farming in any way, a sort of a layabout with ties to a local madrassa, who was coming in to his shop and leaving clothes that stank of fertilizer, he drew the gimlet eye, you see?”
Dalton knew who Amrozi bin Haji Nurhasyim was. And now he knew why Fyke had gone dark. He had always suspected it. But now he knew.
“So, something about this Amrozi fellow and his powdery clothes that are stinking of ammonium nitrate rubs Nguyen Ki the wrong way, so he gets on the phone to me, up in Manado, to tell me about him, wants me to follow up on him, see who his friends are, that kind of thing. This is in early September 2002. At which time, you were where?”
“Wish I could tell you.”
“Hah! You were in a cave, looking down on Tarnak Farms, with a Barrett .50 to keep you warm. I got drunk one night and flew to Guam for a break from the fucking gooks all around me. Wanted to see a blue eye and have a genuine Guinness. Ran into Jack Stallworth at the bar in Anderson, and we got stinko together. He’s the one told me. Dead now, Mandy says?”
“Yes. Couple months back.”
“Heart? He was always a pressure-cooker type of guy.”
“Yeah, I hear heart. So Nguyen doesn’t like this Amrozi guy . . . ?”
“Not by half. He starts calling me about him, but at the time—you have to remember how warm it gets here in October, so I was cooling my system a fair bit with the Jim Beam. More than a fair bit. I guess you could say . . . Well, I bet you heard the talk?”
“After you went dark, they sent some Cleaners from Cliff Long-bow’s unit in Okinawa to trace you. Word was, you had gone off the rails.”
“Off the rails and into the ditch and up the far side and straight through Aunt Bertie’s mudroom. I was dead-blind drunk half the time, and, the other half, I was sorely under the influence. Not my shining hour . . .”
He fell silent then. Dalton didn’t push him.
The plane rocked and soared as they plowed through a bank of cirrostratus. Below them, green-and-purple storm clouds, glimmering with internal bursts of pale fire, were roiling over the sea, blanking out entire reaches. Fyke drained his glass, set it down on the console between them.
“Looks like the monsoon down there,” he said.
“So it does. We’re due for it.”
“We are. Well, anyway, I’m drinking a bit, as you heard, and here’s Nguyen Ki, trying to get me to pay attention to this guy with the clothes reeking of fertilizer, and I’m listening, with the phone propped up to my ear and a cigarette going, and the no-see-ums are clouding around outside the screens and glowing like sparks under the street-light, and, all the while, I’ve got my eye on that tall, square bottle of Jim Beam on the edge of my desk. Long and short of it was, I wrote myself up an action note, full of fine and energetic intentions, which I stuck on a spike and duly forgot about until . . . Well, you’ll remember Amrozi’s name, I have no doubt?”
“I do.”
Fyke laughed, a rueful, humorless grunt.
“So do we all, now and forever, amen. Twelve October, on orders coming from Ayman al-Zawahri himself, a guy named Ali Imron and this Amrozi guy buy a new Yamaha motorbike, which Imron drives to the U.S. Consulate in Kuta and leaves a bomb there, and, just before midnight, he drives two suicide bombers in a white van straight to the club district, where he stops near the Sari Club and tells Bomber 1 to put on his suicide vest and the other one to arm the bomb in the van. The Walker goes into Paddy’s Pub, and the other bomber drives the van in a straight line, as it’s all he knows how to do, back across the street to the Sari Club, where he waits, and, when the backpack bomb goes off inside Paddy’s and all the injured who can still run pour out into the street between the Sari Club and Paddy’s, the second bomber waits until they gather all around and then he triggers the big bomb and two hundred and two people die, some of them right away, but a whole lot die later. There were so many burned people that they put them in hotel pools to ease their passing. Victims were mainly Western kids from all over. Eighty-eight from Australia. Imron drove off on his Yamaha and dialed a number on a Nokia cell to trigger the bomb he left by the U.S. Consulate. It went off. Imron had packed that one with his own shit. They traced the explosives through purchase records, and it led back to you-know-who, and they charged Amrozi, along with a bunch of guys, but nobody’s been executed yet, and the most a couple of them served was two years before the High Court said their trials had not been ‘constitutional.’ The Agency pulled one guy, Hambali, in Bangkok, and they’ve got him somewhere, and I hope to God they’re putting it to his eardrums with bamboo skewers every day of the year including Hogmanay.”
A long silence, and then:
“So, there you go, Mikey. Why I went dark.”
Fyke went inward again, staring out at the gathering dark in the east. Time passed. Dalton could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t sound false. He also had a pretty good idea where Hambali was being held: inside the Orpheus system. But that was a thing not to be spoken of to anyone.
After a while, Fyke smiled across at him.
“And that’s why I said it was always going to be Kuta. It’s a hard truth my mother told me long ago, God rest her. ‘Raymond,’ she says, ‘a man can no more outrun his sins than he can race with the moon.’ ”
Dalton glanced out the windshield, saw a crescent moon like a Saracen blade, glittering gold through great rents in the speeding clouds.
He nodded toward it.
“There you go, Ray,” he said. “We’re racing with the moon.”
Fyke stared at it for a while. It seemed to be the only thing in the sky moving as fast as they were. He shook his head in wonder, and smiled.
“By God, Mikey,” he said, “so we are.”
33
The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
Nikki Turrin found the AD of RA leaning on the railing that ran around the roof deck of the main building. The sun was going down and the lights of Crypto City were coming on. The sky was the color of a tropical drink, and just as cold. The AD of RA was staring out at the setting sun, and the dying light lay upon his seared and scalded skin, softening the rills and fissures and casting a golden aura around the man. His one good eye gleamed in the light. He was leaning with his hands folded, his forearms resting on the railing. A chilly wind was playing in the bare branches of the trees in the park, and dry leaves were making a skittering-insect sound, as they blew across the pavement far below. He was wearing a dark gray suit, an open shirt under that, and he had a scarf thrown around his neck, a gold-and-navy-blue-striped scarf that looked like cashmere and must have been given to him by a woman. He didn’
t hear—or didn’t seem to hear—Nikki’s soft step as she came over the decking to stand beside him.
“Is this a bad time, sir? You told me to get in touch as soon as I had something for you?”
The AD of RA turned to look at her, seeming to come from a very unhappy, if not a desolate, place but warming as soon as he saw her face. The dying light was wonderful for her, giving her a satiny glow, and calling up a pale green fire deep in her brown eyes. She felt his look.
“Not at all, Nikki. Don’t tell me you have something already?”
“I do, sir. The villa is in Muggia, a small fishing port across the harbor from Trieste. The precise coordinates are”—she flipped a page on her clipboard and traced the row of figures—“45 degrees 36 minutes 12 seconds north longitude and 13 degrees 45 minutes 34 seconds east latitude. We have an aerial picture of it here—”
Nikki flipped a page and showed him an aerial image extracted from Google Earth.
“It’s the house with the blue patch right in the middle, sir. That’s the pool. The address is 2654 Salina Muggia Vecchia. Muggia is right on the Italian border with Slovenia. The house was registered in the name—”
Nikki realized the AD of RA was staring at her.
“Google Earth! Sixty gazillion dollars’ worth of top secret, state-of-the-art mainframes, and every conceivable database, and a whole city filled with the best data miners in the country, and you found this on Google Earth?”
“No, sir. I found it on a vacation-homes-for-sale site for Friuli. Then I looked it up on Google Earth.”
“Vacation homes?”
“Yes, sir. I know you wanted me to do a detailed, computerized scan of all the NIMA maps, but I thought, at first, you know, seeing that everybody in the pool had died, it seemed to me that a house like that wouldn’t go empty for long—”
“They can still sell a house where nine people died in the pool!”
“Yes, sir. I know that. But in the part of the world we were lookingat, well, people die all the time, in every way you can think of, and it just seemed to me that I could save a lot of time by—”