by Dana Haynes
From the backseat, Will Halliday said, “You never know, I guess.” He wasn’t worried about the pill he’d put in Stacy Knight-Mendoza’s San Pellegrino water the night before. By the time she eventually died, the drug would have broken down and wouldn’t show up in a standard autopsy.
They drove in silence for a while. The Goldfish said, “Bet you guys wish you’d gotten called up for the president’s security detail.”
Renfro kept digging into the diminishing bag of pistachios between his legs. “It’s not a beauty contest. The presidential detail pulls in who they need. Rest of us do our jobs. Just like yesterday, just like tomorrow.”
In the backseat, Will Halliday felt through the pocket of his parka, found a remote control, and slid the mechanism to the on position.
The Goldfish said, “But have you ever gotten the call to—”
Halliday thumbed the firing mechanism. Pakk! He felt the vehicle shudder.
“The hell was that?” Boyd Renfro’s eyes searched the highway in every direction. The sound had been acoustically wrong for a gunshot. Still, his left hand rested on the Glock in his belt holster.
“Hey,” the Goldfish said, and jutted his chin forward. Steam began hissing from the hood of the Escalade.
Renfro glanced at the temperature gauge as it bobbed upward.
“Pull in there,” Halliday leaned forward and pointed toward the gravel parking lot of a motel, not thirty feet from the Genevieve River and its levee. The parking lot held three cars but was large enough for thirty. The motel rooms were laid out in a C shape, and each building was designed to look like a log cabin. A snowcapped sign on a tall stand read ROCKY VISTA MOTEL.
The Goldfish turned in.
Renfro undid his seat belt and gripped his sidearm. “See anything?”
From the backseat, Halliday said, “Nope.” He drew his own Glock.
The black Escalade glided to a halt in the dead center of the near-empty lot. More steam rose from the hood. The temperature gauge spiked into the red zone.
Renfro said, “Check it out.”
The Goldfish killed the engine and stepped out and down from the SUV, his boots leaving a perfect waffle-sole print in the frozen snow.
Renfro’s eyes moved mechanically, professionally, from trees to the motel’s faux log cabins to Interstate 70 and its thin traffic. “You see anything?”
Behind him, Will Halliday deftly screwed a silencer onto his automatic.
A mid-nineties panel truck flashed its turn indicator and vectored toward the parking lot.
“The hell’s this?” Renfro asked.
The Goldfish popped the hood, obscuring his view of the SUV cabin.
As soon as the Goldfish’s vision was blocked by the raised hood, Halliday placed his silencer against Renfro’s ear and pulled the trigger, once.
Renfro died before his head ricocheted off the dashboard.
Will Halliday climbed out and circled the big SUV. A plume of steam roiled from the engine. The newbie glanced at Will, turned his attention back to the engine.
“I think there’s something here,” the kid said, a gloved finger jabbing at the mechanism that had severed the coolant line. Halliday strolled over to his side. “You did the walk-around before we left the garage. Did you notice—”
Halliday fired once. The Goldfish’s body flopped onto the engine, his squall-line jacket and the skin of his face beginning to blister and crack.
The panel truck pulled up next to the Escalade so as to block the SUV from prying eyes on the highway or windows in the motel rooms. Both front doors opened and two of Asher Sahar’s mercenaries stepped out. Both Israelis, neither looked all that happy to be in Colorado in November.
Halliday opened the front passenger door of the Escalade and helped Renfro’s body fall to the parking lot. He squatted and dug through the senior agent’s pockets, finding the key to the steel-reinforced cage that lined the back of the Escalade. He opened the back door, unlocked the cage, and pulled out the canister and its cooling tanks.
Halliday grinned at the two mercenaries. “How we doin’, fellas?”
The two men did not answer, but took either end of the canister and moved it into the panel truck.
While they worked, Halliday retrieved a cheap, purple vinyl backpack from the panel truck. It didn’t weigh much. Halliday slung it over one shoulder, checked to see there were no eyewitnesses, then trudged away from the highway, across the empty parking lot, through the snow, and clomped into a scrubby expanse of grass. Waxy weeds poked out of the snow. The field ended at the foot of the stone wall that had redirected the Genevieve River away from the highway. A Works Projects Administration wall, it was sturdy and thick, not pretty but competently crafted, and given a chance, it could stand for another two hundred years. Will Halliday tucked the backpack amid the weeds at the base of the river wall.
He jogged back and joined the mercenaries in the panel truck. The silent men pulled back onto Interstate 70. A mile later, Halliday grinned at the Israelis. “Everyone having fun?”
The mercenaries glowered at the inappropriately cheerful American.
“Sweet Jesus. You guys gotta learn to enjoy a job well done! Look: how often do you get to do this?”
He drew the detonator out from beneath his seat and made a show of punching the red button.
A mile behind them, the purple backpack’s explosives shrieked and evaporated a quarter ton of stone and mortar.
The Genevieve River roared into the motel and its parking lot, smashing everything to bits.
Four
The Middle East
Almost Thirty Years Ago
Khalil Al Korshan met his cousin, Mahammad Alamour, as he did a few times per week, at a favorite teashop in the southern half of Rafah. The tea was good, but the cousins picked the shop because they could watch the new security wall and sentry posts being installed on the Philadelphi Road, which separated the Egyptian side of Rafah—their side—from the half of the city inside the Gaza Strip.
The Bedouin cousins had just come from the tailor shop that their families had operated for decades. Many of their best customers had lived in the denser, northern end of the city. But at the dawn of the 1980s, the year of the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty, everything had changed now that the Jews and their damn wall had split the city in two.
The cousins ordered hot tea. They had just been down in the basement of the tailor shop, examining their newly excavated tunnel, which led straight north.
“It’s too small,” Alamour grumbled, keeping his voice low. “There’s barely room for the pallets, let alone for a worker to get them through to the other side. I’m telling you, the tunnel needs to be twice as wide.”
“And I’m telling you, ibn ’amm, that you worry too much. A wider tunnel would get spotted. Either by the police on this side, or the Israeli Defense Forces on that side. Either way: poof.” Al Korshan bundled his fingertips together and blew on them, as one might blow on a dandelion.
The larger, more populous sector of Rafah lay north of the checkpoints that split the city itself. All entry points into north Rafah, and the rest of the Gaza Strip, were heavily guarded by Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. The Jews watched all vehicles like hawks and all shipments were inspected. Reports of shortages on the Gaza side—from food to medicine to clothing—were rampant.
Which is why the Bedouin cousins, Khalil Al Korshan and Mohammad Alamour, had excavated their tunnel under the Philadelphi Road. Their family had known for years that shortages just mean profits for those with the will to make it happen.
But Alamour’s visual inspection of the tiny tunnel, with its long and frayed cable stringing together weak yellow work lights, had been vastly disappointing. There was no way workers could maneuver pallets of goods through the long, narrow tunnel.
Al Korshan sipped his tea, enjoying the sagelike flavor of the desert herb, habuck. “Ibn ’amm.” The term meant cousin. “I think I have a solution. Look behind you.”
Ala
mour turned in his aluminum chair.
An urchin stood outside the teashop, filthy face pressed up against the glass. He watched as a patron at another table stood and reached for the basket of week-old newspapers from Cairo, printed in Arabic, French, and English. As soon as the patron stood, the street child bolted. He was rail-thin, maybe six or seven years old. He dashed into the shop, grubby hands snatching the remainder of the patron’s breakfast roll, and was out the door before the patron turned or the teashop owner, smoking from a tin of Prince of Monaco cigarettes, could react.
The owner shouted a curse but the homeless boy was already out of sight.
“Fast, that one,” Alamour observed.
“I see him here most days. Feral, starving. And stronger than he looks. A patron caught him last week. The demon child fought like a Janissary. The Six-Day War would have lasted a lot longer than six days if the Faithful had had a few soldiers like him, let me tell you.”
Alamour turned back to their table. “There are plenty of starving orphans on the Gaza side. And there will be plenty more.”
His cousin smiled and gestured toward the grubby spot on the window where the urchin had leaned. “That,” Al Korshan said, “is our newest employee.”
Alamour almost choked on his tea. “That devil?”
His cousin corrected him. “No. That tunnel rat.”
* * *
The Bedouin cousins caught the homeless boy in an alley and paid him a single coin. In return for which, the boy climbed into the cousins’ tight, ill-lit, and almost airless tunnel. They had provided him with a snow sled from England, flat-bottomed, cherry red and plastic, with a twined rope that the boy tied around his waist so he could crawl on all fours. The first shipment for the snow sled was a stack of French cigarettes. Other cousins on the Gaza side received the boxes of cigarettes and sold them with a 100 percent markup. The entire shipment sold in a little under an hour.
The orphan pulled the plastic sled back to the Egyptian side. Caked in sweat and dirt, only his eyes shone beneath the grime. He rose from the tunnel, held out a dirt-caked hand, and said, “More!”
The boy worked ten-hour days, crawling with his sled stacked with canned food, spare parts for automobiles, cigarettes, and even American dollars, the only currency that some shops in the Gaza Strip accepted. The cousins waited two weeks to make sure the system was working, then added marijuana and heroin, which proved handsomely profitable.
“More!” the boy would shout, emerging on the Egyptian side of the border. “Canned food. And cigarettes. And lighters. And hashish, if you can get it.”
As the Bedouin sons and nephews scoured South Rafah for the goods, the homeless boy tore into a bowl of lentil soup and a wedge of stale bread. They paid him a pittance.
Alamour made more money in those first three weeks than he had in the previous six months. But he still looked askance at the manic tatterdemalion devouring his food.
“How do you even understand the little hellion?” he asked. “What language is that?”
Al Korshan laughed. “A stew. Some of it is Arabic, some is Hebrew. A little French and English, too. Some I don’t recognize. Yiddish, I think maybe.”
Alamour looked stricken. “Hebrew and Yiddish? Are you saying the child is a Jew?”
Al Korshan shrugged. “I don’t know and I doubt the boy himself knows. That is God’s business. Ours is commerce. That brat could be the cousin of the Pope in Rome for all I care. So long as he can work the tunnels.”
Costa Rica
On board the Belle Australis, off the Nicoya Peninsula, a Jamaican porter made strong coffee for two of the guests, weaker green tea for two more, a Coke Zero with a wedge of lime and no ice for the fifth, and the Captain’s Blend (two-thirds Nescafé, one-third Glenfiddich). He put all the drinks on a tray, along with tablet computers for each guest, preloaded with their newspapers and magazines of choice and a bowl of fruit. Finally, he added small crystal vases, large enough for one short-stemmed rose for each guest.
He hoisted the tray with the beverages, fruit, computers, and flowers, and began distributing them around the megayacht, which sat so serenely in the Pacific waters they might as well have been in the George V Hotel in Paris.
The sun had not yet risen. The palm trees were black against the indigo horizon, the white beaches empty except for colonies of seabirds standing asleep vertically.
The steward headed for the long, claret-carpeted guest corridor and gingerly knelt before each door to leave a breakfast, a tablet, and a flower. His knees popped each time he knelt. He paused at the door of the long-legged beauty; the translator with the indeterminate accent. The steward smiled.
As with the morning before, he again heard the sounds of moaning coming from her room. The sound was ghostly, throaty, rising in crescendo. The steward smiled and shook his head, leaving the morning treats, as the moaning behind the wooden door gave way to a howl, poorly silenced by a pillow.
“Jeune fille de bon chance,” he observed, clucking in appreciation. He was glad someone was having a good time aboard the floating palace.
* * *
Daria awoke under the bed, moaning.
As she did so many mornings.
She was bathed in sweat, her eyes alight, flowing from within a Molotov cocktail of pain and betrayal and pure distilled terror. She was a little girl. An orphan. A child war veteran.
No! She forced her brain to scramble through the morning time travel terrors. Not a little girl. Not the Gaza Strip. There were no bombs, no blood. No callused adult hands, torn and bloody, reaching for her. No diggers above her, screaming for more help. No fire dying in a woman’s eyes. No lips silently breathing apologies.
She was aboard the Belle Australis, off the shore of Costa Rica. The sweat-sodden sheets were rucked around her hips; she had dragged them down off the bed with her. Daria grabbed a fistful and shoved the sheets over her mouth and screamed in panic/hate/pain.
Her morning began much as usual.
* * *
Daria made reservations for a Wednesday sortie of flights—two puddle jumper hops and one crossing the Western Hemisphere—culminating in New York City. That left her free to accept the dinner invitation from the yacht’s first officer, a Moldovan woman with lush blond hair and the body of a distance runner.
She and the first officer sat in the Tango Mar seaside café with glasses of crisp Italian prosecco. The music turned out to be 1950s jazz. The first officer wore a polka-dot dress—quite a change from her well-pressed white uniform with blue button-down epaulettes and sensible, rubber-soled shoes. She had exceptionally fine calves. Daria registered the thought that one doesn’t necessarily expect naval officers to be runners. You expect them to have other skills, like knot tying. Sure enough, a few hours earlier, the first officer had proven most proficient at that, too. But to have exceptional calves? And in flat sandals? Remarkable.
Daria sipped her sparkling wine.
“You seem distracted,” the first officer observed in French, which was their common tongue.
“I am. By you.” Daria smiled and leaned forward to touch the woman’s hand. “Let’s order some food.”
Actually, Daria was distracted. Within one week, she had been unlinked to the FBI, and she had been contacted for an urgent meet with Colin Bennett-Smith, an old British friend from her predefection days.
Coincidence? Daria hated that word.
Five
Montreal, Canada
The security officer at Aeroport International Pierre Elliott Trudeau de Montreal looked bored. Syrian intelligence officer Khalid Belhadj had counted on boredom. He had timed his flight so he would arrive toward the end of the morning security shift.
“Votre passeport, s’il vous plait.”
Belhadj handed over a well-worn Egyptian passport.
“Combien de temps allez-vous rester en Canada?”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot and peered through old, scratched eyeglasses. “Am sorry. I have no French. I
speak some American?”
Belhadj knew very well that airport security personnel the world over are trained to watch for foreigners with superior language skills.
“English,” the officer corrected. “It is called English. Business or vacation?”
Belhadj pointed to his shabby, faux-leather portfolio. “Business. Ah…” He shrugged and opened the portfolio, withdrew a twofold brochure for a medical line of penile catheters. He began to demonstrate how they work.
That was enough for the security guard. He stamped the passport and pushed it through the half-circle opening in his Plexiglas shield.
“Thank you. Welcome to Canada. Next!”
* * *
Within the Trudeau terminal, a woman with a baby stroller knelt near the baggage claims carousel, digging through a massive backpack for a clean diaper, baby powder, and wipe-ups. After Khalid Belhadj passed her with his portfolio of catheters, the woman spoke into her sleeve.
“We have Bowler.”
New York City
Midmorning on Wednesday, Daria landed at JFK with a white canvas beach tote and a glowing golden tan. She looked anomalous amid the snow shovels, bulbous parkas, and sallow complexions of New York in November.
She didn’t know what Colin Bennett-Smith’s situation was, but she owed him her life a couple of times over. If he wanted a life and death meeting—his words—she would show. If she could help him, she would. If not, she’d have some time, a few days, to enjoy New York City. Even in November, cold as it was, the city was lovely. The Christmas decorations were in full bloom and, while Daria wasn’t the holiday sort, she did love the vivid colors of the season.
She hefted her tote and joined the queue walking or half-jogging toward baggage claim and ground transportation. Her almond eyes swept the crowd methodically, although subconsciously. It was the habit of a lifetime.
She just passed a news kiosk as the airport’s P.A. system sounded: Dee Jean D’Arc. Please return to the Alaska Airlines booth to retrieve your purse. Dee Jean D’Arc. Please return to the Alaska Airlines booth to retrieve your purse.