Team Red

by David DeBatto

  “I do have a light,” he said to her. “If that’s what you need.”

  She looked straight ahead a moment before turning to him with a polite smile.

  “Thank you, but I’m all right,” she said.

  She was British. He felt uncomfortable, afraid he’d given her the impression he was trying to pick her up. Apparently she felt uncomfortable too. She turned on a heel to leave.

  “What was so funny?” he asked her.

  She stopped.

  “Woman on balcony fumbles for a match,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The scenario bears a resemblance to a bad soap opera, don’t you think? Sorry about that.”

  She moved again toward the door, then stopped, thinking. She turned again.

  “If you don’t mind, I really would appreciate a light,” she told him. “Now that we understand each other. I really shouldn’t smoke at all, but right now I think I could chew off my own arm for a puff. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

  He knocked the ashes off his cigar, drew on it once to fan the ember and then offered it to her. She leaned forward and lit her cigarette, closing her eyes as she did.

  “If the smell of the cigar bothers you, I’d be happy to put it out,” he offered.

  “No no no,” she said. “I rather like the smell of cigars. Perhaps not in enclosed spaces, but they remind me of weddings. Positive associations.”

  “They remind me of poker games,” he said.

  “Also positive associations, I hope,” she said.

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  “Except when you lose?” she asked.

  “Even then,” he said. “Nobody ever loses much.”

  She smiled.

  “Old friends?” she asked. “Same faces for the last twenty years?”

  “Yup,” he said. “Though nobody has the same face they had twenty years ago.”

  “Sounds nice,” she said.

  “Why the eyebrow?” he asked. She looked puzzled. “When you walked out. The general and I were talking and I saw you raise an eyebrow. It spoke volumes.”

  “None of my business,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been listening in. Didn’t intend to, really.”

  “But?”

  “I recognized a name,” she said. “When you see Omar Hadid, you must tell him that Evelyn Warner says hello.” She extended her hand. DeLuca shook it. She waited a moment, then said, “Now the fact that you’ve got nothing on your uniform and haven’t introduced yourself yet makes me think you must be CIA. Am I right? You don’t have to answer that, of course, but it’s all right if you do—I grew up with a father who was MI5, so I was raised to keep secrets.”

  “David,” he said. “DeLuca. And I’m not CIA.”

  “Counterintelligence,” she guessed next. He said nothing. “BBC, world service, in case you were wondering.”

  “I was,” he said. “Television or radio?”

  “A bit of both, actually,” she said. “I’ve apparently turned into the go-to girl here. Old Middle East hand and all that.” He’d thought she looked slightly familiar and realized where he must have seen her, a face on one of the television screens at the TOC where it was sometimes possible to learn more about what was going on by watching the cable news programs than by reading sitreps.

  “I should have recognized you,” he said.

  “Given that I dress like this about once every two or three years, I don’t see how you could,” she said.

  “Are you here in a work capacity?” he asked.

  “I’m a guest,” she said. “Of General Denby. Off-duty for a change, so feel free to speak your mind—you’re off the record here, David.”

  He liked the way his name sounded with a British accent coloring it.

  “You’re on a date?” he asked. “You’re off the record, too.”

  She laughed.

  “No, not a date. Not quite. Denby’s an old friend. I think I’ve been interviewing him since I was fresh out of university. Which was where I knew your associate, Mr. Hadid, by the way. One of the better batsmen the Trinity cricket team ever had, I should say.”

  “You knew him from Oxford?”

  “Different colleges, but yes. We were members of some of the same clubs.”

  “‘Resolved that the money spent on the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer constitutes a squandering of resources better spent on the remedy of social ills,’” DeLuca said. “And you lost.”

  “Very impressive,” she said, smiling. “As I recall, I argued some rubbish about the impoverished proletariat needing vicarious thrills. Did he say he won? Well, I suppose he did. He was older than me. How’s he faring?”

  “I gather he’s doing all right, considering,” DeLuca said.

  “He’s a good man and he’s had to deal with a terrible situation for quite some time,” Evelyn Warner said. “Been meaning to ring him up but haven’t had the chance. Busy busy.”

  Something else was coming together in DeLuca’s mind, something he’d read back before he’d deployed, when he’d tried to research as much about Iraq as he could. The name “Warner.” Where had he heard it? Then he remembered.

  “Any relation to Lady Anne Strevens-Warner?” he asked her.

  She looked down, then up again.

  “Guilty as charged,” she said. “This is her shatoosh, actually.” She spread her shawl out, then wrapped it around herself again. “A gift from old King Faisal himself. They say these are made from the belly hairs of an endangered Tibetan antelope. They say the hairs are so fine, you can tell if your shatoosh is genuine if you can pull it through a wedding band.”

  “Can you?” he asked.

  “If I knew where my wedding ring was, I suppose I could give it a go,” she said.

  “You can use mine if you want.”

  “Oh, no fair, no fair,” she said. “Men’s rings don’t count. Too much diameter. Has to be a woman’s.” She smiled again. She blinked, embarrassed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. First I ask you for a light, like some schoolgirl punting on the Cherwell, and then I manage to slip into the conversation the fact that I’m not married anymore. Let me tell you, Mr. DeLuca, I am not a flirt and I am not coy. I am simply very tired and not myself and I’ve had a terrible week.”

  “Why a terrible week?” he asked.

  “Oh, that dreadful David Kelly thing,” she said. “My friend Alec was the reporter. And then my mother told me Father is driving her crazy. Just retired and doesn’t know what to do with himself. She’s going to be smoking crack in a matter of weeks if it keeps up. But that’s all right. I come from a long line of solitary women.”

  All DeLuca knew, and this incompletely, was that Evelyn Warner’s great-grandmother, Lady Anne, had been dubbed “The Female Lawrence of Arabia” for the work she’d done in what was then Mesopotamia in the first part of the twentieth century. She’d been an explorer and an archaeologist traveling alone throughout the region at the turn of the century. It had been her maps, and more important her personal connections, that helped British colonial interests secure Iraq’s oil wealth to fuel their ships during the First World War. Afterward, she was named Chief Counsel to the British High Commission for Oriental Affairs, serving as principal advisor to British-installed King Faisal I. Some called Lady Anne “The Uncrowned Queen of Iraq.” She finished her years establishing what would become the Iraq Historical Museum, the same museum that was ransacked during and after the recent American bombing.

  “I’m surprised, given all that she did, that your great-grandmother found the time to raise children,” he said.

  “Bear them, yes,” Evelyn Warner said. “Raise them, no. That task fell to the governesses and private boarding schools. Another British tradition to which I am heir. Do you have any children, Mr. DeLuca?”

  “One,” he said. “A son. Scott.”

  “And where is he?”

  “He’s at Kirkuk,” DeLuca said. “Though I can’t say I’ve seen much of him. We’ve both been a bit busy.”

>   “Now that’s fascinating,” she said. “Do you think I might interview the two of you? I’ve been thinking of doing a story on all the father-son pairings in this war. There are so many in this war. What does he do?”

  “Intelligence,” DeLuca said. “Image analysis.” He liked this woman, but he felt that he’d disclosed more personal information than he was comfortable with. “I thought you said you weren’t working tonight.”

  “You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” she said. “Forget I asked. But I want you to know that if you ever want to tell your story, I can be quite useful to you. I speak fluent unaccented Arabic and I do know a great many people in addition to Omar Hadid. I treat my sources right and I keep my word.”

  She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray after smoking only the first half of it and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders again.

  “Ever run across a character named Mohammed Al-Tariq?” he asked. He was fishing, but he suspected he was fishing in promising waters.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, her voice turning serious. “Now you’ve put me off my party mood. What have you got to do with that hideous man?”

  “I’m looking for his people,” DeLuca said. “His aides. His family. I interviewed his son yesterday in a hospital.”

  “Hassan or Ibrahim?”

  “Hassan,” DeLuca said. “Unfortunately, he died last night. Septic shock.”

  “Good,” she said. “Not unfortunate at all. Ibrahim is worse. I could tell you stories, but I suspect I don’t have to.”

  “Unfortunate because I had some more questions to ask him,” DeLuca said.

  “The father is purely evil,” she said. “The sons, hardly less. If the father’s gone, the world is better off by half.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if’?” DeLuca asked. “We have proof that he’s dead. One hundred percent confidence. That’s what the file says.”

  “Do you now?” she said. “Well, that’s a relief. American intelligence can’t be wrong ever, can it?”

  “Point taken,” he said. “Why doubt it, though? Suppose I’m curious.”

  She stared him down, trying to read his expression. She looked sad, and a bit fearful.

  “You’re going to think me very strange, and you don’t even know me. I don’t believe in ghosts, David DeLuca,” she told him. “But sometimes a feeling comes over me when I walk through a cemetery. That something that wants to be laid to rest hasn’t been. Maybe it’s because I’m English and we have so many very old cemeteries. Yesterday I visited a mass grave site. Outside Shorish. The number of the dead was over five hundred when we left. They’re still counting. And there are 263 other mass burial sites being investigated. This was Al-Tariq’s work. And I felt those souls. You’re probably going to think I’ve lost my senses, but I felt them. I couldn’t help it. And they’re not at rest. Not at all. They’re not at rest because the man responsible has not been brought to justice. That was the feeling I got. I wouldn’t pretend to have any special abilities, David. I truly don’t believe in psychics. It’s just a feeling I have, but yesterday it was overwhelming. That’s why I was taken aback when you asked me if I knew him. If your proof is conclusive, then I want to believe it. But then I can’t explain the feeling I had. Al-Tariq is evil. Personified. And the souls he killed are not at rest.”

  “Do you think he had weapons of mass destruction?” DeLuca asked.

  “Do I think Iraq had massive stockpiles of them? No,” she said. “I think your president and my prime minister quite cooked the books on that. But they had some. Do I think Mohammed Al-Tariq was trying to obtain them, for his own personal uses? I’d heard that. They used a variety of things in 1988, during the Anfal. I tried to get a camera crew in there when I heard, but I’d just started at the Beeb and I lacked the wherewithal. By the time we got there, all we found were dead birds. Thousands of them. They found traces of sarin. It seemed fairly clear though that they used different substances in different villages. Field-testing them. VX. Anthrax. And Al-Tariq controlled these things. But who am I to judge? The first country to use poison gas in Iraq was England, suppressing a Kurdish revolt in Sulaymaniyah in 1919.”

  “After World War I ended?”

  “Yup. I’ve been going over this in my head since before this idiotic war began—since I realized your president has failed to grasp, as the British empire failed to grasp, the most fundamental element of the Arab mind. I’ve never known more loyal or more hospitable friends than the Arabs I’ve known, but the dark side of that is, I can’t think of anyone more apt to make an enemy out of the outsider who comes uninvited. And the Arab remembers who his enemy is for a very long time. You just can’t invade and befriend a country at the same time, even if you do get rid of men like Saddam or Al-Tariq. If you really didn’t want to deal with terrorist threats, you might have wanted to think twice before you created a million new terrorists. And those million new terrorists, Al Qaeda or whatever they want to call themselves, are self-motivated, but they’re going to need three things to be effective: money, arms, and leadership. And that’s precisely what Mohammed Al-Tariq was arranging for before the war began. Did anybody really think they didn’t know how defenseless they were going to be against the initial invasion? They weren’t planning for that—why try? They barely resisted. They were planning to take the blow, suffer the casualties, let the troops in, and then destroy the coalition over the next ten or fifteen years. I think Al-Tariq has been planning for years what he’d do, once Saddam was removed. The coalition could hardly have done him a bigger favor. If he’s still alive . . .”

  “What?” DeLuca said.

  “It’s something I would pray to stop, but it’s not something I would know how to pray for,” she said. “You don’t pray to God to stop the Devil. Only men can stop the Devil.”

  She was quiet, gazing out at the night landscape one more time. Then she reached into her purse and withdrew a card.

  “There’s my sat phone number, and this is my number in London where you can leave messages,” she said. “Do call if you need anything. I think Al-Tariq’s family may be in Iran. Somewhere between Sanandaj and the border. That’s what I’ve heard. Unsubstantiated. Possibly entirely erroneous. I’m working on developing contacts in that area, so I’ll let you know if I’m successful. If you do get there, his first three wives are going to be too scared to talk to anybody, but the fourth one might be approachable. The others won’t be.”

  “Why?” DeLuca said. “What did they do?”

  “They bore him daughters,” Warner said.

  “I thought he only had the two sons.”

  “He does,” Warner said.

  DeLuca didn’t have to ask what might have happened to the daughters.

  He didn’t know exactly how much stock he put in the concept of “woman’s intuition.” Probably not enough. The Englishwoman’s apprehension at the burial site didn’t interest him nearly as much as her expertise and the things her sources had told her. He realized he was going to need a bigger team.

  He checked the battery on his sat phone. He hoped he had enough juice to make one more call before recharging. He dialed.

  “Image analysis,” the voice on the phone said.

  “Lieutenant Scott DeLuca, please.”

  He waited. A moment later, his son came on the line.

  “Hey, Pops,” Scott said. “What are you doing at BIAP? Oh, wait—that’s the big banquet thing, right? How’s the food?”

  “How’d you know I was at BIAP?”

  “GPS on your signal,” his son said.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” DeLuca said. “I thought I had to carry a transponder.”

  “We just got it in,” Scott said. “Still testing it. Are you on the balcony?”

  “Yes, I am. And the food is excellent,” DeLuca said. “I’ll save you some leftovers. I need to talk to you, if you’ve got time for your old man. Not on the phone. In person.”

  “About Mom?”

  “Not your
mother. Business. You free tomorrow?”

  “I can make myself free. What time?”

  “How ’bout lunch? I’ll bring the MREs.”

  Chapter Seven

  IN A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD IN READING, MASSachusetts, Bonnie DeLuca and her best friend Caroline sat in the living room, sipping white wine and watching television, the Larry King show, with the sound off.

  “All right, I’ll drop it,” Caroline said, curling her legs up beneath her on the couch and grabbing another handful of popcorn. “I just think you should take care of yourself. I really worry about you.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Bonnie said.

  “Well, somebody does,” Caroline said. “David certainly doesn’t. I just don’t understand how he could put you through this again. After you told him how hard it was the last time. I don’t get it. A man who loves his wife doesn’t put her through something like this.”

  Bonnie started to cry again.

  “I pray for you both,” Caroline said. “I’m not saying he’s a bad guy. I’m just saying that you’re not taking care of yourself, and you have to, because nobody else is going to do it for you. And if that means . . . disconnecting . . .”

  Bonnie sipped her wine. She was falling into bad habits again. Tonight she was drunk, but she didn’t care.

  “What do you think I should do?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell you what to do,” Caroline said. “I just want you to be happy. And I know you’re not happy in this marriage. I can see it. You shouldn’t have to go through this. You’re a nervous wreck. You don’t sleep. You’re too thin . . .”

  Larry King’s guest was a Middle East expert named Mahmoud Jaburi. Bonnie turned the sound on.

  “Larry—the United States won every battle they engaged in in Vietnam, too. Iraq is not Vietnam. The insurgents are not being backed by a neighboring power the way the North Vietnamese were backed and armed by China. Yet the insurgents have a similar sense of unity and purpose, and this sense grows stronger every day. It may be even more dangerous, in a culture where martyrdom brings with it the gift of paradise. For every Iraqi who is killed, a thousand new faces will rise up . . .”