A few car alarms had been roused to activity by the explosion. Rayhan heard their muted sounds through the ringing deafness caused by the blast.
As the scene settled and the uninjured came to life in starts and jerks, Rayhan looked around for Kealey. She didn’t see him. She texted. There was no answer.
“Let’s go,” she yelled to Yazdi, motioning in case he couldn’t hear.
The Iranian followed, not because the woman told him to but because he recognized the explosion for what it was: a cover. Somehow, the Yemeni and his associate must have known—or at least suspected—they were being watched. Or they may have feared that the van had been identified or followed. They created the explosion in order to get out another way—with the device.
“I don’t see him,” Rayhan said as she ran. She covered her mouth with her sleeve and pushed through people who were moving from the choking fumes. Her eyes scanned the burned bodies as they neared. It was impossible to identify the bodies.
Sirens broke through her muffled hearing. Within minutes the area would be roped off. She slowed as she neared the destroyed van.
“No!” Yazdi said, pulling her along. “We must keep going! The bomb is this way!”
CHAPTER 13
FÈS, MOROCCO
Kealey was standing near the playground, behind a tree, when the man emerged from the side door of the schoolhouse. He was holding something; Kealey decided to move closer to see.
It was a laptop, tucked under his arm.
The American ran toward the playground. There was no time to get to his car and, if he were correct, it wouldn’t do him much good: the road was about to be effectively blocked. He considered trying to get to the phone but couldn’t be sure whether the terrorist was watching. He might detonate it to prevent Kealey from stopping him.
Kealey entered the playground. He dropped to the asphalt, low beneath a bench that afforded him some protection as well as a view of the side door. He protected the Geiger counter by putting it on his left side, wrapped his handkerchief around the lower half of his face, pressed two fingers against his right ear and, with his left hand—the hand away from the van—had his cell phone ready to take pictures.
The blast arrived before the terrorists did. Kealey tried not to think of the people in the streets or on the sidewalk who had been killed. If he had attempted to warn them, the bomb might have been detonated prematurely. If he were on one side of the building, warning people away, he might miss the bomber leaving by another exit. There is no way to win in a situation like this except to be among the survivors and apprehend the people responsible.
This close to the explosion, Kealey felt the heat. He shut his eyes but he felt it through his lids. Pinpricks of sand and grit, lifted from the street, were thrown against his right side like hundreds of pins jabbing his cheek, bare hand, and ankle. Larger shards of the van clanged all around him without syncopation, like dissonant cymbals. A piece of rusted fender hit hard against the leg of the bench, wrapping around it and missing his face by inches. The dust cloud that followed was expected, and Kealey had held his breath despite the protective handkerchief. After the explosion, he pulled his fingers from his ears and used his right hand to shield his eyes on that side. The cloud obscured details, but it couldn’t hide shapes moving straight ahead of him. Kealey snapped a series of images. Computer enhancement might find a detail the human eye missed.
He saw them. Amid the churning wall of dusty gray he saw two dark shapes moving toward the back of the school. He didn’t think they were from the school: the figures were outside within seconds when the air was thickest with the residue of the blast. Kealey waited until they had passed to the left, away from the street, before he slid from under the bench, grabbed the Geiger counter, and went after them. There was a secondary explosion, much smaller, from inside the room under the school.
There goes any traceable evidence, Kealey thought.
The only exit from the playground was on the street side. He ran back, leaping over and around the shapes that had once been swings and seesaws. The golden sands of a sandbox were still sprinkling down, glittering in the now misty sunlight. He got to the side of the building, reached the door, and continued running in the direction the two shapes had gone. There was a zigzagging street that went around the backs of old brick structures, painted white. The shouts of people at the far end made it impossible for him to hear footsteps retreating along the narrow cobbled path. Kealey wasn’t concerned about losing them in a crowd. Not as long as they were carrying an eighty-or-so-pound container with an atom bomb inside.
But they won’t let themselves be hobbled for long, he told himself. Which was why he was hurrying. The van could not have been their only way out.
Kealey found himself navigating against a thickening mob. He couldn’t tell whether they were running to investigate the blast or to get off another main street in case there was another one. The Geiger counter was still ticking its steady beat—and then, as he was just about to emerge from the jagged passage, it slowed.
The reading was residual, he thought. From behind me. They were working in the school.
There was no point going there. He continued ahead.
He emerged on a street that looked like it belonged to another century. It was a large courtyard filled with vats. There were at least one hundred of them, ranging in size from bathtubs to hot tubs. The smaller ones were hewn from white stone, the larger ones formed from clay or adobe. They sat side by side by side and were full of colored liquid that smelled like freshly dyed Easter eggs. The few people who hadn’t run were balanced on the edges with large wooden poles churning the contents. It was an ancient leather tannery, and the only way through it was around the periphery. That perimeter was surrounded by equally ancient white stone structures, one or two stories high, that were the shops and manufacturing facilities and homes of the workers. There were more than two dozen structures that formed the enclosed courtyard. Each had one or two doors. The terrorists could have gone through any of them.
Smoke had filtered over the rooftops of the buildings to the south, forming a misty veil over that side of the courtyard. Kealey followed the Geiger counter but it was losing the trail.
He slowed as the needle returned to normal. He swung it back, toward the vats, around in a full circle. He got nothing.
Angry and frustrated, he called Rayhan. She picked up at once.
“Thank God—” she blurted.
“Where are you?”—he cut her off.
“We’re just coming behind the school—people rushing through.”
“Knock them over. I’m in the courtyard at the other end. I need you here now.”
He hung up. He texted Valigorsky. He asked for an APHID reading at his current location. The APHID was the Atomic Perigee–High Intelligence Drone, a robot space shuttle program activated in 2010. The two drones were on permanent deployment now, in low geosynchronous earth orbit, their uppermost range exactly matching the lowest reach of existing intelligence satellites. Drone A-1 kept an eye on radioactivity in the Middle East; Drone A-2 watched North Korea. They could detect, analyze, and track any radiation source above the level and duration of a medical X-ray. If any rogue nation transported fissionable matter to a bomb-testing site or attempted to sneak raw nuclear materials across their borders, the APHID would find it in whatever millisecond it was exposed. High-definition cameras would simultaneously record images of the scientists, receptacles, and conveyances used in the operation so they could be hunted and retrieved—or terminated, as the Israelis had done with Iranian nuclear scientists. Clarke had “borrowed” the A-1 for this mission.
The problems with the current situation were twofold. The millisieverts he’d picked up were on the lowest end of the APHID’s detection capabilities; and it required an unvarying exposure of at least ninety seconds. It was like an old photographic plate in which the subject had to be still and sufficiently well lit. Otherwise, background radiation from the planet and outer spa
ce diluted the signal.
During the active part of any mission, Valigorsky or her deputy, Dick Levy, were at their desk in twelve-hour shifts. Valigorsky was on now and was texting back as Rayhan arrived.
Kealey shot her an enquiring look.
“Yazdi is checking the schoolhouse for clues,” she said.
That made sense. It was the right call.
“All right. Talk to these workers,” Kealey said. “Find out which way the men with the case went. They had to have come through here.”
Tightening her head scarf, Rayhan ran off to talk to the men working the vats. Kealey was angry because he hadn’t known where the zigzag street led, didn’t know the area, didn’t know to go around it. Neither did Yazdi, but if the three of them had been in the playground together—
It still would have gone the same way, Kealey told himself. There was only one Geiger counter. And there might be a clue in the schoolhouse. And you don’t get to give up, he thought angrily. He looked around. They went in some direction. His chances of finding it were better if he moved.
He looked at the doors near the back of the courtyard, the way he’d come. The figures had been carrying something heavy. They wouldn’t have wanted to negotiate the narrow perimeter. He walked briskly in that direction. He looked for a door without a knob or latch. Saloon doors, perhaps. Something they could have backed into and opened. There was nothing like that, but there were two doors on the same side that were propped open. He started to run toward them. The nearest door was the larger of the two. He stepped in, got no reading. He went to the next one.
There was the faintest uptick. The device was probably not inside, but it almost certainly had gone this way. The room inside was dark, made darker because Kealey’s eyes were adjusted to the bright light outside. The two men had been inside the schoolhouse, able to see better than he.
Kealey turned to Rayhan, who was on the other side of the vats. He whistled. She looked over. He motioned toward the door. She nodded.
Kealey crouched low in case one of them had stayed behind with a gun. He turned on the flashlight app of his phone, shined it inside. The room was full of racks loaded with hanging leather goods, drying in the ventilated room—which is why the door was open. Kealey rose and made his way through. The Geiger beats were slightly elevated and steady.
He moved sideways through the narrow spaces between the hides. They were moving slightly, probably because of the gentle breeze. He was looking ahead, watching the leather from the corner of his eye—there was a whitish scrape mark on one. Something sharp had rubbed against it after it had been dyed.
Kealey took off toward the door on the opposite end. He swung around a table that had leatherworking tools. His phone beeped. He ignored it. He was out the door, on a market street where there were still vendors, still consumers, and a lot of animated discussion—probably about the blast. Kealey looked down the one side street. Cars were parked facing away from the market. The bomber would have had an escape vehicle as near to the school as possible.
A silvery Daewoo Lanos pulled from a spot at the end of the street and sped away. Kealey took pictures of the car, sent them to Clarke as he started after it. He thought he saw just one man inside—
“Awzalohniswid!”
A voice, hard and taunting, came from Kealey’s right. The American stopped, looked over as a clean-cut older man rose from between two cars. The Geiger counter clicked a little louder. That was what he had been picking up. The man had a gun pointed at the American. Kealey lifted his free hand.
“I don’t speak Arabic,” Kealey said.
The man snatched the Geiger counter and threw it against a stone wall. It shattered. The audio bud hung stupidly from Kealey’s ear. Then he reached for Kealey’s phone. Kealey stepped back and shook his head. He made sure his eyes remained on the enemy and the enemy’s eyes on him.
The man lowered his gun at Kealey’s chest. Watching his adversary, Kealey jumped to one side, between the cars, as Rayhan used two hands to bring an awl down hard into the back of the man’s neck. She stabbed him with a force strange to her limbs, with a cry she probably did not think she possessed, with an urgency unlike anything she had ever experienced. The man went down without a sound. It was doubtful anyone behind Rayhan had seen what had happened. Kealey quickly drew the man between the cars. He snapped a photo of his face in the shadow of the fender.
Rayhan was standing in the street, breathing heavily from the run—and from what she had done. Her dark hair framed her face, which was looking out from hunched shoulders with a kind of animal ferocity. Kealey examined the shattered Geiger counter, wiped his prints from the handle, and scooped up the gun. He searched the man. He had a billfold, which Kealey took. There was no money; of course not. He had likely given it to the man who drove away. The only other item he carried were keys, which Kealey also pocketed. Then he stepped in front of Rayhan and bent a little. He lifted her downturned eyes with his.
“He was a killer,” Kealey told her. “You saved my life.”
“I know. I’ll be all right. We—we need to get Yazdi,” she said distractedly.
Kealey looked ahead. Traffic was moving slowly. “You go back the way you came and hook up with him. We’ll meet at my car. I want to see if I can spot the vehicle, see which way it’s going.”
Kealey ran off along the street. He half turned, shouted, “Don’t let Yazdi get his phone from you.”
“Not a chance,” she promised.
Kealey believed her.
He checked the text he’d received as he jogged in the direction of the car. It was from Valigorsky:
WE HAVE NO READINGS.
Kealey continued to race ahead, but the car was out of sight. He slowed on a street where police cars and ambulances were racing by. The terrorist had gotten out before they had gotten in. This was not a careless, casually improvised escape. Kealey was angry at how it had unfolded.
He did not want to go back the way he’d come. He did not want to be anywhere near the body when it was found. He would follow the road the official vehicles had taken. Before turning to go, he took out the man’s wallet and tapped out an email sending the key information to Clarke.
Ryan Kealey wasn’t accustomed to having things go wrong. Even though he couldn’t think of a damn thing that he could have done differently—and he was mentally bashing himself, trying to come up with something—he was supposed to be the best at what he did. At the moment, there was only one thing he was sure of: that he was the guy who’d let a suitcase bomb, possibly armed, slip from his hands. And though he didn’t blame her, the only man who could have helped them had a leatherworker’s tool in his spine.
Screw it, he thought. It’s a setback, not a defeat.
He had been in the business long enough, at least, to tell those apart.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Largo Kealey didn’t recognize air travel. He didn’t even recognize the cab he was in, with video streaming into the backseat.
Arriving at JFK International, he felt like a two-liter bottle on a cola assembly line being shuttled along rollers to be filled and capped. He had bought his ticket online—he could do that—but he still went to the counter where he was told he could go right to the gate after listening to a series of questions that could not really and truly have been designed to ferret out terrorists. He waited in a long security line, even at this hour, since many European flights tended to leave late, he discovered. So did flights out west. So did flights with children, whose parents hoped they would sleep while airborne . . . because they surely weren’t in the line. He chose to be body scanned rather than patted down because at his age, what the hell were a few X-rays? He knew about taking off his shoes, expected to have to remove his belt with its big U.S. flag buckle, but he didn’t anticipate the hustling and banging he took at the end of the line while he tried to get his clothes, keys, overnight bag, comb, pen, and eyeglass case from the plastic bin. Of course, the scanner missed the plastic credit card he kep
t in his wallet, with one end sharpened to a razor-fine edge. Valley Stream had changed over the years, and a mugger trying to take his wallet would get, instead, a slit throat.
All of that was just the preamble to a hurried boarding that finally took place fifteen minutes before their scheduled flight time. Largo entered a small cabin with a seat that barely had a cushion or a recline or the width to accommodate anyone larger than a child. The overhead bin was full with someone else’s carry-on before he got to it, so he asked the stewardess for help. The flight attendant—she was no longer “a stewardess,” the young woman sitting beside him gently but firmly reprimanded him—hurriedly and with a tense smile offered to check his bag for him.
Largo said he would put it under the seat.
The flight attendant said it wouldn’t fit and she would gladly check his bag. The woman had a script from which she didn’t diverge.
Largo removed a sweater and tied it around his shoulders, over the sweater he was wearing. Now it would fit, he told her. She left—not to make the preflight announcements but to turn on a recording that did that while she mimed all the movements.
There were no earphones in the seatback. There were no beverages during the flight. The only thing that hadn’t changed in about two decades was the pilot still said “uh” every few words. When they deplaned after the short flight, Largo and the others were reminded to take their personal belongings. He wanted to ask what other kind there were—and decided he would take a train for the return trip. There had to be a more civilized way to travel.
There was no one waiting at the gate for him. He had to go to the baggage claim area to find Allison Dearborn. Where was the magic in that, the memories for kids waiting at the big windows, waving to the plane as their grandparents left or arrived?
“Didn’t Benjamin Franklin say something about the uselessness of sacrificing liberty for security?” he asked as he approached the paper with his first name written on it.
The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller Page 21