by Larry Bond
“No!” he yelled, struggling to break free.
“We have to save someone,” answered Ferguson. “Come on. It’s Thera. Thera.”
Rostislawitch stopped fighting, but he was even more deeply confused. He felt as if he were in a dream, the world spinning so bizarrely that everything he knew was mashed together into the same physical place: Thera; his wife, Olga; Atha; and this bum; the streets of Moscow when he was a young man; Chechnya the inferno; Naples.
The flames receded, funneling back into a basement near where they’d been walking when the car came by. Ferguson pulled Rostislawitch with him.
“Thera!” Ferguson called. “Thera, where are you? Thera!”
The explosion had broken a water main below the street. Water hissed upward, a cloud of vapor rising from the grate next to the building like a geyser. Black smoke from several boxes of garbage and a nearby car that had caught fire curled across the narrow roadway, clawing at the buildings on either side.
Thera Majed rose from behind the car where she’d crouched. She hadn’t realized what was going on until she saw Ferguson throwing himself into space. When the flames erupted she threw herself down, thinking it was too late, not for her but for him. She was sure she’d never see Ferg again, except in pieces, broken on the pavement.
And there he was, coming through the fire, carrying Rostislawitch with him, calling for her. She threw herself at him and he caught her, and for a long moment neither one thought of anything but the other: they wrapped their arms around each other; they held their hearts close against each other’s chest. Then, like all moments, it disintegrated; they were back in the world.
“Are you all right?” Thera asked.
“I’m good.”
“Your sat phone is ringing.”
Ferguson hadn’t realized it. He pulled it from his pocket. Corrigan had called, leaving a message. The sat phone was notifying him of it.
“Kiska Babev is on her way to Naples,” said Corrigan. “She may be there already.”
Thanks, thought Ferguson, sliding the antenna back down. He turned to Rostislawitch, standing only a foot away, not sure whether to believe Thera was really there. “Come on,” Ferguson told the Russian scientist. “We’ll find a place where it’s safe, and explain.”
~ * ~
2
MISRATAH, LIBYA
The airport at Misratah was primarily a military base, with its parking areas dominated by fixed-wing Aero L-39 Albatross fighter-trainers. But there was very little in terms of intra-service rapport between the U.S. and Libya. Rankin made a vain attempt at soliciting the base commander’s help, telling him that he was sure that Atha’s aircraft had landed here and that any cooperation would be remembered in the future. But his promise was too nebulous for the commander, who valued tangible and immediate rewards; he recommended that Rankin speak to the men in the control tower but added that personally he doubted there would be anyone there who could help.
Guns worked the opposite direction, walking over to the fixed base operator’s shack and trying to strike up a conversation with the men there. He was wondering about airplanes that might have been fueled recently, he told them, because he was trying to find someone who’d flown out a few hours before. But there was too much of a language barrier—none of the men who fueled or worked on the planes spoke enough English to understand his questions, even with twenty-euro notes as an incentive.
The office manager understood, but claimed there had been no aircraft in or out in several days. She did this with her arms folded and one eye on the television in the corner of her small office inside the hangar. An Italian soap opera was playing on the television, the sound turned down while a translation of the dialogue into Arabic ran across the bottom. Guns turned and watched the program for a few minutes while he tried to think of another tactic.
A short, bald man with a beard pushed a broom into the office. The woman scolded him in Arabic, telling him he was late, but the man paid no attention. He swept the dust into a small pile near the door, then went back out into the hangar area.
“So, uh, who else can I talk to?” Guns asked the office manager when the program went to commercials. “I’m really looking for information and willing to pay.”
The woman shrugged. Guns wrote a local telephone number down for her—untraceable, the number would be answered by Corrigan—and said that if she thought of anything, she could call. He left one of his twenties next to the note and left.
He wondered what Ferguson would do next as he walked toward the hangar door. Maybe see something that he wasn’t seeing. Guns tried absorbing everything in front of him, staring, glancing—if there was something significant here, it just wasn’t registering.
“I know what you’re after,” said the man with the broom, pausing over his work near the doorway.
Guns stopped, surprised not so much by what the man said as the fact that he was speaking perfect English.
“You want information about Ahmed.” The man glanced around. “Flies out of here all the time in his little putt-putt plane.”
“How do you know?”
“Ah, I don’t know nothin’.”
The man went back to sweeping. Before Guns could ask another question, the office manager’s voice rang across the large building, once more scolding the sweeper in Arabic. The man pushed his broom toward a corner.
“He is a retard,” she told Guns, walking toward him. The English pejorative flew from her mouth in three syllables: “ree-tuh-ard.” “Not right in the head. Don’t worry about him.”
“I could see that,” said Guns.
Outside, Guns walked as slowly as he could toward the helicopter, parked a hundred yards away. Rankin had already gotten back.
“They’re probably all on the take,” said Rankin, agitated, standing near the nose of the Seahawk. “Control tower guy lied to my face. He claimed he hadn’t had a plane in or out for days, except for the military patrols. He does that in almost perfect English, then he pretends he doesn’t understand when I ask if knows of any Iranians who fly in and out of here. How about you?”
“I’m not sure,” said Guns. “But there’s a guy in the offices there who might talk to us, if we could figure out a way to get his boss out of the picture. She’s kind of a nasty-edged woman.”
“Ferguson would go make love to her,” said Rankin.
Guns laughed. He probably would—or at least flirt. “Well, that won’t work for us.”
“Are they together?” Rankin asked.
“There’s an office inside. She’s watching a soap opera. He’s cleaning up.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll go talk to her. You come around after me and see what the guy has to say.”
The man with the broom had been watching them from across the cement apron, and Guns didn’t have to do very much to get him to talk.
“They think I’m a dope,” the man told Guns while Rankin went inside. “I’m not right in the head, but I’m not a dope.”
“I’m looking for an Iranian,” said Guns.
“That would be Atha,” said the man. “He is always with Ahmed. Ahmed the pilot and his little plane.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“I can tell you everything. Everything.”
“And what do you want?”
“Get me out of here. I know you’re American and I know you’re a spy. Get me back to America.”
“We could probably do that,” said Guns, in his most casual voice.
“I’ll be in your helicopter in half an hour.”
“What’s your name?”
“Just call me Paul.”
~ * ~
P
aul” showed up at the Seahawk five minutes after Guns and Rankin climbed in. Rankin thought Paul looked like a burned-out hippie, and the brief story he told of his background more or less confirmed the assessment: he’d wandered through Africa for nearly two decades, for fun and enlightenment.
“Done some good drugs,”
he admitted. “Got tossed in jail in Morocco for a while. Not a great place.”
“So tell us about Ahmed,” said Guns.
“You guys are going to get me back to the States?”
Rankin looked at Guns. He hadn’t heard about the deal.
“Yeah, we’ll get you there,” said Guns. “I just have to work it out. But I will.”
“I think I can trust you,” said Paul. He turned to Rankin. “Not you.” He turned back to Guns. “But you’re OK.”
Guns asked again about Ahmed, the pilot Paul had mentioned by the hangar.
“Flies a little Fuji FA-200. Tiny little plane. Putt-putt-putt-putt-putt. Fills up with his av fuel, comes back almost bone-dry. Goes south. Doesn’t take much water.”
“Why would he take a lot of water?” asked Guns.
“That’s the desert, man. The desert. People are dying down there. No water. So he’s going someplace with water. Dig?”
“Are you sure he’s goes south?” said Rankin.
Paul snickered. “You don’t trust me.”
“No,” said Rankin.
“Honesty. Ha. Overrated.”
“How do you know he’s going south?” asked Guns.
“Flight vector,” said Paul. “I watch. Some days with glasses. You don’t waste fuel in the desert. You go somewhere, you go. You know, I could fly that plane if he let me. I don’t have a license, but I can fly. I could fly this plane.”
“This is a helicopter,” said Guns.
“I could still fly it.”
“I think we can find our own pilot,” said Rankin.
“Hey, I can find you pilots. I can get you lots of pilots.”
“Yeah?” said Guns, thinking one might know Ahmed. Paul didn’t seem like the most reliable source.
“Lots of pilots, man,” said Paul. “Say, you got something to drink? Stronger than water, I mean.”
~ * ~
3
NAPLES, ITALY
The day his wife died, Rostislawitch had walked through town in a state of shock, his body numb with disbelief. He did this even though he had known for a while it was coming—his need for her was so strong that he had denied the reality of her passing until the sheet was drawn over her head. At that moment, confusion was drawn over him, and his soul was plunged into despair, from which he’d only just down awoken.
He felt that way again, sitting in the abandoned factory building several blocks from the train station. He couldn’t believe what the girl, Thera, was telling him.
He could believe some of it, but not all of it, not the part about her being an American spy, a CIA officer, even though the FSB she-wolf had said it, even though he had quizzed Thera surreptitiously about it. She seemed too young, too innocent, to be so deceptive.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Thera told him. “But someone had to get close to you to protect you.”
Rostislawitch thought this might all be an elaborate trick, an operation they would call it, to get him to come over to their side. Maybe things were still the way they were during the Cold War, when Russians and the West were locked in a battle of spy versus spy They’d get medals for bringing him in, and he would get a small flat in Texas didn’t somewhere, never heard of again until the she-wolf Kiska Babev hunted him down and took his carcass back for her own medal.
“Someone is trying to kill you. This is twice Ferg has saved you,” Thera told him.
“When was the first?” Rostislawitch asked.
“In Bologna. The car bomb.”
“That was a terrorist.”
“No, that was an assassin. He likes bombs, and he likes to make his hits look as if they’re the work of other people.”
“No one saved me,” said Rostislawitch, remembering. “Someone flew into me as the bomb exploded.”
Ferguson interrupted, walking over from his lookout post near the door.
“The person that’s trying to kill you is good. Very good,” he said. “He—or she—killed a CIA officer two years ago. That’s why we went to Bologna. Not because of whatever it was you stole, or because we want you to defect or anything like that. Because you’re the target of someone we want. We want to catch him. Or her.”
“Him or her?” asked Rostislawitch.
“We thought it was a he,” Ferguson said. “We seem to have been wrong about that.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re pretty sure it’s Kiska Babev,” said Thera. “The Russian FSB agent who interviewed you.”
Rostislawitch remembered their meeting, the look in her eyes. She was definitely a killer, heartless.
“But now that we’re here,” continued Ferguson, “we can’t help but be interested in what you gave the Iranians.”
“I didn’t give them anything.”
“You weren’t paid?”
“They stole it from my locker. You saw me. You were there. In your disguise.”
Ferguson caught Thera’s eye and signaled with his head for her to go back by the door and keep lookout. He’d posted video bugs, but it would take considerably more than that to make him feel comfortable now.
“Tell me about what they took,” Ferguson asked the scientist in Russian. “How dangerous is it?”
Rostislawitch took a deep breath. He couldn’t decide what to do, whether to trust the Americans or not. He watched Thera walking to the door. He longed to trust her, but how could he, when she had so obviously lied?
“If I drank what they took, would I die?” Ferguson asked.
“You wouldn’t drink it,” said Rostislawitch. “The taste.” He shook his head. “You would never drink it. Or eat it. Not in that form.”
“So how is it spread?”
“If I talk to you, my friends in Russia—they’ll never be left alone.”
“If the material is used by the Iranians, hundreds of people may die,” said Ferguson.
“You’re wrong,” said Rostislawitch. “It could be thousands, even millions. Maybe millions if they know their business.”
“Then talk to me. You don’t want their deaths on your soul.”
Rostislawitch stared at Thera, silent.
“Help us,” she said, looking back into the room. “You’re not a murderer, Artur. Help us.”
Sobbing, Rostislawitch began to explain the different ways the bacteria could be used.
~ * ~
4
NAPLES, ITALY
This is what came of improvisation.
Hamilton folded his arms, watching as the firemen played their hose on the burned-out building. Augusto Leterri, one of the Naples police lieutenants in charge of the investigation, stood beside him, talking on his cell phone to a superior.
Ferguson was one lucky son of a bitch, Hamilton thought. Always somehow at the right spot at the right time, riding the right twist of fate.
He kicked at a brick from the building, which had partially collapsed about twenty minutes after the explosion. The problem was, there hadn’t been enough time for the gas to fill the basement space. Another half hour, and the explosion would have claimed the entire block. That was the way he liked it: complete and utter obliteration, destruction on a grand scale. One could use a gun—certainly he had—or even a knife or poison, but where was the art in that? Where was the statement of annihilation? Where was the assurance of success?
No, the gas explosion, with the extra diversion of the hired gunner—that was the way it should have happened. And it would have, had they walked down one of the three other blocks where the trap had been set. This just happened to be the last, happened to have a geography that favored luck.
Luck. Always the deciding factor when you improvised.
“I’m sorry for the interruption,” said the detective. “That was my boss. As I was saying, I doubt this was the work of terrorists.”
“Why?” asked Hamilton.
“The inspector has already found part of the gas pipe broken,” said the detective. “If there were a b
omb, there would be more residue. We will look more carefully, because you never know. But from the way the witnesses described it, phooosh.”
He made the sound of a fire, raising his hands up from his belly to illustrate.
“But we will look into your theory of terrorists,” added the policeman.