by Larry Bond
“It’s well out of range,” an Air Force major told her. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“The idea was that they would move it,” she said. Corrigan had arranged for Rankin to give her a briefing an hour before. They were following a lead on Vassenka, though she had gathered from Corrigan that it was a long shot.
“We’ll have coverage around the clock,” said the major. “If they come out to set it up, we’ll see them. It won’t be a problem, believe me.”
“I’d like to,” said Corrine.
The others looked at her, waiting for her to add something optimistic, but she didn’t.
19
TEL AVIV
The marina where Thatch’s credit card had been used catered to very well-off locals and a few extremely wealthy tourists, providing general services and specializing in week-long rentals of cabin cruisers. From the amount of the charge on Thatch’s card, it appeared that the account had been used for one of the latter: a deposit equivalent to a thousand dollars had been charged, along with a fee close to five hundred entered separately.
Ferguson wanted more information than the simple line in the account would give. When he and Thera arrived, the marina’s business office had just closed, which was perfect, actually.
“How do you figure that?” asked Thera as he walked back up the road toward their rental car.
“I am pretty hungry,” he told her. “Let’s go have some dinner and come back later.”
“Later?”
“I prefer to do my breaking and entering at night.”
A half hour later, having not only talked his way into the exclusive Ile de France restaurant several blocks away but also secured a table with a superb view of the Mediterranean, Ferguson ordered a bottle of Les Bressandes, a Burgundy red that was both obscure and très expensive. He was not quite the wine snob that the choice implied; he chose the wine as well as the restaurant primarily because of the price. He watched Thera as she studied the menu, trying to gauge her reactions to the place, the prices, and the ambience. He was back to looking for context, though he remained aware that there were limits: a person might be comfortable with wealth or uncomfortable, envious or indifferent; none of those things made him or kept him from a being a thief. Or her, in this case.
“Here’s mud in your eye,” said Ferguson, clinking glasses with Thera after the wine was poured, scandalizing the overly pretentious wine steward who had hovered nearby.
“Wow, this is good,” said Thera, taking a sip. She looked around the restaurant. “You eat in places like this all the time?”
“When the job calls for it.”
“And it does here?”
“Absolutely.” Ferguson picked up the menu. “I’m going to have a lot of food: soup, salad, the whole nine yards. Get a good feed bag going.”
Thera saw the look of disdain on the waiter’s face as he overheard Ferguson’s American slang. But when he asked Ferguson in a rather forced French accent whether Monsieur was prepared to order, Ferg ripped off his order in French so rapid and fluent that the man — who came from the Ukraine, not France — was lost.
“You love doing that to people, don’t you?” Thera asked. “You just love riding them.”
“He was pretty pretentious.”
“But you would have ridden him anyway.”
“Probably.” He reached into his pocket and took out the bracelet. “Look what I found on the beach.”
Thera took it. “Wow.”
“You can have it, if you want,” Ferguson added.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Told you. I found it on the beach.”
She took it in her hand, unsure exactly what to say. “Ferg… Listen, Bob, I don’t want to be part of this.”
“Part of which?”
“Part of whatever it is you’re doing. You’re skimming money, right?”
“What if I were?”
“God, you can’t. That is so—” She folded her arms in front of her chest, surprised that he was so blatant about it. Then she worried what he might do.
“That’s from the briefcase, isn’t it?” she said. “And you didn’t turn the money in from the car in the desert.”
“Why would I take money?” he asked her.
“You tell me.”
“Why would you do it?”
“I wouldn’t.”
She’d been a little too loud. From the corner of her eye she saw heads turning in their direction. Thera reached for her glass and took a slow sip.
“You think I held that money?” he asked her. The idea that someone might question his honesty had never occurred to him.
“Yes.” Thera stared at his eyes, trying to decipher what was going on. Was he testing her?
“Why would I hang on to that? It was counterfeit.”
“No.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“Really?”
“Check.”
“Should I call Corrigan?”
“Corrigan wouldn’t know counterfeit money if he printed it himself. Call Van Buren. We’re due to check in anyway. Give him our location and say ‘Oh, by the way, that fifty g’s Ferguson found in the desert…’”
“But maybe you lied to him.”
“I guess. And I swapped it out with counterfeit money I just happened to have with me.”
“I will ask him.”
“You should.”
Their dinners came, and they ate in silence. If she was giving him a performance, Ferguson thought, it was a world-class one.
So who took the jewels?
Oh, thought Ferguson. Sheesh. “Talk about in front of my face,” he muttered.
“Excuse me?” said Thera.
“A lot of food here,” he said, picking through the vegetables.
When dinner was over, Thera went and called Van Buren. The colonel confirmed that Ferguson had turned in the counterfeit money.
“Why are you asking?”
Embarrassed but relieved, she said, “I’m getting nosy in my old age.”
* * *
Even though it was well past sundown, the tiny lights lining the marina docks as well as the building made anyone at the front easily visible. The back of the building, however, was cast in shadow, and the window was open. Unfortunately, the building backed onto the water, which meant the only way in was to climb up out of the waves or a small boat. Ferguson picked one up from a row stacked on shore and plopped it into the water.
“You think there’s a burglar alarm inside?” asked Thera.
“I’m kind of hoping they don’t have anything worth stealing,” said Ferguson, leaning down and paddling with his hands. “I wouldn’t want to be tempted.”
“Am I going to hear about this for the rest of my life?”
“Just a good portion of it.”
Ferguson paddled the boat under the window and held it against the structure. The open window argued strongly that there wasn’t an alarm, but Thera checked anyway, bringing up the infrared glasses and using them from the corner of the window to look first for a pyroelectric sensor and then a laser or similar device. Pyroelectric sensors, commonly found in cheap motion detectors, worked by scanning the air for a change in heat energy. While not difficult to defeat — Ferguson had a soapy substance that would blur the sensor’s window, effectively dulling its vision — the sensor itself had to be spotted, and looking around the room carefully took some time.
“Ah, just stick your head in. If the alarm goes off, we’ll know something’s there,” said Ferg.
“Maybe it’ll be a silent alarm.”
“The stuff they have that’s worth stealing is out on the water,” said Ferguson. “If they didn’t chain the small boats, they’re not going to go crazy with burglar alarms. The front door is probably open.”
“Patience is a virtue,” said Thera, pulling out the bug detector to look for a device that used sonar or radio waves.
“I thought it was one of the deadly sins.”
“Oh,
the nuns would be proud of you.”
Satisfied that there were no alarms, Thera pulled herself up and into the building. By the time Ferguson followed, she had found the computer and was hunched over the keyboard, waiting for it to boot up. The machine wasn’t password protected, but the point-of-sale program used to record rentals and credit card charges was.
“We can steal the drive,” Thera suggested. “Have someone analyze the data.”
“We don’t have to do that,” said Ferguson, staring at the wooden board where the boat keys were hung. Double sets sat on each peg, except for one: A3. The alphanumeric system referred to the mooring places. Worst case scenario: they could have figured out what the boat looked like by comparing the photo of the marina on the wall with the boats outside. But that wasn’t necessary; the boats each had a little paper file with important information in the cabinets next to the desk, and Ferguson found that A3 was a fiberglass cabin cruiser that could sleep six. It was called the Jericho, and its engines had been serviced two months before.
“This is the boat,” he told her, showing her the file.
“Who’s using the card? His sister?”
“I’m not sure yet,” said Ferguson. “Except that it’s not Hatch.”
“It has to be the sister,” said Thera. “Or Mossad. They had access to his wallet and card.”
“Could be us,” said Ferguson.
“You can rule us out.”
“Not yet. Come on. We need to get to the airport, and I have to check my e-mail.”
20
BALAD
AFTER MIDNIGHT…
The security was so tight that Rankin, Guns, and James had trouble getting into the city. Troops had staked out all of the areas that Rankin and Guns had ID’d from satellite photos as possible launch sites and several others besides. Heavily armed Iraqi units crisscrossed the major roads and many of the minor ones, and there were already several helicopters and an AC-130 gunship orbiting overhead. An insurgent couldn’t set off a firecracker in town, let alone set up a cruise missile.
More important, there were no Russian bars in the city, and even if there had been, they’d be closed; a nine p.m. curfew had been imposed.
They stopped at a temporary battalion headquarters near a checkpoint north of the city, catching some coffee and gossip. Word of the missile had been broadcast, and in fact a patrol had already investigated what turned out to be a false alarm.
The senior NCO on duty offered them a tent to sleep in. James wanted to take him up on the offer, but Rankin and Guns insisted they’d find their own place to stay. Which struck James as funny; the military guys were the ones who were supposed to be willing to rough it, not him.
James slid into the back of the Hummer, trying in vain to sleep as the truck bounced along the road. Rankin drove, the sound of the tires drilling into the side of his head, his body tense. His Beretta sat in his lap, and every so often he glanced toward his Uzi next to him.
“So you caught that guy up in Tikrit, huh?” said Guns, trying to talk to stay awake.
“Pretty far from there,” said Rankin.
“Musta been tough, huh?”
“Catchin’ him was easy.”
Guns waited for more, but Rankin didn’t volunteer anything else. After a minute or two, James slid forward. Guns thought — hoped — he’d supply more of the story but he didn’t. Instead he asked what Guns did “in real life.”
“This is real life,” said Guns. “I’m a marine.”
“For real?” asked James.
“Well, yeah. What do you think?”
“How’d you get hooked up with Stephen?” James asked.
“Lucky, I guess.”
“Classified, huh?”
“It was an accident,” said Guns.
“Everything in life’s an accident,” said James.
“You believe that?” asked Rankin.
“Pretty much.”
“Lonely thing to think,” said Rankin.
“You think God moves us around like pieces on a chessboard?” asked James.
“I didn’t say that,” answered Rankin. “You don’t believe in God at all.”
“That’s not true. I told you, I don’t believe in God in our image, as something we can understand. I think God’s mysterious, beyond us. That’s why I don’t get hung up on religion.”
“You can’t just turn religion on and off,” said Rankin.
“I didn’t say you could.” James leaned back in his seat. “What do you think, Sergeant?” he asked Guns. “You go to church?”
“When I can.”
“Which one?”
“Next you’re going to ask what kind of underwear he likes,” Rankin said.
“I’m a boxer guy myself,” said James.
“Methodist,” offered Guns, but the other man had pushed back in his seat, watching the shadows along the road.
21
TEL AVIV
The security staff at the American embassy gave Ferguson an incredibly difficult time when he asked to use the secure communications facilities, so much so that at one point he was tempted to deck their supervisor. He didn’t, but only because she looked like the type who might enjoy that sort of thing. She didn’t know him and wasn’t impressed when he offered to give her Parnelles’s home phone number. Finally he managed to convince her that she should call Slott to see if he was legit. The woman didn’t have the guts to come out and apologize herself, sending one of her red-faced peons out to show him to the room.
“You wouldn’t want them to let just anyone in,” said Lauren when he called the desk.
“Yeah, I hear Yasser Arafat was at the door just the other day,” said Ferguson. “Listen, I need to feed you a picture of a boat for the satellite interpreters.”
“Ferg, we’re really stretched.”
“No kidding. I thought you guys were goofing off. Tell you what, though, take the people you have looking for the Siren missile around Baghdad off the job. It’s not there.”
“Where is it?”
“The Red Sea, I think.”
“The Red Sea?”
“Near Mecca,” said Ferguson. “But I’ll worry about that. I want them to look for a Scud within range of Baghdad.”
“Huh?”
“That’s why Vassenka went to Iraq. I don’t know if the plane is a red herring or not. I have to talk to Rankin.”
“What am I doing?”
“You’re going to receive a photo of a boat that I send you and find someone who can tell me what it would look like in a satellite photo,” said Ferguson. “Better would he to find someone who could figure that out for me, but I’ll do it myself if I have to. Then you’re going to send an alert out about a Scud missile in Iraq. Don’t bother canceling the cruise missile; there’s always a possibility I’m wrong. It’s happened two or three times in my lifetime.”
“Ferg.”
“All right, once. But there’s always a chance.”
* * *
Rankin sounded as if he were sleeping when he answered his phone.
“Rankin.”
“Hey, Skippy, top of the morning to you.”
“Ferguson.”
“Listen, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Vassenka and what Khazaal had going.”
“And?”
“Khazaal had to have had a Scud or at least parts for one. More, maybe. Vassenka’s there. He must have brought fuel with him.”
“I thought you said he brought a cruise missile.”
“Never mind that.”
“Ferguson—”
“The other thing that I’m thinking, I’m going to bet that Vassenka improved the range. Because at a hundred miles, we would have found it already, right?”
“They have a hundred-mile range,” said Rankin.
“I think it’s a little more. Check with Lauren. You know what? Tell her to get Thomas Ciello working on this. Get a rundown of all the mods Vassenka might try. The range has to be more. That was probably th
e key to the plan in the beginning.”
“Ciello? Is that the UFO nut?”
“One and the same,” said Ferguson. “I’ll tell you, though, the way things have been going lately, I think I’m starting to believe in UFOs.”
22
SOUTH OF THE SUEZ CANAL
The adrenaline shook Ravid so fiercely that he couldn’t sleep. Finally he got up and began pacing around the small boat. The man at the helm nodded but said nothing.
They were beyond the Suez, the Egyptians paid off, and their paperwork taken care of. With every mile it became easier, but with every mile his heart seemed to beat faster. There were only hours left.
Once the missile was launched, Ravid would kill himself. He would not wait until it struck the target. What was the sense? He knew it would strike, and frankly if it didn’t he would not want to taste the bitterness.
He had debated how exactly to do this — there was no question that he would do it — and finally decided to simply place a pistol in his mouth. It was a sure and simple solution, though it presented a problem: he didn’t have a pistol.
He would have to borrow one but before the time for the launch. Well before. Otherwise they might try and stop him when the time came.
That was the strange thing, wasn’t it? To stop someone from killing himself — what was the point?
Ravid curled his feet beneath him as he sat on the deck. Something itched at the very back of his throat.
He took a long, slow breath, thinking about the day he got married, remembering the moment when he looked at his new wife and felt incredible lust. And the day their son was born. He had nearly been stopped at a checkpoint the day before, disguised so he could come see her.
The ache remained. The men had brought beer with them; there were bottles in the cooler.
Ravid thought of Mecca and its destruction. He envisioned his revenge.
Not his only, nor that of the men who had come gladly to help him, an army of the wrathful, but revenge for everyone murdered by Muslims in the name of their God. For Jews, Christians, Israelites, Americans, Buddhists, Chinese — everyone. Let the Muslims taste what jihad truly was.