Dance of Death

by John Case

  Restraining the impulse to glance at his watch, Wilson lowered his head toward the girl, and said, “Excuse me?”

  She turned and looked up at him.

  “Would you mind holding my place?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, sure! I’d be happy to.”

  “ ’Cause I’ll just be a minute.” A hint of embarrassment in his tone.

  “No problem!”

  “Thanks.”

  With a wince that was meant to be a smile, Wilson set off in the direction of the newsstand, leaving the queue, the girl, and the suitcases in his wake. It took all the willpower he had not to look over his shoulder and not to break into a run, but to walk slowly toward the restrooms –

  And keep going.

  An escalator delivered him, sweating and out of breath, to the baggage area below. He looked at his watch, but the glitter in his eyes made it impossible to read. 2:40? 2:10? 39 seconds? He couldn’t be sure.

  Walking faster now, he went through a passageway to the outside, then quickly crossed the road to the short-term parking lot. Row 15.

  The Jeep wasn’t there. Wilson’s stomach did a backflip, and a sizzle of panic shot through his chest. They’d fucked him.

  He was looking around – there was nowhere to go – waiting for the world to explode, when he heard a horn and, turning, saw the Jeep, one row behind him. And there in the Jeep, Bo was laughing, waving him over. Wilson dashed between a phalanx of parked cars, yanked open the door to the passenger seat, and dove in.

  As the car began to roll, Wilson realized that they weren’t alone. There was a guy in the backseat who looked like an Arab – an older guy he’d never seen before. And he was smiling. Nodding approval.

  Likewise Bobojon, who was good to go, with the parking chit in his lap and dollar bills at the ready. Even so, it was taking a long time to get out of the lot. A BMW sat in front of them at the parking attendant’s booth, while the woman behind the wheel rummaged through her purse, babbling apologies. So they sat there in the Jeep, waiting for the terminal to blow, waiting for all hell to break loose, while this crazy bitch rooted around for her Platinum card.

  The guy in the backseat leaned forward, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. Wilson took one and, doing his best to conceal the trembling in his hand, accepted a light.

  Blowing a stream of smoke at the windshield, he squinted at his watch. 1:12 … 1:08 … 1:04

  The woman continued to paw through her purse.

  He wanted to kill her. He wanted to scream. He wanted to kill her and scream.

  Not Bo. He looked from Wilson to the woman, and back again. Said something to the other guy in Arabic. And laughed.

  A moment later, so did the woman. She threw back her head with an exclamation they couldn’t hear, and pulled a wedge of plastic from her purse. Voilà! The bored attendant swiped the card through the long slot in his credit-card machine and waited for the receipt to print. It only took about thirty seconds, but every one of them seemed like a long, torturous minute. Finally, the woman grabbed the chit and sped off, wiggling her fingers out the window. Toodle ooh.

  Thirty seconds later, Wilson and his friends were behind her on the Dulles Toll Road, heading into Washington. Bo was so loose he was practically whistling, but Wilson was hardwired to the watch on his wrist – as if he was the one who was going to blow. 0:04 … 03 … 02 … The hair on his arms was standing on end, and the muscles in his back began to spasm.

  Bo threw him a glance, then looked away, eyes on the road. Wilson’s heart was crashing against his chest when the watch beeped and, out of nowhere, Bo lunged at him with a shout: “BAMMM!”

  The guy in the backseat chuckled.

  Five

  Washington, D.C. | December 21, 2004

  IT WAS THINGS like this that worried Ray Kovalenko. Not the scimitar-rattling on al-Jazeera or the nonstop threats on Al Faroq. It was the stuff he couldn’t explain. Like the tall guy with the sling and the suitcases.

  The FBI agent sat in the darkened room, nibbling on one of the stems of his sunglasses. At the far end of the conference table, a black-and-white video played in silence on a nineteen-inch Provideo monitor. A time-and-date stamp glowed at the bottom of the screen:

  12-18-04 17:51

  The resolution was decent, Kovalenko thought, but the contrast was lousy. A slurry of grays, and not much more. You’d think TSA could do better than that.

  The tape had been made at Dulles. A passenger agent for British Airways noticed a pair of suitcases sitting in front of the ticket counter “for half an hour, maybe more,” and called Transportation Security. When no one claimed the bags, TSA cordoned off the area and alerted the airport police. A Special Response Team was dispatched, and the terminal evacuated.

  The “first responders” (that’s what they were, and that’s how they thought of themselves) were leery of the situation and wanted an EOD unit sent out, so the suitcases could be destroyed in situ. Wiser heads prevailed.

  A skycap remembered wheeling the luggage up to the counter. “Guy had his arm in a sling, so I put the bags up front. No big thing. We do it all the time.”

  The rep from 2-TIC – the Terrorist Threat Integration Center – coughed, then coughed again. Kovalenko glanced at her, his brow curdling into a frown.

  Andrea Cabot was something of a legend, a bright and attractive CIA officer who might, or might not, have been forty. It was said that she had “her own money” – and lots of it. Having grown up in Morocco (her father ran the Port Authority in Casablanca), she liked to joke that English was her “third language.” French and Arabic were the first two, Chinese the fourth.

  Now, she wore a dark suit and a string of pearls, three-inch heels, and contact lenses that were unnaturally blue – a pure indigo color that you saw only at Disney World. Like Kovalenko, she was on her way to somewhere else. In her case, to Kuala Lumpur – “KL” to the cognoscenti – where she was soon to be chief of station.

  Interesting woman, Kovalenko thought. And not shy. Someone said she’d once sung the “Star-Spangled Banner” in front of forty thousand people at a soccer match at RFK Stadium. So she had guts. Too many, perhaps. One of the guys he played poker with, a counterintelligence drone at the Agency, said she’d gotten her tit in a wringer over a rendition she’d set up in eastern Turkey. The snatch went off without a hitch. They slammed the subject into the back of a refrigeration van and drove him three hundred miles to a plane that was waiting to take him to Gitmo. Imagine everyone’s surprise when they opened the door and the raghead fell out, dead. Some kind of air-handling problem.

  There were a couple of stories like that – or not stories, really. More like innuendos. A bird colonel who’d worked with her in Turkey frowned when Kovalenko asked about her. But all he said was, “Interesting woman …” What do you mean? Kovalenko asked. “Well,” the colonel said, looking uncomfortable, “she can be pretty aggressive in an interrogation setting. Not that that’s necessarily bad,” he hastened to add. “It’s just … kind of surprising when you see it.”

  None of this bothered Kovalenko. As far as he was concerned, Andrea Cabot was just about perfect. Her only drawback – the only reason he didn’t give her a tumble, really – was the Mandarin Chinese thing. That’s what worried him. That’s why he frowned. Because if Andrea spoke Chinese, she was probably speaking to Chinese. So while the cough could be anything, a cold or the flu, it might also be something else. Something Chinese. Like SARS or the bird flu.

  As Kovalenko turned this thought over in his mind, he saw Andrea lean toward the monitor and squint. “Freeze that,” she whispered.

  Kovalenko did. In the picture, a man stood near the end of a serpentine line in front of the British Airways counter. He wore a long dark overcoat, and a hat. You could almost make out his face.

  “That’s the guy?” Andrea asked.

  Kovalenko grunted. The man in the frame had his arm in a sling, as if it were broken. And maybe it was. But Kovalenko didn’t think so. The sling w
as probably just a ploy, a way of getting his bags up to the counter without having to carry them, without having to stand with them. It was the kind of thing Ted Bundy did before they put him to sleep.

  “Okay,” Andrea said. The monitor sprung back to life. Another cough.

  That’s all I need, Kovalenko thought. To drown in my own sputum.

  He’d been running on empty ever since 9/11, hop-scotching from Washington to Hamburg, Hamburg to Dubai. Dubai to Manila. Djakarta, Islamabad. Except for Hamburg, it was one shithole after another. By now, his resistance was nil, his circadian rhythms so out of whack, his body felt like a Pharoah Sanders solo. And this building, squirreled away in the Navy Yard, was a big part of the problem.

  “A secure facility,” its windows had been bricked up since the early seventies, when the NRO had taken it over to study satellite imagery. It was, literally, a place “where the sun don’t shine.” Sometimes, it seemed as if everyone who worked there was sick or coming down with something. Like me, Kovalenko thought. I’ve been coming down with something for a long, long time.

  On the monitor, the man with the sling spoke to someone in the line ahead of him.

  “Who’s that girl?” Andrea asked, peering at the monitor. “Do we know who she is?”

  A laconic voice with a British accent drifted down the table in the darkness. “Nohhhhhh.” The way he said it, the word seemed to go on and on. “I’m afraid we don’t.”

  “Why not?” Kovalenko asked. “It’s your plane. You’ve got a flight manifest. How hard can it be?”

  The Brit sucked in a lungful of positive ions, and sighed. A spook named Freddie, he was one of the liaisons from MI-6. “Well, it can be very difficult, indeed!” he said, leaning forward. “There were a hundred and thirty-one females aboard that flight, and they were listed by name. Not by age, weight, or position in line. We don’t have the manpower to track them all down,” Freddie insisted. “Especially when nothing has actually happened.” He looked at Kovalenko. “Perhaps when you get to London –”

  “London?” Andrea asked.

  Kovalenko shrugged.

  “We’re in the presence of the new Legat,” Freddie explained. “Hasn’t he told you?”

  “No.” Andrea looked impressed.

  “It isn’t official,” Kovalenko mumbled.

  On the monitor, the man with the sling turned away from the girl, and strolled out of the picture.

  “That’s it,” Kovalenko announced. “Let there be light.” It was the ninth time he’d watched the tape, and there was nothing more to be learned from it.

  Above them, fluorescent lights flickered to life with a staticky hum. Kovalenko got to his feet and crossed the room to a library table, where a pair of Travelpro suitcases lay open. In each of the suitcases was a bundle of newspapers. The newspapers were tied together with twine, and there were no fingerprints. Anywhere.

  “Twenty-two pounds,” Kovalenko said. “Each.”

  “Ten kilos,” Freddie observed.

  “My point, exactly,” Kovalenko said.

  Andrea smiled, idly rolling a pearl between her thumb and forefinger. After a moment, she said, “Twenty-two pounds is not what you’d call an American number. Whoever packed the bags was thinking metric.”

  The Brit thought about it for a moment, and chuckled. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere. Not only has nothing happened, but …” He narrowed his eyes, and with a furtive look, glanced left and right. “There’s reason to believe a ‘furriner’ may have been behind it.”

  Even Kovalenko laughed. But only for a second. “Actually,” he said, “something has happened.”

  Freddie’s voice was thick with skepticism: “Oh? And what was that?”

  “There was a test.”

  The Brit considered the possibility.

  “That’s what this is all about,” Kovalenko announced.

  “Possibly,” Freddie said. “Or perhaps it was just a prank.”

  “Well, if it was a prank, it was an expensive one. Those carry-ons are new,” Kovalenko told him, “and they don’t come cheap.”

  “You’re right, of course, but … why bother? If you want to kill a lot of people at the airport, what’s the point in practicing? Why not just … go in and be done with it?”

  “Exactly,” Kovalenko replied.

  The MI-6 man made a face. “For that matter, why bother with the airport? The train station is a softer target. Restaurants, theaters …”

  Kovalenko turned to his left. “Andrea?”

  A little zzzip of nylon as the CIA officer crossed and uncrossed her legs. For a moment, she pursed her lips, and mused. Finally, Andrea said, “I think what Ray’s suggesting is, this isn’t about the airport. It’s about the man with the sling. Someone was testing him,” she decided. “Not the airport’s security.”

  Freddie considered the possibility. After a moment, he asked, “And why would they do that?”

  Andrea shrugged. “I guess they wanted to find out how far he’d go.”

  Kovalenko nodded. “Well, now they know. He goes all the way.”

  Six

  Dublin | January 24 2005

  SOFT.

  That’s what the Irish called it when the weather was like this, more mist than rain. Mike Burke stood by the window next to his desk, idly watching the street below. Every so often, a gust of rain rattled the glass, and his focus would shift to the pane itself, where beads of water spattered and ran.

  His office was a large room with high ceilings in a rose-brick building at the edge of Temple Bar, a famous maze of narrow streets and alleyways near the River Liffey. From where he sat, Burke could see the roof of Merchants’ Arch, the covered byway in which a fictional character named Leopold Bloom had once stopped to buy a book – a pornographic novel, as it happened – for his wife, Molly.

  As cold and wet as it was, Burke wanted to go running. There was a gym bag under the desk with everything he needed – except the chance to use it. He had an appointment with a client, a man named d’Anconia, and d’Anconia was late. The man had telephoned that very morning to ask about forming a company. On the quick, as it were.

  Fair play, Burke thought. That’s what we do. But his mind wasn’t on it. He was thinking about Kate’s father, aka “the Old Man,” whose name was engraved on the brass plaque beside the heavy oak doors that gave entrance to the office:

  Thomas Aherne & Associates

  Bit of a lie, that. Other than Burke, there were no associates. Nor had there been for months. Not since … well, not since Kate died.

  Even now, the words took his breath away. Stuttering senselessly in the back of his mind, they suggested a sentence that had no end, an idea so impossible it could only be stillborn. When Kate died …

  Where do you go with a thought like that – a fact like that? Her death was an avalanche. One minute, he was standing in her light, dreaming of the years ahead of them … then the earth fell away from his feet. Blindsided, he was buried alive in his grief. Eventually, the cold found its way to his heart, and slowly took hold. Grief drained to numbness and then he felt nothing at all.

  The old man was even worse off. One day he was there, holding forth behind his desk, and then he wasn’t. For years, everyone had said, “The firm is his life. You take the firm away, and Tommy’s a goner.” Not true, as it turned out. The firm was the old man’s way of life, a hobby, and a fascination, but Kate … Kate had been life itself.

  He’d raised her from a sprog (his word). Taught her to build sand castles, ride horses, read the Greats, and be wary of boys. Tommy had watched in delight as she took on more and more of her mother’s beauty, the ginger hair and emerald eyes, her skin like an empty sheet of paper – had swelled with pride when she breezed through Cambridge with a first, and came to Dublin for her residency. Then she did the unimaginable, turning her back on the genteel comforts of a surgeon’s life in Ireland to cast her lot with a doctors’ charity that packed her off to a godforsaken clinic on the malarial edge of a ne
verending war.

  Enter, Mike Burke.

  Not right away, of course, but soon enough and quite dramatically. Two years after Kate arrived in Liberia, Burke fell out of the air a few miles from her clinic. And lay there, smoking.

  A rebel army recon unit, led by the self-anointed “Colonel Homicide,” found him. They may, in fact, have shot him down. He lay in a ditch at the edge of the forest, one leg broken and half an ear torn off. His chest and shoulders were flayed with burns. The burns were infested with bees, and he was flickering in and out of consciousness.

  According to the dreadlocked colonel, Burke looked as if he’d been there for days. “I seen his ride, and the ride’s junk, burned out, it’s cold! And this white boy, he’s layin’ in the muck like a bad sign, like a signal from Jesus, swimming in bees. Hieronymus, he wants to take the man’s main machine. You know – just reach in and pull it out, like we do sometimes. That way, we sendin’ a message. Like a Hallmark card. Only this man, his passport says ‘America’! Land of the free! So now, we all humanitarian. Show the positive side of the struggle.” Hoping for a reward, the dreadlocked colonel and his men dragged Burke over to the pickup they were driving (a 4 × 4 technical with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the back), and tossed him onto a pile of ammunition belts. Then they drove him to the Irish lady doctor’s clinic in Porkpa.

  A moldering shantytown of huts on the flanks of a dirt road, Porkpa was proud of its infirmary. With a dozen beds, a tiny lab, and its own ambulance, the clinic – a concrete box with a rusting tin roof, its walls painted ocher, pink, and teal – was the only “infrastructure” for miles around. In her first year at the clinic, most of Kate’s time had been taken up with pediatric care and midwifery, health education and vaccination. When the war heated up, the clinic’s priorities changed. By the time Burke’s helicopter crashed, killing the pilot, the clinic was a round-the-clock trauma unit, with gunshot and machete wounds at the top of its To Do list.