by Gordon Kent
On his second pass, he tucked into the mean street that led to the loading dock and saw Hackbutt, in tropical suit and safari hat, standing there with one hand in his jacket pocket and the other on a big dolly whose other end was being tended by an Arab in what appeared to be a French Zouave uniform. The two of them went together pretty well—an image of imperialism past and present.
Piat felt better.
The transfer was peaches and cream. Hackbutt stood by, hand in pocket, looking like a monarch trying to decide which of them deserved the Order of the Garter and which a lashing. Piat and the porter handled the big cage with a certain amount of grunting. Hackbutt resisted rushing to Bella. Nobody came screaming out of the hotel to say that they didn’t take sea eagles.
For any onlookers, Piat gave Hackbutt some papers to sign.
“The van will be here tomorrow at seven, sir,” he said.
Hackbutt nodded almost absently, as if to say, “Of course the van will be here at seven.”
Piat was impressed, as much with the success of his teaching as with Hackbutt. It had worked. It was all going to work. Why, then, did he feel so worried?
Piat slept deeply, woke to stagger to the bathroom, realizing that he was exhausted. By the last few days in Mull, by Irene, by tension. And by sleep that, while deep, was horrible—dream-ridden, hag-ridden. He felt as if he were getting sick. A terrible gloom hung over him, certainly the result of the dreams, none of which he could remember. Trying to recall why they were so unsettling, he fell asleep again and into their toils.
He struggled up toward his wake-up call at five-fifteen, the last dream like some gluey fluid in which he was drowning. Irene had been in the dream, something erotic but bad that he recoiled from. But there had been a lot more—a memory of looking for a place, a room, a place where things would be all right, then experiencing its constant withdrawal as the city or town around him changed its shape and he could never find his way back. And then a beach. Horrible things. Stuff on the wet sand—yellowing foam, ugly seaweed with stems like tubing. Something dead—a child? A dog?
Bella.
He was up by then, trying to shave without looking at himself. He looked dreadful—old, baggy, burned out. He tried the shower.
Bella. Bella was on the beach. Dead. That had been it. The sea eagle half-awash in the tide. Tangled in wire the way seagulls got tangled in monofilament. Her feathers were wet and bedraggled; one eye was gone, pecked out or rotted out. Wire wrapped around her.
He tried a cold shower to bring him out of it. The aftereffect of the dream was smothering him. Pushing him down. Dragging at him.
At twenty before six, he was sitting in a taxi in a line of three up the street from Hackbutt’s hotel. He studied the street, windows, cars. He tried to ignore his depression. It was terrible.
Hackbutt came out at six. He looked spry, almost dapper, his long hair a nice touch of eccentricity. Without looking around for Piat, he turned right and walked away.
Piat looked for somebody to follow him, looked again at the street, windows, cars. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. Who would care? Unless the prince wanted to run an advance surveillance on them, who gave a damn what they did on the streets of Manama at six on a Sunday morning?
Except that Piat’s effort to detect any surveillance was both passive and simple. He’d catch an amateur. He suddenly wished he’d laid on a mile of intense shopping and switchbacks. He wanted to be reassured.
Piat paid the taxi driver and followed Hackbutt. He found him where he was supposed to be and led him into another hotel and another coffee shop. One that, he had already determined, opened at six.
“You don’t look good, Jack.”
“How’s Bella?”
“I think okay. She settled right down with me. You hung over, Jack?” He grinned. “You should get more exercise.”
Piat rubbed his eyes. “I’m okay.” He began the final briefing. Nothing was put on paper. He went through it all three times, even though they’d been through it in Mull: the meeting would be at the Tree of Life, a landmark baobab out in the desert where people sometimes went to fly falcons. The choice had been the prince’s, approved by Piat. Hackbutt had to find his way there in the van with Bella; Piat went over the route, but he had made Hackbutt memorize it in Mull, and this was simply reinforcement.
“How do I behave toward the prince?”
“Respectful but dignified; I let him set the pace.”
“Good. What’s your real target?”
“Mohamed.”
“What do you want from him?”
“A meeting if possible, a phone number if not. Phone number regardless, I mean. But meeting first.”
“Try to find out if the prince is going to stay in Bahrain. Find out if he has a house here, or maybe he’s using a house of his uncle’s. I don’t see the prince rising early and sprinting across the causeway to make an eight a.m. meeting. I think he’s already here. So try to find out where.”
“From Mohamed.”
“Right.” They went through it again, poked at it, looked at possibilities. Hackbutt asked if he should offer money and Piat said no, that was later. “But try to find out his real name. See if you can get a rise out of him by asking about family. If you get any response, even an expression, maybe he looks at the prince and shuts up—say something about maybe you could carry a message for him. You get it? We want to plant the seed that we’re his connection to the world outside Saudi Arabia. Okay? Nothing heavy-handed, Digger. Light. Nuanced. If you get anything adverse, back away. Okay?”
Piat couldn’t eat. He couldn’t even drink coffee; the first mouthful was like acid.
“Okay, what’s the gimmick—the connection?” Hackbutt, on the other hand, was putting it down pretty well.
“Bella.”
“Damn right. Is she eating okay? Does he understand how finicky she is? How varied her diet is? How—”
“I got it, Jack. She’s my bird.”
“I just want you to bore in on the idea that you’re Mohamed’s expert when it comes to Bella, and he’s to telephone you a lot.”
“Jack, you’re like a water drop on a hot pan. I’ve never seen you like this? Opening-night jitters?” Hackbutt gulped coffee. “It’ll be all right. I’ll be fine. The hard part for me is saying goodbye to Bella, and I did that overnight.” He patted his mouth with a napkin. “You’re making me nervous, Jack.”
Still, he went over it once more. The mood dumped on him by the dreams and the surveillance remained, a curtain through which he tried to be the seasoned professional doing his job. He was just alert enough to keep from spooking his agent, turning his own black mood into a virus that would infect Hackbutt. In the end, it was Hackbutt who looked at his watch and suggested they move on, and Piat gave up and walked out with him.
Piat had left the van in his hotel’s garage. Now, he drove it through the waking streets, looking for surveillance, finding none. He backed it to the loading dock. Hackbutt and the same porter were already there, nodding as if in approval of his driving. Piat handed over the keys, helped load the bird into the van, and walked away.
There was always this moment when you walked away and left the agent to do it or not do it. He, a man who had never had a child, thought it must be like leaving your child for her first day at school.
He was back in his room just after seven.
Something was wrong.
Alone, he knew that something was wrong. It wasn’t Hackbutt and it wasn’t the meeting and it wasn’t his mood. It was—
He didn’t know what it was. He had got out his running clothes, meaning to try to run the dreams out of his head, out of his body. He was sitting on the bed, a T-shirt in his hands. There had been no hitches after the business about the cage; there had been no surveillance, no problem with the agent. He was a basket case, but the briefing had gone okay. What, then?
Something, something that bothered him. He went over the briefing, then tracked the cat back through yesterd
ay. Carl, the bird, the trailer, the cage—
The cage.
The damage to the cage. She hadn’t been hurt but the cage had been ruined. Yet they had called him, fixed it with a new cage; she had been okay, if rattled. Was it the cage?
His mind called up a kind of memory photograph: correspondence lying on the desk in the trailer.
Force Air.
He put down the T-shirt and picked up the telephone.
A woman answered. Her voice was thick with sleep. It was only five in Naples.
“Can I speak to Mike?”
“No, I’m sorry.” He could picture her, sitting up, running her hand through her hair, waking. Pretty woman. “He’s not available right now. Can I take a message?”
Piat contemplated hanging up. She was an NCIS officer, Dukas had said. Let’s see. “Leslie? I doubt you remember me. We met on Lesvos.”
Silence. “Oh,” she said. Then, “How have you been?” Without saying a name.
Even through his panic, Piat thought, That’s one quick girl you’ve got there, Mike. “I need to talk to Mike. Could you tell him that? Something’s a little—off—and I’m trying to reach him?”
Pause. She was chewing on something—a pencil? And writing, he thought. “Is there somewhere that he can call you?” she asked.
Piat wasn’t that desperate. “No. But listen—it’s just something, a name, maybe he’ll recognize. Tell him ‘Force Air.’ Okay? Not Forced—Force, no D.” She was waiting for more. He hadn’t intended to give more, but he said, “Tell him I’m in a place that has one of your offices and a lot of sand.”
“Oh, sure.”
After he’d hung up, he thought he’d done a stupid thing. He should have called the emergency number that Partlow had given him, but he had dismissed that idea without even thinking it through. This wasn’t an emergency. This was a feeling.
He ran. He headed out the way Hackbutt must already have headed, not meaning to go anywhere near the meeting, only being drawn that way by it. He ran hard; he wanted the mindlessness that comes with exertion. He wanted his brain to let go, the mood to let go; he wanted relief. Instead, the dreams seemed to come with greater clarity, and he found himself running in the early heat, sweat pouring down him, and seeing the Bella of the dream, dead on a beach and wrapped in wire.
They’d called him because she was sick. Except that, aside from losing a little weight, she wasn’t sick. The cage was ruined—the fork from a forklift had gone right through it.
Bullshit. He’d helped Hackbutt select the damn thing. To get a forklift to spear it, it would have had to be welded to the floor. Otherwise, it would just move. Not to mention how unlikely it was that an Arab would hurt a falcon.
He was well out of the nice parts of Manama, running through a district that mixed low-income Shia and warehouses. He turned, following old pavement marks for a hash run, a local expat running sport. He automatically took the opportunity of the left turn to check his back trail.
He was under surveillance. The knowledge went through his brain like a lance of ice. The red Toyota crawling along the side street had been around his hotel earlier. Same driver.
Simultaneous with that realization came another.
Bella.
Wire. There had been wire in the trailer. He had used it to make her something. It had been thin, braided of many strands. He could see it wrapped around the dead bird in the dream. Communications wire.
Bella is wired.
It came to him in that form—the dream as pun. And he saw it all. Including the reason an American in a Toyota was watching him.
Bella, wire, the wrapping for two new pagers in the wastebasket, the new cage.
The new cage was a bomb.
22
“Craik.” It was the middle of the night to him; he had been deeply asleep in his London hotel room.
“Al, Mike Dukas.”
He started to say, What the hell time is it and what are you doing to me? but he knew that Dukas was calling because he thought something was important—Dukas would have called Rose, who would have given him the number. He looked at the bedside clock. It was not quite three-thirty in the morning. “Shoot.”
“Get on a STU and call me back. My office.”
“Sunday? At this hour?”
“We never close.”
Cursing, he plugged in the STU he’d brought with him and thought would be useless, got the tinny buzz of encryption.
“That was quick,” Dukas said.
“I didn’t want to ruin my entire night. What’s up?”
“Piat called me. Something’s going on.”
Craik groaned aloud. “What happened?”
“Leslie talked to him.”
“He say anything specific?”
“He asked what I know about Force Air. I didn’t but I checked—it’s the air wing of a security company called Force for Freedom. That ring a bell with you?”
“I’m afraid it does.”
“Looks like he was in Bahrain when he called. That significant?”
Craik thought about how much to tell. “Bahrain could be a meeting site.”
“Al, I don’t want to find I’ve got one foot in the shit just because I helped Partlow with Piat. If Partlow’s running something that’s got Piat worried, I need to know.”
“That makes two of us. I’ll get back to you.”
The Tree of Life was Bahrain’s most uninspiring landmark. Except that it was far from anything else in the desert, and people went there to fly falcons. And it was overlooked by cliffs more than a mile away. Cliffs where a man with a cell phone could sit and remotely detonate a birdcage.
Piat knew where to find the Tree of Life.
And Piat knew what to do with his surveillance, too. Walk. Or in this case, run.
It was a long run. It wasn’t the longest run of his life, but it seemed that way, and he hadn’t run in the desert enough to recognize the difference between good footing and bad, or the difference between short distances and long. He ran easily on hard-packed gravel, and then he was twisting his ankles in shifting sand.
Of course, the well-groomed man in the red Toyota and his partner in the little Mercedes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come across the sand. Piat was careful to run toward the sea until he crossed a small ridge and disappeared from their sight. Then he turned east.
He peeled his jacket over his head and tied it around his waist. And ran on.
After three miles, he was winded, his ankles hurt, and he didn’t have much hope of arriving on time. His watch told him that he had eighteen minutes until the meeting.
Somewhere within a couple of miles, Edgar Hackbutt would be wondering where his good friend Jack was when it mattered.
Piat put his head down and ran faster. He was covered in sweat—lathered in it. He was thirsty and hungry and the curry he’d eaten didn’t agree with the running.
He pounded on, stretched his stride, cursed the sand and his lack of recent exercise and all the thousands of mistakes he had made in this operation, in this year, in his whole life that had led him to this moment.
Then he saw the tree.
Partlow was staying at the same London hotel and was even less happy than Craik to get his telephone call. At the same time, Craik thought that Partlow sounded awake and alert and as if he was expecting a call from somebody else. He was, however, irritated to find that this one was Craik. Craik cut him off and said, “I need to talk to you. Right now.”
Partlow was wearing pajamas, a velour robe, and slippers that cost more than most shoes. He didn’t look like a man who had been sleeping; in fact, he looked like a man who needed sleep. And he was annoyed. He swelled up and vocalized. But he was worried, too.
Craik said, “Tell me what you know about what Jerry Piat’s doing right now.”
Partlow dropped that quick half-beat that meant he’d been surprised. “I can’t possibly—”
“Piat thought enough of Dukas—not you—to call him from Bahrain. Something
’s going on. Tell me about it, Clyde.” He waited. Partlow looked at his watch and gave a little jerk. “He mentioned Force Air, which is the in-house airline of Force for Freedom. I’m mentioning Perpetual Justice. What the hell is going on, Clyde?”
Partlow’s face started to contract; then, through some exercise of will, it smoothed again, but he looked at his wristwatch, and Craik would have sworn he was feeling something like panic. They were still standing, as if Partlow was going to give him ninety seconds and go back to bed.
“Clyde, if you’ve involved Dukas and me in an illegal op, you’re dead meat. If Dukas doesn’t see to it, I will. And don’t tell me I haven’t got the clout!”
“Nothing I do is illegal.” But he sounded unsure—as if he were listening to some other conversation that was more important and what he said to Craik was on autopilot.
“Something smells. Smells enough that you let me see some information about it so maybe you could share the blame with me if it went bad. Perpetual Justice, Clyde—tell me about it!”
Partlow pulled himself a little together. “I’ve no idea why Piat would be so irresponsible as to call Dukas about anything, but it’s nothing to do with me.”
Craik changed his tone. “Clyde—I did you a favor. I brought Dukas in; together, we got Piat for you—twice. ‘Give a little to get a little.’ As a favor to me, then. Please. Clyde, I’m asking you as nicely as I can—what is Piat is doing?”
“I’m awfully afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Craik pulled up two chairs. He sat. After several seconds, Partlow sat, but he looked at his watch again. Craik said, “Perpetual Justice is a DIA setup, Clyde. They do a lot of business with Force for Freedom. What is Piat into in Bahrain?”
“Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you, of course.”
“Perpetual Justice gave you a backdated contact report on an interrogation that probably involved torture. So far as I can find, that report is the original source of interest in Muhad al-Hauq. Isn’t it? Did Perpetual Justice set you up in this operation? Are you just the front guy for a DIA clandestine op that smells enough that the point man has to call on an outsider?”