by Bobby Adair
Salim looked around to make sure no one but Jalal was close enough to hear what he was about to say. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Jalal pumped the handle to draw more water out of the well. “What doesn’t?”
“None of it.”
Jalal kept pumping. “That’s a broad statement, mate. We’re helping these people. That’s what they said we’d do. They said it was our cover story. It makes sense.” Jalal looked at Salim. “It doesn’t to you?”
“Of course it does. It makes fantastic sense.” Salim rolled his eyes.
“Sarcasm won’t make your point,” said Jalal. “Tell me what doesn’t make sense.”
“Well—” Salim gestured toward the yellow HAZMAT guys.
Jalal shrugged and pumped more water. “What about them?”
“Are you kidding?” Salim asked. “Are they with us? They told us when we got off the truck that they were aid workers. Why do they have guns? Why don’t they aid anyone?”
Jalal looked at the men in yellow standing with their guns and doing nothing but looking bored. “They’re here for security. You know how these kinds of situations get.”
Salim lowered his voice as his impatience rose. “No, Jalal, I don’t know how these situations get.”
“Well it makes sense that we might need security, right?” Jalal asked.
“Yeah, of course.”
“There, then,” Jalal concluded.
“Why the yellow suits? Why don’t we have suits?” Salim asked.
Water sloshed out of the top of one of the water pails as Jalal moved it away from the pump. Jalal pointed to the main hospital building. “That one next.”
Salim looked over at the school. “We did all three buildings there. Are we taking anything to the church?”
Jalal laughed quietly, but harshly. “Christians?”
Salim shrugged, and they walked up the dirt road toward the hospital building.
Jalal said, “It’s typhoid. We don’t need the suits.”
“Then why do they need them?” asked Salim.
Jalal smiled. “Maybe they’re ignorant wankers.”
Salim shook his head and walked a bit. “Why aren’t we boiling the water?”
“Because it would be a lot of trouble.” Jalal stopped in the road. Salim stopped and looked at him. Jalal said, “We’re drawing water from a well in the middle of Africa, mate. It’s probably cleaner than the water we get at home.”
“I think typhoid spreads through the water system.” Salim told him flatly.
“That’s not what I heard,” Jalal countered.
“Heard? Heard from whom?”
“I remember from school,” said Jalal.
“What do you remember?”
Jalal started to walk forward with his bucket. “I don’t know.”
Frustrated, Salim asked, “Then why did you say that?”
“What do you remember about typhoid from school? Did you take a class in diseases or something?” asked Jalal.
“No, I don’t remember where I learned it. I just remember it’s a disease that spreads through water.”
“Fine. Is it a virus or a bacteria?”
Salim was getting frustrated. “Why are you being such an asshole? I’m not trying to argue with you about something you think you know, but don’t. I just want to understand what’s going on.”
“Take it on faith, Salim.”
“What, that you think you know something about typhoid, but don’t?”
Jalal shook his head. “It sounds like you don’t know anything about typhoid, either. You’re stressed and you’re trying to think of reasons why you think they’re going to screw us. But think about it, mate. Why would they screw us? How could they screw us? We’ve already promised our lives to the cause. What more could they get out of us?”
Salim shrugged. “I don’t know. Have you seen anybody taking pictures of us? Weren’t they supposed to be taking pictures of us to post?”
“Just do your work. There are a lot of us here. They’ll get to us.”
“We’ve been here for eight hours, at least,” replied Salim.
Jalal didn’t answer. They climbed the stairs. Salim opened the hospital door and followed Jalal inside.
Jalal took his pail and a metal cup and started on one side of the center aisle. Salim went to work on the other. They stopped by each bed or mat, tried to get the patient to drink, then moved to the next.
By the time Salim had visited ten beds, he’d already come across two patients he was sure were dead. Several were alive but unresponsive. Most of them had blood-red eyes, and some of them had blood on their blankets, clothes, and skin.
About halfway up on his side of the ward, Salim came to a cot that held a young Arab man. He had an IV—the only one Salim had seen. He was clean. He wore blue hospital scrubs—recently washed. His sheets weren’t stained in filth. A man in a plastic yellow suit hovered over the young man and waved Salim past.
The next surprise was a pair of Caucasians—a young man on a cot and a woman with absent eyes on a mat on the floor. Salim shuffled up between them, knelt by the familiar-looking young man, shook him awake, and held the cup of water up near his face.
The young man’s eyes snapped open. At first, he just stared at the ceiling. Salim helped him to sit up a bit and held the cold cup of water to the boy’s lips. But instead of drinking, the boy looked at Salim’s face, studied it, and croaked, “Sam?”
In that same second, Salim recognized the boy as Austin Cooper. They’d gone to high school together.
What the hell?
Then the terror set in. It wouldn’t go well for him if anyone realized the sick boy knew him. Those in charge would jump to conclusions, and those conclusions would be bad. Salim stood straight up—looking up as he did—and saw the guy in the HAZMAT suit beside the tidy Arab kid’s bed staring at him.
Chapter 45
Eric stopped by the conference room. Inside, Olivia Cooper and Barry Middleton shared the desk. The room was bigger than the one Eric and Olivia had occupied earlier in the day. It held an oblong table designed to seat six. In the center of the table sat a conference call phone set and a projector, which at the moment wasn’t hooked up to either computer.
Eric dropped himself into a chair and asked, “What do you have?”
Olivia pointed at Barry and said, “Barry got us the lists of passengers on all the flights for the past several days, including Salim’s flight.”
Eric took a drink of his coffee. “And?”
“I’m working on the information, but it looks like there’s been a big spike in passengers flying from Lahore to Nairobi on Western passports.”
“A big spike?” replied Eric.
“It seems to have gone up significantly compared to the day before.”
Eric shook his head. “By itself, that information is somewhat meaningless.”
“Yes,” Olivia agreed. “Barry is pulling in information from the past month so we can see how far it deviates from the trend.”
Eric shook his head. “Statistical anomalies are interesting, and they may mean something, but you know if you go into a problem with a bias toward finding a certain solution, even in random data, you’re going to find a pattern that supports your solution. All you have to do is look long enough.” Eric glanced at Barry. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”
Olivia spoke up to pull the attention back to herself. “This isn’t all we’ve found. Thirteen of those Western passport holders are young men from the ages of nineteen to twenty-seven. All left the United States within the past four months.”
Eric said, “You have my attention.”
“They are all on our list.”
In the department, The List didn’t need to be named specifically. It was the list they were tasked with monitoring—US citizens who’d gone abroad under suspicious circumstances—those under suspicion of potentially joining an anti-American radical group.
Eric turned to Barry. “Yo
u confirmed this?”
Barry nodded. “It gets better.”
“How’s that?” replied Eric.
Barry pointed at Olivia. “I sent her the info just before you walked in.”
Eric turned to Olivia. She was staring wide-eyed at her screen. “Barry?” Her voice was tentative as she glanced sideways at him, then back at her screen. “Tell me I’m understanding this correctly.”
“Judging by the look on your face, I’d say you are.”
“What?” Eric asked.
Glancing between Barry and her screen, she turned to Eric. “Pass me that cord.”
Eric passed her the plug to connect her laptop to the projector. Olivia plugged it into her computer, fiddled with a few keys, and an image of her computer’s screen illuminated the wall.
The projected image on the wall contained a spreadsheet with a column of names—some highlighted in yellow—a column of amounts in some currency not relevant at the moment, a couple of date columns, and columns of flight numbers, carriers, flight times, destinations, numbers of stops, what appeared to be account numbers, and a column that seemed to randomly contain the letter W or blanks.
“Sort by column D,” Barry told Olivia, as she maneuvered the mouse across the top of the spreadsheet.
Olivia clicked a few menu options, and the information was ready for review. She said, “The rows highlighted in yellow are the thirteen I told you about a moment ago—Americans.”
Eric scanned the document, trying to see what was so obvious and important to his two subordinates. “Help me out with this.”
Olivia moused over one of the yellow-highlighted names. “This is one of our boys.”
Eric read out loud, “Salim Pitafi.”
“Look to column D,” Olivia moused down the column and highlighted six rows.”
“And that column is?” Eric asked.
“The credit card number used to pay for the ticket.” Olivia glanced at Barry.
“That’s right.” Barry was excited. “That column next to it. That’s when the purchase was made.”
Eric looked at it for a moment. “Are you telling me that all six of those tickets were purchased with the same credit card number at the same time?”
“That’s exactly what it says.” Olivia scrolled down the page and highlighted contiguous rows, in groups of six. “It happens again and again—nineteen groups of six—all for tickets purchased in a two-hour window.”
“Scroll down slowly from the top,” Eric requested.
Olivia moved the mouse to the top of the spreadsheet and scrolled.
Barry nodded emphatically after the second yellow highlighted name was passed.
When they got to the bottom, Eric said, “By my count, nine of those grouped purchases contain at least one of the guys on our lists.”
“Yes,” Olivia answered.
“Exactly.” Barry confirmed.
“You think these guys are all related somehow?”
“The accounts prove that,” Barry blurted.
Eric turned to Barry, “Yes. No doubt. But what is the relationship? That’s the important thing, right? Without a doubt this is compelling, but we don’t know if a travel agency is booking these boys on safari on behalf of some university travel abroad program, some church is sending groups of missionaries, or they’re part of some elaborate terrorist plot. Am I right?”
Olivia sank in her seat.
Barry flatly replied, “You’re right.”
“I’m not saying this is or isn’t something,” Eric told them. “As I said, I’m curious. I’m even suspicious. I’ve kicked the inquiry about your boy Salim and the other two upstairs. I’ll pass along the other ten names. But until we can get more information on what these card numbers relate to, or until we can get some information on who these others are, we can’t make an educated guess. We can make a guess, but we have to recognize that’s all it is—a guess. As I already mentioned, we’re looking for terrorists here. We expect to find them. So every bit of evidence we find is going to smell like terrorist shit. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” Olivia responded.
Barry nodded.
Eric stood up, walked over to the glass door, and pulled it open. He stopped with one foot out. “Both of you—move your stuff to conference room D-3.”
Olivia looked across the floor to the line of three large conference rooms on the opposite wall.
“I’m sending Katherine to join you. She’ll liaise with our friends at the CIA and see what we can come up with on these other names. Kevin will help you get into the bank information. Christine can dig into the phone data. Save me a place at the table, ‘cause I’ll be checking up on you guys frequently. We’ll order some food in later.” Eric walked out and let the door swing closed behind him.
“Holy crap,” Barry said.
Olivia smiled, but felt anxious, “I hope I’m not sending everyone off chasing nothing.”
“You’re doing your job. Eric gets paid to make these calls.”
“And if I’m wrong?”
“You’re not wrong about anything. We collect data and we analyze it—that’s what we do. We dig further into things when they look like they might be important. This looks like it might be important. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Not every hole you dig has a diamond at the bottom. Eric knows that. We’ll just keep pushing on until the data says we have something or we don’t.” Barry raised an eyebrow and smiled.
Olivia felt no less anxious.
Chapter 46
Najid stepped onto the patio and looked over at the tiny free school halfway between the hospital and the main school. Dr. Kassis had set up a primitive divider with sheets of canvas from a farm truck. He’d doused the whole space with bleach, and it became a clean zone. It was the only place in Kapchorwa where any of them could remove their gear and take care of the body’s necessities. The conditions in the schoolhouse weren’t much better than the setup for the sick in the hospital or any of the other overflowing buildings. A few cots gave them a place to take turns sleeping. Not that Najid had slept. He’d been on his feet for more hours than he cared to think about, but there would be time for resting and sleeping later.
Nevertheless, Najid was thinking about going to the clean room in the free school, removing his Tyvek suit, gloves, goggles, and mask. It would feel so good to be out of the hot, stinking suit.
The sound of gunfire from the west cut those thoughts short.
Najid ran to one of the Range Rovers as the two men who’d been standing guard in the center of town ran over. Removing an AK-47 from the rear compartment, Najid motioned for the others to get in. He had men stationed a quarter-mile to the west of town who had been tasked to block the road. It wasn’t a far run, but driving there would be faster than running and risking overheating in the suits. Najid jumped into the passenger’s seat, and one of his other men took the driver’s side and started the engine.
Once the other guard got in the back seat, the vehicle started to roll. Another of his men came running up to the vehicle and Najid spoke in rushed Arabic, instructing him to keep the others at their duties in the village. The Land Rover accelerated along the dirt road through the tiny town throwing up a plume of dust. By the time they passed the last house, the gunshots had ceased.
Najid worried about what he’d find when he reached his men at the roadblock. They were not experienced soldiers. They’d been through a month or two of training in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and perhaps even a little extra training in Africa. If there had been a firefight, it had ended quickly, with too few shots. And that was the point that worried him. His men weren’t experienced enough to kill armed enemies so quickly.
The road made a sudden, hairpin curve. The driver cornered the Land Rover around the curve and bounced it through a shallow riverbed with the skill of an experienced wadi basher. Najid checked his weapon. The magazine was full. He moved the lever on his AK-47 from safety to semi-auto, the position he preferred when shooting. He
put the weapon out of the window and laid the muzzle over the mirror, ready to fire at any threat that materialized ahead.
In the back seat, his man positioned himself in the center, and pointed his muzzle up between the seats and out through the windshield.
The road snaked through a few curves, finally coming to a section that ran straight. Not too far in the distance, a few vehicles sat in the middle of the road.
The driver slowed, and Najid commanded him to stop. He flung his door open, jumped out, and raised his weapon to his shoulder, using the door for whatever cover it provided. The two men with him positioned themselves on the other side of the Land Rover.
A man was jogging up the road toward the SUV before the dust settled around them. He looked like one of the men Najid had positioned at the roadblock. Down along the sights on his rifle, Najid looked past the jogging man. He spotted what looked like a half-dozen people lying on the shoulder. A few armed men were visible around the vehicles and in the trees nearby.
Breathing heavily, the runner coming toward them slowed, and raised his rifle over his head. He wasn’t wearing protective gear. None of the men Najid left at the roadblocks wore gear—they were expendable.
Certain of the runner’s identity, Najid waved him closer. “Come.”
The man hurried over to stand on the other side of the door.
“What happened?” Najid asked.
The runner pointed behind him. “Doctors. Aid workers.”
Najid looked at the bodies.
“They are dead.” After speaking, the runner focused on Najid’s masked face, looking for some reaction.
Najid nodded. Those were his orders to the men he’d left at the roadblocks—kill anyone attempting to enter the village. “Did any escape?”
“No.”
Najid pointed toward where the ambush had taken place. To his driver he motioned, “Let’s go.”
All four men got into the Land Rover and drove up to where the other vehicles were parked. Najid got out. All the men watched him, waiting for his commands. He walked over to the edge of the dirt road and looked at seven people laying face down, each with at least one bullet hole in his body—mostly to the head, some in the back.