Stumpf splashed some cold water on his face. He peeked out the bathroom door. She was lying on the bed. She had taken off her blouse and bra, and her firm, large breasts were just lying there beckoning to him. Get in there and suck her tits, a horny voice on one side of his head yelled. The other was calling him an asshole. He started hammering at his groin to put out the green light on his manhood. Then, with his libido somewhat suppressed, he suddenly knew exactly what was going on and what he had to do. This was a dirty trick that he himself would have done, and he knew just where to look. Storming back into the bedroom, Stumpf avoided looking at the enticements that awaited him in bed. For godssake, he was telling himself, you’re here for a bigger payday than that. He went from mirror, to lamp, to—the sconce on the wall. And there it was—a wireless micro-camera. He yanked it out. Were there others? Was his room bugged, too? He looked over to Maggie in bed. She wanted him and titillated him by playing with her breasts.
“Be right back, babe,” he said.
Stumpf ran down to the lobby and slapped Maggie’s room key onto the check-in countertop.
“I need another room,” he announced breathlessly to the receptionist, a young man wearing the hotel’s requisite blue tie and ivory blazer.
“I’m sorry, sir. All of our rooms are booked.”
“You’ve got rooms that are booked for tomorrow. I just need a different one tonight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be back in mine.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Our policy—”
Stumpf got into his pissed-off mode, the kind where his whole face turned beet red, and his voice cracked deeply, like someone possessed in The Exorcist.
“Listen to me. I’m gonna tell you once and only once. You’ve got a room. I know you’ve got a room. You’re gonna gimme the key now. I’m gonna pay you for the room. And we’re all gonna be happy.” He paused a moment to let logic sink in. Then he let the devil out. “You don’t, I’m gonna punch you in the face, piss in your lobby, and shit in your kitchen. You’re gonna call the cops. We’ll both be wastin’ our time in court and, in the end, you’ll be black and blue, and your hotel will have a shit-and-piss reputation for years. All for a fuckin’ room. So what do you want to do?”
The desk clerk’s jaw dropped. He seemed speechless. Stumpf had little patience. “Don’t call my bluff,” he said, and he undid his fly. A second later, the desk clerk handed him another room key.
Stumpf opened a Mac laptop in his “new” room and angled it to face the bed. He set the Apple’s built-in camera to record mode. Then he went to bring Maggie back to his new “bug-proof” room.
At dawn, with sunlight shimmering off the snow-covered ski runs just outside her window, Maggie Wagner slowly awoke. A haze seemed to cover her eyes and her mind. And then it began to lift. She remembered little of the night before. When she rolled over in bed, she found herself facing Nate Stumpf’s hairy back.
He awoke a moment later with her standing over him wrapped in a sheet and screaming.
“You bastard. You drugged me.”
“No, no.”
“You raped me.”
“No. No. I didn’t.”
Dashing about the room, she flailed about looking for her clothes, and once retrieving them, went into the bathroom to change. And shortly, she came out dressed.
“Someone drugged you,” Stumpf tried to explain, pulling on his pants. “But it wasn’t me.”
“And how did I end up in this room, naked in your bed?”
“We had to sleep somewhere. They bugged our rooms.”
“You’re fired. Just—just get out of my life.”
“Nothin’ happened, babe. Really.”
“I’m not your babe.”
She hurried out of the room, and Stumpf rushed out after her. He held out her laptop computer.
“Take your computer. It’s yours. Look at it. You’ll see. Just look at it.”
She grabbed the laptop and ran off down the hall to her room. Maggie had looked at him in disgust, like a roach too disgusting to stomp on, something you just wanted to get away from quickly. Stumpf had thought that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t drugs and she would awake in the morning to cuddle close to him and smile that toothy smile. But she ran off without even a “thanks” or a “good-bye.” And he had done nothing. The little princess, Stumpf thought. I should have fucked her.
When Maggie got to her room, she hurried into the shower. Her hands were trembling, her heart pounding. She wanted to wash away that weasel’s stench. By the time she finished, she had calmed. Her breathing slowed. And when she walked back into the bedroom, she saw it—a tiny camera with a lens as big as a dime sitting on the bureau below a wall sconce. The lens was cracked, as if somebody had smashed it. She opened her laptop. An image of her in bed lying alongside Stumpf was frozen on the screen. The pervert had recorded them using her computer’s built-in camera. And then she played back the night. But it was she who was the seductress—disrobing, dancing naked, and lasciviously trying to entice him into bed. Who was this woman? It wasn’t her. She had been drugged. But, except for an occasional kiss and a caress, Stumpf did not respond to her invitation. He never responded to her advances. He was clearly doing his best to restrain himself. And it didn’t look easy. The video showed her finally tiring of trying to seduce him. She got into bed and slept. It was only after she had fallen asleep that he had gotten into bed next to her. Nate Stumpf, it seemed, was telling the truth. Gentlemen, Maggie thought, come in strange packages.
Maggie knocked on Nate Stumpf’s door. She had brought along breakfast. Some cinnamon rolls and coffee. There was no answer. In the lobby, the morning session of the BIOT conference was beginning. Perhaps he was pursuing leads. But he was nowhere to be found. She asked the desk clerk if he had checked out. Apparently not. She spent the next hour sitting by the picture windows overlooking the slopes of Mount Hood. She wondered if she would ever discover the truth of her father’s murder. Having been drugged, it was clear there were people who didn’t want that truth to be known. And now, she had tossed away the one person she discovered she could trust.
And then she saw him. Nate Stumpf, wearing a baggy orange ski bib, was taking ski lessons—falling alongside five-year-olds on the bunny slopes. But he got up and kept trying. She watched as he finally succeeded in completing the short run without falling, raising his arms and his poles in ecstatic triumph. In years to come, Nate Stumpf’s selective and imaginative memory would change that bunny slope achievement into a great slalom victory—and Maggie Wagner would not dispute it.
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.
—Sir Isaac Newton
CHAPTER
TWENTY -FOUR
Colonel Krantz and Fala reported their conversation with the Iranian mullah in detail to Aman. They spoke individually, first with a captain, then a major, and then with a civilian, a psychologist they presumed. The idea was not only to flesh out every detail of what they had seen and been told, but to mine for any discrepancies, lies that is. And then, finally, they met with General Echod again.
“I hate to agree with an Ayatollah,” the general said, biting his lower lip, “but I think he’s right. The Americans are behind this business.”
He handed Krantz some documents detailing the massacre of Islamic rebels on a southern Philippine island.
“The descriptions of the carnage at the battle scene match those from the Hindu Kush. The Americans, they’re not denying their participation,” the general went on, “but they’re busy trying to bury the story and minimize their responsibility.”
“With all their technology,” Krantz asked, “why would the Americans arm their special ops teams with primitive weapons like the Alexander battle scythe? And, considering the size of the weapon, are the soldiers they’re deploying children?”
“I don’t know, Colonel.” Danny Echod shrugged. “But I need to know.”
“General,” Fala said, stari
ng him straight in the eye, probing for a direct answer, “the Americans are your allies. I can’t believe you haven’t simply asked them. I know you have lots of friends in the Pentagon and the American administration.”
“Of course we have asked. But we got nothing. They say we are simply wrong in our assumptions.”
“Do you believe them?”
“We need the Americans,” Echod answered. “But we don’t rely on them for our survival. I believe, more likely, the Americans know. But the information is being closely guarded.”
“But why?” Krantz asked.
“But why?” The general smiled, just a little wickedly. “That is why I have hired you and your lovely lady.”
Although Krantz was feeling a bit jet-lagged, he was a lot more relaxed traveling to the Philippines than to Iran and Pakistan. Israel had had good relations with the Philippines since its founding. In fact, the Philippines was the only Asian nation to support the creation of the Jewish state at the United Nations when the partition resolution was brought to a vote on November 29, 1947. The two countries had had full diplomatic relations since 1957. And, next to the United States, Israel supplied more weaponry to the Filipino army than any other country. There were also more than sixty thousasnd Filipinos working in Israel. With their coming and going over the decades, that meant for a lot of friends.
Krantz found first-class sleeping berths on the Lufthansa flight quite to his liking—and, after a few bourbons and water, he slept well. But Fala was uncomfortable and had abdominal cramps during most of the twenty-two-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Manila. Joshua suggested it was just the long flight. Fala knew the difference. She had had these discomforts before. It was mittleshmerz, a nice German medical term for mid-cycle ovulatory pain. The timing meant she was fertile, but it was pain nevertheless. When they arrived at Aquino International Airport in Manila on the morning of the next day, Krantz and Fala were ushered through customs like VIPs and into a waiting limousine. What a difference a continent makes, Krantz thought.
The hotel manager himself ushered his special guests to their luxury suite in the Peninsula Hotel. Fala was clearly exhausted.
“Stay here and rest,” Joshua insisted.
“I can take a couple of Advil,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“Sweetheart, as much as I enjoy your company, your Muslim roots and Arabic fluency are not important here. We’ll discuss anything I find when I get back.” He kissed her gently on the forehead and closed the drapes, darkening the room. “You just need a dozen hours of sleep. I’ll have the hotel doctor come up and give you something. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
He was right, and she didn’t argue. She closed her eyes and was asleep moments after he departed.
Aman had arranged for the Filipino army to answer any questions Joshua Krantz would pose. A Filipino major was assigned to be his host and guide. Krantz had the timetable fixed in his head. An army helicopter would take little more than an hour to travel the three hundred kilometers to the “scene of the crime” on Jolo Island, south of Mindinao. He would inspect the site for a few minutes, discover the same slaughter he had seen before, and fly right back. He could accomplish his mission and return before Fala awoke.
The site indeed looked like a terrorist camp in the middle of a jungle—a scattering of thatched-roof huts, tunnels, and lookout towers in trees. The bodies were gone, but the dark red stains of a bloody carnage were everywhere—in the huts, on the ground, splattered on the surrounding vegetation.
“Did you find any unusual weapons?” Krantz asked.
“Nothing but the usual—Kalashnikovs.”
There were no witnesses to speak to. No survivors. No need to stay any longer. But Krantz knew his job was incomplete.
“I have to see the bodies.”
“We have plenty of photos.”
“No, I have to see them.”
“There were many,” the Filipino major responded. “They’ve been buried.”
“All of them?”
“In the heat they rot. It’s a terrible odor. And there are vultures here and bugs as big as birds.”
Krantz shrugged. “How hard would it be to unbury them?”
“Are you a bissil meshuga?” a bit crazy? the major responded with the little Yiddish he learned from his time training in Israel.
“Yeah, a lot of people I know would say that. But I can’t go home and say I saw a bunch of pictures. You’ve got to know that.”
“Meshugana,” the major grumbled again. But he made no more arguments and began making some calls.
Krantz imagined that this disinterment was going to involve some expensive quid pro quo. In fact, it did later involve some expensive bargaining. To encourage Israel’s silence regarding what Krantz would subsequently find there on Jolo, the United States subsidized the Philippines in their purchase of Israeli armaments. As opposed to Krantz’s expectation that his request would “cost” Israel, the Jewish state actually made a hefty profit on the deal.
The same bulldozers that had dug the trench and buried dozens of rebel bodies two days earlier now dug up the same site. Krantz jumped into the trench when the bodies appeared. The face mask he wore did little to blunt the stench of death, that malicious and sul-furous odor of rotting flesh and feces. There was also the noxious smell of lye that had been tossed over the corpses. The Filipino major stood far back and even his eyes watered. One after the other, Krantz looked over the bodies. They all appeared horribly shredded by a weapon consistent with the Alexander scythe. What was even more interesting was that some had their limbs literally torn from their bodies. What kind of strength did these American soldiers have? About to move on, he noticed one body whose face and lips had been torn away. But there was something held between the corpse’s clenched teeth. It looked like a piece of tissue. Krantz pried the mouth open and found what looked like a piece of an ear. It was thick, black, and coarse, perhaps from exposure to weather or lye—but no other tissue on any of the victims’ bodies seemed to have discolored the same. It was in the victim’s mouth. Maybe that’s what saliva did to tissue? He would have to find out. Joshua put the fragment into a small plastic envelope and tucked it into his shirt pocket. He spent a few minutes more turning over bodies and finally decided he had enough and perhaps had found what he needed.
“Anything?” the major asked.
Krantz shook his head no.
The bulldozers were covering over the burial site again when their helicopter lifted off. It was an even quicker return to Manila. He had been gone less than six hours and expected Fala to be still sleeping.
Krantz asked to be dropped off first at the Peninsula. He wanted to see how Fala was feeling. But his major got a cell phone call en route and drove him instead where he was ordered—to the Israeli embassy.
Krantz was cordially ushered into the ambassador’s office. Like all Israeli missions abroad, it was an inner sanctum, a windowless office—secure from being targeted from outside snipers and well insulated from any electronic eavesdropping. After some polite introductions, Krantz quickly presented the evidence he had found at the Jola island site and asked that it be sent to Aman for identification and possible DNA analysis.
“Could you get me a driver back to the hotel?” he asked. “I think my business with Aman is done. They no longer have any need for an archaeologist.”
“Colonel,” the ambassador began, trying to calmly explain an unpleasant and perplexing problem, “Miss al-Shohada is not at your hotel.”
“Is she ill? Did they take her to a hospital?”
“No. No. The hospital doctor went to the room as you arranged. But he found the room in disarray, and Miss al-Shohada was not there. He called the police, and our people have been involved, too. But she is nowhere to be found.”
“And you’re sure she just didn’t go out for a cup of tea?”
“The room was torn apart. She clearly struggled. We are sure she was taken. We suspect she has been kidnapped, but ther
e has been no ransom demand, no messages, no threats. In these cases I can’t say for sure, but we don’t know if she’s still alive.”
Krantz felt like a fish caught on a hook. He ached. It was a terrible painless pain. He was being pulled to where he didn’t want to go, but he knew he had no choice.
No, I am not an archaeologist, Krantz thought to himself. I am a fucking spy. And this business working for Aman is not yet over.
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
—Thoreau
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Krantz spent three days in Manila with the Filipino police and military looking for Fala. They were thorough and not insensitive to his concerns. He was an honored guest in their country, and understandably they felt responsible. But Fala was nowhere to be found. There were video monitors at the hotel entrance. She certainly did not leave through the main entrance. How was it possible that a tall, beautiful Egyptian woman could disappear so completely? But no one had seen her. No struggles had been reported. No large packages carried out. There was no forced entry into the room. Desperate, Colonel Krantz even made inquiries at the Egyptian and American embassies. They were sympathetic but just as unhelpful.
On his final day, Krantz decided to review the tapes of everyone who had checked into the Peninsula from the time of his arrival and two days prior. An archaeologist’s talent was being meticulous in sifting through material, looking for clues to the past, tossing aside the detritus to find the bones of history and the truth. He finally discovered one person of interest. A businessman, an American, had checked into the hotel the day before their arrival. He had two oversized pieces of luggage with him, and two porters had struggled to load them onto a cargo rack. Although the American checked out the next afternoon, he left without luggage. Where had it gone? And why leave without it? Could he have managed to stuff Fala into a suitcase? It wasn’t possible. Krantz provided the American’s name, photo, and passport information to the Americans and of course, to the Israelis. No one had a record of the man. His identity was a forgery. So Krantz had a suspect but still plenty of questions and no answers.
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