The Exile rk-4

by Andrew Britton

  Phillips looked out his windshield. The road here in the city proper was already crowded with bakassi, or unlicensed minibuses run by private operators, and he had to be careful not to lose the bus he’d been shadowing as they weaved in and out of the lanes between them. “With Mirghani, for the moment,” he said. “Look, traffic’s getting heavy and I want to stay on the ball. I’ll be in touch later. Out.”

  “Out,” Mackenzie said. He signed off, then turned toward Ebed Khatim Street on the western side of the airport. “And fuck Landis and his whore of a mother, assuming the scumbag has a mother,” he added into the silence of the car.

  “We should be in the clear, Bakri,” Cullen White told the driver, glancing at his wristwatch. “But let’s make it quick now. I don’t want to miss my flight.”

  The man behind the wheel nodded and then pulled out from the parking area on the University of Juba campus, near Africa Street. From there an access road led directly to the airport, approaching it from the east rather than the north, where White had been when he’d noticed the Honda behind him.

  He had always considered his photographic memory as much a curse as a gift. Once he saw a face or heard a name, he would not forget it. He never needed directions to a location-or around it-after paying it even the briefest visit. He’d always learned easily in school, not just because he could remember the contents of what he read, but because he could call to mind how the words had appeared on the page or computer screen. In a flash, he could go back to the experience of making love to a woman decades before-the sensations he’d felt, the look in her eyes, the sounds and whispers of their mounting pleasure. He was equally able to savor the taste of revenge long after it had been taken on an enemy.

  These were some of the blessings.

  The curse was remembering-no, reliving — in totality his mistakes, his failures, and the pain of embarrassment, dishonor, and ostracism. He understood the value of taking one’s lessons from the past. But having to carry it with him like some sort of ghost whose essence dwelled within his very cellular material-that was too often an unwanted burden.

  Today, however, White was not about to complain about his eidetic memory. Were it not for the vivid accuracy of his memory, he might not have recognized the gray Honda sedan that had been following him from the greenbelt across the Blue Nile near the entrance to the Kober Bridge. Recognized the car or its driver. For he had seen both for no more than two or three seconds weeks ago, when he had been entering the U.S. embassy in Khartoum for a sit-down with Walter Reynolds. As he’d turned from the street to the embassy steps, the car had been swinging from the avenue in front into the curb cut on his right, which in turn led to the ramp that went down to the facility’s underground parking garage.

  There had been nothing exceptional about that moment. Nothing he could quantify about why it was imprinted on his synapses. But when he’d noticed the car behind him today, he had recognized it-its plate number, its minor dents, the fact that only three of its four tires were whitewalls, and that the all-black tire also had a slightly different type of hub. He couldn’t explain why he remembered. It was just that way for him.

  The man in the Honda was a worker at the embassy. His nominal post wasn’t of any importance. As far as White was concerned, it only mattered that he had been put on his tail-and that he was almost certainly a CIA plant within the embassy staff. The question was…what did it mean in the broad scope of things?

  The press had attributed the Limbe raid on Hassan al-Saduq’s yacht to an Interpol-EU antipiracy operation. It had directed its questions and criticisms about the arms merchant’s unexplained, and seemingly extrajudicial, disappearance while in custody at the investigative task force and the Cameroonian authorities. The coverage about the motive behind the attack, and its legality, centered on civil liberties issues.

  There was no mention of Agency involvement, no reason anyone in the press would suspect it…but the press didn’t know what White knew about the deal that had been taking place aboard the boat.

  His suspicions had been right all along. His and Stralen’s. Somebody in Washington had sniffed out what was going on. That meant a schism had arisen between DCI Andrews on one side and POTUS, Stralen, and Fitzgerald on the other-and not just in terms of foreign policy. If the details of their plan were uncovered, there would be more, much more, for the press to write about than the questionable legalities of a weapons peddler’s arrest in Cameroon. It would be the biggest political story to hit the international headlines in years and would likely topple everyone involved. Most especially General Stralen.

  Stralen…if what he’d done was fully uncovered, he would be labeled a traitor. A conspirator to a crime many would find reprehensible. There would be no debate over extenuating circumstances, as with the planners of Iran-Contra. No chance of redemption. Historians would cast him with the likes of Benedict Arnold, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Wilkes Booth. His name would go down in infamy.

  White cut free of his thoughts as Bakri slowed to a halt at the first airport checkpoint, fishing his papers out of his travel bag, then reaching over to hand them to the driver. A minute later the guard passed them back through the Escort’s lowered window and waved the vehicle through.

  “Bakri, you’ve done your job well while I’ve been here,” White said as the driver returned his documents to him. “There’s no higher compliment I can offer.”

  Bakri thanked him with an appreciative nod and swung to the left, following the signs to the Sudan Airways departure terminal.

  As they neared the drop-off area, Cullen White took hold of his bag and slid over toward his door, waiting for the car to stop. The time for reflection was over. History could shine whatever light it might on the legacy of someone like Joel Stralen. But White knew only one thing-he owed nothing to anyone but the general. He himself had no moral constraints. He didn’t care a whit how the world remembered him, or if it remembered him at all. Posterity was outside his realm of consideration. He was a role player, a man who worked out of sight in the interstices of power and politics, who lubricated the gears of machinery others saw the need to construct, who did whatever it took to see a mission through from inception to execution. That was it.

  You’ve done your job well… There’s no higher compliment I can offer.

  White had sincerely meant what he said to his driver. And soon he would be on his way to Kassala to meet up with Simon Nusairi’s strike force, where he intended to at last finish the job General Stralen had entrusted him to do.

  He hoped that he, too, would prove worthy in the final accounting.

  The third most senior of Seth Holland’s handful of Agency personnel, Jacoby Phillips was the only member of his staff who did not reside at the embassy, but rather occupied an apartment suite at the sprawling and elegant Hotel Granville on the banks of the Nile, where he held the titular position of resort manager. Owned by the Brits since its establishment, the Granville had been Winston Churchill’s preferred choice of room and board on his trips to the country during the colonial era, and it had continued to accommodate international businessmen in the many decades since Sudan gained its constitutional independence.

  When Holland had requested an operative for placement outside the embassy’s confines in the late nineties, Phillips had been an ideal candidate for the assignment. Much of it had to do with his background. Of mixed cultural descent, he had inherited his Ethiopian mother’s gingery brown skin and was born and partially raised in London, where his white-as-crumpet-dough father had run a large air transport firm before the family’s eventual relocation to New York. Even before the current flare-up between the United States and Sudan, Caucasian foreigners, especially from the U.S. of A., had been regarded with heavy suspicion and hostility by many locals, whose anti-Western fervor had been on the rise for decades. However, if you were black-or looked black like Phillips, who resisted defining himself according to race, being equally proud of both sides of his heritage-there was at least a chance yo
u would receive more civil treatment than people with white faces, although it could sometimes contrarily provoke an antagonistic backlash among elements of the population who regarded black Americans as sellouts to Western culture and ideology.

  Phillips figured you could never totally win at the race game no matter what country you were in, but being a black man still beat the hell out of being white in Khartoum, and how was that for a turnaround? As he had learned soon after accepting the post here, his skin color and multiethnic background made it a challenge for the ignoramuses on the street to figure out what particular slurs to hurl at him, and, more significantly, for radical Islamic terrorists-among them members of al-Qaeda, which had been a major player in the neighborhood before Omar al-Bashir had fallen into its disfavor for expelling certain rabble-rousing mujahideen-to decide whether they ought to attempt to rob him, take him hostage, and/or murder him for the sheer sport of it.

  But Phillips had other things to think about now. The bus carrying his man had reached the city center and had stopped to discharge its passengers about five blocks west of the Souq Arabi. Phillips stayed on Mirghani as he walked in the general direction of the city’s commercial hub, saw an open parking space along the curb, and pulled in while he had the chance. The traffic here remained tolerable, but he knew the streets and avenues would grow exponentially more congested as they got closer to the souq, with its businesses and outdoor markets. From here on out it would be easier to follow him on foot.

  Phillips exited the car and started up the busy sidewalk, remaining 10 yards or so behind the political leader. He was wearing a navy sport jacket, tan slacks, and a white shirt with what appeared to be his credit-card-sized Hotel Granville photo identification clipped to its breast pocket. The card was outwardly indistinguishable from his usual ID unless examined closely by a discerning eye, at which point it indeed might be possible to see the photographic lens in front camouflaged by the hotel’s logo. While Phillips wasn’t nearly as in love with gadgets as many of his colleagues, he would have admitted to finding the eight-gigabyte digital video recorder a clever and useful spy tool, particularly when coupled with the cell phone digital recorder he’d used earlier in his surveillance.

  After three blocks Mirghani came to the Al Shamal Islamic Bank and turned inside. Phillips found this somewhat serendipitous, since the Granville’s employee accounts-including his own, since he drew an income from the hotel in addition to his CIA paycheck-were at the same institution. He could therefore find a legit reason for being inside the place while keeping tabs on his mark.

  Once inside the bank, Phillips was quick to observe a couple of things that were interesting enough to make him finger the tiny record button on his ID card cam. The first was that there were three men waiting for Mirghani just past the door. All wore traditional Muslim garb and had the wary demeanor of trained bodyguards. The second was that after briefly conferring with them, Mirghani had gone right over to the carpeted area alongside the banking floor, where the officers sat at their desks. A guard had immediately shown him to one of the officers, while the guards who’d met up with him hung back on the banking floor…their watchfulness convincing Phillips his initial impression of them had been accurate.

  Phillips found a customer counter that gave him a good vantage of the officer’s desk, parked himself there, and took his DVR phone out of his pocket. He preferred it to the ID card cam for this situation, since he would not have to conspicuously stand facing Mirghani to record his images, but could position himself-and the phone-at different angles while pretending to have a conversation.

  Mirghani and the officer wasted no time commencing with their transaction. After a courteous exchange at his desk, the bank officer gave him some papers to fill out and then led him off down a short hall behind the tellers’ stations-Mirghani bringing his attache case with him. Waiting for him to reappear, Phillips put away his phone contraption, took a withdrawal slip from a rack, and began filling it out. The trio of guards just stuck around near the officers’ area, making no attempt to look like anything but what they were.

  Phillips, who in contrast to the guards very much wanted to blend into the woodwork, then got on the longest teller’s queue he could find. When he was better than two-thirds of the way to the window and Mirghani still hadn’t reappeared, he glanced down at his withdrawal slip, feigned realizing he’d made an error on it, then went back to the customer counter for a replacement and begun writing out another. That gave him several extra minutes of waiting around without being noticed.

  It was all he needed. Less than half an hour after entering the bank, Mirghani and the officer emerged from the hall into which they’d gone off together and shook hands, the officer going back to his desk, Mirghani rejoining his bodyguards with his attache.

  As the four men left the bank, Phillips tore up his withdrawal slip, deposited it in a trash receptacle, and trailed them out to the street. Mirghani and his escorts did not return to the bus station but went the opposite way, toward the gold market. As Mirghani and two of the men entered one of the exchanges lined along the sidewalk, a third went on up the street and disappeared around the corner. Phillips remained outside the exchange, his phone in hand.

  The third guard returned about ten minutes later in a white minivan, double-parking outside the gold exchange. Shortly afterward, Mirghani left the exchange with the other guards and entered the minivan. Though he was still carrying his attache case, the guards who’d entered the gold exchange with him were now toting a pair of larger metal cases that looked fairly hefty in their grasps. Phillips didn’t think it would take a deductive genius to figure out what was inside them, considering where they’d come from.

  He took more videos as the foursome drove off, wishing he’d been in his car so he could stay on them, or that he could phone somebody else to pick them up. But with Bruce Mackenzie likely still out near the airport after being given the shake by Landis, and George Swanson in Port Sudan to meet and greet the new arrivals, there was no one to do it. To say the team in Khartoum was undermanned was putting it mildly; the truth was that Holland had been making do here for years with nothing more than a skeleton crew.

  He left the gold market to head back the way he had come, hoofing through the city center toward his parked Saab. He was going to work on a hunch and try to shortcut it back to Bahri. If his instincts proved correct-and he trusted they would-Ishmael Mirghani would be returning there as well.

  The thing the CIA man mostly found himself wondering was how long he meant to stick around…and whether it would be possible to keep him from flying the coop.

  “Mr. Harner, Ms. Evart, I’m very pleased to welcome you to Sudan on behalf of the Boutros Corporation,” George Swanson said outside the railway station, using not only their aliases but also the cover he’d been given for his drive between Khartoum and Port Sudan.

  Abby was shaking his hand. “It’s fine to use my first name,” she said with a wry little smile. “I’ve been Abby to everyone my entire life. Call me anything else, and I might not know who you’re talking to.”

  Swanson’s own smile was accompanied by a knowing glance. “Certainly, Abby,” he said. And then nodded to his right. “The parking area’s over there… My vehicle’s the white Jeep Cherokee off the center aisle. If you’d like, we can get some refreshments before hitting the road-”

  Feeling stiff and disheveled after the long, cramped train ride from Atbara, Kealey stood beside Abby and looked at him. Behind them, passengers were leaving the station in groups, carrying their bags and bundles from the railroad cars. Some were being greeted by friends and relatives as others haggled over fares with the drivers of beaten-up gypsy cabs outside the station.

  “We aren’t driving to Khartoum,” Kealey said. He did not have to turn in Abby’s direction to feel her eyes on him.

  Swanson’s face, meanwhile, had become a question mark. “I’m not exactly sure I understand…”

  “It’s seven hundred and fifty miles fro
m here to there,” Kealey said. “What does that make the drive time on the local roads? Twelve, fifteen hours?”

  “About that, yes,” Swanson replied.

  “And a flight from the airport here to Khartoum International? How long would it take?”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” Swanson said. “But we’ve made arrangements-”

  “How long?”

  Swanson hesitated. “An hour or so if we’re able to catch a flight without too much waiting around,” he said. He lowered his voice. “The airport security’s tighter at both ends. That’s the reason Holland decided the roads were our safest bet.”

  Kealey shrugged. “He’s probably right. But we’ve killed too much time traveling to worry about what’s safe right now,” he said. “Whatever’s been on the burner in Khartoum has to be reaching a boil. Our papers have to be good enough, because we’re flying in.”

  Swanson regarded him steadily for a full thirty seconds, then turned to Abby. “You’re with him on this?”

  She frowned. “I suppose,” she said, then cast a prickly look at Kealey. “Although it would have been nice if I’d had a chance to consider it beforehand.”

  Kealey kept his eyes on Swanson, saying nothing. Finally the CIA man produced a relenting sigh. “Any idea what I’m supposed to do with the Cherokee?”

  Kealey shrugged. “Leave it in the airport parking lot,” he said.

  Swanson didn’t bother replying that he could have figured that out all by himself.

  CHAPTER 19

  KHARTOUM

  “Are we able to talk openly?” Kealey asked. “I mean, without prying eyes and ears.”

  He was in the station chief’s office at the embassy on Ali Abdel Latif Street, less than an hour after his thankfully uneventful flight from Port Sudan had alighted on the tarmac at Khartoum International.

  “I think we can feel at ease,” Holland replied from across his desk. Placing a hush-hush request to Sergeant Sadowski, he had seen to it that his office at the embassy was swept by a suitcase-sized broad spectrum countersurveillance device consisting of radio, audio, infrared, and acoustic correlation scanners. Simply put, the advanced microcomputer-controlled detection suite could detect everything from passive and active microphone bugs in phones and light fixtures to the low-freq oscillations created by the tiny motors in concealed spy cameras. “As much as is possible anywhere these days.”