She thought of the sheikling her mission had just inherited and said ruefully, "Wanna go for a ride?"
"What?"
She shrugged and drank champagne. "Probably no harm in telling you, it'll be all over the news soon enough."
He heard her out, and at the end of it said, "Hard on the rest of the astronauts waiting to be assigned to their own missions."
She was surprised at his instant comprehension, and grateful. "Exactly."
"And," he added, continuing to follow her thoughts with an accuracy that made her distinctly uneasy, "I hate taking on new crew the day I'm supposed to leave the dock. Taking on an untrained, unknown crewman on a space shuttle mission seems to me to be a thousand times more dangerous. Short of an actual sinking, there isn't a hell of a lot an inexperienced crewman can do to Munro. But to Endeavour?"
She nodded. "Yes," she said, serious, "very dangerous. You should hear the stories the other crews tell about getting stuck with a part-timer." She sipped champagne. Again, excellent, dry and crisp. She looked at him with approval. "Worst story I ever heard. His experiment broke, he had a gold medal case of space sickness, and he couldn't defecate. Seven days on orbit, this guy's constipated, puking nonstop, and his entire reason for being on board has just gone away. The CDR said he thought he was going to have to put the guy on a suicide watch."
Cal laughed before he could stop himself. "Sorry," he said. She chuckled. "No, it's okay. It is funny and they made it home in one piece." Her smile faded. "But the last thing we need on orbit is no faith in a crewmate. One of these days one of these part-timers is going to elbow the wrong switch and the mission's going to go balls up." "I see they're retiring the space shuttle," he said. "Not before I get my turn," she said, and he laughed again. "How'd you get to be captain of one of the biggest ships in the Coast Guard fleet?"
"Grew up in Massachusetts, where we spent the summers in Cape Cod in a house with its own boat dock that was never without a boat. Can't remember sailing for the first time, but it was probably before I could read." He smiled, reminiscent. His mother loved sailing, too. Aside from the fact that his father was (a) loaded, (b) Beacon Hill aristocracy, and (c) on his way to becoming a U.S. senator for the first time, that he owned his own sailboat was probably why she had married him. It was the one uncontested point of reference between mother and child. He shook his head and smiled at the woman next to him, admiring the sight of toned muscle beneath smooth skin as her bathrobe slid from her shoulder, revealing the curve of one breast. She saw him watching, and didn't pull her robe closed. "Any day I get a ride on a boat is a good day for me," he said. "It's all I ever wanted."
She nodded, understanding without question. "All I ever wanted to do was fly."
The sun had faded completely into the west. The glow of lights from the Miami skyline was subsumed by a star-covered sky. There were faint sounds of traffic from the street below. "Married?" he said, much more idly than he felt.
"Wouldn't be here if I was."
Her answer was firm and she met his eyes straight on. She meant it. He nodded. "Understood. Me, either. Ever really listen to those vows?"
" 'For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health'?"
" 'Forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live'?"
They shivered in unison. "Very scary," he said. "Nope, I'm a practicing coward. Never had the guts."
"I heard that," she said. "And, you know, the job."
"And the job," he said. He put down his glass and reached out to brush her hair out of her eyes. It was short and silky, and her eyes were big and brown with laugh lines gathering at the corners. He slipped one hand behind her head and pulled her into a kiss while the other untied her robe and slipped inside to explore.
She pulled back and said a little breathlessly, "Possibly we should go back inside."
His eyes were very blue, their pupils a little enlarged, the corners crinkling as he answered her smile with his own. "Possibly we should."
They were in less of a hurry this time-they even made it to the bed- and the result was even more satisfactory.
The next morning he said, trying not to invest the question with anything more than a casual interest, "You get down to Florida a lot?"
She said, trying not to look as pleased as she felt, "You get to Houston much?"
"There are ways," he said.
"Yes," she said, "there are."
5
WASHINGTON, D.C., NOVEMBER 2006
In spite of Patrick's best efforts, it hadn't taken long before Khalid's version of Kallendorf's all! new! and improved! plan for agency operations was setting off ring tones and melting down blogs all over Washington. Well, nothing Patrick could do about that, or about the fact that three months later Khalid was exiled to the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan.
Patrick had spent the year since collating and culling information on terrorist activities foreign and domestic, real, planned, anticipated, and suspected, trying to match events to perpetrators, and failing signally. He wasn't dismayed, or even disappointed. Such was the nature of intel on prospective guerilla warfare actions that too much of it was gleaned after the fact. The forces arrayed against al Qaeda and all its offspring were oftentimes too slow to recognize a threat. When at last it was recognized, action was all too often stifled in a welter of interagency and international rivalries and protocols, not to mention the occasional ripe diplomatic snafu.
He spent as much time as he could justify collecting data on Isa. Something about the shadowy figure-the ballsy name, perhaps? the Baghdad bombing, which had been the very model of the modern urban terrorist attack?-had captured his imagination. He was determined to gain on this man, and he would spare no energy, no agency resource until he had his hand on Isa's shoulder.
His wife had divorced him two years before. They'd been unable to have children, and he'd signed over the house so he didn't even have a lawn to mow. It had been pretty bloodless, all things considered, a marriage contracted in the fumes of a college lust that faded soon after graduation, leaving behind a civility that over time chilled into indifference. He was grateful that she'd had the courage to make the break, and they were both relieved when it was over. She had already remarried, relieving him of any guilt or anxiety over how she was getting along. There was nothing to distract him from the job at hand. Truth to tell, he'd always been more interested in it than in his marriage.
One day, when he'd assimilated as much information as he could hold, he told his assistant that he wasn't in and closed the door on her disapproving but unsurprised face. With movements that had become ritual, he sat, carefully unbuttoning the jacket of his three-piece bespoke suit, swiveled his desk chair to face the window, propped his feet up on the windowsill, folded his hands over the incipient potbelly that didn't worry him as much as the hairline which appeared to be in full retreat from his forehead, both aging him beyond his forty-two years, and regarded the well-polished toes of his black wingtips with a contemplative frown.
Patrick Chisum was that complete anathema to incoming administrations everywhere, a bureaucrat, one of those bland, behind-the-scenes figures, the nameless, faceless legion of laborers that kept the wheels of governance creaking along in spite of all the posturing on Pennsylvania Avenue and the Hill. He had a very fair idea of his own value, and it didn't take long for every new administration that swept into Washington promising to reduce spending beginning with the federal payroll to learn that Patrick Chisum and his knowledgeable brethren were all that kept the nation one step ahead of chaos.
He wasn't worried about Kallendorf's legendary line-clearing abilities. Patrick had been recruited into the agency right out of Yale, the ink still wet on his advanced degree in Islamic studies, and over the last twenty years he'd worked his way steadily up the ranks until he achieved his goal, the Middle East desk, specializing in terrorist groups beginning with Osama bin Laden, whose chief characteristic so far as Patrick was concerned was that, like the Hydra, each time one group was destroy
ed and its members captured or killed, another two groups sprang up in its place. It took unending patience, a sharp appetite for detail, and a wealth of experience to disentangle the various Islamic terrorism groups and separate them out as targets for observation and either arrest or elimination. Without vanity, Patrick knew that he was essential to that effort. The posturing of appointed rentapols who served solely at the pleasure of the president was far less important than the job at hand.
But Kallendorf was right in one respect. American intelligence agencies had degenerated into an international joke. There were too many of them; CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA, the individual intel-gathering agencies of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the list went on and on, all getting in each other's way, stepping on each other's toes, fighting battles over turf instead of fighting the enemy, refusing to share intelligence or alert one another to ongoing operations. Collectively, they had failed utterly to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, which caught the first Bush administration totally unprepared to deal with the disintegration of the USSR and the sudden independence of Warsaw Pact states. They had ignored their own agents' warnings of terrorist activity within American borders prior to 9/11, the FBI being most grievously at fault here. But his own agency was far from guiltless, having signed off on the WMD in Iraq, and later on Saddam's links with al Qaeda.
Their wholesale failure to anticipate the rise of the sectarian insurgency in Iraq and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the consequences of which played out on every television in America at six p.m. and ten p.m. each night, had led to a disgust for the ruling party that the American electorate had made manifest in the last election. Everyone but the man in the White House seemed to know that it was only a matter of time before the United States suffered its own regime change.
If Patrick wanted to take it personally, those failures and others had led almost directly to the swearing in of Harold Kallendorf as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had been given an unusually united mandate from both Congress and White House to shake up the institution, fire the deadwood, and streamline and update the intelligence-gathering process, with the desired end result an improvement in product accuracy and an increase in the speed of its delivery. Hence, the review in the briefing room in January.
But that wasn't what had him frowning at his wingtips. Kallendorf's idea of reaching out to an agency not their own wasn't necessarily a bad one. Especially when an old friend was at the other end of the line.
He'd just returned from Guantanamo Bay, where he had observed the interrogation of a young Jordanian named Karim Talib. He'd been picked up in a sweep of Fallujah six months ago, and the gators at Gitmo had finally broken him the week before. One of them, an old friend of Patrick's well aware of his new obsession, had called Patrick and said that he might like to hear this in person. Bob's tip-offs were usually pretty solid, so Patrick had hopped a C-12 out of Andrews and been present on the other side of the glass when Bob, a not unintimidating figure, leaned over the young Muslim man whom he must have outweighed by a hundred pounds and purred, "Now. What was it you were telling us yesterday, Karim?" When Karim said nothing Bob let the purr drop to a menacing growl. "Now, Karim, you don't want me to have to jog your memory, do you?" He smiled at Karim, lips pulled back to reveal a set of canines that looked ready and able to rip into raw meat.
Karim didn't look as if he had any intention of resisting, but his teeth were chattering so loudly that he could hardly get the words out.
"You worked for Isa," Bob said.
Behind the glass, Patrick stiffened.
"Y-y-y-yes," Karim said.
"From when to when?" Bob said.
"F-f-f-from 2003 until you k-k-killed Zarqawi."
"Three years. You must know him pretty well."
A spark of defiance gleamed in the young man's eyes. "Y-y-you'll never catch him."
"I'm sure you're right," Bob said cordially, and pulled up a chair. He gave Karim's knee a comforting pat. "I want you to tell me all about your time with him, Karim. Everything, every tiny little detail you can remember." He smiled at Karim again and Karim flinched back. "Take your time. I've got all day."
"I-I-I already t-t-told you everything I know."
"I don't think so," Bob said cheerfully, and gave Karim's knee another encouraging pat. "Start talking."
"W-w-what do I get if I do?"
Patrick had to admire the little terrorist. Terrified as he was, he was still trying to bargain.
Bob shrugged and worked his head. His neck cracked with a loud pop and Karim jumped so hard it moved his chair a couple of inches across the floor. "What do you get?" He smiled again at Karim. "Maybe I let you live to see the dawn."
Karim, who evidently got most of his courage from putting together bombs to be detonated far from his person, started talking. A lot of it Patrick already knew, such as Isa's predilection for and proficiency at Internet banking and communications. The particulars of Isa's dispersal of Zarqawi's cell after Zarqawi's death were news. Isa dispensing with the services of a group of men he and Zarqawi had trained from terrorist infancy seemed wasteful. Why cut loose your experienced personnel, when you had so much time invested in them?
Answer, Patrick thought, because one of them betrayed your boss. You don't know which one, all you know is it wasn't you, so better to cut them all loose. Even wimpy little Karim.
Karim, now weeping over his own betrayal, knew more than he would say about the bombing in Baghdad and nothing at all about Isa's current whereabouts. He drew a heartrending picture of his and Isa's farewell in the Damascus airport. "I didn't know where to go," he said, sniveling. "I didn't know what to do. So I went back."
Patrick shook his head. Embarrassing.
The speaker was quiet for a moment, but for Karim's sniffling. "Almost the last thing he said to me," Karim said wearily, "was a quote from your president Bush."
"Oh?" Bob said, bored. "What was that?"
"He said that Bush said that it was better to fight us on our ground than for the Americans to fight us on theirs."
"Oh, yeah?" Bob said.
Irritated at Bob's apparent lack of interest, the little terrorist said with a snap, "And then he said that he thought Bush was right."
Shortly thereafter Bob joined Patrick over a cup of coffee before Patrick headed north again. What do you think?"
"Is he gay?" Patrick said. "He sounds like he's in love with Isa."
"Something we'd thought of, too, he talks like Isa jilted him in Damascus," Bob said. "He didn't write, he didn't call, it's all one long moan." He cocked an eye at Patrick. "Anything you can use?"
"It's all grist for the mill, Bob," Patrick said thoughtfully. "He was in on that bus bombing in Baghdad."
"Ya think?" Bob said. "I'm going to sweat the little weasel until he tells me exactly how he designed and built that bomb, every nut, every bolt, every wire. I want to know where he got the parts, what the original target was, who picked it, who changed the target and why, and who gave the order for execution. When I have a confession, signed, witnessed, notarized, recorded on tape and on video, then at least, even if they won't let us hang him, he won't be exercising that talent on the streets of anyone's town ever again."
Patrick's driver poked his head in the door. "Time to go, Mr. Chisum."
Patrick drained his mug. "I appreciate the call, Bob, thanks."
"Thanks for the newspapers and the magazines and the smokes," Bob said. "See you next time."
No, Patrick thought now, it didn't hurt to ask a friend for help. His mind made up, he dropped his feet and swiveled back to his desk. He dialed twice before remembering to get his secretary to turn the phone back on, and then he had to redial because he got the country code wrong and wound up talking to a Josie Ryan in Limerick. They had a delightful conversation about the menu for the family dinner she was serving to her husband, Gerry, two daughters, and three sons (a fourth had moved to Alaska, probably partially due to the amount of grandchildren now in evide
nce). She inquired after Patrick's plans for the holiday, clucked her tongue over his having none, and extended an invitation. He declined with sincere regret and redialed. There was a brief silence, the double rings of the European telephone, and a click. "Knightsbridge Institute."
"Patrick Chisum for Hugh Rincon."
"One moment, please."
It was more like five before he was rescued from Muzak hell. No one ever played Yo-Yo Ma on hold. "Patrick?"
"Hello, Hugh. How are you?"
"Fine. What's it been, two wars?"
"More like three," Patrick said, "but who's counting. How's London? How's Sara?"
"Both good."
"She still stuck at the IMO?"
Hugh sighed. "Yeah, for a second tour."
"The people who make those assignments could be changing."
"So we saw," Hugh said, and left it at that.
Patrick respected the reticence. Hugh Rincon was ex-agency, married to an XO in the U.S. Coast Guard. They'd been involved in a lively adventure involving North Korean terrorists in the North Pacific a few years back, and the fallout had included Hugh's resignation from the agency and Sara's exile to the International Maritime Organization. Rumor had it she'd lipped off to the president himself, in the Oval Office no less, but Patrick doubted a career officer would put her future in such jeopardy and took the rumor with a large grain of salt.
Hugh had followed her to London, where he had signed on with the Knightsbridge Institute, an extremely well-funded global think tank which produced ruthlessly researched papers on subjects ranging from China 's embrace of the free market to the military preparedness of Dakar to the economic impact on Central and South America of the legalization of drugs in America. The Institute was known for having the best resources available on every possible global topic whether it be speculation or reality. Patrick faced up to the fact that this was going to cost him. "I've got the Middle East desk, Hugh."
"What happened to Harvey Moskowitz?"
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