by Thomas Perry
“He’s insulted because I’m a woman,” said Dr. Zidane. “For that and because I won’t let him steal food and supplies. We didn’t bring this here to support a war.”
Alan said, “He wants to distribute some to the people around here, who are his relatives or members of his faction. How much of the food can we spare?”
“None.”
“Would his tribe and its allies get some of the supplies if he didn’t ask?”
“Of course. We don’t choose sides or tribes. We give aid to whomever we can reach who needs it.”
“Maybe we could trust him to deliver the supplies that are going to his people anyway.”
She scowled. “I don’t trust him. Why do you?”
“Several reasons. He can’t steal the supplies from his men’s relatives, and he knows it. He’s not a king. Nobody who is surrounded by men carrying machine guns is a king. He’ll just be doing some of our work for us.”
Leclerc looked at her. “This sounds logical to me.”
She threw up her hands in a gesture of frustration. “All right. Do it.”
Alan turned to Leclerc and said, “The other reason is that we can’t stop him. If we say no, he can take everything.”
Alan returned to the colonel. “I’m sorry for the delay. If you would be willing to distribute the goods intended for your friends and relatives, it would save us time and effort, and we would be grateful. Take one quarter of the food and supplies, but please leave the medical goods here for the clinic.”
The colonel looked hard at him for a couple of seconds. “That woman. What about her? Does she agree? What if I take it all?”
Alan shrugged. “If you have skilled doctors, you might do some good. But Dr. Zidane is an expert on North African diseases, the only one we have with us. Dr. Leclerc is a famous surgeon. Dr. McKnight is a great anesthesiologist.”
The colonel smiled. “I see why they brought you with them.”
“Thank you. I’ll ask some people to help your men pick out the cartons you need.”
Alan joined the nurses and volunteers waiting nearby. “Give them a quarter of the food. Nothing else. Keep all the medical supplies and the agricultural machinery and so on.”
The work went quickly because the militiamen wanted to travel while it was still dark and their convoy wouldn’t attract attention, so they did much of the lifting and loading. Meanwhile, Alan began an informal inventory of the items that the soldiers were not supposed to take.
He was careful to locate a crate he had packed personally in Toronto. It held the diagnostic X-ray machine and some stands and associated equipment. Inside he had placed a Czech-made .45 caliber pistol with the barrel threaded for its silencer, and four spare loaded magazines. He had taken the pistol off the body of one of Faris Hamzah’s assassins who had come for him in Chicago. He had chosen this pistol as the one to retain, because it was high quality and had no purchasing history that could possibly lead to him.
He had hidden the pistol and the rest wrapped in two of the lead-lined aprons that went with the X-ray machine, and then restored the original packaging so that even if the machine were subjected to a physical search, his additions wouldn’t be noticed. He slipped the pistol and magazines into his travel jacket. When he found his duffel bag he took off the jacket and hid it inside the duffel.
Alan worked with a few other volunteers to place the pile of supplies and equipment inside the terminal’s damaged waiting area and then set up enough folding cots so they could all sleep as a group and watch each other, their bags, and boxes. When Alan got the chance to pick a cot, he chose one on the perimeter. He reached into his duffel bag, took out a towel, rolled it to use as a pillow, and then reached back into the bag and felt for the weapon he had hidden there. He screwed the silencer on the barrel, engaged the safety, and buried the gun among the clothes.
He studied his own reaction to the long flight, the layover, and the physical labor in the heat. He wasn’t twenty-five years old anymore, but he seemed to be all right—aware of no signs of dehydration or muscle aches.
He lay there thinking about Marie. She would have found the laptop and the videodisc a few hours ago, so she knew what he had done. He felt a painful mixture of affection and regret grip his stomach, and then waited for it to pass. When it didn’t, he spent a few minutes reviewing the provisions he had made for her. They should be sufficient to keep her safe and comfortable for the rest of her life. He reviewed everything again, and soon he dozed off.
Around 5:00 a.m. growling engines signaled the arrival of the three trucks that were to take the aid workers to their first clinic. The volunteers stowed their cots and their belongings, and then began loading the trucks. The wind had shifted while they were sleeping and the temperature had dropped about ten degrees.
The Canadians relaxed and regained their optimism. These were men and women in their twenties through forties—a generation or two younger than Alan—and they had recovered from the long flight overnight. They set up a line like a bucket brigade to pass the cardboard cartons of supplies from the terminal to the trucks. Alan took a place in the line and began to pass boxes.
After a few minutes he sensed someone behind him and turned. It was Dr. Zidane, and she pulled him out of the line and led him a few yards away.
“Alan, I want to express my thanks for the way you handled things last night. I guess what I mean is, how you handled me. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“I wasn’t handling anybody,” he said. “I was just trying to bow to the inevitable, and people let me do it. I find the gray hairs help.”
“I made a foolish mistake,” she said. “I was tired and irritated, and I think I’ve gotten too used to living in places where people wouldn’t think of breaking the rules. Here you have to be flexible and patient. My parents moved to Canada in the seventies, so I never lived here as an adult.”
“Well, I was glad to help. And thanks. It’s nice to get a pat on the back from the boss.”
“Well, I’d better get over to the trucks before somebody puts a generator on top of an ultrasound machine.” She hurried off, and he returned to work on the loading line.
As he worked, he thought. He had made himself visible, and that was a risk, especially being visible to men like the colonel. He might suspect him of being a plant from a Canadian intelligence agency. Alan was fairly confident that the Libya Dawn fighters wouldn’t care if he were. They were allied with the remainder of the old Parliament, and they were opposed to the extreme Islamists to the east, and to the internationally recognized government beyond them in Tobruk. Canada wasn’t much of a threat. But in civil wars it was difficult to know who all the players really were, and which side they might be on tomorrow.
He had also felt a chill from talking to Dr. Zidane. She and Dr. Leclerc were in charge of this mission to Libya, and she was the one who had most of the knowledge of the place—the language, religion, and customs. She should have been able to deal with the commander. But something had gone wrong last night, and he thought he knew what it might be.
Dr. Zidane was clearly a member of a rich, high-status family, the sort who might have once expected to order an army officer around. But things had changed. The country was divided into five or six major factions, and people of every shade of opinion were walking around with military weapons. She might have been right that the colonel was simply unable to tolerate a structure that put a woman in charge. But there might be more to his animosity too. The fighters had no reason to love the aristocracy.
What Alan was most afraid of was that he might have sparked resentment in her. He had unexpectedly come between her and the nearest Libyan authority, and maybe even between her and Dr. Leclerc. He resolved to fade into an unnoticeable blur in the mission as soon as possible.
At nine the trucks reached their first stop and the Canadians set up the first clinic in a village fifty miles from the outskirts of Tripoli. The lines of patients formed while the volunteers were still hauling boxe
s around and setting up tents and canopies. The registered nurses and trained technicians supervised and set up the diagnostic equipment and prepared the supplies for vaccinations, pap smears, deworming, and other routine procedures. At least half of the relief workers had been deployed in remote countries before, so there were plenty of people who were capable of deciding what went where.
The clinic was in operation within an hour, and patients were being seen in an orderly, timely way. Alan was one of the four Arabic speakers who wrote down the names of the patients and their complaints, took their blood pressure and temperature, and then directed them to the triage nurses.
The clinic hours started at first light each day and went on until the four doctors had worn themselves out around dusk. For the nurses and volunteers, the work continued until late evening. They cleaned and bandaged minor injuries, gave shots, and handed out food and clean water.
There were several volunteers who were engineers and specialized in electricity, hydraulics, or sanitation, and they ranged away from the clinic, invited into the villages by local people to solve problems or repair old systems. Alan Spencer quickly learned who they were and what each did, in case the information should become useful.
The clinic remained in its first location for three days, and then the trucks, which had been hidden in two garages and a warehouse, arrived again and they loaded up and left. They drove eastward, but immediately had to swing south into rough country controlled by the Tuareg, because the strip of land along the Mediterranean in the north-central part was controlled by ISIS, and they would have been eager to behead a couple of dozen Canadian humanitarians in front of a web camera to help their recruiting efforts. The Canadians made five six-day stays among the Tuareg at known oases.
As they moved eastward again they entered the area controlled by the national government. The regime was based in Tobruk, and consisted of the country’s Council of Deputies, combined for the moment with the remnants of the former national army. The government army was carrying on a campaign called Operation Dignity. Its primary opponents were the other national government in Tripoli and Islamic militias of the Libya Dawn faction. At that moment both sides were fighting over Benghazi, but a cease-fire was holding south of there, where the Canadian relief mission was headed.
They had avoided the area to the north and west where ISIS was holding out against air strikes from Egyptian fighter planes. The Canadians had also avoided the Tunisian border, where a group of Al Qaeda fighters were operating a base that they used as a training camp and a stronghold for staging raids.
Every region had its own militias, each with its own weapons, its own tribal hatreds, and regional rivalries. Spencer knew that Libya had about 140 tribes. The national army still seemed to be in charge in the east, but they could not pacify it, so lines shifted. Some of the eastern Libyan Islamist militias—Ansar al-Sharia, Libya Shield 1, February 17th Martyrs Brigade, Rafallah al-Sahati Brigade—had banded together into the Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries to oppose the Tobruk forces.
Changes came abruptly in a modern civil war, and the chance of heading for a safe destination and arriving to find it taken or retaken by a hostile force was high. But the relief mission’s leaders kept themselves and the staff informed about what was ahead as well as possible by satellite phone and radio. They stayed out of the large cities, where bad things were most likely to happen. Cities were the big prizes for attackers and the lifelines of the defenders.
As the mission headed eastward, Alan Spencer began to carry on quiet conversations with his Arabic-speaking patients. He would ask about their tribes, how their relatives and friends were surviving, the state of their businesses and home villages. He noted the names he heard, their factions and groups. And sometimes, he would work his way around to asking: “Have you ever heard of a man named Faris Hamzah?”
33
Fall was busy at the university, but Julian Carson enjoyed the work. The university was the most reliable and stable employer in Jonesboro, and he liked the science faculty and students. They tended to be polite but preoccupied, and not especially pretentious, and they were too busy to be curious about him.
But what he liked more was Ruthie. He had not gotten over his secret shock that somehow the course of his life had-twisted around so that she had come to love him.
His life was almost perfect. He had been able to quiet his own conscience about most of the things he had done for the army. He had been part of a forward covert team sent to protect the personnel and the interests of the United States in several countries. He could have made a good argument that each operation made sense and probably saved the lives of civilians in the countries where he’d worked. If his career had ended when he’d been recalled from Brazil, he could have closed that part of his life without regret. If it hadn’t been for his final assignment, he could have been at peace. What made that impossible was the old man.
Everything the senior agents had said the old man had done was logically impossible, and had to be lies. The old man couldn’t have stolen the twenty million dollars from Faris Hamzah unless he had delivered it to him first. And if Hamzah had given the money to the rebels in the hills instead of stealing it, the old man couldn’t have taken it back from him. The old man’s superiors in military intelligence had never charged him with anything, and neither had anybody since.
Julian couldn’t help wondering where the old man and his girlfriend had gone after Big Bear. He had no idea how they were living, now that the old man had returned the twenty million dollars to the Treasury, or what names they were using. He had no way to help them, but what he could do was distract and mislead the pursuers. He needed to make sure that the military intelligence people would be watching him.
Last time, he had reached the old man by putting an ad in the Chicago Tribune. He knew that the old man’s interest in Chicago would have lapsed during the months since then. But he also knew that the intelligence people would not have lost interest. They would still be monitoring the want ads, and still searching for anything that carried the name James Harriman.
He composed a classified ad for the Chicago Tribune just like the one he had used to set up the meeting with the old man in San Francisco. “I will be available to talk in the same way at the usual time. J. H.” He asked that it run for a week, and enclosed payment in cash.
Julian made everything he did look suspicious. He went to an Ikea store and bought furniture that came unassembled in large, flat cardboard boxes. There were a queen bed, a couple of nightstands, and a dresser. On the same trip he bought a set of blackout drapes to hang behind the regular curtains in the guest room. As he left the store with the boxes on a flat cart, he noticed that there was a man he had never seen before standing inside the building a few feet back from the sliding glass doors, watching him. As he was loading the boxes into his car in the lot, he saw the man getting into a dark blue Mustang. Twice on the way home he saw the car again. They were still watching him. He made several quick turns, came back the same way, and passed the man, then lost him.
Julian had bought the furniture because Ruthie’s niece from Louisville wanted to come for a visit, but he did his best to make his watchers suspect that he might be planning to hide the old man and his girlfriend for a time. When he had finished assembling the furniture and hung the blackout drapes, he saw a black SUV parked across the street with two men inside. After a few hours a second pair relieved the first. The shifts went on for over a week, and ended when Ruthie’s niece arrived and moved into the room.
The next week he bought a pair of prepaid cell phones that could be used and discarded and had them delivered to his office at the university.
At frequent intervals Julian did things that would indicate his plan was to help the old man. The next week he began a series of computer searches of travel agencies, airlines, and hotels. He studied Antwerp, where the diamond wholesalers operated; Luxembourg, where the old man had assembled the money to take to Faris Hamzah thirt
y-five years ago; Geneva, where banks might harbor numbered accounts old enough to have existed when the old man had first taken the money out of Libya.
Anything Julian could do to keep the eyes of military intelligence focused on him, he did. He knew he could rely on their overconfidence to help them fool themselves. They knew that he had found the old man twice when they had failed. Now he tried to make them believe that he was secretly in touch with the old man and making arrangements for him to sink deeper out of sight.
Julian e-mailed cryptic messages to men whose names he found online—men in their sixties who owned businesses, ran organizations, were mentioned in articles, or wrote them. He often used the names of donors or graduates he found in online Ivy League university alumni publications. Sometimes Julian’s messages looked like word code. Some were numerical, and others were symbols arranged in patterns. None of them meant anything.
Julian made sure agents would have to get on an airplane, fly to some city, and investigate. He picked addresses all over the country and mailed puzzling things to them—keys that no longer opened any lock, tickets to plays or sporting events in distant cities that might serve as meeting opportunities.
Julian was fairly confident that he could keep one small corner of the intelligence world occupied—Mr. Ross, Mr. Prentiss, Mr. Bailey, Waters, Harper, and a few unseen colleagues. Their operation—trying to deliver a rogue American agent to a Libyan asset—seemed to Julian so incriminating that the number of people who knew anything about it must be very small.
There were some encouraging signs. If they had already found the old man or killed him, they would have no interest in Julian anymore. As long as they were watching Julian, the old man must still be alive and free.
During a break at work he completed searches about banking practices in the Cayman Islands, and the extradition laws of various European countries. He started with France, and then moved to Ireland, and then east to countries that had once been part of the Soviet Union. That would give the people monitoring his computer plenty to think about.