Her stomach turned again in a twisted knot of anguish, just as it had every time she had that thought, ever since Paul had told her about McDougall’s threat.
It was an emotional decision through and through, without a doubt. But a part of her decreed that it was well worth the risk, both of personal danger and of the potential—nay, probable—fool’s errand she was on. But she had ignored the risk to her father and look what had happened. She would never make that mistake again. She simply could not ignore this.
Capie opened her eyes and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “Yes, of course. CIA headquarters is in Langley, Virginia, quite a few miles out from Washington. And there are probably people other than the CIA director that would know about events in the Middle East. But it does look a tad more serious, doesn’t it?”
Tia shrugged. “McDougall seemed to think so too. We should leave in the morning, I think. Agreed?”
• • • •
The quantum dot prototype worked even better than Paul anticipated and furthermore had a low decoherence factor. From there, he started designing and building a four qubit prototype. The first one failed, due to lack of sufficient error correction circuitry.
The days crawled by while he worked on the redesign.
At least a hundred times each day, he wondered where his wife was and why he had not heard from her.
ELEVEN
Fairfax Marriott Hotel
Lee Jackson Memorial Hwy
Fairfax, Virginia
July
Wednesday 10:58 p.m. EDT
Upon reaching Fairfax, Virginia late the next evening, Capie checked into a Courtyard hotel room. Over the course of four days, she threw everything she had into her effort to acquire the information she was looking for—or even to determine if it existed at all.
On the first morning, she rented a Ford Escape and drove over to the Langley Fork Park. From a park bench under the shade of a huge elm tree, she cast a spell for a microportal and magical LAN connection to the Agency’s mainframe and hacked the CIA’s personnel database, spending a few hours putting together a rough estimate of the organizational chart and who held which senior slot. The operational database on the main server also helped establish for her the working flow of intelligence data, and how and what got into the briefings, especially for foreign governments such as Canada. Backtracking, she identified specific individuals (and there were a lot of them too) that might have been briefed on the information that had peaked McDougall’s interest. She wrote the names on a note pad she carried with her.
Thereafter, each night, she would pick out the homes of two or three of the most likely individuals in the CIA that might be able to answer her detailed questions. She would find an obscure place to park close by and go to work. In three such excursions, she had learned nothing of value.
Unlike in Canada with the director of the CSIS, the director of the CIA was not approachable. His home was in Georgetown, the director’s office in downtown Washington, D.C. Capie dared not get that close to what was surely deeply held enemy territory in central Washington.
After talking to the avatars of half of the most senior CIA management and not learning anything new, she decided a different approach was needed. Instead, she focused on the group of analysts in the CIA Middle East section. In retrospect, she thought they might have more details anyway, being closer to the raw data.
The first such interview that night was unproductive. For the second interview, she drove to Reston, Virginia, winding her way through a neighborhood of well-appointed two-story wood frame houses in a relatively up-scale neighborhood. She reached a quiet cul-de-sac off of Stowe Road and parked as far from the porch and street lights as she could get.
According to her information, the house back around the corner belonged to one Henry Chapple—a forty eight year old analyst for the Agency.
She cast her spells, opening a microportal to the man’s house and then a second spell to create the avatar.
Henry Chapple looked exactly as she expected: a short pudgy man in his late forties with balding forehead, gray at the temples, a prominent hawkish nose and thick horn-rimmed glasses. She could easily picture him hunched over a computer screen all day long, looking for clues on the internet about terrorists.
Over the course of the CIA interrogations she had conducted thus far, she had learned to cut to the heart of the matter.
“Hello, Henry,” she said with a tight grim smile at the avatar. “Do you know anything about the Russian ex-soldier that died recently in Dammam?”
“Yes.”
His reply didn’t surprise her much. Other CIA officers had known of the Russian but only the basics, the same as the CSIS director. “Consider this to be one of your standard briefings then. Tell me what you know.”
“The murdered man has been identified as Grigory Kuzmin. We have a short file on him. He was fifty two at the time of his death. Was in the Russian Army until the 2008 down-sizing, which forced him to retire early, at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Was considered to be an expert on the manufacturing and handling of munitions, especially for the Russian Air Force. Spent five years working on the KAB-1500 program and its derivatives. After his retirement, he disappeared from public view. According to his passport file, he has traveled extensively abroad, including the United States. The theory here is that he hired out his services to various governments and terrorist organizations around the world. Then, a little over a month ago, he approached the Dolphin Village Amusement Park in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Witnesses say he staggered around a bit and then collapsed to the ground, apparently from lack of blood due to a gunshot wound. He was taken to the Emergency Center at the Al Amal Hospital, but was pronounced DOA. When the local police realized he was a Russian national, they called in the Investigative Police Force. They filed a report with Interpol and the CIA received a copy.”
“Do you know who he was working for at the time of his death? Or who shot him?”
“No. That information was not provided to us. But there are many terrorist organizations and several countries in the Middle East that might have hired him.”
“Well, that leaves quite the puzzle, does it not?” asked Tia from the back seat. “An expert in bombs shot by parties unknown. Possibly a dissatisfied customer? Or to silence him, perhaps? And we haven’t a clue who he might have been working for either. Humph.”
“It does seem challenging, doesn’t it?” Capie replied with a heavy sigh as she leaned back in her seat. “We have a lot of questions and very little information. But McDougall saw a pattern here, one that might lead to the death of a lot of Normals.”
“So he said.”
“It’s still worth checking,” Capie protested. “The man was an expert in bombs and someone did kill him—”
“Whoa, relax. I’m on your side, sweet thing.” The older woman pondered the situation for a moment. “Looks like a trip to Dammam next. To talk to the Saudi police—”
“Ugh!” groaned Capie with a distasteful grimace on her face.
The Middle East! And she had hesitated to make the trip to the Washington D.C. area! Good grief!
How could she possible justify a trip to Saudi Arabia? Sure, Ottawa and Washington had been a bit risky, though in the end they had both turned out okay. But the Middle East was not friendly to women. And as an American, she would stand out even more, making her efforts there to stay unobserved very difficult.
As a paraplegic for eleven years, she had learned both restraint and courage, though it would have been challenging to explain to anyone who had never sat in a wheelchair the supposed dichotomy involved. Those lessons, as hard as they had been to learn and as valuable as they were, remained with her still. And they were telling her not to risk a journey to Saudi Arabia. That the risk was too great.
“I need to touch base with Paul first, before I go half way around the world,” she muttered through clenched teeth.
“As you will. I suggest you send him an email. Bu
t just remember one thing. Dammam is NOT a capital city.”
Capie thoughtfully considered that fact for a moment. Her husband would not be happy with her decision to run off halfway around the world. This might be one of those cases where forgiveness was easier to get than permission. “It’s not, is it? Well, I suppose that what Paul doesn’t know won’t hurt him, right?”
• • • •
In five hundred mile hops, she crossed the Atlantic, spending the night at the very charming and swank Caleta Hotel at Gibraltar, and then moved on the next morning across the Mediterranean, but in shorter one hundred mile jumps. Just east of Port Said, she turned south, following the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Suez down to the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. From there, she threaded her way east across Saudi Arabia in ever smaller portal hops until reaching the outskirts of Dammam late in the hot afternoon sun. The evening air was still and difficult to breathe. But just in case there might be Oni in the city, she decided to be as stealthy as possible, approaching the city using a minimum of magical energy.
She walked a ways down a deserted two lane road, nothing but desert sand in all directions until she reached a gas station. Before she went in, she cast a disguise spell, now projecting the image of a young Saudi male dressed in the traditional white Thobe ankle-length garment, a scarf-like Ghutra on her head and the Ogal black band to hold the Ghutra in place. Inside the station, she borrowed a phone and, in Arabic, called a cab. The driver, an elderly man with bad breath and a crooked smile, took her to the Sheraton Dammam Hotel & Towers, a five star hotel that oozed luxury from every seam. On the way to her room, she noted with silent gratitude that the air conditioning was working flawlessly. That evening, she dropped the disguise and stayed in an Executive suite, soaking long in a large bathtub.
She felt more than a bit guilty, having not told Paul about her trip to Dammam in the email that she had sent him. But she rationalized it to her herself on the basis that she really didn’t have all that much to report yet. A dead Russian and a crazy theory that he might have helped a government or maybe some terrorists to build a bomb. As theories went, it was pretty feeble.
Still, she felt the driving obsession to check the story out. She was a wizard now and she wanted—no, was under the compulsion to help the Normals of the world. With luck, she might be able to prevent a lot of deaths.
And that, in a small way, would assuage some of the guilt she still felt at not preventing the death of her father.
There, she had thought the unthinkable. And somehow, she felt better for doing it. With an extra degree of confidence, she set out the next morning back under a disguise into the already warming air to find the people in the city who had known Grigory Kuzmin before he had died.
In the interests of speed and leaving Saudi Arabia as soon as possible, she elected to conduct her avatar interrogations during daylight hours this time. She took a quick cab ride to the Al Amal Hospital and, from the lobby, accessed the hospital’s computer network. In two minutes, she found and scanned the meager records on the Russian patient and learned the names of the doctors and nurses that had worked on him.
From the avatar of the principle doctor who had examined Kuzmin, she learned that there had been no sign of a bullet; that it had gone clean through the man’s shoulder. She also learned that it was a very serious wound but had not necessarily been a fatal one; that with the proper treatment early enough, he could have lived. Also, she learned that the wound would have been extremely painful and would have immediately incapacitated most men. Moreover, the Russian could have been shot hours or even a day earlier, and that Kuzmin was in remarkably good shape for a man in his early fifties. But that was all the doctor could tell her.
She learned nothing new from the nursing staff. They had not seen or heard anything significant, nothing that Chapple had not already told her.
Only an hour after her arrival, she left the hospital, taking another taxi ride to return to her hotel. Once back in her room, she kicked off her shoes and ordered a tall cold glass of lemonade from room service. After it arrived, she sat back on the overstuffed, but very comfortable sofa to sip the drink and contemplate her next move.
Since Kuzmin was not a native of the city he likely didn’t have a car or own a house here. Therefore, he might have been staying with someone or, more likely, in a hotel room somewhere and rented a cab anywhere he went. She could spend days investigating all the possibilities and tracking his movements in the city, but in reality what would it tell her? Probably very little.
On the other hand, over a month had gone by since the murder. The police would have investigated all of those possibilities by now and would likely have more information on the case. Since she was only a few blocks from the EP Police Directorate on King Abdulaziz Street, she decided she would take the chance, waving her hand to create a microportal link to that location, hacking into the Police server and displaying the information on a holographic viewer in front of her. She had no trouble running down the appropriate records. And from them, she quickly learned that the agent on the case in the Investigative Police Force was a First Lieutenant Hossien Khouri.
And then she noticed the classification label on the file itself.
“The case is CLOSED!?” she bellowed, rising half off the sofa in stunned disbelief. How could the case be closed? Had the man been murdered by some street thug instead? Someone the police already had in jail? She was going to be sorely disappointed if it turned out that she was wasting her time on some wild goose chase here.
Well, as long as she was here, she was determined to check it out. Very little effort was needed to find Khouri’s office, in the same building, and determine that yes, he was there, at his desk. With another snap wave of the hand, she created an avatar of him and placed it in the wingback chair across the coffee table from her.
The avatar sat dispassionately, staring back at her, waiting patiently.
She forced herself to calm down a bit and to organize her thoughts before asking her first question. “Okay, Khouri. What’s the situation here? Have you caught the man who murdered Kuzman?”
“No.”
“Then why is the case closed?” she demanded.
“Orders from the office of the Ministry of the Interior,” he responded.
She folded herself back in the sofa, pondering his reply. The Ministry of the Interior? Did this case involve political ramifications?
She contemplated the image in front of her. The agent in front of her wouldn’t know the answer to that question. He would simply be following orders. What he could tell her was how far the investigation had gotten before the case had been ordered closed.
Okay, so back to basics. She tried to remember proper police procedure from all the TV cop dramas she’d ever seen. What would Columbo ask next?
“Did they do an autopsy on the body?” she patiently asked.
“Yes. Cause of death was blood loss due to a gunshot wound.”
“Nothing else of significance from the autopsy? No drug use, no unusual marks on the body?”
“No, nothing.”
“What about his clothes?”
“They were mostly of European make, with a wallet made in Spain and shoes from Italy.”
“What was in his wallet?”
“He had several credit cards and several hundred Euros. He also had a lifetime membership card for International Bird Rescue.”
“Did you check out the charges on the credit cards?”
“Yes, the last charges made were for an airline fare to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and a stay at a small hotel there. Both made two months before his death. Nothing after that.”
This was frustrating and going nowhere fast.
“Did you find any additional evidence related to his murder?” she inquired in a discouraged tone, putting her glass of lemonade down firmly on the coffee table.
“Yes,” came the matter-of-fact response. “The blood stains on the jet aircraft.”
Capie froze
in mid-motion.
“The aircraft? What aircraft?” she asked, feeling a sudden spike of excitement running up and down her spine.
“A French Dassault Falcon 20, a business jet. We found it crash landed in the desert forty kilometers northwest of here, not far from the 613 highway. His bloodstains, type O negative, were in the pilot’s seat and in several places in the passenger cabin. We found other blood stains of type A positive in the passenger cabin. There were also two bullet holes in the cabin floor and one in the outer skin of the plane.”
“How very interesting,” Capie stated, now finding herself on the edge of the seat. “And did you trace the registration of the aircraft?”
“Yes. It is registered to the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force.”
The Iranian Air Force. Yes, of course it was. The Iranians.
“I didn’t see any mention of the airplane in the case file or the Iranians. Why is that?”
“All connections to the Iranians and the aircraft were deleted by order of the Ministry of the Interior.”
It made sense now. Some wizard of Errabêlu in Iran was up to no good. He’d convinced the wizard of Errabêlu in Saudi Arabia to squash the investigation in Dammam. Logical.
So, what was her next step?
She couldn’t justify charging off into Iran. Dammam was one thing. Iran was another order of magnitude more difficult and dangerous.
In early 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was formed in Syria of Sunni Arab extremists to battle both government and rebel forces in the Syrian Civil war. Despite the near universal opposition from all of the region’s governments, the UN, the United States and all of the region’s terrorist and terrorist leaning organizations (such as Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah), ISIL (or ISIS) continued to grow in terms of members, weapons and resources. All through 2015, they seized increasing amounts of territory, spreading a reign of terror, murder and destruction across most of Syria and into the entire northern third of Iraq.
The Iraqi Army had tried, but had proved to be mostly ineffective in dealing with the ISIL threat.
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 13