“I do mind,” McGarvey said. “Your contacts wouldn’t do you any good if you were dead.” “What the hell happened over there?” Adkins demanded.
McGarvey handed him Trumble’s report. “Take a look at this, Dick. Bin Laden was playing games with him.”
Adkins sat down and quickly read through the report, which ran only to ten pages. When he was finished he glanced up at McGarvey. “Good call,” he said quietly, and then he turned his attention back to Trumble. “Did you get the sense that he was actually going to come after you and your family?”
“I don’t know. That’s not his style. But there were a half dozen pretty eager looking kids in the room with him, all armed with Kalashnikovs. It would have taken just a word, or even a gesture, from their boss for them to kill me.”
“Did you recognize any of them?”
Trumble started to shake his head, but then thought better of it. He had a very good memory for faces, and the station file in Riyadh had an extensive photo archive of known terrorists and their associates. Not only the foot soldiers, but the planners, the bankers, the technicians and anyone else connected with the dozens of various movements and factions in the region. He’d wanted to do a little checking on his own first before he brought it up. He didn’t know if he was being foolish, but now he decided was not the time to hold anything back no matter how seemingly meaningless it might be.
“There was one man, older than the others, maybe forty, plain looking, who sat in a corner drinking tea. He was the only one not armed.”
“Did you recognize him?” Adkins asked.
Trumble shook his head, trying to place the face as he had done on the way back to the Khartoum airport. “I don’t think so. But I got the impression that he might have recognized me. But it was just for a second, and then bin Laden was talking to me.”
“Anything in your station files?”
“I looked, but I didn’t find anything.”
“Okay, it might be nothing,” Adkins said, clearly not meaning it. He glanced at McGarvey who was content to let him run with it for now. “What’s this number you mention?”
“Bin Laden gave it to me just before I left. It’s not a phone number, but it obviously means something.”
Adkins handed the report to McGarvey, who looked at it. “He didn’t give you any explanation?”
“He said that we’d figure it out.”
“What do you want to do, Alien?” Adkins asked.
“First of all I want some solid bargaining points that I can bring back to Khartoum.”
“Do you think he’d agree to another meeting?”
“I think so—”
“That’s out,” McGarvey cut in sharply. “I’m putting you on the Middle East Desk, and if we do set up another meeting it won’t be with you, Alien.” He and Adkins exchanged a significant look that Trumble caught.
“What am I missing?” he asked.
“Nothing for now,” Adkins said. “Do you think that you can come up with a name for this face?”
Trumble wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but he let it slide for the moment. “That’s the other thing I wanted to try. I’d like to take this to Otto Rencke. We might be able to develop a recognition search program. At least we could narrow down the list of possibilities.”
“Good idea,” McGarvey said. “You can get Otto started this afternoon. In the meantime what are your vacation plans?”
“That depended on my new orders. We were going to hang around Washington for a couple of days to see the sights, and then if there was time, see my folks in Minnesota.”
“Your kids have never really seen the states,” Adkins said. “Dan was born in Baghdad, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah. But we’ve been back a few times to Duluth.”
“You oughta go down to Orlando, Disney World. It’s a little hot this time of year, but after Riyadh it should be a piece of cake.”
“They’ve talked about it.”
“That’s a good idea,” McGarvey said. “Take a couple of weeks, and when you get back we’ll have personnel find you a place to live. You’ll be looking at some eighty-hour weeks.”
“I hate to walk away from this.”
“I’m not handing out charity, Alien. You’ve earned the desk, and right now I need your expertise here, not in Riyadh.”
“Yes, sir.” Trumble closed his attache case, and got up.
McGarvey understood his frustration. “There is another factor out there, an important one. But it’ll hold for a couple of weeks. Knowing wouldn’t do you any good on vacation in any event.”
“Just something more to worry about?”
“Something like that.”
When Trumble left, McGarvey called down to Otto Rencke to tell him what was coming his way. He also read off the twelve-digit number. “Bin Laden gave this to Alien. Find out what it is, Otto. It’s top priority.” Trumble was a very good man; intelligent, knowledgeable and sensitive. But he was an academic, and nothing more than an academic, who should never have been given a field assignment in the first place.
“What do you think, Dick?” Adkins had gone to the fridge for a Coke. “Two possibilities. Either bin Laden is getting tired of hiding out and wants to come back to the real world, or he’s stalling us.”
“I meant the serial number. If it’s what I think it is, we could be in trouble.”
Adkins stared out the window, almost as if he was sorry that he was here and he wanted to escape. He was a short, somewhat paunchy man who had fought a weight problem all of his life. He had light, wavy hair and a pale complexion. Sometimes like this morning he looked as if he had been sick for a long time. “Are we going to send somebody else to talk to him?”
“I don’t think we have any other choice under the circumstances.”
Adkins turned back, his eyes washed out. “Who?” he asked quietly. He knew the answer, but he didn’t want to say it.
McGarvey didn’t respond. A snatch of something from Voltaire ran through his head. The problem is that common sense isn’t so common after all. But what good was common sense, McGarvey wondered, in dealing with a madman who’d dedicated his fortune and his life to one thing-killing Americans? All his life he had been witness to some very bright people making the most stupid of mistakes, himself included. He did not want to repeat the errors, especially not this time.
Otto Rencke had been trained as a Jesuit priest and professor of computer sciences and mathematics, but he’d been kicked out of the church for having sex with the dean’s secretary on top of the dean’s desk. His life after that had been one series of scrapes with the law after another, because he was a genius, he didn’t respect authority and he thought that he knew more about computers than anyone else in the world, which he probably did. In between troubles he had done some very good and very serious work for the CIA, bringing the Agency into the twenty-first century, and he had worked on a number of projects with McGarvey. But he’d been bored. He’d simply been playing games; with the world, with the projects he’d been assigned, with himself. The fact of the matter was that he had no idea who he was, what was driving him or where he was going. A lost soul, his mother had called him on the day she and her husband had kicked him out of the house for good.
It wasn’t until McGarvey became DDO and brought Rencke back into the fold that the forty-one-year-old maverick finally came into his own. He had finally found the one thing he’d been looking for all of his life: a family; someone to love him, someone for him to take care of, to fight for, to be with.
When Trumble walked in on him in his third floor office, he was sitting on top of a table that was strewn with computer printouts, running his delicate fingers through his long, out-of-control, frizzy red hair.
Trumble knocked on the doorframe. “Mr. Rencke?” He’d heard about the assistant to the DDO for Special Research, but he’d never met the man, and until this moment he’d disbelieved almost everything he’d been told as simply too fantastic, too bizarre.
“Bad dog, bad dog. My father’s name was Mr. Rencke, and he was the baddest dog of all.” Rencke hopped down off the table and practically bounded across the room to shake Trumble’s hand. He wore faded blue jeans, a
