dirty MTT sweatshirt, and unlaced black high-top sneakers, showing bare ankles that looked as if they hadn’t seen soap and water in a month. But his grip was light, and his wide blue eyes were so intense, so deep, and so utterly warm and filled with intelligence and childlike good cheer, that Trumble couldn’t help but smile. “You call me Otto, I call you Alien. Saves a lot of time that way, ya know.”
“All right, Otto. I just got in from Riyadh, and Mr. McGarvey thought that you might be able to help me with something.”
“The name is Mac, and you’re lying. It wasn’t his idea, it was yours.” Rencke started to hop from one foot to the other, something Trumble had been told he did whenever he was happy or excited about something. “Trumble, Alien Thomas. Born Duluth, Minnesota, 1960. Parents Eugene and Joyce — solid folks. Poli-sci and psych double majors, University of Minnesota, magna cum. Masters in psych, then the Company recruited you from a fate worse than death in dull, dull, boring hidebound academia.” He grinned, his mouth pulled down on the left. “Hidden talents. Farsi and a dozen Arabic dialects. You have the gift, and we’re all desperate for gifts, ya know. Married to Gloria Porter, kids Julie sixteen, Daniel twelve, apples of then father’s eye, tests off the charts in every embassy school they ever attended,” Rencke stopped in midstream and gave Trumble a strange, pained look, almost as if he’d suddenly seen something so terrible it was beyond words. “What was he like? In person, I mean. Bin Laden.”
Trumble was at a loss for words. Rencke was overwhelming.
“Come on, Alien, reticence is dull. First thing pops into your head.”
“Gentle,” Trumble said, not knowing where that had come from.
“Gentle?” Rencke prompted.
“Cobra.”
“Cobra?”
“Venemous.”
“Venemous?” Rencke prompted again, continuing the word association.
Trumble blinked, knowing exactly what Rencke was looking for. The only true knowledge, that worth having, was sometimes to be found only in the subconscious. “He’s a dangerous man because he’s smart, he’s rich, he’s dedicated and he’s completely filled with hate. It’s his religion, and he has more followers now than Jesus Christ had two thousand years ago when he was out among the people spreading the Word. When he looks at you through those hooded eyes, he’s as mesmerizing as a king cobra.”
“Kamikazes in the flock?”
“You can bet on it,” Trumble said. “He’s got people around him willing to give their lives for the jihad. Without hesitation, without even giving it a second thought, except
that they would be gaining an early entry into the gates of paradise.”
“Gotcha.” Rencke broke out into a broad grin. “That’s the guy we’re looking for. The unarmed man sitting in the corner drinking tea while all around him the troops were twitching.”
“Okay, how do we do it?”
“We’re going to generate a 3-D computer model of his face, his build, his mannerisms, anything you can remember no matter how small — just like the old police IdentiKit drawings — and then my darlings will go hunting. From time to time a candidate should pop out of the slot and I’ll fax it to you.”
“I can stick around—” “Bzzz. Wrong answer, recruit. The boss says you’re on vacation, and this might take some time.”
Trumble had to shake his head. Being around Rencke was like being in the middle of a white tornado; it left you breathless and wondering if your feet would ever touch the ground. Trumble had, in the back of his heart, figured that he was pretty smart. But Otto was smarter, a lot smarter than anybody he’d ever known including a couple of Nobel docs at the U. of M. It was almost disquieting. Thank God the man was on our side, he thought.
Rencke started hopping from one foot to the other again. “Do me a big favor, would you, Alien? Just one?”
“Sure, if I can.”
“Disney World. Magic Mountain, the roller coaster. Keep your eyes closed the whole time.”
Trumble laughed. “Okay, — but why?”
“I always wanted to do that,” Rencke said dreamily. “When you come back I want you to tell me what color it was. I’m betting red.”
CHAPTER TWO
He’s a fool.” Ban Yousef put the satellite phone back in his bag, a look of disgust on his dark, narrow features. He understood the meaning of his orders. Killing Trumble and his family had to be made into a statement of terror. Strike fear into the hearts of everyone who witnessed the attack, or heard about it, here of all places, at America’s mecca for families. But the risks were great.
“You should be careful what you say,” Rachid Walid warned. “If we are given an order, then we must carry it out, because he knows what he’s doing. We’ve come this far together, and if we die now it will be glorious.”
Yousef knew that nothing was foolproof, but he could think of a dozen different methods to accomplish their goal with a much greater chance for their escape afterward. He wasn’t concerned about doing the job, he’d done a lot more difficult things, in Berlin, and Beirut, and Paris, and even in New York. But it was getting away so that they could fight in another place, on another day that worried him. He wasn’t an ignorant country boy like so many of the others, he had gone to school for two years at the American University in Beirut, so he could think beyond the moment. He shook his head in frustration.
“Hamza knows his duty,” Omar Zawattri said from the back of the van. “He’s waiting for us where he should be waiting, just like we planned. He has never failed before.
And by the time the authorities respond we well be a long way from this godless place.”
They made a second pass down the Kangaroo row where the Trumbles’ rented light-blue Toyota SUV had been parked since nine this morning. If the family followed the same routine as they had for the last four days, they would be leaving the park around 6:00 p.m. to return to their Dixie Landings hotel a few miles away but still on the Disney property.
Yousef checked his watch. It was already five o’clock. “Find us a parking place where we can watch the shuttle bus. We have been given the go-ahead.”
Walid, who was driving, glanced over and grinned. Two of his front teeth were missing, and fool that he was he refused to see a dentist in Jersey City where’d they’d lived for the past three years, because he couldn’t find a doctor who was also a man of God. He would not have an infidel attend to him. In the meantime, in Yousef’s estimation, he looked like an ignorant Bedouin. He had never blended in, which made him dangerous.
Seven hundred meters across the still mostly full vast parking lot, the dimpled silver ball that was the symbol of EPCOT rose sixteen stories into the hazy blue sky. They had been told that small carts took people up inside the globe where at the very top they were given the illusion that they hovered in outer space looking down at the earth. One part of Yousef wanted to disbelieve such fairy tales, but living in America for so long he had seen plenty of other fantastic sights, so that another part of him thought the stories might be true. One of the truck drivers working for their cover company in Jersey City had told them that anything is possible in America, so maybe this was true. But none of it was worth so much as a tiny desert village, because of the godlessness. But that would change, and sooner than any of them expected. Insha’Allah.
Trumble was nearly dead on Ms feet. Five solid days of being on the go had gotten to him. He sat on a bench with Gloria in the shadow of Spaceship Earth, the EPCOT dome, waiting for the kids to come out. It had been a beautiful week, although the weather was way too humid after the years he had spent in the desert climates. The crowds in the park had been as heavy as Adkins had warned they would be. Kids were on summer vacation, and this was the ultimate family playground. But what surprised him was how efficiently everything was run. Sure there were long lines for every attraction, but the lines moved pretty quickly so that they’d never had to wait much more than twenty or thirty minutes. And another thing amazed him. With all those crowds everyday he’d expected to see
