I could help.”
She was looking at me like she had done something wrong. I was having a hard time getting my head around the story.
“Well, get ready to go back down. This guy was waiting for backup, and they’re going to be here any second. Can you get down a second time?”
She smiled with relief — whether it was because I hadn’t chastised her or whether she thought we were on the way to getting clear, I wasn’t sure.
“See if you can keep up,” she said.
She repeated her monkey maneuver and was halfway down the building before I even cleared the railing, scampering over balconies and using drainpipes like a kid on a playground.
By the time I jumped the last six feet to the ground, she had her sandals back on and was ready to run.
“What do we do now?”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
The hotel was situated on the eastern edge of town, right on the beach. I decided to go north, along the beach for a few hundred meters, before cutting back into town. After passing several buildings, I cut west through an alley, heading to the bus station. When I reached the edge of the building, I crouched and peered around the corner. Jennifer closed up right next to me, so near I could feel her trembling.
We slipped across the street and began working our way westward. It dawned on me that the trembling wasn’t just from the recent action. Her experiences in Machete’s house had scarred her deep inside, and seeing the Englishman had brought it ripping back out. She was barely coping. I decided to to get her mind off Machete. “Where’d you learn how to be a monkey? I’ve never seen anyone climb that fast.”
“I got in a lot of trouble as a kid. My mom got me started in gymnastics to focus me. I kept at it for quite a while.”
“Hmm. This is probably the first time in history that all the money flushed for some kid’s activities actually paid off in the real world. You should thank your mom.”
I grinned to show I was kidding. She scowled back, which was okay because that was better than the fear.
“It was a little bit more than that. When I dropped out of college the first time I had a bit of a bad stretch. Broke up with a guy and had the usual ‘trying to find yourself’ thing. I auditioned for Cirque du Soleil and was accepted. I trained up in Montreal for three months, learning all sorts of crazy things. That building was nothing.”
I had seen several Cirque du Soleil shows, and the feats that were performed were unreal. Literally mind- bending. I’d watch an acrobatic trick and wonder if my eyes were deceiving me, if it wasn’t a trick done with mirrors. The focus and dedication required rivaled anything in professional sports, or my world for that matter.
I stopped walking and turned around. We were inside another dark alley, which caused Jennifer to bump into me. I looked at her with a new appreciation.
She said, “What? It’s not some French circus. It’s a pretty well respected—”
“I know what it is. You were in it? For real?”
“I sort of was. I was accepted and finished the apprenticeship, but right before I was slotted for a show I decided it wasn’t for me. I was pretty screwed up back then.”
“Still, that’s pretty amazing.”
“Yeah, well, I decided to go back to college. That decision’s worked out well so far, don’t you think?”
She grinned at her joke.
51
In Belize City, waiting at their gate for the flight to Cancun, Bakr said, “We’ve got some time. Let’s see if The Sheik has responded.”
Sayyidd moved to a secluded space within the terminal that had a look angle to the satellite. He went through the laborious process of getting online with the M4 satellite phone, then checked the first Yahoo! address they had used.
Bakr said, “What’re you doing? That’s the first address. They won’t respond to that. They’ll respond to the second address.”
He looked closer at the screen, becoming livid. “Is something in the sent file? Is that the message we sent earlier? You didn’t erase it?”
Sayyidd gave an embarrassed shrug. “We did this together. I forgot to delete it. You forgot to tell me to delete it. It’s a mistake.”
Deleting the message from both the sent and trash files, he said, “It’s gone.”
Bakr rubbed his forehead. He now saw that he would have to look over his shoulder for everything.
“Please check the other address.”
Going to the other Yahoo! account, Sayyidd glowed with anticipation when he saw four messages in the in- box. Three were for penile implants and counterfeit Viagra; one was an e-mail for them. Opening it, he read a simple paragraph, written in Arabic:
Praise be to Allah and all thanks to Allah, your message brings hope to the breasts of true believers. Travel with the weapon to Imam Walid abdul-Aziz. Meet and discuss together the path to success. Peace be upon you in your journey. Imam Walid will send you a message in his own good time for the meeting. May Allah make this a day of pride and success for the Muslim Ummah.
Sayyidd looked up in confusion. “Who’s Imam Walid? Where’s he located? Are we supposed to guess?”
“Don’t worry, my friend. He’s a man that’ll help the plan you’ve come up with, just as he’s helped hundreds of other true believers in Europe. I know he lives in Norway, but don’t know his actual address. We’ll go to Cancun and catch a flight to Oslo. Send a reply to The Sheik telling him of the successful test. Before we leave, delete both messages.”
Sayyidd did as he was told, saying, “I don’t need to be treated like a child. I can learn from my mistakes.”
52
I looked at the list of agencies, trying to smoke out the cover name the CIA was using at this particular embassy. I was looking for the name of an agency that sounded legitimate but was so innocuous it had no specific mandate. A name that nobody would call for anything. I knew most of the legitimate organizations, such as USAID, and focused on the ones I didn’t. Finally, my eyes settled on the pompous-sounding Office of Southern Hemispheric Relations. That sounded like what I was searching for. The title was so broad that nobody would call them unless they had been given the number.
Jennifer asked, “How will we get to the CIA? You’re right, I don’t see them listed.”
Chagrined, Jennifer lapsed into a sullen silence.
We had made the last bus to Belmopan without any other trouble, and had crashed in the nearest hotel we could find. Waking up this morning, it had taken little time to find the embassy and get through the outer security. Now was the hard part — how to get past Marine Post One. I would need to get someone from the CIA to meet me in the lobby, because I wasn’t on any approved access roster that Post One maintained.
I waited for the young Marine behind the bulletproof glass to finish what he was doing and ask me my business. I asked for the number to the office, moved to the phone provided, and gave them a call, Jennifer standing expectantly beside me. A man answered on the third ring. It took a little bit of convincing, made harder
