His cell phone burred a few minutes after he cleared the timber, and he snatched it out of his pocket. Joe wasn’t surprised to see who was calling.
“Hi, darling,” he said.
“Are you okay?” Marybeth asked.
“Okay enough,” he said. “Luke is working with Nemecek. I followed Nemecek as far as the road to his camp.”
“My God,” Marybeth said, and he heard sincere disappointment in her voice. “He seemed like such a good kid.”
“He might be,” Joe said. “I’m about forty-five minutes out. Is everything okay there?”
“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Mike is sticking around until you get back. Every fifteen minutes or so, he goes outside and looks around. He said nobody is out and about yet.”
“Good,” Joe said.
“You sound distracted,” she said. He didn’t realize he was, but she was good at pulling things out of him.
He said, “I was thinking about something.”
As briefly as he could, and with a real effort not to color the theory or worry her any more than necessary, he told her about what Nate had said about the female operative on Nemecek’s team.
“Since we haven’t encountered any young women that would fit that profile,” Joe said, “something came to mind…”
She didn’t let him finish his thought. Her voice quickly rose through the scales: “A young woman, probably from the east. Sheridan’s new friend is from Maryland. She doesn’t know much more about her, I don’t think. The girl who wants Sheridan to go to the East Coast for Thanksgiving. It might be her. Nemecek may know Sheridan is Nate’s apprentice, and this girl might be in Laramie to keep an eye on her- or do something to our daughter to lure Nate.”
“Calm down,” Joe said. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“And she won’t answer her phone!” Marybeth said, clearly alarmed.
“She never does,” Joe pointed out. “Really, we can’t do any good getting worked up.”
“I’m not worked up!” Marybeth shouted.
The juxtaposition of her statement with her tone gave them both pause. He waited until she came back, this time more calmly. “I could try to call a couple of her friends to go wake her up, if only I knew they’d have their phones on,” she said. “Or better yet, we could call the dorm front desk or the Laramie police department.”
He told her about his conversation with Chuck Coon, and she agreed that was the best way to go.
“I’m going to keep trying to get in touch with her, though,” Marybeth said. “She’ll have to wake up and turn on her phone eventually, won’t she?”
“Yup.”
“Hurry back,” Marybeth said. “We’ll need to leave for the airport in three hours, and you haven’t packed anything.”
Joe shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see it.
“Oh,” she said, “I had something to tell you when I called.”
“Go ahead,” he said. The road was covered with an inch of slush as he descended from the mountains into the valley, where it was a few degrees warmer.
“I looked at that book I brought home.”
“Yes,” he said, prompting her.
“It’s a lot to digest. Did you know the idea for al-Qaeda got started in Greeley, Colorado, of all places?”
“Greeley?” Joe said, thinking of the northern Colorado city that smelled of feedlots and cattle. “Is that our connection?”
“Hardly,” she said. “That was 1949. It’s interesting and sick at the same time. The Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb was at the college there as a visiting professor, and he became disgusted with Western morality because he went to a barn dance! I’ll tell you all about it on our plane trip.”
“Okay,” Joe said.
“But that’s not what I found that makes me think we’re onto something. I think we might know the secret of Nate: why he is how he is and how he got that way. And maybe why they’re after him. The timing is perfect as far as Nate goes, and we know he was involved in some bad stuff. Listen closely…”
Joe strained to hear, as she obviously found her place in the book and began to read aloud:
“In early February 1999…”
27
Nate and Haley drove through Riverton without seeing a single person awake or out on the streets. It was 2:30 in the morning and the bars were closed and not even a Riverton town cop was about. For the past hour he’d filled her in on assignments he had undertaken on behalf of Mark V, and some of the things he’d seen and done. He said he used to have several passports, issued to him under different names. In fact, he said, he’d used the last clean one a month before to fly to Chicago and back under a false identity.
Before they cleared town, Nate stopped at a twenty-four-hour convenience store and filled the gas tank as well as his reserve tank. Inside the Kum amp; Go, he awoke the Indian night-shift clerk. He bought two large cups of coffee, granola bars, and energy drinks, and handed over five twenty-dollar bills. Although it hadn’t occurred to him yet that he hadn’t slept for nearly twenty hours, he wanted to stave off exhaustion when it came for him.
He climbed back in the Jeep to find Haley sitting up, wide awake. She rubbed her eyes and thanked him for the coffee, and said, “You left off in 1998.”
“Do you really want me to go on?” he said, easing out onto the street. He turned north until it merged onto U.S. Highway 16. One hundred eighty miles until they hit Saddlestring.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said. “You said Nemecek came to you with a special assignment.”
In March OF 1998, John Nemecek called Nate Romanowski into his office. The building itself was a small, single-level brick residential bungalow. There was no plaque or sign out front to indicate it was anything other than one home of many at Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne. Airmen and their families occupied the houses on either side of the bungalow. There were bicycles and wading pools in the yards up and down the street.
“He started out as he usually did,” Nate said to Haley, “with a history lesson. In this case, it was about how important the sport of falconry was to the Arab emirs through time. How falconry was literally the sport of kings in the Arab world, and how it had almost mythical and religious significance. Unlike here, where anyone can become a falconer if they have the time, patience, and desire, in the Arab world only the royals and elite are allowed to participate. Think of it like fox hunting in England in the past-very elitist.
“The pinnacle of falconry in the Arab world is to hunt a rare and endangered bird called the houbara bustard,” Nate said. “These are large birds that mainly stay on the ground, but they’re capable of short flights. Some weigh up to forty-five pounds. They remind me of prairie chickens but bigger and faster. When a falcon takes them on, it’s a wild and violent fight. Bustards live in high, dry country, and they’re all but impossible to get close to because they live where there are no trees. Bustards can see for miles if anyone is coming. The Arabs like to watch the kill through binoculars hundreds of yards away, like generals watching a battle far from the front line. They don’t eat the dead bustard or use it for any purpose. It’s all about the kill.
“To me, their philosophy of falconry is perverse. They hunt their birds for the sake of killing, and it’s done in big social gatherings of the upper crust. They buy raptors from around the world as if they’re racehorses, and the royals gain status by having the most exotic and deadly birds.”
Haley said, “How is that different from your experience?”
“Every falconer I know hunts his birds as a means of getting closer to the primitive world,” Nate said. “It’s a
