Charon took a deep breath, steeled himself, and made his demand: “One of the women-I think she’s my pick. I mean, she came all this way to meet me.”
Only by a great act of will did the Mole resist shouting a string of obscenities. This was absurd-jeopardizing the operation because of a woman? So many things could still go wrong, and now this.
“But she could be an agent, for Christ’s sake,” he said incredulously.
“It’s got to be her. And that’s that.”
The Mole heard the finality in Charon’s voice and took a deep breath of his own to calm himself. After all, he had unleashed Charon. Why be surprised when he tried to flex his new muscles? So the Mole held his temper and savored the element of risk. Almost like a stab from his youth. He said, in a level, measured voice, “We’ll get her for you, but we have to do it fast.”
After the Mole hung up, he was back on the phone in an instant, making a call of his own: “First, you should both be at the target, I don’t care about the rain business. Second, Rashid talked, and now we may have agents snooping around in Langdon. And our friend’s next girl-toy selection could be one of them. He’s going to blow the operation if we don’t get him in line. You have to go back in and get him out. Now.”
The Mole hung up the pay phone and then, finally, he swore-in English, and then in Arabic. How was he suppose to get the job done with these homicidal clowns for help? Shaking his head, he walked across the deserted parking lot. Security dictated that he use an unfrequented location where he could observe anyone who might be following him. So he chose this abandoned truck stop on the interstate. The gas and diesel pumps had been pulled out. They’d scrawled CLOSED in soapy letters on the empty diner windows. But the pay phones still worked.
He leaned against the hood of his car and studied the sky, wanting the clouds to clear. Wanting this thing to be over. His hand drifted to the open neck of his shirt. Before this all started, he used to wear gold chains around his neck. Kept the top two buttons open so the gold gleamed, nestled in his thick chest hair. Now, instead of the gold, he fingered a small silver religious medallion. His Christian mother had given it to him as a child.
Saint Charbel, in the lore of the Lebanese Maronite Church, had performed miracles after his death. The Mole himself had been practically dead for decades; exiled to this wilderness. Now, like Saint Charbel, years after his death he was about to perform a miracle.
The world of his birth was no more: Beirut when it was the Paris of the Middle East. His family had mirrored the city’s pre-civil war cosmopolitanism; his father had been a Sunni Muslim who’d preferred Karl Marx to the Koran. His mother was a Maronite Christian. His father had also been a member of the Ba’ath Party, an agent for Syrian intelligence, and a businessman heavily invested in growing cannabis and poppies in the Bekaa Valley.
Smuggling ran in his blood.
In 1982, an Israeli air strike killed his young Palestinian wife and infant son. One month later, a sixteen-inch shell from the American battleship
Seeking revenge, he volunteered for a suicide mission against the Americans. His superiors counseled patience. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his left-wing guerrilla group was advised by a KGB handler. The Russian interviewed him, and, seeing that he possessed intelligence and quality, suggested a long game: send him to America to live anonymously with his mother’s Christian family. Let him sleep among the Americans, become one of them, go to their schools, serve in their army.
So they sent him to the United States to ply his father’s trade. He would buy and sell and quietly learn the rhythms of smuggling across the Canadian border. Someday he would prove useful.
But that day never really came. The people who sent him had perished in the endless combat against the Israelis. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Mole was sentenced to prosper among the people he had sworn to kill. He remained faithful to his mission, going through the motions of his shadow life, running drugs, funneling money back to fund Hamas and Hezbollah. He got soft, he got married. He built a business. His two teenage sons were in high school. Christ-just yesterday he had taken them to soccer camp.
And then the knock at the door finally came. Not from his old group, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; not even from Hamas or Hezbollah. There was a new ascendant movement, inspired by the flyers of airplanes into tall American buildings. They were consolidating their fund raising. And asking favors. The dapper Saudi businessman named Rashid had impeccable knowledge of the Mole’s background. And he needed a ton of some unspecified material moved from Winnipeg across the border. No questions asked. And that’s how it began.
Now they were within hours of making it all work.
He believed Charon about the agents showing up in Langdon. And Charon wouldn’t leave until he got what he wanted. So an alternate plan was called for. Something…
The Mole squinted into the darkness. Made a decision. To keep the thing alive he’d have to take some risks. He’d have to divert them away from Charon.
He spun on his heel, walked back to the phone booth, and picked up the receiver.
Chapter Ten
The red label on the prescription bottle warned: “May cause DROWSINESS. ALCOHOL may INTENSIFY this effect. Use care when operating a car or other dangerous machinery.”
Broker took two of the white Vicodin pills, washed them down with bad roadside coffee, and stepped on the gas. If there was any dangerous machinery in the immediate area, it was him.
He was driving Milt Dane’s Ford Explorer pretty fast down a two-lane highway. A road sign flashed up, then disappeared: black rectangle framing a white silhouette of an Indian in profile with war bonnet; black number 5 centered in the white, the letter N in one corner and D in the other; WEST spelled out in the smaller panel over the sign.
He was headed west on North Dakota State Route 5, going mostly over 90 mph. Yet it seemed like he was standing still the last couple hours-ever since he pushed north of Fargo.
He’d forgotten that North Dakota was basically you and the sky.
After Fargo, the sky was no longer behind things, like the horizon. It became the main thing. It was too much. Along with too many clouds and too much flat for his north-woods instincts. The problem was-no cover. Broker was a man who understood the advantages of cover; he’d perfected an eye for the subtleties in human and geographic landscapes, for blind spots he could slip in and out of.
Looking around here, he saw no place to hide.
Talk about being too exposed. Christ. He caught himself hunching his shoulders, almost ducking behind the wheel.
Broker had reluctantly entered his later forties. He was tending toward lean and hungry this season, from compulsive exercise and a mild interest in Dr. Atkins’ diet. He’d cut his dark hair extra-short, almost military. He’d even trimmed some of the bushy ends off his eyebrows that grew in an almost solid monobrow. He had a fix to his gray eyes, a hollowness of cheek, and a flatness to his belly of a man who had taken vows, who was on a pilgrimage, who was in serious training.
There was some other stuff that affected his mood.
Like: a little over twenty-four hours ago he had been shot in the left hand. At the moment he was thinking, in a sweaty, feverish way, that taking a bullet was a mere nuisance, a distraction, compared to what was waiting for him down this highway. What was waiting for him was Nina Pryce. His wife.
He shook his head. People like him and Nina shouldn’t get married.
They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.
And now she’d ditched their daughter with strangers in a motel in North Dakota.
He’d lost the sugar-beet fields when he climbed out of the Red River Valley. Now he passed through a haze of strong-smelling clover and was into serious wheat. The fields stretched out to the horizon like a deep green comforter quilted with chrome yellow patches of canola and spashes of iridescent blue flax.
There was so much sky, he thought he could see ten thousand miles, clear past summer into fall, all the way
