Algerian had a tough time blending in anywhere. Although he shaved every morning while in Europe, he sported a five o’clock shadow by lunchtime, and it was now an hour past that-the best time for a meeting because the lunch crowd thins so that friend can more easily be distinguished from foe, or rather foe may be distinguished from genuine tourist. Qatada’s choice to heavily pomade his thick black hair, giving prominence to a V-shaped hairline, made him stand out even more. Also his eyes were set close to an extraordinarily wide and flat nose. But his most remarkable feature was an almost constant toddler-like glee, odd given that the majority of his forty years had been spent on a serial rant-in the form of massacres of innocent civilians-directed at the French government.
“I’m looking to retire,” Bream said.
“As opposed to living on a tropical island and flying once or twice a week?” Qatada spoke fluent British- accented English, at a higher pitch than the growl presaged by his appearance.
Bream gazed at the cricket game on the TV above the bar, without which the dark stone tavern wouldn’t have appeared much different than it had a millennium ago. He used the mirror behind the bar to take an inventory of the crowd, inspecting for shifts in stance or positioning-that is, were they watching or listening to him? As new people came through the door, he assessed them: local businessmen, tourists, ladies lunching, etc. He would have preferred that one of his “associates” do the countersurveillance, but the mercenaries in his employ were all busy in Gstaad today, rehearsing a rendition for the new Counterterrorism Branch of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service-as far as they knew.
“I was on the tropical island prospecting,” Bream told Qatada. “Now I’ve got a prospect.”
Qatada smiled, maybe at the cricket game, maybe at the play of light on his water glass-who knew? Bream had given him no reason to be happy.
He was about to, though.
“You know how for a party, you write a check and a party planner does everything?” Bream asked. “He gets you the band, the cake, the hall-all for the exact day you want?”
“What about it?”
“I’ll run an op for you like that in two weeks, except instead of cake I’ll serve up an ADM.”
Qatada smiled again. “Sounds like quite a party.”
“The venue I have in mind is the municipal marina three hundred and seventy-five meters north of the hotel hosting the G-20.”
“The Grand Hotel near Mobile, Alabama?”
“Yeah, beautiful old resort.”
“The French delegation is planning to stay there.” Qatada spoke matter-of-factly. “I am guessing you knew that.”
“Think of them as your guests of honor. All you’ll be required to do is push a button, and you’ll strike the biggest blow possible for an Islamic state.” Qatada’s al-Jama’ah al-Islamiyah al-Musallaha, known here in France as Groupe Islamique Arme, sought to oust the current Algerian government.
Qatada sat back, lips pursed with skepticism. “Does the Fountain of Youth come with this package too?”
Bream laughed politely. “You know Nick Fielding?”
“I hope for your sake that he is not your supplier.”
“You mean ’cause he’s dead? That’s why I can get my hands on his ten-kiloton Russian ADM without any opposition from him.” Bream paused while the waitress deposited their plates of steak fries, then waited until she was out of earshot. “You know you can practically throw a rock from my place on Martinique to Fielding’s island, right?”
“No, I did not.” Qatada was rapt.
“I watched his act for three years. Not only that, I watched No Such Agency watching him-I even got myself hired on as copilot for a couple of their charters. After giving an envelope full of money to one of Fielding’s goons, I now know not only about Fielding’s ADM, but that he took its hiding place to his grave. Since he died, legions of spooks have tried and failed to find it.”
“But you can?”
“Yes. Then it’s yours, plug and play. I just need five million down to cover my expenses and another seven hundred and forty-five mil on delivery.”
The Groupe Islamique Arme’s principal benefactor, Algerian oilman Djamel Hasni, could write a check for $750 million on any one of a dozen of his accounts around the world.
“If I told Djamel that you asked for a billion dollars, he’d think seven hundred fifty million was a steal,” Qatada said. “His problem isn’t going to be the sale price; it’s going to be the salesman.”
“He’ll think I’m an American spook running a play for the United Satans of America?”
“Of course.”
“That would mean that the Air Force faked my dishonorable discharge, that I flew clunkers for four years in exile, and that I damn near destroyed myself with the cheap local rum all to build up cover for an op whose objective is to bag a couple of members of an Algerian terrorist group that no one’s heard of.”
Qatada ceded the point with a nod, but remained circumspect. “How would you get the device into the States?”
“That’s the easy part. I built myself an ironclad alias with access to a U.S.-flagged yacht that’s a fixture at the Mobile Bay Marina. You ante up, I’ll go get the yacht, cruise down to Martinique for a ‘pleasure trip,’ pick up a ‘souvenir’ along the way, then cruise on back to Bama.”
Qatada winced. “Take it from an expert: Since 9/11, your Homeland Security can’t install enough chem-bio- nuke detectors in your ports.”
“You’re part right. In Miami this scheme would never fly. Houston and New Orleans, ten miles before I even reached the coast, drones would shoot Hellfire missiles, turn my yacht into flotsam, and ask questions later.”
“But not in Mobile?”
“Think of Mobile as the Groupe Islamique Arme of port cities: It’s big, but no one knows much about it or really cares much about it. Cares enough, I ought to say.”
Qatada shrugged. “Even in such places, the Americans can afford to give every other port employee a palm- sized gamma-ray spectrometer and litter the docks with sniffers and ICx rovers and probably many other new detection devices that we do not even know about.”
“But there’s almost nothing along the other hundred-something miles of coast.”
“Except the Coast Guard and the Customs and Border Protection agency. You don’t think al-Qaeda has spent thousands of hours trying to find holes there? Djamel has spent millions of dollars on computer simulations alone.”
As a twelve-year-old, Bream had been undefeated in Tennessee Chess Association junior play, but he had dropped the sport in high school in deference to his image. Still he thought like a chess player. Now he saw checkmate in two moves. “The key is, I’ll be cooperating with Coast Guard and CBP from start to finish,” he said. “They’ll have had me on transponder and satellite the whole time I’m in the Caribbean, plus five kinds of radar on top of that as soon as I get close to U.S. waters on the way home. A foreign national can expect a Custom and Border Protection ‘welcome committee’ on reaching Alabama waters. But most of the time, all a good ol’ American boy’s gotta do is check in with the CBP folks with a phone call, which I’ll do during the night-they close at five every day. One in thirty times, they summon you across the bay to the commercial docks for an inspection the next morning, in which case I’ll risk offloading the device before I go. One in ten times, they come to your marina for a look-see the next morning. But even if that happens, I’m still good because the ADM’s concealed within a specially modified housing that does to spectrometers what fresh-grated bell pepper does to bloodhounds. And most of the time, all the CBP folks do is call you and say, ‘Welcome home, sir.’ ”
And there it was, Qatada’s smile, at full wattage. Although pleased, Bream looked down so that no one would remember his face, too.
2
The CIA’s New Headquarters Building, a pair of six-story towers of sea-green glass, could have been
