The Camel Club

“I’ve covered the bases, Oliver. If it wasn’t drugs?”

“Exactly. If not drugs, what? I think someone should answer that question very thoroughly. Perhaps the answer lies with his work. Consider that planting drugs at his home would be an easy way to cover something up.”

Alex looked doubtful. “That’s highly unlikely. And quite frankly, NIC is a big can of worms to open for a guy looking to retire in three years.”

“Three years isn’t such a long time, Agent Ford; not nearly as long as the years you’ve already served your country. And unfortunately, fair or not, the end of one’s career is what a person is usually remembered for.”

“And if I make a misstep on this one, maybe I don’t have a career left.”

“But the other important point to realize is this: The end of one’s career is also what you remember most vividly. And you’ll have decades to possibly regret. And that is a very long time.”

Leaving Stone, Alex slowly walked back to his car. What the man said made sense. There were issues that were not clear in Alex’s mind about Patrick Johnson’s death. The drug discovery did seem a little too convenient, and other details just didn’t add up. In truth, he had been only halfheartedly investigating the case, more than ready to follow the Bureau’s lead and its conclusions.

And Stone had been right on another level. Alex had stayed at the Service after his accident because he didn’t want to go out on a disability ride. Well, sleepwalking through a major case wasn’t the way he wanted to go out either. There was something to be said for professional pride. And if U.S. presidents shouldn’t cruise through their duties, Secret Service agents shouldn’t either.

Oliver Stone watched Alex pass out of sight and then quickly walked to his cottage at the cemetery. From there he used the cell phone Milton had given him to call Caleb and tell him of this latest development. “It was a stroke of good fortune that I couldn’t ignore,” Stone explained.

“But you didn’t say anything about us seeing the murder, did you?”

“Agent Ford is a federal policeman. Had I told him that, his duty would’ve been clear. My best hope is that he will dig up something at NIC that would have been beyond our means to do.”

“Won’t that place him in jeopardy? I mean if NIC’s gunning down its own employees, they might not stop at killing a Secret Service agent.”

“Agent Ford is a capable man. But we’ll also have to act as his guardian angels, won’t we?”

Stone clicked off and, suddenly remembering he hadn’t eaten any dinner, went into his kitchen and made some soup, which he ate in front of a small fire he’d built. Cemeteries always seemed to be cold, no matter the season.

After that, he sat down in his old armchair next to the fire with a book that he’d been reading from his very eclectic collection that Caleb had helped him assemble. That’s all he had left: his friends, his books, some theories, a few memories.

He glanced at the box with the photo album again, and, despite intuitively knowing it would be a bad thing, he put his book down and spent the next hour drifting through his past. Stone lingered over the pictures he had of his daughter. One showed her holding a bunch of daisies, her favorite flower. He smiled as he remembered how she would pronounce it: dayzzzees. There was another picture of her blowing out candles on a cake. It wasn’t her birthday. She’d gotten stitches in her hand after she’d fallen on some broken glass, and the cake was her reward for being so brave. The cut left a scar in the shape of a crescent on her right palm. He’d kissed it every time he held her. He had so few memories of her that Stone clung desperately to every one.

At last his mind went back to that final night. Their house had been situated in a very isolated area; his employer had insisted on that. It was only after the attack that Stone understood the reason for this requirement.

He remembered the creak of the door as it was opened. Cut off from their child, he and his wife barely slipped through the window when the muffled shots commenced. Stone remembered visualizing the suppressor cans on the ends of the muzzles. Thump — thump — thump. They nipped at him like lethal gnats. And then his wife screamed once, and that was all. She was dead. Stone killed two of the men sent to execute him that night, using their own guns against them. And then he’d gotten away to a safe place.

That night was the last time Stone saw his wife or his daughter. The next day it was as though they’d never existed. The house had been emptied and all signs of the murderous attack obliterated. All attempts to find his daughter over the years had failed. Beth. Her full name was Elizabeth, but they had always called her Beth. She was a beautiful child and the pride of her father. And he had lost her forever on a hellish night decades ago.

When he eventually learned the truth of what had happened, Stone was consumed with the idea of revenge. And then something happened that struck those thoughts from him. He read in the paper of the violent death of a man, an important man, in a country overseas. The killing was never solved. The man left behind a wife and children. Stone recognized the fingerprints of his former employer all over that killing. It was a scene personally very familiar to Stone as well.

That’s when he realized he was not a man who deserved revenge even for his wife being murdered and his child taken from him. His past sins were many, piled high under the dubious cloak of patriotism. For Stone, it effectively disenfranchised him from seeking justice for the wrong committed against his family.

He disappeared and traveled the world under a number of aliases. It had been relatively easy; his government had trained him very well to do just that. After many years of wandering he embarked on the only option left to him. He became Oliver Stone, a man of silent protest, who watched and paid attention to important things in America others didn’t seem drawn to. And still, it had not been nearly enough to balance the pain of losing the two people he cared most about. That would be his burden until his last breath.

When he fell asleep in the chair as the fire died low, the wetness of his tears still shimmered on the album’s slick pages.

CHAPTER

27

DJAMILA ROSE AT FIVE O’CLOCK in her small apartment on the outskirts of Brennan, Pennsylvania. Shortly after dawn she performed her first prayer of the day. After she had cleansed herself and removed her shoes and covered her head, Djamila went through the Islamic rituals of standing, sitting, bowing and prostrating herself on her prayer rug. She began by reciting the shahada, the central statement of Muslim faith: La ilaha illa’Llah, or “There is no god but God.” After that, she recited the opening sura, the first chapter of the Qur’an. The invocations were performed silently, only her lips moving as she formed the words. After she’d finished her salat, she changed her clothes and readied herself for work before sitting down to breakfast.

As she surveyed her tiny kitchen, Djamila reflected on her conversation with Lori Franklin the day before. Djamila had lied to her employer, though the American would have no way of knowing of the deceit. Djamila’s official papers showed her to be a Saudi. That, and her being a woman, had allowed her entry into America to go very smoothly, even in post-9/11 times. Djamila was actually an Iraqi by birth, and a Sunni Muslim by religious practice, as were over 80 percent of all Muslims, although in Iraq the Sunnis were in the minority. In early times the Sunnis clashed with their Shia counterparts largely over the issue of the successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Now the differences were far more numerous and bitter.

The Shiites believed that the fourth rightly guided caliphate, Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law and also his cousin, was the true blood successor to the Islamic Prophet. Shia Muslims performed a pilgrimage to Mazar-i-Sharif to the blue mosque where Ali was entombed. Sunni Muslims believed that Muhammad had not appointed his successor, and thus they established the caliphates to take over for the Prophet after his death. The Sunnis and Shiites agreed that none of the caliphs rose to the level of a prophet; however, the fact that three of the four caliphs had died violent deaths was a testament to how fervently divided the Muslim population was over this issue.