trace could ever be left; no one could still be walking around with knowledge of you, however slight. Which was why, broadly, Matt Barker had perished.
Ravi understood his own situation as well as Shakira had understood hers. If, during his forthcoming journey across the Emerald Isle, any Irishman tried to get too close, or was too persistent, then Ravi would have no choice. The stakes were too high, the risks too great. It was costing $100,000 just to get him to West Cork. No one must interfere with his mission, however well-meaning.
And again, in this mood of self-examination, General Rashood wondered about his wife. Just what had gone wrong? And where was she? She had not tried to make contact again, but how could she? There was no cell-phone reception deep under the sea. Maybe she had tried. Maybe Shakira had cried out for help. Help that he could not provide. For all he knew, she could be in Guantanamo Bay, being interrogated by the servants of that evil bastard Admiral Morgan.
This particular thought sent that old familiar ramrod of steely resolve up his spine. If Shakira was in Cuba, he would make sure she was the last person Morgan ever sent there. And then, somehow, he and his warriors would get her out. “Can’t this thing go any faster?” he asked Captain Abad.
“Sorry, General. This is top speed. We must be patient. The worst part is over.”
Lt. Commander Ramshawe called Detective Joe Segel down in Brockhurst every day. And both of them were growing increasingly depressed. The detective was heartily sick of chasing the impossible shadow of Carla Martin, and Jimmy was growing more and more concerned for the safety of Arnold Morgan.
He had alerted associates at the FBI and the CIA that the admiral would need more security during his trip to England. He had consulted with the Secret Service agents at the White House and requested extra vigilance at British ports of entry through which a would-be assassin might pass.
Jimmy had even had the FBI search through the airport records in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston for any passenger who had bought an expensive one-way transatlantic ticket on the night of the murder — either to London, Paris, or any of the big European terminals: Amsterdam, Bonn, Hamburg, Madrid, Rome, Milan, or Geneva. Nothing popped up.
Neither Jimmy nor the FBI gave one thought to Dublin, simply because it’s not a big enough onward-journey airport. London probably has twenty international flights going anywhere you could name, anywhere in the world, to Dublin’s one. Same with Paris and the rest. One call to Aer Lingus would almost certainly have revealed that last Tuesday morning, a woman named Maureen Carson had turned up at the airport and paid more than six thousand dollars with her American Express card to travel on the 10:30 A.M. flight to Dublin.
Such passengers are quite rare, people with no bookings or reservations, only going one way, plainly acting on a spur-of-the-moment decision. Even a bank robber would have found time for preliminary arrangements. Murder can of course be slightly less predictable.
And Carla had slipped through the net, with a lot of savvy and a bit of luck. Jimmy, armed with a lot of facts, but not enough certain knowledge, was unable to close in. There were too many gaps, especially the one in Dublin airport.
The other problem was that no one was very impressed with Jimmy’s diagnosis of the situation. Like the admiral himself, it seemed no one could take seriously the vanishing barmaid as some kind of latter-day Mata Hari. Everyone was polite. But no one was convinced of the danger posed by the lady who had journeyed to Brockhurst with one mission in mind.
What really got to Jimmy was the fact that this Carla Martin had plainly succeeded in her mission. In a very few short days, she had moved in, befriended Arnold’s mother-in-law, and found, almost to the hour, the time of their departure, their destination, and their hotel. The Australian lieutenant commander, on this unproductive morning, was mildly surprised that Carla, or whoever the hell she was, had not managed to come up with the room number or Arnie’s breakfast order—
Those heavily connected facts and thoughts were quite sufficient for Jimmy’s antennae to start vibrating. But the clincher was the antiseptic precision of “Carla’s” departure. She had carefully erased every detail, sneaked around taking things out of the hotel files, signed for her apartment under a different name, handed over thousands of dollars. And left nothing behind. She had had no car, but there was obviously a 24-hour chauffeur to transport her everywhere: a chauffeur for whom someone was paying, with cash that had not come out of a barmaid’s wages.
Jimmy’s montage of facts sounded fine when he had them all together. It was simply one of those conundrums that did not play well to a third party. Too many little things, too much lack of one big overwhelming fact that could not be disputed. On the phone Jimmy could sense people growing more bored by the minute, thinking silently, “Shut up, Jim, the admiral’s going to be fine. None of this adds up to an assassination attempt on Admiral Morgan.”
Lt. Commander James Ramshawe knew better. Or at least he thought he did. He checked the airline schedules to London from Washington on Monday night, July 30. Arnie and Kathy would travel first-class on a U.S. airline, the trip arranged by the White House travel department. That would almost certainly be American Airlines, departing 2115, arriving Heathrow around 0830. They’d be at the Ritz by 1015 on Tuesday morning. In Jimmy’s mind, thanks to “Carla,” a Middle Eastern terrorist organization knew all that as well as he did.
He’d already had the Secret Service call the London embassy to ensure that the admiral always traveled in a bulletproof car. He’d asked for extra agents, he’d asked the FBI to alert Scotland Yard that there might be an attempt on Arnie’s life, he’d had the CIA check in with the British secret services MI-5 and MI-6, just to keep everyone on high alert.
But he was still worried. He needed a bodyguard for Arnold Morgan, an experienced operator who would treat the subject as hair-trigger dangerous, as Jimmy himself did. And he did not know such a man, not one who would be available to drop everything and go to London with Arnie and Kathy. Everyone was so stretched these days, and the military would not have sufficient personnel to help out. Everyone was too busy chasing the goddamned insurgents in Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan.
But he would not give up. He realized, alone above all other high-placed officials in government circles, that “Carla” had done her work. That something was going to happen.
Shakira was back in the Cashel Palace Hotel. She’d had a farewell Irish coffee with Dennis and retired to bed. The maids had drawn the curtains in her room and turned down the bed. But before she climbed between the spotless linen sheets, she drew back the curtains so she could see the illuminated outline of the Rock of Cashel, which was beginning to seem like an old friend.
Like most terrorists, Shakira Rashood slept only fitfully, awakening every two hours, alert for danger, her long fishing knife tucked under the pillow. She liked to see the ramparts of the Rock against the night sky, and she loved to contemplate its age and the centuries it had stood there, rising from a grassy plain, a place of kings and bishops, saints and choristers, Romans and Normans.
For a while she lay there, lost in the kind of peaceful speculation that so often eluded her because of the terrors of her calling. And then her mind moved on, back down to Mizen Head, where she had gazed upon great waters. And she pictured again those mighty acres of the Atlantic, dark now, flecked with whitecaps, nightcaps, far above the black submarine that was speeding through the depths, unseen, bringing her husband home to her.
Home? Could there ever be a home, like those of other people? Even the poorest of her people had homes, perhaps small, perhaps even squalid, but she and Ravi had nothing. The last home they had in Damascus had been bombed to smithereens by — she believed — the Israeli Mossad.
And it would always be the same. People trying to kill them. She and Ravi trying to survive, trying to live, and love, and do everything they could to destroy the West and all it stood for. All for the Muslim cause, everything for Allah and for the word of the Prophet. They were frontline warriors for the
And she turned once more to St. Patrick’s Rock, wondering how many people down all the years had turned to the great patron saint of Ireland and looked to him for guidance and protection, just as she and Ravi turned to Allah. And were the beliefs of those Irish people any less powerful than her own? She could not answer that, but she fervently wished that she did not need to leave this place tomorrow. And that she and Ravi could shelter here
