we thought.”
“So what else is new?” said Danny.
7
For an officer who spent most of his time in the field, coming to CIA headquarters was not generally something to look forward to. Even if one wasn’t coming home to be called on the carpet, the stay tended toward the onerous. For one thing, it was almost always associated with paperwork: official reports, expense reports, and briefings. Then there were the routine and not routine lie detector tests, dreaded audits, and the even more dreaded physical and psychological fitness exams.
But perhaps the worst thing that could happen to you at Langley, at least as far as Nuri Lupo was concerned, was being second-guessed. Which he expected was on today’s agenda in bulleted capital letters. He’d taken it as a particularly bad sign when Reid told him to take the weekend off. Reid himself always worked Saturdays, so a routine pummeling could easily have started then. Anything that had to wait for the work week to begin was guaranteed to be onerous indeed.
Not that there was
Nuri’s only consolation — and it was thin — was the fact that he had found a restaurant with a cute waitress the night before. She’d flirted a bit, and he figured he’d be eating there a lot if he was stuck here for any length of time.
He drove to the parking lot near the main building, parked in one of the visitor’s slots, and went inside to meet Reid. He was a few minutes early, and after going through the ID and weapons check — guns were frowned on — he decided to head down the hall and grab a coffee at the Starbucks. Along the way he passed the displays of Cold War paraphernalia. Though put out mostly to impress visiting VIPs, Nuri found the old gadgets endlessly fascinating, and lingered on his way back, admiring the miniature bugs in the cases, huge by today’s standards.
Reid, coming down from the other direction, spotted Nuri in the hall. He paused and studied the agent, surprised at how young he looked. He was, in fact, young, though Reid would never hold that against him.
It was nearly impossible for the older man not to draw parallels with officers and agents he’d known in the past, and his mind did so freely in the few seconds that passed before Nuri looked up and saw him waiting at the end of the hall. The young man reminded him of several people, all good men, all dead well before their time. The comparison that came most readily was to Journevale — Reid remembered the agent’s code name, not his Christian name, even as he pictured him.
Journevale was a Filipino who’d been recruited by the British to work in Vietnam and at some point was handed over to the U.S. During the time Reid knew him, he’d lived among the Hmong people in Laos, helping organize guerrilla groups that fought along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
When Reid wanted to check on his status, he had to parachute in via Air America. The flights in rickety airplanes, held together by duct tape and wire, were horribly dangerous; jumping out of the plane at night into the dark jungle wasn’t much of a picnic, either. In the days before GPS satellite locators, it could take hours to find a contact in the jungle; Reid twice failed to meet his agent at the landing zone and had to hike several miles to a backup rendezvous point. But Journevale always managed to meet him, even when the pilots had gone far off course. He was good with languages, and cheery, and best of all, he could cook murderously well. The tribespeople worshipped him.
He’d killed himself in a Bangkok hotel room after the war was lost and his people were slaughtered. It was the honorable thing to do.
“Hey, Bossman,” said Nuri. “Sorry I’m late. I just grabbed a cup of joe. The coffee I’ve been drinking’s lousy. Everybody wants to put sugar in it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Where to? Your office?”
“Yours.”
Nuri realized he meant Room 4, the support project headquarters. That was a bit of a surprise.
“I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about Jasmine,” said Nuri as they got into Reid’s car outside. “I have some ideas on how I can get inside.”
“Why would Luo be so important that he had to be killed?” asked Reid.
The tone in his voice told Nuri that Reid already had a theory. But his supervisor liked the Socratic method of quizzing his underlings before lowering the boom.
“Competitor wants the market to himself.”
“Possible. Other theories?”
“He pissed off the wrong person,” said Nuri. “They got him back.”
“Plausible.”
“Or the Egyptians killed him. They’re becoming more active. They see the rebels as a threat, and want to keep them off balance. You take out Luo, you deprive them of ammo for a few months.”
“Also plausible.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I have no opinion, really. It’s going to be your next step to find out more information. The analysts have finished going over the data,” Reid added, almost as an afterthought. “The tubes could not have been used for rockets.”
“OK. And where are they?”
“That’s the next thing you have to find out.”
Room 4 was located on the opposite end of the campus, but even so, the drive took only a few minutes. There was no parking lot there; they had to park near a larger building about fifty yards away.
Reid turned off the ignition but didn’t get out of the car.
“We’re going to expand your team,” he told Nuri.
“Expand?”
“As I told you when you started. The Whiplash concept calls for more people.”
“Mmmmm,” said Nuri.
“We have a new officer who’s going to be in charge.”
“In charge of me?”
It was a reasonable — more than reasonable — question. Reid ducked it, though. “Not precisely.”
“The operation.”
“The operation remains a CIA mission.”
“So what’s his role?”
“He’ll be in charge of the paramilitary component.”
“I’m paramilitary.”
“In the sense I mean,” said Reid, “they are DOD, and you are CIA.”
“And independent?”
“No one is independent, Nuri. You know that.”
Reid opened the car door. Nuri took a sip of his coffee, then left the cup in the car.
“What’s that mean, exactly?” he asked Reid, catching up to him.
“It means Agency and military people work together. You’ve been there before.”
“Generally, there’s someone specifically in charge.”
“I’m in charge. And Ms. Stockard.”
Politics, thought Nuri. They were probably haggling about the real chain of command above him, each agency trying to protect its turf. Generally that meant no one was in charge, a potentially dangerous situation.
“I think you’ll like the man we’ve chosen. He was in the Air Force. He worked at Dreamland.”
