scrawny little necks. But that had been a long time ago, and even back then, he’d nearly blown it. Memories of old days. More to the point, fifteen feet to the forward head. The older he got, the more he needed to keep track of that kind of thing.
The flight was grossly ordinary, with nary a bump, taking hardly an hour before they touched down at O’Hare, named for a World War Two naval aviator who’d won the Medal of Honor before getting splashed, probably by friendly fire, which could kill you just as dead as the other sort. Clark wondered how hard it was for the pilot to find the right jetway, but then he’d probably made this flight before, maybe a hundred times. Now came the hard part, John realized. Where was Hadi going, and could he bag a seat on the same flight? A pity he couldn’t just ask the bastard. He had to go through immigration, because America had gotten serious about controlling who came into the country. Really that meant tough enough that the bad guys had to devote maybe a whole minute of thought before sneaking in, but maybe it was something to stop the really dumb ones. But the dumb ones weren’t much of a threat, were they?
That was far above his pay grade, however, and those who made such decisions rarely consulted the worker bees who live out where one’s ass was on the betting line. That fact had started for Clark in Vietnam, when his name had been Kelly. So maybe stuff like that never changed. That was a frightening thought, but frightening things came with the territory, and he’d signed on to that more than thirty years earlier. The entry procedures were not even perfunctory. His passport wasn’t even stamped, a considerable surprise. Another procedure change? Keep the ink from staining the clerk’s hand, maybe?
Okay, what’s happening?” Granger asked over the secure line.
“Clark took the same flight as our friend,” Jack replied. “We got a couple photos of him. With luck, he’ll shadow him to where he’s going.”
“We’re booked on a flight into D.C. National; leaves in thirty minutes. Be back in the building about five-thirty or six, probably.” Which amounted to a complete wasted day, unless you counted a couple of photos as a success, Jack thought. What the hell, it was more than what they’d had.
50
CLARK WAS in the subterranean walkway from one terminal complex to another. Mostly moving walkways, like conveyor belts; it certainly looked long enough. He’d watched Hadi step out into the open air and have another smoke before coming back in, running through the metal detectors-miraculously, his marshal’s badge did not trip it here-down into this lengthy tunnel, and then up the escalator to the outboard terminal, where it was time to go to work. Hadi turned left at the top. He’d gotten his gate assignment from an information monitor- without checking his ticket for the flight number. Did that make him a trained pro or just a guy with a good memory or a surfeit of confidence? Clark wondered. You pays your money and you takes your choice. At the top, Hadi turned left onto Concourse F. He was walking briskly.
Hadi, in seat 1D of his flight, considered the menu as he sipped his complimentary white wine-it was better in Italy, but that was no surprise-and he chided himself for an unseemly discrimination in his nose for wine. The ground below was mostly flat, with a few strangely green bull’s-eyes, which, he’d learned, marked the rotary irrigation systems American farmers used in the prairie states. This area had once been called the Great American Desert by explorers. It was the world’s bread-basket today, though other deserts, real ones, lay ahead, beyond the mountains. Such a large, strange country this was, full of strange people, most of them unbelievers. But they were people to be wary of, and so he had to watch himself and his conduct every minute, even more than he had in Italy. It was hard on a man never to relax, never to let down his guard. With luck he’d be able to relax when he met his friend, depending on the next stop in his flight. How strange that he’d never learned where the Emir lived. They’d been friends for many, many years. They’d even learned to ride horses together, at the same time and place, at a very young age, attended the same school, played and run together. But the wine took its toll, and he’d suffered through a long day. His eyes grew heavy, and he drifted off to sleep as night overtook the aircraft.
Clark boarded another airliner, took his first-class seat, and closed his eyes, not to sleep but to run his mind over the events of the day. What had he done? What things had he done wrong? What had he done right, and why had it not mattered?
The short version was manpower. The Caruso boys seemed competent enough, and Jack did fine, but that was no big surprise. The kid had some good instincts. Heredity, maybe. All in all, not a bad op, given how hastily it had been assembled. They’d known he was headed to Chicago. Better to have split into teams of two and then forwarded the photo electronically to make it easier to carry forward? Could they have done that? Technically