“All I have to do is fly to Latakia. Ferguson will take it from there.”
“Uh—”
“Charles, you’re with me,” she said. “Danny, we’ll see you in a few hours.”
14
The power of money had always impressed Judy Coldwell, but in the Middle East it could be absolutely intoxicating. A folded hundred-dollar bill could get one on an airliner that was supposedly booked; two would stop a customs agent’s inquiries. A single fifty-dollar bill was enough to ensure that her registration at the hotel was entered under a name different from the one on her passport — Benjamin Thatch.
Yesterday, Coldwell had stopped in Athens, Greece, where she visited a small pawnshop on a backstreet seldom traveled by tourists. She had retrieved a small suitcase, sewn into the lining of which was a list of accounts as well as the name of a local bank and a bank officer who did not ask many questions, as long as they were accompanied by the right number of hundred-dollar bills. Within an hour he had confirmed that the accounts in Morocco and Austria were accessible. Together, they held about two hundred thousand dollars. Unfortunately, that was a small sum compared to the task that needed to be accomplished.
Coldwell took off her shoes and reached to undo the top button on her blouse. She was tired from the journey, which had included stops in France and Egypt as well as Greece. She would take a bath and then sleep. Tomorrow she would resume her mission.
And do what, exactly? Make herself visible, surely. Find the places where the demons swarmed. She would go to the merchants of hate, mention her brother’s name. Eventually, the contact that Benjamin had made would come to her.
And then what? Would he scoff at thousands when millions were needed?
Coldwell got up from the chair and went to the bathroom. As she leaned over the tub she felt her hands begin to shake. She stared at her fingers; they seemed gnarled, foreign, not hers at all. Fear shot through her; she was not up to the task.
The room turned to ice. Coldwell felt as if she were falling. She had experienced this sensation several times in her life, always at moments of great stress. The first had been as a five-year-old, when she discovered her mother in the basement, her head wrapped in a plastic bag taped tightly so she could not breathe.
Suicide, though the five-year-old had no comprehension what that meant.
Coldwell found herself sitting on the floor, paralyzed. She was a little girl again, staring at the dead body, unable to go back up the stairs.
“I have faced great problems in the past,” Coldwell said aloud. “I can overcome this.”
Still she did not move. She tried thinking of achievements, of struggles. Not a year after she had been hired by the oil company, she had arranged for her boss (a slime and reprobate) to be freed from a Cairo jail after that unfortunate incident with several local boys. That task had been extremely difficult: harder than this, surely, and with greater personal risk. One man had held a knife at her throat and drawn blood.
If she could succeed then, she could succeed now.
Coldwell tried to rise but could not. Little had been at stake in Cairo beyond her life and that of her boss. This… this was an entire millennium waiting to be born.
That was all the more reason that she would succeed, wasn’t it? For she had the great weight of history on her side. Change was coming; it was inevitable. All she had to do was play her own small role in it, a droplet of rain in the stream.
“I can do it,” she said. “I will not falter.”
Slowly, unsteadily, Coldwell rose. A bath would feel wonderful. And after that, bed.
15
Monsoon sidled up next to Guns in the courtyard between the mosque and the outer wall. There were twenty or so men crowded around the ambulance, trying to see what had happened to the man the medics were working on.
Guns sneezed, then reached for a handkerchief. “Fouad,” he whispered to Monsoon. “Find out what happened.”
Monsoon didn’t acknowledge but shifted forward slightly, craning his head to get a better view. Then he asked a man in Arabic what was going on.
“Allah has called him,” answered the man.
“What?”
The man clutched at his heart. “His time,” he said. “It is a sign of holiness and worth to be called while praying,” said the man approvingly. “Perhaps the brother’s greatest wish was granted.”
Listening in the van, Ferguson turned to the small laptop computer he was using to track the signals from the locator devices planted on Fouad, Guns, and Monsoon, making sure they were working. He’d known the moment Fouad collapsed in the mosque that the Iraqi wasn’t faking; he’d gasped and made a muffled chirp like a young bird that had fallen from its nest. He upped the audio and heard him breathing irregularly, struggling for life.
Ferguson couldn’t help thinking of his father, who’d had a heart attack at home. He’d lain on the floor of his study for three days before the housekeeper found him.
A terrible thing, to die alone.
Ferguson pushed his headset to the side so he could talk on the sat phone to Corrigan back in the Cube. “You getting anything from our phone tap?”
“They called for the ambulance.”
“Nothing out of that office Guns went into?”
“We have all the lines you tapped. If that includes that line, we’ll get it. There’s no calls. You should have just planted a bug there,” Corrigan added.
Ferguson hated explaining things he thought should he obvious. “If I put the bug in there, and we’re right that Khazaal is going to be going there at some point, they’ll find the bug,” he told him. “Then we have to go back to square one.”
“They’re low probability of intercept,” said Corrigan.
“Did you read that out of the sales brochure?” Ferguson snapped. It was really a waste of time to get into details with other people, really a waste of time. “Listen, I need you to do something that’s going to seem strange, but is very important,” he told Corrigan. “I want you to call a number and give someone the access code so they can call my phone.”
“You sure?”
“Corrigan, do what I tell you. Here’s the weird part: the number is in Cuba.”
“Ferg—”
“If I explain it to you, I’ll have to kill you. So just do it. All right?”
He gave him the number.
“Am I looking for a response?” Corrigan said.
“You’ll get a machine. Give the access code, nothing else. Make it a one-time-use code.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“Coming out,” muttered Guns, just loud enough so it could be picked up by the bug he was wearing.
The ambulance started to move. Ferguson put the laptop down and moved to the front of the van, where Rankin and one of the marines they’d borrowed were sitting.
“Skip, you take the con back here, OK? Keep monitoring the area, checking the bugs, but don’t go in,” said Ferguson. “When Thera checks back after renting the hotel rooms, tell her to come over and spell you guys. Don’t
