Atha was so anxious when they finally landed at the Tripoli airport that he left Ahmed and went straight to the Alfonse, the hotel where Rostislawitch had said to look for him.
The Alfonse’s lobby was a pleasantly large space, with couches and chairs parked in different groupings to give a show of intimacy. There was a piano, some very thick rugs, and thin side tables. A wide staircase led to reception rooms on the second floor. The check-in counter was opposite the front doors, albeit separated by a good eighty feet.
Atha went to the desk and asked if Rostislawitch had checked in; the clerk said he had but would not reveal his room number. Atha started to argue, but before he could say anything the man picked up a phone and held it out to him.
“Call his room. The operator will connect you.”
Atha looked around, trying to see where the operator was, but couldn’t. He got a computerized voice telling him the guest he had called was unavailable, but he could leave a message.
“This is Atha. I’m in the lobby,” he said, then hung up.
Atha went over to the Steinway piano and sat on a sideless couch next to it, which gave him a good view of the hallway leading to the elevator. Arms crossed, he tried to lean back on the couch, telling himself to relax though he knew it was hopeless.
Upstairs, Ferguson opened his suitcase and took out the hair coloring kit, adding some gray highlights to his temples and sideburns — just a touch, the way he remembered his father when they first moved to Cairo. Then he took a fake moustache, fiddled with it a bit, put it back, selected a beard.
Too much.
The Fu Manchu looked good, but that wasn’t particularly Russian.
He went back to the beard. Ferguson didn’t mind if Atha thought it was a disguise; he just didn’t want him to connect the man wearing it to any glimpse he’d had in Bologna.
A pair of thick-rimmed glasses, his hair slicked back, a thick wool sweater — the overall effect was Russian, with a slight nod toward Berlin in the sixties.
The video feed showed Atha was still sitting alone in the lobby, rocking back and forth impatiently. Ferguson decided that he couldn’t keep the Iranian waiting much longer. He stuck the Walther under his sweater, tucked a magazine of bullets in his left boot and a smoke grenade in his right, then went down to play Let’s Make a Deal.
25
Thomas Ciello had used the scripts Fibber had given him to map out Kiska Babev’s travels based on her credit card expenditures. That had allowed Ciello to find possible connections between two of the T Rex assassinations, one in Seoul, Korea, where she had visited a week before a murder, and one in Turkey, when she had been in Romania a day later.
The fact that the connections were tangential didn’t bother Ciello; any experienced intelligence agent would be careful about leaving a trail that directly matched with a murder he or she committed, and an assassin with a reputation and track record like T Rex’s would be even more thorough.
But what did bother Ciello was the sheer paucity of records, tangential or otherwise.
He loved that word,
In this case, the lack of information suggested not that he was dealing with a UFO incident — Ciello knew he could not be so lucky — but rather that he was missing a great number of accounts. Clearly, Kiska had other credit cards that he was not yet aware of. If he found them, he reasoned, he would undoubtedly find more definitive proof that she was T Rex.
And when he found it, he would be able to expunge — another of his favorite words, though not linked to a UFO case — the dark cloud hanging over him for his alleged misidentification of the nature of the Bologna attack.
Corrigan, of course, thought that two connections, along with the air trip to France, were proof enough. He had sidetracked Ciello with other assignments, telling him to dig up information about Iran’s biological research labs and Libyan hotels. But finally, scut work done, Ciello began trying to puzzle out how to find the accounts.
Comparative searches — looking for similar expenses — were useless in this case, because the accounts were used so sporadically that the pattern they established matched three-quarters of the bank’s accounts. He had to work the other way — he needed to know Kiska’s other aliases.
Ciello couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t already in her file. It was fairly easy to forge documents in Russia, so Kiska could be literally anyone. The problem for most people when they adopted a phony identity, however, was that they needed some way to keep track of it. That was why many agents who used different names to cloud their identity kept their first name or some variation; it was much easier to remember.
Kiska’s cousin in the mental institution had six different accounts, all apparently used by Kiska. Her parents, who lived nearby, had one — which was clearly not used by Kiska, since the charges were all made within a fifty- mile radius of their home.
Ciello felt his back tightening up again and decided he had best take a break. He got up from his computer and stretched gently. Then he lay down on the floor, arms over his head, legs straight out. He closed his eyes.
The harsh overhead lights of his office shone through his eyelids. The white spots hovered together, like a fleet of spaceships spinning together.
Friends.
Or rather, other patients.
Ciello jumped up and began entering the address of the nursing home into one of the search scripts for the bank companies.
26
Ferguson walked out of the elevator and turned right past the back of the grand staircase. He swung around past the restaurant, avoided the maid cleaning the carpet with a vacuum that looked fifty years old, and headed toward the Steinway piano. He pointed his gaze straight ahead, oblivious to everything around him. He passed Atha, then spun around quickly, pointing at the Iranian’s face.
“Anghuyu Jahan, you are here to see Dr. Rostislawitch,” he said in Russian.
Atha said in Farsi that he didn’t speak Russian. Ferguson pointed at Atha, turned his head left and right to look around, then sat down in the chair across from him.
“Do you speak English?” said Atha.
“I can speak English,” said Ferguson, injecting a heavy Russian accent into his voice. “You are here for Dr. Rostislawitch. Your name is Anghuyu Jahan. You have people call you Atha. You are not to be trusted.”
“Wait just a second.”
Ferguson leaned forward. “No, Mr. Atha, as you call yourself, you wait. Who do you think you are dealing with? Just a professor from a laboratory? What do you think?”
Atha was not about to be bullied. “Tell Dr. Rostislawitch when he is ready to talk with me, he can communicate in the usual manner,” he said, rising.
“I suggest you sit down, Mr. Atha,” said Ferguson, showing his drawn pistol.
