Angels of Wrath (4 page)

“She doesn’t have to worry,” said Rankin. But he waited for her to come on the line.

“Stephen, what’s going on?”

“Looks like some Palestinian whack job blew herself and our subject up. I don’t think he was a specific target.”

“How’s Ferg?”

“OK.”

“Corrigan said he was in the hospital.”

“He’s all right. They’re checking him out.”

“The embassy will send someone to the morgue to handle Thatch,” said Corrine. “Can you get over there with them to see if someone else turns up?”

“Not a problem,” Rankin said. She was right; he should have thought of that himself. “I’ll get back to you.”

~ * ~

erguson held his hand up as the nurse approached with the needle. “I don’t need it, thanks.”

“It’s just a painkiller.”

“Doesn’t look like Scotch.” He smiled at her, and, keeping his hand out to ward her off, pushed off the gurney. “You’re frowning at me,” he said, reaching for the curtains. “Don’t do that.”

“Of course I’m frowning. You need treatment.”

“I
’ve had worse hangovers,” said Ferguson. He glanced toward the wall and saw that it was past two o’clock. “Can I have a glass of water? I have to take a pill.”

Ferguson reached into his pocket for a small metal case he used to carry his medicine—he took two different types of thyroid hormone replacement drugs every day—and pulled out a small pill.

“Should I ask you what that is?” said the nurse when she returned with a cup.

“I misplaced my thyroid one day,” he told her. “Left it with my car keys and couldn’t find either. The car was easier to replace.”

Stein had just finished talking to some of the other victims who’d been taken here when Ferguson found him.

“Get anything?” Ferguson asked.

“No. Looks pretty random. Fanatics.” He shook his head. “They kill their women and children. Life means nothing.”

Ferguson had locked eyes with the woman perhaps a half-second before the bomb ignited, maybe at the moment that she had pushed the trigger. He saw them now, blank, questioning—doubt, he thought, not faith.

Am I going to paradise?

Will the bomb go off?

Or maybe he saw none of that. Maybe that was his concussion reinterpreting what had happened. Because, damn, his head hurt.

“Let’s go over to the hotel,” he told Stein.

~ * ~

uns watched as the FBI people worked the room Thatch had left early this morning, and it had been cleaned; still, the three men moved through, meticulously lifting prints from the surfaces and using chemical sniffers to check for traces of explosives and other items. Thatch’s suitcase sat on a folding stand near the bed. It contained two pairs of pants, two shirts, three pairs of underwear, one change of socks.

Not enough socks, in Guns’s opinion. As a Marine, he’d learned in boot camp to think of his feet before anything else.

“Find it yet?” asked Ferguson, walking into the room. Stein trailed behind him.

“What the hell are you doing here, Ferg?” said Guns. “You’re supposed to be checked out.”

“The nurses weren’t pretty enough to stay.”

“Are you all right?” said Manson. The FBI supervisor sounded like a concerned parent.

“I’ve been better.” Ferguson sat in the chair opposite the bed, slowly scanning the room. “No money in the mattress? No microdots?”

“What’s a microdot?” said Manson.

“You don’t know what a microdot is?”

The FBI agent shook his head.

“Rent some old James Bond movies sometime,” Ferguson said. “See how it’s supposed to be done.”

“This might be something,” said one of the forensics people. He brought over a piece of paper containing an image lifted from a pad of hotel paper. By placing the pad in a device similar to a flatbed scanner, they had found an impression left from writing on an upper sheet. The expert gave it to Manson, who passed it to Ferg. It had an address on it.

“So, he was supposed to go to Cairo?” Ferg handed the paper to Stein.

“Cairo wasn’t mentioned in the wiretap.”

“Maybe he didn’t have to.”

“You sure that’s a Cairo address?”

“Yeah.” Ferguson had spent several years off and on in Egypt when his father was based there with the CIA.

“That’s not necessarily his handwriting,” said the FBI expert.

Stein stared at the address. “It’s near the Old City, the Islamic quarter.”

“Isn’t every quarter in Cairo Islamic?” asked Ferguson.

The Mossad agent smiled wryly, handing back the paper.

~ * ~

3

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS LATER IN THE DAY . . .

As Thera Majed got out of the car in front of the suburban Chicago home, she noticed the basketball hoop and backboard over the garage. It reminded her of the hoop on her parents’ home in Houston, and she thought of what her parents would feel if someone were coming to tell them she’d been blown up by a fanatic in Jerusalem.

The situation here wasn’t precisely parallel. The driveway Thera was walking up belonged to Benjamin Thatch’s sister, Judy Coldwell. And Thatch might justifiably be called a fanatic himself.

Thera straightened her skirt, letting the State Department official and the Cook County sheriff’s deputy take the lead. The men thought she was with the FBI, a mistake she had encouraged. In actual fact, Thera was a CIA First Team operative working with the FBI on the Seven Angels case. She’d come up from New Mexico primarily because she was the one member of the task force easily spared. The others, all FBI agents, were trailing church members and preparing search warrants to shut down the group. While the Chicago-area FBI agent with her knew she wasn’t with the Bureau, he’d been briefed on the sensitivity of the operation and let the misconception stand as well.

Judy Coldwell opened the door as they reached the stoop. “I know why you’re here,” she announced. “Come in.”

Coldwell led them inside to a dining room off the living room. Even if Thera hadn’t known from the backgrounder that Coldwell and her husband didn’t have any children, she could have read it in the house’s pristine order and the ceramic vases that sat on low tables near the side of the room. Coldwell, thirty-six, looked maybe ten years younger. Unlike her older brother, who’d been overweight, she was extremely thin; her five-eight frame might have been suited for modeling had her face been prettier. It had a harshness to it, a bleached asceticism maybe. Thera thought it might come from dieting fanatically, though it could just as easily have been a symptom of suppressed grief.

“My brother and I really weren’t that close,” said the woman, looking at Thera. “I didn’t even know he was overseas. Not until you called.”

“That would have been Mary Burns,” said the State Department rep. He took charge, telling Coldwell what she already knew: her brother had been killed by a suicide bomber; the Israelis would release the body in a few days, and he would be flown home at their expense.

Coldwell nodded once or twice. Her face remained almost entirely blank, cheeks pinched ever so slightly, as if she smelled a faint odor of vinegar. Only when the sheriff’s deputy told her that police protection would be provided if she wanted did she speak.

“I don’t believe that would be necessary. Do you?”

“Probably not,” agreed the deputy.

Thera watched Coldwell. She was an accountant with a small local practice. Thera thought it a cliché that accountants were more comfortable with numbers than people, but Coldwell seemed to be living proof of it.

Distant rather than uncomfortable, Thera thought. People reacted in different ways to grief; it was difficult to judge them from the exterior.

“I wonder, Mrs. Coldwell,” said Thera when the last of the mundane but necessary details of the death and its aftermath had been squared away, “if you’d be willing to help us with an aspect of the situation that may seem a little unusual.”

Coldwell blinked at her. “I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Thera Majed. I’m with a task force. The FBI, as you could imagine, is interested in examining the circumstances as they occurred in Jerusalem.” Thera made her answer seem improvised and almost haphazard, though it was anything but.

“The FBI is investigating?” asked Coldwell.

“Our interest is routine. It wouldn’t be an official investigation, unless the Israelis made a request.”

“Did they?”

“They’ve asked for some help on our part.” Even if they were necessary, Thera disliked having to use weasel words. She wasn’t lying exactly, but she was leaving a lot out. “Primarily, in a case like this, the agencies have to make sure that what seems to have happened, did happen.”

“Can there be any doubt?”

“It’s not really my job to say that.” She smiled, as if agreeing with Coldwell that, of course, there could be no doubt at all. “In cooperating with the Israeli government, we would like a few more days before this became public.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“The government of Israel is withholding public confirmation of your brother’s identity for forty-eight hours,” said Thera. “Just so that everything can be checked out. Our government is prepared to acquiesce.”

“Why?”

“As I said, a few days to look into this quietly would be most useful.”

“Are you saying my brother wasn’t a random victim?”

“I’m not saying that, no. It looks as if he was, but there are questions. The Israelis would like to be sure, and so would we.” The Israelis
were
withholding Thatch’s name, though at the FBI and CIA’s request.

“Was my brother doing something illegal?”

“Do you think he was?” asked Thera.

“I don’t. But it sounds to me as if you do.”

Thera had reached the point in her script where she had to make a judgment call: what exactly to tell the sister. She could just shrug and pass this off as routine. Or she could gamble that Coldwell might know something that might be useful to the FBI.

Which way to go?

“Have you ever heard of the Church of Seven Angels?” asked Thera.

“What is it? A church? A born-again church?”

“It is a church, but it’s not Christian,” said Thera, studying the emotionless face across from her. “They’re not Christian at all. They consider themselves . . . apart.”

Thera struggled for the right word. The church members believed that they were part of a “post-Christian vanguard” in the same position to Christians as Christians were to Jews.

“Your brother flew several times a year to New Mexico to attend services,” said Thera. “It seems that he may have gone to Jerusalem on their behalf.”

“On some sort of tour?”

“No. Business.”

“For a church? Were they his clients?”