Dark Zone (20 page)

But she didn’t. She quickened her pace, following Rockman’s directions in her ear as they made her way to the other terminal building.

“We’re supposed to be on that plane,” said Dean to the clerk at the boarding gate.

The man looked up from his terminal. “Oh. Hold on. There’s some sort of computer glitch.”

“You sure?”

The clerk glanced down. His terminal was working again.

“Lucky thing for you,” he said. He found them in the computer and called over to the plane, which had experienced problems of its own and hadn’t pulled away yet.

“Nice to have friends in high places,” said Dean as they walked down the tunnel.

“Right,” said Lia.

Dean had known Lia long enough to realize she wasn’t the effusive type, but he expected a bit more of a hello. He stowed his bag in the overhead rack and sat next to her. Lia kept her head turned as if there was something interesting to see through the window.

“Hey,” he said softly. He reached to touch her shoulder gently; she jerked away.

He felt as if he’d walked in on the middle of a movie that was hard to follow. They’d spent a week together on the Maine shore after their last assignment—long, languid days steering a friend’s sailboat offshore and cool nights in the seashore village near the borrowed house. He’d loved the unhurried rhythm and casual intimacy.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Charlie Dean,” she said. “Just fine.”

“That’s a good makeup job on your eye.”

“I suppose you’re an expert on makeup.”

“I’ve had a few black eyes in my day. What happened?”

“I walked into a door. What do you think?”

“You’re all right?”

“Peachy.”

All right, he told himself. Give her some space. He turned and leaned his seat back, closing his eyes as if there were actually a possibility he could relax enough to nap.

29

The chemist’s house was a small brick building close to the road and bordering on a large farm. The field of sunflowers had been harvested very recently, perhaps that morning, and Karr found that the smell tickled his nose in an unpleasant way. He started to sneeze as LaFoote unlocked the door to let them in, and then stood in the foyer sneezing.

The sneeze probably saved their lives.

As Karr reached for a handkerchief, he saw a thin thread strung across the bottom of the doorway to the left. He grabbed the Frenchman, pulling him down just as the back of the house exploded, showering them with debris. Karr pulled the old man with him as he crawled out. Just as he reached the path there was a second explosion, this one much louder and so violent that it rolled them into the nearby roadway. A fireball shot into the air. Large pieces of wood and stone began falling around them; a piece of brick about the size of a fist bounced off Karr’s shoulder, and an even larger one flew by as he got up.

LaFoote was breathing all right, but he was dazed, and it took Karr a good two or three minutes to get him back to full consciousness. By then, Telach had started screaming in Karr’s ear, asking what was going on, and there was a siren in the distance.

“I think there was an explosive rigged to ignite the gas main,” said Karr, speaking to LaFoote as well as the Art Room. “Or something. There was a thread on that inner doorway.”

“It wasn’t booby-trapped last week,” said LaFoote, coughing.

“All right, time for us to retreat if we can,” Karr said.

“Why?”

“Because my French isn’t up to an eight-hour workout with the police,” said Karr. “Come on.”

30

Mussa’s phone rang just as he was about to board the airplane. He hesitated before answering—if he used the phone, his self-imposed rules called for him to dispose of it, and that would mean that he would have no way of communicating before evening.

However, if he did not answer it, he would have lost whatever opportunity this information provided. So he pulled the phone from his pocket and stepped aside.

“Yes?” he answered cheerfully.

“The farmhouse has exploded.”

Mussa knew which farmhouse was being referred to—the chemist Vefoures’—but was nonetheless surprised. Of course, being surprised and showing it were two different things.

“A shame,” said Mussa. “We should do something for the family of the man who was sent to disarm it, though I suppose his carelessness was to blame.”

“It wasn’t him. He hadn’t gotten to it yet.”

Hadn’t gotten to it?

Mussa took a moment to stifle his anger. He had asked—directed—that the bomb be disabled within a few hours of learning that Donohue had done his job in England. The delay was inexcusable, though of course there would be some nonsensical excuse.

Another sign of corruption and seduction, the weakness of the West corroding Islamic values. When Mussa was young, orders were carried out promptly. Now, underlings worked on their own schedule.

“It was to be dismantled in only a few hours,” said his caller, sensing his anger.

“These complications are unfortunate and unwelcome,” said Mussa.

“No one was killed,” said the caller. “The police are there. One of our friends made sure to get close enough for information.”

“The bomb did not go off by itself,” said Mussa, barely keeping his calm.

“No. We have additional information. Someone saw a friend of the chemist, a Monsieur LaFoote, at mass the other day. You had asked about him the other day.”

LaFoote?

But the Irishman Donohue had already killed him. Even if one of Mussa’s network had not verified the shooting, he would have been confident that it had been carried out. Another man might have missed or botched the job, but not the obnoxious Donohue.

“LaFoote set off the bomb?”

“It seems possible.”

“You are sure it was LaFoote?”

“Yes.”

“Have you watched his house?”

“Not since you said it was unnecessary.”

LaFoote had been poking around into the chemist’s disappearance, raising trouble with the DST. He had even gone so far as to try to get American intelligence interested. Mussa had enough sources within the French intelligence agency so that he did not have to worry about problems from that quarter, at least not for the time being, but the Americans were a different matter entirely. Fortunately, the fool had made a call from Vefoures’ phone two or three weeks ago. When Vefoures was first approached to work for them the phone was tapped with an automated device that worked only when the call was placed; it had been a surprise to find a call had been made, and Mussa’s people had had some difficulty figuring out what was going on. Mussa, of course, had concluded it must be this LaFoote, who until now had only been an annoying ant, if that. And Mussa might not have been concerned, except that a number of CD-ROMs containing data on the explosives had been taken, apparently by Vefoures before he was killed. The data on them was supposedly technical—but who knew?

Interestingly, the disks had not shown up in England.

LaFoote back at the house—perhaps the disks had been there all along? The house had been searched but must be searched again.

And this LaFoote—even an ant could be annoying.

“Prepare information on Mr. LaFoote for a friend. Precise information,” Mussa told his caller. “And this time, be sure that it includes photographs.”

“It will,” said the caller.

“Have Vefoures’ house searched again.”

“We have been over it twice. There are no CD-ROMs or anything that might—”

“Have the house searched again,” said Mussa. “And this time they may take whatever they find, including the money—but the search shall be thorough. And there will be an additional reward if you find the disks.”

“I will do it myself.”

I’ll bet you will,
thought Mussa, pushing the button to end the call. As much as he disliked greed, it remained a most useful motivator.

31

Johnny Bibleria paced around the conference room, walking the perimeter at a rapid pace. Every so often he glanced up at the numbers on the white board at the front of the room.

“Nothing is related,” he repeated. “Nothing.”

They were missing something basic.

“What information would make a murder worthwhile?” Rubens had asked him. It was an excellent question, Johnny thought—but not the sort that a cryptologist should ask. It wasn’t even something for a mathematician to contemplate. The answer involved morality or at least judgments separate from numbers. A mathematician needed a sequence.

Johnny stopped his pacing. He thought he saw part of a Fibonacci sequence in the updates of the weather site.

No.

Johnny Bib took one of the pens from the table and stepped toward the board. The key must be the change out of sequence, but the numbers were merely a digit or two off. He made a grid based on the days of the week, ran the numbers in a line, put them backward ...

Maybe it was like a pointer in a codebook. Use this page ...

If it was a pointer, then they could see who had accessed the site and follow that person to the relevant Web page.

Except that they didn’t have a record of the visits to the sites.

Johnny went back to the board. They were watching for another change on the weather site, hoping to see who accessed it and where the computer went from there. But that meant they were reacting, waiting. And there was no guarantee that they would be able to find anything useful if it did change.

There had to be a pattern
somewhere
that he could detect, surely.

32

It sounded absurdly easy when Rubens outlined it—walk into the restroom, remove the old package, put in a new one.

But in real life, the fifty feet down the hall to the steps that led to the lavatory were treacherously long. Lia’s legs trembled beneath her long, African-style skirt. The muscles in her thighs and calves felt weak and her mouth horri bly dry.

There were soldiers posted along the walls and at the steps. Each man had a French-made FAMAS assault rifle, a smallish, odd-looking weapon nicknamed the bugle (or
le
clarion). Lia pulled the scarf a little farther down around her face but found herself staring at the weapons as she walked by, wondering if the guns were safed or ready to fire. It took all of her self-control to wrest her gaze back toward the carpet on the floor.

She started to slip on one of the steps as she descended. She grabbed the railing, just barely keeping herself from falling off the step.

I can do this,
she told herself.
I’m just going to the bathroom.

Two more soldiers stood outside the women’s room near the bottom of the steps. She put her hands on her scarf, hooking her thumbs beneath the fabric—it wasn’t an attempt to feign modesty or even hide her identity but rather to keep her hands from jerking wildly out of control.

I can do this. It’s the easiest thing in the world.

An attendant sat inside, an old woman in a black chador who jumped as Lia opened the door.

The old woman began speaking in Arabic. Lia didn’t wait for the translator to explain, nor did she attempt one of the rudimentary phrases she’d memorized on the plane. She walked directly to the last stall and closed the door.

“You were supposed to give her change,” said Sandy Chafetz, her runner. “You get towels.”

Lia didn’t answer. She had no intention of leaving the stall now that she was inside. She knelt next to the commode. There wasn’t enough room to see what she was doing, and so she slid her fingers along the floor until they found the bolt cover. Sure of where it was, she withdrew her hand and reached to the pocket of her dress, removing what looked like a small lipstick holder. She twisted the two halves, then pushed them together. The device was designed to provoke a response from the bug beneath the bolt cover. If she got a beep from the device, she would know that it had not been tampered with.

That, of course, was how it was supposed to work in theory. Lia thought that a really clever engineer could come up with a way to defeat it—the Desk Three people did that all the time. She felt herself leaning her head back as she reached in.

Nothing.

Run. Run now!

She put her hand back in the space behind the toilet, reaching farther.

Still nothing.

Get out!

Her hand trembled. A tiny beep sounded as she pulled it back.

“You’re good to proceed,” said Chafetz.

Lia took out a small medicine bottle with an eyedropper and placed it down on the floor, where she carefully unscrewed the top. The bottle held a strong solvent, which she needed to loosen the bolt cover. The scent was somewhere between rubber cement and ammonia; Lia coughed so hard she nearly lost the dropper.

The compact. She could use the mirror to see what she was doing.

As Lia reached into her pocket, her knee brushed against the bottle of solvent. Its contents spewed on the floor in front of the toilet.

Her hand trembled as she tried refilling the dropper from the nearly empty bottle, but she got no more than a half of the plastic tube filled. During the mission briefing they’d told her it would take at least four full eyedroppers of the solvent to remove the glue holding the bolt cover in place.

Lia applied what she could, trying to work the few drops around the base as if the dropper were a paintbrush. She got a little more from the floor, but most of the liquid had burned into the grouting around the mosaiclike floor tile. Panic surged in her chest, turning her esophagus to fire.

Almost too late she realized she was going to retch.

She got the top of the commode up just in time. Tears ran from her eyes; she gripped the porcelain lip with her hands, wanting to die.

33

Dean turned the comer behind the building, walking down the narrow alley toward a neighboring street. Two- and three-story brick apartment buildings nudged against one another on the left, crowding out much older structures that seemed as if they’d been made entirely of sand and glued into place. The charity building dated from just after World War II and was one of two nearly identical buildings lining the short avenue. The offices the terrorists used were on the second story at the corner, two floors over the restroom where Lia was.