Executive Actions (27 page)

“M
r. Morales, your pictures leave a lot to be desired,” Hevit complained. He ran through the digital camera’s memory chips, criticizing the American just for sport. “You do a fair job on our revered mosques, but your street shots are deplorable. So again I ask you. What were you really doing.” He paused for a second and corrected himself. “No, no. Let’s start with who you really are.”

So far D’Angelo’s Office of Internal Security inquisitor, through all of his theatrics, hadn’t gotten anywhere after three hours. They developed the film in the Nikon and although Fadi Kharrazi’s office building was in some of the pictures, it clearly was not the subject of the shots. When officer Number Three came into the sealed room and whispered in the major’s ear, D’Angelo presumed that they had made the call to Collingsworth and his story checked out. It wasn’t going well for the Hevit and he looked mad. He slapped his prisoner harder than before, only to see a frightened photographer shrink into a ball to protect himself, not a defiant spy.

“Please,” D’Angelo pleaded. “My name’s Morales. Just like it reads on my identification. I’m from Miami, Florida. My parents are Cuban. They emigrated from Havana. But you are right about one thing.” Hevit raised an eyebrow. “I’m not a particularly good photographer. That’s why I do books. But I’m into art history. I’m a pretty fair amateur archeologist and I wanted to come to Tripoli and see your buildings.”

D’Angelo gave him something.
Now let’s see what happens.

Hevit circled his quarry’s chair three times. Then he pressed right into his face. “I don’t like you, Tomás Morales. What’s more. I don’t believe you.”

Hevit swung his arm back ready to slap D’Angelo again. Then he smiled and dropped his hand. “An archaeologist, you say.”

“No, just a history buff.”

“A what?” Hevit asked not understanding the colloquial term.

“A buff. It’s just a hobby.”
Keep it going awhile
, he thought.

Hevit drew up another chair, swiveled it backwards and sat face to face with his captive. “No, no. That’s not what you said. Your words were a pretty
fair archaeologist
.”

“Amateur. I said amateur. It’s just a pastime.”

“Oh, well, let’s see what you know. Consider it a test, shall we?”

Now it was going to get interesting.

It was called a newsstand. But that was a misnomer. There were newspapers, but not ones that reported any actual news.

Roarke stopped at the kiosk near the hotel located on the edge of the souk, leafed through a few glossy German magazines, then opted for a Cuban cigar. He took it to the salesman, a haggard old man with a toothless grin.

Over the man’s shoulder was a broken down art deco clock; its face stained from years of cigarette and cigar smoke. There was nothing particularly distinctive about the timepiece except the time. It was an hour behind.

Roarke handed the man 200 dinars. He spat openly on the ground and handed back the wrong amount of change. Roarke looked at the amount, recognized that he was being stiffed, but left.

The wrong time on the clock and the wrong amount of change told him two important things.

Change of plans. Don’t count on your safety any longer.

Roarke strolled back to the hotel, casually smoking his cigar while watching his watchers. Once back, he’d wait until midnight. If D’Angelo hadn’t returned by then he was to proceed to a pre-selected location. From there everything was pre-arranged.

“So, tell me,” Hevit began. “Tell me all about our heritage you admire so much. Let’s start with Karamanli Mosque.”

And so amateur archaeologist Tomás Morales began reciting everything he knew, those things he learned in the past few days, and his personal impressions. He got into the details of the exterior walls, the building materials, and the poor patchwork done over the years. He threw in just enough facts to sound authoritative. He even covered the smog damage. All of it served to deflate Hevit. But the officer was not through.

“Such facts can be memorized by a talented spy, especially when you have learned exactly what pictures to take.” Hevit stood up and went to a door that opened when he knocked twice. “I will be back.”

“May I go to the a bathroom?”

“Piss in your shorts if you’d like,” the major said. “There are no bathrooms for American spies.”

D’Angelo made a good showing in the last round. No doubt, he’d be asked to play “Final Jeopardy” when Hevit returned. He silently hoped he’d remember enough to talk his way out of the mess.

Twenty minutes later the door opened again.

“Mr. Morales, a few more questions. It seems you do have friends who confirm that you are a photographer for this Collingsworth book company. But I remain skeptical. Not because of your recital about our great treasures, but your photography near the offices of the son of our Brother Leader. So one more test for the amateur archeaologist. Something you’re unprepared for.”

“Look, my job checks out. Just let me go.”

Hevit ignored the wimpy request. He removed a folded sheet of lined yellow paper from his jacket pocket, opening it meticulously. Hevit read it to himself and smiled. “This shall determine your guilt or innocence.”

“I’m not on trial here.”

“Shut up,” the major shouted louder than before. Then he pulled his voice back. “Perhaps you’re right. This is not a trial.” He lurched forward with his face no more than an inch from D’Angelo’s. “There is no judge or jury. But you are facing your executioner, Tomás Morales. So think carefully before answering my next and very
last
question.”

D’Angelo feared that he might have pushed the sadistic Major too far. He took a deep breath and locked onto the cold eyes.

“I just want to go home, major. I want to see my wife.” That was his most truthful answer of the day.

“Mr. Morales, your interest in ancient architecture must include Greece,” Hevit said ignoring the plea.

D’Angelo blinked and looked away.

“Well, we shall see. This took me some time to get. I am so sorry for my delay. But not being a student of archaeology myself, I needed to make a few calls. But you, on the other hand will be able to educate me on a place called Isthmia.”

D’Angelo gritted his teeth and met Hevit’s eyes again. They were still no more than an inch from his face. “So Mr. Morales. Tell me all about this rare archaeological site.”

“Isthmia?”

“Isthmia, Mr. Morales. As if your life depended on it.” Hevit leaned back and removed his service pistol from his shoulder holster. He flipped off the safety and repeated, “Isthmia.”

“Isthmia,” the American whispered, then cleared his throat.

“Louder!”

“…is along the old Scironian Road from Athens to the Peloponnesus.” D’Angelo’s voice strengthened and now his expression grew colder, more hateful. “It was home of the temple of Poseidon, a landmark to travelers in the first and second century
A.D.
Adjacent to it, I believe, was the sanctuary of Melikertes-Palaimon,” he paused in thought. “From the Roman period? Perhaps that’s why you asked? The Romans controlled your land for some time.” Then he stopped and corrected himself, “No, no. I’m mistaken. It definitely was not Roman. Melikertes-Palaimon. But Isthmia is best known for the Panhellenic Games, which was very popular in the Roman colonial period.”

Hevit was fuming. Every word undermined him more.

“The principal dig was in 1952, by Oscar Broneer and in the mid 1970s….”

“Enough. I should kill you right now!” He raised his gun toward D’Angelo when suddenly the door flew open. Another officer, a few years older and probably higher ranking than Hevit, entered and spoke in Arabic. Vinnie D’Angelo could actually understand them, but he didn’t let on and it didn’t matter. Language was no barrier to what was being said. It would have been apparent to anyone. The superior officer was dressing down a subordinate.

The major saluted and left, glaring at the man who defeated him.

The senior officer allowed Number Two to untie the prisoner’s hands.

“Thank you,” he said to the corporal without acknowledgment. “Thank you,” he then said to the man, memorizing his face.

“I suggest you and your friend, Mr. Gino, leave Tarabulus and the Great Jamahiriya as quickly as you can, Mr. Morales. You are no longer welcomed here,” he said in poor English. “And Major Hevit is not a happy man.”

Roarke acted increasingly concerned through the rest of the afternoon, making sure the hotel staff noticed. He constantly went up to the lobby to ask the front desk clerk if he’d heard anything from his colleague. The word was always no. Roarke figured the more annoying he appeared, the more his cover story would hold. Eventually, he laid out his clothes and put his suitcase on the bed knowing that microphones undoubtedly picked up the sounds. He had to assume cameras were trained on him as well. It was now 1930 hours; the night before they were scheduled to check out, so packing would not be unusual. But inwardly he was planning an immediate escape, traveling as light as possible. He set 2200, ninety minutes away, as his target.

Better start winding down.
Roarke hummed a made-up song for the sake of the microphones, intentionally sounding nervous. He yawned, then he killed the lights and turned on the television set to one of the pirated films on Kharrazi’s movie channel, Schwarzenegger in “Total Recall.” The film was more than half over. He pushed his suitcase out of the way and stretched across his bed. He lowered the sound twice during the next forty minutes to check again with the hotel reception desk.

When the movie ended he shut off the TV and closed his eyes. In another thirty-five minutes he would sneak out, hopefully after his watchers got bored listening and watching.

Roarke tuned his senses to the dangerous work ahead. He mentally ran through the backup plans. He felt it would be dangerous only until he slipped into a café two blocks away. Once there he would order a coffee, wait an appropriate amount of time, maybe twenty minutes or so, then go to the bathroom. From there he would exit through the window, one with a broken latch over the far stall. After dropping down into the alley behind the establishment his instructions were to turn left and just before the corner find a rotting faded blue door and knock three times.
That’s the signal,
he recalled.
Three knocks.

Three knocks. Roarke bolted forward. Had he fallen asleep? The sound seemed so real. He checked his watch. 2153. Then he heard knocking.
The door?
He automatically reached under his pillow for his gun. It wasn’t there. Roarke stopped fumbling and remembered that they’d come into the country unarmed.
Shit. Shit. Shit
, he mouthed but did not say aloud.

Three knocks again. He checked the window.
No escape there. Too high up
. He decided to approach the door cautiously.

“Come on, wake up and open the damned door!” came a booming voice from the other side. Roarke took in a huge breath and sighed with relief. “Time to get out of Dodge!” He was never happier to hear a wiser ass voice than D’Angelo’s.

“Where the hell were you,” he called out to D’Angelo, expecting not to hear an honest reply. “You’re gonna get us both fired.”

T
he two Americans went straight to the airport and waited standby for the next BA flight out of Tripoli. It wan’t the prescribed emergency route, but better to do it in public. They were able to fly to Cairo, make a change of planes to Amsterdam and then onto Heathrow. Neither men talked about what had occurred earlier that day until they had landed and rented a car to take them to Crowley Road in Oxford, home of the Collingsworth Publishers. However, the bruises on D’Angelo’s face had already told Roarke everything he really needed to know.

They arrived at 2015 hours and said their good-byes. The building was still open. D’Angelo remained at Collingsworth for another hour in the research department, biding his time in the archeological department, reading up more on Isthmia, the ancient city that saved his life.

Roarke, on the other hand, wanted to get back to Washington as fast as possible. After nursing a Coke from a vending machine for twenty minutes while perusing Collingsworth’s winter catalogue, he ordered up a lift to the train station for the 2 hour 45 minute ride to London. He checked in at Grosvenor House as Giannini, slept for two hours, then discreetly left through a service entrance. His double from Heathrow, still in London, would check him out three days later.

Roarke made his way to Devonshire Terrace changing cabs three times, taking the Underground, and walking two blocks before finding another cab. He liked the hotel, a popular three-star establishment with a comfortable bar. It was not known to most tourists and the location afforded him any number of ways to disappear through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.

It was now 0500. After settling in he dialed up Shannon Davis at home.

“Hello,” Davis answered.

“Hi. It’s Roarke.”

“Jesus, it’s about time. Where the hell have you been?”

“Getting a tan.”

“Well, get the fuck in here. I’ve been trying to reach you,” the FBI agent complained.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, late afternoon.”

“Good, because I’ve got some stuff you’re going to want to see.”

“So, where were you?” asked Shannon Davis.

“Out.”

“Really, Roarke? Out? Out of the city? Out of the district? Out of the country? I couldn’t get bubkis from the White House. So…”

“I was just out. Busy.”

“I see nothing much has changed. I ask questions and never get an answer. You ask me to get information for you and I never know why.”

“And your problem is?”

“Oh nothing. It’s just good to see you.”

“You too.”

The FBI man gave him a genuine bear hug. They both counted on each other. If the situation were reversed, Roarke would be the first to help Shannon.

“Well then, let me bring you up to date. I’ll start with Alfred Nunes. He’s still dead.”

“Very funny, Shannon.”

“But you’d be interested to know that he may not have died from a heart attack. Come with me to the lab. We’ll walk and talk and see if there’s anything new on the toxicology report.”

They left Shannon’s office on the 5
th
floor and walked down the hall to the elevator that would take them to the basement lab.

“No visible puncture wounds, no trauma to his body except when he fell off the rock he was sitting on. But we’re looking into the possibility of drugs. Honestly, I didn’t give it a second thought even though you were suspicious, until one of our guys, a fairly aggressive rookie found a footprint down stream.”

“A footprint? Not much to go on,” Roarke said.

“No, but we’re running it anyway. Looks like a boot. A man’s. Size 12ish.”

“You have a file of boot prints? Like fingerprints?” Roarke asked.

“Some, not many. But you go with what you have. We’re running it for potential matches now.”

They changed the subject in the elevator when two other people joined them. They were in the headquarters of the FBI, but as recent history had shown, they might as well be telling the Russian president directly. Secrets were hard to keep and security was always playing catch up to spying.

While most of the toxicological work was done in facilities at Quantico, the FBI still kept a lab in Washington. This is where a sample of Alfred Nunes blood was analyzed.

“Anything showing?” Shannon Davis asked a technician.

“Very hard to tell Shannon.” He acknowledged Roarke with a nod.

“It’s all right. This is Scott Roarke, Secret Service. He started us on this science experiment.”

“Thank you for your help,” Roarke offered.

“Don’t thank me yet. But I may be getting some positives for Sodium Morph.”

Roarke stopped him. “Sodium Morph?”

“Sorry. Sodium Morphate. It dissipates into the body damned fast so it’s hard to read this far out. I’m still working the probabilities since there’s no clear evidence left.”

Shannon leaned over and whispered to Roarke, “Sodium Morphate is lethal stuff. The kind of thing used by the mob and others.”

“Others?” Roarke said curiously.

“Assassins. From
all
countries. You fill in the blanks. We’ve got a list as long as the Washington Monument is high on suspected hits using the drug.”

“It’s nasty,” the technician offered while working on a computer model of Nunes blood compared with the characteristics of Sodium Morphate. “Painful and slow with all of the outward signs of a heart attack.”

They continued to talk about the deaths attributed to SM and those that were hinted about in the halls of the agency. After another fifteen minutes, the technician pulled back from the screen as two overlapping pictures merged as one.

“Yup,” the technician offered. “Your boy should have lived another good five to ten years. This was no natural heart attack. In my estimation, he was poisoned. I’d say he probably got a hefty swig of Sodium Morphate in something he drank.”

Roarke sighed. “What’s all this mean, Scott?”

“It means my life is going to be sheer hell for the next few months.”

The president’s mouth was full of prime rib when Roarke walked into the White House dining room. Morgan Taylor acknowledged him with the wave of his hand. Roarke automatically turned to the first lady.

“Hello, Mrs. Taylor,” Roarke politely offered. “Mr. President.”

“Hello, Scott,” Lucy Taylor answered.

Mrs. Taylor invited Scott to join them for dinner, which he gladly accepted.

“Well, you look like shit,” the president finally said.

Mrs. Taylor didn’t flinch. She was used to her husband’s language.

“Nothing that an early retirement wouldn’t solve.”

“Tell me about it,” the president said reaching for a roll.

Through the next few minutes they traded sports stories and caught up on movies the president and the first lady had seen, since neither man could discuss the more sensitive work issues yet.

“Morgan tells me that you’ve met a woman in Boston.”

Roarke gasped. He wasn’t used to personal questions.

“Well, yes.” Roarke said.

“And?” Mrs. Taylor continued.

“And what?”

“And do you like her?”

“Well, yes,” he answered positively squirming. He hadn’t spoken with Katie since he left Boston. She probably hated him, or worse yet, she forgot about him.

“Look honey, Scott’s obviously not quite ready to talk about this. We’ve got to give him time,” the president stated. Roarke appreciated Taylor letting him off the hook. “Anyway, we’ve got some business to catch up on, so…”

The first lady took her cue. “And I have some reading to do,” she said as she stood up. “You take care, Scott. And let me know when I can meet her.”

Roarke looked down, embarrassed.

“Oh, and take care of my husband, too,” she said. Roarke looked at the president. He telegraphed a look that seemed to say Mrs. Taylor had her sources as well. She kissed Roarke goodbye and they waited to speak until the door was closed.

Roarke looked at the president for an explanation.

“She probably just put things together, my boy.”

“It seems to run in this family,” Roarke joked. Then it was time for business. First he covered his trip to Libya, then a different topic, the likely cause of Alfred Nunes’ death. As he ran through the facts, the president did his normal pacing across the floor. He lit a cigar, smoked it, often stopping to examine the ashes as they accumulated at the end. It was a habit of the president’s whenever he listened intently. Roarke knew what would come next. A barrage of questions. Some rhetorical.

“Nunes was the attorney for the Lodge estate?”

“Yes sir.”

“And he lost representation to…” he trailed off allowing Roarke to fill in the blank.

“To Haywood Marcus in Boston.”

“Yes, your lady friend’s boss.”

“Yes.”

The president studied the ashes and flicked them in a crystal ashtray, the gift of the Chinese premier.

“Nunes dies. What does that suggest to you, Scott?”

“The end of a trail. Quite intentional.”

“Perhaps so. But from what you say, not completely provable.”

“Yet,” Roarke stated.

“Stay with the facts for now, Scott, because I have another interesting tidbit for you.”

The president wasn’t playing it out for theatrical sake. He was weaving meaningful pieces together himself.

“The
gentleman
you
encountered
in Boston along the Charles? You remember him, Scott?” the president remained intentionally vague.

“Yes,” Roarke responded.

“Apparently he was from out of town with prints that brought up a nice long record. Well, not exactly nice.”

Roarke laughed at the president’s delivery. He was obviously having fun but saving the best for last.

“He carried a cell phone,” Taylor said, again pacing. “Which led to his telephone records, which have proven very enlightening to the FBI, and will soon be in the Attorney General’s hands. We know for sure who called him and set him on his merry way.”

“A Mr. Haywood Marcus?” Roarke volunteered.

“Give the man a cigar.”

“Scott Roarke. No, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone by that name.”

“Well then, perhaps you should. I just arrived from abroad and I understand that you’re the sexiest woman in the Boston law community.”

“Well, you heard right,” Katie Kessler said through a chuckle. “And you, Mr. Roarke, have quite a compelling voice. I bet you make all the girls cry.”

“There’s only one on my list,” he bravely added.

Katie prided herself on being quick on the uptake. This time she stuttered and then confessed, “Scott, where were you? What happened?”

“Not over the phone. I have one stop first, then I’ll see if my boss will give me a few days rest.”

She smiled to herself. “You come up here, but I guarantee you won’t get much rest.”

Duane Parsons typed in his password, jumped over three security fences he’d built, and called up his finished j-pegs. Roarke peered over his shoulders.

“I think I have a pretty good extrapolation here, based on the predictable variables,” he told Roarke. “But I still need those other pictures I told you about.”

“I’ll try to come up with something,” the Secret Service agent answered. “I’ve just been busy.”

“Family, the kid’s family at various ages. Anything that would help me input some…any genetic influences. Anyway, here it comes.”

Roarke watched as the image of the original Boy Scout picture appeared on the 19” flat screen.

“Okay, here’s your newspaper clipping.” He typed in a command and an enhanced picture appeared, which Touch Parsons then added to a split screen with the first.

“You see I cleaned up the picture. The grain’s gone. It’s sharpened. I’ve doubled the pixels and played with the gray scale. Next, I zoomed in on the boy’s face and cleaned it up more.”

Another pair of images appeared on the screen as Parsons quickly typed. These were close ups with enhanced facial detail. Roarke could just about see the pores.

“This is the one I modeled. The real challenge is not to impose my aesthetics on the subject, but to focus on what’s unique in the character. Otherwise, the individual would disappear during the digital aging process.”

Touch blew up the clear picture on the right and then slowly put it through a series of dissolves. In an extraordinarily dreamlike progression, the boy aged, with the face elongating, then broadening, his hair growing, then thinning, the eyes narrowing, the nose expanding. “Honestly, there’s no software that can guarantee we’ll come up with ‘the’ most accurate picture, but the developmental characteristics should be within a range of acceptable. I use a PhotoShop 9.0 on a Wacom tablet. The files use a helluva lot of RAM and a project this complex takes hours to render. After I saw where I was going, I added other variables like stress, possible weight gain, the effect of exercise or the lack of it. You name it. I threw out some of the choices the computer offered and took some guesses on the features including eye and hair color.”

The age progression continued. Roarke watched in amazement. The face aged from the teenager to college student to a twenty and thirty-something in slow two-year increments. At last it dissolved to a 47-year-old man wearing a suit and tie of Parson’s choice.

“I thought you’d like the clothes. They say they make the man.”

Touch hit Ctrl-P on his computer and an Epson Stylus Photo inkjet whirred. A minute later, a full-color glossy 8x10 photograph sat in the tray. It depicted a strikingly handsome man with a broad distinctive smile, high cheekbones, and slightly almond eyes.

Roarke silently examined it for what seemed like an eternity to Parsons.

“Well?” the photo expert asked.

“This is absolutely incredible. Are you sure you’ve got him nailed?”

“Am I sure? Well, no. You’ve got to get me more family pictures. But I think I’m within striking distance. Anyway, it’s the best I can do for now.”

Roarke continued to look at the photo in amazement. “Thank you, Touch. Do you have an envelope I can put this in?”