Legends (32 page)

In the middle of the hangar Daoud rolled clear of the moving van and rose to his feet. He raised one hand to shield his eyes from the headlights and started to walk in the direction of the bullhorn. When he was halfway there the hand holding the pistol emerged from behind his back. Lincoln could hear the hiss of two silenced shots before several rifles firing on automatic cut him down. The Egyptian, propelled backward by the bullets slamming into his chest, crumpled to the cement. Sobbing like a baby, the fat Egyptian boy crawled from under the van to his grandfather’s body and flung his arms around him. Then the boy stumbled to his feet and, peering through his tears into the headlights, tugged the pistol from his shoulder holster. Before he could get it clear, high powered bullets burrowed into his chest.

Sweeping the ground before them with blinding hand-held klieg lights, a line of armed men wearing black windbreakers started advancing through the hangar. When one of them turned to shout an order, Lincoln noticed the large white letters “FBI” on the back of his jacket. “Wait till we can see the whites of their eyes,” Leroy whispered to Lincoln, who was hiding behind a stanchion next to the crouching Texan. “I’ll plug the one who’s leading the pack.”

The FBI agents drifted past the van, the beams of their klieg lights spearing the darkness ahead of them as they closed in on the sheets of corrugated roofing at the rear of the hangar. Lincoln thought he recognized the stumpy figure of Felix Klick in the lead, hunched low with a bullhorn in one hand, a pistol in the other. When Klick was fifteen yards away he brought the bullhorn to his lips. “This is your last chance Leroy Streeter, Lincoln Dittmann, you can’t escape. Come out with your hands over your heads.”

Klick took several more steps as he spoke. Leroy, steadying his shooting arm with his left hand, his left elbow locked into his gut, raised the Webley and Scott and took careful aim at Klick’s head. Lincoln had hoped they would be captured without a fight, but the timing of the raid on the hangar had gone wildly wrong. The op order had called for the agents at the campfire in the field to arrive at the back of the hangar as the headlights coming off the Pulaski ramp became visible. Leroy and Daoud, distracted by the approaching automobiles, would be easily overpowered before they could put up a fight. Now there was nothing for Lincoln to do but save Klick from the bullet. In one flowing gesture he raised his cane and brought it crashing down on Leroy’s arm, shattering his wrist. Klick jumped when he heard the bone splinter. Leroy gazed up with more pure hate in his eyes than Lincoln had ever seen in a human being. His lips moved but no words emerged until he managed to croak, “You’re one of them!”

“Felix, we’re over here,” Lincoln called, stepping around the corrugated sheeting into view.

Klick came over and played his light on Leroy, who was gaping in astonishment at his right hand hanging limply from the wrist. The wooden-handled Webley and Scott lay on the cement. Two FBI agents gripped Leroy under his armpits and dragged him toward the automobiles. Using a handkerchief, Klick retrieved Leroy’s weapon and held it by the barrel. “Something tells me I owe you one,” he said.

Lincoln and Klick walked over to where Daoud and his grandson lay. Medics were kneeling next to both of them, listening with stethoscopes for any signs of life. The medics looked up at the same moment and shook their heads. Someone illuminated the corpses with a klieg light and started taking photographs from different angles. Other agents covered the corpses with lengths of silver plastic. An agent wearing elastic surgeon’s gloves brought over the handgun that had been retrieved from under the corpse of the fat Egyptian boy. He held it out, grip first, so Klick could get a better look at it.

“Holy mackerel,” Klick said. He shook his head in disgust. “It sure looked like the real McCoy to me.”

Presiding over the formal postmortem in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick at Langley, Crystal Quest made no effort to tame the shrew in her. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, she seethed. The adults pretending to be FBI agents in the field behind the hangar had been spotted by a child by a child7 before the raid was even underway. Daoud had walked into a hail of bullets so as not to be taken alive. Lincoln Dittmann’s legend was blown when he saved Klick’s life. As an added extra bonus, the FBI clowns under Felix Klick’s command had gunned down a juvenile armed with a plastic pistol. Holy Christ, it hadn’t even been loaded with water. Leroy Streeter Jr.” who would get a life sentence for attempting to blow up a square mile of Wall Street, knew precious little about the al-Qa’ida cells and less about the Saudi who was organizing them; Streeter’s expertise was limited to a small group of nutty white supremacists in Texas that had already been infiltrated by so many state and Federal agents half the group’s dues came from the government. To add humiliation to embarrassment, any hope of nabbing the Saudi had evaporated the night before when the cretins from the Argentine State Intelligence had bungled the raid on Boa Vista. Talk about stealth, they had headed into the Brazilian mato graso in half a dozen giant army helicopters flying at treetop level with their running lights on, for God’s sake, and kicked up such a storm of sand when they touched down at the training camp that half the fedayeen managed to slip away in the confusion. Naturally the Saudi who had been presiding over the meeting in the low-roofed building was nowhere to be found when the SIDE agents, backed up by a handful of the Company’s paramilitary people who were currently hunting for new jobs, burst through the door. So what did the raid net? I’ll tell you what it netted. Are you ready for this, gentlemen and ladies? It netted two jokers from Hamas, two more from Hezbollah, seven from Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, a drunk Irishman from the IRA and two young females from the Basque ETA who listed fashion model under profession when they were interrogated. Fashion models my ass! One of them was so flat chested she put padding in her brassiere to break even, for Christ’s sake. No shit, we could have snared twice as many terrorists using fly paper tacked to the rafters of any bar on the main drag of Foz do Iguacii.

Quest appeared to come up for air. In the several seconds of silence, Lincoln was able to get a word in. Well, he said, we did pin down the identity of the Saudi.

The speculation about the chronic kidney failure had been the starting point. On the theory that Leroy Streeter’s offhand remark about the Saudis wealth (“Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich”) would suggest he’d been diagnosed and treated by an expensive private physician, Riyadh intelligence authorities had combed the clinics frequented by the royal family and affluent members of the business community. If they came up with anything, they kept it to themselves. Confronted with the Saudi foot dragging, the American secretary of state had been persuaded to take the matter up with his Saudi counterpart. Within days the intelligence authorities in Riyadh had pouched a thick dossier to Langley filled with hundreds of photographs and associated biographical information. Lincoln had sorted through the photos in the conference room next to the DDO’s office, with Quest peering anxiously over his shoulder. He came across several that gave him pause. No, no, that’s not him, he would finally say, our Saudi had incredibly intense eyes that seemed to look into you rather than at you. Going through the pouch a second time, Lincoln had used a magnifying glass to study the group photographs. Suddenly he had leaned over the table to get a closer look at one man.

I think maybe

You think maybe what, for Christsake?

Maybe this is our Saudi. Yes, there’s no doubt about it. Look at those goddamn eyes.

The group photograph had been taken years before at the wedding of a seventeen-year-old Saudi to a Syrian girl who was a distant relative of his. The bridegroom’s name, according to the caption provided by the Riyadh intelligence people, was Osama bin Laden. He turned out to have a Central Registry file dating back to when he became involved in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The son of the Yemeni-born construction tycoon Muhammad Awad bin Laden,

who had made a fortune in Saudi Arabia, Osama, according to Riyadh, was considered to be the black sheep of the fifty-three siblings in the extremely wealthy bin Laden family, in part because of his disdain for the ruling Saudi royal family and their ties to the United States, in part because of his recent obsession with Islamic fundamentalism.

Okay, we have his name and a mug shot to go with it, Quest was conceding, the shrew in her only partly assuaged. A goddamn pity we don’t have his warm body also.

What we need to do, one of the staffers ventured from the sideline, is put pressure on the Sudanese to hand him over to us, or at least expel him from Sudan.

I’ve promoted bin Laden to the top of our wish list, Quest announced. We wish he were dead. Something tells me we had better get our paws on this Osama character before he gets his paws on radioactive waste and builds himself a dirty bomb.

Amen, said Lincoln.

Six weeks later Lincoln, in Rome for two weeks of R and R, hired a taxi to drive him out to Hadrian’s sprawling villa near Tivoli and spent the afternoon limping around the site in a light spring rain, trying to distinguish myth from reality. Which was the flesh and blood Publius Aelius Hadrianus, which the legend he had consigned to history? Was he the emperor who ruthlessly suppressed the Jewish revolt of 132 and paraded the survivors through Rome in chains? Or the patron of the arts who presided over the construction of the vast country villa outside of Rome, and most especially its entrancing circular library where he spent afternoons studying the manuscripts he accumulated? Or, as seemed likely, was there something of the real Hadrian present in both incarnations?

Didn’t truth provide the spinal column in every legend?

In early evening Lincoln had the driver drop him off across the Tiber on the Janicular. He checked the address scrawled on the slip of paper in his wallet and headed up hill, walking at a leisurely pace so as not to tire his leg, until he came to the luxurious four-story apartment house near the fountain where Romans lingered to inhale the negative ions from the cascading water. He settled onto the stone railing near the fountain, with Rome stretched out behind him, and breathed in some of the negative ions himself. It surely wouldn’t hurt him, he thought. These days he was walking without the aid of a cane, but his leg tired easily; the doctors at the Company clinic in Maryland had warned him the pain would never completely go away. He would learn to live with it, they promised; that’s what everyone did with pain.

The bells on a church uphill from the fountain tolled the hour and Lincoln checked his wristwatch. Either it or the bells were four minutes off, but what did it matter? In the end time was something you killed. Across the street a doorman in a long blue overcoat with gold piping removed his cap to salute the very elegantly dressed woman emerging from the building. She held the leash of a small dog in one gloved hand, in the other she clasped the small hand of a little boy dressed in short pants and a knee-length overcoat buttoned up to the neck. With the dog leading the way, the woman and the boy crossed the street to pass the fountain on their way downhill to the music school. Lincoln slipped off the stone rail as they came abreast of him.

“Hello,” he said.

The woman stopped. “Do I know you?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

The woman, who spoke English with what Lincoln took to be an Italian accent, looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, no. Should I?”

Lincoln noticed a small silver crucifix hanging from the delicate silver chain around her neck. “My name’s Dittmann. Lincoln Dittmann. We met in Brazil, in a border town called Foz do Iguacii. Your name your daytime name was Lucia.”

“Mama, que dice?”

A nervous smile tugged at the corners of the woman’s mouth. “My daytime name happens to be the same as my nighttime name. It is Fiamma. Fiamma Segre.”

Lincoln found himself speaking with some urgency, as if a great deal depended on convincing her that daytime names were never the same as nighttime names. “I told you it would end. You said you would breed baby polyesters on a farm in Tuscany. I am elated to see you’ve found something more interesting to do with your life.”

The nervous smile worked its way up to the woman’s frightened eyes. “Polyester is a synthetic fabric,” she said softly. She pulled gently at the boy’s hand. “I am afraid we must be on our way. It was a pleasure talking to you, Lincoln Dittmann. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” Lincoln said. Although his heart wasn’t in it he forced himself to smile back at her.

1997: MARTIN ODUM IS MESMERIZED TD TEARS

THE JETLINER ELBOWED THROUGH THE TOWERING CLOUDS AND emerged into an airspace as cheerless as sky gets without sun. Dark pitted fields ribbed with irrigation gutters unfurled under the belly of the plane. From his window seat, Martin Odum watched Prague tilt up in its oval frame as if it were perched on the high end of a teeter board In his mind’s eye he imagined the buildings yielding to gravity and sliding downslope into the Vltava, the broad mud-colored river meandering through the center of the city that looked, to Martin’s jaundiced eye, like a beautiful woman who had been tempted by a face lift too many. The plane’s wing dipped and Prague leveled out and the hills rimming the bowl of the city swam into view on the horizon, with the prefabricated Communist-era high rise apartment boxes spilling over the crests into the bleak countryside. A moment later the tarmac rushed up to graze the wheels of the plane. “Welcome to Prague,” announced a recorded voice over the public-address system. “We hope your flight has been enjoyable. The captain and his crew thank you for flying Czech Airlines.”

“You’re definitely welcome,” Martin heard himself respond. The buxom English woman in the next seat must have heard him too, because she favored him with a look reserved for passengers having conversations with recorded announcements. Martin felt obliged to decipher his remark. “Any airline that gets me where I’m going in one piece has my un stinting gratitude,” he informed her.