Riders of the Pale Horse (2 page)

Suddenly above the wind's blast came the roar of great diesel engines, and Alena wailed in her husband's ear. He forced her forward until the first great dark beast appeared in front of them. The guard shouted words that were lost in the wind, but his signals were clear—this was Alena's truck.

Alexis felt the child in his arms stiffen with fear from the strange roaring shape in front of them. He bent over and buried his face in the towel that protected his daughter, then straightened and allowed his sobbing wife to clasp his neck. He placed his lips upon her ear and shouted as loud as he was able, “I am ever with you, Alena!”

Together with the guard he forced his wife up into the truck's open door, then lifted his daughter up to her. The satchels came next. He climbed up the step, and in the cabin's relative calm he embraced them once again. Then he stepped
back and slammed the door, searching through the yellow storm for a final glimpse of his world beyond the grimy window.

His daughter pulled the towel free and instantly realized that she was on the inside and her father on the outside. She flung herself at the closed window and screamed at the top of her voice,
“Papa!”

He stepped down from the truck and watched his daughter claw at the glass, shrieking the single word over and over.
“Papa!”

The truck roared its defiance of the storm and pulled away. Alexis stood and faced the tumult until his daughter's screams had faded to meld with the wind's shrill blast.

The guard gripped Alexis's arm and pulled him to the next truck. They embraced in the way of friends in the Orient, a swift hug to either shoulder, and Alexis was surprised to find tears streaking the guard's seamed features. In order to keep the moment untainted, Alexis did not place the final payment into his hand, but rather shoved it deep into the man's pocket, then gripped him by the neck. He shouted, “You are indeed a friend, Ivan Ivanovichu.”

“My world collapses and sweeps away all of value, even friends,” the guard replied, then shoved him brusquely toward the truck. “Go while the portal is open. And when your way is clear, remember me.”

Alexis climbed aboard, slammed the cabin door, and looked down at his friend. The man stood defiantly against a wind so fierce it threatened to blast him from the earth's surface, and shouted up a single word of farewell.

Remember.

The new United States Embassy in Amman was a cross between an Arabian Nights palace and a functional American office building. The exterior was covered in desert stone, with rose-tinted borders around numerous windows. The structure
dominated an entire hilltop in a newer suburb of town, and afforded a wonderful view over Amman's old quarter.

Judith Armstead had held her current position for almost four years, and still had not tired of the panorama.

There was no such view from the room they now occupied, however. The windowless conference room had the deadened feel of a bomb shelter. Which was not surprising, given that the chamber was located in the embassy's subbasement and surrounded by two feet of steel-reinforced concrete. The Americans had learned from the Moscow embassy debacle, where the structure had been so riddled with listening devices that they had been forced to tear it down and start again. When the Jordanians had insisted upon the Americans using local labor, the Americans had worked out a fitting compromise; vetted construction workers had been flown in to lay the basements and foundation, where all the sensitive operations were housed. The Jordanians were then allowed to construct the public rooms on top of this, but never permitted to enter what lay beneath. Although Judith Armstead had spent as much time here as her office, she had never grown accustomed to the subbasement's tomblike spaces.

This room still made her skin crawl.

Judith Armstead pushed the file across the conference table. “I've received Washington's permission to share this with you.”

Cyril Price, liaison between Her Majesty's Government and local operations, looked at the closed file before him, but made no move to open it. “And about time as well.”

“Don't be so snide. It's not like your side has had the welcome mat out.” Judith Armstead was a stern, no-nonsense woman with clear gray eyes and a very direct gaze. She wore a navy-blue skirt and jacket of severe lines, no jewelry, and little makeup. Her gray hair was cut short and worn straight. Her expression was as determined as her tone. Her title of cultural attach;aae meant as little as the stated purpose behind Cyril's current visit. “Aren't you going to read it?”

“Afraid I don't need to.”

She smirked. “You're not going to try and tell me you've got a mole.”

“Nothing of the sort. I simply think that our meeting here, in your embassy's most secure chamber, is sufficient to confirm what our side has recently suspected.”

Judith leaned back and crossed her arms. “Which is?”

“That Aqaba has become a major staging area,” Cyril replied. “For both goods and scientists.”

She studied him a moment before admitting, “All right. I'm impressed.”

Cyril Price accepted the accolade with a slight nod. He was a tall, slender man whose glossy silver mane and tailored suit granted him a sleek elegance. He carried his polish with that astonishing ability of the English upper class to be courtly without the slightest hint of effeminacy. His reputation had awed Judith from the outset, and only recently had she found herself able to speak with him as an equal. Cyril went on, “I think it is time for a bit more openness on both sides. We intercepted yet another consignment in Munich two nights ago.”

“Using the overland bus route?”

“The very same.” His expression turned bleak as he took a folded sheet from his pocket and passed it over. “Ten kilos of highly enriched uranium. The real thing this time. And headed for here.”

“The borders with Belorussia and Ukraine have turned leaky as a sieve,” she said, reading rapidly. “Not to mention security around the Russian missile placements.”

“Nor is it any better around their laboratories, I take it.”

“Like watching lemmings take to the sea,” she agreed. “We picked up a smuggling group operating across the Caucasus just last week.”

“Boxes?”

She shook her head. “Bodies. Claimed to be the only one in the area working with scientists. But even if they were,
which I doubt, others will be only too happy to step into their shoes. It's become a smugglers' paradise up there.”

“And all fingers,” Cyril finished for her, “point to Aqaba.”

Judith Armstead leaned across the table. “We need to identify the shipping point and close it down. The Jordanians are absolutely no help whatsoever. They're so determined to smooth out relations with the West that any new problem is simply ignored.” She stopped, then asked, “We were wondering if you had any people in place.”

It came as no surprise to either that the Americans would request such help. Fiascos on the ground, such as the most recent scandal in France over economic espionage, continued to tie the CIA's hands. The British operated under no such restrictions. Since they had never possessed the cash required for spy satellites, they continued to focus their attention on live agents, as they had ever since the days of the Great Game.

Regretfully, Cyril shook his head. “I am afraid not. The extremist cells have proven almost impossible to infiltrate.”

“That's what I told Washington to expect,” Judith said, leaning back, and failing to fully mask her disappointment. Placing an agent into a sensitive field position was extremely difficult. The Americans had spent twenty years trying to place an agent within the Chinese Communist hierarchy, and in the end they still failed. Establishing an agent is normally considered to be a ten-year project. In a region dominated by unstable regimes and fledgling terrorist movements, setting up agents was deadly work. “Then we're stuck.”

“Not necessarily.” Cyril covered his momentary hesitation by smoothing a nonexistent crease to his trousers. He then raised his eyes, and continued, “I might have an ally to our cause. An American, actually. An old friend.”

A spark of renewed interest brightened Judith's gaze. “In Aqaba?”

“Operates all over southern Jordan, actually. Runs a clinic for the poorest of the poor. He allowed us to use his infirmary
as a base of operations. We set an agent there, one of our local operatives. Awful choice.”

Judith was glad for a reason to smile. “Not Smathers.”

“You've met him, I see.” Cyril sighed. “Almost ruined us before we had a chance to start. Ben Shannon, that's my friend, has reluctantly agreed to speak with me again. Don't know what I'm going to suggest, to be perfectly frank. Starting from scratch with a new operative and simply searching for clues would be hopeless at this point.”

“Time is beyond critical,” Judith Armstead agreed.

“Mmmm. We must draw them out. Force their hand, as it were.” He rose to his feet. “I must be off.”

“Where to?”

“First to Aqaba, then to London.” He hesitated at the door, turned back, and remarked, “You know, what we really require is someone Ben already trusts. Someone to act as liaison... or a lure.”

1

He stepped onto the runway of the Chechen-Ingush airport and paused to sniff the steamy September air. A swarthy soldier in a decrepit uniform watched him with eyes as dark as his moustache. The new arrival smiled blandly, took in the well-oiled machine gun, and announced to no one in particular, “There's money in the air and riches in the wind.”

The soldier barked a guttural command and swung his weapon toward the arrivals hall. Robards replied with a full-fledged grin, shouldered his battered satchel, and sauntered off.

In his thirty-seven years, Barton Jameson Robards had won and lost more fortunes than many small countries. In a barroom confession to a buddy too drunk to remember, he had once said, “Finding it isn't near as much trouble as making it mine. Losing it isn't any trouble at all.”

Robards stood a hair over six foot six and sported a jaw like the front fender of a Mack truck. His hair was black, his eyes steel-gray, his way with women indifferent or demanding, depending on his mood of the moment. His friends, and they were almost as numerous as his enemies, called him Rogue, after the bull elephant who preferred his own company unless the heat was on him, and who reigned supreme over whatever turf he decided to claim as his own.

Rogue Robards didn't consider himself a particularly greedy man. All he wanted was his own yacht, his own tropical island, his own Rolls, his own Swiss bank account sporting some number followed by at least nine zeros, and a string of nubile secretaries to smile adoringly as he dictated his autobiography. He had long since decided on the title—
Laws Are for Little People.

The arrivals building, a converted airplane hangar of World War II vintage, was as cheerful as an empty morgue. Voices
splashed like a heavy rain off distant metal walls and roofs and concrete floors.

Robards clumped his leather satchel down on the steel customs table and opened it without being asked. Experience had taught him that anybody as big as he was, dressed in flight jacket and laced-up boots and pressed cords while everybody else wore either the local garb or grimy business suits, was going to get searched. Opening his luggage unasked usually saved a few minutes and disarmed the worst of the questions.

“Anything to declare?” the officer asked, his accent mangling the English words into insensibility.

“Merely sixteen smidgens of ground worm food and a can of green guppies,” Robards replied, certain the man had memorized the question and knew no other English at all. He shook his head and lifted out his shaving kit; holding the bag toward the soldier, he said in a casual drawl, “I left my pet catfish on board with the baby alligator. I hope they get along.”

The customs guard released him with a curt wave and turned to the next passenger. A bald-headed businessman raised his multilayered chin to give Robards a thoroughly confused look. Robards replied with a buccaneer's grin, hefted his satchel, and sauntered toward the exit.

There was a good deal of the pirate in Rogue Robards. Once a solid deal had taken him to New York—a solid deal being one that allowed him to walk away with his money and his life. His lady of the hour had used a costume ball to dress him up in pirate garb: fold-down boots, baggy black trousers, drawstring shirt, sword, and ostrich-plume hat. Standing on a chair to tie his eye patch into place, she had examined his reflection in the full-length mirror and declared, “You were born four hundred years too late.”

“I've always had a soft spot for hidden treasure,” Robards had agreed.

“Now the question is whether I'm going to risk letting you loose in a roomful of New York women,” the lady had
added, getting as much of his shoulders and neck as she could manage in a full nelson. “After a steady diet of Wall Street yuppies, they might just eat you alive.”