The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (16 page)

Kealey woke when he felt the plane begin its descent. Rayhan was asleep beside him. He gave her a gentle shake.

“I’m awake,” she said.

He waited a moment with a crooked little smile. She fell asleep again. He shook her a little harder.

“I’m awake,” she repeated. This time she opened her eyes.

Kealey moved a little closer and looked at her. “Your lips are dry, and your voice isn’t quite connected to your brain,” he said. “What did you take?

She didn’t answer.

“I asked you something, Rayhan.”

“Ambien,” she said as she wriggled semi-upright in her sling.

“Dumb,” he said bluntly. “Are you going to be alert? You need coffee?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been if I couldn’t sleep. Don’t worry. I used to do this when I was a kid. My mother gave me Valium. Otherwise, I could never have rested in the bomb shelters.”

Kealey did worry, though he let it rest. It was one thing to risk his life on a partner, which is why he didn’t like having them. It was something else to risk his life—along with the security of the nation—on a partner with a drug hangover. The only drug he had ever carried into the field was a cyanide capsule, and then only in places like Chechnya and Iraq, where capture meant torture and beheading with a knife.

A Petty Officer First Class came aboard to collect Kealey and Rayhan. The two got a big “good-bye” from Representative Thomson as they deplaned.

“Stay safe, you two, and look me up in D.C.,” Thomson said.

Kealey did not think the invitation was for him and hoped their paths did not cross. He did not want to be reminded that people like this were deciding the policy he had to execute.

The joint U.S.-Spanish Color Guard aboard Naval Station, Rota—NAVSTA Rota—covers six thousand acres on the north shore of Cádiz, the Gateway to the Mediterranean. It was established in 1953 by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who was looking to shore up relations with the United States. The United States Navy is responsible for the upkeep of the 670-acre airfield, the trio of piers and hundreds of military structures, and over eight hundred homes for the soldiers.

The unobstructed sunlight was a shock to Kealey and his companion as they emerged before the jeeps and before the Congressmen. They were taken by the Petty Officer First Class to a waiting Humvee. Just before the seaman deleted them, Kealey caught their photographs on the dashboard display.

The man introduced himself. He was Johannes Megapolensis, which the young man spoke proudly and clearly as the Humvee hummed and he drove them across the six-thousand-acre base toward one of the piers. The red-tile roofs and low white buildings were pure Mediterranean, a contrast to the purely functional bases Kealey was used to. The United States had been here for sixty years, since 1953—it was an ideal stopping-off point halfway to the Middle East, the Suez Canal and oil shipments, and Southwest Asia. For Spain, it was a boon to the local economies.

When they reached the pier, a sleek, twenty-seven-foot powerboat was waiting for them. It had a canvas canopy, a food locker, and a radio.

“Do you know how to run ’er, sir?” Megapolensis asked.

“Twin 250 HP Yamahas? No kicker engine?”

Megapolensis smiled. “No, sir. If you’d care to wait we could rig one—”

“No thanks. I used to troll for steelheads with an 8 HP. How many gas tanks?”

“Three, sir. Two hundred gallons per. Will that do?

“That’ll do,” Kealey said appreciatively. The boat wouldn’t get the best mileage on the open sea, but the extra tanks more than compensated—and, better, they would provide extra weight and greater stability. Rayhan would probably appreciate that. She still looked a little dazed. And if she weren’t used to it, knocking around at sea was not like bumping up and down on an ATV.

“There are requested add-ons—binoculars, some fishing gear onboard, and some sandwiches in the locker in case you don’t have time to fish,” Megapolensis said. “If I might ask, sir, where did you fish? Out here, it’s always nice to hear stories from home.”

“Maine,” Kealey said as he stepped in and offered his hand to Rayhan. Megapolensis was already putting her overnighter onboard. “I had a house there for a while. Really rustic.”

“I love that. I’m from Vermont,” the enlisted man said with a longing look atop a big smile. “Grew up on Lake Champlain.”

“Ever see the monster?”

“No, sir. I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”

Kealey smiled as the sailor handed him a pair of Navy-issue sunglasses. “Monsters exist,” Kealey assured him as they untied the boat from the pier.

“The kind with flippers and fangs, sir?”

“Worse,” Kealey said. “The kind with smiles and power.”

The young man offered a confused salute as Kealey started the engines. Rayhan was familiarizing herself with the GPS.

“We good?” he asked her.

“The boat appears to be,” she said. “Are we?”

“I sure hope so.” It wasn’t a commitment, but then she didn’t deserve one. Kealey was angry, but he would have a few hours of sea air to rid himself of that and for her to clear her head.

“There’s an iPod in the music bay,” she said. “Should we leave it?”

“Yeah. And it isn’t an iPod. It’s a TAC-X receiver. If Clarke needs to send us maps, dossiers, or anything else, he’ll do it there. If you hear a ping, check under “Kealey Playlist.” The device wipes its memory every ten minutes except for Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopin, Eugene Ormandy performing Tchaikovsky, and Arthur Fiedler whipping up the best of John Philip Sousa.”

“How do you know what’s on it?”

“Standard playlist,” Kealey said. “One way to know if someone’s replaced it.”

“Why not just send the maps to your cell phone?”

Kealey held up a finger while he ran a radio check. He would remain in contact with Rota until they reached Africa. Then he was on his own. As he noted the location of the fire extinguisher and emergency flares, he answered Rayhan’s question.

“The general’s going to have his eyes on both devices,” Kealey said. “They will be on me at all times. An iPod may get left behind. If we are separated, he’ll assume that something is wrong.”

“But we’re the only ones in the field,” she said. “If something goes wrong, how will that help us?”

“It won’t,” Kealey said. “It’ll tell him our mission is in jeopardy and he should go to Plan B, whatever that might be. They’re probably figuring that one out now.” The operative smiled appreciatively. “The general’s philosophy is ‘Do something now.’ He likes to develop his available pieces ASAP. That’s us. There’s nothing sentimental about him, not when he’s on the job.”

Rayhan was wearing the same fall coat she’d been wearing when they went to Valley Stream. Kealey yanked a black sweater from his grip, slipped into it, then pulled from the pier. He eased skillfully into the blindingly bright water. The boat had four seats, two of them facing back. That was where the sportfishermen sat. Rayhan was in the one behind Kealey, right beside the low railing. The canopy protected her from the sun but not from the motion of the vessel. Though Kealey was traveling at the maximum speed of forty-five knots, the skimming action was mitigated by the added fuel weight. The powerboat cut through the water rather than rode up and slapped down.

“I’m sorry about the Ambien,” she said, turning her head back and shouting to be heard over the sound of water and twin Yamahas. “I should have asked.”

Kealey nodded. He was angrier than before. Now that they were boots-on-the-ground, he found that he wasn’t willing to rely on her as completely as he needed to. That was the kind of quirk that would have been knocked out of a person during training. You learned to sleep hard and fast. During survival runs in the Rockies—which was where a lot of the special forces teams going to Afghanistan did their drilling, seven thousand feet up—you knew that helicopters were going to be looking for you in two-hour cycles. That gave you exactly one hundred and twenty minutes to rest between flyovers. If you didn’t seize that time, you didn’t sleep. If you didn’t sleep, your chances of falling from a slope and dragging your companions with you, of dooming the mission, increased.

“Going forward, you don’t do anything without being told,” Kealey said. “And when you are told something, you do it. I need your eyes and ears and brain, and I need them at one hundred percent. Everything we do is to preserve the only Arabic speaker and scientist on this mission. Understood?”

“I understand,” she said, then turned aft again.

Kealey knew that no one liked being upbraided. She probably felt safe because he had gotten chummy with the enlisted man.

She was wrong.

“I need you to watch the iPod,” Kealey said.

Rayhan used the back of the seats to support herself as she swung around. She fell into the seat without complaint. He would have told her to sit there from the start if he had known she wouldn’t get seasick. Now, he had no choice.

“What am I looking for?” she asked, turning it on.

“It’s a four-hour trip to Rabat. Clarke’s eyes in the sky are watching the area around the motel where the Iranian was killed. The satellite feed is in my file. Assuming Tehran has someone in the area now, that’s where they’ll go for starters. There’s also—”

“I see it,” she said. “A crawl of radiation levels. How—?”

“A plane from Rota fired a DART into the motel roof two hours ago,” Kealey said. “A Direct Access Radiation Test. Which also happens to be a dart. What does the data tell you?”

“It’s a hot spot but falling,” she said. “Someone most likely opened the container and shut it quickly.”

“After taking a lethal dose?”

“Without a doubt,” she said. “My God, if this is the residue—it was a hell of a burst. The individual wouldn’t have survived an hour.”

“So we’re looking at a pair or more of perps or a device that’s still in Rabat or both.”

“I’m betting on both,” Rayhan said.

“Why?”

“Because there’s a secondary reading coming from the northeast,” she said. “Very faint but it has the same—let’s call it a fingerprint. Nothing close to lethal but elevated from ambient radiation.”

Kealey did a pullback on the GPS map. He saw the river. It wasn’t a real-time image, so he couldn’t tell whether there was anything of interest on it. He took his cell phone from his belt and called Clarke at home.

“Did I wake you?” Kealey asked.

“I wish you had. Where are you?”

“On the Mediterranean, where it’s sunny with a hint of fallout.”

“Too tired to find that funny. Are you saying there’s a trail?”

Kealey explained the twin radiation readings, then asked him to have his INTERPOL connection, Mostpha Bensami, get someone to follow the radiation trail from the motel to wherever it leads.

“Open or not?”

“Open,” Kealey said. “We might as well see if anyone else is watching.”

“You got it,” Clarke told him.

Kealey hung up.

“May I ask—?” Rayhan said.

“About open or not?” Kealey said.

She nodded.

“Do we want a theoretical Iranian operative to see what’s being done,” Kealey said. “The answer is yes.”

“Why?”

“A twofer,” Kealey said. “Hopefully, we find the killer and the device. Mr. Bensami or whoever he sends will be waiting and watching. With luck, we may also get ourselves an Iranian agent.”

He was dressed like a tourist, in white shorts, a green T-shirt, and a nondescript white baseball cap. He had preregistered at the motel, arrived with two carry-on-bags, and stubbed out his cigarette before entering the lobby. When he saw that one of the other guests was smoking, he lit up again. There were three good reasons for smoking. First, it was one way to ferret out Americans. They tended to hang back from cigarette smoke, especially the younger ones. Whoever was farther away than a careful observer should be—he could be an American operative.

The second good reason for smoking was that it was an excuse to loiter, which is what Mahdavi Yazdi was doing now.

It was late morning and he was in the parking lot, under an oak tree, beside his rental car, watching the room where Qassam Pakravesh had died. The broken window had been boarded with plywood and covered with a waterproof tarpaulin. The light was off inside. Yazdi stood there through three cigarettes. No one came or went.

The Iranian agent went back inside. He walked down a corridor lit darkly with functional fixtures every few feet. The room was near the end, well away from the lobby. The door was old, operated by key access; Yazdi didn’t bother picking the lock. He slipped on a rubber glove, got a solid grip, and turned while pushing the door with his shoulder. The latch gave with a little snap. He stepped inside and braced it shut with a wooden chair.

There was enough light that he didn’t need to turn one on. He didn’t expect to be here long. He went directly to the rickety night table, opened the top drawer, felt inside along the top. He found what he was looking for, duct-taped out of view: Pakravesh’s cigarette lighter. He tugged it free, put it in his pocket, and left.

Back in his room, Yazdi drew the drapes, worked the bottom from the lighter, and pulled out a memory chip. It was the job of every field agent to create a visual diary of his travels and everyone with whom he had a meaningful encounter. That was the third good reason for smoking. An instinct lost from the Cold War: no one suspected a cigarette lighter of being a camera.

The intelligence chief plugged the stick into a slot in his cell phone. He scrolled through the images until Pakravesh arrived in Rabat. He studied them carefully, comparing the people he saw one to the other. Who was staring at him? Who appeared in more than one photograph? Who was the man who helped him to his room?

He transmitted a selection of photographs back to his office at VEJE: the other vendors at the waterfront, the stevedores, and the one who came to the hotel. He wanted to know if any of the faces matched those in their database. One came back positive in just a few minutes: Mohammed Tahir.

A revolutionary contact in Yemen
was all the data that was in the open file—a file that was accessible to low-security workers.

He sent back an encrypted text to his deputy, Sanjar:

Then, eating a pita sandwich he’d bought, Yazdi sat on the bed, looked out the window at the parking lot, and waited.

Until something going on outside caught his eye. Scooping up his phone—and the cigarette lighter—he hurried outside.

 

 

The Royal Moroccan Gendarmerie had a good working relationship with INTERPOL. The two police groups left each other alone. When INTERPOL had an area of concern it had to be serious enough to merit cannibalizing their limited resources.

Lt. Abdelkrim el-Othmani was actually happy to get out into the field. For the past two weeks he had been investigating a scam in which senior citizens were phoned by a man allegedly representing their health care insurance firm and wanting to return the cost of medications. All the seemingly helpful officer needed was their bank account information—which he used to empty those accounts. The thirty-seven-year-old was no closer to finding the perpetrator than he had been when he started. All of the crimes, from solicitation to execution, were committed somewhere else in the world. The closest he got was finding out that the signal apparently originated in China. Given the number of Chinese throughout the continent, that did not surprise him. There were literally thousands of nationals, mostly training and financially supporting local militias to make them financially dependent. A lot of data was going home with them to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other hotbeds of black market activity.

But now el-Othmani was on a terror watch. Not a criminal investigation, which is what he thought when the captain gave him the address. He had recognized the motel from the morning reports.

At the request of INTERPOL, el-Othmani was to carry a Geiger counter—one of two owned by the RMG—and follow a trail of radiation from the crime scene to wherever it took him.

“We have reason to believe this crime may have been connected to the break-in at the medical facility,” the captain told him. “We need to know whether radiation was involved and where it ended up.”

“Am I at risk?” el-Othmani had asked.

The captain—a former bodyguard to HM King Mohammad IV—replied matter-of-factly, “Only if you find the source.”

The lieutenant was told that if levels rose above twelve millisieverts he was to return to the station, where a soldier trained in the use of the district’s only nuclear protection suit would take over. The lieutenant did not have to ask why that individual wasn’t chasing the radiation. It was the captain.

After receiving an initial jolt at the motel where the readings began at eight millisieverts by the broken window and spiked again in the parking lot, el-Othmani was relieved to find them drop to seven as drove his white-and-black patrol car, following the trail wherever it led. The trip took nearly two hours, as the signal frequently fell to normal levels. That happened after he reached the medical center, proving that the captain’s theory was correct. Driving around, el-Othmani would find it again. It struck him as curious that the lead apron stolen from the dentist’s office did not seem to impact the intensity of the radiation. The signal eventually took him to the banks of the Bou Regregin neighboring Salé, and the Stack—the unofficial graveyard where small boats were left aground for whoever wanted to repair them or use them for parts or kindling.

The police officer stopped when he saw the tire tracks in the sand. He got out, holding the Geiger counter, and walked it slowly around the periphery. The digital readout hovered between 7 and 7.5. The higher readings were near a rough patch of sand.

The lieutenant called the captain, told him to bring the suit—and a shovel.

 

 

It was late morning when Kealey and Rayhan reached the coast of Morocco. A message was relayed by Clarke from Mostpha Bensami, INTERPOL Vice President for Africa, informing him that radiation had been detected in a patch of beach northeast of Rabat. Clarke sent him the coordinates, which Rayhan plugged into the GPS.

Two minutes later, Clarke called with an update. Kealey put it on speaker.

“They just dug a body out of the sand there,” Clarke told him. “Apparently died of radiation poisoning, if the Geiger counter’s any indication. The area is cordoned off for a half mile in all directions, including the waterway. No other details until the one guy with a radiation hazmat suit gets through looking over the site.”

“But it’s just a body?” Kealey asked.

“Seems to be. They’re not getting readings from anywhere else in the vicinity.”

“Crap. Would’ve been nice to wrap up something quick and easy for a change. Who’s handling the investigation?”

“Local police,” Clarke said. “Liberal Islamists, loyal to the king, want to protect all the investment dollars and foreigners in Morocco—just a checklist of good stuff. They don’t resent the questions, but we have to let them run with this for a while.”

“Understood. Any twitches from Iran?”

“You’re going to have to tell me,” Clarke said. “The news is all over town, on TV and the Web. If anyone’s in from Tehran, that’s where they’ll be.”

Clarke told Kealey the nearest place he could berth the boat was in Rabat, across the river. Kealey glanced at the map Rayhan had brought up and acknowledged their destination. He was about to hang up when he noticed that Rayhan seemed distracted: she looked up, her eyes following the shore as the high minaret of the coastal medina loomed nearer. Kealey asked Clarke to hold.

“Something on your mind?” Kealey asked.

“Yes. I’d like to go ashore as soon as I can,” she said. “We can meet up later. There’s no point in both of us being inactive for a half hour or more.”

He looked at Rayhan. “What’s the objective?”

“To put educated eyes and ears on the scene as soon as possible,” she said. “I may hear something about the radiation. Or I may see something. Some
one
.”

She looked like she was alert mentally and okay physically. “Fine with me,” Kealey said. “General?”

“You’ll be without a translator.”

“Lots of languages spoken in this town,” Kealey said.

Clarke was silent for a long moment. “I have no problem with that. We can track her if you lose touch. Ryan? Your mission, your call.”

“Sounds okay,” he said. “I can relay any updates. I’m about ten minutes from the mouth of the river—the target sandbank is right there. I’ll leave her in Salé, then swing back to park the boat.”

Clarke gave his okay and Kealey put the phone back on his belt.

“You haven’t been in the field before,” Kealey said.

“Blend in, eyes open, mouth shut except to ask relevant questions. I took the mandatory JICT.”

That was “just-in-case training.” Along with rudimentary weapons skills, it was required of all DNI employees. It didn’t carry the actual risk to life and liberty, but it was not bad for what it was.

“Do you have any particular agenda, or is this a scouting mission?” Kealey asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been in the air and on the water so long I may just be eager to get on solid ground and do some real work.”

Kealey smiled a little. He liked that answer. It was honest. “Find a spot for me to let you off—I don’t suppose you brought a bathing suit?”

“No, and they are not wildly popular among Muslim beachgoers. A woman of my descent would stand out. I would get disapproving glances.” Rayhan was looking at the satellite image on the GPS. “There appears to be a natural sandbar. If you come in on the eastern side I can wade ashore. I will put on a head scarf.”

“No one will think
that’s
unusual?”

She picked up one of the fishing rods and a small tackle box. She placed her passport and wallet inside. “Not now they won’t. If anyone asks, I’ll say I was looking for—steelheads.”

“Perch and mullet,” he said. “I’ve fished off the Spanish coast. That’s what I caught.”

She repeated the names. Kealey admired her resourcefulness. He handed her the wheel as he picked up the binoculars.

“Wait! Ryan, I’ve never—”

“Throttle up slowly and it’ll be more like an ATV, slapping up and down instead of side to side,” he said.

He looked along the shoreline beyond the river and spotted the sandbar she was talking about.