The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (22 page)

WASHINGTON,
D.C.

Largo Kealey didn’t recognize air travel. He didn’t even recognize the cab he was in, with video streaming into the backseat.

Arriving at JFK International, he felt like a two-liter bottle on a cola assembly line being shuttled along rollers to be filled and capped. He had bought his ticket online—he could do that—but he still went to the counter where he was told he could go right to the gate after listening to a series of questions that could not really and truly have been designed to ferret out terrorists. He waited in a long security line, even at this hour, since many European flights tended to leave late, he discovered. So did flights out west. So did flights with children, whose parents hoped they would sleep while airborne . . . because they surely weren’t in the line. He chose to be body scanned rather than patted down because at his age, what the hell were a few X-rays? He knew about taking off his shoes, expected to have to remove his belt with its big U.S. flag buckle, but he didn’t anticipate the hustling and banging he took at the end of the line while he tried to get his clothes, keys, overnight bag, comb, pen, and eyeglass case from the plastic bin. Of course, the scanner missed the plastic credit card he kept in his wallet, with one end sharpened to a razor-fine edge. Valley Stream had changed over the years, and a mugger trying to take his wallet would get, instead, a slit throat.

All of that was just the preamble to a hurried boarding that finally took place fifteen minutes before their scheduled flight time. Largo entered a small cabin with a seat that barely had a cushion or a recline or the width to accommodate anyone larger than a child. The overhead bin was full with someone else’s carry-on before he got to it, so he asked the stewardess for help. The flight attendant—she was no longer “a stewardess,” the young woman sitting beside him gently but firmly reprimanded him—hurriedly and with a tense smile offered to check his bag for him.

Largo said he would put it under the seat.

The flight attendant said it wouldn’t fit and she would gladly check his bag. The woman had a script from which she didn’t diverge.

Largo removed a sweater and tied it around his shoulders, over the sweater he was wearing. Now it would fit, he told her. She left—not to make the preflight announcements but to turn on a recording that did that while she mimed all the movements.

There were no earphones in the seatback. There were no beverages during the flight. The only thing that hadn’t changed in about two decades was the pilot still said “uh” every few words. When they deplaned after the short flight, Largo and the others were reminded to take their personal belongings. He wanted to ask what other kind there were—and decided he would take a train for the return trip. There
had
to be a more civilized way to travel.

There was no one waiting at the gate for him. He had to go to the baggage claim area to find Allison Dearborn. Where was the magic in that, the memories for kids waiting at the big windows, waving to the plane as their grandparents left or arrived?

“Didn’t Benjamin Franklin say something about the uselessness of sacrificing liberty for security?” he asked as he approached the paper with his first name written on it.

The woman holding it was a tall, slender blonde with hypnotic blue eyes. It was funny how Largo realized just then he’d become an observer of women, not as a shopper but as a browser at a museum. He was old and they were younger. Yet when he saw Allison, he was twenty years old again, seeing lovely young women in France and remembering his own beauty back home. How he so very much wanted to return to her and say that he was never tempted, even by the live-for-today Partisans who wanted him. He had always felt that so many of them wanted anyone who wasn’t German . . . wanted a Resistance fighter to rub away the stench of having been with the enemy.

Which was one reason he greeted her with a handshake and Benjamin Franklin: it spared him from possibly making a bigger fool of himself.

“Freud or Jung, I’m right there with you,” she said. “Founding Fathers? I’d have to cheat and look it up.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I made it, somehow, through the gauntlet.”

She offered to take his carry-on bag. He assured her he was fine. She turned and he followed.

“When was the last time you flew?” Allison asked.

“Let’s see. They were showing
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. On a TV suspended over the aisle.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. You were probably still watching cartoons.”

She smiled. “I did not see that movie on its first run, no.”

It struck Largo how tired he was as they walked toward the exit. He remembered how it used to be, long ago, gearing up for a mission and not realizing how much energy he’d expended until it was over and he crashed. They enjoyed a brief get-to-know-you talk as they went to the car, though Allison could see he was tired and, while not offering overt support, backed off pushing him too hard.

She drove Largo to the Archstone at the corner of First and M Street NE and showed him to the fourth-floor one-bedroom apartment kept by the Department of Defense. She had purchased some groceries, which she brought up with her: bottled water, fruit, crackers, instant coffee, microwavable biscuits and jam.

“I’ve cleared the morning schedule,” she said. “Call for you at nine?”

He nodded, and she hugged him lightly and left. When she was gone, Largo sat on the hard bed.

“Oh, God,” he sighed and shuddered into a gentle sobbing release of whatever was inside him that prompted him to make this trip. Missing his wife, missing his old life, missing a reason for getting out of bed when the sun rose.

He lay back and fell asleep with his extra sweater still tied around his shoulders. But he woke with the sun as he always had and was ready for Allison when she arrived.

Mohammed did not look back once he pulled from the curb. He was afraid that he had been spotted, the car identified. He had to get away and seeing the enemy would not make him go faster. He watched for openings in the traffic, ignored the honks, and he cut people off, heard the onrushing sirens, knew he had to get back on the highway before he was blocked in.

He did not know what was going to happen to Boulif. What he
did
know was that the scientist had been possessed with the kind of quiet excitement he had never seen in any man. The look in his eyes told Mohammed that this man would die to see the device get to safety. He had seen
that
look before, in many eyes—though without the genius and wisdom that this man clearly possessed.

He reminded Mohammed of the great imams he had met. Boulif was an imam of science, if there could be such a thing.

Even though the two powerful fans were running, they were blowing in warm air. Mohammed had to wipe the perspiration with his sleeve as he drove. His mouth was drier than it had ever been. He silently prayed to God all the while that Boulif was all right, that the enemy had not harmed or detained him.

With the bomb, a backpack, and the IED cell phone beside him—and the X-ray apron spread over them all—the Yemeni carefully knit and picked his way through the narrow streets, braking now and then to avoid bicycles and pedestrians walking two abreast, as well as the occasional cart carrying goods from any number of bazaars. A tester of smoke had begun to form above him, the residue of the explosion. He was humbled by the ease with which Boulif had created the bomb, built from a laptop and triggered with a spare cell phone that he then destroyed in the microwave oven. In Yemen, that sort of project would have taken hours.

Mohammed finally emerged at a roundabout Boulif had described. He was to take it onto the A2, stay to his right, and get on the A1. His goal was Tangier, 195 miles to the north, at the Strait of Gibraltar. There, he was to contact a friend of Boulif’s who would help him plan the next phase of the operation.

An operation that would cripple the West in such a way that Islam could easily and irrevocably pour through the breach.

First, however, he had to do something about the possibility that the enemy knew exactly which car he was driving.

THE DEAD MAN IS PROFESSOR
MUSTAPHA BOULIF, NUCLEAR
PHYSICIST. GOOD KILL. SUSPECTED
AFFILIATE OF TAHEHLIB GROUP.
LOOKING FOR AREA CONTACTS.