The Falconer's Tale (26 page)

In the morning, Piat went out to the farm, headache and
gut ache and all. Irene looked fine—in fact, she was drinking
orange juice and was ready for work. Hackbutt looked like
hell—but a happy hell.

“Mombasa,” Piat began. He told them about Mombasa
and its beaches and resorts. He bored them with maps and
diagrams. He finished by saying, “The target's uncle and
his entourage have booked twenty-six rooms for five days.
They have conference rooms, a section of private beach,
their own restaurant in the hotel and their own pavilion
outside.”

Hackbutt was lying on the sofa like an invalid. He nodded
with every sentence as if he already knew everything Piat
had said, but now he rubbed his chin. “What are they doing
there? Mombasa?”

Piat shook his head. “Hard to say. The uncle has some
appointments—among other things, his family have paid for
a mosque in Kilini, up the coast.” Piat decided that a digression
on the various types of Islam on the east coast of Africa
wasn't suited to the audience. “He's going to shoot some
animals in the game park. Illegally, of course. And there's an
Islamic film festival in town, and it's possible the uncle is a
heavy hitter among the donors.”

Hackbutt, however, was not to be led astray by talk of film
festivals. “What about the birds?” he asked. “What about the
man with the birds?”

Piat clicked to a still picture of the Nyali. “He'll be somewhere
in the hotel. I assume he'll have birds with him—if he
took them to Monaco, I think he'll take them to Africa. I think
he'll fly on the beach. And I think that's where we'll get him.”

Hackbutt rubbed his head, which obviously hurt, but when
he took his hand away, he had a light in his eyes. “I want
to talk to that man about his birds.”

Piat nodded.

Irene finished her juice and stood with her hand on her
hip. “So we're going to a beach resort in wintertime.”

“High summer there.”

“And a film festival,” she said.

“If you like Islamic film.”

“Maybe I will. This sounds a
fuck
of a lot more satisfying
than Monaco.” She shot Piat a smile—enigmatic.

“Always happy to please,” Piat replied while sorting their
tickets.

“And I need to be back by Tuesday. I have an installation
to complete. And I'll need some of my money, too.”

Hackbutt pulled himself up on an elbow. “We both do.”

Piat handed them their tickets. “Half up front, half on
completion, bonus for success. That was the deal.”

Irene scowled. “But I need the money next week.”

Hackbutt nodded. “Jack, it's really important to her. And
I need some cash too—I have costs. I have to pay the girl
who takes care of my birds.”

Piat snarled inside at the eternal mercenary nature of
agents, but he nodded. “That's an operational expense,
Digger—we need Bella fed and flown. In top condition, like
you said.” He glanced at Irene. “I'll see about some money
for you.”

Irene looked out the window at the stream which ran past
their drive and out to the small loch at the base of the hill.
She seemed to be lost in contemplation of the interplay of
grays—gray sky, gray water, gray grass. “I need the money
soon,” she said quietly.

“It's not due until we land our fish,” Piat said. It never
worked to give an inch on payments.

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Well, then. I guess we'll
need to land him in Mombasa.”

That night, he drove to Glasgow. At four a. m., he flew to
Mombasa via Brussels and Nairobi. He thought that he knew
everything that could go wrong.

Ray Spinner was the youngish man who had been in OIA
and who Abe Peretz believed was responsible for his having
been shot. Alan Craik had known Spinner vaguely a few
years before and thought he was too feckless to do much of
anything. The skinny on Spinner in the Navy was that if it
hadn't been for his father, he'd have been working at Jiffy-
Lube. His father was a partner in one of the heavy-hitting
Washington law firms, one that always had connections in
government, no matter which party was in power, although
it was said that they were particularly tight with the current
bunch. Ray Spinner should have done well, then, but he
hadn't: resignation from the Navy over a screwup that
involved his tipping his father off about privileged information;
abrupt discharge from the Office of Information Analysis
for the data-gathering trip he'd made to Tel Aviv that had
ended in the disaster when Peretz had got part of a bullet
that had hit somebody else first.

“So I got fired—even though it was my boss's idea. To go
to Tel Aviv. And be a spy.”

Spinner and Alan Craik were sitting at a table in a Thai
restaurant near American University. Craik thought that
Spinner had changed for the better—physically thinner, but
maybe psychologically so, as well, as if he'd lost pounds of
self-confidence and self-love.

Craik said, “Pretty dumb, sending somebody to a foreign
country that way.”

“Yeah, well—” Spinner gave him an embarrassed smile.
“Greta says it was my own fault and I should suck it up. I
mean, I didn't say no, she says.”

It had already been established at the beginning of lunch
that Spinner had married. It was also evident that somebody
had taken him in hand, given him a good talking-to, made
him understand he'd been a shmuck and had to do better
from now on. The hand would be Greta's, Craik guessed, a
woman who apparently had Spinner under tight control:
he'd mentioned doing the dishes and the vacuuming as “my
share of having a home.”

“Who was your boss?”

“The great Frank McKinnon.”

One of the people Peretz had given him notes on, now
doing something “creative” at the Petroleum Education
Council. Craik nonetheless pretended ignorance. “Do I know
him?”

“
Nobody
knows McKinnon. You just know
about
him.”

“Like what?”

“Big-time neocon, academic when it suits him, published
American Millennium
—you read it? Very persuasive. Actually
a wonderful book, as Greta says, until you do the math and
see what it would cost to keep the US as the world's only
superpower forever. McKinnon's a big thinker.”

“So he sent you to Tel Aviv as Ray Spinner, Boy Spy, and
then fired you because you got caught?”

Spinner flushed. “Well, there was more to it than that.
But yeah, he waited a month and then fired me. I didn't
take it very well at the time. I thought—I was accustomed
to having my dad bail me out.” He looked away and then
back, directly into Craik's eyes. “Greta says I have to admit
my dependence on my dad.”

“Like a twelve-step program.”

Spinner laughed. “Greta'll love that! Wait till I tell her.
Losers Anonymous.” He filled his fork with something that
had coconut and pork in it and then held the fork in the air
halfway to his mouth. “McKinnon firing me was the best
thing that ever happened. Reality check.”

Alan ate a little of his peanut-sauced chicken and said,
“The Office of Information Analysis was a sort of off-the-cuff
intel project when you worked there, right?”

Spinner nodded, chewing. “Finding nuggets you guys had
‘suppressed.' Don't get mad! ‘Suppressed' was their word,
not mine. Actually, I bought into it while I was there. It was
my job. After I got bounced, I wasn't so crazy about it.”

“Just finding nuggets, or did they do operations, as well?
Other than yours, I mean.” Alan smiled, making it a little
joke. Spinner hadn't been in intelligence in the Navy; Craik
didn't know how much he understood about the field.

Spinner forked more food into his mouth. He ate, Alan
thought, like a hungry graduate student. Spinner said,
“Everybody in OIA was really close-mouthed. If they did
operations, I didn't hear about it. Everything was top-down,
need-to-know, classify it Secret or above if you possibly can.”
“Ever hear of something called Perpetual Justice?”

Spinner looked at him in a different way. Maybe it was
the moment when he realized why Alan had asked him to
lunch. “Is this official?”

“I'm in the US Navy; the Navy has an interest in something
called Perpetual Justice. I'm not on some sort of legal
case, if that's what you mean.”

Spinner moved his lower jaw way over to one side, his
cheek bulging where his tongue was. He looked perplexed.
Maybe he was wishing that Greta were there. “I saw a folder
on McKinnon's desk once with ‘Perpetual Justice' on the
cover. I had to read it upside down.”

“Read anything in it?”

Spinner shook his head. His bowl was empty, but he made
a point of going around the sides with his fork, picking up
the last gobs of sauce. Alan changed the subject back to Greta
and learned that Greta was a nurse, and Spinner was studying
to be a physician's assistant. It was such a revolution in his
goals that Alan wondered if he would really stick with it.
Then Spinner told him that becoming a physician's assistant
was Greta's idea, so Craik thought the chances of his becoming
one were pretty good.

“How's your father?”

“We don't communicate much. He doesn't like Greta. The
feeling's mutual.”

They both had more tea, and Spinner had a brightly
colored, gelatinous dessert. Alan allowed a silence to grow,
and then he said casually, “So what's OIA up to now?”

“They closed up shop. There was an agenda there about
invading Iraq; once that went down, probably the big guys
looked for new worlds to conquer. Especially with the aftermath
in Iraq going to hell—I can't see McKinnon wanting
to be associated with that.”

“So where's he now?” Even though he knew the answer.

“Oil industry.”

“What's he know about oil?”

“He doesn't have to know anything about it. One, he's tight
with people in the White House; two, he's big on interna
tional policy. Looking ahead ten years, fifty years. Big thinker.”

“Sending you to Tel Aviv wasn't big thinking.”

“It was early days. He was trying stuff on. I was part of
his learning curve.”

“Little hard on you.”

“Yeah, but not on him.” Spinner laughed. “When I'd
completely fucked up in Israel, I sent him an email and said
we'd made a mistake. He wrote me back. ‘We don't make
mistakes, and when we do, they become triumphs.'” He
laughed again and shook his head.

Alan signaled for the check and took out a credit card. As
if as an afterthought, he said, “When you were at OIA, ever
hear of an outfit called Force for Freedom?”

“Funny you should ask.” Spinner had been ready to get
up; now he put his forearms on the table. “It's a big security
company now—you know that, I guess. In 2001, it didn't
exist. Two guys I knew slightly in OIA started it. After I got
fired, I went to them and asked for a job. They wouldn't
even talk to me.” He smiled. “McKinnon.”

“What were these two guys at OIA—security people?”

“Nah! They were analysts, like me. Shit, one of them was
only two years out of college. But they were incredibly gung
ho. They were into what OIA called ‘direct action'—preemptive
strikes, military solutions to everything. I heard the older
guy say in a meeting that the President should declare martial
law—this is right after Nine-Eleven—and take over the
National Guard from the states.
That
kind of guys.” He sniggered.
“And had either of them been in the military themselves?
Ho-ho-ho.”

“Did they talk about intel operations?”

“Never heard them comment on that. We weren't friends
or anything. Sorry.”

“Any idea where they got the money to set up Force for
Freedom?”

Spinner shifted his shoulders, almost a wiggle. “Private
money, probably.”

“Any chance it was DoD money?”

Spinner seemed uncomfortable with that. “There was a lot
of off-the-books money, I guess. Like sending me to Tel Aviv.
But about the two guys that set up Force for Freedom, no,
that wasn't the scuttlebutt.” Clearly, he didn't want to say
more. Old loyalty, or caution?

Craik didn't want to let it go. He said, “If it was private
money, where did it come from?”

Spinner frowned and fidgeted. Finally, he muttered,
“Energy sector. That's all I'll say about that.”

They stood and made their way to the door.

Before they went their separate ways, Spinner said, “Did
you get what you wanted out of me?”

Alan smiled. “Greta would say you're being paranoid.”

They laughed.

No operational plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Taught by instructors, repeated by superiors, often a joke,
sometimes in earnest, and never more true than on a sunny
morning amid the palm frond-dappled shadows of Mombasa's
Nyali Beach.

Piat lay on a deck chair with coffee and a bottle of ice
water at his elbow. He was only one of hundreds of pale
slugs trapped beneath the white heat of the sun. The hotel
was full to overflowing, and only bribery had secured him
the two rooms that his reservations had supposedly insured.
And that was the least of his concerns.

A fence had been built from the hotel's “garden lodge”
down to the beach. The fence was three meters tall and
heavily built, with woven mats stapled over teak. Piat had
walked all the way around the enclosure and he knew now
what it meant.

It meant that the uncle, the target, and their entire
entourage were completely walled off from unbelievers. They
were due to arrive at Daniel Arap Moi International airport
in six hours and then they would be driven by limousine
over the potholed road from the airport to the hotel. They
might be visible for a few moments in the lobby during check-
in, just as they had been in Monaco. They might then be
vulnerable, however briefly, except that Hackbutt and his
priceless bird-oriented brain were still in transit and wouldn't
arrive for a further five hours.

And then the whole entourage would slip through a heavily
guarded door in the north end of the lobby and occupy the
garden lodge, as secluded from the other guests as the occupants
of a seraglio.

Piat sat in the sun, sipped coffee, and debated various
tactics of desperation.

The lead idiot plan was to attempt the contact himself. Six
weeks of Hackbutt on falconry had taught him enough to
know that it was a sport at least as demanding as fishing,
with its own cant and its own techniques, from the knots
on a bird's jesses to the way a lure was tied and flung. He
knew how men sounded when they attempted to pass as
“anglers.” He knew how he would sound if he tried to pass
as a falconer. And he knew what Partlow would say if Saudi
intelligence made him on his first pass.

So he considered trying to buy a hotel staffer. Really buy
the guy—ten thousand US, cash and carry. Big money on
the beach in Africa. But for what? And at what risk?

Bad idea. Really bad idea. Except that Piat was constitutionally
unable to simply surrender to the inevitable and
walk away. Rather than abandon the whole thing, he'd take
some insane risk.

Which Partlow really ought to have known. Ought to
have watched out for. The more Piat thought about it, the
more he thought that he was being his own case officer,
and that left him with no shoulder to lean on, much less
cry on. He allowed himself a lot of traitorous thoughts on
the beach at Nyali—for instance, he reminded himself that
he'd already made a fuck of a lot of money off Partlow and
there was no reason for him to give a shit whether they
got the target or not.

Except that he was wired to focus on the needs of his
agents and the realization of his operational objectives, and
the wiring held. Despite the money and the risks and the
fact that nothing about Saudi money or “possible al-Qaeda”
terrorists stirred his blood by an iota.

So he sat in the shade of the palms and watched the fence
and thought.

One of the few attractive bonuses associated with the hotel
for a man in Piat's position was that the café had a plate
glass window that looked in on the lobby. It was not an
arrangement that Piat could recall encountering in other five-
star hotels, but it made his second reconnaissance of the
entourage a matter of alertness and discipline rather than
the high-risk maneuver he'd had to use in Monaco. He sat
at the coffee bar against the window and watched the guests
arrive in neat pulses, to the tune of airline arrivals. His own
familiarity with the evening's schedule allowed him to note
them silently as they arrived—Air Kenya, Lufthansa, British
Airways. Different looks, different luggage, different cabin
crew.

The entourage arrived on Gulf Air, and their limousines
beat the hotel's buses by quite a margin. Two of the security
men—by now Piat thought that they were Saudi intelligence
officers—came through the door as soon as the limos
stopped outside and walked to the desk with a stack of passports.
Both of them glanced over the lobby. They weren't
thorough, and they weren't interested in the glass window
to the café.

Behind them came a solid phalanx of women. They were
expensively dressed, and just as in Monaco their laughter
could be heard through the window and over the
omnipresent air-conditioning. Piat recognized the first
woman through the door from Monaco—she had Chanel
sunglasses, dark red, perched atop her black hair, and she
was over fifty, handsome in a craggy way, and loud.
Imperious. It struck Piat that despite the differences in
culture and race, Irene might very well become that woman
in ten years.

Piat assumed she was the principal wife. The uncle had
four of them, all political choices, all brought to him as tribal
connections, according to Partlow's reports. Piat knew a lot
more about the uncle this time, and he used his new knowledge
to try and match names to faces.

Each of the other wives had her own retinue. The four of
them did not congregate, didn't laugh together or share
conveyance. They had probably come from the airport in
separate cars. Piat watched them come in and wondered what
reptilian security guru had decided that the uncle could use
his wives as bait in the event of an ambush, because the
great man himself came in last, flanked by the rest of his
security. He came in fast, as if they actually feared a threat
in the lobby of the Nyali. By the time he entered, the check-
in was complete—the great man himself never stopped
moving across the lobby, only pausing at the teak door to
the garden lodge to acknowledge the bow of a senior manager,
and then he was gone.

Piat's heart beat harder. He forced himself to sit still for
five more minutes until the very last attendant had passed
from the lobby to the garden lodge, until the red taillights
of the five limos had faded into the warm African night.
Then he walked out of the café to the lobby terrace and then
down the steps and then all the way down the drive to the
three-lane-wide main road, where a party of hotel staffers
waited in uniformed dignity to be picked up by their buses
and whisked away to their huts, far from the eyes of the
tourists.

He was thorough, and he looked everywhere. He walked
through the unlit darkness of the African night, located the
tea shop where the matatu drivers waited for their fares
and where he asked who had been at the airport, but he'd
known the truth from the moment he had seen the uncle.

His target, his lawful prey, the object of his operation,
Prince Bandar Muhad al-Hauq, had not arrived at the hotel.

After an hour in his room consuming alcohol, Piat remembered
the truck. The anomalous truck, the one mentioned
in Partlow's report that he'd read in Turin so many weeks
before that it seemed like another lifetime.

Piat bludgeoned his memory, already a little the worse for
wear from booze, until he decided that the truck was supposed
to come from Avis.

Once he'd established this fact to his own satisfaction, he
stopped drinking.

He hadn't planned to meet Hackbutt and Irene at the
airport. He had planned to send Mike, the driver he'd acquired
for the week with recommendations from Partlow, to collect
them. But now he had reason to be at the airport, and the
security concerns that had prevented him from wanting a
public meeting with his agents were now running a poor
second place to his need to reacquire his target.

By the time Hackbutt and Irene landed in Mombasa late
that night, Piat had moved down the beach to the Serena.
There was no longer any reason to expose himself, or them,
to the Saudis at the Nyali. He arranged for his driver to
meet them in arrivals carrying a sign with their names that
Piat wrote out himself in heavy magic marker to avoid
surprises.

Piat himself went to the Avis counter with a wad of twenty-
dollar bills. It was, by a miracle, manned. The occupant was
there only to service his reservations coming off the London
flight, but he was happy to take some of Piat's money—more
than he earned in a week's work—and doubly happy to tell
Piat that the truck had been rented to an African with a
Sudanese passport and a Saudi driver's license, but the prince
had been two steps away, had provided the credit card, had
been polite. The Sudanese was the driver of record. When
the Avis counter rep had been paid his fifth US twenty-dollar
bill, he copied the whole form for Piat on his office copier.
The form contained a lot of useless detail—but it gave their
destination.

Nguri Lodge, Tsavo East—a game park a couple of hours'
drive inland.

“Sorry we're late, Jack,” Hackbutt called around his wife.
“We sat in Brussels forever.” He looked like hell. “One of my
birds got sick. Carla—a buzzard. You remember her?”

Piat gave them both a tolerant grin. “I'm just glad you're
here. We've had a few changes in plans.” He picked up one
of Irene's bags. Mike picked up the rest.

Piat waved Mike over. “Can you get us a four-wheel drive,
Mike? Since we're here at the airport?”

Mike was a tall, thin man with a deeply serious expression.
His English was excellent, as was his Italian and German.
Mike was a good driver, and he'd come recommended in a
number of ways. He seemed to consider for several seconds.
“You want to go on safari, bwana?”

Piat nodded. “I want to go out to Tsavo East tomorrow,
Mike.”

Mike looked at his watch. He looked at it a lot, as it was
clearly one of his prize possessions, a big Seiko chronograph,
the gift of a former customer. “Not tonight, bwana. I'll get
it in the morning, okay?”

Piat knew that “getting it in the morning” meant that Mike
would have to rise before four, to walk to the bus stop from
which he could get to the airport—all so they could have a
car by eight. And it was nearly midnight now.

Piat gave him a twenty off his roll. “That's okay, Mike.
We'll want it early.”

At eight in the morning, the three of them left their hotel
with boxes of sandwiches and hats, binoculars and bug repellent
and shorts and shoes—and all their luggage. Luck and
telephone charm had got Piat a reservation at Nguri Lodge.
It was a much smaller hotel with only fifty rooms. He was
taking a number of chances. First, that his hunch was right
and that the prince would go—virtually alone—to Tsavo. To
this hotel. Second, that he would still be there. On and on—
more risks than he wanted to face, but this was the stage of
an operation where everything became one long set of risks—
some avoidable, some not.

Hackbutt started the ride in the dumps but he recovered
as soon as they had left the litter and pollution of Mombasa
behind them and turned north into the countryside. Hackbutt
kept referring to the road as a “country road,” when in fact
the two-lane tarmacked strip was the main highway from
Mombasa to Nairobi. There weren't any support services on
the highway except tea shops and petrol stops with ill-spelled
signs and single windows for service. Towns were infrequent
and looked like boom towns in America's old west—a single
street of shops painted in garish colors with tall false fronts.
Blink and you missed it—that was Mariakani.

They stopped for a late breakfast at a truck stop. Piat wolfed
down two heavy cakes laden with sugar and drank a cup of
excellent coffee. Kenya didn't have bad coffee anywhere.
Irene watched him eat the cakes with something like horror,
and Hackbutt raised his hands as if in surrender and ate from
his hotel lunch.

It was noon by the time they reached the gates of the
park. A line of matatus and four-wheel-drive vehicles was
queued up fifty vehicles long. Mike sighed.

“Jesus,” Piat said. He had been impatient since he had got
in the car, various nightmare scenarios playing out in his
head: the prince was at Tsavo for one night—was already
back—would pass them on the road.

Mike shrugged. “You want me to get us in the gate,
Bwana?”

“Sure.”

“Cost you fifty dollars.” Mike shrugged, as if the venality
of his countrymen was a source of perpetual astonishment.

Piat counted out the money.

Mike drove past the waiting vehicles, pulled up into an
apparently closed bay, and honked his horn.

The man from the first bay completed his altercation with
a matatu driver and then crossed over. Other drivers in the
line honked, then shouted. Matatu drivers tended to be free
spirits, or even rebels—and they didn't like to wait. The gate
guard shouted a phrase that was so heavily accented that
Piat couldn't even recognize the language. Mike grunted and
replied calmly in his own clearly accented Swahili. Piat's
Swahili ran to about fifty words, and he understood nothing
of Mike's rapid flow.

Then Mike handed over the fifty dollars.

The guard brightened up, took the money, and raised the
barrier.
“Habari!”
he shouted at the occupants of the car.
Irene waved. Piat called
“Habari ya leo!”
and they were
through the gate. Mike gave Piat a big smile.

Piat clapped him on the shoulder. “Nicely done.”

Mike nodded. “I told them you were all citizens, yes? And
you say—
Habari ya leo
! Just like Ki-setla. Now the guard, he
thinks maybe you are citizens.”