Threatcon Delta (10 page)

“Have you been to confession since you’ve been back?”

He nodded.

“How did that make you feel?” She wouldn’t ask what he had said, but hoped this question would tell her.

“Like I was back in that Iraqi bomb shelter,” he said. “I closed the door of the confessional and I sat down and I wanted to scream.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It was a packed chapel, and only the priest is required to honor the seal of confession.”

Major Dell scowled out a question. “Is that why everyone whispers in the confessional?”

He nodded.

“I never knew.”

“Make a note for your superiors,” he added. “That’s the only religious secret I know.”

The analyst gave him a disapproving look but let it pass. It wasn’t the confessional that had made him feel trapped, she suspected. But what situation weighed most heavily on him? The students? Being home and bound to the base? The sixteen years he’d been lost and wandering? Or sixteen years of feeling not lost at all?

This was going to take a while.

He looked at her. “That wasn’t a joke, Major. Is the army still worried that I’ve been turned?”

“I honestly can’t say.”

“You know, maybe it’s not the captivity that scares me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, as a kid, the church and my faith provided fuel to keep me growing. While I was in Iraq, I needed others to survive. Now that I’m back, the army has decided to give me everything I need until I don’t need it anymore or they don’t need me. What happens when I become self-sustaining?”

“Let’s not fly before we’ve poked our beak over the edge of the aerie.”

“Am I that bad off?” He laughed self-consciously.

“Not at all,” she replied. Then, trying not to sound augural, she added, “But let’s not assume that the army wants to toss you, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, looking at her with a little smile. “Though that’s one thing that is very different in Iraq.”

“What’s that?” she asked with interest.

“The people were provincial,” he said with knowing eagle eyes. “No one ever had to pretend they didn’t know more than they knew.”

R
yan Kealey was standing in his living room with the TV remote in his hand and his mouth open. He was staring at Dr. Hanif al-Shenawi on his 4K television. The channel was Al Jazeera America, which he’d reluctantly flipped to after catching a brief flash of the doctor on CNN. He figured they’d give the bastard all the coverage they could. Only the most basic facts would be reliable but this was a definite basic fact: the man who disappeared into a San Antonio mosque just before the mayor was assassinated was now going to be the top-level manager of a nonsectarian hospital in Basra that would be under joint stewardship of Iraq and Iran.

The news coverage did not include an interview with the doctor, only footage of him walking around the large, flat, dusty vacant lot where the hospital was going to be constructed, chatting and smiling with his colleagues, motioning in the air at future wings and floors. News of the hospital would have been staggering enough. News that the man who traveled an opium route out of Iran through Iraq only six months ago was going to be the public face of this project . . . Kealey wanted to sit down and spend the rest of the evening researching this, but the doorbell rang.

He was expecting her. After a few perfunctory phone calls, the courteous coolness of which made it clear that Kealey did not want to rekindle anything with Allison Dearborn, it had come down to the stupid, unavoidable fact that he still had a pair of her earrings. They were emeralds, they were antiques, they belonged to her grandmother, and she would have been heartbroken if anything happened to them in the mail. Even overnight mail couldn’t be fully trusted. It made simple, aggravating sense for him to hand them to her, and since his neighborhood was on the way home for her from the office, her stopping by was preferable to being caught up in dinner somewhere. Kealey had no patience for small talk these days and an aversion to anything deeper, and dinner with her would surely strike deep. With this arrangement, even after the doorbell rang his mind could still be hovering on the broadcast, barely thinking of her.

He opened the door of his newish townhouse, virtually identical to every other townhouse in the area, brick in the front, vinyl siding in the back, no exterior decorations. In this neighborhood, it was a fair bet that any house without a summer flag in front or a red-white-and-blue-ribbon wreath on the door or children’s toys out front or out back was the residence of a CIA employee. They were temporary leasers, counting down until they were reassigned as if the neighborhood were a helicopter pad, and Allison knew it. There was a trace of pity in her expression when he opened the door. He could have told her that he now owned the property on the mountain in Connecticut but he chose not to. The ownership was abstract. He hadn’t set a foot on the land since the day he wired the down payment. And telling her might have complicated their simple ending.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head, unwilling to engage in surprise that she could still read him so easily. He just walked back over the newish, beige wall-to-wall carpet to the living room, letting her close the door and follow him to the TV. The channel was now showing footage of Dr. al-Shenawi clucking over the crowded, unsanitary conditions in an existent hospital in some remote location in Iraq.

Allison looked at Kealey’s face, looked at the TV. “It can’t be the hospital that’s the problem, so it must be the man,” she said.

“I’ve been trying to find him for six months,” Kealey said, choosing his words carefully as always to avoid giving too much information. “He was in a hot zone, let’s put it that way. And he vanished. Even factoring in the help of his extremely powerful friends, the complete absence of clues for how he got out and where he went has been. . . .”

“Disappointing?”

“It’s been a kick in the teeth. And suddenly here he is, fully publicized. We had no hint he was involved in this.”

“So this is good, you found him.”

Kealey laughed shortly and Allison glanced at him. He had never laughed at her for any flash of optimism before.

“The hospital is a problem,” he said.

“Because it’s Iran working with Iraq? It’s surprising for old enemies but surely it must be a good omen.”

“Iraq and Iran have been cozying up for a few years now,” Kealey said, his eyes fixed on the screen. “It was one of the unforeseen consequences of the sanctions against Iran for their nuclear program. They started to realize that they needed at least the semblance of friends and allies, so they started courting Iraq as soon as our troops pulled back. They started with one of the richest offerings they could make: natural gas.”

“A trade agreement?”

“More fundamental than that. They ran pipelines into Iraq to make the exporting as easy and cheap as possible. Mutual assistance has been proliferating ever since. This isn’t even the first joint hospital. The Iranians have been building clinics for their pilgrims to certain Shiite holy sites in Iraq.”

“So this is a problem because our foreign policy has been assuming a natural state of distrust between the two of them?”

“Our foreign policy doesn’t assume anything. Look, there have been instances where Iran has worked together with Al Qaeda. That’s like yoking a shark and a crocodile together and watching them pull a plow. They hate each other, yet it happens, every now and then. So there are no illusions being shattered here. A hospital in Basra, a hub on a major opium route? No heads spinning over that one, either. But Iran publicly, proudly helping to build a nonsectarian hospital? That’s a problem.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense. Iran still throws non-Muslims into jail for years whenever they feel like it. Christians and Jews are barely tolerated; everyone else is tormented at will. The regime isn’t going to back off of that any time soon. So why? What are they gaining? What do they think they’re doing?”

“Maybe Iraq made it a requirement of the joint partnership?”

“Sure,” Kealey said, in a tone of voice that said,
not likely.
“And then they put this man at the head of it.”

“He could be involved in opium?”

“A bit more than that.”

Kealey abruptly turned off the TV, strode to the air conditioner gauge and turned it off, strode to the table next to the door where he picked up Allison’s earrings, and placed them in her hand without looking at her. He refused to allow his mind to observe, at any level of remove, that this was a woman he’d once come very close to loving. He cut his mind into manageable surfaces like her emeralds.

“You’re heading out, too?” she asked.

“I need to access some databases.”

He reached for a cap from the coat-closet shelf. She put a hand on his other arm. “Ryan, I’ve never seen you like this. I’ve seen you in mission mode and this is different. You are locked off and locked down.”

“I’m focused, Allison, that’s all.”

“No, I’ve seen you focused, too.”

He made a move toward the front-door handle, but she stopped him.

“I don’t need a Cassandra, Allison. I know what terrors the world holds in store.”

“Yes, and you also know how you respond to them, which is why it’s important for you to know when you’re responding differently. If I had to guess, I would say that you are deeply confused at something, by something, over something . . . whatever it is, it is eating at you at your very core. And you look like you’re going to pick up a ball-peen hammer and smash it because you don’t understand it.”

Again, he would not let himself feel surprise at her insight, but this time it was harder to sequester the reaction. She really was outstanding. He wanted to tell her about Hernandez, about Isobel Garcia. He wanted to confess to her that yes, it was driving him crazy, trying to figure out why the hired killer of the drug dealer would have assassinated the youngest Hispanic mayor in the United States. They had checked Garcia’s history and it showed no reason why Hernandez would have any particular grudges against her, no indications that somehow she would be a more formidable opponent for him than anyone else had been. No connections at all. It was possible the killer was a mercenary and had simply been hired by someone else, but then Dr. al-Shenawi had been in San Antonio, too, after just meeting with Hernandez. The drug dealer had to have been involved. None of it made sense and they had no leads, because Hernandez had disappeared as completely as the doctor had. Every day Kealey cursed his assignment because he should have been the one to go after Hernandez. Instead he had wasted six months only to find another unfathomable event.

“I’m only useful when I’m locked down,” he said.

“I understand why you feel that way,” Allison said. “But be careful about—”

“Be careful about what I smash?”

“Yes but also, be careful about what hammer you choose.”

She broke eye contact and put her earrings in her purse, signaling that he was free to go now. He hesitated. He wanted to, not give her something, not reward her for her insight, but let her know that he had heard her even though his decisions would probably be based on a thousand things other than her advice. It was still sane advice.

“As a psychiatrist,” he said, “if you had to send someone over there to . . .”

“To keep an eye on things?” she said, smiling at how close he was edging on saying things he shouldn’t.

“Yes. What kind of person would you send? I’m assuming not a surgeon, not an administrative type, maybe a nurse?”

“Well, to a nonsectarian hospital being run by two countries that may not completely grasp the meaning of the term? I’d send a man of God.”

He half smiled. “Which god? Assuming that an American imam, for example, would be under suspicion because he could be turned.”

She shook her head. “You live in a cold and brutal world, Ryan Kealey.”

She put her hand on the door handle and let herself out.

Kealey watched her walk down the cement path toward her car. He stepped out, closed the door after him, and followed the same path to his own. After all they had experienced together, been with each other, they simply half raised their arms in good-bye. Then he followed her taillights out of the suburb.

U
ntil today, thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant Bassam Adjo—a five-year veteran of Egypt’s elite Task Force 777—had never spied on his own country. On and above the borders looking outward, yes. On unauthorized aliens coming in, yes. But never on Egyptians in Egypt. That was the job of the Mubahath el-Dawla, the General Directorate of State Security Investigations, which reported to the minister of the interior and spied on everyone, including the minister of the interior. They were useless, the information they collected serving as a deterrent to anyone within the government acting against anyone else within the government. The result was the same as if no one had any intelligence about anyone else. That was all nonsense. But this . . .

Spying on ordinary citizens made him uneasy, as if the precious democracy he supported—an oasis in a desert of theocracies and dictatorships, so incredibly hard won after the years of Egyptian Spring and subsequent falls of several governments—was starting to dry around the edges once more.

Perhaps, though, this mission was not without justification,
he told himself. At least he hoped so. He loved and respected his organization too deeply to imagine its mission changing.

Based northeast of the capital in a nondescript hangar at the Cairo International Airport, the seventy-man Task Force 777 typically patrolled the outer regions of the ancient nation in a fleet of Mi-8 and Westland command choppers. Now, however, a commando group under Lieutenant Adjo was crouched on a ledge 1,920 meters above Wadi el-Deir, the passage that connects Mt. Sinai to the Plain of el Raha—the Plain of Rest, where the restless Israelites awaited the return of Moses and built themselves a calf of gold to worship.

Adjo was lying on his belly, the sleeves of his leather jacket fluttering as he stared at the Mountain of Moses through night-vision goggles. He was studying a black cave at the summit of the sacred mountain. It was in this cave that the prophet was said to have dwelt for forty days while he communed with God and crafted the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Beside Adjo, Cpl. Kek Massari was listening to an electro-acoustic amplifier. They lay in silence until, with a heavy sigh, Massari removed the headphones.

“The wind is too severe,” Massari said, pulling the hood of his jacket over his ears. “I can’t make out anything.”

“I can’t see very much, either,” Adjo admitted. All he had seen since they arrived three hours before, shortly before dusk, were the thirty or so pilgrims milling around the mouth of the cave.

Adjo rolled on his side and motioned to a radio operator who was crouching by his equipment outside a tent, the canvas flaps whipping in the cold mountain air. The young man hurried over and dropped to his knees beside the officer.

“Tell the pilot we’re staying the night,” Adjo said, cupping his hand by the private’s ear.

“Staying the night,” he repeated. “Yes, sir.”

The private ran back to his radio and transmitted the message. The helicopter that had ferried the four men—the fourth member, huddled inside the tent, was a veteran climber in case they needed to reach a different vantage point—had landed on an outcropping on the other side of the mountain, some three hundred meters down, where it could not be heard or seen by anyone on Mt. Sinai. Theirs was a delicate reconnaissance due to the nature of the reputed individual they were seeking and the ramifications of whatever he might be doing.

“Did you tell him we’re staying?” asked Massari.

Adjo nodded.

“We are among the fortunate,” Massari said sarcastically, rolling his eyes heavenward.

“We have warm clothes, at least,” Adjo said, taking another look at the cave. “Not like those robed devils. Take a break until the wind quiets.”

“I don’t mind waiting with—”

“Grab it when you can get it,” Adjo admonished him.

Massari gathered his gear to go to the tent as Adjo continued to watch the cave. He had never been to Mt. Sinai. Due to the high tourist volume and the fact that three major religions revered Moses and had to commingle here, this region was a joint protectorate of the Egyptian government and the United Nations. Though he was not a particularly religious man, Adjo was not immune to the power of these ancient sites. This place was not like the pyramids at Giza, which were the handiwork of men. Here, the hand of God had been felt. His voice had echoed through the very crags at which Adjo was looking.

That was a lot for a man to comprehend. He didn’t know how Moses did it. He was a prophet, yes, but still a man. Did one just accept that the finger of the Almighty had touched him? Did events simply carry him along, events whose tides and currents the shepherd could not resist? Perhaps both. Or perhaps he was a man big enough, wise enough, strong enough to believe that he could do what, after all, God had appointed him to do.

Maybe it was just as well that he had this assignment. The lieutenant could not afford to be swayed by what he sensed, by what he wanted to feel, only by what he saw. The mission was too important for misinterpretation.

The powerful binoculars sat on a small, squat tripod that prevented the equipment from shaking as Adjo’s hands trembled in the cold. A stubby antenna jutted from between the two eyepieces and pale white numbers scrolled along the bottom left of the green, glowing image, a time-stamp and file reference numbers for the digital recording being made on a laptop in the tent. It was a very different age for surveillance compared to when Adjo first joined the army in 1998. Back then, the big transition was still replacing the aged Soviet equipment with new infantry combat vehicles from the United States. When the war against jihadists began in 2001—a slow-burning World War III to those who were inclined to take a long, large view—more and more sophisticated electronics were added to the arsenal. The son of a fisherman who hated the water—it was too restricting for him—Adjo was excited to transfer to 777 when the opportunity arose. He loved the adventure but that was the least of what motivated him on patrols in the dry, baking desert and now the mountains. He loved being a part of one of the most honored divisions of the oldest military force on the planet. Whereas most of his comrades had joined the military as a way to make a living—and there was certainly nothing dishonorable about that—the weight of Adjo’s responsibility had inspired him to levels of performance he had never imagined. His commanding officer had two brass paperweights on his desk—which no longer held paper, merely these sentiments: one said, “The Army Makes Men,” the other, “Men Make the Army.”

“Which is the truer?” Lieutenant General Samra would ask newcomers.

In twenty years, according to the officer, no one had ever been able to choose.

After another hour there was movement outside the cave they were watching. Adjo clacked two rocks three times—their prearranged summons—and Massari hurried over. Everything he heard, like everything Adjo saw, was also being digitally stored. As Massari rolled up the hem of his wool cap and slid the headphones on, people were emerging from the cave, incongruously holding battery-powered lanterns.

If this was the work of God, the bushes would burn,
Adjo thought, comforted by his own clear grasp of the situation.

He watched the group of men, now forty-odd strong, most of them wearing dark, loose-fitting
djellabas
with the hoods drawn up for warmth, as they formed a semicircle, their backs to Adjo. They were looking at the mouth of the cave.

Suddenly, something fell among the men, landing heavily at their feet. The three men nearest the object flinched, taking backward steps that kicked up a fine layer of sand.

Adjo studied the object. It appeared to be a pole about two and a half meters long. Though the dust partially obscured Adjo’s view, what he did see confounded him. The pole appeared to expand width-wise at one end, as though it were a child’s balloon inflated with a single, long breath. This fattened end shifted slightly from side to side and appeared to rise slightly, all under its own power, it seemed; while the bulk of the pole, still earthbound, twitched once in S-curves along its length and back again. After a moment, the serpentine shape lay down and was stiff again. Hands emerged from the darkness of the cave to retrieve the object.

“They seem to be chanting,” reported Massari. His voice was calm; in the darkness, he had seen nothing of what had transpired.

Adjo raised one of his companion’s earphones. “What are they saying?” he demanded.

Massari replied, “The Stranger has returned!”