Threatcon Delta (22 page)

A
guirre was being droll. Their first stop was actually a local fishing boat where they were hustled unceremoniously onboard. Aguirre had phoned ahead and the vessel was readied within minutes. The ship was already in motion as the slick, slimy gangplank was being pulled onto the deck.

“What will you do?” Kealey had asked Aguirre as the others were boarding.

“We’ve got a mutual-protection pact down here with the Brits,” he said. “We’ll wait at their embassy until it’s safe to go back.”

Within fifteen minutes the forty-year-old vessel was outside the territorial waters of Venezuela. There it stopped while the four passengers boarded a motorized dinghy that took them to the navy vessel. There, all but Kealey were bundled into a small white conference room in the aft section of the vessel, which had only about a third more space than the back of the escape van. A guard was posted outside, ostensibly to see to their needs. Food and beverages were provided.

“I do not think we are here for a conference,” Carla said.

The only sound was the hum of the distant engines and the slight wheeze in Durst’s breath. It was moderated somewhat by the coffee he drank.

“I wonder if the fishing vessel will return to Caracas,” Durst thought aloud. “I doubt it. The police will figure this out. Perhaps they will go to Grenada. They will find safe haven there. And good fishing,” he added with a chuckle.

You don’t have a right to laugh,
Phair thought, and wished the man would just stop talking. He wished the man would stop breathing altogether. And he didn’t feel guilty thinking that. Lukas Durst had supported a monstrous cause and he did not deserve the respect or courtesies he was being shown. Phair also envied him, more than a little, his doting granddaughter. Phair did not have that from family, friends, or congregation. He had borrowed it from day to day in Iraq, especially from the Bulani family—but that was gone now. He did not feel sorry for himself, but he did yearn for that sense of belonging.

Kealey had been gone about a half hour when he stuck his head in the door.

“James?” he said, motioning him out with a cock of his head.

Phair stepped into the narrow, gunmetal corridor. His flesh was moving like a tuning fork due to the proximity of the ship’s engines.

“You were on an OPEC-backed ‘no-admit’ list for oil-producing nations,” Kealey told him.

“How is that possible?”

“You were photographed with petro-terrorists in Iraq,” Kealey said. “They didn’t have a name, so it didn’t show up on our background check. Those police knew you on sight, so I figured it had to be a photo trigger of some kind—facial recognition technology, probably at the airport.”

“Why didn’t the information show up when we boarded in the United States?” Phair asked.

“We don’t use that kind of software yet,” Kealey explained. “When you’re basically a one-industry nation like Venezuela, you need to protect your assets. I’m relieved.”

“No Ramirez.”

“More than that.” Kealey stepped closer. “I was concerned that Carla had ratted us out while she was inside.”

Phair considered that. “This doesn’t mean she didn’t. She might have come along simply because her grandfather insisted.”

“Unlikely, but it’s a possibility I’m not quite ready to dismiss,” Kealey admitted. “But if that was the case, I don’t think it was us or the mission, per se. She may have been afraid for her grandfather’s health or security. Still, we’re going to have to take precautions that she doesn’t try to run to the authorities somewhere—and also to make sure you don’t get photographed anywhere else.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting a fake beard—”

“A real one didn’t protect you in Iraq,” Kealey pointed out. “The Venezuelans still ID’ed you.”

Phair had been joking. Kealey was not. Phair wondered if the man was done with joking permanently. His tight, grim façade seemed more hardened by the hour. He was perhaps lacking that sense of belonging even more than Phair.

“We’ll get you a chip that generates a local electromagnetic field,” Kealey was saying. “It will create just enough holes in the pixels of a camera image to prevent registering sufficient points of similarity.”

Phair wasn’t sure whether he felt relieved or concerned because he’d be undetectable. If this technology were available to him, it would conceivably be available to terrorists.

“Anyway, we’re going to Honduras, where we’ll be provisioned with fresh clothes and then flown to Jacksonville,” Kealey said. “The NSA has chartered a plane to take us to Rabat.”

“Why Honduras?”

“SOUTHCOM—the United States Southern Command—maintains bases in the region to patrol Latin America and the Caribbean. The facility in Soto Cano has a significant air force presence to fight drug trafficking.”

“I assume we’re not mentioning our connection with Ricardo Ramirez, then.”

“No.”

“Considering who we’re working with to fight would-be world conquerors, I’m not sure who is worse,” Phair said.

Kealey only nodded.

“Speaking of which, are you concerned that Durst may show up on a list of fugitive Nazis?”

“The truth is, they’re older than yesterday’s news,” Kealey said. “No one’s watching anymore. Look what we had to go through to find him.” He started toward the conference room. “Let’s go. I’ve got an update.”

Kealey entered, followed by Phair. The cleric was slightly relieved to learn how they’d been caught. At least the Venezuelans hadn’t been after him for something careless he’d actually done, only for the company he may have accidentally kept. That was unfair, but there was an oddly reassuring competence to it. Maybe there was hope for international security.

Gathered around the table—Kealey and Phair sitting across from Durst and his daughter—the agent cracked open a water bottle and sat back.

“I’ve just been informed that there are now several thousand pilgrims gathered at the base of Mt. Sinai, but still no actual sightings of this supposed prophet,” Kealey said. “I’m told there is an Egyptian operative inside the monastery, which appears to be a staging area for whoever is behind this. We do not know yet what he may have discovered.”

“How could such a well-visited compound be a staging area?” Phair asked.

“Its popularity works for it,” Kealey said. “Anyone can come or go without raising suspicion. Mr. Durst, can we talk about the location of the Staff? Specifically, how sure are you that it will still be accessible?”

“I believe it is or I would not have come,” Durst said easily. “But before I tell you, I wish you to tell me—are all of your operations conducted with as much, what is the word? Holes?” He looked at his granddaughter. “
Porös?
”

“Porousness,” Carla said.

“What happened in Caracas was unfortunate and unforeseeable,” Kealey said.

“Yes, yes, we have all experienced such setbacks,” Durst agreed. “But we are dealing now with a quest and a relic where we must anticipate all things, against people who are undoubtedly far more ruthless than our dear Caracas police. We cannot retrieve this object and, in so doing, deliver it to the hands of the very forces we are trying to discredit.”

“We are going to move forward with extraordinary care,” Kealey said. “As I was just explaining to Major Phair, we were thrown into this without being able to clear everything from his record.”

“What infamy was on the record of a priest?” Durst asked.

“He was inadvertently mixed up with French ecoterrorists,” Kealey said.

“Ah, the French,” Durst said. “Individually resourceful, yet strangely useless as a whole.”

Carla slipped her slender hand over the large one of her grandfather, clearly a familiar gesture intended to remind him he was with company. He raised his thumb from beneath and held her hand.

“In any case, the matter has been cleared up now,” Kealey assured him.

“If only I had had such support,” Durst sighed, reaching over and patting Carla’s hand.

Phair didn’t know whether he meant Kealey or Carla. It didn’t matter, not when considering the millions of lives destroyed by the Nazis.

“You did all right,” Phair said, ignoring the look Kealey fired him.

“ ‘All right’?” Carla replied. “Living in one’s native land, free to move about, earning a living in your chosen field—that is ‘all right.’ You have those things. My grandfather did not.”

“I was on the losing side in a war,” Durst reminded her. His gray eyes shifted to Phair. “I am lucky to be alive. But do not confuse that for contentment.”

“Getting back on topic,” Kealey said, “where are we going?”

“The Staff is buried in the desert,” Durst said, “in a chest in a well.”

“A well,” Kealey said.

“That is correct.”

“I’ve been to wells in the Iraqi deserts,” Phair said. “Most of them are fragile stone holes that are quickly covered with sand.”

“And some last for centuries,” Durst said. “The area we chose has not been covered or irrigated. I look from time to time on the Internet.”

“Can you actually see the chest that contains the Staff?” Kealey asked.

“No,” Durst said. “But it is there.”

“Why didn’t you try to recover it yourself?” Phair asked. “You could have made a great deal of money.”

Durst shrugged. “It is just a piece of old wood. And to sell it—that would have raised too many questions. It was better to leave it.”

“I suppose that if the Staff had been recovered, someone would have heard about it,” Kealey said. “It would have been offered for sale somewhere.”

“I assure you, it is unlikely to have been touched,” Durst said with a smile. “And so you don’t worry unnecessarily, while you were out I told my granddaughter everything you need to know to find it. I whispered it,” he added, turning a finger around the room, “in case there are microphones or cameras in this chamber. Should anything happen to me, should I suddenly perish from all of this excitement, Carla will have the information you require.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Kealey assured him.

“One never knows about such things,” Durst replied. “I am not young, and hate has a long memory.”

“Hate has done a lot of damage to the world,” Phair agreed.

“Major, be clever on your own time and not around me,” Kealey snapped. “Mr. Durst, so that I can make arrangements, where in Morocco are we going?”

Durst savored the quiet moment of victory before replying, “Marrakech.”

While Durst and his daughter ate sandwiches that had been brought in, Kealey motioned for Phair to join him outside.

“I’m not going to have any further outbursts from you,” he said. “This isn’t a war crimes tribunal—”

“The man is an unrepentant Nazi!” Phair charged.

“I need him. I need you. End of discussion.”

“No,” Phair said. He didn’t care which Kealey this was. Durst was a racist creature, a heartless thing. He meant to say so.

He didn’t get the chance.

“That wasn’t a recommendation, it was an order,” Kealey barked, angrier than Phair had seen him. “The world is on fire and I don’t have time to piss on Major James Phair. You have been seconded to the CIA under my command. Failure to honor that instatement, duly executed under CIA Charter Regulation Nineteen, will result in an invocation of Regulation Thirty-Seven, which states that you will be fucked by me, up the ass and out the mouth. If you impede my mission in any way, said counteraction to be defined by Regulation Forty-Two and personally observed by me, I will have you tried for treason, I will make it stick—your past record of desertion will not help you, I guarantee—and you will meet your God before we are through. So, Major, let me know right now if any of this is going to be a problem for you.”

Phair did not reply. The only response to the hyper-angry Old Testament figure before him was New Testament charity. Ruling the roost was obviously important to Kealey, probably because in all those unseen moments with his superior, it had been made abundantly clear that he didn’t.

Kealey turned and left Phair in the corridor while he entered a room marked “Communications.” The cleric did not reenter the little conference room but stood where he was, staring at the gently swaying floor. He didn’t know how much of that speech was bluster and how much could be made to stick. That wasn’t the point. Kealey was right about the country needing them both. The question was whether Phair’s personal ethics, once compromised, would ever snap back. Kealey was correct; technically, he had betrayed his country once before by deserting. Morally, however, it had been the right thing to do.

For now, he would give Kealey what he needed: cooperation and silence, nothing more.

L
ieutenant Adjo sprinted ahead, chased by the man from the stairs. The pursuer spoke into his radio as he ran. It enabled Adjo to hear the man’s voice and to learn if there were any passwords when calling in.

There weren’t. That could come in useful, if he lived.

The corridor curved severely, no doubt dictated by the rock the engineers had encountered long ago. To the left were two-meter-high arches every few meters, where clay vases no doubt held water at one time. Now the spaces were empty. Adjo found one that would serve. It was just shy of an S-curve in the corridor and he pressed his back to the wall on his left. When his pursuer was near, Adjo tossed his gun ahead—as though he had been rounding the curve and dropped it. The pursuer stopped a few paces before the arch, listened, then hurried ahead.

As the man passed his hiding place, Adjo extended his right arm, bracing the inside of his bicep with his left hand. The “clothesline” caught the man in the chin and threw his torso back as his legs moved forward another step. The instant the man landed on his back on the uneven stone floor, Adjo leaped from his hiding place and punched him hard in the right temple. One blow was all it took to daze him. Adjo patted the man’s pockets until he found a wallet. He put it in his robe, then took the man’s gun, radio, and flashlight. He recovered his own semiautomatic—the toss hadn’t seemed to damage it—then stuffed it in his belt. He switched the radio on as he continued along the corridor.

“I have him cornered,” Adjo whispered in a fair representation of the man’s voice.

“Going silent.”

“We’re right behind you.”

“No,” Adjo barked. That meant there would be no doubling back. “Hold position until you hear from me. Over.”

“Where are you headed?” the voice on the other end asked urgently.

Adjo would have been happy to mislead them while he searched for an exit, but if this was a paramilitary operation—as the guns and radios suggested—the compound was probably divided into sectors with code names. He turned off the radio since the enemy might be able to use it to triangulate his position. The good news was, the question had told him that this tunnel led somewhere.

Where it went immediately was down, which surprised him. Perhaps the ancient builders had been seeking a water table below. That proved to be exactly the case: it ended in a rough-edged channel that millennia of runoff had cut in the rock. It was barren now and Adjo hopped into the dust-dry waterbed, the walls of which were less than a meter high and steeply angled. The lights ended here and he turned on the flashlight. The path turned upward, as he had expected, and the ceiling sloped lower and lower. Water did not need much headroom. He bent, then crawled, and after a few minutes he was wriggling on his belly. His robe snagged and tore on ridged outcroppings and his sleeves were pulled back, leaving his forearms exposed to the rock and bleeding.

Perhaps this is where the Biblical river of blood originated,
Adjo thought. He wondered whether some long-vanished, pre-Dynastic people had ever offered sacrifices here like the peoples of Mexico on their pyramids. Perhaps that dark history was one reason this channel was not mentioned on the tour map.

Adjo had no idea how far he traveled, or for exactly how long. Occasionally he was able to crawl, never walk; mostly, he had to worm his way forward. It was difficult to breathe in the narrow chamber, not just because it was so confined but because the heat from the daytime was trapped here, and rising with the addition of his own body heat. While there was no going back, going ahead was uncertain. Finally, a faint, milky crescent appeared where the stone wall curved gently to the left. It grew as he neared, getting wider. He suspected there might be an opening, not only because it was light but because the air became noticeably less stuffy and hot.

In a few moments he saw what was allowing the air and moonlight to enter: a narrow vent, about a half meter wide and two meters deep, cut in the rock. He stopped below it. Using the light from above and his fingertips, he examined the walls. There were chisel marks, with the gouge-end pointing down. The air vent had been cut from above.

The gouges were extremely symmetrical. They appeared to have been cut by a power tool.

He continued to shimmy upward. Darkness returned, unwelcome and deeper than before. He had to feel his way lest he belly up onto an opening and tumble in. Curiously, there were mice in the chamber. He could hear their distinctive scratching on the rock, feel their fur as they brushed his exposed skin. Their presence didn’t make sense. There clearly hadn’t been any flowing water in this arid passageway for quite some time—millennia, perhaps. There was food to be found in the monastery, but it was a long way to go when there were seeds, bark, and insects on the mountainside.

It is a riddle for some other time,
the young officer decided. There were more pressing matters.

Adjo wore holes in the knees of his pants and then in his knees. His wrists turned gummy with a mix of blood and clinging particles of minerals. It was an effort to face ahead, to keep his chin from dragging on the rock. Occasionally, he felt his head begin to sag and jerked it up, only to hit the top of his skull on the low ceiling. He distracted himself by recalling all those years he had spent in cramped helicopters and on stakeouts where movement was often extremely limited and patience was the key to success. He remembered one mission in particular, his first year with 777, when he and then-Colonel Samra were trying to discover how gunrunners were getting weapons into the country. A treetop stakeout one night revealed that the arms were being tied to the underbellies of sheep, like the famed Greek warriors from Troy. To determine who was receiving the weapons, Samra and Adjo had to follow the sheep along two kilometers of dry, shallow, scorpion-infested creek bed. The entire operation took ten hours. And then they had to deal with the smugglers and the sheep.

This mission was worse because there was no Abort button. He couldn’t just flip himself over the side of a gully or climb down from a tree. Still, without those experiences, the closeness of this place would have been unendurable.

Finally, Adjo saw shadowy light ahead—ruddy, not moonlight—and emerged at the base of the wall of a much larger tunnel. He poked his head through the opening to his ears—there was not enough light to see—and listened.

He heard footsteps approaching and ducked back inside. The steps echoed through the cave, then came over and past him. When they were gone, he slipped from the tunnel, jumped to his feet, and turned on the flashlight—first wrapping it in his big sleeve to diffuse its glow. Immediately, he noticed fresh, lighter-colored scrape marks on the dirt floor of the cave. He crouched and looked at them closely. Something had been dragged from the tunnel opening to the left. He bent closer and saw faint tread marks. They looked like dolly wheels.

Adjo followed them quickly, ignoring the complaints from his ragged knees. As he did, he checked his cell phone. Not surprisingly, there was no reception here. It would not be enough to reconnoiter. He had to see what was going on, then get outside and make his report.

He heard voices behind him from the main tunnel, not the one he’d used. They seemed agitated. He assumed the worst: that the unconscious man had been found and the enemy had figured out where Adjo had gone. He hoped this system of natural caves was complex enough for him to elude them, even hide if necessary. If there were people up here, possibly the prophet himself, they wouldn’t be able to smoke Adjo out with fire or tear gas.

Unfortunately, the cavern was comprised of this single passage and it did not go on much longer. It dead-ended in a large nook. Worse than that, however, was what the cranny contained.

He
had
to get out of here and make his report.