Threatcon Delta (31 page)

“Either way, we have some difficult hours ahead of us.”

“Speaking of difficulty, do you have a plan for getting into the monastery?”

“Not as yet. I was hoping that upon seeing the enclave, an American special operative would have some insight on that.”

“I believe I do. Have you a weapon?”

“Yes.”

Phair was quiet for a long moment. “Where is the front entrance?”

“To the east. Why?”

“Because that is how we are going to enter,” Phair replied.

“You have a plan.” It was a statement that was really a question.

“Yes. It will get us inside, I hope. After that, I may be able to talk them into ignoring us.”

“How?”

“By being unimportant,” he said.

“And if that fails?” Adjo asked, though he knew the answer. That was why Phair had asked if he had a gun.

“It won’t be by our doing if violence becomes necessary,” Phair replied.

The gun suddenly felt clammy in Adjo’s hand. Not like a foreign object he wished to be rid of, but almost organic.

There was apparently nothing more to be said as they left the refreshing coolness of the garden for the ominous cobbled expanse outside the monastery. Adjo noticed that the cleric had discarded his staff somewhere behind them. Perhaps he didn’t want to be perceived as a prophet impersonator and brushed aside. A part of Adjo wished he hadn’t done that.

Any opportunity for a miracle should not be overlooked,
he thought, as they strode through the faint moonlight toward the main gate and a plan that sounded like it might get them in the door and nothing more.

R
yan Kealey shouldered his way through the crowd, followed closely by Lukas Durst and Carla. Everyone on the plain was standing, watching the torches move along the side of the mountain. There was one light in the center of the circle, but it said nothing about whoever was holding it. Kealey guessed it was the prophet, of course, the other hand wrapped firmly on his staff. The man of the hour was probably surrounded so that someone would show him the way down or catch him if he stumbled. It wouldn’t be terribly impressive for the Deliverer to drop full on his face.

The crowd was not unusually dense at the foot of the path from the mountaintop. The pilgrims no doubt assumed that the prophet would come to them. Many were probably tired from the journey and baking in the sun, and not everyone wanted to walk about the plains in the dark.

“They are all such sheep to think this could possibly be real,” Durst said with disgust.

“I’d watch what I say,” Kealey cautioned.

“Why? Another Nazi allusion?” Carla snapped.

Kealey stopped and glared at her. “No,” he said quietly. “I’d watch what I say in English, German, or Spanish. Anything but a regional accent may draw unwanted attention. Though the shoe does fit, doesn’t it?”

Carla’s head ticced to the side in embarrassed little moves, but Durst nodded in agreement. The man might be a loutish fascist, but ego wasn’t a large part of what guided him. He could be reasoned with.

They reached the path that ran like a ribbon along the mountainside. The torchlight was drifting down away from the smoldering ridgeline, like embers from a wildfire. The faithful had lined both sides of the road as far as Kealey could see, sometimes five and six people deep, but without shoving, no one jockeying for position. To be close to the prophet was apparently all they needed. Now that Kealey’s eyes had fully adjusted to the moonlight, their staunch posture suggested they had not come to see so much as to protect. If there was a rush of pilgrims to get close to the prophet, the men lining the road would hold them back. Kealey didn’t think they were part of the plot, at least not founding members. They were willing converts.

Kealey kept Carla and Durst back several meters so as not to draw undue attention from anyone in that line. There was a fidgety eagerness about the German, his head moving and pecking as he tried to keep the torches in view as they came and went beyond the heads of the pilgrims.

There was indeed a circle of robed attendants as Kealey had guessed. As they neared the bottom of the path, the surrounding circle doused their flames in the dirt. Either they did not want to detract from the prophet or, more likely, they did not want anyone to see them too clearly.

“Those monks do not look real,” Carla whispered. “They’re hovering near him like police, not like the devout.”

“I agree,” Kealey replied.

“Are they dressed that way to conceal weapons?”

“That’s my guess,” Kealey said. There was something sweet about Carla’s manner. After her faux pas a few minutes before, she seemed eager to show she was part of the team.

In the midst of the circle was a tallish figure with a brown beard and white robe, lava red—and flowing, at that—in the torchlight. He wore new sandals with thick soles; a benevolent expression peeked from under the hood that covered his forehead. With each step he purposefully planted and replanted a chest-high stick in the ground beside him. It was straight, slender, durable, and dark—like a sapling that had been burned and hardened in a forest fire. One fist easily encircled the staff near the top, which ended in a knob worn smooth by hand labor.

“That is not the Staff!” Durst said through his teeth, a poor effort at reserve. At least he said it in English, which was probably not understood by anyone who might happen to hear.

“Are you sure?” Kealey asked.

“I wouldn’t give you a Euro for that thing. And— look for yourself. It would not have fit in that place where I left it.”

That was true. Kealey motioned for Carla and Durst to follow him. He wanted to get out of the crowd before they were trapped as people clustered around the prophet. It was already becoming difficult to move, the pilgrims instinctively moving toward the light, floating in hypnotically on their chants, wanting to be a part of whatever was happening. There was a communal hunger and at the same time, an outpouring of energy and passion. Kealey tried to imagine what the prophet himself was feeling, something real or something cynical. It would depend, he guessed, on whether the man was a believer or part of the scam. Kealey also wondered if Durst was feeling a sense of longing or déjà vu. This had to be what the Germans had experienced when their führer arrived to address a rally.

Kealey was most curious, though, what the man would do next. Taking Durst at his word that the staff was a fake, that all of this was orchestrated, the organizers would not be able to leave much time for the fraud to be discovered. Whatever their plan, whatever their hand, they had to reveal it soon. No doubt the helicopters were going to be a part of that.

There was a press of people forming new layers, new lines, many, many pilgrims deep. But they did not intrude on the path that had been created for the prophet. The chanting continued, uncoordinated and personal, as the pilgrims bowed or held their hands palms-up in a show of supplication. A few went to their knees, others tripping against them in the dark. Some, here and there, took pictures using cell phones. The monks did not attempt to discourage such activity as they maintained their black-garbed bubble around the figure.

The prophet did not stop. He did not acknowledge the worshipers. Once he reached level ground he strode toward the north, toward the plain. As he passed nearer, he seemed the model of what Kealey imagined an ancient desert dweller to be like, his body lean with hunger, his eyes wide with vision and focused on some distant goal.

“Do you have any idea what he’s going to do?” Carla whispered.

“If he were going to address the group, he would have spoken from higher on the mountain,” Kealey said. “Look at the soles on his shoes. Solid. I think he intends to keep walking.”

“Where?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “It seems clear that wherever he goes, these people are going to follow.”

Things became more confusing for Kealey and the pilgrims when a low-register beating rose under the sound of the chanting. Within moments the roar had equaled and then surpassed their prayers. The multitude and the plain began to grow lighter and lighter. Turning to the east, Kealey saw the helicopters arriving. They were a formidable sight, fifteen brilliant white lights growing larger and brighter and louder as they approached.

“There’s nowhere for them to set down,” Carla observed. “At least, not where the people are.”

“I don’t think that’s their intention,” Kealey said, as he watched them approach at top speed some one hundred meters above the gathering.

“So they aren’t picking up the prophet,” she said.

“No,” he said. There was a hodgepodge of markings on the aircraft. They weren’t part of an organized fleet. But neither the prophet nor the former torchbearers looked up. The helicopters had been expected.

The aircraft continued west, not stopping until they were beyond where Kealey suspected the edge of the crowd might be, a bottleneck formation of mountain and brush at the far end of the Wadi el-Deir. Finally, they set down.

“Little more than a century ago those lights would have been considered gods,” Durst said softly to no one in particular. “Yet they are men. I learned that. One day they will, too.”

It was an uncharacteristically unguarded remark from a man who had bought into the myth of the
über-mensch.
Whether it was part regret, part revelation, or simply exhaustion talking, Kealey was glad to hear it.

But this was not the time for his own introspection. The important thing was to get away from the crowd, reconnoiter where the helicopters had landed, then contact Harper and figure out their own next step.

Telling Carla where he was headed in case they were separated, Kealey maneuvered ahead, beyond the prophet and closer to the truth.

J
onathan Harper was eating lunch away from his desk, which was a rarity. He had been dragged away by Sarah Knute, the director of Public and Media Affairs. They were seated in a corner booth at Off the Record, a wood-paneled bar not far from the White House. Harper was picking at an order of lightly fried calamari while Knute tucked into a cheeseburger. The thirty-five-year-old woman had the metabolism of a teenager, and except for a bit of wear and tear around the eyes, she looked like one.

“Don’t let those squid have died in vain,” Knute cautioned.

“No,” Harper said, halfheartedly dipping one in a dish of tartar sauce, watching and turning it for nearly a half minute before finally consuming it.

“I like a man who knows how to dine instead of rush, rush, rush.”

He smiled thinly.

“I dragged you out so you would forget the office for an hour,” Knute said. “There’s nothing you can do right now.”

“I know.” It reminded him far too much of San Antonio. He looked at the secure cell phone that sat on the table beside him. There was only one call that he would risk taking in a public place. Not that anyone would be eavesdropping. Virtually everyone who came here knew everyone else, and knew where to sit so as not to be overheard. The women at the next table worked for the mayor of D.C. Across the aisle was a pair of congressmen from the South. Everyone was huddled so close, so paranoid, so deep in their own secretive conversations that they didn’t have time for anyone else.

“We need to do something with this project you’re on,” Knute was saying, also sotto voce.

Her conspiratorial tone got his attention. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone says we work only against the Islamic world, that we want them only for their oil,” she said. “We should be putting out the word that we’re working on behalf of the stability of a sovereign Arab nation.”

“We need to know more before we leak word of any involvement,” Harper said.

“The press is asking questions.”

“That’s their job.”

She made a face. “The
Post
heard from someone in the Egyptian Ministry of Defense that Israel was behind a plot to destabilize the region, and that we had a team over there helping them.”

“And you said?”

“It was all a lie.”

“You told the truth,” he grinned.

“I concealed the truth,” she said. “But if I didn’t, this could help bolster our image abroad.”

“Whose? The nation’s or the CIA’s?”

“The nation’s,” she said. “Who cares what anyone thinks about us?”

Sarah was right. Choose any agency, any officer or politician, and you’d find 50 percent of his or her subordinates, or the nation itself, disapproving of what they were doing. Even if you happened to be doing the right thing, that would be the wrong thing to someone, somewhere. Nations, though, had a more permanent, universally recognized personality. For most of the world, Russians would always be brutes, Frenchmen snobs, the British humorless with bad teeth, the Israelis land-grabbers, Americans greedy with short attention spans and great movies. Once in a while, though, it helped to remind the world that America was also about democratic values.

Usually.

They continued eating as the press secretary pressed her case. Harper half-listened. It was sobering to be out and about in the greatest seat of power on the planet. He sat there and considered—as he rarely did, caught up in the moment-to-moment demands of the office—that despite the tiny part they all played here, virtually everyone in this restaurant, in restaurants like it, created rippling ramifications throughout the globe and history. By extension, a good meal, an unusually pleasant service staff, a drink or appetizer on the house, could change the mood of any individual present and, through them, alter the course of history.

“The press hasn’t really picked up on what’s happening out there,” Harper said. “Shouldn’t we wait to see how that plays?”

“Why do you think they haven’t?”

“Still below the radar,” he said. “Too grassroots and far away.”

“For now,” she said. “When it breaks, though, everyone will be afraid. Until Russia invaded, who cared that there was a country called Georgia?”

“Georgians,” he replied.

“Right. Not most Americans. As soon as things exploded, everyone was afraid it would be the next big flashpoint. Same here. Americans, Egyptians, you name it—they’ll all be afraid when they find out. That’s why, if we get out in front of it, we can not only control the volume of noise, but sweeten it. It’s happening, yes, but your government is on top of things.”

“For once,” Harper said.

“Exactly.”

“With the help of a Nazi. Who we kidnapped.”

“We did?”

Harper nodded. “I think we need to let this play out a little longer.”

“Okay,” she said, “but here’s another point of view. If we take someone into our confidence, they’ll owe us. I don’t have to say anything about the team members or what we’re doing. Just about our counterterrorist work. We can make it look like a reporter did some snooping and came up with the story. In public ‘no comment,’ but I’ll continue to be an unnamed source and spin it.”

He thought about that for a moment. It was good to have the press in your debt for the times things didn’t go so well. “Who’d you have in mind?”

“The
International World Journal.
”

That unwieldy name had been created by the merger of three former print magazines into one online news source. They were centrist and generally accurate.

“Okay,” Harper said.

“Great,” Sarah said, smiling with satisfaction. “Are we going to turn over the Nazi when we’re done?”

“I don’t know,” Harper replied.

“Don’t we have a quid pro quo arrangement with the Israelis?”

“For intel, not war criminals.”

As he answered, a text message appeared on his phone. The words appeared in a single space, each new one replacing the last, so that no one could read the message without seeing the entire thing.

It was from the American embassy in Egypt. There had been a three-alarm fire in Sharm el-Sheikh. The only reason he received the alert was because he had a team there. The fire did not, on the surface, seem to have any bearing on the mission.

Still, he would mention it to Kealey when he called.

Just in case.