The Shield of Darius (14 page)

“I am so sorry. I love you, my little angel,” he whispered as she said good-bye. She felt Falen’s hand squeeze her shoulder firmly.

“I love you too,” she said and hung up.

Falen drove her to the 19
th
Street lot and stopped beside her car.

“You’re not afraid I’ll call and tell him you’re on to him?”

Falen shook his head. “You’re not a stupid woman. And I think you know what’ll happen if you stay with him. He can’t afford to have anyone know as much as you do. If I were you, I’d go visit your mother and stay out of the way for awhile.” He handed her a half sheet of paper. “Jot a little note down on this to go with the list and I’ll mail it and take care of things for you with Rose. We’ll tell him you’ve been pulled off to work on this with me. As far as I’m concerned, in a few weeks, you can go back to your job and no one will be the wiser. You’ve learned your lesson.”

“What about Javad?”

“He’ll be out of the picture by then.”

Amy leaned against the side of her Taurus and covered her eyes with her hand.

“But why was he going to have me stop? Leave my job and marry him?”

Falen shrugged. “We can only guess. As I said, he can’t have you loose knowing what you know. And they may be planning on working you into whatever they’re doing with these other people. Paris seems to figure into this somehow. Do yourself a favor and go to New Hampshire, Ms. Trossen. Here’s your mother’s address.”

Amy had driven to work rather than taking the Metro, with every intention of leaving early and driving directly to Philadelphia. Instead she drove back to the apartment in Arlington, unable to concentrate long enough on a single thought to make any use of it. She sat in her parking spot behind the rectangular brick buildings looking vacantly at the dash, wishing she could cry and relieve the pressure that was boiling inside with nowhere to go. She finally forced herself from the car and climbed the steps to her flat. In the shadows of late afternoon she stood in front of the mirror on the back of her closet door, looking at her gaunt reflection. Slowly she peeled away her clothes. She was still thin to the point of looking unhealthy. Still breastless and still had eyes too prominent and a protruding nose. Her hair was still coarse and unruly and she was still forty and unmarried. But she was no longer a virgin. He had raped her. Not physically. She’d given her body to him willingly. But he’d ravaged the rest of her. Violated her heart and soul and left her empty. Amy knew that she would never be loved again.

She pulled on a baggy sweat suit and without packing a bag, walked back down the stairs to her car. At the Memorial Parkway she turned west to the Dulles Access, then north toward the 495 Loop that circles Washington. As she approached the interchange where the expressway meets highway 123 from McLean, she accelerated to 70 and released her seat belt, thought for a final time of Javad Esfarjahni, pointed the nose of her blue Taurus at the concrete pillars that support the overpass and closed her eyes.

THIRTEEN

Christopher Falen heard the report of Amy Trossen’s death on the ten o’clock news with the first twinge of remorse he had felt since before Vietnam. The feeling bothered him. Early in his work with Fisher he had learned the world was full of people who survived by either taking advantage of others or by being taken advantage of. Both types eventually paid a price and he’d occasionally been involved in exacting it. The choices had been theirs, and he couldn’t feel responsible for them. But Amy was a victim. A sucker, but still a victim.

He wondered fleetingly if his growing desire to seduce Kate Sager was affecting his judgment. Making him careless. He’d set up another lunch meeting with her on the pretext of telling her that the RPA connection didn’t seem to be panning out, but mainly to see her again and try to score some points. Or just score. He wasn’t sure.

The points had been hers. She arrived at the restaurant in a tailored blue suit and black stockings that accentuated her trim hips and legs and as she entered, she looked at him so directly with her deep green eyes that he felt transparent. The look was more penetrating than seductive and peeled him open in such a way that he felt very vulnerable. Falen was not accustomed to the sensation.

Kate Sager was much less restrained than she had been during their first visit. She talked freely about the holes he’d supposedly uncovered in his Kosovo support group theory and offered thoughts of her own.

“From all we’ve been able to tell, your husband wasn’t a member of the RPA,” he offered. “In fact, none of the others seems to have unusual connections with groups, and some aren’t even East European, let alone Roma. Some guy in the State Department pulled that early list together to try to force connections that just weren’t there.”

She hadn’t been surprised, confessing that there were things she didn’t know about Ben, but didn’t think he could be tied up in something like that without her knowing. She had asked if Falen had any new leads and he offered his latest plan to keep her occupied – out of the way, but still in touch.

“A piece of information seems to support one of your early suspicions and leads off in another direction,” he told her. “Orly Airport in Paris has a camera system as a security measure that videotapes deplaning passengers as they come through the gate. We looked over film from the flight your husband supposedly took from Manchester to Paris and although there’s one man who looks a good deal like him, Ben wasn’t on the flight.”

“I’m not surprised... but what do you think that means?”

“One of two things. Neither’s good. Either he was abducted like you thought, and the kidnappers had someone use the passport to misdirect an investigation, or he was taken specifically to get that passport. We see a lot of that. Someone is abducted overseas by groups that deal in black market documents.”

Kate fingered the stem of her wine glass and frowned down at the table.

“If it’s the latter – this black market thing – are you suggesting Ben might have been killed?”

Falen tried to look uncomfortable. “I hate to say it, but if the passport was the target, that’s not a good sign.”

She fixed him with that green, stripping gaze.

“But this is all still conjecture, isn’t it? You don’t really know the passport was the target.”

He agreed.

“And how will you find out?”

“We think there’s a good chance of finding the man who used it. We ought to learn something from him.”

“I want to know as soon as you learn
anything
.” 

.  .  .

Javad Esfarjahni was Falen’s first real breakthrough and he hoped the Arab would give him that ‘call if you get anything’ information that meant getting back in touch with Kate Sager. Hell, maybe the black market passport theory was right and Ben wouldn’t turn up again at all.

He called Fisher the night of Amy’s death.

“I need phone taps on two addresses in Philly, and someone to monitor cell phone calls. Can you get it done over the weekend?”

“When do you need them?”

“Tonight would be best. I need them in place by the time a letter gets there, and the post office might surprise me and deliver tomorrow.”

“Are the locations residences?”

“One residence and one retail business. My guess is that the residence is usually empty during the day and the store vacant at night, though there may be alarm systems on both.”

“We’ll get them in by tonight. Where are the places?”

Falen gave Fisher Javad’s cell phone number and addresses for his apartment on Quince Street and the import store on 18th.

“Call me in four hours and I’ll have a location for the listening station, if you want one,” Fisher said. “Or we can patch calls directly to your cell. Do you want someone monitoring the apartment and store phones, or should I record them to your laptop?”

“I’ll cover the store, and I’d like to be close. Find a place nearby, but patch the store and office taps to my cell with ‘Javad’ as the identifier. You can send conversations from his home to the computer. I think he’ll call from the shop. And monitor conversation inside the entire store. He may meet with someone, and my guess is he’ll use cell phones rather than wired systems. If he has a phone other than the one I have a number for, we may need someone following him.”

“Need anything else?”

“Yes. Surveillance on four people.” He gave Fisher the names of the four on Amy’s latest list. “They will all be going overseas in the next few months – some pretty quickly. I think I can narrow the list to one or two before then. Tell me where they go, who they talk to, who they call, and what they do. Can you get that done?”

“Get it narrowed down as soon as you can. I’ve got a couple of things going and can’t tie people up any longer than necessary.”

“Done,” Falen said, packed a bag, stopped at an all night convenience store to pick up a can of shaving cream, and started for Philadelphia. Ten minutes before his four hour call to Fisher, he pulled off the interstate and found a convenient place to park to make his call.

“We have the apartment above the shop just north of the import store. We’ve patched you directly to the office phone and to listening devices around the shop. We’ll send recorded conversations from the house directly to your laptop. The stairs to the apartment go up between the shops and the key’s taped under the overhang of the first step, against the wall on the right. Let me know when you’re through with the service.”

Within an hour of Monday morning’s mail delivery, the call went out over Javad’s cell phone from the office at the Persian Garden. Falen was stretched on the bed in the second floor apartment next to the carpet store, studying a smaller version of his wall map and trying to anticipate who the carpet merchant would pick from the four names on his list. There had been no conversation for the previous half hour, just rustling about in the office, and Falen was alerted by the dialing tones as Esfarjahni punched in the numbers. He glanced over at the lights on the recording equipment to be certain the number would be saved, but had been listening to routine business calls earlier in the morning and paid only casual attention until he heard the caller speak.

“
Salaam ‘aleikom.”

“Aileikom salaam
.”

The two men continued to converse in what Falen guessed was Arabic, punctuated by the English name
Galen Broom
and mention of a street address in Miami, Florida. As the call ended, Falen called Fisher and transmitted a recording of the conversation to a machine in his Control’s office.

“I need a translation ASAP. I could run this through one of the web translators, but don’t want it out in cyberspace. Also get a name and address on this phone number.” He read Fisher the numbers from the digital display on his recording device.

“I can probably have this for you in ten minutes,” Fisher said. “I’ll call it back to you and send an electronic copy to your computer. The conversation wasn’t long.”

“Very good. I’ll stand by here till I hear from you.”

When the call came, the voice wasn’t Fisher’s and the woman didn’t identify herself, but Falen recognized her as the woman who called about Dura-frame windows. “I have the translation for you. I’ll just read it to you. Are you ready to copy?”

“Why are you calling? I expected someone else.”

“Fisher isn’t available at the moment. He knew you were anxious to get this and asked me to call.”

“He’s always been reachable…. Why is this different?”

“All I can tell you is that his current circumstances make it impossible for him to make or receive calls. If you’d like to delay this, I’ll have him call when he’s available.”

Falen paused briefly. “Go ahead. If you have the information, you must be legitimate.”

“Before I give you the translation, I have some background information that may be useful. The conversation was in Farsi, not Arabic. The language is spoken in Iran and parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Both men were native speakers and from their dialects and use of colloquialisms, our people guess they come from north central Iran, probably Tehran. The call was placed to 1437 East Aspen Way, Salt Lake City, Utah. The residence is owned by Lee and Mary Cunningham of 720 Cherry Lane, Sandy, Utah, who rent the house to a Hoshang Baktiar. Baktiar is a visiting professor of Political Science at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and has no known affiliations with undesirables in Iran. He is single and lives alone. Do you have questions about this data?”

“The caller’s not Egyptian?”

“No. Iranian.”

“No other questions right now. Go ahead with the translation.”

“Here goes. If I go too fast, speak up.”

“Go ahead. I’m recording this so I can check back if I miss something.”

“
’Hello.
’ Spoken in English by the person answering. All the rest is in Farsi.”

“
The peace of Allah be with you.”

“And with you.”

“I have an assignment for you.”

“I’m ready. Go ahead.”

“Our next buyer is Galen Broom – spelled just like ‘broom’ – of 417 Palm View Circle, Miami, Florida.”

“How long do we have?”

“A week. Ten days at the most.”

“That’s very short notice.”

“I know. But we’re running out of time. Can you do it?”

“I think so. His destination?”

“Majorca”

“Good. That should be a fairly easy sale. I’ll notify the sales team. Do you have a back-up buyer?”

“If necessary. But this one looks good. If he doesn’t check out, let me know.”

“What about the woman?”

“We’ve had a delay there. Nothing serious. She’s away for a few days to take care of family business. I expect her back in a week or two. It might set our schedule back a few days but I’m sure she’s still interested in buying.”

“That should be our final sale.”

“Praise Allah for that. Our luck can’t last forever. Call again only if you need another buyer. Otherwise I will plan to deliver the final one myself on my way back to the warehouse.”

“Allah be with you.”

“And with you.”

“That’s all of the conversation. Would you like any of it repeated?”

“I have it down.”

“Anything I need to pass along?”

“Yes. Three things. Tell Fisher he can lift the tails from everybody but Broom for now. But follow him everywhere, including overseas. I suspect someone will begin checking Broom out soon and he’ll be taken when he’s in Majorca. I don’t want that stopped, but want to know how it happens, where he goes, and exactly who takes him. If he’s transferred from group to group, follow everyone.

“I also want a tail and tap on Baktiar. If he sends letters, texts, e-mail, anything, I want to know content but don’t want them stopped.

“Finally, I want Javad Esfarjahni picked up very quietly and held somewhere until I can talk to him privately. He needs to just disappear. I might want him there until I get more information on Baktiar and Broom, so put him where you can keep him for awhile. Do you have all that?”

She repeated the instructions back verbatim. “Will you be there until we have Esfarjahni?”

“No. In Washington. You can remove the taps. I have what I need.”