Twice a Spy (35 page)

“I was on the tropical island prospecting,” Bream told Qatada. “Now I’ve got a prospect.”

Qatada smiled, maybe at the cricket game, maybe at the play of light on his water glass—who knew? Bream had given him no reason to be happy.

He was about to, though.

“You know how for a party, you write a check and a party planner does everything?” Bream asked. “He gets you the band, the cake, the hall—all for the exact day you want?”

“What about it?”

“I’ll run an op for you like that in two weeks, except instead of cake I’ll serve up an ADM.”

Qatada smiled again. “Sounds like quite a party.”

“The venue I have in mind is the municipal marina three hundred and seventy-five meters north of the hotel hosting the G-20.”

“The Grand Hotel near Mobile, Alabama?”

“Yeah, beautiful old resort.”

“The French delegation is planning to stay there.” Qatada spoke matter-of-factly. “I am guessing you knew that.”

“Think of them as your guests of honor. All you’ll be required to do is push a button, and you’ll strike the biggest blow possible for an Islamic
state.” Qatada’s al-Jama’ah al-Islamiyah al-Musallaha, known here in France as Groupe Islamique Armé, sought to oust the current Algerian government.

Qatada sat back, lips pursed with skepticism. “Does the Fountain of Youth come with this package too?”

Bream laughed politely. “You know Nick Fielding?”

“I hope for your sake that he is not your supplier.”

“You mean ’cause he’s dead? That’s why I can get my hands on his ten-kiloton Russian ADM without any opposition from him.” Bream paused while the waitress deposited their plates of steak fries, then waited until she was out of earshot. “You know you can practically throw a rock from my place on Martinique to Fielding’s island, right?”

“No, I did not.” Qatada was rapt.

“I watched his act for three years. Not only that, I watched No Such Agency watching him—I even got myself hired on as copilot for a couple of their charters. After giving an envelope full of money to one of Fielding’s goons, I now know not only about Fielding’s ADM, but that he took its hiding place to his grave. Since he died, legions of spooks have tried and failed to find it.”

“But you can?”

“Yes. Then it’s yours, plug and play. I just need five million down to cover my expenses and another seven hundred and forty-five mil on delivery.”

The Groupe Islamique Armé’s principal benefactor, Algerian oilman Djamel Hasni, could write a check for $750 million on any one of a dozen of his accounts around the world.

“If I told Djamel that you asked for a billion dollars, he’d think seven hundred fifty million was a steal,” Qatada said. “His problem isn’t going to be the sale price; it’s going to be the salesman.”

“He’ll think I’m an American spook running a play for the United Satans of America?”

“Of course.”

“That would mean that the Air Force faked my dishonorable discharge, that I flew clunkers for four years in exile, and that I damn near destroyed myself with the cheap local rum all to build up cover for an op
whose objective is to bag a couple of members of an Algerian terrorist group that no one’s heard of.”

Qatada ceded the point with a nod, but remained circumspect. “How would you get the device into the States?”

“That’s the easy part. I built myself an ironclad alias with access to a U.S.-flagged yacht that’s a fixture at the Mobile Bay Marina. You ante up, I’ll go get the yacht, cruise down to Martinique for a ‘pleasure trip,’ pick up a ‘souvenir’ along the way, then cruise on back to Bama.”

Qatada winced. “Take it from an expert: Since 9/11, your Homeland Security can’t install enough chem-bio-nuke detectors in your ports.”

“You’re part right. In Miami this scheme would never fly. Houston and New Orleans, ten miles before I even reached the coast, drones would shoot Hellfire missiles, turn my yacht into flotsam, and ask questions later.”

“But not in Mobile?”

“Think of Mobile as the Groupe Islamique Armé of port cities: It’s big, but no one knows much about it or really cares much about it. Cares enough, I ought to say.”

Qatada shrugged. “Even in such places, the Americans can afford to give every other port employee a palm-sized gamma-ray spectrometer and litter the docks with sniffers and ICx rovers and probably many other new detection devices that we do not even know about.”

“But there’s almost nothing along the other hundred-something miles of coast.”

“Except the Coast Guard and the Customs and Border Protection agency. You don’t think al-Qaeda has spent thousands of hours trying to find holes there? Djamel has spent millions of dollars on computer simulations alone.”

As a twelve-year-old, Bream had been undefeated in Tennessee Chess Association junior play, but he had dropped the sport in high school in deference to his image. Still he thought like a chess player. Now he saw checkmate in two moves. “The key is, I’ll be cooperating with Coast Guard and CBP from start to finish,” he said. “They’ll have had me on transponder and satellite the whole time I’m in the Caribbean, plus five kinds of radar on top of that as soon as I get close to U.S. waters on the way home. A foreign national can expect a Custom and Border Protection
‘welcome committee’ on reaching Alabama waters. But most of the time, all a good ol’ American boy’s gotta do is check in with the CBP folks with a phone call, which I’ll do during the night—they close at five every day. One in thirty times, they summon you across the bay to the commercial docks for an inspection the next morning, in which case I’ll risk offloading the device before I go. One in ten times, they come to your marina for a look-see the next morning. But even if that happens, I’m still good because the ADM’s concealed within a specially modified housing that does to spectrometers what fresh-grated bell pepper does to bloodhounds. And most of the time, all the CBP folks do is call you and say, ‘Welcome home, sir.’ ”

And there it was, Qatada’s smile, at full wattage. Although pleased, Bream looked down so that no one would remember his face, too.

The CIA’s
New Headquarters Building, a pair of six-story towers of sea-green glass, could have been mistaken for a modern museum. Hardly the dark fortress that Charlie, in the Hyundai’s passenger seat, had been expecting. At the wheel of the rental Corbitt was whistling the tune of “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”

Although it was two in the afternoon, Charlie would have believed it was early evening, a consequence of the enervating trip from Martinique more than the overcast sky. A nagging sensation that he’d overlooked a clue to Bream’s plans had kept him from sleeping.

As he extricated himself from the subcompact car, his eyes smarted from fatigue, and his reflection in the window shocked him: In the gray flannel business suit and dark overcoat the consulate had procured for him, he resembled his father in old photos.

He and Corbitt proceeded through a colossal arching entryway to the skylit lobby. Feelings of inadequacy buffeted Charlie, making the bitter wind an afterthought.

Leaving him with Eskridge and a young analyst at the door of a secure conference room, Corbitt said, not entirely in jest, “They only sent me along to make sure you didn’t stop at a racetrack.”

“But I have a hunch I’m missing something,” Charlie said after detailing the events of the past few days. “What if India is a decoy? What if the real target is somewhere else, maybe even somewhere in the United States?”

Across the conference table, a giant surfboard rendered in aquamarine glass, Eskridge shared a look with the analyst, Harding Doxstader, a twentysomething version of his boss. Their look made Charlie think of parents who’ve just been informed by their child about the monsters in his closet.

“We’ve picked up a good deal of chatter that a Punjabi separatist group was in the market for an ADM,” Eskridge assured Charlie. “If not for you, though, we wouldn’t have any idea about Vasant Panchami, or even that the bomb was heading to India.”

“What if Bream just wants you to think he tried to kill me and my father?” Charlie asked. “That way, our India revelation would carry more weight.”

Eskridge shrugged. “If Bream had meant to use India as a decoy, eliminating you would have eliminated his means of decoying us.”

Nodding, Doxstader scribbled a note on what appeared to be a sheet of white light hovering above the table.

“The thing is, he probably would have taken into account that my father could land a plane,” Charlie said. “Also, if he really wanted to kill us, why not just shoot us beforehand on the beach?”

Doxstader said, “Sir, if I’m not mistaken, you said that, at that time, your father was suffering from extreme disorientation symptomatic of Alzheimer’s disease.” He checked his notes. “ ‘A four,’ you said.”

“Right, at the time, he couldn’t have flown a kite. But Bream knew that my father had episodes of lucidity. And my father wasn’t our only option. If Alice hadn’t called, someone at one of the control towers in the area might have given us instructions over the radio.”

Eskridge appeared to ponder this, pulling the knot of his tie to the point where it would take some effort to undo. “Mr. Clark, do you have any factual basis for your speculation that the target might be in the United States?”

“For one thing, I don’t see Bream being on the level about his employers. The Injuns, he called them. Every bit of information he volunteered was tailored to a clever cover—it was only at the very end that I saw his redneck act for what it was.”

“So he’s more intelligent than he let on.” Eskridge inspected his
fingernails. “There’s a fellow here at the agency. Summa cum laude from MIT, top of his class at the Farm, National Clandestine Service fast track. He had some home trouble. Now he works in Food Service.”

Food Service
gave Charlie a new line of thought. “You know, I asked Bream if he’d celebrate the sale of the ADM with a good bottle of wine—I was fishing for where he was taking the bomb. He pooh-poohed me. He’d be having Budweiser, he said, and a rack of ribs. Not exactly standard Mumbai fare.”

“Probably just playing to his cover again,” Eskridge said.

“What if it were one of the bits of truth mixed in to give foundation to the lies?”

“You’d be surprised what you can find in Mumbai,” said Doxstader. “There are now two hundred and forty-four McDonald’s in India.”

Eskridge remained intent on a thumbnail. “Alternately, if you’ve just sold a nuclear weapon to folks who have no compunction about using one, you don’t want to stick around. You want to get bloody well back on your plane. Later, you celebrate, sure. At a good ribs joint, if that’s your thing. Or a sushi bar. I don’t see how it pertains.”

With a sudden sense that he was closing in on the clue that had been eluding him, Charlie rushed his words. “Right after that, I asked him how the collateral would affect his appetite. I was hoping to bring his ego into play. He asked if my knowing he was kept up nights by thoughts of the victims made him less of a villain in my eyes. Then he said that he’d made the decision to go ahead anyway because it’s the wake-up call
our country
needs.”

Eskridge shook his head. “It’s more likely that, as you said earlier, he wants the mansion. Ultimately, the bad guys all want the mansion. The good guys too.”

Charlie pulled his seat closer to the table. “But if we walk back the cat—”

Eskridge turned to Doxstader to explain. “Old counterintelligence expression.”

The junior man nodded, as if impressed. Charlie suspected they were mocking him, but he forged on. “He made so many disparaging remarks about the ‘Culinary Institute of America’ and other ‘so-called’ intelligence agencies. If the best and brightest were on this case, he said, he
wouldn’t have had such an easy time of it. Maybe he was one of you once. It sure seemed like he’d had the same training as my father. Maybe the intelligence community didn’t accept him, or, in his mind, judged him unfairly. And now he wants to prove he was right.”

Eskridge almost sneered. “The way horseplayers do?”

“The thrill of being right drives a lot of people to do stupid things.”

Doxstader looked up. “You know, the G-20 starts this weekend.”

“The G-20?” Charlie said.

“The Group of Twenty. Argentina, Brazil, China—”

Eskridge cut in. “And seventeen other countries, including ours, who send deputies to chat about economic issues. The reason you don’t know about it, Charlie, is the same reason terrorists wouldn’t be interested: no sex appeal. I couldn’t even tell you where they’re holding the G-20.”

“Mobile, Alabama.” Doxstader set down his stylus for the first time. “Gem of a city, precisely the sort of secondary target al-Qaeda’s been focusing on.”

He waited for a response from Eskridge, who focused on a cuff link.

Doxstader wasn’t deterred. “Sir, a number of the top French officials are attending the G-20, including the president—something having to do with Mobile’s French heritage. Also Mobile has close to a hundred miles of coast without anything near the level of security in a Miami or a Long Beach.”

“And wouldn’t the element of surprise be a selling point?” Charlie asked.