Hard Rain

Forty-seven

Harvey Stringer glowered as we walked into his office. ‘You’re late. Ten minutes by my watch.’ ‘Our apologies, sir,’ Masters jumped in. ‘But we just got a call from Colonel Portman’s ex-wife. She wanted to know if there’d been any developments. She and Emmet were still close, despite their divorce, and his murder hit her pretty hard.’

Stringer tapped an enormous finger on the desk in front of him, considering his response. After a moment, he grunted and said, ‘We have no room for romantics in our world, Special Agent Masters. Don’t waste my time again.’ He aimed a small remote at a spot on the wall, the lights suddenly dimmed and an LCD screen descended from a slot in the ceiling. ‘Now, Special Agents Telopea and Blitz tell me that you’ve had contact with these people already,’ Stringer continued, shifting his focus to a selection of familiar faces tiled across the screen.

Telopea and Blitz, alias Mallet and Goddard, were seated opposite. They remained deadpan, feigning good behaviour.

I nodded. Yeah, Masters and I had had contact with them. ‘We understand the woman’s name is Yafa,’ I replied. ‘We don’t know the name of the guy with her, though usually he chews on a silver toothpick. The guy in the smock is an Egyptian industrialist and gun smuggler by the name of Moses Abdul Tawal.’

‘The woman’s full name is Yafa Fienmann,’ Stringer said, taking over. ‘The man with her we’ve identified as Ari Shira. They travel under Czech passports but they are in fact Israeli and ex-Mossad, though I’m sure neither nation would want to claim these two as their own. Both characters are serious fuck-ups. Shira went nuts one day and killed a bunch of Palestinian women and children. Just pulled them out of a marketplace and shot them in the street. He then bought an ice-cream and caught the bus home. He spent four years in a mental institution until they pronounced him cured. Fienmann was expelled from Mossad after a shoot-out that went wrong and she shot her partner by accident. There was another story doing the rounds that she killed her partner in order to sleep with his wife.’

Beneath the table, Masters tapped my foot with hers.

Stringer continued. ‘Moses Abdul Tawal is Jewish, rich, without conscience and open to the highest bidder. We believe that these three deviants are involved in activities against the interests of the United States, as well as in the illegal trafficking of extremely dangerous, high-value, high-security materials.’

‘Such as uranium hexafluoride,’ Masters offered.

Stringer fixed us both with an intense stare. If I’d been standing, I’d probably have taken a step back. But then the big man exhaled, the paper on his desk fluttered, and the immediate danger seemed to pass. ‘We don’t know where the HEX originated from or how Tawal got his hands on it, despite a surveillance operation that has gone on over the last twelve months,’ he said. Stringer was feeding us a little worthless detail to make us feel included, but I wasn’t buying. The CIA would have known where the HEX had come from, even if they couldn’t yet pinpoint the specific facility. But their intel would harden up substantially once they tunnelled through the tons of fallen rock and earth and recovered those storage cylinders. In the meantime, we still had our problem. I made a unilateral decision.

‘There’s an inside man,’ I announced. I felt Masters’ stare.

Stringer’s nostrils flared. ‘An inside man, eh? An inside man… How do you know it’s not me?’ Was it me or did the room suddenly become very cold and still?

‘As a matter of fact, Mr Stringer, we have you down as a potential suspect,’ I said. ‘Colonel Portman was the point man in your surveillance operation. And yet you deliberately impeded the investigation into his death.’

‘The truth, Special Agent, is that Portman’s murder took us by surprise. He went a lot further on his own than we had any knowledge of, becoming something of a loose cannon. As for impeding your investigation, if you remember I gave it a hand along with the Bosphorus shipping log when your investigation had hit the wall.’

Stringer had me here. Unless, of course, he knew where the Onur was headed in which case he’d given us the information knowing full well it would take us no further than the bottom of the port. Had he done that just to throw off any suspicion?

‘So tell me why you think there’s an inside man, Cooper.’

‘Information to which only this mission and the Istanbul Police Department had access was provided to Yafa.’ I then went on to discuss how our theory about the two safes at Portman’s house had also become known to the killers, and the fact that Portman’s email files had been selectively edited to remove any mention of Kawthar Al Deen, Kumayt, Thurlstane, or anything that would have helped us cut to the chase and perhaps prevent further deaths. Doctor Merkit’s, for example. I balled my fists.

The CIA boss smiled, his lips as big as a couple of porterhouse steaks. ‘Cooper, Portman’s activities on behalf of the CIA were top secret. We don’t leave information about Company activities — past or present — where it can be accessed by anyone who happens along. And we don’t just acknowledge that such-and-such or so-and-so is on our payroll when asked — not even by senate committees. As for the details about the existence of the second safe… they could have been passed along by anyone on a very long list, anyone with low-level access who wants a little extra pocket money.’

Stringer sat back in his chair, its joints begging loudly for mercy. ‘No, in our view Tawal is the top man, and he’s on Jerusalem’s payroll. Our next play is to remove Tawal from the board. By doing that, perhaps we can delay the game. An Israeli nuclear strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is imminent — Arak, for example, where heavy water is made, is less than a couple of hundred miles across the border from Kawthar Al Deen and well within the range of the IDF Special Forces they intend stationing there. We can’t let it happen. People think the world changed on 9/11. But it will seem like a footnote in the history books compared to the day after an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran.’

‘Why are you telling us all this, sir?’ Masters asked.

‘Because you’re on the team, now, Special Agent Masters — you and Special Agent Cooper. You’re going to help us capture Moses Abdul Tawal. I’ve been admiring the way you handle yourselves. You’ve done extremely well since you’ve been here. So, until further notice, you and Special Agent Cooper are working for me. Here are your orders from the Pentagon assigning you both to me for the duration of this operation,’ he said, tossing a fax on the desk.

I was lost for words. For once.

‘Can you handle a weapon with that thing?’ Stringer indicated the cast on my forearm.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘Good. We leave for Cairo,’ he said, checking his watch, ‘in one hour. And this time, make me wait at your peril.’

Cairo traffic reminded me of a landslide: everything was headed in the same general direction, only that’s where the cooperation seemed to end. Aged Fiats, Renaults and Peugeots swarmed all over our Suburban and the one in front as we headed from the airport to the US Embassy.

A sudden electric shock against the top of my hand felt like a pinch. Cairo was warm and dry — perfect conditions. I turned and said, ‘So let me get this straight, Mallet, or whatever your name is today. You actually bought that suit? With your own money?’

‘The name’s Special Agent Telopea. And we’re about to go on a mission, Cooper. We’ll have high-powered weapons and it’s going to be dark. Get my drift? Thought you should be apprised.’

‘Just keep your suit away from inflammables, Mallet. It’s sparking. In the meantime, move over.’

Mallet put a couple of inches between us. We flashed past a ten-foot-tall concrete pharaoh standing in the middle of the road, its hands clenched. If I had to stand like that in Cairo traffic, hands wouldn’t be all I’d be clenching. I sat back and let my mind wander.

Anna and I didn’t have much time to talk back at the consulate-general before we’d had to leave. Neither of us wholly believed Stringer. He’d fed us a mélange of fact and fiction, making it difficult to sift the one from the other. Israel was planning some kind of strike and Kawthar al Deen figured in it somehow. No argument from us — we’d worked out as much on our own.

But we didn’t accept that Tawal was the number-one man. How could he be? The plan was to get our hands on him; then, with the spectre of a long stay at Guantanamo Bay ahead, there was a good chance he’d roll on everyone around and above him. Mostly, there was the issue of the HEX. Fact: somehow, someone had acquired it from a US storage facility. Fact: Masters and me had the serial number of the tank we’d unearthed, and that would tell us which facility. When we felt we could trust Stringer, the CIA would have it too. Ultimately what bugged Masters and me most was not that Stringer had given us half-truths, it was that he’d given us any truth at all.

The Suburbans crossed a sluggish river a fifth the width of the Mississippi, a signpost on the bridge informing us that it was the Nile. We turned right almost immediately on the other side of the bridge into a world of silence, the madness of Cairo held back behind concrete-block chicanes manned by military types armed with old MP5s and AK-47s behind portable armour shields. The driver flashed his ID at the checkpoint and the security guys eyeballed the passengers while another detail checked under the Suburbans’ skirts with mirrors on poles. Finding nothing of interest, they waved us on.

Across the road from the US Embassy, I noticed a large international hotel going broke with no one game enough to sit in the bar. Backing onto the same street was the Egyptian Academy of Music, revelling in the quietest location in all of Cairo. The Suburbans carried us through the embassy’s anti-blast gate, and parked.

It was not my idea of a good briefing. Several people I didn’t know asked questions that suggested they hadn’t been listening in the first place. Or maybe they were just of the belief that a good briefing was a long briefing. I was expecting something different, this being my first full CIA-only gig — like maybe folks doing forward rolls into their seats, something dynamic.

Stringer did his best to make the operation ahead seem like just another day at the office. There were observation points, photos, targeting strategies, logistics considerations, Sudanese- and Egyptian-language issues, air-traffic control sectors, the boundaries of Sudanese and Egyptian Army and Air Force installations in the operations area, ATC and ground frequencies, as well as the usual SIGINT, ELINT, maps and satellite intel. Need-to-know was paramount. By that I mean there was nothing provided to the folks at the briefing about Tawal, the target — who he was, and why the United States government wanted him in a nice secure place beneath the sleepless gaze of surveillance cameras. Just that he was wanted and that ‘Failure was not an option, people.’ The only CIA outsiders besides Masters and me were two women from State, neither of whom said a word. In the wrap-up, Stringer asked if they were okay with everything. I took it from the zombie-like way they both moved their heads up and down that they were. CIA can do whatever it damn well likes.

The overall picture of the mission was as follows: Tawal had taken up residence on his barge on Lake Nasser/Nubia, just south of the Egyptian — Sudanese border. Satellite intel showed fifteen to twenty armed personnel accompanied him. The strike team, which included Masters and me, would transit to a town in northern Sudan called Wadi Halfa. From there, Masters and I, together with Mallet, Goddard and three sharpshooters, would deploy aboard a Sudanese fishing boat. There would be two other boats besides ours, also commanded by CIA teams. This was a lot of firepower. Tawal was a high-priority target and Stringer obviously didn’t want to take chances.

All vessels would make their way north to points less than a mile from the barge, where Tawal could be kept under observation. An hour before first light, the squad from one of the three boats would disembark and position itself to become a blocking force/cordon on the landward side of the barge. There was to be no chance of escape. Half an hour before first light, three Pave Hawks would depart Abu Simbel Airport, Egypt, and orbit five miles downwind of the operation zone, and wait for the radio call that the target had been secured. First light minus twenty minutes, and the strike teams would close with the barge. When within range, the sharpshooters would disable Tawal’s security force. Coordinating via radio, Masters, Mallet, Goddard and I would then board the barge and snatch Tawal. We’d all egress in the Pave Hawks, which would arrive three minutes after being summoned. Easy.

In practice, reality got in the way. We made it to Wadi Halfa without a hitch, but the boats weren’t available. One day lost there. Then the boats arrived but one broke down in transit. A prayer held its ancient motor together and none of the gods were listening when we tried to spark it back to life. Another day lost. A third day disappeared when two of the translators and four members of one of the strike teams came down with gastroenteritis.

There was concern that our presence might be conveyed to Tawal by the locals, so we spent these additional nights bivouacked out of town where there was sand, scorpions and snakes and not much else. Day four: ELINT and sat intel confirmed that Tawal remained in residence on his barge, so we were cleared in hot.