Death Wave

13

It was, Dean reflected, a matter of every spy agency for itself.

When in Tajikistan, the Desk Three operators had had to maintain their covers as foreign military personnel. They couldn’t work with the Russian FSB because that organization had been thoroughly penetrated by the Russian mafiya. The Tajikistan police and security services were, for the most part, controlled by militant Islamics.

Once across the border into Afghanistan, they’d learned that even NATO had been penetrated somehow, and they’d been less than open with their German hosts. So far as NATO was concerned, Dean, Akulinin, and Alekseyevna were journalists who’d needed rescuing.

Now, less than twenty-four hours later, Dean and his partner were in Pakistan, a nation supposedly dedicated to fighting terrorism and bringing down Islamic militarist fanatics whether they were Taliban, al-Qaeda, or JeM — but the two NSA officers had to maintain their deep cover. Many members of the Pakistani ISI, both in the rank and file and in the leadership, were secretly pro-Taliban, pro-Islamist, or both, and simply could not be trusted. The ISI had scored some significant victories in recent years against the militants, especially in the case of suicide bombings on Pakistani soil, and yet there continued to be major security leaks, covert operations compromised, and even high-ranking militant leaders who lived and moved openly within Pakistan’s population, often as revered and respected clerics calling the faithful to jihad.

Maulana Masood Azhar, the Army of Mohammad’s founder and leader, was a case in point.

Dean and Akulinin moved slowly through the crowd that had spilled out onto the street from the courtyard of the Jami’ah Binoria Madrasah — a large and well-known Islamic university located in the sprawl of northwestern Karachi in the heart of an industrial district with the unlikely name of Metrovil. The mob was as raucous and noisy as the riot in the streets of Kunduz that morning; this time, though, the excitement was being generated by the speech coming from loudspeakers mounted high up on the madrasah’s walls. It was Friday, the Muslim holy day, and the sermon was being delivered to an enthusiastic crowd. Dean estimated that several thousand people were packed into the university’s grounds and the surrounding city streets.

“What’s he saying?” Akulinin asked as a harsh, nasal voice brayed from the speakers in Urdu. “He sounds pretty passionate about it.”

“The usual rant,” Jeff Rockman’s voice replied through their implants. “God is merciful, God is just, and God is going to mop the floor with Jews, fornicators, and Americans.”

A fresh burst of cheering arose from the crowd. “These people really eat this stuff up,” Dean said.

“This would definitely not be a good time to tell them you guys are American infidels,” Rockman said. “Wait a sec … I’m reading the translation off my screen … Okay, now he’s saying that the promised end of days is upon us, and God Himself is going to wipe America away in a deluge of righteousness … He has held back His hand to give America time to repent, but now the time of merciful forbearance is past … and when the eyes of the faithful behold the divine hand of God sweeping away His enemies, all of His faithful will put aside their differences and … Jesus, this guy ought to be a televangelist.”

“I think we can do without the running commentary,” Dean said. “How far to the target?”

“Twelve meters. And a bit more to your left. He’s hanging back, on the very edge of the crowd.”

“Copy. I think I have him.”

The two Desk Three operators continued to skirt the crowd as the impassioned declarations boomed out, eliciting waves of cheering, chants, and dizzying exultation. The speaker was Maulana Masood Azhar, delivering his Friday sermon from somewhere inside the Binoria Madrasah.

That in itself was interesting. The Pakistani government had repeatedly told the West that they had no idea of Azhar’s whereabouts.

Dean didn’t speak Urdu; since their arrival in Pakistan yesterday, the two operatives had been reliant on the Art Room’s simultaneous translations and on the efforts of Najamuddin Haroon. Even so, the rhythm and power and sheer thunder of the declamations had a mesmerizing quality. Dean was reminded of films he’d seen of Adolf Hitler delivering a speech to a sea of passionately adoring listeners at Nuremburg.

The speech was an assault upon reason itself.

Dean had hoped that by this time they would have been on their way back Stateside. After the debacle in Dushanbe, he’d assumed Rubens would pull them out, turning Haystack over to other field assets. He didn’t like breaking off in the middle of a mission, but he’d actually been looking forward to it this time. The riot in Kunduz had reminded him how much he hated this part of the world with its Islamic Nazis, volatile passions, brain-dead bigotry, and blind adherence to unreasoning hatred.

They’d said good-bye to Masha at the Kabul airport yesterday afternoon — she would be flying to the States sometime today — and boarded a NATO C-130, heading south to Karachi and landing at a military airfield just outside the city. They’d been met by the CIA station chief himself and taken to the U.S. Embassy, where they’d spoken with Rubens, eaten, and collapsed into exhausted sleep.

Early this morning, they’d been awakened and introduced to Haroon. They received new legends, identity cards and papers, local clothing, money, and a new mission.

Their target, they were told, was attending a public sermon by Maulana Azhar, who would be speaking at the Binoria Madrasah this morning.

And there he was.

Alfred Koch stood out in the crowd. Blond and blatantly Aryan, he was still wearing his gray flight utilities, though he’d donned a borrowed taqiyya in deference to local custom requiring a head covering for men. Koch had been the pilot of the NATO helicopter that had picked up twelve suitcase-sized containers in a cotton field outside Qurghonteppa and flown them to Karachi. He was leaning against the wall of a shop opposite the madrasah’s entrance and seemed to be nodding to the cant and meter of the speech.

It had been relatively easy to follow him. Koch’s cell phone used a SIM card with a coded number that could be tracked if you had a sufficiently large antenna in orbit, and the NRO had several SIGINT satellites in the sky with truly large antennae indeed. The NSA had been able to lock onto Koch’s phone after tracking his banking records; a deposit of a quarter of a million euros that afternoon at a bank in Karachi had focused the agency’s attention on the man. German Luftwaffe lieutenants didn’t normally make deposits of that size.

A final burst of invective from the loudspeakers set the crowd into wild and jubilant celebration. A chant had started.

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

God is great.

Dean and Akulinin split up as they approached, sidling in from left and right. Koch seemed unaware of either of them until Dean stepped up on his left, draping his SIG SAUER P226 within the long and loose-hanging sleeves of his kameez and pressing the muzzle hard against the small of the German’s back.

“What’s the matter, Alfred?” Akulinin said in English from Koch’s right. “You’re not joining in with all the celebrating.”

“Was ist?”

Koch demanded, eyes widening, then narrowing to slits. He shifted to English. “Who the hell are you?”

“We’re accountants, Alfred,” Dean told him. “We’d like to have a word with you about that bank deposit you made today.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Nothing at all,” Dean agreed, “except maybe borrowing a NATO helicopter, and flying proscribed weapons for the wrong people.”

Surprisingly, Koch smiled. “You are Americans? CIA? You can prove nothing. You have no legal jurisdiction here.”

“What makes you think we’re CIA?” Akulinin asked, his voice casual, even friendly.

“You’re Americans. The accents …”

Dean nudged him with the pistol. “Walk. That way. Nice and easy. You’re out for an evening stroll with a couple of friends.”

“You must be CIA!”

Akulinin grinned, a cold showing of teeth. “Alfred, you’ve pissed off a lot of people, not just the Americans.”

“But—”

“Shalom, Alfred,” Dean said, and he gave the German another nudge with the weapon’s muzzle.

By the time they reached the car, with Haroon at the wheel, Koch was babbling, almost pathetically eager to talk.

Lia DeFrancesca held on to Chatel’s arm as they stepped off the boarding ladder and onto the tarmac of La Palma’s airport. “Oh, I do hope you’re not going to tell Mr. Feng on me, Herve,” she said, cooing with her best innocent schoolgirl voice. “He would just kill me!”

“Of course not, chérie,” Chatel said, and Lia could almost see his white knight’s armor gleam in the morning sun. “The man is a boor and a barbarian. He hasn’t the slightest idea how to treat a beautiful woman properly.”

Chatel’s tone of voice indicated that, of course, he himself did know how to treat a woman well. The patronizing I-know-best flavor to the words set Lia’s teeth on edge.

“It’s about respect, Herve,” she told him. “He was treating me like a piece of meat, like eye candy, putting me on display …”

“I know, and it was terrible! But you don’t need to worry about that now. I’m sure we can find you an excellent position with Petro-Technologique.”

“Thank you, Herve.” She gave his arm a squeeze as they walked across the tarmac toward the main airport building. “I am so grateful. The guy couldn’t keep his hands off me.”

As promised, Rubens had had her on a Spanair flight to Grand Canary by early the previous evening. What she hadn’t expected was to be here with Herve Chatel, inspecting his company’s operations in the Canary Islands. Shah, thankfully, had remained in Spain, but he was expected to arrive on La Palma later today.

They’d stayed on Grand Canary overnight and caught an island hopper across to La Palma this morning. Chatel had spent most of the morning talking — primarily about himself.

Which was fine, so far as Lia was concerned. She needed to learn all she could about this Frenchman who’d expressed doubt about some aspect of a secret operation involving both Feng and the mysterious al-Wawi. So far, she’d learned that he was a senior vice president for his company, which manufactured high-duration drilling bits for the petroleum industry, that he had more money than God, and that he expected to move up to the position of CEO when the old man retired late next year.

“So, how long are you going to be here in La Palma?” she asked him.

“A few days. I need to check with my people in the field on … on a project.”

“Really? What project?”

“Nothing you would be interested in, my sweet. I’ve already reserved a room for you at the Hotel Sol. You can enjoy the sun and the sea while I go check on my people in the interior. When I return, we shall fly back to Paris, and I’ll talk to my human resources people about hiring you as my personal assistant.”

Lia had already used her laptop to do some research on La Palma, the outermost of the flattened horseshoe of islands off the southern coast of Morocco called the Canary Islands. La Palma was an arrowhead pointed due south, twenty-eight miles long north to south, seventeen across from east to west. The airport was on the east coast, facing the nearby islands of Gomera and Tenerife; the Hotel Sol was directly opposite, in Puerto Naos on the west coast.

La Palma had been forged in fire, a volcanic island of basalt cliffs and black sand beaches. The rounded northern half of the island was dominated by the Caldera de Taburiente, an imposing ring of mountains that, despite its name, was not itself a volcano. A high, rugged spine of mountains, many of which were volcanic, ran north to south down the island’s center, almost impassable in places and dividing east from west. The spine was called Cumbre Vieja, the Old Ridge.

The last volcanic eruption on the island, she’d learned, had been in 1971.

“If you really want me to be your personal assistant,” she told him with a small pout, “you might be a little more direct and honest about just what it is you do.”

“In time, in time.” He looked worried. “For now, all you need to do is be beautiful, and you seem to have that down to perfection.”

Well, there would be time to ply him later, and there might be some places she could check here on the island. Something, she thought, just wasn’t adding up. If Petro-Technologique and Saudi Aramco were involved in a project on La Palma, it must involve drilling, possibly exploratory drilling, and on a fairly large scale. Lia knew about petroleum geology, but somehow a volcanic island didn’t seem like the best place to prospect for oil. You found petroleum reserves beneath sedimentary rock — sandstone, limestone, and shale — not beneath a mountain of volcanic basalt.

What the hell were these people playing at?

Yet something was tugging at Lia’s memory about La Palma … and she couldn’t quite pull it out into the light.

“You,” Station Chief Charles Lloyd told Dean, “are a sneaky, underhanded bastard. I like that.”

“I take it our friend is talking?”

“We can’t get him to stop talking. Anything to keep us from turning him over to the big bad nasties of the Mossad.”

“Well, we got lucky. We wouldn’t have had time to break him by conventional means.”

Lloyd was leading Dean through the twists and turns of some back passageways, ending in a darkened room where two more CIA officers sat with recording equipment, watching the interrogation through a soundproofed glass window. In the brightly lit room there, Koch sat at a small table, his interrogator opposite with a pen and an open notebook. Koch no doubt guessed that the mirror was a oneway window; it didn’t matter. He seemed to be only too eager to cooperate.

“Yeah,” Lloyd said, nodding. “Ever since Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, we have to be nice when we interrogate the bastards. Read them their rights. Ask them ‘pretty please.’ Takes forever, and the tough ones just laugh at us.”

Dean looked at him sharply. “You sound like you’re longing for the bad old days of waterboarding and electric shock.”

“Maybe I am. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the idea of torture any more than you do. It … it contaminates every organization, every person, who uses it. But how the hell do we break a man who might know where a bomb is planted, a bomb that might kill a dozen school kids … or a suitcase nuke that could incinerate the center of a fair-sized American city?”

“Torture doesn’t deliver reliable information,” Dean told him. “You know that. A prisoner will say anything, anything, to make the pain stop. That’s how the Inquisition ‘proved’ that Europe was overrun with witches who blighted crops, ate babies, and had sex with the devil. You need to use psychology, not torture.”

“Yeah, yeah. And with what for leverage? The bad guys know we’re not allowed to rough them up.”

“We seem to have done okay with Koch.”

“Sure … with you and the Russian guy pretending to be Mossad, and hinting that you didn’t have to follow the rules. He was practically begging to talk to us after that!”

The man on the other side of the one-way glass certainly seemed willing to talk freely. He’d been given a cigarette and appeared relaxed as he answered the interrogator’s questions.

“And when did you get your payoff, Lieutenant?” the interrogator was asking, the voices coming through over a speaker in the ceiling.

“It was in two payments,” Koch replied. “Half when I agreed to do this thing, half at Qurghonteppa, when I met the truck with the helicopter.”

“And how much were you paid?”

“Half a million euros. Half when I agreed, half when I made the pickup.”

“Why didn’t you take the money, fly back to Kabul, and turn in the shipment?”

“There was a man with me, a Pakistani. Don’t know his name. He flew with me all the way to Karachi. He was supposed to be my liaison here. They never said, but I knew he was also a … how do you say? A watchdog. To make sure I carried out my part of the deal.”

“Isn’t it true you were supposed to be paid even more money once you were in Karachi?”

Koch seemed to hesitate. “Well …”

“The Mossad has been tracking all of the financial trails in this case.”

“It is true. I was supposed to see a man at Jinnah this evening.”

“His name?”

As the questioning continued, Lloyd filled Dean in on what they’d learned already. “Koch was deserting from the German Air Force anyway. Seems he’s a member of a German Muslim group promoting jihad in Europe. Der Volk auf Gott.”

“He doesn’t quite look the Muslim type.”

“The VaG is radically anti-Semitic, though they’re careful about the invective for obvious reasons. It’s popular with the more radical flavor of Islamic immigrants in Germany, and is apparently picking up converts among the good, pure Aryan types as well. Especially in the teenaged population. Koch joined eight years ago, while he was in college in Berlin.”

Germany, Dean had heard, possessed the fastest-growing Muslim population in Europe, and at least some of that explosive growth was linked with lingering anti-Semitic prejudices submerged since the Nazi Götterdämmerung of 1945.

“So Koch is a Muslim convert?”

“At least in name. The VaG started off as a radical skinhead group in the eighties. More into social protest and riots than worshipping God. In any case, Koch was also planning on deserting from the air force. Apparently a Muslim buddy in Kabul knew that, and got him in touch with the Army of Mohammad in Afghanistan. We’re getting a lot of leads there. We’ll be following them up for a long time to come.”

“So he wasn’t planning on flying back to Kabul.”

“Nope.”

“What was he going to do with that helicopter?”

“Abandon it at Jinnah. The Luftwaffe will be treating it as theft of government property on top of desertion.”

“So they’ll be taking an interest in our friend there.”

“Oh, yes. Big-time. They have people flying into Karachi tomorrow to take him back to Germany for court-martial.”

“Does he know that yet?”

Lloyd shrugged. “I don’t know. We promised not to turn him over to the Mossad, and that’s all he’s been concerned about so far. He hates Jews and is terrified of the Israeli intelligence service. Almost paranoid.”

Dean nodded. Rubens had sent him a file on Koch before sending him to find the man. Apparently, Koch’s anti-Semitism and his pre-military membership in the skinhead gang had been well known back in Germany. There’d even been an entry describing his conviction that Mossad agents had infiltrated the German Luftwaffe.

It had been Dean who’d suggested using the Mossad ploy to pick him up, and perhaps convince him to cooperate. With the black hair and olive skin dye from the Tajikistan deployment, he could easily pass as a Sabra, a native-born Israeli. Mossad had a rep worldwide for being thorough, professional, and as ruthless as they needed to be when it came to preserving their tiny nation wedged in between the sea and nations still determined, after more than sixty years, to exterminate them.

“Are you sure you never knew what was in those containers?” the interrogator was demanding.

“They never told me, I never asked,” Koch replied.

“Weren’t you curious?”

A shrug. “It was my ticket out of the Luftwaffe, that’s all. They were paying me to make a delivery.”

“Three-quarters of a million euros is an expensive delivery.”

“It wasn’t my business to know. I just wanted out of fucking Afghanistan.”

On the other side of the glass, Dean asked Lloyd, “Have you asked him about the shipment, about where it went?”

Lloyd nodded. “Several times. He says it was being taken to a ship at the waterfront. He didn’t know which one.”

“That squares with the intelligence we got from you people.”

“The Yakutsk, yes,” Lloyd said, nodding. “She left yesterday. Is the Navy going to intercept her?”

“That,” Dean told him, “depends on the political winds back home. They’d damned well better.”

Where, Dean wondered, do you draw the line? Ships at sea belonging to one nation should never be summarily boarded and searched by the military forces of another; that was a principle the United States had signed for in blood. But what if you had good information that the ship carried stolen nuclear weapons, weapons that would be used against you or your allies, weapons that could kill millions?

Was torture ever justified?

Hard questions, and Dean knew he didn’t have the answers. He knew if Lloyd had tried to torture Koch, he would have stopped it if he could, and reported him back home.

Yet if the man knew where those nukes were …

“Okay,” Dean said. “Just so a full report gets back to my people.”

Rubens could deal with the ethics of information gathering.

No wonder, he thought, the various U.S. intelligence agencies preferred spy satellites over HUMINT, intelligence drawn from human contacts.

Satellites were so much more antiseptic.

Lia DeFrancesca walked into the hotel lobby, a vast and brilliantly lit space of pillars, skylights, tropical plants, and marble floors. She’d checked into her room and unpacked an hour before and was ready for the next phase of her new assignment.

“Buenos tardes,” she told the young man at the desk. Her Spanish was rusty but passable.

“Sí, Señorita Lau,” the man replied. “How can I help you?”

“You have, I believe, a guest here? A Señor Carlylse?”

“Yes, miss,” the man said, having checked his computer screen. The shift to English was effortless. “Is there a message?”

“Yes. Please tell him a Miss Diane Lau wishes to speak with him on a matter of extreme importance.” She thought a moment, then added, “Tell him it is about his book, and about his partner.”

That ought to get a response from him, she thought.

“I happen to know that Señor Carlylse is out of the hotel at the moment,” the man said, typing at his keyboard, “but I shall certainly see that he gets the message when he returns.”

“Mil gracias,” she told him and handed him a five-euro tip.

She left the lobby by ascending a broad set of spiral steps, following a blaze of tropical light filtering down through the skylights. At the end of a long hallway, she walked through a set of glass doors and onto a pool deck.

Beyond the pool, a placid semicircle of aquamarine, she looked out over the far deeper and wilder blue of the ocean.

The west coast of La Palma faced the raw, powerful Atlantic. There were no beaches with tame, knee-high rollers surging up a golden sand shelf. The Hotel Sol was perched atop a cliff extending out over the ocean; from here, Lia looked down the black and rugged face of sheer basalt, a drop at least sixty feet high, directly into the surge and thunder of the ocean surf.

The waves breaking on the rocks below the hotel were easily fifteen and twenty feet high, and the thunder as they crashed into cascades of white spray physically assaulted her senses. Looking up, she stared into the western horizon, knowing that there was nothing but open ocean between La Palma and the coast of Florida, fully thirty-seven hundred miles distant.

North of the Hotel Sol, the town of Puerto Naos lay snuggled up to the ocean beyond a broad beach of black volcanic sand curving away from the rocky point. To the south, the land seemed to rise explosively from the water in sheer vertical cliffs of black rock. The land continued to rise steeply inland, culminating in the green-clad ruggedness of the island’s central spine, the Cumbre Vieja.

Those mountains running down the middle of the island loomed massive against the sky. They were oppressive, Lia thought, heavy, threatening to come sliding toward her, sweeping the sprawling hotel into the sea. The land looked alien, otherworldly, and raw, as if the entire island had only recently thrust itself above the seething surface of the ocean.

“Okay,” she said, leaning on the safety rail. “Carlylse isn’t here, you heard?”

“We heard, Lia,” Marie Telach told her.

“If you have a position for him, I can try to find him.”

“Our best guess is that al-Wawi hasn’t found him yet either,” Telach said. “No message intercepts to that effect, at any rate. We suggest that you stick with the original plan, and make contact when he returns to the hotel.”

“Any ideas on how al-Wawi is going to try to get to him?”

“Unless he already has a tail on him, the hotel is the likeliest venue. They’ll find a way to gain access to his room, and kill him there, out of the public eye. They may try to make it look like suicide. That’s how they took out Pender.”

“Then my best bet will be to hang around the lobby, try to hook up with him when he gets back,” Lia decided.

“So where’s your new boyfriend?”

Lia made a face, though she knew Marie couldn’t see it. “In his room, getting ready to go check on his project later this afternoon. At least he didn’t try to share a room with me like Feng did.”

“I don’t know, Lia. This one sounds kind of cute.”

“Marie, you can have him.”

“Missing Charlie?”

Was she that transparent? Her relationship with Charlie Dean was less than deep-serious … but it was more than casual, certainly, and right now she did find herself missing him.

“How is he?” she asked. Marie wouldn’t be allowed to say anything about Charlie’s mission, but … “How’s he doing?”

“He’s fine. He’s wrapped up his current op, and—” She broke off what she was saying.

“And what?”

“Nothing. He’s fine.”

She was about to tell me he’s getting ready for another op, Lia thought. She knew that Charlie and Ilya Akulinin were in South-central Asia, chasing some stolen suitcase nukes believed to be in the hands of the Russian mafiya. She frowned. Russian mafiya and Islamist extremists. A deadly mix.

Please be okay, Charlie, she thought.

She wondered if he might be thinking of her.