Hard Rain

Forty-five

‘The FBI confirmed it — from the same batch of explosives used on Portman’s safe. Ours, or the Israelis’, depending on how you want to look at it,’ said Captain Cain.

Masters came in and took her seat.

‘You missed the funerals, by the way.’ The captain had trouble deciding where to look, so he walked to the window and watched the Bosphorus traffic. ‘But then, so did I,’ he continued. ‘Doctor Merkit’s family didn’t want infidels present. I bought her flowers from the three of us. Karli and Iyaz delivered them. I sent flowers to Emir’s family also.’

‘Thanks, Rodney,’ I said. ‘I know how you felt about her.’

‘Actually, I doubt that, Special Agent. But what can you do?’ He wasn’t expecting an answer and shuffled his feet. ‘I know it wasn’t intentional on your part — how things turned out between you and her… just happened.’

Cain had his back to me. Beyond him, through the window, a Russian oil tanker drifted down the waterway.

‘Do you want to hand your involvement in this case to someone else?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied, turning to face me, a grim set to his features. ‘I want the satisfaction of helping you nail the fuckers who killed her. The FBI just came good with IDs on those photos you sent from Iraq.’ Cain opened his briefcase and removed a folder. Inside were the photos, which he spread out across my desk.

I picked up the one on top. ‘Moses Abdul Tawal.’

‘And that’s his real name, not an alias,’ Cain continued. ‘Stop me if I’m telling you stuff you already know. He’s a heavy hitter in Egyptian business circles. Well known to Egypt’s politicians. Helped build the Aswan High Dam. Could be why he was brought in on your desal project, water and heavy construction being common to both. You need something big done, you call in Tawal. He owns at least two-dozen companies, is a major shareholder in double that number, and not all of them above board. It’s rumoured he also deals in illegal arms — the hard-to-get high-tech stuff — but no one has managed to hang anything on him. Interestingly, Interpol has had their eye on Tawal for a while in a low-level kind of way. One odd thing: he’s Jewish. You can count the Jewish population in Egypt on the fingers of one hand, by the way. They’re a statistical anomaly. Apparently, he takes his religion seriously, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt him in business. Tawal doesn’t have a police record, although he has been implicated in a large number of common assaults, none of which has ever gone to court. He probably punches them in the mouth, then pays them to keep it shut. It’s safe to say the guy has a temper.’

I nodded. We’d seen one of his tantrums.

‘Tawal has a number of addresses, in Paris, New York and Cairo. Also has a houseboat on Lake Nasser — likes to feed the wildlife.’

Masters picked up another familiar face from the pile, a photo of Jarred with a powerful set of binoculars in his hands. ‘And this guy?’

‘Jarred Ben-Gari. Formerly of the Israeli Defense Forces, rank of captain. Good record. Fought in the September War against Hezbollah. Then one day he just resigned his commission and walked away. No reason. Turned up at your desal plant.’

I recalled the look on the guy’s face the moment he died. ‘I don’t think we’ll be running into him again,’ I said. In fact, for all I knew, maybe Tawal himself was also getting debriefed on eternity. ‘Was Ben-Gari with the Sayeret?’ I asked.

‘Good guess,’ Cain replied. ‘He was. Something went wrong and he was transferred. Ended up in artillery.’

Masters and I exchanged a glance. Both of us had caught the connection, even if Cain hadn’t. The explosives used on the safe and in the car bomb had come from Israeli artillery shells supposedly fired in the September War. Jarred, military HMX, Tawal, Portman…

‘What about the rest of these people?’ Masters asked, picking up a photo of a guy wearing sunglasses who was strolling along arm-in-arm with an AK-47. He was either whistling or puckering up.

‘Just your usual rag-tag bunch of former shooters,’ replied Cain, ‘graduates from various combat units who quit to make some real money doing the same job they were doing for their governments. Nothing special about any of them. No apparent common factors.’

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling, trying to put the pieces together. The exercise made my head hurt.

‘Anything else you need a hand with?’ Cain asked.

‘No, not really. Not just at the moment anyway,’ said Masters. ‘Thanks for all this, Captain. And Vin and I are both deeply sorry about Doctor Merkit.’

Cain nodded and said, ‘Yeah.’ He was about to say something else, but then decided he should leave before whatever it was just came out of its own accord and shot him in the foot.

Masters looked at me and I looked back at her. We were both thinking the same thought: could Rodney Cain be our mole?

‘You stole his girlfriend. That’s a motive right there.’

I wasn’t ready to point the finger at Cain quite yet. And my relationship with Doc Merkit came along after the information about a second safe was passed to Yafa. ‘I need some air,’ I said.

‘No you don’t. We need to talk. About the case. There are holes.’

‘You want to talk about the case… here?’ I opened my hands wide and looked around the room. For all we knew, you could shake more bugs out of this room than a picnic rug. Whoever the mole was had plenty of resources, along with high-level access. There were at least ten people on the short list.

The phone on my desk rang. I picked up. ‘Special Agent Cooper.’

‘Hello, Special Agent. It’s Sage Laboratories calling.’ The voice on the line was young, female and black. ‘Says here on the instructions that we’re to fax our report, rather than email it.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘You provided us with a couple of security questions for proof of identity.’

‘Yep, I remember.’

‘Usually these are your mother’s maiden name, that sort of thing…’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Okay… um… Who did the Redskins trade for on April Fools’ Day, 1964?’

‘Sonny Jurgensen.’

‘What year did George Allen take the Redskins to the Superbowl?’

‘1972.’

‘Okay, Special Agent Cooper. Your report is being faxed as we speak. And… have an NFL day.’

‘I’ll try to,’ I said, hanging up.

‘What was that all about?’ Masters asked.

‘To the fax machine, trusty sidekick,’ I said.

It was cool but sunny down by the water; warm, as long as I didn’t move about and gave the sunlight enough time to accumulate on my exposed skin. A few small fishing boats bobbed at their moorings close to the retaining wall. I finished reading the report from Sage Laboratories as Masters dodged the traffic and skipped through a break, a steaming apple tea in each hand.

‘Here,’ she said, holding one out to me.

‘Thanks.’

‘I could get addicted to this stuff.’

‘Jarred… it’s possible,’ I said. ‘Thousands of shells were fired into southern Lebanon. A captain of an artillery barrage could’ve made a few of them disappear.’

‘If we could prove that, and I think we could, at least to a court’s satisfaction,’ Masters added, ‘it would connect Tawal to Portman’s wall safe, and hence to Portman’s murder. From there it’d be a hop, skip and a jump to all the other murders. What did Sage come up with?’

‘I haven’t read the whole thing, but pretty much what we expected.’ I handed her the report on the earth sample we’d taken from the pit and sipped my tea while she skimmed through it, mumbling, picking out bits here and there.

‘Concentrations of uranyl fluoride… hydrafluoric acid… adducts of uranyl fluoride… consistent with the exposure of uranium hexafluoride to water… Jesus, you know what this means?’

‘That Tawal is a good reason to make the electric chair more freely available.’

‘The bastard really did poison the water supply to give the desal plant a reason to exist, then produced a fabricated water report to make it look like DU contamination.’ Masters shook her head. ‘Fuuuuck… All those poor children, their parents…’

I held my hand out to take back the report but she stopped me.

‘Hang on. There’s a note here about the HEX.’ She turned the page and continued reading as I watched a tanker the size of the Chrysler Building squeeze through the narrow strait, and thought about what I’d like to do to Tawal if I caught up with him. ‘Oh, man… listen to this,’ she said. ‘They’re saying most of the hot isotope of uranium, U235, had been removed. The percentage of uranium-235 was 0.3.’

‘Can you give that to me in English?’

‘As you know, depleted uranium is the feed-stock for nuclear fuel that ends up either in reactors or bombs. The stuff gets put through a process called gaseous diffusion. What comes out one side is depleted, HEX with very little of the U235 left in it, remember? That stuff goes into storage. Out the other side comes enriched HEX, which goes on to be made into the fuel. Sage says that because the sample we provided contained a specifically small amount of U235 — 0.3 per cent — our uranium compounds came from depleted uranium hexafluoride from a specific source. Vin, they’re saying the storage cylinder we dug up was one of ours!’

‘Ours?’

‘America’s, the USA’s — ours. Somehow Tawal managed to get his hands on one of our depleted-uranium storage tanks — or more than one, who knows? — shipped it to Iraq, and buried it in the ground… Jesus, Vin, we have to take this to somebody.’

‘Like who? We don’t know who we can trust, remember? We’ve got the cylinder’s serial number, and we keep that card close to our chest till we’re ready to play it.’

Masters’ cell started ringing. She juggled the report and the tea and took the phone out of her jacket. From the look on her face when she checked the screen, I could tell she didn’t know the caller. ‘Special Agent Masters… Yes, of course I remember you, Colonel.’

Masters lowered the phone and mouthed, ‘Colonel Woodward.’

I nodded — the Reapers’ commanding officer.

‘No, I’m in Istanbul,’ she said. ‘Yes, a beautiful city… Yes, Special Agent Cooper is here with me… Uh-huh… Uh-huh… sure…’

I drank the last of the tea and walked the twenty paces to a trash can. When I returned, Masters was still on the call.

‘Yeah… So you were aware that Colonel Portman had lost his appi-8 status?… Uh-huh… Fair enough… Yes, sir… You were? Really?… Uh-huh… What did he have against them?… Uhhuh… What?… Okay… Well, thanks very much for the heads-up, Colonel. Special Agent Cooper and I appreciate your cooperation. Goodbye, sir.’ Masters gave me a half smile. ‘Y’know, I cannot understand that man. What the hell is a SWAG?’

‘What was the colonel having a “scientific wild-ass guess” about?’

‘He knew that Portman had been grounded.’

‘Why didn’t he mention it to us?’

‘Probably didn’t trust us — us being ground pounders and all. Though his stated reason was that he was unsure about what he could and couldn’t say. Anyway, his superiors have cleared him to talk. The SWAG related to him believing that Portman had a problem working with the Israelis.’

‘Was he anti-Semitic?’

‘No, nothing like that.

‘The Reapers were going head to head with the Cheil Ha’avir, taking on those F-16 Sufas we saw down at Incirlik. The Israelis were practising bombing runs — lofts.’

‘Lofts? Shit…’ A loft was a particular bombing profile designed to throw ordnance a long way, where the delivery platform flew a parabola and let the load go near the top of the arc. ‘Practising the delivery of nuclear ordnance?’

‘That’s what the colonel said. And while the Israelis were doing that, it was the Reapers’ job to come at them, mimicking the sort of tactics an opposing force might use.’

‘Was he specific about what kind of opposing force?’ I asked.

‘Block said his squadron was flying intercept profiles that might be used by F-14s.’

I was mildly stunned. F-14s. There were only two places in the world where F-14s still flew. In re-runs of Top Gun. And in Iran.