1991: LINCOLN DITTMANN WORKS THE ANGLES OF THE TRIANGLE

HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE BUSINESS OF SELLING WEAPONS?” THE Egyptian wanted to know.

“Chances are you won’t believe me if I tell you,” Lincoln Dittmann said.

“If he don’t believe you,” said the short American with the tooled cowboy boots and tapered Levis and slicked back hair, “you’re in deep shit.” He spoke in a Texas drawl so silky that Lincoln had to strain to make out the words.

The Egyptian and the Texan, strange bedfellows in this godforsaken Paraguayan frontier town across the border from Brazil, both laughed under their breaths, though there was no trace of mirth in their voices. Lincoln, sprawled on a sofa, his bad leg stretched straight out in front of him, the cane within arm’s reach, his hands clasped behind his head, laughed with them. “I was teaching Civil War history at a junior college,” he said. “My area of expertise—I wrote a book on the subject once—was the battle of Fredericksburg. Collecting Civil War weapons seemed like the natural thing to do. My pièce de résistance is a rare English Whitworth.”

“That there’s a sniper rifle, ain’t it?” said the Texan.

Lincoln looked impressed. “Aren’t many people around who can tell the difference between a Whitworth and an ordinary barnyard Enfield.”

“My daddy had one,” the Texan said proudly. “Feds went an’ impounded it along with his other guns when he was nabbed for burning a nigger church to the ground in Al’bama.” He tilted his head back and regarded Lincoln warily. The Texan, who had introduced himself as Leroy Streeter when he’d picked Lincoln up in front of the mosque with the gold-tinted roof on Palestine Street across the border in Foz do Iguaçú, said, “Go and describe your Whitworth?”

Lincoln smiled to himself. Back at Langley, they’d learned from the FBI that Leroy Streeter’s father had once owned a Civil War Whitworth; they’d reckoned the son would be familiar with the weapon. If Leroy’s quiz was what passed for checking bona fides in Triple Border, it certainly was amateur hour; an undercover agent wouldn’t name drop—even the name of an antique rifle—if he couldn’t backstop it with details. Fact of the matter was that Lincoln did own a Whitworth—a collection of Civil War weapons went with the Dittmann legend. He’d even fabricated cartridges and gone out to a remote landfill in New Jersey to see if the rifle was as accurate as its reputation held. It was. “Mr. Whitworth’s rifle,” he told Leroy now, “came factory-equipped with a low-powered brass scope fixed atop the hexagonal barrel. Not many of the Whitworths around these days, even in museums, still have the scope. Mine also has the original brass tampon to plug the barrel against humidity and dust. The scope’s fitted with little engraved wheels to sight the rifle and adjust for latitude and longitude errors.”

As he spoke, Lincoln kept his eyes on the Egyptian, who obviously ran the show here. He had not been introduced—though Lincoln had a good idea of his identity; the FBI’s briefing book back in Washington had contained a blurry photo taken with a telephoto lens of an Egyptian known as Ibrahim bin Daoud talking to a man identified as a Hezbollah agent in front of the entrance to the Maksoud Plaza Hotel in São Paulo the previous year. The long delicate nose and carefully trimmed gray beard visible in the photo were conspicuous on the Egyptian sitting on the sill across from him now.

Stretched out on the unmade bed in the room above a bar in Ciudad del Este on the Paraguay side of Triple Border, the muddy heels of his boots digging into the mattress, Leroy was nodding emphatically at the Egyptian. “He sure as hell’s got hisself a Whitworth,” he confirmed.

Lincoln was hoping that gun collecting could provide a useful bond between him and the Texan. “Crying shame about your daddy’s Whitworth,” he said. “Bet the FBI goons didn’t have the wildest idea what a goddamn prize they had in their hands when they confiscated it.”

“They was too fucking dumb to tell the difference between fool’s gold and actual gold,” Leroy agreed.

Lincoln looked back at the Egyptian. “To answer your question: From the Whitworth and my other guns, it was just a matter of branching out to Kalashnikovs and TOW antitank missiles, with the grenades and ammunition thrown in for good measure. Pays a lot better than teaching Civil War history at a junior college.”

“We are not in the market for Kalashnikovs and TOWs,” the Egyptian noted coldly.

“He’s not interested in Ak-47s and TOWs,” the Texan explained. “Now that Commie Russia’s got one foot in the grave, you trip over this kind of hardware out here on Triple Border. He’s interested in Semtex or ammonium nitrate, something in the neighborhood of eighty thousand pounds of it, enough to fill one of those big moving vans. We pay cash on the barrelhead.”

Lincoln locked his eyes on the Egyptian. He was a skeletal man with a round pockmarked face and hunched shoulders, probably in his late fifties, though the gray beard could have been adding years to his appearance. The upper third of his face had disappeared behind dark sunglasses, which he wore despite being in a dingy room with the shades drawn. “Semtex in small quantities is no problem. Ammonium nitrate in any quantity is also no problem,” he said. “You probably know that ammonium nitrate is used as fertilizer—mixed with diesel or fuel oil, it is highly explosive. The trick’ll be to buy a large amount without attracting attention, which is something I and my associates can organize. Where do you want to take delivery?”

Leroy smiled out of one side of his mouth. “At a site to be specified on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel.”

Lincoln heard the cry of the muezzin—it wasn’t a recording but the real thing—summoning the faithful to midday prayer, which meant he’d been taken somewhere within earshot of the only mosque in Ciudad del Este after Leroy had picked him up in front of the mosque in Foz do Iguaçú. He’d been shoved into the back of a Mercedes and ordered to strap on the blackened-out ski goggles he found on the seat. “You taking me to the Saudi?” he’d asked Leroy as the Mercedes drove in circles for three quarters of a hour to confuse him. “I’m taking you to meet the Saudi’s Egyptian,” Leroy had answered. “If the Egyptian signs off on you, that’s when you get to meet the Saudi, not before.” Lincoln had asked, “What happens if he doesn’t sign off on me?” Leroy, sitting up front alongside the driver, had snorted. “If’n he don’t sign off on you, he’ll like as feed you to the pet crocodile he keeps in his swim pool.”

Now Lincoln could feel Daoud scrutinizing him through his dark sunglasses. “Where did you hurt your leg?” the Egyptian asked.

“Car accident in Zagreb,” Lincoln said. “The Croats are crazy drivers.”

“Where were you treated?” Daoud was looking for details he could verify.

Lincoln named a clinic in a suburb of Trieste.

The Egyptian glanced at Leroy and shrugged. Something else occurred to him. “What did you say the title of your book on Fredericksville was?”

Leroy corrected him. “It’s Fredericksburg.”

“I didn’t say,” Lincoln replied. “Title was the best part of the book. I called it, Cannon Fodder.”

Apparently Leroy was still fighting the War of Secession because he blurted out, “Cannon fodder is sure as hell what they was.” His normal drawl, pitched a half octave higher, came across loud and clear. “Federal cannon fodder, fighting to free the niggers and legitimize intermarriage and dictate the North’s way of thinking on southern gents.”

The Egyptian repeated the title to make sure he’d gotten it right, then muttered something in Arabic to the fat boy piecing together the jigsaw puzzle on the linoleum-covered table in the alcove. The boy, who was wearing a shoulder holster with a plastic gun in it and chewing bubble gum that he inflated every time he fitted in a piece, sprang to his feet and rushed out of the room. The Egyptian followed him. Lincoln could hear their footfalls on the staircase of the ramshackle building as the boy headed downstairs and Daoud climbed up one flight. He let himself into the room overhead and crossed it and dragged up a chair as a telephone sounded. Lincoln guessed that the Egyptian was phoning abroad to get his people to check out details of the Dittmann legend.

The DDO’s people in Langley had anticipated this and laid in the plumbing. If someone nosed around the Trieste clinic, he would come across a record of a Lincoln Dittmann being treated by a bone specialist for three days, and paying his bill in cash the morning he was discharged. As for the book, Cannon Fodder had a paper trail. The Egyptian’s contact would discover a 1990 reference to the publication of the book in Publishers Weekly. If he dug deeper he would come up with two reviews, the first in a Virginia junior college student newspaper praising one of the school’s own teachers for his Civil War scholarship; the second in a Richmond, Virginia, historical quarterly devoted to the War of Secession, accusing Lincoln Dittmann of having plagiarized great chunks of a privately printed 1932 doctorate treatise on the battle of Fredericksburg. There would be a small item in a Richmond newspaper repeating the plagiarism charge and reporting that a committee of the author’s peers had examined the original treatise and Dittmann’s Cannon Fodder, and discovered entire passages that matched. The article went on to say that Lincoln Dittmann had been fired from his post teaching history at a local junior college. Chain bookstores would have reported modest sales before the book was withdrawn from circulation. If anyone hunted hard enough, copies of the first and only edition (what was left of the original five-hundred-book print run) could be found in the Strand in Manhattan and several other second-hand bookstores across the country. On the inside of the back jacket there would be a photograph of Dittmann with a Schimelpenick jutting from his lips, along with a brief biography: born and raised in Pennsylvania, a Civil War buff from the time he started visiting battlefields as a youngster, an expert on the Battle of Fredericksburg, currently teaching Civil War history at a Virginia junior college.

Waiting for the Egyptian to return, Lincoln plucked a Schimelpenick from the metal tin in his jacket pocket and held the flame of a lighter to the end of it. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke gush through his nostrils. “Mind if I smoke?” he inquired politely.

“Smoking,” Leroy remarked, “poisons the lungs. You ought to give it up.”

“Trouble is,” Lincoln said, “to give up smoking you need to become someone else. Tried that once. Went cold turkey for a while. But it didn’t work out in the end.”

After awhile the Egyptian returned to the room and settled into the wooden chair set catty-corner to the sofa. “Tell me more about what you did in Croatia?” he instructed Lincoln.

Croatia had been Crystal Quest’s brainchild. For all her imperiousness, she was old school: She believed a good legend needed more than a paper trail to give it authenticity. “If he’s supposed to be an arms merchant,” she’d argued when she dragged Lincoln up to the seventh floor at Langley to get the director to sign off on the operation, “there’s got to be a trail of genuine transactions that the opposition can verify.”

“You’re proposing to actually set him up in the arms business?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Whom would he sell to?” the director had demanded, clearly unsettled by the notion of one of the Company’s agents establishing his bona fides by becoming a bona fide arms merchant.

“He’ll buy from the Soviets who are running garage sales from their arsenals in East Germany, and deliver to the Bosnians. Since U.S. policy tilts toward the Bosnians, our Congressional oversight commissars won’t give us a hard time if they get wind of it, which they won’t if we’re careful. The idea behind this is to put Lincoln in the path of one Sami Akhbar, an Azerbaijani who buys arms for an al-Qa’ida cell in Bosnia.”

“As usual you’ve covered all the bases, Fred,” the director had noted with a flagrant lack of enthusiasm.

“Sir, that’s what you pay me for,” she’d shot back.

Lincoln had spent the next four months tooling around the Dalmatian coast in a serviceable Buick, avoiding the Serb undercover agents like the plague, using a fax to contact a shadowy Frankfurt entity and purchase truckloads of the Soviet surplus arms being sold off by Russian soldiers soon to be recalled to the USSR from East Germany, meeting the drivers at night on remote back roads as they came across Slovenia, then arranging for delivery at crossing points on the Dalmatian coast between Croatia and Bosnia. It was at one of these pre-dawn meetings that Lincoln first felt the fish nibbling at the bait. “Could you get your hands on explosives?” a Muslim dealer who went by the name Sami Akhbar had casually asked as he took possession of a two-truck convoy loaded with TOW antitank missiles and mortars and handed Lincoln a satchel filled with crisp $100 bills bound in wrappers from a Swiss bank.

Lincoln had dealt with Sami five times in the past four months. “What do you have in mind?” he had inquired.

“I have a Saudi friend who is shopping around for Semtex or ammonium nitrate.”

“In what quantities?”

“Very large quantities.”

“Your friend looking to celebrate the end of Ramadan with a big bang?”

“Something like that.”

“Russians aren’t peddling Semtex or ammonium nitrate. It would have to come from the States.”

“Are you saying it is within the realm of possibility?”

“Everything is within the realm of possibility, Sami, but it will cost a pretty penny.”

“Money is not a problem for my Saudi friend. Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich.”

The Muslim had produced a scrap of paper from a shirt pocket and, pressing it to the fender of the truck, had printed out with the stub of a pencil the name of a town and the street address of a mosque, along with a date and an hour. Lincoln had crouched in front of the Buick parking lights to read it. “Where in hell is Foz do Iguaçú?” he’d asked, though he knew the answer.

“It is in Brazil right across the frontier from Paraguay at a place called Triple Border, where Brazil and Paraguay and Argentina meet.”

“Why can’t we get together somewhere in Europe?”

“If you are not interested, only say so. I will find someone else who is.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong, Sami. I’m interested. I’m just worried that it’s a long way to go for nothing.”

Sami had coughed up a laugh. “You guys who deal arms tickle me. I do not call two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. nothing.”

Lincoln had glanced again at the scrap of paper. “Are you sure your rich Saudi friend will contact me if I am standing outside the mosque on Palestine Street at ten in the morning ten days from today?”

Sami had nodded into the darkness. “A person will contact you and take you to him.”

In the small room over the bar, the Egyptian listened in silence to Lincoln’s account of his dealings in Croatia. In the alcove, the boy, working again at his jigsaw puzzle, blew bubbles with the gum until they burst against his fleshy lips. Leroy cleaned the fingernails of his left hand with a fingernail of his right hand. When Lincoln reached the end of the story, the Egyptian, lips pursed, sat without moving a muscle, weighing his next move. Finally he announced, “Leroy will take you back to your hotel in Foz do Iguaçú. Wait there until you hear from me.”

“How long will that take?” Lincoln asked. “Every day I’m away from the Balkans costs me money.”

The Egyptian shrugged. “If you become bored, you are free to yawn.”

“How did it go?” Lincoln asked Leroy when the two were alone in the car and heading toward the bridge and Foz do Iguaçú.

“The fact that you’re still alive can only mean it went well.”

Lincoln glanced at the Texan, whose face flashed in and out of the light as cars passed in the opposite direction. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Fucking A, I’m serious. Get it into your skull,” he said, drumming a forefinger against his own. “You’re associating with tough customers down here.”

Lincoln had to swallow a smile. Felix Kiick had used much the same words as he wound up the briefing back in Washington. “Holy mackerel, watch your ass when you get to Triple Border,” he’d said. “You’ll be rubbing shoulders with mighty ornery folks.”

The briefing in Washington had taken place on neutral turf, a nondescript Foggy Bottom conference room that had been swept by Company housekeepers and then staked out until the principals showed up at the crack of noon. From word one, the tension had been as thick as the fog Lincoln had braved driving to work that morning from the safe house in Virginia. It wasn’t so much the FBI briefer, a short, stumpy veteran counterterrorism maven named Felix Kiick with the low center of gravity of a NFL linesman; the CIA had dealt with him on any number of occasions (most especially when he directed the FBI’s counterterrorism team at the American embassy in Moscow) and considered him to be a straight shooter. The tension could be traced to the clash of cultures; to the mistrust J. Edgar Hoover (who had run the FBI with an iron hand until his death in 1972) had sewn into the agency’s bureaucratic fabric during his forty-eight years at the helm. The fact that the FBI, acting in obedience to a formal presidential “finding,” was being obliged to pass on to its arch competitor at Langley an operation and the assets that went with it, or what was left of them, only made matters worse. Kiick put the best possible face on the situation in his opening remarks. “Triple Border,” he told Lincoln as Crystal Quest and several of her wallahs looked on, “which is the nickname for the zone where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet up, is a cesspool filled with scum from Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatist group ETA, Colombia’s FARC, all of them operating under false identities or false flags. The FBI’s interest in Triple Border goes back roughly ten years when a large expatriate population fleeing the civil war in Lebanon gravitated into the area. The local authorities, some of them bribed, some of them intimidated, turned their backs on the sharp rise in crime in their backyard. You could buy and sell almost anything down there—passports for two-thousand dollars a clip, including the mug shot and the official government stamp; stolen cars; cheap electronics; along with the staples on any lawless frontier these days, drugs and arms. Several terrorist organizations set up guerilla training camps in the mato graso—the outback—to teach recruits how to rig car bombs or shoot the Soviet hardware that anyone could purchase in the back alleys of the border towns using money conveniently laundered by the banks at Triple Border.”

“Sounds like your people have a handle on the problems,” Lincoln said. “Why are you backing off?”

“They’re backing off,” Crystal Quest said, “because the director has convinced the White House that American interests would be better served if the CIA held the Triple Border action.” Quest fingered some crushed ice out of a bowl and began munching on it. “Drugs, contraband cars, a black market in computer software or pirated Hollywood films are small potatoes. We have reason to believe that Triple Border has become a staging area for Muslim fundamentalist groups working in the western hemisphere; at Triple Border they can purchase all the arms their hearts desire and launder the money to pay for it. And their fedayeen can get some R and R at the local bars, out of sight of the mullahs who expect them to remain chaste and pray five times a day. The mosques in Foz de Iguaçú on the Brazilian side and Ciudad del Este on the Paraguayan side are filled with Sunnis and Shiites who in other parts of the Muslim world don’t give each other the time of day. In Triple Border we suspect that they’re plotting to attack the United States and kill Americans.”

Kiick spoke up. “Despite what the CIA thinks of our collective abilities, the FBI did manage to run a handful of assets in Triple Border. With some persistence one of them struck pay dirt, pay dirt being the Egyptian named Ibrahim bin Daoud who runs the fundamentalist training camp called Boa Vista. Daoud, whose real name is Khalil al-Jabarin, has a record—al-Jabarin was convicted of being a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and served serious time in a Cairo military prison. He has the physical and mental scars to show for it; electrodes attached to testicles are said to be the torture of choice of Egyptian jailers. No doubt about it, Daoud himself is a cold-blooded killer—whether it’s the result of his suffering or his genes we don’t know. What we do know is that last month he snuck a crocodile into a swimming pool in São Paolo and then pushed in a man accused of being a police informer while some local hookers holding paper plates filled with defrosted hors d’oeuvres looked on. Money was spread around and the murder was hushed up. We know the story’s not apocryphal because one of the hookers was a collateral asset. The dead informer was our principal asset in Triple Border.”

“So the FBI has gone blind out there?” Lincoln asked.

“For all intents and purposes, yes.”

“The principal asset who got close to Daoud didn’t have an understudy?”

“We didn’t get around to it in time,” Kiick admitted.

“What else can I expect to find at Triple Border besides ravenous crocodiles?”

Kiick—Lincoln had a nodding acquaintance with him from having sat in on several of the rare joint CIA-FBI coordinating sessions—slid an FBI briefing book across the conference table. “What we’ve picked up is all in here,” he said. “You’re likely to come across a Texan who goes by the name Leroy Streeter. He’s what we call a crossover—in his case, an Aryan nationalist nut who is making common cause with the Muslim fundamentalists. Mind you, the mix is potentially lethal. If and when Muslim terrorists do attack the United States, the white supremacists could provide infrastructure support and eventually hit men, since it’s easier for an American to gain entrance to public places than an Arab from the Middle East. Leroy Streeter may or may not be the Texan’s real name, by the way. The guy you’ll meet—he’s five foot two, a hundred and thirty pounds, speaks with a Texas drawl—travels under a passport made out to a Leroy Streeter Jr. Leroy Streeter Sr. was the führer of a Texas-based white supremacist splinter group called the Nationalist Congress; he died of cancer in Huntsville while he was serving time for blowing up a black church in Birmingham. State Department consulate in Mexico City issued a passport to a Leroy Streeter Jr. four years ago, but Argentina’s Secretariat for State Intelligence thinks that he drowned on a Rio beach two years back; as far as we know, no body was recovered. Which means that Leroy Streeter Jr. has risen from the dead or someone is using his passport. Either way, he’s high on the FBI’s most wanted list. “

“Don’t let yourself get sidetracked,” Crystal Quest told Lincoln. “Leroy Streeter is not the target of this operation. The person we’re after down there is the Saudi.”

“Does the Saudi have a name?” Lincoln inquired.

“Everyone has a name,” Quest snapped. “FBI just doesn’t know it.”

“From what our principal asset was able to tell us before his untimely death,” continued Kiick, unfazed by Quest’s dig at the Bureau, “we understand the Saudi is the kingpin of a fundamentalist group that recently surfaced as a blip on our radar screen. It’s been operating out of Afghanistan since the Russians were evicted from the country two years ago and calls itself al-Qa’ida, which means ‘The Base.’ The Saudi appears to be organizing al-Qa’ida cells across Europe and Asia and running them from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.”

“How do I get to this Saudi?”

“With any luck, he gets to you,” Quest said. “He’s in the market for explosives, lots of it. The FBI asset picked up rumors that the Saudi is shopping around for a truckload and is offering a small fortune if it can be delivered to an address in the United States. The explosives may be the tip of the iceberg—the Saudi may have his heart set on acquiring something that will render the explosives more lethal.”

“You’re talking about a dirty bomb,” Lincoln guessed.

“He’s talking about gift wrapping the explosives with plutonium or enriched-uranium radioactive waste,” Quest said, “which would result in the contamination of a wide area when the charge is detonated. Hundreds of thousands could be effected. It’s because of this threat that the president decided to bring the CIA into the picture.”

Kiick said, “Mind you, Lincoln—I understand that that’s the name you’re using now—the business about a dirty bomb is a worst-case scenario, and pure speculation.”

Quest ignored the FBI representative. “We’re going to come at the Saudi obliquely,” she told Lincoln. “We know of an al-Qa’ida cell in the Balkans that’s been running guns and ammunition to the Muslims in Sarajevo in the belief that war between the Serbs and Bosnians is inevitable. Guy who directs it is an Azerbaijani who uses the name Sami Akhbar. Our plan is to hang you out to dry on the Dalmatian coast, which is Sami’s stamping ground, and let him stumble across you. Once you’ve established your bona fides and whet his appetite, you reach the Saudi by working your way up the chain of command. In Triple Border, he’s said to use Daoud as a doorkeeper; nobody gets to the Saudi without getting past the Egyptian.”

Crystal Quest, dressed in one of her signature pantsuits with wide lapels and a dress shirt with frills down the chest, scraped back her chair and stood up. Taking their cue from her, the wallahs from the DDO jumped to their feet. “Get it into your head that Triple Border isn’t the Club Med,” Quest reminded Lincoln. “The group we know least about—the group which interests us the most—is this al-Qa’ida entity. Bring home the bacon on the Saudi and al-Qa’ida, Lincoln, and I’ll personally see to it you get one of the Company’s jockstrap medals.” She added with a leer: “Pin it on you myself.” The DDO contingent all laughed. As Quest headed for the door, Kiick offered his hand across the table and Lincoln, half rising from his chair, shook it. “Our cutout will make herself known to you by saying something about Giovanni da Varrazano and the bridge named after him.” Kiick added, “Holy mackerel, watch your ass when you get to Triple Border. You’ll be rubbing shoulders with mighty ornery folks.”

Crystal Quest’s voice, suffused with satisfaction at her own morbid sense of humor, came drifting back over her shoulder: “Whatever you do, Lincoln, stay away from swimming pools.”

Hanging out with Leroy Streeter in a booth at the rear of the Kit Kat Klub on the main drag of Foz do Iguaçú for the second night running, polishing off the last of the sirloin steak and French fries, washing it down with cheap Scotch in a shot glass and lukewarm beer chasers drunk straight from the bottle, Lincoln watched the hookers slotting coins into the jukebox and swaying in each other’s arms to the strains of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” which, judging from the fact that it was played over and over, night after night, was either number one on the Brazilian hit parade or the only 45-rpm record in the machine still functioning. Leroy had just come down the narrow stairs leading to a dark hallway with two bedrooms off of it, having gotten his ashes hauled (as he put it) for the second time that night. The skinny teenage girl with the red-dyed hair worked into a chignon on the top of her head to add height and age came down behind him, ironing the folds of a thin shift with her palms as she tottered back to the bar on spiked high heels. “I prefer jailbait,” Leroy informed his new found friend as he signalled for another bottle of beer. “They got theirselves tight snatches and do whichever you tell ’em to without raising a fuss or renegotiating the price. Can’t figure what you got ’gainst getting laid, Lincoln. Like I told you, the girls here is all clean as whistles.”

“They’re only clean as the last whistle they blew,” Lincoln said. “Last thing I need to come down with is gonorrhea. Wind up costing me two hundred fifty grand to get screwed.”

“I see what you’re saying,” Leroy said. He looked over at the dancers padding around on the broad pine planks of the floor in front of the jukebox; one young man, whom Leroy had identified as a Pakistani he’d seen at Daoud’s boondock training camp, was hugging Leroy’s skinny friend with the red-dyed hair and dancing in place, shifting his weight from foot to foot in time to the music. “I don’t hold with females dancing with females,” the Texan told Lincoln, aiming his chin in the direction of the hookers who hung limply in each other’s arms, their backs slightly arched, their painted lids closed, their heads falling off to one side as if their necks weren’t strong enough to support the weight of their elaborate hairdos. “It ain’t normal, is my view, in the sense that lesbian love ain’t normal. If God meant women to fuck women he would have given some of them dicks. The hell kind of music is that anyway? Don’t worry, be happy is how I aim to pass the rest of my days on earth once all this is over with.”

Lincoln decided the moment had come to see whether his efforts at bonding with the Texan had paid off. Bending over the table, lowering his voice so the two Brazilians in the next booth couldn’t make out what he was saying, he asked, “Once all what is over with? It’s got to do with the ammonium nitrate, right? Tell me something, Leroy—what the fuck would anyone do with a moving van stuffed with ammonium nitrate?” He managed to ask the question very casually, as if he were only trying to hold up his end of the conversation; as if he couldn’t care less about the answer.

Leroy, a little man who wanted people to think of him as big, couldn’t resist bragging. “Between you and me and the fly on the wall over there, I’m gonna go and personally drive it through the Holland Tunnel,” he replied, leaning forward until their foreheads were almost touching. “Gonna set the fuse and blow it up in downtown Manhattan and flatten a square mile of Wall Street real estate, is what I’m gonna do with it.”

Sinking back, Lincoln whistled through his teeth. “You guys aren’t fucking around—you’re going straight for the jugular.”

“Fucking A we’re not fucking around,” Leroy said, squirming gleefully on his banquette.

Lincoln raised the bottle to his lips and swallowed a mouthful of warm beer. “What you got against Wall Street, Leroy? Did you lose money on the stock market?”

Leroy sniffed at the air in the Kit Kat Klub, which reeked of beer and marijuana and perspiration. “I hate the Federal gov’ment,” he confided, “and that there Wall Street is a branch of the Federal gov’ment. Wall Street is where them Jews hang out, running the country from behind their polished mahogany desks, plotting to take over the whole entire world. Whether you admit it or not, you know I’m right or you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. You’re a foot soldier like me in the war of liberation. Hell, we may have to destroy America to liberate her, but one way or another we are gonna go and set the clock back to where right thinking folks can get on with their lives without being dictated to by some pompous asshole in Washington. It’s the Civil War all over again, Lincoln. The Federal gov’ment’s trying to tell us what we can do and what we can’t do. Things keep up the way they been going, hell, they’re gonna throw away the Constitution and decide you need to get yourself a license before you can own a handgun.” Leroy kept his voice pitched low but he was starting to rant now. “A license to buy a handgun! Over my dead body! Listen up, Lincoln, you got yourself book learning so you know the country is going to the dogs. Give the kikes an’ niggers an inch, they’ll come right back at you for a country mile. If we don’t draw the limit line in the dirt, if we don’t make our stand now, why, one day soon they’re gonna bus the niggers to every goddamn school in the country until there won’t be such a thing as a white man’s school left between the Pacific and the Atlantic.”

Leroy seemed to run out of steam just as the mulatto girl working the bar turned up with his beer. She deftly flicked off the cap with a church key hanging between her breasts at the end of a long gold necklace. “Ready for a refill?” she asked Lincoln.

The bottle of beer on the table in front of him was still half full. “I’m okay,” he said.

“He is definitely okay,” Leroy agreed impatiently.

The waitress told Leroy, “My girlfriend Paura, she’s the dark haired one in toreador pants dancing all by herself over there, has taken a shine to your friend here.”

“You don’t say,” Leroy said. He smirked across the table at Lincoln. “Why don’t you invite Paura over for a beer, Lincoln. If’n you don’t fancy her I’ll take her on.”

“I told you—” Lincoln started to say, but Leroy had already grabbed the waitress’s wrist. “Go and tell this Paura chic to get her ass over here.”

The waitress could be seen laughing and saying something to her friend as she headed back to the bar. Paura, holding an enormous joint between two fingers of her left hand, slowly turned her head and sized up the two men in the booth, then went on with her dancing though each shuffling step brought her closer to the rear of the bar. She kept dancing even after the record stopped and wound up swaying like a leaf in a faint breeze next to the booth as “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” started in again. She took a drag on her joint and swallowed the smoke and said, “I bet she told you my name’s Paura.”

“She did,” Leroy affirmed.

“She never gets it right.” The girl spoke English with what Lincoln took to be an Italian accent. “I’m Paura some days. On others I’m Lucia. Today is a Lucia day.”

Lincoln, an aficionado of legends as well as firearms, asked, “Are these different names for the same person or two distinct people?”

Lucia scrutinized Lincoln to see if he was mocking her. When she saw he was serious, she answered his question seriously. “They’re as distinct as night and day. Lucia is day. Her name in Italian means light. Sunshine and daylight fill her heart, she is grateful to be alive and lives from day to day, she doesn’t see past tomorrow. She goes down on anyone who pays without haggling, she considers it a matter of principle to give a client his money’s worth. She passes on half of what she earns to her pimp and does not hold back his share if a client should happen to leave a tip.”

“And Paura? What’s she like?”

“Paura is night. Her name means fear in Italian. Everything about her can be traced to fear—she is afraid of her shadow during the day, afraid of the darkness when the last light has been drained from the day, afraid of the customers who remove their belts before they take off their trousers. She’s afraid of swimming pools. She is afraid life on earth will end before dawn tomorrow, afraid it will go on forever.” She regarded Lincoln with her frightened eyes. “Would you like me to read your palm? I can tell you on what day of the week your life will come to an end.”

Lincoln politely declined. “I have no visible lifeline,” he said.

The girl tried another tack. “What sign were you born under?”

Lincoln shook his head. “I’m a Zodiac atheist. Don’t know my sign, don’t want to know.”

“That more or less narrows our relationship down to dancing,” Lucia said, her body starting to sway to the music again. Shrugging the filmy blouse so far off one shoulder that the aureole on a breast came into view, she held out a hand.

“She’s a nut case,” Leroy muttered. “But she sure has got the hots for you.”

“I have a bad leg,” Lincoln informed the girl.

“Go ‘head and put her out of her misery,” Leroy urged. “Jesus Christ, you can’t catch nothing jus’ dancing with her.” When Lincoln still hung back, Leroy nudged his ankle under the table. “You ain’t being a gentleman, Lincoln, that’s for goddamned sure.”

Lincoln pulled a face and shrugged and slid off the banquette to his feet. The Italian girl gripped one of his large hands in hers and pulled him limping into the middle of the room, then turned and, stomping out her joint on the floor boards, melted against him, both of her bare arms flung around his neck, her teeth nibbling on the lobe of his ear.

In the booth, Leroy slapped the table in delight.

Lincoln was a good dancer. Favoring his game leg, and with the girl glued to his lanky frame, he launched into an awkward little three step that set the other girls around the bar to watching in admiration.

After a bit Lucia whispered in Lincoln’s ear. “You don’t need to tell me your names if you don’t want to. Wouldn’t change anything if you did—around here nobody uses real names.”

“Name’s Lincoln.”

“That a first name or family name?”

“First.”

“That your name during daylight or at night?”

Lincoln had to smile. “Both.”

Without missing a beat, Lucia said, “Giovanni da Varrazano, who gave his daylight name to the bridge that connects Brooklyn to an island named Staten, was killed by Indians during an expedition to Brazil in 1528. A little bird whispering in my ear told me you would be thrilled to know that.”

Lincoln stopped in his tracks and pushed her off to arm’s length. The smile sat like a mask on his face. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

Lucia, quite pleased with herself, tucked her breast into her blouse with a dip and toss of her shoulder and sank back into his arms, and they started dancing again. Lincoln, suddenly edgy, pressed his mouth to her ear. “So it’s you, the cutout,” he said. He thought of Djamillah in the room over the bar in Beirut, with the faded night moth tattooed under her right breast; he remembered telling her I am addicted to fearI require a daily fix. You had to be addicted to fear to get into the business of spying; this is the thing he had in common with the Italian girl Paura—she had surely been the cutout who had seen the FBI asset thrown to the crocodile. Lincoln identified the source of his edginess: He hoped against hope she wouldn’t suffer the same fate. “Do you have a good memory?” he asked her now. Without waiting for a reply, he said, “Here goes nothing: I was picked up by the Texan sitting at the table with me, I believe his name really is Leroy Streeter because he mentioned that his father had burned down a Negro church in Alabama. He took me to a room over a bar in Ciudad del Este. The Egyptian named Daoud was there.”

“It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t want sex,” Lucia said. “I’ve had enough sex for one day. My pussy and my mouth are both sore.”

“Daoud checked out my bona fides—I heard him go upstairs and make a phone call—my guess is he was getting his people to confirm that I’d been treated in a Trieste clinic, that I’d written the book I said I wrote. I must have passed the initial muster because he sent me back here and told me to hang out with Leroy until I was contacted again, which is what I’m doing now.”

“The reason we play the same record all the time,” Lucia whispered, her tongue flicking inside his ear, “is because ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ is the opposite of our lives down here. Except for Lucia, all we do is worry about not being happy.”

“With any luck, the next step is for me to be taken to meet the Saudi.”

“The girls who work here,” Lucia said, “use abortions as birth control. If you ever come back again, it will be appreciated if you would bring us a carton of condoms.”

“Leroy told me why they’re shopping around for ammonium nitrate,” Lincoln went on. “I don’t know if he’s bragging or inventing, but he says he plans to fill a moving van with explosives and blow it up in the middle of Wall Street.” He let one of his palms slip down to her tight toreador pants and the swell of a buttock. “What will you do when all this is over?”

Lucia dropped one of her hands to reach under the back of Lincoln’s shirt. “All this will never be over,” she breathed.

Her answer startled Lincoln; that was what the Alawite prostitute Djamillah had told Dante Pippen as he was leaving the room over the bar in Beirut a legend ago. “It will end one day,” Lincoln promised her. “Where will you go? What will you do?”

“I would go back to Tuscany,” she said, clinging to him, burrowing into his neck so that her words were muffled. “I would buy a small farm and breed baby polyesters and shear them twice a year and sell the hair to make silk-soft cloth.”

“Polyester is a synthetic fabric,” Lincoln said.

Lucia’s hand came in contact with the leather of the holster nestling in the cavity in Lincoln’s lower back. She caressed the cold metal on the butt of the small-caliber automatic in the holster. “I will raise baby acrylics, then,” she said, annoyed at his nitpicking. Her fingers worked their way under the holster; when they reached the smooth scar of the healed wound she stopped dancing abruptly. “What gave you that?” she asked.

But Lincoln only murmured her night name, Paura, and she didn’t repeat the question.

Hanging out at the Kit Kat Klub the following night, Lincoln made a point of dancing with two other girls and taking the second one up to a room so that suspicion wouldn’t fall on Paura if he was compromised. Once in the room, the girl, a bleached blonde who called herself Monroe Marilyn, named her price. Lincoln counted out the bills and set them on the table. Monroe washed in a chipped bidet and insisted he wash too, and watched him to make sure he did. She took off the rest of her clothing except for a black lace brassiere, which she claimed to have bought in Paris, and stretched out on the mattress covered with a stained sheet, her legs apart, her eyes fixed on the filaments in the electric bulb dangling from the ceiling. In the bar below “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” started to play again on the jukebox. Lincoln shut his eyes and imagined he was making love to Paura. Under him, Marilyn moaned and cried out with pleasure; to Lincoln her sensual clatter came across as a recorded announcement, played over and over like the 45-rpm disk on the jukebox downstairs. He finished before “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” did.

“So you got your ashes hauled after all,” Leroy said when Lincoln came limping back to the booth and slid onto the banquette across from him. “You must of broken some kind of speed record. You need to get laid at least once a day not to be sex starved. The trick is to make it last as long as you can. That way you get more fuck for your buck.”

“You ought to write a lonely hearts column for the newspapers,” Lincoln said. “You could advise men how to solve their sexual problems.”

“I just may do that when I’m too old to take on the Federal gov’ment in Washington.”

“How old will you be when you’re too old for the good fight?”

“Thirty, maybe. Maybe thirty.”

Around eleven, an old man wearing a long shabby overcoat and a threadbare scarf wound loosely around his thin neck came into the bar to sell lottery tickets. He had turned up the same hour every night since Lincoln had been hanging out at the Kit Kat. As he stepped through the door, the hookers dropped what they were doing to crowd around him, hunting for lucky numbers on the lottery slips attached to his clipboard. When they’d each bought a ticket that suited them, the girls drifted back to the tables or took up where they’d left off on the dance floor. The lottery vendor shuffled across the floor to a vacant booth not far from where Lincoln and Leroy were sitting. The mulatto waitress filled a tall glass with tap water and set it down in front of him. The old man half bowed to her from a sitting position—the gesture seemed to come from another world and another century. A new girl Lincoln had not seen before came down the steps behind a corpulent Lebanese client and, noticing the old man with the clipboard in the booth, hurried over to buy a ticket. When the music went silent, Lincoln could hear their voices—he could even make out what they were saying. The girl was asking when the drawing would be held and how she would know if she’d won anything. The old man told her that he kept the stubs attached to his clipboard for months. Each morning he tore the list of winning numbers from the newspaper, he said, and made it his business to personally seek out winners who had bought a ticket from him.

The idea of a hooker hoping to strike it rich from a lottery ticket intrigued Lincoln. He wondered if her pimp would take half the proceeds if she did win.

Leroy was listening to them also. He reached across the table and tapped Lincoln on the wrist. “The hell language they talking?” he wanted to know.

Lincoln hadn’t realized they were talking a foreign language until Leroy called his attention to it. “Not sure,” he replied, although, to his astonishment, he found that he knew very well. The old lottery vendor and the hooker were talking in Polish, which was the language Martin Odum’s mother had used when she told him bedtime stories in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, a lifetime ago.

At the booth, the girl could be heard asking, “Ile kosztóje bilet?” When the old man told her how much a ticket cost, she carefully counted out coins from a small purse and tore one from the clipboard.

“Sounds foreign to me,” Leroy was saying. “Don’t like foreigners, don’t like the languages they talk. Don’t know why foreigners don’t learn American. Make the world simpler if everyone talked American, is how I see it.”

Lincoln couldn’t resist baiting Leroy. “You want them to talk American with a Texas drawl like you or a clipped Boston accent like John Kennedy?”

Leroy took the question seriously. “Don’t matter none to me. Any American beats out a foreign language, hands down.”

Near midnight, as the girls began to drift over to the bar to settle up what they owed for the rooms they’d used, the fat Arab boy who’d been doing the jigsaw puzzle in Ciudad del Este burst into the bar. He was still wearing the shoulder holster with the plastic grip of a toy gun jutting from it. Spotting the two Americans in the rear booth, he padded over on his Reeboks and thrust out a folded note. Leroy read it and raised his eyes and cried out excitedly, “Bingo, Lincoln. Daoud is waiting for us behind the bar.”

Daoud’s coal black Mercedes was idling in the shadows at the street end of the alley when the two Yankees, the one with the cane limping along behind the short American in cowboy boots, came around the side of the Kit Kat and settled into the backseat. The fat Arab boy slid in next to Daoud in front. “Where are you taking us?” Lincoln asked, but Daoud didn’t bother to reply. He gestured to the driver and the car lurched past the halal butcher shop on the corner into the poorly lit main drag and headed in the direction of the Little Dipper and Polaris, hanging in the night sky over the rooftops. Twenty minutes out of Foz do Iguaçú the paved road abruptly gave way to a rutted dirt track and the driver had to slow down to keep the passengers from hitting their heads against the roof of the car. In the headlights, Indians leading donkeys piled high with burlap sacks could be seen stumbling through the pitch darkness. “In the outback,” Leroy told Lincoln, “lot of smuggling goes on during the night.” After one particularly rough bump Daoud flung an arm over the shoulder of the fat teenager and said something to him in Arabic. The boy said, “Inch’Allah.”

Lincoln leaned forward to ask the Egyptian if the boy were his son. Daoud turned his head only slightly and said, “He is the son of my son.”

“And where is his father?”

“His father, my son, was killed in the attack on the American Marines at Beirut Airport in 1983.”

Lincoln reminded himself he was living deep in a legend; that he ought to be commiserating with the Egyptian. “It must be a source of great sadness to have lost your son—”

“It is a source of great pride to have given a son to the jihad. Along with my son, two hundred and forty one American marines and sailors lost their lives in the Beirut attack, after which your President Reagan lost his nerve and disengaged from Lebanon. Every father should have such a son.”

An hour and twenty minutes out of Foz de Iguaçú, the headlights of the Mercedes picked up the first of two road blocks. Soon after the second one, located beyond a sharp curve in the track, the car slowed to give three armed men with red-and-white checkered kaffiyehs over their faces time to drag open a chain-link gate. One of the guards said something into a walkie-talkie as he waved the Mercedes through. The driver headed downhill toward a group of wooden army barracks set in what looked like a dry river bed and pulled up before a structure that was lower and wider than the other buildings. On a flat rise behind the barracks, in a dirt field illuminated by floodlights powered by a gasoline-driven motor whose put-put was audible in the still night air, a dozen men in khaki fatigues were practicing penalty shots against a goalie outfitted in a yellow Hertz jumpsuit. When one of them scored, Lincoln could make out the other players taunting the guardian.

Daoud’s grandson darted from the Mercedes to pull open a narrow door in the side of the building. The young Pakistani whom Lincoln had seen dancing at the Kit Kat with Leroy’s jailbait hooker stood in the corridor inside the door, an Israeli Uzi with spare clips taped to the folding metal stock tucked under an arm, his finger on the trigger. He tensed when he saw the two Americans and muttered something to Daoud, who translated. “He wants to know if you are armed.” Lincoln, laughing, reached under his shirt behind his back and pulled the small-caliber automatic from the holster worn high on his belt so that it would disappear into the shrapnel wound. The Pakistani took the automatic and waved the party through.

The corridor gave onto a square room with a low ceiling. It took a moment for Lincoln’s eyes to become accustomed to the dimness. About thirty or so men sat around the room on straw matting, their backs against thin cushions attached to the walls. Daoud motioned Lincoln and Leroy to a spot along the near wall, then crossed the room and took a free place against the opposite wall near the figure who was clearly presiding. Lincoln set his cane on the cement floor and settled down, his bad leg stretched out in front of him, the other ankle tucked under his thigh. Next to him, Leroy sank into an awkward cross-legged position. Lincoln reached for his tin of Schimelpenicks, but a lean young Arab posed a hand gently but firmly on his wrist. Lincoln noticed that nobody in the room was smoking. He nodded and grinned at the young Arab, who turned away, expressionless.

Lincoln tried to distinguish the features of the figure across from him. The man, who looked to be in mid-thirties, was ruggedly handsome, with a stringy ash-colored beard and dark thoughtful eyes exuding an inner calm that could have easily been taken for arrogance. He was extremely tall and dressed in a collarless coarse off-white ankle-length robe with what Lincoln took to be a thick Afghan goat-hair vest over it. Bareheaded, with socks and heavy walking sandals on his feet, he sat crosslegged on the mat with a supple elegance, his back off the wall and hunched slightly forward as he read something from a sheet of paper to those within earshot, occasionally tapping the long forefinger of his right hand on a word to emphasize its importance. All Lincoln could make out was the honeyed undertone of someone who didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard.

There appeared to be some sort of queue because the two men sitting between Daoud and the figure Lincoln identified as the Saudi spoke next, raising problems that needed to be solved or providing information that needed to be weighed against what was already known. Finally Daoud’s turn came. Leaning forward, talking quietly, he spoke to the Saudi for several minutes. Once he tossed his head to indicate the two Americans sitting across the room. Only then did the Saudi’s gaze settle on the visitors. He scratched at his chest with several fingers and uttered a single word. Daoud looked over and motioned for Lincoln to approach. Leroy assumed the gesture included him and started to get up, but Daoud wagged a finger and he collapsed back into his cramped position. Leaning on his cane, Lincoln pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the Saudi and sank onto his haunches facing him. The Saudi saluted him with a palm to his heart and Lincoln mimicked the gesture. A thin man with greasy hair parted down the middle and thick spectacles slipping along his nose was sitting next to the Saudi with a lined notebook open on his lap; Lincoln took him for a secretary. The Saudi murmured something and the secretary repeated it in a loud voice. Instantly all the men sitting around the walls sprang to their feet and headed for the door. Across the room, only Leroy remained, squirming uncomfortably in a position he would never grow accustomed to. Lincoln looked from Daoud to his host and back as Daoud delivered a short speech in Arabic. The Saudi listened intently, nodding from time to time in apparent agreement, his eyes darting occasionally to Lincoln and, once, to Leroy across the room. Finally the Saudi, scratching again at his chest, started to put questions. The secretary with the greasy hair translated them into English.

“He welcomes you to Boa Vista. He asks how you arrived to here from Croatia.”

“I flew Lufthansa from Zagreb to Munich to Paris, then Air France to New York, then PanAm to São Paolo. I chartered a small plane that flew me into Foz do Iguaçú.”

When the secretary had translated this, the Saudi, never lifting his eyes from Lincoln, put another question. The secretary said, “He asks how the struggle is going in Bosnia? He asks whether the Bosnians, in the event of war, will be able to defend Sarajevo if the Serbs capture the hills overlooking the city.”

“The Serb military is by all accounts a great deal stronger than anything the Bosnians can field,” Lincoln said. “What will strengthen the Bosnians in the event of war is that they have no place to go; their backs are against Croatia, and the Croats hate them as much as the Serbs.”

“He agrees with your analysis. He tells the story of the Greek general who warned his officers not to attack a weaker force trapped in a canyon without a line of retreat available, because the weaker force would then conquer the stronger force.”

The Saudi spoke again; again the secretary translated. “He asks how you plan to accumulate large quantities of ammonium nitrate without attracting the attention of the police.”

Almost against his will Lincoln felt himself falling under the spell of the Saudi. He saw, now that he was close to him, that the skin on the Saudi’s face and neck appeared yellowish, but he assumed it was due to the low wattage of the bulbs burning in the room. He couldn’t help but like his style—no wonder young men were flocking to join his al-Qa’ida cells in Afghanistan and Yemen. Watching his unflinching eyes, Lincoln could feel the magnetic pull of his personality; the Saudi spoke softly but he carried a big stick. Seeing how uncomfortable his visitor was, the Saudi reached out to offer him a cushion. Lincoln sat on it, his game leg thrust forward, and provided an explanation that had been prepared back at Langley: His several associates would spread out across America and, pretending to represent farmers’ cooperatives in various southern and eastern states, would buy up whatever ammonium nitrate was available and truck it to New Jersey, where it would all be loaded onto a moving van. At a site to be designated, Leroy Streeter would take possession of the ammonium nitrate and pay the fee in cash.

“He asks if you are curious to know what Mr. Streeter plans to do with the ammonium nitrate.”

“I suppose he plans to explode it someplace. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less.”

“He asks why you could not care less.”

“I believe America has grown too rich and too fat and too insolent and needs to be taken down a peg or two.” It was clear from the secretary’s expression that he didn’t understand the expression “a peg or two.” Lincoln repeated the thought another way. “America needs to be taught a lesson in humility.”

“He asks what kinds of arms you sold in the Balkans.”

“All kinds. My clients would give me a wish list and I did my best to fill it.”

“What is it, a wish list?”

“A list of the arms and munitions that they wished to have.”

“He asks if you have limited your operations to conventional weapons.”

“My operations have been limited to selling what the Soviet military has in its stocks. Up to now I have procured almost all of the weapons and munitions from Soviet army units in East Germany. Many of the Russians I dealt with have returned to the Soviet Union and would be able to supply me with other articles from the Soviet arsenal. Do you have something particular in mind?”

“He asks whether you could supply spent plutonium or enriched uranium.”

Lincoln thought about that for a moment. “Spent plutonium or enriched-uranium waste could be obtained from nuclear power plants like the one in Chernobyl, north of Kiev in the Ukraine—”

The Saudi interrupted Lincoln and the secretary translated what he said. “He is curious why you mention Chernobyl, since its reactor exploded five years ago and the radioactive waste has been sealed under an enormous concrete sheath.”

“It was the plant’s number four reactor that exploded. Two other reactors remain in use. The radioactive waste is trucked to various nuclear disposal sites in the Soviet Union. There is another source of spent plutonium—the Soviet nuclear submarine fleet based in Archangel and Murmansk is known to be decommissioning vessels because of budgetary shortfalls. Plutonium pits are removed from the decommissioned subs and trucked to the same nuclear disposal sites. The bottom line is that there is no shortage of weapons-grade plutonium or uranium for anyone willing to run the risks involved in negotiating the acquisition. It goes without saying, very large sums of money would be required to conclude such a deal.”

The Saudi accepted the translation with a preoccupied nod. He muttered something to the secretary, who said: “He asks how large?”

“How much radioactive waste would be required?”

“He says to you a tenth of a short ton to start with.”

“Where would he want it delivered?”

“At a site to be specified in Afghanistan.”

“I would need to consult my associates before setting a price. Off the top of my head, I should think we are talking about something in the neighborhood of a million dollars U.S., a down payment in cash when I have located the spent pits, the rest to be paid into a numbered account in an offshore bank.”

“He asks is it so that nuclear bombs can be fitted into something the size of a common valise.”

“He’s referring to what the Americans have designated the MK-47. The Soviets are said to have constructed several hundred of these devices. Imagine something shaped like an army canteen, only larger, roughly the size of a bulging valise, with an automobile gas cap on the top and two metal handles on either side. Because of its size and mobility, the nuclear device can be easily smuggled into a target city and exploded by a crude timing mechanism. The MK-47s contain twenty-two pounds of uranium which, when exploded, is equivalent to one thousand tons of conventional TNT, one twentieth the size of the first Hiroshima atomic bomb.”

“He asks about the shelf life of these valise-bombs.”

“The Russians have been miniaturizing their nuclear payloads since the mid 1980s. Whatever they have in their stockpiles could be expected to function for ten to fifteen years.”

“He wants to know if such a valise-bomb can be acquired?”

“For obvious reasons, the Russian military keep these devices under lock and key, with a high degree of command and control accountability. But if someone were to offer an enormous sum of money, plus safe passage out of Russia for the seller, it is conceivable that something might be worked out.”

“He asks how much money is an enormous sum.”

“Again, off the top of my head, I would say something in the neighborhood of three to five million U.S for each valise-bomb.”

The Saudi sank back into the cushion fastened to the wall behind him and scratched absently at his upper arm and his ribs. Lincoln noticed that the Saudi was sweating despite the chill in the room; that the sweat on his brow seemed to crystalize into a fine white powder.

“He says to you that for the time being we will concentrate on the spent plutonium or uranium pits. He says that nobody can say what the future holds. Perhaps one day he will raise the subject of the valise-bomb again with you.”

Lincoln smiled and nodded. “It’s your call.”

There was a large glass bowl filled with fruit, and another overflowing with nuts, near the Saudi. He pointed first to one and then the other with a hand turned palm up, offering something to eat to his guest. Lincoln reached out to help himself to some nuts.

“He notes that it turns cold at night out here,” the secretary translated. “He asks if you and your friend would like some herbal tea.”

Lincoln looked at Leroy over his shoulder and said, “He is offering us hot herbal tea.”

“Ask ’em if they got anythin’ slightly more alcoholic,” Leroy said.

“Leroy, these people don’t drink alcohol. It’s against their religion.”

“Goddamn. How can they expect folks to convert to a dry religion?”

The Saudi apparently caught the gist of Leroy’s remark because he replied in Arabic without waiting for the secretary to translate. The secretary said: “He tells the story of the czar who converted Russia to Christianity—it was near the end of the first millennium. Vladimir I of Kiev was tempted by Islam but decided against it because he did not think Russians could get through their cruel winters without something the Arab chemists who developed the technique of distillation called al-kuhl. History might have turned out differently if the Prophet had not abstained from alcohol—the long cold war would have been between Christianity and Islam.”

Lincoln said, “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, perhaps there will be another cold war—a new struggle for Jerusalem between the spiritual descendants of Richard the Lion Hearted and the heirs of the Sultan Saladin.”

Listening to the translation, the Saudi reached for a glass filled with water and, popping two large oval pills into his mouth, washed them down with a long swig. Lincoln watched his Adam’s apple bob in his long neck. Wiping his lips with the fabric on the back of a wrist, the Saudi said, in labored English, “A new struggle is surely a possibility.”

“You speak English?” Lincoln asked him directly.

The Saudi responded in Arabic and the secretary translated. “He says to you he speaks English as well as you speak Arabic.”

Lincoln grinned. “I understand four words of Arabic: Allah Akbar and Inch’Allah.”

“He compliments you. He says to you the person who understands only these four words grasps the heart of the holy Koran. He says to you there are pious men, descendants of the Prophet, who can recite all one hundred and fourteen suras from memory but do not hold in their hearts the significance of these four words.”

Lincoln looked at the Saudi. “Are you pious? Do you practice your religion?”

“He says to you he practices as much of it as needs to be practiced to be a faithful Muslim. He says to you that he resides in what Muslim’s call dar al-harb, the home of war; above all other things he practices jihad. He would have you know that waging war on behalf of Islam and Allah against the infidel is a Koranic obligation.”

Lincoln nodded at the Saudi, who inclined his head in a sign of esteem for the foreigner who appeared to respect him.

“What happened then?” Crystal Quest demanded when Lincoln, back in Washington, described the meeting at the training camp in the Brazilian mato graso.

“He threw questions at me for another twenty minutes and I fielded them. It was all very low keyed. At one point he got into a long discussion with the Egyptian, Daoud; for five or so minutes it was almost as if I didn’t exist. Then, without saying another word to me, the Saudi climbed to his feet and departed. I heard the motors of three or four cars kick into life behind the building and saw their headlights sweep into and out of the room as they headed deeper into the mato graso. Daoud signaled that the meeting had come to an end and ushered Leroy and me back to his Mercedes and we started back toward Foz do Iguaçú. The Egyptian told me I had made a good impression on the Saudi. He said I was to return to the United States and organize the purchase and delivery of the ammonium nitrate at mid month to an abandoned hangar off the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey.” Lincoln produced a page that had been torn out of a lined notebook. “The address is written here.”

Quest snatched the scrap of paper. “What about the Saudi and his radioactive waste?” she asked.

“Daoud invited me to return to Boa Vista on the night of the new moon to meet the Saudi and organize with him the delivery of the two hundred pounds of spent plutonium.”

“Describe the Saudi again, Lincoln.”

“It’s all in my mission report. His name was never mentioned, either by Daoud or by the secretary translating for him at the meeting in Boa Vista. I would estimate he was roughly six foot five and in his middle thirties—”

Quest cut in. “Guessing someone’s age has never been your strong suit. How old do you think the cutout was?”

“The hooker in the Kit Kat? I’d say she was in her late thirties or early forties.”

“Proves my point,” Quest told the wallahs who had crowded into her office to attend Lincoln’s debriefing. “The girl, the youngest daughter of an old Roman family, is twenty-seven. Her real name is Fiamma Segre. She’s been doing hard drugs for years—that’s why she looks old before her time. Go on with your description of the Saudi.”

Lincoln, resting his elbows on the cane stretched like a span between the two arms of the chair, closed his eyes and tried to summon an image of the Saudi. “He’s charismatic—”

“That’s a load of crap, Lincoln. What do we put on the advisory we send out to our stations? ‘Wanted, dead or alive, one charismatic Saudi.’”

Lincoln’s patience was wearing thin. He was bone tired—the car ride back to são Paolo and the flight back to the States had worn him out. The grilling by Fred and her wallahs was shaping up as the straw that would break the camel’s back. “I’m doing the best I can—”

“Your best needs to be better.”

“Maybe if he were to get some shuteye,” ventured one of the bolder wallahs.

Quest didn’t like to be second guessed. “Maybe if you were to get yourself a posting to another division,” she shot back. “How about it, Lincoln. Give us something concrete to go on. Rack your memory. I’m looking for what you didn’t put into your report.”

From a remote corner of his subconscious, Lincoln dredged up several details he had overlooked when he drafted his report. “Something’s very wrong with the Saudi—”

“Mentally or medically?”

“Medically. He kept scratching at different parts of his body—his upper arm, his chest, his ribs. He seemed to itch all over. His skin was sallow—at first I thought it was because of the dim lighting, but when he stood up to go he passed under a bulb and I saw that he really was yellowish. Another thing: He was sweating even though it wasn’t warm in the room. The perspiration on his forehead appeared to crystalize into a fine white powder.”

Crystal Quest sat back in her chair and exchanged looks with the M.D. on her staff who directed the section that provided psychological and medical profiles of world leaders. “What do you make of that, Archie?”

“There are several possibilities. The start of chronic kidney failure has to be one of them. It’s a condition that could go on for five, ten years without becoming life threatening.”

“He took pills,” Lincoln remembered.

“Small? Big? Did you notice the color or the shape?”

“Oval. Very big, the kind I’d have trouble swallowing. It was dark so I’m not sure of the color. Yellow, maybe. Yellow or orange.”

“Hmmm. If it is chronic kidney failure, a bunch of early treatments come to mind. Could be calcium carbonate and calcium acetate—both are big yellowish pills, oval shaped, taken several times a day to lower the phosphorus level of the blood when the kidney isn’t filtering properly. Diet would be critical—dairy products, liver, vegetables, nuts are high in phosphorus and would need to be avoided.”

Lincoln remembered another detail. “There was a bowl of nuts on the floor between us—he offered them to me but he never helped himself to any.”

For once Quest looked pleased. “That should give us something to go on. A Saudi operating out of Khartoum who may be suffering from chronic kidney failure—if he’s taking pills it would mean he’s been diagnosed by a doctor somewhere, or even undergone clinical tests in a hospital. When you’ve gotten forty winks, Lincoln, I want you to work with one of the artists on the third floor and see if you can’t come up with a portrait. Meanwhile we’ll get our people to collect enough ammonium nitrate to fill a moving van so you can make that rendezvous in New Jersey with the would-be Wall Street bomber, Leroy Streeter.”

“Do I go back to Boa Vista the night of the new moon to sell radioactive waste to the Saudi?” Lincoln asked.

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Quest said. “We have a good working relationship with SIDE. We’ll send in a para team to back up the Argentine State Intelligence people. They can encircle Boa Vista the night of the new moon—”

“That’s the fourth of next month,” one of the wallahs noted.

“We’ll let SIDE pick up the Saudi and work him over.” She added with a harsh laugh, “Their methods of interrogation are less sophisticated than ours, but more cost efficient. When they’re finished interrogating him they can feed him to one of Daoud’s alligators and America will have one less enemy to worry about.”

“I want to make sure we get the Italian girl out before all hell breaks look at Triple Border,” Lincoln said. He fingered his cane and rested the tip of it on Crystal Quest’s desk. “I don’t want her to end up like Djamillah in Beirut.”

“You’re a vulgar romantic,” Quest complained. “We’ll sneak her out of there the afternoon of the day we close in on the Saudi.”

“I want you to give me your word.”

The sudden silence in the room roared in Lincoln’s ear. The wallahs had never heard anyone talk to the DDO quite like that. They kept their eyes fixed on their boss so as not to miss the eruption; it would be another tantrum to add to the Crystal Quest saga when the subject came up, as it invariably did, at happy hour. The color drained from her rouged cheeks, her eyes bulged and she looked as if she were about to choke to death on a fish bone stuck in her gullet. Then an unearthly bleat seeped from between her resplendently crimson lips. It took a moment for the people in the room to realize she was laughing. “We’ll get the girl out, Lincoln,” she said as she gasped for breath. “You have my word.”

They met an hour shy of first light in an enormous abandoned hangar under a curve of the Pulaski Skyway, twenty minutes from the mouth of the Holland Tunnel leading to Manhattan. At the rear of the hangar sheets of corrugated roofing had sagged to the ground, creating a makeshift wall that blocked the gusts sweeping in from the coast. Beyond the hangar, in a hard dirt field strewn with thousands of empty plastic bottles, a small campfire burned; twenty or so homeless migrants who picked up work as longshoremen on the Hoboken docks were sitting with their backs against the dilapidated panel truck they used as a mobile bunkroom, drinking coffee brewed over the open fire. Carried on the gusts of damp air, the tinny syncopated clatter of a Mexican mambo band reached the hangar from the panel trucks radio. Inside, Ibrahim bin Daoud scrambled up the narrow metal ladder into the back of the moving van and began inspecting the large burlap sacks, all of them stencilled in black letters “AMMONIUM NITRATE.” Daoud had turned up with a sample of ammonium nitrate in a small jar and started comparing the contents of the sacks against his sample.

Leroy, watching from the ground, called impatiently, “Well?”

“It is ammonium nitrate, all right,” the Egyptian confirmed.

Smiling out one side of his mouth, Leroy hefted a large valise out of the trunk compartment of Daoud’s rented Toyota, set it on the car’s hood and snapped open the lid. Lincoln, leaning on his cane, could see a transparent plastic sack filled with $100 bills bound in yellow wrappers. A six-volt car battery, a coil of electric wire, a small satchel filled with tools and several army surplus percussion caps were also in the valise. Lincoln pointed at the money with his cane. “Count it,” he told the wiry man who had driven the moving van from Pennsauken outside of Camden, the assembly point for the pick-up trucks bringing ammonium nitrate from various parts of the East Coast. Lincoln leaned back against a rusting stanchion to watch; he could feel the holster and small-caliber automatic rubbing against the skin in the cavity at his lower back. Up in the van, Daoud opened each of the burlap sacks in the first two rows to inspect the contents. He played a flashlight into the depths of the van, counting the sacks out loud in Arabic. Satisfied, he backed down the metal ladder and walked over to Lincoln.

“You are clearly someone we can do business with,” he said.

The man counting the wads of bills, wearing a corduroy sports jacket with the butt of a pistol visible in a shoulder holster, looked up from the ground. “If there are a hundred bills in each packet like they say,” he told Lincoln, “the count is right.”

“The last thing we would do is cheat you,” Daoud said. “We still have unfinished business in Boa Vista on the night of the new moon. Have you made progress with the problem of radioactive waste?”

“I have located twenty-three-thousand spent plutonium pits stored in two sheds at a secret military site. Security is insignificant—it consists of barbed-wire around the sheds and padlocks on the doors.”

Daoud was someone who didn’t display emotions easily. Now, unable to contain his excitement, he danced a little jig on the cement floor of the hangar. “My Saudi friend will be extremely pleased. In what area of Russia are these sheds?”

Lincoln only smiled.

Daoud said quickly, “It was not my intention to be indiscreet. I am trying to calculate how difficult it will be to retrieve a quantity of these pits and transport them across the various frontiers into Afghanistan.”

“It can be accomplished. I shall require a down payment of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars U.S., in used one-hundred-dollar bills, payable when I meet the Saudi in Boa Vista on the night of four February.”

Daoud started to say that the down payment would be waiting at Boa Vista when everyone was distracted by a commotion at the rear of the hangar. Daoud’s fat grandson could be seen squirming through a gap in the corrugated roofing. Crying out in Arabic, he came padding toward his grandfather. Daoud plunged a hand into the deep pocket of his raincoat; it emerged clutching a pistol fitted with a silencer. “My grandson tells that the men around the camp fire in the field are armed with automatic rifles—he crept close and saw people distributing them from the back of the panel truck. It appears we have walked into a trap—”

The headlights of a dozen automobiles, glimmering in the predawn mist that clung to the ground, materialized on the ramp coming off the Pulaski Skyway half a mile away. The cars formed up in a line abreast and headed in the direction of the hangar.

Leroy cried, “Give me the detonator—I’ll set off the sacks and blow ’em all to hell,” but before he could do anything the wiry man who was counting the money scooped up the valise and darted out the side of the hangar, disappearing into the darkness. Daoud pulled his grandson under the moving van. Leroy grabbed Lincoln’s arm and drew him toward the fallen squares of corrugated roof as the headlights began to play across the interior of the hangar. “Goddamn,” Leroy muttered, hauling a shiny wooden-handled Webley and Scott from his belt and spinning the chambers angrily. “You was followed here, Lincoln,” he said in a harsh whisper.

“You or Daoud were the ones who were followed,” Lincoln retorted.

Behind them they could make out the distant shouts of men coming across the field from the direction of the campfire.

Leroy crouched behind a sheet of tin. “My daddy died in one of their jails,” he said. “Listen up, Lincoln—it’s still night out. All we got to do is shoot down one or two of ’em—when the others panic an’ go to ground, we can squirm off into the field and make a run for it.”

The automobiles, with their headlights flickering over the moving van, pulled up around the hangar. Silhouettes could be seen running in front of the headlights as men took up positions on the hangar’s perimeter. Some of them were armed with rifles, others carried plastic shields. A voice Lincoln thought he recognized came echoing over a bullhorn. “This is the FBI. We know you’re in there. You are completely surrounded. You have two minutes to come out with your hands raised over your heads.”

In the middle of the hangar Daoud rolled clear of the moving van and rose to his feet. He raised one hand to shield his eyes from the headlights and started to walk in the direction of the bullhorn. When he was halfway there the hand holding the pistol emerged from behind his back. Lincoln could hear the hiss of two silenced shots before several rifles firing on automatic cut him down. The Egyptian, propelled backward by the bullets slamming into his chest, crumpled to the cement. Sobbing like a baby, the fat Egyptian boy crawled from under the van to his grandfather’s body and flung his arms around him. Then the boy stumbled to his feet and, peering through his tears into the headlights, tugged the pistol from his shoulder holster. Before he could get it clear, high powered bullets burrowed into his chest.

Sweeping the ground before them with blinding hand-held klieg lights, a line of armed men wearing black windbreakers started advancing through the hangar. When one of them turned to shout an order, Lincoln noticed the large white letters “FBI” on the back of his jacket. “Wait till we can see the whites of their eyes,” Leroy whispered to Lincoln, who was hiding behind a stanchion next to the crouching Texan. “I’ll plug the one who’s leading the pack.”

The FBI agents drifted past the van, the beams of their klieg lights spearing the darkness ahead of them as they closed in on the sheets of corrugated roofing at the rear of the hangar. Lincoln thought he recognized the stumpy figure of Felix Kiick in the lead, hunched low with a bullhorn in one hand, a pistol in the other. When Kiick was fifteen yards away he brought the bullhorn to his lips. “This is your last chance—Leroy Streeter, Lincoln Dittmann, you can’t escape. Come out with your hands over your heads.”

Kiick took several more steps as he spoke. Leroy, steadying his shooting arm with his left hand, his left elbow locked into his gut, raised the Webley and Scott and took careful aim at Kiick’s head. Lincoln had hoped they would be captured without a fight, but the timing of the raid on the hangar had gone wildly wrong. The op order had called for the agents at the campfire in the field to arrive at the back of the hangar as the headlights coming off the Pulaski ramp became visible. Leroy and Daoud, distracted by the approaching automobiles, would be easily overpowered before they could put up a fight. Now there was nothing for Lincoln to do but save Kiick from the bullet. In one flowing gesture he raised his cane and brought it crashing down on Leroy’s arm, shattering his wrist. Kiick jumped when he heard the bone splinter. Leroy gazed up with more pure hate in his eyes than Lincoln had ever seen in a human being. His lips moved but no words emerged until he managed to croak, “You’re one of them!”

“Felix, we’re over here,” Lincoln called, stepping around the corrugated sheeting into view.

Kiick came over and played his light on Leroy, who was gaping in astonishment at his right hand hanging limply from the wrist. The wooden-handled Webley and Scott lay on the cement. Two FBI agents gripped Leroy under his armpits and dragged him toward the automobiles. Using a handkerchief, Kiick retrieved Leroy’s weapon and held it by the barrel. “Something tells me I owe you one,” he said.

Lincoln and Kiick walked over to where Daoud and his grandson lay. Medics were kneeling next to both of them, listening with stethoscopes for any signs of life. The medics looked up at the same moment and shook their heads. Someone illuminated the corpses with a klieg light and started taking photographs from different angles. Other agents covered the corpses with lengths of silver plastic. An agent wearing elastic surgeon’s gloves brought over the handgun that had been retrieved from under the corpse of the fat Egyptian boy. He held it out, grip first, so Kiick could get a better look at it.

“Holy mackerel,” Kiick said. He shook his head in disgust. “It sure looked like the real McCoy to me.”

Presiding over the formal postmortem in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick at Langley, Crystal Quest made no effort to tame the shrew in her. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, she seethed. The adults pretending to be FBI agents in the field behind the hangar had been spotted by a child—by a child!—before the raid was even underway. Daoud had walked into a hail of bullets so as not to be taken alive. Lincoln Dittmann’s legend was blown when he saved Kiick’s life. As an added extra bonus, the FBI clowns under Felix Kiick’s command had gunned down a juvenile armed with a plastic pistol. Holy Christ, it hadn’t even been loaded with water. Leroy Streeter Jr., who would get a life sentence for attempting to blow up a square mile of Wall Street, knew precious little about the al-Qa’ida cells and less about the Saudi who was organizing them; Streeter’s expertise was limited to a small group of nutty white supremacists in Texas that had already been infiltrated by so many state and Federal agents half the group’s dues came from the government. To add humiliation to embarrassment, any hope of nabbing the Saudi had evaporated the night before when the cretins from the Argentine State Intelligence had bungled the raid on Boa Vista. Talk about stealth, they had headed into the Brazilian mato graso in half a dozen giant army helicopters flying at treetop level with their running lights on, for God’s sake, and kicked up such a storm of sand when they touched down at the training camp that half the fedayeen managed to slip away in the confusion. Naturally the Saudi who had been presiding over the meeting in the low-roofed building was nowhere to be found when the SIDE agents, backed up by a handful of the Company’s paramilitary people who were currently hunting for new jobs, burst through the door. So what did the raid net? I’ll tell you what it netted. Are you ready for this, gentlemen and ladies? It netted two jokers from Hamas, two more from Hezbollah, seven from Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, a drunk Irishman from the IRA and two young females from the Basque ETA who listed fashion model under profession when they were interrogated. Fashion models my ass! One of them was so flat chested she put padding in her brassiere to break even, for Christ’s sake. No shit, we could have snared twice as many terrorists using fly paper tacked to the rafters of any bar on the main drag of Foz do Iguaçú.

Quest appeared to come up for air. In the several seconds of silence, Lincoln was able to get a word in. Well, he said, we did pin down the identity of the Saudi.

The speculation about the chronic kidney failure had been the starting point. On the theory that Leroy Streeter’s offhand remark about the Saudi’s wealth (“Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich”) would suggest he’d been diagnosed and treated by an expensive private physician, Riyadh intelligence authorities had combed the clinics frequented by the royal family and affluent members of the business community. If they came up with anything, they kept it to themselves. Confronted with the Saudi foot dragging, the American secretary of state had been persuaded to take the matter up with his Saudi counterpart. Within days the intelligence authorities in Riyadh had pouched a thick dossier to Langley filled with hundreds of photographs and associated biographical information. Lincoln had sorted through the photos in the conference room next to the DDO’s office, with Quest peering anxiously over his shoulder. He came across several that gave him pause. No, no, that’s not him, he would finally say, our Saudi had incredibly intense eyes that seemed to look into you rather than at you. Going through the pouch a second time, Lincoln had used a magnifying glass to study the group photographs. Suddenly he had leaned over the table to get a closer look at one man.

I think maybe

You think maybe what, for Christsake?

Maybe this is our Saudi. Yes, there’s no doubt about it. Look at those goddamn eyes.

The group photograph had been taken years before at the wedding of a seventeen-year-old Saudi to a Syrian girl who was a distant relative of his. The bridegroom’s name, according to the caption provided by the Riyadh intelligence people, was Osama bin Laden. He turned out to have a Central Registry file dating back to when he became involved in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The son of the Yemeni-born construction tycoon Muhammad Awad bin Laden, who had made a fortune in Saudi Arabia, Osama, according to Riyadh, was considered to be the black sheep of the fifty-three siblings in the extremely wealthy bin Laden family, in part because of his disdain for the ruling Saudi royal family and their ties to the United States, in part because of his recent obsession with Islamic fundamentalism.

Okay, we have his name and a mug shot to go with it, Quest was conceding, the shrew in her only partly assuaged. A goddamn pity we don’t have his warm body also.

What we need to do, one of the staffers ventured from the sideline, is put pressure on the Sudanese to hand him over to us, or at least expel him from Sudan.

I’ve promoted bin Laden to the top of our wish list, Quest announced. We wish he were dead. Something tells me we had better get our paws on this Osama character before he gets his paws on radioactive waste and builds himself a dirty bomb.

Amen, said Lincoln.

Six weeks later Lincoln, in Rome for two weeks of R and R, hired a taxi to drive him out to Hadrian’s sprawling villa near Tivoli and spent the afternoon limping around the site in a light spring rain, trying to distinguish myth from reality. Which was the flesh and blood Publius Aelius Hadrianus, which the legend he had consigned to history? Was he the emperor who ruthlessly suppressed the Jewish revolt of 132 and paraded the survivors through Rome in chains? Or the patron of the arts who presided over the construction of the vast country villa outside of Rome, and most especially its entrancing circular library where he spent afternoons studying the manuscripts he accumulated? Or, as seemed likely, was there something of the real Hadrian present in both incarnations?

Didn’t truth provide the spinal column in every legend?

In early evening Lincoln had the driver drop him off across the Tiber on the Janicular. He checked the address scrawled on the slip of paper in his wallet and headed up hill, walking at a leisurely pace so as not to tire his leg, until he came to the luxurious four-story apartment house near the fountain where Romans lingered to inhale the negative ions from the cascading water. He settled onto the stone railing near the fountain, with Rome stretched out behind him, and breathed in some of the negative ions himself. It surely wouldn’t hurt him, he thought. These days he was walking without the aid of a cane, but his leg tired easily; the doctors at the Company clinic in Maryland had warned him the pain would never completely go away. He would learn to live with it, they promised; that’s what everyone did with pain.

The bells on a church uphill from the fountain tolled the hour and Lincoln checked his wristwatch. Either it or the bells were four minutes off, but what did it matter? In the end time was something you killed. Across the street a doorman in a long blue overcoat with gold piping removed his cap to salute the very elegantly dressed woman emerging from the building. She held the leash of a small dog in one gloved hand, in the other she clasped the small hand of a little boy dressed in short pants and a knee-length overcoat buttoned up to the neck. With the dog leading the way, the woman and the boy crossed the street to pass the fountain on their way downhill to the music school. Lincoln slipped off the stone rail as they came abreast of him.

“Hello,” he said.

The woman stopped. “Do I know you?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

The woman, who spoke English with what Lincoln took to be an Italian accent, looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, no. Should I?”

Lincoln noticed a small silver crucifix hanging from the delicate silver chain around her neck. “My name’s Dittmann. Lincoln Dittmann. We met in Brazil, in a border town called Foz do Iguaçú. Your name—your daytime name was Lucia.”

“Mama, que dice?”

A nervous smile tugged at the corners of the woman’s mouth. “My daytime name happens to be the same as my nighttime name. It is Fiamma. Fiamma Segre.”

Lincoln found himself speaking with some urgency, as if a great deal depended on convincing her that daytime names were never the same as nighttime names. “I told you it would end. You said you would breed baby polyesters on a farm in Tuscany. I am elated to see you’ve found something more interesting to do with your life.”

The nervous smile worked its way up to the woman’s frightened eyes. “Polyester is a synthetic fabric,” she said softly. She pulled gently at the boy’s hand. “I am afraid we must be on our way. It was a pleasure talking to you, Lincoln Dittmann. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” Lincoln said. Although his heart wasn’t in it he forced himself to smile back at her.

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