Pinnacle Event

22

Abdullah added new wood to the fire, as his “tea boy” changed the tobacco in their hookahs. The lights of Aqaba below were as bright now after midnight as they had been in the early evening. No one on this side of the border was conserving on electricity or fuel.

“You have a magnificent home here. Why are we sitting on a patch of dirt above it freezing our asses off,” Bowman observed, “after a sumptuous meal with some truly outstanding Montrachet.”

“I told you my wife won’t let me smoke the hubby bubbly in the house,” he said holding a small battery powered fan over the tobacco as his aide lit the coals. “This is the good apple cinnamon from Turkey. They make good tobacco for the hookahs, the Turks.”

“Your wife is in London. You just like pretending you’re a bedouin or a desert Arab when you have never been on a camel in your life,” Bowman laughed. He took a drag on the water pipe, tasting the flavored tobacco on his tongue. “The only things you ride are Bugattis and Black Hawks.”

“Did I tell you I qualified on the Osprey? Boy was that hard. You think flying a helicopter is difficult?” Abdullah asked. “We have three Ospreys now in the Royal Wing.”

“I don’t trust those things,” Ray replied. “Secret Service will not let the President ride in one.”

“Speaking of your President, who is going to replace him? They say it is so tight, neck and neck. His Majesty watched the debates. He loves switching between MSNBC and Fox,” Abdullah said. “We couldn’t believe they were still talking about climate change and abortion. How can anyone still not believe in climate change? And abortions? We just go to London for them.”

Ray poked at the fire, stirring it up. “I have no idea who is going to win the election. Until a little while ago I was safely off the grid, or almost. My job now is to make sure the election happens and is not canceled because of nuclear bombs going off a few days before.”

Abdullah put down the hookah. “So it’s real then? We saw the Israelis starting to inspect all their cargo with Geiger counters. There are nukes on the loose? North Korean? Pakistani?”

“No, old ones from South Africa. Somebody just bought them. Spent two and a half billion U.S.,” Ray explained. “The President is about to start holding up all of our cargo, too, looking for nukes. I was hoping you would tell me that al Qaeda just spent that kind of money on something and where I might look for that something.”

“If I knew anything like that, Raymond, Washington would already know from me. Besides, how would I know?”

Bowman took a long gasp from the hookah and exhaled a cloud. “Because you and two other royal Arab houses have pretty good intelligence services and you have each penetrated al Qaeda and its branches, AQAP, AQIM, ISIS, and the rest of the alphabet soup of sickos. You all share what you get with each other, but not always everything with Washington.”

“Raymond, who do you think pays my bills? I tell them everything, of course I do.”

“No, Abdullah, you tell them most things, you tell them facts, you don’t tell them sources. Because you fear Washington will leak to the press or some perv like Snowden will tell the Russians and your sources will be slowly flayed alive. I know because you were telling me more than you have been telling the Agency. You knew it wouldn’t leak from me and it never did.”

“Okay. I’ve heard nothing about a WMD. Neither have my brothers in the Gulf. Nothing,” Abdullah insisted.

“Tell me about the money. Could AQ come up with that kind of money to buy nukes?”

“Once maybe, not now. Their bank rollers in Qatar and Kuwait are spent out on ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt, the Nusra in Syria, their tribal militias in Libya, the Houthi down in Yemen, even Shabab in Somalia,” Abdullah replied. “It would take a major effort to get that kind of money and we would have heard about it.”

Bowman added sticks to the fire. “Can you double-check?”

Abdullah stood. “Walk up the hill a little, so we can see the stars, farther away from the villa.” Raymond Bowman followed him.

They looked down on Abdullah’s villa, the lights in the pool making the water seem like a floating blob of baby blue. “I do have a very special source, which I hear from time to time. You are right about him. Washington does not know about him. He is too precious.”

“Why is he so special?” Ray asked.

“Ray, AQ is not as fractured as Washington thinks. The big man still calls the shots on major policy decisions. Using a WMD would be a major policy decision. No one would act on a WMD without his knowledge.”

“And your source would know?”

“He is a very precious source, Raymond.”

“He calls you?”

“He communicates.”

“You have an emergency way of initiating communication?” Ray asked.

Abdullah looked up at the stars. “There is Orion’s Belt. You see it?”

“If a WMD bomb goes off, or several do, and you had a way…” Ray began.

“I understand. I do, truly, Raymond, habibi, I do.” Abdullah began to walk back down the hill. “It may take several days. It may not even work.”

“Please try,” Ray Bowman pleaded.

“Of course. Anything else?”

“Are you or the King using the Gulfstream 650 tomorrow? I need to get to Hong Kong.”

“But you’re white,” the drummer said.

“White dudes can play tenor sax,” Dugout insisted.

“Name the great tenor saxes in history,” the drummer asked.

“Okay, okay. Charlie Parker, Coltrane, the Hawk, Dolphy, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, and Stan Getz.”

“And how many of them was a white dude?” the drummer asked.

“Stan Getz.”

“You play like him?” the drummer asked.

“No, man, I play like Charlie Parker,” Dugout answered.

The four guys in the group laughed simultaneously. “This I have to hear with my own damn ears,” the bass player said. “You’re in. Besides, our man Harold is sick and there ain’t no other tenor sax players here tonight.”

“Yeah, okay,” the drummer agreed. “Besides it’s just an open jam after the midnight show. Let’s call it practice.”

“Or we could call it integration,” the bass player joked.

“What you know, Mr. Parker, or what you say your name is.”

“They call me Dugout. Why not start out hot and then go blue. So, maybe ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ then switch up to ‘Mood Indigo’?”

The group looked around at each other, nodding. “Let’s try it,” the bass player agreed.

As the blue lights came up on the little stage and the group appeared from the darkness, the bass player spoke into the mic. “We had a little problem tonight with Harold Rainman Rollins. His appendix done burst this afternoon. So, in the spirit of brotherhood, we are integrating the group tonight. So on tenor sax, we have Dugout. And because we haven’t played a lot with him before, we ask of you ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.’ Hit it.”

After the first two bars, the drummer hit the cymbals and the room started to clap, Dugout leaped into the sax solo, and handed off to the piano player amid a round of applause. The drummer gave Dug a wink and a thumbs-up. As the piece ended with Dug squeezing out a high note, the bass player intoned in a deep voice over the audience’s approval, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

“Mood Indigo” gave way to “Green Dolphin Street,” “Desafinado,” “I Remember Clifford,” and “Isfahan.” Dugout had soaked through his black T-shirt under the lights and was wondering how long a set these guys played, when the bass player stepped up and explained to the crowd. “We appreciate that it seems like none of you all have left during this set. That’s always a good sign. So, maybe we found us a good sax after all.” There were hoots and clapping. “So, we’re going to close out with a piece that will let him strut his stuff. A piece made famous by his hero Charlie Parker.”

Dugout felt a moment of fear, not knowing whether this was a setup, whether this was going to be something he knew how to play.

“‘A Night in Tunisia,’” the bass player exclaimed.

It was the classic Charlie Parker piece, written by Dizzy Gillespie. He knew it cold. Dug hit the opening bar and it was all his after that.

After the set, the group sat around in the audience, drinking on the house. “We’re hoping to get Harold back next week, but you are welcome to join us anytime,” the bass player said as they were closing the hall.

“Yeah,” the drummer agreed. “After all, you can never have too much sax.”

It was after three in the morning when Dugout got on the red Capital Bikeshare bicycle on F Street and pedaled past the White House toward Foggy Bottom. The streets were far from empty. Students from George Washington were finding their way back to the dorms from 14th Street, from H Street, from wherever they had eaten a grease burger to sop up the booze after the bars closed. As he dodged them on his way to Navy Hill, the breeze giving him a little chill after the heat of the club, Dugout still felt the high of the music, the audience, the group. His good feeling was reflected by the fun the college kids were obviously having that night. He thought of texting a friend to see if he was still up, to see if he wanted a late-night visit.

Then he thought of the work he had to go in to do, and why. He had needed the break of playing his music, but he also felt guilty taking any time off, with Ray out there with people trying to kill him. He really should not have a life of his own, Dugout thought, until he had cracked the problem. And he had thought of new ways of running the correlations, new databases to add. As he passed a knot of students horsing around outside a fraternity, he sensed sobriety overtaking him. Unless he could crack this jumble, find out who it was they were up against, there might not be many more fun nights in this city.

He flashed his badge at the gate into the Navy Hill complex and punched in his PIN. The guard in the gatehouse knew him by sight and waved. Dugout showed up a lot in the middle of the night.