Whiplash

3

Nuri’s heart dropped a beat as he stared at the solid stone wall cutting off his escape. He threw himself to his right, pressing against the wall as a bullet flew next to him. Stone flicked from the wall, hitting him in the forehead. Unhurt, he threw himself down out of desperation, crying out as if he’d been hit by the bullet itself.

“There! There!” people were yelling above.

“Look out!”

“Watch!”

“There’s been a murder!”

“That man has a gun!”

Nuri heard footsteps running toward him. He collapsed facedown on the ground, pretending he was dead.

The shooter hopped over the wall and saw him. She pushed him over to his back, extending her arm toward his heart and firing twice. Then she raised her aim for his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. The pistol, smuggled past the metal detectors by an accomplice she’d never met, was empty.

Nuri looked dead. Ordinarily, the woman wouldn’t have taken a chance on looks alone, but she had no choice. She was out of bullets, alarms were sounding, people were watching. She dropped the gun on his prostrate body and fled.

The bullets that hit Nuri in the chest had bruised his chest and trachea, but he was otherwise okay, thanks to the thin-layer protective vest he wore under his shirt. The Teflon and carbon polymer vest had diverted most of the energy from the small caliber bullets, saving him from death, though not pain.

He rolled over, trying to get back his breath. With great effort he forced away the black shroud around the edges.

Scumbags, that hurt. Damn.

Nuri pushed up to his knees, his whole body trembling. He couldn’t hear anything — there was sound around him, echoes of noise, but nothing his brain could process.

He got up and stumbled into the next passage, saw someone’s legs moving ahead to the left. He leaned forward, using gravity to help him move. Disparate sounds began to emerge from the incoherent cacophony. People screamed and shouted in panic as they tried to funnel through the Coliseum’s narrow outer passages.

I have to get close to her, he told himself. Close enough to get a marker on her.

He reached into his pocket for the vial of marker liquid and held it. A wave of pain hit him as he reached the hall where he’d entered the arena area. Feeling faint and nauseous, he put his free hand against the wall, steadying himself while waiting for the pain to pass. It didn’t, though, and finally he lurched off the wall, heading toward the steps.

There were so many other alarms and sirens sounding that if the alarm went off when he pushed through the door to the main level, no one noticed. He walked into the main hall, then took a step back as a flood of panicked tourists rushed by, running toward the exit despite the pleas of one of the guards for them to stop.

“Which way?” he asked.

“The subject is below,” replied the Voice. “He has ceased to move.”

“The shooter?”

“No data.”

Of course not; the system had no information to use to follow her. Nuri pushed out into the corridor, weaving left and right as people fled. He went to the archway, looking out on the stone path below. But he didn’t see her.

It was too late now to go back to Luo. His best bet would be to get outside, take a wild shot at finding the shooter or maybe someone supporting her. If that didn’t work — and it almost certainly wouldn’t — he would find someplace to catch his breath, then start figuring out what had happened.

People were still running toward the exit. Nuri took a few steps with them, his chest heaving but his legs sturdier now. He felt a sting in the top of his thighs and pushed harder.

The woman had been wearing khaki green pants, with black running shoes. The detail crystallized in his mind as he reached the exit. He tried working his memory toward her shirt. It was some sort of print T-shirt, over another T-shirt.

Italian, maybe. A soccer team?

No, some sort of slogan. Not in Italian. French, he thought.

Maybe one of the cameras had seen it.

Her face?

Nuri pressed his memory but it wouldn’t yield an image. He turned in the direction of Piazza del Colosseo, the street at the end of Via dei Fori Imperiali. There was a truck there, selling water and other drinks. The alarms were still sounding in the Coliseum, but the people milling around didn’t know what was going on. Most thought there was some sort of fire, or a false alarm.

Nuri quickened his pace, his stomach queasy but the rest of him feeling stronger. Adrenaline buzzed through his body, making his ears ring. He saw a woman with green pants eyeing him in front of the truck. He glanced at her shoes and saw that they were black. But she was wearing a red silk blouse, and her hair was long. The shooter’s had been short.

A wig.

He stared at her face. The woman turned abruptly, walking up the hill. Nuri glanced around, making sure there were no other likely suspects, then started to follow. But as he did, a girl nearby began to yell.

“There he is! There he is!” she said in English, pointing and screaming. “There! There!”

The girl had seen him in the ruins and thought that he had been the one shooting. Everyone nearby turned, and one of the men near Nuri reached to grab him. He pushed the man away, then saw a pair of policemen running toward him from the Coliseum.

The last thing he wanted to do was end up in police custody. Nuri spun and ran across the street, dodging past a tourist bus to run into the Metro stop. Leaping over the turnstile, he ran toward the down escalator, pushing people aside and then squeezing past a pair of old women. His stomach felt as if it was going to explode.

A train was just arriving. Nuri ran through the doors and found a seat, then closed his eyes as he waited for it to move again. The doors shut. The train lurched forward, then stopped. Nuri pushed his eyes closed further, worrying that it wouldn’t start, afraid he’d been caught. But then the train began to move again.

He leaned his head back against the window and contemplated his next move.

Two stops later he got off at Termini, hoping it would be easier to blend into a crowd there if anyone was looking for him or following him. He decided he would find a hotel where he could see to his wounds and perhaps monitor the news. He walked up and around the piazza, down the block, then back, and finally across to Nationale. He chose one of the hotels a few blocks from the station that he had passed earlier.

The desk clerk squinted at the disheveled man who stood before him. Most of their clientele, especially at this time of year, were Italians in Rome on business. The man before him looked too disheveled to pay the bill.

Nuri gave him an American Express card for the reservation. The clerk made sure to check his signature on the register against the blurry script on the back. It matched, but that didn’t satisfy his doubts.

“I need your passaporte,” he said.

It was a standard request in Italy, where technically visitors were required to be registered with the local police. Nuri hesitated, unsure whether to hand over his “regular” passport or the diplomatic one. He decided the diplomatic passport might raise too many questions, and gave the man the normal one.

The clerk saw the hesitation as one more bad sign, and might have called his supervisor or even decided to claim they were full had not a large family come through the doors. Just in from Modena for a visit with an ailing grandmother, there were three children under six in the party, and the small lobby suddenly felt as if it were under assault. The clerk processed Nuri’s credit card, then promised to have his passport ready within the hour.

“Your bags?”

“The airline lost them,” said Nuri. “I’ll deal with it later.”

Upstairs, he pulled off his top shirt and undid the vest, which looked like a tight-fitting, waffle-style sports T-shirt. The sides were hooked together, and Nuri had to hold his breath to undo them. Pain shot through his entire chest as he pulled the vest apart. The spots where the bullets had hit were dark purple and black. Bruises in the shape of spiderwebs ran out from them. His nausea returned. He stood over the toilet, dry heaving for four or five minutes. He ran a warm bath, laying with some difficulty against the side of the tub as the water slowly filled it up.

The bath didn’t do much to relieve the pain. The beer in the minifridge, Stella, made only slightly more headway.

The bruises were nothing. The real pain came from the fact that he had permanently lost Luo, and would now have to start from scratch on the Jasmine Project.

JASMINE WAS ONE OF THE CODE NAMES USED BY A RING OF smugglers who worked primarily in Africa. As these things went, they were relatively small fish. Their main wares were flowers — they got them in and out of different countries cheaply, sometimes legitimately, but more often without applying for the proper inspections or paying government fees, thus allowing them to be sold more cheaply. Low-priority smuggling of this nature was common, especially following the collapse of the Free Trade agreements at the start of the decade.

But if you could smuggle flowers, you could easily smuggle drugs. If you could smuggle drugs, you could easily smuggle weapons.

Actually, the flowers tended to be relatively lucrative, especially when the risks for everything else were figured in. But most of the organizations involved in smuggling didn’t have risk analysts on the boards of directors.

Jasmine had attracted the CIA’s attention after it sold machine guns to a notoriously abusive warlord in Somalia. The Agency didn’t mind the sale — the warlord was fighting against an even more notoriously abusive warlord. But it raised Jasmine’s profile in the Agency, which soon realized that the network — actually more a loose organization of contacts with a variety of benefactors — was very active in the Sudan. Still, Nuri might never have been assigned to check into the network had it not acquired a variety of finely milled aluminum tubes and small machine parts some months before.

Aluminum tubes might have any number of uses, depending on their exact dimensions. In this case, the tubes happened to be of a size and shape suited for the construction of medium-range missiles — a particularly potent weapon in the Sudan, since they would allow rebels to fire against urban centers from a considerable distance.

The tubes could also be used to construct machines useful in extracting uranium isotopes from “normal” uranium. That seemed unlikely, given that they were bound for the Sudan, but just in case…Nuri was given the assignment to find out what he could about Jasmine.

He’d spent months wandering in and out of eastern and northern Africa, getting the lay of the land. He had help from the NSA, which provided him with daily summaries of intercepts and would give him transcriptions on the hour if necessary. And he had an array of “appliances” to help — most importantly, a biological satellite tracking system that could locate special tags practically anywhere on earth, and the Massively Parallel Integrated Decision Complex, a network of interconnected computers and data interfaces that constantly supplied him information via a set of earphones and a small control unit that looked like a fourth generation Apple Nano. Called the MY-PID by the scientists, Nuri referred to the system as the Voice, since it primarily communicated through a human language interface.

But mostly Nuri was on his own. He didn’t mind. He’d always been a bit of a loner, not antisocial, but willing to rely on his own wits and abilities. The only child of expatriate parents who spent most of their adult lives moving through exotic countries, he was used to that.

By the time Nuri reached the Sudan, the aluminum tubes had been delivered. Jasmine had not had a similar deal since. In fact, the network seemed to have fallen into a bit of a lull, without any large deals for some months, if the NSA intercepts were to be believed. But he’d managed to track down Luo in Turkey two weeks before, following a credit card trail. He’d missed him in Istanbul, but found him in Alexandria, where he was able to have him “tagged” by an unsuspecting masseuse working in an unlicensed bath.

At least the sign claimed it was a bath.

His surveillance and NSA intercepts made it clear that Luo was expecting some sort of big payoff from a deal being cooked up in Italy.

But now all that work had been flushed by a woman with a gun.

Nuri popped the top on another beer, sipped the overflow on the top, then sat down to talk to his CIA supervisor. The Voice network had a separate communications channel, but he used his sat phone; Jonathon Reid wasn’t typically on the Voice network.

“Hey, Bossman,” Nuri said to Reid, “how’s it shaking?”

“Poorly,” said Reid. “Was that your subject who died at the Coliseum?”

“Word gets around fast.”

“It’s on the news.”

Nuri reached over and flipped on the television. It was, in fact, on the news. The reporters didn’t know the dead man’s name, let alone the fact that he was an arms smuggler. But they did have his picture, courtesy of several tourists. They also had a reasonable description of the alleged shooter: Nuri Lupo.

“I didn’t shoot him,” said Nuri, watching the homemade video on the screen. The legend at the bottom said it had been posted on YouTube.

“That’s good to know,” said Reid. “I was beginning to lose faith.”

Jonathon Reid’s official title as special assistant to the Deputy Director Operations, CIA, covered a myriad of responsibilities and not a few sins. Reid was a throwback in many ways, an old-school line officer who had been exiled from the Agency following a very bad case of “red butt” two decades before.

“Red butt” was a term veteran officers used to describe how someone in the field reacted when someone in the bureaucracy told them how to do their job. Someone with red butt typically began telling that person what he or she could do with their advice. The general result was termination of some sort — usually by reassignment rather than firing, though the latter was not completely unheard of. A red-butt-induced reassignment was both mind-numbing and career ending. Usually it resulted in something that made counting paper clips in Fredonia look exciting, and the usual result was early retirement.

Reid had ended up in Fredonia, though he didn’t count paper clips there. The small town in upstate New York had an outpost of the New York State university system. Granted a job as a permanent visiting professor — red butt or not, the Agency took care of its own — Reid had used his position to work behind the scenes, writing and lecturing on national security and technology issues, and quietly advising a number of politicians and government officials. One of his main themes was leveraging technology to help men and women in the field do their jobs more effectively. A year ago he’d been brought back by the new CIA director.

Reid had actually been offered the position of deputy director, an extremely powerful post whose responsibilities included overseeing the Agency’s covert action programs. But he had declined for several reasons, the most important that he thought he would be a lightning rod for controversy, since he had made many more enemies since leaving the Agency.

The fact that he had just celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday had nothing to do with the decision.

Alerted to the shooting, Reid had arranged to obtain information from the Italians on the investigation. An FBI liaison officer had been dispatched to the local headquarters. The FBI agent worked routinely with the CIA on terrorist cases, and had been instructed to forward updates to Reid.

“The shooter was a woman,” said Nuri. “Short hair. MY-PID didn’t get enough to ID her.”

“Yes, I’ve checked. But you might look at some of the online video sites and see if you can get a better image.”

“Good idea.”

“You looked pretty scared in the images, Nuri. It shakes my confidence in you.”

“I wasn’t scared. I’d just been shot in the damn chest at point-blank range.”

“Your bulletproof armor did its job.”

“How many times have you been shot in the chest?”

The answer was twice, but Reid, realizing he’d pushed a little too hard, said nothing.

The YouTube video shown on the news did not include a good image of the actual shooter, but a search of similar videos turned up three other videos of the same incident. Nuri, looking at the images in the hotel’s business center, forwarded the information to the CIA’s technical people via a blind e-mail address. By the time he got over to the embassy to follow up, they had sent the image to the FBI liaison in Rome, who managed — with some difficulty — to persuade the local prosecutor to let her compare the image to those captured by various security cameras around the Coliseum. Only about half of the possible cameras had been working, and only a half dozen of those were connected to computer systems that the carabiniere could easily access. Fortunately, one of them was the Metro system, which provided a good image of the woman getting on the same train Nuri had taken.

Nuri shook his head. The next time she saw him, she’d aim for the head first.

The woman had gotten off at the next stop, Cavour.

Nearly six hours had passed since then, but Nuri had decided to stay in Rome at least for another day, and if that was the case, he might just as well take a shot at finding her. So he went over to the Metro stop and began placing small video bugs, hooking them into the MY-PID circuit and hoping that the video would catch a glimpse of the woman. The bugs were about the size of a small bead on a woman’s bracelet. They attached to a wall or other surface with a tiny piece of a gumlike sticker. The small size meant their integrated batteries lasted only a few hours, and they needed a larger transponder to pick up their signals and upload it to the satellite network. But they were nearly invisible, and provided video quality on par with the typical laptop or cell phone camera.

From the Metro stop, Nuri bugged a number of hotels, then left bugs on lampposts and buildings. Hungry, he was about to go across the river to a Sicilian restaurant he remembered from an earlier visit when the Voice told him it had a possible match.

“How possible?” he asked. His stomach was growling, and he could almost taste the caponata di patate.

“Facial bone structure matches. Height is within five percent. Hair is different.”

“That could be a wig,” Nuri told the computer.

“Assumption cannot be tested.”

“No kidding.”

He walked over to the area where the computer had spotted the woman going into the Hotel Campagnia. It was a mid-level place, used by foreigners mostly, about evenly split between business people and tourists. He scattered a few more bugs around, and contemplated whether it would be useful to call the FBI liaison and try for a list of the guests. As he did, the Voice warned him that the subject was coming down into the lobby.

Nuri went across the street to a café and ordered a glass of wine. The woman paid her bill, then had the clerk call her a taxi to take her to Fumicino, better known to Americans as Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport, which was just outside of Rome.

He might have called the FBI liaison then, to get her name, but even if the Italians cooperated — an iffy proposition — it would have taken hours. Instead, he took matters into his own hands, swiping the pocketbook of the woman sitting next to him as her back was turned.

He slid it under his shirt and crossed the street.

“Sfortunate!” he yelled, rushing in. “The lady dropped her pocketbook.”

“C’e?” asked the clerk.

“The woman, who just got in the cab.”

“Who?”

Nuri described her. “Where was she going?”

“The airport.”

“Did she have a cell phone?”

The clerk looked baffled.

“I could call her,” Nuri explained.

The clerk bent over to the computer and pulled up the registration. “There is no cell phone.”

“What’s her name?” Nuri asked. “I can page her.”

He pulled out his sat phone quickly, fearing the clerk would want to do it for him.

“She was pretty, wasn’t she?” added Nuri.

“Ah, yes. Margaret Adamoni.”

“Her name was Margaret Adamoni,” said Nuri, repeating the name for the Voice. “Did she say which terminal?”

The clerk couldn’t recall.

“Check the wallet with me,” said Nuri, “so we can’t be accused of stealing money.”

The clerk agreed, and in short order they discovered that the wallet belonged to someone else entirely. Nuri, pretending to be embarrassed, made a quick exit, then grabbed a taxi to the airport.

There was no Margaret Adamoni registered on a flight out of Fumicino, but the MY-PID tapped into the international flight registry, which used computerized passport IDs to screen for possible terrorists and other suspicious persons. Discarding people traveling in groups and examining flight profiles, it found three possibilities. After buying a ticket, Nuri checked two out at the gates. He missed the third.

That, of course, turned out to be his subject: Bernadette Piave, who’d just gotten on her plane for Athens, Greece, when he reached the gate. He went back to the ticket area, bought a ticket for the next plane, and booked an Alitalia flight two hours later.

It was only as he was waiting that the Voice turned up an interesting tidbit from a file maintained by Interpol: Bernadette Piave was believed to be a pseudonym for a woman named Meg Leary. That was the extent of the file there.

The CIA had its own file on Leary. It was restricted; not even the Voice could access it. So Nuri had to get help from Reid.

Meg Leary had been born in 1969 in Belfast, Ireland, the daughter of a convicted Irish Republican Army bomb maker and a woman from Dieppe, France. A short time afterward, Meg’s mother disappeared, and she was raised by her father’s family, shuttling back and forth between different uncles, aunts, and grandparents as the family members spent time in prison for their alleged roles in the Northern Irish “troubles.” Given her family history, it was not surprising that she had her first run-in with authorities at age thirteen; she was arrested for allegedly spraying a Protestant home with submachine gun fire. The Protestants in question were prominent “provos”—essentially the Protestant equivalent of the IRA — though that didn’t prevent Bernadette from serving jail time. Her rap sheet grew from there to include armed robbery and a variety of weapons charges, all before she was eighteen.

She was arrested a few days before her eighteenth birthday on suspicion of murder — a member of the family she’d first shot at when thirteen — but the evidence against her proved insufficient. That was the last time the British criminal justice system had anything to do with Ms. Leary. Officially, at any rate.

Reports from the various agencies charged with dealing with Northern Ireland stated that she had “apparently reformed.” There were rumors that she had been drummed out of the IRA, or that she was never a real member in the first place. In any event, she hadn’t received so much as a traffic ticket in the twenty-five years since.

“That’s all the file has?” Nuri asked Reid.

“That’s it.”

“The implication is what?”

Reid sighed. “Don’t jump to too many conclusions.”

The implication was that she worked, or more likely had worked, for the Agency in some capacity.

Like maybe an assassin.

“Can you get somebody to watch for her in Athens?” Nuri asked.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Reid.

“Why not?”

“She’s a freelancer, Nuri. She works for the highest bidder.”

“So you do know her.”

“Not personally. But you’ll be wasting your time in Athens.”

“Not if I can figure out who hired her.”

“Do you think you can do that by following her?”

Nuri leaned back against the thin airport lounge seat and thought about it. Someone like Leary was unlikely to lead him to an employer; she might not even know who had hired her in the first place.

“We didn’t hire her?” he asked Reid.

“Of course not.”

“You’re sure?”

“Reasonably sure.”

“Who? A competitor? The Sudanese? The Egyptians?”

“Unfortunately, your guess is as good as mine. When will you be able to return home?”

“Home?”

“Here. We have some new arrangements to acquaint you with. It will make starting over with Jasmine considerably easier.”

Months of work, down the drain.

“Get me a flight, and tell me when it leaves,” Nuri told Reid. “I’m already at the airport.”