Angels of Wrath (21 page)

“What?”

“She’s really mad that you blew her off. She’s flying into Tripoli tomorrow. She says either you find her or she finds you. She’s going to be at the Medici.”

“Aw, come on.”

“She’s pissed, Ferg. I keep telling you. You can’t just blow her off.”

“Tell her that I’ll contact her. Remind her I’m a member of the IRA, right?”

“She knows you’re undercover.”

“And tell her this isn’t the Yale Drama Club.”

“I don’t think you’re being fair.”

“You’re right. She wouldn’t have passed the auditions.”

Ferg snapped off the phone. When he got back, Kel and Aress were slumped in the booth. Aress had fallen asleep; Kel looked at him through slit eyes.

“Who are you?” she said, speaking in Arabic. “What are you doing here?”

“Just a traveler.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Time for bed. Come on.”

He slid his arm under Aress and got her to her feet. A woman played a piano nearby, working the keys slowly as she moved through a bluesy version of a Cole Porter song. She glanced at Ferg and he smiled at her, admiring the way she flipped her shoulder-length hair as she turned back to her keyboard.

Ferg found the driver napping in the car. He woke him up, and they started back to the hotel.

“Where are we going now?” Kel asked.

“I’m going to my hotel and sleep,” he told her cheerfully. “You can go anywhere you want.”

“And her?”

“She can have my couch.” Aress was too far gone to leave anywhere.

“You don’t want both of us?”

“I don’t even want one of you. Nothing personal.”

“What do you want?”

“Usually what I can’t have.”

~ * ~

14

EASTERN SYRIA

“They didn’t like you in there,” Thera said to Fouad when they stopped outside of town.

“No. They were Kurds.”

“Iraqi Kurds?”

“Kurds believe they belong to their own country. They were our enemy. They are our enemy now.”

“They’re part of your government.”

“I don’t expect Americans to understand,” he told her.

Rankin, who’d doubled back to see if they’d been followed, finally caught up.

“We’re clear,” he told them. “What was the business about the jewels?” he asked Fouad.

“He cannot carry money, so he carries jewelry, probably things stolen or hidden during the regime.”

Fouad explained to Rankin about the airplane. As in most places in Syria, even scheduled flights tended to be sporadic there, but it might be possible for Khazaal to rent a plane, especially if he had enough jewels.

“If he wanted to take an airplane, where would he be going?” asked Thera.

Fouad shrugged. “Somewhere in Syria, but from there, who knows? There is a plane every week to Damascus, but it is suspended every so often for different reasons. Sometimes security, sometimes one of the dictators has a notion of something. It is hard to say where he would go.”

“But he’s out of here?” said Rankin.

“That much I would believe. Nassad would not lie about that.”

“Right,” said Rankin.

Fouad stared at him but said nothing.

“Push on or call for pickup?” asked Thera.

“We should go to the airport,” said Fouad.

“How far is Mansura?” Rankin asked.

“A little more than a hundred kilometers up this highway. Two hours. We can rest outside of town and go in during the afternoon.”

“Yeah, he’s right. Let’s go. We can always get picked up.” He kick-started the bike, revved the motor, then started down the road.

~ * ~

1
5

TRIPOLI

THE NEXT DAY ...

Kel decided she would stay in his room as well. Ferguson ended up giving the women the bed and sleeping in the bathtub, not because he was chivalrous by nature but because it was the only room in the suite that he could lock. He woke around ten in the morning to the sound of furious banging, punctuated by a teary whimper.

“I have to pee,” said Aress outside the door.

“Can’t you find a cup or something?” he asked.

“Please?”

He got up out of the tub and unlocked the door. Aress glanced at his pistol but was in too dire shape to say anything or even pause. Kel lay sprawled on the bed, one of her breasts exposed. She opened her eyes and blinked at him.

“One of your boobs is showing,” he said, gesturing with his Clock. She pulled the sheet up. He went to the telephone and ordered two pots of coffee from room service. Kel watched him as he looked around the room. He had scanned it before turning in, wanting to know if anyone— Romanski he hoped—had gone to the trouble of adding their own bugs. They hadn’t, and no one had come in during the night. (He’d attached small detectors near the door and window, which would have sounded an alert if they had.)

“There’s aspirin in the medicine cabinet,” he told Aress in Arabic.

She looked at him, nodded, then went back and got it.

“What are you going to do with us?” Kel asked in English.

“Get you some breakfast. Show you the sights.”

“That’s all?”

Someone kicked at the door, much harder than a room-service waiter would have dared. Ferguson reached into his pocket and tossed Kel a hand grenade. Her eyes nearly bolted from her head.

“Hold on to that.”

“Where’s the pin?”

“Lost it. Peel off the tape and hold down the trigger, preferably not in that order. Once you let go, you have about four seconds. Maybe three. Throw it and duck. By the way, in here wouldn’t be a good place to throw it.”

Whoever was outside kicked again, the door shaking.

“Open the door, would you?” Ferguson told Aress.

She went and unlocked it. As soon as she turned the handle, it flew open. Two men in Western business suits pushed her aside, standing in the doorway with Steyr AUG/HBARs, light machine-gun versions of the Steyr AUG assault rifle, packed with forty-two-shot boxes. Behind them came a tall, mustachioed man in Arab dress. His squared-off jaw, bald head, and regal gait made him look like Caesar of Arabia, a description he would have encouraged.

“You’re up early, Romanski,” said Ferguson, who had zeroed the big Glock at his face. “Then again, you took your time getting to me. I was starting to think I might actually have to pay for the room.”

“Ferguson. Always with a joke.” Romanski’s English was perfect; he had spent nearly a decade in New York as a young KGB man before going to the Middle East. “But you point a pistol at me? My men could cut you in half with their guns.”

“Not before you got a third eye.”

“They are very fast.”

Romanski glanced toward the bed, where he saw Kel holding the grenade. “What is this?”

“An assistant,” said Ferguson.

“A common whore.”

“It’s not smart to insult people who are holding grenades,” said Ferguson. “Especially when they don’t have pins in them.”

“So what do you want?”

“My coffee, for starters. Then you probably want to close the door.”

~ * ~

orrine and her bodyguards left before dawn and drove north from the capital to Tripoli in a pair of Mercedes, escorted by an unmarked Renault police car. The hotel was located south of the city proper, not far from the Olympic Stadium, but protocol required Corrine to first pay a visit to the local mayor. This meant going into the city, a gray-looking place that still showed signs of the occupation by Israel that had ended many years before. A faceless apartment building gaped at a small fruit stand not far from the center of town; closer to the sea, a brand-new mansion muscled its way into a quarter of battered old brick buildings that had stood since the time of the Crusades.

The mayor and the dozen other city officials who met her were so gracious that Corrine found herself feeling guilty for using them as a cover to come here. She listened as they made a short and almost subtle pitch about the importance of better trade with the U.S. and all countries. When she told them that she would take their message back to the president, she meant it.

Walking back to the car, she saw a wall pasted with posters of Bashir al-Assad, the dictator of Syria. The image was a popular one here, though it was difficult to tell if it was a sincere appreciation or something simply meant to curry favor from the muscular and dominant neighbor, which had also occupied Lebanon in the past.

Corrine and her small entourage headed back south, passing the Olympic Stadium and catching a grand view of the Mediterranean as they pulled into the hotel lot. The embassy had detailed two marines and two Delta Force bodyguards, all dressed in civilian clothes, as escorts. The men fanned out around Corrine as she walked into the hotel. One of the Delta ops and a marine went upstairs to check her room out while she waited below.

The hotel’s display cases showed off eleventh- and twelfth-century Italian manuscripts, pages that had originally been part of prayer books brought to the Holy Land by crusaders. Though the works were exquisite, Corrine thought it odd that the hotel would feature a display devoted to the art of the country’s ancient invaders. She wondered at the disconnect between war and art, between the reality of what the crusaders had experienced and done, and the beauty of the artists’ work.

Her brief moment of distraction was interrupted by one of the marines, who tapped her on the shoulder.

“We have a problem, ma’am,” he said. “Men with guns in your hall.”

~ * ~

erguson made sure Romanski took two full sips from his coffee before he drank his. The Russian saw this and nodded.

“A lesson from your father?”

“Common sense,” Ferg told him.

Romanski claimed to have known his father from service in Germany as well as the Middle East, though Ferguson had never bothered to check. He was the right age, pushing sixty, and he had been in the KGB’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR), which was succeeded more or less intact (as far as his area was concerned) by the Central Intelligence Service, or Centralnaya Sluzhbza Razvedkyin (CSR), in the early 1990s. He had retired in 1995 to set up shop as a businessman; as long as he did not sell drugs to Russians, his former employers left him alone. Romanski knew everything that was going on in Tripoli and northern Lebanon, indeed, in the rest of the country and much of Syria as well. He had better sources now than when he had worked as an intelligence officer.

Which wasn’t the same thing as sharing information or even sharing the truth.

“Can the women be trusted?” Romanski said, pointing toward the women. Aress had joined Kel on the bed.

“As much as any women,” said Ferg.