Angels of Wrath (57 page)

Exhausted by the last several days, feeling the aftereffects of the pill she’d taken to keep herself going last night, she burst into tears.

~ * ~

6

TEL AVIV

THE NEXT MORNING . . .

“The problem with you Americans is that you think you don’t have to get your hands dirty. You think you can deal with a problem by talking about it rather than taking action, when only action will solve it: strong action, eradicating action. You would have kept Khazaal and Meles alive, risking their escape. We have dealt with them efficiently. We have provided you a solution to the problem which you did not have the stomach to take.”

Ferguson sipped his coffee in the secure room beneath the Mossad building as the Israeli’s rant continued. One thing surprised him: the lecture was coming not from Tischler, who sat stone-faced across from Corrine, but from Aaron Ravid. The slime had not only made good time getting back to Israel but also put the effort into polishing up a speech.

Corrine listened impassively. She didn’t have a lot of experience as a courtroom litigator; most of what she did had come from pro bono work in local courts representing poor people accused of very minor crimes. But she knew how to act during a prosecutor’s summation: nonplussed, occasionally sipping from her water, once in a very great while taking the time to look incredulous.

“Is that the position of the Israeli government?” she asked Tischler when Ravid finished.

“We don’t speak for the government,” he answered.

Corrine pushed her chair away from the table and got up to leave. As she did, she turned to Ferguson. “Is there anything you want to say?”

“Only that this is the best coffee I’ve had in the Middle East. It’s not Starbucks, is it?”

~ * ~

 can’t believe they blew us off like that,” said Corrine outside the building. “I can’t believe it.”

“Relax,” said Ferguson. “Walk with me.”

He turned to the left, leading her down the block, away from the car.

“We’re supposed to be allies,” said Corrine. “We’re supposed to work together.”

“Yeah. That happens sometimes. Not as much as you’d think.”

Corrine pressed her lips together. She wanted to admit that she wasn’t really sure what to do, but she couldn’t say that to Ferguson. Making herself that vulnerable to someone who not only didn’t like her but also resented her would be suicidal.

“You noticed that Tischler didn’t say anything?” asked Ferguson.

“And?”

“That’s what’s important for the next step. Whatever that is.”

Corrine stopped in the street, squinting because of the sun, which poked through the buildings and hit her in the eyes. Ferguson saw the squint and interpreted it as her attempt to look tough, which he thought made her look just the opposite. If it weren’t for stuff like that, she might actually be all right to deal with.

Not better than all right, but all right. On a good day.

“What’s next is we figure out where the Russian went,” said Ferguson. “He’s not in Latakia.”

“You don’t think back to Russia?”

Vassenka could have gotten down to Damascus, hopped a plane to Cairo, and then flown just about anywhere in the world. Alternatively, he could have taken a boat to Turkey or Lebanon or even Israel, driven north in a car, even taken a train.

“Let’s say Khazaal’s friends didn’t kill him. On the contrary, they helped him get out of town. Seems logical. If that’s the case, then he owes them a favor.”

“We have the rocket fuel.”

“True. But we don’t have the rockets.”

“How many could there be?”

“You tell me. There was enough fuel for a dozen at least. You have them in parts? Who knows?” Ferguson still thought that Khazaal had overpaid for the fuel and for Vassenka. But the fact that he had to get the rocket fuel from Korea showed that maybe the stuff was getting harder to come by these days because of the weapons export agreements. When the Russians had first started mixing the stuff using German recipes, it had cost about twenty cents a kilogram, which would work out to less than a thousand dollars a missile. Clearly, the stuff was harder to come by these days.

“One thing I want to take care of in Syria,” Ferguson added. “The cruise missile Birk’s offering for sale. I want to buy it.”

“For a million dollars?”

“That’s cheap. Not only do I take it off the market, but I also can find out where he got it. As far as we know, nobody’s manufactured copies of the SS-N-9 Siren, and it’s never been exported. If we have this one, we may find out differently. Not to mention the fact that we’d be taking a pretty potent weapon off the market. The Siren has a range of over 110 kilometers, carries a 500-kilogram warhead; it’ll do a lot of damage.”

“All right. I’ll fix it with Parnelles.”

Mildly surprised, Ferguson told her that he was sending Rankin and Guns to Iraq to see if they could figure out who was supposed to pick up the fuel and to poke around for Vassenka. He mentioned Thera in passing, saying he was keeping her in Cyprus in case he needed backup.

Which was the truth, just not all of it. He hadn’t decided what to do about the jewels yet.

“Ferg, let me ask you something,” Corrine said, trying not to look at her watch. “What do you think about Iraq?”

“It’s a hellhole.”

“Do you think the government there is going to last?”

“You were just there. You tell me.”

“The ambassador claims it will. He seems pretty confident.”

Ferguson laughed. It was the only answer he gave and the only one she needed.

~ * ~

ince Ferguson had to make a complicated dance to get from Israel to Syria anyway, he made a virtue of necessity and stopped in Cairo for a few hours that afternoon. The new CIA deputy station chief who met with him had recently discovered the pleasure of the pipe, and spent much of their meeting in the café puffing away, to Ferguson’s amusement. Unfortunately, that was about the only thing he got out of the meeting. If Vassenka had stopped in Cairo on his way out of Syria, no one had spotted him.

There had been no fallout from the Fatman incident. “Dead is dead” went an old Egyptian proverb. It might have lost a bit of color in the translation, but it retained all of its meaning.

“That was related to that whacko Christian thing, Seven Angels, right?” asked the deputy between puffs.

“Yeah,” said Ferguson.

“Did the FBI find that lady or what?”

“You lost me there.”

“They had a heads-up the other day, travel-advisory thing, about this woman they were looking for. Real vague. It got flagged because it: was related to your run-in. Routine stuff.”

“Yeah, routine. You find her?”

“She didn’t come to Cairo.”

“You sure?”

“Not on any of the lists. You can check with Dave downstairs if you want. I don’t even remember her name.”

Neither did Dave downstairs, who had to look it up: Judy Coldwell.

It didn’t click with Ferguson either, but it did with Thera.

“That’s the woman I visited in the States. Thatch’s sister,” she said immediately when he mentioned the name. “The bureau said she wasn’t connected with Seven Angels. Why is she traveling overseas?”

“And why the hell don’t we know about it?”

~ * ~

wo hours later, Ferguson had his answer to the question: the FBI had considered the First Team’s involvement in the case over and therefore hadn’t bothered to inform them. He also knew that someone had used Thatch’s name to register at a hotel in Latakia.

“The FBI really dropped the ball, Ferg,” said Corrigan as he finished filling Ferguson in. “They really screwed up.”

“Yeah. Where is she now?”

“Unclear. Thatch checked out. We’re trying to see if we can trace any credit cards that were used.”

“Get back to me when you know something.”

Ferguson called Thera in Cyprus to see if she knew anything else about Coldwell. When he told her that Coldwell had been in Latakia, she volunteered to go there and look for her.

“No,” he told her. “Not now.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure she’s still there.”

“Hell, Ferg. Why am I on ice here?” she asked. “You think I screwed this up somehow?”

“You’re not on ice.”

“Well, why I am here when everybody else is on the job?”

“Just get some rest.”

“I’m sorry I screwed up.”

“I didn’t say you screwed up.”

The emotion in her voice sounded genuine, so convincing, that it was hard for Ferguson to imagine that she could do anything wrong. But it wasn’t easy to figure out if someone was lying from the tone of their voice. Ferguson, who made a science of lying, knew you could never go by what someone said, or even how they said it; you needed the whole context of what they did, and even then it could be a tough call.

Few people were above suspicion where millions of dollars were concerned. Then why didn’t he think Guns or Rankin had taken them? He couldn’t even consider that possibility. Neither was a good liar, but that wasn’t the reason: he knew where they would draw the line. He’d seen them under fire, been next to them through a lot of mud and thunder.

He’d seen Thera under fire, too, though not for as long. Maybe he was just being harder on her, or more distant, because he realized she was in love with Monsoon.

“Just hang loose,” he told her. “Work on your tan. He also serves who sits and waits.”

“Whoever said that was blind,” snapped Thera. She killed the connection before Ferguson could tell her she was right.

~ * ~

7

NEAR JERICHO, THE WEST BANK

The building looked no different—absolutely no different—than a public school in America. In fact, as she walked through the halls Corrine couldn’t help but think of her own childhood. They paused at the door of a classroom where the students were learning English; third-graders were reading a storybook about ducklings that would have been appropriate in any American class.

Corrine realized that the officials who met her might distrust and even hate the U.S. The deputy prime minister had chided her for starting her day in Israel rather than coming directly from Baghdad or Jordan. But the children who turned from their lesson to stare at her did so with curious eyes; they were neither suspicious nor particularly troubled by her presence.

“I know that story,” she said from the doorway. “I read that when I was your age.”

She hesitated and then walked into the classroom. The children rose in respect, something that she thought would never happen in America.

“Oh, no, please sit,” she told them. She went to the teacher, a young man about her age. “Might I read that?”

The teacher, embarrassed, turned to her escorts, who besides the school principal included the deputy prime minister and the American ambassador. By the time he told Corrine that he would be honored, she had already taken the book and pulled over a chair to the children, beginning to read. When she was done, she told the children that she had gone to a school in California just like theirs.