Brothers In Arms (16 page)

“Yes, I am well, thank you,” Youssef said.

Bin Faisal closed the door and ushered Youssef to a seat at the small table set up before the big window.

“Sit, my friend,” bin Faisal said. “Have you eaten today?”

“Yes, thank you,” Youssef said. “Would you have juice?”

“Of course,” Faisal said. He took a small bottle from the minibar, opened it, and poured it into a glass. “Here you are.”

“Thank you.”

Bin Faisal stood and studied the young man sipping his orange juice. Youssef avoided his gaze, looking instead around the room and finally out the window at the lights of Athens.

“What is on your mind, Youssef?” Faisal said. “You seem troubled.”

The younger man shrugged. “It is difficult to be alone.”

“Yes. It is difficult to be alone. Only the best could do such a thing as you are doing.”

“Surely there must be others,” Youssef said. There was a hint of something like hope in his voice.

“No, my friend. There is only you. You are the One.”

Later, Ahmad bin Faisal worried about his lone operative Youssef bin Hassan. Youssef was young and inexperienced, but his background and his demonstrated ability in the camp had marked him out as the one to be chosen for this most difficult of missions. The loneliness of work far from home and the dangers of that was dealt with in the training camps; most deep-cover operatives that went to America found ways to relieve their loneliness, often getting married as that was a way of establishing legal residency. But that was not an option in this case.

Bin Faisal hurried through security at the Athens airport, his long-practiced eye watching the guards for any undue interest in him. But there was nothing there, and he passed the soldiers with their submachine guns without another glance. He caught a direct flight to Damascus and in his comfortable first-class seat, he glanced over a few cryptic notes he’d taken during the debriefing of his field agent.

It was a risk to use the One as a cutout for the elimination of Uday, to be a go-between for communication with the hired assassins and bin Faisal, but it was easy work and allowed Youssef to stretch his wings in a foreign venue and practice the tasks he would perform in America. He’d done well, thinking of new ways to spread the genetically altered smallpox virus. Using the blankets of the homeless was a brilliant stroke; the long incubation period of the altered virus coupled with the conditions of the homeless in the United States would guarantee a widespread contagion occurring simultaneously in several locations.

Soon it would be time to provide the real virus to Youssef.

On a pathway that followed the sinuous curve of a canal, with row houses on either side, the windows gleaming brightly in the sun, Marie Garvais and Isabelle Andouille walked with their daughter. Ilse toddled between them, each mother holding a tiny hand. The little girl was dressed up for the day in a blue skirt and white blouse, a black beret on her head, and shiny black patent shoes with white socks. After passing a tobacco shop and a small appliance repair store, they came to an Italian gelato shop, a favorite stop for the family.

“Shall we have an ice?” Isabelle said.

“That would be good right now,” Marie said.

They took their time selecting their flavors, the old man behind the counter smiling indulgently as he scooped a small peach cone for Ilse, who managed it with both hands, chocolate for Marie, and peach for Isabelle. They took their treats to the canal side and sat at a bench that looked over the waterway, a heavy chain linked between posts in front of them, and watched the passersby on the other side of the canal.

“Be careful, Ilse,” Isabelle chided, taking a napkin from her pocket and brushing at a smear of gelato on Ilse’s chin. “We don’t want you to dirty your pretty dress.”

“Have you thought more about what we should do with that contract?” Marie said.

Isabelle brushed the child’s hair away from her face and tucked the loose ends under the beret.

“There we go,” she said. “Now your hair won’t get in the way.” Isabelle brushed her own hair back and dipped her tongue delicately into her cone. “No. I haven’t thought about it.”

“There is no new intelligence,” Marie said. “The target has disappeared . . . he was moved from the center, and our people were unable to determine when and how or where he was moved. The trail is cold, and we still have an open agreement with the Saudi.”

“We earned our fee,” Isabelle said. “They can keep the completion installment.”

“They want us to go after him.”

“I know that, Marie,” Isabelle said. She licked at her cone. “I’m sorry.”

“I told the cutout we couldn’t do anything without better intelligence, and that we weren’t going to spend our money doing the work-up . . . that wasn’t the agreement and they know that. Money doesn’t seem to be an object.”

“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Isabelle said. “We have made two high-profile operations, and whoever is providing protection for them is very good. Good enough to make me think that it’s American intelligence who is protecting them, and we don’t want to go up against them. They have long memories and deep pockets.”

“The money could help us . . . we took some bad losses in our investment portfolio.”

“I know the money could help us, Marie,” Isabelle said. “But all the money we’ve made will be of no use if we’re not there to spend it. And Ilse needs us. When is enough enough?”

“We’re not there yet,” Marie said. She crossed her legs at the ankles, then uncrossed them and brushed at her pants. “We need to do some more work.”

“Then we should look at something close to home. I don’t think we need to work this contract anymore. There is something larger at play here and we don’t have enough of a picture . . . we’ve been
exposed here and the problem is open-ended. We don’t have enough information to mount another operation against that target.”

“I told the cutout that. He’s going to speak to his controller and see what information they can gather for us . . . and if they get enough, they want to know if we’ll take it on, complete the contract.”

Isabelle reached out and stroked the back of their child and was silent for a long time. Then she spoke.

“I’ll do whatever we have to do, but I don’t think we should try to complete this contract. We have upheld our end of the bargain and done the best we could do. Their intelligence was incomplete and contributed to the failure in Minneapolis. I don’t understand their insistence on us completing the contract; we took only the first half of the contract payment and that they got full value for, considering their intelligence failure. There’s something we don’t know about, and I am afraid . . . afraid that they are setting us up to take the fall for them. I know I don’t trust at the best of times, but this, this is something we must be careful for.”

“Yes, we have to be careful,” Marie said. “I’m sorry to be the one who must say it, but we need the work. There’s nothing else on right now.”

“Then perhaps we need to find something new.”

“If there’s work, there’s work,” Marie said. “If there isn’t, there isn’t. That’s all there is to that.”

“Yes,” Isabelle said. She wrapped her arms around herself as though suddenly cold, even though she sat in full sunlight. “Let’s put this aside, shall we? We’ll discuss it more later. We’re neglecting Ilse.”

“Is that right, Ilse?” Marie said, stroking the child’s face. Ilse laughed and smiled, her lips gleaming with peach gelato. “She hardly looks neglected.”

Isabelle stood, took a napkin, and wiped Ilse’s face. She plucked the soggy remnants of the cone from her daughter’s fingers and wiped the sticky fingers with a Handiwipe she took from her purse.

“Let’s go,” Isabelle said. She took Ilse by the hand and began to walk away, leaving Marie on the bench.

“Isabelle? Isabelle?” Marie called. “Don’t be like this.”

“Come along, Marie,” Isabelle said over her shoulder. “We are wasting a beautiful day.”

Marie got to her feet and slowly followed her lover and her daughter.

Charley and Dale sat inside the screened-in porch of the big farmhouse and watched the sun drop low in the west, casting long shadows across the packed dirt of the gun range.

“You know you can hear corn grow?” Dale said. “It cracks at night when it’s growing.”

“You grew up around here, didn’t you?” Charley said.

“Right here in Decatur,” Dale said. “Until I went into the army.”

“Just a regular country boy, huh?”

Dale laughed. “Thank god for that.”

“I’m a city boy myself.”

“Where?”

“San Francisco mostly, then San Jose.”

“Nice out there.”

“Yeah, the city is sweet. I miss it sometimes, but I get back there to visit my family pretty often. Too damn expensive to live there anymore.”

“I’ve heard that.”

Charley nodded, then sipped at the small glass of whiskey, well iced, he held in his hand. “So what does Callan say about the Twins?”

“We’re getting our hunting license,” Dale said.

“Really?” Charley said. “Hunt as in find or hunt as in kill?”

“Don’t know yet. What do you think?”

“They’re pros, Dale. They knew the risks going in, but they’ve got powerful friends, lots of low people in high places. I think just warning them off is enough, now that they’ve blown their last shot at getting Uday. They didn’t know who was protecting Uday, and they don’t know that they’re messing with the best. A good warning should be enough.”

“What kind of message does that send? That you can take a whack at us and walk away from it?”

“You’re certainly bloodthirsty,” Charley said. “They obviously didn’t know who they were going up against or they would have come heavier. They thought they had a superior grade of rent-a-cop. They’ve backed off and I don’t think we’ll see them again.”

“The fact that they were operating on our soil is a factor to me.”

“We’re not operating for the G,” Charley said. “We’re protecting the client with his own funds, albeit through Callan.”

“We’re working for the G and you know it,” Dale said. “We have been all along. Callan’s a black company exec and always has been.”

“Well,” Charley said, sitting back in his chair and rolling his eyes in mock astonishment. “You think so?”

“There’s something to Uday,” Dale said. “This smallpox thing . . . Callan didn’t say anything about passing that on to the right people . . . not that he would anyway to us.”

“You’re sticking your nose where you shouldn’t, Dale,” Charley said. “We get our checks from Callan and that’s all we need to know. Need to know, remember that? As for teaching the Twins a lesson, I’m all for a visit to the fleshpots of Amsterdam. But they won’t be easy to whack on their home turf and I don’t like killing women anyway. Put my vote down for a stern warning.”

Dale shifted in his seat. “Just warn them off?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Anything else and we get into more trouble. That’s direct action. That’s not what we’re getting paid for.”

Dale stood and stretched his back, raising his arms above his head and stretching his palms toward the roof.