Legends (31 page)

“You speak English?” Lincoln asked him directly.

The Saudi responded in Arabic and the secretary translated. “He says to you he speaks English as well as you speak Arabic.”

Lincoln grinned. “I understand four words of Arabic: Allah Akbar and Inch’Allahr

“He compliments you. He says to you the person who understands only these four words grasps the heart of the holy Koran. He says to you there are pious men, descendants of the Prophet, who can recite all one hundred and fourteen suras from memory but do not hold in their hearts the significance of these four words.”

Lincoln looked at the Saudi. “Are you pious? Do you practice your religion?”

“He says to you he practices as much of it as needs to be practiced to be a faithful Muslim. He says to you that he resides in what Muslim’s call dar al-harb, the home of war; above all other things he practices jihad. He would have you know that waging war on behalf of Islam and Allah against the infidel is a Koranic obligation.”

Lincoln nodded at the Saudi, who inclined his head in a sign of esteem for the foreigner who appeared to respect him.

“What happened then?” Crystal Quest demanded when Lincoln, back in Washington, described the meeting at the training camp in the Brazilian mato graso.

“He threw questions at me for another twenty minutes and I fielded them. It was all very low keyed. At one point he got into a long discussion with the Egyptian, Daoud; for five or so minutes it was almost as if I didn’t exist. Then, without saying another word to me, the Saudi climbed to his feet and departed. I heard the motors of three or four cars kick into life behind the building and saw their headlights sweep into and out of the room as they headed deeper into the mato graso. Daoud signaled that the meeting had come to an end and ushered Leroy and me back to his Mercedes and we started back toward Foz do Iguacu. The Egyptian told me I had made a good impression on the Saudi. He said I was to return to the United States and organize the purchase and delivery of the ammonium nitrate at mid month to an abandoned hangar off the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey.” Lincoln produced a page that had been torn out of a lined notebook. “The address is written here.”

Quest snatched the scrap of paper. “What about the Saudi and his radioactive waste?” she asked.

“Daoud invited me to return to Boa Vista on the night of the new moon to meet the Saudi and organize with him the delivery of the two hundred pounds of spent plutonium.”

“Describe the Saudi again, Lincoln.”

“It’s all in my mission report. His name was never mentioned, either by Daoud or by the secretary translating for him at the meeting in Boa Vista. I would estimate he was roughly six foot five and in his middle thirties “

Quest cut in. “Guessing someone’s age has never been your strong suit. How old do you think the cutout was?”

“The hooker in the Kit Kat? I’d say she was in her late thirties or early forties.”

“Proves my point,” Quest told the wallahs who had crowded into her office to attend Lincoln’s debriefing. “The girl, the youngest daughter of an old Roman family, is twenty-seven. Her real name is Fiamma Segre. She’s been doing hard drugs for years that’s why she looks old before her time. Go on with your description of the Saudi.”

Lincoln, resting his elbows on the cane stretched like a span between the two arms of the chair, closed his eyes and tried to summon an image of the Saudi. “He’s charismatic “

“That’s a load of crap, Lincoln. What do we put on the advisory we send out to our stations? “Wanted, dead or alive, one charismatic Saudi.””

Lincoln’s patience was wearing thin. He was bone tired the car ride back to Sao Paolo and the flight back to the States had worn him out. The grilling by Fred and her wallahs was shaping up as the straw that would break the camel’s back. “I’m doing the best I can “

“Your best needs to be better.”

“Maybe if he were to get some shuteye,” ventured one of the bolder wallahs.

Quest didn’t like to be second guessed. “Maybe if you were to get yourself a posting to another division,” she shot back. “How about it, Lincoln. Give us something concrete to go on. Rack your memory. I’m looking for what you didn’t put into your report.”

From a remote corner of his subconscious, Lincoln dredged up several details he had overlooked when he drafted his report. “Something’s very wrong with the Saudi “

“Mentally or medically?”

“Medically. He kept scratching at different parts of his body his upper arm, his chest, his ribs. He seemed to itch all over. His skin was sallow at first I thought it was because of the dim lighting, but when he stood up to go he passed under a bulb and I saw that he really was yellowish. Another thing: He was sweating even though it wasn’t warm in the room. The perspiration on his forehead appeared to crystalize into a fine white powder.”

Crystal Quest sat back in her chair and exchanged looks with the M.D. on her staff who directed the section that provided psychological and medical profiles of world leaders. “What do you make of that, Archie?”

“There are several possibilities. The start of chronic kidney failure has to be one of them. It’s a condition that could go on for five, ten years without becoming life threatening.”

“He took pills,” Lincoln remembered.

“Small? Big? Did you notice the color or the shape?”

“Oval. Very big, the kind I’d have trouble swallowing. It was dark so I’m not sure of the color. Yellow, maybe. Yellow or orange.”

“Hmmm. If it is chronic kidney failure, a bunch of early treatments come to mind. Could be calcium carbonate and calcium acetate both are big yellowish pills, oval shaped, taken several times a day to lower the phosphorus level of the blood when the kidney isn’t filtering properly. Diet would be critical dairy products, liver, vegetables, nuts are high in phosphorus and would need to be avoided.”

Lincoln remembered another detail. “There was a bowl of nuts on the floor between us he offered them to me but he never helped himself to any.”

For once Quest looked pleased. “That should give us something to go on. A Saudi operating out of Khartoum who may be suffering from chronic kidney failure if he’s taking pills it would mean he’s been diagnosed by a doctor somewhere, or even undergone clinical tests in a hospital. When you’ve gotten forty winks, Lincoln, I want you to work with one of the artists on the third floor and see if you can’t come up with a portrait. Meanwhile we’ll get our people to collect enough ammonium nitrate to fill a moving van so you can make that rendezvous in New Jersey with the would-be Wall Street bomber, Leroy Streeter.”

“Do I go back to Boa Vista the night of the new moon to sell radioactive waste to the Saudi?” Lincoln asked.

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Quest said. “We have a good working relationship with SIDE. We’ll send in a para team to back up the Argentine State Intelligence people. They can encircle Boa Vista the night of the new moon “

“That’s the fourth of next month,” one of the wallahs noted.

“We’ll let SIDE pick up the Saudi and work him over.” She added with a harsh laugh, “Their methods of interrogation are less sophisticated than ours, but more cost efficient. When they’re finished interrogating him they can feed him to one of Daoud’s alligators and America will have one less enemy to worry about.”

“I want to make sure we get the Italian girl out before all hell breaks look at Triple Border,” Lincoln said. He fingered his cane and rested the tip of it on Crystal Quest’s desk. “I don’t want her to end up like Djamillah in Beirut.”

“You’re a vulgar romantic,” Quest complained. “We’ll sneak her out of there the afternoon of the day we close in on the Saudi.”

“I want you to give me your word.”

The sudden silence in the room roared in Lincoln’s ear. The wallahs had never heard anyone talk to the DDO quite like that. They kept their eyes fixed on their boss so as not to miss the eruption; it would be another tantrum to add to the Crystal Quest saga when the subject came up, as it invariably did, at happy hour. The color drained from her rouged cheeks, her eyes bulged and she looked as if she were about to choke to death on a fish bone stuck in her gullet. Then an unearthly bleat seeped from between her resplendently crimson lips. It took a moment for the people in the room to realize she was laughing. “We’ll get the girl out, Lincoln,” she said as she gasped for breath. “You have my word.”

They met an hour shy of first light in an enormous abandoned hangar under a curve of the Pulaski Skyway, twenty minutes from the mouth of the Holland Tunnel leading to Manhattan. At the rear of the hangar sheets of corrugated roofing had sagged to the ground, creating a makeshift wall that blocked the gusts sweeping in from the coast. Beyond the hangar, in a hard dirt field strewn with thousands of empty plastic bottles, a small campfire burned; twenty or so homeless migrants who picked up work as longshoremen on the Hoboken docks were sitting with their backs against the dilapidated panel truck they used as a mobile bunk room drinking coffee brewed over the open fire. Carried on the gusts of damp air, the tinny syncopated clatter of a Mexican mambo band reached the hangar from the panel truck’s radio. Inside, Ibrahim bin Daoud scrambled up the narrow metal ladder into the back of the moving van and began inspecting the large burlap sacks, all of them stencilled in black letters “AMMONIUM NITRATE.” Daoud had turned up with a sample of ammonium nitrate in a small jar and started comparing the contents of the sacks against his sample.

Leroy, watching from the ground, called impatiently, “Well?”

“It is ammonium nitrate, all right,” the Egyptian confirmed.

Smiling out one side of his mouth, Leroy hefted a large valise out of the trunk compartment of Daoud’s rented Toyota, set it on the car’s hood and snapped open the lid. Lincoln, leaning on his cane, could see a transparent plastic sack filled with $100 bills bound in yellow wrappers. A six-volt car battery, a coil of electric wire, a small satchel filled with tools and several army surplus percussion caps were also in the valise. Lincoln pointed at the money with his cane. “Count it,” he told the wiry man who had driven the moving van from Pennsauken outside of Camden, the assembly point for the pick-up trucks bringing ammonium nitrate from various parts of the East Coast. Lincoln leaned back against a rusting stanchion to watch; he could feel the holster and small-caliber automatic rubbing against the skin in the cavity at his lower back. Up in the van, Daoud opened each of the burlap sacks in the first two rows to inspect the contents. He played a flashlight into the depths of the van, counting the sacks out loud in Arabic. Satisfied, he backed down the metal ladder and walked over to Lincoln.

“You are clearly someone we can do business with,” he said.

The man counting the wads of bills, wearing a corduroy sports jacket with the butt of a pistol visible in a shoulder holster, looked up from the ground. “If there are a hundred bills in each packet like they say,” he told Lincoln, “the count is right.”

“The last thing we would do is cheat you,” Daoud said. “We still have unfinished business in Boa Vista on the night of the new moon. Have you made progress with the problem of radioactive waste?”

“I have located twenty-three-thousand spent plutonium pits stored in two sheds at a secret military site. Security is insignificant it consists of barbed-wire around the sheds and padlocks on the doors.”

Daoud was someone who didn’t display emotions easily. Now, unable to contain his excitement, he danced a little jig on the cement floor of the hangar. “My Saudi friend will be extremely pleased. In what area of Russia are these sheds?”

Lincoln only smiled.

Daoud said quickly, “It was not my intention to be indiscreet. I am trying to calculate how difficult it will be to retrieve a quantity of these pits and transport them across the various frontiers into Afghanistan.”

“It can be accomplished. I shall require a down payment of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars U.S.” in used one-hundred-dollar bills, payable when I meet the Saudi in Boa Vista on the night of four February.”

Daoud started to say that the down payment would be waiting at Boa Vista when everyone was distracted by a commotion at the rear of the hangar. Daoud’s fat grandson could be seen squirming through a gap in the corrugated roofing. Crying out in Arabic, he came padding toward his grandfather. Daoud plunged a hand into the deep pocket of his raincoat; it emerged clutching a pistol fitted with a silencer. “My grandson tells that the men around the camp fire in the field are armed with automatic rifles he crept close and saw people distributing them from the back of the panel truck. It appears we have walked into a trap “

The headlights of a dozen automobiles, glimmering in the predawn mist that clung to the ground, materialized on the ramp coming off the Pulaski Skyway half a mile away. The cars formed up in a line abreast and headed in the direction of the hangar.

Leroy cried, “Give me the detonator I’ll set off the sacks and blow ‘em all to hell,” but before he could do anything the wiry man who was counting the money scooped up the valise and darted out the side of the hangar, disappearing into the darkness. Daoud pulled his grandson under the moving van. Leroy grabbed Lincoln’s arm and drew him toward the fallen squares of corrugated roof as the headlights began to play across the interior of the hangar. “Goddamn,” Leroy muttered, hauling a shiny wooden-handled Webley and Scott from his belt and spinning the chambers angrily. “You was followed here, Lincoln,” he said in a harsh whisper.

“You or Daoud were the ones who were followed,” Lincoln retorted.

Behind them they could make out the distant shouts of men coming across the field from the direction of the campfire.

Leroy crouched behind a sheet of tin. “My daddy died in one of their jails,” he said. “Listen up, Lincoln it’s still night out. All we got to do is shoot down one or two of ‘em when the others panic an’ go to ground, we can squirm off into the field and make a run for it.”

The automobiles, with their headlights flickering over the moving van, pulled up around the hangar. Silhouettes could be seen running in front of the headlights as men took up positions on the hangar’s perimeter. Some of them were armed with rifles, others carried plastic shields. A voice Lincoln thought he recognized came echoing over a bullhorn. “This is the FBI. We know you’re in there. You are completely surrounded. You have two minutes to come out with your hands raised over your heads.”