Retribution (4 page)

CHAPTER 5

 

C
lark Ashby poured a cup of coffee into her travel mug and held it with both hands. It was an unusual hour to see each other. Normally she'd have been rushing to the courthouse for work. But this day was different.

“Who was it?” William asked, standing across the kitchen from her.

“Scott.” She waited for him to respond, then looked away.

“Don't you have a trial?” he said at last, rather clumsily changing the subject.

Clark held him with her gaze. “When the judge told me a Mr. Scott had left a message about you, I had someone else cover for me.”

“How about a run?” William was trying to change the subject again. He gave her a small smile. “It's perfect weather for the trail.”

She sighed and put the coffee mug on the kitchen counter. “All right. Let's go.”

Clark hadn't been a runner until she met William Parker, but she had always had a runner's body type. Or so she'd learned. For months they had been training for her first marathon, enduring the ten-mile cross-country run that they called the trail. At first, the idea of a marathon had struck her as simply being insane. Clark hadn't run a mile since her Alpha Chi Omega sorority charity functions at Vandy, and that had been more of a walk. Strolling a few miles for cancer was not a marathon. Twenty-six miles seemed unimaginable.

She was already dressed for the run in her shorts, bright orange T-shirt, and New Balance shoes. He made her wear orange. It was the only protection against another trespassing hunter willing to shoot at anything that moved. But the slim running outfit showed a suntanned, freckled, tight, fit shape. Clark had cut her hair for the heat of the summer into a short, angled bob and wore a baseball cap during the runs. Despite the change of weather, she kept it short. Clark could tell from the way William looked at her that he liked it.

“It'll take a second.” William bounced up the stairs to the bedroom to change.

Damn.
She felt angry, mostly with herself. She assumed and expected too much. William could be distant at the best of times. She'd clearly broached the return of Mr. Scott the wrong way, shutting down any chance of him openly discussing Scott's return. But, Clark wondered, how could she have done it differently?

“You're too slow,” she yelled up to him from the bottom of the wide-slat pine stairs. William had built the stairway himself from dark, aged heart-of-pine logs taken from a house close to the riverbank. The old cabin that was scrapped for its parts had stood there, over the river, for well over a hundred years. The logs were seasoned with time and showed black knotholes that curled in the wood as if Van Gogh had painted them on.

“What's the hurry?” he called back. “You're not going back to work, are you?”

“No, it's just getting hot.” The day had warmed up quickly. If the New York Marathon ended up taking place on an unseasonably warm day, Clark would be ready for it. Training during the south Georgia summer had drained her, literally, requiring an infusion of water by the gallon. She carried her bottles everywhere.

Finally William joined her, and they still had a head start on the building heat of the day. Even with the chill of the Canadian clipper that had blown through, the days would warm up quickly. They would be soaked in their sweat in only a matter of minutes. And even though it was daylight, the mountain trail would descend into several forested valleys that were still in near complete darkness. So they began slowly, sticking to the roadway for a few miles as the sunlight would continue to illuminate the forest. By the time they reached the end of the gravel road, they could see the entrance to the trail. She would feel the temperature drop when they turned into the dark, well-canopied trail. It wound down the river for several more miles. The land covered well over three thousand acres and stretched west and south along the Chattahoochee River. As usual, William led, but she stayed right in his draft.

The trail wasn't easy. The river valley had a small run of hills that paralleled it to the east. An occasional deep ravine cut through the hills, down toward the river, causing the trail to take a sharp cut down and a stair-like climb back up on the other side. It was the perfect training ground to develop the endurance needed in the marathon. The hills would push the heartbeat up, and then a short downhill would let it briefly recover before the strain of another hill pushed it up again.

And lately he would cut her no slack. In the beginning, she knew he was impatient as she strained to even keep up with his slowed-down pace. But she had also begun to run at the courthouse, on the lunch breaks from the trials, and slowly she'd built up her strength and endurance.

The trail cut through the forest following a creek that fed into the main river. Several of the rocks were worn smooth on this section of the path, which had been a part of the main trail of the Creek nation traveling to the west. Once he'd stopped after a rainstorm, picked up a flat, milky white, well-chiseled, triangular-shaped rock, and handed it to her.

“An ax head cut from chert.”

She'd felt an edge that could slice through a sheet of paper.

“It's probably been sitting there for a thousand years.”

The ground around their feet had been littered with sharp-edged rocks, both big and small. As she focused her eyes, she saw fragmented shapes of clay shards from broken pottery left there from some Indian village hundreds of years ago. Clark picked one up and held it in her hand. A perfectly straight line, with a row of dots and curls, marked what was once the curvature of a small clay pot. The hand that crafted it had been dust for centuries.

Eventually, the runs became a way for them to communicate better with each other, a side benefit, along with the endorphins, that came with marathon training. They had been carrying out this regimen together since early March. All summer, as the miles built up, they had stuck to a rigid training plan. Over the last two months they had built the training pattern up to two workouts a day. Now, in the final weeks, both were in top form. The long Sunday runs involved two laps of the trail, which pushed the mileage well above twenty miles. She was ready for the race.

The New York Marathon was meant to be special. It was her first. He would run it with her and help push through the wall at twenty miles. When she had doubts, he would push her on.

Would have,
she corrected herself. For with Scott's call came the very good chance that William would not be available to run the marathon with her.

“You know if I do what Scott wants,” Parker said, “I can't tell you anything about it. Not who, or where, or when. Nothing.”

It was almost as if he'd been reading her thoughts.

“Yes.” She knew what it all meant. And she didn't want him to go. But his insomnia, his restlessness, and his recurring nightmares provided a compelling counterargument. Clearly, William was not cut out for the quiet life, which must have felt like premature retirement to him. If taking on some other military or intelligence mission meant he'd be happier, then it would be hard to convince him to decline it. In truth, Clark had been expecting such a telephone call for some time.

“Can you trust Scott?”

“Probably not.”

“Oh.” She looked away, wondering if she should have ignored the call. She had been the only feasible way of contacting William Parker. His cabin lay far off the beaten path and had no phone, computer, or fax. To call Scott back, in fact, William would have to use her cell phone.

“What exactly did he say to you?”

“Just that he needed to talk to you as soon as possible. It concerned your past.”

William stopped running and turned to face her in the path. “My past?”

She nodded.

“Exactly how did he say it involved my past?”

Clark took a breath, then said what William must have expected—or feared:

“He said it was about Lockerbie.”

CHAPTER 6

 

T
he two pickup trucks bounced wildly over the potholed road, leaving a cloud of dust as they crossed the plateau. Both were packed with turbaned, bearded men carrying AK-47 rifles. Occasionally, the lead truck would veer off what little was left of the paved road and cross the open desert, thus avoiding sandstorm drifts, some as high as the cab of a truck, that blocked the main route.

Finally, they entered through a mountain pass into a small, enclosed valley. The valley was surrounded by a range of jagged, chocolate-brown mountains with steep walls that cut down to its floor. On the far end of the valley, a village of mud and stone huts tucked up against the mountain ridge. As they got closer to the outskirts of the village, they came to a patchwork of small apple orchards.

The valley lay so deep among the steep mountain walls that any eyes in the sky could only view the village when directly overhead. The American drones were limited in number. They had to cover much of both Afghanistan and the western border; consequently, they flew farther to the north. Satellites were a bigger concern. The people on the ground now knew the flight path and timing of such space-borne surveillance craft. When one of the birds was set to fly over, everything below would become quiet. The farmers would tend their apple orchards. The children would play and smoke would come from the fire pits. The truck-mounted weapons were pulled under the thatched roof huts. They knew the game.

The lead truck turned off the main road, cutting through a small orchard, the driver haphazardly avoiding the branches of the trees at breakneck speed. His passengers swung with the truck as it cut first to the left and then to the right, ultimately sliding to a stop in front of a small, stacked-stone house tucked up against a wall of rock at the far western edge of the valley.

A short, pudgy man, dressed in a white-collared shirt and Western-style brown slacks, stepped out from the passenger seat of the truck. Despite his young age, Masood Akram, barely in his thirties, had a round face and large belly that pushed his white shirt out over his belt. The people of this tribe all looked hungry, had sunken eyes, and showed ribs when they removed their woolen shirts. One look told them that Akram was from the West.

The reason Masood had withstood nearly thirty-six hours in cramped economy seats.

“Yousef!”

A man turned, hearing his name, and stopped playing with his two children for a second. Then one of the toddlers climbed on the father's back, giggling loudly, as the father yelled out a false protest and then collapsed as if overcome by a stronger force.

This is the man who will change the history of Islam.
Masood waited patiently for Yousef to turn his attention to him.

The guards in the truck jumped out and formed a semicircle, facing out toward the orchard as Yousef al-Qadi stood to greet his younger visitor.

“
As sala'amu alaikum,
” Masood said to Yousef.

Yousef al-Qadi was much more than just the senior member of the pair. The rail-thin, bearded man with a bony face and mournful eyes was even much more than a leader of the jihad. Yousef had set forth a goal that eclipsed even the greatest aspirations of al-Qaeda. It was this goal that had brought the younger visitor halfway around the world to meet Yousef al-Qadi.

“
Walaikum as sala'am,
” responded Yousef, who turned to his two children, kissed them on their foreheads, and instructed them to go inside to their mother.

“Your children are growing up quickly.”

Yousef al-Qadi smiled at the compliment. “You have come a long way. I have some tea and sweet biscuits for you.”

He pointed to an opening in a stone gate to the side of the mud-walled house that led to a small garden, where a trellis, covered with a twisted, thick grapevine, provided some shade and protection. A stacked-stone wall surrounded the garden, and the smell of juniper followed a faint breeze up from the far side of the valley. They sat across from each other on two stone benches as a woman brought a silver tray with small, blue Dresden china cups of tea and a plate of honey-soaked biscuits. The tray and china seemed strangely out of place in these bare surroundings.

“Tell me, how is your charity work?” Yousef spoke softly through the gray-streaked beard.

“Fine, very fine.”

Masood had first heard of Yousef al-Qadi as a young college student in RU-MSA, the Rutgers University Muslim Student Association. The other students spoke of the mythical man who'd graduated from Harvard Business School as bright, serious, and often intense. He also had become the man who would create a new state of Islam out of the wilderness of western Pakistan, Afghanistan, and some of Iran—the old kingdom.

As always, Yousef wore the dress of a Pashtun, the common brown, rough weave of a farmer. Masood knew that Yousef 's dress belied his lineage. Yousef was a sayyid, the son of a descendant ten generations removed from the Prophet's daughter, and the son of the Muslim Brotherhood. But he had also been the only son of his father's third wife, the daughter of a gardener, who as a child of fifteen was married to the owner of the garden. She was a frail child and had died giving birth to her son.

Being the grandson of a gardener, Yousef received little respect from the other wives and children. Growing up that way, Yousef 's self-respect had come to depend upon the respect of others. Masood understood this, for he'd had a similar childhood.

Yousef 's father would often beat the child with bamboo, as it was the father's role to be the strict, often brutal disciplinarian. In many families, the mother would be there to console the child. Masood's own father had disciplined him with a stick, but Masood could always turn to his kind mother for relief. For Yousef, however, there had been no consolation.

But the father did give Yousef al-Qadi something Masood did not receive. Oil. Whether the father had guilt or not, he gave his third wife's son the El Haba oil field that would pump crude for generations. Although Saudi Aramco operated the field, 27 percent of its revenue would go to Yousef and Yousef 's children and grandchildren for more than a hundred years.

Yousef 's large brown eyes stared intently, his arms crossed in judgment, making Masood feel suddenly unprepared. Masood had witnessed his mentor's rage more than once. Once, when Masood had failed to follow his master's specific instructions and held a stock position too long, Yousef told him that they would discuss it when he next made the trip to Afghanistan. Nothing else was said. But when he arrived, Yousef 's voice soon had Masood literally trembling in fear. But Yousef had every right to such anger. Like Muhammad, Yousef had rejected the rewards of this world. His half brothers and sisters flew their Gulfstreams from Riyadh to Gstaad. But the master believed the Koran spoke of a different way of living. It required a humble life. And it required that infidels be sought out and a great slaughter be made. The respect Yousef lacked as a child would be gained as a man. And Masood would follow this man on his jihad.

“Your plan has been tremendously successful,” said Masood. “We are in three markets that are returning well over twenty percent, even in a recession.”

Yousef had built the business model himself and was very proud of it. “
Alhamdulillah,
” he said, praising Allah.

“They were not as successful in Doha.” Masood changed the subject to the bombing.

“Yes.”

Masood saw a glimmer of the fire in his master's eyes. It may have been a mistake to raise the subject.

Yousef knew much more than his response indicated. He changed the subject. “We need to remain as liquid as possible at all times.”

“Yes, sir.”

Masood had also attended college in the United States. Ironically, many of the Ivy League schools had trained the best of the leadership. Masood, born in Cairo, was raised in East Orange, New Jersey. From an Egyptian family of limited means, he was only able to attend Rutgers because of a full scholarship from the Islamic Scholarship Program. At the mosque, he was quickly recognized for his bright mind, and after graduating from Rutgers, he was selected from several applicants to be the executive assistant to the head of BMI, Inc., an Islamic investment firm based in New Jersey.

Masood had quickly earned a reputation as a trusted manager. His short, portly frame disarmed many. He would always smile, his round face and bright eyes indicating shyness, humility. Yes, Masood was disarming, though he'd never be able to hide anything from Yousef.

A young boy, barely as high as the stone wall that surrounded the garden, ran up and jumped on Yousef 's lap.

“Patoo!”

Yousef's voice was stern, but he gently picked up the child and raised him up to where he could almost touch the trellis and then dropped him to the ground like a brakeless elevator, stopping only at the last moment.

“Go to your mother.” Yousef patted the child on his backside in a mock manner of punishment.

Patoo ran away, knowing not to push his father too far.

“What is the next market?”

“As you know, we are finishing up in Baltimore,” said Masood. “Perhaps some commercial property in the South?”

“Atlanta. On the north side of the city. Anything near its Georgia 400 highway will turn a profit. We can concentrate on selling locations to drugstores. Properties with high traffic counts.”

The world had become much smaller. Although Yousef was hiding in the near-lawless mountains of Pakistan, a guest of the Sherani clan of the Pashtun tribe, he knew the real estate market of Atlanta in detail.

Masood, listening intently, nodded.

“They will continue to have growth,” Yousef said. “With our ability to leverage on the land in a high-traffic-count area, anything will be a profit.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We will have another private offering of stock. The stock will be issued to IIRO.” IIRO, known more formally as the International Islamic Relief Organization, had been established by the royal assent of Saudi Arabia's ruling family. IIRO provided millions upon millions in relief to Islamic families devastated by the tsunami and various flood and earthquake disasters that had followed around the world. It also provided the source of funding for other projects. The profits would make their way back to Yousef.

“There is someone I want you to meet.” Yousef signaled with his hand to the guards in the front of the stone house.

As Masood turned, a man with a sparse red beard and a deep scar across his cheek, jaw, and neck approached. The beard accentuated the path of the scar, which looked like a chalky white streak cutting through the red. His looks were out of place among the Pashtun mountain men. Although built like a brute with wide shoulders and thick hands, he had an orange-freckled complexion.

“This is Abu, my brother and compatriot. Abu Umarov, a Chechen.”

“
As sala'amu alaikum
.” Masood spoke first.

“
Walaikum as sala'am
.” Abu's light blue eyes bored a hole in Masood's mind.

Good God.
This man made Masood more uncomfortable than Yousef did.

Abu swung his AK-47 off his shoulder to shake Masood's hand.

“Umarov is a true Muslim warrior,” Yousef said proudly. “He fought the Russians in Chechnya and the dogs in Bosnia. He was a lieutenant under Deli
. Now he kills Americans and Jews.”

Masood nodded in appreciation.

“He is my second-in-command. Do you know why?”

Masood stood there in silence.

“His loyalty is absolute!” Yousef 's voice rose as he spoke. “My Chechen!”

Abu Umarov smiled slightly at that.

“In Grozny, he was a construction engineer. He built buildings. Buildings that last.”

“Not like the Americans,” Masood put in.

“Then Tsentoroi came and all of Umarov's family, his wife, his children, his mother and father, were shot like dogs on the street.”

Masood watched Umarov's face and saw not the slightest change in his expression.

“Umarov once served with Sabri al-Banna.” Yousef said it as if Abu Umarov had been a veteran of some great war. “Look at this!”

Yousef grabbed Umarov's arm and pulled it up in the air like a referee's final verdict in the ring. At the same time, he pulled Umarov's shirtsleeve down, revealing a tattoo.

Masood had to look at it twice to understand.

“It's a swan?”

“Yes,” said Umarov. “Hell yes.”