Soul of the Assassin (46 page)

As usual, Ahmed was amused. He would tuck the plane up slightly, then back down, staying close to the contours of the earth. The desert was not quite the empty wasteland it looked on many maps. On the contrary, to Ahmed it teemed with life—desperate refugees escaping from Darfur or the Sudan or Chad, militiamen seeking justice or simply enemies, smugglers taking a convenient route. He loved the desert, especially when the radar detector tracked a radar somewhere above. It was impossible to tell what the signal had come from; military flights from Libya and Chad and occasionally NATO fighters crisscrossed the area. All were to be avoided at the pain of death; it was a challenge Ahmed relished.

Ahmed strained against his seat belt as he pushed his small plane forward, tracking through the highlands of northeast Sudan. If a jet were to appear above, he knew precisely what he would do, how he would turn and twist to get away, slinking into the crevices of the mountains ahead.

And then, like a photo suddenly coming into focus, they were there: Ahmed rose over a ridge and the camp spread out below, its buildings clustered around a tiny spring-fed pond in a scar-faced canyon.

Atha took a deep breath as Ahmed legged the plane onto the narrow, dusty landing strip. A great deal of work was about to reach fruition.

The Fuji FA-200 bumped hard on the strip. Ahmed came in a few knots too fast and had trouble braking; he needed the entire strip to stop. Behind him, a crowd of people swarmed the plane, hoping its occupant was in a good mood as he usually was when he returned from a long trip; he was known to throw candy to children and, on rare occasions, coins.

They would be disappointed today. Atha had not had a chance to pick up any sweets. They would gladly forgive him, however, for in many ways he was their savior.

He was also planning to be their executioner, though that part they didn’t know.

Except for the large pond that supplied a modicum of water even during the dry months, Atha’s camp was similar to the larger camps that dotted North Darfur, Sudan, and Chad farther south. Like those, it consisted of huts at irregular though relatively spacious intervals. The walls of the huts were generally made of rushes or other stalks of vegetation, trucked in from many miles away. The tops of these houses were plastic or nylon sheets.

With roughly five thousand people, Atha’s camp was smaller than many of the refugee camps to the south, even those in Chad, which tended to be less imposing than the cities of death in the deserts of West and North Darfur. It had two small permanent structures, made of thick stone and lashed vegetation, their metal roofs covered by plastic sheets so they appeared less conspicuous. But the major difference was the people—compared to the people in the other camps, Atha’s were far better fed, in far better health. For this was a necessary part of the plan: one could not start an epidemic with people who were already sick.

An old Jeep circled around the crowd. A young man in a baggy white tunic and pants stepped out of the Jeep, waving at the people before walking to the plane. Though not yet thirty, the young man was a doctor and a scientist, a man who knew nearly as much about bacteria as Rostislawitch did. Dr. Navid Hamid had, in fact, been a pupil of Rostislawitch’s for a brief time in Moscow, though Hamid doubted he remembered him and Atha had thought it best to conceal that fact from the Russian when he had made his arrangements.

“Atha, you have made it back,” said Dr. Hamid.

“By the grace of Allah, all glory to him,” said Atha, reaching into the back of the plane for the bag.

“This is it?”

“Yes, Doctor. This is it.” Atha handed over the bag. “How soon?”

“I can’t be sure. Perhaps thirty-six hours to have enough to infect the camp—if everything we were told is correct, and if these samples have held up to transport.”

“That was the entire reason for obtaining them,” said Atha.

“As I say, if everything we were told is correct. Thirty-six hours.”

“Go. The minister will want it done even quicker.”

The doctor nodded, then went back to the Jeep. Atha turned and looked at the crowd around him. At least three hundred people were close by, and others were coming as well. Children, women, fathers. Most were members of the Massalit tribe, ethnic Africans from farther south, but there was a good number of Arab Africans as well. Without any exception that Atha knew of, they were Sunnis, though had they been Shiites like him he still would have felt no pity for their fates. The poor were puppets for the powerful; the only relief was to escape poverty. It was the lesson he had taught the spider in the hotel the other day.

“Your passage has been arranged,” he told them in Arabic, speaking in a loud voice. “In a day, perhaps two, your journey will begin. Prepare.”

There was silence. Even though it was the camp’s common tongue, most of the ethnic Africans did not understand Arabic, or at best were far from fluent. But then suddenly one person held up his hand and yelled, “God is great!” and a giant roar of approval went up from the crowd.

~ * ~

21

NAPLES, ITALY

Thera watched as Ferguson walked with Rostislawitch out of the station, toward a restaurant Ferguson had chosen because it had good acoustics for their bugs. The scientist looked dazed, still unsure of what was going on.

Ferguson looked like a paranoid street person.

Thera began following them. She’d bought a cheap shawl and covered her face and head and the top of her torso so she looked like a devout Muslim. With her face covered and Rostislawitch preoccupied, it was a simple but effective disguise, and she was able to get within a few yards without worrying about being recognized.

Because of the screening at the airport, Thera had left her weapons in Bologna, so she’d borrowed Ferguson’s hideaway, a tiny CZ-92 Pocket Automatic barely five inches long. The gun felt almost like a toy in her pocket.

A car veered around the corner, heading toward the side street Ferguson and Rostislawitch had just turned down. The window began to open.

“Get down! Get down!” Thera yelled, throwing off her shawl. She pulled the CZ from her pocket and fired in the direction of the car, just as a submachine gun appeared in the window and began shooting,

~ * ~

~ * ~

1

NAPLES, ITALY

An infinitesimal moment of time passed, the space of a spark passing across an electrode. This shell of a moment contained a universe of action and thought, all possibilities to follow. Standing at its rim, Bob Ferguson saw them all—himself, the car, the submachine gun, Rostislawitch.

Ferguson’s impulse was to push Rostislawitch down, to take cover. But that would have been a mistake; that would have been what the shooter wanted. Instead, Ferguson chose the unexpected.

How much of this was actual thought and how much reflex would have been impossible to say. But in the half second that followed, Ferguson twisted around and grabbed Rostislawitch by the arm, hooking his shoulder and arm into his. Then he threw himself not forward or to the ground but upward, in the direction of the passing car.

He landed on the trunk, dragging Rostislawitch with him. Ferguson threw his hand out, gripping the far side of the car as it sped down the road.

As strong as he was, Ferguson could not hold himself on the trunk of the moving vehicle, let alone support the added weight of Rostislawitch. They slid off the car after a few yards, rolling across the street into the gutter. Ferguson pushed Rostislawitch with him, forward, trying to move in the direction the vehicle had been going. He got another three or four yards before an explosion rent the air behind him.

Fire pitched upward from the side of the street where they’d been walking. Ferguson looked back and saw a sheet of red covering the block.

He had only one thought: where was Thera?

Rostislawitch, head spinning, felt himself being dragged back to his feet. He’d closed his eyes when the shooting started, clamped them closed as he flew through the air. Now he struggled to reopen them. He was pulled back, dragged toward heat.

“What are we doing?” he screamed in Russian.

His eyes sprang open and his vision returned; the bum whom he’d met in the station had him over his shoulder, carrying him into the fire.

“No!” he yelled, struggling to break free.

“We have to save someone,” answered Ferguson. “Come on. It’s Thera.
Thera.”

Rostislawitch stopped fighting, but he was even more deeply confused. He felt as if he were in a dream, the world spinning so bizarrely that everything he knew was mashed together into the same physical place: Thera; his wife, Olga; Atha; and this bum; the streets of Moscow when he was a young man; Chechnya the inferno; Naples.

The flames receded, funneling back into a basement near where they’d been walking when the car came by. Ferguson pulled Rostislawitch with him.

“Thera!” Ferguson called. “Thera, where are you? Thera!”

The explosion had broken a water main below the street. Water hissed upward, a cloud of vapor rising from the grate next to the building like a geyser. Black smoke from several boxes of garbage and a nearby car that had caught fire curled across the narrow roadway, clawing at the buildings on either side.

Thera Majed rose from behind the car where she’d crouched. She hadn’t realized what was going on until she saw Ferguson throwing himself into space. When the flames erupted she threw herself down, thinking it was too late, not for her but for him. She was sure she’d never see Ferg again, except in pieces, broken on the pavement.

And there he was, coming through the fire, carrying Rostislawitch with him, calling for her. She threw herself at him and he caught her, and for a long moment neither one thought of anything but the other: they wrapped their arms around each other; they held their hearts close against each other’s chest. Then, like all moments, it disintegrated; they were back in the world.

“Are you all right?” Thera asked.

“I’m good.”

“Your sat phone is ringing.”

Ferguson hadn’t realized it. He pulled it from his pocket. Corrigan had called, leaving a message. The sat phone was notifying him of it.

“Kiska Babev is on her way to Naples,” said Corrigan. “She may be there already.”

Thanks, thought Ferguson, sliding the antenna back down. He turned to Rostislawitch, standing only a foot away, not sure whether to believe Thera was really there. “Come on,” Ferguson told the Russian scientist. “We’ll find a place where it’s safe, and explain.”

~ * ~

2

MISRATAH, LIBYA

The airport at Misratah was primarily a military base, with its parking areas dominated by fixed-wing Aero L-39 Albatross fighter-trainers. But there was very little in terms of intra-service rapport between the U.S. and Libya. Rankin made a vain attempt at soliciting the base commander’s help, telling him that he was sure that Atha’s aircraft had landed here and that any cooperation would be remembered in the future. But his promise was too nebulous for the commander, who valued tangible and immediate rewards; he recommended that Rankin speak to the men in the control tower but added that personally he doubted there would be anyone there who could help.