ROTA, SPAIN
Kealey woke when he felt the plane begin its descent. Rayhan was asleep beside him. He gave her a gentle shake.
“I’m awake,” she said.
He waited a moment with a crooked little smile. She fell asleep again. He shook her a little harder.
“I’m awake,” she repeated. This time she opened her eyes.
Kealey moved a little closer and looked at her. “Your lips are dry, and your voice isn’t quite connected to your brain,” he said. “What did you take?
She didn’t answer.
“I asked you something, Rayhan.”
“Ambien,” she said as she wriggled semi-upright in her sling.
“Dumb,” he said bluntly. “Are you going to be alert? You need coffee?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been if I couldn’t sleep. Don’t worry. I used to do this when I was a kid. My mother gave me Valium. Otherwise, I could never have rested in the bomb shelters.”
Kealey did worry, though he let it rest. It was one thing to risk his life on a partner, which is why he didn’t like having them. It was something else to risk his life—along with the security of the nation—on a partner with a drug hangover. The only drug he had ever carried into the field was a cyanide capsule, and then only in places like Chechnya and Iraq, where capture meant torture and beheading with a knife.
A Petty Officer First Class came aboard to collect Kealey and Rayhan. The two got a big “good-bye” from Representative Thomson as they deplaned.
“Stay safe, you two, and look me up in D.C.,” Thomson said.
Kealey did not think the invitation was for him and hoped their paths did not cross. He did not want to be reminded that people like this were deciding the policy he had to execute.
The joint U.S.-Spanish Color Guard aboard Naval Station, Rota—NAVSTA Rota—covers six thousand acres on the north shore of Cádiz, the Gateway to the Mediterranean. It was established in 1953 by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who was looking to shore up relations with the United States. The United States Navy is responsible for the upkeep of the 670-acre airfield, the trio of piers and hundreds of military structures, and over eight hundred homes for the soldiers.
The unobstructed sunlight was a shock to Kealey and his companion as they emerged before the jeeps and before the Congressmen. They were taken by the Petty Officer First Class to a waiting Humvee. Just before the seaman deleted them, Kealey caught their photographs on the dashboard display.
The man introduced himself. He was Johannes Megapolensis, which the young man spoke proudly and clearly as the Humvee hummed and he drove them across the six-thousand-acre base toward one of the piers. The red-tile roofs and low white buildings were pure Mediterranean, a contrast to the purely functional bases Kealey was used to. The United States had been here for sixty years, since 1953—it was an ideal stopping-off point halfway to the Middle East, the Suez Canal and oil shipments, and Southwest Asia. For Spain, it was a boon to the local economies.
When they reached the pier, a sleek, twenty-seven-foot powerboat was waiting for them. It had a canvas canopy, a food locker, and a radio.
“Do you know how to run ’er, sir?” Megapolensis asked.
“Twin 250 HP Yamahas? No kicker engine?”
Megapolensis smiled. “No, sir. If you’d care to wait we could rig one—”
“No thanks. I used to troll for steelheads with an 8 HP. How many gas tanks?”
“Three, sir. Two hundred gallons per. Will that do?
“That’ll do,” Kealey said appreciatively. The boat wouldn’t get the best mileage on the open sea, but the extra tanks more than compensated—and, better, they would provide extra weight and greater stability. Rayhan would probably appreciate that. She still looked a little dazed. And if she weren’t used to it, knocking around at sea was not like bumping up and down on an ATV.
“There are requested add-ons—binoculars, some fishing gear onboard, and some sandwiches in the locker in case you don’t have time to fish,” Megapolensis said. “If I might ask, sir, where did you fish? Out here, it’s always nice to hear stories from home.”
“Maine,” Kealey said as he stepped in and offered his hand to Rayhan. Megapolensis was already putting her overnighter onboard. “I had a house there for a while. Really rustic.”
“I love that. I’m from Vermont,” the enlisted man said with a longing look atop a big smile. “Grew up on Lake Champlain.”
“Ever see the monster?”
“No, sir. I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”
Kealey smiled as the sailor handed him a pair of Navy-issue sunglasses. “Monsters exist,” Kealey assured him as they untied the boat from the pier.
“The kind with flippers and fangs, sir?”
“Worse,” Kealey said. “The kind with smiles and power.”
The young man offered a confused salute as Kealey started the engines. Rayhan was familiarizing herself with the GPS.
“We good?” he asked her.
“The boat appears to be,” she said. “Are we?”
“I sure hope so.” It wasn’t a commitment, but then she didn’t deserve one. Kealey was angry, but he would have a few hours of sea air to rid himself of that and for her to clear her head.
“There’s an iPod in the music bay,” she said. “Should we leave it?”
“Yeah. And it isn’t an iPod. It’s a TAC-X receiver. If Clarke needs to send us maps, dossiers, or anything else, he’ll do it there. If you hear a ping, check under “Kealey Playlist.” The device wipes its memory every ten minutes except for Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopin, Eugene Ormandy performing Tchaikovsky, and Arthur Fiedler whipping up the best of John Philip Sousa.”
“How do you know what’s on it?”
“Standard playlist,” Kealey said. “One way to know if someone’s replaced it.”
“Why not just send the maps to your cell phone?”
Kealey held up a finger while he ran a radio check. He would remain in contact with Rota until they reached Africa. Then he was on his own. As he noted the location of the fire extinguisher and emergency flares, he answered Rayhan’s question.
“The general’s going to have his eyes on both devices,” Kealey said. “They will be on me at all times. An iPod may get left behind. If we are separated, he’ll assume that something is wrong.”
“But we’re the only ones in the field,” she said. “If something goes wrong, how will that help us?”
“It won’t,” Kealey said. “It’ll tell him our mission is in jeopardy and he should go to Plan B, whatever that might be. They’re probably figuring that one out now.” The operative smiled appreciatively. “The general’s philosophy is ‘Do something now.’ He likes to develop his available pieces ASAP. That’s us. There’s nothing sentimental about him, not when he’s on the job.”
Rayhan was wearing the same fall coat she’d been wearing when they went to Valley Stream. Kealey yanked a black sweater from his grip, slipped into it, then pulled from the pier. He eased skillfully into the blindingly bright water. The boat had four seats, two of them facing back. That was where the sportfishermen sat. Rayhan was in the one behind Kealey, right beside the low railing. The canopy protected her from the sun but not from the motion of the vessel. Though Kealey was traveling at the maximum speed of forty-five knots, the skimming action was mitigated by the added fuel weight. The powerboat cut through the water rather than rode up and slapped down.
“I’m sorry about the Ambien,” she said, turning her head back and shouting to be heard over the sound of water and twin Yamahas. “I should have asked.”
Kealey nodded. He was angrier than before. Now that they were boots-on-the-ground, he found that he wasn’t willing to rely on her as completely as he needed to. That was the kind of quirk that would have been knocked out of a person during training. You learned to sleep hard and fast. During survival runs in the Rockies—which was where a lot of the special forces teams going to Afghanistan did their drilling, seven thousand feet up—you knew that helicopters were going to be looking for you in two-hour cycles. That gave you exactly one hundred and twenty minutes to rest between flyovers. If you didn’t seize that time, you didn’t sleep. If you didn’t sleep, your chances of falling from a slope and dragging your companions with you, of dooming the mission, increased.
“Going forward, you don’t do anything without being told,” Kealey said. “And when you are told something, you do it. I need your eyes and ears and brain, and I need them at one hundred percent. Everything we do is to preserve the only Arabic speaker and scientist on this mission. Understood?”
“I understand,” she said, then turned aft again.
Kealey knew that no one liked being upbraided. She probably felt safe because he had gotten chummy with the enlisted man.
She was wrong.
“I need you to watch the iPod,” Kealey said.
Rayhan used the back of the seats to support herself as she swung around. She fell into the seat without complaint. He would have told her to sit there from the start if he had known she wouldn’t get seasick. Now, he had no choice.
“What am I looking for?” she asked, turning it on.
“It’s a four-hour trip to Rabat. Clarke’s eyes in the sky are watching the area around the motel where the Iranian was killed. The satellite feed is in my file. Assuming Tehran has someone in the area now, that’s where they’ll go for starters. There’s also—”
“I see it,” she said. “A crawl of radiation levels. How—?”
“A plane from Rota fired a DART into the motel roof two hours ago,” Kealey said. “A Direct Access Radiation Test. Which also happens to be a dart. What does the data tell you?”
“It’s a hot spot but falling,” she said. “Someone most likely opened the container and shut it quickly.”
“After taking a lethal dose?”
“Without a doubt,” she said. “My God, if this is the residue—it was a hell of a burst. The individual wouldn’t have survived an hour.”
“So we’re looking at a pair or more of perps or a device that’s still in Rabat or both.”
“I’m betting on both,” Rayhan said.
“Why?”
“Because there’s a secondary reading coming from the northeast,” she said. “Very faint but it has the same—let’s call it a fingerprint. Nothing close to lethal but elevated from ambient radiation.”
Kealey did a pullback on the GPS map. He saw the river. It wasn’t a real-time image, so he couldn’t tell whether there was anything of interest on it. He took his cell phone from his belt and called Clarke at home.
“Did I wake you?” Kealey asked.
“I wish you had. Where are you?”
“On the Mediterranean, where it’s sunny with a hint of fallout.”
“Too tired to find that funny. Are you saying there’s a trail?”
Kealey explained the twin radiation readings, then asked him to have his INTERPOL connection, Mostpha Bensami, get someone to follow the radiation trail from the motel to wherever it leads.
“Open or not?”
“Open,” Kealey said. “We might as well see if anyone else is watching.”
“You got it,” Clarke told him.
Kealey hung up.
“May I ask—?” Rayhan said.
“About open or not?” Kealey said.
She nodded.
“Do we want a theoretical Iranian operative to see what’s being done,” Kealey said. “The answer is yes.”
“Why?”
“A twofer,” Kealey said. “Hopefully, we find the killer and the device. Mr. Bensami or whoever he sends will be waiting and watching. With luck, we may also get ourselves an Iranian agent.”