Threatcon Delta (25 page)

But his brain was still working as the rest of him quickly faded. And Adjo’s last conscious thought, while not enough to keep him awake, did terrify him.

The burning bush,
he thought again, his mind drifting back to the napalm.
All that burning . . . burning . . . burning.
. . .

I
t was dark but still hot when the Gulfstream landed at Marrakech-Menara Airport, five kilometers from the heart of the nearly thousand-year-old city. A sedan was waiting to take the group to their hotel; it was not a government vehicle but a private limousine.

Well, why not?
Phair thought.
Anonymity had not worked very well in Caracas.

Kealey lingered before getting into the car, pretending to talk on his cell phone. In fact, Phair later learned, he was looking around, checking passengers, porters, taxis, and police to make sure they weren’t being watched. After two minutes he got in the car, apparently satisfied. Before he shut the door and the car light went off, Phair thought he saw a trace of self-censure in the twist of Kealey’s mouth—as in,
That’s what I should have done in Venezuela.

They were booked in the Desert Pearl Hotel, a sandstone-faced structure five stories tall with a pool and handsome but not opulent appointments. Kealey told them not to get too comfortable since they wouldn’t be there long. That was all Kealey said of their plans.

Phair wasn’t sure who Kealey didn’t trust. Not that it mattered. The cleric did not live for the agent’s approval. In fact, in the struggle between “like” and “don’t like,” he was coming down on the side of the latter. The clergyman had not managed to come to terms with the events in Venezuela, or onboard the ship. He felt that Kealey had crossed a line with his good-me, bad-me routine. Everyone lost their temper from time to time, but his tirade struck him as the true, despotic Kealey punching through his Teflon veneer. Perhaps he’d deserved the rebuke, and he would try to maintain some kind of perspective. He understood that they needed the Nazi. But he felt that Kealey should have been more sympathetic to his conflict. If the larger struggle were not about morality, what were they doing here? But then, perhaps the loss of a personal god, whoever that was for Kealey, could only devolve into a loss of personal morality as well.

After checking in, Kealey talked briefly with Durst in the lobby. Phair was not invited to join them. He assumed the agent was asking for details about their next move. Durst must have provided them because Kealey left to talk to someone at the information desk.

Phair went to his room. He looked out the window at the hazy city lights beneath a low-lying mist, and the exotic moon overhead. It reminded him of Iraq, with its blend of the new and the timeless. He felt a sharp sense of nostalgia for those years, when there was so much to discover and so little to lose. Even if they took his life—and rarely did he fear that, for he never presented a threatening profile or uttered a seditious phrase—the priest had enriched the soul he would be laying before God.

Phair watched Carla walk out to the pool. He hoped she was searching her soul or praying to God for forgiveness. Not for herself so much, but for her grandfather. Before he could truly repent and save his soul, he needed to accept the fact that he had sinned.

The priest let the drape close and noticed that his BlackBerry was flashing on the night table. He looked at it. Jonathan Harper had sent maps to Kealey, who had forwarded them to Phair.

“In case anything happens to me, I shouldn’t be the only one with this information,” it said.

It was a tactical maneuver but also, Phair guessed, a show of faith. It was like a sip of brandy: it took a bit of the chill away but it wasn’t about to make him drunk on Ryan Kealey. The cleric looked at the maps, and at one in particular, which Kealey had starred. It was a map of the desert region south of Tarfaya. A coordinate had been marked with a small X. Phair clicked on it. There was a satellite surveillance photograph with an odd-looking object causing an odder-looking shadow to ripple over the desert sand. He guessed that this was their destination.

What puzzled him was the time stamp on the photograph. It was an hour before Durst and Kealey had spoken in the lobby. Either the CIA was guessing or they’d figured it out beforehand.

Phair walked idly around the spacious room. He was tired but restless, wondering why he was being so accepting about all of this. If Kealey had the location, why continue to deal with Durst? Because the Nazi might be lying? Was Durst testing them to see if they were trustworthy? Would they get to the well only to be told the Staff was somewhere else? Did Durst even know where it was, or was this a twisted game of some kind? Is this how covert operations worked, having to trust the unreliable for results that were uncertain, at best?

Phair needed to get out. He needed to do something proactive. Maybe his problem had nothing to do with people but with structure—square rooms, timetables, chains of command. He had lived without them for so long, and so happily. He needed to taste that again.

The cleric unpacked the duffel bag, which contained the clothes and basic toiletries that had been provided for him in Florida. There was also an emergency kit, standard army issue, which had everything from a compass to chewing gum to a pocket flashlight and penknife. There was even a long-sleeved, thin, black shirt—
Where’s the matching ski mask?
he thought, laughing—and he pulled it on.

Phair happened to see himself in the mirror. He didn’t know the man looking back at him. It wasn’t the face of a cleric or the Iraqi nomad who had barely even looked at a mirror for a decade and a half. It wasn’t the instructor from Fort Jackson, a simulacrum of pedagogy who recited fact and ritual without much personality or a larger purpose, other than to turn out single-minded servants of God and country.

Who was it?

The man in the mirror was a fourth, he decided, waiting to be born. But as what? He had no idea. That was what he needed to find out.

With a determined turn from the mirror, James Phair went out the door to reflect not on where he’d been, but where he was going.

A
ll deserts swallow the tracks of civilization, large and small, but they do not always digest them. In that way, they’re like history itself.

The Second World War played out in massive swells through the Sahara, what the British described as “Big Pours”—an ironic reference to a place where water never flows. Many of the artifacts that were left behind in the conflict, from personnel to jeeps, are still there. The economic and political realities of the region simply did not support memorialization or extensive excavation.

But the historical accounts and the remnants didn’t paint a complete portrait. There were largely unrecorded participants, unheralded events, and unfinished stories. Durst himself represented all three.

Ryan Kealey knew something of the history of the region. He had read biographies of Rommel and General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, the British officer and explorer whose search for Noah’s Ark took him to the ends of the continent. Yet Kealey knew that facts alone were largely useless to him now. He knew the muscular forces that had moved the large events forward, domino-like, but crucial information often fell through those black tiles. Witness the slipup in the background check of James Phair. Even though Jonathan Harper felt he had a good idea where the chest might be hidden, Kealey wasn’t willing to go there alone. If information was missing, if they had drawn a wrong conclusion, Kealey would blow the trust of Durst and his granddaughter and he would never get that back.

He went to bed late and rose early. After four hours of sleep, Kealey got up and, over strong Moroccan coffee and toast ordered from room service, studied the latest data from the CIA. It was also time to think; his sleeping brain had a way of sorting information into useful groups while freshened eyes often found new patterns or details he had missed before.

Not a lot of that happened this morning.

There was no new information, though the update from Egypt was of some concern: satellite photographs showing at least three thousand people gathered in the desert at the foot of Mt. Sinai.

The discovery of napalm inside the mountain was of even greater concern, and for the first time, Kealey admitted to himself that Harper had been fully correct to send him on this mission, delaying his operation at the hospital at Basra. Suddenly Kealey realized with a jolt that Basra was moot now. The agency would keep their eyes on the Iranian doctor, but they could not interrupt his life as it was progressing or that would threaten the route of information from him to Hernandez to the CIA. Dr. al-Shenawi, the terrorist financier, trainer, and facilitator, the dupe for the death of an American mayor, was now a protected asset.

Kealey couldn’t even feel rage anymore. The parts of the machine were fitted and slick with oil and already humming. From his cold, mechanistic perspective, he could even see that Harper had been right to send Kealey here instead of west to work Hernandez for intel. Napalm on the holiest of mountains brought the whole situation a few steps closer to a global concern, though the e-mail from Harper stated that no one was sure who or what the napalm was to be used against, or why. The latest satellite surveillance of the mountainside had revealed no exterior movement of interest. Nor had anyone seen anything of the supposed prophet or his activities since the Task Force 777 video.

“Hopefully, we will be able to make some educated guesses when the identity of the individuals inside the monastery has been ascertained,” Harper wrote in the secure communiqué. One of the men had identification on him, but as yet, nothing had been turned up on him. “The Egyptians won’t share his name,” Harper noted, “which means they probably know who he is and don’t want to tell us.”

That could mean any number of things, Kealey knew. The man might be a monk who was suffering from what the church called “monastery fever”—isolation in a holy setting that turned men with a mission into men with visions. That was something that had to be handled by the church.

That wouldn’t easily explain the napalm,
Kealey thought—unless the two were unrelated. It was possible that the military secretly used Mt. Sinai as a warehouse and the low-ranking special-ops officer had simply stumbled on that fact. That would be another reason for the Egyptians to suddenly cut off the flow of information. Who knew what else might be stored there?

The prophet could be an Egyptian whose identity would be a potential embarrassment to Cairo, such as an industrialist who had “gone native” and was using his fortune to sponsor a movement of some kind. Perhaps he was a Muslim cleric with a vast following whose identity would polarize forces for and against his sect throughout the Middle East. He might even be the son of an oil sheik, another Osama bin Laden who had to be protected from capture or assassination by the army until his influential family had the chance to rein him in.

Regardless, the exponential growth of the crowd was troubling, along with the possibility that these people might be firebombed for some maniacal religious or political reason—something that wasn’t on the radar of the CIA or Task Force 777. Kealey didn’t have enough information to consider all that. And then there were things that could not be factored into his thinking, from a sudden sandstorm in the desert to a preemptive Egyptian military action against the cave where this man was hidden.

It was profoundly frustrating. What made it worse was that he couldn’t get his hands dirty in the main issue until this preliminary step of the operation was achieved—and he couldn’t even be sure when and if that would happen.

He closed his laptop and phoned the others. None of them answered. He went to their rooms and knocked on the doors.

Nothing.

Carla was easily located. She had fallen asleep on a chaise lounge by the pool and had remained there through the night, a thin blanket pulled to her chin, her legs tucked fetus-like against her belly. The sun was still too low to have awakened her. Kealey let her sleep while he looked for Phair. He found him out front, walking back from the direction of the Old Town. The priest seemed surprised to see Kealey waiting for him.

“Did I do something wrong?” the cleric asked.

“Technically, you were AWOL,” Kealey said. He was careful to make it an observation and not an accusation.

“Very, very technically,” Phair replied.

“You’re a crucial part of this mission. If something had happened to you, I wouldn’t have known where to look.”

“I’m sorry,” Phair said. “I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to wake you.”

“A message at the desk—”

“I didn’t know I would be leaving the grounds,” Phair said. “I was walking out front, saw a taxi, decided to take it to Medina and back. On the way I saw the Church Saints Martyrs. It was a lovely night, a night like I remembered at the best of times in Iraq, so I decided to get out, visit the church, and walk back.” He thought for a moment. “If a chaplain goes to a church, that would be very, very,
very
technically AWOL, I should think.”

Kealey didn’t appreciate the jab. The priest had an air of smugness, of righteousness, that had no place on the team. Kealey took a deep, calming breath of the dry air. He smelled morning cooking on the wind, some kind of meat. He heard vague chanting from a minaret well behind the hotel. He did not embrace the stimulus but he recognized the sense of isolation. He was not in the arms of the agency here. There was no infrastructure other than himself, and when any element of his team was out of balance he had to pull them back to center, to stability.

“Did you find it inspirational?” Kealey asked.

“I found it haunted,” Phair replied. “Churches are houses of God, but they are also houses of the anguish that’s poured out there. Depending on my mood, one takes hold more firmly than the other.”

“And you were ready to receive pain.”

“I understand what compels flagellants,” Phair said. “It isn’t just penitence as a form of piety. It’s a liberation from fear.”

“Of?”

“Depending on the man, it differs,” Phair said.

“For you?”

“Sometimes we do what is convenient or safe instead of what’s right,” he said.

“Are we talking about Durst?”

“Oddly, no,” Phair said. “I understand why he’s necessary. I even understand why you rebuked me on the ship.”

“Then what?”

“When I ran off to help the Iraqis during that firefight, I was tuned to their pain,” Phair said. “It mattered more at that moment than my other obligations, including the fact that they might have been responsible for killing my countrymen. I felt it was important, tonight, to reconnect with that feeling.”

“So you could overlook the other challenges.”

“Something like that.”

That was still a little vague for Kealey’s taste, but there wasn’t time to question the cleric further. As long as Phair pulled his own oars, Kealey could live with a little uncertainty.

“Do you happen to know where Durst is?” Kealey asked.

“I haven’t seen him since we arrived,” Phair said.

“Why don’t you go to your room and order something to eat,” Kealey said. “I’ll call you when we’re ready to leave.”

“All right, I’ll go to my room,” the cleric said, with a wry twist to his mouth.

Kealey watched as Phair eased around him. Car traffic was beginning to collect on the nearby N9, and the rising sunlight bounced from the gilt domes and clay towers of the old city, which was only a kilometer distant. The new light illuminated Phair. His black shirt whitened with windblown sand, his feet sore and legs a little awkward from his long walk, he seemed only slightly less out of place than the robed and sandaled merchants who were setting up little stands along the street.

Is it his look, or is he just accustomed to blending in?
Kealey wondered. It was a real skill, the ability to not draw attention to oneself. The roll of the shoulders, the angle of the head, the stillness of the arms, the smaller, lower steps, the lack of sudden movement. It was something Kealey had never been able to train people to do. One gained it only by necessity.

Kealey also wondered if Durst had gone to Medina as well, perhaps searching for his own past. It troubled him that the German might have lied about the location of the Staff and had gone to collect it elsewhere—perhaps to ransom it. If so, Kealey would get the information out of him later. Durst would have to return, since his granddaughter was still here.

As it turned out, Durst was in the lobby of the hotel. A few members of the housekeeping staff were the only other people down there, polishing lamp bases and setting up a coffee urn. Phair was glancing at a morning newspaper, waiting for the coffee. Durst was facing the pale oak registration desk in front of a high wall of blue with large patterns of gold and green diamonds. He was dressed in jeans and his CIA-issued black shirt. Behind the counter, a woman was on the phone. Durst appeared to be waiting for something. The door to the office beyond was partly open. Inside, a Muslim was about his prayers.

“Good morning,” Kealey said, walking over.

Durst turned, nodded, and looked back across the counter.

“I didn’t see you here earlier,” Kealey said.

“I went looking for a café that might serve milk,” he said. “Failing to find one, I came back to ask for it. They are only setting up for coffee and tea.”

Kealey stepped up beside Durst. The German’s face was damp with perspiration, and he looked drawn.

“Are you all right?” Kealey asked.

Durst seemed puzzled. Kealey indicated his face.

“
Ja, ja,
” Durst said. “I ended up behind the hotel, in the basement, and took the stairs up.”

The receptionist hung up and apologized for making Durst wait. “Can I be of assistance, sir?” she said pleasantly.

“You can,” he said. “I would like some milk set out on that cart and I would also like you to close the door in the name of decency.”

The woman smiled. “Ahmed is not bothered by—”

“
I
am bothered by,” Durst said. “He can pray to whatever camel god he wishes but this is not designated as a church or mosque. I would trouble you to respect the views of guests who may not be interested in his display! Or is this also a cabana where I may openly change to a swimsuit?”

Without expression, the woman turned and went back to the office, closing the door behind her.

Durst turned to Kealey and said loudly, “Bloody savages.”

“You probably won’t get your milk now,” the agent remarked. It was a little taunt to avoid making a larger expression of disgust.

“I’ll bet I do,” Durst said. “That girl will want to show me that she is a devoted hostess above all. Good manners are important to these people. Or at least, they were once.”

Kealey realized that in Durst’s entire life, he had probably always been a guest or an invader. Entitlement was part of his muscle memory.

From a door behind the corner, the receptionist summoned the lobby attendant. The woman walked over, listened for a moment, looked at Durst, nodded, then left.

The bastard was right.

“She’ll probably spit in it,” Durst said, then shrugged. “In some parts of Africa that was considered a blessing.”

“You’ve seen so much but you’ve seen so little,” Kealey said. He felt his resolve to stay outwardly neutral cracking.

“What you mean to say is that I have embraced little,” Durst said. “What is there to take from a place like this except a sad realization that the world is threatened by savages?”

“Do you actually believe these things, or is this all for effect?” the agent asked.

“I am not sure what you mean by
effect,
” Durst said. “It is not the howling of a jackal in the night, the herald of a pack that has been driven from its hunting ground. I believe, Mr. Kealey, in a standard of human conduct and the firmly held belief that many religions and cultures push us closer to the cave than to the stars. My God, isn’t that the very argument we are here to make?”