Threatcon Delta (9 page)

Still acting for the cameras, she looked around wildly, holding her shoulder bag with one hand, the crossbow hidden between her hand and the strap. She put her hand to her face as if calling again for a missing person, then gave up in desperation and ran from the plaza, south to Dolorosa, where an SUV had just pulled up to the curb. Abejide never looked at it, only kept running straight past the courthouse. Several turns and backtracks later, she headed for the appointed location to meet with the pretzel vendor’s contacts. The world of sound came back to her, but all it contained was distant sirens.

F
ive hours later the upstairs room at the JIB was still quietly buzzing with coordination efforts, but everyone was despondent. Twelve people had died on Main Plaza, including a ten-year-old who had played guitar for the mariachi band slated to perform. A further twenty-two were wounded, some now in critical condition at the hospital. San Antonio’s citizens, unable to access the plaza or the cathedral because of police cordons, were creating a memorial for their young mayor on the lawn of City Hall, filling it with flowers, candles, photographs, and handwritten notes and prayers. The lawn was fairly small, so the memorial was spilling all the way around the white stone building, and mourners unwilling to go home were sitting on their parked cars on every block nearby. On the plaza, someone had turned off the lights on the big Christmas tree.

Jonathan Harper could not have taken it harder if he had lost someone personally. The deputy director sat with his chin propped on three fingers of his hand, watching the videos, photos, and reports roll in. He had devoted one laptop screen to coverage of the growing memorial. Kealey could see by how rigidly he held his neck that he was raging inside at the nearest target: himself.

“Jon,” Kealey said quietly, “you know if you’d warned them earlier, any safety precautions they would have taken still wouldn’t have mattered. They couldn’t have closed down streets without information that we didn’t have. They wouldn’t have checked cars for bombs without clear evidence pointing that way. They could have limited entry and exit points for the plaza but chances are, they would have used that particular corner. And even if they’d kept the crowd a yard or two away from the street, some people would still have died.”

Harper only nodded.

“And you don’t know if the mayor would have consented to dragging around more security guards than she already had. Frankly, more men in play probably wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“We’ll see what the autopsy says,” Harper said, locked in his guilt.

The autopsy results were e-mailed to him a quarter of an hour later. The first photo showed the tiny arrow, half the length of a finger with open slits along the side. It had been placed on a white towel and had not yet been washed, so there were streaks of blood on the arrow and smears on the towel. Arrayed next to it were eight carbon points soaked in blood.

“That’s almost impossible,” Kealey said. “The spring mechanism would have to be so sensitive, it would go off if it hit a raindrop.”

“Not much rain in Texas,” Harper muttered. “What on earth would have propelled something like that? A blowpipe?”

They shook their heads, incredulous.

“Whatever it was,” Kealey mused, “the person holding it must have had preternatural muscle control. To launch something that sensitive with a panicking crowd all around, very little time to aim, and such a small target . . . that’s not someone with some military training under his belt. That’s someone who’s been practicing his whole life.”

“And did it in a way that he wasn’t noticed, either,” Harper added with a sigh.

They had spent the last five hours reviewing the feeds from the security cameras over and over. Neither one of them had seen anything suspicious. Rather, they had seen everything suspicious and nothing even remotely conclusive. They’d spent ten minutes repeatedly watching one girl hop the Christmas tree fence just as the mayor was passing by, but she was so obviously trying to get out of the way of the crowd, making no movements that could be read as taking aim . . . At that point they had realized they were burning out and seeing ghosts where there were only bedsheets. The people nearest the mayor at time of death had been detained by the police and questioned, but all they said was that they saw everyone else looking at the mayor after she fell so they ran over to help.

Harper scrolled back to the photograph of the miniscule arrow and its multiple heads. “I hate assassinations,” he grimaced.

“You know who could have done this?” Kealey said. “The archer who took out Yerby. Victor was one of the best, yet he was outmaneuvered.”

“The archer with the size eight shoes,” Harper said, staring at him.

They quickly found the security feed with the view of the tree and the cathedral. Unfortunately the camera was placed across the plaza so figures were small. Again, they watched the young woman with the shoulder bag hop onto the fence and cling to the lamppost. She was distraught, calling out into the crowd. In the moments before the explosion, she had been simply standing by the tree and waiting.

“It’s obvious,” Harper said. “She was waiting for her friend or her boyfriend or whoever, the bomb exploded, she was terrified her person had been caught in the explosion or in the crowd, she stayed as long as she could get herself to stay there, and then she ran.”

Kealey nodded agreement. He watched the tape again. “There’s just no way in hell anyone could shoot with that precision from that position with that much motion going on. Aside from the fact that she had nothing to shoot with.”

“Although it is a security camera feed,” Harper said. “Lousy on detail.”

“And we don’t have a view of every corner of that plaza,” Kealey said. “But I’m still willing to bet that Yerby’s killer and the mayor’s assassin are one and the same.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Harper said, and fell silent to prove it.

“I’m willing to bet my new house on it,” Kealey said.

“Thank you, Ryan,” Harper said, recognizing that Kealey had just offered his foreseeable future to the operation they would rapidly roll out.

“To clarify,” Kealey said, “I want Hernandez.”

“I know you do.” Harper rubbed his eyes.

Damn it,
Kealey thought. He had openly stated his objective because somewhere deep down, he’d already known that Harper would say no.

“The DEA will take Hernandez,” Harper said. “We need you on the doctor.”

“The DEA hasn’t done the job so far on Hernandez—” Kealey started.

Harper cut him off. “You have the international experience, Ryan. You take the international job.”

Kealey didn’t argue further, just watched the memorial flowers and candles fill the lawns of City Hall. Finally he stood. “I’ll report to you tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ve got to pick up my car. You’ll let me know if the doctor leaves the mosque?”

Harper nodded and the battle-scarred old friends shook hands.

“Take the chopper,” Harper said.

Kealey left the building wondering what he was going to tell Ellie about her refuge on the mountain. He could already feel his operational mind hardening over his feelings of disappointment. When people like the mayor’s husband were telling his kids that their mom had been killed, people like Kealey put their feelings to the side.

A
hot wind swirled a six-foot-high dust devil into life, a pillar of air carrying sand and dead foliage across the plain. The airborne flotsam gleamed red in the noon sun. The fast-spinning funnel passed behind the beefy man in khaki shorts before colliding with a steep hillside and exploding.

“There is a great deal of wonder in this land . . . and gold in this ground,” Oxford professor of archaeology Desmond Wesley confided to the high-definition TV camera, conspiratorially tapping his walking staff on the hard, pale plain. Small, rosy pearls of sweat plumped the caked makeup on his balding head. But the greater heat was the one in his eyes, a fire possessed by so many outsiders for this land, its history, its mad prophets and worthy martyrs.

“The gold deposits come as no surprise, since the ancient Land of Midian was renowned for its deposits of precious metals,” Wesley went on. He gestured behind him, to a card table that held a device that looked like a megaphone attached to a small microwave oven, the front of which sported an LCD display. “But we are not here on a prospecting mission, per se. In this broadcast, we will use a molecular frequency generator to scan the strata and distinguish between whatever lumpish indigenous gold lies beneath our feet and any carefully worked trinkets and statues carried by the Children of Israel when they left the servitude of Pharaoh. In that fashion, we hope to be able to find the first
actual relics
of the Biblical Exodus.”

As the professor spoke, a small figure swathed in a dirty black burnoose appeared on the white-graveled foothills some three hundred meters behind him. Wesley was unaware of the intruder, but a production assistant raised his binoculars to make sure it was just one of the pilgrims or holy men who frequented the holy mountain and not a terrorist. He did not seem to be a threat, though this pilgrim was different from the few others they had spotted since the
Archaeology HD
jeep caravan arrived the night before. The man was moving quickly, as though he were running from—or to—something. No bother, as long as it wasn’t them. More likely he was hurrying to the Monastery of St. Catherine, which sat behind them in the foothills of Mt. Sinai.

 

The host noticed the stares of the crew and turned to follow their gaze. He shielded his eyes with his hand.

“Those are the robes of a monk of the monastery,” Wesley commented.

“Maybe a snake bit him or something,” suggested a production assistant.

The veteran camera operator continued to record as an Egyptian bodyguard traveling with the group unshouldered his MISR assault rifle and walked forward cautiously.

“
Esmak eh?
” the Egyptian shouted.

When the man failed to identify himself, the bodyguard raised the weapon waist high, pointed toward him, and repeated the question.

The newcomer waved his arms over his head and shouted something back. Wesley struggled to hear it but couldn’t quite make out the panting Egyptian.

The bodyguard managed to hear him and shook his head. “
Mesh mumk’n!
” he yelled with a sneer.

The man, now about fifty meters away, slowed to a trot and held both hands up as though he were surrendering.

Standing behind the camera, the director frowned uncomfortably. “He said something about Allah. That’s not good, is it?”

“It’s all right,” the bodyguard said, relaxing his weapon. “He was simply swearing that what he told me was true.”

“What did he tell you?” Wesley asked.

The bodyguard gestured toward the top of the holy mountain with his weapon. “He said that he has just seen the
Gharib Qawee.
”

“Did he now?” Wesley said with some astonishment.

“Who’s that?” the director asked.

“The Remarkable Stranger,” Wesley replied.

“And who is
that
?”

Wesley said, “It’s a Byzantine usage that references Exodus 2:21–22, the Stranger in a Strange Land.”

“I’m confused,” the director said.

Wesley told him, “This fellow insists that he has just seen the prophet Moses.”

I
t didn’t happen often, but
infrequently
is not
never
.

The Department of Defense assigned Maj. Amanda Dell to Fort Jackson, home of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps. While Maj. James Phair was assigned to teach a course in Chaplain Officer Basics to new recruits, she was asked to make a more thorough study of him. It came as Administrative Directive 703 ID—Intelligence Detachment—and cc’ed one Deputy Director Jonathan Harper at the Central Intelligence Agency. The AD gave no reason other than to say that “the cleric,” as Phair was called, was a “subject of interest.” The description told her nothing she hadn’t gleaned from the assignment itself. The fact that the CIA was involved told her that it wasn’t so much Phair as his walkabout among the Iraqi people that was of interest. She had not been instructed to probe him on any specific points, however. That was uncharacteristic of the military. Also to her surprise, Dina Westbrook had not been cc’ed on the AD.

Dell was instructed by the head of psychiatric studies at the Pentagon not to make him her sole patient. They did not want him to feel special, put him on guard. She e-mailed the HOPS that he was already on guard because of his experiences in Iraq and asked if that mattered. They said no. They reiterated that this was simply a six-month project that might be followed by what they called an “Evaluation of Impressions,” which was bureaucratese for “What do you think of him?”

Goals and priorities were still shielded at worst, vague at best. But at least the air-conditioning worked here.

This was session number nine since she arrived early in the spring. Phair had come here in January to give him time to settle in.

“How’s the teaching?” she asked as he settled into the armchair across from her desk. He had been training up-and-coming clerics for two weeks.

“They’re eager and devoted to God and country,” he replied, though his terseness suggested that he had more to say.

“Is that wrong?” she asked.

“No,” he said behind an out-thrust lower lip. “Not conceptually.”

“In practice?”

“I don’t know.”

She was flipping through notes. At least the cleric’s speech patterns and enunciation were getting back to some level of pre-Iraq confidence. “Have you been keeping a journal?”

“That hasn’t been working for me.”

“Why not?”

The lanky Phair leaned into his lap and looked down. “The words just aren’t there.”

“The words or the feelings?”

“Oh, I feel a lot,” he said. “I just can’t seem to isolate one memory or reflection from another.”

“How does this hodgepodge make you feel?”

“The hodgepodge itself is frustrating because I feel like I’m stuck on flypaper,” he said. “I have this sense that I was ‘found’ while I was away and ‘lost’ now, though there wasn’t a day out there that I wasn’t scared.”

“For some people, fear and chaos are a familiar and therefore natural and more comfortable state.”

“If they’d lived with it before,” Phair said. “I hadn’t. I had a very stable life.”

“Which you tossed away when you left your post to minister to the wounded Iraqis.”

Major Phair remembered that he had told the psychologist that he had been intent on ministering to the spiritual needs of the Iraqis. He realized later, after he’d moved to Fort Jackson, that although he had gone to the Iraqis for their aid, it had really been more to assure himself that in the shadow of death, sectarian distinctions were nothing and spirituality was everything. He had to let the wounded men know—and himself, as well—that while men made war over fine religious print, that all vanished as one stood poised to turn himself over to the care of God.

“Let’s talk about how life was simpler before you began your independent work in Iraq,” she suggested.

“My ‘independent work,’ ” he smiled bitterly. “Some of my superiors have called it desertion.”

“Their information is incomplete.”

He gave her a long, searching look. “Are you helping to fill it in?”

“I am not,” she replied. “I’m here for you.”

Phair grinned a little. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There has been so much spin—that’s a new word I’ve learned since I’ve been here. Very useful.” He settled back. “Do you know that one of the commanders in Baghdad wanted to write my work up as a black-ops action?”

“To help you?”

“Are you kidding?” He shook his head. “It would have helped him, added to the tally of proactive maneuvers as opposed to defensive tactics.”

“Do you believe it was desertion?” Major Dell asked.

“No. I was compelled to do what I did out of love of God, not from a lack of patriotism.” He took a long, slow breath and looked at her with searching eyes. “But I will tell you this, Major Dell. My life was very much simpler before I left that hole in the ground.”

Phair had already been on his way to the abandoned government office building, following the wounded Iraqis, when his unit began to withdraw. Intelligence had just been received that the insurgents were using the building as a base. The unit was pulled back and the American forces bombed the building. Since Phair knew the phone lines would be secure inside underground concrete conduits, and help could be summoned—which had been the point of taking the wounded there—Phair hid with several Iraqis in a bomb shelter, where he tended to the bodies and souls of two wounded Sunni fighters. They remained for more than a day, under attack from the air and from artillery fire. A subsequent sweep of the town failed to locate him or his young companions. In the small hours of the following night, Iraqi militiamen who knew of the fortified room dug them out. The assault left the clergyman frightened and disoriented, initially fearful of anyone except those who had gone through it with him. The Iraqis who rescued him would have killed him, but for the interference of the men who saw how he helped their comrades.

“Do you ever think of your emergence from the cellar as a kind of rebirth?” Major Dell asked.

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “It was more like mitosis. I split off a new me.”

The sixteen years that Phair had stayed in Iraq, learning from Sunnis, Shiites, Yazidis, Nestorians, and other religions, he felt his devotion to Catholicism had been enhanced. He had affirmed that the goals of charity and good were fundamentally the same from group to group, as was the ultimate destination of a beatific afterlife.

As was the desire to foster one faith over all others, often through violent means among the radical elements.

While Phair found the rituals and hierarchies instructive and inspiring, he came to believe that no one group had a monopoly on the Way. Not even his own. It was no different than when he would watch the soldiers train in various martial arts disciplines. Judo was different from karate was different from kung fu. All were valid and the end result was the same: self-preservation. Understanding this, there had been no need to question his Catholic faith. It served and continued to serve as his unfaltering conduit to God.

“This new you,” Major Dell said in a way that suggested a weighty preamble. “How much overlap does it have with the old you?”

“In what respect?”

“Any.”

“Let me answer that bass-ackwards,” he suggested. “I can guess the reasons for these ongoing sessions. The DoD wants to know if I’ve been brainwashed, either by design or association. Correct?”

“If that’s a concern, it’s not mine,” she answered semi-truthfully.

“How does the military view me?”

“I can’t speak for them,” she replied.

“You know they debriefed me there,” he said.

She nodded.

“They prodded me to recall everything I’d seen and heard as what they wanted to call their ‘undercover observer. ’ They wanted to know about the unguarded lives of Iraqi citizens, what the black market was like, how often and in what way the Iraqis were bullied by insurgents or the police or the military and how they responded. I saw a lot of that. I told them what I could remember. That the people are afraid. Of insurgents, of local authorities, of Americans, of despots, of anyone from outside their villages. They shook my memory like they were panning for gold and frankly, I remembered things I had forgotten.”

“Except for the first few weeks you were away from your unit,” Major Dell said.

“That’s right.”

“No dreams or fragments or déjà vu that might indicate what happened?”

He shook his head.

It bothered her superiors in the Army Medical Corps that Phair seemed to have been brought back from post-traumatic stress—literally shell shock, from the hammering he took in that cellar—by fraternizing with “a population that might include enemy sympathizers or activists.” Phair remembered coming out into dusty daylight from the shelter beneath the bombed building. He remembered hearing an argument among the Iraqis about sparing his life, but he recalled little else until three weeks later, when he was learning Nadji Arabic from a schoolteacher.

The question that remained to be answered was: had he “gone native”? Had he begun to assume the prevailing view of Americans as invaders? He didn’t appear to have done so. By identifying with their spiritual rather than political needs, he regained his own center. Though he stayed in Iraq to educate himself and others, he remained fundamentally the same James Phair who was last seen running off during a firefight—but now his own twin, with a new set of experiences and influences.

What would happen if he went back? That’s what the top brass wanted to know.

“Are you having difficulty remembering aspects of your stay that used to be clear?” the psychologist inquired.

“The details are still clear,” he said. “It just seems a little odd to me that I don’t think in Mesopotamian Arabic or Kurdish or Farsi the way I used to. When I look in the mirror I see sunburned skin and silver hair where I once saw pale and brown, but I have seen that before, as a teenage volunteer working in different missions. I could just as easily be looking at one of my faces from Veracruz or Ethiopia as one from Mosul. The original James Phair is back. It doesn’t feel as though I’ve been away.”

“That’s because your core beliefs didn’t change,” she remarked. “You collected ideas and experiences without being altered by them. You made them subjective instead of objective, though those can be reversed by changed circumstances. We have a medical term for that.”

He looked at her with a look of patient, clerical inquiry.

“We call it ‘the switcheroo,’ ” she explained. “Faith
can
move mountains.”

He smiled back. “I am a modern-day Mohammad. Shall I change my name? Would the DoD appreciate that?”

A twisted grin was her answer.

“There is actually some truth to that,” she went on. “These experiences have made you more connected to those distant prophets. They had moved among people who were very much like the ones you met. Their awe was your awe, their humility your humility. The difference is, all the faiths you encountered were cumulative in you. Each of those old prophets only received what each of them carried. They had an agenda of stamping out multiple faiths.”

He settled back in the armchair, his mind skipping back. “You asked about my teaching post. The one thing that has changed since I started is how I feel about the students.”

“How do you feel?” Major Dell asked.

“I see me as the old me, but I see the students as religious militants.”

“You effectively began your career in the clergy as a teenager,” she said.

“It was a haven.”

“Were you a militant?” she asked. “I’m sure you saw and felt passion when you studied at the St. Charles Seminary. Isn’t faith your own backbone and heart?”

“I felt safe there, and wanted,” he said. “And I had faith but not certainty. These young people—and I have not been around them since I was a young enlistee here—but they seem to be not distractible in their beliefs, just like the Iraqis. Enlistment in the Chaplain Corps is up. I think, or at least I suspect, that some portion of the American youth is hungry to become zealots. Maybe that’s a response to what they consider a threat to our way of life from the Middle East—I don’t know.”

“Perhaps they only seem that way against a backdrop of war,” Major Dell suggested.

“No, these kids are different,” he insisted. “They ‘blog’ about polarizing community issues and they get angry about things they read in other blogs. They bring cell phone cameras to rallies and post recordings of objectors on video websites. All of it is not only legal but they say it is justified, given the fervor of an adversary who challenges their faith and homeland.”

“You’re saying they target Muslims and you feel uncomfortable about that?”

“They target everyone, Major. Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists. This environment that should be inspiring is very unsettling.”

“Any religious collective goes through phases, influenced by charismatic people or events,” she said. “Students or acolytes in particular tend to be reactionary. We’ve seen that before, dating back to the Crusades—”

“They were waged with swords and arrows,” he said. “The Inquisition, horrible as it was, was waged with primitive implements in a geographically narrow realm. But you’re right. My students are like Raymond IV, Godfrey, and Tancred. They possess a level of aggressiveness that makes me feel like an outsider, or somehow a betrayer of the faith.”

“Do you find yourself emotionally drawn to their side? Or are you being pulled in the opposite direction?”

“I’m paralyzed,” he blurted. “I guess that’s what bothers me. I can’t move in any direction. I don’t
want
to root for one side over the other.”

“You want everyone to get along, like the truest Christian.”

“Yes.”