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By Root 880 0

They were like evil djinns in the way they could inspect a piece of evidence and turn all manner of magical information from it. You could never tell what they knew and how they could tie it all together. And his primary job was not to exist. No one was to know his name or his face. He traveled as anonymously as a desert breeze. The URC could stay alive only if it remained hidden. For his part, Ibrahim traveled on numerous unknown credit cards—cash, unfortunately, was no longer anonymous at all; the police feared those who used cash, and searched them out rigorously. He had enough passports in his home to satisfy a nation-state’s foreign ministry, each of them expensively procured and used only a few times before being burned to ashes. And he wondered if even this was precaution enough. It took only one person to betray him.

And the only people who could betray him were those whom he trusted absolutely. Thoughts like that turned over and over in his mind. He took a sip of coffee. He even worried about talking in his sleep on an aircraft during an overwater flight. That’s all it might take. It wasn’t death he feared—none of them feared that—but rather failure.

But were not the Holy Warriors of Allah those who did the hardest things, and would not his blessings be in proportion to his merit? To be remembered. To be respected by his compatriots. To strike a blow for the cause—even if he managed to do that without recognition, he would go to Allah with peace in his heart.

“We have final authorization?” Ahmed asked.

“Not yet. Soon, I expect, but not yet. When we separate here, we won’t see each other again until we’re in country.”

“How will we know?”

“I have an uncle in Riyadh. He’s planning on buying a new car. If my e-mail says it is a red car, we wait; if a green car, we move to the next stage. If so, five days after the e-mail we will meet in Caracas, as planned, then drive the rest of the way.”

Shasif Hadi smiled and shrugged. “Then let us all pray for green car.”

The office already had their name tags on the doors, Clark noticed. Both he and Chavez had medium-sized adjoining offices, with desks, swivel chairs, two visitor chairs each, and personal computers, complete with manuals on how to use them and how to access all manner of files.

For his part, Clark was quick to figure out his computer system. Inside of twenty minutes, rather to his amazement, he was surfing through the basement-bedrock-floor level of CIA’s Langley headquarters.

Ten minutes later: “Holy shit,” he breathed.

“Yeah,” Chavez said from the door. “What do you think?”

“This is a director-level compartment I just surfed into. Jesus, this lets me into damned near everything.”

Davis was back. “You’re both fast. The computer system gives you access to a lot of stuff. Not quite everything, just the major compartments. It’s all we need. Same thing with Fort Meade. We have a road into nearly all of their SigInt stuff. You have a lot of reading to catch up on. Keyword EMIR will let you into twenty-three compartments—all we have on that bird, including a damned good profile; at least we think so. It’s labeled AESOP.”

“Yeah, I see it here,” Clark replied.

“A guy named Pizniak, professor of psychiatry at Yale medical school. Read it over and see what you think. Anyway, if you need me, you know where my shop is. Don’t be afraid to come up and ask questions. The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask. Oh, by the way, Gerry’s personal secretary is Helen Connolly. She’s been with him for a long time. She is not—repeat not—cleared into what we do here. Gerry does his own drafting of reports and stuff, but mostly we do it verbally at his level of decision-making. By the way, John, he told me about your restructuring idea. Glad you said it; saved me from bringing it up.”

Clark chuckled. “Always happy to be the bad guy.”

Davis left, and they got back to work. Clark went first to the photos they had of the Emir, which weren’t many and were of poor quality. The eyes, he saw, were cold. Almost lifeless, like a shark’s eyes. No expression in them at