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By Root 824 0

in all manner of bad habits to their hearts’ content. John finished his candy bar and walked back to the tunnel entrance. As before, the down escalator seemed to go halfway to hell, and he blessed whatever architect had specified the moving walkways. Clark was old enough to appreciate it. He remembered not to frown at what he thought of as a blown mission. Partially blown, anyway. They knew things about this subject that they hadn’t known before, including a photo. He liked to travel under a Jewish cover, almost clever but a little obvious. Jews and Arabs were genetic cousins, after all, and their religious beliefs were not all that disparate—furious as both were even to consider such a thought, of course. Christians, too, all People of the Book, so his Saudi friends had explained it to him once upon a time. But religious people generally did not commit murder. God might not agree. In any case, his current job was to fly back to The Campus. He waited for the jetway door to be closed and watched the twin-engine airliner back away from the terminal, then turn under its own power for the taxi out to the runway. Three hours to Vegas? Maybe a little less, over Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, to the city that celebrated sin. And on from there to where? John wondered. Wherever it was, he wouldn’t be finding out anytime soon. Well, this whole mission had been on the iffy side, and he couldn’t be too disappointed that it had turned into a washout. And what the hell, they had some photos of the mutt. He found a counter that offered him a ticket back to BWI in ninety minutes. He called ahead to make sure someone would be waiting with a car.

Hadi, in seat 1D of his flight, considered the menu as he sipped his complimentary white wine—it was better in Italy, but that was no surprise—and he chided himself for an unseemly discrimination in his nose for wine. The ground below was mostly flat, with a few strangely green bull’s-eyes, which, he’d learned, marked the rotary irrigation systems American farmers used in the prairie states. This area had once been called the Great American Desert by explorers. It was the world’s bread-basket today, though other deserts, real ones, lay ahead, beyond the mountains. Such a large, strange country this was, full of strange people, most of them unbelievers. But they were people to be wary of, and so he had to watch himself and his conduct every minute, even more than he had in Italy. It was hard on a man never to relax, never to let down his guard. With luck he’d be able to relax when he met his friend, depending on the next stop in his flight. How strange that he’d never learned where the Emir lived. They’d been friends for many, many years. They’d even learned to ride horses together, at the same time and place, at a very young age, attended the same school, played and run together. But the wine took its toll, and he’d suffered through a long day. His eyes grew heavy, and he drifted off to sleep as night overtook the aircraft.

Clark boarded another airliner, took his first-class seat, and closed his eyes, not to sleep but to run his mind over the events of the day. What had he done? What things had he done wrong? What had he done right, and why had it not mattered?

The short version was manpower. The Caruso boys seemed competent enough, and Jack did fine, but that was no big surprise. The kid had some good instincts. Heredity, maybe. All in all, not a bad op, given how hastily it had been assembled. They’d known he was headed to Chicago. Better to have split into teams of two and then forwarded the photo electronically to make it easier to carry forward? Could they have done that? Technically possible, maybe, but just because it might have been possible didn’t mean it would have worked. Stuff like this, you wanted multiple backups, because random chance could not be depended on to do anything but screw things up. Hell, carefully planned stuff could not be depended on, even with ample manpower composed of trained professionals. The enemy didn’t even have to be professionals for random events