Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [99]
“You’re part right. In Miami this scheme would never fly. Houston and New Orleans, ten miles before I even reached the coast, drones would shoot Hellfire missiles, turn my yacht into flotsam, and ask questions later.”
“But not in Mobile?”
“Think of Mobile as the Groupe Islamique Armé of port cities: It’s big, but no one knows much about it or really cares much about it. Cares enough, I ought to say.”
Qatada shrugged. “Even in such places, the Americans can afford to give every other port employee a palm-sized gamma-ray spectrometer and litter the docks with sniffers and ICx rovers and probably many other new detection devices that we do not even know about.”
“But there’s almost nothing along the other hundred-something miles of coast.”
“Except the Coast Guard and the Customs and Border Protection agency. You don’t think al-Qaeda has spent thousands of hours trying to find holes there? Djamel has spent millions of dollars on computer simulations alone.”
As a twelve-year-old, Bream had been undefeated in Tennessee Chess Association junior play, but he had dropped the sport in high school in deference to his image. Still he thought like a chess player. Now he saw checkmate in two moves. “The key is, I’ll be cooperating with Coast Guard and CBP from start to finish,” he said. “They’ll have had me on transponder and satellite the whole time I’m in the Caribbean, plus five kinds of radar on top of that as soon as I get close to U.S. waters on the way home. A foreign national can expect a Custom and Border Protection ‘welcome committee’ on reaching Alabama waters. But most of the time, all a good ol’ American boy’s gotta do is check in with the CBP folks with a phone call, which I’ll do during the night—they close at five every day. One in thirty times, they summon you across the bay to the commercial docks for an inspection the next morning, in which case I’ll risk offloading the device before I go. One in ten times, they come to your marina for a look-see the next morning. But even if that happens, I’m still good because the ADM’s concealed within a specially modified housing that does to spectrometers what fresh-grated bell pepper does to bloodhounds. And most of the time, all the CBP folks do is call you and say, ‘Welcome home, sir.’ ”
And there it was, Qatada’s smile, at full wattage. Although pleased, Bream looked down so that no one would remember his face, too.
The CIA’s New Headquarters Building, a pair of six-story towers of sea-green glass, could have been mistaken for a modern museum. Hardly the dark fortress that Charlie, in the Hyundai’s passenger seat, had been expecting. At the wheel of the rental Corbitt was whistling the tune of “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”
Although it was two in the afternoon, Charlie would have believed it was early evening, a consequence of the enervating trip from Martinique more than the overcast sky. A nagging sensation that he’d overlooked a clue to Bream’s plans had kept him from sleeping.
As he extricated himself from the subcompact car, his eyes smarted from fatigue, and his reflection in the window shocked him: In the gray flannel business suit and dark overcoat the consulate had procured for him, he resembled his father in old photos.
He and Corbitt proceeded through a colossal arching entryway to the skylit lobby. Feelings of inadequacy buffeted Charlie, making the bitter wind an afterthought.
Leaving him with Eskridge and a young analyst at the door of a secure conference room, Corbitt said, not entirely in jest, “They only sent me along to make sure you didn’t stop at a racetrack.”
“But I have a hunch I’m missing something,” Charlie said after detailing the events of the past few days. “What if India is a decoy? What if the real target is somewhere else, maybe even somewhere in the United States?”
Across the conference table, a giant surfboard rendered in aquamarine glass, Eskridge shared a look with the analyst, Harding Doxstader, a twentysomething version of his boss. Their look made Charlie think of parents who’ve just been informed by their child about