Joshuas Hammer km-8 Read online

  “Anything in your station files?”

  “I looked, but I didn’t find anything.”

  “Okay, it might be nothing,” Adkins said, clearly not meaning it. He glanced at McGarvey who was content to let him run with it for now. “What’s this number you mention?”

  “Bin Laden gave it to me just before I left. It’s not a phone number, but it obviously means something.”

  Adkins handed the report to McGarvey, who looked at it. “He didn’t give you any explanation?”

  “He said that we’d figure it out.”

  “What do you want to do, Alien?” Adkins asked.

  “First of all I want some solid bargaining points that I can bring back to Khartoum.”

  “Do you think he’d agree to another meeting?”

  “I think so—”

  “That’s out,” McGarvey cut in sharply. “I’m putting you on the Middle East Desk, and if we do set up another meeting it won’t be with you, Alien.” He and Adkins exchanged a significant look that Trumble caught.

  “What am I missing?” he asked.

  “Nothing for now,” Adkins said. “Do you think that you can come up with a name for this face?”

  Trumble wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but he let it slide for the moment. “That’s the other thing I wanted to try. I’d like to take this to Otto Rencke. We might be able to develop a recognition search program. At least we could narrow down the list of possibilities.”

  “Good idea,” McGarvey said. “You can get Otto started this afternoon. In the meantime what are your vacation plans?”

  “That depended on my new orders. We were going to hang around Washington for a couple of days to see the sights, and then if there was time, see my folks in Minnesota.”

  “Your kids have never really seen the states,” Adkins said. “Dan was born in Baghdad, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah. But we’ve been back a few times to Duluth.”

  “You oughta go down to Orlando, Disney World. It’s a little hot this time of year, but after Riyadh it should be a piece of cake.”

  “They’ve talked about it.”

  “That’s a good idea,” McGarvey said. “Take a couple of weeks, and when you get back we’ll have personnel find you a place to live. You’ll be looking at some eighty-hour weeks.”

  “I hate to walk away from this.”

  “I’m not handing out charity, Alien. You’ve earned the desk, and right now I need your expertise here, not in Riyadh.”

  “Yes, sir.” Trumble closed his attache case, and got up.

  McGarvey understood his frustration. “There is another factor out there, an important one. But it’ll hold for a couple of weeks. Knowing wouldn’t do you any good on vacation in any event.”

  “Just something more to worry about?”

  “Something like that.”

  When Trumble left, McGarvey called down to Otto Rencke to tell him what was coming his way. He also read off the twelve-digit number. “Bin Laden gave this to Alien. Find out what it is, Otto. It’s top priority.” Trumble was a very good man; intelligent, knowledgeable and sensitive. But he was an academic, and nothing more than an academic, who should never have been given a field assignment in the first place.

  “What do you think, Dick?” Adkins had gone to the fridge for a Coke. “Two possibilities. Either bin Laden is getting tired of hiding out and wants to come back to the real world, or he’s stalling us.”

  “I meant the serial number. If it’s what I think it is, we could be in trouble.”

  Adkins stared out the window, almost as if he was sorry that he was here and he wanted to escape. He was a short, somewhat paunchy man who had fought a weight problem all of his life. He had light, wavy hair and a pale complexion. Sometimes like this morning he looked as if he had been sick for a long time. “Are we going to send somebody else to talk to him?”

  “I don’t think we have any other choice under the circumstances.”

  Adkins turned back, his eyes washed out. “Who?” he asked quietly. He knew the answer, but he didn’t want to say it.

  McGarvey didn’t respond. A snatch of something from Voltaire ran through his head. The problem is that common sense isn’t so common after all. But what good was common sense, McGarvey wondered, in dealing with a madman who’d dedicated his fortune and his life to one thing-killing Americans? All his life he had been witness to some very bright people making the most stupid of mistakes, himself included. He did not want to repeat the errors, especially not this time.

  Office of Special Research

  Otto Rencke had been trained as a Jesuit priest and professor of computer sciences and mathematics, but he’d been kicked out of the church for having sex with the dean’s secretary on top of the dean’s desk. His life after that had been one series of scrapes with the law after another, because he was a genius, he didn’t respect authority and he thought that he knew more about computers than anyone else in the world, which he probably did. In between troubles he had done some very good and very serious work for the CIA, bringing the Agency into the twenty-first century, and he had worked on a number of projects with McGarvey. But he’d been bored. He’d simply been playing games; with the world, with the projects he’d been assigned, with himself. The fact of the matter was that he had no idea who he was, what was driving him or where he was going. A lost soul, his mother had called him on the day she and her husband had kicked him out of the house for good.

  It wasn’t until McGarvey became DDO and brought Rencke back into the fold that the forty-one-year-old maverick finally came into his own. He had finally found the one thing he’d been looking for all of his life: a family; someone to love him, someone for him to take care of, to fight for, to be with.

  When Trumble walked in on him in his third floor office, he was sitting on top of a table that was strewn with computer printouts, running his delicate fingers through his long, out-of-control, frizzy red hair.

  Trumble knocked on the doorframe. “Mr. Rencke?” He’d heard about the assistant to the DDO for Special Research, but he’d never met the man, and until this moment he’d disbelieved almost everything he’d been told as simply too fantastic, too bizarre.

  “Bad dog, bad dog. My father’s name was Mr. Rencke, and he was the baddest dog of all.” Rencke hopped down off the table and practically bounded across the room to shake Trumble’s hand. He wore faded blue jeans, a dirty MTT sweatshirt, and unlaced black high-top sneakers, showing bare ankles that looked as if they hadn’t seen soap and water in a month. But his grip was light, and his wide blue eyes were so intense, so deep, and so utterly warm and filled with intelligence and childlike good cheer, that Trumble couldn’t help but smile. “You call me Otto, I call you Alien. Saves a lot of time that way, ya know.”

  “All right, Otto. I just got in from Riyadh, and Mr. McGarvey thought that you might be able to help me with something.”

  “The name is Mac, and you’re lying. It wasn’t his idea, it was yours.” Rencke started to hop from one foot to the other, something Trumble had been told he did whenever he was happy or excited about something. “Trumble, Alien Thomas. Born Duluth, Minnesota, 1960. Parents Eugene and Joyce — solid folks. Poli-sci and psych double majors, University of Minnesota, magna cum. Masters in psych, then the Company recruited you from a fate worse than death in dull, dull, boring hidebound academia.” He grinned, his mouth pulled down on the left. “Hidden talents. Farsi and a dozen Arabic dialects. You have the gift, and we’re all desperate for gifts, ya know. Married to Gloria Porter, kids Julie sixteen, Daniel twelve, apples of then father’s eye, tests off the charts in every embassy school they ever attended,” Rencke stopped in midstream and gave Trumble a strange, pained look, almost as if he’d suddenly seen something so terrible it was beyond words. “What was he like? In person, I mean. Bin Laden.”

  Trumble was at a loss for words. Rencke was overwhelming.

  “Come on, Alien, reticence is dull. First thing pops into your head.”
>
  “Gentle,” Trumble said, not knowing where that had come from.

  “Gentle?” Rencke prompted.

  “Cobra.”

  “Cobra?”

  “Venemous.”

  “Venemous?” Rencke prompted again, continuing the word association.

  Trumble blinked, knowing exactly what Rencke was looking for. The only true knowledge, that worth having, was sometimes to be found only in the subconscious. “He’s a dangerous man because he’s smart, he’s rich, he’s dedicated and he’s completely filled with hate. It’s his religion, and he has more followers now than Jesus Christ had two thousand years ago when he was out among the people spreading the Word. When he looks at you through those hooded eyes, he’s as mesmerizing as a king cobra.”

  “Kamikazes in the flock?”

  “You can bet on it,” Trumble said. “He’s got people around him willing to give their lives for the jihad. Without hesitation, without even giving it a second thought, except

  that they would be gaining an early entry into the gates of paradise.”

  “Gotcha.” Rencke broke out into a broad grin. “That’s the guy we’re looking for. The unarmed man sitting in the corner drinking tea while all around him the troops were twitching.”

  “Okay, how do we do it?”

  “We’re going to generate a 3-D computer model of his face, his build, his mannerisms, anything you can remember no matter how small — just like the old police IdentiKit drawings — and then my darlings will go hunting. From time to time a candidate should pop out of the slot and I’ll fax it to you.”

  “I can stick around—” “Bzzz. Wrong answer, recruit. The boss says you’re on vacation, and this might take some time.”

  Trumble had to shake his head. Being around Rencke was like being in the middle of a white tornado; it left you breathless and wondering if your feet would ever touch the ground. Trumble had, in the back of his heart, figured that he was pretty smart. But Otto was smarter, a lot smarter than anybody he’d ever known including a couple of Nobel docs at the U. of M. It was almost disquieting. Thank God the man was on our side, he thought.

  Rencke started hopping from one foot to the other again. “Do me a big favor, would you, Alien? Just one?”

  “Sure, if I can.”

  “Disney World. Magic Mountain, the roller coaster. Keep your eyes closed the whole time.”

  Trumble laughed. “Okay, — but why?”

  “I always wanted to do that,” Rencke said dreamily. “When you come back I want you to tell me what color it was. I’m betting red.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  EPCOT

  Orlando, Florida

  He’s a fool.” Ban Yousef put the satellite phone back in his bag, a look of disgust on his dark, narrow features. He understood the meaning of his orders. Killing Trumble and his family had to be made into a statement of terror. Strike fear into the hearts of everyone who witnessed the attack, or heard about it, here of all places, at America’s mecca for families. But the risks were great.

  “You should be careful what you say,” Rachid Walid warned. “If we are given an order, then we must carry it out, because he knows what he’s doing. We’ve come this far together, and if we die now it will be glorious.”

  Yousef knew that nothing was foolproof, but he could think of a dozen different methods to accomplish their goal with a much greater chance for their escape afterward. He wasn’t concerned about doing the job, he’d done a lot more difficult things, in Berlin, and Beirut, and Paris, and even in New York. But it was getting away so that they could fight in another place, on another day that worried him. He wasn’t an ignorant country boy like so many of the others, he had gone to school for two years at the American University in Beirut, so he could think beyond the moment. He shook his head in frustration.

  “Hamza knows his duty,” Omar Zawattri said from the back of the van. “He’s waiting for us where he should be waiting, just like we planned. He has never failed before.

  And by the time the authorities respond we well be a long way from this godless place.”

  They made a second pass down the Kangaroo row where the Trumbles’ rented light-blue Toyota SUV had been parked since nine this morning. If the family followed the same routine as they had for the last four days, they would be leaving the park around 6:00 p.m. to return to their Dixie Landings hotel a few miles away but still on the Disney property.

  Yousef checked his watch. It was already five o’clock. “Find us a parking place where we can watch the shuttle bus. We have been given the go-ahead.”

  Walid, who was driving, glanced over and grinned. Two of his front teeth were missing, and fool that he was he refused to see a dentist in Jersey City where’d they’d lived for the past three years, because he couldn’t find a doctor who was also a man of God. He would not have an infidel attend to him. In the meantime, in Yousef’s estimation, he looked like an ignorant Bedouin. He had never blended in, which made him dangerous.

  Seven hundred meters across the still mostly full vast parking lot, the dimpled silver ball that was the symbol of EPCOT rose sixteen stories into the hazy blue sky. They had been told that small carts took people up inside the globe where at the very top they were given the illusion that they hovered in outer space looking down at the earth. One part of Yousef wanted to disbelieve such fairy tales, but living in America for so long he had seen plenty of other fantastic sights, so that another part of him thought the stories might be true. One of the truck drivers working for their cover company in Jersey City had told them that anything is possible in America, so maybe this was true. But none of it was worth so much as a tiny desert village, because of the godlessness. But that would change, and sooner than any of them expected. Insha’Allah.

  Trumble was nearly dead on Ms feet. Five solid days of being on the go had gotten to him. He sat on a bench with Gloria in the shadow of Spaceship Earth, the EPCOT dome, waiting for the kids to come out. It had been a beautiful week, although the weather was way too humid after the years he had spent in the desert climates. The crowds in the park had been as heavy as Adkins had warned they would be. Kids were on summer vacation, and this was the ultimate family playground. But what surprised him was how efficiently everything was run. Sure there were long lines for every attraction, but the lines moved pretty quickly so that they’d never had to wait much more than twenty or thirty minutes. And another thing amazed him. With all those crowds everyday he’d expected to see a lot of litter, maybe even some graffiti and broken things, or worn-down paint. He’d watched for it, but the entire huge park looked almost brand-new, the same as Magic Kingdom. Perfectly mowed lawns, beautifully arranged flower beds and topiaries. Everything was clean and neat, everybody smiled, everybody was having a good time. It was impressive, and a far contrast to the rigidly defined structure that the Saudis imposed on their people; and it was even worse in the other Islamic countries where they’d lived. He was a Middle East expert, but he decided that he wasn’t going to miss living there very much. Coming home was going to be a new start for them.

  “A penny?” Gloria asked, contentedly. She’d been a CIA wife for seventeen years, and until recently had always gotten along wherever they were assigned. But Saudi Arabia had gotten to her. He could see that now. She’d taken the news that they were pulling out with a mixture of surprise, and relief, and finally some suspicion. Transfers weren’t done so suddenly unless something was wrong. But she’d not made a point of it so far. The only blot on their vacation was the kids. They had been at each other’s throats for five days. Nothing was right. There were too many people. It was too hot. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do. Julie wanted to spend money on clothes, and Danny wanted to do nothing other than play video games.

  He smiled. “A hot shower, clean clothes, one very cold martini, something fishy for dinner — maybe lobster — and two quiet children.”

  “They’ll be okay. Alien. This has been a big change for them. They dreamed about it for so
long that now that they’re here they can’t take it all in.”

  “Maybe they’ll drown each other in the pool tonight and we can start all over again,” Trumble said. Gloria laughed at the back of her throat, like she did when she was happy. She hadn’t done that for a long time, and Trumble felt a stab of guilt.

  “I wouldn’t go through that again for all the oil in OPEC.”

  “Tea in China,” he corrected. “At any rate, twelve and sixteen, we’re almost home free.” He shrugged. ” “Course there’ll be college bills, a couple of weddings, grandkids.”

  Gloria reached over and kissed her husband. “It’s going so fast, Alien. I’m glad we’re home.” She gave him a look that she wanted to be serious now. “Are you going to be okay with this move?”

  “It’s a promotion.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Are you going to get wanderlust in a few months, reading reports from places we’ve been — where you think you still belong?”

  Trumble thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “I probably will,” he admitted. “But it’s time for us to come home, sweetheart. And all kidding aside, being with you, Julie and Danny, and being back home like it used to be, beats Riyadh hands down.”

  Gloria was watching him closely. “You almost said safe. Back home and safe.”

  “That too.”

  A dark cloud came over her face. “Can you tell me what happened, Alien? Why they won’t let us go back even to pack our things?”

  “No.”

  “Were we in some danger over there?” she demanded sharply.

  Trumble had never been a very good liar, which was another reason, he knew in his heart of hearts, that he was never a very good spy. An expert, an administrator, an analyst, but not a spy.

  “There was a possibility, and I mean a remote possibility, that something might have happened, maybe a kidnapping or something like that. That’s why McGarvey pulled us out the way he did.”

  “How about here? Are we in any danger?”

  Trumble looked into his wife’s eyes, certain now that their troubles were finally behind them, and told her the absolute truth as he knew it. “Not unless Mickey Mouse turns out to be a rat and bites us.”