Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  “No, thanks,” he said. “There are some things I want to think about.”

  Glenn stood watching Ricci’s impassive face from the aisle.

  “You don’t need to make this worse than it is,” he said. “Worse than it has to be between us, anyway.”

  “Sure,” Ricci said. “It’s just a big adjustment for me, flying with a babysitter.”

  Glenn hesitated a moment.

  “Suit yourself, man,” he said. “But I didn’t put you in this predicament. Didn’t ask for this job. We’re on it together—”

  “Like it or not?” Ricci said, and looked at him.

  Glenn shrugged. The plane’s turbines droned smoothly on around the low conversational voices of the executives behind him.

  “My only point’s that talking to each other wouldn’t hurt,” he said.

  Another moment passed. Ricci kept looking at him, his eyes as pale and blue as the untouchable sky outside.

  “Something needs to be shared,” he said, “we’ll talk.”

  Glenn considered how to answer, didn’t take long to conclude there was really nothing more to say. Ricci’s quiet, relentless antagonism could wear you down fast.

  He squared his shoulders into another shrug, but Ricci didn’t see it. His eyes had instead gone again to the window and whatever separate space might have drawn their attention.

  “Enjoy the view,” Glenn said, his level tone betraying only a fraction of his discouragement as he turned and carried his menu back to his seat.

  * * *

  The sun was at its midday zenith in a cold, sickly gray sky as Hasul Benazir strode from the Kiran building’s front entrance, crossing its paved and landscaped grounds on his way toward the mountain woods. He was covered in full UV gear, wearing a shielded headpiece instead of the sunglasses, hood, and draping face guard he had used on the dusk of his self-exposure. Based on the design of a motocross helmet, the headpiece with its Velcro collar ring and dark pull-down visor sealed him in more completely to provide a superior level of protection.

  Hasul would not have dared remove it for a moment this time. Even the bled-out light of a winter’s noon would ravage him, setting cancerous fire to his genes.

  Zaheer walked with him, his face clinched with unhappiness over what he perceived as an abrupt change in their plans. Hasul understood his reaction and would not fault him for it — why else had he kept the entire truth from him, but for having anticipated his discontent?

  Now they entered the forest growth, took a long slow natural path under the trees and down the slope, and after a time stepped out into a small, frost-browned knoll.

  John Earl stood at the far side of the clearing in his black leather coat, a watchcap pulled down over his head, a muffler around his neck. As they appeared he reached into a pocket for a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, slid its filter between his lips, held a disposable lighter to its tip, and smoked, looking straight across the open space between them.

  Zaheer turned toward Hasul as they stopped outside the treeline.

  “This one, he is dangerous,” he said, and tilted his head in Earl’s direction.

  Hasul nodded.

  “What we do is dangerous, and it can only increase the likelihood of success to use him,” he said. “Your contribution will not be outshone, rest assured.”

  Zaheer looked at him in tentative silence.

  “It is not for myself that I ask you to reconsider,” he said.

  Hasul reached out and placed a gloved hand on his shoulder. In a ventilator compartment at the back of his helmet, a small battery-powered airflow fan whirred softly to prevent his breath from fogging its visor.

  “Trust me and wait,” he said. “I will only be a short while.”

  His face dour, Zaheer did not answer.

  At that, Hasul lowered his hand, then turned and went over to Earl, the bare winter earth of the field hard and ungiving under the ridged rubber soles of his boots.

  “You found your way here without trouble, it seems,” he said, halting in front of him.

  Earl slid his cigarette between his lips, absently holding the lighter, rotating it in his hand.

  “Just an old country boy in the woods,” he said. “Long as I trust my feet, they’ll bring me to the right place by-and-by.”

  Hasul was silent, his attentive expression partially obscured by the UV helmet’s tinted visor.

  “Your vehicle,” he said. “You left it without being observed?”

  “At a gas-and-food stop about a mile down the mountain and east of here.” Cigarette smoke laced from Earl’s thin smile. “Thank goodness for McDonald’s, don’t know what anybody the wide world ’round would do without them.”

  Hasul looked at him. A gust of wind flapped the ultraviolet blocking fabric of his external garments. Overhead, the sun showed through a gap in the fast-moving clouds to send glancing rays off his visor.

  “I have more work for you,” he said.

  Earl shrugged, took a deep inhale off his cigarette, held his breath a moment.

  “I don’t ever like to say no a job,” he said, blowing smoke. “But I’m not half finished with the last thing. The little woman, you know she couldn’t give me what I needed. Didn’t have it in her head.”

  Hasul nodded.

  “That is why it is crucial to move forward with added urgency,” he said. “The situation is not what I thought it to be. Whether he is dead or alive, Patrick Sullivan meant to betray me the night of his disappearance.”

  “You’re sure of it.”

  “Certain,” Hasul said. “He had something of mine in his possession when he went to meet his contact. Items I did not suspect he knew existed.”

  “How’d he get hold of them?”

  “They were stolen,” Hasul said. “I have yet to learn how.”

  Earl looked at his helmeted face. A small mist of breath formed inside the UV shield and was almost immediately dried up by its airflow fan.

  “Can we talk free and open?” he said.

  Hasul nodded again.

  “It is the reason I chose to meet out here rather than at my office,” he said.

  Earl stood there smoking. The field around him dimmed and brightened under the patchwork shadows of the windherded clouds.

  “My guess is your other missing items aren’t more of those sapphires,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to tell me what they are?”

  “It will be necessary if you agree to the mission.”

  Earl looked at him, smoking. He seemed to just then realize he was still holding the Bic and dropped it into his coat pocket.

  “Mission,” he repeated. “I thought we were talking job.”

  “The word was of your choice, not mine,” Hasul said, meeting his gaze from behind the darkly tinted face shield. “In comparison, the whole of what you’ve done for me before amounts to a string of minor errands.”

  Earl grunted. “What kind of risk are you talking?”

  “High.”

  “And the money?”

  “Commensurate,” Hasul said. “A hundred thousand dollars, half on acceptance, the remainder upon completion. Payment in full would not be contingent upon a guaranteed outcome, but only the successful execution of your given role.”

  Earl looked at him. “My role.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s got the other?”

  “You will be assisted by Zaheer.”

  A few seconds fell away. Quiet, Earl remembered something Hasul had told him at the conclusion of their last appointment.

  “Later’s come up faster than expected,” he said. “But maybe your clock does it different from mine.”

  Hasul had continued to regard him through the dark glass panel.

  “I am the clock whose hand marks the hour,” he said. “And by my hand it comes as it is meant to.”

  Earl was silent, smoking, his eyes ranging out to Hasul’s sideman back over near the trees. These were some crazy people.
So crazy part of him wanted to get out of whatever Hasul was talking about before he even got in. But the money… the money was key. With enough of it a man would be able to open any door, get in and out of anything.

  Earl stood there another moment as cloud shadows fled beneath the sun. Then he finally snapped away the remnant of his cigarette and gave Hasul a nod.

  “Okay,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  * * *

  It was about half past noon and Avram Hoffman was at the Club, finished with Katari and going over the rest of the day’s appointments in his Palm computer’s date book. Farther down the long cafeteria table where he sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows, three men were bargaining over a parcel of mediocre diamonds — the Nadel brothers, who’d recently closed their retail business and moved into Internet jewelry sales, and an aging Hasidic broker named Taubman who’d come to show them his goods.

  Avram could hear their obligatory back-and-forth. One of the brothers, Yussel, complaining about Taubman’s asking price while pointing out deliberately concealed flaws he insisted had become visible under his loupe. Taubman insisting there were no such flaws. Nadel’s exaggerated umbrage at the denial. “This is fracture filled, you should take a look here in the sun.” “Maybe you should look at the lab reports.” “I don’t need to look at the lab reports.” “How can you say I’m supposed to look at my own diamond, if you don’t think you need to look at the reports?” “You want to hear what I say?” “If you’re going be more reasonable than your brother.” “I say my tuchis makes better reports every morning than that Thai grader you use—”

  Avram tuned them out with a surpassing disgust that bordered on contempt. The old broker’s reports, whatever artificial processing Yussel Taubman had or hadn’t seen in the dull light of an overcast January day… it all seemed recycled and trifling to him. He was moving up and on, and had heard enough of that sort of thing to last a lifetime.

  Avram took his cellular from his pocket. Besides wearing on his tolerance, the negotiations he’d overheard had reminded him of his intention to call the GIA lab and nudge things along there.

  The phone rang three times in his ear before Craig Brenner, the gemologist, picked up at the other end.

  “Avram,” he said, “I can’t talk right now.”

  “Was it clairvoyance or caller ID that told you it would be me?”

  “You decide,” Brenner said. “Look, really, I am too backed up to talk.”

  “This will only take a moment,” Avram said. “The sapphires…”

  “I promised I’d look at them right away, and that’s what I’m doing,” Brenner said. “Pushed you ahead of twenty other clients who are wondering if I’ve looked at their stones, and that’s including Tiffany’s—”

  “It was my brother-in-law’s company, not the Tiffany family, who gave your son his sponsorship at Brown University.”

  A pause, a sigh.

  “The golden rod again,” Brenner said. “You going to hold it over my head forever?”

  “Forever and beyond,” Avram said. “I’m in a great hurry.”

  “You’re in a hurry, I’m in a hurry, everybody’s in a hurry,” Brenner said. “Listen, Av. Turnaround for an analysis is usually a two-week minimum, and I’ve got an expert doing a Secondary Ion Mass Spec for you in two hours. That’s a quarter-million dollar unit I’ve tied up, plus his time, which isn’t cheap—”

  “You’ve already examined the sapphire yourself?”

  “I have, yes.”

  “And your findings?”

  “Obviously inconclusive,” Brenner said. “I’ve tested for specific gravity, run color filter and immersion tests, looked at them under a stereo microscope… the same kind of things you probably did at home. There’s no sign of heat or chemical color enhancement, and the crystallization patterns look natural, but it’s possible a specialized laboratory could make fools of us. Until the SIMS provides meaningful information on trace-element concentrations, we can’t be close to definitive. And even then, Avram, this isn’t an exact science. This tech’s so new, and the stone so rare, there just isn’t the kind of comprehensive database that allows for a hundred percent accurate comparison check.”

  “I can settle for something less than a complete grading for now,” Avram said. “Every journey begins with a small step.”

  “And the race is not to the swift.”

  Avram smiled wanly at that. “Craig… what do your eyes and experience tell you?”

  Brenner sighed again.

  “Early opinion,” he said. “I mean very early, got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “This stone looks like a moneymaker to me,” Brenner said. “I don’t know how you managed to raid the Maharajah’s tomb, but it’s either an authentic Kashmir, or the most magnificent fake ever produced.”

  Avram fell silent, his heart knocking in his chest, his hand suddenly moist with sweat around the cell phone.

  “Now that I’ve lit up your existence,” Brenner said, “is it okay if I get back to my mundane one?”

  Avram still didn’t say anything. A moment before he had glanced over at the Nadels, who were still quibbling with old Taubman’s prices. Now, suddenly, they seemed to vanish before him. Instead, he could see the talented guitarist from the subway the day before.

  Soon, Avram, thought, he would be free. As free, in his own way, as that young man had been.

  “Thank you, Craig,” he said at last. “I really do appreciate your help.”

  Then he ended the call to make another on the spot, thinking it would be none too premature of him to contact the Russian.

  * * *

  Leaving the shelter of the hut with its central fire pit, Yousaf accompanied the others a short distance through bitter wind and cold toward a mud-brick stable.

  He entered behind them and stood watching as the pack mules were saddled, harnessed, and loaded by their handlers, four hired Bakarwal nomads who would guide him out on his final passage from his homeland… one that had begun long days ago with the truck convoy out of Islamabad, and was soon to lead him across the northernmost strand of the Line of Command over high mountain trails negotiable only by foot and hoof.

  With Yousaf were a half dozen of the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba fedayeen he had met near Halmat at the outskirts of the sixteen-kilometer-wide military buffer zone between Pakistan and Indian-administered Kashmir. All but their leader, Farris Ahmad, would be climbing the steep valley slopes with him tonight.

  Yousaf leaned back against the wall of the stable, thinking. On his arrival at the fedayeen encampment — was it only yesterday? — he’d found a mixed group of political and tribal confederates, their practical alliance formed under the banner cause of Kashmiri independence. There were Sunni Dogras and Gujjars. Pashtuns from the vast Northwest frontier province. A considerable number were intelligence agents who had broken with the nation’s present government-by-coup and were Yousaf’s principal links to the fedayeen. He’d known some well enough to have called them by their first names; others were of familiar face. But life in the rough hills had so transformed them, it had been a struggle of sorts to recognize even those with whom he’d worked closely at the Directorate’s Karachi bureau.

  Yousaf had been particularly struck by how much Ahmad — once his immediate superior, now a chief among outlaws — had changed in the year since his sudden desertion from the ISID. The holder of an exemplary record, he had been a robust, dashing man with a small, neatly trimmed mustache; a perfect model of distinction in his starched, pressed uniform and spit-polished shoes. But the officer Yousaf remembered was a distant cry from the hardened guerilla who had welcomed him back at the Halmat camp, and led him here to the Bakarwal enclave. Like the fedayeen under his command, Ahmad was gaunt and leathery, his lips cracked from undernourishment, his wild, shaggy growth of beard bushing down from his cheeks to his chest. Also like the other fighters, he had on threadbare combat fatigues that showed signs of frequent and hasty mending, and scuffed, worn-at-the-he
el boots. And again, as did the rest, Ahmad carried a large backpack, multiple duffels, and a shoulder-slung Kalashnikov assault rifle. Distrustful of the profiteering nomads, some of his rebels had brought additional small and man-portable arms with them tonight, including RPG-7 launcher tubes.

  Yousaf continued to observe the activity around the mules from his spot by the stable wall. Betrayal, he mused, could come from many unexpected directions.

  This thought was still very much in his mind as Ahmad turned from the hurried preparations of the guides and approached him over the straw-covered floor.

  “I expect you’ll be on your way in the shorter part of an hour,” Ahmad said. He angled his head back toward two of the stalls. “The laser components are transported on different mules from your provisions, you see?”

  Yousaf nodded, looking past him at the splendid, barrel-chested animals. The Bakarwal had lashed wooden loading boards onto either side of their large-girthed saddles and were roping the precious cargo that would complete the Dragonfly cannon — boxed and bundled in canvas sacking — to the boards.

  “Travel over the mountains is never easy, especially in winter, but night can be your best friend,” Ahmad said. “The guides know the terrain walking blindfolded, and you have been favored by a three-quarter moon and starlight.” He regarded Yousaf. “There is also a surplus of food should it be needed — we’d expected you to arrive with at least one other man.”

  “And I would have, if the rangers outside Chikar had not forced me to set out alone and in haste.” Yousaf looked him in the face as he spoke his lie. “What are the chances of encountering more troops?”

  Ahmad continued to appraise Yousaf, seemingly lost in a moment’s thought. “An outside possibility always exists,” he said. “Of late my scouts have seen no signs of either the president’s forces or Indian security, however.”

  “And should that change?”

  “They will keep their eyes open and be in immediate radio contact with you,” Ahmad said. “If all goes well, you will be across the LoC and make your rendezvous with half the morning to spare. Should you be forced to leave the pass on either side, the mules have sufficient food, water, and ammunition on them to last many days. And we have amply stocked caves along the way you can quarter in for many more if the situation were to demand it.”