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  “This is very good wine,” she observed after a sip.

  “Thank you. One tries to be a good host.” He waved in a courtly gesture to a leather couch, and Melinda took her seat, putting her purse at her left side but leaving it unzipped.

  “You prefer to be paid the remainder beforehand?”

  “Yes, if you don’t mind.”

  “Certainly.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out an envelope, which he handed over. Twenty $100 bills, which took care of business for the evening. Maybe more, if he was particularly pleased with how things turned out.

  “May I ask your name?” Melinda asked.

  “You will laugh—my name really is John. It does happen, you know.”

  “That’s fine, John,” she responded, with a smile that would melt the chrome off the bumper of a 1957 Chevy. She set her wine down. “So ...” And business commenced.

  Three hours later, Melinda had taken the time to shower and brush out her hair. It was part of her après-sex routine, to make her client feel as though he had touched her soul. But that was a long reach for most men, and it was too long a reach for John this night. It would also wash away the smell he’d had all over him. The odor was vaguely familiar, though she couldn’t place it. Something mediciney, she thought, dismissing it. Probably athlete’s foot and something similar. Still and all, he wasn’t a bad-looking man. Italian, maybe. Mediterranean or Middle Eastern for sure. Plenty of those around, and his manners certainly suggested he wasn’t hurting for money.

  She finished dressing and walked out of the bathroom, smiling coquettishly.

  “John,” she said in her sincerest voice, “that was wonderful. I hope we can do this again sometime.”

  “You are very sweet, Melinda,” John answered, and then he kissed her. He was, actually, rather a nice kisser. All the more so that he produced another envelope with a further twenty $100 bills. For that he got a hug.

  This could be something, she thought. Maybe, just maybe, if she’d done her job right, she’d be invited back. Rich, exclusive clients were the best kind.

  She was adequate?” Tariq said after returning from dropping Melinda off.

  “Quite,” the Emir said, reclining on the sofa. More than adequate, in fact, he thought. “A vast improvement over the first.”

  “My apologies for that mistake.”

  “No apology necessary, my friend. Ours is a unique situation. You were being cautious—as I expect you to be.” The other woman—Trixie—had been ill-mannered and too practiced in bed, but those were traits the Emir could forgive. Had she not asked so many questions, not been so curious, she would have been safely returned to her street corner to continue her pathetic life—her only punishment not being asked for a return engagement. Unfortunate but necessary, the Emir thought. And a necessary lesson. Bringing Trixie directly to the house had been a mistake, one that he’d had Tariq correct by leasing the condominium; it would serve as a buffer, should they need to dispose of another harlot.

  “Anything before I go to bed?” he asked. They would spend the night here before returning to the house. Cars coming and going in the night tended to attract the attention of nosy neighbors.

  “Yes, four items,” Tariq replied, sitting down in the opposite chair. “One, Hadi is on his way back to Paris. He and Ibrahim will be meeting tomorrow.”

  “You reviewed Hadi’s packet?”

  “Yes. Four facilities in particular look promising. Our agent has worked at each of them within the last two years, and it appears security has changed dramatically at only one of them.”

  “Paulinia?”

  “Correct.”

  This made sense, the Emir thought. Petrobras’s facility there had been tasked with accommodating the new influx, which in turn required new construction—and this, he knew, was where the vulnerability lay. They’d seen it happen outside Riyadh in the ’70s and ’80s, a deficit of trained, competent security personnel to keep pace with expansion. Such was the price of greed.

  “It’ll be a year before their security has caught up.”

  “You’re probably right, but we are not going to wait to find out. Recruitment?”

  “Ibrahim is almost done,” Tariq concluded. “He reports he’ll be ready within two weeks. He’s proposed that Hadi be recruited for the team.”

  The Emir considered this. “Your thoughts?”

  “Hadi is reliable, that much we know, and there’s no question about his loyalty. He’s had some training in fieldwork, but little real-world experience beyond what he’s done in Brazil, which has been solid. If Ibrahim thinks he is ready, I tend to agree.”

  “Very well. Give Ibrahim my blessing. What else?”

  “An update from the woman. Their relationship is well established and she’s making progress, but she doesn’t think he’s quite ready to be reeled in yet.”

  “Did she offer a timeline?”

  “Three to four weeks.”

  The Emir mentally projected that on the calendar. Her information was the cornerstone. Without it, he would have to consider postponing for another year. Another year for the Americans to whittle away at their networks and for tongues to wag. And for someone somewhere to get lucky and stumble onto that one thread that would unravel the entire spool.

  No, he decided, it had to be this year.

  “Tell her we’ll expect it no later than three weeks. Next.”

  “A message from Nayoan in San Francisco. His men are in place and awaiting orders.”

  Of all of Lotus’s myriad parts and pieces, Nayoan’s had proven the easiest, at least the infiltration and preparatory phases. Student visas were relatively easy enough to come by, and easier still to acquire by someone in Nayoan’s position. Besides, as ignorant as Americans were about the world outside their own borders, Indonesians were for the most part seen simply as Asians or “Orientals” rather than as members of the single greatest concentration of Muslims on the face of the earth. Bigotry and narrowmindedness, the Emir thought, were weapons the URC was only too happy to employ.

  “Good,” the Emir said. “Tomorrow let’s review the targets again. If there are changes to be made, we should make them sooner rather than later. Next?”

  “Last item: You saw the news about the Tripoli embassy?”

  The Emir nodded. “Idiotic business. A waste.”

  “The planner was one of ours.”

  The Emir sat up, his eyes hard. “Pardon me?” Eight months earlier, word had been sent to all URC affiliates that cell-level missions were forbidden until further notice. Their current operation was too delicate, too intricate. Smaller operations—mostly near misses and low-casualty events—had their place in creating the illusion of disorganization and business as usual, but something like this . . .

  “What’s his name?” the Emir asked.

  “Dirar al-Kariim.”

  “I don’t recognize it.”

  “A Jordanian. Recruited from the Hussein mosque in Amman three years ago. A soldier, nothing more. The same mission was proposed last year by our people in Benghazi. We declined it.”

  “How many dead?”

  “Six to eight of ours. None of theirs.”

  “Praise God for that.” With no hostages killed, the Western press would quickly forget about the incident, and often where the press’s attention went, so, too, did intelligence agencies’. Such was the burden of fighting their “global war on terror.” They were the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

  “Do we know who he recruited?”

  “We’re looking into it. Also, we don’t know whether anyone survived the raid—except for al-Kariim himself,” Tariq added. “He didn’t participate, in fact.”

  “Imbecile! So this . . . nothing plans a mission without our approval, then botches it and doesn’t have the good sense or honor of dying in the attempt. . . . Do we know where he is now?”

  “No, but he shouldn’t be hard to find. Especially if we extend our hand. He’ll be on the run, looking
for safe haven.”

  The Emir nodded thoughtfully. “Good. Do that. Offer him an olive branch, but at a distance. Have Almasi handle it.”

  “And when we have him?”

  “Make him an example for the others.”

  34

  IN PARIS’S Montparnasse Arrondissement Shasif Hadi sat, sipping his coffee and doing his best not to appear nervous.

  As promised, his connection at Topanga Beach had made contact the day after their meeting and given him instructions where he should pick up the return packages, each of which he’d found at rented mailboxes in the Los Angeles area. He was unsurprised to find each package contained an unlabeled CD-ROM but was surprised to find a typewritten note attached to one of them—“Indiana Café, Montparnasse, 77 Av Maine”—along with a date and time. What Hadi didn’t know was whether this was simply another courier mission or something more.

  Algerian by birth, Hadi had emigrated to France in his early teens as his father sought gainful employment. Hadi spoke good French, with the accent of a pied-noir, a “black foot,” the name applied two hundred years before to French colonial citizens of what had been the French colony on the North Coast of Africa, erased in the early 1960s after a bloody and prolonged colonial/ civil war that the French Republic had more left than lost. But Algeria had not exactly flourished, and so the Arabs had exported millions of its citizens to Europe, where they had been marginally welcomed, all the more so in the last decade of the twentieth century, when they’d discovered their Islamic identity in a country that still held to the idea of the melting pot. Speak the language (pronounce the words properly), adopt the customs, and you were French, and the French race didn’t particularly care what color your skin might be. Though nominally a Catholic country, the French didn’t care what church you might attend, since they were not a nation of churchgoers, either. But Islam had changed that. Perhaps remembering the victory of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732, they knew that they’d fought wars with Muslims, but mostly they objected to the fact that Muslim immigrants rejected their culture, adopting modes of dress and customs that did not fit in with the wine-drinking bons vivants, and thus leaped out of the melting pot. And why would any man or woman not wish to be French? they asked themselves. And so the myriad French police agencies kept an eye on such people. Hadi knew this, and therefore made an effort to fit in, in the hope that Allah would understand and forgive him out of His infinite mercy. And besides, he was hardly the only Muslim who imbibed alcohol. The French police took note of this and consequently ignored him. He had a job, as a salesclerk in a video store, got along well with his workmates, lived in a modest but comfortable flat on rue Dolomieu in the 5th Arrondissement (“district” in Paris), drove a Citroën sedan, and made no trouble for anyone. They did not notice that he lived somewhat in excess of his means. The cops here were good but not perfect.

  Nor did they notice that he traveled a little, mostly within Europe, and occasionally met people from out of the country, usually at a comfortable bistro. Hadi particularly enjoyed a light red from the Loire Valley, not knowing that the vintner was a Jew who was a vigorous supporter of the State of Israel. Anti-Semitism was regrettably alive in France once again, rather to the pleasure of the five million Muslims who now lived there.

  “Mind if I join you?” a voice said near Hadi’s shoulder.

  Hadi turned. “Be my guest.”

  Ibrahim sat down. “How was your trip?”

  “Uneventful.”

  “So what do you bring me?” Ibrahim asked.

  Hadi reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the CD-ROM disks, which he passed over without attempting to hide the transfer. Trying to appear inconspicuous was often conspicuous in and of itself. Besides, if the casual stranger—or even a seasoned customs official, for that matter—were to see the contents of either CD, they’d find themselves looking at a digital slideshow of someone’s summer vacation.

  “Did you look at these?” Ibrahim asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Any problems with customs?”

  “No. I was surprised, actually,” said Hadi.

  “There are five million of us here. They cannot watch us all, and I keep a low profile. They think that a Muslim who drinks alcohol is not a danger to them.”

  Keeping a low profile meant that he never attended a mosque and didn’t frequent places used by Islamic fundamentalists, called “Integrists” by the French because “fundamentalist” was a term locally applied to Christian religious fanatics, who were probably too busy getting drunk to be a threat to him, Hadi thought. Infidels.

  “They mentioned a possibility of my role changing,” Hadi prompted.

  They were at a sidewalk table. There were people within three meters, but there was traffic noise, and the usual bustle of a big-city environment. Both men knew not to hunch over the table in a conspiratorial manner. That had gone out with 1930s movies. Much better to drink wine anonymously, smoke, and turn heads to look at the women passing by in their chic dresses and bare legs. The French could understand that readily enough.

  “If you’re interested,” Ibrahim replied.

  “I am.”

  “It will be different than what you’re used to. There is some risk.”

  “If God wills it.”

  Ibrahim looked hard at him for five seconds, then nodded. “Your trip to Brazil . . . How many times have you been there?”

  “Seven in the last four months.”

  “You enjoyed yourself?”

  “It was nice enough, I suppose.”

  “Nice enough to return if you are asked?”

  “Certainly.”

  “We have a man there. I’d like you to meet with him and arrange accommodations.”

  Hadi nodded. “When do I leave?”

  Got him,” Jack said, handing the pages over.

  Bell took them and leaned back in his swivel chair. “France?” he asked. “The birth announcement?”

  Exploring his suspicions about the URC’s sudden communication protocol change, Jack had backtracked and cross-referenced until he managed to strip away one of the alphanumeric handles, revealing a new name on the e-mail distribution list.

  “Yep. His name is Shasif Hadi. Apparently lives in Rome, not sure where exactly, but he’s a Muslim, probably Algerian in origin, and probably doing his best to stay under the radar. Been spending a lot of time in Paris.”

  Bell chuckled. “Probably the Italians have no idea he exists.”

  “How good are they?” Jack asked.

  “The Italians? Their intelligence services are first-rate, and historically they don’t mind doing some heavy lifting. Their police are pretty good, too. They don’t have as many restrictions on them as our guys do. They are better at tracking people and investigating background stuff than we allow our people to be. They can do wiretaps administratively, without a court order, like our guys have to do it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to attract their attention if I were breaking the law. It’s the old European way, they like to know as much about people and what they do as possible. If your nose is clean, they’ll leave you alone. If not, they can make your life pretty miserable. Their legal system is not like ours, but on the whole it’s pretty fair.”

  “They keep an eye on their Muslim population because there’ve been some rumbles, but not much more than that. You’re right, though: If this fellow’s a player, he’ll know to keep his head down, drink his wine, eat his bread, and watch TV like everybody else. They’ve had terrorism problems, but not too bad. If you go back to the OAS in the 1960s, yeah, that was a real problem once, and a scary one, but they handled it pretty efficiently. Pretty ruthlessly, too. The Italians know how to do business when they have to. So this Hadi—is he static?”

  “No, been traveling a lot in the last six months or so—here, Western Europe, South America. ...”

  “Where specifically?”

  “Caracas, Paris, Dubai ...”

  “Aside from that and the e-
mail, what makes you think he’s hot?” Bell asked. “You know, I got a call once from Comcast. It seems I’d been accidentally piggybacking on my neighbors’ Internet Wi-Fi. I had no idea.”

  “That’s not the case here,” Jack countered. “I checked it and double-checked it; it’s Hadi’s account. It originates from a German ISP based in Monte Sacro, a Rome suburb, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can access it from anywhere in Europe. The question is, why send it encrypted over the Internet when he could do it over the phone or meet the guy at a restaurant? Obviously the sender thinks it’s sensitive. Maybe he doesn’t know Hadi by sight, or doesn’t want to make a phone call or a dead drop—or maybe he doesn’t know how. These guys are wedded to the Internet. That’s an operational weakness that they try to turn into a virtue. They have a relatively small organization that is not professionally trained. If these guys were the KGB from the old days, we’d be in deep shit, but they’re using technology to make up for their structural weaknesses. They’re small, and that helps them hide, but they have to use Western electronic technology to communicate and coordinate their activities, and that’s fine, but we know they’re outside Europe, too. Crossing technology boundaries can be dicey. All the more reason to use couriers for the high-end stuff.

  “If they were a nation-state, then they’d have better resources, but then we’d be able to target them and their chain of command more efficiently. Good news and bad news. You can use a shotgun on a vampire bat but not against a mosquito. The mosquito can’t really hurt us badly, but it can make our lives pretty miserable. Our vulnerability is that we value human life more highly than they do. If we didn’t, then they couldn’t hurt us at all, but we do, and that’s not going to change. They try to use our weaknesses and our fundamental principles against us, and it’s hard for us to use those assets against them. Unless we can identify these birds, they will continue to sting us, hoping to drive us mad. Meanwhile, they’re going to try to leverage their skills—plus our technology against us.”