Ask the average person what he thinks "going off the grid" means, and he'll tell you something about catching a Greyhound bus in Wilmington, Delaware, getting off in Bozeman, Montana, hiking up into the mountains, building a shack out of bark, and going without electricity, a phone, or anything else that links you to the digital cosmos. He has it only half right.
Going off the grid in my world means two things. Step one: Systematically erase all "stable indices" in your life. No credit cards, no checks, no cell phones, no calls to family or anyone else who could be tied to you in any database. I'd already executed most of step one, or more accurately, the thief on the plane had: getting rid of my true-name passport. The cash had freed me of credit cards. Carthage Voyages and Yuri was another step in the right direction. There was no database in the world that could connect me to them. (I'd never reported either to headquarters, although have to admit I couldn't eliminate the possibility that Yuri had reported his
contact with me to Moscow.) Skiing into Italy meant I left no border prints, either.
Step two is just as important: Create a virtual identity in another place, preferably another country. You need to give your pursuers something to Jdo, waste their time and money, and irritate the hell out of local authorities with leads that don't go anywhere.
[l dozed off for yet another long sleep and woke to find the boat stopped Uead in the water, engines idling. It was dark, eleven at night by my watch. I was half amazed in my stupor at the humanlike cries of the seabirds, and khen I realized they weren't birds at all. We were docked. Larnaca. Cyprus. ¦ grabbed my jacket-everything I now owned-and went up on deck. The 0)emopolis or whatever we were now called was deserted. A parade of roaches the size of field mice led the way down the gangplank.
I'd spent enough time in and out of the harbor to know that this close to midnight, immigrations and customs would be closed, or at least dozing. I could have walked out of the port unchallenged, but I needed to start fcstablishing a virtual persona here. I pounded on the door of immigrations lor at least ten minutes until some bleary-eyed guy with his shirttail out ileepily recorded the arrival of Eamon Mooney, stamped the Irish passport, and let me through without a word.
From there, I checked into a suite at the Flamingo Beach Hotel, then faent back out to cruise Larnaca's run-down waterfront until I came to Pcottie's, a scabby imitation-pub watering hole for sunburnt and homesick wits. At the end of the bar were three twenty-something girls partying, one Prunette and two blondes. I sat next to the bemused blonde in a pink sPaghetti-strap tank top.
"Eamon," I said, sticking out my hand, nodding to her two friends.
"What kind of Yank has a name like Eamon?" she asked. Australian to Ae bone.
I pulled out a wad of bills, bought a round of drinks for the four of us. [Hie brunette and the other blonde took their drinks and wandered off, 'eaving Alice to me.
Alice was from Alice Springs, although maybe that was just to help her
remember both sides of her story. She'd just quit her waitressing job and was blowing her savings on a one-way trip to London-via Cyprus-where she hoped to figure out life.
By the time the bartender started to pull down the metal shutters an hour or so later, Alice was too sloshed to walk on her own. I helped her out the door, and by the time we got to my hotel, I was practically carrying her. The desk clerk at the Flamingo didn't give Alice a second look.
Up in my room, I tucked Alice in and sat down on the corner of my bed. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
I called my old office near Tysons Corner, hoping someone would be working at least to closing time. Jake was-just the guy I'd hoped to talk with.
"Max, what happened to you?" He pretended to be pleased to hear from me.
"I'm in Larnaca. On my way to Jeddah. I need a favor."
Silence.
"I need to see Rafik Hariri. Know anyone who knows how to get in touch with him in Jeddah?"
Hariri was Lebanon's prime minister, although he'd made his fortune in Saudi Arabia. Even after he became prime minister, Hariri spent a good part of his life in Saudi Arabia. A lot of Lebanese considered him a paid agent of the Saudi royal family.
"I wouldn't go near him, especially you, especially now."
"I'm on to something. Something I've been after for years. Hariri holds the keys. Isn't there some ex-case officer who works in Hariri's Jeddah office?"
In fact, I knew exactly who I was talking about: Bill McGuiness. I could see him clear as day charging down the halls, always looking straight ahead, never acknowledging anyone. Ex-Marine. Silver-blond hair. Every other word was fuck.
"You mean that crazy bastard who snarled like a mad dog?" Jake said. "Bill something."
"That's it. Bill McGuiness. Got a telephone number for him?"
"Sorry."
I "It's okay. I'll find him. But if you can think of anything, I'm at the lamingo in Larnaca." What was going to happen within the next five minutes was that Jake?ould walk into his new boss's office and relay my conversation word for rord. The new boss would then call the Counter-Espionage Center, setting ff a blizzard of one-page memos about Max Waller's going off the reser-ation. The seventh floor would go on full alert, especially after Counter-rspionage produced my spiral notebook and the Peshawar photo as Exhibit A. What better evidence that I was still after the Buckley grail.
Headquarters would easily buy off on the story line that I was on my way to Saudi Arabia to see Hariri. Hariri ran his own private intelligence service. As prime minister of Lebanon he could tap into all sorts of official Lebanese intelligence bases. He was in a position to dig up something on Buckley. But just as useful for my misdirection, as far as the seventh floor was concerned, I couldn't be in worse company.
After Bill McGuiness was fired for gross incompetence, he spilled every
secret he knew to Hariri. He came close to being indicted. On top of it,
Hariri was despised on the seventh floor. In Jeddah in the early seventiesback when he was a procurer of girls and liquor for the Saudi royal familyhe'd openly cultivated connections to the CIA, using them as a platform to
claim to the royals that he was a conduit to Washington. (Hookers aside,
Hariri's reporting turned out to be all lies, and headquarters eventually
dumped him.) Now that he was a prime minister and a triple A-list player
in Washington, pouring millions into K Street lobbying firms, Hariri had
¦ set himself up as the avowed enemy of the CIA, dumping on it at every
party he attended. The way headquarters would look at it, having Bill
McGuiness, Hariri, and me together in Saudi Arabia was the perfect storm.
There'd be meetings all day tomorrow at Langley, followed by calls to
the Cypriots and the Saudis. My bet was Alice's wake-up would be a cop
I pounding on the door. They wouldn't find me, but I wanted them to think
I they knew where I was going and why. It would take them a month to figI Ure out I wasn't on my way to the Kingdom.
Just to make sure no one missed the lead, I wrote Alice a note and propped it on the dresser: "Had to pop over to Jeddah a couple days. Please stay. Restaurant etc. is at your disposal. Eamon."
Downstairs, I left a thousand-dollar deposit with the desk clerk and asked him to make me a reservation to Jeddah on the first flight. While I waited for a cab to the airport, I borrowed the desk clerk's computer and logged into the e-fax site I'd left with Chris Corsini: one last unfinished piece of business before I disappeared.
Chris had come through: an eighty-six-page list of all Webber's cell calls for the previous three months. The evening Webber sacked me he'd called three numbers. One, in San Diego, he'd dialed six times. A quick reverse-directory check told me it was Applied Science. That's exactly what I'd expected. The second number was one in Maine. The reverse directory listed a post office box as an address, but no name to go along with it.
The third number Webber had called that evening I didn't need to look up: It was Frank Beckman's house.