HAVING TO deal with an intermediary wasn’t common, but it wasn’t so uncommon that it gave Melinda cause for concern. Usually it meant the customer was married and/or a luminary in a prominent position, which in turn usually translated into more money, which was the case here. The intermediary-a Mediterranean type named Paolo with burn scars on his hands-had given her half of the $3,000 fee up front, along with the address of the corner on which she should be waiting for pickup-again, not her usual modus operandi, but money was money, and this money was far beyond her usual fee.
The most likely danger she faced was that the john was into something kinky she didn’t want to do. Then the problem became how to misdirect him without losing the date. Most men were easy that way, but once in a while you’d come across one with his sights stubbornly set on something perverse. In those cases-it had happened twice to her-discretion, she’d found, was the better part of business. Say thanks but no thanks, and get the hell out of there.
Statistically, there weren’t that many serial killers around, but about half of them killed hookers-all the way back to Jack the Ripper in London’s Whitechapel district. Ladies of the evening, in the elegant phrase of nineteenth-century England, took their johns to secluded places for a “knee trembler,” where a murder was easier than it was in the middle of a busy street, and so she and some of her colleagues had evolved a simple system of mutual security, sharing with one another the details of their dates.
In this case the car was a Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows. It pulled up to the curb, and Melinda heard the rear door unlock. The windows did not roll down. After a moment’s indecision, she climbed in.
“Why the tinted windows?” she asked the driver, trying to sound casual.
“To protect against the sun,” he replied.
Reasonable enough, Melinda had thought, keeping her hand near her purse, where she had a very old.25-caliber Colt pocket model automatic, nearly weightless at thirteen ounces. She’d hardly ever fired it, but it was fully loaded with seven rounds, with the safety on. Not exactly a.44 Magnum, but not a kiss on the cheek, either.
She checked her watch. They were thirty minutes out of town, she figured. Good news and bad news. A really private place was a good place to kill a whore and dump the body. But she wasn’t going to worry about everything, and her purse was only an inch from her right hand, and Little Mr. Colt was right in there…
The car took a hard left turn into an alley, and then another left into a condominium parking garage. A private garage rather than a communal one, which meant a private entrance to the condo. At least it wasn’t a trailer park. The people who lived in those frightened her, though they did not constitute her normal clientele. Melinda charged a thousand or two a pop, and $4,500 for overnight. The remarkable part was that so many were willing to pay it, which was a fine supplement to her regular job, receptionist at the headquarters of the Las Vegas public school system. The man got out of the car, opened her door, and offered her his hand as she climbed out.
Welcome,” called an adult voice. She walked toward it and saw a tallish man in the living room. He smiled pleasantly enough. She was used to that. “What is your name?” he asked. He had a nice voice. Melodic.
“Melinda,” she replied, walking toward him, putting a little extra sway into her hips.
“Would you like a glass of wine, Melinda?”
“Thank you,” she responded, and a nice crystal glass was provided. Paolo had disappeared-where to, she had no idea-but the atmosphere had disengaged her alarm systems. Whoever this was, he was rich, and she had ample experience with those. She could relax a little now. Melinda was excellent at reading men-what else did she do for a living?-and this guy was not threatening in any way. He just wanted to get his rocks off, and that was her business. She charged so much because she was good at it, and men didn’t mind paying because she was worth the money. It was a perfectly laissez-faire economic system well known in this area, though Melinda had never voted Republican in her life.
“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.”