SUDAN
Navigating under cover of night’s darkness with their sophisticated GPS systems, the pirates had pulled their long, flat cargo barges to shore at Zula on the Bay of Arafali, some 50 kilometers south of the far busier port of Massawa, with its commercial dhow and tourist boat traffic, American naval base, police stations, and railway line. Thousands of years in the past this tiny Eritrean village had been an extension of Adulis, a major center of trade within the vast and influential Kingdom of Aksum, later to be known as Ethiopia. In the modern era, with the great empires fractured and degraded, their glory crumbled into sand, it was a sparsely populated belt of semiarid Sahel, with the thatch huts of its native tribesmen dotting the land near occasional springs and wadis, and stretches of featureless dun-colored terrain, over which archeologists would bump along in their 4x4s while heading toward the ancient ruins and excavations a stone’s throw to the north.
Standing very straight in his desert camouflage uniform, his hands planted on his hips above a nylon web belt-its pistol holster on the right, an ammunition pack on the left-the commander moved his gaze along the dockside, where half the total consignment of Zolfaqar MBTs and ANSAT/Sharaf combat helos had been discharged onto waiting heavy equipment transports. He would have preferred receiving the arms and equipment in a single delivery, and expedience was hardly his principal reason. It would be a sufficient challenge to get the trucks across the border without detection even once; twice invited complications and escalated the already considerable risks. But the pirates had wisely transferred the shipment from its original Ukrainian freighter onto a pair of smaller barges, and there had been restrictions on the size and weight of the loads those aging vessels could carry. That aside, the commander himself had corresponding practical and logistical limits. Seventy-five feet long from end to end, his giant tractor trailers could travel between 400 and 600 miles cross-country at a fair enough clip given the inhospitable desert landscape, their 500-horsepower diesel engines fueled by massive driver- and passenger-side gasoline tanks. Still, it would take two trips to move all the materiel to the staging ground, whatever quantity the pirates were able to bring with them tonight. The bottom line was that he had just so many available trucks.
Now he reached for the canteen strapped over his shoulder, removed its cap, and took a drink of tepid water, swishing it around his mouth before he gulped it down. It was now almost two o’clock in the morning, six hours since the Hangarihi had guided the barges ashore and deployed their off-load ramps. His men had since driven the Zolfaqars onto the trailers and put their backs into manually rolling the helicopters from the barges on metal tow carts, grunting and sweating as they hastened to complete their arduous work so the convoy could set out with many hours of darkness still ahead.
Lined along the gunwales of the barges, the Hangarihi had watched the laborious effort as if it were a relaxing diversion, smoking and drinking whiskey from tin flasks, the tips of their cigarettes glowing like orange fireflies in the night. They had offered no assistance after their cargo had been unlashed from its pallets, and the commander and his men had expected nothing else from them. In delivering his plunder without delay, their leader had stuck to his end of the bargain when he could have simply made off with the loot, using the raid on the yacht of Hassan al-Saduq as justification to go into hiding. That alone had earned him a large quantum of respect. With its easily defended coves and grottos, the Somali coast was a rabbit warren where he could have laid low indefinitely…not that it would have been his single best recourse. In the pirate boom-towns that were the underpinnings of the country’s new economy, Nicolas Barre would be treated as a king in his stronghold, and the people there would go to any lengths to shelter and protect them from legal authorities or any other threats.
The commander heard the growl of powerful engines coming to life, twisted the cap back onto his canteen with long, graceful fingers as he saw his chief lieutenant, Mabuir, striding toward him from the line of HETs. Although Mabuir had not shied from assisting in the off-load, it did not escape the commander’s notice that he looked crisp in his beret and field uniform. A great deal had changed about his fighters since the events at Camp Hadith-or the best of them, at any rate.
The reason was no mystery, and the commander credited himself for recognizing that the first step in preparing his force for what lay ahead would be to alter its composition. He had winnowed out the incorrigible brutes, the ones who were addicted to the adrenal highs of unbridled destruction and its spoils…who knew only the way of the gang and were incapable of restraint and strict obedience to his authority. Although the rest had lost none of their ferocity, it was as if their basest urges had been expunged, seared away in the cauldron of that blood-soaked raid. The commander himself had no qualms about what he had done in retrospect, and would have been surprised if any of his followers, to a man, recalled their actions that night with the faintest tinge of regret…not the killing, not the burning, not what they had done to the young American woman. But he managed to instill them with a discipline and purpose that went beyond the primal lust for combat, a sense of larger mission, which would be imperative for all that was to occur next. His goal, his driving motivation, was to reclaim for Africa what was African-its very lifeblood, a source of unsurpassed power that outsiders had drawn from its sand through conquest and subjugation and had used to further their own global dominance.
The Americans, the Russians, and recently the Chinese…their empires had risen as those on this continent had fallen into stagnation and decay. Risen to unthinkable heights on their broken souls and spines. But the reality they took for granted was about to be struck by the thunder and lightning of change, the geopolitical puzzle they had pieced together swept from the table at which they sat, its pieces scattered helter-skelter around them. With the commander leading a charge none of them could foresee, a new Pan-Africanism would be born.
Oil-it was the lifeblood of the earth, pulsing through the heart and veins of every contemporary superpower. Control its flow and you controlled them. Control them and you quite simply became supreme.
Some called him the Exile, and he did not object to that term in the least-in fact, its sublime irony amused him. When in times past had the visionary achieved recognition before the products of his imagination, his revolutionary dreams and ambitions, were actualized?
Simon Nusairi felt as if the entire arcing trajectory of his life-the fall from privilege to ignominy and disgrace for his refusal to accept complacency, his family’s rejection and ultimate denial of his rightful heritage, his embracing the role of pariah and outcast as a form of liberation, and finally his regenesis as a master gamesman and warrior-had been preparation for the great redemptive achievement that lay ahead of him.
He would soon shake the world in his fist. Grab it by the throat and shake it. And he would not release it from his choke hold until they acquiesced to his demands…
“Sir, we are ready to get under way on your orders,” Mabuir said, tearing him from his thoughts.
The commander nodded, glanced at the tarpaulin-covered equipment. “Give everything a last inspection… I want to be doubly certain the tanks and helicopters are well secured for the trip. The tarps as well. Everything. It’s best we take precautions now to avoid delays than have to proceed in fits and starts.”
Mabuir gave a brisk military salute. Nusairi gave no outward display of satisfaction, but for him it was yet another affirmative sign that the ragtag band of fighters he’d pieced together had been tightened into a legitimate armed force. He returned his lieutenant’s gesture and then reached into his field jacket for his satellite phone.
“Hello?” On the first ring.
Nusairi gave a thin smile. The leader of the so-called Darfur People’s Army was another of those in for a surprise. There would soon be no more room for his breed of minor insurgents; they would fall into step or else. But that was still something for the future.
“Ishmael,” he said. “I take it you have been waiting for my call.”
“Yes,” Mirghani said. “How could it be otherwise?”
“And the American?”
“He has retired to my guest room. Whether he sleeps or not is another story. But I confess to envying how he manages to be calm under most circumstances…or act as if he is, at any rate.”
“Well, he has substantial cause to relax,” Nusairi said.
“The shipment came as arranged?”
“Precisely.” Nusairi was gazing at the assembly of transport vehicles. “It is already aboard our trucks and set to move west over the border.”
“This is the most encouraging word I could have gotten tonight, my friend,” Mirghani said, breathing an audible sigh of relief. “After the news from Cameroon several days ago…”
“Put it out of your mind,” Nusairi said. “It was of trifling consequence in the broader scheme of things.” He paused in thought. “I would recommend that you knock on the American’s door and pass on your recovered optimism. It’s my expectation that he will in turn want to convey it to his puppeteer in the United States.”
Mirghani’s chuckle was slightly uncomfortable. “I don’t believe he would appreciate your characterization of him…or the one to whom he answers.”
“It makes no difference,” Nusairi said. “For all his bluster, he is a hand puppet to be waggled on his master’s fingers. A pawn who does as he is told. Let him reassure the one who makes him twitch and jerk that we are on course.”
“I will update him immediately,” Mirghani said. “ Allah ma’ak, may God be with you on your journey.”
Nusairi pocketed the phone without a word of farewell. Mirghani was a fool. Another narrow-minded separatist warlord, one of dozens used to firing potshots at Omar Bashir and one another while crouched out of sight behind rocks or inside burrows. If the opportunity arose, he would resort to licking the soles of Western boots in exchange for a fiefdom through which he could parade at will, lording over his flatterers and subjects, strutting about like a peacock with his tail feathers outspread for their admiration.
Grunting to himself, Nusairi walked toward the convoy, gave it a quick once-over, then climbed into the passenger seat of the second truck and radioed the order to move.
A minute later its oversized wheels began to roll.
Playing with her sat phone to kill time aboard the cramped, grimy train from the railway junction at Atbara to Port Sudan, Abby Liu had found a Google search result that read, “The Road from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum.” When she’d clicked on the link, she’d come upon a color photograph of a young man standing thigh-deep in an infinite vista of powdery gray sand, a set of barely distinguishable tire treads running between him and the camera lens. Besides the blue screen of sky overhead, and those old, faded tracks, nothing disturbed the barrenness of the near or far horizons.
She’d smiled thinly at the online snapshot, then nudged Kealey in the seat next to her, holding the phone out to show him the image, thinking whoever had posted it had a caustic sense of humor…and that it might help break the silence in which he’d sat staring out the window for hours.
He had glanced down at it expressionlessly, shrugged her off, then turned back toward the dust-filmed window.
“My apologies, Ryan,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Interrupt the grinding monotony of this ride,” she said. “I mistakenly thought you might appreciate it.”
Kealey said nothing for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “We need to get to where we’re going,” he said. “This is like, I don’t know…”
“Being stuck in sand?”
He studied her face. And this time a smile ghosted at his lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose that’s as good a way of putting it as any.”
She nodded, a gleam in her slanted brown eyes.
“Something else you find amusing?” Kealey asked.
It was her turn to shrug. “We can only do what we can do,” Abby said quietly. “That doesn’t include shrinking the desert or laying highways across it-so where’s the use in brooding over our situation?” She took her voice down another notch so the local travelers packing the aisles couldn’t hear it. “I count us damned fortunate to have gotten this far without any snags.”
He grunted. In fact, she was right. Ferran’s arrangements had gone beyond holding the ferry’s departure for them; Gamal, his fixer at the Aswan pier, had gotten them past the Egyptian customs and immigration officers and onto the boat without a single one of them so much as glancing at their documents. Gamal had assured Kealey there likewise would be no hitch at all when they reached Wadi Halfa the next day, and true to his word, things had gone smoothly, the blue-uniformed Sudanese customs men moving them from the ferry onto the waiting train with alacrity. In that sense, the two thousand dollars Kealey had used to grease Ferran’s palm had seemed an absolute bargain.
The problem was that he had not considered that the railway trip to Khartoum aboard the antiquated, slow-moving Sudanese train would take over two days. It had been an oversight that had little bearing on things, since there had been no faster means of transport available to them. The only remedy, using the word loosely, had been to alter their planned route and switch to the Port Sudan line at the Atbara junction. In the port city, they would have the option of hopping a plane to Khartoum or motoring down a paved road-and after a phone call to Seth Holland, the Agency man at the embassy, it had been determined that he would dispatch one of his staff there to meet and drive them down into the capital, once again staying away from the unwanted scrutiny of air security personnel. Which was all well and good. But still…
“I have to remind you about Cullen White,” Kealey said, looking at Abby. “The man is calculating, and quick on his feet. Once he hears about Saduq being in custody, he’s going to put two and two together.”
“He can’t possibly know you’re involved.”
“He doesn’t have to,” Kealey said. “All he does have to do is get a whiff that something about the raid on Saduq’s yacht-or his being held out of sight-deviated from what’s SOP with Interpol or the EU task force. I think that’s already happened, and I’m pretty sure the same thought must have crossed John Harper’s mind more than once. I guarantee White won’t be waiting around for the sky to fall on his head. Whatever he’s been working on, we can expect he’ll very quickly start looking at contingencies. And that means ways to shift into high gear.” He shook his head. “This holdup is about the last thing we needed. Doesn’t matter if we were stuck with it from the get-go…I wish I’d at least seen it coming.”
Her features serious, Abby sat beside Kealey in private thought as the train clanked along over obsolete wooden railroad ties, the blackness outside its windows no more uniform than the sandy landscape visible by day. Around her, passengers rustled in their sleep amid heaps of shabby-looking baggage and loosely packed cartons.
“We’re in far from an ideal spot. I won’t quibble with you there,” she said at length. And then hesitated, still looking contemplative. “Ryan, this probably doesn’t need stating, but we’re very different. I don’t work like you. I’m used to careful planning, gathering of evidence, adherence to rules and process…”
“And you’re wondering what happens when we do reach Khartoum,” Kealey said.
She simply looked at him, and he all at once recognized something in her expression that he had not seen there before, a kind of vulnerability that caught him off guard.
“I wish I could tell you,” he said, whispering now. “But I won’t lie, Abby. I have no idea beyond what I said in Limbe. We’re going after Ishmael Mirghani. We came into the game late…and I get the feeling that we’re close to being out of time. All I know is we’re at the stage where we’ll have to wing it again, and it means we’ll have to hit the ground running-”
“And do whatever’s necessary,” she said, finishing the sentence.
Kealey gave her a long glance, studying her face, and was surprised to find himself wishing he could say something to relieve the unsettled look that continued lingering over it.
But he could not give that much of himself. Try as he might, he could not. And instead he turned away from her, his eyes returning to the window and the black emptiness into which it seemed he’d been staring for an unendurable eternity.
Jacoby Phillips had spent almost an hour tailing Ishmael Mirghani through Khartoum in his ten-year-old blue Saab SPG, having picked him up when he’d exited his suburban home in the northern section of Bahri, leaving a short while after the man who had once introduced himself to the American charge d’affaires as James Landis slipped out a back entrance and then turned onto a side street from the rear garden.
Phillips had watched Landis hasten down the street from Mirghani’s yard, then climb into a waiting Ford Escort, which had promptly driven off toward the highway, heading in the general direction of the Kober Bridge, or Armed Forces Bridge-which, he’d realized, was the most direct route to the airport. Although Landis was not Phillips’s assignment, the CIA agent had taken a video capture of him entering the black sedan with his DVR cell phone, making sure to get a close-up shot of its plates. He’d then relayed the encrypted file to his colleague Bruce Mackenzie, whose job was to stay on Landis, using the Agency’s secure Intelink-SCI wireless intranet, and continued cooping about a half block from Mirghani’s house.
After about ten minutes Mirghani emerged from his front door, carrying a hard-shell briefcase, strode a few blocks to the bus station, and got on the express shuttle to the downtown area. Staying close to him, Phillips slowed down as he boarded, and then eased along three car lengths behind the bus, following it past the Kober Bridge, which Landis’s vehicle had taken, and then over the old Blue Nile suspension bridge for the short ride across the river.
Mackenzie had spotted the black Escort within minutes of receiving Phillips’s e-mail and video attachment, having waited just a few blocks away from Mirghani’s home, outside an area of landscaped trees and lawn along the riverside. The CIA agents had known it was just a matter of time before one, the other, or both of their birds flew the coop, and their assumption had been that they would do so separately. It would have been a source of intensely curious attention had the Muslim radical and his unlikely Western visitor left there together at the peak of U.S.-Sudanese relations; for them to do so now in plain sight was incomprehensible.
In fact, Mackenzie had thought, the same could be said about their relationship, period. Whatever link had formed between those two could mean nothing but trouble.
As he’d borne west from Mirghani’s neighborhood, the Escort had gotten on the highway belting the Nile and then swung onto the Kober Bridge’s wide concrete span. Mackenzie, driving a Honda, had followed it past Al Salaam Park and then the Burrii Cemetery to the traffic circle, where it had turned right onto Buri Road toward the turnoff to the airport.
Moments after the Escort made the turn, however, its driver unexpectedly hit his left signal, slowed, and then pulled onto the shoulder of the two-lane access road and came to a complete halt with his flashers on. Caught by surprise two cars behind it, Mackenzie saw no recourse but to continue straight ahead toward the airport. What else was he supposed to do? Stop behind the Escort? Of course, that was out of the question and just underscored the realization that anything besides driving on past the car would have been an outrageous giveaway. But what the hell had happened? There’d been no sign that the Escort was having car trouble. No sign it had gotten a flat tire. And he had been careful to stay far enough behind so that Landis and his driver would not suspect they had anybody on them.
Mackenzie sighed in disgust and resignation. Whatever reason the Escort had for stopping, the real problem was that there was nobody available to take his place on its ass; Phillips was the only other man on the job, and his gig was to stay with Mirghani. He figured the least conspicuous thing he could do now would be to go on to the security checkpoint up ahead, show his diplomatic ID to the guards, then turn toward the arrivals terminal as if he was picking someone up there and simply leave the airport through an alternate route. The only excuse they would have for busting his chops would be that he wasn’t in a car with official plates, but he had a registration certificate to show this was his personal vehicle…which happened to be the absolute truth.
As he approached the checkpoint, Mackenzie reached across the dash to get his documents out of the glove box, simultaneously glancing into his rearview mirror just to see what was up with the Escort.
And then his eyebrows lifted in surprise. Landis’s car had doubled back around the way it had come after making a U-turn on the access road. And its blinkers were no longer flashing.
Mackenzie cursed aloud behind the steering wheel. What in fucking hell was going on? All he could figure was that Landis had decided to return to Mirghani’s home for some reason-unless, of course, he’d actually, and inexplicably, realized he was being followed in spite of every precaution Mackenzie had taken. It was hard to imagine…though he couldn’t think of a third explanation that held the slightest bit of water.
He tapped his brakes, slowing for one of the guards as he left his booth at the lowered barriers. Mackenzie’s preferred explanation for what had occurred would be that Landis had in fact returned to his point of origin for a reason having nothing to do with his being followed…and obviously so, since it would mean he hadn’t caught on to it and would allow Phillips to resume keeping a lookout on him-perhaps even long enough for Mackenzie to get back on the job.
A minute after passing through the checkpoint under the leery eyeballs of the security guards, he reached for his sat phone and punched in Phillips’s number, hoping the Escort had reappeared at Mirghani’s place.
The word from his partner, unfortunately, wasn’t close to what he’d wanted to hear.
“Bruce, what’s up?” Phillips asked, answering his sat phone.
Mackenzie gave him an aggravated, profanity-laced rundown of what had happened on the airport road and asked if the Escort had gone back across the river to Bahri.
“No,” Phillips said. “Or not to Mirghani’s, anyway. He’s already left. I’m behind him on the Blue Nile, near the southbound exit ramp.”
“Shit on ice,” Mackenzie said. “How am I supposed to fucking break this to Holland?”
“Any way you want…as long as you do it,” Phillips said. “It’s one thing if Landis knows somebody’s on him. There are candidates galore-for all he knows, it could be the Sudanese. But if he realizes it’s us, or even suspects it, we could have bigger problems.”
Mackenzie grunted in his ear. “Okay, got you,” he said.
“Another thought,” Phillips said. He’d left the bridge and gotten onto El Geish Avenue, the main thoroughfare into the middle of Khartoum. “You might want to run some traces on the Escort and see what turns up. You got that vid I sent, right?”
“Yeah,” Mackenzie said. “I did.”
“We have the car’s plate numbers, then,” Phillips said. “You never know, they might lead to something.”
“Or someone,” Mackenzie said. He sighed. “Guess I ought to abort the tail.”
“May as well, unless you intend on hanging around the arrivals or departures terminal all day and hoping your man eventually crosses your path, which sounds like a crapshoot to me. Even if he heads back to the airport and you’re lucky and wind up in the right place…if he made you once, he’ll be on the lookout for you again.”
Mackenzie expelled another breath. “I’m heading toward the exit now,” he said. “Goddamn, Jake, where’s this leave us?”
Phillips looked out his windshield. The road here in the city proper was already crowded with bakassi, or unlicensed minibuses run by private operators, and he had to be careful not to lose the bus he’d been shadowing as they weaved in and out of the lanes between them. “With Mirghani, for the moment,” he said. “Look, traffic’s getting heavy and I want to stay on the ball. I’ll be in touch later. Out.”
“Out,” Mackenzie said. He signed off, then turned toward Ebed Khatim Street on the western side of the airport. “And fuck Landis and his whore of a mother, assuming the scumbag has a mother,” he added into the silence of the car.
“We should be in the clear, Bakri,” Cullen White told the driver, glancing at his wristwatch. “But let’s make it quick now. I don’t want to miss my flight.”
The man behind the wheel nodded and then pulled out from the parking area on the University of Juba campus, near Africa Street. From there an access road led directly to the airport, approaching it from the east rather than the north, where White had been when he’d noticed the Honda behind him.
He had always considered his photographic memory as much a curse as a gift. Once he saw a face or heard a name, he would not forget it. He never needed directions to a location-or around it-after paying it even the briefest visit. He’d always learned easily in school, not just because he could remember the contents of what he read, but because he could call to mind how the words had appeared on the page or computer screen. In a flash, he could go back to the experience of making love to a woman decades before-the sensations he’d felt, the look in her eyes, the sounds and whispers of their mounting pleasure. He was equally able to savor the taste of revenge long after it had been taken on an enemy.
These were some of the blessings.
The curse was remembering-no, reliving — in totality his mistakes, his failures, and the pain of embarrassment, dishonor, and ostracism. He understood the value of taking one’s lessons from the past. But having to carry it with him like some sort of ghost whose essence dwelled within his very cellular material-that was too often an unwanted burden.
Today, however, White was not about to complain about his eidetic memory. Were it not for the vivid accuracy of his memory, he might not have recognized the gray Honda sedan that had been following him from the greenbelt across the Blue Nile near the entrance to the Kober Bridge. Recognized the car or its driver. For he had seen both for no more than two or three seconds weeks ago, when he had been entering the U.S. embassy in Khartoum for a sit-down with Walter Reynolds. As he’d turned from the street to the embassy steps, the car had been swinging from the avenue in front into the curb cut on his right, which in turn led to the ramp that went down to the facility’s underground parking garage.
There had been nothing exceptional about that moment. Nothing he could quantify about why it was imprinted on his synapses. But when he’d noticed the car behind him today, he had recognized it-its plate number, its minor dents, the fact that only three of its four tires were whitewalls, and that the all-black tire also had a slightly different type of hub. He couldn’t explain why he remembered. It was just that way for him.
The man in the Honda was a worker at the embassy. His nominal post wasn’t of any importance. As far as White was concerned, it only mattered that he had been put on his tail-and that he was almost certainly a CIA plant within the embassy staff. The question was…what did it mean in the broad scope of things?
The press had attributed the Limbe raid on Hassan al-Saduq’s yacht to an Interpol-EU antipiracy operation. It had directed its questions and criticisms about the arms merchant’s unexplained, and seemingly extrajudicial, disappearance while in custody at the investigative task force and the Cameroonian authorities. The coverage about the motive behind the attack, and its legality, centered on civil liberties issues.
There was no mention of Agency involvement, no reason anyone in the press would suspect it…but the press didn’t know what White knew about the deal that had been taking place aboard the boat.
His suspicions had been right all along. His and Stralen’s. Somebody in Washington had sniffed out what was going on. That meant a schism had arisen between DCI Andrews on one side and POTUS, Stralen, and Fitzgerald on the other-and not just in terms of foreign policy. If the details of their plan were uncovered, there would be more, much more, for the press to write about than the questionable legalities of a weapons peddler’s arrest in Cameroon. It would be the biggest political story to hit the international headlines in years and would likely topple everyone involved. Most especially General Stralen.
Stralen…if what he’d done was fully uncovered, he would be labeled a traitor. A conspirator to a crime many would find reprehensible. There would be no debate over extenuating circumstances, as with the planners of Iran-Contra. No chance of redemption. Historians would cast him with the likes of Benedict Arnold, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Wilkes Booth. His name would go down in infamy.
White cut free of his thoughts as Bakri slowed to a halt at the first airport checkpoint, fishing his papers out of his travel bag, then reaching over to hand them to the driver. A minute later the guard passed them back through the Escort’s lowered window and waved the vehicle through.
“Bakri, you’ve done your job well while I’ve been here,” White said as the driver returned his documents to him. “There’s no higher compliment I can offer.”
Bakri thanked him with an appreciative nod and swung to the left, following the signs to the Sudan Airways departure terminal.
As they neared the drop-off area, Cullen White took hold of his bag and slid over toward his door, waiting for the car to stop. The time for reflection was over. History could shine whatever light it might on the legacy of someone like Joel Stralen. But White knew only one thing-he owed nothing to anyone but the general. He himself had no moral constraints. He didn’t care a whit how the world remembered him, or if it remembered him at all. Posterity was outside his realm of consideration. He was a role player, a man who worked out of sight in the interstices of power and politics, who lubricated the gears of machinery others saw the need to construct, who did whatever it took to see a mission through from inception to execution. That was it.
You’ve done your job well… There’s no higher compliment I can offer.
White had sincerely meant what he said to his driver. And soon he would be on his way to Kassala to meet up with Simon Nusairi’s strike force, where he intended to at last finish the job General Stralen had entrusted him to do.
He hoped that he, too, would prove worthy in the final accounting.
The third most senior of Seth Holland’s handful of Agency personnel, Jacoby Phillips was the only member of his staff who did not reside at the embassy, but rather occupied an apartment suite at the sprawling and elegant Hotel Granville on the banks of the Nile, where he held the titular position of resort manager. Owned by the Brits since its establishment, the Granville had been Winston Churchill’s preferred choice of room and board on his trips to the country during the colonial era, and it had continued to accommodate international businessmen in the many decades since Sudan gained its constitutional independence.
When Holland had requested an operative for placement outside the embassy’s confines in the late nineties, Phillips had been an ideal candidate for the assignment. Much of it had to do with his background. Of mixed cultural descent, he had inherited his Ethiopian mother’s gingery brown skin and was born and partially raised in London, where his white-as-crumpet-dough father had run a large air transport firm before the family’s eventual relocation to New York. Even before the current flare-up between the United States and Sudan, Caucasian foreigners, especially from the U.S. of A., had been regarded with heavy suspicion and hostility by many locals, whose anti-Western fervor had been on the rise for decades. However, if you were black-or looked black like Phillips, who resisted defining himself according to race, being equally proud of both sides of his heritage-there was at least a chance you would receive more civil treatment than people with white faces, although it could sometimes contrarily provoke an antagonistic backlash among elements of the population who regarded black Americans as sellouts to Western culture and ideology.
Phillips figured you could never totally win at the race game no matter what country you were in, but being a black man still beat the hell out of being white in Khartoum, and how was that for a turnaround? As he had learned soon after accepting the post here, his skin color and multiethnic background made it a challenge for the ignoramuses on the street to figure out what particular slurs to hurl at him, and, more significantly, for radical Islamic terrorists-among them members of al-Qaeda, which had been a major player in the neighborhood before Omar al-Bashir had fallen into its disfavor for expelling certain rabble-rousing mujahideen-to decide whether they ought to attempt to rob him, take him hostage, and/or murder him for the sheer sport of it.
But Phillips had other things to think about now. The bus carrying his man had reached the city center and had stopped to discharge its passengers about five blocks west of the Souq Arabi. Phillips stayed on Mirghani as he walked in the general direction of the city’s commercial hub, saw an open parking space along the curb, and pulled in while he had the chance. The traffic here remained tolerable, but he knew the streets and avenues would grow exponentially more congested as they got closer to the souq, with its businesses and outdoor markets. From here on out it would be easier to follow him on foot.
Phillips exited the car and started up the busy sidewalk, remaining 10 yards or so behind the political leader. He was wearing a navy sport jacket, tan slacks, and a white shirt with what appeared to be his credit-card-sized Hotel Granville photo identification clipped to its breast pocket. The card was outwardly indistinguishable from his usual ID unless examined closely by a discerning eye, at which point it indeed might be possible to see the photographic lens in front camouflaged by the hotel’s logo. While Phillips wasn’t nearly as in love with gadgets as many of his colleagues, he would have admitted to finding the eight-gigabyte digital video recorder a clever and useful spy tool, particularly when coupled with the cell phone digital recorder he’d used earlier in his surveillance.
After three blocks Mirghani came to the Al Shamal Islamic Bank and turned inside. Phillips found this somewhat serendipitous, since the Granville’s employee accounts-including his own, since he drew an income from the hotel in addition to his CIA paycheck-were at the same institution. He could therefore find a legit reason for being inside the place while keeping tabs on his mark.
Once inside the bank, Phillips was quick to observe a couple of things that were interesting enough to make him finger the tiny record button on his ID card cam. The first was that there were three men waiting for Mirghani just past the door. All wore traditional Muslim garb and had the wary demeanor of trained bodyguards. The second was that after briefly conferring with them, Mirghani had gone right over to the carpeted area alongside the banking floor, where the officers sat at their desks. A guard had immediately shown him to one of the officers, while the guards who’d met up with him hung back on the banking floor…their watchfulness convincing Phillips his initial impression of them had been accurate.
Phillips found a customer counter that gave him a good vantage of the officer’s desk, parked himself there, and took his DVR phone out of his pocket. He preferred it to the ID card cam for this situation, since he would not have to conspicuously stand facing Mirghani to record his images, but could position himself-and the phone-at different angles while pretending to have a conversation.
Mirghani and the officer wasted no time commencing with their transaction. After a courteous exchange at his desk, the bank officer gave him some papers to fill out and then led him off down a short hall behind the tellers’ stations-Mirghani bringing his attache case with him. Waiting for him to reappear, Phillips put away his phone contraption, took a withdrawal slip from a rack, and began filling it out. The trio of guards just stuck around near the officers’ area, making no attempt to look like anything but what they were.
Phillips, who in contrast to the guards very much wanted to blend into the woodwork, then got on the longest teller’s queue he could find. When he was better than two-thirds of the way to the window and Mirghani still hadn’t reappeared, he glanced down at his withdrawal slip, feigned realizing he’d made an error on it, then went back to the customer counter for a replacement and begun writing out another. That gave him several extra minutes of waiting around without being noticed.
It was all he needed. Less than half an hour after entering the bank, Mirghani and the officer emerged from the hall into which they’d gone off together and shook hands, the officer going back to his desk, Mirghani rejoining his bodyguards with his attache.
As the four men left the bank, Phillips tore up his withdrawal slip, deposited it in a trash receptacle, and trailed them out to the street. Mirghani and his escorts did not return to the bus station but went the opposite way, toward the gold market. As Mirghani and two of the men entered one of the exchanges lined along the sidewalk, a third went on up the street and disappeared around the corner. Phillips remained outside the exchange, his phone in hand.
The third guard returned about ten minutes later in a white minivan, double-parking outside the gold exchange. Shortly afterward, Mirghani left the exchange with the other guards and entered the minivan. Though he was still carrying his attache case, the guards who’d entered the gold exchange with him were now toting a pair of larger metal cases that looked fairly hefty in their grasps. Phillips didn’t think it would take a deductive genius to figure out what was inside them, considering where they’d come from.
He took more videos as the foursome drove off, wishing he’d been in his car so he could stay on them, or that he could phone somebody else to pick them up. But with Bruce Mackenzie likely still out near the airport after being given the shake by Landis, and George Swanson in Port Sudan to meet and greet the new arrivals, there was no one to do it. To say the team in Khartoum was undermanned was putting it mildly; the truth was that Holland had been making do here for years with nothing more than a skeleton crew.
He left the gold market to head back the way he had come, hoofing through the city center toward his parked Saab. He was going to work on a hunch and try to shortcut it back to Bahri. If his instincts proved correct-and he trusted they would-Ishmael Mirghani would be returning there as well.
The thing the CIA man mostly found himself wondering was how long he meant to stick around…and whether it would be possible to keep him from flying the coop.
“Mr. Harner, Ms. Evart, I’m very pleased to welcome you to Sudan on behalf of the Boutros Corporation,” George Swanson said outside the railway station, using not only their aliases but also the cover he’d been given for his drive between Khartoum and Port Sudan.
Abby was shaking his hand. “It’s fine to use my first name,” she said with a wry little smile. “I’ve been Abby to everyone my entire life. Call me anything else, and I might not know who you’re talking to.”
Swanson’s own smile was accompanied by a knowing glance. “Certainly, Abby,” he said. And then nodded to his right. “The parking area’s over there… My vehicle’s the white Jeep Cherokee off the center aisle. If you’d like, we can get some refreshments before hitting the road-”
Feeling stiff and disheveled after the long, cramped train ride from Atbara, Kealey stood beside Abby and looked at him. Behind them, passengers were leaving the station in groups, carrying their bags and bundles from the railroad cars. Some were being greeted by friends and relatives as others haggled over fares with the drivers of beaten-up gypsy cabs outside the station.
“We aren’t driving to Khartoum,” Kealey said. He did not have to turn in Abby’s direction to feel her eyes on him.
Swanson’s face, meanwhile, had become a question mark. “I’m not exactly sure I understand…”
“It’s seven hundred and fifty miles from here to there,” Kealey said. “What does that make the drive time on the local roads? Twelve, fifteen hours?”
“About that, yes,” Swanson replied.
“And a flight from the airport here to Khartoum International? How long would it take?”
“I see what you’re getting at,” Swanson said. “But we’ve made arrangements-”
“How long?”
Swanson hesitated. “An hour or so if we’re able to catch a flight without too much waiting around,” he said. He lowered his voice. “The airport security’s tighter at both ends. That’s the reason Holland decided the roads were our safest bet.”
Kealey shrugged. “He’s probably right. But we’ve killed too much time traveling to worry about what’s safe right now,” he said. “Whatever’s been on the burner in Khartoum has to be reaching a boil. Our papers have to be good enough, because we’re flying in.”
Swanson regarded him steadily for a full thirty seconds, then turned to Abby. “You’re with him on this?”
She frowned. “I suppose,” she said, then cast a prickly look at Kealey. “Although it would have been nice if I’d had a chance to consider it beforehand.”
Kealey kept his eyes on Swanson, saying nothing. Finally the CIA man produced a relenting sigh. “Any idea what I’m supposed to do with the Cherokee?”
Kealey shrugged. “Leave it in the airport parking lot,” he said.
Swanson didn’t bother replying that he could have figured that out all by himself.