“You didn’t have the State Department paying extra to let some of their people tag along.”
“Good point. So what do you make of Bumford?”
“If I were to guess, I’d say he’s making a healthy per diem being out here and is in no hurry to find out what happened to Alana Shepard and the others.”
“Nice,” Linda said sarcastically.
The Tunisian representative approached Bumford about an hour after he’d settled into his chair. They spoke for only a moment. Bumford made elaborate gestures with his arms and ended the conversation with a nonchalant shrug.
Linc whispered in a thick, faintly Arabic accent, “ ‘Professor Bumford, have you heard from your people?’ ” He then made his voice pinched and nasally. “ ‘ I have no idea what happened to them . . . Surely you have contacted your university and reported them missing . . . That isn’t my responsibility. I am only here as a consultant . . . But aren’t you concerned? They are several days overdue . . . Not my problem.’ And local guy exits stage right.”
Linc’s pantomime and prediction was spot-on. Bumford didn’t give the conversation a second’s thought before returning to his book.
They waited twenty more minutes for the camp to quiet down. The native staff was nowhere to be seen, so Linc crept from his hiding place and threaded his way to the back of Bumford’s tent. He slipped a knife from a deep pocket of his coveralls. It was an Emerson CQC-7A. The blade was so sharp that when he slit the nylon, it made no more sound than a knife cutting butter.
Stepping silently into the tent, he crossed over to the entrance. Bumford’s back was toward him, less than a foot away, and the man had no idea anyone was looking over his shoulder. Linc glanced across to where Linda crouched behind barrels used to keep the camp’s generator fueled. She held up a slim hand for Linc to wait while one of the cooks crossed the compound headed toward the pit latrine. As soon as he vanished, Linda clenched her fist.
Linc reached out and grabbed Bumford under his arms and heaved him into the tent in a fluid motion that sent the Ottoman specialist sprawling onto the dirt floor. Lincoln was on him like a dark wraith, one hand clamped over Bumford’s mouth, the other poised with the knife so the portly professor could see it.
A moment later, Linda stepped into the tent through the hole Linc had cut. “Damn, you made that look easy. He must weigh two-fifty.”
“Closer to two-seventy. That was my variation on the clean and jerk. I call it heave the jerk.”
Linda hunkered low next to Bumford’s head. The doctor’s eyes were as big as saucers, and sweat beaded his domed forehead. “My colleague is going to remove his hand. You are not going to move or cry out. Understand?”
Bumford lay there like a gutted fish.
“Nod if you understand.”
When he still didn’t move, Linc prompted him by yanking his chin up and down. Bumford’s eyelids fluttered as the first wave of terror ebbed, and he nodded vigorously.
When Linc pulled his hand away, Bumford whimpered, “Who are you?”
“Keep your voice down,” Linda said. “We’re here about Alana Shepard, Mike Duncan, and Greg Chaffee.”
“Who are you?” Bumford repeated. “I don’t recognize you. You aren’t part of this group.”
When Linda reached across him, Bumford seemed to try to burrow into the ground. She straightened his glasses on the bridge of his nose and curled one of the spectacles’s arms around his ear where it had dislodged. “We’re friends. We need to talk to you about the other members of your team.”
“They aren’t here.”
“What is this guy, an idiot savant?” Linc asked.
“Professor Bumford,” Linda opened again, as smoothly as she could, “we’re here to ask you a few questions. We’re part of an American search-and-rescue team.”
“Like the military?”
“Strictly contract civilians, but people in Washington thought your mission important enough to hire us.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Bumford said, regaining a little of his equilibrium, and his arrogance.
“Why do you say that?”
“You do know who I am, yes?”
Linda knew he was fishing for a little recognition to prime his ego. “You’re Emile Bumford, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Ottoman Empire.”
“Then you must know I needn’t explain my opinions. You may take them as fact. This expedition for the State Department is a complete waste of time.”
“Then why in the hell did you come?” Linc asked.
Bumford didn’t answer right away, and Linda saw the furtive look in his eye. “Don’t lie,” she cautioned.
With a sigh Bumford said, “I lost my tenure because of an affair with a student, and I’m now in the middle of a divorce. My soon-to-be-ex-wife’s lawyer is treating my wallet like a piñata, and I didn’t make that much teaching in the first place. Add that to the fact that I haven’t published a book in ten years, and you figure it out.”
“Money.”
“The State Department is paying me five hundred dollars a day. I need it.”
“That’s why you’re out here sitting on your butt even though the rest of your team is missing. You’re just racking up your per diem.” There was neither denial nor shame in Bumford’s expression.
Linda wanted to slap his smug face but instead said as calmly as she could, “Well, it’s time you start earning your money. Tell me exactly why you think this trip is a waste of time.”
“Do you know the story of Suleiman Al-Jama we were told—about how he befriended an American sailor and had a change of heart concerning his jihad against the West?”
“We’ve heard it,” Linda said.
“I don’t believe it. Not for a second. I’ve studied everything Al-Jama ever wrote. It’s almost as if I know the man. He wouldn’t change. None of the Barbary corsairs would. They made too much money waging war against European shipping.”
“I thought Al-Jama fought for ideological reasons, not monetary gain,” Linc countered.
“Al-Jama was a man like any other. I’m certain he would’ve been tempted by the riches that raiding provided. He might have started off wanting to kill infidels for the sake of killing them, but in some of his later writings he talks about the ‘rewards’ he accumulated. His word, not mine.”
“Reward doesn’t necessarily mean treasure,” Linda said, realizing that Bumford was interpreting Al-Jama through his own money-grubbing prism.
“Young lady, I was brought out here because I am the expert. If you don’t care to listen to my explanations, please leave me be.”
“I’m curious,” Linc said. “Just how lucrative was piracy for the Barbary pirates?”
“What do you really know of them?”
“I know the Marines kicked some butt like the song says—‘to the shores of Tripoli.’ ”
“That was actually five hundred mercenaries under the command of ex-American consul, William Eaton, and a handful of Marines who sacked the city of Dema, a backwater in the Bashaw of Tripoli’s holdings. True, their action may have hastened a peace treaty, but it was far from a legendary battle worthy of a hymn.”
Linc had some Marine Corps friends who would have killed the man for such a remark.
“Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries,” Bumford continued, “the Barbary pirates had a stranglehold on the most lucrative sea routes in the world—the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic coast of Europe. During that time, those nations that wouldn’t or couldn’t pay the exorbitant tributes had their shipping fall prey to the pirates. Their cargos were stolen and their crews either ransomed or sold into slavery. Nations like England, France, and Spain paid the pirates millions in gold to protect maritime commerce. For a time, even the United States was paying them. And by some accounts, more than a tenth of the federal revenue went to various Barbary Coast rulers. The pirates also went on raiding parties to kidnap people from seaside villages as far north as Ireland. By some estimates, more than a million and a half Europeans were taken from their homes and sold into slavery. Can you imagine?”