He heard only two rings before a familiar voice picked up. There were no salutations.
"Have you changed the timetable?"
The question threw Jabers well-organized thoughts into disarray. "Yes," he stumbled," of course. But there can be no further alterations. Nothing can be stopped." He looked at his watch. "Thirty hours remain."
"So why have you called?"
Ibrahim Jaber swallowed hard. "We have a problem—"
The passage from Italy was misery itself.
Fatima sat hunched, staring alternately at the pitching deck and the churning sea below. She could not decide which was less nauseating. The conditions on the northern Mediterranean tonight were horrid, a stiff wind and cold rain lashing the deck, and tremendous seas rolling the craft mercilessly.
Fatima remembered, back on the dock in Genoa, pausing for a moment to study the boat. In the fading light of late afternoon, the passenger ferry had seemed a relatively large ship, a thing of stout decks and heavy construction. Not that she would know. Fatima had been on airplanes before and a few trains, but never a boat. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
At the beginning of the voyage she'd taken a seat on the roof, open to the elements. This proved another mistake, even if made with good intentions — Fatima knew it was always preferable to travel away from crowds, and at the outset of the trip all but two of the other passengers were ensconced below in the warmth of the protected main compartment. When Fatima vomited the first time, the young couple had been downwind. Soon she was alone.
That she now had privacy was small consolation. Sharp gusts snapped at her flimsy jacket and rain pelted her cheeks. Fatima s stomach churned and convulsed to no end. She was leaning over the rail and heaving when a steward came up to check on her — the man had most likely been alerted by the deserters. Keeping his distance, he suggested something in Italian.
Fatima replied with a blank stare. He would reason she knew nothing of the language. The man pointed downward with a rapid motion that could only mean, You will feel better below.
Fatima puked.
The putrid stream splashed over the deck, and nearly splattered onto the steward's work shoes. When she got her breath back, she cursed both him and his wretched boat. The words were in Arabic, but the sputtering cadence and harsh consonants crossed any linguistic divide. As a visual exclamation point, a strand of green spittle dangled from her lower lip, fluttering in the breeze. The steward, who had certainly seen this kind of thing before, seemed genuinely repulsed. He left her alone.
Once again she had privacy. But once again it seemed an empty victory. Such was Fatima s state that she soon reconsidered. Ready to try anything to ease her agony, she went below and found a seat nearer the center of gravity of the tumbling ship. Back among the crowd, Fatima muttered her frustrations, one expletive, one demon at a time. She cursed Italy and France. She cursed the sea, the wind and the steward. Cursed anyone who looked at her.
Few did.
Ten minutes after going below, the combination of Fatima s stench and demeanor created a five-meter buffer that lasted all the way to France.
The four hours seemed like a lifetime. When she finally stepped off the ferry in Marseille, Fatima s legs wobbled. She paused for a moment, steadied herself, and made a quiet vow to never leave dry land again.
Finally having something firm beneath her feet, she trundled ahead unsteadily with the crowd, aiming in a general way for the immigration desk labeled NON-EU. There were two lines — on the left a man and on the right a woman. Both were middle aged, both disinterested.
For Fatima Adara, the choice was easy.
Two minutes later, the Frenchman asked for her passport. The document was an extremely good forgery, a Jordanian item with smudged entry stamps from seven countries — mostly EU, but with a smattering of the less controversial non-EU federations. Fatima handed over the passport, having already wiped it on her shirt where a ripe streak of vomit held fast.
In what had to be his natural rhythm, the man eyed her passport first. Then he pinned his gaze on Fatima. She watched his face sink into a mask of revulsion, as if he'd just watched someone get doused with a chamber pot. Then the scent of the passport hit his nose. The immigration man's arm locked out as if a bolt of lightning had struck his nervous system. He held the document at the greatest possible distance, probably wishing his arm was longer.
"Quelle desastre!" he said.
Fatima took on a puzzled look, played it for just a moment. Then a lightbulb seemed to go off over her head. She gave him a wink and replied in rough English, "Pleasure."
The man huffed and snorted, shrugged his shoulders in a classically Gallic fit. He kept the passport at rigid arm's length and used the eraser of a pencil to flick through a few pages. Two more standard questions, two more incomprehensible answers, then a stamp. The man grimaced through it all. Finally, the immigration officer handed back her passport and gave Fatima a sharp wave through.
She began to amble away. Fatima was three steps past the podium when the man suddenly barked, "Mademoiselle!"
She froze.
Very slowly, Fatima turned and met the immigration officer's eyes. They were stern, accusing. He lifted an arm and pointed stridently to something in the distance. She followed his gesture and saw stenciled letters, thick and black, over an open passageway. It was labeled toilettes.
Fatima Adara took a deep breath and headed for the ladies' room.
He was on the balcony, twenty feet up.
Wilson Whittemore IV twirled the cold tail of a latte in a paper cup and thought, This is not what I signed up for when I joined the CIA. The arrivals from the Genoa boat were streaming in, another decrepit mass of Mediterranean humanity. Grandmothers, laborers, tourists, immigrants— some legal, some certainly not. Whittemore had been watching this stinking terminal since noon. Eight hours. And he still had four to go.
His eyes settled on a young Italian woman as she strode away from the EU passport stand. She had to be Italian. Her long dress was cut to accentuate tan legs and high heels. She knew how to walk in heels, Whittemore decided. Not all women did. A jacket was slung over one shoulder on a finger, the chin was set high, and her boobs bounced freely under her dress. She had the look down. What a firebrand, he thought. Whittemore saw her wave to a young man in the distance, and the two closed the gap. When they were ten paces apart, she started reading him the riot act.
Whittemore couldn't hear a word — didn't need to. Her chopping hand motions made it clear she was upset. That's how Italians talked. An expressive people. The guy gave back as good as he got, and soon they disappeared around a corner, a whirlwind of flailing hands and Armani and gnashing white teeth. Whittemore figured that inside thirty minutes their designer clothes would be scattered on the floor of some nice hotel room, and they'd be having frantic sex. A passionate people, the Italians.
The show over, he turned back to the arrivals gate and thought, One lover's spat. The highlight of my day The boat from Genoa was the third he had monitored. Each group of passengers took roughly thirty minutes to debark, get filtered by immigration, and connect with luggage and relatives and taxis. The whole thing was damned tedious. If there was anything more boring than having to stand in line, it was watching other people stand in line.
Whittemore was fed up, ready to move on. He had his sights set on a posting to an embassy staff. Still "in the field," but civilized. Mingle at cocktail parties, maybe rub ankles with a baroness under the table at a State Department dinner. Martinis and proper clothes. Not cold lattes in filthy ferry terminals.