Fatima downed her last drink, snapping her head back to get every last drop. Then she fished into her pocket, dropped a wad of euros on the bar, and headed out.
Whittemore had settled in advance. He was increasingly disappointed. Short of spotting Caliph, he hadn't known exactly what he was looking for, what to expect. But so far, Fatima had gone to a hotel, gotten drunk, and now she was probably headed to her room to pass out. Once that happened, there wouldn't be anything to do until morning. If that was how it went, Whittemore didn't have much choice. He would have to call in the contact. Take his commendation plaque.
He followed Fatima into the hotel lobby. Whittemore looked discreetly toward the elevator, expecting to see her there. Nothing. His head whipped around and he spotted her, just a flash, as she cleared the main entrance and headed down the street.
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
The bar menu had a decidedly European tilt. Davis and Sorensen both skipped the special of the day, seaweed and oyster tartare, and neither gave a thought to ordering snails. He went with the salmon bagel, while she settled on onion soup.
"So that file you have on me," Davis asked, "what's in it?"
Sorensen dipped a crusty piece of bread into her soup. "It said you put your fist through a wall at an officer's club."
"That was in there?" He shrugged it off.
Sorensen gave him a look that asked for more. Perhaps a reasonable explanation.
"I was at a dining in," he said.
"A dining in?"
"It's a formal military banquet where the whole fighter wing gets dressed up in our best uniforms. We do guy stuff — eat meat, drink bourbon, smoke cigars. On the night in question, some of my squadron buddies and I were having a stud-finding contest. I lost."
Sorensen took the bait. "Okay — and what does the winner get in this event?"
"A broken hand."
She paused, but then moved on without comment. "The file said you spent three years in the Marines, then got an appointment to the Air Force Academy. Why did you switch services?"
"The Marine Corps is a great organization, but I wanted to fly jets. The Air Force seemed the most likely place. Plus I was a little tired of living in dusty tents and eating MFJEs."
"And you shot down a MiG in the first Gulf War?"
"Yeah, I was flying F-15s at the time. My wingman and I tracked down a MiG-23 that was headed for Iran. Saddam thought his jets would be safer there."
"I guess you proved him wrong."
"I guess."
"So it was a dogfight? Just like in the old movies?"
"You mean like with the wind snapping at my scarf, maybe shaking my fist at the other guy? No. The real thing is very clinical, very quick. And usually very one-sided. The Iraqi pilot had been ordered up on what was basically a suicide mission — his commander told him to fly a jet to Iran before we blew it out of its bunker. He got airborne and was running away at six hundred knots. I chased him down doing six-eighty, put a heater up the poor bastard's tailpipe. Bottom line, we both had jobs to do and gave it our best — but my airplane, missiles, and information were a lot better. So I killed a guy in a fight that wasn't fair."
"In combat I suppose that's how you want all your fights," she said.
He shrugged.
She said, "I remember reading a report a few years back — it said a lot of those Iraqi pilots who actually made it across the border were never heard from again."
"Which means what? That I gave his family a little… closure or something?"
Sorensen said nothing.
Davis spread mustard on his bagel. He had an urge to change the subject. "So tell me what you found out about our Egyptian friend."
"Dr. Jaber? Nothing troublesome. At least not yet. He's a career engineer, sort of a vagabond. He's worked for a number of the big aerospace companies. There's no evidence of any fringe politics, no family members in the Islamic Brotherhood. Jaber has a wife and two kids back in Cairo."
After a pause, Davis said, "And that's it?"
"Langley says they're still working on it."
Davis was putting the finishing touches on a clever reply when the phone in his pocket buzzed. "Excuse me." He wedged it open with a thumb and saw a message from Jen: aunt l can chaperone at dance, please! please.1 kisses, j.
Davis weighed a reply, maybe something like: GO DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Sure. That would score points. Davis put the phone away and frowned. He rubbed a hand over his face, top to bottom, and let out a long, controlled sigh.
"Your daughter?"
He nodded.
"Can I help?"
"You don't even know her."
"I'm a girl."
Davis gave her a hard look that said, No shit. He turned his beer mug by the handle. "Jen is fifteen years old. It'll get easier, right?"
"My mom used to say that kids are the reverse of anchors — the more they weigh, the less they hold you down."
He didn't reply.
"Jammer… what happened to your wife?"
The question caught him off guard. He replied in a smartass tone, "Wasn't that in the file?"
This time Sorensen went silent.
"Sorry," he said, "you didn't deserve that."
Davis had told the story more times than he could count. But not lately. Family and friends all knew what had happened, which meant he only had to deal with fresh acquaintances now. People like Sorensen, Jen's teachers every year, the occasional new neighbor moving in. Someday, he figured, time would do its thing. People would stop asking altogether. Davis wasn't sure if he'd like that or not.
"Diane was killed in a car crash. It was almost two years ago now. She was on her way home from a night class, some kind of healthy-living nutrition class. A big delivery truck — not a semi, but the next size down — blasted right through a stop sign and hit her Honda square in the drivers-side door."
"God, how awful. For you and your daughter. I can't imagine dealing with something like that."
"I'll tell you what really made it hard. It was just an accident. The truck driver was an old Guatemalan guy, barely spoke English. But he was here legally. He'd been working a thirteen-hour shift. That's legal too."
After a pause, Sorensen said, "So there was nobody to blame."
"Exactly. If he'd been drunk, I could have kicked his ass. Maybe I'd have stopped drinking myself and joined MADD, or DADD, or whatever the hell. Or if she'd died from colon cancer I could run a race, wear the right color ribbon, eat cruciferous vegetables the rest of my life. But the way it is—"
"No reason," she said, finishing the thought. "Just random chance."
"But doing what I do, Honeywell, investigating accidents — if it's taught me anything, it's that there's never just one single cause for any disaster. There's always a chain, a series of things that go wrong."
"Even with what happened to your wife? One guy running a stop sign?"
"That night I had thought about calling her on her cell. If I'd gotten through when she was walking out of class it would have slowed her down. Maybe she wouldn't have been at the intersection at that one precise moment. Maybe the truck would have just clipped her. And when she bought that car I tried to talk her into something bigger, something with a little more iron. But Diane insisted on doing the right thing for the goddamn environment. And—" Davis stopped abruptly.
She eyed him with concern. "Jammer — you can't blame yourself."
He stretched, trying to force the tension from his shoulders. "That's what I do for a living, isn't it? Find blame. Sometimes I don't like the answers, don't like what I find. But it's there all the same."