Stella said, “You’re stepping out of character and telling a joke.” Squinting, she studied Martin’s face. “Okay, you’re not telling a joke.” Around them passengers were collecting their hand luggage and starting to head toward the stairs leading to the boarding gate. “I wish I were going with you. I’m getting used to your sense of humor.”
“I thought you said I didn’t have one.”
“That’s the part I’m getting used to.” She stood and grazed his elbow with the back of her hand. “I hope against hope you’ll call me from London.”
His eyes took in the triangle of pale skin on her chest. “I admire your ability to hope against hope.”
She toyed nervously with the first button on her shirt that was buttoned. “Maybe I can infect you.”
“Not likely. I’ve been inoculated.”
“Inoculations wear off.” She stood on her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Bye for now, Martin Odum.”
“Uh-huh. Bye.”
Crystal Quest was in wrathful dudgeon. “There’s only one thing more revolting than having to target one of your own,” she declared to the wallahs scattered around her sanctum, “and that’s bungling the hit. Where do we hire marksmen these days, will somebody kindly enlighten me. Coney Island popgun concessions where you win a plastic doll if you topple the clown into the pan filled with dish water? Oh my God, it’s pathetic. Pa-the-tic.”
“We should have given the assignment to Lincoln Dittmann,” one of the newer wallahs suggested. “I understand he’s a crackerjack shot—”
Quest, her head angled, her eyes unblinking, gazed at the speaker as if he just might have come up with the solution to their problem. “Where did you pick up that nugget of information?” she inquired in a husky whisper, humoring the wallah before decapitating him.
The young man sensed that he had ventured onto quicksand. “I was reading into the Central Registry 201 files to get a handle on our assets in the field …” His voice faltered. He looked around for a buoy but no one seemed interested in throwing him one.
Quest’s mouth sagged open as her skull bobbed up and down in wonderment. “Lincoln Dittmann! Now there’s an idea whose time has come. Ha! Will somebody put the neophyte here out of his misery.”
Quest’s chief of staff, a thick skinned timeserver who had weathered his share of storms in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick, said very evenly, “Dittmann and Odum are one and the same individual, Frank. You would have seen that they were cross-referenced in the 201 files if you’d read the fine print on the first page.”
“That’s strike one,” Quest informed Frank. “If you read the fine print on your employment contract, you’ll see that we operate by the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule in the DDO.” She swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees in her chair as if she were winding herself up. “Okay. I’ll recapitulate,” she said, stifling her irritation. “We made an honest effort to talk Martin Odum out of walking back the cat on Samat Ugor-Zhilov. Martin’s a consenting adult. He’s doing what he has to do. And we’re going to do what we have to do to make sure he never catches up to the Samat in question. This is a priority matter, which means it gets our full and undivided attention. Where did Martin Odum go when he left Israel? What leads is he following? Who is he planning to talk to? And what resources do we have on the ground—what resources can we throw into the theater of eventual operations—to make sure I get to wear my sackcloth and ashes before this thing blows up in our faces?”
1997: MARTIN ODUM PLAYS INNOCENT
LEANING OVER THE DEAD DOG, MARTIN SLIT OPEN ITS STOMACH with a safety razor, then reached in with the gloved hand to cut out the organs and create a stomach cavity. He motioned to one of the fedayeen students, who removed the frame from the hive and gingerly set it down on the road next to the dead dog. “Honey is very stable,” Martin said with a laugh. “Tell him it won’t blow up in his face until it’s detonated.” Using a spatula, he carefully scraped the beeswax from the honeycombs until he had accumulated a quantity the size of a tennis ball, then wired it to the tiny homemade plastic radio receiver and slipped the package into the stomach cavity. Using a thick needle and a length of butcher cord, he sewed up the opening. Rising to his feet, he stepped back to survey his handiwork.
“Any questions?” he demanded.
One of the fedayeen said something in Arabic and the Russian with the heavy gold ring on his pinky translated it into English. “He asks from how far away can we set off the charge?”
“Depends on what equipment you’re using,” Martin said. “A cordless phone or a Walkman will work up to a half a mile away. One of those automatic pagers that doctors wear on their belts can set off a charge five, six miles away. A VHF scanner or cellular mobile phone is effective for ten or twelve miles as long as the weather is good and there is no frequency jamming.”
Martin, trailed by his three students and the translator, set off up the slope and went to ground behind the rusty wreck of a U.N. jeep. They didn’t have long to wait. The Isra’ili patrol, led by a soldier scanning the dirt road with a magnetic mine detector, appeared around the bend. The soldier searching for mines passed his metal detector over the dog and, getting no reading, continued on. The officer behind him came abreast of the dog. Something must have caught his eye—the crude stitches on the stomach, probably—because he crouched next to the animal to have a closer look. Martin nodded at the fedayeen holding the automatic pager that had been rigged to transmit a signal to the plastic receiver inside the dog’s stomach. Below, a dull blast stirred up a fume of mustard-colored smoke. When it cleared, the Isra’ili officer was still crouching next to the dog but his head could be seen rolling slowly toward the shoulder of the road.
“Comes as news to me that honey can explode,” the Russian whispered, his thick Slavic accent surfacing indolently from the depths of his throat.
The sulfurous stench of the burnt beeswax reached Martin’s nostrils and he had trouble breathing. Gasping for air, he bolted upright in bed and blotted the cold sweat from his brow with a corner of the sheet. His heart was beating furiously; a migraine was pressing against the back of his eyeballs. For a terrible moment he didn’t know who he was or where he was. He solved the second problem first when he heard the hacking cough of the old man two rooms down the corridor of the boarding house and knew where he wasn’t: southern Lebanon. When he figured out which legend he was inhabiting, his breathing gradually returned to normal.
When his plane landed at Heathrow, four days before, Martin had breezed through passport control without a hitch. “Here on business or pleasure, is it?” the woman custom’s agent in the booth had asked. “With any luck, pleasure, in the form of licensed tabernacles and museums, and in that order,” he’d answered. The woman had flashed a jaded smile as she stamped him into the country. “If it’s pubs you’re looking for, you have come to the right corner of the world. Enjoy your stay in England.”
Collecting his valise from the baggage carousel, Martin had started following the signs marked “Underground” when a portly young man with a peaches-and-cream complexion had materialized in front of him. “Mr. Odum, is it?” he’d asked.
“How come you know my name?”
The young man, his body wrapped in a belted trench coat a size too large for him, had ignored Martin’s question. “Could I trouble you to come with me, sir,” he had said.