As he spoke, Lincoln kept his eyes on the Egyptian, who obviously ran the show here. He had not been introduced—though Lincoln had a good idea of his identity; the FBI’s briefing book back in Washington had contained a blurry photo taken with a telephoto lens of an Egyptian known as Ibrahim bin Daoud talking to a man identified as a Hezbollah agent in front of the entrance to the Maksoud Plaza Hotel in São Paulo the previous year. The long delicate nose and carefully trimmed gray beard visible in the photo were conspicuous on the Egyptian sitting on the sill across from him now.
Stretched out on the unmade bed in the room above a bar in Ciudad del Este on the Paraguay side of Triple Border, the muddy heels of his boots digging into the mattress, Leroy was nodding emphatically at the Egyptian. “He sure as hell’s got hisself a Whitworth,” he confirmed.
Lincoln was hoping that gun collecting could provide a useful bond between him and the Texan. “Crying shame about your daddy’s Whitworth,” he said. “Bet the FBI goons didn’t have the wildest idea what a goddamn prize they had in their hands when they confiscated it.”
“They was too fucking dumb to tell the difference between fool’s gold and actual gold,” Leroy agreed.
Lincoln looked back at the Egyptian. “To answer your question: From the Whitworth and my other guns, it was just a matter of branching out to Kalashnikovs and TOW antitank missiles, with the grenades and ammunition thrown in for good measure. Pays a lot better than teaching Civil War history at a junior college.”
“We are not in the market for Kalashnikovs and TOWs,” the Egyptian noted coldly.
“He’s not interested in Ak-47s and TOWs,” the Texan explained. “Now that Commie Russia’s got one foot in the grave, you trip over this kind of hardware out here on Triple Border. He’s interested in Semtex or ammonium nitrate, something in the neighborhood of eighty thousand pounds of it, enough to fill one of those big moving vans. We pay cash on the barrelhead.”
Lincoln locked his eyes on the Egyptian. He was a skeletal man with a round pockmarked face and hunched shoulders, probably in his late fifties, though the gray beard could have been adding years to his appearance. The upper third of his face had disappeared behind dark sunglasses, which he wore despite being in a dingy room with the shades drawn. “Semtex in small quantities is no problem. Ammonium nitrate in any quantity is also no problem,” he said. “You probably know that ammonium nitrate is used as fertilizer—mixed with diesel or fuel oil, it is highly explosive. The trick’ll be to buy a large amount without attracting attention, which is something I and my associates can organize. Where do you want to take delivery?”
Leroy smiled out of one side of his mouth. “At a site to be specified on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel.”
Lincoln heard the cry of the muezzin—it wasn’t a recording but the real thing—summoning the faithful to midday prayer, which meant he’d been taken somewhere within earshot of the only mosque in Ciudad del Este after Leroy had picked him up in front of the mosque in Foz do Iguaçú. He’d been shoved into the back of a Mercedes and ordered to strap on the blackened-out ski goggles he found on the seat. “You taking me to the Saudi?” he’d asked Leroy as the Mercedes drove in circles for three quarters of a hour to confuse him. “I’m taking you to meet the Saudi’s Egyptian,” Leroy had answered. “If the Egyptian signs off on you, that’s when you get to meet the Saudi, not before.” Lincoln had asked, “What happens if he doesn’t sign off on me?” Leroy, sitting up front alongside the driver, had snorted. “If’n he don’t sign off on you, he’ll like as feed you to the pet crocodile he keeps in his swim pool.”
Now Lincoln could feel Daoud scrutinizing him through his dark sunglasses. “Where did you hurt your leg?” the Egyptian asked.
“Car accident in Zagreb,” Lincoln said. “The Croats are crazy drivers.”
“Where were you treated?” Daoud was looking for details he could verify.
Lincoln named a clinic in a suburb of Trieste.
The Egyptian glanced at Leroy and shrugged. Something else occurred to him. “What did you say the title of your book on Fredericksville was?”
Leroy corrected him. “It’s Fredericksburg.”
“I didn’t say,” Lincoln replied. “Title was the best part of the book. I called it, Cannon Fodder.”
Apparently Leroy was still fighting the War of Secession because he blurted out, “Cannon fodder is sure as hell what they was.” His normal drawl, pitched a half octave higher, came across loud and clear. “Federal cannon fodder, fighting to free the niggers and legitimize intermarriage and dictate the North’s way of thinking on southern gents.”
The Egyptian repeated the title to make sure he’d gotten it right, then muttered something in Arabic to the fat boy piecing together the jigsaw puzzle on the linoleum-covered table in the alcove. The boy, who was wearing a shoulder holster with a plastic gun in it and chewing bubble gum that he inflated every time he fitted in a piece, sprang to his feet and rushed out of the room. The Egyptian followed him. Lincoln could hear their footfalls on the staircase of the ramshackle building as the boy headed downstairs and Daoud climbed up one flight. He let himself into the room overhead and crossed it and dragged up a chair as a telephone sounded. Lincoln guessed that the Egyptian was phoning abroad to get his people to check out details of the Dittmann legend.
The DDO’s people in Langley had anticipated this and laid in the plumbing. If someone nosed around the Trieste clinic, he would come across a record of a Lincoln Dittmann being treated by a bone specialist for three days, and paying his bill in cash the morning he was discharged. As for the book, Cannon Fodder had a paper trail. The Egyptian’s contact would discover a 1990 reference to the publication of the book in Publishers Weekly. If he dug deeper he would come up with two reviews, the first in a Virginia junior college student newspaper praising one of the school’s own teachers for his Civil War scholarship; the second in a Richmond, Virginia, historical quarterly devoted to the War of Secession, accusing Lincoln Dittmann of having plagiarized great chunks of a privately printed 1932 doctorate treatise on the battle of Fredericksburg. There would be a small item in a Richmond newspaper repeating the plagiarism charge and reporting that a committee of the author’s peers had examined the original treatise and Dittmann’s Cannon Fodder, and discovered entire passages that matched. The article went on to say that Lincoln Dittmann had been fired from his post teaching history at a local junior college. Chain bookstores would have reported modest sales before the book was withdrawn from circulation. If anyone hunted hard enough, copies of the first and only edition (what was left of the original five-hundred-book print run) could be found in the Strand in Manhattan and several other second-hand bookstores across the country. On the inside of the back jacket there would be a photograph of Dittmann with a Schimelpenick jutting from his lips, along with a brief biography: born and raised in Pennsylvania, a Civil War buff from the time he started visiting battlefields as a youngster, an expert on the Battle of Fredericksburg, currently teaching Civil War history at a Virginia junior college.
Waiting for the Egyptian to return, Lincoln plucked a Schimelpenick from the metal tin in his jacket pocket and held the flame of a lighter to the end of it. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke gush through his nostrils. “Mind if I smoke?” he inquired politely.