“Holy mackerel,” Kiick said. He shook his head in disgust. “It sure looked like the real McCoy to me.”
Presiding over the formal postmortem in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick at Langley, Crystal Quest made no effort to tame the shrew in her. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, she seethed. The adults pretending to be FBI agents in the field behind the hangar had been spotted by a child—by a child!—before the raid was even underway. Daoud had walked into a hail of bullets so as not to be taken alive. Lincoln Dittmann’s legend was blown when he saved Kiick’s life. As an added extra bonus, the FBI clowns under Felix Kiick’s command had gunned down a juvenile armed with a plastic pistol. Holy Christ, it hadn’t even been loaded with water. Leroy Streeter Jr., who would get a life sentence for attempting to blow up a square mile of Wall Street, knew precious little about the al-Qa’ida cells and less about the Saudi who was organizing them; Streeter’s expertise was limited to a small group of nutty white supremacists in Texas that had already been infiltrated by so many state and Federal agents half the group’s dues came from the government. To add humiliation to embarrassment, any hope of nabbing the Saudi had evaporated the night before when the cretins from the Argentine State Intelligence had bungled the raid on Boa Vista. Talk about stealth, they had headed into the Brazilian mato graso in half a dozen giant army helicopters flying at treetop level with their running lights on, for God’s sake, and kicked up such a storm of sand when they touched down at the training camp that half the fedayeen managed to slip away in the confusion. Naturally the Saudi who had been presiding over the meeting in the low-roofed building was nowhere to be found when the SIDE agents, backed up by a handful of the Company’s paramilitary people who were currently hunting for new jobs, burst through the door. So what did the raid net? I’ll tell you what it netted. Are you ready for this, gentlemen and ladies? It netted two jokers from Hamas, two more from Hezbollah, seven from Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, a drunk Irishman from the IRA and two young females from the Basque ETA who listed fashion model under profession when they were interrogated. Fashion models my ass! One of them was so flat chested she put padding in her brassiere to break even, for Christ’s sake. No shit, we could have snared twice as many terrorists using fly paper tacked to the rafters of any bar on the main drag of Foz do Iguaçú.
Quest appeared to come up for air. In the several seconds of silence, Lincoln was able to get a word in. Well, he said, we did pin down the identity of the Saudi.
The speculation about the chronic kidney failure had been the starting point. On the theory that Leroy Streeter’s offhand remark about the Saudi’s wealth (“Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich”) would suggest he’d been diagnosed and treated by an expensive private physician, Riyadh intelligence authorities had combed the clinics frequented by the royal family and affluent members of the business community. If they came up with anything, they kept it to themselves. Confronted with the Saudi foot dragging, the American secretary of state had been persuaded to take the matter up with his Saudi counterpart. Within days the intelligence authorities in Riyadh had pouched a thick dossier to Langley filled with hundreds of photographs and associated biographical information. Lincoln had sorted through the photos in the conference room next to the DDO’s office, with Quest peering anxiously over his shoulder. He came across several that gave him pause. No, no, that’s not him, he would finally say, our Saudi had incredibly intense eyes that seemed to look into you rather than at you. Going through the pouch a second time, Lincoln had used a magnifying glass to study the group photographs. Suddenly he had leaned over the table to get a closer look at one man.
I think maybe—
You think maybe what, for Christsake?
Maybe this is our Saudi. Yes, there’s no doubt about it. Look at those goddamn eyes.
The group photograph had been taken years before at the wedding of a seventeen-year-old Saudi to a Syrian girl who was a distant relative of his. The bridegroom’s name, according to the caption provided by the Riyadh intelligence people, was Osama bin Laden. He turned out to have a Central Registry file dating back to when he became involved in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The son of the Yemeni-born construction tycoon Muhammad Awad bin Laden, who had made a fortune in Saudi Arabia, Osama, according to Riyadh, was considered to be the black sheep of the fifty-three siblings in the extremely wealthy bin Laden family, in part because of his disdain for the ruling Saudi royal family and their ties to the United States, in part because of his recent obsession with Islamic fundamentalism.
Okay, we have his name and a mug shot to go with it, Quest was conceding, the shrew in her only partly assuaged. A goddamn pity we don’t have his warm body also.
What we need to do, one of the staffers ventured from the sideline, is put pressure on the Sudanese to hand him over to us, or at least expel him from Sudan.
I’ve promoted bin Laden to the top of our wish list, Quest announced. We wish he were dead. Something tells me we had better get our paws on this Osama character before he gets his paws on radioactive waste and builds himself a dirty bomb.
Amen, said Lincoln.
Six weeks later Lincoln, in Rome for two weeks of R and R, hired a taxi to drive him out to Hadrian’s sprawling villa near Tivoli and spent the afternoon limping around the site in a light spring rain, trying to distinguish myth from reality. Which was the flesh and blood Publius Aelius Hadrianus, which the legend he had consigned to history? Was he the emperor who ruthlessly suppressed the Jewish revolt of 132 and paraded the survivors through Rome in chains? Or the patron of the arts who presided over the construction of the vast country villa outside of Rome, and most especially its entrancing circular library where he spent afternoons studying the manuscripts he accumulated? Or, as seemed likely, was there something of the real Hadrian present in both incarnations?
Didn’t truth provide the spinal column in every legend?
In early evening Lincoln had the driver drop him off across the Tiber on the Janicular. He checked the address scrawled on the slip of paper in his wallet and headed up hill, walking at a leisurely pace so as not to tire his leg, until he came to the luxurious four-story apartment house near the fountain where Romans lingered to inhale the negative ions from the cascading water. He settled onto the stone railing near the fountain, with Rome stretched out behind him, and breathed in some of the negative ions himself. It surely wouldn’t hurt him, he thought. These days he was walking without the aid of a cane, but his leg tired easily; the doctors at the Company clinic in Maryland had warned him the pain would never completely go away. He would learn to live with it, they promised; that’s what everyone did with pain.
The bells on a church uphill from the fountain tolled the hour and Lincoln checked his wristwatch. Either it or the bells were four minutes off, but what did it matter? In the end time was something you killed. Across the street a doorman in a long blue overcoat with gold piping removed his cap to salute the very elegantly dressed woman emerging from the building. She held the leash of a small dog in one gloved hand, in the other she clasped the small hand of a little boy dressed in short pants and a knee-length overcoat buttoned up to the neck. With the dog leading the way, the woman and the boy crossed the street to pass the fountain on their way downhill to the music school. Lincoln slipped off the stone rail as they came abreast of him.
“Hello,” he said.
The woman stopped. “Do I know you?”