"Thank you, Melanie, that will be all."
"Certainly, sir." Melanie swept out, and he couldn't help it, he had to watch. Women nowadays had forgotten how to walk, or maybe they just didn't care, striding along like they were in a race, all trace of what had once been an inviting softness to a man's hand long since worked ruthlessly off at the gym and leaving something perilously close to the stringy haunch of a greyhound behind.
Melanie was a throwback. A pocket Venus of a blonde in her midthirties, she wore heels and pencil skirts topped by a variety of soft sweaters in even softer colors, and every day he sent up a prayer of thanks to whoever had assigned her to him when Birdy had left. A forty-year veteran with an institutional memory that went back to the agency's roots in the OSS, Birdy was irreplaceable, but even Birdy was subject to the march of time. When she retired in October, Melanie had replaced her, and Patrick had suffered so instant and overwhelming an attraction that he had hidden it behind a curt, distant manner.
Even if every fiber of his being urged him to throw her down on his desk each time she walked in his door. "Whoa there, down, boy," he said beneath his breath. She was too good at what she did to treat with anything less than respect, so he locked his fantasies into a steel vault with a fail-safe lock and doggedly returned to the report.
Isa or someone bearing a striking resemblance to him had been spotted in Auckland, of all places. The source reported he had it on good authority that Isa was recruiting from among the Maoris for the purposes of launching a terrorist attack from down under.
Which was about as reliable as any humint his agents were fielding nowadays, he thought glumly. Everyone was hedging their bets, scarred from too many years of being slapped down for intelligence the previous administration either disbelieved or suppressed in pursuit of their almighty crusade. Except they didn't call it a crusade. They'd learned that much.
There were times when he thought he ought to finally register to vote.
There were others when he looked at the people in office and the ones running to replace them, and was overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness and impending doom.
Still, he could not afford to overlook any lead, and while the hard intel was grinding to a temporary halt the rumor mill was hitting high gear. Along with the sighting in York, he had reports of additional sightings in London, Darfur (from a recently evacuated aid worker who did some freelance work for the agency on the side, and whose product had never been all that reliable), Baghdad (at the site of an IED resulting in three killed and which he knew was nonsense because Isa would never have been so careless as to flaunt himself at the scene of one of his own attacks), Toronto (which frightened him; he'd sent a rocket back to the agent who had submitted it, requesting an immediate re-interview and a more thorough canvas of other possible witnesses), Bern (which he almost believed, given how well funded the al Qaeda cells were and how scrupulously they looked after their money), Moscow, and the list went on and on. Isa had been sighted fifty-three times in the last six months, three times in three different cities on three different continents on the same day.
Boeing was good, but they weren't that good.
The phone rang. "The director on line one," Melanie said, sounding fiuttery Patrick had noticed most women did around Kallendorf. Guy looked like a bull elephant and had about as much finesse but he had to beat the women off with a stick. Chisum smoothed back his thinning hairline, sucked in his potbelly, and picked up the phone. "Chisum here."
"I have your report in front of me," Kallendorf said without preamble. "Anything to add?"
Chisum thought swiftly, and then decided there was no margin for defense. It was what it was. "No, sir."
"When did we last talk about this Isa?"
By now he knew that the director remembered exactly when Chisum had briefed him on the terrorist, the day, the hour, probably down to the color of Chisum's tie. "At the annual JTTF briefing, sir."
"That's almost a year ago, Patrick. What have you done for me lately?"
"It's not like he's posting his schedule on the Internet, sir."
"No, it's not," Kallendorf agreed, a little too easily. "Maybe he's retired."
Patrick found himself on his feet without knowing how he got there. He forced himself to speak calmly. "Fanatical terrorists don't retire, sir. Usually they are killed. Rarely they are captured. They don't retire."
"Then he's been killed or captured. I think it's time to reallocate some of our intelligence-gathering capabilities to more worthy targets. Convince me otherwise."
Chisum took a deep breath. "Sir, Isa was Zarqawi's right-hand man and his closest confidant. He is widely believed to have pioneered Zarqawi's use of the Internet for banking, communications, and recruiting. I can definitely place him in Diisseldorf in June."
"Sez who?"
"I-acquired the information through a third party," Chisum said carefully.
"You trust this source?"
"Absolutely, sir."
Kallendorf grunted. "Which means we paid for it. I don't like buying intelligence, Patrick."
"I don't think anyone's going to give it to us for love, sir," Chisum said before he could stop himself.
There was a moment of silence, followed by a booming laugh. "What was Isa doing in Dusseldorf?" Kallendorf said, still chuckling.
"Recruiting," Chisum said baldly.
"Identify anyone?"
"Two, before Isa made our informant."
"Made him, did he? What'd he do to him?"
"Started a riot, and then threw him into the advancing line of riot police."
"No shit. Guy's got style, gotta give him that."
Chisum said nothing.
"Our snitch must have survived," Kallendorf said.
"Must have," Chisum said dryly. He sat back down. "According to him, the two recruits were young Muslim men, both German-born of immigrant Lebanese parents, both with degrees in engineering."
"What the hell is it with al Qaeda and engineering degrees? You'd think they wouldn't let you into the gang without one."
Chisum shrugged. "It's probably a lot like anything else. It's not what you know, it's who."
"What did they say about Isa?"
"Everyone we spoke to described Isa as a quiet man who socialized primarily in the coffeehouses with men his own age or younger."
"He gay?"
"Hasn't been any rumor of that so far. His boss says he was a reliable and competent if undistinguished employee."
"No proselytizing in the workplace, eh?"