The next morning he took the Air Train to Newark International, where he boarded a flight for Chicago, where he changed airlines and flew to Seattle, where he changed airlines again and flew to Mexico City.
From Mexico City he flew to Port-au-Prince.
11
WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 2007
The phone rang. It was Hugh Rincon. "Isa's in the U.S. "
Patrick straightened in his chair so fast he propelled himself away from his desk and bounced off the windowsill. "How do you know?"
"He was spotted by an immigration agent in JFK."
"He was spotted by Immigration in JFK?" Chisum said, his voice rising. "And I'm hearing about this from you instead of our own people, why?"
"You came to me," Rincon said, and left it at that. To his credit he didn't sound one bit smug.
"Wait a minute, you said they spotted him. They didn't grab him up?"
"The agent told her supervisor she thought this guy was worth a look. The supervisor disagreed."
Patrick digested this. At last he said, without much hope, "Did they at least follow him? Find out where he was headed?"
Rincon's silence was answer enough.
Chisum rubbed a hand over a suddenly aching head. "Anything else?"
"He entered the country under the name of Adam Bayzani. He was wearing a U.S. Coast Guard officer's uniform. The agent asked him where he'd been and he said Istanbul for a conference." Rincon took a deep breath. "There is more. Patrick, Sara just got back from an IMO conference on marine safety in Istanbul. You're not going to believe this, but she thinks she rode down in the elevator with this guy."
"What?"
Rincon repeated himself.
Patrick's first instinct was to scoff. Outside of Dickens this much coincidence was highly suspect. On second thought, he knew enough about Sara Lange to know that she was nobody's fool. Neither was Hugh Rincon. "All right," he said cautiously. "How'd he feel to her?"
"Bent," Rincon said bluntly. "The first information Coasties exchange after names is duty stations. She said this Bayzani said he was posted to District Seventeen, and then when she said she was from Alaska he shut down completely. For the rest of the conference whenever she saw him he was going in the opposite direction at flank speed. Her words."
"She make contact again?"
"She tried. She left a message on his voice mail to join her for drinks the last day. She never heard back from him. The whole thing felt wrong to her, so she told me about it when she got back, and then she checked the Coast Guard personnel list."
"And?"
"And there was an Adam Bayzani, all right."
"Was?"
"Was. She emailed him, and when he didn't email back, she emailed his CO."
"And?"
"And Adam Bayzani was in fact a commander, and he was in fact assigned to District Seventeen. The problem is, he's dead."
Chisum sat up straight. "When?"
"His body was found the week before the IMO conference started in Istanbul."
"Murdered?" Chisum said, sure of it.
"No. Died in his sleep, according to the police report."
"When and where?"
"Lanzarote."
"Where's that?"
" Canary Islands."
"What the hell was he doing in the Canary Islands?"
"Working on his tan. Lanzarote's a vacation destination for Europeans."
"He was on leave?"
"Yes. His boss said he was stopping off for a week in advance of the IMO conference."
"He alone?"
"He rented his car alone and he checked into his hotel alone."
"But?"
"But his boss said that Bayzani acted like he would be meeting someone."
"He say who?"
"No. His boss said he seemed happy lately. Evidently a pretty morose guy at the best of times. No girlfriends, kept his private life private, nobody he worked with had ever been to his apartment. His boss thought he might be gay."
"Really." Patrick digested this in silence for a moment. "Was there an autopsy?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"When a tourist dies, the local authorities get the body out of there as fast as they can. Tourism is pretty much their living. Anyway, I'm not sure they even have an ME."
"Can we ask for an autopsy?"
"The body is on its way home to his family in Los Angeles."
"All right, I know people in L.A.," Chisum said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could access the directory on his computer to look up names of helpful colleagues in L.A. "Any footprints on Bayzani's service record?"
"None that I can find, outside of his heritage. His family is fourth-generation American. He does have a Jordanian great-grandfather. His grandfather served in the Eighty-second Airborne during World War II. His mother was a Navy nurse in Vietnam. He was a Coast Guard Academy grad himself. They're all as American as apple pie, no red flags anywhere." Crap.
"Now for the good news."
Patrick perked up. "There's good news? Did the son of a bitch finally get on a phone?"
"Not that good, but almost. He had to have a passport to get into the country, and passports have to have photos."
"We've finally got a photo?" Patrick said, disbelieving. "A current photo?"
"Okay, don't start hyperventilating, it's doctored, our resident geek tells me some kind of computer overlay program where they alter the original photo to resemble the current holder without looking like it's been got at by a kindergartner with a crayon. There is a general ethnic similarity between Isa and Bayzani, probably one of the reasons Isa picked him, and the photograph's a little blurry, but it's the best we've had so far."
"You're sure it's him? This isn't an 'all Islamic terrorists look alike to me' kind of thing?"
"As sure as I can be," Rincon said, not taking offense. "As I don't have to tell you, the photos we've got of him aren't good, but I was pretty sure from the get-go this was the same guy." He hesitated. "Patrick."
"What?"
Rincon spoke, sounding as if he were choosing his words very carefully. "There was an-incident involving maritime shipping two years ago."
"I know," Patrick said. He'd looked up the case file after he'd called Hugh for help on Isa.
"Yeah, I know you do, and I know you know that I'd like to stay out of jail for violating state secrets. Kind of a personal quirk. The only point I'm making is, I think attacks by air are pretty much over. I think the terrorism community is moving on to attacks on maritime targets, in particular busy ports."
"We've been talking about that ourselves."
"Not enough," Rincon said tersely. "Not nearly enough, Patrick."
"Forward me what you've got," Patrick said.
"Will do." Rincon hung up.
Melanie brought him the fax from Hugh just as Chisum was sitting back from issuing an all-agencies alert as to Isa's probable presence inside U.S. borders. The phone began ringing as he spread the pages across his desk. "Get that, will you, Melanie, thanks. And I'm not in for the rest of the afternoon."
"Yes, Mr. Chisum." She was curious but too well-trained to ask, and he watched her walk out the door with his usual attentive wistfulness. He shook his head and pulled out his Isa file to compare the photographs. The ones in Iraq were group shots, taken from a distance. Everyone was burnoosed and bearded. Isa's head was circled, and in another print blown up. The quality of the print was atrocious, and what resemblance there was between it and the clean-shaven, smiling face in the passport photo was minimal at best. The group photo was more about personality than likeness. He was standing a pace in the rear behind Zarqawi, looking solemn, even a little studious, his hands folded, his lean figure a study in stillness.