The two photos Rincon had been working from were only marginally better. One was a black-and-white head shot taken with a long lens, picking Isa's face out of a crowded Baghdad street. He was seated at an outdoor cafe, drinking something from a tiny cup, facing someone with his back to the camera. Isa's face was seen over the second man's shoulder, looking straight into the camera lens. The resolution was grainy and his expression couldn't be made out, but there Patrick nevertheless got a clear impression of vigilance, as if Isa were always alive to his surroundings, might even be somehow aware that his photograph was being taken at that very moment.
The third photograph was another group shot, this time a posed shot of a Zarqawi grip-and-grin with bin Laden. The accompanying caption read " Peshawar, Pakistan?" Neither man looked overcome by joy at the encounter, but by the date on the photo, this was right after the hotel bombings in Jordan, and at that time no one in Arab leadership, legitimate government or terrorist, was pleased with Zarqawi.
And once again, at Zarqawi's shoulder, stood Isa.
He compared the two faces first to Bayzani's service file photo, and then to the doctored passport photo. He'd have the photos looked at by their own geeks down in tech services, but he was sure in his own mind that Rincon was right. It was Isa.
And that meant Isa was indeed in the United States.
He read the account of the immigration agent who had cleared Isa for entry. No useful knowledge to be gained there, except that Isa appeared to be at least superficially well versed in Coast Guard lingo. He made a note to inquire into Bayzani's past movements with care and attention. If he'd been spending time spilling his guts to Isa about his job, Patrick wanted it all down, chapter and verse.
While he had been perusing the file he was aware of the phone ringing nonstop outside his door, Melanie's voice a soothing counterpoint. At precisely sixty minutes and one second her tap was at the door. At his response she came in, set down a large stack of pink telephone slips, and departed again.
He thumbed through the slips. Mostly panicky demands for more information. Since he didn't have any, he shoved them to one side and assumed the position, feet crossed on the windowsill, hands folded on his stomach, frown aimed at the horizon.
No way to catch up to Isa until he surfaced again. Isa was a very cautious man. So far as Patrick could tell he never spoke on the phone, he never emailed twice from the same address, and he never flew directly to a destination, always employing multiple segments on multiple airlines, never booking them all at once, spreading his purchases around on Orbitz, Travelocity, and the airline web sites. No, Isa didn't make mistakes often, and truly, in these two instances, Istanbul and New York, he had erred more on the side of bad luck than bad judgment. Better to be lucky than good, as the old saying went. American immigration agents by and large were trained to look more at documentation than they were at faces and behavior.
Political correctness was all very well, but at what cost to the nation's security? The men on the planes had been recruited from upper-middle-class Saudi families, well educated and for the most part well off. Therefore American security forces manning American borders ought to be looking hard at upper-middle-class, well-educated, well-off men of the Islamic faith of every nationality. Never mind that there were millions of Muslims who did not subscribe to the notion that killing was the way to revenge, redemption, and paradise. Nobody ever hijacked an El Al jet and that was because El Al knew all there was to know about profiling and then some.
We could take lessons, Chisum thought now, and we should. As he had told Khalid nearly two years before, Kallendorf wasn't all wrong.
But Isa's first real piece of bad luck had come in Istanbul. He had learned enough, probably from Bayzani, to know that he'd have to have a duty station on offer when asked. Alaska would have seemed sufficiently remote to be safe. What were the odds, he would think, that he'd find himself riding an elevator with a Coast Guard officer born in Alaska?
Turns out, pretty good odds if he'd had anything but a superficial knowledge of the U.S. Coast Guard, who maintained a very large presence in Alaska, a state with 36,000 miles of coastline if you included all the islands, peninsulas, and archipelagoes.
That was not the real question, however.
The real question was, what was Isa doing at an IMO conference on marine safety in the first place?
There were two possible answers to that question.
One, he was there to learn what measures the international maritime community was putting in place to ensure the safety of vessels and crews working the high seas, for the purpose of confounding those measures and launching an attack against pick a target.
Two, and the answer Chisum considered far more probable, Isa was there to meet someone. Someone already inside the maritime community. Someone with a solid working knowledge of the shipping industry.
Or, or perhaps including, a working knowledge of ports. Western ports. Busy ports. Vulnerable ports.
But then, they were all vulnerable. Less than three percent of containers coming into U.S. ports were examined for contraband. Anybody could tuck anything inside of a container, stick it on a Horizon Lines ship, and feel pretty secure that it would never be spotted.
On the other side of his door he could hear the phone still ringing, though less frequently than before, and Melanie's voice still desolate at her inability to oblige any of the callers. She was really very good. She came in with another sheaf of phone messages. He looked at the clock. "Hey, it's after five. Go on home, Melanie."
"I can stay, Mr. Chisum. You could use the help."
"You have to have something better to do than babysit me, Melanie."
She smiled. She had a dimple in her right cheek. Her skin was like ivory. He recognized the triteness of the observation at about the same time he realized he'd been staring. He could feel the color creep up over his face, and he said gruffly, "I appreciate it, Melanie, thank you."
And again he watched her walk out of his office. Rumor had it that she'd been seen outside the office in company with Kallendorf. He hoped it wasn't true, and not just because it would mean the director had a spy too close to Patrick for comfort. He liked Melanie. He liked her a lot. She had thus far proved not only decorative but capable and efficient as well. True, he also liked the thought of her naked and stretched out on a bed, but he tried not to dwell on that. It was always a mistake to dip your pen in the company ink. Particularly this company.
He swiveled back to his computer and got online. The IMO's web site displayed an impressively far-reaching organization, with at a rough count over 170 member nations, including ones like Bolivia, Switzerland, and Mongolia, which so far as he could recall without looking at an atlas were landlocked. The U.S. Coast Guard was the United States ' representative at the IMO. He wondered who other nations sent. Be worth finding out. He made a note.
Then there were the government and non-government organizations affiliated with the IMO, some of which might prove productive of investigation, like the Arab Federation of Shipping, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, the International Association of Ports and Harbors. This last looked interesting so he pulled it up, and found links to countries with links to various of their ports. He clicked on Ireland in memory of Josie Ryan and on the Shannon page somewhat to his dismay found all the information he could wish for about the port, including maximum vessel dimensions and a scale map showing seven separate ship-berthing facilities.
He sampled some of the other port pages, and while some web sites were better than others they were all very informative.
He swiveled back to the window and reassumed the position.
On ports at least there was all the information Isa could wish for on the Internet if he were planning an attack against one. He would have no need to attend a conference on maritime safety to learn more.