"I actually kinda do. He really is a sad sack of a terrorist, Patrick. Isa must really be desperate." The two of them contemplated the thought of a desperate Isa in silence for a moment, and then Bob added, "You might want to alert our friends north of the border."
Patrick had already sent off an email. "Will do. Did you tell Sadiq we found Isa's email instructions in Brittany 's jewelry box?"
"Yeah. He was astonished, he thought he'd hidden them so well. Now he thinks we're some kinda psychic."
"Good." There hadn't been much of use to them in the little slip of paper, but if it made Yaqub fear them, that worked for Patrick. "Why was he getting on a plane for Mexico City?"
"He says Isa emailed him that the LAX plan had been aborted due to some security breach and to get on a plane for Mexico City."
The next report in the intelligence folder was of a young woman found in the back of a Ford sedan with her neck broken, in the parking garage at Miami International Airport. Other than that the young woman was a Muslim American, it seemed unfortunate but unrelated to any of his concerns. "Last-minute orders and absolute obedience to same," he said to Bob. "That sounds a lot more like him than that whole planning session in York."
He could almost hear Bob shrug. Bob's job was to interrogate, not to interpret. "I don't think Yaqub's even close to a true believer. He thought about Isa's email for a while before he complied."
"What pushed him over?"
"He says that even if Isa couldn't find him he could probably find Yussuf, since Yussuf is apparently more of a true believer than Yaqub. He was Yussuf's friend, he said. He couldn't let him down."
"Honor among terrorists. Who'd a thunk it?" Patrick turned to the next report, and then he turned back to the one on the murder in the airport garage.
The body showed signs of recent and consensual sex. The ME thought she had been a virgin. She'd had no identification, but her mother had been making increasingly frantic calls to the hospitals and the police from the first morning of her disappearance, and had identified the body within hours of its discovery. Her mother had-
Patrick sat up, his attention caught. Her mother, a Mrs. Haddad Man-sour, had said that she suspected her lodger, a Mr. Daoud Sadat, of the crime. Mr. Sadat, she said, had been renting their spare room for six months, and she feared that he and her daughter had grown quite close.
Even more interesting, her description of him, precisely detailed, was very similar to the doctored photo on Adam Bayzani's passport.
A man, a Muslim terrorist who called himself Isa, or Jesus, a way of mocking the nations pursuing him.
He'd assumed the name Gandhi in Germany. After Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps? It seemed likely, even probable, especially if he then took as an alias the name of another good man, a man whose inspired leadership and vision for peace in the Middle East was a legend among all peoples, if anathema to some. "I will go to Jerusalem," Anwar Sadat had famously said. He had, and Muslim extremists had assassinated him for his vision.
"The fucker's giving us the finger again," he said, marveling, almost admiring.
"Which fucker?" Bob said.
Patrick got to his feet. "Bob, I'm sorry, I've got to go." He hung up the phone. "Melanie!"
18
HAITI
The anonymous little village was built on pilings perched on a narrow strip of tropical coastline at most a hundred feet in width between the almost vertical forest and the cerulean blue sea. It consisted in the main of a waterlogged marina with a dock ending in a ramp leading down to two wooden slips. The slips looked as if they were on the verge of going under for the third time. To the north and south of the marina were a few related businesses that looked even more tatterdemalion, and some one-room, thatched-roof homes clinging to the sides of the steep coastline that were almost tree houses. At the southern end of the village sat a shabby hotel, a one-story structure whose largest room was the bar, and a half-dozen bungalows with ancient thatched roofs teeming with insect life.
Up the coast from Port-au-Prince, it was so small it didn't even have a name, which might have explained why it was on no map. Although AMI thought that absence more probably had to do with the reason for its existence, its primary industry, which encouraged a wholesale discretion on the part of its residents, always providing they wanted to live to see tomorrow. It was probably the same reason that the encroaching vegetation had been encouraged to overhang the shoreline, all the buildings, and as much of the marina as possible. That much harder to spot, from the sea or the air.
There were a few open skiffs tied up to the marina, one painted a deep blue with a broad stern to accommodate the line of six large outboard motors bolted to it. Akil, inexperienced in the ways of boats, thought they looked very powerful.
He had been here for three days as the rest of the cell trickled in in ones and twos, some flying in on a seaplane held together quite literally with duct tape. Others came by ferry, a self-propelled scow whose arrivals and departures were as erratic as her drunken captain, a squat, scrofulous man with an almost incapacitating limp, very bad teeth, and one eye. Akil had arrived by car, although he'd had to hire a driver to find the road and then to get the car down the almost indecipherable switchback through the jungle, alive with bird calls. He imagined that he could hear the slither of snakes, too, and his driver, a gaunt, morose young man with the scarred knuckles of a fighter, enlivened the journey with a description of the various indigenous species. None of them were poisonous, the driver assured him, but Akil didn't like snakes, and this made the pit stops on the twelve-hour, twenty-two-mile journey interesting. If Akil had been in a less apathetic mood, he might have been more appreciative.
He didn't know quite what he was doing here. Yussuf, good soldier that he was, had arrived before him and had begun to gather in Yaqub's cell members as well as his own, settling them into the tiny cabana he had rented at the very edge of town. He brought them food-if all went according to plan they wouldn't be there that long but there was no point in giving away information about themselves to the investigators who would swarm about the place later-and he found women for those who wanted them. He led them in prayer, stiffening more than one spine, and when the Koran couldn't do the job, engaged the nervous in long discussions of what waited for them in paradise, with emphasis on the honey and the virgins.
During the last three days Yussuf couldn't be faulted. After the initial greeting, Yussuf had said only, "Yaqub?"
"He didn't make it," Akil said.
Yussuf muttered a prayer for his boyhood friend's soul and asked no more questions.
By comparison to Yussuf, Yaqub would have been at best only a decent aide de camp. Akil himself was superfluous.
He didn't need to be there. Moreover, he shouldn't be there. He'd known that before he'd arrived, before he'd left Miami, even. It was the first time he'd ever exposed himself to the risk of operations. For that matter the operation itself was at risk because of his actions. Sooner or later Zahirah's body would be found, and when they questioned Mrs. Mansour she would have too much of value to tell them. He cursed himself again for not returning to the house and disposing of her. He didn't make mistakes like that. It was why he was still alive, and still a threat.
He himself had flown on pre-existing reservations from Miami to Lima, from Lima to Mexico City, and from Mexico City to Port-au-Prince, a different passport for the last flight. The last two men had arrived this morning.
The transportation he had arranged for six months ago was due in late this evening. He would see off the faithful, entrust Yussuf with the completion of the operation, make the hazardous drive through the jungle back to Port-au-Prince, and fly to Paris, where he already had a reservation in a hotel where all the rooms had satellite television and he could watch the results of his plan play out on CNN and the BBC, and especially on Al Jazeera. It would be the glorious culmination of a long and inventive career, and a fitting coda to the life of his master, the man who had taught him everything. He knew Zarqawi would approve and rejoice at this astounding blow to the fabric and pride of the infidel.