The Phoenix Affair - Dave Moyer (smart ebook reader TXT) 📗

if anyone was following out of sight, and there was nothing. The men have all come up now, and we have a good position here as you can see. But there will be lookouts tonight anyway, one can never be sure about people and goods smuggling into Iraq since the war, but we think we are quite safe. There’s no tea just yet, sorry, it is not ready, and there will be about two hours before dinner. You will find some bread, dates, and Pepsi in your tents, though, and water to wash off some of the dust of the day. You may find a nap is just the thing after that. I will send someone for you if you oversleep, but we will probably see dinner around 7:30 or 8. Now, I’m going to settle the family, so I’ll see you then.”

“Thanks, Fahd, this is marvelous, see you at around 8 then.” They smiled and parted. But Cameron grimaced. He was hungry, and he worried that 8 might become 10 before dinner was served. It would be a big meal to be sure, but he hoped there was a big pile of bread in the tent as he rounded the back of the Suburban to get his bag and looked at Allen, a large man looking very hungry. This shock reminded him of how soldiers could eat, and animal instinct took over. He grabbed his things and turned fast toward the tent while Allen and Ripley stirred around in the gear in the back of the truck.

It was still warm in the tent, but not as hot as it was in the sun. His eyes adjusted quickly to the relative gloom and he surveyed the space. Along the two sides and the back wall there were carpets topped with a variety of cushions. Near the center at the back lay a neat stack of the curious faux-fur blankets that seemed to be everywhere in a Saudi department store, garishly colored in animal prints, Hollywood movie themes, and the like. The sight reminded him of his last camping trip, where it seemed all the Saudis had one of these, and used it instead of a sleeping bag for his bed. Cameron shook his head thinking of the oddity of this choice, the strangeness of the Kingdom in so many ways. But right in the middle of the tent there was a circular aluminum platter about three feet in diameter, and on it the pile of flat pita-like bread, a large bowl of dates, a smaller bowl of nuts looking like pistachios, and a pyramid of canned colas. He tossed his pack and gear into a pile near the blanket stack and sat crosslegged at the platter, looking toward the door, and began to eat.

Ripley and Allen walked into the tent through the square of dazzling sunlight a few minutes later. They too paused briefly to adjust to the dimness, but grasped the situation immediately and tossed their things in heaps to left and right. The pile of bread diminished fast, the dates disappeared, nuts crunched away, only the Pepsi, lukewarm and no ice, looked likely to survive. Satisfied for the moment, Cameron rolled toward his bag and a blanket. “Dinner at around eight, gentlemen, and someone will come to wake us. Siesta time.” He was out and very deep down in what seemed like no time at all. XXII. Langley/Taif

Jones emerged from his briefing with the DDO and crossed the outer office, smiling at the pleasant secretary who seemed to have a face that could both snarl and smile back at the same time. Outside he crossed the hall and got on the elevator heading for the second floor.

His pitch had gone pretty well. The Boss contributed a couple of things he didn’t know—that the French service was actively engaged and had indeed been the guys that bagged the suspect outside the Amman embassy; that they bagged a few more bad guys around town using the data on his cell phone, and that since about midnight last night local time traffic on most of their cell phone contacts had gone pretty much silent. He now had an overhead image of the town of al-Hail, and he thought he could identify the compound that Cameron and party were headed for. The analysts were still looking at the picture, but he didn’t think there was going to be anything earth shattering to come from that.

There was nothing yet on any of the American passports they were looking for, or the Saudi men who held them. That was one of the seams in the system that wasn’t quite solved yet. There was not any concrete way to randomly request anyone to monitor the hundreds of airlines in the world for the appearance of any of up to a thousand men and their US passports. Instead, what the US government wheedled out of its allies was the provision of lists of passengers after they boarded. These lists were necessarily a little late to the party from Jones’ point of view as it was, but even worse, he had to wait for them to make their way through the national government in the country of departure, usually the aviation ministry, and from there to the FAA in the US and sometimes but not always simultaneously through the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence. Even if those steps happened with the best will in the world, and with the most enthusiastic spirit of cooperation between agencies, it could not happen in less than a few hours. Often, it was at least a day. The flight from Heathrow to New York or Boston took just over seven hours, to someplace in Canada it would be even less, and then it was often an easy and short drive across the border. Amid that good news there was always the less-often-considered option of a nice, slow cruise ship from Europe to the US—uncommon, expensive, slow, but infinitely less susceptible to monitoring. And then there were the possibilities of booking passage on a freighter from just about anywhere to just about any US port, with a Captain or a company that might be more or less honest, and the difficulties boggled the mind. Every half-witted intelligence agent on the planet knew that it was easy and perfectly legitimate to travel the world in a merchant fleet cabin, in fact, it was a relatively common way for elder Europeans to see the world, and it was cheap. And then the Mexican border did not even bear thinking about . . .

Jones turned into his office looking sour, took a seat in the chair and swiveled to stare out the window, across the lawn at the now sunlit forest. Hard to believe he’d been staring into the darkened forest just three days ago, or was it four, hoping to get into the game and now right back here. “Well, no use complaining about that,” he said aloud. He focused instead on the edge of the forest, trying to see what was moving out there among the trunks or in the air between the branches, and trying at the same time to sort out a way to find his Saudi needles in the enormous haystack of the global transportation system. He was sure they were out there, sure that he knew who they were, and almost sure that the train wreck called Phoenix was likely to have spurred them to act, or at least to move, sooner than they’d planned. He hoped that also meant sooner than they were ready. “But hope is not a plan,” he mumbled.

*****

Just about twenty miles due East at Fort Meade, Maryland, a room stuffed with Cray supercomputers hummed away, working hard on their task to sort, categorize, prioritize, interpret, and route telephone intercepts to and from all over the world. Well, almost all over. Technically, the NSA was not allowed to record phone calls originating in the United States without a warrant from a court somewhere. Technically.

The third machine on the left, the one the day shift had nicknamed “Fluffy”, finished it’s current call, deciding it was of no immediate interest to anyone, and moved on to the next one, which was provided by its nearest neighbor, incongruously named “Ingrid” by its own set of geeks. Fluffy compared the English text of the transcript to its list of words of interest and discovered that there were ten word matches in the forty-one-word transcript referring to an Air Force General and some Americans and Saudi Arabia. It noted that the original audio had been in Arabic, which set another flag. It noted that the call had originated with a cellphone at a Saudi tower and that it was placed to a landline in Dhahran. Neither line was under deliberate surveillance according to the data in the record. Fluffy was not possessed of any great intuition, in fact none at all, but that final discouraging fact was not enough to overwhelm the other interesting characteristics of the call. Instead, it only dropped it from FLASH importance to a fairly high-priority for the attention of a linguist/analyst at NSA, and Fluffy duly sent it to one of its neighbors, which in turn routed it to a cue that would come to the attention of the analyst team at some point. If the call had been rated FLASH, it would have gone direct to the Counter Terrorism Center, to the CIA Intel Directorate, to the DNI, and to Homeland Security immediately. As it was, the cue for the analyst team at NSA was running about two days wait time, occasionally less depending on volume and manning. But it was also Friday afternoon, and the majority of the team was heading home. The weekend watch crew was smaller and therefore slower.

*****

Khalid woke from his afternoon nap as the call to Isha, the last prayer of the night, died in a slow echo down the narrow street outside his hotel room. He’d overslept, he’d intended to go to the prayer, but now it was too late to go to the mosque a block away. Instead he got up and stood on the floor facing North toward Mecca and began to recite the verses as the imam would be doing at the mosque.

When he was finished he sat on the bed again to collect his thoughts. He was hungry, but that would have to wait: nothing would be open around town on a Friday night anyway, and the men in the small hotel restaurant would not be back from prayer themselves and re-organized to produce any food for at least another thirty minutes. Thirty minutes to think, then.

The afternoon was not as pleasant as the day started. Something had definitely gone horribly wrong in England after that bloody-minded General arrived. It was like someone rolled up the entire bottom and middle layers of the al-Qaeda network all over the bloody country, just like Paris only a day or two earlier. There was too much damage done in too short a time for the presence of the General in both places to have been a coincidence. Everyone’s cellular phone had gone quiet. He’d discarded his after erasing