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

necessarily, Arabic linguist and intelligence background, solid communications experience. Last, another guy, don’t care whether he’s officer or enlisted, good at security, good with horses, a woodsman/outdoorsy type, weapons, Arabic, maybe Farsi and/or Dari if you can find it. And really last, obviously we need at least one solid CIA spook so we're not a complete bunch of amateurs. Someone who can keep us all from getting killed if we ever go out into the field again." He came out of his reverie, grinning. “I don’t need much, eh? Just a few simple, easy-to-find Joes. But you know better what you have in mind for us to be doing. Can you get them?”

“Sure, we can get them, if they exist anywhere. I assume you want to talk to them before we actually bring them on? That's only four guys plus my spook: is that enough?”

“For the business yes, and for your part, yes for starters, when we start working on stuff we’ll know what else we might need. These are the guys I need you to train for the business piece while we're building it. Also, yeah, I'd like to talk to them. Send them to Dayton, I’ll talk to them in my office there if you find them in the next three months, after that . . .hmm, where do you expect me to be for the rest of the time that the “palace” as you call it is a-building? I’m out of a job once my name’s on that promotion list, and it’s going to be really awkward if I have to hang around. Impossible, actually. I need to disappear from the Air Force. Like I said before, maybe that’s a really bad idea, anyway. I can still do this for 3 years as a Colonel and that keeps everyone I know from being pissed at me for life. . .”

“Give it up, it’s done, the President’s already fixed it with the Chief of Staff and the Director of Personnel. You don’t have to tell all your pals anyway, they can think you’ve retired as a gentleman of property in North Carolina or wherever. Now, where to be: at home there in Dayton is fine with us, “special assignment, data masked, classified”, nobody will give you a hard time about that. We’ll get you the airplane pretty quick anyway, and you can begin using that to supervise the project until you’re ready to make the move, maybe go find the guys and interview them in situ, whatever works for you. Come to DC to chat with me and the guys from time to time when we need to. Meantime, enjoy the semi-retirement with your wife for a while.”

Cameron looked a little sick. The promotion felt, well, cheesy, really cheesy. But he said simply, “Fine, Dayton is good until then. We have some scheduling stuff to work out, but I need to work on the building project a bit before we can firm that up: when the guys move, that kind of thing. Here’s an idea, since you have the President’s ear: ask him if my name can be masked on that promotion list, along with the location and assignment and all. That’ll help me pretend it never happened. Now, what else do you have, Herr Direktor?”

Anderson grinned. “I do like you, son. I almost forgot, there are two other small things. First, the President wants to give you the Silver Star next month some time, his people will call you to set it up. Here in D.C., bring your wife, you’ll stay with me at my place. Last, I noticed you took a trip to Grand Cayman with your wife? I trust you had a satisfactory time?”

Cameron’s face remained blank. Everything in Grand Cayman had been perfectly satisfactory. But he wondered what Anderson knew about that? It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Company or his new Boss about the money he’d found in his account, which had quietly gone from the $800,000 that’d been there when the whole escapade started to a round $1,000,000 by the time he’d left Saudi Arabia. It was more that he wondered how traceable it all was, who else knew about it in the government, and whether at some point he might be vulnerable to pressure from someone, maybe through the IRS. So he’d done a little maneuvering.

Five days after the fight at the al-Auda compound he was relaxing by the pool at Fahd’s home in Riyadh. That’s when the offer had come to go into business with the hotel, but also when Cameron decided to make the move he’d been considering since his flight to Paris took off. So, he and Fahd had gone to the biggest office of the Saudi-British Bank, Fahd’s bank in Riyadh. There, they’d wire transferred all but $50,000 from Cameron’s Cayman account at the Royal Bank of Canada in Georgetown into Fahd’s personal account. At the same time, Fahd’s private banker, a very efficient Englishman in a custom Saville Row suit, opened a new numbered account for Cameron across the street down in Georgetown at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Three days later, with Cameron on a flight back to the US, Fahd walked into his bank, and ordered his man to wire transfer $950,000 to the RBS account in Georgetown. Cameron paid a comfortable visit to his new fortune with Elizabeth, who was delighted to have joined the spy business, the money having somewhat recovered her pique at his having been shot. In theory, neither the CIA nor anyone else now had a clue where the money had gone.

Getting no response to this innocent question, and guessing that none was coming, Anderson got up, as did Cameron, and they shook hands across the small table. “Thanks for all this, sir” the latter said, more than a little embarrassed. It was an awful lot, after all, he thought.

“Nonsense, you’re buying,” Anderson quipped, pulling on his cap with a look at the plates on the table. Then he turned serious. “No kidding, though, Colonel. You did good, really, really good, better than anyone could or would have expected. The President is grateful, I’m grateful, the nation is grateful whether they know it or not, which of course they don’t. There’s a lot of bad guys out there still, we’re at war, but you made war like nobody else has in a long time. We don’t hand out knighthoods like Her Majesty’s government, but we do know how to say “thanks” to guys like you when the chance presents itself. It has, and “Thanks”. President told me to be sure and tell you that. Now, I’m outta here. I’ll see you next month for the Silver Star.”

“Two last things before you go,” Cameron stopped him. An Anderson eyebrow went up. “OK, first, can I ever go to France again? Second, what’s the deal on the Saudis who tried to get into the States?”

Anderson glanced around quickly, there was just the two of them, his own guy by the window with his date, and the hostess at the stand near the door. Far enough. “OK. One, yes you can go back to France, but to be safe you will have a diplomatic passport, always, and we’ll make sure the embassy knows you’re coming every time. That’ll be fixed. However, I think it might be best to put off such a trip for a while, I’d prefer a year or more but we can talk about it. The French are going to be a little testy, best to let them cool off. Two, things are not quite as good. We found 5 of them trying to cross from Canada. They’re not talking, but we figure there may be as many as 25, possibly even 30 left somewhere. We have to assume they’re here and they’ve disappeared, waiting for instructions or something. That truly sucks, these are nasty people, but we’re working on it. Right now it’s not your problem, but if we have something for you to think about, you’ll hear from us right away. Now I really have to move. Next month, the White House, or else…we’ll talk more then.”

Then he turned away and walked briskly past the hostess stand and out the front door. Cameron watched as he transformed into the old man again out on the sidewalk, stooped a little, leaning on the cane, limping heavily. The traffic on King Street seemed to magically make a space big enough for him to cross to the car on the other side of the street at his old-man-pace, where the door opened and he disappeared inside. A moment later the car pulled into traffic and was gone.

Cameron was dazed, felt like wood, and sat down with a thump on the hard chair, still staring at the spot where the car had been. He took a big gulp of the iced tea, then forked another piece of the Spanish ham into his mouth, where it melted in a burst of flavor against his palate. He sat there like that for nearly ten minutes, staring like a shell-shocked soldier at something a thousand yards away, eating and drinking on automatic, but otherwise as rigid as though made of stone. At length he eased a bit, shrugged both shoulders in slow circles a few times, and looked around. The place was empty, even the dark haired girl and her “date” were gone, the server waited patiently against the wall on the other side of the room.

“Well, old son,” he said quietly to the empty room, “isn’t that quite the thing?” But the steel blue eyes were alight now, the face animated, smile broad, everything sharp and full of energy. He reached for his wallet right-handed and made the international “check” sign with his left, sending the waiter scurrying. In just 3 minutes he’d melted into the crowd moving east on King Street.

*****

Khalid al-Shahrani left the young woman alone in the bed, pulled on his trousers and walked out onto the covered porch at the back of his new home. After nearly two months of slow, quiet, careful effort through very distant intermediaries, he was ready to make a phone call. He took a seat on the long chaise with his back to a wall so that he could watch the door through which he'd just exited the house. It would not do for the woman to wake up and interrupt this conversation. His hosts here in Khartoum were indulgent, but even they feared what the Americans might do if their "guests'" activities became detectable, let alone obvious. And women always talked to other women.

He looked at the new mobile phone in his hand, so new this would be the first call he'd made with it. The thought of its "virginity" made him smile after his long night with the young woman. Then he cursed what his enemies could do...no, HAD done to him, with just a sniff of a few calls from a mobile phone. Entire networks of the Brothers were utterly destroyed in France, the UK, and Jordan. Much of the long two months since he'd fled here from Taif in Saudi Arabia had been spent carefully crafting new operational rules. Numbers could no longer be stored in phones, but had to be committed to the Brothers' memories instead. Phones and their numbers had to change monthly. Even the names they used on their calls had to change with each phone purchased. All this took time to coordinate via careful and obscure work on the Internet and sometimes by personal messengers who undertook dangerous cross-border travel. But finally, they were ready to return to operational status, and Khalid was ready to call his top operative in Europe.

He reclined on the chaise and dialed the number, using a country code of "49", which as far as he could remember he had never used before. He did not really know where it was, but somewhere in Europe he was sure. He waited.

The phone