Close to midnight and the city lights of Langdon, miles to the north, pushed a dome faintly against the sky. Overhead, a sickle moon wedged between the clouds. Lots and lots of mosquitoes swarmed around.
He was torn over the decision he had to make as he swatted at the bugs. Across the road, a spooky thread of moonlight outlined the Aztec dimensions of the Nekoma radar pyramid. He hugged himself, shivered in the muggy seventy-nine degrees, and looked up. Jeez. It was creepy out here, suspended between the ruins of the Cold War and this slender Muslim moon.
As he paced, he put his right hand, palm open, over his heart, like when you sing the national anthem. Except he was searching for his sluggish heartbeat. He suspected that a catastrophic illness lurked inside him, coiled up, something part diabetes and part cancer, that lapped sugar from his blood the way a dog laps water.
Sometimes he saw things.
Shapes jerked at the corners of his vision. He caught fleeting glimpses of movement he thought were people darting away through doorways.
At first he thought he might have paranormal powers. Lately he had come to believe that it was a sign his death was near. If this were the case, he reasoned, the closer he came to it the better he could see into the world that existed just the other side of death. Since his body and its functions repelled him, the idea of leaving it was a kind of comfort.
He had entered “out of body experience” in his computer’s search engine one day and found his way to research papers about NDEs-near death experiences. The more he read about it, the more he surmised that the shapes he detected were presences transiting a zone between the sputtering energy of life ending and the total void of nothingness.
Near Death Experience.
The subject intrigued him and he’d investigated the sensation of what it might feel like with the help of a drug called ketamine. Abusers of the compound called it “going in the K-hole”; the dreamy scary sensation of leaving the body.
He had always suspected, and now he knew it for sure.
He was different.
It was time. Charon picked up the phone, inserted coins, and dialed the number. The Mole picked up on the other end but didn’t say hello. Charon pressed the receiver closer to his ear and could feel the building anxiety-the whole attack plan hung in the balance. Finally Charon broke the silence: “It’s me.”
“Where the hell are you?” the Mole asked.
“Still in town. You know, Rashid must have told them something, ’cause I think they’re here.”
“Shit. How many?”
“Three. Two women and an older guy.”
“I repeat. Why are you still there?”
Charon took a deep breath, steeled himself, and made his demand: “One of the women-I think she’s my pick. I mean, she came all this way to meet me.”
Only by a great act of will did the Mole resist shouting a string of obscenities. This was absurd-jeopardizing the operation because of a woman? So many things could still go wrong, and now this.
“But she could be an agent, for Christ’s sake,” he said incredulously.
“It’s got to be her. And that’s that.”
The Mole heard the finality in Charon’s voice and took a deep breath of his own to calm himself. After all, he had unleashed Charon. Why be surprised when he tried to flex his new muscles? So the Mole held his temper and savored the element of risk. Almost like a stab from his youth. He said, in a level, measured voice, “We’ll get her for you, but we have to do it fast.”
After the Mole hung up, he was back on the phone in an instant, making a call of his own: “First, you should both be at the target, I don’t care about the rain business. Second, Rashid talked, and now we may have agents snooping around in Langdon. And our friend’s next girl-toy selection could be one of them. He’s going to blow the operation if we don’t get him in line. You have to go back in and get him out. Now.”
The Mole hung up the pay phone and then, finally, he swore-in English, and then in Arabic. How was he suppose to get the job done with these homicidal clowns for help? Shaking his head, he walked across the deserted parking lot. Security dictated that he use an unfrequented location where he could observe anyone who might be following him. So he chose this abandoned truck stop on the interstate. The gas and diesel pumps had been pulled out. They’d scrawled CLOSED in soapy letters on the empty diner windows. But the pay phones still worked.
He leaned against the hood of his car and studied the sky, wanting the clouds to clear. Wanting this thing to be over. His hand drifted to the open neck of his shirt. Before this all started, he used to wear gold chains around his neck. Kept the top two buttons open so the gold gleamed, nestled in his thick chest hair. Now, instead of the gold, he fingered a small silver religious medallion. His Christian mother had given it to him as a child.
Saint Charbel, in the lore of the Lebanese Maronite Church, had performed miracles after his death. The Mole himself had been practically dead for decades; exiled to this wilderness. Now, like Saint Charbel, years after his death he was about to perform a miracle.
The world of his birth was no more: Beirut when it was the Paris of the Middle East. His family had mirrored the city’s pre-civil war cosmopolitanism; his father had been a Sunni Muslim who’d preferred Karl Marx to the Koran. His mother was a Maronite Christian. His father had also been a member of the Ba’ath Party, an agent for Syrian intelligence, and a businessman heavily invested in growing cannabis and poppies in the Bekaa Valley.
Smuggling ran in his blood.
In 1982, an Israeli air strike killed his young Palestinian wife and infant son. One month later, a sixteen-inch shell from the American battleship New Jersey, firing in support of the Lebanese Army, killed his parents, his brother, and his two sisters.
Seeking revenge, he volunteered for a suicide mission against the Americans. His superiors counseled patience. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his left-wing guerrilla group was advised by a KGB handler. The Russian interviewed him, and, seeing that he possessed intelligence and quality, suggested a long game: send him to America to live anonymously with his mother’s Christian family. Let him sleep among the Americans, become one of them, go to their schools, serve in their army.
So they sent him to the United States to ply his father’s trade. He would buy and sell and quietly learn the rhythms of smuggling across the Canadian border. Someday he would prove useful.
But that day never really came. The people who sent him had perished in the endless combat against the Israelis. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Mole was sentenced to prosper among the people he had sworn to kill. He remained faithful to his mission, going through the motions of his shadow life, running drugs, funneling money back to fund Hamas and Hezbollah. He got soft, he got married. He built a business. His two teenage sons were in high school. Christ-just yesterday he had taken them to soccer camp.
And then the knock at the door finally came. Not from his old group, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; not even from Hamas or Hezbollah. There was a new ascendant movement, inspired by the flyers of airplanes into tall American buildings. They were consolidating their fund raising. And asking favors. The dapper Saudi businessman named Rashid had impeccable knowledge of the Mole’s background. And he needed a ton of some unspecified material moved from Winnipeg across the border. No questions asked. And that’s how it began.