“They pay me to travel around the world and write about it. What’s not to like?”
He laughed. “I want to be you when I grow up.”
“So do I.”
“What brings you home, Arlene?”
She let her smile fade. “You know I was in Pattaya Beach the day of the bombing, right?”
Hugh looked at her. “Really,” he said. “I didn’t know, as it happens.”
Her mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that. I sent my report in by way of the American embassy in Bangkok. I knew when I didn’t hear from you that you’d probably never gotten it. Diplomats.” The word was an epithet.
“Squared,” Hugh said with feeling.
“That’s why I came in when I got back.” Without hurrying, Arlene unwedged an envelope from a battered leather bag on a short strap designed to hug her shoulder. Hugh had never seen her without it. He had been curious enough one day to rifle through it when she was out of the room and had excavated a reporter’s notebook, her passport, a lone Visa card, a fistful of Travel + Leisure business cards imprinted with her name, her office phone number, her cell phone number, her fax number, Marie’s phone number, Hugh’s phone number, and a Hotmail e-mail address to which Hugh had an icon on his desktop with the password already programmed in. He had just excavated a twelve-pack of Uniball gel pens with medium points when she came back into the room.
“Where’s your computer?” he had asked, and she had laughed and told him she had accounts in cybercafes from Bakwanga, Zaire, to Galahad, Alberta. “Cheaper than trying to find a tech when your computer freezes up.”
“And a lot harder to trace,” Hugh had said. “Why so many pens?”
“Two reasons. One, you can use pens for currency in a lot of third-world countries.”
“And?”
“And I might run out of ink.”
Marie brought in the sandwiches and drinks. Arlene waited for the door to close behind her before laying out a row of photographs across Hugh’s desk. They ranged from clear to indistinct, and once Hugh mentally filtered out the background noise in the way of waiters and drinkers and diners and Arlene, smiling at the camera with her curly hair frizzed into steel wool from what appeared to be a high level of humidity, they featured four men sitting at a table in front of a white sand beach with a strip of blue ocean beyond. He fished a magnifying glass out of a drawer and ran it over their faces. Two of them in particular drew his attention. “Hey?” he said, with a gathering sense of incredulity.
“Which one?” she said.
“The skinny one on the right.” He punched up a file on the computer and typed in a name. A mug shot flashed on screen. “Noortman, Jaap Junior.”
Arlene gave a satisfied nod. “Our friendly neighborhood international pirate.”
“Is-” His voice failed him. Arlene waited, her expression somewhere between expectant and joyous. “Arlene, is Fang the guy sitting on his left?”
She nodded, a grin breaking out. “I wasn’t close enough to catch the whole conversation, but I definitely heard Noortman call him Fang.”
Hugh dropped the magnifying glass and stared at her with something approaching awe. “Holy shit, Arlene. I don’t think we’ve got a photo of Fang. And we sure as hell don’t have one of the two of them together.”
“You do now.”
Hugh didn’t grudge her the satisfaction he heard in her voice. As far as she was concerned she could have retired at full pay on this one photograph alone. He took a self-indulgent moment of his own to congratulate himself once again on being smart enough to hire her.
They’d met three years ago, when Hugh had been seated at Arlene’s table at a mandatory second-banana appearance to support the director when he spoke to the National Press Club. From the subsequent conversation Hugh had deduced that writing a travel column wasn’t going to keep Arlene interested for very long. He’d asked for her card and called the next day to invite her to lunch at a small Indian restaurant, where she ordered the hottest curry on the menu. Her eyes hadn’t even teared up. Hugh had recruited her on the spot. She was one of three in his private stable of informants, all personally recruited and trained and all of whom reported directly to him.
The new big thing in the intelligence community was satellite surveillance, and much was made of the ability to read the license plate of a truck from low earth orbit. Hugh relied upon it himself every day on the job, but when it came right down to it, there simply was no substitute for the human eye, informed, trained for detail, and on the scene. He had chosen his operatives because they were multilingual and already widely traveled, with an inborn predisposition to head straight for trouble and an equally inborn lucky streak that enabled them to get out of it again with minimal damage, to themselves or their nation.
At which time they would call Hugh, or e-mail him, or show up in his waiting room, and his files on the pace of construction of nuclear weapons facilities in Iran or what Russian arms dealer was selling off surplus AK-47s in Bryansk or which Pakistani general was plotting an attack across the Pakistan-Indian border increased by another piece of information. It was almost never a vital piece in and of itself, but each piece fit into a larger puzzle whose growing picture helped him see what was going on in the world beneath the headlines on CNN. In his job he needed to know what was going to happen, not what already had. He was an analyst, a synthesizer, a spider sitting at the center of a web, recording each distant vibration of silk in an effort to predict from what direction the next threat was going to creep.
He laughed at this flight of fancy.
“What?” Arlene said, startled.
“Nothing. Sorry.” Fang and Noortman having drinks on a Thai beach with two unidentified Asians was definitely something he needed to know more about. “Go ahead,” he said with an encouraging wave. “Tell me the tale.”
Arlene folded her hands neatly in her lap and reached back for the memory of that terrible day.
She’d been in Pattaya Beach to write a column on single destination resorts going up in the area and had been wandering around in search of local color. She’d been a little over a block away from ground zero when the balloon went up. Her voice remained even and matter-of-fact, but it was clearly an upsetting memory.
Hugh made a comforting noise and nodded encouragingly.
“There were these two guys.” She pointed at the photos. “Asian for sure, Korean I’m thinking. Everyone else is screaming and feeling for where their eyes or their balls used to be, but not these two. They’re standing there, not talking to each other, not helping anyone, just taking it all in. It-” She shrugged. “They looked, I don’t know, wrong. So I followed them to a bar on the beach. Pretty soon this guy shows up.” She pointed at Fang. “Then Noortman appears, and I remembered that day we spent going through your bulletins.”
Hugh nodded again. One of the many reasons he had recruited Arlene was the fact that she literally never forgot a face, whether she saw it in person or posted on the wall of a post office.
“So, I got out my camera and told the waiter I wanted to take some pictures to send home to my grandkids. I talked to him in French and even though he informed me that my accent was odieux and my grammar horrible, hein, what could one expect of les americains after all and du moins I was trying, so he agreed to pose for a few pictures of himself so that I’d have a memento of that day on the beach at Pattaya.”
He looked at her purse. She grinned and opened it up to produce the tiniest digital camera he’d ever seen. “I’ve added to the armory.”
“So I see, and lucky for us.” He looked back at the photos. “Did you follow Fang?”
She shook her head. “That meeting looked a lot like somebody was hiring somebody else. I figured it’d be better to follow the boss. Looked to me like the boss was those two, so I followed them to Bangkok, and from there to London. They stopped in Bangkok long enough to acquire clothing and one piece of luggage each,” she added. “And before you ask, they bought their tickets through a travel agent that day, on a credit card that is paid off out of a numbered account in Riyadh. I went back and checked.”