“I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
He hesitated, thinking of Ginella.
“OK,” he told her finally, deciding it was more important to keep Li happy. “I’ll be there.”
Even so, he waited a full ten minutes before getting out of the car. He could feel his heart starting to pound as he walked around to the driveway, and by the time the automatic door at the front swung open, his pulse was approaching a hundred beats per minute.
Ginella wasn’t there. Li greeted him with a smile, and they went out quickly to the car.
The Sicilian city was even nicer with someone to share it with. They walked around for more than an hour, checking out the menus posted outside the restaurants. Never picky about food, Turk would have agreed to go into the very first place, a modest-priced ristorante promising “Roman style” cooking. But Li was more of a foodie, and insisted on checking as many places as possible. She didn’t just look at the menus; she glanced inside, and eyeballed the diners as well.
“You can judge a lot about a restaurant by who eats there,” she told him. “What we want is a place that the locals eat at.”
“How do we know that they’re local?”
“You can tell if they’re Italian,” she said. “Look at the clothes. The shoes, especially.”
Once she had pointed it out, differences became very noticeable. A lot of people wore jeans, just as they did, but they had different hues and washes, and tended to be fairly new. The shoe styles were very different, and even the way people walked could give them away.
“I was a psych major in college,” Li told him. “Reading people is more sociology—you can tell a lot by what they’re wearing, and just the forms of how they interact.”
“Can you tell that much about me?”
“I can figure out a few things,” she said. “But it’s no fair in your case—I already know you.”
“What do you know?”
“I know you’re a good pilot. And a good person.”
“I could say the same about you.”
“Could you?” Li laughed. It was a little girl laugh, innocent. Aside from the jeans, she was wearing a thick knit sweater that coddled her neck. She couldn’t have looked prettier to him if she were wearing a flowing gown.
They circled through downtown, Li studying the menus, Turk studying her.
“How did you get from psychology to flying Hogs?” he asked.
“You don’t think flying Warthogs takes a lot of psychology?”
“Seriously.”
“I was in an ROTC program. That’s how I paid for college. But I was always going to be a pilot.”
“Or a psychologist?”
“Not at first. I was in engineering. You wouldn’t believe the red tape switching.” The corners of her mouth turned up with a quick smile. “But I was also thinking that maybe I would use it, if I didn’t make it as a pilot. And maybe down the road.”
“Are you going to psychoanalyze me?”
She laughed, a long, warm laugh. “I don’t think so.”
They settled on a small restaurant whose menu was entirely in Italian. The waiter tried explaining the dishes, patiently answering Li’s questions. Turk ended up with a fish dish, even though he thought he had ordered beef. He barely tasted the food, completely entranced by the woman he was sharing the meal with. Everything Li said seemed interesting—she talked about her hometown in Minnesota, about the fact that she had been adopted, about the grudging acceptance of other pilots because she was a woman.
She could have talked about differential calculus and he still would have hung on every word.
His phone rang during dinner. He pulled it out, and not recognizing the number, decided to let it go to voice mail. Then he turned the phone off.
Driving back to her hotel, he searched for some reason to keep the night going. He asked if she wanted to hit the bar. She said she was tired and wanted to turn in.
He let that hang there—it wasn’t an invitation, and in the end he simply said good night.
When she hesitated for a moment before reaching for the door handle, he wondered whether he should kiss her. But the moment passed.
He rolled the window down and called after her. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I hope so,” she told him, before turning and going inside.
Back at his hotel, Turk checked his voice mail. He’d missed three calls—all from the same number. Belatedly, he realized it was Ginella’s.
She’d left only one message.
“Where are you?” she said, her voice raspy and tired. “I thought I’d see you tonight.”
Breaking things off wasn’t going to be easy. He turned in, leaving it for another day.
6
al-Hayat, Libya
When Ray Rubeo was eight years old, a cousin’s house had caught fire and burned to the ground. Rubeo visited the house the day after, as a bulldozer tore down what was left. A metallic smell hung in the air, mixing with the diesel exhaust of the Cat. His cousin’s family stood around, eyes glassy as they watched the dozer work through what had been their home for more than a decade. There had not been time to rescue any of their belongings. Toys and clothes and furniture were jumbled in the flotsam.
The smell and the emptiness returned to him now as he walked through the ruins of the buildings hit by the Sabre’s missiles. The ruins hadn’t been touched since immediately after the attack, when the victims were pulled out. Now the bricks were being salvaged; two young boys were piling them on one side. Otherwise the area was deserted.
“Seen enough?” asked Jons.
“Not yet.”
“I don’t want to stay too long,” said the bodyguard. “We stand out here.”
“Understood.”
Rubeo walked along the narrow street at the center of the attack, coordinating what he saw with what he remembered from the map. With the exception of a pair of buildings at the eastern end, where a fire had started and then spread, the rubble petered out at the edges of the street and three alleys that intersected the target area. That meant the computer had identified the buildings as targets.
Which he already knew.
Or did he? Because really, looking at the targeting information, they simply assumed that the computer had deliberately gone after a building. But it could just as easily have been looking at pure GPS coordinates.
It was a subtle, subtle distinction. Given the coordinates, the targeting section would look at the building, and go from there.
Significant?
Certainly this had not been a random act—the house was struck perfectly.
No, that didn’t mean it wasn’t random. That just meant the house was struck perfectly. Because in theory, to the machine there was no difference in the coordinates for an empty desert.
Not true—the machine took the coordinates and looked at them, deciding if it was a building or a tank or whatever. It then worked from there.
To an investigator coming in later, it would look purposeful. But that didn’t mean it necessarily was.
If it had been given an empty desert, it wouldn’t have attacked at all. But given a location with a house . . .
Rubeo played with his earring. The mission had been programmed in. Assuming there was no interference, what had happened could be explained by a change in the navigation system that made the Sabre think it was several miles away from its intended target, and by an override to the targeting computer that put the strike into dumb mode—in other words, turned off the target recognition feature. Two separate events that someone would have to beam in.
Dumb mode wasn’t on. It hit the house—it was going to a target.
Maybe by accident. Or not accident exactly, but whoever had worked out the coordinates knew it would be close enough to look deliberate.