“They’re off by a few hundred miles,” Mark said. “If you want my opinion, I think they’re just going through the motions. They know we’ve got the satellites, so they’re fumbling around until our government tells them where to look.”
“Probably right,” Juan agreed. “Anyway, we’ve got to be able to get up there and we can’t use our chopper covertly, so map a route in for the Pig.”
“Max doesn’t like when you call it that,” Eric reminded.
“He gave it the ridiculous name Powered Investigator Ground, so we’d call it the Pig. He just grumbles about the nickname because he likes to grumble.” Juan tried to say this lightly, but his thoughts were on the victims of the plane crash.
If he closed his eyes, he could imagine the terror they must have all felt as the plane was about to barrel into the side of the mountain. He wondered what Fiona Katamora’s last thoughts were.
An hour later, he was alone in his cabin, sitting with his feet propped up on his desk, a Cuban cigar between his index and middle fingers. He watched the smoke pool lazily along the coffered ceiling. Everything was set for their arrival in Tripoli the following night. He had gotten hold of a shadowy facilitator in Nicosia, Cyprus, who went by the name L’Enfant, the Baby, a man Juan had never met but who had contacts all over the Mediterranean. For a fee, the Baby had made all the customs arrangements for unloading the Pig. He had also gotten together the proper visas for the team Cabrillo would take with him into the mountains. Langston had been adamant that they verify that the Secretary of State was dead.
Juan didn’t relish combing the wreckage, but he knew they had to be certain.
He again glanced at the hard copy of the satellite image sitting on his blotter. Something about the wreckage pattern bothered him, but he couldn’t say what. He’d pulled up pictures of plane crashes from the Internet and saw no obvious discrepancies. Not that any two crashes were identical, but there was nothing glaringly out of place. Still, there was something.
With Cabrillo’s fluency in Arabic, it was no surprise he had spent time in Libya during his years with the CIA. The two missions he’d been assigned hadn’t been that dramatic. One had been helping a general and his family to defect. The other had been a secret meeting with a scientist who claimed he worked on Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons program. It turned out the guy had virtually no useful information, so nothing came of it. Juan had liked the people he’d met and sensed that they weren’t too keen on their government but were too frightened to do anything about it. Such was life in a police state.
He wondered if that had changed. Was Libya really opening up to the West or did they still see us as enemies? For all he knew, both factions coexisted within the halls of power. He made a decision anyway. He wasn’t going to trust that what happened to Katamora’s plane was an accident until he heard the flight voice recorder for himself. And he wasn’t going to believe she was dead until he saw the DNA result from the samples Langston wanted them to gather.
He had been a success as a CIA agent because he had good instincts and knew to trust them. He’d done even better with the Corporation for the same reasons.
Something wasn’t right, and he was determined to find out what.
ELEVEN
IT TURNED OUT THAT THE HARBOR PILOT ASSIGNED TO TAKE the Oregon into the Port of Tripoli was their contact. He was an affable man of medium height, with thick curly hair just beginning to gray. His eyebrows stretched across his forehead in an unbroken line, and one of his incisors was badly chipped. He worried at the tooth with his tongue whenever he wasn’t talking, which led Juan to think it was a recent break. There was a little bruising at the corner of the man’s mouth to bolster Cabrillo’s assumption.
The man explained that he did what he did because he needed the extra money to take care of his extended family. His brother-in-law had recently lost his construction job in Dubai, so his family had moved into the man’s house. His parents were both alive, blessings to Allah, but they ate him out of house and home. And he had two upcoming weddings to pay for. On top of that, he claimed he made regular contributions to an assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins.
All this information had come in the time it took them to walk from the boarding ladder to Juan’s topside cabin.
“You are indeed an honorable man, Mr. Assad,” Juan said with a straight face. He didn’t believe a word of it. He suspected that the proceeds from Assad’s corruption went to maintaining a mistress, and either she or the wife had recently hit him hard enough to crack the tooth.
The pilot waved a dismissive hand, the cigarette clutched between his fingers moving like a meteorite in the dim cabin. The sun was well beyond the horizon, and the Oregon was far enough from the harbor that little light from the city filtered through the salt-rimed porthole. Juan had only turned on the anemic desk lamp. Although he had disguised himself a bit—a dark wig, glasses, and gauze in his cheeks to puff up his face—he didn’t want Assad getting a good look at him, though he knew from experience that men like Assad didn’t want to take a good look anyway.
“We do what we must to get by,” Assad pontificated. He laid a well-used leather briefcase on Cabrillo’s desk and popped the lid. “Our mutual friend in Cyprus said you wished to off-load a truck and needed visas and passport stamps for three men and a woman.” He withdrew a handful of papers as well as a customs stamp. Juan knew the routine and gave him four passports. They had come from Kevin Nixon’s Magic Shop and with the exception of the photographs bore no accurate information about the crew accompanying Cabrillo into the desert.
It took the harbor pilot a few minutes to record names, numbers, and other information before he stamped a fresh page in each of the passports and handed them back.
He then gave Juan some more papers. “Give these to the customs inspectors for your truck. And these”—he pulled out a pair of license plates and set them on the desk—“will make it much easier traveling in my country.”
That saved Cabrillo the hassle of stealing a set from a vehicle in town. “Very thoughtful. Thank you.”
The Libyan smiled. “All business is customer service, yes?”
“True enough,” Juan agreed.
“How good are you at remembering numbers?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Numbers. I want to give you a cell phone number, but I do not want you to write it down.”
“Oh. Fine. Go ahead.”
Assad rattled off a string of digits. “Give the person who answers a number where you can be reached, and I will call it within the hour.” Assad chuckled. “Provided I am not with my wife, eh?”
Juan smiled dutifully at the joke. “I’m sure we won’t need your services, but, again, thank you.”
Assad’s bonhomie suddenly faded and his eyes narrowed under his unibrow. “I don’t see how three men and a woman in a truck can be any great danger to my country, but if I become suspicious about anything I hear in the news I will not hesitate to contact the authorities. I have ways that keep me out of it, understand?”
Juan wasn’t angry at the warning. He’d been expecting it and had heard it from dozens of such men over the years. Some might actually have had the juice to back it up. Assad could be one of them. He had that look. And Juan knew that next on the agenda, if Assad held true to form, would be a little fishing expedition.
“The American government must be very upset about the death of their Secretary of State,” Assad remarked.
How Juan loved a cliché. “I’m sure they are. But, as you saw from my passport, I am a Canadian citizen. I have no control over what happens with our neighbor to the south.”