A tap on her half-open door caught her attention. Turning, she saw Yolanda’s swarthy face.
“That crop duster is downstairs waitin’ on you,” Yolanda said. She had been a family servant all her life, as had her mother before her. Jane smiled at her choice of words. Anyone who flew an airplane was a crop duster, as far as Yolanda was concerned.
As Jane came down the stairs the pilot was standing in the entryway, looking more like a field hand than anything else in his jeans and work shirt. He had flown ground-attack Warthogs in the Middle East, although it took several drinks to get him loose enough to start talking about his “tank plinkin”’ days.
“Goin’ down to Austin agin?” he asked.
“No, Zeb. Not this time. I want you to fly me to the Astro Corporation complex on Matagorda Island, first thing tomorrow morning.”
“You’re goin’ there on a Sunday?”
“Yes,” Jane said, thinking, Dan’s office will be closed on Sunday. I’ll be able to talk to him without interruptions, without lots of other people in the way.
Zeb’s brows crinkled. “That’s a private airfield, ain’t it? I’ll need their okay to land there. Might even be closed of a Sunday.”
“I’ll take care of that part of it, Zeb,” said Jane. “You just pick me up here at seven tomorrow morning.”
“Seven, right.” He started to leave, then turned back with a shy smile. “Um, maybe I oughtta pack a breakfast?”
Jane nodded. “That’s a good idea. Grapefruit juice for me, please.”
The pilot left and Jane headed back upstairs thinking, I’d better not let Morgan know about this. He wouldn’t understand why I’ve got to see Dan. She wondered if she truly understood herself.
La Marsa, Tunisia
From the rooftop garden of the hotel, Asim al-Bashir could see the ruins of Carthage shimmering in the heat haze. The broad Mediterranean sparkled in the afternoon sunlight; tourists and vacationers frolicked on the narrow beach; expensive yachts and cruise liners dotted the glittering water.
Sitting under the shade of the leafy trellis with a cool breeze wafting in from the sea, al-Bashir looked out at the ancient ruins from behind his polarized sunglasses. Once Carthage was a mighty power, he thought. Once warships from that harbor dominated the Mediterranean. Then came the Romans, the stolid, unimaginative, implacable Romans. No matter how many times Hannibal defeated them, no matter how many Roman armies were slaughtered, they came back with more, always more men, more armies, more battles until they wore Carthage into the dust. They demolished the city, house by house, temple by temple, stone by stone, until nothing was left standing. Then they sowed salt over the foundations so that nothing would ever grow there again. Destruction more savage and complete than a nuclear bomb would have caused.
The final humiliation was that the Romans themselves built a new city alongside the devastated site. It was the Roman ruins that al-Bashir stared at now.
That is the enemy we face, al-Bashir thought. Ruthless, implacable, capable of raising armies against us no matter how many times we batter them.
We cannot conquer them in battle, he knew. We must conquer them from within. Get them to destroy themselves. Make them use their greed and their power against each other. That is what we will do with their power satellite. That will be the first step in our eventual victory over them.
He heard footsteps clicking along the tiled walkway that led to this shady trellis. Nervous, quick steps. Turning, he saw the Egyptian walking toward him, short, spare, his white linen suit looking half a size too big for him, a broadbrimmed hat covering his bald pate.
Al-Bashir rose and nodded perfunctorily. “Salaam, my brother,” he said, taking off his sunglasses.
The Egyptian removed his dark glasses, too, and sat on the white-painted cast-iron chair beside al-Bashir’s without waiting to be invited.
“Salaam,” he murmured.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” al-Bashir asked, allowing the irony to show in his tone.
The Nine met as a whole only rarely, and even meetings between individuals were kept to a minimum. But with Western intelligence agencies’ abilities to eavesdrop on telephone conversations and computer links, some face-to-face meetings were unavoidable.
“The others grow anxious about your operation with the satellite,” the Egyptian said.
“I have spoken to most of them. Everything is proceeding well.”
The Egyptian took off his hat and placed it on the table next to them. “This business of your operative being arrested doesn’t alarm you?”
Al-Bashir allowed a small smile to curve his lips. “My operative is a chauffeur who was bribing an Astro Corporation employee for information. Nothing more.”
“We understand he was the one who caused the explosion of their hydrogen facility.”
“The Americans have no inkling of that.”
“But if they have him in custody they might get him to talk.”
With great patience, al-Bashir explained, “He was in custody for merely a few hours. He said nothing. He is now free. American police are very restricted in their methods of interrogation. We have nothing to fear on that score.”
The Egyptian nodded his round, bald head. Watching him, al-Bashir thought that in another time, another era, this man might have been a royal scribe for one of the pharaohs instead of a planner of terrorist strikes.
The Egyptian licked his thick lips, then said, “In the meantime, Randolph has flown his rocketplane. The test was a success.”
“All to the good,” said al-Bashir.
“You believe so?”
With a small chuckle, al-Bashir said, “If Randolph had been wise enough to ask my help, I could have been of great assistance to him.”
The Egyptian looked doubtful.
“My brother,” said al-Bashir, “we want Randolph to succeed. We need him to finish his power satellite and put it into operation. Only then can we use it for our own purposes.”
“To kill many Americans,” said the Egyptian.
“Many. Including, perhaps, their president and many of their Congress.”
“Really?”
“Really. And the best part is that they will never realize we have attacked them. They will believe the power satellite malfunctioned. They will want to blow that satellite out of the sky. Certainly they will tear Dan Randolph to pieces with their bare hands.”
The Egyptian gaped at him in admiration.
Calmly, al-Bashir added, “It will also destroy the political career of the only presidential candidate who might pose some problems for us in the future.”
“Indeed?”
“Morgan Scanwell,” al-Bashir said. “Him we will not kill, however. He will be humiliated, ruined.”
“And Randolph?”
“The mobs will tear down his buildings in Texas.” Turning to look back at the ruins of Carthage, he added, “Perhaps they will even sow salt on the site of Astro Manufacturing Corporation.”
Matagora Island, Texas
Never let a woman leave a toothbrush in your bathroom, Dan reminded himself as he leaned over the gunwale of the ferry and breathed in the fresh salt-tanged air. It’s like allowing the Marines to establish a beachhead on your territory.
The sun was going down as the last ferry of the day chugged across the bay toward Matagorda Island. Dan had spent the previous night and all this Saturday with Vicki Lee, who had come to do an in-depth interview with him, because of the successful flight test of the spaceplane. “In depth,” Dan muttered to himself, with a grin. Vicki was fun to be with and energetic in bed. But when she suggested she stay overnight at Dan’s apartment instead of returning to the hotel suite she’d rented in Lamar, every alarm bell in Dan’s nervous system started clanging.