"A believer among the infidels?"
"Yes," Akil said. As well as someone who would be well paid. Or thought he would be. "I must speak to the captain," he said, and escaped the stateroom.
He stepped over and around numerous bodies down the passageway and up the stairs to the deck before he found the captain at the wheel in the tiny pilothouse. It was perched on top of the cabin, and was the one place on the whole of, to Akil's mind, this nauseatingly odiferous, dangerously overloaded craft where there was a semblance of order and solitude.
The captain raised an eyebrow at him and drew on his cigar. The smell hit Akil's nostrils and his sinuses ached in immediate response. He coughed, cupping his mouth and nose in his hand, trying in vain to block the smell. The captain took another drag and expelled another cloud of smoke. It drifted across the pilothouse, lit by the eerie green glow of various instrumentation screens. "I thought you didn't want anyone else to know you were on board."
"I didn't," Akil said.
"Then you shouldn't have come out of your cabin until I told you to." The captain blew a smoke ring, waited, and then blew a second inside the first.
Coughing again, Akil said, "Why is this trip taking so long?"
The captain raised his eyebrow again. "It took forty hours to get to Caicos Passage, and another fifty to get here."
"Where is here?" Akil said, mostly because the captain seemed to expect it.
The other man stepped back from the wheel, and smiled when he saw Akil's expression. "Don't worry, I've got her on the iron mike. The autopilot," he added, when he saw that Akil still didn't understand. He turned to a slanted table mounted against the rear wall and tapped the chart with the two fingers holding his cigar, now burned down to a squat, glowing stub. "Look here. We came through Caicos Passage fifty hours ago. There's no wind to speak of, and no seas, so I'm estimating that we'll be south of Abaco a couple of hours after dawn. Then we go up the inside, south of Grand Bahama -"
"I don't understand," Akil said, eyes watering from the cigar smoke as he tried to follow the captain's explanation. "Why don't we just stay outside the islands? Surely all this maneuvering will slow us down."
The captain regarded Akil with a quizzical expression. "For one thing," he said levelly, "we'll pick up the Gulf Stream if we go inside, which is good for another two or three knots of speed. For another, we can lose ourselves in the traffic."
"Traffic?"
"Yes, traffic, other ships, as in cruise liners, fishing boats, pleasure boats, sailboats, freighters, tankers. There is a great deal of traffic up and down the Straits of Florida, Mr. Mallah. We will hardly be noticed."
"How can you be sure of that?" Akil said, studying the map through streaming eyes. "Wouldn't it be safer to go up the outside of all these islands and then move in closer to the coast?"
"This ain't my first rodeo, Mr. Mallah," the captain said. His tone was placid but nonetheless conveyed a distinct warning.
Akil changed the subject. "Where do you plan to let us off?" He didn't ask because he wanted to know, he asked because the captain would think it odd if he didn't. Akil already knew where they were getting off.
The glowing tip of the cigar moved north. "I have a few favorite spots here, in the barrier islands off Georgia and North Carolina." He smiled, the gold-capped molar flashing. "Don't worry, Mr. Mallah. America will swallow you whole where I put you ashore. No one will be able to find you." Another draw, another exhalation of smoke. "Unless of course you wish to be found."
Akil's hand closed over the comforting shape of the little GPS unit in his pocket. "No," he said. "We only want to begin a new life in America."
He left the pilothouse, and the captain returned to the wheel.
He didn't know what the group of men in the forward cabin were up to, but the price of their passage doubled the total amount all the other migrants on board had paid. He was in the transportation business, his job was to get his paying passengers where they were going, nothing more, and nothing less. His curiosity extended to the color of their money, and stopped after they had counted it into his hand.
He took another long, satisfying draft of his cigar, and placidly blew another cloud of smoke.
MIAMI
"Patrick?"
"Hugh, thanks for calling. What if I told you that Isa was Pakistani?"
"How would you know?"
"Somebody ID'd his accent." Patrick wanted to cut to the chase. "Never mind that. What does that knowledge do for us?"
Hugh was silent for a moment. "I'm not sure," he said slowly.
"Can you backtrack, run the profile through your database and see if any matches pop up out of Pakistan?"
"Can't hurt," Hugh said. "But it's a long shot, Patrick. We've already been through the database a hundred times looking for Isa before he was Isa."
"Ever go looking for him in Pakistan?"
"When he got to be big news, we looked for him everywhere. Especially when he surfaced in al Qaeda, with Zarqawi. Back then, though, you'll remember that al Qaeda leadership was all Saudi and Egyptian."
"So?" Patrick was impatient. "Nowadays it's increasingly Libyan, or at least North African. He hated Zarqawi, that is well known, but bin Laden's never been shy about rewarding initiative, wherever it comes from."
"And bin Laden's looking for Isa, too."
"Yeah, I remember. Hugh, Isa's a Pakistani. I'm sure of it. I've already talked to the ops guys in Islamabad. Get the word out to your people. This guy just spent six months in Miami, living like a monk-well, mostly-in somebody's spare room. Then he left for Mexico City, where we lost his trail. He's up to something, and he's not a small player like-oh, like the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. He's the real deal. He'll be the guy to dream up another 9/11.1 want to get to him before he does."
"So do I, Patrick," Hugh said, although he sounded much more placid in talking about Isa than he did when he'd found out about Sara and Isa in the elevator in Istanbul. It helped when someone you thought might quite like to kill your wife removed himself to another hemisphere. "I just don't think going back to Pakistan gets the job done."
"Humor me. It's my dime."
"It's the American taxpayer's dime. How long do you think Kallendorf is going to let you get away with this?"
"As long as I continue to produce results."
Patrick hung up and stared at the television, still set to NTV, which was running an old interview of Sally Ride and her husband and fellow astronaut Steve Hawley by Jane Pauley. Jane wanted to know if they planned on having children, and Sally told Jane it was none of her business. A charm school dropout, Sally Ride. He thought of his own close encounters of the media kind and wished she worked for him.