Beck put up a hand. “You’ll get it, don’t worry. But how did you feel when you thought you might not? There’s no way in hell we can produce enough for every man, woman and child on what’s left of the earth in time…. So we’ve got to be particular. And we’ve got to be very careful about security.”
Dickson rubbed his eyebrows: “I agree.” Relief was still evident in his voice. “When’s this genius Morse coming? Fifteen minutes, you said? I can probably put together a citation for valorous service; he’d like that….”
“Five minutes from now. Never mind the citation, Dickson. I want an operational budget, no receipts required. And I want a free hand: if this blows and President Beggs never gets his shot, you don’t want it to be your head that rolls. Okay?”
“Certainly. And about your security people? Do you know whom you want?”
This was it. Beck slid off the desk and faced Dickson squarely: “Sure do. I want Ashmead and whoever he wants.”
Dickson turnd ashen. “Ashmead. Ashmead? What are you expecting, to be interdicted by an entire Soviet division? Absolutely not. Find someone else.”
“There’s no one else I’d trust,” Beck said flatly.
“But he’s CIA! He’s a murderous, insubordinate cowboy! He’s… he’s barely human; he’s got no feelings, no—”
“He’ll do the job with me and he won’t ask me to give him his shot first. And, CIA or not, he and I get along.”
“Well, it’s impossible. You can’t let the Agency in on this: their shop’s so full of holes you might as well send a telegram to—”
“Don’t give me that interagency rivalry crap. Not now. It’s Ashmead or I’ll just sit here and blow this thing off so completely that, even given what you know, you’ll never be able to put it back together—not with Morse, or the Israelis. And don’t think I won’t do it.”
“Look,” Dickson, his mind on his own inoculation, approached Beck with something akin to desperation. “It’s not that I don’t think Ashmead’s a good choice… or even that the two of you couldn’t keep a lid on things. But I had occasion to talk to the Tel Aviv station chief, and Ashmead—and his nasty little operations team—have disappeared. It seems they’ve taken out after the Islamic Jihad on their own, figuring that it’s every man for himself and, for their parts, they want to take as many of the Jihad with them to Paradise as they can manage.”
“That’s Ashmead, all right,” Beck said drily to cover his shock. “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to go find him. Hold the fort, Dickson, and be nice to my biogenetic engineer.”
Beck made for the door as Dickson, still wheedling, demanded to know how Beck thought he was going to find a CIA agent when the CIA couldn’t, how long he’d be gone, and where he could be reached.
“Don’t know, Sir,” said Beck to all of those as he left Dickson’s office at the very moment Morse arrived.
Chapter 4
The dusky air blowing south off the Persian Gulf into Abu Dhabi had death in it—Ashmead could smell it and it raised the tempo of his pulse while all around him the capital city of the United Arab Emirates prepared for another languid Arabian night.
He and his team were professionally unremarkable in the narrow shadowed street of coffee bars and market stalls; the street itself, restless in twilight, churning in slow motion as it made the transition from day to night, was another of his agents, part of the team, accommodatingly providing them perfect cover in an imperfect world.
Down the street, drinking sweet coffee and waiting unknowingly for the death Ashmead’s team brought like a tin of sweetmeats wrapped in newspaper, was the quarry, one of the Islamic Jihad’s revolutionary heroes. He was their mullah’s son, a sullen-faced boy with lamb’s eyes who had studied nuclear physics at Caltech and done his graduate work in Libya, who dressed Western in blue jeans and gold to flaunt his intellectual’s status but didn’t have enough common sense to go into hiding or even wear a kefiya to ward off the radioactive dust he’d helped blow into everybody’s sky. He sipped and sat in blissful ignorance while around him Ashmead’s reshet—network—tightened like a noose.
If ignorance were truly bliss, the world would be at peace.
Ashmead felt an almost sexual attraction to the bomb-maker he was going to kilclass="underline" the death on the breeze from the Gulf tonight was Ashmead’s to give and the Iranian’s to receive—if there was another, subtler taint to the sea wind, the counterterrorist refused to think about it: his team and he had decided there wasn’t a damned thing you could do to better your odds; they weren’t going around in paper masks or worrying about hours of exposure or holing up in basements; they were getting in their last licks.
Now he was browsing among the stalls, buying vegetables, looking for a yam. He’d rather have had a nice, firm Idaho potato but his specialty was weapons at hand, and he didn’t have his carry-gun, with its threaded muzzle, on him: he was going to kill the kid they’d nicknamed Schvantz, in case any of their low-tech communications were intercepted, with a throw-away scratch-gun he’d bought on the gray market and the old 9mm Tokagypt 58 was going to need some kind of silencer—this wasn’t a suicide mission.
Lazily he fondled fruit and produce, buying pome granates and other exotic delicacies he didn’t need along with the yams, desultorily haggling with the vendor, in desert headgear he hoped would protect him from this newest American threat to the very air, who wanted to finish with Ashmead and two other late customers behind him and go home.
Ashmead’s Arabic matched the black-and-white kefiya on his head: Palestinian in accent, like the aghal binding it to his head and the desert fatigues he wore tucked into combat boots. He wanted the street peddler to remember him, to give a Palestinian’s description, and so he would: Yes, yes, the peddler would say to the police, and then to the secret police, and then to the national guard—a Palestinian; no, I don’t remember the face, it was late, his kefiya cast shadows… who can tell one Palestinian from another? And then, when pictures of uniforms and men were shown to him: But perhaps… yes, I am sure now that he was bearded, that he wore his kefiya in the manner of Habash’s PFLP fighters.
And that description, plus the fact that the gun was not a Beretta 92, Fatah’s issue weapon, would place the blame for Schvantz’s assassination squarely where Ashmead wanted it: on the doorstep of Habash’s faction, the very same Palestinians who had helped the Islamic Jihad blow the fucking lid off Home Plate.
It was a matter of honor to Ashmead’s team; they’d been pulled back by their own superiors in Tel Aviv and Langley when they could have intervened.
Ashmead had been sitting with his thumb up his ass on Cyprus, drinking Turkish sludge in Nicosia and watching the beginning of the end of every damn thing he cared about, when one of his team, a kid they called Slick, had slipped into the wrought-iron chair beside him and, fingering brown olives to find the firmest in the bowl on the checkered table, had said, “Bugger all, Rafic. Let’s get the lot of ’em—the mullah and all his chickens. We’ve talked it over, and we figure that in fourteen hours there’s not going to be any Agency, at least not enough of one for us to be sweating any disciplinary action. We estimate we owe it to those holy warriors to give ’em a head start to Paradise….” Slick’s sight-picture eyes had been shining like a laser. “We’re not pushing you, Sir, you understand—this isn’t a fucking mutiny. We just thought you ought to know how we feel—that we’re game to play until we drop from… well, you know. And we’d really appreciate it if you’d run us this one more time. We’d sure like to die happy—fulfilled like. Let’s grease as many of those cocksuckers as we can in the time we’ve got left. Why not?”