She’d smiled thinly at the online snapshot, then nudged Kealey in the seat next to her, holding the phone out to show him the image, thinking whoever had posted it had a caustic sense of humor…and that it might help break the silence in which he’d sat staring out the window for hours.
He had glanced down at it expressionlessly, shrugged her off, then turned back toward the dust-filmed window.
“My apologies, Ryan,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Interrupt the grinding monotony of this ride,” she said. “I mistakenly thought you might appreciate it.”
Kealey said nothing for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “We need to get to where we’re going,” he said. “This is like, I don’t know…”
“Being stuck in sand?”
He studied her face. And this time a smile ghosted at his lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose that’s as good a way of putting it as any.”
She nodded, a gleam in her slanted brown eyes.
“Something else you find amusing?” Kealey asked.
It was her turn to shrug. “We can only do what we can do,” Abby said quietly. “That doesn’t include shrinking the desert or laying highways across it-so where’s the use in brooding over our situation?” She took her voice down another notch so the local travelers packing the aisles couldn’t hear it. “I count us damned fortunate to have gotten this far without any snags.”
He grunted. In fact, she was right. Ferran’s arrangements had gone beyond holding the ferry’s departure for them; Gamal, his fixer at the Aswan pier, had gotten them past the Egyptian customs and immigration officers and onto the boat without a single one of them so much as glancing at their documents. Gamal had assured Kealey there likewise would be no hitch at all when they reached Wadi Halfa the next day, and true to his word, things had gone smoothly, the blue-uniformed Sudanese customs men moving them from the ferry onto the waiting train with alacrity. In that sense, the two thousand dollars Kealey had used to grease Ferran’s palm had seemed an absolute bargain.
The problem was that he had not considered that the railway trip to Khartoum aboard the antiquated, slow-moving Sudanese train would take over two days. It had been an oversight that had little bearing on things, since there had been no faster means of transport available to them. The only remedy, using the word loosely, had been to alter their planned route and switch to the Port Sudan line at the Atbara junction. In the port city, they would have the option of hopping a plane to Khartoum or motoring down a paved road-and after a phone call to Seth Holland, the Agency man at the embassy, it had been determined that he would dispatch one of his staff there to meet and drive them down into the capital, once again staying away from the unwanted scrutiny of air security personnel. Which was all well and good. But still…
“I have to remind you about Cullen White,” Kealey said, looking at Abby. “The man is calculating, and quick on his feet. Once he hears about Saduq being in custody, he’s going to put two and two together.”
“He can’t possibly know you’re involved.”
“He doesn’t have to,” Kealey said. “All he does have to do is get a whiff that something about the raid on Saduq’s yacht-or his being held out of sight-deviated from what’s SOP with Interpol or the EU task force. I think that’s already happened, and I’m pretty sure the same thought must have crossed John Harper’s mind more than once. I guarantee White won’t be waiting around for the sky to fall on his head. Whatever he’s been working on, we can expect he’ll very quickly start looking at contingencies. And that means ways to shift into high gear.” He shook his head. “This holdup is about the last thing we needed. Doesn’t matter if we were stuck with it from the get-go…I wish I’d at least seen it coming.”
Her features serious, Abby sat beside Kealey in private thought as the train clanked along over obsolete wooden railroad ties, the blackness outside its windows no more uniform than the sandy landscape visible by day. Around her, passengers rustled in their sleep amid heaps of shabby-looking baggage and loosely packed cartons.
“We’re in far from an ideal spot. I won’t quibble with you there,” she said at length. And then hesitated, still looking contemplative. “Ryan, this probably doesn’t need stating, but we’re very different. I don’t work like you. I’m used to careful planning, gathering of evidence, adherence to rules and process…”
“And you’re wondering what happens when we do reach Khartoum,” Kealey said.
She simply looked at him, and he all at once recognized something in her expression that he had not seen there before, a kind of vulnerability that caught him off guard.
“I wish I could tell you,” he said, whispering now. “But I won’t lie, Abby. I have no idea beyond what I said in Limbe. We’re going after Ishmael Mirghani. We came into the game late…and I get the feeling that we’re close to being out of time. All I know is we’re at the stage where we’ll have to wing it again, and it means we’ll have to hit the ground running-”
“And do whatever’s necessary,” she said, finishing the sentence.
Kealey gave her a long glance, studying her face, and was surprised to find himself wishing he could say something to relieve the unsettled look that continued lingering over it.
But he could not give that much of himself. Try as he might, he could not. And instead he turned away from her, his eyes returning to the window and the black emptiness into which it seemed he’d been staring for an unendurable eternity.
Jacoby Phillips had spent almost an hour tailing Ishmael Mirghani through Khartoum in his ten-year-old blue Saab SPG, having picked him up when he’d exited his suburban home in the northern section of Bahri, leaving a short while after the man who had once introduced himself to the American charge d’affaires as James Landis slipped out a back entrance and then turned onto a side street from the rear garden.
Phillips had watched Landis hasten down the street from Mirghani’s yard, then climb into a waiting Ford Escort, which had promptly driven off toward the highway, heading in the general direction of the Kober Bridge, or Armed Forces Bridge-which, he’d realized, was the most direct route to the airport. Although Landis was not Phillips’s assignment, the CIA agent had taken a video capture of him entering the black sedan with his DVR cell phone, making sure to get a close-up shot of its plates. He’d then relayed the encrypted file to his colleague Bruce Mackenzie, whose job was to stay on Landis, using the Agency’s secure Intelink-SCI wireless intranet, and continued cooping about a half block from Mirghani’s house.
After about ten minutes Mirghani emerged from his front door, carrying a hard-shell briefcase, strode a few blocks to the bus station, and got on the express shuttle to the downtown area. Staying close to him, Phillips slowed down as he boarded, and then eased along three car lengths behind the bus, following it past the Kober Bridge, which Landis’s vehicle had taken, and then over the old Blue Nile suspension bridge for the short ride across the river.
Mackenzie had spotted the black Escort within minutes of receiving Phillips’s e-mail and video attachment, having waited just a few blocks away from Mirghani’s home, outside an area of landscaped trees and lawn along the riverside. The CIA agents had known it was just a matter of time before one, the other, or both of their birds flew the coop, and their assumption had been that they would do so separately. It would have been a source of intensely curious attention had the Muslim radical and his unlikely Western visitor left there together at the peak of U.S.-Sudanese relations; for them to do so now in plain sight was incomprehensible.