There had been nothing exceptional about that moment. Nothing he could quantify about why it was imprinted on his synapses. But when he’d noticed the car behind him today, he had recognized it-its plate number, its minor dents, the fact that only three of its four tires were whitewalls, and that the all-black tire also had a slightly different type of hub. He couldn’t explain why he remembered. It was just that way for him.
The man in the Honda was a worker at the embassy. His nominal post wasn’t of any importance. As far as White was concerned, it only mattered that he had been put on his tail-and that he was almost certainly a CIA plant within the embassy staff. The question was…what did it mean in the broad scope of things?
The press had attributed the Limbe raid on Hassan al-Saduq’s yacht to an Interpol-EU antipiracy operation. It had directed its questions and criticisms about the arms merchant’s unexplained, and seemingly extrajudicial, disappearance while in custody at the investigative task force and the Cameroonian authorities. The coverage about the motive behind the attack, and its legality, centered on civil liberties issues.
There was no mention of Agency involvement, no reason anyone in the press would suspect it…but the press didn’t know what White knew about the deal that had been taking place aboard the boat.
His suspicions had been right all along. His and Stralen’s. Somebody in Washington had sniffed out what was going on. That meant a schism had arisen between DCI Andrews on one side and POTUS, Stralen, and Fitzgerald on the other-and not just in terms of foreign policy. If the details of their plan were uncovered, there would be more, much more, for the press to write about than the questionable legalities of a weapons peddler’s arrest in Cameroon. It would be the biggest political story to hit the international headlines in years and would likely topple everyone involved. Most especially General Stralen.
Stralen…if what he’d done was fully uncovered, he would be labeled a traitor. A conspirator to a crime many would find reprehensible. There would be no debate over extenuating circumstances, as with the planners of Iran-Contra. No chance of redemption. Historians would cast him with the likes of Benedict Arnold, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Wilkes Booth. His name would go down in infamy.
White cut free of his thoughts as Bakri slowed to a halt at the first airport checkpoint, fishing his papers out of his travel bag, then reaching over to hand them to the driver. A minute later the guard passed them back through the Escort’s lowered window and waved the vehicle through.
“Bakri, you’ve done your job well while I’ve been here,” White said as the driver returned his documents to him. “There’s no higher compliment I can offer.”
Bakri thanked him with an appreciative nod and swung to the left, following the signs to the Sudan Airways departure terminal.
As they neared the drop-off area, Cullen White took hold of his bag and slid over toward his door, waiting for the car to stop. The time for reflection was over. History could shine whatever light it might on the legacy of someone like Joel Stralen. But White knew only one thing-he owed nothing to anyone but the general. He himself had no moral constraints. He didn’t care a whit how the world remembered him, or if it remembered him at all. Posterity was outside his realm of consideration. He was a role player, a man who worked out of sight in the interstices of power and politics, who lubricated the gears of machinery others saw the need to construct, who did whatever it took to see a mission through from inception to execution. That was it.
You’ve done your job well… There’s no higher compliment I can offer.
White had sincerely meant what he said to his driver. And soon he would be on his way to Kassala to meet up with Simon Nusairi’s strike force, where he intended to at last finish the job General Stralen had entrusted him to do.
He hoped that he, too, would prove worthy in the final accounting.
The third most senior of Seth Holland’s handful of Agency personnel, Jacoby Phillips was the only member of his staff who did not reside at the embassy, but rather occupied an apartment suite at the sprawling and elegant Hotel Granville on the banks of the Nile, where he held the titular position of resort manager. Owned by the Brits since its establishment, the Granville had been Winston Churchill’s preferred choice of room and board on his trips to the country during the colonial era, and it had continued to accommodate international businessmen in the many decades since Sudan gained its constitutional independence.
When Holland had requested an operative for placement outside the embassy’s confines in the late nineties, Phillips had been an ideal candidate for the assignment. Much of it had to do with his background. Of mixed cultural descent, he had inherited his Ethiopian mother’s gingery brown skin and was born and partially raised in London, where his white-as-crumpet-dough father had run a large air transport firm before the family’s eventual relocation to New York. Even before the current flare-up between the United States and Sudan, Caucasian foreigners, especially from the U.S. of A., had been regarded with heavy suspicion and hostility by many locals, whose anti-Western fervor had been on the rise for decades. However, if you were black-or looked black like Phillips, who resisted defining himself according to race, being equally proud of both sides of his heritage-there was at least a chance you would receive more civil treatment than people with white faces, although it could sometimes contrarily provoke an antagonistic backlash among elements of the population who regarded black Americans as sellouts to Western culture and ideology.
Phillips figured you could never totally win at the race game no matter what country you were in, but being a black man still beat the hell out of being white in Khartoum, and how was that for a turnaround? As he had learned soon after accepting the post here, his skin color and multiethnic background made it a challenge for the ignoramuses on the street to figure out what particular slurs to hurl at him, and, more significantly, for radical Islamic terrorists-among them members of al-Qaeda, which had been a major player in the neighborhood before Omar al-Bashir had fallen into its disfavor for expelling certain rabble-rousing mujahideen-to decide whether they ought to attempt to rob him, take him hostage, and/or murder him for the sheer sport of it.
But Phillips had other things to think about now. The bus carrying his man had reached the city center and had stopped to discharge its passengers about five blocks west of the Souq Arabi. Phillips stayed on Mirghani as he walked in the general direction of the city’s commercial hub, saw an open parking space along the curb, and pulled in while he had the chance. The traffic here remained tolerable, but he knew the streets and avenues would grow exponentially more congested as they got closer to the souq, with its businesses and outdoor markets. From here on out it would be easier to follow him on foot.
Phillips exited the car and started up the busy sidewalk, remaining 10 yards or so behind the political leader. He was wearing a navy sport jacket, tan slacks, and a white shirt with what appeared to be his credit-card-sized Hotel Granville photo identification clipped to its breast pocket. The card was outwardly indistinguishable from his usual ID unless examined closely by a discerning eye, at which point it indeed might be possible to see the photographic lens in front camouflaged by the hotel’s logo. While Phillips wasn’t nearly as in love with gadgets as many of his colleagues, he would have admitted to finding the eight-gigabyte digital video recorder a clever and useful spy tool, particularly when coupled with the cell phone digital recorder he’d used earlier in his surveillance.