It was nearly impossible for the older man not to draw parallels with officers and agents he’d known in the past, and his mind did so freely in the few seconds that passed before Nuri looked up and saw him waiting at the end of the hall. The young man reminded him of several people, all good men, all dead well before their time. The comparison that came most readily was to Journevale—Reid remembered the agent’s code name, not his Christian name, even as he pictured him.
Journevale was a Filipino who’d been recruited by the British to work in Vietnam and at some point was handed over to the U.S. During the time Reid knew him, he’d lived among the Hmong people in Laos, helping organize guerrilla groups that fought along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
When Reid wanted to check on his status, he had to parachute in via Air America. The flights in rickety airplanes, held together by duct tape and wire, were horribly dangerous; jumping out of the plane at night into the dark jungle wasn’t much of a picnic, either. In the days before GPS satellite locators, it could take hours to find a contact in the jungle; Reid twice failed to meet his agent at the landing zone and had to hike several miles to a backup rendezvous point. But Journevale always managed to meet him, even when the pilots had gone far off course. He was good with languages, and cheery, and best of all, he could cook murderously well. The tribespeople worshipped him.
He’d killed himself in a Bangkok hotel room after the war was lost and his people were slaughtered. It was the honorable thing to do.
“Hey, Bossman,” said Nuri. “Sorry I’m late. I just grabbed a cup of joe. The coffee I’ve been drinking’s lousy. Everybody wants to put sugar in it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Where to? Your office?”
“Yours.”
Nuri realized he meant Room 4, the support project headquarters. That was a bit of a surprise.
“I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about Jasmine,” said Nuri as they got into Reid’s car outside. “I have some ideas on how I can get inside.”
“Why would Luo be so important that he had to be killed?” asked Reid.
The tone in his voice told Nuri that Reid already had a theory. But his supervisor liked the Socratic method of quizzing his underlings before lowering the boom.
“Competitor wants the market to himself.”
“Possible. Other theories?”
“He pissed off the wrong person,” said Nuri. “They got him back.”
“Plausible.”
“Or the Egyptians killed him. They’re becoming more active. They see the rebels as a threat, and want to keep them off balance. You take out Luo, you deprive them of ammo for a few months.”
“Also plausible.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I have no opinion, really. It’s going to be your next step to find out more information. The analysts have finished going over the data,” Reid added, almost as an afterthought. “The tubes could not have been used for rockets.”
“OK. And where are they?”
“That’s the next thing you have to find out.”
Room 4 was located on the opposite end of the campus, but even so, the drive took only a few minutes. There was no parking lot there; they had to park near a larger building about fifty yards away.
Reid turned off the ignition but didn’t get out of the car.
“We’re going to expand your team,” he told Nuri.
“Expand?”
“As I told you when you started. The Whiplash concept calls for more people.”
“Mmmmm,” said Nuri.
“We have a new officer who’s going to be in charge.”
“In charge of me?”
It was a reasonable—more than reasonable—question. Reid ducked it, though. “Not precisely.”
“The operation.”
“The operation remains a CIA mission.”
“So what’s his role?”
“He’ll be in charge of the paramilitary component.”
“I’m paramilitary.”
“In the sense I mean,” said Reid, “they are DOD, and you are CIA.”
“And independent?”
“No one is independent, Nuri. You know that.”
Reid opened the car door. Nuri took a sip of his coffee, then left the cup in the car.
“What’s that mean, exactly?” he asked Reid, catching up to him.
“It means Agency and military people work together. You’ve been there before.”
“Generally, there’s someone specifically in charge.”
“I’m in charge. And Ms. Stockard.”
Politics, thought Nuri. They were probably haggling about the real chain of command above him, each agency trying to protect its turf. Generally that meant no one was in charge, a potentially dangerous situation.
“I think you’ll like the man we’ve chosen. He was in the Air Force. He worked at Dreamland.”
“Air Force? He’s a pilot?”
“No, he was with the original Whiplash. Danny Freah. He’s a colonel.”
It all fit together for Nuri. Breanna Stockard—a very nice woman, though in his opinion a fish out of water as a manager, far too laid back—was recreating her past glory by surrounding herself with fellow Dreamland alums. Even the name of the project, Whiplash, was the same.
He clamped his mouth shut. There was no sense complaining.
They cleared security quickly. Nuri shivered slightly as they descended—the closed-in stairwell reminded him of the labyrinth beneath the Coliseum.
“Jonathon, good morning,” said Breanna Stockard, who was waiting just beyond the nano wall as they came in. “Mr. Lupo, good to see you again.”
“You can call me Nuri.”
“Nuri, this is Danny Freah. Colonel, Nuri Abaajmed Lupo. He’s been overseas for a while. Still jet-lagged?”
“I’m over it,” said Nuri. Danny was younger than he’d expected.
Ray Rubeo was standing in the corner, arms crossed. “Mr. Lupo, good morning,” he said.
“Hey, Doc.”
“I trust the gear is working satisfactorily?”
“You might make the bulletproof vest thicker.”
“Resistant. It’s resistant, not bulletproof,” said Rubeo in his world-weary voice. “Any thicker and you wouldn’t be able to wear it beneath your clothes.”
“You should work on it.”
Rubeo frowned. “I have a few things to attend to,” he told Breanna. “Text me if you need me.”
“I thought we would begin with an informal briefing on the situation in the Sudan for Colonel Freah,” said Reid after the scientist left. “And then Ms. Stockard and I will expound on what we see as the next step, both for the project, and for Whiplash.”
“Sure,” said Nuri.
“Why don’t we go inside?” suggested Breanna. “We’ll be more comfortable.”
“The Sudan is the incarnation of hell on earth,” started Reid. He’d prepared a brief PowerPoint, which the computer system presented on the cube at the center of the room. “The country has been in and out of revolt forever. The various factions have different grievances and aims. Our interests are not directly tied up in any of them. We were drawn there because of an arms selling network known as Jasmine.”
Some part of Sudan or another had been involved in civil war since before the country gained independence in 1956. The wars had various causes, though the outcome was uniform: the majority of the people suffered, while a few tribal and religious leaders managed to eke out a marginally better existence. Darfur, in the west, had occupied the world’s attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Now things were flaring in the eastern borderlands with Ethiopia. The Sudanese government was dominated by Arab-speaking Muslims; the rebels were a mixture of different tribes and ethnic groups. Arabic was their common language; many of the elite and even a number of peasants could manage reasonable English.
Reid turned his attention to the arms dealers who made much of the bloodshed possible. He noted that Jasmine, like many of its brethren, was a loose association of people who moved things around the world, mostly from Africa to Europe. He mentioned the aluminum tubes, and their possible connection to nuclear weapons. Finally he came to Luo’s assassination, a professional job that suggested the game Jasmine was involved in had very high stakes.