Brothers In Arms (47 page)

Charley waved the two gunfighters who stood guard away.

“Want us to leave the door cracked, boss?” said the senior gun-fighter, a thin man with wispy blond hair receding from his gleaming forehead, who shifted his MP-5 to his other hand as he went to leave the room.

“I’m good, Daryl,” Charley said. “Isabelle and I know each other.”

Isabelle turned her head and smiled up at Daryl. “I promise not to hurt him.”

Daryl stopped, his submachine gun dangling from his hand. “Okay,” he said. “And I promise not to kill you . . . for now.” He stood there for a moment, then went out the door, shutting it quietly behind him.

“Oh,” Isabelle said, facing Charley again. “Did I say something to upset him?”

“We don’t share your sense of humor, Isabelle,” Charley said. He reached back and adjusted the butt of his Glock in its holster, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “Where is he, Isabelle?”

“Where is who?” Isabelle said. “You have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know your name.” She held up her cuffed hands. “Are these necessary?”

Charley reached for his belt and took his Leatherman tool out of its sheath. He opened the pliers, then got out of his seat and used the wire cutters in the pliers to snip neatly through the plastic flexi-cuffs around each of Isabelle’s thin, muscular wrists. He stood over her for a moment while she rubbed the red impressions the cuffs had left.

“How’s that?” he said.

“Thank you.”

“My name is Charley.”

“Charley. Short for Charles, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“Where is who, Charley?”

Charley snapped the Leatherman tool shut, replaced it in its sheath, and sat back down. He took his time answering.

“You and I both know who we’re talking about. Let’s cut to the chase. We want Youssef bin Hassan. You followed him here from Amsterdam. You know where he is or where he’s staying. We want that. We don’t have the time to play with you.”

Isabelle’s seeming calm irritated Charley. She seemed so unruffled and unconcerned, her breathing slow and regular, her gaze level and direct.

“We want him,” he said.

“This I can see,” Isabelle said. “For what do you want him?”

“That doesn’t concern you.”

“What concerns me is what you intend for me and my family.”

Charley tilted his head in confusion. “You and your family?”

“Yes.”

“What about you and your family?”

Isabelle laughed, but there was no humor in her face. “You Americans. You think everyone else is so dense. You think I don’t know what you plan for Marie and me?”

“We made a deal, Isabelle. You took the cash and you walked away. And you handed over the two Arabs. We got what we wanted, you got what you wanted.”

“As though you would leave it like that! I am not a fool.”

Charley chewed his upper lip, then leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Listen to me, Isabelle. There was no further action planned against you. We got what we needed and we left you alone. We held up our end of the deal. But you? You’re here, right now. Why?”

“I want certain guarantees,” Isabelle said. “For my family. And me.”

“This isn’t the time for bargaining.”

“Then find him yourself.”

“We will, eventually.”

“Why are we talking?”

“Do you know what he’s here to do, Isabelle? Do you? I don’t think so. You’re a mother. You have a beautiful child. What he’s here to do endangers your child.”

“We are very far from Amsterdam.”

Charley leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms on his chest. It would create new problems to tell Isabelle the particulars of the case. But the pressing problem was locating the One before he could act on his plan, and Isabelle was the key to that.

“Do you know where he is?” he said.

“Probably. I know where he’s been staying.”

“What do you want?”

“A guarantee that you will leave me and my family alone. A guarantee that there will be no comeback from either Amsterdam or here.”

“Isabelle, what kind of guarantee can we give you that we haven’t already? We let you go in Amsterdam, we paid you what you wanted. Wasn’t that guarantee enough?”

She was silent, and even with her stone-faced expression, Charley’s intuition told him that she hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“No matter what you think, we don’t make war on families,” Charley said. “Your daughter was never in any danger from us.”

“What do you want with the boy?” she said. “He’s not much.”

“He’s more than he appears.”

“If he is so important, then it is easy for you to make an agreement.”

The door opened and they both looked up. Ray Dalton leaned into the room and signaled to Charley. “I need to speak to you.”

Charley watched fear and curiosity play across the woman’s face.

“We don’t have much time,” he said to her. “And it’s running out.”

He got up and followed Ray into the hallway.

“Offer her whatever she wants,” Ray said with no preamble. “We’ll sort it out later. If she insists on stalling, then we’re going to rip it out of her head with drugs. I’ve got a medical interrogation team on its way right now.”

“She doesn’t even know what she wants,” Charley said. “What kind of guarantee can you offer a paranoid?”

Ray seemed struck by the question. “What do you think?”

“I think we tell her the truth about the One. She’s smart enough to see the risk to her family if bioengineered smallpox starts spreading across the country. It’s only a short jump to the Continent. I say just tell her and get her to work with us. That’s proof enough that we’re not going to job her and be done with it. Then send her on her way with money and a promise.”

“Will that work?”

“We don’t have time for anything else.”

“Then do it.”

Charley nodded, then went back into the room. Isabelle looked over her shoulder at him, crossed and recrossed her legs, and watched him till he sat down across from her again.

“Well?” she said.

There was a slight tic in the corner of her left eye, the only indication that she felt any nervousness at all. Charley admired her self-control; for a fleeting moment, he fantasized about what he might do if they had met as man and woman someplace. But then, men weren’t really her thing, were they? He smiled, and she smiled back, a cold and controlled smile, one that showed long practice.

“Isabelle, what do you know about smallpox?”

A flurry of emotions flickered beneath the smooth mask of her face: surprise, curiosity, puzzlement, and then a carefully concealed comprehension.

“Yes,” she said. “That would command your attention, would it not?”

“You understand why, now.”

“Is he infected?”

“No. But he has the agent with him.”

Now it was worry that furrowed her brow, her composure slipping away. “Has he been spreading it? In Amsterdam?”

“No, Isabelle,” Charley said patiently. “Ilse and Marie are safe, for now. It’s here that he’s to spread the agent. But Amsterdam doesn’t seem so far now, does it?”

“They wouldn’t dare,” she said. “They know what you Americans would do to anyone who did.”

“They’re doing it as we speak. They being your old paymasters at Al-Bashir. Now we’ve talked enough, Isabelle. That’s why we want him. And we’re willing to pay you, provide you with whatever assurances you need, whatever you want. But you will tell us where he is.”

Isabelle licked delicately at her lips. For the first time, Charley
noticed how her lips were chapped, and the lower lip looked as though she’d chewed on it. How had he missed that?

“May I have water?” she said.

Charley went to the door, and one of the technicians who was monitoring the room from the communications center brought him a bottle of spring water.

“Thanks,” Charley said.

He went back in and sat down, the seat hard against his back, and handed the bottle to Isabelle.

“Thank you,” she said. She cracked the seal on the bottle, tipped it up, and drank off half its contents in one long swallow.

“That’s better,” she said. She toyed with the cap in one hand, flipping it between her fingers like a magician working a coin. “I should have killed him in Amsterdam.”

“Did you mean to?”

“I knew you wanted the elder. I thought of killing them both, but I didn’t know what you wanted. I regret being involved with them . . . it is not like us to be used this way.”

“This is your chance for payback. And a bigger payday than you got the first time around.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will want that. Do you want me to kill him for you?”

“We want him alive, if possible. With his product. And we mean to see to that ourselves.”

“Of course. I will tell you what I know. He is staying at the International Youth Hostel in downtown Washington, under the name Youssef Ameer. He is in a single room on the third floor, beside the fire-exit stairwell. Today he left very early and went to a cyber café near where you took me. Then he made his signal near the mailbox. And got away. Yesterday he went to the National Mall and sat on the steps of the National Art Gallery, then took a taxi somewhere. I lost him there. He stays by himself for the most part, alone in his room, only coming down for meals and to use the computers at the hostel.”

Charley looked at the door, then back at Isabelle. “What else?”

“That’s it. I planned to follow him, to see what he was doing, and then either kidnap or kill him. Whichever would get me the guarantees from your people.”

“You have our guarantees. And as of now, you’re working for us.”

Isabelle laughed. “Such is the way of our world, is it not, Charley?”

Things happened. Federal agents and DC police set up vehicle surveillance posts on the streets around the hostel. Armed men in plain-clothes loitered near the hostel exits. T
WO DOMINANCE RAIN
operators and a DC vice officer, all in plainclothes, went to the front desk and asked about their friend Youssef Ameer. A blond girl with dreadlocks was on duty.

“He’s in his room,” she said. “Room three-fourteen, on the third floor. He came in a couple of hours ago, said he was tired and was going back to bed. I told him he shouldn’t be out too late.”

“Thanks,” said the vice cop, a blade-thin black man dressed in a leather car-coat too heavy for the heat, and black dungarees. “He was probably out partying. I’ll go look him up.”

“If he’s not there, check the computer room. He spends a lot of time on-line.”

“I’ll do that.”

The two special operators signaled for the vice cop to wait. They went down the hallway where the computer room was and walked slowly by, looking in. There was one heavy Germanic-looking youngster, his ears elaborately pierced, and a black woman in her thirties typing busily at the terminals. No sign of the One.

“What do you want to do?” said the vice cop, whose name was
Earl Long. “We can go up, knock on his door, eyeball him, make sure he’s there before the team comes to get him.”

“No,” said the senior operator, a muscular Filipino man with graying hair. “We’re not going to approach him. We’ll recon the floor, check the room and the stairwell, but we don’t want to wake him if he’s sleeping. We’ll leave the wake-up call to the team.”

“If this guy some kind of bad-ass terrorist, why he staying in a youth hostel?” Long said.

“Who’s going to look for him here?” the Filipino operator said.

“Word,” Long said. “Let’s get it done, then.”

They split up, the junior operator going up the fire-exit stairwell to the third floor, the vice cop and the quiet Filipino taking the elevator. The elevator went slowly, and the floor numbers ticked off on a LED screen greasy with fingerprints. On the third floor they got out, squeezing by two long-haired travelers dressed almost identically in baggy hooded sweatshirts and cargo pants drooping off their thin hips. Then they were alone in the curving hallway lined with doors. There was a constant hum of sound: voices in discussion, a television from a communal room tuned to a talk show, the distinctive voice of Dave Mathews playing on a stereo turned up loud, the rattle of air conditioners at their highest setting.

Earl Long pursed his lips in a soundless whistle and tapped his fingers against the body mike he wore beneath his heavy jacket. He wiped sweat off his brow with one forefinger and said, “I wonder where my room be?”

The Filipino operator, whose name was Eddie Aledo, brushed his fingers along the open front of his photographer’s vest, which served to conceal his holstered pistol. He looked both ways down the curving hall, then inclined his head to the right. “This way.”

He walked down the center of the corridor, his hands loose and ready by his side, Earl Long following behind him, occasionally glancing over his shoulder. Room 314 was at the end of the hallway on the right-hand side as they came directly beside the fire-exit door that led to the stairwell. Aledo’s partner stood there waiting for them.

Aledo gestured for silence and he walked up to the door and
listened for a moment. Any noise from the room was drowned out by the sound of the air conditioner going full blast. Then he checked the fire-exit door, trying the handle on the stairway side. Even though it turned freely, he took a small roll of duct tape from his vest and plastered a piece across the bolt, so that the door couldn’t be locked. He leaned close to his partner’s ear and whispered, “Anything?”