Dark Zone (21 page)

The bug Lia was “servicing” was in principle a sophisticated electroacoustic receiver, sometimes called a concrete microphone. It worked by picking up minute vibrations in the building’s concrete and metal structure; those vibrations were transmitted to a larger pickup unit outside, which then transmitted them back to the NSA for interpretation. Plumbers in the United States sometimes used a less sophisticated version to listen for leaking pipes in concrete foundations and structures. Theirs couldn’t filter out various conversations or be tuned to pick up certain areas of the building’s skeleton—but then again, Deep Black’s couldn’t have found a leaking faucet a few feet away, much less heard a conversation there. The device had been placed in the women’s room not because it was difficult to detect there, but because the steel grid in the concrete carried the vibration from the room down in that direction. The bug could be easily defeated by heavy vibration devices—a simple vibrating sander against the wall would do the trick—but only if the targets knew to do so. And these didn’t.

In fact, thought Dean, the people in the office were extremely confident that they were safe here; they had the windows wide open. Dean watched from across the street as two shadows flitted across the space. He crossed the street, listening to the voice above. There were at least two people inside and so there was no question of going in, but he put a small audio fly below the window. The fly was low-powered; its battery would last only a few hours, transmitting voice information to a small unit he tucked into a wall around the corner, and from there back to the Art Room.

“Good,” said his runner as Dean crossed back. “They’re talking about food or something.”

“Maybe they’ll go to dinner soon. Let me know if they leave,” Dean answered.

“Will do.”

Dean walked down one of the connecting alleys past the apartments, crossed near some smaller row houses—they were more like shacks—and then around to the street across from the charity building, pretending to look at the wares spread out on the sidewalk and in general playing the interested but distracted tourist.

A man dressed in traditional white desert garb stood nearby, a microphone in hand, talking rapidly. The translator back in the Art Room told Dean he was a native entertainer, telling what were supposed to be humorous stories, though judging from the bored expressions of the few people watching him the stories weren’t very funny.

“The real entertainment is inside the medina,” added the translator. “And not until much later.”

Dean glanced at his watch. Lia should have been out by now.

“How we doing?” he asked the runner under his breath.

“She’s working on it, Charlie,” said Chafetz.

Dean walked down the street to a vendor who sold small morsels of charcoal-broiled fish. The translator told him how to ask for it, but Dean found it easier now simply to point, holding out a five-dirham note—a bit less than fifty cents at the current exchange rate. The man worked silently, scooping up a bit of the fish and placing it on a piece of bread. Dean took his change—two dirhams and fifty centimes—and nibbled at the food, walking slowly back toward the building.

“How is she doing?” he asked when he reached the corner across the street from the building.

“Everything’s fine,” said Telach. “Relax, Charlie.”

“I’m going inside,” he told the Art Room supervisor.

“There are still two people in the office. We can hear them very clearly.”

“I’m not going into the office. I want to check on Lia.”

“It’s not necessary. She planted a video bug in the hallway. We can see all the way to the top of the stairs. Just relax.”

“I’m going inside,” he insisted, crossing the street.

34

“Lia?” said Chafetz.

Go away,
Lia thought.
Leave me.

The attendant said something in Arabic, harsh words, as if she were yelling at Lia for messing the stall.

“She’s asking if you’re all right,” the translator told Lia. “Tell her this.”

Lia had to listen to the phrase three times before she could attempt it; her voice stuttered as she spoke. The attendant asked if she was sure.

“Pregnant,” whispered Lia under her breath. She wanted the words to tell the woman—it was the perfect excuse, wasn’t it?

The translator, however, either didn’t understand or couldn’t hear.

“Pregnant,” Lia tried again, slightly louder and coughing.

The attendant came to the door and knocked.

“I’m pregnant,” Lia said in English. And the translator finally caught on, supplying a line about how Lia was expecting.

Men.

The woman began clucking sympathetically, offering a stream of advice. Lia moaned in agreement. She was ready with a cover story about her English: her identity was supposed to be Chinese, but she usually spoke English because most of the people she worked with did. But the woman didn’t ask.

The woman also didn’t move away from the door. While the metal stalls went all the way to the floor, there was enough of a crack at the opening for the woman to see through.

Lia couldn’t think of anything to say to get her to go away. With her brain seeming to move only in slow motion, she wiped her face, hoping the woman would eventually run out of steam.

“A cloth for my face,” said Lia finally, this time in Chinese. The translator relayed the Arabic words back and she repeated them. Lia waited until the woman went back to the washbasin, then rose and went to the stall. She opened the door just a bit.

“You can tell her you’re sorry,” said the translator, offering words. But Lia didn’t need any; the woman nodded and handed her a wet towel, calling her daughter and telling her about her own trials. Lia listened for a bit, offering a weak smile and finally handing back the towel. She retreated back into the stall, closing the door. The woman went back to her post by the door.

Her stomach still queasy, Lia pushed herself to the floor. She clawed at the bolt cover; it broke from the floor with a loud snap. Lia coughed several times and then reached down to retrieve the old bug. It was two inches long but only three-eighths of an inch thick, a slightly misshapen pen top. She pulled out the replacement and slid it in, then reached for the transponder device to activate it.

It was gone.

Lia locked her mouth against the bile rising in her chest. She was going to do this.

As she slid her head down to get a breather, she saw the device sitting near her knee. She snatched it up, thankful that she hadn’t crushed it by accident. She twisted it, then put her hand over the bug.

It beeped softly.

“Very good,” said Chafetz. “We’re getting data. Go.”

Lia stood up, the old bug in her hand. She felt calmer now, not in control but calmer: she’d had a crisis but gotten over it.

This wasn’t her, the nausea, the fear. Maybe she was pregnant.

The idea literally shook her. The old bug slipped from her hand into the toilet. She was supposed to bring it out with her—it was worth several hundred thousand dollars and would be good as new once the battery was replaced—but there was no way, just no way ...

She flushed the toilet. The water rolled up the sides of the bowl so quickly she thought to herself that it was going to go over the lip of the toilet.

But it didn’t. As it receded, she saw that the bug didn’t go down. It spun around in the water, mocking her.

Lia closed her eyes and flushed again. This time the water barely stirred in the bowl; the tank hadn’t had enough time to refill.

She forced a slow breath from her lungs, pushing the air out from the bottom of her diaphragm, exhaling as carefully as she could, forcing herself to calm down or at least be patient, be more patient.

The third time, the water seemed to explode downward, and the bug went with it.

Lia fixed her skirt and took a breath. It was all downhill from here. Lia pulled open the door and stepped out, only to find one of the guards pointing his gun six inches from her face.

35

Dean trotted up the steps, glancing at his watch as if he were impatient—not exactly a difficult act, under the circumstances. He strode to the door of the charity office, feigning surprise when he found it locked.

“Ms. Yen?” he said, using Lia’s cover name. “Ms. Yen?”

He turned around in the hall.

“Where is she really?” he said under his breath to the runner.

“Down the stairs on the left, past the guards,” said Chafetz. “Charlie, Marie’s having a fit. You shouldn’t be in there. Really, Charlie. Lia’s on her way out.”

Dean carried two small Glocks as hideaway weapons. He reached for the one under his shirt, pulling it out and palming it against his stomach. He called again for Lia, using English and then a phrase supplied by a translator in the Art Room who he guessed was Norwegian, since according to his cover story that was his nationality.

Dean went down the steps and turned, sliding his hand and the small gun into his pocket. There was only one guard there, and though he looked at Dean suspiciously he did not challenge him. Dean went to the man and asked in English—he broke it up, trying to duplicate what he imagined a Norwegian would make it sound like—if the man had seen a young Chinese woman. The guard did not understand his English but began speaking French; as the Art Room scrambled to get the proper translator into the circuit Dean figured out that the man was saying she was downstairs. He played the grateful companion, pointing at his watch and complaining in English and very poor French about how late the girl was. He thought this might be a universal male complaint, but it failed to elicit any sympathy from the Moroccan. Dean thanked him and then started down the steps. As he did, the guard yelled at him.

“He’s telling you to stop,” said the translator, finally on the line.

“Faites attention!”
yelled the man.

“He’s yelling at you to watch out, to stop!”

Behind him, Dean heard the soldier fumbling with his gun.

Lia felt as if her face had been shorn from her body, as if she were just the small bit of flesh and bone around her eyes and nose and mouth—no skull, no body, no stomach. She neither thought nor felt anything for a moment, and then an idea occurred to her:

This is what death feels like.

The lessons of her Chinese teacher when she was five came back to her. The sound, more primitive than the writing of the words:
mmmm goi.

Excuse me.
The first phrase she had learned.

“Excuse me. This is a ladies’ room,” she said in Chinese, and then she turned to English. “Why are you here?”

The translator started to tell her how to ask who he was in Arabic.

“Why are you here?” she said in English.

The man lowered his gun a few inches until it pointed toward her breast.

Lia’s left hand moved without her directing it to, jerking up to slam the top of the bugle-shaped rifle away. The rest of her body flew forward and the man landed against the floor, the gun clattering away and a strange sound shrieking from his lips.

To Lia, it seemed as if she were still standing back by the stall, watching it all unfold, watching her fist slam hard three times against the bridge of the man’s nose, shattering it with the first blow, watching her knee as it punctured his rib. She watched as her body jumped back, saw herself scan the bathroom—the old woman had fled.

Lia scooped up the assault rifle and started for the door.

Dean was just about to spin and fire at the guard when he heard the scream.

It was a woman’s scream, but it wasn’t Lia’s. He looked down the steps, then back toward the soldier. They both started in the direction of the shouts. An old woman in black dress appeared, yelling and cursing in a dialect so obscure even the Art Room translator couldn’t decipher a word. Dean ran past her, then tried to stop as the door to the women’s room opened and Lia appeared, a French assault rifle in her hand.

“You OK?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Charlie Dean,” she said, walking past him up the steps.

36

Karr scanned the ruins of the chemist’s house with the night-vision binoculars, a commercial pair that used light amplification technology rather than infrared rays to see. The police had left for the night, roping the area off with crime scene tape but otherwise trusting that it would not be disturbed before they returned in the morning.

“Ready?” Karr asked LaFoote.

“You’re sure we’ll know if the police are coming?”

“Oh yeah. A little birdie’ll tell me. Come on.”

Karr wasn’t lying, exactly. Fifteen minutes before, just after the last policeman had gone home for the night, Karr had walked to a point on the other side of the hill, obscured from LaFoote as well as the nearby farmhouses. There he had taken a small black robot aircraft from his pack. Called a Crow, it had been designed to look like a bird from a distance. The aircraft, which could be controlled by Karr or the Art Room, provided real-time video of the area. Under other circumstances, Karr would have tapped into the video feed himself via his PDA. But he didn’t want to share any more of his bag of tricks with LaFoote than absolutely necessary.

“Nothing coming for miles,” said Rockman in his ear.

“Let’s move out,” Karr told LaFoote—and the Art Room.

The explosions and the fire that followed had destroyed the roof and gutted much of the interior of the house, but a good portion of the brick walls remained upright. The police theory—shared with Karr via a small boom mike—was that a leaking gas pipe in the kitchen had exploded because of some random spark.

The theory made
some
sense, but it failed to explain the extraordinary damage near what had been the refrigerator—clearly where the bomb had been set. That explosion might have damaged the gas line running beneath the kitchen in a crawl space, causing it to explode a few seconds later. Or perhaps there had been another bomb set on a delayed fuse.

Whatever the exact sequence of events, the bomb had blown through the floor and the crawl space, disturbing dirt that hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. Karr’s chemical analyzer picked up some traces of complex compounds used in explosives, but not as much as he expected; he had to slide the probe around in the dirt before he got strong readings. These were consistent with Semtex.