Liberation Day (8 page)

At last he looked up. “She didn’t even give you time to dry your hair.” There was just a hint of a smile as he thought of his daughter fucking me off, as he placed the frame carefully on the tabletop. “I’ve done you a favor, son. She needed to find out sometime. And I happen to think she deserved to know.” He bent down and picked up a leather folder from beside his feet. “Maybe this will help. Compliments of the U.S. government.”

He went and poured himself some coffee from the pot while I sat opposite his chair at the table and unzipped the folder. “It’s not as if it’s a bad thing you have done, you have nothing to be ashamed of.” He turned around and gestured toward the mug in his hand. I accepted with a grudging nod. Carrie’s mother would go ape if the wood got marked, so I took two pineapple-motif coasters from the pile in the center of the table as George continued, now with his back to me. “This isn’t a war of choice like Vietnam or Kosovo. This is a war of necessity. It’s in our yard now, Nick. Carrie should be proud of you.”

I glanced into the folder and saw my passport, driver’s license, and other documents. “This could have waited, George.”

“What you did for us out there, it had to be done, Nick. This is not the time to be showing the world we’re nice guys. This outreach thing that’s going on, every schoolkid gets a Muslim pen pal, that kind of thing, it makes no sense. This isn’t a time to hug, this is a time to be feared.”

I flipped through the passport and there was something wrong, big-time wrong. These weren’t Nick Stone’s documents; they belonged to someone called Nick Scott, who had the same face as me. I looked up sharply. George was still pouring creamer. “I didn’t want a new name, I wanted my own back.”

He came and sat down with the two mugs of coffee, passing one across the table then waving my last words aside. He kept the other in his huge left hand, his veteran’s onyx signet ring glinting on his ring finger. He took a tentative sip; too hot—the mug went on the coaster. “Do you know over six hundred people died in floods over in Algeria two days ago? You were lucky to get in-country before the storms.”

I cupped my hands around the mug and felt the heat. “I heard something.”

“You know why? Because the drains had been blocked to stop terrorists planting bombs under the streets and killing people. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know where this was headed, but I wasn’t feeling good about it. I just wanted to get out of here and go and find Carrie.

“Know what my job is nowadays, Nick? To make sure we don’t have to block our drains. You’ve helped me do that, and the first thing I want to say today is thank you.”

This was really starting to worry me. I picked up the dull-looking brew with not enough cream, and took a sip.

“For years, we’ve been fighting this war with our hands tied. Now people are looking for scapegoats because America doesn’t feel safe anymore. America says, ‘The government should have known, the CIA should have known, the military should have known. Thirty billion of our tax dollars spent on intelligence, why didn’t anyone know?’” He paused to lift his mug. “Well, here’s the news. On nine-eleven America had the exact level of protection that it was willing to pay for. We’ve been telling government for years that we need more money to fight this thing. We told them this would eventually happen but Congress wouldn’t give us cash. Doesn’t anyone watch C-Span anymore to see what their own government is doing? Maybe they’re just too busy watching Jerry Springer. What do you think?”

I shrugged, not really understanding what he was going on about, not that it mattered. I just got the feeling the place we were going to wasn’t one where I wanted to be.

“Did any of the complainers see the intelligence chiefs talking about the new terrorism? We kept telling Congress, live on TV, there wasn’t enough money to build intelligence networks in the areas where these scum are operating—and that they needed to untie our hands so we could deal with this situation. We’ve told them for years that this is a clear and present danger within America’s borders that needs to be taken on and defeated but, hey, guess what? Congress just said no, looking at ways of saving a nickel.”

He took a long, slow breath of frustration before continuing. “So why didn’t America demand more protection from their Congressmen? Because they were watching one of their two hundred other channels and didn’t catch the news. Didn’t catch Congress telling us we didn’t need more capability. Telling us we were just looking for something to replace the Cold War. Know why Congress did that? Because they think that’s what the people think, and they don’t want to upset them, because they don’t want to lose their vote. Now everything is different. Now we have all the nails we need to shut the stable door, but the horse has already bolted.

“Goddamn it, Nick, why didn’t things change after the terrorist attack on the U.S.S.
Cole
? Seventeen American sailors came home in body bags—why didn’t that open their eyes? And what about the bombing of the air force base in Saudi Arabia? Or the embassy staff in Africa? Or our soldiers mutilated and dragged through the streets of Somalia? Why wasn’t anybody letting us do anything then?

“Because those guys up on the Hill were just too damned busy worrying about the civil rights of pedophiles and rapists, worrying about interest rates on credit cards that the voters use to buy wide-screen digital TVs to make them feel life is good. But those home-entertainment centers don’t seem to get C-Span. Nobody knows what’s going on, and that’s just how Congress wanted to keep it. Then they have the gall to ask us: ‘Why did they attack the innocent people? Why didn’t they go after the military?’ Well, the answer is, that’s a done deal, but no one took any notice.”

He picked up his mug and looked genuinely sad, the first time I had ever seen him like that. He seemed to be lost in his own world for a while until I cut in. “So now what?”

“Now?” The mug went down. “We’ve got the money. A billion-dollar down-payment. The problem is finding a way to fight these people. They don’t have anything to defend. It’s not like the Cold War, or any war that we’ve seen before. There’s no real estate to fight over, and the notion of deterrence doesn’t apply to these guys. There’s no treaty to be negotiated, no arms control agreement that’s going to guarantee our security. The only way we can deal with them is to hit them hard and fast and take them down. You know it’s crazy—only a few months ago, they were saying a hundred million for the Navy was too much…”

He paused and reflected. I wasn’t too sure if this was all part of the performance: George might be sad, but he still had a job to do. “But, hey, you can’t unring a bell, Nick. I’m here because I want you to work for me. For us. Nick Scott would be your cover name.”

I shook my head. “The deal was one job. You agreed on that.”

“Events have taken a serious turn these last couple days, Nick.” His voice was steely, his gaze level. “Al-Qaeda has upped the ante, these guys are just programmed for trouble. I can’t tell you how unless you commit. But I can tell you, this is the front page of the threat matrix the president gets to read every day. These are scary days, Nick. Yesterday’s ran to thirty pages.” He looked down at the table and traced a figure eight with his mug. “You know what? At the moment I feel like a blind watchmaker, just throwing the components into the case and waiting to see what works.”

I didn’t look up, because I knew he was waiting, his eyes ready to ambush mine.

“I need your help, Nick.” It was a challenge, not an entreaty.

“Things are good here with Carrie.”

“Are they?” He gave an exaggerated frown. “I don’t think she took it too well. She’s like her mom.”

The asshole. Divide and rule. He’d done it on purpose. I forced myself to stay calm. “You didn’t tell her everything, did you?”

“Son, I don’t even tell God everything. I’ll leave that until I meet him face-to-face. But, right now, I see it as my duty to make sure there’s a big fucking bunch of al-Qaeda ahead of me in the line.”

He stood up and turned his back to me again as he placed the framed picture back on the dresser. Maybe he didn’t want me to see how proud he was of the way he’d delivered his lines. “The secret of combating terrorism is simple—don’t get terrorized. Keep a clear head and fight back on their terms. That’s the only way we’re going to win this war—or, at least, contain it, keep a lid on it. But we can only do that if we take the battle to them, with every means at our disposal. And that’s where you come in, Nick. I need to stop the drains getting blocked—and fast. Do you want to know more, Nick, or am I wasting my time here?”

I looked at him and took another mouthful of coffee. “I’d like to know what happened to Zeralda’s head.”

There was a bit of a smile. “It came back here and was presented to his cousin in Los Angeles on a silver platter. By all accounts it kind of freaked him out.”

“What about the greaseball who was there with him? Was he the source? Is that why no one else was to be killed?”

“Greaseball?” He managed to complete the smile. “I like it. Yes, he was and still is a source, and a good one—too good to lose just yet.” The smile faded. “Nick, have you ever heard of
hawalla
?”

I’d spent enough time in the Middle East to know it, and when I was a kid in London, all the Indian and Pakistani families used it to send cash back home. “Like Western Union, but without the ADSL lines, right?”

He nodded. “Okay, so what we’ve got is a centuries-old system of moving money, originally to avoid taxes and bandits along the ancient Silk Road, and nowadays to avoid the money-laundering laws. A guy in San Francisco wants to send some cash to, say, his mother in Delhi. So, he walks into one of these
hawalla
bankers, maybe a shopkeeper, maybe even working in the money markets in San Fran. The
hawallada
takes his cash and gives the guy a code word. The
hawallada
then faxes, calls, or e-mails his counterpart in Delhi, maybe a restaurant owner, and gives him the code word and the amount of the transfer. The guy’s mother goes into the Delhi restaurant, says the code word, and collects. And that’s it—takes less than thirty minutes to move huge sums of money anywhere in the world, and we have no track of it.

“These
hawalla
guys settle their debts and commissions among themselves. In Pakistan, business is huge. There’s maybe five, six billion U.S. dollars sent back there every year by migrant workers just from the Gulf states. But only one billion goes through normal banking channels. Everything else goes via
hawalladas
. These guys work on total trust, a handshake or a piece of paper between them. It’s been going on for centuries, must be about the second oldest profession. It even gets a mention in the New Testament.” He gave me a wry smile. “Carrie’s mother is a very religious woman. You know the tale of Ananis and Safia?”

As if. I shook my head.

“Go read it someday. These
hawalla
guys were hiding money that they were due to give to Peter, so they were deemed sinners. And when they were confronted with their shame they just fell down and died.” There was a pause. “That’s what you did for us, Nick: you made Zeralda fall down and die. This
hawalla
network has been used to funnel money to the terrorist groups in the Kashmir valley. It’s been used by the heroin trade coming out of Afghanistan, and now it’s here, in the U.S.

“This is not good, Nick. Zeralda was a
hawallada,
and we reckon he’d moved between four and five million dollars into this country for terrorism in the last four years. You can be sure the legit banks are doing their bit now and cracking down on laundering all around the world, but with
hawalla
we can’t check accounts or monitor electronic transfers.

“Well, we’ve got to close it down. Al-Qaeda is retreating and regrouping its assets in both manpower and cash. We’ve got to turn off the faucet, Nick, and we’ve got to do that before al-Qaeda moves all its funds to safe harbors. Money is the oxygen for their campaign in this country—your new country. I say again, am I wasting my time here, Nick?”

I really needed room to think. “What happened to the cousin in Los Angeles?”

“Let’s put it this way: we didn’t stand in his way when he jumped on the first plane he could get out of the States. All he left behind was a few clothes, a pair of leather motorcycle gloves, a Qur’an, and maybe sixty pages of Arabic text off the Internet. All his accounts are frozen, but we’re not after his money. We want him to go spread the news of what happened to the other half of the transaction route. He’s back in Algeria, a very scared man, and much more use to us there than he would be sitting in a penitentiary.”

The coffee was almost cold. I took another sip to buy myself some more thinking time.

“See, Nick, you were the key. The key that switched on the power of terror. Bringing back that head showed these guys that for us anything is possible as well. They’ve got to know we’re coming for them, that they shouldn’t start reading any long books, know what I mean?”

He liked that one and took another swig himself. “As Rumsfeld just told the world, Nick, there will be covert operations and they’ll be secret even in success.”

“Did you know beforehand that Zeralda was into boys? We were briefed it was just hookers.”

“As I said, even God doesn’t know everything I know. I wanted to make sure you guys finished the job. Not being mentally geared up for it, then seeing something as sick as that would make it…shall I say, less confusing? I just figured you’d be thinking it could be your own kid. Am I right?”

I nodded. The expression in those boys’ eyes had reminded me of the way Kelly looked when her parents were killed.

“Nick, I understand what you want from life now, but things have changed for all of us since September, and everything’s ratcheted up again in the last twenty-four hours. My grandfather was only here a year before fighting for this country in the First World War. My father did the same in the Second, because he wanted this country to remain free. I’ve done the same all my life, and even found myself crying on nine-eleven—and that’s not a place I often go to.