The Sleeper (4 page)

“You're toast,” he said at last. “You killed the wrong man.”

“That's what you think.”

“That's what the Brits think. He was one of theirs.”

“Fuck he was.”

“He was.”

“He was a user,” I said. “Using them.” I picked up the pace. More breaths, less words is what I wanted. “They know about me?”

“Nobody made connection—but me.”

“So no problem.”

“It's over.”

“Just beginning.” Faster now. “Five. Six. More like him.”

“No.”

“You firing me?”

“Sending you home.”

We ran for a few hundred yards without saying anything, through a little tunnel under a road, then up toward a huge fountain and pond. The sun was up now, and we were starting to have company in the park.

“What'd Brits tell you?” I asked.

“Asset murdered. Ealing.”

“His hard drive?”

“They got it.”

“No, man, you got it,” I said, “if you want it.”

We were in the middle of a small meadow with a stone monument in the center that looked like a miniature Washington monument. From there we could see everyone for 360 degrees around, and nobody was close. I sprinted toward the monument and stopped beside it like I'd just crossed a finish line. Griffin came up about five strides behind me.

“
You
got the drive?” he said.

I nodded. “You'll get it.”

Griffin laughed. “Lord,” he said. “Lord. There is justice.”

I laughed, too.

“When it comes to this stuff,” said Griffin, “the Brits don't share shit. But—”

“But—?”

“But seriously. Time for you to go home.”

“Think so?”

“Know so.”

I took a long, deep breath. Then another one. “You were smart to find me, Griffin.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Smart enough. But you don't know these guys. You don't know what they can do.”

“I know 'em as well as anybody in my shop,” said Griffin. He put his hands on his knees and tried to get more air. I thought he was going to puke. “I know the faith. Like you. I know the files, which you don't. And”—his face went stone hard—“I saw Ground Zero.”

“Yeah, well, they can do that again.” I took another deep breath. “And again.” One more breath, slow. “And worse.”

“They're smart,” said Griffin. “Smart as hell. Unpredictable as hell. And that's why…” He groaned. “That's why we got to coordinate, got to keep everybody on board—the Brits, the Germans, even the fucking French—work with the other services.”

“Uh-hunh.”

“This thing with Abu Seif. Shit! Your mission was to penetrate the organization, not take it out all by yourself.”

“Let me ask you something. How much time do you think we've got?”

“Don't know.”

“Me either. But somebody out there is checking off days on a calendar, maybe even setting his alarm clock. And you're not going to find out who that is and what he knows with some interservice liaison committee.”

“You don't follow procedures and I get fucked. I don't like that.”

“We stick to procedures and we all get fucked. Big time. And you know it. You keep catching bait fish and pretending you're going up the food chain. We got to move faster than that. I will do what I have to do whether you help me or not.”

“You're fucking crazy.”

“Sure. Crazy, and worse: I've got common sense. You think these assholes like Abu Seif are complicated? Unpredictable? That's because you got to have everything approved by committee, you got to have your flow chart, you got to have salaries and pensions and bonuses, and you think they do, too.”

“Spare me.”

“You know what jihad is about for these guys, Griffin?”

“Holy war. Paradise.”

“Think ‘glory,' ” I said. “I don't believe for a second that the smart ones really think when they die they'll wake up with virgins waiting on them hand and foot. And if they do, that's just a bonus. What they
know,
what they count on, is that their names are going to be up in lights—here—right on earth—and right now. Ground Zero's not about God, it's about Hollywood. It's
The Ten Commandments
meets
Independence Day,
” I said. “I've been inside their heads. I know that. And so should you.”

“We're a whole lot smarter than you think,” said Griffin.

“Yeah? Ask those poor dead bastards in the Trade Center how smart you are.”

“Fuck you,” said Griffin.

“Yeah? You've been grabbing people all over the map for three years, and you didn't know shit about that attack.”

“I ain't got all day to listen to your Power Point presentation,” said Griffin. “We know what goes on.”

“Tell me something, Griffin. Every intelligence service in the Middle East has spies in those camps: Egyptians, Jordanians, Algerians, Israelis, the Brits, the French, the Russians—maybe even your Agency. Right?” It was a guess, but it was obvious. Griffin just looked at me with that stare-into-space expression that comes with a security clearance. “I bet half of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards are working for ‘friendly' services. But you didn't have a clue what was coming ten days ago.”

“And you are so fucking smart, you knew. Right?”

“What I know is this. When a recruiter like Abu Seif spots a baby shark instead of a bait fish—someone who's smart, who's got the right look in his eye—that recruit gets tagged for a different program. The sharks get special care, special feeding, become part of a different food chain. Might not go to the camps at all. In fact, probably don't. Who runs
them
? We've got to find the man who handles the sharks, who knows where they swim, and who comes out to swim with them. And you can bet he's not sipping tea with Osama these days. Because the sharks are already in America. They're already in Europe. They're sleepers. They don't do anything until they get the signal. Then: BAM! And while they wait to launch the second wave of terror, and the third, and the fourth, they're leading perfectly ordinary lives in, I don't know, in—”

“In Kansas,” said Griffin.

“Could be,” I said. “Or in Langley.” I stood up straight and arched my back in a long, yawning stretch. “You want that hard drive? Let's find an ATM machine.”

“Tell me something about you,” I said.

“What do you want to know?” said Griffin.

“Something that's true,” I said.

We were on the edge of the park, now, and headed on foot into a collection of town houses and small hotels. I remember there was a statue of a general on horseback.

“I am thirty-six years old,” said Griffin.

“Yeah.”

“I was born just outside of Jackson, Mississippi.”

“Where's your accent?”

“It finds me whenever I go back there.”

“All right.”

“In my family,” said Griffin, “there's a lot of kids, and not a lot of money.”

“And a lot of Muslims?”

“Nope. Everybody's African Methodist Episcopal.”

“So what happened to you?”

“I was looking for something. Didn't find it. You know the rest. After the Rangers the Secret Service. Now this. Along the way I got myself a degree in Middle East studies at George Washington.”

“You got a wife? Kids?”

“Two little boys. They live with their mother.”

“You love them.”

“Hell yeah.”

“At some point, the bad guys are going to go after America's children.”

“Bullshit.”

“Read their declarations of war, the way they talk about the children martyred in Palestine, the children martyred in Iraq. You know what? Children
are
martyred in Palestine and Iraq. They blame us. And it ain't a big jump from ‘an eye for an eye' to ‘an innocent for an innocent.' ”

“You got anything else to back this up?”

“I hope I'm wrong,” I said. “Here's an ATM. We're going to make this a cash transaction, and you can start pulling the money out now, as much as it will give you, as a down payment. I want fifty thousand dollars in my pocket by the end of the day, and then you get Abu Seif's hard drive.”

“Bullshit!” said Griffin. “You're practically on the payroll. You don't get bonuses. And we don't pay murderers for stolen property.”

“I thought I told you, Griffin—just like you told me—I ain't working for you anymore. You don't want to pay up now? You will. I'll call you mid-afternoon.”

I jogged back into the park through a narrow alley with flowers all around, across the wide green lawns and among the trees toward the Oxford Street hostel where I'd spent the last couple of nights. It was time to take a shower and pack.

The escalators took me down into memories of wars before I was born. The deepness of the London subway was like nothing I'd ever seen before, the moving stairs so long that you lost your sense of the surface of the earth. There were posters to read for musical shows and for lingerie, all kinds of things to distract you. But by the time you got to the bottom of the stairs, all of that seemed like another world, and I understood now what I read about the British taking refuge in the Underground during the Blitz. No bomb dropped from the sky could blast through to these man-made caves. But here and now at the end of September 2001, the people around me were scared. They had the idea that death could erupt in the tunnels around them, that it could filter through the enclosed air that they breathed, that it could blow apart the subway cars they rode in. When we stopped for a couple of minutes between stations, nobody spoke. The only sound I heard was from the earphones of people wearing Walkmen.

The newspapers that were lined up on the racks at Paddington Station didn't have anything that I could see about the death of Abu Seif. They were still running headlines about the number of people who'd died and, mostly, disappeared in the World Trade Center. It was like nobody could believe it. Maybe six thousand dead. Maybe less. Not twenty thousand, like a lot of people thought at the beginning. Not ten thousand. Just eight thousand, or six thousand. Like it might be possible to whittle down the horror by whittling down the numbers. I picked up a copy of
The New York Times
and stood in the station reading it, waiting for the train. At the bottom of the front page was a story about people making a lot of money speculating in airline and insurance stocks just before September 11. But who the hell would do that? Or could? I never met anybody in the muj who was that smart, or, at least, smart that way.

“Pardon me. You're a Yank, are you?” The voice belonged to a man with long white hair and the gray stubble of a beard. He was as tall as I was, but hunched with age. His eyes were a dead brown and yellow around the edges, his skin was sunless bloodless white, like he hadn't left these tunnels for a lifetime. His sport coat and his pants looked like he slept in them. The scarf around his neck was dark with dirt, and he smelled of dust. But he was smiling. “A Yank?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Terrible thing,” he said, nodding at the headlines. “Terrible. But you'll pull through. God bless America. That's what I say.” The old man touched his head like a stage salute. “God bless,” he said, and he was gone.

I wanted someplace lonely but public. I wanted it well marked and easy to find if you followed directions stage by stage. I wanted it outside of London. But I'd never been here except for a training mission we did with the Special Air Service when I was in the Rangers, in some rough hills near Hereford. We flew in and flew out and they didn't even stamp our passports. What I knew about England was from reading about its wars and what I could pick up in the Soho Internet café these last couple of days.

The place I found on the Web was on the way to Birmingham near a village called Little Compton. It was a tourist site, according to the Web sites, but there were no tourists anywhere in the world right now. If I could get out there early enough, I thought, I could get a feel for the place. I took a train to Oxford, then climbed in a big London-style taxi, and threw my backpack on the floor.

“The Rollright Stones,” I said.

“In the Cotswolds, then, near Chippy?” The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“I guess,” I said. “Supposed to be near Little Compton.”

“That's right. Cost you about fifty pounds.” It was a good thing I was about to get some fresh cash. As we drove through town, I checked out the little mobile phone I'd bought in London for about a hundred dollars cash. It was perfect, I thought. It worked anywhere in England, and you bought scratch cards to pay for the calls before you made them. No bills, no statements, no identity.

The afternoon was warm, one of the last breaths of summer, and the windows of the cab were rolled down wide. We drove through countryside as quaint as Disney movies, but real. The air smelled of straw. Sheep grazed in rolling meadows marked off by stone fences. Stone cottages with big old trees around them looked like they'd been around for five hundred years. Elves could have lived in them.

Betsy and Miriam would love this place, I thought. Miriam would feel like a fairy-tale princess, and Betsy would feel like a lady. I thought about bringing them here someday soon. And then I thought that “soon” might not exist for me, or them, or us. All this, even this, could be destroyed.

“Excuse me, governor?”

“Just a sigh,” I said.

 

I talked Griffin to me, following his progress on my map. He was coming by car up the M40. He was taking the exit at Banbury. He was driving, after a little confusion in Banbury, down the A361 through Bloxham. And I was waiting near a circle of enormous stones that had been in this place for four thousand years.

Griffin's headlights swept along the narrow road that rolled through the countryside beneath me, cones of white cutting through the last of the twilight. There was no sign of other cars around him. I listened for the sound of a chopper, but all I heard, in the distance, were sheep.

“Where the fuck am I going?” Griffin shouted over the phone.

“You're almost there,” I said, taking up my position and talking into the wire mike that came with the phone. “When you see the little rest area on your right, pull over.”

“Got it.”

“You're alone.”

“Yes.”

“Step over the rope, and come down the path. It's just a few feet.”

“What the hell is this?” Griffin shouted in the open air. I could see him now, but there was no way he could see me. “You planning a human sacrifice? Better not be me!” He was a lonely shadow squared off in that circle of stones, like a gladiator not knowing where the attack might come from.

I kept talking softly into the wire earpiece-microphone. I didn't want him to hear me except on the phone. “Put the bag down behind that big rock.” Griffin's black face was lit green from the glow of the telephone screen. “Repeat,” I said. “Put the bag down behind the biggest rock in the circle, the one over there to your left.”

“Done,” he said, not sure whether to answer into his phone or into the emptiness of the night.

“See those three big rocks outside the circle?” I whispered.

“Which?”

“Up to your left. You can see them outlined against the sky at about a hundred yards. I left the hard drive there in a white plastic shopping bag.”

Griffin put his phone in his pocket and let his eyes adjust to the night, working his way up the hill with practiced moves while I took a few steps from among the tall fir trees that circled the site and recovered the money bag. It was a loose net sack made out of nylon, just like I told him. I could smell the used bills, part paper and part sweat. I retreated back into the dark.

Griffin came down the hill with the hard drive in his hand. When he got to the middle of the circle he stopped and turned around, looking closely at the branches, bushes, and stones now that his eyes were part of the night.

“You still here?” he shouted. He held up the wrapped metal box like a trophy. “Thanks for this,” he said. “Stay safe, you son of a bitch. And get the hell out of England.”

 

That night I slept in the shelter of trees near the stones, wrapped in the Mylar blanket I'd packed. I watched the crescent moon rise, and saw a helicopter pass twice over the site. There was no spotlight. The chopper could have been looking for my heat signature, but the Mylar would hide that. Maybe it wasn't looking for me at all. Maybe.

The next morning when the sun came up, I counted the money. Part of it was in pounds, part in dollars, but it added up. There was enough for me to send some to Betsy, and to do what I had to do. I walked into the town of Chipping Norton two miles away. Nobody bothered me. I took a taxi to Birmingham airport.