"Dry, hot night," the driver said. "Straight to the Smoky, Mr. Al-Husam. Good time to see the ranch. They had choppers up doing practice runs last time I was out there, a couple hours ago. Might still be putting on a show. Real fine."
The shuttle drove through darkness along straight smooth roads, better maintained than the city streets or highways. The headlights painted in brilliant white the occasional jackrabbit, one possum, one artichoke—no, armadillo. Like little armored rats, armadillos were common around here, unsightly and unclean beasts—or so Fouad surmised. They were frequently seen ruptured and ugly, squashed by passing cars. It was said the treatment for leprosy had been found in the pads of armadillo feet. No Muslim could have made that discovery—nor even come close to touching such a prehistoric curiosity.
Yes, definitely unclean.
The driver delivered him to the gate house for the Smoky, and from there, another driver used an open cart to take Fouad half a mile to the main house, around to a side entrance, and dropped him off at the door.
At no point did this seem to be anything alarming or out of the ordinary.
Yet the network on the campus had gone out. Or so they said.
Price's private office was simple but elegant, the very best money could buy, but without much in the way of ostentation or even artwork, and comparatively small—barely twenty feet on a side.
A modest low bay window looked out over another plot of tall grass and beyond that, a set of gray hangars lined the horizon.
As Fouad watched, the lights surrounding these buildings dimmed, then shut off.
The side windows were open and a clean, grassy night breeze blew into the room, prickling the hairs on his neck.
A curved bank of monitors covered the eastern wall of the office, providing a panoramic view of a broad, distant gray ocean—sunrise or sunset, Fouad could not tell. In the middle monitor, jerky video of a large cargo ship marked "HKA" was apparently being shot from the vantage of a small boat crossing choppy water.
The view swooped to the left to show three other boats bouncing and skimming: trim, fast, purple inflatables known as Starfish.
The CEO of Talos rose from a stool in front of the monitors, took a sharp step forward, and offered his hand to Fouad.
Axel Price would have been difficult to describe to a sketch artist, yet once you saw him, you never forgot him. Beneath neatly trimmed brown hair, his clean, planed face was at once handsome and unmemorable. He had a narrow, knowing smile and observant but not penetrating blue eyes. Very small lines around the corners of his lips could just as easily have been traces of cruelty or humor. Just above his collar line, Fouad saw reddened scars, which he guessed would extend down his back—a case of acne rosacea, perhaps, in Price's impoverished adolescence.
Price stood two inches taller but did not outweigh him. Fouad had put on a little weight in the past year and Price was in top condition though slender, with just the beginning of a stoop.
"I've heard a lot about you," he said as he walked around Fouad to close the door. "You've done a great job for us."
"Always a pleasure serving Talos, sir."
Price returned to the stool and sat with one leg raised, brown Oxford wedged on a cross bar. "I was impressed by how you performed at Buckeye. Sorry you had to be exposed to that silliness. What do you suppose tipped the poor guy"
"I have no idea," Fouad said. "He is not known to me."
"Not really known to anyone, apparently. Big mistake, hiring those guys. All of them. Scattered all over the planet now, ticking time bombs, waiting to explode." Price waited for a reaction.
Fouad lowered one eyebrow, truly uninformed.
"Well, you handled him better than my guards. A magnificent job of defusing. I'm grateful."
"Is the programmer well?" Fouad asked.
He wondered why programmers as a group would be waiting to explode.
Price lifted one shoulder and grimaced. "No longer your concern."
He pointed to the rightmost monitor. A fast patrol ship in purple and green—Talos colors—was standing off from the cargo vessel.
"Gulf of Aden. You'd think I wanted to be Pompey the Great, with all the pirates my boys discourage and all the ships I recover. Started that business five years ago. When foreign countries want military assistance, they don't go to the U.S. government anymore—they come to me. I sell protective systems to ship owners, but they're slow to spend what they cost—so I charge them for recovery, ten times more expensive. It's hard, dangerous work. Never underestimate what a little boredom and a lot of poverty can do to a bunch of fishermen.
"A few years ago, when our snipers started blowing their brains out, the Somalis acquired a taste for blood as well as treasure." He grinned with a touch of boyish wickedness. "It's an old story—but they're getting tougher and meaner and more desperate every year, poor bastards. So we conduct our raids the same way they do. Surprise, speed, and ass-kicking violence."
Fouad could see no guns on the patrol ship, but recognized a prickly array of LED blinders—bigger versions of the light used on Nick in Buckeye—as well as seizure-inducing strobes, acoustic blasters, and even conical microwave pain projectors, mounted on the bow.
"My team commander has just given the pirates five minutes to abandon the vessel and leave the crew unharmed," Price said. "If they aren't away by then, he'll go in with a pulsed sound and light show—sends anyone topside into fits, and they don't even have to face the strobes. Backscatter does the trick most of the time. Anybody inside is going to have their sphincters open right up—the crew will be inconvenienced, but Hershey shorts are better than dying. Hell of a sensation. All my guys go through it, though not the strobe fits—too many side effects.
"But we get the ships back, 100 percent, and if the pirates harm anyone—or if any of the crew is severely affected by our recovery operations—then we hunt the pirates down on the open water and blast them to fish food. They never get home to squeeze their kids and kiss the missus."
"And if they depart the vessel as ordered?" Fouad asked.
"We let 'em go. Catch and release. They're one of our biggest centers of profit—fees plus 30 percent of assessed ship and cargo. You trained a few of these Starfish boys in Arabic and Aramaic a few months back. They seem proficient.
"You're very good at what you do, Mr. Al-Husam. All that you do."
"Thank you," Fouad said. His neck hairs had not stopped prickling since he entered the office.
The starfish had come within a few hundred yards of the cargo ship, which now switched on its working lights, lighting up like it was in port and waiting to offload.
Men with assault rifles scampered along the gunwales, as seen through a telephoto camera on the lead starfish.
Muzzle flare sparked from several points on the facing port side.
Price humphed. He slid off the stool and approached the monitors. "Getting tired of me, are you, aren't you, you skinny sons of oola-oola-oola black bitches?" He glanced at Fouad again, eyes sharp. "Watch this."
The camera lens was blocked by men erecting black foam barriers like curtains around the inflatable.
Bullets splashed in the last visible stretch of water.
"Curtains protect our crew from the worst of it. But all my Starfish team members wear diapers, just in case."
The camera winked out and another view took its place on the central monitor—from the bridge of the patrol ship.
Starfish bobbed like lumps of coal in the water, hundreds of yards from the cargo ship.
"Love this, just love this," Price murmured, rapt.
Blinker strobes lit up the ocean. Even through the monitor, Fouad could imagine the dazzle of the rapid-fire flashes of white and blue light, the laser beams drawing red squiggles along the vessel's upper works.
"Here it comes," Price said, folding his arms.
The first big pulse of sound from the bow of the fast patrol ship feathered the ocean like an invisible broom. Fouad could see the hull plates on
the cargo ship actually ripple with the impact.
Men flew back like matchsticks.
Their ears would bleed—perforated ear drums, great pain.
Not visible at all were the microwave pain projectors. On deck, the men would feel their skin burn as if bathed in hot oil. The effects were temporary but felt mortal.
Next, through the speakers came a greatly reduced and muffled thum-thum-thum, rapid as the flashes of light. Fouad knew the frequencies of both sound and strobes—had witnessed them in training at the Academy, and after, when studying crowd control. Less than lethal, usually, but painful and disturbing.
The deck was soon clear of standing figures.
"That's it," Price said. "They won't abandon ship. We've pushed them too far. Now we board and take them out one by one—lots of skinny black corpses."
Price snapped his fingers and the monitors shut off. "That concludes tonight's show. We'll do the accounting and send off the bills tomorrow."
He focused his attention on Fouad.
"John tells me you're the best we've got with dialects. He's already seeing results with his Haitian boys in the field in Algeria and Libya."
One of Price's three senior partners, a former South African army colonel named John Yardley, was in charge of Talos's Special Forces Training division. The mercenary troops Yardley trained—mostly Haitians—called him "Colonel Sir."
"Your students are highly motivated," Fouad said. "I take pleasure in working with them."
"Good pay, great benefits, terrific prospects," Price said, nodding approval. "Uncle Sam has a moth or two in his pockets and not much more. We're paying our overseas contractors about eight times the average government salary, twelve times the typical military starting pay grade. Causes a bit of a stir."
Price walked to the window. Outside, a very large insect buzzed past. It wasn't an insect, of course.
"I'd like to move you up a notch," he said. "As you know, we've got a big conference in a couple of weeks. I've asked the campus supervisors who's best at translating Arabic dialects—and they all tell me it's you, hands down. You're also well-versed in Texan, I hear." Price chuckled. "Not easy to get a handle on how we talk around here. The food alone . . . well, Muslims aren't big fans of some of our favorite dishes."
Fouad remained smiling.
"We'll be hiding billboards and such that might offend some of our Muslim guests as they limo in from the airport. I've asked restaurant owners to cover up the pink neon pigs, that sort of thing. They're happy to oblige—they know how important this is to Lion City. But once our guests are here, I'd like a fellow I can trust to provide a running commentary, delivered straight to me, on how they're thinking, what they're saying, and maybe pitch in and correct misunderstandings, as need be. I'd like you to be that fellow."
Price gestured to a well-upholstered blue leather chair on one side of the desk, near the window.
"Take a seat, Mr. Al-Husam."
Fouad sat. This was not at all what he had expected. Best to show surprise and quiet pride. "I am honored," he said.
Price beamed. "I pick my people well."
The man could be charming. Many here could be charming and yet hold the most untoward views.
"Tell me what you think that sort of work would require, Fouad . . . if we can go on a first-name basis. And please, call me Axel."
Price's pronunciation was good. He spoke sound but rudimentary Arabic, from the years when he had directed security and other contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.
"I could be attached to delegations as a back-up translator," Fouad said. "The guests will rely on their own translators, but they will not be offended if you also position someone with expertise, to listen."
"My thoughts exactly. You can't cover all the conversations—hell, I'll probably only be able to drop by for about a third of the sessions myself. But if I'm there . . . you'll be there. I'd be pleased if we could make that sort of arrangement. Keep you around a while, at a much higher pay grade than a teacher, of course."
"It would be my pleasure, Mr. Price—Axel," Fouad said. "My contract, however, is soon ended, and I have other commitments I would have to adjust."
Price bowed his head and threw up his hand, showing this was not his concern.
"I'm sure you can work it out," he said. "Start now. I might need you in a snap, so we'll put you up in a guest house. Real nice place. Deluxe. You'll sleep out there tonight. My logistics team will move your stuff from Lion City. You'll need a chip upgrade, of course—deep, deep security."
"Thank you," Fouad said, but his heart was not with him. This familiarity felt too convenient. Trust meant nothing to Axel Price—caution was his hallmark.
"The conference is coming up fast," Price said. "Private jets from all over are coming into Lion City airport. About two hundred guests, fifty or sixty from the Emirates, Qatar, Arabia Deserta, Yemen, Jordan—plus retinues. You'll get all the docs and prep you need, plus a finger-key transcriber." He held out his hand and waggled his fingers. "You know how to use it—like a court steno?"
Fouad nodded. It was standard for secure translators.
"Good. FBI trained you well. Any regrets about heading for greener pastures while the Bureau's in limbo?"
"Of course," Fouad said. "But it was inevitable."
"Moving them out of D.C. and Virginia—that's a hoot. Our beltway masters seem to think they need to squeeze everything good out of the South—or squeeze the South out of everything. As if the war never ended."
Price shook his head in wonder at this effrontery. "Be up and dressed by 0700. Prep team will meet you in the cook shack.
"Welcome to the ranch!"
Chapter Thirteen
Los Angeles, California
The bar was a long, shadowed cave with highlights of blue and gold. The angled glass window beyond the stools and tall tables overlooked a themed restaurant laid out like a 1930s train station. Three dining cars waited beside a wooden platform, sleek roofs lacquered black, sides painted tan and hunter green. Waiters in white jackets and trim black pants and red caps showed customers to their tables while diners watched through half dropped windows.
The restaurant was called The Roundhouse and Rebecca Rose had come here at the invitation of a navy captain. They were in town attending the COPES domestic security conference and had unexpectedly run into each other while registering in the convention center lobby.
His name was Peter Periglas, Captain, USN, retired. It had been two years since they last met—on a ship in the Red Sea.
Two years since Mecca.
She sipped her vodka martini. She didn't like themed restaurants. Worse, the captain was late.
The bartender was a waxen, seen-it-all mannequin with toned shoulders and silicone breasts, eyes dulled by self-doubt and too many boyfriends. She asked Rebecca if she wanted a refill.
"I'm good."
Rebecca was about to get off her stool and return to the hotel when she saw a tall man with black hair enter through heavy glass doors at the far end of the bar.
He caught her eye and waved.
She quirked her lips and waved back.
"Sorry," Periglas said, approaching with a sheepish grin. "My handlers are giving me grief about my speech tomorrow. I seem to be a little stiff."
"I was surprised to see you in the exhibit hall," Rebecca said. "When did you get out of the Navy?"
"Last year. Took the rank—they offered it out of rotation—and then retired. Too many secrets, I guess. You?"
"Not really retired—just on extended leave. Furlough."
"So what are you doing?"
"Consulting, traveling. Enjoying life."
"I need a beer," the captain said.
The bartender was occupied by three raucous young men at the far end of the bar.
"How long with the FBI, total?" Periglas asked.
"Eighteen years. And you, the navy?"
"Twenty-three. Enough of the wine-dark sea. Dry land looks good. I'd like t
o become a private investigator. I could set up a downtown office," Periglas said. "Inland Empire Investigations. Keep a .38 in a drawer. Stare out the window, harass the pigeons, suck on a bottle of hooch and let the California sun bake me through the flyspecked window while I bask in a big oak swivel chair."
"You've given it some thought," Rebecca said. "Sounds pretty good."
She had dealt with navy men before. All the pulling up of roots made them a little too quick, a little too eager, but this time, she didn't mind.
"You could protect all the pretty WAVEs when they come to you with their problems. Sensible shoes, tight skirts, pert little . . . caps."
Even before Periglas had invited her to the bar, Rebecca had checked his right hand. The impressed shadow of a ring.
"My wife—my ex-wife—can't stand me enjoying anything. She was why I knew I would never make admiral. Hates Washington." The captain grinned a what-can-you-do grin. "Do we order bar food or descend to the dining cars?" he asked. "Cost no object. I'm buying."
Rebecca gave a passing thought to dropping her shields. It was about time. He seemed pleasant and smart, a little out-of-breath but not nervous. He might not bite. She might not bite. She felt remarkably strong.
All better now.
"Did you make reservations?" she asked.
"Nope," Periglas said.
"Tail o' the Pup for us, then," Rebecca said, leaning across the bar to get the waxy woman's attention.
No joy.
"That was over on San Vicente," Periglas said. "I'm a native Angeleno. My father might have eaten at the Pup. I never did. It's been gone for years."
He lifted his arm and the bartender gave him a frown and a nod but kept arguing with the young men.
When she finally minced down behind the long bar to their seats, her eyes were like flints and her cheeks flushed cherry.