Mariposa (6 page)

Chapter Eleven

Dubai

Two hours later, haggard and somber, Nathaniel took a limo to Dubai Airport.

The Quiet Man had always been aware they might face difficulties. As a precaution, Jones had reached out and created false identities for all of the Turing Seven. So many fingers in so many pies around the planet.

Jones was that good.

The people in the Ziggurat lobby . . . He did not know just how they would have disposed of him when they were finished.

The desert, vast and empty.

In the packed airport mall, under the shade of a gigantic hammered-brass palm tree, Nathaniel used one of his assigned IDs to link up with a pilot who flew oil and architecture execs from Jiddah and Dubai back to the states. The pilot arranged for him to hitch an anonymous ride on a MedPetro jet to London.

There, using a new passport—traveling as Robert Sangstrom—he would pay for a ticket to the United States.

He would arrive in Los Angeles just in time to greet the California dawn. Nathaniel had made up his mind. Novelty was the game of the hour.

For now, and just for starters, he would try doing some good, just to see how it felt.

Chapter Twelve

Talos Campus

The wide window of the Talos command center looked out over forty acres of calf-high, swaying grass, dazzling green beneath high banks of football lights. The field had been planted at Price's orders to replicate the original Texas tallgrass prairie that had once covered twenty million acres.

Indiangrass and Little Bluestem flowed up to the window, lush and deceptive.

Axel Price was a tough man to see, even when he was doing the summoning. Fouad was increasingly certain his cover was blown. There were many sympathetic to Price even within the Bureau. He wondered which would come first: his meeting or security police dangling handcuffs.

With the slow, painful decline of oil prices in the second decade of the twenty-first century—and the living death of the local cattle industry after three major outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease—Talos Corporation was now the only thing that enabled anyone to make a living in this part of Texas. It supported almost a quarter of the state; it might even elevate Axel Price to governor—
or emperor
, Fouad mused, if the state legislature finished cutting itself away from the feds.

This time, there would be no Abraham Lincoln to stand in their way.

The receptionist—a slender brunette in a tight brown skirt and white blouse, mincing on shiny black high heels—opened the door to his left and tapped across the slate floor. Her glasses were shaped like cat's eyes, with small wings on their outer tips, as if they wanted to fly away.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Al-Husam," she said. "Mr. Price was here a few minutes ago, but a helicopter came and took him out to the Smoky. He told me you should hop a shuttle and meet him there."

"Thank you," Fouad said.

Even more privilege. The Smoky was Price's private ranch, four hundred acres on the northern edge of the Talos Campus. He did not raise cattle or horses but kept antique cars, helicopters, and armored vehicles in hangars and garages nearby—along with a sophisticated fighter jet, a two-seat Sukhoi Su-27 that he sometimes flew out of the Lion City airport, with the help of a professional pilot.

"I've called the van," she continued, "and it'll be here in five minutes. Terribly inconvenient, but he says it's important."

"I will wait out front," Fouad said.

"You do that! It'll be here in a jiff."

He left the reception area and stood on the porch beside the parking lot. Crickets sang in the dark heat. He wondered where they found their moisture. His own lips were dry. Of course, crickets did not have or need lips. Cartoons from television again came to mind: they spat black juice and played guitars.

Or perhaps those were grasshoppers or locusts.

The security team was nowhere in sight.

Other than the timing, there was no good reason to believe he had been discovered. He had been exceptionally careful and Jane Rowland had trained him well.

Still, Talos was a place of unexpected eyes and ears. Price's dictum was that since he trusted everyone, no one should mind being closely watched.
"We're all family here—partners in a big effort. I'm watched, we're
all
watched. It's no big deal."

Price had nothing to hide. Of course, reports of his activities ultimately ended up on his own desk.

Fouad did not know what to make of what he had seen of the information that now passed through the tiny machines in his blood. Banks, corporations, international holding companies, names—nations.

He was grateful he was merely a vessel and not an analyst.

Even so, as he waited under the Texas night—the stars bleached from the sky by the banks of lights—he made a few surmises, put together a few educated guesses.

It did not look good.

The Bureau had been right to send him here.

A shuttle pulled up to the curb, a long, broad black van with twelve seats, all empty. The door swung open. The driver was a young, muscular black with short hair. He wore a gray jumpsuit with red stripes on the sleeves and pants legs, as did all support service workers on the campus. He smiled at Fouad as he climbed up the steps and took a front seat, facing the windshield.

"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."