BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Allison Dearborn looked spellbound at the medusa as it parachuted through the large tank of the aquarium. She had just told Ryan Kealey she loved the colors of the jellyfish, and he said he understood. Then, suddenly, Kealey turned his back to the curved glass of the aquarium tank.
“You okay?” she asked, her blue eyes following him.
He nodded. She wasn’t convinced.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Just random-”
“Ryan? Don’t try to smoke me.”
He smirked. “It isn’t that… I don’t know if I can explain,” he told her. “It might sound a little crazy.”
Allison shrugged. “I’m a psychotherapist. Without craziness, I’d be unemployed.”
His smile broadened, but he remained silent.
“We’ve got nearly an hour before Julie’s dinner at the convention center.” She hooked her arm in his. “Come on. Give it a shot. I want to know.”
Kealey patted her hand and glanced back at the tank. Allison took a moment to admire this man, who was not only a good friend but also an exemplary patient. Lean and of medium height, his dark hair nearly reaching his collar, Kealey had dressed for the banquet in a Caribbean-blue collared golf shirt, navy Dockers, and loafers. He looked good, and he looked healthy, relaxed. He was certainly in a much better place than when they had first met. There was a long way to go, but he was making progress.
The creature was hovering now, barely drifting, its bell expanding and contracting with slow, rhythmical pulsations.
“The medusa could be at rest right now or hunting its prey,” Kealey said. “You can’t tell the difference by looking at it.”
“Fascinating and deflecting. What’s that got to do with-”
“Bear with me,” he said.
“Fine. How do you know this?”
He raised the brochure he’d picked up at the exhibit’s Pier 4 entrance. “I read this while you were on the phone. It describes the creature’s survival mechanisms, like those venomous tentacles. It doesn’t wait for its enemies to mature. It eats their eggs. It’s a perfect biological machine. Tell me, how would you go about injecting humanity into something like that?”
“I wouldn’t try. It’s not a human being.”
“Exactly,” he said. “It’s the same with some people. People who watch other people and hover and kill for a living-they’re not quite human beings, either. I was thinking, How do you instill that, or if lost, how do you get that back?”
“There are numerous approaches to rehabilitation-”
“On the surface,” he said. “You acclimatize someone. Do you really change them?”
“You mean brainwash?”
“That’s a little harsher than I meant,” Kealey said. “You scrub out so much in the process. I’m thinking more along the lines of, how do you integrate new ideas with old to make a better person?”
“That may be more a job for a priest than a shrink,” she said.
“Maybe.” He smiled. “I told you it was kind of nutty.”
“Only the part about equating yourself to a jellyfish,” she said. “That is what you were doing.”
“Maybe,” he admitted.
“Do you know what I was thinking? How its beautiful orange and violet stripes match my bracelets.”
“Perfectly understandable.”
“Why? Because it’s girl-brain stuff?”
“No,” he replied. “Because you’ve never carried a gun.”
His hand was still on hers. She gave it a loving squeeze. “Self-awareness is the cornerstone of psychological healing. I don’t think that’s crazy at all.”
She looked back at the tank, caught a glimpse of herself in the glass. A tall, lithe blonde in her midthirties, she was dressed in her banquet attire, a brief, sleeveless black dress with box pleats, gold drop earrings, and the vintage Lucite bangles on her wrists. They looked good together, but that was as far as it went. She had met Kealey at a party thrown by Julie and her husband, Jon Harper, in D.C., and they’d gone on a long, rambling moonlit stroll that wound through Georgetown’s cobblestone streets to the Mall and, eventually, to his hotel. But their instant attraction had been counterbalanced by her strong professional ethic; Allison, a former CIA trauma counselor, had thought she was being introduced to a likely patient and had reluctantly stayed in the lobby while he went up. For his part, Kealey later admitted he hadn’t been sure what to think when she left. He did say he was glad she took control. His romantic history was spotty at best, deadly at worst, and he might have scared her away before getting to know her as a dear and trusted friend.
Allison continued to watch the medusa in the cool radiance of the hall. “So,” she said. “Flotation is groovy, huh?”
He gave her a questioning glance.
“A line from a Hendrix song,” she said.
“I see. I was more of a Peter, Paul and Mary kind of guy.”
“I didn’t know that about you.” She smiled. “Folksingers, eh?”
“Apple pie and peace, that’s me,” Kealey said without a trace of irony. “I’m the product of their vision. Or, more accurately, trying to protect that vision.”
Allison stared at him in silence. She recognized the monotone, the distant look. It was the hint of post-traumatic stress that many soldiers and virtually every field operative acquired at some point. Kealey was no exception. He had been relaxed, sociable since he returned from his last mission in Darfur and South Africa, which was anything but.
Sent in as part of a “peacekeeping” tactic, Kealey had been on the ground to assist in ending the ten-year rebellion between the Eritrean government and a group of former eastern Sudan rebels that had united as the Eastern Front. Kealey had convinced both divisions that a peace treaty between them was their only option. Either that or get disintegrated, one way or another. But unfortunately, the deal had kept the Federal Alliance of Eastern Sudan, a fragment of the former eastern Sudan rebels, out of the picture, and Kealey feared a possible merging of the Justice and Equality Movement and the FAES, which would only prolong the peoples’ unremitting penury and extreme economic downturn due to an impossibly dense “national vision.” Not to mention the illicit guidance of their capital city, Khartoum, whose feelings toward its bordering African Nuba people was holocaustic.
But America did it once, balanced peace, Kealey thought. Why not Sudan? Was our revolution, our own civil war so different? Yes. Because our leaders weren’t insane. America had erudite leaders then, on both sides of the battlefield. And this unmatchable lunacy is what’s causing the political collapse. The inescapable massacres. The contagious spread of demise. But learning that human nature is the ultimate technology, that will be the key to releasing their ancient manacles, and the beginning of their modernized advancement.
When the deployment of a thousand South African troops to the western front of Sudan had been delayed due to elaborate passport and visa oversights-allowing the Janjaweed militia to raid a dozen more villages, killing hundreds more residents-Kealey was redeployed to inspect, scrutinize, and inform Washington about the sufficiency of the refugee camp outside the North Darfur city of Al-Fashir, which housed more than fifty thousand expatriates. Reporting first to the South African National Defence Force, to comply with their awkwardly strict regulations, Kealey observed firsthand the SANDF’s vast gaps of inexperience in dealing with the fallout of these radical wars, realizing further that foreign assistance was going to be insurmountably crucial to the survival of these people and their region. Being short on supplies and munitions notwithstanding, the numerous Islamic taboos and the South Africans’ critical views toward refugee women only increased tensions among gathering allies, which split the allied tribes into even more jagged, irreparable shards.
But Kealey was not prepared to just sit on the bench and watch his side, the reasonable side, continually lose lives and ground. He had been trained to do far more than the SANDF even knew to ask for. In the mentally tormenting months he was out there, Kealey ran personally sanctioned special ops-planting perspicacious residents across enemy lines to filter critical intel back to the good guys, or vriende, as it had to be explained to the locals-and Kealey used the information to personally direct small bands of troops to several previously undisclosed mass graves containing nearly five thousand African corpses in various states of butchered decay.
Despite Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal’s and President Omar al-Bashir’s repeated admissions that death was merely the path that war took, genocide was still the only word for it. And even the windblown sands couldn’t cover the killers’ scent. Kealey only wished he could follow the tracks all the way back to the maniacs’ doorsteps, kick in the doors, and do the same to their testicles. If they even had any.
Those intense desires to right terrible wrongs didn’t diminish easily, not without help. Giving it “time” didn’t relieve a warrior’s hardened beliefs; it only made them swell like a corpse left neglected. Some sights, some smells, some instincts weren’t meant to go away that simply. If ever, at all.
After returning home and renting a small house in Jesmond the previous winter, Kealey started to think about teaching again, about taking a break from conflict. Certainly, there was something about conveying critical information that was a passion of his. Besides letting him ventilate some of his painfully accrued wisdom, he liked the way people, especially students, reacted when their minds opened in new directions. Like the snaking vines that were steadily making their way up the sides of his rented quarters, he enjoyed watching them make progress, grow up, grow stronger.
And dealing with unfamiliar people was constantly a challenge for Kealey. People always asked questions and made him reassess his easily slung answers into more exigent responses. In a classroom setting, despite his deeply sympathetic almond-shaped eyes, he couldn’t get away with just surveillance; he had to inspire students, push them, make them understand ideas outside their assorted upbringings. And students often required from their teachers what they could not get from their parents. They needed a scholar, someone who had all the answers, or knew how and where to find them quickly. Someone who could keep all the blank, staring faces separate but could still get them to work together, no matter what the course, no matter what the assignment. No matter what the mission.
Unquestionably, there was concentrated pressure on being a teacher, and after considerable reflection, Kealey just wasn’t sure he was ready for that sort of pressure test yet. He had put the world’s humanity on the front line for years, and he didn’t think he could manage to “phone it in” for another 180-day school year, at least not as capably as the students really needed. Instead he booked some guest lectures on global issues at the University of Virginia. That was where he’d met Allison’s nineteen-year-old nephew Colin, who happened to attend school there.
Kealey was better adjusted than most special agents, but there were times when the deaths he’d caused and the risks he’d taken gripped his soul. He had said it himself once: “My life is like the old joke about the waiter who serves a matador burger at the restaurant in Vera Cruz one day apologizing to the patron, saying, ‘Sometimes the bull wins.’ ”
Thinking of Colin became an act of synchronicity. Allison reached into the small leather purse under her arm and pulled out her cell phone.
“Hold on a sec,” she said. “I want to see what’s going on with Colin.”
“Didn’t you just talk to him a half hour ago?”
“Yes, but I want to check his posts.”
“He’s blogging?”
“Blogging? You’re so twenty-ten,” she said as she browsed down her queue of updates. “He’s tweeting from the convention center for his student newspaper. It’s called ambient journalism.”
“I see. And how’s that different from reporting?”
“Anyone can do it,” she said.
“So the difference is it’s for amateurs.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Not at all,” Kealey said. “Where’s the editor, the veteran eyes?”
“It’s the public, Ryan. The process has been democratized.”
“Cheapened-no offense to Colin.”
“You’re wrong,” she said confidently. “The good journalists get repeated hits. The bad ones are relegated to Facebook. The worst ones are left to comment on what’s relegated to Facebook.”
“No fair,” Kealey said. “You lost me at ‘repeated hits.’ ”
“It’s no different than all the civilian eyes being used in the war on terror, watching for something unusual. Isn’t that how we recruit in Afghanistan, Iraq? Find the people who have a knack for observing, blending in, collecting images on cell phones?”
“It’s a good thing I’m retired,” he said, shaking his head.
“Why? Technology doesn’t scare you. You’ve used portable uplinks-”
“It’s not the technology,” he said. “It’s the lack of privacy. The exponential noise. What spy would welcome that?”
Allison smiled at something she read on her display. She started pecking out words of her own. “Sorry. As much as I’m enjoying your ‘poor us’ monologue, I have to respond to Col’s latest tweet.”
“My point is made,” he said confidently.
“Your point is beside the…,” she said, typing slowly with the sides of her thumbs, pausing once or twice to check for misspellings before she returned the phone to her purse. “Done,” she said.
“What’s the word from the front?”
“The red carpet is lined with local paparazzi and ready for the glitterati to begin arriving.”
Kealey glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s a quarter to four,” he said. “Why don’t we take a leisurely walk back to the car, get my sports jacket and your high heels, and head over to the center?”
“Sounds good.” She hooked her arm in Kealey’s and gave the creature in the tank a final look as they strolled away. The medusa tumbled through the water on an internal current, bumped up randomly, briefly, against another jellyfish, then spiraled away. It was a beautiful, functional life.
But hollow, she thought. You could sum them up in a brochure. They weren’t conflicted, the way Ryan Kealey was, yearning for peace but missing the thrill of the hunt, walking chastely beside her yet caring deeply and wanting more.
She hugged Kealey’s arm a little tighter, cherishing the prolonged contact, and quietly thanked God for the good that came with the bad. It didn’t make life easy, but they at least could actually hold each other.
And walk away from the fish tank.
The petite woman with short dark hair and Asian eyes approached room 306 of the Baltimore Hilton. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle. She ignored it and swiped her key card, entering the large, modern room with its panoramic view of the city’s Inner Harbor.
The harbor had come a long way since its taxpayer-paid restoration in the early eighties. Much like Times Square, prostitutes and crackheads were “relocated” or arrested, and their tainted syringes and condoms, which clung to the grates of gutters, were finally cleaned out. Warehouses, crack dens, rotting fuel tankers, and out-of-favor dog tracks were replaced by new shopping malls, fine dining, a world-class aquarium, and a new convention center. These improvements helped draw other corporate entities back into the suddenly decorous setting, bringing tourists and families back into the historic marina and closer to its famous “star-spangled” Fort McHenry. And thanks in part to hometown hero Cal Ripken, Jr.-and his just over 2,000 consecutive played games record, which was quickly sneaking up on record holder Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 games-the Baltimore Orioles got their new brick Camden Yards stadium in the early nineties, nearly completing the once-sagging city’s late twentieth-century facelift.
But somehow, unlike Midtown Manhattan’s redo, no matter how many distractions and special events tried to cover up Baltimore’s seamy history, echoes still hummed from the still neglected canneries lining the shore, from years upon years of painfully obtained sugarcane and oysters-turned-mother-of-pearl that were toiled through and exported by gifted, poorly paid women who needed pennies for provisions and by skilled slaves who sorely needed their autonomy liberated, as is memorialized in the often sightseer-slighted Museum of Industry.
The woman put away her key card as the door clicked shut behind her, went to the dresser, and opened the second dresser drawer from the bottom. She withdrew a black, satchel-style photographer’s bag, pulled it up by the strap, and hefted it over her shoulder. With its bulky contents, it weighed between 5 and 6 pounds, which was substantial but not heavy enough to make carrying it difficult.
She wore a sleeveless champagne-colored blouse and black Capri pants with a damask rose printed on the right outer thigh, and had a wireless mobile headset on her right ear. She also wore trendy sixteen-button gloves. In her line of work, she thought, women had two advantages: they could get close to men of influence, and it was easy not to leave fingerprints.
My line of work, twenty-one year-old Jasni Osman reflected bitterly.
Three years ago, the gifted gymnast was training for the Singapore Youth Olympics. All she had ever wanted was to express herself in movement, revel in the joy of being free. Then her eldest brother, Yusuf, a journalist, was arrested for what the ruling People’s Action Party termed radical activities and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He suggested from his prison cell that she could help him by attending a meeting of Jamaah Anshorut Tauhid at a local mosque. Although she had to pray apart from the men, in keeping with strict tradition, the organization’s religious instructors fully welcomed her as a daughter of Islam, instructing her on the lies and deceit of their government’s rulers and the hateful imperialism of their masters, the United States.
Seven months later she was arrested in a raid on a JAT camp at Aceh, Indonesia, accused of being a courier of illegal funds. Her captors were American agents, and she vividly recalled the terrible place to which she was brought in Jakarta, the suffocating torture by the CIA, the brutal sodomy committed by the BIN, the state’s fearful Badan Intelijen Negara. Before her arrest, she had been interested only in bringing down the PAP and freeing her brother. Now she wanted jihad against all oppressors of the Muslim people.
Captivity and restraint were unthinkable to Jasni. It took repeated assaults from the BIN, in her cell, for Jasni to locate and steal the key to the restraints of the waterboard. After a near drowning the Americans left her-and she escaped, using her flexibility to hide and then to cling to the underside of the very nondescript scout vehicle they were using to hunt her. She returned to the mosque, committed to jihad, and was assigned by JAT leader Al Su’al to Alef, the group responsible for bringing bloodshed to the American homeland.
Today she would honor all those who had helped her on her journey-and her brother, who was still languishing in that filthy prison.
Before leaving the room, she slipped two fingers into the front change pocket of her Capris, extracted a red glass marble. She held it for a moment, enjoying its smooth, cool exterior and the strange heart that seemed to beat within. A sense of well-being permeated her, and she reluctantly put it in the drawer. Then she pushed the drawer shut, adjusted the satchel so it hung more comfortably on her shoulder, and bowed her head.
Oh, Allah, I will infiltrate the enemy and kill them without fear of death.
Jasni Osman left the room and went downstairs. Soon afterward a young male stepped from the elevator. Wearing a navy blue sports jacket and dark trousers, he used his key card to enter the room and took his specified package from the dresser.
It was shortly after 5:00 p.m. when he dropped his colored marble in the drawer and exited.
The order to strike would come over the headset exactly thirteen minutes later.
Colin Dearborn frowned as he got on the fast-food line at the rear of the convention center. Almost fifteen bucks for a chili dog, a side-chips or fries or a paper cup of slaw-and a Coke was nuts. The disorganized mass of customers, paying more attention to their cell phones than to the lines, and the glacially slow service didn’t help.
Faced with the prospect of languishing there awhile, Colin slid his smartphone from his pants pocket to tweet his displeasure. As a contributing editor to the Cavalier, UVA’s student newspaper, he’d been an enthusiastic champion of fully integrating the grid into its content delivery model. While he wasn’t among the hard-core geeks who insisted print journalism was dead, it had clearly become the lowest-growth segment of a broader information market.
He opened his Twitter application and thought a moment, smoothing his chin beard between his thumb and forefinger. Getting his message across in 140 characters or less was an enjoyable challenge. In a sense it was like composing a haiku; you had to be super clear and tight with your writing.
His thumbs rapidly flurried over his touch pad as he typed: #Food vendors// This is a career fair. We r here looking 4 #JOBS//. #Affordable // hot dogs wanted. Lower prices, plz
Finishing the update, Colin scrolled down his timeline to check the responses to his earlier tweets and smiled to see one his aunt had pecked out minutes before: On way from aquarium w/RK. Bringing u jellyfish burger. Lettuce, tomato, fries. Pick tentacles w/stingers out b4 you eat.
Colin considered calling her the old-fashioned way so he could ask her to bring something to eat, but he figured he might miss her, anyway. He’d turned the volume down on his phone so it wouldn’t sound in the middle of the interviews he had been conducting with company recruiters and potential employees, all of which would be used to write his story for the school paper.
Closing the app, he put the phone back into his pocket and realized the line in front of him had shortened while he’d stood there tweeting. It was still another ten minutes before he reached the cashier and five more before somebody gave him his order in one of those cardboard carrying trays that resembled egg crates.
Colin eased from the roiling mass of customers to look for a table, saw one on his left, and rushed over, holding his tray in front of him. A woman in a huggy tan-colored blouse and loose-fitting Capri pants with a big stuffed photographer’s satchel on her shoulder stood directly between him and the table. He noticed her partly because she was very attractive, and also because she seemed strangely oblivious to the hustle and bustle around her-neither recruiter nor job seeker.
Reporter?
He was squeezing past the woman when she abruptly turned, banging her satchel into his elbow so hard that his soda cup tipped over sideways. Halting in his tracks, Colin tried to catch it with one hand but was too late. It had spilled over everything else on the tray, drenching his chili dog and fries in a foaming puddle of Coke.
Colin’s angry eyes snapped up at the woman. She was oblivious to their collision, and it was then that he saw the earpiece of a Bluetooth headset on one side of her face and realized she must be listening to somebody over the phone.
“Pay attention, idiot!” he shouted after her.
People around him turned to see what was up as the woman made her way through the crowd as if he wasn’t there.
Colin looked back down at his flooded tray. Frowning, he walked over to a row of trash bins on one side of the dining area. He shook off the soggy hot dog and gulped it down, then dumped his fries into the bin labeled FOOD and the tray into one that said RECYCLABLES. Turning, he saw that the table he’d been approaching was still unoccupied and headed for an empty seat. He needed a couple of minutes to chill-and post another status update. People: if you MUST carry a bag or backpack in crowded places, plz b aware of ur turn radius AND the people around you.
Colin put away the phone and looked around. Another thing about those bags, was anyone even scanning the oversize monstrosities? He’d seen guards in the center’s Pratt Street lobby, but he was pretty sure they didn’t have metal detectors at the door. Also, he hadn’t noticed any security checks whatsoever over at the skyway entrance from the Hilton Hotel.
You can check on all that later, write it up as a sidebar, he thought as he eyed a bag of chips someone had left behind on another table. Scooting over and grabbing it, he felt slightly redeemed, as if the universe had regained a little bit of balance.
Tearing open the bag and snacking down happily, Colin left the food area, his eyes actively searching for the woman so he could return the nudge and even the scales a little more.
From the start, Julie Harper had realized that agreeing to cochair the planning committee and deliver the keynote speech for tonight’s advanced nursing conference was a recipe for trouble. No one had forced her to micromanage the entire agenda. As her husband, Jon, had sweetly reminded her before they left the house, “Most of this is none of your goddamn business.”
She didn’t disagree. But in a town where image was everything and spies and saboteurs were everywhere, where a social disaster was also a political disaster, hands-on was the only way to be. Jon knew that, too. After three decades of marriage-most of that spent in Washington-he had come to rely on his wife to have his back like this.
What was it that the former first lady had told her? “You have to host to be seen. You have to host well to matter.”
The Baltimore Convention Center contracted out to a professional catering service that set the course list and handled the food preparation for all its banquets. Even if you paid their fee and chose not to use the food, no one else got in the door. She was assured they knew their business and wouldn’t need her input, but that would make this conference no different from every other conference.
That was not “hosting well.”
So she fretted, even as H hour approached. Was the coquilles Saint-Jacques really the best choice for a seafood entree? They had assured her it would be, but she’d insisted they use only a high-quality imported Gruyere in the recipe. She’d paid for the upgrade out of pocket. Or rather, her husband did. He hated to see her upset because of something that money could fix. And what about their wine pairing? Did they have a white varietal, something textured and flowery like Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc? As for the poultry offering, Julie had requested-and paid for-a substitution for the caterer’s chicken Kiev. She wanted a lighter alternative. Lemon chicken, for example, was a reliable crowd pleaser. And what about the vegetarians or, God help her, the vegans? Asparagus with plum tomato casserole was the expensive solution.
Even now, as she greeted guests in the lobby outside the ballroom, standing near a table covered with name tags, Julie was mentally reviewing the seating chart, wondering if it was wise to segregate the Tea Party affiliates from the Democrats. It was a coin toss as to which was worse, a perceived snub or a political catfight.
“… introduce you to Dr. Jose Colon.”
Julie started slightly and glanced at Donna Palmer, the director of pediatric nursing at Sloan-Kettering in New York and nominally her assistant coordinator for the event. Beside her, a young man stood in the hall, his hand extended.
“Good Lord!” Julie exclaimed. “Am I really looking at Helen Colon’s little boy?”
“You are.” He smiled. “Mom has spoken often of you over the years, Ms. Harper.”
“What a dear she is! I haven’t seen her since our Mayo Clinic days.” Julie was suddenly choked up-pressure waiting for an emotional trigger like this. “How is your mother?”
“Very well,” he said. “Mom does in-homes for an insurance company. She told me I have to take pictures of us together, but you’re busy. I’ll find you later?”
“Please do,” she replied. She almost called him back to take the photo now- Carpe diem, she thought-but he had moved on.
Donna ushered over a man and a young girl. She turned to them and smiled. “Mr. Reed Bishop and his daughter Laura,” Donna said.
Julie took their hands, one in each of her own. Her eyes were beginning to glisten. The whole thing was more emotional than she had expected.
“Your wife’s trust fund,” she said to Bishop, “your mother”-she smiled at Laura-“has been a lifesaver for our organization.”
“Caregiving was her passion,” Bishop said. “I couldn’t think of a better way to honor her.”
“Thank you,” Julie said. She looked at the slender girl with strawberry blond hair. “Are you going to be a nurse?” she asked.
Laura Bishop nodded. “I’m getting my dad to stop smoking.”
Reed Bishop smiled awkwardly under Julie’s playful scowl. The words secondhand smoke all but floated above her head.
“That’s a very noble goal,” Julie said. “I’m sure your dad means to help.”
“Every bloody inch of the way,” he said.
Another round of thank-yous and the Bishops moved on. Julie looked past Donna at the next arrival. As she was shaking the hand of Connecticut senator Victoria Bundonis, she noticed a man standing just inside the door. He looked to be in his late twenties. He was wearing a navy blue sports jacket and dark trousers and carried an expensive-looking hard-shell briefcase. What caught her eye was his posture-slack and loose limbed, his eyes lowered. As she watched, he was visibly swaying on his feet.
As the senator moved on, Julie took Donna by her elbow and pointed from her waist. “Do you know him?”
Donna glanced briefly at the man. “No. It appears as if he spent too much time dodging the afternoon heat in the hotel’s cocktail lounge.”
“I don’t know. Looks to me like he’s dancing to his iPod. See the earbud?”
“I do now.” Donna was reaching for her cell phone. “Should I call security?”
“No. They’ll stick out.”
“Aren’t they supposed to?” Donna asked.
One of the things Julie insisted on was that her guests not be inconvenienced with security checks. Between herself and Donna, they knew almost every one of the 250 people who were attending. To search them would have been insulting. Still, this merited watching.
“Wait until everyone is inside and chatting,” Julie said.
The women resumed welcoming new arrivals.
Glancing at his watch, the man with the briefcase finally came over. His blue wristband meant he’d paid over two thousand dollars to attend the dinner. Donna put out her hand as he approached.
“Good evening,” she said. “I’m Donna Palmer, your cohost, and this is Ms. Julie Harper.”
He bowed in a slightly courtly fashion but said nothing.
“The name tags are in alphabetical order,” Donna went on. “If you’d like, you can check your briefcase at the counter behind the table.”
“Thank you,” he said as he scanned the table for the plastic tag.
Julie couldn’t place the accent. It sounded Israeli, and he had what looked like a deep Mediterranean tan. As he reached for the tag, she noted that his name was Michael Lohani. It meant nothing. She exchanged looks with Donna, who shrugged. The name wasn’t familiar to her, either. It was then that Julie saw the way he held his briefcase against his side, his fingers tightly clenched around its handle, his shoulder dropped low, as though it were quite heavy.
He moved ahead with a weak smile. Julie turned casually to watch. He didn’t check his briefcase but went right to the ushers at the door.
“Okay, something’s not right,” Julie said to Donna. “Call security.”
Zuhair Khan Afridi paused in the tiled, narrow court outside the Hilton’s Eutaw Street entrance, his hand closing around the marble deep inside his trouser pocket, rolling the smooth glass ball between his fingertips. Silently, without moving his mouth, bowing only slightly, reverently at the knees, he repeated the affirmations he’d learned at the camp where his mind and body were healed and he received his instruction as a mujahid. The words had helped to dispel the painful recollections of his treatment by the American CIA: the blindfolded trips by plane, helicopter, and van; the interrogations and repeated water tortures; the rats in his tiny cell.
He had waited out these final hours at an afternoon baseball game, reviewing the plan in his head as he gathered himself for his task. Zuhair had paid no attention to the game until shortly before he left Camden Yards, when people suddenly began exiting the ballpark.
Had someone identified him and given an alert? Was the stadium being evacuated? That was when he realized the visiting Boston Red Sox had a large 10-0 lead in the eighth inning, and that people were leaving.
Zuhair wore an Orioles baseball cap and jersey outside his baggy chinos, aware he would be inconspicuous enough disguised as one of the many who had come to cheer the home team. He departed with the others, confident that his somber mood would be perceived as nothing more than the disappointment of a fan.
As the time approached, he vacated his seat in the right-field stands, exited the park through Gate A, and went to room 306 at the hotel. Zuhair closed the door behind him and briefly looked out at the busy piers, then glanced over at the wall-length furniture unit to his right. A combination dresser and desk, it had drawers at his end, a plasma television in the center, and an office chair pushed underneath it near the window.
Zuhair went directly to the dresser and produced the yellow marble from his pants pocket. Opening the bottom drawer, he found a plastic grocery bag with a bulky object folded inside. He removed the bag and dropped the marble into the drawer before shutting it, leaving it as confirmation that he, and no one else, had removed the bag and its contents.
Not that anyone would ever find them. These tokens were for the team only, to let one another know they had each made the pickup and no one else. Zuhair left his marble simply to complete the ritual.
They’d given him the belt, not one of the overstuffed backpacks or shoulder bags. He had no preference, as long as it got the job done.
Inside the grocery bag was a nylon weight belt of the sort designed for scuba divers. He momentarily set it down and reached behind his back to unclip a safety pin that had cinched the waistband of his oversize chinos so they would fit him, letting the pants fall almost to his knees. Then he opened his baseball jersey, put on the belt, and adjusted it using a Velcro closure strap. The waistband would now close snugly over his middle-and the scuba belt’s explosive-filled pouches-without the safety pin.
After he’d rebuttoned the baseball jersey and carefully smoothed it over his chinos, Zuhair moved past the double beds to the desktop for his second piece of equipment. He slid the chair out, found the computer carry bag that had been left there for him, and unzipped its outer compartment. He transferred the wireless detonators it contained to his pocket. The C4 charges and battery inside the belt accounted for two-thirds of its 7-pound weight. The rest of the weight consisted of nails and shards of glass. When triggered, the explosive charge of the bomb and his two shrapnel packages would kill anyone within 10 or 15 feet of the blast.
He left the room and strode along Eutaw, the Baltimore Convention Center casting its expansive shadow to his right, beyond the parking lots, train tracks, and wide crosstown thoroughfare.
Now he stared up at the enclosed sky bridge that spanned the court, connecting the Hilton’s main building and business meeting facility and then leading on across Howard Street into the convention center. Peering through its glass-paneled sides, he could see long streams of people moving in both directions-the ball game and other events had filled the center and caused nearly every room in the hotel to be occupied.
Oh, Allah, our caravan seeks your assistance inflicting the maximum damage, he prayed. We are honored to sacrifice our lives in your path.
Zuhair lowered his gaze from the sky bridge, pressing the earbud of his Bluetooth headset more securely into place with a fingertip, watching a pair of attractive young women cross his path as they approached the hotel entrance. One of them made chance eye contact with him and pointed to the Red Sox emblem on her T-shirt. She smiled a gloating smile and moved on with her friend. He smiled back, feeling the confidence of one who walked freely among his enemies, wrapped in their very skin, unnoticed as he prepared to attack. Perhaps he would kill the woman and her friend.
Yes. That appealed to him.
Following the women, he made his way back into the hotel lobby. They sat, probably to wait for friends or plan what they were going to do for the rest of the day. Zuhair looked around the crowded space, at the support columns. He went there to wait for the call.
Allah, forgive his vanity, but he experienced something of what the Prophet himself must have felt when he sat in his cave, meditating, and the word of God was revealed to him. Zuhair could tell the women exactly what they were going to do today, just minutes from now.
They were going to die.
Julie Harper looked at the diamond-studded Cartier watch her husband had given her for their twenty-fifth anniversary. She touched it, treasuring it, treasuring him, and saw that she had just fifteen minutes before the doors closed and the event officially began.
Julie was backstage, reviewing her welcoming remarks, when her cell phone rang in her clutch bag. The tone, assigned to her husband’s number, was a snippet of “My White Night” from The Music Man, the show they saw on their first date. It was a regional production, nothing spectacular, but they were sobbing and in love by the time Harold hugged Marian at the end of act 2. Julie smiled every time she heard it. Jon knew that, knew how tense she’d be.
“Thanks,” she said, picking up. “I needed that.”
“I figured you would,” he said. “You’ll be great.”
“As long as I don’t trip and the microphone works, I think I’m good.”
“Big turnout?” he asked.
“Fabulous.”
“I saw you had a security alert.”
“Doesn’t the CIA’s deputy director have anything better to do?”
“Puckett received it, sent it on. What’s up?”
“Guy came in with a briefcase, acting strange,” she said. “He’s at the bar, talking on his Bluetooth. Center security is watching him. I had Donna check. He’s with Interglobal Pharmaceuticals, a sales rep.”
“Must be some very special samples he’s got.”
“I guess.” Julie was looking at the man. She saw the head of security, Bill Roche, standing at the other end of the bar, facing him.
“Well, I don’t want to keep you,” Jon said. “I just wanted to say I’m so proud.”
“Thanks. And, Jon? Don’t beat yourself up for being in Washington.”
“Hon, I’m not-”
“I think you are,” she interrupted. “I hear it in your voice.”
He said nothing.
“I’m telling you it’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t,” he admitted. “Tonight’s an important moment in your life. I should be sharing it with you.”
“President Brenneman needed you,” she said. “I don’t-”
She froze as she noticed Michael Lohani’s hand emerge from his pants pocket. He raised a cylindrical object that looked like a pen. And then she saw his eyes turn upward and his mouth form words and the security guard look over…
In the final instant before the explosions, she became conscious of her husband repeating her name over the phone. “Julie? Julie?”
And then the roar swallowed everything.