Target two, p.2
Target Two, page 2
Right now, he had another beast to contend with. The Master of Pain had finished his harira and was paying.
Jacob had made the precaution of paying for his chicken tajine in advance so he could leave at a moment’s notice. A pity that would be so soon. It was delicious, and he was only halfway through.
Karim looked away for a moment, so Jacob took the opportunity to glance at his team, a pair of Moroccan state security agents.
The senior agent, Farid, sat at another food stall on the opposite side of Karim, dressed like a businessman and nursing a tea.
Beyond the stalls, near the entrance to the lane into the medina they thought Karim might take, stood Ghanem, dressed in the traditional hooded, brown robe but looking anything but traditional by being draped with gaudy necklaces of plastic beads and fake silver and carrying a basket full of little leather camels. A longtime undercover man, Ghanem had picked props that were so cheap, so ugly, that not even the most clueless tourist would consider buying one. That way he wouldn’t be bothered by innocent bystanders in case he had to make a move.
People did take his picture, though. He looked laughable. In a fight, he was anything but.
Karim got up. Jacob bent over his plate and took another forkful of tajine. A Moroccan would have used a piece of bread to scoop some of the food up, and so would Jacob, but he had to look like someone who had never been to North Africa before. The Yankees t-shirt and shorts helped with that.
Karim passed behind him, a couple of stalls between them. It looked like he was headed for the lane where they thought he’d go, one that led, after several twists and turns, to the house of a man suspected as being a fighter in the country’s outlawed Al Qaeda of the Islamic Magreb.
They’d follow him there and bust them both.
In Jacob’s peripheral vision, he saw Farid set down his tea. Ghanem would be keeping an eye on the target until Farid and Jacob could make their move. Ghanem was too gaudily dressed, too noticeable, to lead the tail. Once the tail was underway, he’d duck into a house down one of the alleys used by the local secret police, shuck off the djellaba to reveal modern clothes underneath, and catch up.
Jacob had no fear on that score. Both men knew the labyrinthine alleyways of the old city like the back of their hand.
Farid passed him. Jacob took that as his cue to get up and saunter slowly behind Karim.
The terrorist was about twenty yards ahead of him, with Farid about halfway between Jacob and the terrorist. A tight cluster for tailing, and one Jacob wouldn’t use in most situations, but the plaza was so packed with people that they needed to keep that close in order not to lose him.
Up ahead, he saw Ghanem move off down the alley where he was going to do his costume change, still holding up his trinkets to every passing foreigner.
Karim entered the lane, a narrow passage between tall buildings of featureless stone pierced only by a few high and shuttered windows. Farid was right behind him, tailing like a pro by letting a couple of people pass ahead of him to act as a screen. Karim had been a leading terrorist for the better part of a decade, so he would be armed and alert. They had been tailing him all day, and Jacob had noticed that while he never made the obvious move of looking over his shoulder, he always took any turn at a sharp angle, allowing his peripheral vision to take in what had, a moment before, been behind him. He also lingered at shop windows, studying the reflection in the glass for any unwanted followers.
As far as Jacob could tell, Karim didn’t know they were there. He hoped it would stay that way. He wouldn’t want himself or either of his Moroccan colleagues to end up starring in one of the Master of Pain’s videos.
Jacob entered the narrow canyon of the lane, the punishing sun replaced with the shady cool of stone walls and flagstones that only felt the touch of sunlight for an hour a day. The alley bent to the right up ahead. Karim was already out of sight, as were the two innocent pedestrians. Farid was just rounding the corner. Jacob increased his pace slightly.
Just then his phone buzzed in his pocket. He had it set so only an emergency from the control center would set it off.
Control already knew they were tailing the target, so if they were calling him, something more important had just come up.
Perfect timing.
He pulled out his phone and slackened his pace.
“Yes?” he said in a low voice, taking a look over his shoulder. An older Moroccan man with a canvas bag of what looked like groceries walked into the alley, approaching him.
“Come back to control. You’re needed elsewhere ASAP,” said a male voice in English with a Moroccan accent. He didn’t know who. He didn’t need to know.
“But we’re already—”
“The others can handle this. Time is a factor. You’re needed now.”
“All right.”
He turned and put away his phone. The older man with the canvas bag had gained on him and had been looking right at him. Now, he looked at the ground.
Jacob’s heart pounded. Was this one of Karim’s men? Was someone tailing the tail?
He couldn’t leave now, not with the other members of the team in danger. He had to check this guy out first.
Pretending to text, Jacob walked along the side of the alley where the man was carrying his bag. Just as he came up to him, Jacob bumped into him, hitting the bag with his shin. Something hard and heavy inside banged against it and made a clatter.
Jacob feigned a stumble and fell against the man so he couldn’t see his arm slip inside the bag and flip aside a cloth covering whatever lay beneath.
A large ceramic dish covered by a peaked ceramic cover. A tajine dish, and judging by the smell coming out of it, it actually contained a tajine.
“Sorry,” Jacob said in loud English. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“No problem, mister,” he said in English, then muttered in Arabic. “How are these people so rich when they are so stupid?”
Jacob hurried back to the Jemaa al-Fna, his shin sore from colliding into an innocent civilian’s lunch. He cut across the square as fast as he could, alert for signs of pursuit. No one that he could tell, but with hundreds of people in the square and up on the overlooking balconies, who could really tell?
He grabbed a cab at the edge of the square and had it take him across town.
* * *
Jacob had the cab drop him off three blocks from control. He waited until the taxi drove out of sight before walking the rest of the way.
Control for the Moroccan secret service was a café like any other, a grimy front hiding a dark interior with a dozen men sitting at tables talking, smoking, or watching a TV loudly playing a National Geographic documentary about polar bears. The sort of café where a foreigner gets a second look for entering.
No one gave him a second look. Every single man in there was in one of Morocco’s many branches of security service, and they all knew him by sight. Some he’d even been in firefights with.
While Jacob felt bad about leaving Farid and Ghanem alone, he didn’t blame the men in here for not helping. Some were guarding this place. Some were too well-known to the Islamist underground to join in the hunt. Others had different specialties. The man winning at backgammon in the far corner was a sniper, and the older fellow across from him cursing his luck was an expert at decoding encrypted radio communications. Tailing was a skill, and you couldn’t set just anyone on it, not with someone as paranoid and seasoned as Karim ibn Mohammed.
Jacob cut to the far left of the café, out of sight of the narrow front door and passed the bored-looking proprietor who had black belts in six martial arts, and through a heavy wooden door of faded blue paint.
There was a short hallway and a locked metal door. The door was painted with the warning “Electric relay, do not touch” in Arabic and French along with a couple of lightning bolts to push the point home. A low hum from behind it made a convincing sound effect. Jacob couldn’t see it, but there was a miniature camera posing as one of the many black stains on the grimy wall.
The lock clicked open.
Beyond the door and the mountain of Moroccan muscle holding it open was a medium-sized office of transparent glass cubicles, each reaching to the ceiling and shut off by a clear door. In each of these cubicles was a desk, and most of them had an agent sitting at them. Some were listening in on radios or acting as dispatch. Others were surfing jihadist webpages and passing decryption software through images of beheadings and car bombs, looking for writing hidden in the code.
All this activity went on in complete silence, at least as seen from the outside. Each cubicle was noise-proofed so that the classified conversation going on at the next desk couldn’t be heard by the operative on the phone next to him, or by sensitive microphones at the other end of the phone conversation.
A Moroccan general sat at a larger cubicle at the end. He had never appeared on television, in a country where the government stations were fond of their generals, and yet, he had more medals than any two of his colleagues. None of those medal ceremonies had been public events.
Because his war was the silent war. The cat-and-mouse with Islamist terror cells, whether homegrown or imported from the rougher areas of the Middle East. One by one, he would hunt down their operatives, question them in whatever ways he deemed necessary, and work his relentless way up their chain of command until he snuffed the cell out.
Over the past fifteen years, he’d done that enough times that no one could estimate how many lives he had saved.
His name was General Jaloul Cherkaoui, and under Moroccan law, Jacob would be executed for ever mentioning that name to anyone.
And Washington would let them. General Cherkaoui had saved a lot of American and European lives too.
Jacob walked up to the general’s door, accompanied by the guard who had let him in. The guard saluted through the clear glass. Jacob did not. He was CIA, not military.
General Cherkaoui glanced up from an email he was typing on a laptop, continued typing for a moment, then closed the laptop and nodded. The guard opened the door, and Jacob walked in.
Neither man spoke until the door was closed behind him. The only sound was the low whir of the air circulation system.
The general spoke first, in clipped, careful, but perfectly correct English, “You have been reassigned. You need to fly to Asilah in a helicopter that is waiting for you at the airport. At the Asilah airport, a Land Rover will be at your disposal. You will drive to the coordinates I’m giving you and save an archaeologist from an assassination attempt.”
Jacob’s heart clenched. He knew an archaeologist working near Asilah.
The general continued, “We have it on good authority that a Tunisian mercenary named El Idrissi has been hired to kill Dr. Jana Peters, who is running an excavation there.”
The general showed no indication that he knew of Jacob’s and Jana’s work together thwarting an attempt by a terrorist group to detonate a crude nuclear bomb in the Suez Canal. There was no need for him to know, so he had never been told.
“We received this information from a reliable informant, although the informant did not know the purpose of the hit. We have the usual records on Dr. Peters, but nothing to indicate that she is a security threat.”
Good to see the CIA is a tight enough ship that you don’t know who her dad was.
Aaron Peters had extracted Jacob out of Afghanistan after Jacob had a mental breakdown, and he nursed him through the slow process of becoming a functional human being, and then a CIA operative.
Sadly, Aaron Peters was gone now. MIA and presumed dead like so many good men.
General Cherkaoui handed him a dossier. “This is all the information we have on Dr. Peters and El Idrissi. You can read them on the helicopter.”
“Thank you, general.”
“Good luck, Agent Snow.”
Jacob was already walking out, a cold sheen of sweat covering his skin and making the air circulation system feel like an Arctic blast.
Jana’s in trouble.
All thought of the mission he had been plucked out of vanished. He had a helicopter to catch.
CHAPTER TWO
A field near Asilah, northwestern Morocco
That evening
Dr. Jana Peters looked out one last time over her excavation as the field crew put tarps over the open squares and trenches before calling it a day and heading back to the dig house. The tarps would keep any windblown dirt or leaves from messing up the tidy portions of the excavated Roman villa the square and trenches had revealed, and would also keep the dew off, essential for preserving the delicate mosaic that they had been uncovering all summer.
Jana had missed much of that. Shortly after making the discovery of a large zodiacal mosaic in what they now knew was the triclinium, the dining room of the villa where the family would receive guests, she had been swept up in the most terrifying two weeks of her life.
The most terrifying, and the most rewarding.
She had done things she had never thought she could achieve and had seen things that she would never forget.
But she was trying to put all that behind her. Jacob, that irritating and fascinating man with strange ties to her late father, had told her in no uncertain terms that he would keep her far away from CIA business from now on. It was only a fluke that her expertise had been needed for that mission, and with her own life in danger, it had made sense for her to be on the team.
Now, life had settled down to its previous routine. She walked over to the mosaic to take another look before her graduate students covered it up for the night. On the very first week of the excavation, some two months ago, a test trench had hit the jackpot and uncovered the edge of this elegant work of ancient art. One panel showed a bull, expertly executed with different shades of brown and black tesserae to create shading, and the one next to it showed two young men in tunics standing side by side.
Taurus and Gemini. Expanding the trench out over the course of the ensuing weeks, her team had gradually uncovered the entire floor of the triclinium, its center dominated by a grand circle showing all the constellations of the zodiac. In the center, a brilliant sun shone, which Jana was relieved to see was made with yellow stone and not gold. They had already had trouble with antiquities thieves, and now the local police had posted a guard through the night.
“It sure is beautiful, isn’t it?” said a voice beside her.
Brian stood next to her. He was a handsome graduate student who had worked at a different career for a decade before switching to archaeology. He was about her age, bright and well read, and was good company. Athletic and well-groomed, he was good eye candy too.
Brian obviously thought the same of her, although he hadn’t tried anything overt yet. She didn’t quite know what she thought about that. Disappointed? Relieved? She still hadn’t put the turmoil of the Egyptian mission to rest in her head, so getting involved with a graduate student might not be the best idea.
And yet . . .
“It sure is. The best mosaic I’ve ever seen under excavation,” she said for a lack of anything else to say.
“It’s a real privilege working on this dig. This is my first overseas. I did a field school in Illinois and a Middle Mississippian village, then ended up assisting at the field school the next three seasons. It’s good to work on the Old World stuff.”
“Have you made a decision on what you’ll do your dissertation on?”
“Well, as I told you, I want to shift to Old World studies. The Native American sites are interesting, but I want to study my own past.”
Jana nodded. “I can understand that. When I was an undergraduate and still trying to figure out my specialty, I did a field school in Guatemala where we worked on a Mayan site. We found a long stretch of beautiful, really well-done bas-reliefs. And yet, they were so alien with their snake gods and people sticking thorns through their tongues. Then a few years later, a professor with some connections got me in Lascaux.”
Brian turned to her, his face eager. “You’ve been to Lascaux?”
Jana laughed. “Sorry to make you jealous. Yes, I spent a whole afternoon there. One of the best days of my life. The paintings of the hunters and wildlife are so vivid, and the way they use the natural shape of the cave to flesh them out is creatively brilliant. But the thing that struck me the most was how familiar they seemed. With the Mayan site, I needed all the Mayan symbolism explained to me. This is the goddess of rain. This is a priest performing a ceremony. That professor who took me to Lascaux didn’t have to explain anything. I could tell which figures were shamans and which figures were dancing or going on a hunt. It was all familiar. And that’s when I realized that these hunter-gatherers from almost 20,000 years ago were like us. They were us.”
Their eyes met, and the excitement in Brian’s showed that he understood. So few really did, even among graduate students, but Brian really did have a passion for the past, not just an intellectual interest in it.
Their gaze lingered on each other for a moment.
The thwap of a tarp being laid over the mosaic by a pair of undergraduate students broke the spell. Jana cleared her throat and said, “I’m going to take a walk up the hill. I’ll catch you later.”
She walked off, flushing with embarrassment.
Why hadn’t she invited him along? She was in the habit of walking up a rocky hill overlooking the site every evening to watch the last rays of sun touch the distant Atlantic and look out over the rugged landscape as it turned from gold to crimson to pale blue. This nightly ritual, always performed in solitude, calmed her after a long and demanding day better than a cold beer would have.
She could have invited him along. She knew he wanted her to. The last few times she said she was going on her evening walk, he’d given her a hopeful look.
No, more an expectant look. After all the subtle flirting, after all the thrilling conversation, after the weeks of the easy familiarity of excavation life, he figured that they should be ready for the next step.
