Prepared For Rage

"She make contact again?"

"She tried. She left a message on his voice mail to join her for drinks the last day. She never heard back from him. The whole thing felt wrong to her, so she told me about it when she got back, and then she checked the Coast Guard perso

"And?"

"And there was an Adam Bayzani, all right."

"Was?"

"Was. She emailed him, and when he didn't email back, she emailed his CO."

"And?"

"And Adam Bayzani was in fact a commander, and he was in fact assigned to District Seventeen. The problem is, he's dead."

Chisum sat up straight. "When?"

"His body was found the week before the IMO conference started in Istanbul."

"Murdered?" Chisum said, sure of it.

"No. Died in his sleep, according to the police report."

"When and where?"

"Lanzarote."

"Where's that?"

" Canary Islands."

"What the hell was he doing in the Canary Islands?"

"Working on his tan. Lanzarote's a vacation destination for Europeans."

"He was on leave?"

"Yes. His boss said he was stopping off for a week in advance of the IMO conference."

"He alone?"

"He rented his car alone and he checked into his hotel alone."

"But?"

"But his boss said that Bayzani acted like he would be meeting someone."

"He say who?"

"No. His boss said he seemed happy lately. Evidently a pretty morose guy at the best of times. No girlfriends, kept his private life private, nobody he worked with had ever been to his apartment. His boss thought he might be gay."

"Really." Patrick digested this in silence for a moment. "Was there an autopsy?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"When a tourist dies, the local authorities get the body out of there as fast as they can. Tourism is pretty much their living. Anyway, I'm not sure they even have an ME."

"Can we ask for an autopsy?"

"The body is on its way home to his family in Los Angeles."

"All right, I know people in L.A.," Chisum said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could access the directory on his computer to look up names of helpful colleagues in L.A. "Any footprints on Bayzani's service record?"

"None that I can find, outside of his heritage. His family is fourth-generation American. He does have a Jordanian great-grandfather. His grandfather served in the Eighty-second Airborne during World War II. His mother was a Navy nurse in Vietnam. He was a Coast Guard Academy grad himself. They're all as American as apple pie, no red flags anywhere." Crap.

"Now for the good news."

Patrick perked up. "There's good news? Did the son of a bitch finally get on a phone?"

"Not that good, but almost. He had to have a passport to get into the country, and passports have to have photos."

"We've finally got a photo?" Patrick said, disbelieving. "A current photo?"

"Okay, don't start hyperventilating, it's doctored, our resident geek tells me some kind of computer overlay program where they alter the original photo to resemble the current holder without looking like it's been got at by a kindergartner with a crayon. There is a general ethnic similarity between Isa and Bayzani, probably one of the reasons Isa picked him, and the photograph's a little blurry, but it's the best we've had so far."

"You're sure it's him? This isn't an 'all Islamic terrorists look alike to me' kind of thing?"

"As sure as I can be," Rincon said, not taking offense. "As I don't have to tell you, the photos we've got of him aren't good, but I was pretty sure from the get-go this was the same guy." He hesitated. "Patrick."

"What?"

Rincon spoke, sounding as if he were choosing his words very carefully. "There was an-incident involving maritime shipping two years ago."

"I know," Patrick said. He'd looked up the case file after he'd called Hugh for help on Isa.

"Yeah, I know you do, and I know you know that I'd like to stay out of jail for violating state secrets. Kind of a personal quirk. The only point I'm making is, I think attacks by air are pretty much over. I think the terrorism community is moving on to attacks on maritime targets, in particular busy ports."

"We've been talking about that ourselves."

"Not enough," Rincon said tersely. "Not nearly enough, Patrick."

"Forward me what you've got," Patrick said.

"Will do." Rincon hung up.

Melanie brought him the fax from Hugh just as Chisum was sitting back from issuing an all-agencies alert as to Isa's probable presence inside U.S. borders. The phone began ringing as he spread the pages across his desk. "Get that, will you, Melanie, thanks. And I'm not in for the rest of the afternoon."

"Yes, Mr. Chisum." She was curious but too well-trained to ask, and he watched her walk out the door with his usual attentive wistfulness. He shook his head and pulled out his Isa file to compare the photographs. The ones in Iraq were group shots, taken from a distance. Everyone was burnoosed and bearded. Isa's head was circled, and in another print blown up. The quality of the print was atrocious, and what resemblance there was between it and the clean-shaven, smiling face in the passport photo was minimal at best. The group photo was more about personality than likeness. He was standing a pace in the rear behind Zarqawi, looking solemn, even a little studious, his hands folded, his lean figure a study in stillness.

The two photos Rincon had been working from were only marginally better. One was a black-and-white head shot taken with a long lens, picking Isa's face out of a crowded Baghdad street. He was seated at an outdoor cafe, drinking something from a tiny cup, facing someone with his back to the camera. Isa's face was seen over the second man's shoulder, looking straight into the camera lens. The resolution was grainy and his expression couldn't be made out, but there Patrick nevertheless got a clear impression of vigilance, as if Isa were always alive to his surroundings, might even be somehow aware that his photograph was being taken at that very moment.

The third photograph was another group shot, this time a posed shot of a Zarqawi grip-and-grin with bin Laden. The accompanying caption read " Peshawar, Pakistan?" Neither man looked overcome by joy at the encounter, but by the date on the photo, this was right after the hotel bombings in Jordan, and at that time no one in Arab leadership, legitimate government or terrorist, was pleased with Zarqawi.

And once again, at Zarqawi's shoulder, stood Isa.

He compared the two faces first to Bayzani's service file photo, and then to the doctored passport photo. He'd have the photos looked at by their own geeks down in tech services, but he was sure in his own mind that Rincon was right. It was Isa.

And that meant Isa was indeed in the United States.

He read the account of the immigration agent who had cleared Isa for entry. No useful knowledge to be gained there, except that Isa appeared to be at least superficially well versed in Coast Guard lingo. He made a note to inquire into Bayzani's past movements with care and attention. If he'd been spending time spilling his guts to Isa about his job, Patrick wanted it all down, chapter and verse.

While he had been perusing the file he was aware of the phone ringing nonstop outside his door, Melanie's voice a soothing counterpoint. At precisely sixty minutes and one second her tap was at the door. At his response she came in, set down a large stack of pink telephone slips, and departed again.

He thumbed through the slips. Mostly panicky demands for more information. Since he didn't have any, he shoved them to one side and assumed the position, feet crossed on the windowsill, hands folded on his stomach, frown aimed at the horizon.

No way to catch up to Isa until he surfaced again. Isa was a very cautious man. So far as Patrick could tell he never spoke on the phone, he never emailed twice from the same address, and he never flew directly to a destination, always employing multiple segments on multiple airlines, never booking them all at once, spreading his purchases around on Orbitz, Travelocity, and the airline web sites. No, Isa didn't make mistakes often, and truly, in these two instances, Istanbul and New York, he had erred more on the side of bad luck than bad judgment. Better to be lucky than good, as the old saying went. American immigration agents by and large were trained to look more at documentation than they were at faces and behavior.