The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (12 page)

S
alé comes from
asla
, which means “rock” in Berber. Dating back to the seventh century BC, it is the oldest city on the Atlantic Coast. Today it is a rock of extremist Islam, the home of many active jihadist groups and fanatical Muslim beliefs and practices. With radicalism at its core, and staggering poverty throughout the streets and alleys, the city is effectively isolated from the rest of modern Morocco.

Mohammed and Aden, the men who murdered Qassam Pakravesh, drove a rusting, thirty-year-old VW van from the N1 to the N6. Mohammed was behind the wheel. It was late at night, the highway was relatively free of traffic, and the men were both more relaxed now that they’d achieved their goal.

They didn’t speak, each man lost in reflection. Mohammed’s head was full of remembering. Not just about his brother; that was in his body, in his flesh. What was in his mind was training he had undergone with al Qaida in Yemen. First, the manual that had comic strip illustrations of how to stab a man or woman, where to shoot to kill or cripple, sensitive areas of the body to extract information with anything from a pencil to a shard of brick—of which there were many from explosions caused by enemies without and rival factions within, like the misguided Shi’ite separatists who fought them instead of the imperialists. He remembered the awful heat at the training camp in Southern Yemen, a flat, barren desert where nothing grew but men. The hours spent under the sand at night, breathing through a straw; learning to use his ears to listen for vehicles and voices; learning to lie still for hours at night so the sand would blow naturally above him. And the days learning to endure the heat; digging tunnels with hands or a child’s plastic shovel for concealment and storage of weapons; and physically toning by climbing on or swinging from ropes.

Putting knives or bullets in dead bodies taken from morgues. Tying wire around throats and garroting them. That came naturally.

His grief was tempered with excitement that the arduous months had borne fruit. The men were also tired from the long shifts of watching and tracking the Iranian. Before they hurried away, they collected what they thought was useful from the dead man—the belt he wore with the passports and cash and the box he was trying to carry off, but not his gun. That was a sad reminder of why Mohammed and Aden were here. The dead man’s identity would probably never be known, but his controllers in Iran would know what happened to him—and they would figure out why. Mohammed had shot him in the mouth the way his brother had been shot by this man for defying an order to assassinate a local mayor who was hostile to Iranian influence in the nation. He was a leader in the Zayi order of Shi’a, to which Mohammed and his brother belonged, and that took precedence over the funds Tehran gave to Yemeni al Qaida—the group to which Mohammed and his brother also belonged.

They were staying in the back room of a café across the street from the railway station. It wasn’t until they parked—in the darkness beside the metal trash barrels near a high wooden fence—that they completely relaxed.

Mohammed leaned across the seat and embraced his companion.

“Thank you, dear friend, for making my vengeance your own,” Mohammed said.

“We have an unbroken bond now,” said the younger man. “I am your brother now and proudly so.”

The men unloaded the van—the supplies they had carried with them in case their stay in Rabat had been a long one, rolls of money, maps, the diagram the stevedore had drawn them of the hotel interior, and the box they had taken from the dead man. A box, they now saw, that was more than it had appeared in the dark. They had known right away that it was heavy, and presumed it held ammunition or gold, which was why they had taken it. Now that the two men looked at the gunmetal container in the open hatch of the van, and saw a black swastika stenciled on the four sides, they knew it was something more. Especially since someone had taken the pains to weld it shut.

“What do we do with it?” Aden asked.

Mohammed shook his head. He tried to go through the victim’s phone messages, but the phone was locked with a password. He stuck it in his back pocket.

“I’ll find tools,” he said upon reflection.

“Maybe we can use the tire iron.”

“Why not a rock or a brick?”

“Why not?” Aden asked.

Mohammed smirked. “I was joking.” He handed Aden the pistol. “You wait here. I’m sure I can find a hammer and chisel. We
may
want to close it again.”

“What is the story about the box? The curious girl?” Aden asked.

Mohammed did not know, and he couldn’t imagine why Aden knew a story about a girl.

He was raised on the Koran and tales of the great caliphs. Nothing else mattered. He walked off, thinking he could find something in the rail yard. Aden watched him go, then ran his fingers along the silver weld.

“It doesn’t look that strong,” he muttered. He moved the container aside and opened the tool compartment in the back. He removed the tire iron, tapped at the weld, then noticed a crowbar in the well. He took the warm, rusty tool out and angled it against the thick smudge of melted lead. He stabbed it repeatedly until the weld started to come away from the metal. It did not break off but remained attached, like a tight metal band; still, the slight gap allowed him to work along the front side of the box. Jiggling it with the crowbar inserted in the gap allowed him to loosen the broken lid.

Setting the crowbar aside, Aden put both his hands on the sides of the top and wriggled it until it came free.

 

 

Mohammed returned after ten minutes. He saw his friend slumped half in, half out of the back of the van interior and ran over. He dropped the tools he’d stolen and ran forward. His first thought was that the young man had been shot, since Aden appeared to be lying in a soapy pool of reddish blood. As he neared, however, he saw that Aden was not dead and that the fluid was vomit, not blood. Then he saw that the young man’s limbs were convulsing with short staccato tics.

Mohammed pulled him to the ground, laid him out gently, saw in the light from the van that his eyes were rolled back in his head. Aden was trying to raise his arms.

“Lie still,” Mohammed said. He winced as he used a sleeve to wipe the young man’s mouth. There was blood in his spittle. “I’m going to find a medic.”

Aden shook his head once.

“I must—” Mohammed said but Aden tried to grab his shirt, stop him.

“Box . . . hot,” he croaked.

“Hot?”

Aden lay back. He nodded, gagging on the froth in his throat.

The realization hit Mohammed like a bullet—what was in the box. He looked over at it. The contents—were radioactive. The Iranian had picked
something
up on the ship, perhaps uranium, and was carrying it to a destination. Most likely on a schedule, with other intermediaries to meet him.

That was a delivery someone would absolutely be expecting. And would miss. What had they stumbled into?

Mohammed looked down at his friend. The lid was shut but the seal had been broken. Was this his own fate now? He had to do something about that.

And about Aden. That is, if anything
could
be done for him. The young man was trembling and red-tinged saliva was dribbling from both sides of his mouth. Either he was biting his tongue or he was hemorrhaging internally. In either case, he would not leave him lying on the ground. Mohammed scooped him in his arms and laid him in the back of the van. He picked up the tire iron and used it to nudge the box back just enough so that he could close the back door. Then he stood away from the van.

For something to work this fast, with so brief an exposure—the purity and deadliness was unfathomable to him. This was too important for Mohammed to decide. Aden, like himself, was a martyr to the cause of Islam: to obtain—and protect—a weapon this powerful he would gladly give his life.

And now Mohammed was being asked to give over his new brother’s life for the cause. He knew he was being asked to do so because it had to have been the Hand of God that sent him away while Aden opened the seal. Otherwise, they should have opened it together and both men would have perished.

Mohammed would not stay here, at the café. It occurred to him that he must first locate a dentist’s office. They had coverings to shield radiation. That would help to slow whatever exposure Mohammed might be receiving. Then he would go somewhere and get rid of the van, steal a different vehicle, and contact Yemen. He would find out if there were contacts here he could trust. Salé was rich with sympathetic souls, but he could not be certain which of those souls might also be sympathetic to Iran. Many would be happy to take his money to provide safe haven—then report him to agents of Tehran. Mohammed needed to get away from here. That was first.

“I will make sure that your sacrifice matters, my brother,” he said as he climbed into the van.

He could hear Aden breathing in desperate little gasps. Mohammed wasn’t sure how he himself felt, whether the weakness in his arms, the trembling in his wrists, was shock or exhaustion or something worse. He didn’t think that anything in nature, other than a snakebite or certain kinds of poison gas, could kill so swiftly. If it was something radioactive—he had always heard that even intense radiation, like the fallout in Hiroshima or the meltdown in Chernobyl, killed over time. Days on average, hours at the worst.

What in the name of God had that Iranian been carrying
?

Whatever it was, the toxicity made it imperative that Mohammed make his next moves quickly and carefully. He pulled away from the café and drove to a new medical center the United Nations had helped to build. He would get what he needed there, then drive to the Bou Regreg River. The waterfront was populated by people who were accustomed to smuggling arms, drugs, people. Now, with the cash he had taken from the Iranian, he should have enough money to buy information, allies, pockets that would serve as sanctuary. It could only be temporary, until someone on the other side came along with more cash. But he didn’t think he would need very long.

Something more important was beginning to take root in his mind.

A way to use what they had found.