The Rule of Nine (16 page)

But for now he would be satisfied to have the media asking questions, demanding to know why the cops weren't developing the information he had given them on Thorn and Liquida. He would blow the lid off the investigation, smoke out the people in charge, and force them to answer his questions. He was tired of standing on the outside looking in, calling and getting no answers. It was his son who was dead. He had a right to know what was happening. And he wasn't going to sit around and wait to find out.

I
'm getting a little hungry. Would you mind if we stop?” Harry looked over to discover that Sarah had dozed off in the passenger seat next to him.

“What? What did you say?” She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and stretched her arms. “You want to stop?” She yawned. “Sure. Where are we, do you know?”

“Somewhere west of Gallup. I'm not sure how many miles. We crossed the Arizona–New Mexico line a ways back,” said Harry. “Just passed a sign. There's a restaurant and truck stop just up ahead.”

“How far to the next town?” she asked.

“What, you don't like truck stops?”

“If you want to stop, it's fine with me,” said Sarah.

“We're going to need gas anyway. How are you doing?” Harry looked over at her and smiled.

“I'm fine. Rather be home.”

“Wouldn't we all,” said Harry.

“After we gas up and eat, I'll drive if you want. You can rest up.”

“Sounds good.”

“You must be tired,” she said.

“Actually, I am a little.” Harry had been up half the night, keeping one eye out the window of the motel room toward the car. He had parked it almost a block away, under a streetlight in front of another motel across the road. He had told Sarah it was too dark in front of the motel where they were staying and they had a lot of stuff in the car.

She called him Uncle Harry, told him he was weird, and asked him if anybody had ever told him that before.

“No. Just you. Oh, and maybe a half dozen judges in town.”

Harry had known Sarah since she was three. Until she was six, Sarah thought he was her uncle. When she was finally told they were not related, it was like finding out that the tooth fairy was a fraud. Harry hung around the house more than most of her relatives. He was often there for dinner. And when her mom, Nikki, died, it was Harry who sat with Sarah for long hours and played games with her, cards and anything that came in a box out of her closet. While Paul arranged the funeral, Harry tried to keep Sarah's mind from grasping the permanence of death.

The images of him in that effort were forever engraved on her memory. She could still see his hulking form scrunched up sitting on a ridiculous little chair at her play table, looking like the giant who'd lost his beanstalk. He would move the Parcheesi pieces around the board with his thick fingers and he would cheat just to keep her mind on the game whenever she asked an uncomfortable question, like what they were doing to her mom at that place where they'd taken her, or where Dad was going with one of Mom's pretty dresses on a hanger.

There were times when Sarah still called him Uncle Harry, but usually now it was only to get his goat, to remind him of how old he was getting. But Harry didn't care. Harry was timeless, like a comfortable old pair of jeans. The fraying and the holes only added character. He would be there forever, at least in her memory.

“Explain something to me,” she said.

“If I can.”

“How did we get in this mess?”

“You mean Liquida?”

“No, I mean the stuff with terrorism. The attack on the base in Coronado, 9/11 and the World Trade Center. All the hostility from the Islamic world. How did it happen?”

“Why don't you just cut to the chase and ask me what happened before the big bang?” said Harry.

“No, really,” she said. “I was just a little kid when most of it happened. Now we're caught up in it. Dad, you, me, Herman. I'd like to have a better understanding.”

“Fair enough. Where should I start?”

“The Middle East. I didn't take any world history,” said Sarah.

“Oil and money, what can I tell you? From the history I've read, it began before the First World War with the Western powers when their warships went from coal to oil. When the war ended, the winners carved up the Middle East and installed friendly leaders to get oil. The national boundaries didn't make much sense. They didn't take into account many of the ethnic groups, clans that had been warring with each other for centuries. Some of the poorer countries got none of the oil but had most of the population. Add to that the creation of Israel in the late forties, the loss of Palestinian lands, and you get a region that's a boiling cauldron. We shared in the division of spoils from the oil. Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran fell into our sphere.”

“Iran?” said Sarah.

“Yeah. Strange as it seems now, we were thick as thieves with the shah before he fell. It started in the fifties when a CIA-inspired coup brought him to power, but got real ugly in the late seventies. Yeah, I'd say that's when the real trouble started. The origins of jihad and the terrorist movement.

“Then once in a while you get a leader who decides to do what he thinks is right, by that I mean morally correct. Jimmy Carter was one such soul. He had his share of failings, but most agree that
his heart was in the right place. Unfortunately, in the twisted world of foreign affairs that's probably a disability. Carter's big thing was human rights.

“But you see, it's not that easy. After a couple of thousand years using avarice, malice, greed, and tyranny as the steady diet of the body politic, a sudden dose of human rights can make the patient upchuck. The shah had all the jails in Iran bulging, some of them with political prisoners who wanted to replace him. Every once in a while he'd stick 'em with cattle prods and do other nasty stuff. Needless to say, this didn't go over big with Carter.

“He turned his back on the shah. The message to the world was that unless the shah cleaned up his act, we wouldn't support him. It was a new day. Human rights were suddenly in vogue. But the regime was already sitting on a powder keg.

“The shah saw the fuse being lit and left town. The army threw down its guns, students overran the palace and the American embassy, and suddenly the Islamic revolution was in full swing.

“You would think the students in the streets would be grateful to Carter for his stand on human rights. But they weren't. Everyone in the U.S. embassy became a hostage. Carter became a victim of the law of unintended consequences.

“After that it was like a house of cards. It led to the Iran-Iraq War. We backed our good pal Saddam Hussein, the tyrant in charge of Iraq. A few million people got killed. Saddam lost a lot of face when we got tired and the war ended up in a draw. In Middle Eastern politics, loss of face is a terminal condition. Generals seeing their dictator walking around with half a face figure they could do a better job and they start measuring the other half to see where a bullet might look good.

“A few years after this, Al Qaeda declared war on us, but given everything that was going on, we didn't notice. They set off a bomb in the World Trade Center. We treated it as a criminal matter, made a few arrests, and shook it off. A few years later they blew up two U.S. embassies in East Africa. We lobbed a few missiles at Al
Qaeda training bases and then went about our business. They attacked a U.S. warship in port in the Middle East, killed a bunch of sailors, and we started another round of investigations. Then came 9/11.

“We went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, ousted their allies, the Taliban, only to have them come back later.

“Which leaves us with Iran, their quest for nukes, and their continuing threats to use them on Israel the moment they get them. And of course Al Qaeda, who would like to borrow a couple of these for use in gift baskets to New York and Washington.”

“So what are we doing to stop them from getting the bomb?”

“Oh, the State Department's on top of it. They're talking to the Iranians through third parties. Trying to convince the international pariah that they wouldn't want to be viewed as an international pariah. Threatening to isolate them with economic sanctions. And trying to make sure that if Israel incinerates them, they do it on a day when the rest of the world is upwind.”

“You are a cynic.” Sarah laughed.

“I know. What can I say? I founded the party and our numbers just keep growing. We have our government to thank for this.”

“Whatever happened to Jimmy Carter?”

“He lost to Ronald Reagan in the next election. Reagan wrinkled his brow, took one look at Iran on his way to take the oath of office, and the Iranians released all the hostages that day.”

“Reagan was that strong?”

“He had a big advantage. He was standing tall, on top of the heap of mistakes made by Carter. It's always easier when someone else has cleared the way through the minefield. Carter tried to negotiate the release of the hostages. The Iranians used the negotiations to humiliate him. It failed. He tried a rescue mission. A U.S. plane and a helicopter collided in the dark in the desert, and that failed. The Iranians knew that the American public had reached the end of its tether. Americans weren't just angry, they were mad
as hell. It was the reason they elected Reagan. He had a mandate to kick the crap out of Iran, and the Iranians knew it. And he wasn't coming into office on a platform of human rights singing ‘Kumbayah.' It's a noble concept, but worn on a presidential sleeve and advertised to the world as the guiding principle, it tells the devil more than you want him to know. The Iranians figured they'd milked the hostage crisis for all they could get. So why put Reagan to all the trouble of fueling up the B-52s?”

Harry could see the sign and the off-ramp coming at them fast, up ahead. He eased to the right and took the ramp up the incline. At the top he hung a right, went a little ways, and pulled into the truck stop. There were fuel pumps off to the left under a large corrugated metal roof. To the right was a hexagonal building with signs out in front, what looked like a shop and a restaurant.

“Tell you what, that looks like the restaurant, and maybe a small shop next to it,” said Harry. “I'm gonna drop you off right in front and go get gas so that we're ready to go when we're done. I'll be over at the pumps. Why don't you check out the menu, and here, get me a bottle of water.” Harry reached into his pocket for some cash.

“Don't be silly. I've got money. You're the one who's hungry. Why don't I get the gas, and you can go in and check the menu and get some water?”

“No,” said Harry. “Listen. I want you to go in and look at the menu. See what the place looks like. If you don't see anything you like, we'll go on to the next town.”

“Whatever.”

He drove over in front of the building. Sarah grabbed her purse and got out. She closed the door and Harry drove away slowly, heading in the direction of the fuel pumps about a hundred yards away.

Harry watched Sarah in the rearview mirror as she went inside the restaurant and closed the door. He wasn't comfortable leaving
her alone, even for a minute. But he had no choice. He glanced down at the car's fuel gauge. He still had a quarter of a tank, plenty of gas to get to the next town.

Harry had been nervous as a cat since the previous evening when he'd failed to find a good truck stop to take care of business. It was why he'd parked the car so far from the motel the night before. If Sarah had known, she would have been in his face. It violated her rule of no more secrets.

Harry counted seven large trucks, sixteen-wheelers, parked in the back along a gravel strip just beyond the pumps. Off to the right there were four more big rigs. These were over behind the back of the restaurant.

Harry took one look and turned right. He figured there was a better chance that the drivers of these four trucks would be down out of their cabs, probably inside the restaurant having lunch. The last thing he needed was an ugly confrontation with an angry truck driver.

Three of the trucks were long-haul jobs with sleepers behind the cabs. One of them was hauling an empty flat-bed trailer. He didn't like the rigs with the sleepers. Harry couldn't be sure that somebody wasn't up inside taking a nap. Instead he picked the red Peterbilt. The load on the back was covered by a tarp. It was perfect, and unless the driver was stretched out low across the seat, sleeping, the truck's cab was empty.

Harry drove all the way around the back of the semitrailer, pulled up behind it, and turned off his engine. He stepped out of the car and stood behind the open door for a second, then looked around to make sure nobody was watching. He reached down into the wheel well of the car and pulled the lever. He heard the latch pop.

Harry quickly closed the driver's-side door, went to the front of the car, and lifted the hood. He didn't have to waste much time looking. Herman had done a good job. For Harry, driving with it
for two days, knowing it was there, was like driving with a bomb under the hood.

Herman had located the GPS tracking devices a week earlier, about the time Jenny was murdered. He'd discovered them while doing an electronic sweep of the office and Paul's house. The sweeps had become routine after they'd discovered a year earlier that the law office had been bugged during the period just before the attack at Coronado. Herman found nothing in the office or the house. But he got a weak signal from the front of Paul's car, in the driveway, where he found the GPS device affixed to a magnet under the front bumper.

At that point he checked all the cars. He found similar tracking devices on Sarah's VW bug, his own car, and Harry's. The vehicles belonging to the rest of the office staff were clean. It was the reason they were confident that if they got the staff out of the office now, they would be in the clear. Liquida hadn't targeted any of them because he figured there was no need. He could easily keep tabs on the two lawyers, Sarah, and Herman.

The tracker was smaller than the palm of Harry's hand. It had a tiny antenna about the size of a toothpick and was shaped like a twig that swiveled out to pick up the satellite signal. For long-term power it was connected to the car's battery by a wire from underneath up into the engine compartment.

The day before they left, Herman purchased two small batteries and went to work on Harry's and Paul's cars, the two they were going to use.