The Towers (2 page)

But he still had two acres of dense chaparral, and the tunnels under it he'd used to play in. A carport, down by the access road, with low-water plantings. A pool, though it was covered now. The house looked down from under huge live oaks, and standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that had been the wonder of the architectural magazines back in the forties, Teddy reached behind the drapes until his fingers brushed the flash hider of the full automatic M4 he'd left leaning where glass met brick. The drapes stank of mildew. His headache throbbed. Behind him the woman grunted, rolled over, and began snoring.

His chest rose and fell. He stared down at the shimmering glitter, the scattered house lights and moving headlights of Laurel Canyon. But he wasn't seeing it.

A green spheroid. His peripheral vision made it as a grenade.

And Kaulukukui gave him that look. “War's a motherfucker, ain't it?”

Yeah, Sumo. It's a motherfucker, all right.

But us … we were supposed to be the meanest motherfuckers in the valley.

“You bastard,” he muttered, wiping his nose on his hand. “You fat bastard.”

The insurgents had pinned the SEALs in the kill zone. Four shooters, pushing muzzles over the catwalk so they could fire down without exposing themselves. He'd snap-shot back. Beside him Kaulukukui was hugging the wall, returning fire. Bullets ripped rock walls, spewing chips. Hot brass spun through the air. Dirt flew, and something hard cracked into his goggles.

“Obie! Y'in there?” The SEALs behind them, yelling past the machine gunner who'd cut them off.

“They got us stone, babe,” Oberg had shouted back. “Set us up righteous. Some fucking assistance here!”

“Can't get to you, man. Got us cold.”

Teddy groped for a grenade, then remembered: not even a flash-bang. Gone, used up fighting their way down from the roof to assault the hide site of the man behind this whole insurgency. Or so Higher'd said.

A shooter stuck his Kalash over the railing and emptied it like a garden hose. A bullet clipped Teddy's boot, another his harness. “Shit,” he'd muttered, backing toward a corner as he kept the front sight on the balcony, waiting for the next weasel. “Pop the fuck up, fuckers.” But they didn't, just kept sticking rifles over the rail and spraying lead. Sooner or later—

He'd been slamming in another mag when something flew down. It struck the ground and took a lopsided bounce. A green spheroid. His peripheral vision made it as a grenade at the same moment it struck the wall beside him.

It rolled, spinning, and rocked to a halt midway between him and his partner. The drill was to duck or roll, but there was nowhere to go. Or kick it away. But there was nowhere to kick it to. This whole end of the room was open ground.

His eyes had met Kaulukukui's across four feet of space. And the big Hawaiian said, “War's a motherfucker, ain't it?”

Before Teddy could react, he stepped over it and crouched, putting himself between Teddy and the grenade.

“No! Sumo—”

The shattering crack of high explosive. Kaulukukui had shuddered. Half-turned, a smile still curving his lips.

Then he'd toppled, exposing the raw bleeding mass that had been his back.

Shuddering, Teddy drew clawed fingers down his cheeks. Over the ridges of old scars. The cool air crawled over his skin like leeches in a Mindanao rain forest. He turned on a heel and walked naked into the next room, then down flagstone steps. A light glowed over the bar, in front of another floor-to-ceiling window. The bottle's neck rattled on the glass as he poured Grey Goose. His mouth felt stale and raw, his head slammed and his lips stung, but he got the first slug down.

He stood again before the lights, looking down. He knew this house. Had let go of that faux bamboo end table to take his first steps, or so his mother had always said. But he didn't belong here. He wasn't sure where the fuck he belonged.

“You got to catch up on your sleep,” he told himself. “Important meeting this morning.” He looked at the neon-circled clock over the bar. Three twenty-four.

The Movie. He'd left the SEALs to make it. A film that told the truth about combat, about men, about honor, about death. Not
Sands of Iwo Jima,
not
Apocalypse Now,
no heroes and no fools, just the sweat and blood and the kind of man it took and the kind it left once the fighting was over. He and Loki had hammered the script out over a year, endless meetings with the writers and the money people, Germans looking to move funds into the United States. He didn't understand it, but Loki said the European tax laws were such that even if you lost millions on the film, they made money anyway.

He'd said, Why do we need them? I can front this, mortgage the beach house and all that land. But Loki Dittrich had said no. Rule Number One: Never use your own money. Erase your risk. Get foreign distributors to cover half your production costs. She'd been his mother's friend. They'd gone to bed once, eons ago, “Just to get that out of the way,” she'd told the then fifteen-year-old Teddy. She'd hooked him up with Breakbone Pictures. Found a million from a hedge fund. Teddy had called one of the guys who used to set fires with him—now an A-list agent—and they had Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell attached. Russell Crowe, a firm maybe. Teddy wanted Ridley Scott, but Loki said she wanted to do the financing first, have it wrapped up before they signed a director; that would give them leverage.

That was what the meeting was about: nailing down the Germans. They'd seen the script, made suggestions, read the rewrites. Now they were flying in. They'd meet in the garden of the Polo Lounge, to lock in the memorandum of understanding.

In Hollywood, it always came down to “credit” and “money.” Since he didn't need the money, he wanted “A Teddy Oberg Production” above the title. Loki said it was outrageous to ask for it on his first film. But if he produced, it'd get made the way he wanted. If he let the money people drive the train, he might as well just pick up that Mossberg and see what an ounce and a half of buckshot tasted like.

He felt a small, distant thrill; almost the way a normal person might feel when it looked as if his movie, about combat and manhood and what it did to you when a friend died, might get made.

He picked up the bottle again. Weighed the glass in his hand, one of the heavy cut-glass tumblers his grandmother had served Cary Grant and Bette Davis out of. Discipline, he thought. Duty. Above all, teamwork. All those words pounded into you at Coronado.

But what about when the team was dead? Where did a guy go then?

The first words on-screen would be the names. The dedication.

Sweat broke out over his back. He looked at the tumbler again, forced his hand to put it down. Weighed the bottle too. Throw it through the window? No. No, Obie. Set it down too. Gently. There.

The bed creaked as it took his weight. The mattress stank of mold. He needed new furniture. Tear out the seventies shag. The woman flinched when he threw the covers off. Silvery hair. Smooth shining breasts. Large, dark nipples. Oh yeah. A songwriter; just another wannabe.

“Hey there,” he said, and pushed her over on her back.

“I don't want to. You're too rough. I was asleep—”

“Nobody asked if you wanted to,” he grunted, twisting a fist into her hair. Get them by the hair, they didn't fight long. Pulling her head back as his hand clapped between her legs and twisted. He set his knees and followed his fingers with his prick, driving it in with his full weight. She cried out and fought, striking his back with hard little fists. She connected with a lucky blow to his ear and he started to choke her, but restrained himself just in time.

Holding her down, his other hand over her mouth, Teddy Oberg plowed toward the only personal forgetting left. Knowing even as he triggered, pale neon lancing behind his eyes, that as soon as it was over, the images would return.

6:05 A.M., EST, PORTLAND, MAINE

Two Middle Eastern men check in to their flight to Boston, with a connection to LA. One, an Egyptian architect, sets off an automated screening system as a flight risk. Security holds his bags until they confirm he's actually boarded.

In Boston, one flier takes a cell call from a traveler at Logan waiting to board another aircraft. As he and other men check in for the next flight, the security system flags more of them. Again, the security people hold their bags. But they all pass through the metal detectors and security checkpoints and quietly enplane.

At nearly the same time, five other men are boarding a flight in Washington, DC. A ticket agent finds two of them suspicious. She holds their bags until they're on the plane.

In Newark, four more young men board United Flight 93 for Los Angeles. One gets additional screening. Security inspects his bag for explosives. They find nothing suspicious. The others pass preboarding screening and all four enter the aircraft.

By 7:50, nineteen men are safely aboard four transcontinental flights.

4:15 P.M., YEMENI TIME, SANA'A, YEMEN

The armored SUV growled through empty streets, the blazing afternoon heat boiling up off uneven asphalt and ancient cobblestones. Another Suburban sped ahead, with the protective detail. In the center car, FBI SWAT members rode passenger-side front and in the back.

Special Agent Aisha Ar-Rahim was ensconced in the center seat in a bright hibiscus-patterned abaya with long sleeves, low heels, and a headscarf, a loose shawl over her shoulders. Her round face was bent to a notebook screen. A little girl with hair in braids smiled up. A link chart occupied the rest of the screen, with boxes and arrows and phone numbers in red, green, blue. Under her abaya ar-Rahim wore a Kevlar ballistic vest. Beside her slumped a large carpetbag purse.

The heavyset guy sitting too close was Scott Doanelson. Every federal agency had a trademark, and Doanelson fit his: scuffed oxfords, Wal-Mart suit, button-down white polycotton shirt under his Kevlar. He wore the suit even when they went out—which wasn't often, since kidnapping foreigners had become the Yemeni national sport. He wore a holster, though it had been empty since the week before, when Doanelson had called the ambassador “Sweetie.” But Aisha's SIG was in in her purse, along with her badge, Mace, a spare magazine of Cor-Bon +P+ hollow points, and a small red prayer rug she'd picked up on Hajj.

Doanelson had been in-country for two weeks. Aisha had been here for six months and had worked counterterror throughout the Mideast for years. Had two Civilian Service Awards, one for Bahrain, one for Ashaara, and the Julie Cross Award for Women in Federal Law Enforcement. But none of that seemed to rival the luster of an FBI badge. At least from Doanelson's point of view.

“Think we're getting anywhere with this guy?” he grunted, pulling a Sprite out of the SUV's cold box.

“I'm establishing rapport.”

“We're wasting time and dollars. Coddling fucking Islamic terrorists—”

“They're not
Islamic
terrorists,” she said sharply. “Just
terrorists
. Islam doesn't condone what they're doing.”

“I don't see them pushing back. These moderate Muslims you keep telling me about.”

“We recruited these people, Scott. Trained and armed them, to fight the Soviets. Sixty thousand just from Yemen.”

“You saying we should've left the Russkis in Afghanistan? That would have been better?”

She didn't answer, just turned her face to the colorful façades passing by. Sana'a wasn't Somalia. Yet. The rabid fundamentalists, the Salafis, only had a toehold, backed by Saudi millions. With luck, they could save this country.

The frame of the SUV rattled; dusty wind scratched at the windows. Behind it the follow car growled, another heavy vehicle with more grim-faced, heavily armed men. The threat condition had been upped to Delta. Even here, in the heart of the capital, the desert filled the streets with sandy, tan fog. The howling wind scudded trash along the road. She yearned out at colorful shopfronts, vendors' stalls. She'd felt perfectly safe walking these streets, as long as she wore the hijab. For the first few months she'd frequented the Salt Market and worshipped with Yemeni women in the Jami al-Kabir, the Grand Mosque, and no one had said a word other than friendly salaams.

Aisha Ar-Rahim had been a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent for twelve years. The NCIS looked into any crime involving naval personnel, grand theft to murder. It conducted criminal-investigation, contract-fraud, counternarcotics work. Being one of the few agents who spoke Arabic, she'd found herself more or less permanently assigned to force protection, especially since she'd helped bring to justice the leader of a raging insurgency in a country on the Red Sea. Al-Maahdi was dead now, shot in a fracas among his bodyguards. A huge thorn in the side of US policy in the region plucked out, and all but one of the hostages safely returned. Based out of Bahrain as the Yemeni referent, Aisha had worked in-country for the last six months as part of a joint FBI/NCIS team.

At the moment, she was assisting in the interrogation of a suspect Islamic Jihad member. Abu-Hamid Al-Nashiri had been identified as a phone contact of men involved both in the USS
Cole
bombing the year before, and in a plot to attack Western-flag oil tankers. Working out of El-Hadida and Makullah, the joint team had helped the local authorities break up the bombers. They'd found an abandoned speedboat with Semtex residue, although the explosive itself had been removed.

But the perpetrators had escaped. Now phone records transferred by NSA, combined with her patient work on intelligence from local authorities, were uncovering not just a network, but a Yemeni hub to a wagon wheel of Al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan. And also an as-yet-unclear effort that seemed pointed somewhere outside the Mideast, possibly even at the United States.