Fastia gave a last bitter look through the window, where the crowd cheered wildly for Gaddafi. Resigned, he said, “He lives, then.”
“And so do we, Kadir,” said Morgan. “Come on. The clock is ticking.”
Slipping out of the building and back into their sedan, Morgan, Conley, and Fastia drove to an air base where Fastia had arranged for a military aircraft with a flight plan to Egypt; once in the air, they would divert their course to London. Fastia’s family had already boarded and sat waiting for them. They would eventually fly to America, to start a new life. With two guards killed and the Russian weapon left behind, Gaddafi would discover there had been an assassination attempt on his life. There would be repercussions. Lives would be lost. But nothing would ever be tied back to the CIA. The dictator himself would rule for years more before being toppled by a Western-backed popular uprising.
“Well, Kadir?” asked Morgan.
Fastia took a puff from his cigar and let the smoke flow slowly out of his mouth. A child’s exuberant laughter came from outside his office.
“Tell me something,” he asked Morgan. “You have a family, like me. A home, a child. You are a different man now, with a different life. Does the past call you so strongly that you would leave it all behind on the spur of the moment?”
“I thought you, of all people, would understand,” said Morgan.
“It has been a long time since I left Libya,” said Fastia. “I have changed much since then. And history, as it seems, does catch up eventually.”
“Did they ever tell you why they aborted the Libya mission? Why they chose to let Gaddafi remain in power when we could have eliminated him back then?”
A sudden intensity came into Fastia’s eyes, and then he sighed deeply, as if trying to soothe a profound pain. “The geopolitical circumstances changed abruptly. That, or OPEC interceded on the butcher’s behalf. What does it matter?” Changing the subject, he asked, “Do you still call yourself Cobra?”
“If I have to,” Morgan said simply.
Fastia put out his cigarette in an ashtray on his desk. “I will need money,” said Fastia. “I will not charge you my normal fees, but the airplane and the asset in Afghanistan will not come cheap.”
“I have the money, Kadir. I need to know if you can deliver.”
Fastia took a deep breath. “Yes, Cobra. I will help you. For Cougar’s sake, and for yours.”
CHAPTER 10
Leo Guzman’s fingers flew across the keyboard. It was daytime, but his little nook was a dark burrow. The daylight, he found, would set his biological clock to a day-and-night cycle, which interfered with the alternative sleep cycle he was training himself to follow. At the moment, he was interspersing bouts of furious typing with sips of an energy drink. He was hitting the sweet spot, his wired mind racing, and feeling in a very real sense, as he often did at this job, that he had the world at his fingertips. He was concentrating so deeply and intensely that he didn’t even notice the knock on the door; he only saw the light streaming in from the hallway outside when someone opened it.
“Guzman?” he heard coming from behind him.
He swiveled around in his chair, mildly irritated at the interruption. “Oh, hey, Plante, can I help you?”
“I need you to run a trace on a phone.”
“Got the number?”
Plante told him. “Think I can get a real-time feed of the trace at my desk?”
“What, did you think I’d make you look over my shoulder?” said Guzman, grinning.
“Oh, and one more thing. Think you can keep this one quiet, too?”
“Be careful, Plante. Someone might think we’re running some kind of covert intelligence-gathering operation or something.”
Plante grinned at the joke.
“Anyway, it’ll be ready by the time you’re back at your workstation.”
“Appreciated, Guzman.”
“You got it.”
Plante closed the door, and the room was plunged back into its previous denlike darkness. With a few strokes of the keyboard, Guzman began to run the trace. The program connected surprisingly fast, immediately placing the cell phone in a residential neighborhood in Bethesda. He noted the speed only long enough to deduce that someone else must be tracing that same number. But having done what Plante asked, he only cursed the disruption and began to work himself back into sublime hyperconcentration.
CHAPTER 11
“I hope you understand, Barry, that this is a career ender.” Nickerson watched with well-concealed pleasure as the young senator squirmed in his seat. It had been over a full minute since he had set the pictures down in front of the man, and Lamb still hadn’t taken his eyes away from them. “If the media got ahold of this . . . I mean, we can already see the story play out, can’t we? Senator Lamb caught with a pretty young thing named Erika Dillon. Speculations abound on whether she’s a call girl. Political base disgusted. Your own party dumps you like a barrel of toxic waste.”