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Authors: Marcia Muller

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BOOK: A Wild and Lonely Place
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Renshaw said, “Belgian consular offices. Last month. Bomb and message both mailed from the Lombard Street substation. One
fatality.”

He left the slide on the screen, and we contemplated the destruction silently. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, but
I was entertaining emotions, rather than intellectual concepts.

Somewhere in this city was a person who methodically plotted and carried out monstrous crimes. A person who’d gotten away
with them time and again. He could be any nationality, could come from any walk of life. Could look as ordinary and harmless
as the wrappings that concealed the bombs. Could kill or maim again at any moment. The thought of such a creature walking
the same streets as the people I cared about chilled me through and through.

Renshaw had only guessed at part of my interest in the Diplo-bomber case. I wasn’t sure if even Joslyn was aware of it. Yes,
a million-dollar reward was attractive; I’d be a fool if I didn’t want to claim it. But there was more.

Last August a hired killer had blown up a house that had stood on the Mendocino coast property that now belonged to Hy and
me. I had been his target, but someone else had died in my place, and other lives had been ripped apart as a result. Time
had passed, people had healed, the rubble had been cleared from the cliff top; the place seemed beautiful and serene once
more. But often at night I could sense violent ripples beneath the surface of that serenity, could hear the echoes of grief
and loss in the waves and sea breeze. The aftershocks of that bombing would never be stilled.

I couldn’t do anything about the tragedy in Mendocino County, but I sure as hell could take steps to prevent any more bombings
in San Francisco. I was, as Adah told me when she asked me to help, “a flat-out fine investigator, if sometimes a pain in
the butt.”

I turned to Renshaw. “Okay, Gage, we’ve reviewed what’s public knowledge. Now show me something new.”

He smiled thinly and advanced the slide.

An imposing house: creamy white plastered brick, with a mansard roof and heavy cornices. The arched windows were elaborately
ornamented, and carved pillars rose beside the massive front door. Yew trees stood like sentinels at its corners. I’d seen
it before but couldn’t place it.

Renshaw said, “Azadi Consulate, Jackson Street near Octavia.”

“Azad—isn’t that one of those oil-rich emirates?”

“Right. Oil rich, progressive, and politically stable. They’ve maintained the consulate since the late sixties, do a high
volume of business with our West Coast oil companies.”

“But they haven’t been—”

“The target of a bombing? No.”

The next slide showed another sheet of plain paper lettered in Palatino Italic:
BE FOREWARNED.
Below a sentence was taped, obviously a headline clipped from a newspaper: BRAZILIAN EMBASSY BOMBED.

I asked, “The Azadis received this after the first D.C. bombing?”

“Yes. And again after each subsequent one.” He showed slides of the messages in quick succession.

Odd. According to Joslyn’s files, none of the other diplomatic missions who had been bombed had reported receiving such warnings.
But then, neither had Azad. “Did these come to the consulate, or to other Azadi delegations as well?”

“Only the consulate here.” Renshaw switched the projector off and the screen went blank.

“Okay,” I said, “what’s RKI’s connection to Azad?”

“We handle their security in San Francisco, D.C., and New York.”

“How’d that happen?”

“They were impressed with how we dealt with a situation for an American company operating out of their capital in the late
eighties. When these messages started arriving, they decided to beef up their protective measures at all three of their U.S.
locations and contacted us.”

“Did they also contact the authorities?”

“No. Mrs. Hamid has an aversion to negative publicity and, besides, the authorities hadn’t done anything for the bomber’s
other targets.”

“And Mrs. Hamid is…?”

“Malika Hamid, consul general here.”

“A woman consul general? Interesting, for an Arab country.”

“As I said, they’re progressive.”

I thought for a moment. “Do you buy the idea that they didn’t contact the authorities because of Mrs. Hamid’s concern about
bad press?”

He shrugged.

“There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“If there is, no one’s told us.”

“And you haven’t asked.”

“It’s not our policy to question our clients’ motivations. Not that I wouldn’t mind finding out, and that’s where you—”

A pager went off in Renshaw’s pocket. He took it out, went to an extension phone on the wall by the door, and spoke briefly,
his back to me. When he hung up and turned, he asked crisply, “Sharon, do you want in on this or not?”

His cut-to-the-chase tone alerted me that something big had happened. I stood. “Yes, I want in.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Azadi Consulate. There’s been a bombing attempt, and one of our operatives is injured.”

Two

The police had barricaded Jackson Street between Octavia and Laguna, so we parked around the corner from the consulate. The
pavement there was at a steep grade, but Renshaw neglected to curb the wheels and set the emergency brake of RKI’s maroon-and-gray
mobile unit. As he stepped down, the van lurched backwards. I grabbed the brake handle, pulled it up, then twisted the steering
wheel to the left. Renshaw acknowledged his mistake with a rueful headshake.

When I joined him on the sidewalk, he muttered, “Dan would’ve laughed his ass off at that—and then made me pay out of pocket
for the damage.”

“You were preoccupied.” I quickened my step to keep pace with him. “Surely Kessell could understand that.”

“That’s no excuse—and I wouldn’t accept it either. Neither Dan nor I tolerates any margin for error.”

Given their pasts, I could understand why. Renshaw had been an agent on the DEA’s elite—and now defunct—Centac task force,
based in Southeast Asia. When it was disbanded in the mid-eighties, he disappeared into Indochina and emerged a wealthy man
several years later; I’d never had the nerve to ask him about that period in his life. I did know that earlier, in the seventies,
he’d accepted finder’s fees for steering important people who wished to remove themselves and their assets from the war-torn
Asian countries to an air-charter service run out of Bangkok by Dan Kessell. Hy—who had been discharged from the marines after
a flare-up of his childhood asthma—had been one of Kessell’s pilots; guilt stemming from his actions and experiences during
those turbulent, terrible years had consumed him for nearly two decades. Not so with Kessell, though; on him they had left
no mark. He was, according to my lover, the same resilient and apparently conscienceless man of the early days in Thailand.

Renshaw and I rounded the corner onto Jackson. A police barricade blocked access and farther down I spotted squad cars, a
fire truck, the bomb squad van, and an ambulance. Word about this latest bombing had already reached the media; reporters
and camerapeople clamored to be allowed onto the scene, and the uniformed officers were having trouble controlling them. Renshaw
and I pushed through the crush.

As Gage held up his I.D., a Channel Seven cameraman swung around and began filming us. I stepped back so Renshaw’s body blocked
view of me; already I had too high a public profile, and having my presence there broadcast could hamper my ability to investigate.
The officer moved the barricade to let us pass, then shoved the persistent cameraman back when he tried to follow. Immediately
he began yowling about the public’s right to know. I shot him a disgusted look and trotted after Renshaw.

In front of the consulate, the excitement was dying down. The fire crew prepared to leave, the bomb squad van pulled away,
and a pair of cops leaned against a black-and-white, talking in low voices. Neighbors from the surrounding houses and apartment
buildings began to wander home, their hushed conversations in counterpoint to the harsh sounds from the emergency-vehicle
radios. I recognized an unmarked blue Buick that belonged to the task force.

The big creamy-white house was set farther back from the sidewalk than its neighbors, surrounded by a low ornamental fence
and fronted by a formal garden. To the left of the brick walk leading to its front door lay the ruins of a fountain; jagged
chunks of concrete were scattered around its tiled base, and water had gushed from its piping, soaking and puddling the ground.
The pipe, capped off now, leaned at a forty-five-degree angle.

I caught my breath, my skin prickling. The destruction here was nothing like what I’d seen after the bombing on the Mendocino
coast, but nevertheless it unnerved me. I swung my gaze to the right of the walk and saw a pair of paramedics standing over
a young woman on a stretcher. Her face was cut and abraded; water plastered her short blond hair to her skull.

Renshaw was talking with one of the paramedics. I went over and squatted down beside the RKI operative. “How’re you doing?”

“I feel like dog meat.” Her eyes were glazed by pain, but she sounded lucid.

Renshaw squatted down on the other side of her. “Holman,” he said, “how the hell did this happen?”

Her fingers spasmed against her thighs, but otherwise she didn’t react to his abruptness. As calmly as if she were being debriefed
at the office she said, “I was on grounds patrol when I saw what looked like a UPS man handing over a package at the door.
I checked for a truck. Wasn’t any. So I yelled at him, and he took off.”

“You allowed him to get away.”

Again Holman’s fingers tightened. “Yes. Mrs. Hamid’s granddaughter, Habiba, was the one who accepted the package. Today’s
her ninth birthday, and I guess she thought it was a present for her. She had already started to open it, so I grabbed it
and chucked it into the fountain.”

“Thus triggering the detonating device.”

Holman closed her eyes. Like all RKI’s people, she was a tough pro, but either the pain or the accusatory tone of Renshaw’s
questioning was getting to her.

Renshaw swiveled around to face a stocky young man who had come up behind him. “Well, Wilson,” he said, “where were you, that
a kid opened the door?”

Wilson shifted from foot to foot, his round face reddening. “I…don’t have any excuse for not being on the door, sir. But I
didn’t realize Habiba’d escaped from her nanny. The kid’s a sly one—”

“Jesus, if they can’t control a nine-year-old—” Renshaw broke off, his lips white with anger. After a moment he turned back
to Holman, briefly touched her arm. “They’ll take you to S.F. General now. You’ve got some bad cuts and a few broken ribs,
but nothing that can’t be fixed.”

Holman nodded, her eyes still closed. Renshaw stood and stalked off toward the fountain, ignoring the puddles and splashing
his trouser legs with water and mud. After a moment I followed. He stood with his arms folded, glaring down at the chunks
of concrete. “Jesus, what a fiasco,” he said, more to himself than to me. “They’ll both have to go, of course.”

“You’re firing them? I can understand about Wilson, but Holman risked her life to save the little girl.”

“It’s the margin for error again. The guy who delivered that package should never’ve gotten as far as the door. We can’t tolerate
slipups like that from any of our operatives.”

I was silent, wondering how long I’d have lasted with RKI. Not very, I decided. Lucky for me I hadn’t taken them up on their
offer of a job the year before.

Now I heard Joslyn’s husky voice coming from the consulate’s entryway. I looked over there and saw her step outside, followed
by a tall man who had the look of a federal agent, from his conservatively cut brown hair to his wing-tipped shoes. I started
over there, but Adah saw me and shook her head slightly. They went down the walkway and got into the blue Buick.

“Joslyn?” Renshaw asked softly.

I nodded.

“She wonders what you’re doing here.”

“I’ll explain to her later.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“What does that mean?”

He ignored my question. “We should talk with Mrs. Hamid now.” Taking my arm, he steered me to the door; the police officer
stationed there examined his I.D., then told us we’d find Mrs. Hamid in the library.

“Library” was a misnomer. True, there were bookcases on all four walls, but they contained few volumes and a great many art
objects—enough porcelain and jade and ivory and crystal to stock a fair-sized gallery. The gleaming hardwood floor was partially
covered by a deep blue Persian rug, and on a leather sofa in front of a leaded-glass window sat a heavyset woman in a plain
black suit. She nodded and motioned for us to join her.

Nothing about Malika Hamid’s demeanor suggested that she had nearly lost her granddaughter in a bombing attempt. She rose
when Renshaw made the introductions, taking my hand in a steady grasp and meeting my eyes with an equally steady gaze. When
she asked us to be seated, I was surprised to hear a cultivated British accent. Smiling faintly at my expression, she said,
“I was educated in England, as are most members of my family.”

As we sat down, Renshaw and I on chairs flanking the sofa, I took the opportunity to study the consul general. She was tall,
with thick gray hair fashioned in a plain knot; the severe style emphasized the square shape of her face. Her eyes were so
dark that it was difficult to tell where the pupils left off and the irises began, harder yet to read her expression. She
wore no makeup, no jewelry, no polish on her blunt fingernails. Malika Hamid cared nothing at all for artifice, and I sensed
a strong will and singularity of purpose beneath her gracious manner.

She immediately confirmed my feeling by saying to Renshaw, “I assume you are about to offer excuses for this breach of security.
None are welcome—or acceptable.”

“No excuses, no explanations,” he replied easily. “It was error on the part of my operatives. Of course they’ll be dismissed.
Before I left the office I requested replacements, and they’ll be on duty shortly.”

BOOK: A Wild and Lonely Place
13.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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