The Solomon Effect (22 page)

Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia: Thursday 29 October
4:00
P.M.
local time

Borz Zakaev kept a heavy foot on the gas as he headed east
toward Yasnaya Polyana. It was only late afternoon, but already the light was beginning to fade from the white, cloud-laden sky.

This entire oblast gave him the creeps, with its dark bogs and empty, silent houses. He’d heard it said that before the war, East Prussia had been one of the most intensely cultivated and heavily populated regions in Europe, second only to the Netherlands. No one would believe that now.

He put his foot down harder and heard the
blip
of a siren. Casting a quick glance in the rearview mirror, he saw a militia van with flashing red and blue lights coming up behind him, and swore.

The snow began to fall late in the afternoon.

Stefan stood in the soaring doorway of the abandoned granary and watched the big, fluffy flakes float down to cover the world in a hushed wonder.

It had been sometime before dawn when the old farmer reigned in to let Stefan and the pup down some two kilometers before Yasnaya Polyana. “You’re going home, aren’t you?” said the farmer.

When Stefan only stared up at him, the old man laughed, displaying a scant collection of stained, gaping teeth. “If someone’s after you, home’s the first place they’ll look. You know that, don’t you?”

Stefan tried to swallow the sudden lump in his throat, failed, and simply nodded, his lips pressed tight together.

“You take care, you hear?” said the farmer, and spanked the reins against his mules’ rumps.

The old man had only confirmed Stefan’s worst fears. And so, even though he was so close to home that he imagined he could practically smell his mother’s freshly baked bread and hear the honking of the geese as she walked down to the pond at feeding time, Stefan and the pup had come here, to the vast ruins of what had once been the royal stables of Trakehnen.

The stud farm was the birthplace of the famous warm-blooded Trakehner horses, begun back in the eighteenth century by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I. Stefan had heard it said that at one time the village of Yasnaya Polyana had been called Trakehnen, too, back in the days when Kaliningrad had been a German land and the stud farm had housed more than twelve hundred horses and three times that many people.

Now, the horses and their handlers were all gone. The dilapidated old mansion, with its towering stucco walls and moss-covered red-tiled roof, had been turned into a school. But the rest of the vast stud lay deserted beneath the falling snow, a crumbling ruin of brick stables and grain silos and overgrown, empty pastures.

Stefan felt the dog’s cold nose thrust against his hand. Hun
kering down, he threw an arm across the pup’s shoulders and drew it close. From here he could look out across the fields to the old riding ring and the school beyond. “What do we do now? Hmmm, boy? Any suggestions?”

But the pup only gazed up at him with silent, trusting brown eyes.

Beirut: Thursday 29 October 5:00
P.M.
local time

Hotel Offredi was built into the side of a dusty, weed-strewn
hillside scarred by piles of broken rocks and bulldozed raw earth. Cheap aluminum-framed windows reflected the glare of a pitiless hot sun that wilted the fig tree growing in a cinderblock container near the front door. Rows of rusting rebars thrust up from the walls at the roofline, as if in anticipation of another story that might or might not be built someday.

Inside, they found a thickset woman in a long dress and headscarf seated behind a desk with a simple sign that said in Arabic, R
OOMS
T
O
L
ET.
English and French-speaking patrons didn’t usually make it into this part of town.

“I wanted to ask you,” October whispered to Jax as they followed the woman up a set of bare stairs to a narrow hall. “What exactly was the crop growing around Badr al’Din’s compound?”

“You didn’t recognize it?”

The hall was starkly bare, the floor paved with cheap tile
inexpertly grouted by someone in too much of a hurry to wipe up stray blobs of mortar.

“No,” said October. “What was it?”

“Cannabis.”

“Cannabis? You mean—” She broke off. “Oh.”

Wordlessly, the woman leading them thrust open the door to a small room with a hard bed covered in faded red chenille. A battered, fifties-style blond-veneered chest of drawers and bedside table, and an orange plastic chair completed the room’s furnishings. Everything was worn and cheap but meticulously clean. Mohammed had taught his followers that cleanliness is next to godliness, and they still struggled valiantly against dust and sand and poverty to please God.

“Shukran,”
said October.

The woman nodded and withdrew.

Jax went to stand at the window overlooking the mean street below. A withered old man, his head down, pushed a wheelbarrow loaded with propane tanks past a handful of noisy, half-grown boys playing what looked like a version of
Star Wars.
Otherwise, the street was quiet in the mid-afternoon sun. Yet, Jax’s palms were damp, and he could feel waves of heat rising from his stomach to his throat. He didn’t like this setup. He didn’t like it at all.

“It’s beginning to sound more and more as if there really was an atomic bomb on that sub,” said October, dropping her bag on the floor with a thump. “Or at least, the material to make a dirty bomb.”

Jax glanced back at her. She sank down on the hard plastic chair, hooked her heels on the edge of the seat, and drew her knees up so she could clasp them to her chest. He said, “Maybe. Maybe not.”

She tossed her head to shake the loose strands of honey-colored hair away from her face. “So what exactly are we hoping to get out of this mysterious contact of Azzam’s?”

“Confirmation.” Jax pushed away from the window.

“Is that really necessary at this point?”

“It’s always necessary. Remember the run up to the Iraq War? How certain individuals cherry-picked unconfirmed intelligence suggesting Iraq still had a WMD program and was in contact with al-Qa’ida? It was all bullshit.”

“Yeah, but that was deliberately planted bullshit, designed specifically to trick the American people into supporting a war. This is different.”

A dusty old white Mercedes crawled down the street, scattering the laughing children. Jax watched it through narrowed eyes. “I keep coming back to that remote viewing session you tried in Bremen.”

“You mean the one that didn’t work?”

“Yeah. That one.”

She pushed up from the chair. “It didn’t work because it was just too weird and distracting, having the Colonel task me over the phone. And because I knew too much about the target. When a viewer knows too much up front, their conscious, analytical mind can kick in and block out access to—”

Jax held a finger to his lips. She fell silent.

He heard it again. The scruff of footsteps on the stairs. The light treads of two men in the tiled hall.

The footsteps stopped outside their room. He saw her eyes widen.

“Mr. Alexander?” A light knock sounded on the door.

Jax moved to open it carefully.

Two young men pushed into the room. Lithe and clean shaven, they wore fatigue pants and T-shirts with black-and-white kafiyas draped rakishly around their necks. Both carried MAC-10 machine pistols.

“Kaif halak,”
said the one in a white T-shirt decorated with a portrait of Che Guevara. He looked slightly older than his companion, perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five. “This is
Abu Elias,” he said, nodding to his companion. “You can call me Amin.” His gaze flicked to October, one eyebrow cocking in inquiry. “You’re Ensign Guinness?”

Jax didn’t like the way the Arab used her Naval rank. She nodded, her throat working visibly as she swallowed.

The one called Abu Elias couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. He said something in a low voice to Amin that Jax didn’t catch.

Amin nodded and said, “You will both take off your watches and empty your pockets, please. Very slowly and carefully.”

Jax piled up change, wallet, phone, and keys on the scarred dresser top. The only thing October had in the pockets of her chinos was a small yellow Burt’s Bees lip balm.

“Now hold your arms out at your sides and stand very still.”

Tucking his machine pistol under one arm, Abu Elias reached into his pocket and came out with a small black box with steady red and green LED lights. He carefully passed the box over each of them in turn, like an FTA employee checking suspicious-looking airplane passengers.

“What is that?” asked October.

“It’s a radio frequency detector,” said Amin. “It detects anything that emits an electronic impulse—hidden transmitters, tape recorders, tracking devices—whatever.”

“We’re not hiding anything.”

Amin flashed her a smile that showed his teeth. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t take your word for it. You”—he nodded to Jax—“will sit. But I must ask you, Ensign, to take off your shoes.”

Aware of Abu Elias’s narrowed gaze upon him, Jax settled carefully onto the hard plastic chair. He now had a really,
really
bad feeling about all of this.

October said, “My shoes?”

“Min fadlik.”
Amin turned to survey the two bags standing just inside the door. “Which is yours?”

“The green one.”

Hunkering down beside it, the Arab laid the bag on its side and unzipped it. “Excuse me,” he said as he rummaged through her things, “but it is necessary.”

“Why?” she asked, kicking off her tennis shoes.

“It’s too easy to hide things in the soles and heels of shoes.” He came up with a pair of navy-and-white-striped flip-flops. “Here. You will wear these.”

She slipped on the flip-flops without argument. “I’m not carrying a weapon.”

“Nevertheless, I’m afraid I must also check your hair.”

“My hair?”

“My apologies.” Reaching out, he systematically ran his fingers through her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair. “Women have been known to hide razor blades in their hair.”

She cast an uncertain glance to where Jax sat in the orange plastic chair, his hands resting carefully on his thighs. They were both painfully aware that no one was checking his hair or making him take off his shoes.

As if conscious of the train of Jax’s thoughts, Amin said to him, “You are to stay here, with Abu Elias. Only the girl can come.”

“But—” Jax started to push out of his chair, then froze when the younger man made a
tssk
ing sound and jerked his head back, his finger twitching on the machine pistol’s trigger.

“Laa. Khalleek hawn!”

Jax sank back very slowly.

“Don’t worry,” said Amin. “She will come to no harm.” He glanced at October. “Are you ready?”

They walked together down the narrow set of concrete stairs
to the hotel’s small, spartan lobby. Tobie noticed that the older woman in the long dress and headscarf who had been behind the desk when they arrived was no longer there.

Outside, the evening was hot and dry, with a warm wind blowing out of the east that sifted dust over the stark, stone-faced facades of the neighborhood’s buildings. The sidewalk here was made of swirled tiles of alternating red and yellow clay, some cracked, some missing entirely. They dodged piles of builders’ sand, a battered wheelbarrow encrusted with dried concrete, a spindly olive tree struggling to survive. Tobie was aware of two women chatting beside a doorway who fell silent as she drew abreast, the women’s heads turning to watch her pass.

Amin touched her arm. “This way.”

They ducked down a narrow passage kept shaded and dank by tall apartment blocks hung with laundry drying limply in the fetid air. The passage emptied onto a street similar to the one they’d just left, although with more small shops, their front windows displaying their wares. They passed a
bakery with stacks of fresh flatbread and a tray of croissants, and a tiny shoe store with boxes of children’s plaid slippers in a range of sizes. A man in a dark sweater stood at the corner, near a grocery selling Digestive biscuits and bananas, bottled water and yoghurt. As they passed, Tobie noticed he had a Bluetooth in his ear, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the street.

“Why just me?” said Tobie.

Amin shook his head and kept walking.

They made three or four such turns, winding back on themselves, passing more men—and one young woman—wearing Bluetooth earpieces and quietly watching the street behind them. As they drew abreast of the woman, she nodded to Amin and said quietly, “You’re clean. No one is following you.”

Halfway down the next block, Amin drew up in front of an ancient stone building with a bullet-scarred facade. Staring through the dusty windows, Tobie could see a small restaurant crowded with aluminum tables and chairs with seats covered in dark green plastic. More tables and chairs spilled outside onto the narrow sidewalk.

This was the time of day when such places were typically filled with old men smoking hubble-bubbles, drinking coffee, and playing backgammon. But Tobie could see only one man, sipping tea by himself at a table near the kitchen door.

Amin nodded toward the restaurant’s entrance. “You go in. He’s waiting for you.”

She hesitated a moment, then pushed open the door. Her escort stayed outside.

Inside, the air was heavy with the scents of cinnamon and allspice and coffee. From his table at the rear of the restaurant, the man watched her approach. His features were sharply formed, his nose aquiline, his eyes large and deeply
set, his brows heavy and straight. At first she supposed he must be somewhere in his forties, with a heavy dark mustache and dark hair he wore clipped short. But as she drew closer, she realized he was older than she first took him to be, his hair touched by gray at the temples, the skin beside his eyes creased by years of staring into a hot Mediterranean sun. He wore gray chinos and a well-cut black polo shirt, and he might have been mistaken for a French businessman if it weren’t for the MP5 that rested casually across his lap.

“Please,” he said in heavily accented English. “Sit.”

Tobie pulled out the chair opposite him and sat.

A thickset middle-aged woman appeared with fresh tea and another cup from the kitchen. After she had left, the man said, “Do you know who I am?”

Tobie took a quick swallow of the tea and burned her tongue. “No.”

One eyebrow rose in polite incredulity. “You’re not with the CIA?”

“No. I’m in the Navy.”

“Why have they sent you?”

“I’m a linguist.”

He switched to Arabic. “You speak Arabic?”

She answered him easily. “I lived in Dubai as a child.”

A wry smile curled his lips, lifting the edges of his mustache. “You speak Arabic like a Beduin.”

“And you speak Arabic like a Palestinian.”

He tipped his head to one side, acknowledging the point. “My family is originally from Gaza.”

“You’re with Hamas?”

He blinked and took a slow swallow of his tea before answering. “My apologies for not introducing myself. My name is Farrah. George Farrah.”

“Ah. So you’re a Christian,” she said. Arab men named George were always Christians.

“We Palestinians were the first Christians, you know,” he said softly. In Arabic, the word for Christian was Masihi, from the Aramaic word for Messiah. He leaned forward, his hazel eyes watching her face. “A hundred years ago, Arab Christians made up 40 percent of the population of Palestine. We are the descendents of the Jews who followed Jesus, of the Canaanites and Philistines who were here before the Jews but followed Christ, too, and of the Romans and Crusaders who came to the Holy Land and stayed. Now…” He spread his hands wide. “Now we are scattered all over the world in our own diaspora.”

He had unexpectedly graceful hands, with fingers that were long and lean and finely tapered, like a musician’s or an artist’s. As she watched his hands, he took another sip of his tea and said, “Why are you interested in Jasha Baklanov?”

“I’m interested in what Baklanov tried to sell you.”

“I didn’t buy it.”

“I know. I’m trying to find out who has it now.”

“That, I can’t help you with.”

Tobie leaned forward, her palms pressing flat against the aluminum tabletop. “The people who originally contacted Baklanov found out he was planning to double-cross them, and they killed him.”

George Farrah nodded. “I had heard he was dead.”

“Do you know who hired the
Yalena
to raise the U-boat?”

“Jasha never said.”

Tobie wasn’t sure whether he was telling the truth or not. She said, “You can’t tell me anything about them?”

Farrah rolled one shoulder in a typically Mediterranean shrug. “He said something about a Chechen, but he didn’t mention any names.”

“Chechens?” Tobie drew in a quick breath. “Could Baklanov have been dealing with al-Qa’ida?”

Farrah’s heavy brows drew together. “What would al-Qa’ida want with this?”

“Everyone says they’ve been trying to get their hands on a nuke for years.”

He sat back with a bark of laughter that ended abruptly. “Is that what you think Baklanov was selling? A nuclear weapon?”

Tobie shook her head, not understanding. “If it’s not a bomb, then what is it?”

Farrah sat very still. When he spoke, his voice was a harsh whisper. “Something worse. Something far worse.”

Tobie stared at him. “What could be worse than an atom bomb?”

“What could be worse?” He leaned forward, one hand coming up to punctuate the air between them, his lean musician’s fingers delicately curled. “I’ll tell you what would be worse: a biological weapon with the potential to kill two hundred million people or more.”