Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

"You're certain?" Hewitt asked.

"Positive," she told him as she began checking the weapon. "No trouble at the airport, no shadows on the way to the hotel, nothing since. There's a Frenchman in the group named Billiery; at first I thought he might be a plant. He's not. He's a student."

"Keeping his hands to himself, I hope?"

"He is now," Chace said. "I think it's safe to say that the only people who know I'm here are the two of us and a handful of people in London."

"And another handful in Tel Aviv."

Chace looked up from the gun in her hand. "That suspicion or something more?"

"Straight from D-Ops. I don't know why he wanted it passed along, but there's a lot I don't know. Presumably it means something to you."

The cheerful grin came back, and Chace wondered if it was affect or sincerity. It didn't much matter to her, and she wasn't inclined to answer, so she shrugged and went back to examining the Walther. Content that it would do its job when called upon, she set it aside and moved onto the task of loading the clip.

"What's the word on Faud?"

"Normally we'd lay down a bundle of riyals and buy information," Hewitt said. "But London told us to go softly, so it proved a little more difficult. He arrived yesterday with his bodyguards, six of them. He's staying with Saleh Al-Hebshi, in the Old City. Al-Hebshi is one of the louder resident Wahhabist imams, normally works out of the Al-Jami' al-Kamir-the Great Mosque-but seems to be favoring the Qubbat Talha Mosque a little more of late. Hebshi was linked to one of the Yemenis who rammed the USS Cole in 2000."

"When yesterday?"

"Did he arrive? Late afternoon. Arrived on a private jet from Jeddah, landed fifteen-forty, was met by Al-Hebshi at the airport. Taken by four-wheel-drive convoy to Al-Hebshi's home."

"How large was the convoy?"

"Three vehicles. Al-Hebshi had two guards of his own." Hewitt's look was full of sympathy. "I'm afraid you're going to find it very hard to get Faud alone."

Chace finished with the clip, set it aside, and put out her cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand, then gave Hewitt a reappraisal. Number Twos were the legmen for London, while the Number Ones maintained cover and attended the day-to-day running of the Station. Most every One, and quite a few Twos, viewed a Minder's arrival in their terrain with hostility or loathing or both. Minders were trouble for a Station, sent in to do a job, to get a result, and then to depart once more. For the Station, that quite often meant the residents had a mess to clean up, a politically sensitive, potentially law-breaking mess.

So Chace was used to dealing with recalcitrant Twos and bitter Ones who wanted nothing more than for her to leave them alone.

Hewitt didn't seem to be one of those, and while she didn't show it to him, she appreciated the fact.

She swept the box and suppressor from the map, saying, "Show me where Al-Hebshi lives."

"I'm ahead of you there." Hewitt removed the poster from the case, slid the elastic off its end and onto his wrist, and then unrolled it in front of her, revealing a detailed map of the Old City. He used the gun and the box of ammunition to weigh the ends down. "Think you'll find this a bit more useful than that one provided by the General Tourism Authority. You'll see I've already marked the key spots."

She stared at him. "All of them?"

Hewitt seemed confused for a second, then shook his head. "No, not all of them. The place you're thinking of, I think, would be right about here."

He set an index finger on the map, indicating a block well outside the walls of the Old City. There was no other indication of the safehouse aside from the pressure of his finger on the paper.

Chace nodded, and Hewitt retracted his finger. She studied the map, noting the streets and the street names, and particularly how the same street seemed to switch identities several times within the space of only a few blocks. The Great Mosque was marked, as was the Qubbat Talha. She stayed focused on the map for several minutes, long enough for Hewitt to realize that no questions were immediately forthcoming, and so he moved to one of the two chairs in the room, beside the television, and settled himself.

It wouldn't do, Chace decided. She had to get into the Old City away from the tour, learn the lay of the land herself. She'd have to see Al-Hebshi's place, to verify what she already suspected: there was no way she'd be able to get to Faud as long as he was inside. And if Faud's travel in San'a' was, as she suspected, going to be conducted via four-wheel drive, she wasn't likely to get a crack at him in transit, either. At least not a crack at him where a twenty-two-caliber semiautomatic with seven shots would make a difference.

So far, almost every excursion she'd made had been within the confines of the tour group, an act to maintain cover more than anything else. The thought of wandering through San'a' alone didn't bother Chace; this wasn't Saudi, and while women here still lived very different lives apart from the men, the same rules simply did not apply to foreign women, seen as a strange kind of "third sex." As long as she remained culturally sensitive, traveling alone through the Old City wouldn't be a problem, and she had packed the wardrobe to do just that. A long skirt that fell to her ankles, a loose top that fell almost to midthigh and would remain unbelted to hide her shape, and a scarf to conceal her hair were all that modesty demanded.

Yemeni women, on the other hand, moved through their days hooded in their black baltas, shapeless cotton coat-slash-cloak combinations that effectively hid any body beneath. Almost all of them wore veils as well. It was deception of an entirely different sort, a public modesty in the face of a private vanity. Chace knew for a fact that most of the women she'd seen on the streets wore midriff-baring tops and tight designer jeans beneath their baltas.

Chace rolled the map once more, offered it back to Hewitt. "Anything else?"

"Sorry, that's all. When I left it this morning, Hebshi and Faud were still at the house, though I suspect they went to the Great Mosque for their morning ziryat."

"Why the Great Mosque and not the other one?"

"I would think its name would tell you everything you need to know. It's truly spectacular, what little I've seen of it, and I've seen very little, and I've been here two years, now. It was built sometime around A.D. 630, when the Prophet was still living, just after Islam had come to Yemen. Man like Faud, I can't imagine him being content to worship anywhere else."

Chace considered that, then nodded. "You're a perceptive fellow, Mr. Hewitt."

He lifted the case in his hand, smiled again. "Perceptive enough to know that I'm desperately hoping I won't be seeing you again."

"It's mutual, I assure you." Chace followed him down the hall, unlocked the door so he could exit.

"Best of luck," Hewitt said.

Chace locked the door again after he'd left. • She started the walk through the Suq al-Milh, literally the salt market, though as far as Chace could ascertain, salt was a very small part of what was for sale. In truth, the suq seemed comprised of dozens of other, smaller markets, with vendors selling everything from silks to jewelry to uniquely curved tribesmen's daggers called jambiya. It was warm but not uncomfortable, and Chace assumed the sky was blue, but Ron's projected rain hadn't come, and as a result, clouds of dust hung endlessly in the air, kicked up by foot traffic or, worse, vehicle traffic.

Chace made her way through the noise, jabbered conversations, and blasts of music played from boom boxes, bootlegs sold by vendors. Men sat in the shade at the sides of the streets, talking, smoking, chewing qat, others walking hand in hand, showing their friendship. A few were armed, sporting antique carbines and rifles, weapons left over from the Ottoman occupation that had ended in 1911, as well as the modern Middle Eastern mainstay, the Kalashnikov AK-47.