Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

"I hate this place," he told Cheng.

She nodded around a mouthful of fish, chewed, swallowed. "I love it."

"You're a bloody tourist, Angela."

She shrugged, as if denying the accusation wasn't worth the effort. "You're paying."

"Yes, I am." He raised a hand-carefully-and flagged a surly young man, asking for a soda.

"No argument?" Cheng poked at a caper on her plate with her fork. "No let's go halvesies, no you've got the bigger budget?"

"No."

"You must really want something."

"Why's Box going through Chace's unmentionables?"

"Because they're like the FBI?" Cheng offered. "They suffer from the same intelligence equivalent of blue balls?"

"They know how to get themselves off," Crocker said. "That's what I'm afraid of."

The surly young man came back and placed Crocker's drink on the tiny table, hard enough that soda slopped over the sides, then lingered to take his order. Crocker asked for the pierogi and another napkin, lit a cigarette as the waiter departed.

"Come on, not while I'm eating."

"Especially while you're eating. What do you know?"

"What makes you think I know anything about why your Security Services-meaning Britain's-are looking at your people-meaning you specifically?"

"Because at last count the CIA was supplementing the income of roughly a quarter of the staff at Box."

Cheng grinned and pointed her fork at him. "You can't prove that. And even if you could, I'd deny everything."

"I'm serious, Angela. They've got her under close watch, it's not a check, it's something else. David Kinney came to me this morning trying to figure out what I know and left smug in the knowledge that the answer is nil. We're talking about my Head of Section. Anything happens to Chace, I lose one-third of my ops capability. Bad for me, bad for you, bad for the special relationship between our houses."

"You lose Chace, you lose more than a third," Cheng remarked, now using a small slice of rye bread to make an open-faced sandwich. "Lankford's untested."

"No, he's tested, he's yet to pass."

"Making my point."

She took a bite from her sandwich, then bent back in her chair to make room for the waiter's return. The young man dropped Crocker's plate on the table with the same finesse with which he'd delivered his drink, spilling more soda. He then dropped a napkin on Crocker's lap before departing again for the bar.

"You're sure he's not Russian mob?" Crocker remarked.

"No, he makes porn," Cheng said. "This is his day job. His mother runs the place. Came over during the war, her husband was with the Polish exiles."

"You checked?"

"Sure. Didn't you?"

"About Chace."

Cheng shook her head. "You should talk to your own people, not me."

"I've tried. They are being unusually reticent."

"Meaning you couldn't bully it out of Weldon?"

"Meaning Weldon has suddenly developed a spine. Meaning Rayburn is out of the loop, whatever it is, and meaning that I can't get in to see C."

"C's avoiding you?"

"Kate's been trying to get me in to see him all morning, keeps being told that he's out of the building or in meetings."

Cheng stopped eating, used her napkin to wipe the corners of her mouth. The gesture was deliberate and slow, and Crocker knew she was using the time to collect her thoughts, and he knew the thoughts weren't pleasant ones. The mirth was draining from her face much the way ice melts under running water.

"You need to start looking for a new Minder," Cheng told him softly. "You're about to be one short. Again."

Coming from anyone else, Crocker would have dismissed the statement as hyperbole. But for all the banter between them, all the jokes, Cheng didn't make cracks like that, not about the lives of his people or hers.

"What in the hell is going on?" Crocker asked.

"They're giving her to the Saudis, Paul."

"What?"

"They're giving her to-"

"I heard you. What the bloody hell does that mean, Angela? The Saudis have no reason to be looking at her, they've no reason to be looking at us. They were looking at the Israelis for what happened in Yemen."

"I know."

"What changed?"

"The world." She folded her napkin beside her plate, pushed back from the table, rising. "Let's go to my office. That way you can scream and shout and break things." • "It's in the Wadi-as-Sirhan, somewhere south-southeast of the Jordanian border." Cheng turned the photographs on her desk, facing them toward Crocker, standing opposite. "Complement anywhere from forty to eighty terrorists, mix of veterans from campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Chechnya, along with new recruits, mostly pulled from the madrassa-and-mosque crowd in Saudi, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan… you get the idea."

"Who claims it?"

"You don't know?" Cheng looked genuinely surprised. "It's your pals in the Harakat ul-Mujihadin, Abdul Aziz faction. Same gang that set fire to your lovely subway system. The camp's equipped for the whole nine yards, Paul-firing exercises, CQC, bomb-making, rhetoric. Word is it's higher education for the jihadis."

Crocker bent, giving the photographs a close examination. They were remarkably clear and uncompromising, and he guessed they had come from the latest-generation satellites the CIA now employed. In a couple of photographs, he was able to make out faces, gestures, even expressions, all of them captured from orbit.

"How recent are these?" he asked.

"These came in this morning, requested by the White House yesterday. There's another batch coming, the satellite's making a pass every seventy-nine minutes, and for the time being, it's a hot spot."

"Wadi-as-Sirhan." Crocker chewed on it, trying to connect the location with the facts in his memory. "That's Tabuk province, isn't it? Prince Salih was on the magistrate's council in Tabuk."

"Salih was the main source of income for the camp."

"But the camp hasn't dried up now that he's dead?"

"On the contrary, it's doing booming business. Maybe they were stashing away money for a rainy day, God only knows. The Mossad has hard intel that HUM-AA is liaising with Hamas and Al-Aqsa, bringing in bombing recruits."

Crocker, mildly alarmed, moved his look from the pictures to Cheng. "They're teaming the bombers with the regulars?"

"Mossad thinks that's the plan. Your pal Landau apparently pushed a rather strongly worded pack up the chain to his Chief, and his Chief in turn presented it to his Prime Minister and select members of his Cabinet. Mossad Research believes that the bombers are being paired with trained jihadis to act as their cutouts and handlers. The jihadis move the bombers to their target locations, assemble the explosives, wire up the bombers, and turn them loose."

"And from the Wadi-as-Sirhan…," Crocker said.

"Yeah, from the Wadi-as-Sirhan, they've got access to the whole Middle East. With the mess in Iraq right now, the White House is more than a little antsy that we're going to be seeing more dead soldiers on television, and that's the last thing the President wants. Not to mention what it could do in places like Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan."

"Why stop there? If they're willing to give it the effort, they could strike a lot closer to home."

"There's that, too."

Crocker made a face, discarded the photograph in his hand with a flick of the wrist, turning away from the desk. On the far wall of Cheng's office was a framed photograph of the President of the United States, and beside it, another of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. An American flag hung limply from a pole in the corner, between the couch and a bookshelf.

He heard Cheng moving, then the rattle of a cap coming off a bottle and the whiff of alcohol splashing into a glass. When he turned back, she was standing by the sidebar behind her desk, offering him a cut-glass tumbler of scotch.