In other words, the woman was a black hole, a nonentity. Kealey knew how much it bothered Harper that she’d never been caught, but as he’d just said, there had been no progress on that front. This realization brought Kealey to his next point.
“John, it’s good to see you again, but what exactly are you doing here?”
The deputy director didn’t respond right away. Instead, he picked up his beer and swirled the contents thoughtfully.
“I’m surprised to hear you ask me that first,” he finally said. “I thought you might be wondering how I found you.” He looked up and studied the younger man. “You know, I have a few questions of my own. For instance, I’d like to know why you haven’t set foot on U.S. soil in two and a half months. I mean, I spend half that time looking for you, and when I finally catch up, I find you…” He trailed off and lifted his arms, as if to include the whole country.
There was an unspoken question there, but Kealey wasn’t sure how to answer it. When he’d set out three months earlier, it was without a plan. Without a real idea of what he was looking for. But whatever it was, he’d found it on the alpine tundra and the vast, seemingly endless ice fields of Iceland. He’d found it in Alaska, Tanzania, Patagonia, and all the other places he’d seen in recent months. For lack of a better word, it was solitude, the kind of terrain where one could walk for days without hearing a sound other than the wind. It was what he had wanted at the time—what he still wanted, to a certain degree—and he couldn’t explain why. Naomi’s disappearance had played a role, but that was only part of it. Something else had instilled in him the desire to get away from it all, though he had yet to identify the secondary cause for his restless behavior.
“I’d also like to know where you picked up a French passport in the name of Joseph Briand,” Harper continued. He paused expectantly. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to volunteer the information.”
Kealey gave a wan smile, and that was answer enough.
“I didn’t think so. It’s funny, seeing how you don’t even speak French. A Saudi passport would have been far more—”
“Comment savez-vous que je ne parle pas français?”
“Okay, so you speak a little French.” The older man couldn’t conceal a small, fleeting smile of his own. “It’s good to see you’re expanding your horizons.”
“Just trying to keep my mind active.”
“Sounds like you’re ready to return to the ranks.”
“Not in this lifetime.” Kealey shook his head and looked away. “And if that’s why you’re here, John, you’re wasting your time. I’m not interested. I’ve done my part.”
“We’ve already played this game, Ryan, on more occasions than I care to recall. You say the same thing every time, but when it comes down to the wire, you always—”
“I meant it when I said it before,” the younger man shot back. “And I mean it now.” His face tightened suddenly, his dark eyes retreating to some hidden point in the past. “I just didn’t walk away when I should have. That was my biggest mistake. There was always something else that had to be done. Before it was Vanderveen, and at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. But you know what it cost me to track him down, and then last year, with Naomi…”
Harper nodded slowly, his face assuming a somber expression. “I know what it cost you, Ryan, and I know what it cost Naomi.” He hesitated, then said, “You may not believe this, but I personally advised the president against bringing you into this matter. I told him everything you just said to me. I told him that you’ve done your part. That you wouldn’t be interested. He didn’t want to hear a word. After what you did in New York last year, he won’t have it any other way. As far as David Brenneman is concerned, you’re the first and only choice, at least when it comes to the current situation.”
“And you couldn’t say no to the president,” Kealey said sarcastically. “Is that it?” He didn’t bother asking what “the current situation” was; simply put, he didn’t care to know.
“That’s part of it,” Harper conceded. “But there’s another reason you need to be involved, and once you hear me out, I think you’ll feel the same way.”
Kealey studied the older man for a long moment without speaking. Jonathan Harper was one of the smartest people he knew, but he could also be extremely manipulative. They had known each other for nearly a decade, ever since Harper had first “sheep-dipped” him for an off-the-books assignment in Syria. “Sheep-dipping” was a term that referred to the temporary recruitment of active-duty soldiers for “black,” or deniable, operations. Usually, the CIA had a hand in the process, and Kealey’s first task was no exception. At the time he had been a captain in the U.S. Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group, and that assignment—the assassination of a senior Islamic militant—had changed him forever, as well as putting him on the path to a new career.
Since then, he and Harper had become good friends, but the job always came first, and Kealey knew the other man wouldn’t hesitate to impose on their relationship. He had done it before, and Kealey had always been up to the task. He wanted to refuse this time and knew he would have been justified in doing so. But while the older man’s face was as implacable as ever, there was something in his tone that gave Kealey pause. He could tell there was more to the current situation than Harper was letting on, and that made the decision for him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll hear what you have to say, but I’m not committing to anything. Let’s get that straight from the start.” Kealey lifted his glass and drained the contents. “What’s this about, anyway?”
Harper pushed a plain manila folder across the table, then rose and collected their empty glasses. “Read through that, and then we’ll talk.”
CHAPTER 2
ORAEFI
“This guy doesn’t have much of a track record,” Kealey said ten minutes later. He closed the folder and tossed it onto the table. “And there’s nothing in that pile of paper to suggest he’s a threat. At least not to us.”
“Have you ever even heard of him?” Harper asked. He had returned with two fresh beers a few minutes earlier, but had sat quietly as he waited for Kealey to finish reading.
“The name seems familiar, but no, I don’t really know who he is.”
“Well, allow me to enlighten you, as the file is a little thin when it comes to his background. Amari Saifi is forty years old, Algerian born, and a former paratrooper in that country’s army, hence his nom de guerre, Abderrazak al-Para. He’s also a senior figure in the GSPC, otherwise known as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. Since it came to prominence in the late nineties, the GSPC has been responsible for countless acts of terrorism in Algeria, most notably the kidnapping of thirty-two European tourists in 2003. That incident was masterminded by Saifi, and it was also what brought him to the attention of our government. To be fair, we weren’t really interested in the act itself. We were more concerned with how it all turned out in the end.”
“What do you mean by that?” Kealey had looked through the file with a slight degree of interest, but he didn’t know anything about Saifi or the GSPC, so it didn’t make much sense to him. One thing in particular had left