Legends

“The principal asset who got close to Daoud didn’t have an understudy?”

“We didn’t get around to it in time,” Kiick admitted.

“What else can I expect to find at Triple Border besides ravenous crocodiles?”

Kiick—Lincoln had a nodding acquaintance with him from having sat in on several of the rare joint CIA-FBI coordinating sessions—slid an FBI briefing book across the conference table. “What we’ve picked up is all in here,” he said. “You’re likely to come across a Texan who goes by the name Leroy Streeter. He’s what we call a crossover—in his case, an Aryan nationalist nut who is making common cause with the Muslim fundamentalists. Mind you, the mix is potentially lethal. If and when Muslim terrorists do attack the United States, the white supremacists could provide infrastructure support and eventually hit men, since it’s easier for an American to gain entrance to public places than an Arab from the Middle East. Leroy Streeter may or may not be the Texan’s real name, by the way. The guy you’ll meet—he’s five foot two, a hundred and thirty pounds, speaks with a Texas drawl—travels under a passport made out to a Leroy Streeter Jr. Leroy Streeter Sr. was the führer of a Texas-based white supremacist splinter group called the Nationalist Congress; he died of cancer in Huntsville while he was serving time for blowing up a black church in Birmingham. State Department consulate in Mexico City issued a passport to a Leroy Streeter Jr. four years ago, but Argentina’s Secretariat for State Intelligence thinks that he drowned on a Rio beach two years back; as far as we know, no body was recovered. Which means that Leroy Streeter Jr. has risen from the dead or someone is using his passport. Either way, he’s high on the FBI’s most wanted list. “

“Don’t let yourself get sidetracked,” Crystal Quest told Lincoln. “Leroy Streeter is not the target of this operation. The person we’re after down there is the Saudi.”

“Does the Saudi have a name?” Lincoln inquired.

“Everyone has a name,” Quest snapped. “FBI just doesn’t know it.”

“From what our principal asset was able to tell us before his untimely death,” continued Kiick, unfazed by Quest’s dig at the Bureau, “we understand the Saudi is the kingpin of a fundamentalist group that recently surfaced as a blip on our radar screen. It’s been operating out of Afghanistan since the Russians were evicted from the country two years ago and calls itself al-Qa’ida, which means ‘The Base.’ The Saudi appears to be organizing al-Qa’ida cells across Europe and Asia and running them from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.”

“How do I get to this Saudi?”

“With any luck, he gets to you,” Quest said. “He’s in the market for explosives, lots of it. The FBI asset picked up rumors that the Saudi is shopping around for a truckload and is offering a small fortune if it can be delivered to an address in the United States. The explosives may be the tip of the iceberg—the Saudi may have his heart set on acquiring something that will render the explosives more lethal.”

“You’re talking about a dirty bomb,” Lincoln guessed.

“He’s talking about gift wrapping the explosives with plutonium or enriched-uranium radioactive waste,” Quest said, “which would result in the contamination of a wide area when the charge is detonated. Hundreds of thousands could be effected. It’s because of this threat that the president decided to bring the CIA into the picture.”

Kiick said, “Mind you, Lincoln—I understand that that’s the name you’re using now—the business about a dirty bomb is a worst-case scenario, and pure speculation.”

Quest ignored the FBI representative. “We’re going to come at the Saudi obliquely,” she told Lincoln. “We know of an al-Qa’ida cell in the Balkans that’s been running guns and ammunition to the Muslims in Sarajevo in the belief that war between the Serbs and Bosnians is inevitable. Guy who directs it is an Azerbaijani who uses the name Sami Akhbar. Our plan is to hang you out to dry on the Dalmatian coast, which is Sami’s stamping ground, and let him stumble across you. Once you’ve established your bona fides and whet his appetite, you reach the Saudi by working your way up the chain of command. In Triple Border, he’s said to use Daoud as a doorkeeper; nobody gets to the Saudi without getting past the Egyptian.”