The Command

Maybe he was just numb, but suddenly it just didn’t seem to matter that much. He’d been shipwrecked, torpedoed, and tortured. Led men in combat. Where did Niles get off telling him he wasn’t a good officer? To hell with Niles’s opinion of him. And everybody else’s, too.

McCall came striding down the passageway, cool gaze seeking his. He watched with only the most perfunctory attempt to hide his admiration. Damn! She was good-looking after all.

5

Manama, Bahrain

Three blocks outside the main gate, in the rundown, predominantly Shi’a neighborhood west of the U.S. Naval Support Activity, a dark-eyed woman with a surgical mask over her face peered down at the body sprawled on the pavement. Blood and fluids stained the road. The driver stood beside the truck, smoking; the bicycle, crushed flat, was still pinned under the big double rear tires.

“He must have died instantly,” the traffic sergeant said in Arabic. “The wheel passed over his head.”

Aisha Ar-Rahim said a short du’a asking for help. Then she knelt and pulled the bloody sheet back, careful to touch it only with rubber-gloved fingertips, releasing the olfactory bouquet of the violently and recently dead.

The pathologist at Glynco, where she’d gone through federal law enforcement training, had warned the students before their introductory forensic autopsy. Blood, he’d said, was only part of that mingled smell. Its metallic tang could be flavored due to recent ingestion of foods, drugs, or alcohol. The lungs, liver, and kidneys all had peculiar odors. Bone had little smell, unless it was heated, as in amputations. Of course, any tissue that had been burned — in this case, from contact with the truck’s exhaust pipes, muffler — would have its own aroma. And finally, organ contents — bowel and bladder — would be part of the collection. Their odors were dependent on many things, including metabolites of vitamins, asparagus, alcohol, coffee, drugs, diseases, and, of course, the bacterial mixture in the feces.

Breathing through her mouth, after that first necessary whiff, she studied what lay beneath.

The skull had been crushed. But the face had not been destroyed. The right cheek hung down, exposing teeth carameled with tartar. She pressed the flap of flesh back into place, restoring the face to where she could visualize it in life. Black hair, brown eyes, weathered skin. Mustache, but no beard. About thirty, at a guess.

Aisha was from Harlem, New York. This was her second month in Bahrain as a special agent, specializing in foreign counterintelligence — although so far she hadn’t done any of it in her two years with the agency.

Which up to now, she thought, had been nowhere near this exciting. Though it was hard to see this as a high point.

Typically, a duty call would be answered by an admin person. The “investigative assistant,” a fancy name for the secretary, would notify the duty agent. After hours, after 5:00 P.M. or on the weekend, like now — it was Saturday — base security would contact the duty agent directly, who would then respond.

Which she was doing now, since the resident agent in charge was in Naples at the moment. When they’d told her where the body was, she’d started to put on a pants suit she often wore when she had to go off base. Then changed her mind, and chose instead a light but capacious abaya dress with long sleeves, low heels, and a scarf, which she’d converted to a hijab before getting out of the car. In the black leather purse locked in the white Suburban were a cell phone, a heavy, silver-toned badge with the seal of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a container of Mace, handcuffs, a little prayer rug, just big enough for her face and hands, that she’d bought on hajj, and a nine-millimeter SIG Sauer P228 loaded with 115-grain Cor-Bon +P+ hollow points.

She asked the police sergeant, in Arabic, “Tell me again why you called us.”

He smiled nervously, obviously still unclear who she was, though she’d already explained. “He has American ID.”

“You’re telling me he’s an American?”

“No, that he has American ID.”

She remembered to keep her voice softer, more polite than she would have if this was a crime scene investigation in the United States, or within the walls that sealed the American enclave from the Arab city around it. “May I see it, please?”

She flipped through the documents in the noon sunlight. The sergeant looked uneasy, keeping an eye on the passersby. The women were all in black, covered from head to toe, only darting eyes visible. Some tugged children. The men wore the long white cotton thobe that was the national dress of the island. The sergeant cleared his throat, and they dropped their glances and walked quickly past, sandals scuffing up dust.