Storm Front
Hezbollah will arrive this afternoon in Minneapolis, and will take a car, and will come here to stay in my apartment, and then I am supposed to meet him with Jones. This frightens me, and I have decided that the only way I may survive this is to become an informant. So, this is what I do.”
“Very, very smart,” Virgil said. “What’s this guy’s name?” To Yael, “Pass me the pepper.”
Awad said, “What? Pepper?”
“I was talking to somebody else,” Virgil said.
“I don’t know this name, but I am told he is important, and will call me,” Awad said.
“All right, I will tell you what,” Virgil said. “You’re now my official informant, and I will do everything I can to protect you. If any of this ever comes to court and you are implicated somehow, I will protect you.”
“This is good,” Awad said. “How should we proceed?”
“Whenever you learn anything, call me on the telephone. I will listen for you all day and all night.”
“I will do this,” he said. “Do not shoot me.”
“I won’t,” Virgil said.
“This other figure, you may shoot him.”
“I’ll try to avoid that, as well,” Virgil said. “He will have to call you to make arrangements to meet. Call me as soon as you hear.”
“I will. I thank you, and my father would thank you, if he was here to do that.”
Virgil rang off, pleased with himself, and Yael asked, “What was that?”
“A man put his life in my hands,” Virgil said. “That’s always good.”
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T HE BIGGER of the two Turks, the one with the knife, whose name was Timur Kaya, looked at the face of his cell phone, then pressed the “answer” bar and said, “Mr. Kennedy.”
Kennedy, a rental car clerk, said, “I have a location for you.”
“That is excellent. This comes through the hijack mechanism?”
“LoJack,” Kennedy said. “He shouldn’t be running from the cops in one of our cars, anyway.”
“You are quite correct,” said Kaya. He thought it was interesting how people who took bribes usually found a way to justify them as the right thing to do.
The location, which they got from Kennedy and spotted on their iPad, was at a nearby lake. By zooming in on Google Earth, they could see a cabin; by switching to the map view they could get an exact route to the place.
“This Google, I love this Google,” said the smaller Turk.
“When we are in the car, I will tell you my famous Google story,” the big Turk said.
They both had guns, and checked them before they went out to the Benz. “This time, this snake shot will not stop us,” Kaya said.
“Americans have a lot of very interesting sporting equipment,” the smaller Turk said. “Guns, everywhere.”
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O N THE WAY out to Jones’s location, the smaller Turk said, “So tell me this famous Google story.”
Kaya said, “In 2008, I was sent to Iraq in coordination with the American Air Force. To Balad Air Force Base to observe operations. While I am there, I find that some of the Americans call this air base ‘Mortar-ita-ville,’ because, you see, the resistance fighters hide in the farm fields around the base, with a mortar dug in the ground, and they drop in a shell and walk away. So, five, ten times a day, a mortar shell lands on the base. Since the Arabs don’t shoot so well, nothing happens, except that the Americans make an announcement of the event on the loudspeaker. I don’t know why, but this is what happens—a woman makes this announcement. The people on the air base call her ‘the Big Voice.’ While I am there, an American sergeant shows me his laptop, with his Google Earth. He calls up Balad. You can see everything—buildings, runways, even individual helicopters parked on the flight lines. He shows me that you can find an intersection outside the base—a canal crossing, a deviation in a road, a group of palm trees. Then, using a Google measuring stick, on the Google Earth, you can get the distance to your target in precise meters, and the precise direction. So this, with a mortar, should be like shooting a paper target. But, the Arabs fail to do this. Why? I don’t know.”
“Lucky for you, they don’t,” the smaller Turk said.
“Yes. But I wonder. Does this Google work with the American government, with the CIA, to change distances and directions? Is this why the mortars never hit? Is something to think about.”
“I don’t have to think about it,” the smaller man said. “Of course they do. The CIA is everywhere.”
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