just a guy with a good memory or a surfeit of confidence? Clark wondered. You pays your money and you takes your choice. At the top, Hadi turned left onto Concourse F. He was walking briskly. Maybe in a hurry? Clark wondered. If so, bad news for him. Sure enough, the subject turned to check a monitor, oriented himself, and angled to the left for Gate F-5, where he took a seat, looking as though he needed to relax. F-5 was a flight for . . . Las Vegas? McCarran International was a sizable airport with a huge number of connecting flights to Christ knew how many other destinations. Just one cutout for Hadi? Was that prudent? John wondered. Hmm. Who, if anyone, had trained this bird? A KGB type, or someone internal to his organization? Whatever the answer, the flight was leaving in fifteen minutes, not enough time for John to get back to the desk at Terminal 1 and get a ticket to allow him to follow. The tracking exercise would end at this point. Damn. He couldn’t even make the effort to eyeball the guy too obviously, even to observe very closely. Hadi may have looked around, and might, therefore, recognize his face. He might have been trained by a pro, and he might have the ability Clark had for remembering faces that appeared and disappeared in the course of life. For a field spook, that was a survival skill of considerable importance. Clark walked to a gift shop and bought a PayDay candy bar, along with a Diet Coke, just allowing his eyes to trace around the concourse. Hadi was sitting, not even looking around for a smoking booth where people could indulge their bad habit behind glass. Maybe he could control his passions, John thought. Such people could be dangerous. But the flight was called then, first-class tickets first, and Hadi stood, walked to the jetway gate, and showed his ticket. He even smiled at the male clerk, who checked his ticket and waved him aboard the elderly DC-9 for a wide leather seat and free booze for his trip to Vegas, where people could indulge in all manner of bad habits to their hearts’ content. John finished his candy bar and walked back to the tunnel entrance. As before, the down escalator seemed to go halfway to hell, and he blessed whatever architect had specified the moving walkways. Clark was old enough to appreciate it. He remembered not to frown at what he thought of as a blown mission. Partially blown, anyway. They knew things about this subject that they hadn’t known before, including a photo. He liked to travel under a Jewish cover, almost clever but a little obvious. Jews and Arabs were genetic cousins, after all, and their religious beliefs were not all that disparate—furious as both were even to consider such a thought, of course. Christians, too, all People of the Book, so his Saudi friends had explained it to him once upon a time. But religious people generally did not commit murder. God might not agree. In any case, his current job was to fly back to The Campus. He waited for the jetway door to be closed and watched the twin-engine airliner back away from the terminal, then turn under its own power for the taxi out to the runway. Three hours to Vegas? Maybe a little less, over Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, to the city that celebrated sin. And on from there to where? John wondered. Wherever it was, he wouldn’t be finding out anytime soon. Well, this whole mission had been on the iffy side, and he couldn’t be too disappointed that it had turned into a washout. And what the hell, they had some photos of the mutt. He found a counter that offered him a ticket back to BWI in ninety minutes. He called ahead to make sure someone would be waiting with a car.
Hadi, in seat 1D of his flight, considered the menu as he sipped his complimentary white wine—it was better in Italy, but that was no surprise—and he chided himself for an unseemly discrimination in his nose for wine. The ground below was mostly flat, with a few strangely green bull’s-eyes, which, he’d learned, marked the rotary irrigation systems American farmers used in the prairie states. This area had once been called the Great American Desert by explorers. It was the world’s bread-basket today, though other deserts, real ones, lay ahead, beyond