around them and stepped down the ramp, smelling the sweet rot of dead fish washed up along the shoreline.
The robed man waited a few feet away. Rafan introduced himself, but the young, bearded cleric made no effort to take his hand. Instead, he spoke his own name slowly, as some men do when they believe they are worthy of note, while peering intensely at the visitor through rimless glasses. Rafan avoided the cleric’s dark eyes by looking past him.
“Was there someone else here? I thought I saw two of you but it was hard to tell because of the sun.” He lowered the brim of his white ball cap to emphasize the blinding light reflecting off the white sand.
Parvez Avila didn’t reply. He looked at the barge and cumbersome front loader. “What are you doing here?”
Rafan told him.
“You do not think that you will get away with this, do you?”
Rafan spotted shadowy movement in the palm grove less than thirty feet away. For the first time, he felt afraid. Most likely the other man was back there—Doing what? Rafan wondered. He decided not to present the order of confiscation. He feared that Parvez Avila would tear it up, and that even a simple act of violence against paper could unleash much deeper anger and resentment.
“You should never have come here,” Avila said. “Never.”
The sun pounded on Rafan’s cap, but all he felt was a coldness deeper than the sea.
“Rafan,” the captain called, “are you ready?”
Rafan waved, signaling that the earthmover should come ashore.
The diesel engine belched a thick black pillow of smoke that enveloped the two men facing each other on the sand, stinging their eyes and filling their noses with the acrid smell of industrial waste.
* * *
Jenna whirled through the revolving door, keeping her cell to her ear, quickly shaking her head as she began to speak: “I can’t give you his name without talking to him; and I doubt very much that I’ll be able to give it to you even then.”
Rick Birk, a codger in his mid-seventies—and the network’s principal investigative reporter for five decades—had landed in Honolulu en route to Malé. He’d called Jenna to try to cajole Rafan’s name and contact information from her. How does he know I know Rafan? was her first thought.
Birk now hardened his tone: “For fuck’s sake, Jenna, you were sleeping with him.”
How’d he know that? she wondered. The answer came right away: He’s an investigator. “That’s my business, and bringing up personal stuff is out of line.”
“The terrorists could be planning to bomb the network next. Getting me in touch with him could save the lives of everyone we work with.” What a frickin’ James Bond complex. “I already know he works in government.”
“What do the plans of some Islamists have to do with my giving you the name of an old friend? Even if he is in the government?”
“He might know someone who knows someone.”
“I’m sure he knows someone who knows someone, but you’re badgering me, Rick, and I don’t appreciate it one bit.”
“And I don’t appreciate getting stonewalled by a fucking meteorologist over such a ridiculously simple—”
She hung up on him. Jenna could count on one hand the number of times that she’d hung up on someone. You just didn’t do that when you’d been raised by parents like hers, who’d given her a strong sense of propriety. “Fucking meteorologist”! Even if he was old school, very old school, that was off the charts.
Christ, there he is, calling me back. Leave a message, creep.
As she stopped out of the elevator on the third floor, her friend and producer, Nicci, rushed toward her, short, dark hair flying. “Birk’s in a tizzy. He’s on line one and says he wants to apologize.”
“He can stay on line one till his ear rots off. I’ve got work to do.” In her office, Jenna tossed her overnight bag onto a chair, then turned to the pixie-size Nicci. “They should have sent us to the Maldives, not him. You know that, don’t you? He’ll make a hash of it. It’ll be another one-dimensional story that begins ‘This is the Maldives…’” Jenna offered a fair impersonation of Birk’s typical basso profundo story opening. As creative as a paint-by-number kit.
“We may get a chance,” Nicci said. “The National Review broke a story online half an hour ago: USEI is sending half a million tons of liquid iron oxide to the Maldives in a supertanker. It’s part of some geoengineering project. Everyone’s jumping on the