The Colonel's Mistake Read online

  “The Burj has got twelve of those cars, all white, just like this one. The Russian mafia-types and people who’ve never been to Dubai and don’t know any better eat it up. You really know the city, you go to one of the classier places in Jumeirah. And did you see that dark suit he was wearing? No one who’s spent any time here wears a suit like that on a hundred-and-ten-degree day. He’s a fish out of water. Ten to one we can rattle him.”

  “If he’s not local he might not even work for Doha. He could be a client.”

  “He just came out of their main office. He’ll at least be able to tell us who the real players are.”

  “You getting this?” said Mark to Daria, speaking into his cell phone as the Rolls pulled away.

  “Don’t even bother tailing him,” said Bowlan. “I can tell you how to get to the Burj. He’ll show up there eventually.”

  “Haul ass to get there before him,” said Mark. “And figure out his name and room number if you can.”

  Daria took a big sip of her cranberry cosmo and eyed her man.

  He had short hair that was graying at the temples. Clean-shaven. Wore rimless eyeglasses and a gold wedding band. Probably in his fifties. A snifter of some brown liquor sat in front of him, but he rarely touched it. His motions as he switched between typing on his computer and eating his dinner were precise and quick.

  He had a clear view of her—she was seated at the bar—but he was focused on his work, his eyes darting back and forth as he scanned his computer screen. This despite the fact that she knew she looked awfully good in the black cocktail dress she’d just bought for $600 in one of the ground-floor shops.

  She took another big sip of her cosmo. The oversized glass was rimmed with red sugar and the sweet lime-scented booze inside tasted almost good enough to justify the thirty dollars she’d paid for it. And then there was the view—the restaurant occupied the top floor of the Burj and was ringed with panoramic windows. Outside, all of Dubai was lit up in rose by the waning sun: the towering skyscrapers, the palm-shaped island resort just down the coast, the white sands of the Persian Gulf…

  In a corner of the room, under a ceiling dotted with primary-colored polka dots, a live band from Oman played a bad reggae version of “Karma Chameleon.”

  When a young Arab guy tried to hit on her, she turned him down but it got her thinking of Mark, and how pleasant it could be, in some alternate reality, to just enjoy a carnival like Dubai together. But that daydream soon made her feel guilty, so she forced herself to brood yet again on darker matters, like Astara, and the Trudeau House.

  Eventually that line of thought led her to consider how much she hated the mullahs in Iran. Which in turn led her to wonder for the millionth time whether the mullah’s Revolutionary Guard shock troops really had raped her mom, before they’d killed her, all those years ago. Her uncle, after too many glasses of wine, had told her of his fear that it had happened. Evidently rape was a common occurrence at that time because the beasts had believed that virgins couldn’t go to hell, and they’d wanted to make damn sure that was where all their enemies ended up. The fact that her mother had already had a child probably wouldn’t have mattered. They raped plenty of mothers just to make sure.

  After swirling that around in her brain for a while, mixing it all up with the alcohol, Daria eyed the excess around her and decided she hated Dubai. Her mother had never known anything except Tehran—a dirty, crowded city ruled by the Shah and then the mullahs. The thought that her mother had never really been able to experience anything of the wider world made Daria want to hurl her frilly cosmo glass into the mirror behind the bar.

  Mark’s call interrupted her thoughts. She answered using the earpiece hidden beneath her hair.

  “Status?”

  “He’s eating dinner. I’m watching him from the bar.”

  “Why didn’t you call in?”

  Daria checked her watch. The time was 6:47 pm. She’d said she’d call with an update by 6:45.

  “I got distracted. Decided to have a drink.”

  “Jesus, Daria. Focus.”

  “I’m plenty focused.”

  “Do you need me?”

  “No.”

  “Name and room number.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  She finished her drink, ordered a bottle of Pellegrino water instead of the second cosmo she wanted, and observed the flow of the restaurant for the next half hour while Rolls Royce Guy slowly pecked away at his dinner. At some point she realized that the clientele was divided between hotel guests and people who were just there for drinks or dinner. The difference was clear because some paid for their drinks with cash or a credit card, while others were presented with a computer tablet that they signed.

  When the waiter came by with a dessert tray, Rolls Royce Guy snapped his laptop shut and chose a crystal goblet filled with what looked like vanilla pudding.

  Daria called for the bartender.

  “Offer a drink to the gentleman in the restaurant seated by himself,” she said. “Anything he likes.”

  Upon delivery of the message, Rolls Royce Guy flashed Daria a polite smile and shook his head awkwardly in what could only be interpreted as a gentle rebuff.

  Which she’d expected. But it didn’t matter. She’d made him uncomfortable. That was all that mattered. She took out her phone and switched it to camera mode.

  A few minutes later Rolls Royce Guy finished his dessert and asked his waiter for the check. Daria palmed her phone and approached his table just as he was signing a computer tablet.

  She lightly touched his shoulder, bent down far enough into his personal space so that she knew he’d be rattled, so that he could feel her breath on his cheek, and said, “I’m certain we’ve met before. It was London, wasn’t it? The Grosvenor House?”

  “I haven’t been to London in five years, Miss.” He smiled uneasily as he placed the computer tablet back on the table.

  “If not London, then was it here?” In a low voice that she gauged was somewhere between seductive and pathetic, she said, “I wouldn’t forget a face like yours.”

  Rolls Royce Guy stole a quick, embarrassed glance at her breasts and said, “Miss, ordinarily I’d love to talk, but the honest truth is that I am up to my eyeballs in work.”

  In the glass-walled panoramic elevator that led down from the restaurant atop the Burj al Arab, Mark watched as Daria pushed a few buttons on her phone and then showed him the display.

  “His check,” she said.

  Mark squinted. “I can’t read anything.”

  Daria cropped it so that only the relevant portion remained, and then she enlarged that section and clicked on a filter that sharpened all the lines in the image.

  They were able to determine that Rolls Royce Guy had eaten a meal of assorted seafood canapés, followed by a Wagyu beef tenderloin. He’d indulged in one snifter of Lagavulin single-malt scotch, followed by a white chocolate mousse. The meal, with tip, had cost $227. At the bottom of the page was an indecipherable signature, beneath which it read:

  Deluxe Suite, Room 302

  Waltrop, Stewart R.

  “Got him,” said Mark, thinking that he’d show up at Waltrop’s room later that night, flash his old CIA identification card and diplomatic passport, and start pressuring the guy.

  Meanwhile, Daria was already Googling “Stewart Waltrop.”

  The search didn’t return a single direct hit.

  So she Googled “Waltrop” by itself and got over a million hits.

  When she tried “S. Waltrop” five direct hits came back, but they were all obscure references to a German town.

  “Try Stu Waltrop,” said Mark.

  Thirteen direct hits popped up. Five had something to do with the German town. The rest were related to an executive vice president who worked in the business development unit of an Oklahoma-based company called Richter, Inc.

  That Stu Waltrop had attended an oil services industry conference in Houston the previous April. And he’d been quoted
in Oil and Gas Journal as being optimistic that Richter’s new line of roller-cone drill bits would soon turn a profit for the company. His e-mail was listed on a contact page associated with the company’s website.

  Daria followed the links to Richter’s homepage. And it was there, at the top of the page, right under the flashy Richter banner, that Mark read the words Partners in Progress, followed by what he recognized as the logo for Holgan Industries.

  “Well, would you look at that.” Holgan Industries was the largest oil services company in the world, he knew. An American firm, but headquartered in Dubai.

  Daria’s eyes narrowed a bit.

  She clicked on the Partners in Progress link and was taken to a page that explained that Richter, Inc. had recently become a valued member of the Holgan Industries family.

  Since Holgan supplied tools and know-how to nations and companies that pumped oil out of the ground, it made sense to Mark that Holgan would be interested in a firm like Richter.

  What didn’t make sense to him was the connection—if there was any—between Holgan and the Doha Group. They were both oil services companies, so they should have been competitors.

  “Go to the SEC’s website. See if Holgan and the Doha Group have done any deals together.”

  Daria followed the links until she got to a page that allowed her to search all of Holgan Industries’ filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. There were thousands. Starting with the most recent and working back, she searched each for the word Doha. It didn’t take long to get a hit.

  It was in an end-of-year 10-K report, under a heading listed as Exhibit 21: Subsidiaries of the Registrant.

  “Goddamn,” said Mark, as he squinted, trying to read the page that had loaded onto Daria’s phone. The Doha Group was near the top of a list of over fifty companies, all owned by Holgan Industries. “Holgan’s not just doing business with the Doha Group. They own them, just like they own Richter.”

  It made Mark’s head spin to keep all the connections straight, but they were there. The uranium had been stolen from the Iranians and delivered to the MEK. The MEK had passed it on to the Doha Group. And the Doha Group was owned by Holgan Industries. Which made Holgan Industries, a huge American firm, the most likely recipient of the stolen uranium.

  “Stu Waltrop, this is your lucky night,” said Mark.

  “I’m not following.”

  “We don’t need him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I already know who to go after next.”

  The receptionist at Holgan Industries was a young blond woman with a Texas accent. She wore a pink blouse and matching pink lipstick. Mark’s question appeared to amuse her.

  “And do you have an appointment?”

  It was eight thirty in the morning. Mark hadn’t slept more than an hour the night before.

  “I don’t.”

  A pair of thick-necked guards—expats from Oman or Saudi Arabia, Mark guessed—exchanged a look. Wondering whether they had a crazy on their hands.

  Holgan Industries had been founded half a century ago by Jimmy Holgan Sr., a former Eagle Scout and graduate of the US Naval Academy. But recently Jimmy Sr. had turned the day-to-day operations of the business over to his son, Jimmy Jr., who had promptly shifted Holgan’s headquarters from Houston to Dubai, to be closer to his customers.

  And unless you were the head of a first-world nation, or a third-world despot with gobs of oil, you didn’t just breeze into Jimmy Jr.’s office.

  “Then I’m afraid you won’t be able to see Mr. Holgan,” said the receptionist cheerfully.

  “My name is Mark Sava. I’m with the CIA.” He produced his diplomatic passport and allowed her to examine it. “If you tell Mr. Holgan I’m here, I believe he’ll want to speak with me.”

  “Mr. Holgan doesn’t speak to anybody without an appointment, sir. There are no exceptions.”

  “I said he’ll want to speak with me.”

  “And what, may I ask, is the nature of your business?”

  “The nature of my business involves national security and it’s between Mr. Holgan and myself.”

  She stared at him. Mark stared back.

  Holgan Industries occupied the top twenty floors of the Iris Bay Tower, an enormous silver banana-shaped building that had sprung up on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai’s main thoroughfare. But there were no public elevators to Holgan’s upper floors. To even get near Jimmy Holgan Jr., Mark first had to make it past Holgan’s ground-floor lobby.

  And what a lobby it was, Mark thought, looking over the marble floor mosaics and gleaming brass doors and brilliant light shafts set off at an angle as though the ceiling had been pierced like a pincushion. The place was cavernous and smelled of disinfectant.

  “If you know Mr. Holgan, why haven’t you contacted him directly or arranged for an appointment?”

  “I didn’t say that I knew him. I said that he’d want to speak to me.” Mark pointed to the ceiling-mounted security camera behind the receptionist. “He’ll recognize me.”

  He gestured to a cluster of overstuffed wingback chairs that formed a conversation pit near the reception counter. “I’ll wait. But not longer than a half hour. What I have to say to Mr. Holgan is time sensitive.”

  The receptionist gave him another stare then reluctantly put in a call and gave a professional account of the situation. When she was through, she said, “Your request has been delivered. Beyond that, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Exactly thirty minutes later, two more security guards showed up. Only these guys were Americans, with close-cropped hair and shoulders that barely fit inside their blue blazers. Each carried a Sig Sauer pistol, visible in shoulder holsters beneath their blazers.

  Mark was escorted down a long hall to a locked steel door, which opened with an electronic key.

  Three more guards, who looked as though they could have been brothers of the first two, stood in a room with a concrete floor, concrete walls, and a ceiling of exposed I-beams.

  “We’ll need to search you. Raise your hands above your head.”

  Mark did as instructed. First they used a metal detector. Then they did a pat-down.

  “I thought that kind of thing was illegal in this country,” said Mark as they worked beneath his belt. No one laughed. Finally he was told to walk through a backscatter machine. They didn’t find any weapons because he wasn’t armed.

  One of the guards ushered him—using subtle pushes and pulls as though leading a horse—into a service elevator. After a fast ascent followed by ten minutes of twists and turns down a maze of hallways, they arrived at Jimmy Holgan Jr.’s private reception room.

  What appeared to be original Frederick Remington paintings lined the walls and a bronze Remington statue of a cowboy riding a rearing horse dominated one corner of the room. Behind a desk sat a middle-aged secretary, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She frowned when she saw Mark and the guard.

  After quite a bit more silent frowning, she spoke quietly into her phone. Then she cast a disapproving glance at Mark and said, “Mr. Holgan will see you now.” She got up and opened the oversized French doors behind her. The guard began to follow Mark, but the secretary shook her head. “You wait.”

  The inner sanctum was a corner office on the top floor and it came with the obligatory sweeping views. A lord in his seat of power looking out over the sea of humanity toiling below, thought Mark. It was diminished only by the fact that there were so many other seats of power, in so many other skyscrapers, visible across the horizon.

  A few ten-foot-tall potted cacti had been placed by the panoramic windows. On one of the inner walls, set in a framed glass display box, lay a rolled horse whip, a bolo tie with a fancy turquoise clasp, and a sheriff’s silver star.

  “Nice office,” said Mark, as he looked over the display box.

  Between all the marble and artsy-fartsy light shafts in the ground-floor lobby, the original Remingtons, and now this office, Mark thought that if he’d been a
client actually considering hiring Holgan he’d worry about how much effort was going into impressing people rather than just focusing on delivering a good product. Apparently his sentiment was not mirrored by actual clients, however, because business for Holgan was booming.

  “The Arabs like this crap, Mr. Sava.” Holgan was seated behind a vast desk into which a variety of horse-themed scenes—a herd drinking by a river, a lone horse galloping across a plain, another pulling a plow—had been painstakingly carved. “When they visit they want a show. They like to think they’re doing business with a hard-headed cowboy.”

  “That would be you?”

  Holgan laughed, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. He was a big man, in both height and girth, with bags under his eyes. His teeth were straight and white but they seemed a little too small for his mouth. Mark remembered reading that he was worth around $30 billion.

  He tried to wrap his head around that figure, to imagine what it must feel like to be Holgan. Holy shit that was a lot of money.

  “I just canceled a meeting with the Emirates energy minister to accommodate you. So maybe you should sit down and tell me why you’re here.”

  Mark felt swallowed up by the oversized leather chair in front of Holgan’s desk. He wondered whether it had been designed to make people feel small. If so, it was working.

  “I work for the CIA. I used to be the station chief in Baku, but now I’m on contract. You already knew that, though, or I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now.”

  “I wouldn’t make any assumptions about what I know and what I don’t know.”

  “How about Jack Campbell. You know him?”

  “Former deputy sec. def.”

  “Assassinated in Baku five days ago.”

  Jimmy Holgan Jr. fixed his unblinking eyes on Mark for a moment before saying, “So I’d heard.”

  “I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice it to say that Campbell wasn’t the only American killed in Baku. A lot of CIA personnel were also hit. I was hired to figure out who did it. My investigation led me to an Iranian resistance group—the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK as they’re known in Washington. I believe you’re familiar with them?”