The Spoils of War. Gordon Kent

a gym bag in Salem’s car.

      The men beating Salem at the dig, pounding him with their fists and the flat of a shovel. Yelling abuse. Telling Salem he was a thief. And Rashid, Salem’s loyal friend, had run away and hidden in the old tunnels under the city.

      He went into the bedroom. The epicenter of the apartment’s wreckage. He started to go through the piles of clothing the searchers had thrown on the floor.

      Salem’s clothes were in a separate pile. Rashid dug into it for Salem’s Navy coat; he didn’t wear it in Gaza, where American sailors would hardly be popular, but he often wore it in Israel where the opposite was true. Up in the padding of the shoulders was Salem’s emergency stash. Salem had shown it to him, once, with a joke.

      “It’s my fly-away money,” he had said.

      A thousand dollars in American bills, crisp and neat. And a tiny hard rectangle that felt unfamiliar. Rashid pulled it out and tried to remember what it did. He took another swig of water and remembered. He was holding a flash card, the memory of a digital camera. And Salem had hidden it.

      He pocketed it with the money. He took the peacoat, because it was warm and dry and it was Salem’s. It made him feel taller.

      He still had to leave the building. He poked through the rubble of Salem’s life with Saida and found a pair of his boots, rubberized duck shoes that Salem had seldom worn because, he said, they hurt his feet and were too hot. They fit poorly, but with the peacoat they made him look like a young man of means. They gave him the confidence to take the elevator and face the man at the desk.

      As the elevator descended, he found he was calm. Perhaps too tired to feel more fear.

      “She’s not home,” the guard said when Rashid emerged. The tone was on the edge of accusation.

      “I know,” Rashid replied, walking steadily to the doors. Whatever the guard might have wanted to ask, Rashid kept going, volunteering nothing, a tactic that seldom failed him, until he was out on the street in the cold winter rain. When the guard finally opened her apartment, he, Rashid, would be the obvious suspect. Then the police would join Hamas in searching for him.

      His life here was done. He was going to find Salem, and the place to look was back in the occupied territory. So be it. Rashid felt the crisp bills in his pocket and headed for a bus stop.

       Naval Criminal Investigative Service HQ, Naples, Italy

      “Aw, shit!”

      Mike Dukas was looking at a message directing him to do something—urgently—and his people were already stretched thin and he didn’t have time for Mickey Mouse. His hand hit the phone.

      “Dick,” he growled, “get in here.”

      “Your wish is my, mm, suggestion.”

      Dick Triffler was the ASAC—the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, NCIS Naples. He was a tall, slender African American with an oddly high voice and a manner so precise that he seemed to be doing an imitation of somebody—Clifton Webb, maybe, or William F. Buckley. He had worked with and for Dukas off and on for years and had always been eager to transfer someplace else; Dukas had been astonished, therefore, when Triffler had requested to be ASAC when Dukas had taken over Naples as Special Agent in Charge. Asked why, Triffler, who had been running his own long-term investigation on the West Coast, had said, “I thought I needed a challenge.”

      Now Triffler came in, buttoning a black blazer over a blueon-blue striped shirt and a thick silk tie that, in an office where Dukas was wearing an ancient polo, made it look as if the Prince of Wales was visiting a homeless person. “You rang?” Triffler said as he sat down, pulling one knife-creased pant leg over a knee.

      “I got a Rummygram telling us we urgently got to get the closeout details on some poor ex-Navy bastard who died in Tel Aviv. What the hell, is this any way to run a war on terrorism?”

      “What war on terrorism?”

      “The one we’re waging twenty-four-seven throughout the universe. Isn’t that what all this paperwork is about? Jesus Christ, I’ve got five drunken sailors in foreign jails, three sex abusers, a phantom shitter on the Fort Klock, and we’re supposed to be looking under the beds for al-fucking-Qaida! Now I’ve got to scrape up somebody to do scut work in fucking Tel Aviv! Let the naval attaché do it!”

      “You’re venting again. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it—to listen to you vent. As you know, naval attachés have better things to do, like looking for a good place to have lunch, and dealing with dead sailors in foreign places is our charge.”

      Dukas sighed. “Well—yeah, it’s our business—so who’s near Tel Aviv? The Jefferson’s already in the Canal. Athens office is too busy. We got anybody who can take a day and go?”

      Triffler’s laugh was deliberately false. “How about Al Craik? He’s in Tel Aviv even as we speak.”

      “How the hell do you know that?”

      “Your wife told my wife.”

      Dukas stared at him, stuck his lips out, raised an eyebrow. “That’s some network you got—two wives. You ever think of going into intelligence?”

      Triffler stood—an impressive unfolding of long-boned limbs. “Am I done being vented at? You get in touch with Al.”

      “You giving the orders now?”

      “Somebody has to do it.”

      Dukas scowled at his retreating back and then put out his hand for the phone and called Fifth Fleet, Bahrain, to ask where Commander Craik was staying in Tel Aviv.

       Washington

      In the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) mint-new Office of Information Analysis, the workday went on longer even than in the White House. The atmosphere of the place was that of a great business enterprise at the top of its game—buoyant, aggressive, determined, and overworked.

      For a thirty-five-year-old named Ray Spinner, the place was salvation. He’d got bounced from the Navy for passing privileged information to his power-lawyer father; Dad had placed him in OIA to make it up. Now, Spinner reeled through his workdays in a frenzy half joy and half terror (Could he measure up? Could he be hardline enough? Did he dare to ape the bosses and wear power suspenders?). It was better than the Navy had ever been, but scary.

      Sitting in a cubicle among twenty other cubicles, he was watching a message come up on his computer. New data came first to people like him; he knocked out the obvious bullshit and passed the rest up the line. The criteria had little to do with either authenticity or reliability and everything to do with usefulness to the office’s main goal—just then, getting something going in Iraq. He had already made the mistake of knocking out a report from a defector who said he had overheard a third party say that sarin gas was being manufactured nights and weekends in a Baghdad elementary school; it had been made very clear to him that this was precisely the kind of intelligence that was wanted, and if he made the same kind of dumb-nuts mistake again, he’d find himself handing out towels in the men’s room.

      Spinner therefore really bore down now. The bit he was looking at struck him as a no-brainer—forwarding of a Tel Aviv police department memo about some dead A-rab.

       Yarkov District police tonight reported death of Salem Qatib, Palestinian, resident West Bank. Held US student visa 1994-95, ex-US Navy reserve.

      Meaning that the informant thought the dead guy might be of interest because he had US connections. Wrong. The real question was, Was he a terrorist? Well, let’s see. Spinner brought up OIA’s own list, which was different from the CIA’s and the FBI’s and much longer, and he didn’t find Salem Qatib as a terrorist but did find him on the Purgatory list (“not in Hell, but nearby”) of people “tracked for conflate background”—that is, for combining at least two suspicious factors. Like being Palestinian and having served three