Jihad by Stephen Coonts Page A

don’t want him to have one?” Rubens couldn’t hide his surprise. “It’s an honor due your father.”
    “I know. But he was such a private—he didn’t like the pomp and circumstance. You know that, Bill. He...” Her voice faded, but a smile came to her lips. “He didn’t live his life in quotes.”
    She made quotes in the air—just as her father might have.
    “Yes,” agreed Rubens.
    “I remember one time, he’d just come from a meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I think, and he had two big stains on his tie.” Irena laughed again, this time much more deeply. “And the tie—I swear I gave it to him for Father’s Day when I was twelve, so it had to be fifteen years old. At least. That was my father.”
    “He also wrote the definitive book on Asian-American relations in the 1990s,” said Rubens. He stopped himself, cutting off what could have been a long list of Hadash’s achievements.
    The thing was, his daughter was right. George Hadash wouldn’t have wanted a state funeral.
    They sat silently for a moment, neither one knowing what to say.
    “He does deserve to be honored,” said Irena finally. She reached her hand toward Rubens. “You’ll help figure this out?”
    “Of course.”
    “I remember the first time I met you—Daddy was so careful. Call him Bill, not Billy. Not Billy. But you don’t seem like a Billy. More a William, I think.”
    “I’m used to Bill.”
    Irena nodded. The truth was, she could call him anything she wanted and he wouldn’t have minded.

CHAPTER 34
     
    “FA -SHONE! ” KARR SPREAD his arms wide as he approached the short man standing in front of the bubble-front helicopter. “Nice cap you got there, dude. Met fan, huh? You got a hangover, right?”
    The pilot—his real name was Ray Fashona, though Karr pronounced it right perhaps one time out of ten—grunted and finished his walk around of the helicopter. A rather old though serviceable Bell 47, it had a towline at the rear with a banner advertising “Turkey No. I Tours” in Turkish and English.
    “This part doesn’t say, ‘Hey, look at us, we’re spies,’ does it?” Karr asked, pointing at the banner as he followed Fashona around the rear of the aircraft.
    “Wasn’t my idea,” said Fashona.
    “Got a hangover, huh?” said Karr. “You drank that raki stuff, right? What is that, like licorice-flavored white lightning?”
    “Make sure your seatbelt’s tight. If you fall out, I’m not picking you up.”
    A pair of laptops were lashed to the dashboard in front of Karr’s seat on the right-hand side of the chopper. He opened the top unit and turned it on; ninety seconds later he was greeted by the opening screen of the program controlling a boost unit for the eavesdropping device implanted in Asad’s skull. The unit, mounted in the helicopter’s boom tail, was considerably more powerful than the ones they had left on the roof yesterday; even so, its range was only about five miles.
    “Good to go,” Karr told Fashona, pulling on his headset.
    “Yeah,” said the pilot, cranking his engine to life.
    They took a pass about two miles from Asad’s house, confirming that the unit was working and allowing the Art Room to run a full set of diagnostics with the master receiving unit, which was a specially equipped 707 flying at forty-five thousand feet over the Sea of Marmara, ostensibly on a NATO training mission.
    “Everything looks good, Tommy,” said Rockman, who’d just come back on duty in the Art Room. “Unit B is going off duty. You guys are it.”
    “The A Team is ready,” Karr said, his voice booming over the engines.
    “It sounds like Red Lion is getting ready to go for a ride. Remind Fashona he doesn’t have to get too close. We have plenty of tracking units scattered around the city now.”
    “Okey-doke.”
    “Asad has just woken up. We’ll keep you up to date.”
    Karr zoomed the map showing the location of the sending unit.
    “Where are we going today, Red