The Enemy Within

Halovic shrugged. The name meant nothing to him. He stabbed a finger toward the pile of maps. “Show me.”

He peered intently at the map Yassine pulled out and unfolded, orienting himself memorising the astonishingly complex network of highways and major roads that fed in and out of America’s capital city and surrounding suburbs. It was time to begin preparing in earnest for the war he would ignite.

CHAPTER 7 FALSE COLORS

AUGUST 18

Walker’s Landing, Virginia.

(D MINUS 119)

Walker’s Landing was a tiny Virginia hamlet nestled against the southern bank Of the James River roughly two and a half hoors south of Washington, D.C., and west of Richmond. Surrounded by tangled woods, gloomy swamps, and small, rundown farms, it was little more than a cluster of houses and stores cantered around Route 250, a two-lane blacktop highway that crossed the river.

Sefer Halovic peered through the dirty windshield of his Buick LeSabre and nodded in satisfaction. He’d been guided to this part of Virginia by pamphlets carefully collected by Yassine and other Iranian agents. Walker’s Landing seemed perfect for his purposes. Isolated, confined, and impoverished, the place appeared a likely breeding ground for the narrow minds and festering hatreds he sought. Country villages had produced some of the most savage killers in the Bosnian war. He saw no reason why it should be any different here.

He pulled off the main road and into a gravel motel parking lot at the southern end of town. A row of ten dilapidated cinder-block bungalows surrounded the parking lot. Each had been divided into two motel rooms. A car and an old pickup were parked out in front of two of the bungalows. The rest appeared unoccupied. The building closest to the highway had a sign in one of its unwashed windows identifying it as an office.

Halovic stepped out of his car and into the sticky warmth of a late summer afternoon. His nose wrinkled in disgust. From the smell and the flies buzzing around his head, he guessed that the owners of the StarBrite Motel rarely bothered to have their trash removed. Or perhaps they simply could not afford it, he thought coldly, eyeing the deserted parking lot again.

The contrast between this place and the tidy suburban communities he’d grown used to seeing around Washington was striking. It was a reminder to him that America’s elites built their fortunes on the backs of the poor, both abroad and here in their own land.

The StarBrite Motel’s office was no cleaner or fancier inside than its exterior suggested. Dust Leered a rack of sunfaded tourist brochures and local maps near the rusting screen door. Flies circled lazily around the room. The smell of fried food and stale beer hung in the air.

Halovic let the screen door spring closed behind him and walked up to the deserted front desk. The sound of a television filtered out through an open door behind the desk. From the muted crowd noises he heard, he assumed the set was tuned to one of the mass sporting events which seemed to preoccupy so many Americans. A baseball game, perhaps?

He stood waiting for a moment, listening, and then cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, please? Is anybody there?”

Halovic was proud of his assumed German accent. Together with his own native speech patterns, simply substituting “I” for “th” and “v” for “w” made his words decidedly Teutonic. The accent lent credence to his new alias as Karl Gruning, a German postgraduate student on an extended vacation to America.

“Be right there, mister,” a slow, southern drawl answered him from the back room. The owner of the voice, a wizened old man, emerged a few seconds later, blinking rapidly against the sunlight streaming in through the windows. He finished buttoning a plain white shirt that had clearly seen cleaner days and smiled nervously, showing an uneven row of yellowing, tobacco-stained teeth. “Now, then, what can I do for y’all?”

“I would like a room, please. You have a vacancy?”

“A room?” The old man seemed surprised by the notion that anyone would want to stay at his establishment. Then he roused himself. “That ain’t no problem, mister. I’ve got plenty of rooms.”

He looked Halovic up and, down, clearly weighing what the traffic would bear. “Now, I charge twenty-five bucks a night~ash. In advance.” He looked almost defiant as he continued: “I don’t take no credit cards. And no checks, neither. Too much trouble.”

Halovic nodded. Better and better. He had hoped that the motel oh’s — Keeping would be on a par with his eanliness. Carrying out this phase of the mission already entailed more risk and personal exposure than he would have preferred. At least staying in this rattrap would not require leaving a paper trail for the police to follow. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a full wallet, and carefully counted out fifty dollars in crisp ten-dollar bills. “That is not a problem. I would like to stay at least two nights, please.”