Margaret scurried into the kitchen and got some paper towels to get Kevin dry, an operation that caught Betsy’s eye if only because the drink had spilled into his lap.
In a strange way Betsy was more disappointed with Margaret than she was with her brother. She knew her brother. She knew that he was young and full of himself and just going through a phase, and that eventually he would snap out of it and be embarrassed by his behavior—and rightly so. But Margaret had seemed pretty sharp. That she was fawning over Kevin called her judgment into question—her judgment, or her sincerity.
Kevin stood up abruptly and headed for the bathroom. Margaret watched him go, then turned sheepishly to Betsy, perhaps reading the look on her face.
“My dad’s got a drinking problem—a typical master-sergeant thing,” she said. “So I guess this is incredibly pathological of me. I apologize.”
This went some way toward alleviating Betsy’s suspicions. “We never had booze in the house when we were kids,” she said. “Now he has to drink as part of his job. I wonder if Larsen knew what he was getting into when he hired my brother.”
Margaret said, “He’s really sweet. But I hope he doesn’t go down the same road my father did.” Then she blushed, perhaps realizing she might have gone too far. “I’d better go now.”
Paul emerged from the bathroom with one arm around Kevin and half carried him to the bedroom. He came back, looked very seriously at Betsy, and said nothing. Jeff Lippincott came in from the balcony; the fireworks were over, and Betsy had missed them. Jeff hugged Betsy and whispered in her ear, “Recheck my note.”
“My God,” Betsy murmured. Jeff had given her an envelope during the trip to Wildwood; she had put it in her pocket and then forgotten it, preoccupied as she was with Paul. Since then she had washed the shorts.
She left Cassie in charge of the party, knowing that it was in good hands, and entered the bedroom, where Kevin was snoring loudly on the bed, smelling of vomit. She dug her shorts out from deep in the ironing basket and removed the warped and fuzzy envelope. There was a sheet of paper inside, hard copy from a laser printer, fortunately waterproof.
Jeff had given her a list of names—Arabic names. Jeff was Agency, but he worked at USIA, checking visa applications, and Betsy had come across his name more than once when investigating the flow of Iraqi scientists into American universities.
Some of the names she recognized—they were people she already knew about, people on her Dirty Dozen list. But some were new to her.
Next to the column of names was a column of dates, labeled “Date of Entry.” Most of the dates were one or two years in the past. But some of them were marked July 1990. These names were the ones Betsy didn’t recognize.
Kevin had just been bragging about the big shots he was going to be bringing into the country in the coming month. None of this could possibly be a coincidence.
Chapter Twenty-One
Fazoul, the maimed foreign student, was throwing his own Fourth of July shindig down by the river at Albertson Park, so-called because it lay across from Albertson’s grocery. The invitation specified Picnic Shelter Number Nine, a quarter mile in, close to the bluffs above the Nishnabotna. The small parking area there was full, and a couple of dozen cars were parked quasi-illegally along the shoulder of the road leading to it.
As Clyde, Desiree, and Maggie reached the parking lot next to the big shelter, they saw a banner printed out on long strips of computer paper, hung from the eave of the shelter, with letters—shapes, really—printed on it in green. He figured it was Arabic. Beneath it were smaller letters in some other script he’d never seen at all, lots of curlicues. He saw men who looked straight out of Lawrence of Arabia, dressed in white robes with towels draped over their heads; men wearing aprons and leather vests, wearing square, boxlike hats the size of McDonald’s drink holders; men in shorts and Nikes wearing Tshirts with things written on them in English and other languages; men dressed in suits and ties. Some of the women were completely veiled in chadors, just columns of black with huge black eyespeering out as through gun slits—Clyde thought of the EIU Twisters mascot, a tornado on legs, with a male cheerleader concealed inside looking out through a narrow aperture. Other women were showing their faces, and there were tawny women running around barefoot in shorts and Tshirts. Kids were everywhere, all of them dressed as if they’d just gone on a shopping spree at Wal-Mart. Clyde could hardly plant one foot in front of the other for all the kids.