by Brad Taylor
Jennifer said, “I already have the stuff from the guy who jumped.”
I smiled, saying, “Well, then, there you go.”
Nung said, “I have two sets of keys. And the electronics. We’re complete.”
Meaning we had both cars. I said, “Perfect. Let’s beat that asshole back to the hotel. He’s got no phone to call an Uber or cab, and he’s going to look a little stupid asking for a cell with his hands flex-tied.”
Nung said, “What about this mess? There’s no way to cover it up.”
The room looked like a slaughterhouse. Nung had managed to kill his man without any blood, but I’d slit my target’s throat, and the floor was coated in it, with some on me.
I went through the implications in a nanosecond and said, “Nung, swap shirts with me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re right. We need to close this out, and I can’t have blood on my shirt. You guys are going to walk out of here like nothing happened.”
Nung said, “I’m pretty sure walking out of here like nothing’s happened isn’t going to close this out.”
I smiled and said, “Jennifer, take a picture of their passports, to include any previous travel, then leave the passports on the bodies. Finding them completely stripped of identification will cause major questions in all directions. Leave the cops a thread. Saint Kitts is going to drive this city crazy, but it won’t lead to us.”
Jennifer said, “What are you going to do?”
Putting on Nung’s shirt, I said, “Go back down and get a rum and coke. Then close out my tab. You guys never entered as far as they know. Nung, get the button camera on the way out. Jennifer, just get out of the building. The only one here that’s stamped is me.”
I finished replacing Nung’s shirt, which was a little tight, and said, “We good?”
Nung looked at the sag in his new shirt and said, “No. This thing doesn’t fit.”
Incredulous, I said, “Are you bitching about my shirt? Really?”
Nung smiled at me and said, “This will work to get out of here.”
I said, “Then let’s go, and pray that the police aren’t good enough to figure this out.”
We started jogging to the elevator and I said, “Nung, please tell me you disabled the camera in the elevator.”
From our reconnaissance, we knew there were no cameras on the upper floor, and none in the hallway to the bathroom, but there was one inside the elevator.
He looked at me like I was insane. He said, “Of course I did.”
The elevator doors opened, and my phone rang. I checked the number, seeing “unknown.” I answered, and heard, “Uber? Really? You can’t even pick us up? Is that what my skill is worth?”
The doors closed and I said, “Sorry, Pumpkin King, but something came up. Meet Jennifer at a place called the Restoration Hotel. Right now.”
I heard nothing for a second, then, “Why?”
“Because I might need your skills.”
Chapter 16
Nikita padded around the opulent penthouse, staring at his watch every ten seconds. He had to report the progress of Operation Harvest to Dmitri, and they were behind schedule. There was only one target down, and he’d withdrawn most of the teams to Salvador to deal with the second—a woman, no less. And so he paced, rehearsing what he was going to say. He knew he was correct in his decision, and that Dmitri would understand—if he could frame it correctly.
When his digital watch struck 2 p.m., he dialed the phone. It rang twice, and then a man with a flat voice answered saying, “Black Sea Holdings.” Nikita said, “Group chat number for Harvest.”
The robotic man said, “Two twelve.”
Nikita disconnected from the cellular network and brought up a VPN app, checked to ensure he was on Wi-Fi, then double-tapped it. A screen cleared, asking for a group number. He typed in 212, and waited.
The application was a voice-over-internet-protocol that was encrypted end to end and completely off the cellular network, chosen because it was unbreakable and untraceable. While Nikita couldn’t use it point-to-point with other cell phones, Dmitri insisted it be used when communicating with Russia.
Because he’s always looking out for himself.
He heard Dmitri pick up. “Sir, did you get the situation report on the lawyer?” Nikita asked.
“Yes. Good job. I’m still waiting on news about the Mines and Energy minister and the Petrobras ombudsman. What is the status of them?”
“We’re tracking both, but I’ve had to consolidate the teams for the ombudsman. It’s under control.”
“You were given such a large team precisely to execute concurrently, not sequentially. We have a two-week window. That’s it. And we have the primary target to deal with.”
“Well, sir, to meet the timeline, I’m going to need more men. We ran into a problem that’s also an opportunity, and it’s caused a consolidation of my manpower. We have the ombudsman in our sights, but it’s complicated.”
He explained the current situation with the ferry in Salvador, then waited on the response. When it came, it wasn’t what he expected.
“I can’t give you more men immediately. We’ve run into a problem in Charleston, and Global Engagement Branch is skittish. Your team missed the man we were targeting from Grolier Recovery Services.”
“Missed him? What are you talking about? My team saw him incinerated.”
“Your team saw someone else incinerated. If I remember right, when I asked you if you were sure, you said, ‘unless he can walk out of fire.’ Well, it looks like he did.”
Nikita could feel the sarcasm coming from the phone, and understood he was standing on a trapdoor. He said, “How do you know? The next day the press said it was him. Was there a sighting?”
Nikita heard laughter, then, “The man you killed is named Kurt Hale. Something your men would have learned had they bothered to wait a few days for the press to sort out their own bad reporting. And yes, there was a sighting. Your target set a trap and killed two men from the team. A third barely escaped.”
“Killed them? In Charleston?”
“Yes. In Charleston. I knew they should have flown home immediately. Sergey is the only one who made it out alive—and even he barely did so. He’s holed up at a cheap motel near the airport, waiting on a flight out. Luckily, the deaths are being blamed on some drug competition from the Caribbean. Nobody has connected us to the action, unless you fuck something else up.”
Nikita tried to process the information. One second he was fighting for more men on a sanctioned mission, and the next he was being berated for screwing up a hit he didn’t even have control over. The last time he’d talked to Sergey, they were headed out to some fort in the middle of the harbor, enjoying life. And now, according to Dmitri, most of the team was dead.
He focused on the mission. “Did Sergey make it back to the hotel? Sterilize the room?”
“He tried to, but he was beaten to the room by the GRS men. He saw the target enter the lobby and just kept walking.”
Jesus Christ. “So they have everything in the room?”
“I haven’t personally debriefed him yet. He’s flying out tomorrow. Due to your incompetence, I’m closing that out.”
“Sir, he can’t fly out. We need to recover the equipment. At a minimum, recover the laptop that was in the suite.”
Nikita heard Dmitri’s voice take on a sharpened edge. “Why? What was on the laptop?”
Nikita hesitated, then said, “Information about that specific target. Intelligence that could prove damning, like the Brits found after we targeted Skripal in England.”
“Is that it?”
“There might . . . maybe, be some information about our operations here. There shouldn’t be, but I haven’t seen the computer.”
Nikita waited, then heard the anger come through the phone. “You fucking idiot. You cross-pollinated operations?”
“Wait, sir, there aren’t two different operations going now. I’m executing Operation Harve
st, and you put this target on my list. I had to coordinate with the team before I began operations down here. The laptop should be clean, but I can’t be sure. Don’t let Sergey leave.”
“What would you have me do, you fuckup? We’re about to cause an international incident, like those idiots did in England. We’ve muddied the waters enough in Charleston. We have two dead men there, and a car bomb you initiated. It won’t take much to connect the two. You mentioned Skripal, and that’s exactly what I’m worried about. When Russia’s hand was exposed, it was a worldwide mess of pressure. We don’t need that here.”
“Sir, Harvest has only begun, and it was you who said this man was a threat to successful execution. You put him on the target deck. His men are still here, and I can eliminate them, but the head is still alive, and we don’t know how many more he controls.”
Nikita could almost sense Dmitri’s brain turning over the implications. He pressed forward: “If you want to end Harvest because you think we’re already compromised, then so be it. But if you want me to continue, that target in Charleston needs to be eliminated. If what you say is true, it means stopping him now more than ever. Before, he was just a possible threat, but now he knows we’re hunting him. It’s a setback, but it’ll be worse if we don’t go on the offense.”
Nikita waited, hearing nothing. Then, “What do you suggest?”
“Let me continue with the mission. Reinforce both Sergey and myself. Give him what he needs to eliminate the head of GRS in Charleston and give me what I need to execute down here.”
“I’m not sure taking that man head-on is smart. He’s a hard target, and as you said, he knows he’s being hunted now.”
“Hard target or not, he needs to be dealt with. His men are down here for a reason, and I promise it’s because the United States wants the influence we’re trying to get here. They are no different. GRS is probably working for Exxon. We need to be bold.”
Dmitri said, “Maybe, but being bold and being stupid are the flip sides of the same coin, with only a twist of fate determining the difference. I’m not sure which one you are.”
“Sir, I have his men down here, just as I described. Give me more men for the other targets and let me execute this mission. Give Sergey what he needs and let him work the Charleston target set. We’ll eliminate not only the ombudsman, but the GRS problem.”
“Okay, but I don’t need another mistake. GRS is proving resilient, and I have to answer to powerful men.”
“You won’t get one. GRS may be resilient, but they aren’t superhuman. Give me command of the men in Charleston, and I’ll solve that problem. As for here, I own the police response, and those two GRS men on the ferry are trapped.”
Chapter 17
Knuckles waited until the sun was well past the horizon, a full moon providing feeble illumination on the water. He checked the sleeping guard curled on the bench bolted to the gunwale, leaned over, and poked Brett in the thigh, saying, “It’s time.”
Tonight marked the second cycle of darkness since they’d been taken hostage, and Knuckles knew the longer the crisis continued, the more unstable it would become. The hostage takers were at first arrogant and cocksure. Some type of criminal element with a sliver of grassroots insurgency, throughout the second day they had grown surly with the pressure—as always happened when a group took other human beings as pawns.
The hostage takers were tolerable now, but Knuckles knew it was only a matter of time before the terrorists began to crack. It caused him to worry. They needed to resolve this before the terrorists began fraying, losing the ability for rational thought.
On the plus side, the terrorists had shown they’d thought through the problem, and hadn’t simply stopped their planning at the moment of capture. They’d dictated to the police how the ferry would be fed, down to the type of boat that would bring supplies, and had planned for a sustained control of the situation. That told Knuckles that the fraying would take longer than an ordinary hostage situation, such as a bank robber who had no intention of taking captives but now was stuck with them.
All of that was a good thing in Knuckles’s mind, as it gave him space.
The captives had been given water and a basket of fruit, brought to the ferry on a wooden skiff from the town of Vera Cruz. A single man had been allowed to pilot the skiff, and he remained in the back, working the throttle while the gunmen all glowered, looking for some team of commandos to spring forth from the boat. When that hadn’t occurred, the skiff had returned twice more, delivering jackfruit, papaya, and bananas.
The terrorists had shown planning in other areas as well. While the passengers were all corralled in the center of the ferry for control, and not allowed to roam about, they were given the use of one bathroom at the stern of the boat, going in pairs under the watchful eye of a guard. It was the only movement permitted, and it was synchronized, with each individual guard knowing what was required. That was both good and bad.
Good because it showed detail orientation to the problem they’d caused. They’d not only studied the floor plan of the boat prior to assaulting, but had also determined the control of the hostages throughout the crisis, meaning they wouldn’t spaz out at the first hitch in their plan. Bad because it also meant they’d probably synchronized a response to any assault, either from the hostages or from the police.
Knuckles had studied the cycle of the terrorists, and had noticed that only one was allowed to sleep at any one time. And so he waited after nightfall until the one chosen for rest had been down long enough to be asleep.
He wasn’t thinking of attacking the remaining two down below. Like the care and feeding of the hostages, the terrorists had put some thought in their plan for control, and never congregated together. The three awake were always separated, providing no way to eliminate the threat before one could begin to defend himself, especially since one always remained upstairs in the captain’s chair. And it would take only one, as all of the terrorists had made clear they each held a daisy-chained initiation device that would cause the four satchels of explosives to detonate. Because of that, Knuckles’s goal wasn’t to eliminate the threat, but to engender someone else to do so. Someone with the skill to succeed. All he needed was a way to alert them that he was in trouble.
In the initial attack only the woman’s bodyguard was killed. Every hostage was searched, especially for cell phones and all identifying articles such as wallets and passports. The cell phones had been turned off and placed in one knapsack, the wallets and passports annotated for communication with the police and placed in another. Both were stored at the back of the boat, near the toilet everyone was forced to use.
Brett sat up, looked around in the darkness, then whispered, “You sure about this? We get caught and it might be the end.”
Knuckles said, “Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure unless we get some help, it’s the end anyway. You got a better idea than just sitting here waiting on some Neanderthals from Brazil to try a rescue, or these guys to decide they want to show they’re serious? You know the first they’ll kill is anyone who they think is a threat. That woman will live. You and I will not.”
Brett chuckled softly and said, “Nope. But if we get in a fight, I’m going down swinging, which means this whole boat is liable to blow. I’m not dying on my knees with a barrel to my forehead.”
Knuckles looked at the woman with the child. She was curled up around him like a lioness, protecting him from whatever the men with guns wanted to extract, her expensive clothes now being used as a makeshift blanket to give them warmth. It reminded him of the stakes.
He patted Brett’s thigh and said, “Same here, brother, same here. But if you give me cover, it won’t come to that. We missed our contact window, and the Taskforce has got to be wondering why, but they won’t pull the trigger on a Prairie Fire without some additional reason.”
Prairie Fire was a code word alert for a Taskforce element in mortal jeopardy. Once initiated, everything stopped, with all assets within the area o
f operations dedicated to helping the team in trouble. It was rarely used, and Knuckles knew the Taskforce wouldn’t initiate the protocol just because of a missed SITREP. So he needed to push a little bit, which is where his phone came in.
A special iPhone, designed from the ground up with features that were hidden from the casual user, it had a beacon inside that would signal not only their location, but the fact that they were in trouble.
If he could get to it.
He didn’t want to steal the phone and keep it, thereby jeopardizing the rest of the passengers, because he had no idea if they’d take an inventory of the backpack in the future or would search him at a later date. Finding it on his person would mean his instant death—and possibly someone innocent, just to prove a point.
All he wanted to do was take it into the bathroom with him.
Knuckles said, “Remember the play?”
“Yeah, you go first, get to the door, then I shit my pants, pushing you out of the way.”
Knuckles smiled and said, “But you don’t really need to shit your pants. Just act like it.”
Brett chuckled and said, “I’ve been saving in this gas for hours. Someone’s going to get it. You sure you can get that beacon up and running in the time we have? It’s not going to be more than a few seconds.”
“Nope. I’m sure I can shove that phone in my pants before they see, though. You’ll just have to do the dance twice.”
Brett stood up and said, “Let’s get it on.”
He waved his hands to the guard at the bow of the boat, and pointed at his groin. The man nodded, then held up two fingers. Brett knew the drill. The guards wanted to prevent going to the bathroom over and over, so they demanded two at a time, forcing the passengers to hold their bladder until another was ready. Brett tapped Knuckles, who stood as well.
The woman with the child heard the commotion and raised herself to her elbow. He glanced at her, and she locked eyes with him, as if she wanted something. He furrowed his brow, and she nodded. Meaning . . . meaning, what?