The Forgotten Soldier

by Brad Taylor

  He’d left his room, running to the harbor, the first time he’d broken the plane of the door in a day and a half.

  He’d watched the boat moor, taking note of the slip, and had sprinted back up, getting his surveillance package. Cloaked in the gathering gloom, the castle itself blocking the view from the harbor, he’d climbed the scaffolding lashed to the walls, reaching the rampart on the top. He laid out his kit, positioned his spotting scope, then settled in, doing the same thing he’d done in his hotel room.

  Sitting and watching.

  Eventually, dawn had broken, and the boat had begun to stir. He followed the crew members with his scope, then saw his target on the deck, eating breakfast. He waited until the man appeared to be close to finishing, then surveyed the base of the castle. On the land side, fishermen were repairing nets and prepping their boats for the day. On the ocean side, with the exception of a couple taking an early stroll on the seawall, there was nothing. He packed his belongings and waited until they’d turned around, heading back toward the city. He slung his pack and scrambled over the side.

  He reached the rock walkway just as another couple rounded the corner. They looked at him curiously, but continued strolling. He ignored them, moving toward the land, his eyes on the towering yacht, the biggest in the harbor.

  He saw a figure walking down the gangway but was too far to get a facial identification. He quickened his pace, intersecting the man at the juncture of the seawall, the gangway for the harbor funneling all straight to that point.

  It was his target.

  He fell in behind and began to follow, once again letting his quarry dictate his actions, thinking through his mission.

  Killing a man was easy, especially if one didn’t care about the future. But Guy needed to learn about the others. That’s what he told himself, even if it didn’t really explain his quest.

  He wanted absolution. Needed to know what he was doing was just. Wanted to believe it, even without sanction, but the man in Key West had provided no information other than the location of Haider.

  Guy had entered the bathroom in Key West with the naïve belief that the man would tell him what he needed to know. The man had not.

  He had fought like a demon until the bathroom was bathed in blood, and Guy had learned only one thing: the location of Haider. He’d left the island wondering if he’d murdered an innocent man, not a small thing in his mind. Guy had killed many men in his life, but all in combat. In the line of fire. This one was eating at him, growing in power, draining his ability to continue.

  Late at night, when the bad man came and he couldn’t sleep, he told himself he wasn’t a terrorist. Not a murderer. He focused on his brother’s face to obtain blissful sleep, and then was tortured by his dreams. He desperately wanted to prove he was in the right. That required questions, along with staying alive to pursue the answers.

  He followed the target most of the day, the man staying on foot for the duration. There were only three interesting stops, none involving a meeting. The first was at a car rental—one of the many dotting the city. The target spent twenty minutes inside, but left without a vehicle.

  Guy had wanted to enter the facility and learn what had transpired, but he had yet to implant his virtual tether, so was forced to follow the target. Leaving there, the Arab wandered up 25 Avgoustou Street, the main pedestrian thoroughfare that went through the heart of the city. He went to the second stop of interest. The Alpha Bank of Greece.

  Guy watched him go in, but didn’t follow. He took a seat at a Starbucks on the corner, unable to escape the ubiquitous smiling green icon even here in Crete. The target exited twelve minutes later, carrying a zipped bank bag. A bank bag bulging with cash.

  32

  The target left the bank and wandered aimlessly up the pedestrian avenue, killing time and acting like a tourist. He passed city hall, Guy tracking behind, seeing youthful protestors and spray-painted bedsheets howling anti-austerity slogans. Eventually, they reached the outdoor bazaar, the smell of fish overpowering.

  The target circled through the fish market, ignoring the vendors hawking their catches, and entered a section dedicated to trinkets and handmade crafts, bouncing in and out of the small tourist shops. Guy read his demeanor and surmised he wasn’t meeting anyone here. If he had been, he wouldn’t have bothered with the rental car office. Guy faded into the crowds and patiently waited for the target to stop longer than five minutes.

  Eventually, the target started walking back toward the harbor, and Guy began planning how he could return to the top of the castle, feeling his mission slipping away. He needed help. But in his heart, he knew he wouldn’t use such help even if he had it. Wouldn’t ask anyone to bloody their hands on his quest. A part of him wanted the man to return to his boat and relieve him of the mission. Giving him an out for not completing it.

  Another part, slithering deep in the abyss, wanted vengeance, and the dichotomy was beginning to rip at his psyche. He decided to let fate do what it would. If the man gave him the chance, he’d take it. But if he didn’t, he would fly home with his information, turn himself in, and let the Taskforce do what it would do.

  And then fate stepped into the game.

  Walking down a narrow alley, forcing Guy to give him a large lead, the target disappeared from view. Guy suppressed the urge to rush forward, knowing that the target wasn’t the only threat. Once the man was dead, they’d look for connections, and he running down the street—caught either on a surveillance camera or in the memory of someone looking out a window—was a sure way to halt his mission profile.

  He reached a narrow stairwell the target had escaped through and paused, staring into darkness in confusion, then saw a sign proclaiming the day’s specials.

  Restaurant.

  The snake in the abyss twitched. Time. The target was giving him time. He went up the stairs slowly, his eyes adjusting to the gloom.

  He entered a large room, open-air windows, and tables scattered throughout, all save one empty at the late lunch hour. The target was in the back of the room, next to an upright piano with nobody playing.

  A hostess seated him and he pretended to peruse the menu. He ordered an appetizer just to keep the waitress away, then pulled out his stolen Gremlin. It looked enough like any tablet on the market, to include a Wi-Fi capability, that he had no fear using it. He asked the waitress the password for the restaurant Wi-Fi, then pretended to surf the web. In actuality, he initiated the Gremlin’s true purpose, the parasitic device sniffing the air for cellular signals. Four phones registered. One was his. Two were a Greek country code. The last had to be his target.

  He selected that number, and the device began attempting to exploit, working through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the cellular network in an effort to penetrate the targeted phone. Guy kept one eye on the device and one on his target.

  The man was flirting overtly with the waitress, looking like a cheesy disco boy from the seventies. Guy could only imagine the idiotic lines he was using. The waitress laughed and seemed to reciprocate, and an idea formed. Guy watched the target scribble something on a piece of paper and hand it to her, and he had his in. He would trap the man with his own sorry libido.

  Guy started working through a plan, thinking of hotels he’d seen away from his own, when the Gremlin vibrated. It had penetration; the phone now slaved with the device.

  Ordinarily, this would be the point when some nefarious Taskforce exploit would be injected, but Guy had no such thing. Luckily, the cheating spouses club the world over had engendered a lucrative business in cell phone spying, and the open market was replete with cell phone exploits. The application he’d subscribed to was called OneSpy, and it allowed him to literally take over the targeted phone like a ghost in the machine. Listening to calls, seeing texts and web pages real-time, and giving GPS locational data were all in its repertoire—even turning on the microphone remotely to hear conversation
s. And it worked in the background, unseen by the phone’s owner.

  No doubt, should the man do any sort of forensic scan, it would be found—unlike Taskforce applications—but he didn’t need root access to deploy it, and he was fairly sure the Romeo across the room would never look.

  Not knowing the type of phone the man would have, he’d purchased both iOS and Android applications. He scanned the readout of the slaved phone and saw it was an Apple iPhone 6. He linked the iOS into the Gremlin and the parasite went to work. Ten minutes later, it was done.

  Still pretending to surf the web, Guy pulled up the OneSpy web page and logged in. Working through the menus, he pulled up the GPS feature and found a blinking blue dot sitting on top of the building the restaurant was in. The target.

  He smiled. No longer would he have to keep the man in sight. He used the GPS fence feature, setting an alarm should the man leave his yacht, and relaxed, eating his appetizer as the target finished his meal.

  When he left, Guy made no move to follow, instead waving over the waitress. Before she could speak, he said, “That man that just left works for the same company I do. In Qatar. He doesn’t know me, but I’d like to surprise him tonight. I’ll give you a hundred euros if you’ll call him when I ask.”

  Looking hesitant, not wanting to upset a patron, she hesitated. In broken English, she said, “I don’t do that. I’m not . . .”

  Guy leaned back and laughed, then said, “No, no, no. You misunderstand. He was trying to get a date with you, yes?”

  She nodded.

  “I just want you to call him when I ask.”

  He peeled off a hundred-euro note and held it up. “You get this now. All I want to do is surprise him with some friends from work. A simple phone call. Nothing else. He’s from Qatar. He’ll never expect it, but my company wants to reward him, and I promise he’ll be happy.”

  Naïve, but now returning his smile, she said, “He was cute.”

  “You call him, and if you want, I’ll send him back to you tomorrow. After I’ve surprised him. You can apologize for the trick, and he’ll be flattered.”

  She nodded, saying, “Is he rich?”

  “Yeah. He’s rich. He’s on that big yacht in the harbor.”

  Her eyes widened, everyone near the harbor having commented on its appearance. She said, “Is he staying here long?”

  Guy grinned and said, “Yes. He’ll be here for the foreseeable future. I promise.”

  33

  Knuckles and I exited the Megaro Moussikis metro stop and took a couple of seconds to get our bearings. He pointed north, toward what looked like a concert hall, and said, “She told me it was just on the other side of that.”

  We started walking, and I said, “You sure she’s good to go?”

  He said, “I’m sure she’s trustworthy, but I don’t know if she’ll be any help. She was close to Decoy, and when he was killed, she became close to Guy. If he was getting any help inside Greece, she’d be the first one he’d call.”

  Carly Ramirez was a CIA case officer currently working out of the Athens station. A few years before, Knuckles had taken Decoy to Lima, Peru, for his orientation deployment—a final check before becoming a full-fledged Operator in the Taskforce, and the thing I’d talked Kurt into letting Nick Seacrest skip. While they were there, Decoy had hooked up with Carly—against Knuckles’s expressed orders—and they’d dated on and off with a comfortable, long-distance relationship that had suited them both, right up until Decoy had been killed. I didn’t push any further, because I knew Knuckles had been the one who’d delivered the news. He was close to her as well.

  We’d flown out of DC the day before, using the last known trace of the Pandora application, an ISP in a hotel in Athens. The trace wasn’t real time, only showing where the Pandora application had been used in the past, requiring us to wait until Guy decided to log into his brother’s account again. In essence, it showed where he had been only after he was gone. Not good enough for a tracking operation.

  We needed something more. A name he was using, or a real-time tracking capability, and the hacking cell was working on that. Apparently, through what little digital evidence Pandora kept, Creed had determined Guy was using an HTC phone, but nothing further. The SIM card was another roadblock. It had been purchased from a vending machine at JFK International, and if I knew Guy, he’d probably bought about a dozen of them.

  There was one bright spot: Apparently, HTC phones used some type of evil diagnostic software called Carrier IQ. It was designed to monitor and report things like dropped calls and bad data connections for troubleshooting purposes, but Creed called it a rootkit, and said it not only monitored the calls but allowed the carrier to remotely access the complete usage of the phone, to include texts, web searches, key presses—basically anything done with the handset. Somewhere in that digital trail, we wanted to find a name. A tag. Something that would allow the hacking cell to dig out the alias he was using. From there, we could start a track.

  First, though, Creed had to get into the phone. It was all black magic to me, but he said he could do it.

  In the meantime, I’d sent Jennifer, Brett, and Nick to the hotel for static surveillance. It was tedious work, rotating in and out, and hoping the target showed, but it was all we had. Not wanting to go sightseeing around Athens, and feeling left out because we were no good for the surveillance effort, Knuckles had come up with the idea to hit up Carly and see if Guy had made contact.

  Knuckles had set up a meeting at the embassy under the auspices of “just passing through,” and she’d put us on the cleared visitor list. We could get on the grounds but couldn’t get past Post One, the Marine Guard who was the gatekeeper for the interior of the embassy.

  We reached the side entrance to the embassy on Petrou Kokkali Street and stated our purpose. The guard looked through a list of names, then pressed a button, letting us enter the guardhouse. Inside, it looked like a small airport, complete with X-ray machine and metal detector. We unloaded our pockets into a bin, followed by our smartphones. I pushed mine toward the X-ray and followed Knuckles through the metal detector. He started to shove everything back into his pockets when the back door opened, and I saw a woman enter. About five-three, with black hair that fell just past her shoulders, she had a healthy tan, a sprinkle of freckles on her face, and a little upturned nose that was cute for no damn reason whatsoever.

  Knuckles’s smile split his face open and he gave her a bear hug. So that must be Carly. I could see why Decoy had chased her. She was pretty attractive, in a tomboy, elfish sort of way.

  I walked through the detector and began putting my belt back on, waiting to be introduced. Knuckles ignored me, saying, “What happened to the red hair?”

  “Nobody has red hair in Greece.” She turned to me and said, “This must be the infamous Nephilim Logan.”

  I showed some surprise at her using my given name instead of my callsign. She stuck out her hand and said, “Decoy told me all about you. Don’t worry, it was all good. Mostly.”

  I grinned and shook her hand, saying, “He didn’t say a damn thing to me about you. Probably afraid he’d lose your attention once you met me.”

  She said, “No, no, I don’t think that’s it. Maybe because you’re not my type. I don’t really date Neanderthals.”

  Huh? I’d never even met this woman and she was going to insult me? Right in the embassy? I bit back my reply and Knuckles grinned, slapping me on the back and saying, “I told you she was a handful.”

  Carly looked past me and said, “This is it? Just you two? Where’s the girl? Jennifer? I wanted to meet her.”

  Now I was really aggravated. There was no reason for Knuckles to tell a CIA case officer the makeup of the team we had here. All she needed to know was who was coming to the embassy.

  Carly saw my look and said, “Don’t blame Knuckles. Decoy told me all about Jennifer as we
ll.”

  She glanced at Knuckles and I saw a little melancholy on her face. The sarcastic facade slipped a bit, and I saw the pain leak out. She said, “We had a unique relationship. He kept asking for tips on getting Jennifer into bed, because he said we were so much alike. Wanting to make me jealous, but he knew it would never work. I’m not built that way.”

  She turned back to me and said, “Besides, he also told me he didn’t stand a chance because of the mighty Pike. He really respected you, you know. And he was very impressed with Jennifer. I just wanted to meet her. Not too often you get a chance to talk to someone in the arena, dealing with the enemy and you chauvinists at the same time.”

  She winked at me to let me know I was in on the joke, and in the span of about fifteen seconds, I went from being aggravated to warming up to her. I said, “Maybe you will. It’s a small world we live in.”

  She said, “That it is. Come on.”

  We exited the guardhouse and walked down the sidewalk, moving past a newer building before turning into a courtyard with a few scattered picnic tables. Inside the glass doors, I could see Marine Post One.

  Carly took a seat and said, “As far as we go.” She held out her hands for Knuckles to take and said, “I’ve really missed you. Ever since I left DC, I never see any of you secret squirrels. Guy came through here the other day, and it reminded me of the good times we used to have when I was at HQ. The only saving grace in working there. When you called, I knew you guys were doing something here.”

  She saw us both tense up, and she chuckled, saying, “Come on, Knuckles. After that crap in Lima, you know I’m not telling my boss anything. I still owe you my career.”