by Barry Eisler
He started to say something, but I cut him off. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you know that. I’ll meet you back here in two hours.”
He smiled and held out his hand. I shook it. He started to say something again, and again I cut him off.
“Don’t tell me to do the right thing,” I said. “I already told you I’d think about it. Don’t sell past the close.”
He looked at me. “What, are you psychic now?”
I frowned. “What, then?”
“I was just going to say good luck. Is that okay?”
I told him it was. We were going to need it. And so was Dox.
28
I DID A ROUTE from the hotel to make sure I was still clean. Then I stopped at Orchard Towers, a nondescript office complex in the city’s shopping district. No one would know from the utter diurnal blandness of the place that every night it was overrun by a raucous throng of calculating prostitutes and eager johns. For now, the wall-to-wall bars in the basement and on the first two floors were shuttered, and the atrium was quiet enough to be in a coma. I took the escalator to an Internet shop I knew on the second floor.
I used one of the terminals to check out the Republic of Singapore Yacht Club, first through the club’s own website, then from the air with Google Earth. Amazing, the information that’s publicly available these days. Not long ago, you needed a top secret clearance to access Keyhole satellite photographs. Not anymore.
The club had berths for about seventy boats of varying sizes. A long pier extended out from the marina facilities, with five perpendicular quays leading off it. Kanezaki had said Ocean Emerald was a thirty-footer. That meant the boat could have been in any of the perpendicular berths. I would try to find a way to narrow it down. Even if I couldn’t, five general possibilities wasn’t insurmountable.
The club also had three restaurants and a bar; twenty-eight guestrooms; and boat rentals. All of which meant that, however exclusive the place might otherwise be, they welcomed, and were used to, visitors on the premises.
So far, so good. I called Boaz from a pay phone.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“A food court, in a shopping center at the corner of Orchard and Scotts.”
“You know where Orchard Towers is?”
“Orchard Road?”
“Yeah, a half-mile west of you, across the street from the Hilton. Meet me out front in five minutes. You in a car or on foot?”
“On foot.”
“All right. See you in five.”
Five minutes didn’t give him a lot of time to scramble an ambush team, if that’s what this was about. But I still wasn’t going to wait exactly where I’d told him.
I headed out and walked a hundred yards east, then ducked into an alley. I put my back to the east side of a loading dock, where anyone moving west would have to look backward to see me. Four minutes later, I watched Boaz go past. He was wearing shorts, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and sandals, and a large backpack was slung over both shoulders. He might have been a European tourist on his way to a hostel somewhere.
I eased out, checking behind and across the street. I didn’t see any problems.
“Boaz,” I called out.
He turned, keeping his hands at his sides.
“Ah, I didn’t think you’d be where you told me,” he said.
“Just come this way. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
He complied. We cut down Claymore Road. I glanced behind as we moved. No one was following.
Harry’s bug detector was buzzing in my pocket. “You have a mobile phone?” I asked him.
“Of course.”
“Reach for it slowly and turn it off.”
He shrugged and slipped his hand into one of the front pockets of his shorts. Harry’s detector fell silent.
“Are you armed?” I asked.
“Only with something sharp. Nothing that goes bang.”
I steered us into another alley. “Face the wall,” I said. “I’m going to pat you down.”
“I don’t see how we can accomplish our objectives with this level of mistrust,” he said, his expression grave.
“Boaz, a year ago, your organization was trying to kill me. Turn around.”
He shrugged. While I patted him down, he said, “That was situational, you know, and personally I regretted it.”
He was wearing an FS HideAway knife in a sheath around his neck, the same kind Delilah had introduced Dox to a year earlier. For the moment, I didn’t bother with the backpack. He couldn’t access it quickly enough for anything in it to present a threat.
“I’ll let you keep the knife,” I said, straightening. “Just don’t reach for your neck suddenly. What’s in the backpack?”
He smiled. “Camera gear. Take a look.”
“I will as soon as we’re settled. Come on, let’s keep moving.”
“You’re wasting time,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m alone. And if I weren’t, I wouldn’t have a team follow me now. I’d have them waiting wherever Hilger is, as soon as you told me. They would know to expect you there eventually.”
I looked at him, disturbed by the truth of his words. Goddamnit, I was in a box. And Delilah had caused it.
“We want Hilger,” he said. “Why would we want you? That situation is over. Our interests are aligned now.”
All right, the hell with it. I didn’t have a choice.
“What do you have for me?” I asked.
He broke out in a big, boyish grin. “Wait’ll you see it.”
We took a cab to a hawker’s market, one of the outdoor food courts that dot the city and serve cheap, delicious Singaporean food. The centers are popular and can be crowded and noisy well past midnight, but we were ahead of the lunchtime crowd and had no trouble getting a table. We sat on plastic chairs under the shade of a big beach umbrella and enjoyed skewers of chicken and beef satay washed down with mango juice. While we ate, Boaz invited me to take a look in the backpack, which he had placed on the concrete floor between us.
I did. As he’d mentioned, the pack seemed to be full of camera equipment: a Nikon camera body, a variety of lenses, portable lighting equipment, a tripod, and battery packs.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
He gave me the boyish grin again. “Have you heard of an ‘active denial system’?”
“No. Should I have?”
“ADS is the Pentagon’s name for a nonlethal millimeter wave energy weapon. America’s troops have used it in Iraq.”
“Okay…” I said, getting interested.
“It shoots electromagnetic radiation at ninety-five gigahertz. Boils moisture in the skin, but only to a depth of one sixty-fourth of an inch. So it hurts like hell, but doesn’t cause damage.”
I glanced down at the backpack. “Your guys have developed a portable version.”
“Correct. The Pentagon’s unit, which they had developed by Raytheon, is truck-mounted. Very powerful—the range is over a kilometer—but big. What I’ve got here has to be employed close up, but you can carry it on your back.”
“It goes through walls?” I asked, doubtful.
“That’s…the tricky part. You can adjust the frequency. Shorter-range frequencies go through walls, yes. But they also cause more damage.”
“So if you don’t calibrate it right…”
“Right, you can cook the hostages along with the terrorists. It looks bad on TV after. Do it right, though, and no one gets worse than a sunburn.”
I nodded. “What does it feel like?”
He smiled. “You want to try?”
“Just tell me.”
He laughed. “A wise decision. I had it done to me—once. It feels like your skin is on fire, simple as that. The Sayeret Matkal had a little competition. Five thousand shekels to anyone who could group three rounds in a five-inch cluster from ten yards away while being hit with the beam. This is a joke for these men, they’re expert shooters. Ordinarily they group
in one inch from much farther.”
“What happened?”
He laughed again. “They couldn’t shoot at all. They were too busy writhing and running away. No one asked to try twice. When word got around about what it felt like, people stopped volunteering.”
“I like it,” I said.
He nodded. “You should. Without intelligence…”
“Yes, I know. Delilah’s already been persuasive on that point.”
He looked at me. “You’re treating her right?”
I returned the look. “That’s really none of your business, is it?”
He shrugged. “She’s my colleague, and as close as a sister. We watch each other’s backs.”
I nodded. “It’s good of you to ask, then.”
“So? You’re treating her right?”
I couldn’t help laughing. He laughed, too. “I know, I know,” he said. “We Israelis are pushy. You know, there’s no word for ‘Excuse me’ in Hebrew?”
“What?”
He shrugged. “An old joke. But with some truth. If I put my nose where it doesn’t belong, forgive me.”
“We’re…managing,” I told him, thinking of what she had said to me on the phone just a few hours earlier. “It’s not easy, though.”
He laughed again. “It never is, my friend. It never is.”
We were quiet for a moment. I said, “You…have a family?”
He nodded. “Three sons and a baby daughter. Thank God we finally had a girl. My wife was ready to give up. And you?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, after a moment.
We were quiet again, and this time he didn’t push.
“Why did Hilger take your friend?” he asked.
“Does it matter?”
He shrugged. “It won’t affect what happens to Hilger.”
“It did affect it. It guaranteed it.”
“Good.”
We finished the food. He said, “So? How do you want to do it?”
I shrugged. “Show me how to use the device. I’ll take care of the rest.”
He nodded. “I owe Delilah a hundred shekels.”
“What?”
“She told me you would say that.”
I looked at him, nonplussed.
“I can’t show you. It takes training and experience. I have to see the terrain. Set the controls wrong one way, and it has no effect. Wrong the other way, and you boil your friend’s internal organs. And while you’re trying to get it right, probably people on the boat will be shooting at you. Don’t be stupid.”
I didn’t answer.
“Besides,” he went on, “I’ve already got a van, a driver…”
“Jesus, you’re not alone?”
“No one works alone anymore, Rain. You’re the only one I know.”
Again I didn’t answer. I was trying to account for how quickly and thoroughly I’d lost control of this op. And at the same time thinking, admitting, really, that my odds of success were better because of it.
“You’ll like Naftali,” he said. “He’s, what do you call it, a wheelman?”
“You could call it that, I guess, yeah,” I said.
“Very serious. I don’t think he knows how to talk.”
“That’ll be refreshing.”
He laughed. “Here’s what I propose. Naftali drives. I operate the device. You do the shooting. I assume you’re equipped?”
“With a cannon.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing. I’m equipped. And I already have a driver.”
“You’re bullshitting me.”
“I’m not. I think we’re all going to have to sit down together. If we don’t coordinate…”
“You’re right, it will be a cluster fuck.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked at me, and I nodded to show that I appreciated his use of the idiom. “Yes,” I said. “A cluster fuck.”
He smiled. “And you’re sure Hilger will be on the boat, as Delilah says?”
I didn’t hesitate, or give any other indication that I was lying. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”
“Good. Then let’s sit down with our two drivers. We don’t have much time.”
29
HILGER STEPPED OFF THE BOAT, leaving Guthrie and Pancho with Dox. He needed to check the bulletin board, and preferred to do so from anonymous points like Internet cafés. He was able to tell where Rain was accessing it, and although he had taken steps to ensure that Rain couldn’t do the same thing on the other end, a little extra caution never hurt.
He did a surveillance detection route, then caught a cab to the Ritz-Carlton, where he logged in at their business center. No response from Rain, but…
He checked, and sure enough, Rain had accessed the board a few hours earlier, from Paris. He must have gone back there after New York. That’s where he’d been when they first grabbed Dox. Maybe he was living there these days. Something to consider, if they didn’t wrap him up soon somewhere else.
He wondered why Rain hadn’t responded. Maybe he hadn’t felt the need to. Hilger had told him to call at 08:00 GMT; maybe Rain simply planned to comply.
Or maybe Rain had found unpersuasive Hilger’s protestations of innocence about what had happened outside Accinelli’s apartment. So what, though? They still had Dox, meaning Rain had no choice but to play along. Playing along meant, at a minimum, calling in to make sure Dox was still okay. At which point, Hilger would deny everything again, assure Rain there was a third target, and just keep stringing the man along for another couple of days. Once Rotterdam was done, he’d give Rain a fictitious target and finish him off when he showed up for the job. But for now, Rotterdam was the main thing. He needed to focus on that.
He went to a pay phone and called Boezeman. They had never met—Demeere had recruited and run Boezeman precisely to keep his knowledge of Hilger’s operation as limited as possible—but they also had a backup plan, just in case. Agency SOP, and Hilger still followed it. Because if something happens to the primary case officer, how do you make contact with his assets? And how do you establish your bona fides when you do?
Demeere had implied to Boezeman that he was fronting a heroin operation. Demeere had never said so in so many words, of course; just a wink here and a nudge there, and Boezeman had filled in the details he was most comfortable with. Why else would the blond Belgian want a Rotterdam port security official to escort him onto the facilities, look the other way while he removed something from a shipping container, and escort him out? For a million dollars U.S., it had to be drugs, and a big shipment at that. And it wasn’t as though anyone was going to be hurt by it. Holland’s drug laws were the most liberal in the world, but they were still fundamentally silly, distinguishing between “soft” drugs, like cannabis and magic mushrooms, on the one hand, and heroin and cocaine, on the other. But people wanted them all, and what right did the government have to interfere with that? Or with a man’s right to profit so handsomely from the government’s hypocrisy?
The problem, Boezeman had explained to Demeere, was access. Only the head of security had the authority, official and perceived, to move an unauthorized person around the way the Belgian wanted. Didn’t the head of security take vacation? Demeere had asked. Boezeman had laughed at that, pointing out that Henk Jannick hadn’t taken a vacation in more than two years. Well, we can wait, Demeere had assured him. Maybe something will come up, and you’ll find yourself in a position where you can help me.
The phone rang twice on the other end, then three times. It was six in the morning in Amsterdam. Maybe Boezeman turned his mobile off at night, although most Europeans Hilger knew never did.
Then a voice cut in: “Hoi.”
“Hello, Mister Boezeman?” Hilger said.
“Yes, speaking,” the man said, switching to English.
“My name is James Hillman, and I’m a friend of William Detts. He told you I might be calling, right?”
“Uh, yes, he did.”
“Well, unfortunately, W
illiam can’t make it to Amsterdam as he was hoping. But perhaps you could hold open that rental property he discussed for me? The one with the western view and the sunsets?”
The reference to rental property and the rest was a prearranged signal that would establish Hilger’s bona fides. He waited for the prearranged response.
“Yes,” Boezeman said. “It’s a good property, and the sunrises are even better than the sunsets. I can hold it for you.”
“Wonderful. I expect to travel to Amsterdam in the next two days. Perhaps you could show me the property then?”
“I’d be happy to. Just let me know your itinerary.”
“I’ll call again as soon as I have the details. I assume you take cash?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Perfect. I’ll make the arrangements, and call you again shortly.”
He hung up, relieved that it had gone smoothly. It wouldn’t have been the first time an asset forgot his fallback instructions, but Demeere had clearly drilled the man well. Damn, he would be hard to replace. He’d reeled in Boezeman so efficiently after Accinelli had introduced them at that conference in New York, and then managed him perfectly afterward.
It had taken a while to get everything else in place. First, they’d needed the material. Accinelli had come through there. Cesium 137 was a radioactive element and therefore highly regulated, but Accinelli was willing to fudge the paperwork at Global Pyrochemical Industries and provide it to a fellow Gulf War veteran he trusted, who he believed was still with the Agency. Hilger had hinted that the cesium was being used to develop a new kind of ion propulsion engine for the military, a black program, totally off the books, everything acquired from private sources without any official government funding. Accinelli was a patriot, and was pleased to be able to leverage his success in the private sector in the interests of national security.
The only problem was that Accinelli knew of the Hilger–Demeere–Boezeman link. When the operation was completed at Rotterdam, it would be worldwide news. The initial explosion would be trivial—only a hundred pounds of TNT—and, with a little luck, wouldn’t even produce casualties. It was the fallout, literal and figurative, that would get all the attention.