by Blake Banner
He was quiet for a while. I could hear him breathing and he grunted a couple of times. All the while I was holding Diana’s eye. Eventually he said, “But, you must understand. In the first place, the kind of figure you are looking for, you can’t just come up with that in a few hours. And, what guarantee have I that having paid you…”
I cut him short. “Well that’s very sad, Omar. I’m sorry you feel that way…”
“No, wait!”
I smiled at Diana and received a reluctant rictus in reply.
“What for, Omar? All I am getting is a lot of bullshit and verbiage which I am really not interested in. It is a very simple choice you need to make. Meet me at the Woodstock Bar in half an hour, twenty minutes, and be prepared to make a very substantial transfer to Belize, or don’t. If you do, you walk away with the stone in your hands. Why? Because the one thing I do not want is to complicate my life. How uncomplicated do I want it? Well, I was kind of thinking Forbes Five Hundred uncomplicated. If you can do that, that’s great. If you can’t, somebody else can. I’m pretty sure I can rustle up some Russian friends in Marbella and Puerto Banus.”
“OK, OK, take it easy. Let’s stay calm and take things easy, one step at a time…” I heard a deep breath. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes, with my secretary and my accountant. I am sure we can sort something out. Let’s just please keep calm.”
“That’s fine, Omar. But just be sure that your secretary and your accountant aren’t built like quarterbacks and have big bulges under their jackets. Try to play me, mug me or snatch it from me, and you will never see the stone, and I will kill you in a way that would make most sane people vomit copiously. Not tonight, not tomorrow, but the day after, maybe. Or in a week or a month. So, you know, behave.”
“It is pointless asking who you are, I suppose.”
I gave him a sample of cut-glass upper-class English from England that I had learned at the Regiment and said, “As you say, dear chap, utterly pointless.”
“How will I know you?”
“You won’t. I’ll know you. And in case you have some Chicago gangster idea of mowing me down from a passing car, just remember the SAS always work in teams of four.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Yeah, most probably. Shall we find out?”
Another sigh. “No. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I hung up and Diana and I sat staring at each other. Finally I said, “The clock is ticking. And, to be perfectly honest, I have no compunctions about standing up, giving you a right hook, taking the damned stone from your panties or your bra, or wherever the hell you have it right now, and going back to the hotel. Something tells me you won’t press charges with the cops.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“Yeah, thanks, but like I told you in Canada, I am trying to save your life.” I reached across the table with my open hand and said, “Give it to me now. We’re out of time. Give it to me or I’ll take it by force.”
She glanced around, then reached inside her bag, pulled out a slim carton and handed it to me.
“What happens now?” she asked. “You throw me to the wolves? Are you going to hand me over and let them torture me to death, while you relax and enjoy the good life?”
I slipped the carton into my inside pocket and arched an eyebrow at her. “You don’t learn fast, do you? Shift your chair around so you’re sitting right next to me and you can bury your face in my neck and shoulder when they arrive. My guess is he’ll be punctual, and he’ll be here in the next ten minutes.”
She shifted her chair so she was sitting practically on top of me, and placed her head on my shoulder, so she was almost completely hidden in shadows. She whispered in my ear.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure. I have to say I am pretty curious about how high they’ll go.”
“They could ambush us and kill us.”
“I don’t think they’d risk it.”
“You’re overconfident. You have no idea who you’re up against. We should run and get the hell out of here.”
“Run?” I shook my head. “Do you know, Helen, why you can’t spend your whole life running?” She groaned, rolled her eyes and looked away. I answered anyway. “Because that is not living.”
“Amazing. You should write inspirational self-help books.”
“Yeah, well you can spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. I don’t plan to.”
Five minutes later a black Mercedes S Class pulled into the road and parked outside the Woodstock. The driver got out and opened the back door. Three men in suits got out and stood looking around. After a moment one of them spoke, gestured at the bar and they went inside. I turned to Diana.
“Go inside. Order two drinks. I’ll be right back.”
She stared at me aghast, and it struck me it was the first time I had seen a genuinely intense emotion on her face.
“You have got to be kidding! Do you know how negligent that is?”
I nodded. “Shut up and go inside.”
I stood and made my way fifty yards along the sidewalk to the Woodstock. I stepped through the door and stood looking at the three men in suits sitting in the corner, in brown leather armchairs and sofa. They hadn’t been given their drinks yet and they were looking around nervously.
I approached them, pulled over a hardback chair, and sat next to a saturnine, skinny guy in his sixties whom I figured was the accountant. He stared at me, then stared at the guy opposite him, whom I figured was Omar. He was completely bald and had a gray goatee. His charcoal gray suit was exquisite and his black shoes had a high-gloss shine.
The third guy had shiny black hair, very black eyes and dark pouches under his eyes. He was in his thirties and he was the one with the attaché case. I pointed at the bald guy.
“Omar?”
The distaste in his face was palpable. He said, “Professor Arian.”
I smiled. “You know? I would call you that if I had any respect for you. Have you come prepared to pay?”
“I have come prepared to pay.” He gestured at the little guy. “Salim Masih, my secretary, will take care of the payment, and Abdul Kouri, my accountant, will oversee it. You see I am serious. But however much you threaten me, I am not going to pay without some guarantee that you have the device, and that you will give it to me. But…” He shook his head and both his hands to emphasize the totally negative condition of his statement. “Not me, not anybody. The sums of money you are talking about, nobody is going to part with that kind of money just on your say-so!”
I barked a laugh. A waiter stepped up with three bottles of Coca-Cola and three glasses with ice and lemon. He distributed the drinks and looked at me inquiringly. I said, “Scotch, no ice,” and he went away.
I said to Omar, “So I hand it over to you, you take it, shoot me and run.”
He shook his head and the little guy with the attaché case sat forward.
“Ten percent now, we have sight of the object. Half tomorrow in a hotel room of your choice, which you will tell us about ten minutes before the deal. Then you and I…,” he pointed at me vigorously and then at himself, “hold the device while the transfer is made, then you let go of the device and we all leave.”
I nodded a few times like I had my doubts. “Sounds like the makings of a plan. I don’t like hotels, especially hotels I don’t know. But I will message you a place. I will be alone, but make no mistake, I am very dangerous and I will be armed. There will be the three of you and your chauffeur. If you try anything at all, there will be very serious consequences for all of you.”
We all stared at each other and nodded. I pulled the carton from my pocket and Omar sat forward, rubbing his mouth with his fingers. I slid open the carton and removed the packing tape and the magnets, and held up the NPP for them to see. Omar looked at his secretary and snapped, “Salim!”
Salim nodded and opened the attaché case. He reached inside and came out with what looked like a smal
l remote control. He pressed a button and a blue, translucent circle appeared on the black stone. There was a collective gasp around the table and I snarled, “OK, that’s enough of that!”
I wrapped it in the magnets and the packing tape again, put it back in the box and slipped it inside my pocket. Then I handed the secretary a card with the Belize bank account details on it, and watched him rattle at his keyboard for a minute or two. Finally he glanced at Omar, Omar gave him the nod and he hit enter.
Fifteen seconds later my phone pinged. I pulled it out and looked at the message from my bank in Belize. My head swam for a moment but I tried not to show it.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll see you gentlemen tomorrow at noon. I’ll let you know where.” I stood. “Enjoy your Colas.”
Fifteen
I found her sitting at the bar. There were a couple of guys eying her up, but when I came in they ceased and desisted and I climbed on the stool beside her. I smiled, like I was trying to build a bridge across a deep divide that had become obsolete.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Bit late for that, Mr. Ethelbaum.”
I signaled the waiter and told him a Macallan, no ice. Then turned my smile on Diana again.
“It’s almost time for real names. What will we do when I am not trying to drown you and save your life by turns?”
To my surprise she burst out laughing. It was loud enough for a couple of people to turn and look. It was also a pretty sound. And when she stopped laughing, the look in her eye was also surprising. It said she liked me. I hadn’t seen that look very often in my life.
“You know, John, Mr. Ethelbaum, Harry…whatever your name is, I could almost grow fond of you.”
“That’s almost a nice thing to hear.”
“Before we start planning a future in the green Midwest with a white picket fence and gloriously happy hours making apple pie, why don’t you tell me what happened with Omar and his pals?”
The barman placed my drink in front of me with a bowl of peanuts.
“He just transferred a sum of money to my numbered account in Belize. It’s the kind of sum that Bill Gates would spend on rewiring his house, but most other people would retire on and secure their family’s future for generations to come.”
I pulled out my cell and showed her the message from my bank. I saw her pupils dilate, but then she frowned.
“You haven’t given it to him?”
I shook my head and spoke as I put my phone away.
“That is just a statement of good faith. We meet tomorrow at a place of my choosing, I hand over the device, and they pay me the other ninety percent.”
“It’s a trap.”
“Probably. How could they raise that much money that quickly?”
“I don’t know what their backing is. But I do know that if this thing is weaponized, whoever has it, wins the game.”
Her eyes flicked over my face under contracted brows. “And knowing that you’re willing to hand it over?”
I took a sip from my whisky and followed it with a pinch of peanuts.
“That’s an assumption. I never said that. My commitment is to hand you, and it, over to the people in Washington. That’s the job I am paid to do. Whatever spoils of war I pick up along the way, those are for me.”
Her eyebrows arched. “That’s a hell of a lot of spoils. Especially considering the stone is mine.”
“Is it? I don’t know that. I don’t know anything, remember?”
She sighed and gave a smile that was on the exhausted side of tired. Then she quoted me. “It’s almost time for real names…”
“Where we go, and what happens next, after this moment, depends one hundred percent on what you do and what you say.” I picked up a fingerful of peanuts and dropped them into my mouth, waiting for her to say something. She didn’t, so I pressed her. “I have enough money accumulated that I can retire right now and live like a king for the rest of my life. And if I ever have any kids, their kids will be able to do the same. I don’t need the other ninety percent, and I’m not sure I even want it. But what I do want, within my limitations as a man, is to do the right thing, according to my own rights. To do that, I need to know who you are, what you are doing, and what you want.”
She snorted at the floor and glanced briefly at my face.
“Is that all? Why didn’t you say so?”
It was a facetious question and I didn’t feel like giving a facetious answer. So I waited. She drained her glass and signaled the barman for another. After a moment she narrowed her eyes at me.
“Harry? Is that real?”
I nodded. “Yeah, Harry.”
“Well, Harry, I am exhausted. I come from a long line of Scandinavian Protestants who go all the way back to the first Puritan Scandinavians who settled here way back when. We are stoic, pragmatic, long-suffering and we never show emotion. But I am spent, burnt out and exhausted.”
“It’s been a tough few days.”
“You mean for me. You look fresh as a…” She snorted. “I was going to say as a daisy. But clearly that’s ridiculous. More like fresh as a fifteen-foot saguaro cactus.”
“Not really. I’m pretty tired too. I’m not a Scandinavian Protestant, but where I grew up in the Bronx you didn’t show pain or weakness, or you were dead.”
“Well, anyway.” She turned her glass around a few times on the bar. “I am Helen Johansdota, of Iowa. We came from Iceland via Norway.”
She reached out her hand, staring with pursed lips at the hand instead of me. I took the hand and shook, smiling on the ironic side of my face.
“Harry Bauer. It’s good to finally meet you, Helen.”
She smiled and shook her head. “You’re a piece of work, Harry Bauer, but you are too soft—no, not soft, too good. You’re going to get hurt.”
“I’ll get by. So how did you get involved with Omar?”
She drew a deep breath, hesitated, went to speak and sighed, looking me straight in the eye.
“OK, you deserve the truth. I was not a research assistant. I was head of project. I graduated with maximum honors from Caltech, was then given special leave to do my PhD in firmions and how the Pauli exclusion principle generates the potential for space and time…”
I raised a hand. “Grunt here, totally lost already.”
“Sorry, OK, so I did a PhD in theoretical quantum physics. Along the way I discovered that I had an IQ in the very high one-sixties.”
“Like Einstein.”
“Thereabouts. My thesis was controversial, upset a lot of people, but attracted a lot of attention from the kind of dot-com billionaires who don’t really care for conventions and hallowed grounds. Just as the predator’s first question is, ‘Can I eat it?’ their first question is, ‘Does it work?’ If it works, they’re interested. If it will make them richer even than they already are, they want to own it. So my thesis attracted the attention of Ethan Booysen. He owns a couple of dot-com banks, a couple of social media platforms…”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“But his real passion is space. He was obsessed as a kid by Star Trek and he believes our future lies on Mars. He wants to terraform Mars and then go beyond this solar system and spread a human empire across the galaxy. That requires two things.”
She paused and looked at me like I was going to try and guess what they were. I shrugged. She spread her hands like I had missed something self-evident.
“You need to be essentially immortal, or at least live for millennia, and you have to be able to meld with machines, especially cybernetic systems.”
“That’s science fiction.”
She gave a short, very dry laugh. “Have you had a look around recently? Kirk and Picard would be pretty freaked out at some of the technology we have now, Harry. Science fiction is not science fiction anymore. Listen…” She leaned forward with one elbow on the bar and pointed a finger at me like a gun. “Science fiction is becoming increasingly fantasy, because there is nowhere left for it to go.
The science is all either real or theoretical and being developed. What’s left is magic. Cybernetic systems are a reality today, and the technology exists theoretically to prolong human life indefinitely. All we need is to develop nanotechnology a little further, and we are there.”
“And as far as Booysen was concerned, you were the girl to do that.”
“Yes.”
“And he installed Omar Arian to oversee the project.”
“Yes. I am not sure how much Ethan knew about how the project was evolving. Most of the time his head was either on Mars or at NASA trying to thrash out joint projects.”
I nodded and sipped. “And…?”
“It began to dawn on me, even if Ethan wasn’t seeing what was developing under his nose, I was.”
“And what was developing under your nose?”
“You have to be careful these days…”
“Not with me you don’t. Come on, Helen, spit it out.”
“The project was mainly funded by an Islamic foundation.” She took a deep breath and thought for a moment. “The Mohammed ben Amini Memorial Foundation of New York. They covered most of the research and development. Ethan Booysen supplied the next biggest chunk of support, and it was understood he was responsible for seeking out the talent. But as time went by, and the project began to show real signs of progress, I became aware that the representatives of the foundation, and particularly Omar, were trying to take possession of the research and the project. To such a point that I actually tried to alert Ethan, and I began hiding vital pieces of research from Omar and his colleagues. He actually installed a couple of researchers to spy on me, but I blindsided them and eventually had them sacked.”
She took a long pull on her drink and set the drink down carefully on the bar. She licked her lips with the tip of her tongue.
“In the end things got pretty hairy and Omar called me into his office and threatened to have me removed from the project and all my contributions reattributed, as though I had never been there. You can imagine that I was furious. I promised I would toe the line but immediately called Ethan. We met for coffee and agreed on a plan. I would take the stone and all the relevant research, would irreversibly corrupt the research which was contained in the computer networks at the foundation. He supplied me with a micro-pen to do that. And he also made arrangements for me to be taken care of and taken to safety in DC.”