‘It may escape you, but it’s extremely important to me,’ Andrea muttered.
‘… but what’s key for us right now is to get our hands on the same information Russell has. He’s not going to share it with us, that’s for sure. And that’s why we need you to take a look at those files.’
‘Why can’t I just steal them from Russell?’
‘Two reasons. First, because Russell and Kayn sleep in the same cabin, which is under constant surveillance. And second, because even if you managed to get in, their quarters are huge and Russell probably has papers all over the place. He’s brought quite a bit of work with him in order to continue managing Kayn’s empire.’
‘All right, but that monster… I’ve seen the way he looks at me. I don’t want to go near him.’
‘Mr Dekker can recite the entire works of Schopenhauer from memory. Maybe that will give you something to talk about,’ Fowler said in one of his rare attempts at humour.
‘Father, you’re not helping,’ Harel scolded him.
‘What’s he talking about, Doc?’ Andrea asked.
‘Dekker cites Schopenhauer whenever he gets worked up. He’s famous for it.’
‘I thought he was famous for eating barbed wire for breakfast. Can you imagine what he’d do to me if he caught me snooping around in his cabin? I’m out of here.’
‘Andrea,’ said Harel, grabbing her arm. ‘From the very beginning Father Fowler and I have been uneasy about you being on this expedition. We had hoped to convince you to make up some excuse to quit as soon as we docked. Unfortunately, now that they’ve told us the aim of the expedition, nobody’s going to be allowed to leave.’
Damn! Locked up with the exclusive of my life. A life, I hope, that won’t be too short.
‘You’re in this, whether you want it or not, Ms Otero,’ Fowler said. ‘Neither the doctor nor I can get near Dekker’s cabin. They’re watching us too closely. But you can. It’s a small cabin and he won’t have much in it. We’re sure that the only files in his cabin are the ones pertaining to the briefing on the mission. They should be black with a gold logo on the cover. Dekker works for a security outfit called DX5.’
Andrea thought for a moment. As much as she feared Mogens Dekker, the fact that there was a killer on board wasn’t going to vanish if she simply looked the other way and continued writing her story, hoping for the best. She had to be pragmatic, and teaming up with Harel and Father Fowler wasn’t a bad idea.
As long as it suits my purpose and they don’t get between my camera and the Ark.
‘All right. But I hope that Cro-Magnon doesn’t cut me up into tiny pieces, or I’ll come back as a ghost and fucking haunt the both of you.’
Andrea headed for the middle of passageway 7. The plan was quite simple: Harel had located Dekker near the bridge and was keeping him busy with questions about vaccinations for his soldiers. Fowler would keep watch on the stairs between the first and second decks – Dekker’s cabin was on level two. Unbelievably, his door was unlocked.
Overconfident bastard, thought Andrea.
The small, bare cabin was almost identical to her own. A narrow bunk made up tightly, army style.
Like my father’s. Fucking militaristic assholes.
A metal cabinet, a small bathroom, and a desk. On it a pile of black folders.
Bingo. That was easy.
She was reaching her hand towards them when a silky voice almost made her spit out her heart.
‘Well, well. To what do I owe the honour?’
24
ON BOARD THE BEHEMOTH
THE PORT OF AQABA PIERS, JORDAN
Wednesday, 12 July 2006. 11:32 a.m.
Andrea struggled not to scream. Instead she turned around with a smile on her face.
‘Hi, Mr Dekker. Or is it Colonel Dekker? I was looking for you.’
The hired hand was so big and stood so close to Andrea that she had to tilt her head backward to avoid speaking to his neck.
‘Mr Dekker is fine. Did you need something… Andrea?’
Think of an excuse, and make it a good one, Andrea thought, widening her smile.
‘I came to apologise for showing up yesterday afternoon while you were escorting Mr Kayn from his plane.’
Dekker limited himself to a grunt. The brute was blocking the small cabin door and was so close that Andrea could see more clearly than she wished the reddish scar across his face, his brown hair, blue eyes, and two days’ worth of stubble. The smell of his cologne was overpowering.
I can’t believe it, he uses Armani. By the litre.
‘Well, say something.’
‘You say something, Andrea. Or haven’t you come to apologise?’
Andrea suddenly recalled a National Geographic cover she had seen of a cobra eyeing a guinea pig.
‘Forgive me.’
‘No problem. Luckily your friend Fowler saved the situation. But you should be careful. Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.’
Dekker took a step forward. Andrea backed up.
‘That’s very deep. Schopenhauer?’
‘Ah, you know the classics. Or are you getting lessons on the ship?’
‘I’ve always been self-taught.’
‘Well, the great teacher said: ‘A man’s face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth.’ And your face looks guilty.’
Andrea glanced sideways at the files, although she regretted doing so immediately. She had to avoid suspicion, even if it was too late.
‘The great teacher also said: ‘Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.’ ’
Dekker showed his teeth as he smiled in satisfaction.
‘Very true. I think you’d better go and get ready – we’re going ashore in about an hour.’
‘Yes, of course. Excuse me,’ said Andrea, attempting to go past him.
At first Dekker didn’t budge but finally he moved the brick wall of his body, allowing the reporter to slip through the space between the desk and himself.
Andrea would always remember what happened next as a piece of cunning on her part, an ingenious trick to obtain the information she needed from right under the nose of the South African. The reality was more prosaic.
She tripped.
The young woman’s left leg caught on Dekker’s left foot, which didn’t move an inch. Andrea lost her balance and fell forward, bracing her arms against the desk to avoid slamming her face against the edge. The contents of the files spilled onto the floor.
Andrea looked at the ground in shock and then up at Dekker, who was staring at her, smoke coming out of his nose.
‘Oops.’
‘… so I stuttered an apology and ran out. You should’ve seen the way he looked at me. I’ll never forget it.’
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to stop him,’ Father Fowler said, shaking his head. ‘He must have come down through some service hatchway from the bridge.’
The three of them were in the infirmary, Andrea seated on a bed with Fowler and Harel looking worriedly at her.
‘I didn’t even hear him come in. It seems incredible that someone his size could move so quietly. And all that effort for nothing. Anyway, thank you for the Schopenhauer quote, Father. For a moment there he was speechless.’
‘You’re welcome. He’s a pretty boring philosopher. It was hard to recall a decent aphorism.’
‘Andrea, do you remember anything you saw when the files fell to the floor?’ Harel interrupted.
Andrea closed her eyes in concentration.
‘There were photos of the desert, plans of what looked like houses… I don’t know. Everything was a mess and there was writing all over it. The only folder that was different was yellow with a red logo.’
‘What did the logo look like?’
‘What difference would it make?’
‘You’d be surprised how many wars are won because of unimportant details.’
Andrea concentrat
ed again. She had an excellent memory, but she had glanced at the scattered sheets for only a couple of seconds and had been in a state of shock. She pressed her fingers on the bridge of her nose, screwed up her eyes and made odd little noises. Just when she thought she couldn’t remember, the image appeared in her mind.
‘It was a red bird. An owl, because of the eyes. Its wings were open.’
Fowler smiled.
‘That’s unusual. It could help.’
The priest opened his briefcase and took out a mobile phone. He pulled out its thick antenna and proceeded to turn it on while the two women watched in astonishment.
‘I thought all contact with the outside world was forbidden,’ said Andrea.
‘It is,’ Harel said. ‘He’s going to be in real trouble if he’s caught.’
Fowler peered closely at the screen, waiting for coverage. It was a Globalstar satellite phone; it didn’t use normal signals but instead linked up directly with a network of communication satellites that had a range covering roughly 99 per cent of the earth’s surface.
‘That’s why it’s important we check something out today, Ms Otero,’ said the priest, as he dialled a number from memory. ‘At the moment we’re near a big city so a signal from the ship will pass unnoticed among all the others from Aqaba. Once we reach the excavation site, using any kind of phone will be extremely risky.’
‘But what-’
Fowler interrupted Andrea by holding up a finger. The call had gone through.
‘Albert, I need a favour.’
25
SOMEWHERE IN FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Wednesday, 12 July 2006. 5:16 a.m.
The young priest jumped out of bed, half asleep. He knew straight away who it was. That mobile rang only in an emergency. It had a different ring tone than the others he used and only one person had the number. A person Father Albert would have given his life for without a second thought.
Of course Father Albert hadn’t always been Father Albert. Twelve years ago, when he was fourteen, he was called FrodoPoison, and was the most notorious cyber delinquent in America.
Young Al had been a lonely boy. Mom and Dad both worked and were too busy with their careers to pay much attention to their skinny blond son, despite the fact that he was so frail they had to keep the windows closed in case a draught of air carried him away. But Albert didn’t need any draught to soar through cyberspace.
‘There’s no way to explain his talent,’ said the FBI agent in charge of the case after his arrest. ‘Nobody taught him. When the kid looks at a computer he doesn’t see a device made of copper, silicon and plastic. He just sees doors.’
To begin with, Albert had opened quite a few of those doors just to amuse himself. Among these were the secure virtual vaults of Chase Manhattan Bank, the Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group and the BNP, the national bank of Paris. During the three weeks that his brief criminal career lasted, he stole $893 million by hacking into the banks’ programs, redirecting them to credit commissions to a non-existent intermediary bank, called Albert M. Bank, in the Cayman Islands. It was a bank with only one client. Of course giving the bank his own name wasn’t the brightest thing to do, but Albert was barely a teen. He noticed his mistake when two SWAT teams broke into his parents’ house during supper, ruining the living-room carpet and stepping on the cat’s tail.
Albert would never know the inside of a jail cell, confirming the saying that the more you steal the better they treat you. But while he was handcuffed in an FBI interrogation room, the meagre knowledge of the American jail system that he had acquired through watching TV kept running through his head. Albert had a vague notion that jail was a place you could rot in, where you could be somonised. And even though he wasn’t sure what the second thing meant, he guessed it would hurt.
The FBI agents looked at this vulnerable broken child and sweated uncomfortably. This boy had shaken up a lot of people. It had been incredibly hard to hunt him down, and had it not been for his childish mistake, he would have kept on fleecing the megabanks. The corporate bankers certainly had no interest in bringing the case to trial and having the public find out what had happened. Incidents like that always made investors jittery.
‘What do you do with a fourteen-year-old nuclear bomb?’ asked one of the agents.
‘Teach him not to blow up,’ replied another.
And that’s why they handed the case over to the CIA, which had use for a raw talent such as his. In order to talk to the boy, they woke up an agent who, in 1994, had fallen from grace inside the Company, a mature Air Force chaplain with experience in psychology.
When the sleepy Fowler entered the interrogation room early that morning and told Albert he had a choice between spending time behind bars or doing six hours of work a week for the Government, the boy was so happy he broke down and cried.
Being babysitter to this boy genius was imposed on Fowler as a punishment, but for him it was a gift. In time the two forged an unbreakable friendship based on mutual admiration, which in the case of Albert entailed embracing the Catholic faith and eventually entering the seminary. After he was ordained a priest, Albert continued to cooperate with the CIA sporadically, but, like Fowler, he did so on behalf of the Holy Alliance, the Vatican’s intelligence service. From the start, Albert had got used to receiving calls from Fowler in the middle of the night, which was, in part, pay-back for that night in 1994 when they had first met.
‘Hello, Anthony.’
‘Albert, I need a favour.’
‘Don’t you ever call during regular hours?’
‘Watch therefore for ye know not what hour-’
‘Don’t piss me off, Anthony,’ said the young priest, walking to the refrigerator. ‘I’m exhausted, so talk fast. Are you in Jordan already?’
‘Do you know of a security outfit that has a logo of a red owl with its wings spread?’
Albert poured himself a glass of cold milk and went back to the bedroom.
‘Are you joking? That’s Netcatch’s logo. Those guys were the new gurus for the Company. They won a good chunk of the CIA’s intelligence contracts for the Department of Islamic Terrorism. They also did consultancy for several private American firms.’
‘Why are you referring to them in the past tense, Albert?’
‘The Company issued an internal bulletin a few hours ago. Yesterday a terrorist group blew up Netcatch’s offices in Washington and wiped out the entire staff. The media knows nothing about it. The whole thing’s being passed off as a gas explosion. The Company has been getting a lot of flak for all the anti-terrorist work they’ve contracted to private outfits. A job like this is going to make them look vulnerable.’
‘Any survivors?’
‘Only one, someone named Orville Watson, the CEO and owner. After the attack, Watson told the agents he didn’t need protection from the CIA, then split. The chiefs at Langley are pretty angry with the jerk who let him get away. Finding Watson and putting him under protective custody is a priority.’
Fowler was silent for a minute. Albert was used to his friend’s long pauses and waited.
‘Listen, Albert,’ Fowler continued, ‘we’re in a mess and Watson knows something. You have to find him before the CIA does. His life is in danger. And what’s worse, so is ours.’
26
ON THE WAY TO THE EXCAVATION
AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN
Wednesday, 12 July 2006. 4:15 p.m.
It would be a stretch of the imagination to call the ribbon of hard earth that the expedition convoy was travelling along a road. Viewed from one of the cliffs that dominated the desolate landscape, the eight vehicles must have seemed like nothing more than dusty anomalies. The journey from Aqaba to the excavation site was a little more than a hundred miles, but it took the convoy five hours due to the irregularity of the terrain coupled with the dust and sand thrown up in the wake of each successive vehicle, resulting in zero visibility for the drivers who followed.
At the head of the conv
oy were two all-purpose Hummer H3s, each containing four passengers. Painted white, with the open red hand of Kayn Industries emblazoned on the doors, these vehicles were part of a limited series built specifically to contend with the harshest conditions on earth.
‘It’s one hell of a truck,’ said Tommy Eichberg at the wheel of the second H3, to a bored Andrea. ‘I shouldn’t call it a truck. It’s a tank. It can go over a fifteen-inch wall, or climb a sixty-degree slope.’
‘I’m sure it costs more than my apartment,’ said the reporter. Unable to get any photos of the landscape because of the dust, she contented herself with some candid shots of Stowe Erling and David Pappas, who were seated behind her.
‘Almost three hundred thousand euros. As long as it has enough fuel, this machine can cope with anything.’
‘That’s why we brought the gasoline trucks, right?’ said David.
He was an olive-skinned young man, with a slightly flattened nose and a narrow forehead. Whenever he opened his eyes wide in surprise – something he did fairly often – his eyebrows nearly touched his hairline. Andrea liked him, in contrast to Stowe, who even though he was tall and attractive, with a neat ponytail, behaved liked something out of a self-help manual.
‘Of course, David,’ Stowe replied. ‘You shouldn’t ask questions you already know the answer to. Assertiveness, remember? That’s the key.’
‘You’re very sure of yourself when the professor’s not around, Stowe,’ David said, sounding slightly hurt. ‘This morning, when he was correcting your evaluations, you didn’t seem so assertive.’
Stowe raised his chin, making a ‘can you believe this?’ gesture to Andrea, who ignored him and busied herself changing the memory card of her camera. Each four-gigabyte card had room for 600 high-resolution photos. As soon as each card was full, Andrea transferred the pictures to a special portable hard disk that could store 12,000 stills and had a seven-inch LCD preview screen. She would have preferred to bring her laptop, but only Forrester’s team was allowed them on the expedition.
Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition Page 11