“So you’ve hired Thayer to steal whatever it is back for you. When and where is he supposed to do the deed?” Kemp frowned impatiently out at the room.
Durand said, “He was given a seventy-two-hour deadline. At this point we’ve intercepted enough chatter to make us think the thief is heading for the States. We’re working with real-time information as it comes in, and as of right now that’s all we know.”
“So you’re telling me the plan is for someone to take down Thayer as he attempts to steal whatever it is back from wherever it winds up. Only, you don’t know who stole it or where it’s going to go.” Kemp’s words held a derisive edge.
“If by ‘take down’ you mean ‘kill,’ the answer is no. We want Traveler alive,” Durand said. “We need to know what he’s done with the information he’s stolen. We need to know what he knows.”
“If Traveler is Thayer, good luck with taking him alive. The man’s a killer, among many other things. One of the most proficient we ever had,” Kemp said.
“That’s Rogan’s job,” Durand said, nodding at Rogan. Kemp gave Rogan a long look.
“It is, and if there’s nothing else, I’ll be on my way. I expect I’ll be getting updates as they come in?” Rogan had been read into the situation by Durand via the phone call in which Durand had summoned him to the meeting, which was being held at the clown factory because the information being discussed was deemed sensitive enough that a secure facility was needed. Having gotten all he had expected to get from the meeting, which was nothing, Rogan headed for the door. His question was addressed to Durand, who nodded.
“I’d say that concludes our conference,” Cowles-Parker said as Rogan left.
* * *
Groton’s house in Great Falls, a swanky neighborhood just outside of DC, was impressive: a two-story, ten-thousand-square-foot brick mansion with white columns and five acres of well-groomed lawn. To Kemp, it looked like every light in the place was on, including the three massive chandelier-like ones dangling two stories on the wide front porch. Pulling up the oak-lined driveway about two hours after the conference call, he experienced a pang of envy. Groton’s wife came from old money, and that allowed him to live far more lavishly than Kemp, who was forced to get by on his not overly generous government salary.
They don’t pay me enough for this, Kemp thought, not for the first time. Three more years until retirement, and he was looking forward to it. Parking behind the line of cars that filled the top third of the driveway, he got out and walked around the back of the house to Groton’s study, which had a separate entrance. Groton didn’t want Kemp to be seen by his wife, who was entertaining her book club. Likewise, Groton no longer wanted any information on the topic that was prompting their get-together to be discussed via email or over the phone.
In person only.
Groton had been on the alert for him, heard him coming, met him at the door, ushered him inside. Groton was a tall, spare man of seventy-five, his face was deeply lined, but his blue eyes were sharp and he had a full head of white hair. He was dressed in a blue-checked shirt tucked into a pair of dark slacks.
“Drink?” Groton asked, gesturing at a silver tray holding a bottle of Maker’s Mark whiskey, an ice bucket and some glasses.
“Yes, thanks.” Kemp glanced around the study while Groton poured. Dark green walls, plaid curtains drawn over the windows, a leather couch and chair, a massive desk. Hunting prints on the walls, plus a few family pictures. Groton handed the drink over, Kemp sipped the fine bourbon appreciatively and they sat and got down to business.
When Kemp finished relaying the gist of the conference call to him, Groton said, “The solution is simple. Find out where this comedy is taking place, get there and take out Thayer.”
“There’s a concern about the top secret material he may have in his possession.”
Groton shook his head. “Not our problem.” He gave Kemp a level look, one that Kemp remembered from many years of working under him. It still had the power to make Kemp nervous. “I don’t have to tell you that our asses are on the line here. And not just ours. Some very important people’s.”
“I know.” Kemp tossed back the last of his whiskey and set the glass on the table beside him, careful to use the coaster Groton had provided because, he’d said, his wife went nuts about things like that. He had one more piece of bad news to share, and he hated like hell to have to do it. There was no help for it, however. Groton had to know. “The lab got back to me today with the DNA analysis we had run on those spots of blood that were found in the air vent in Bahrain. We assume it came from that woman who was working the robbery with Thayer.” Kemp hesitated, wishing he hadn’t been so quick to finish his drink. He could use another shot of whiskey about now. He bit the bullet, came out with it. “It’s definite. The DNA matched our sample. It’s her.”
Groton’s face whitened. His fingers tightened around his glass until Kemp thought it might shatter in the old man’s hand. He carefully put the glass down and stood up.
“I’ve been understanding. My God, I’ve been understanding. But this is on you.” Groton towered over him, his eyes burning, his fists clenching. Reminded of what the old man had once been—an operative with more successful missions and kills under his belt than Kemp had himself—Kemp had to consciously stop himself from cringing. “How the hell—how the hell—did you screw this up so badly? How the hell did you let her live?”
Kemp licked his lips. “I, uh—”
Groton shut him up with a slashing gesture.
“Fix it,” he said.
15
In Savannah, approximately three hours later, Bianca was in her office frowning down at the information contained in the open folder in her hand.
The emailed file, printed out now for convenience, included exactly three pages and a photo. To say that it was not as complete as Bianca would have liked was an understatement, but after requesting additional information, including as many details of the actual theft as were known, she was able to put together the broad strokes of a plan.
Of course, it was a well-known principle of war that no plan survived the firing of the first shots in a battle, but it was a start.
The first vital piece of information in its formulation was that the theft involved a physical object of a size and weight that could be carried in a briefcase, which meant that she would easily be able to transport it herself once she acquired it. A prototype weapons defense system was how the target was described, which didn’t tell her a whole lot. The accompanying photo was more helpful. The object was about the size of a hardback book, with a remote-control-shaped electronic center complete with buttons, lights and a small digital display encased in a clear plastic box. It was shown cushioned by dark foam inserts inside a silver titanium briefcase with a six-digit combination lock. The specifications provided were complex, but what the object boiled down to was, in Doc’s words, a drone detector.
“It works like one of those things drivers use to bust cops lying in wait on the freeway, you know what I mean? A radar detector.” Doc’s enthusiasm for the technology involved bubbled over as he studied the specs that were included in the file he’d printed out. Because this job belonged to the part of her life that couldn’t be shared with Evie or Hay, Bianca had returned to the office after hours to do the prep work that needed to be done before going after the target. Doc had been waiting for her there, and he was with her in her office at that moment as they went over the information. His technical expertise was proving to be a surprisingly good fit with her more practical abilities. “Some Afghan warlord can just stick it in his jeep and it’ll start beeping and give him, like, a two-minute warning if there’s a Predator with a Hellfire missile overhead locking in on him.”
“Yay?” Bianca replied. She was sitting in her office chair; he was in the visitor’s chair across the desk from her. Once she’d a
scertained the size, weight and not-dangerous-to-her status of the target, she was more interested in grappling with the identity of the thief.
Because that was the second vital piece of information she needed. Couldn’t steal the thing back if she couldn’t find it, and, presumably, the thief had it. The good news was, all thieves had a signature, a way of going about certain jobs that made it possible for someone who knew the players in that world to narrow down the pool of suspects if given enough of a description of the job. Plus most thieves specialized in objects of a certain type, which thinned the pool out even more.
This individual—Bianca never assumed the gender of a thief, for obvious reasons—had done it Mission: Impossible–style, dropping down through a hole cut in the ceiling to snatch the briefcase off a desk in a locked, secured office on a locked, secured floor in a locked, secured building where it had been left for no more than an hour while the businessman who’d had possession of it had run out to grab dinner. The alarm had been circumvented by the ceiling access because whoever had wired the building had not considered the possibility that someone might enter through it. Cameras had been thwarted by the same means. They filmed in arcs designed to detect intruders at normal human heights.
Bianca allowed herself a moment of professional admiration for the mind behind the planning and execution of the theft before once again getting down to business.
The style was flashy, the thief was an athletic pro and Bianca was as sure as it was possible to be that he/she already had a buyer lined up before he/she pulled the job.
The buyer was the third vital piece of information.
There was a limited market for a prototype weapons defense system with a low-to mid-eight-figure price tag, which was, she thought, a reasonable estimate for the price it would fetch given the amount she was being paid to retrieve it.
The fourth piece of information was that the theft took place in Southeast Asia. The client—thinking of them as “the client” was better than thinking of them as “the blackmailers,” because the latter just made her angry and this kind of operation called for a cool head—refused to be more specific about where the theft had taken place than that, presumably so as not to give away their own location, but it was enough to point Bianca in the direction she needed to look.
Since Richard’s death, she’d been reluctant to tap into the sprawling network of contacts her father had developed over the years that were now, she supposed, hers by inheritance in case it should somehow draw the wrong kind of notice. But for this she did, reaching out cautiously over the Dark Websites they used with what she knew and asking for help filling in the blanks. The information she got back yielded no more than a handful of possible identities for both the thief and buyer. By having Doc run a computer search on the names and known aliases of their thief candidates and then having him cross-check for last-minute flights booked by passengers with those names and known aliases to the areas where the possible buyers were located, she was able, with what she considered a high degree of certainty, to identify both thief and buyer.
Justin Lee, traveling under the alias Austin Hunt, was at that moment a passenger on a flight from Bangkok to Singapore, where he was scheduled to board United Flight 2, a nonstop flight to San Francisco. He was the thief.
Allied Industries in San Jose was the most likely buyer. It was the only major player in weapons systems development in the area. Its founder and CEO, Walt Sturgeon, was almost certainly the one who would be making the buy. According to her sources, he ran the company with an iron fist, and neither buying stolen property nor forking out millions of dollars for it was going to happen without his say-so. Who would actually take physical possession of the prototype, though, was open to question.
The simplest thing to do would be to intercept Lee at San Francisco International Airport and relieve him of the prototype before he got anywhere near his buyer.
United Flight 2 was scheduled to take off in three hours, and the flight was slated to land in San Francisco at 4:50 p.m. Pacific time the following day, Friday, which was 7:50 p.m. Savannah time. It was currently just after 6:30 p.m. Thursday Savannah time. She had approximately nineteen hours to get to San Francisco.
Piece of cake.
“Could you see if you can find me a direct flight from Atlanta to San Francisco International that gets in before 2:00 p.m. tomorrow?” she asked. Because flying was flying, after all, and she wanted a time cushion to leave room for any possible mishaps, like, say, tarmac delays. On the other hand, too long an interval wasn’t good, either. She wanted to remain inside the gate area behind security after her plane arrived so that she could pick Lee up when he exited the international arrival area. It would be a lot easier than trying to pick him up as he left the busy airport. And there was only so much in-airport shopping and eating she could do without risking attracting unwanted attention.
With a grunt of assent, Doc stood up and headed for his office. A few minutes later he was back, rattling off flight times.
“The 11:15 one,” she said. The flight time between Atlanta and San Francisco International was five hours, ten minutes, which meant she would arrive at 1:25 p.m. Pacific time, giving her a three-hour-plus window to allow for things going wrong. It was a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Atlanta from Savannah and she needed to be at the airport at least an hour and a half before the flight, which meant she needed to leave home around six tomorrow morning. Yes, she could make that work.
“You want me to book two tickets?”
She frowned at Doc as he stopped in front of her desk. “You can’t come with me.”
He looked affronted. “What? I can help.”
If it had been a full-fledged heist, that would have been true. Doc’s expertise with surveillance and alarm systems and anything computer-related or virtual that could be hacked was an ace in the hole that could make a difficult job a whole lot less complex. Plus it was always good to have backup, just in case. But what she was planning was a simple snatch-and-replace as the target exited the airport. The broad strokes of the plan were to distract Lee with something like, say, a hard stumble against him that made him fall down and drop the briefcase that he would be carrying with him because it was too valuable for him to do anything else with it, apologize profusely, help him up and in the process exchange the briefcase he was carrying for the nearly identical one she would have with her. Then she would disappear before he discovered the switch.
She said, “We can’t travel under our own names. I don’t want to leave a trail that could be traced back here once the job goes down. Any legend—” thief-speak for a false identity, including passport, other ID such as a driver’s license, credit cards and accompanying backstory “—you used before can never be used again. And there’s not enough time to get you a new one.”
In fact, all the identification documentation connected with the disaster in Bahrain was sleeping with the fishes; once they’d made it safely back to Savannah, she’d collected everything, burned it and thrown the ashes in the river.
The key was to make it as close to impossible as she could for anyone to retrace her path from Savannah to San Francisco after she completed the job. Protecting her identity and her bolt-hole from discovery and her friends from being involved was of paramount importance. She had a selection of legends to choose from; he was back to being Miles Davis Zeigler.
Doc made a scoffing sound. “You think I don’t have a fake ID? I’ve got a drawer full.”
The look she gave him was incredulous. “How?”
“I made them. I’ve been making fake IDs since high school. I made decent money selling them back then, too.”
“You’re getting on an airplane, not trying to sneak into a bar.”
“They’re as good as anything you’ve got. Want to see?”
“They’re here?”
“Like I told you, I got a drawer fu
ll. A desk drawer.”
“Show me.” Bianca stood up and followed Doc into his office. When he opened one of his desk drawers to show her his collection of driver’s licenses—he had more than a dozen, featuring his picture matched with different names, addresses, birth dates and states—she picked them up one at a time, examined them closely and was impressed. “These are good.”
“Told ya.”
“Why do you have these?” She was examining the bar code on a Texas license with Doc’s picture and the name Blake Warren—if she hadn’t known the thing was fake, she never would have been able to tell.
He shrugged and looked shifty. Bianca’s attention was caught and her gaze sharpened on him.
“Well?” she said.
He sighed. “When I first got here, I wasn’t sure how long I was going to stay. I mean, I was tripping out over what happened, and I thought—well, I thought I might need to take off and fend for myself, you know what I mean? Go north again, or something. I might be fresh out of family, but New York—that’s still home.”
Okay, she got that. “And now?”
“I like it here. As long as the AC doesn’t go out.”
Bianca had to smile.
Seeing that, he added, “So I can come?”
She hesitated. Her gut instinct was to keep the operation as small as possible, but on the other hand, going in naked—more thief-speak for alone—had its hazards, too.
“You know you’re safe here in Savannah, and you can stay here and stay safe,” she said. “I don’t expect anything bad to come out of this job, but—”
“Shit happens,” he finished for her and grimaced. “If I’d wanted to stay safe, I never would have hacked into government computers to begin with. Anyway, now—we’re kind of a team. I think.”
The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller Page 17