Dead Wrong

by Richard Phillips

  Approaching their initial destination, Jack turned the car into the entrance to Stefan Rosenstein’s mansion, stopping at the closed front gate. Unlike his previous visits to the house when Stefan had been in Bolivia, this time Jack planned to park in the driveway near the front door. Jack lowered the window, pressed the call button, and waited.

  A moment later he heard the smooth voice of Stefan’s butler, Ricardo Hernandez, through the speaker.

  “Quién es?”

  “Home is where the heart is.” The phrase from Stefan’s message rolled off Jack’s lips in English, exactly as he’d received it.

  There was a short delay, and then the electric gate swung open to allow them admittance. Jack pulled forward, progressing counterclockwise around the looping driveway, coming to a stop before the front door. Seeing Janet place her hand inside her leather jacket, Jack shook his head.

  “Easy. We don’t want to spook him.”

  “Stefan?”

  “No, his butler.”

  Jack climbed out of the Tundra and Janet did likewise, both of them approaching the double doors together. The leftmost door swung inward, held open by the tall, traditionally clad butler.

  “It is a pleasure to see you again, Señor Gregory. Please step inside, both of you. The others are waiting in the parlor. May I take your jackets?”

  Jack, familiar with Ricardo’s strict adherence to the formal rules of his profession, didn’t offer to shake his hand or to introduce Janet, merely extending the standard greeting.

  “Thank you, Ricardo, but no.”

  Jack led the way through the foyer and then turned left into the parlor. Inside, four high-backed chairs were arranged in a semicircle before an unlit fireplace, the center two occupied by the two men that Jack had expected to find here, both puffing on thick cigars. They smiled up at him but only bothered climbing to their feet when they saw Janet.

  Beside him, Jack saw Janet smile at the oddly archaic courtesy these men suddenly felt compelled to render. He stepped forward to shake the hand of the nearest of the two, a fair-skinned, curly-headed man who stood an inch shorter than Jack.

  “Janet, this is Stefan’s cousin, Efran Rosenstein. A good man who can’t drive worth a damn.”

  Janet merely nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

  “My pleasure,” said Efran.

  “And this,” Jack said stepping forward to shake the hand of the second man, “is Pablo Griego, a man of big deeds but few words.”

  After Janet and Pablo exchanged pleasantries, Pablo and Efran returned to their seats while Jack and Janet took the two chairs that bracketed them. Cigars were offered and refused. Then they got down to business.

  Jack glanced at Janet, sitting with her legs crossed, leaning back in the chair opposite his. Her brown eyes glittered in the light of the sunset that filtered in through the tall, western-facing windows. For a weird moment, it seemed that she picked up the same red eye-shine that was a common trait of his.

  He turned his attention to Efran, who had just taken a deep pull on the cigar, blowing out a blue cloud of smoke that drifted upward toward the twelve-foot ceiling.

  “Tonight I’m going to finish the job Stefan hired me to do. I need to know what help you’ve come here to offer.”

  Efran moved his arm to the armrest, a movement that threatened to drop a half inch of ash on Stefan’s fine hardwood floor.

  “Not much, I’m afraid, at least not in terms of active support.”

  Jack felt his jaw muscles tense and forced them to relax. “Then what’s this all about? Why did Stefan bother to message me if you’re not going to help.”

  “Let me remind you that Stefan hired you to do this, not us.”

  “Then why waste my time with this little side trip?”

  Efran crushed out the stump of his cigar in the free-standing ashtray beside his chair and stood.

  “To show you this.”

  Efran nodded at Pablo, who rose from his chair and walked across the room to open the door to a standard-sized coat closet.

  A low whistle escaped Janet’s lips and she stepped forward as Jack rose from his chair.

  Efran shrugged.

  “It’s not a huge selection, but considering the short notice Stefan gave me, it was the best I could round up.”

  Jack looked on as Janet ran a loving finger over the weapons and satellite communication gear stacked inside.

  “I take it,” Janet said, “Stefan wasn’t your typical Bolivian senator?”

  Efran laughed, his curious eyes studying Janet.

  “Help yourself to anything you want.”

  Jack found himself adjusting his previous ideas of how he and Janet might deal with Altmann at some location where he was protected by two to three dozen heavily armed fighters.

  “Don’t you think we’ll be a little conspicuous hauling that stuff out front and loading it into the bed of the Tundra?”

  “No need. The van I used to pick you and Tupac up at Palmasola is parked in the second garage. I know a chop shop that will be happy to get rid of your pickup.”

  Janet turned to Efran. “I need to connect my laptop to the Internet to download the latest update on Altmann.”

  Efran’s quizzical eyes shifted to Jack.

  “It’s okay,” Jack said. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t be with me.”

  “There is high-speed WiFi throughout the house.”

  As Janet, assisted by Pablo, retrieved their kitbags from the Tundra, Efran spread a protective mat on the floor. By the time she had set up her laptop and received log-in instructions, Jack had already begun pulling equipment out of the closet and laying them atop the mat.

  What they were taking wouldn’t win World War III, but it would certainly go a long way toward getting it started.

  CHAPTER 84

  As the sun sank below the long line of clouds, low down on the western horizon, Conrad Altmann watched the red sky bleed out. After all these years of patiently working toward this night, his patience had finally worn thin.

  For most of the day he and his men had waited as the Bolivian Army units secured the site, clearing all the archeological teams, even evacuating people from the surrounding farms and villages. To complete the fiction they were creating, bomb search and disposal teams scoured the ruins before progressing to the nearby hotels and hostels.

  Now all he waited for was the passage of twilight and the deeper darkness that followed. The light of the quarter-moon wouldn’t bother him. His men would blend in with the activity of the preceding daylight, the continuing work of a bomb squad that had identified suspicious materials and the security team that had been put in place to keep others away from the implied danger.

  Three meters to Altmann’s left, Tupac Inti sat stoically, his hands securely cuffed to a belly chain, his legs shackled at a length that would limit him to something slightly less than a normal walking stride. Standing beside Tupac, ever watchful, stood the tall form of Dolf Gruenberg, a pale specter in the deepening twilight.

  Altmann’s daughter stood at his side. Although he would have loved to have known Bones while she was growing up, her mother had done a marvelous job of home schooling the child, preparing her for the role she would play in her father’s master plan. Tonight, here at the Temple of Kalasasaya, that plan would reach its glorious objective. Klaus Barbie would have been very proud of his son and granddaughter, had he only been alive to see this.

  Altmann turned back to Dolf.

  “Position the men, then hustle back here. I want to be ready to move out in half an hour.”

  Dolf glanced down at Tupac and then strode rapidly away, gathering Altmann’s men to him as he went.

  With the purple remnants of the sunset at his back, Altmann knelt beside Tupac Inti to look directly into the whites of the shaman’s eyes.

  “Can you feel it? Can you sense the power I am about to unleash?”

  Tupac made no sign that he had heard, but Altmann continued.

  “For the first time in
history, the Sun Staff will perform the task it was designed to do. Your ancestors knew the staff held the power to recall the old gods, but until now, no one has had the key to unlock that power. It wasn’t their fault. Until now, the technology to unravel the codes didn’t exist.”

  Altmann clapped a hand down on Tupac Inti’s shoulder.

  “Be happy. Tonight, with your help and that of my daughter, I will turn the dreams of your forefathers into a reality.”

  CHAPTER 85

  Admiral Riles was more angry than he could ever recall being. Conrad Altmann had pissed in his oatmeal. Now Riles intended to use the full arsenal at his disposal to help Janet Price and Jack “The Ripper” Gregory burn Altmann’s little empire down around him.

  The NSA War Room was in full operation, something that rarely happened without the president’s direct authorization. This was no circle of generals sitting around an oval table staring at digital maps showing the layout of forces or incoming and outgoing missile tracks. It was more akin to the NASA mission control center in Houston.

  In a glass-walled room that overlooked three tiers of workstations, Admiral Riles stood beside Levi Elias, absorbing the scene that spread out before him. On the curving far wall, high-resolution displays summarized the activity of the assembled group of cyber-warriors that Admiral Riles had nicknamed the Dirty Dozen.

  The NSA War Room was a construct Riles had created. Although it was true that most of the best programmers and hackers preferred to work alone, at heart they were gamers, and the very best enjoyed being recognized as such. The only way to prove who was the best was to dominate in a competitive game environment. So Admiral Riles had come up with a way that, when the most difficult cyber-attacks had to be carried out under tight timelines, his current top crop of CWs could be thrown into an environment that drove them into a competitive frenzy.

  Inside the war room, the hacking targets were clearly defined and prioritized. The cyber-warriors were awarded or penalized points based upon the speed and progress of their attacks. They were allowed to team up or to attack targets individually. At the end of every war room battle, the overall ranking of each CW was adjusted and publicized throughout the NSA’s CW community. The reigning CW top gun was a twenty-year-old black MIT prodigy named Jamal Glover, who went by the nom de guerre “Ace.” Riles considered recruiting Jamal to the NSA as one of his best feats—right up there with stealing Janet Price from the CIA. If he managed to land Gregory, it would complete the hat trick.

  As always, tonight’s action had started with the posting of the target list, most of the targets in the Bolivian military, but some designed to blind or delay other international agencies from being alerted to what was happening in Bolivia.

  The room in which Riles stood was the op-center. It was where a mixture of analysts, linguists, and communications experts gathered to exploit the target systems that the Dirty Dozen hacked. As Riles watched targets pop out of the red queue and into the green, he managed a smile.

  “Levi. Do we have solid confirmation that Altmann’s group is at Tiahuanaco?”

  “Yes, sir. The next batch of satellite imagery will start coming in on the downlink in three minutes. We’re picking up low-priority Bolivian military comm-link chatter. They are referring to Altmann’s group as Bomb Squad Zero. Apparently, it is causing quite a chuckle among the rank and file that some bozos are searching for explosives in the dark.”

  “Are Janet and Jack on-site?”

  “Their last contact was from La Paz. We’re monitoring the encrypted satcom link Janet said she’ll be using.”

  “Wait for it. We don’t want to distract the military police until we know exactly where Janet and Jack plan to assault.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As the long target list continued to transition from red to green, Admiral Riles watched with satisfaction. Very soon now, it would be show time.

  CHAPTER 86

  Tupac Inti led the way toward the Kalasasaya Temple ruins, one of the many architectural wonders of this ancient site, but the only one he was interested in tonight. Behind him he could hear the crunching footfalls of Conrad Altmann and the select group of eight who accompanied the Nazi boss to the altar cavern, their flashlight beams lighting the ground but killing their night vision. He tried to keep his eyes averted from these bright spots with only partial success.

  Although he’d dreaded the moment that would forever rob the Quechua people of their most sacred artifact, he found himself anxious to get it over with. Altmann wanted to be shown to the Altar of the Gods, and Tupac would make sure he got there. It was the only way to forever end the threat that Altmann posed.

  He approached the Kalasasaya Temple from the east, initially heading toward the gate before turning northward along the outer wall. Tupac held out his left hand, counting the precision cuts in the stone blocks as he moved slowly northward. Such was his rising excitement that he momentarily forgot his shackles, almost tripping and falling as he lengthened his stride.

  Suddenly he slowed, his count having reached the magic prime. Forty-seven. Feeling up and down the wall with both hands, he traced the edges of the blocks and found the two spots he was looking for. It was an engineering marvel from the past. The whole place was, but this place in particular.

  How many hundreds of archeologists had examined every facet of these stone walls as they sought to uncover the ancient secrets that lay buried in these ruins? The walls of Kalasasaya grew more interesting as one progressed toward the temple’s interior. But the entrance to this temple’s greatest secret had been hidden on the outside, in the most visible but least likely spot.

  Tupac gestured toward Altmann, pointing at two stones that jutted out slightly from the wall.

  “I need strong men here and here.”

  Altmann gave the command, and two men stepped forward until they could touch the dark wall.

  Tupac guided their hands into position beneath the head-sized stones.

  “When I say lift, put your backs into it and push straight up. Do not stop until I say to do so.”

  As Conrad Altmann stepped forward to observe, Tupac positioned himself between the two men, thrust his fingers into two holes that seemed to be mere cracks between stones, and gave the command.

  “Lift now.”

  The men to his left and right grunted, and though the weight of the edifice would have seemed to make such a thing impossible, Tupac felt a slight shift in the stone before him. Grasping his handholds, he levered himself up, placed his feet against a large stone, leaned back, and pressed with all his might.

  Deep within the wall there came a sound of rolling stone, followed by a grinding, sandy sound as the stone against which his feet pressed moved ever so slowly inward.

  “My God!” Conrad Altmann gasped.

  Tupac ignored him, increasing the effort he was directing into the stone.

  “Lift harder on the right side,” he gasped.

  Dolf stepped forward to place his hands under the other man’s and lifted, grunting with effort. The smaller man’s bones cracked, and he screamed, but the stone started moving again. This time it did not stop until it rolled inward to reveal a one-meter-wide opening.

  “Release the stones,” Tupac hissed.

  Dolf and the other two complied, one cursing and cupping his injured hands to his chest.

  Altmann’s voice rang in Tupac’s right ear. “Quick. Jam something in there to keep it open.”

  Tupac pulled his legs back out of the hole and righted himself, struggling to catch his breath.

  “No need. The passage will remain open until we again lift the two stones and release the counter balance within.”

  Conrad Altmann pushed through, thrusting his head and shoulders into the hole, his flashlight pushing back the interior darkness. He backed out.

  “The air smells bad.”

  “It is old air,” Tupac replied. “But it will not kill you.”

  I will do that. The thought came unbidden to his min
d.

  And then, one after another, they squeezed through the hole and scrambled inside.

  CHAPTER 87

  Two kilometers east of Tiahuanaco, Jack killed the headlights, turned off of Highway 1 onto a dirt road, and pulled into a concealed parking spot. In the dim light of the quarter-moon, he looked across the van at Janet, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline that approaching danger and her presence fed him. Tonight the adrenaline spigot was cranked wide open.

  As was always the case when that happened, Jack felt his natural intuition amped up disproportionately, leaving no doubt in his mind that his enemies were close by. Still, it paid to spend some time gathering whatever intelligence the NSA could provide. So he would muzzle the hound that howled within and give Janet a chance to do her thing.

  It took her fifteen minutes to set up the secure satellite data link, running a cable from the vehicle battery to the inverter that would power the rig. Seated on the floor in the back of the panel van, she powered the system on, giving Jack direction as he worked outside, adjusting the satellite antenna for maximum signal strength.

  When she was satisfied, Jack moved to the side of the van where he could see her work while he maintained a lookout for any unwelcome visitors.

  The sound of her fingers hitting the laptop keys mimicked the staccato beat of a soft drumroll.

  “We’re in,” she said. “Altmann has two dozen of his men in firing positions around the Kalasasaya Temple. A military police platoon has set up road blocks just east and west of the ruins, but most of their men are at a temporary headquarters they’ve established at one of the hotels in town.”

  “Any chance your NSA buddies can provide some satellite imagery?”

  “I’m downloading one now. It’s big, so it’ll take some time.”

  “How long?”

  “Fifteen or twenty minutes for the first one.”