by Jeff Abbott
“I call Anna. We set up a meeting. You give her the rest of the money. Then she makes a phone call and the child is brought to you.”
“Has my son been sold?”
“I told you, I don’t know. Please. Please!”
“Watch him,” I said to Mila. I opened the laptop. On the screen was a catalog in PDF format. Pictures of babies. Countries of origin. Description of parents, if known—but no names. The spring catalog featured over two dozen children. Beautiful kids on the auction block. I scanned it quickly. None was listed as being born in France and I didn’t see what the point of lying in the catalog would be.
“You’re going to call Anna Tremaine, and you’re going to set up a meeting.”
Mr. Bell’s lip trembled.
“Where is she based?”
“Her cell phone has a Las Vegas area code. But that’s not where she necessarily meets people,” he added in a little rushed lie.
“Las Vegas will be just fine.” I decided I’d make it extra easy for Anna Tremaine. “You tell her that Mr. and Mrs. Derwatt have checked out and that we’ll be in Vegas tomorrow night to collect our child and pay the money.”
“You have to pick one, then.”
“What?”
“A child. You have to pick a child.”
“This one.” I just pointed to the infant whose picture was on the current page of the digital catalog.
“Okay.” His breathing slowed. “I’ll do it, please don’t kill me.”
“Call her. Now. And if you say a single syllable that I don’t like, I will kill you.” And I slipped Mila’s garrote around his throat. The bloodied wire lay against his shirt and I tightened it enough so that the steel lay against his soft throat. I gave him an address in Las Vegas to suggest as a meeting place. He nodded.
He dialed. He waited. I leaned close enough to hear.
“Yes?”
“Anna. It’s Bell. The couple today, the Derwatts, they checked out okay. They’ve made their selection.”
“Which one?”
“Number fourteen.”
I could hear the barest scratch of pen and ink. “All right.”
“They don’t want to meet in New York. I think they would be willing to come to Las Vegas.”
A pause. “All right.”
“Do you know a place called The Canyon Bar, just off the Strip?”
“Oh, wonderful,” she said. “Hipster parents.”
“They suggested meeting there. Tomorrow evening at nine.”
I thought she might suggest her own choice. But any public spot could be put under surveillance. Our locale was as good as any other. “That’s fine,” she said.
“All right, I’ll tell them.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” The conversation felt off. Tense. But he hadn’t said anything I could pinpoint as a signal to her.
“The wife and kids all right?”
“Yes, Anna, thanks for asking.” He swallowed against the wire. “Brent starts flag football this weekend. Jared’s joined swim team.”
“Oh, that’s nice. All right, I’ll see the Derwatts tomorrow. How will I know them?”
“She’s very petite, dark-haired. He’s about six foot, wiry, dark blond hair, green eyes. Nice-looking couple.”
“Tell them to get a table, preferably in the back. Order me a martini, three olives, and leave it at the table with a seat for me. I don’t like the look of anything in the bar, I skip the meeting, and no baby.”
“I’ll tell them.”
“Very well,” Anna said. “Bye.”
He hung up the phone and dropped it to the floor. Shivering under the wire, waiting for me to kill him.
Mila knelt to meet his gaze. “You’re not going to die. You’re going to talk. You’re going to tell me everything you know about Novem Soles.”
“Who?”
“Novem Soles, also called Nine Suns.”
“What? I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean the criminal ring that Anna works for.”
“I only know Anna. She’s self-employed.”
I pushed up the sleeves on his shirt. There was no marking tattoo, a fiery nine transformed into a blazing sun. Novem Soles’s mark of ownership; I’d seen it on too many arms back in Amsterdam. I checked the arms of the two muscles. One had a tattoo, but it was the Chinese symbol for luck. Hadn’t worked.
“She’s not working for herself,” I said. “She works for an incredibly dangerous group of people. They were plotting a mass assassination a month ago. You screw them over, you die.”
Mr. Bell’s lip trembled. He was trying to find his bravery but failing.
“You see them?” Mila pointed at the bodies.
He nodded.
“You’re not going to be like them unless you make trouble. You’re going to be locked up in a room and wait until we’ve taken care of Anna. And you tell my people all you know about Anna Tremaine and her operation,” Mila said. “Everything. And then you’re going to go back and live with your family and you’re going to stay the hell out of illegal activities.”
He nodded.
“Call your wife. Tell her you need to go out of town for a few days. Then call your office.”
He nodded, eager, hopeful he would live.
When he was done, he handed her back the phone. She took a pair of handcuffs off one of the dead men and cuffed Bell. I almost saw him shiver in relief. If she was cuffing him, she wasn’t killing him.
I had the information I needed, finally. I was going to find my son.
2
The Bahamas
IT WAS A BREAKING OF THE RULES, punishable by death. His project; his failure. His only shield was that he controlled access to many secrets that made their work and their profits possible. He smoothed out the thin strip of blond hair that bisected his scalp, a low-cut mohawk, and tugged at the jacket of his Armani suit. He stood on the porch of the large house and waited for the other eight to arrive in the darkening evening.
Rain slashed the beach, wind whipped the waves. Thunder thrummed the sky and the world appeared to have been smeared with gray paint. Alongside the sodden beach ran an equally sodden road, with a sign marking that it had been closed for repairs. Over the course of two hours, eight cars came down the rain-smeared asphalt and went around the wind-buffeted sign without the slightest hesitation. Each of the Lincoln Navigators, with its windows tinted against prying eyes, had been hired out from a local company that usually specialized in transporting film actors and rock stars around the island.
The passengers in each car, in this case, were not famous, and each liked their anonymity.
The house nestled in a private cove. The drivers helped their passengers inside. Each had packed light and carried a single bag. The drivers—all former military, now security for hire, from a variety of English-speaking nations—then took up stations around the house, to ensure that no one approached via boat, or car, or plane. Shortly after the last passenger arrived, the sky began to break, the clouds parting as if a curtain was rising on a stage, the early evening stars as witnesses.
The house smelled of Italian cooking: a heady mix of oregano, garlic, simmering beef, and red wine. The host for this gathering of the Nine Suns, or Novem Soles as it was also known, had spent part of his wandering childhood in Rome. He loved food, and his nanny had taught him how to cook. So for dinner there was salad, grilled fish, hearty pastas, and fine wines imported from Tuscany and Piedmont.
The nine men and women ate and sipped wine and chatted about the world’s events: a financial crisis in South America, the increasing violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, the latest scandal in the American Congress—and the opportunities for expansion that all three presented.
The man with the blond mohawk accepted compliments on the food; he smiled and encouraged the quieter members of the group—quiet, that is, in the way of cobras, observing, considering when to strike—to join the conversations. He had wanted to arrange prostitutes
for the visiting group, but had been sternly warned that, given recent events, this was no time for debauchery. He missed sex; he was reduced to being a spectator nowadays, but even watching, a feeble substitute, was better than nothing.
In these rooms they did not use each other’s names. They were known by their responsibilities: the Banker, the General, the Diplomat, the Courier. Titles passed down through long years, or kept by the original members of the nine. The blond mohawk was called the Watcher; it was a role he’d fought hard to get, and he had no intention of losing it now.
The Watcher waited for the Banker and the General to get into their usual bickering, but for once they did not. He heard English spoken, Russian practiced, the silk of Arabic whispered. These gatherings were always a good chance for everyone to practice their foreign language skills. But the meeting would be conducted in English, the group’s lingua franca.
After supper, the nine gathered in the large den. The Watcher stood at the head of the long table. He took a calming breath that he camouflaged under a welcoming smile. He was the youngest. Can’t be scared, boy. Be tough.
“I’m a firm believer in bad news first,” the Watcher said. “As you know, our recent mass assassination plot in the United States failed.”
Silence among the nine. It seemed like all the goodwill engendered by his fine food and wine evaporated like ice on summer concrete.
“A smuggling ring that we used as a cover to get experimental weapons into the United States was destroyed. The ring was infiltrated by a former CIA operative named Sam Capra. He should have died in our bombing of a clandestine CIA office in London dedicated to stopping illicit transnational activities. His office was part of the Special Projects branch—which, as you know, does the work that even the CIA is not supposed to discuss.” The mention of Special Projects caused a bit of a stir in the room: glances exchanged, water sipped, eyebrows raised. “These days Special Projects is specifically interested in any criminal, non-terrorist activities that can affect American national security.”
He paused; they stared. Waiting. He tapped on the laptop button and a picture of Sam Capra appeared on the screen. Brownish-blond-haired, green-eyed, the lean face of a runner, mid-twenties, boyish. “Capra survived only because he walked out of the office before it was bombed, however, and was regarded by the CIA as a likely traitor due to financial irregularities committed by his wife, and the inconvenient fact that his pregnant wife had told him to leave the office right before it was destroyed. Capra escaped from the CIA’s custody, went searching for his wife, infiltrated our group in Amsterdam, and disrupted the assassination plots.”
The nine waited while the Watcher took a long drink of water. He studied their faces. Most of them would not have been recognized by any government official, any police department, any journalist, any intelligence service. They were, for the most part, so ordinary. Frighteningly ordinary. The person who might sit next to you on the subway, or stand behind you in the grocery store line, or drop off their child at the same time you did at school. They came from around the world, yet they all seemed to have that same urban sameness. It was, the Watcher thought, a superior camouflage. Yet they had come so close to delivering a history-changing death blow to American stability, to bringing the country to a mad level of chaos that promised an erosion of the rule of law and, in turn, enormous profit.
Look how far we’ve come since the early days, the Watcher thought. A tremendous lesson could be learned from a tremendous failure. They were unbloodied and unbowed. “You will note that we lost our main CIA contact. He was killed in action by Capra. We have since lost two other low-level contacts I… recruited inside the CIA. They’ve been arrested. Fortunately we did not deal face to face with them, and they cannot betray us.”
“So right now, we have no eyes inside the CIA?” the Banker asked.
“We have an eye or two that never blinks.” He smiled. Let them know he still had information feeds inside the agency, but not exactly what kinds. “I do not know if they can see as well, or as far.” The Watcher cleared his throat. He could have shared a file two inches thick on Sam Capra’s life with his compatriots, but he’d decided not to play up the man’s importance. “We do, however, have leverage over Sam Capra. We have his infant child.”
“Children,” sniffed the Banker. She was a Chinese woman, petite, thin, with a lovely face that could have sold cosmetics by the tonnage. She made a frown, as though the word held a sourness.
“Control,” countered the General. “Control of a puppet with no strings for us to pull. While we have control over his kid, there’s no way the CIA will let him close to any information that is useful to us,” the Diplomat said. He spoke with a deep baritone, a South African accent, hands tented before his face. “I say we kill him. Show that we cannot be defied.”
“Sam Capra,” the Watcher said, “doesn’t know that our group has steered him from six years ago, that we have guided his life as surely as a hand on a rudder. We made him into what he is, not the CIA. The setback with his wife was… unfortunate. But he only knows us as a name that means nothing, a vague threat. He doesn’t know who we are, he doesn’t know how we came to be.”
“He has damaged us like no one else has,” the General said. “I truly prefer that he be dead.”
“We should not be killing CIA agents unless absolutely necessary,” the Historian said. He was a heavy-set Russian, head shaved bald, muscles thick under the black of his tailored suit. “It provokes attention. It is bad for business. He’s no longer with the CIA, he is useless to us. He cannot hurt us. He cannot find us. He dies at our hand, the CIA will be coming to investigate.”
“I agree,” several of the others murmured. The Watcher scanned their faces, taking the temperature of their reactions. The Banker stared at him and he nodded at her and said, “You have a thought to share?”
“Yes. You wanted us to finance your ability to spy on very specific people. I want to know how much of that ability has been compromised by this failure.”
“The whole reason we were able to attempt a project of this scale was because of me. Because I have made it easy for us to access information that is critically damaging to some of the most vitally placed people in the world and use it to force them to do what we need. We had a failure. It doesn’t change the fact that I—I mean we—now own several people in key positions in government and business around the world.”
“So. You want to mount another project, using your resources.” The Banker’s tone mocked him. In another time he would have slapped her across the face, torn her silk suit from her body, taught her who was master. His jaw quavered. Those days were done. Instead he nodded gravely. “Yes. But first I want to clean up the mess that Sam Capra made for us, but I want you to understand why it’s a risk.”
The Banker nodded.
“We had an asset in Amsterdam, a computer hacker who had helped me with infiltrating the laptops of our targets so that we had a free view of the classified information that came into their systems. Nic ten Boom. He’s dead, killed by Capra. There is a loose end there that we have only now discovered.”
“What? Who?” the General asked.
“A young Chinese graduate student, a computer hacker named Jin Ming, was present at a shootout in a Rotterdam machinists’ shop that was owned by the smuggling ring we used in Amsterdam. He was Nic ten Boom’s hacking assistant. He wrote the software that enabled us to spy without being detected. But he doesn’t know who our targets were. Ming is in the hospital, recovering from his wounds.”
“The assistant may know nothing that can hurt us.”
“He may not. I would very much like to know if he is going to be a problem. We know that Nic ten Boom was most ambitious.” He had to be careful here. “In checking my own computer’s logs, I found out that ten Boom was trying to learn more about us, and about our organization when he died. We hired him to spy for us, but he was starting to spy on us.”
“Then I’m glad he’s dead, and
you should hire with a more careful eye,” the Banker said.
“Nic was attracted by success. He wanted to move up the ladder.” The Watcher shrugged. “He didn’t seem to realize we require success before promotion.”
“Kids today are lazy,” the General said.
“Everyone else involved in the Amsterdam operation is dead, either killed by Capra or by one of our people, Edward, who sought to minimize our risks by eliminating those who could identify him. Edward is dead.”
There was no sentimentality about the death of a hireling.
“I did not know until now that this young man, Ming, was alive. He was grabbed by the CIA from an internet café, then we assume Ming gave them the Rotterdam address. They took him in when they raided our smuggling operation and Ming was shot. Apparently both our side and the CIA left him for dead. He is in an Amsterdam hospital, under police guard.”
“So have him killed.” The Banker gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “I can assure you, if there is a surfeit of anything in the world, it’s Chinese grad students.”
“I will. But why I’ve told you all this is because it’s all part of a bigger picture. We have shaped Sam Capra, over the years, like he was made of clay. And I don’t intend to let that wheel stop spinning until he is molded in just the way we need. The time has come. I have thought of a way in which Mr. Capra can be invaluable to us.”
“Because we have his child,” the Banker said. “You just got a new pawn on your chessboard, darling.” She actually smiled at him.
He did not like her changing his metaphor. “You have to seize what advantages you can,” the Watcher said. He felt the tension in his chest begin to loosen. At any moment any of the others would have been in their rights to call a vote on his life. They hadn’t.
“The CIA will never trust him while we have his child. Ever,” the General said.
“Oh, I know. I intend to take full advantage of that. It’s not like there’s a surplus of highly trained CIA operatives on the market. And most of them would never consider working for us.”
“But he will,” the Banker said.