“Damn it!”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“All right! But you tell me this. Who’s baby-sitting Akira while you yahoos are robbing the bank? Who’s extracting him if things get hot? Phoenix touched down in Berlin half an hour ago and can’t spare anyone. Mack’s busy.”
“I don’t know, pick an asset, pick anybody. Just do it in the next ten minutes.”
“Ten min—” Kurtzman glowered. He sat back in his wheelchair while he frowned mightily. “All right, Carl. I guess it will have to be a blacksuit.”
That was the way Carl had figured it. “Who do you want?”
“I want Tino.”
“Tino?” Lyons rolled his eyes. “Yeah, he’s not going to stick out in the Caribbean.”
“Like you’re not, Blondie, and Tino can pick up Akira and swim him home if it comes to it.”
“Well, there is that. Okay, Bear, you got it. Call Tino and tell him you got a job for him. Then send Akira to the Cowboy.”
“Why?”
“’Cause Akira always gets stomped. Let’s see if we can prevent that from happening again.”
Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles
“A THOROUGHLY MODERN FACILITY.” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz took in the blazing white building overlooking the town and beach. Infinite Financial Antilles looked more like a flying wing than a traditional bank. It hung from the tropical hillside like a bird of prey about to take off. “Just like the brochure said.” He grinned at Tokaido. “Think you can crack it, tough guy?”
The young computer genius had hacked undetected into the top-secret databases of most of the major military powers on the planet, both friend and foe of the United States. He had been clandestinely privy to secrets of state that would get him killed in most corners of the world. In his experience, the cybernetic defenses of governments and militaries were monolithic and mind-numbingly, militaristically predictable. All they took was time. Tokaido stood on the hotel balcony and gazed upon the sweeping structure that was his enemy. The problem as he saw it was that his opponents weren’t guarding nuclear secrets or Byzantine strategic plans for world domination. That would have been relatively simple.
These guys were Dutch financiers and they were guarding money.
Their defenses would be state-of-the-art, as slick as grease, and their counterattacks across the datum plane lighting-fast.
And they would have hired someone like himself to design them.
“No problem.”
Tino Nathaniel Tenari tossed back a Red Stripe beer almost without swallowing. “Check out the big brass balls on hacker boy.”
Tenari was 280 pounds of American Samoan jammed into a blue Guayabera shirt and khaki shorts. He was also a former Air Police sergeant. His nickname was TNT, and he qualified as a one-man brute squad. He had accepted the bank job without a second thought.
Tokaido was looking up at the bank as if he could see through the walls and was staring at their computer network. His concentration was so total he spoke to no one in particular. “No, all you have to do is get me in. Hook me up directly into their system, and I can defeat it.” He nodded slowly. “They’ll never know I was there. They’ll never know what data they’re missing.”
Tenari waved his empty beer bottle in a vaguely appalled fashion. “I hate it when he gets like that. Creeps me out.”
“Yeah, well, you’re baby-sitting him.” Carl Lyons stared up at the architectural wonder and contemplated an entirely different set of defenses that needed to be overcome. “We’ll be busy.”
“Just as long as I don’t have to listen to his music.”
“The plan is pretty straightforward. We don’t want anyone to know we were in the computers, so we’re going to make it look like a heist. Able robs the bank. Akira, you and Tino heist the data.” Lyons opened up a bag and pulled out three rubber masks.
Blancanales opened a suitcase full of weapons. “So, we go in like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?”
“We go in like the Mongol horde,” Lyons corrected him. “Gadgets blows the security suite, then we steal everything that isn’t nailed down, set fire to the place and leave slogans about multinationals, stolen money in offshore accounts and indigenous islanders’ rights.”
Blancanales pulled out a rather beat-up looking ex-Venezuelan navy Walther MPK submachine gun. “Jesus, Carl. Muy primitivo.”
“We’re just shooting the place up.” Lyons pointed to some canisters of ancient-looking British police riot gas. “If we face local opposition, we use the gas to break contact. Regardless, we head for the southern side of the island. There’s a speedboat waiting, and a mile and a half out, the submarine City of Corpus Christi will be waiting for us. Any questions?”
Infinite Financial Antilles
“OH COME ON, Rita.” Sybo Dykstra leaned over the reception table. It was Sunday morning, things were slow, and even at the firm’s busiest on Monday mornings when the markets opened, Rita Mannlicher held at least half of the young man’s attention. Rita was half Dutch half and half islander, and her hair skin and eyes were all the same startling shade of cinnamon. The effect only enhanced the tropical-weight white skirt and jacket she wore. “Come with me to Florida.”
Mannlicher sighed. “Oh, I don’t know, Sybo, I…” The woman cocked her head and looked out the front door. “What is that?”
Dykstra turned to look out the vast glass doors. “What?”
A dilapidated Land Rover was barreling down the road toward the bank. Infinite Financial Antilles engaged in a number of forms of business on Sundays but walk-in banking wasn’t one of them. “Maybe some kids joyriding, the road forms a loop…”
“Sybo!”
Mannlicher screamed as the vehicle plowed right through the glass doors. The tires shrieked to a halt on the Italian pink marble floor. A rubber-faced facsimile of former President Richard Nixon leaped from the passenger seat. He raised a German submachine gun in each hand and fired them in a blazing arcs into the ceiling. “Peace and freedom! Blood and fire!” Nixon screamed.
Senator Ted Kennedy leaped from behind the wheel of the Land Rover, his weapon ripping nameplates, pens and stacked forms along the teller windows. “Death to the running dogs!”
A third masked man, former president Jimmy Carter, jumped from the back and pointed his submachine gun into the bank employees’ face. “Down! Down! Down!”
The employees complied instantly.
“Up! Up! Up!” Kennedy yanked Dystra back up by the arm. “Where’s the money!”
“Money? We don’t have any money!”
“You’re a bank!” Carter screamed. “You got to have money!”
IFA often did receive very large sums of money in cash, bearer bonds, gold and gems, but they were met by appointment, swarmed by guards, placed in the vault and then swiftly converted into less tangible assets for their clients who wished to keep their money secret. Part of the offshore bank’s lease required them to give the local Bonaire island population banking services at very favorable rates of interest, which accounted for the row of teller windows, but the vast majority of those accounts were small and hardly worth the bank’s time.
“I mean, we do! But we don’t!”
“Are you being indecisive!” Carter screamed.
“No! I mean, we’re not like a local bank! It’s Sunday! The teller tills were all emptied on Friday! Anything in the bank is in the vault! No one here has access to it!”
Kennedy walked over and shoved the hot muzzle of his submachine gun into the financier’s temple. “Open the vault!”
“I can’t!” Dykstra shrieked.
“Open it, Nixon!” Kennedy howled. “Let them feel the fire of freedom!”
Nixon and Kennedy blasted their submachine guns in all directions. In their random orgy of destruction they just happened to take out the lobby security cameras, and Nixon put a full magazine of armor-piercing ammo into a section of wall that happened to be a nexus of the building’s security suite.
“The vault!” Nixon pulled a satchel out of the Land Rover and dragged Dykstra across the floor. “Show me the vault!”
The young man shuddered as he led the Republican President down a wide arc of marble steps. The door to the vault was a gleaming, six-foot circle of massively thick steel with a gate of steel bars in front of it. Nixon opened a satchel full dynamite.
“For God’s sake!” Dykstra howled. “You can’t blow it open with that! You’ll kill us all!”
“Blood and fire!” Nixon screamed. He pulled out a butane lighter and lit the fuse.
“Oh, my God!” Dykstra ran for his life and Nixon let him. Rosario “Pol” Blancanales subvocalized behind his mask as he shoved the satchel through the bars. “Hostage on his way upstairs. Intercept. Detonation in ten seconds. T, be ready to move.” Blancanales raised his voice to the heavens in a mad scream. “Behold His rod of correction!”
Upstairs, Dykstra screamed in sudden terror.
“Hostage acquired,” Lyons came back.
“Ready to move on your signal,” Tenari responded.
Blancanales took the stairs three at a time. He reached the main landing and dived over the teller windows. “Blood and fire!”
Downstairs the dynamite detonated. The sticks had been neutered and the actual explosive charge was fairly minimal, however the blast, smoke and wave of heat that rolled up the steps felt like the end of the world. The bank employees were curled into fetal shuddering balls on the floor as black smoke rolled through the lobby.
Carl Lyons thumbed his throat mike. “Move, T.”
“LET’S DO IT.”
Akira Tokaido followed Tino Tenari as the big man burst out of the foliage and sprinted into the smoke-filled lobby of the bank. Tokaido’s bag of tricks thumped against his back and he held his hand to his face against the choking smoke and the overpowering acrid scent of high explosive. The fire alarms were ringing and the fire-suppression sprinklers were dousing everything. Glass broke beneath his sandals. A pair of bank employees lay shuddering and clutching each other as Kennedy and Nixon danced around them screaming political slogans and firing their weapons into the air.
Jimmy Carter looked over from spray-painting graffiti and jerked his head toward the back. The two men raced to the stairs and went up. While they hadn’t been able to covertly break into Infinite Financial Antilles secure banking records, acquiring blueprints and wiring schematics of the building had been a much simpler prospect.
Physical security was Tenari’s provenance. It was something he was already good at and he had all of Gadget’s Schwarz’s coaching and know-how backing him up. He overcame the lock on the financial office door like a ghost. “We’re in.”
Tokaido sat in front of the main computer terminal. The computer, actually the Local Area Network, was on. The worst possible thing you could do to a computer was to turn it on or off. He smiled at his prey and pulled a highly modified laptop out of its carry case.
Tenari crouched with his bulk filling the door frame. A silenced .45 SOCOM pistol filled his hands. He peered over at Tokaido as he began connecting his laptop to the central LAN terminal. “I’m an Apple man, myself.”
Tokaido gazed heavenward for patience. Then his fingers began to fly like birds across his keyboard.
Moments later he punched Control-Alt-Delete on his computer and financial records began scrolling down his screen. “We’re in.”
“That fast?”
Tokaido leaned back smugly. “That fast.”
Sirens began howling in the distance.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“Saudi Arabia.” Hal Brognola shoved his cigar around in his mouth and stared long and hard at the data Tokaido had sent from the Antilles. “We’re sure this is good intel?”
“Good as gold, I’m calling it.” Though Barbara Price wasn’t entirely pleased. “Did you check the name that Akira earmarked as the money end source?”
“Sheikh Harith Jaspari. It almost sounds familiar but—” The shoulders of the man from Justice sank. “No, no, no…”
“Sorry, but I’m afraid so.” Price brought up a photo on the monitor of a middle-aged Arab in a jibbah and burnoose on a brilliant green golf course surrounded by sand dunes. “He’s Saudi royal family.”
“Damn it…”
Kurtzman spoke up. “Could be worse. Our boy Harith isn’t part of the royal line with any kind of claim on the throne. He’s one of the nonroyal branches of the family.
“Are you saying we can reach out and touch this Harith guy without pissing off the royals?”
Kurtzman scratched his beard. “Members of the Jaspari family branch have always been outsiders. They’re desert dwellers and have stayed that way. They’ve been on the wrong side of succession struggles more than once. In their favor, they are very orthodox Sunni Muslims, and are known for their piety and the number of highly respected clerics in the family. They’ve also been known to support terrorist causes in the Middle East. They’re fanatically anti-Israel and anti-American. There was a stink two years ago when some of the Jaspari young men were captured fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and had to be quietly handed back.”
“Let me ask you a different question. Could Harith drop thirty million into an Antilles offshore bank account?”
“Well, they’re not Saudi powerhouses but they marry well, and have some pretty vast personal fortunes, I would suspect—”
“Yes or no?”
“Without blinking,” Kurtzman replied.
Brognola grunted. “Barbara, have Phoenix get ready to head to Saudi Arabia.”
“What about Able?” Barbara asked. “They’re still in the Antilles.”
“Leave them there. Tell them to keep their jet hot on the pad, be ready to go to point anywhere on the planet within twenty-four hours.” Brognola raised his bulk from the conference table. “I’ve got to go talk to the man.”
Berlin, Germany
“MR. DEYN?”
Laurentius Deyn clicked a button on his intercom. “Yes, Franka. What is it?”
Deyn’s cyberneticist-security agent had a strange tone in her voice. “I am not sure, but I know you wished to be kept abreast of any anomalies…”
Deyn sat up in his chair. “What kind of anomalies?”
“It is strange, but I have a report that Infinite Financial Antilles was robbed.”
“Robbed?” Deyn frowned. Robbing an offshore banking facility was nearly impossible. “How? Was the system hacked? In what amount were assets transferred?”
“It did not appear to be that kind of robbery. I am transferring you the report and file footage.”
Deyn watched the security camera tape of two employees talking at a desk when a Land Rover came smashing through the glass doors. He noted the Walther MPK submachine guns as they sprayed in the air and remembered that the Venezuelan navy had issued such weapons at one time. He found the rubber masks to be in extremely poor taste. The tape ended abruptly as bullets smashed the cameras.
“They tried to breech the vault with dynamite. Naturally they failed.”
A picture flashed on the screen of the massive vault door. The walls around it were blackened but the gleaming steel remained unscratched.
“Fools.”
Pictures from the police report flashed across the screen, showing the smoke-damaged and bullet-raddled interior of the lobby and the political slogans crudely spray painted onto the walls and artwork. “Death to the Imperialists!” “Power to the People!” “End the Multinational Monarchy!” Laurentius Deyn was the defacto head of one of the most powerful multinationals on Earth, and like most of his kind, he found the local people in the Third World countries where he made his greatest profits revolting.
“Goddamn savages.” Deyn was completely disgusted. “Did they get away with anything?”
“The tills had been emptied previously and put into the vault. Naturally, neither of the employees could access the vault. Indeed no one save the presiden
t, the chairman and the bank director could access the vault until Monday. The two employees were robbed of their watches and the money they had on them.” Marx sighed. “All of the ballpoint pens in the teller’s windows were stolen.”
Deyn shook his head slowly. There was nothing on Earth more unforgivable than stupidity. “And what became of them?”
“They escaped, sir.”
The second thing Laurentius Deyn couldn’t abide was incompetence. Deyn’s voice grew cold. “Why have you brought this to my attention?”
Deyn could almost hear Franka flinch on the other side of the line. It took her several moments to regain her courage in the face of her mentor’s wrath.
“Mr. Deyn, we have no assets currently in play with Infinite Financial Antilles, but we did arrange the routing of certain funds through it…”
Deyn’s demeanor changed in an eyeblink. There was nothing at Infinite Financial Antilles that could lead to him or his activities, but there were possible loose ends. “Franka, I want this to be considered a Level 4 security breech.”
Marx gasped.
Deyn continued. “I want a cybernetic team sent to the island of Bonaire. You will lead them. I want the computers and data within them thoroughly examined. Take your best people. I also want a full crime scene investigation of the upper offices. I will route a double strength security team from our South American headquarters to meet you there. Pack your bags, you leave within the hour.”
Deyn punched a button for his personal secretary. “I need a secure satellite line to Saudi Arabia immediately. Then get me the head of Middle East security.”
Saudi Arabia
THE CAMEL GROANED and spit green froth into the sand. The Bedouin and his band sat on their camels by the side of the road, placidly swatting at flies with his switch and waiting for the herd of goats to pass. The goats bleated and clip-clopped over the dusty single-lane road with the bells around their necks tinkling. The old goatherd wore a faded T-shirt with Saddam Hussein’s smiling face on it. He nodded at the Bedouins and smiled to reveal a nearly toothless mouth. “Asalaam aleiku.”
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