“Amen to that. There’s probably a few million Soviet soldiers who’d argue that, though. Stalin shoved them into the meat grinder of the Eastern Front like they were cattle.”
“Always an exception to the rule.”
Brian stopped to check their map. “Almost there. Next left, then right down an alley. Bari’s apartment is the third door on the left. Painted bloodred, according to Ghazi.”
“Let’s hope that ain’t a bad omen.”
They found the right alley ten minutes later and ducked through the arch. Soldier that he was, Brian’s night vision was better tuned than that of his brother, so he was the first to realize the man walking toward them down the alley was none other than Rafiq Bari. He was not alone but rather was flanked by a pair of men, each dressed in dark slacks and long-sleeved white shirts open at the neck and untucked at the waist.
“Local heavies,” Dominic muttered.
“Yep. Let’s let them pass.”
Bari was walking fast, as were his bodyguards, but both Bari’s body language and that of the two bodyguards told the Carusos that Bari wasn’t under duress. The relationship was clearly of an employee-employer nature.
Brian and Dom reached the red door first and kept going, letting Bari and his party pass on their left. Brian cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw Bari slipping a key into the door’s lock. Brian turned back forward. The door opened, then slammed shut. The Carusos turned left at the next corner and stopped.
“Never gave us a second look,” Dominic said. Bari’s bodyguards were probably street-level thugs who assumed a familiarity with violence was training enough for the job, and they’d probably be right in most circumstances.
“Bad luck for them, good for us,” Brian replied. “He was moving quick, though. He’s either in a hurry to catch Wheel of Fortune or he’s on the move.”
“Better assume the latter. Time to improvise.”
“The Marine way.”
Twenty feet down the alley, they found an open archway on their left and stepped through into a small courtyard with a dry circular fountain in the center. It was almost fully dark now, and the corners were cast in deep shadow. They took a few moments to let their eyes adjust. Leaning against the far wall was a trellis covered in dried vines. They walked over and tested the wood; it was brittle.
“Boost,” Brian said, then stepped to the wall and formed a saddle with his hands. Dominic stepped into it, reached high, and snagged the top of the wall. He scrambled up, then looked down and gave Brian the wait one-hand signal and crawled away. He was back in three minutes. He gave an all okay nod, then leaned over and helped Brian up.
“Bari’s door leads to an inner courtyard. Open doorway on the east wall. One bodyguard there. Bari and the other one are inside. I can hear them banging around. Sounds like they’re in a hurry.”
“Let’s do it.”
They loaded their Brownings, affixed the suppressors, and started across the roof. To their left, in the alley, there came the sound of a dog barking, then a dull thump. The dog yelped and went silent. Brian held up his closed fist, calling a halt. They both knelt down. Brian crept across the roof, peeked over the edge, then returned.
“Four men coming down the alley,” he whispered. “Moving like operators. Or police.”
“Maybe the reason Bari’s in a hurry,” Dominic observed. “Let it play out?”
“If it’s the police, we got no choice. If not…”
Dominic shrugged, nodded. They’d come a long way for Bari; they weren’t going to give him up unless they had no other option. The question was, if these new players had come to kill Bari, would they do it here or take him somewhere else?
Brian and Dominic moved closer to the eaves overlooking Bari’s courtyard, then dropped to their bellies and eased forward until they could see. The lone bodyguard was still standing beside the door, a mere shadowed outline in the darkness. A cigarette’s cherry tip glowed to life, then dimmed.
To their left the footsteps grew louder, scuffing along the sand-and-dirt alley before stopping-presumably at Bari’s door. The Carusos knew the next few moments would tell them all they needed to know about their competitors. The police would go in shouting; anyone else would go in shooting.
Neither happened.
There came a soft knock at the courtyard door. Bari’s bodyguard tossed his cigarette away and leaned into the opened doorway, said something, then headed toward the courtyard door. His body showed no signs of tension; he made no move to draw the weapon that Brian and Dominic assumed was tucked into a belt holster. They exchanged glances: Bari expecting company?
The bodyguard threw back the sliding latch and pulled open the door.
Pop, pop.
The gunshots were soft, no louder than a palm being slapped on a wooden tabletop. The bodyguard stumbled backward and sprawled onto the ground. Three figures rushed past him toward the inner doorway. A fourth followed, paused beside the bodyguard’s body to put a final round in his forehead, then kept walking.
Two more muffled pops came from within the house, then a shout, then silence. Ten seconds later Bari came out with his hands clasped behind his head, being shoved from behind by the three intruders. He was pushed to his knees before the fourth man-the leader, it seemed-who bent at the waist and said something to Bari. Bari shook his head. The man slapped him.
“Looking for something,” Dominic whispered.
“Yeah. URC, you think?”
“I’d say. Unless he’s freelancing for someone else.”
The questioning went on for another two or three minutes, then the leader gestured to the other men, who pinned him to the ground. His hands were bound with duct tape, and a rag was stuffed into his mouth. They dragged him back into the house.
“Mr. Bari’s going to lose some fingernails,” Brian observed.
“If he’s lucky. Best we get to him before they fuck him up too much.”
“Give it a few minutes. He’ll be all the happier when the cavalry arrives.” This Brian said with a grin Dominic decided was halfway evil.
“Shit, Bri, that’s hard-core.”
“That’s leverage.
The muffled screams from inside the house started almost immediately. At the five-minute mark, Dominic looked up from his watch and nodded. Brian went over the edge first, hanging from the eaves, then dropping lightly to his feet. Hunched over and Browning pointed at the door, he sidestepped to the far wall, then knelt down and gave his brother a nod. Dominic was down ten seconds later and crouched beside the near wall.
Together they started forward, sliding along the wall in the shadows until Dominic gestured for a halt. He crept forward until his angle allowed him a glimpse through the door. He gestured to Brian: Three men visible; room to left through the door. Short hall straight through the door. Two unaccounted for.
Brian nodded, then signaled back the entry plan and got a nod in return. Dominic crossed the last ten feet to the door-side wall, then sidestepped along it until he was pressed flat beside the doorjamb. Brian moved forward and crouched beside the other jamb. Dominic took one last look, leaning out just enough to see through the door. He nodded.
Brian nodded one… two… three, then stood up, stepped through the door and turned left, the Browning up and leading him. Dominic was a step behind.
Two of the men had Bari pressed face-first into a wooden trestle table; the surface was slick with blood, which glistened blackly under the glow of a floor lamp in the corner. The leader sat across from Bari, a paring knife in his right hand; the blade and his hand were wet.
One of the men holding Bari looked up, saw Brian as he sidestepped into the room. Brian’s first shot struck the man in the throat, the second in the center of the forehead. Brian adjusted aim, put down the second man. The leader spun around, a gun in his hand. Dominic was already there. He slammed the butt of the Browning into the man’s temple, and he slumped sideways to the floor.
“Clear.”
“Clear,” Br
ian whispered. “Him?”
“Give him a nap.”
Brian rapped Bari behind the ear with the Browning’s butt, then checked him. “Good.”
They both turned, stalked back down the hall, glanced right through the open door and saw nothing, so they turned left, down the short hall. A silhouette appeared in the doorway at the end. Dominic fired twice. The man went down. From the room they heard the screeching of wood on wood.
“Window,” Dominic said.
“Got it.”
Brian was at the threshold in three steps. He peeked around the corner and saw a man climbing through a window on the other side of the room. He fired. The 9-millimeter hollow-point slammed into the man’s hip. His leg collapsed beneath him, and he fell backward into the room. In his left hand was a pistol. Dominic stepped forward and double-tapped the man in the chest.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
The rest of the apartment consisted of a bathroom and a second bedroom, both off the short hall. Both rooms were empty, as were the closets. They found Bari’s second bodyguard in the bathtub, fully clothed, with a neat hole in the back of his head. They returned to the front room, which they realized was in fact a living room/kitchenette. Bari lay where they’d left him, face-first on the table, arms spread.
“Christ,” Brian said. “What the fuck…”
In the short five minutes in which Bari’s visitors had worked on him, they’d managed to cut two fingers off his left hand.
“Somebody green-lit this guy,” Dominic said.
“Yeah. The question is why?”
66
WHATEVER HIS EFFECTIVENESS as a bureaucrat, one thing about Agong Nayoan became quickly apparent to Clark, Jack, and Chavez: As an intelligence operative, either the man was untrained in the ways of fieldcraft or he’d chosen to ignore the rules, and nowhere was this more acutely obvious than his choice of online passwords, which Gavin Biery cracked within hours of Clark and company leaving Nayoan’s home. The Web browser on Nayoan’s laptop had the normal array of bookmarks-from shopping sites to reference sites and everything in between-but he also maintained several online e-mail accounts, one at Google, one at Yahoo!, and one at Hotmail. Each mailbox contained dozens of messages, mostly from friends and family, it seemed, but also junk mail and spam, these heavily laden with banner images that Biery would be scanning for traces of stego.
Nayoan was also an avid user of Google Maps, which Jack found heavily annotated with digital pushpins. Most of these turned out to be restaurants, cafés, or similar San Francisco hot spots within walking distance of both the embassy and his home. One pushpin, however, caught Jack’s attention, a private home in San Rafael, about fifteen miles north of the city across the Golden Gate Bridge.
“What’s the pushpin called?” Clark asked.
“Sinaga,” Jack replied.
“Sounds like a last name.”
“Checking,” Jack said, before Clark could make the suggestion. He had Biery on the phone a minute later. “Need you to scan Nayoan’s accounts for a name: Sinaga.”
Biery was back ten minutes later. “Kersan Sinaga. Nayoan has written him seven checks in the last two years, ranging from five hundred to a couple thousand bucks. One of the check abstracts I pulled up at his bank’s website has a notation: ‘computer consultation.’ Here’s the interesting part, though: I ran his name through Immigration; they’ve got him flagged. He was supposed to show up for a hearing eight months ago and never showed. He’s also flagged on the watch list.”
“Double whammy,” Chavez said. “Skipping an ICE hearing doesn’t get you a place on the list all by itself.”
“No chance,” Clark agreed. “What else?”
“He’s wanted by the Indonesian POLRI,” Biery replied, referring to the Polisi Negara Republik Indonesia. The Indonesian national police. “Seems your Kersan Sinaga is a top-notch forger. They’ve been looking for him for four years.”
The drive north out of the city took thirty minutes. According to Jack’s own Google map, Sinaga lived on the eastern outskirts of San Rafael, in a sparsely populated mobile-home park. They drove through once, then circled back and parked a hundred yards north of Sinaga’s trailer, a double-wide surrounded by a rusted waist-high hurricane fence and hedges.
“Ding, there’s a legal pad in my briefcase back there,” Clark said over his shoulder. “Grab it for me, will you?”
Chavez handed it over. “Whatcha thinking?”
“A little neighborhood survey. Be back in ten minutes.”
Clark climbed out, and Jack and Chavez watched him walk down the lane to the nearest trailer, where he mounted the steps and knocked on the door. A woman appeared a few seconds later, and Clark chatted with her for thirty seconds before moving on to the next house, where he repeated the process until he reached Sinaga’s trailer. When he reappeared, he walked to three more trailers before walking back to the car and climbing in. He handed the legal pad to Jack. It was covered in names, addresses, and signatures.
“Care to clue us in?” Jack said.
“I told him I was trying to open a restaurant down the road and I needed five hundred signatures from nearby residents to apply for a liquor license. Sinaga’s not home. According to his neighbor, he works part-time at the Best Buy off one-oh-one. He gets off at two.”
Chavez checked his watch. “An hour. Not enough time.”
“We’ll wait for dark,” Clark said.
“And then?” Jack asked.
“We’re going to kidnap the sonofabitch.”
Clark’s reasoning was sound. Nayoan rarely contacted Sinaga, and even then only by e-mail, so the man’s disappearance wasn’t likely to raise an alarm. Better still, if they worked the scam correctly, they might be able to parlay their electronic association into an information dump from Nayoan. Worst case, they would have a warm body who had, more than likely, forged documents for the URC, perhaps both here and overseas. Whether Gerry Hendley would like the idea of The Campus having custody of a URC stringer none of them knew.
“Easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” Clark observed.
They drove to the Best Buy and waited for Sinaga to emerge, then followed him to a nearby grocery store, then home. They waited thirty minutes, then Clark reprised his bar-owner role, this time taking the houses on the opposite side of the street before crossing over to Sinaga’s trailer. He was back five minutes later.
“He’s alone. Playing Xbox and drinking beer. I didn’t see any feminine touches, so it’s a good bet he’s a bachelor,” Clark reported. “He’s got a dog, though, an old cocker spaniel. Didn’t bark until I knocked on the door.”
They killed time until nightfall, then drove back to the trailer park and circled the block once. Sinaga’s car, a five-year-old Honda Civic, was parked under the carport awning, and lights showed in the trailer’s windows. A bare bulb cast the porch in white light. Clark doused the Taurus’s headlights and killed the engine, then scanned the legal pad.
“His neighbor-the one that knew he was at work-is a guy named Hector. Looks a bit like you, Ding.”
“Let me guess: I’m borrowing a cup of sugar.”
“Yep. There’s no screen door, so he’ll have to open the door. When he does, you bulldoze him and I’ll grab the dog and put it in the bathroom. Jack, you go through the side gate and cover the back windows. Not much of a chance he’ll have time to get to them, but better safe than sorry.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t skulk around. Walk like you’ve got purpose. The neighbors were pretty friendly, so if somebody sees you, just wave or say hi like you belong. Let’s do it.”
They got out and started down the street, chatting quietly and occasionally chuckling, a trio of residents walking back from somewhere. When they drew even with the trailer, Clark and Chavez turned toward it. Jack stepped into the shadows beside the gate and watched as Clark pressed himself against the wall beside the door and Chavez mounted the steps. Clark turned and nodded to J
ack, who gently pushed open the gate and stepped into the yard. There wasn’t much grass, but there were plenty of weeds and brown spots and piles of dog crap. He reached the rear of the trailer and squatted down so he could see the length of the trailer. There were two windows, but one was too small for an adult; the window closest to him was the only exit.
From the front, Jack heard Chavez’s knock, followed a few seconds later by a “Yeah, who’s there?”
“Hector, from next door. Hey, man, my phone’s disconnected. Can I use yours for a second?”
Footsteps clicked on the trailer’s floor. Hinges squeaked.
“Hey!”
A door slammed, followed by the pounding of footsteps. Jack looked up, on alert now. Shit… what…
“Coming your way!” Clark called. “Back window!”
Even as Clark said the words, the window slid open and a figure appeared, diving out headfirst. He landed with a grunt, then rolled over and jumped to his feet.
Jack froze momentarily, then said, “Stop, right there!”
Sinaga spun on him, head darting first left, then right. He charged Jack, and in the light filtering from the window Jack saw a glint of steel in Sinaga’s hand. Knife, some distant part of his brain told him. Then Sinaga was on him, knife slashing sideways. Jack backpedaled. Sinaga kept coming. Jack felt the fence railing slam into his back, then saw Sinaga bringing his arm around. He jerked his head sideways, felt an impact on his right shoulder. Slightly off balance by the wild swing, Sinaga stumbled sideways. Jack caught his arm, left hand on his wrist, and gave it a jerk, then wrapped his right arm around Sinaga’s neck, his larynx in the crook of Jack’s elbow. Sinaga bent his head forward, then butted backward. Jack sensed it coming but was able to only tilt his face sideways. The back of Sinaga’s head slammed into Jack’s cheek-bone. Pain burst behind Jack’s eyes. Sinaga flailed, trying to free himself, and slammed Jack back against the fence again, but losing his own footing in the process. Legs splayed out before him, Sinaga dropped straight down and landed on his butt. Jack held on, felt himself tipping forward over Sinaga’s head. Don’t let go, don’t let go… Arm still wrapped around Sinaga’s throat, Jack somersaulted. He heard a muffled crunch-pop. He landed in a heap, rolled sideways, sure Sinaga would be on him.
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