“It is a humbling experience,” Gutaale replied, using Helms’s word as if deliberately mocking him. “I thought I was better connected in Puntland than I am, at least for the moment. I don’t mean I have made no progress. I am connected to people who are in a position to at least observe what the pirate is up to, if not actually negotiate with him, at least not yet. All of which is to say that I’ve just been told that another hostage has died.”
Helms froze. “Is my wife…?”
“A woman attempted to escape. She jumped into the sea. Apparently she was a strong swimmer and struck out for the beach. But she did not consider the zambezi.”
“What is zambezi?”
“Sharks. Bull sharks. Very aggressive.”
Helms whispered, “My wife is a beautiful swimmer.”
Gutaale raised a cautioning hand. “No, no, no. We don’t know yet it was her. It could have been another. My people of course are observing closely—Sit down, my friend!”
The blood had rushed from Helms’s face. He stood as pale as a wraith, unable to move. Gutaale waited a few moments before he pressed his knee to the button again.
The young man in shirtsleeves burst into the office. This time, instead of whispering he cried, “It is not her! It is not Mrs. Helms.”
“Allah be praised,” said Gutaale.
Kingsman Helms sank into a chair. “Thank God.”
Home Boy said, “I will redouble my efforts to free her.”
PART TWO
A Far Country
EIGHTEEN
04°40' S, 55°31' E
Seychelles International Airport
Mahé, Seychelles Islands
A fire-engine-red 1956 MG TF roadster clattered alongside Seychelles International Airport’s passenger terminal, backfiring explosively and grinding gears. The driver, resplendent in a linen suit, a pink shirt, and a club tie, doffed his Panama hat and shouted, “Hop in, gorgeous.”
Excellent, thought Jessica Kincaid. The Invisible Man had made himself invisible by standing out. On an island famous for expensive honeymoons, he looked like a rambunctious groom careening into a fourth marriage.
Kincaid returned the sunshiny smile of a party girl about to graduate to trophy wife, strapped her bag to the luggage rack, and climbed in beside him. Janson gave her a theatrical kiss on the mouth and floored it, weaving the MG’s angular snout through dense traffic.
“Sweet ride.”
“Borrowed it from the lady who owns our hotel.”
“Old friend?” Was there anywhere on the damned planet he didn’t know a gal?
“Friend of.”
Blasting out of the traffic, Janson was soon climbing a cliffside road with neither shoulders nor guardrails. “Want me to drive?” asked Kincaid.
“I’m fine,” he shouted over the roar of engine, gearbox, and wind.
Kincaid concentrated on the scenery. About the only thing she did not admire about Janson was his driving.
“We head out tonight after dark,” said Janson. “Allegra has not called, again. Helms says he was told in Mogadishu that she’s still alive.”
“Who told him?”
“Warlord Home Boy Gutaale, who has clansmen up in Eyl.”
“Helms is connected.”
“Connecting to local biggies is what ASC pays him for. But there’s still no peep about ransom, which is why we’re going in tonight.”
Kincaid asked, “What do you think about Helms arranging his wife’s kidnapping?”
“Highly unlikely. I nosed around the yacht harbor. It sounds like Adler invited both Allegra and the fashion model spur-of-the-moment, hoping to get laid with one or the other. So even if your Camorra lady gangster is not a paranoid with a blighted worldview, Helms had no time to set up his wife’s kidnapping.”
“Nothing to stop him from taking advantage of it.”
“Why is he paying us to get her back?”
Kincaid said, “Maybe he hopes we’ll screw up and get her killed before SEALs save her?”
“But whether or not your Camorra lady is wrong, we are back to square one: rescue Mrs. Helms. Goes without saying, we haven’t and won’t share plans with her husband…There’s the hotel.”
At the edge of a palm-tree forest, far below the cliff road, a steep-roofed former plantation house draped in verandahs overlooked a two-mile crescent of white sand. The beach circled a blue bay that spilled into the darker ocean. “I can’t wait to take our scooter for a ride.”
“I already did. It runs fine. Fast as hell, too. I’ve got the battery recharging.”
“Do I have time for a swim before we suit up?”
She’d been cooped up on the long flight from Italy, and tonight they were looking at nine hours in a small plane, so Janson said, “Do it. We’re not going anywhere until dark.”
“Paul, what if Helms thought that Allegra’s family meant to kill him before their prenup expired?”
“That would motivate him to strike first.”
“Particularly if he thought she was on their side.”
Janson said, “But we still have to wonder how Helms connected with pirates on such short notice.”
“Warlord Gutaale must know some pirates.”
“Possible,” Janson admitted.
He had asked the hotel’s owner to instruct her staff never to come without being summoned to their cottage, which was the farthest from the main house and the most private. He had a large map of Somalia’s Puntland region spread out on the porch when Kincaid appeared in a snug white one-piece Speedo Aquablade.
“That is terrific.”
Kincaid’s eyes fixed on a small granite island that marked the line between the darker ocean and the lighter bay. “How far’s that rock, four thousand meters?”
Janson gave it a glance. “Give or take.” A bit over two miles.
“The tourist board says sharks aren’t a problem.”
“A shark may change his mind when he sees that swimsuit.”
“It’s white, so he won’t see it,” said Kincaid. “He’ll think it’s the sky—Anything new on your Chinese shooter?”
Janson shrugged. “Beirut cops pulled over a motor scooter with a guy who looked Chinese.”
“What did they get out of him?”
“Nothing before he escaped.”
“Escaped? How—”
“Lebanon buries the needle on every corruption scale. The cops locked him to a neighborhood hoosegow. Bunch of lawyers showed up at the front door. Somebody C-foured the back door.”
“Nobody would import a guy with that much juice to kill a local who’s hated by every side in town. He was gunning for you.”
Janson shrugged again. “I’ve got a fellow in Beirut looking into it. And a friend in Tel Aviv.”
“Any unmentioned Chinese parts of your past I should know about?”
“The only Chinese I can think of who were mad enough to kill me are dead. Go swimming. Don’t pester the sharks.”
“When you want to kill somebody in a strange city, the only reason not to hire locals is you haven’t been there long enough to vet the right locals.”
“Meaning it was an ad-hoc attack?”
Kincaid nodded vigorously. “Someone saw an unexpected opportunity to blow you away. Didn’t have time to hire locals. So if the shooter was Chinese, the someone who wants to blow you away is Chinese too.”
Janson asked, “What makes you think a Chinese killer only works for Chinese clients?”
“The guy stood out like a sore thumb in Beirut. I’m not saying it’s proof positive, but ask yourself, would you import a tall, broad-shouldered northern Chinese assassin who would stick out like a sore thumb? Huge risk he’d get caught. Just like he did. You told me yourself, the cops picked him up right away.”
* * *
JANSON WORKED HIS sat phone, glancing up regularly to watch Kincaid freestyle two miles out to the rock. Coincidences came in degrees. As Kincaid said, Daniel Barorski getting assassinated immediately aft
er meeting him was hardly definitive, considering how many people would have liked Barorski dead. His hunger for a clean German passport proved that a sudden exit was on his mind. That he had been wearing Janson’s distinctive vest, however, was harder to discount.
But no one was supposed to know he was in Beirut. Janson had covered his tracks coming into Lebanon as Kurzweil, operating as “Mr. Saul.” That meant that whoever was gunning for him—if they were gunning for him—was good at tracking. But lame at execution. Hitting the wrong man was the sort of amateur nonsense he’d expect of gangsters like the Camorra assassins who attacked Kingsman Helms in New York.
But why come after him at all? He was reasonably satisfied by the family connection between the Camorra and Kingsman Helms. But what was the Chinese-Janson connection?
He had no answer. All the more reason to move quickly. There would be time to deal with the Chinese after they got Allegra Helms home safely.
Yet in the back of his memory, he heard a Catspaw analyst saying, “As big and powerful a global as it is, the American Synergy Corporation is being squeezed out of every oil patch in the world by China.”
He trained his monocular lens on the rock between the bay and the Indian Ocean. Kincaid did a resting breaststroke around the rock. When she started back, freestyle, Janson shook his head in awe. With two miles to go, she was sprinting. She would record her time, and if they happened to come back to the Seychelles to celebrate liberating Allegra Helms, she would swim her brains out to beat it.
Another thought, which had been hovering just beyond consciousness since he saw Barorski shot, began to take the shape of a vague yet compelling question: What if whoever might be gunning for him had not caught up by tracking him? And had not just gotten lucky.
What if they had somehow anticipated he would go to Beirut?
Janson reviewed each step of his route to meeting Barorski: the throwaway-cell-phone call he had made from the Hamburg T-Punkt shop; subsequent encrypted sat-phone queries from the plane; a final cell call from Jordan; and crossing the Lebanese border as Mr. Kurzweil.
He had taken each step as securely as technology and tradecraft could make it. Which raised the ominous possibility that whoever had tried to kill him knew his ways well enough to predict them. Another question that would have to wait until Allegra Helms was safe.
Fact was, had he been wearing the vest, he’d have had his pistol out the second he heard them coming. He would have shot the driver, and when the scooter crashed, put his warm gun in the assassin’s ear and asked who had paid him.
Janson put it from his mind and went back to the phones. Hassan, Ahmed, and Isse should be in Mogadishu by now. He wanted news on Ahmed’s former-pirate relatives and a negotiator hungry enough to risk prosecution.
But none answered their shanzhais.
* * *
“FAT FINGERS,” said Ahmed. “My bad.”
“What happened?” Isse squinted at Ahmed. The Mogadishu sun was so intense—ten times brighter than in Minneapolis—that it made his eyes hurt. They were waiting in line outside the Bakaara Market Internet Café, which was on the ground floor of a three-story Italianate building with a giant satellite dish hanging off the roof and workers troweling stucco over bullet holes.
Ahmed held up his shanzhai phone. “I accidentally erased Paul’s cell.”
“How’d you do that?”
Ahmed flashed what Isse called his smooth-operator grin. They hadn’t been in Mogadishu two days yet, and he had some kind of big deal in the works. Ahmed had traded his Somalia Coast Guard T-shirt for a white button-down shirt with a collar when they got off the plane. Now he looked like every other loudmouth businessman wheeling and dealing on the street.
“I was just checking my e-mail and I hit the panic button by accident. Now I can’t report to Paul. And Paul can’t GPS me. Gee, what a shame.”
“What if you need help?”
“I put his number in my regular phone, dummy, before I erased it—I mean panic-buttoned it.” Ahmed laughed.
Isse felt his scorn. It was like Ahmed was a full-grown man and he was somehow stuck in student mode, still sleeping in his old bedroom in his parents’ house.
He asked Ahmed, “Why don’t you want Paul to know where you are?”
“I got business,” Ahmed said. “I can’t afford babysitters checking my GPS.”
Isse took out the phone Paul had given him. He brought the panic button up on the screen and held his finger over it.
“What are you doing?” Ahmed asked.
“I have business too.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, Isse. Don’t burn bridges where you got no place to go.”
“I have a place to go.”
“You do? Where?”
“A place that’s not about money,” Isse said earnestly. “A place for Muslim respect.” What he got back was the withering fire of Ahmed’s disdain.
“Here we go again. Come on, Isse, you sound like a fucking Saudi. We’re Somali. Sure, we’re Muslim. That’s cool. But we’re Somali first. Why are you always going on about Muslims and respect?”
“Americans do not respect us.”
“You grew up in America just like me. You know damned well that no American ever dissed nobody with plastic in his wallet. Do you really want to boost Muslim respect? Give ’em a job. Let ’em have fun making dough.”
“There is a better way to live,” Isse protested doggedly. “They must be given the law of God.”
“I’d rather make a business and give ’em jobs. When they get some cash in pocket, let ’em make up their own mind how they want to live. Don’t you see, man? It’s so much easier and nobody gets killed. Hey, lighten up, we’re in Mog. It’s a wild new world and we got here just in time.”
Ahmed’s phone pinged a text received. “Yes!”
He showed Isse the screen.
SOAP ARRIVED.
“I’m in business.” Ahmed thumbed a quick answer and grinned in Isse’s face. “Hey, sourpuss! All I’m trying to tell you is lighten up.”
“I wish I could,” said Isse, reminded of when he was twelve years old asking his mother, who fought a daily, losing battle with depression, “Can’t you just be happy?” and she answered, “I would if I could.”
Suddenly, an explosion thumped the air. The stones shook beneath their feet. Everyone stopped talking. For a moment a heavy silence gripped the street. People tried to look everywhere at once and braced to run. Even Ahmed looked scared.
Phones starting ringing, texts pinging, and in seconds news and rumor flew.
“Bomb at the Lido.”
Two miles away. They were safe.
“Suicide bomb at the beach.”
“Seafood restaurant.”
“Cars wrecked.”
“Only two killed.”
“Lido Seafood,” Ahmed told Isse. “You know, where the rich guys and government guys eat lunch—what did you say?”
“I said, ‘That got their attention.’”
“Lunatic.”
Isse brought the panic delete button up on his screen, again, and pressed it for two seconds. Then he stepped out of the line for the Internet café.
“Where you going, Isse?”
“Check out some mosques.”
Ahmed laughed. “Say a prayer for me.”
Isse turned back, surprising Ahmed with a face with a big grin and surprised him again by bumping fists. “I’ll do you a rap prayer,” he said. “It goes, ‘Join the caravan before you lose your soul.’”
Ahmed looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Whatever turns you on, Isse.”
Isse turned around and melted into the crowd.
Ahmed watched him go, wondering how fucked up Isse really was. He knew the Amriki rap. The religionist dickhead’s next line went, “Sell this life for endless happiness down the road.”
Which was lame code for martyr suicide. But even Isse couldn’t be that stupid.
NINETEEN
When night close
d on the ocean, Janson and Kincaid blacked out head-to-toe in warm-water wet suits and marched down the beach. There was no moon, but the gentle surf gleamed under a sky white with stars. They walked the hard sand at the edge of the rising tide. The water erased the distinctive fish-spine prints of their assault boots.
Janson flipped down his JF-Gen4 PSFE Panoramic night-vision goggles when he reckoned they had gone a mile. The built-in GPS nailed their position. He led Kincaid up the sloping beach into the palm forest.
Kincaid said, “What’s that smell? Paint?”
“I had to spray it flat black. The damned thing came red and white. You could see it at a thousand meters.”
Flat black, the hydrofoil was nearly invisible on a boat trailer with balloon tires. They pulled it into the surf, floated it beyond the low breakers, stashed the trailer back in the trees, and returned to the water, erasing footprints and wheel tracks with a palm frond Janson had cut earlier.
With its foils retracted, the wedge-shaped scooter—high in back, lower in front, ten feet long—floated in half a foot of water. They waded it out until they were knee deep and climbed into the seats, Kincaid in front. She engaged the electric motor, which was as silent as advertised, and drove it toward the open sea.
From the west, over the sea, they heard the hollow whisper of a turbine aircraft engine. The sound intensified to a growl. A bulbous form drifted down from the stars and headed straight at them. Its silhouette appeared ungainly—like a flying guppy, said Kincaid—but just as it was about to touch the water, two hundred meters ahead of them, the lower half of its fuselage split in two, lowering a pair of wide-spread floats.
The engine throttled back to a murmur. Spray glittered, and a sleek and sturdy ten-passenger high-wing single-engine de Havilland floatplane surfed to a quiet stop twelve seconds after it touched water. Kincaid approached from the rear, avoiding the propeller. Janson leaned out of the scooter and flipped a line over a cleat on the back of the nearest float. Kincaid throttled ahead and turned the airplane around to face the sea.
A section of the fuselage that encompassed the two rearmost windows hinged downward, forming a ramp to a five-foot-wide cargo hatch. Janson and Kincaid scrambled onto the right-hand float and threw their waterproof combat packs through the hatch. From the dark within, the copilot passed down a line. They hooked it to the scooter, which they guided up the ramp as the electric winch took the weight, and hauled it into the plane. They climbed in after it. All but the forward two passenger seats had been removed, creating a capacious hold with more than enough room for the scooter.
Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) Page 14