“You turn rather quickly on the hand that feeds you,” said Lena.
“Like I said, I’m a contractor,” said Morgan. “Not a company man. What, you think I’d die for someone just because they cut me a check?”
“You yourself said that some things cannot be bought,” said Weinberg, finishing off a second cigarette. “Not with money, anyway.” He mashed the stub into a brass ashtray. “Let’s suppose that this deal is advantageous to me. How do we make a trade? I will not let you go until you show it to me, and once you have, that is the whole game, no?”
“I guess that is a problem, isn’t it?” said Morgan. “But there might be a solution to our little conundrum. The information I am offering you is accessible on an encrypted server. I can give you access to this with a password. We go out to a public place, where I can be sure you will not shoot me, and—”
“And you can run away to safety,” said Lena. “Kill him. He is a liar, and is probably lying again.”
“Hmm, yes,” said Weinberg, stroking his beard. “It does pose a problem. Still, we need not take his word for it. What he said is easily verifiable. Anse, will you get my computer for me, please?”
“No,” said Morgan. “Not here.”
“Here, Mr. Morgan. That is my best offer.”
“I’m not giving it to you here. I don’t have any guarantee you won’t kill me if I give it to you here.”
“Anse,” said Weinberg. “Give Mr. Morgan a little incentive.”
Fleischer bent down and grabbed Morgan’s left hand. He took Morgan’s pinky finger in his thick paw.
I hate this part.
Fleischer bent Morgan’s finger back until it cracked. Morgan screamed through gritted teeth, squirming wildly in his chair, straining against the restraints.
“You will give me the information now,” said Fleischer. “Or you will give me the information after you have no fingers left. The decision is yours.”
“Someone will hear,” he said, panting with pain.
“The room is soundproofed,” said Weinberg. “One of the benefits of paying an ungodly daily rate. Mr. Morgan, tell me how to access the server.”
“Not until—”
“Anse,” said Weinberg. “Again.”
Fleischer grabbed Morgan’s ring finger and pulled it back. Morgan roared with pain.
“Are you ready to talk?” said Weinberg.
“Eat shit,” said Morgan, through heavy breaths and a fog of pain. The bastard just sat back and sipped his drink like he was watching the opera. Morgan looked at his two mangled fingers bending backward at sickeningly wrong angles, and wondered if they had been broken or just dislocated.
“That is not very polite,” said Weinberg. Morgan spat at him, the bloody gob landing on Weinberg’s suede loafers. Weinberg looked down with disgust, then motioned to his valet. “Anse.”
Fleischer grabbed Morgan’s middle finger. Morgan winced. “Okay, okay!” Morgan exclaimed. Fleischer held his finger but didn’t bend it back. Weinberg held up his hand. “I’ll tell you. Open the browser and input exactly what I tell you.”
Lena picked up the computer. She had been standing and pacing, but now she sat next to Weinberg and waited for the laptop to start up. “Shoo,” said Morgan at Anse, who scowled in response.
“Okay,” said Lena. “I am ready. Let’s see what Mr. Morgan has for us.”
Morgan dictated the address of one of Zeta’s shared servers, staring at the thick patterned carpet as he did, with a look of shame and defeat. In the meantime, he prayed that Shepard had an alert for strange activity on the server.
“Okay,” said Lena Weinberg. “It is asking me for a password.”
“Listen carefully,” said Morgan. “The password is . . .” Morgan spoke a long string of numbers, letters and symbols, and Weinberg typed them in, one by one.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“That’s it,” he said.
She hit Enter on the keyboard.
“The password is incorrect,” said Lena. “Kill him.”
“I think I agree with you this time,” said Weinberg.
“No! No!” said Morgan. “You must have written it wrong. The password is right. I swear!”
“Okay, Mr. Morgan,” said Weinberg. “You have one more try. One more chance to prove to me that you are not lying.”
“Okay, listen carefully this time.” Morgan repeated the string, and Weinberg typed it in once more.
“Failed again,” said Lena.
“They’ve changed it! They must have found out I was taken and changed the password!”
“He is playing with us,” said Lena.
“No, I swear!” Morgan said. “Look, I’ll tell you everything if you let me go! Whatever you want to know!”
“I’m afraid I must agree with my sister this time,” said Weinberg. “You have wasted enough of my time, and I must be going. I have a busy day in Vienna ahead of me. Anse, take him away. Torture him and find out what he knows. And be careful. He is tricky. Take Gert to help keep an eye on him. After you have found what he knows, kill him.”
Weinberg held a gun on him while Fleischer cut Morgan loose from the chair. Morgan kicked Fleischer downward on the shin and then pivoted for an uppercut to the jaw, but Fleischer deflected and grabbed him in a choke hold. Another man came in, presumably Gert, almost as bulky as Anse, with dark hair slicked back into a ponytail. He bound Morgan’s hands with plastic cuffs as Fleischer held him. Then Fleischer released him and set him walking.
“I have a gun to your back,” he said to Morgan in a thick, drawling voice. “It will be hidden, but it will be there. If you try to run away, you will die.”
Morgan, Fleischer, and Gert marched out the room and to the elevator.
“I’ll give you a million dollars to kill him and let me go,” Morgan said to Gert.
“Don’t listen to him,” said Fleischer in German. Gert remained silent.
They reached the hotel garage. Morgan looked for a possible way out, but there was no way he could run without risking getting shot. They escorted him to Weinberg’s Beemer, and sat him in the front passenger seat. Gert sat behind him, and Morgan could practically feel the gun in his back. Fleischer took the driver’s seat.
“Do anything,” Fleischer admonished, nose inches from Morgan’s, “and you will die.”
Fleischer pulled out, and then steered out the garage.
“So, where are we going?” Morgan asked in his best conversational tone. It was received with stony silence.
Morgan winced at the sudden light as they drove outside. He did not recognize the street they were on, but he spotted the Saint Nicholas Cathedral, and knew they were not far from their base of operations.
That’s when he saw it: a black van, coming toward them on the opposite side of the street. His plan had worked, sort of. Shepard had found him, traced his location based on the strange attempt to access the Zeta remote server. I’ll have to remember to buy him a beer, Morgan thought.
Then the thought occurred to him that they would be going to the hotel. They weren’t looking for Morgan in a car, and wouldn’t be able to see through the tinted windows, anyway. He had seconds to act.
In a calculated move, Morgan pulled the hand brake. The car skidded and fishtailed on the cobblestones until it came to a stop. Fleischer hit his head against the steering wheel, and Morgan felt the impact of Gert hitting the seat back. Without missing a beat, Morgan clicked open his seat belt and opened the passenger door.
He hit the ground rolling, and used the momentum to get to his feet. He then ran in front of the van, which was just about to pass the BMW. It screeched to a halt to avoid him. Diesel was behind the wheel, and Morgan saw the whites of his eyes as he stared in disbelief and yelled something. Morgan ran to the side door of the van as it opened from the inside. He jumped in, next to Bishop and Spartan.
“Go! Go!” he yelled. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The van began moving. He heard gunshots ou
tside, and there were several dull thuds as bullets hit the back of the van. Morgan allowed himself to breathe once they had been driving for thirty seconds and the sound of gunfire had died out.
“You guys sure like to cut it close,” said Morgan.
“Shepard said there was some weird activity in the servers, and traced it back to here,” said Bishop. “I didn’t want to come at all. Said it was probably some kind of fluke. You can thank him later.”
“Oh, I will,” he said, catching his breath. “I will.”
“Oh, and one more thing,” he said. “You’ll be interested to know he got a hit on your girl.”
“You mean the thief who stole the thumb drive?” asked Morgan.
“Yeah. This Lily person. Looks like he found out who she is.”
Chapter 31
June 8
Monte Carlo
“Her name really is Elizabeth,” said Shepard. “Elizabeth Louise Randall.”
Morgan was sitting in an old and stained wicker chair that groaned when he shifted his weight. On Shepard’s screen he saw the unmistakable green eyes and red hair. Lily. They were in one of the rooms of the base of operations. It was decorated Mediterranean style, with white walls, tile floors, and rounded arches on the doors, which vaguely recalled Middle Eastern styles. On another computer was the face of Diana Bloch, on a video conference call.
Diesel, who was the best of them at first aid, had taken care of Morgan’s fingers by setting them back and bandaging them. They hurt like hell, but they weren’t broken.
“What is she, some kind of scam artist?” asked Morgan. “Grifter? Notorious cat burglar?”
“Not quite,” said Shepard. “She’s MI-5.”
“You’re kidding,” said Morgan. “British intelligence?”
“No doubt about it,” said Shepard. “Field operative. Got a list of skills to match yours, Cobra. With the added bonus of being a lot easier on the eyes.”
“Lily’s a spy?” said Morgan, still incredulous. “What the hell was she doing there?”
“That’s the thing,” said Shepard. “No one knows. She’s gone AWOL. Hasn’t checked in over the past two weeks.”
“Any chance that’s all plausible deniability?” asked Morgan, rubbing his bandaged fingers and testing for pain. “Could be they sent her on a covert op, and want to play it off as a rogue agent and wash their hands of her.”
“Unlikely,” said Bloch. “They’d be burning an agent for nothing if they did that. They might do it for a high-value assassination, but not for this kind of thing.”
“So, what, she’s gone rogue?” asked Morgan. “Working for the highest bidder?”
“Who knows,” said Shepard.
“It’s our best working theory,” said Bloch. “Any indication of possible sedition in her file?”
“No,” said Shepard. “She was a model agent before she disappeared. No indication that she would do something like this.”
“We still need to figure out what ‘something like this’ is,” said Morgan. “We still have no idea what her ultimate mission was in Monte Carlo.”
“Could be blackmail, sabotage . . .”
“Maybe,” said Morgan. “But she said something to me. After I found out it was her in Weinberg’s suite, as she left. Weinberg’s mine. I get the feeling this wasn’t about stealing the data.”
“Assassination after all?” asked Bloch.
“Well, that’s one way to put it,” said Morgan. “But the feeling I got is that it was personal. Like she wanted to—”
“Hold on—now this is something,” Shepard interrupted. “I’ve just got a hit on one of her identities. She’s just taken off on a commercial flight to Vienna.”
“That’s where Weinberg is headed,” said Morgan. “She’s going after him.”
“If she kills him, our lead goes cold,” said Bloch.
“Shepard, I need you to find out exactly where Weinberg is going to be in Vienna,” said Morgan. “I’ve got to stop her before she pulls the trigger. And I’m going to need a fast car.”
Chapter 32
June 8
Dir, Pakistan
Peter Conley looked through a slit on the side of the truck. After his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see the endless rocky mountains circling the road. It had been a very awkward drive so far. The whole Lambda team had bristled with suspicion from the moment they laid eyes on Harun, who was now sitting shotgun with the driver. The rowdy energy of the group had chilled, and everyone sat quietly, hardly speaking to one another, in the dark and bumpy ride. It didn’t help that the box they were in formed a natural steam room.
The vehicle in question was what was locally called a jingle truck. It had intricately carved wooden panels covering the entire trailer and the door, all painted in bright clashing colors. This particular specimen was yellow, red, and green, with tchotchkes hanging all along its grille and sides. The driver of the truck was a man named Yasir, who had agreed to carry this dangerous cargo only after significant cash-based exhortations, and was grumpy the whole way there.
By Conley’s estimation, they should be arriving in Dir at any minute. The city was an isolated town of twenty thousand inhabitants tucked away in a small valley in Northwestern Pakistan. Most of the people working in the town were truck drivers, which was good news for them. It might be tricky finding a driver somewhere unfamiliar, but that kind of supply helped, and they would likely go unnoticed in the swarm of trucks coming in and leaving town.
The trouble came in getting to their final destination, Chitral Valley, on the border with Afghanistan. The problem was less hostiles than that this was one of the most dangerous roads in the world. Narrow and treacherous, the twisting two-laner regularly claimed the lives of drivers who chanced it in their rickety, decorated trucks.
Conley opened up his satellite phone and sent a message to Ken Figueroa, the head of Lambda Division, asking for updates on Raza. He quickly got a message back that there had been none.
“That rat’s going to sell us out,” said Walker. “I can’t believe you’d lead us into a situation like this, trusting one of them.” Conley didn’t need to make out Walker’s face in the dark to know who the you of that sentence was.
“I trust Harun,” he said, “and Harun is managing the driver.”
“Should have taken a goddamn chopper,” said Walker.
“Let’s not go over this again,” said Conley.
They did not see the city of Dir except brief glimpses. Yasir parked the truck at a garage where other truck drivers were waiting for work. Harun haggled with a driver and then another. Money, of course, was no object, and even then it wouldn’t cost too much, because these drivers normally made something to the order of thirty dollars a month.
Eventually, the back door opened, and the Lambda tactical team had their semiautomatics at the ready. But it was only Harun.
“What are you doing?” he scolded. “Come on, I’ve got us transportation into the Chitral valley.”
They were in a closed garage. Yasir was there, as well as another man.
“Our driver,” said Harun. “Akram. He’s been driving the Lowari Pass for over ten years, never a wreck.” Akram was a man no older than thirty, with a jet-black moustache and a loose-fitting light brown button down shirt. He had his hands clasped in front of him and bowed, in a subservient manner. Walker and the Lambda team were visibly displeased, but didn’t say anything.
“I will get you food,” said Harun, “and then we go.”
Harun left them to lounge outside of a truck for once. The Lambda Tactical team spread out, stretching their limbs, a couple of them taking advantage of the limited space in the garage to exercise. Conley took the opportunity to inspect Akram’s truck, which was in poorer condition than Yasir’s, and then talk to Akram himself, who was standing silently beside his vehicle.
“How old are you, Akram?” Conley asked in Urdu.
“Twenty-nine,” said Akram. His Urdu wasn’t great, but he seemed to
understand it fine, and seemed gratified that Conley spoke a language he was at least somewhat conversant in.
“You started doing the pass when you were nineteen?”
“Driving,” he said. “Before, I went with my brother. I helped to get the truck unstuck, remove rocks from the way, things like that.”
“So you know the road pretty well then?”
Akram smiled. “I do, sir. I certainly do.”
“How long do you think it’ll take us to get across, with the weather the way it is?” Conley asked.
“We can make it in one day, if we are lucky.”
“Good, good.” Conley looked around the room, arms akimbo.
“Akram, are you married?”
“I have a wife,” he said, smiling. “Children soon, inshallah.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
Akram smiled as he called Conley up to the truck’s cab to show a picture that had been pasted onto the dashboard in a colorful frame.
Conley asked him if he liked chocolate, and he answered yes. “Hold on a second,” he said.
Conley drifted away from Akram toward the back of Yasir’s truck, where he had left his pack. Walker stopped him with a hand to the chest. “We’re supposed to kill ’em,” he said. “Not talk to ’em.”
“Take your hand away or you lose it, pretty boy,” said Conley.
Walker did, with a gesture of childish arrogance. “You’re going native, old man.”
Conley fumed. “Forget about being a decent goddamn human being for a second,” he said. “That man over there”—he motioned toward Akram—“just smiled at me. He sees me as human now. If he was ever planning on double-crossing us, well, I just made that a whole lot less likely.”
“You know what would make him a lot less likely to betray us?” said Walker. “A bullet to the brain.”
“And then you’re stranded in a strange town surrounded by people who hate you,” said Conley, anger rising. “Tell me, Walker, were you dropped as a child or were you born this stupid?”
Black Skies Page 17