Liquid Gold

by James Phelan

  Nix nodded. This video would clear his squadron, clear Mac, show the Russian spin for what it was. It might even be the turning point in getting this shit-cold caucus off the ground once and for all.

  “Tell me,” he said to Anna. “If we go with you—in total secrecy, so no one will see us—could you get us this video?”

  68

  AIRPORT SCHIPHOL, AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

  Kolesnik switched on his cell phone as he walked into the passenger terminal, and listened to his message.

  The voice of an agent from the FIA, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency; a middleman who was proving very useful. Not only had he introduced Kolesnik to the terror cell he had recently utilised, but he had kept tabs on all his targets in the country and organised for Fox and Gammaldi to be locked up.

  “Just this moment your two guests were released following high-level intervention…”

  Kolesnik stopped walking and clenched his phone tighter to his ear.

  “… I am sorry, this happened without my prior knowledge. They are to stay overnight in Amritsar, and I have intercepted a call that they are to be at the Harmandir Sahib—the Golden Temple—at nine a.m. tomorrow. They will be meeting your Indian Samaritan there.”

  Okay, there was a silver lining. The ‘Samaritan,’ Amar Singh, had been useful, but his usefulness had come to an end—Kolesnik could now tie up two loose ends for good. He would take care of Singh, and finish off Fox and Gammaldi, as Sirko should have done in Spain …

  Kolesnik quickened his pace and flashed through EU customs with his diplomatic passport. This trip started out as an insurance policy, had turned into a necessity on hearing of Fox’s release, and now was again a useful back-up. Either way, he was here, and he was being thorough, and of that his father would surely approve.

  He climbed into a cab and told the driver the address for his hotel. First, he had to get his Pakistani friends into gear again. Then, he had a date with a beautiful woman.

  69

  AMRITSAR, INDIA

  Four hours later at the five-star Raj Intercontinental Hotel, Fox was cleaned up and sitting back in a plush dressing gown, while Gammaldi lay on a bed, halfway through a sixer of Heineken.

  The concierge desk had sent up three shopping bags of new clothes to their room—their own gear was long-past wearable, ransacked and soiled.

  “Oh man, best—beer I’ve—ever—had!” Gammaldi said through a series of hiccups. He took a handful of fries from Fox’s room service plate and stuffed them all down. “Oh my God, these chips…”

  “You’re not my bitch—buy your own damn fries.”

  Gammaldi grunted. “Sarah Shahi.”

  “What?”

  “Sarah Shahi,” Gammaldi said. “She’s on my list. Preity Zinta, too.”

  “Are you still going on about that?”

  He burped in reply.

  “Dude, I have to use your laptop,” Fox said. “Mine was all fucked up by those—”

  “Bloody Pakistani prison assholes,” finished Gammaldi. “The password’s Franklin.” Another hiccup.

  Fox typed it into Gammaldi’s MacBook. He used the room’s wireless connection to log on to the GSR website, and started writing copy for his next syndicated story on the water crisis.

  “Why Franklin?” Fox asked as his fingers blurred over the illuminated keyboard.

  “Motherfucker was awesome,” Gammaldi said with another hiccup, before popping open another Heineken. “This one night, when he was kicking in his crib with his bastard son, Bennie Franklin is like, ‘Bastard son, there’s rain and lightning outside—let’s go fly a kite. With a key on it.’ And then, ‘Oh yeah, by the way, YOU’RE flying the kite!’ And his son’s like, ‘What?!’ But Ben Franklin’s like, ‘You have no mum, and you’re going to become a loyalist governor one day to spite me, I can feel it—just do it’—”

  Gammaldi hiccupped, hung over the side of his bed for a few suspicious seconds, then turned back and winced from his rib pain. “‘William,’ he went on. ‘It’ll be like rubbing your feet on carpet and then touching metal—when the lightning hits the kite, touch the key, and tell me what happens.’”

  Fox shook his head and logged into his email. “Al,” he said, reading about the escalations in Georgia: Russians sending more troops into the region; the EU putting a rapid-reaction force in. “You’re kind of like a condensed index of alternate American history. I call your lessons American History Y.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he replied. “So then William flies the kite and Ben Franklin is saying, ‘When that key’s charged, touch it!’ Then William touched the key and it sparked and proved to Franklin—” another hiccup “—that electricity comes from the sky. His son became the world’s first lightning rod.”

  Fox nodded and ate some hamburger. Gammaldi hiccupped, a big one this time, and then clutched his ribs in pain.

  “Interesting, Al. I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, but it’s a good story.”

  More room service came in from the connecting suite where Special Agents Duhamel and Brick were set up. The Feds’ room was a hive of activity as waiters came and went—all staff had to clear through them and a couple of Indian cops who sat out in the hall.

  “I love cricket…” Gammaldi said as he worked his way through a selection of curries and breads, alternating between the beer and juice, and watching the Australian cricket team getting its arse handed to it by South Africa, “… except when it seems we have forgotten HOW TO PLAY!” he yelled at the television, then winced again. “You know, I’m gonna be a dad?”

  “It’s pretty awesome.”

  “That’ll make you an uncle.”

  “You say so.”

  “You’re family. Hey … What do we do about Amar Singh?” he said. “What did Thomas say when you called him?”

  “He didn’t sound pleased,” Fox replied, looking up from the computer. “But he was certain his brother would show at the Golden Temple tomorrow—so I guess we have to just wait and see what Amar has to say.”

  “Does Amar know we’re out?”

  “I doubt it,” Fox replied.

  “Did Thomas believe you?”

  “I think so,” Fox said, popping a can of Coke, loving every sip of the sugar. “But he’s a cagey one…”

  “Doubting Thomas…” Gammaldi said. He removed a lid of a new dish. “Oh man, hot dogs.”

  “You’re sick, Al.”

  “I’m trying to get the taste of that prison out of me.”

  “Taste?”

  “Yeah, you know—it was disgusting on so many levels…”

  “Right, the whole kind of … mise en scène of the thing.”

  Gammaldi smiled through half a hot dog. The two men looked around their new accommodation. The room cost five grand a night, with either GSR or Uncle Sam footing the bill, and the walls were lined with signed photos of some of the world’s rich and famous who had stayed there. Fox wished he could have added a picture of how Gammaldi looked right now—he’d hang it in between Bono and Bill Gates.

  There was a knock on the interconnecting door, and Duhamel came in.

  “We’re going to get a couple of hours’ shut-eye,” he said. “You guys all good?”

  Fox gave him the thumbs up, kept typing; Gammaldi burped. The FBI man disappeared into his room.

  70

  GORI, GEORGIA (EASTERN EUROPE)

  Nix watched as his mortar squad tore off in their Humvees. He and his crew completed their final preparations to go in under the cover of darkness: night-vision gear, M4s locked and loaded. They were a well-oiled fighting unit, experts at infil by night, and Anna was acting as their local guide.

  Another Humvee dropped them at the edge of the Blue Zone, from where they would make the journey into South Ossetia on foot. Sara, their GSR embedded reporter, was hanging back inside the Blue Zone, ready for a vehicle-supplied exfil if needed. Three small fire teams made
up the assault: Nix and Top would go into the house with Anna with Mac and Kynoch providing sniper cover, and the mortar team as heavy hitters if that call had to be made.

  Mac and the spotter had headed off first, just after nightfall, on foot. They were the eyes on this op—no one wanted to take out a civilian. Nix had reminded all those heading out that engaging hostile targets was a last resort. They all knew that enemy snipers operated in the area, and they were entering no-man’s-land without their specialist anti-sniper weapon, the vehicle-mounted Boomerang sniper detection system.

  “Why does this sort of mission keep happening to us?”

  “I guess we’re just lucky, Top,” Nix said.

  They walked through a deserted street, using the back fences that bordered a laneway as cover. There were no street lights on, and Top led the way with night-vision goggles. Anna was behind him, Nix brought up the rear. They paused at an intersection to catch their breath, more for Anna’s sake.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked them, adjusting the dark blue Kevlar vest she had borrowed from Sara.

  “Getting this video?” Nix asked. “Or being here in Georgia?”

  “No, the Army,” she said, as Top re-did the straps for her on the Kevlar, far too big for her small frame. “Fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, all these places—why would you want to do that?”

  Nix watched as Top pulled out a laminated photo of his wife and two kids from his shoulder pocket. It was just discernible under the moonlight.

  “This is why. I look at this, and I know I’m missing out on so much by being away,” he said. “I’m sacrificing everything because I want to make this world a better place for them, for my kids to grow up in.”

  71

  AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

  “Miss Dawson, I need to go to the bathroom,” the little girl said.

  Kate Matthews wasn’t sure she would ever get used to that name. Maybe she would. Harder still was trying to forget her real name, to not turn around if someone called it out.

  “You can’t wait for the bell?”

  The little girl shook her head.

  “Okay, take Milly with you.”

  Kate turned her attention back to helping the rest of the kids with their English literacy work. The schools here were good, even this preschool and first-year class of four- and five-year-olds was far better than Stateside with the ratio of teachers to students. She alternated the content of her classes to keep things interesting: reading books to them, playing guitar and singing in English—thankfully the kids weren’t harsh critics—and setting writing tasks. Now, they were copying down sentences from the blackboard and then reading them out. Despite the chaos that often ensued, words had never sounded so pure.

  She knew her parents would be proud. Her mum had spent twenty-five years teaching in a Manhattan school not dissimilar to this, and she had always quietly encouraged her to follow this career, while her father was a professor who encouraged any career choice she’d made. It certainly had its rewards—no happiness was as contagious as the happiness of children—and it was infinitely more fulfilling, in a personal sense, than the corporate law of her past career, her past life—

  Kate stopped herself before she cried, then wondered why and how long she would have to live like this. The emptiness broke into a smile as she received a hug from a little boy, full of genuine love and affection and for no special reason. The bell rang.

  He had watched her go about her everyday work, and he had watched her at night.

  She taught three mornings a week, and spent two full days working in a small legal office. She spent her spare time doing pilates, reading, watching DVDs, and she had an address book and email inbox full of local friends, none of whom—nor any file on her computer, nor any diary in her apartment—went back further than six months. She may have been fucking a guy called Johan De Groot, which made him laugh for a couple of reasons, or Jacob Van Rijn, or maybe even a Swedish woman named Cecilia. There were several pictures of her with a guy, taken on different occasions, but there was no name to the face. She lived alone, with a black cat that was overly friendly with strangers.

  He had spent the night in a very nice hotel, and even picked up a decent New Zealand backpacker at a bar. It was his second time in Amsterdam and he wondered why he didn’t come here more often. The question was: would he leave empty-handed? And if he chose to take Kate with him, who was best to help get her out of the country?

  He walked away from the school, trudging through the snow-covered sidewalk along a canal to where he would show his credentials at the Russian Embassy and have a good discussion with the FSB station chief. He had little doubt that with money to grease some wheels, he could move any number of people around Western Europe within the shortest of timeframes.

  72

  SOUTH OSSETIA (EASTERN EUROPE)

  Nix led the way and hoofed it double-time across the bridge. On the other side he took cover in the large doorway of an empty store.

  “You’re sure you can’t persuade him to give this thing over?” Top asked Anna, heaving for breath.

  She shook her head. “They humiliated him, the South Ossetian militia, Russians mainly,” she said. “They made him and all the men in our street take their clothes off and lie on the road. They kicked them, they hosed them down, they took their money and then they came in the house and took what they wanted. All our family’s valuable things, modest things like silverware, they took it, stuffing it in their pockets. Then, before they left, they shot a man who yelled at them—he just yelled at them!—just to prove a point: if you stand against them, they will kill you. They come around now … every week or so, and they are recruiting all the young men my brother’s age, into the militia. They give them guns, get them to wave them in the faces of people who voice opposition to Russia. My family, they are not that happy with Georgia as it is, but they would like a separate South Ossetia—not a South Ossetia that is a puppet of Russia, a place to station Russian troops for the next hundred years, but a free place that we can call our home. My brother—maybe he now thinks it’s easier to join them, I don’t know—”

  “Shhh…” Nix said, pulling down his night-vision set and raising his M4. He saw four guys with guns messing around in the street about six hundred metres away.

  “They’re militia,” Anna whispered.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know the difference a mile away,” she said. “The Russians are always drinking and smoking. The militia don’t do that in public, not while on duty. They’ve learned the hard way.”

  Top smiled at Nix. Judging by the house lights, these militia were near civilians—‘hugging,’ they’d termed it in Iraq, where they deliberately used crowds at schools and hospitals and churches as shields. It meant artillery and mortar fire were not an option, given the wind conditions, which could cause the round to stray significantly. There were smart artillery rounds, but not on hand here. Damn, right now Nix would take a pay cut to have that kind of firepower parked back in Gori.

  “They are welcome here,” Anna explained. “They form a kind of local police. Villagers make them food—strong sweet coffee, dips, dried and pickled foods, flat breads.”

  Nix wondered what that felt like. Liberators. Keepers of the peace. It must have been like that for the GIs in Western Europe after WWII ended.

  This girl who looked as if she could break any man’s heart managed to break theirs back in the Blue Zone while they were prepping for this night-time run. The stories she had told them—what she’d seen, what she’d heard, her missing friends and family. She could not understand how they, as Americans, could not go out there and find them.

  Nix couldn’t, despite what he might want to do. He had to make sure his RSTA looked tough for the Russians, to hold his corner. There were others looking into that sort of thing, surely? There was a UNHCR group recording evidence for possible war crimes charges, and with the embedded reporters the w
orld would hear and see what had really happened here.

  Nix watched the guys with guns walking away. He looked at the girl and said, “They’ll find a political solution for your people.”

  “No,” Anna replied. “We need fresh minds for that—if fresh minds aren’t brought in to find a political solution to this conflict, then this war could go on for years and years.”

  “They’ll work this out, things are changing.”

  “Maybe in your country. Here it’s always same-same. When the Russians come again, and they will come, you can’t stop them,” she said. “We will all be killed next time, they won’t leave witnesses behind.”

  “They won’t try anything while we’re here.” He looked into her eyes, trying to convey his sincerity, his promise. “We won’t leave you until you’re safe.”

  Maybe she misread his look. “They don’t care who you are. They will come again, they will kill us all. And we won’t be missing, we’ll be dead, and there’s nothing anyone will do about it because … what can they do?”

  It was sobering. He knew the sense of it to be true: they couldn’t hang around forever—like Iraq, like Afghanistan, like Somalia, they would eventually move on. He settled into the cover of the shop’s entrance, just a few streets south of Anna’s home. They waited for the right time, for all the units to check in. They already had the absolute cover that darkness would provide, and dawn was a couple of hours off—the perfect time right now for this kind of op.

  They waited for the right moment—a moment in time that would change everything.