Liquid Gold

by James Phelan

  “There was an abduction in an apartment on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam,” the agent said. “I just had the Dutch FBI Legat call me. He’s at the scene now with local forensics.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Within the past hour,” the agent replied. “She hit the panic alarm on her keychain, so our guys went and checked it out. They broke the door down when there was no answer. Her alarm had a locator, which was found on her keychain in her apartment.”

  “Any sign of—”

  “We think she’s alive,” she replied. “A quick chem check turned up some form of TCM-type compound.”

  “So she was taken out of the building unconscious?”

  “Crude drug of choice, but yes.”

  “Footage?”

  “We’re checking on that, possibly a cleaning company that wasn’t scheduled to be there showed up on the lift camera; we can’t say it’s definitely them.”

  “But you’re tracking them?”

  “Yes—they had a large bin, and it timed with the abduction. Three white males. We have pretty good images from a camera behind the lift’s mirror. We’ve notified all relevant European agencies about the persons of interest.”

  “Good. Get those pics into the database as soon as you get enough info on them.”

  “On it,” she said. “Would you like to get in touch direct with the Legat in Amsterdam?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that now,” he replied. He stopped walking.

  “Sir?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Hutchinson said. “Look, we have watermarks on the witness protection files, don’t we? Traceable, I mean, to anyone who accesses them?”

  “That’s still a work in progress, but yes.”

  “Run it.”

  “You’ll need to provide a—”

  “Just run it. Now.”

  Silence on the other end for a moment.

  “Sir, what if it leads internal?”

  “I’ll worry about that if it happens,” he said.

  “You won’t be able to use it in court, if it comes to it.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  83

  HIGH OVER THE MIDDLE EAST

  “Thanks,” Gammaldi said, taking a couple of painkillers and a drink from Brick.

  Fox shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep, but his mind was racing. He felt a dangerous kind of tired, the sort that lured you in and from which you never really woke up.

  “This better all be worth it,” Gammaldi said, flinching under the pain of his broken ribs.

  Fox’s right hand and forearm were bandaged, and he had burn cream on the backs of his hands. Numb all over—tired, weary, fed up. He looked out his window. Gammaldi was right. How much more blood would be on his hands before this was over?

  “Lach, are you asleep?”

  “Yeah, Al.”

  “Do you think India and Pakistan would ever go nuclear against one another?”

  Fox looked at him, too weary to really think about it.

  “I mean—they’ve got a—they’re…”

  “Al,” Fox said, “if it gets worse than it is—if we can’t put a kink in Umbra’s plans and they spend the next fifty years pumping India’s underground water table dry—yeah, maybe.”

  “But nuclear?”

  Fox looked around the cabin. Duhamel was on a phone back to Hutchinson prepping the next leg, Luigi and Ivan were alternating between sleep and playing chess. He felt a lead weight in his gut about finding Art Kneeshaw, knowing so much would depend on what Duhamel and Hutchinson could get mobilised on the ground in Italy.

  “Look, Al: in seventy-four, India set off a ‘peaceful’ nuclear explosion. Indira Gandhi herself said they had no intention of building a bomb, they just wanted to know they could. Twenty years later they set off five nuclear explosions. Who gets nervous? Pakistan. And when Pakistan gets nervous, everybody gets nervous. You know why? Because we’re all going to die.”

  “We’re all going to die?” Gammaldi said, loudly enough to be heard by everyone.

  “They’ve got, like, a one-minute warning or something,” Fox said. “There’s no lag like the US and Russia used to have, no time to get more information—they’re fucking next door to one another. So do I think they’d go nuclear? Let’s just not think about that, okay?”

  84

  WASHINGTON DC

  “Sorry, I thought—”

  “You thought!” McCorkell flushed, then calmed himself down quickly. He had stared down foreign heads of state as they threatened to kill American troops and those of her allies, he had woken three Presidents countless times with bad news, and he had … But this was personal. “You thought I was leaking intel? You thought I was—fuck!”

  Hutchinson didn’t fight, didn’t respond, just sat on his barstool, drank his beer and took it like a man. They sat in the Off the Record bar at the Hay-Adams Hotel, a few minutes’ walk from the EEOB, across Pennsylvania Avenue and through Lafayette Park.

  “I mean, seriously?”

  “Bill, I had to be careful,” Hutchinson explained. “I had to check everywhere, everyone.”

  “Do you know how far I go back with Tas Wallace at GSR?” McCorkell said to him. “We were the original homies—we started that closed-fist high-five thing at college in the seventies.”

  “Did you invent electricity too? Maybe the wheel?”

  “And all this from a man young enough to be my son.”

  “Look, Bill,” said Hutchinson sincerely, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

  “Clearly.”

  “And for the record,” Hutchinson said, “I never actually believed you would do anything like this, I just had to check it out.”

  “Yeah, you said. What a fascinating story…” McCorkell said, draining his beer. “So entertaining and full of useful information.”

  Hutchinson felt like a chastised child. McCorkell looked around, sighed, let it wash over him.

  “Anyway, forget it,” McCorkell said before ordering another beer and a single-malt Scotch. “What have you got? Seriously, give me everything. Lay it all out, right now.”

  As Hutchinson updated him, McCorkell listened, asked a few questions and ate his way through an entire dish of cocktail nuts, which was cheerfully refilled by the bartender. After a few drinks McCorkell felt comfortable enough to forgive Hutchinson—he was a pro doing his job. He wouldn’t have done much different himself.

  “The leak at CIA goes back to Merlin too.”

  “Oh?” McCorkell said. He remembered Merlin too well. A covert operation under the Clinton Administration, Merlin aimed to delay Iran’s nuclear program by providing—via a defected Russian nuclear scientist—flawed blueprints for a nuclear warhead. The plan backfired, however, when the nervous Russian noticed the flaws and pointed them out to the Iranians, hoping to enhance his credibility while still advancing what he thought was the CIA’s plan to use him as a double-agent inside Iran. Merlin ended up unwittingly accelerating Iran’s nuclear program by providing useful information, once the flaws were identified and the plans compared with other sources, such as those provided to the Iranians by Abdul Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program. The ugly fact was, while there was serious money to be made selling secrets, be it military technology or a simple phrase that gets agents killed, men like Hutchinson would be in high demand to play defence.

  “It’s the same guy inside the Agency who tipped the Iranians off in the first place,” Hutchinson said.

  “And he’s your man,” McCorkell said, “who intercepted and replaced my email to GSR about clearance to land in Spain, and then sold out Kate?”

  “Yep.”

  “So how did you get him?”

  Hutchinson explained about the work done by the Open Source Centre team, how they’d played the computer game and tracked these guys, watched server traffic and tracked ISPs, all for not much until they narrowed i
n on the ex-Marine with some kind of remote access Trojan that the NSA helped plant.

  “Like what was being employed at the hotbed of al-Qaeda internet cafés on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border?”

  “Exactly,” Hutchinson replied. “I used an OSC team to catch a US-based traitor and murderer.”

  “Murderer?”

  “I’ll go into it later.”

  “Right. So, you’re going to send Lachlan Fox in to face off with Roman Babich, without telling him Babich has Kate—his world is going to explode! You don’t know Fox like I do, Andy.”

  “We’ll keep him on a leash, and he’s well protected.”

  “Maybe,” McCorkell said. “And you tell me that Babich has someone in the CIA helping him out—”

  “We know who, and we’re taking him down next.”

  “And—really?” McCorkell savoured the weight of this. “Okay … When is this going to happen?”

  “Soon,” Hutchinson said, checking his watch. He stood, picking his coat off the back of the barstool. “I’m headed to Italy in a few hours to coordinate the arrest of Babich, taking my full team over there. We’ve got local support setting up shop in Italy as we speak.”

  “So Fox is scheduled to meet with Babich?”

  “He will be. This is it, Bill,” Hutchinson said, peeling off a few bills and leaving them on the bar. “This fucker’s been flaunting it since the end of the Cold War, and we’re finally bringing him down.”

  “Yeah, but Andy?” McCorkell said. “The Agency guy, when are you bringing him in?”

  “I’m not bringing him in,” Hutchinson said, pulling on his jacket and pocketing his BlackBerry. He shook McCorkell’s hand. “You are.”

  PART THREE

  85

  ROME, ITALY

  Fox scanned the crowd until his eyes came to rest on Art Kneeshaw’s friendly face. The old guy looked like he was in heaven sitting there, watching the crowd, enjoying life around him.

  Kneeshaw saw them approach the café; saw Gammaldi throw a few coins into the Trevi Fountain and heard him whistling ‘Three Coins in the Fountain.’ He appeared alarmed, but not surprised.

  “We’re friends, Mr Kneeshaw,” Fox said after introductions.

  “Ah, Australians,” he replied. “A beautiful country—not without its own water problems.”

  “May we join you for a moment?” Fox said. The man nodded and they sat at his table, under an umbrella set up outside on the cobbled street. His gaze seemed to take Fox in, and there was realisation there that showed he must have seen Fox on television.

  “How did you find me?” he asked.

  “Facial recognition at the airport.”

  “Ah.”

  “Your passport didn’t flag the Italian authorities, though.”

  “I have an old friend in the Canadian Foreign Office,” he said with a cheeky grin. “He’d warned me to stay low, organised me a clean passport … I’m glad to hear there are still smart people there.”

  Fox smiled.

  “But here—how did—” Kneeshaw stopped, saw the FBI men across the street. “Someone from the US embassy followed me to this café, I suppose?”

  Fox nodded.

  “And you’re not a spy?”

  “No,” said Fox. “I’m a reporter, and Al here is my shadow. Those guys over there—” Fox motioned with a tilt of his head “—as well as a couple you can’t see, are with us. They’re FBI, mainly.”

  “All this for me?”

  “There’s a contract out to kill you, Mr Kneeshaw,” Fox said. “The men who financed the big water project in Kashmir are cleaning out those involved.”

  He nodded.

  “You know? Your friend in the Canadian government warned you of that?”

  He looked at Fox with mischievous eyes.

  “Amar Singh warned me, too,” he said. “He didn’t mention who was behind it, although he didn’t have to.”

  Fox sensed this guy wasn’t one to budge.

  “Mr Kneeshaw, Amar is dead.”

  The mischief dimmed in his eyes, was replaced by sadness.

  “We can protect you—”

  “If they find me here, so be it,” he said, looking out at the Trevi Fountain. He let out a long breath. “This is where it all started.”

  Fox looked at him, unsure what to read into it.

  “You see that? The passage of the water in that fountain, an aqueduct running for more than twenty kilometres, is over two thousand years old. Two thousand years!” said Kneeshaw. “Romans have been using water from that source since 19 BC, when Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa built it … a remarkable man, Agrippa.” Kneeshaw sat back and smiled benignly towards the fountain, watching the hordes of tourists clamouring for a picture in front of it despite the biting cold.

  “These people come to see the fountain because they have read about it and have seen movies—maybe even for some luck—but do you think they really appreciate its perfection? Do you think they realise that fresh water is life?”

  He smiled at Fox, suddenly looking a little closer to his eighty years.

  “If it is my destiny to be found here, Mr Fox, so be it. I feel that I have lived in balance, and that the right thing will happen. It will be just.”

  Fox looked at Kneeshaw with interest. He was hard to read, but intriguing.

  “It’s going to rain in a few minutes,” Kneeshaw said.

  It was overcast, with not a patch of sky to be seen. The air felt heavy.

  “Can you tell me about your work in Kashmir?”

  “I have such clear memories of my first time in India,” Kneeshaw said, smiling. “I remember rain like I had never seen. From my window I’d watch it, listen to it, for hours, watching as the river swelled and the parched red land turned green. At night I’d lie on my bed listening to the fat drops drum on the roof, a sound like the galloping of horses—”

  “Mr Kneeshaw,” said Fox, leaning forward. “How did you come to work on this water project? What did you mean when you said it all started here?”

  “I worked on an aqueduct repair here in Rome, over ten years ago now, and Umbra was a major donator to the restoration project—Babich buying up favours with the political elite, I see in hindsight.”

  “Hindsight?” Fox said.

  “I met him when I worked on the repair, and he asked me to consult on a couple of engineering projects. I mentioned to him I’d once worked on a Kashmir pipeline project—I was an infrastructure engineer with Canadian Rail, and we worked on the sub-continent, then I returned later and helped plan that pipeline that ran under the road … I liked that area, liked that work. We spent time getting wells put in—artesian wells—in remote areas on both sides.”

  “And what was his interest in it?” Fox asked, pulling from his jacket pocket a pen and his map of that area.

  “I guess money. Here was a half-completed thing; he was already in the process of developing the gas pipeline—” Kneeshaw took Fox’s pen, put on his glasses and drew a shaky line that fed gas across the country. “I had been in the region for a long time, knew the terrain and work crew as well as anyone.”

  “And consulted on the new project there—this Iran–Pakistan–India gas pipeline that would deliver natural gas from Iran to Pakistan and India?”

  “It may one day end up going into China,” Kneeshaw said. “The project will greatly benefit India and Pakistan, because they simply do not have sufficient natural gas to meet their rising demand for energy.”

  “I remember the trilateral talks about the project,” said Fox.

  Kneeshaw nodded, looked absently at the map of the places he obviously knew so well.

  “So,” Gammaldi said, “Babich just saw this as a way of doing more with the resources he already had there working on the gas pipeline?”

  Kneeshaw nodded again.

  “The water pipeline runs under the highway south, as you have marked on here already,” Kneeshaw sa
id. He adjusted his glasses, and marked in a new line, a continuation of what Fox and Omar Hasif had put there two days ago. “Then it links up with the gas pipeline and follows that, all the way west.”

  “You’ve drawn too far,” Fox said. He tapped the map, figuring that Kneeshaw’s sight wasn’t good despite his thick reading glasses. “Pakistan’s western border is there.”

  “I know.”

  “Your line goes into Iran,” Fox said. “We’re talking about the water pipeline, not the natural gas line.”

  “I know,” Kneeshaw said. He put the pen down and sipped his coffee. “The water pipeline goes there. Into Iran.”

  86

  GORI, GEORGIA (EASTERN EUROPE)

  Top was gone. The Blue Zone looked the same, but everything was different. A few of the senior US officers who knew of the overnight mission had been in meetings all morning. That mission had changed everything. Nix knew what he had to do.

  The camcorder footage was with Sara, the GSR reporter, downloaded to her computer, on which Nix had watched it in full high-res definition. On that same memory card, before the footage of the snipers that Mac took out that day, was the scene of Anna posing outside the Town Hall the day of the bombing.

  “Make a copy of this and get it to your people,” he’d said to her. He’d kept it quiet, away from the eyes of the Army’s media liaison detachment. “I want this to get out there.”

  His Colonel wasn’t happy—he was getting chewed out by the French commander about the way the mission ended. Nix knew he’d be next, didn’t give a damn. If this was the end of his career, so be it. He would defend Top’s fine work with his own dying breath. The Western world held understandable anxiety about South Ossetia, and Russia’s role in the South Caucasus. The oil and gas pipelines running from Azerbaijan through Georgia and into Turkey impacted Russia’s support for South Ossetia’s independence, especially heated since Georgia’s attempts to move closer to the West and join NATO. Russia also viewed quite unfavourably the West’s recent recognition of Kosovo’s independence, and wanted to give the West a taste of its own medicine.