Liquid Gold

by James Phelan

  Hutchinson put his hand over the foam cover of his tactical mic headset, spoke to his comms specialist: “Have we got communication up with the agent in the café yet?”

  “Radio’s still down.”

  “Why?”

  “Interference from something, localised to the café; could be some electrical equipment the café uses.”

  “Not a jamming device?”

  “Could be, but the one-way bug near Fox is on and recording fine. It’s definitely some kind of broadcast interference from something inside the café.”

  “Are you telling me their fifty-year-old espresso machine is blacking out our million-dollar comms gear?”

  “All I know is that it worked when we planted the bugs in there last night, and our agent’s gear worked until he got into the building this morning.”

  Something wasn’t right. Hutchinson didn’t like unknowns, didn’t like mistakes, especially avoidable ones like comms-gear failure.

  “Cell network is fine though?”

  The tech grunted yes, checking the frequencies with an ear glued to a headphone.

  “Call our man in there,” Hutchinson ordered. “I need to hear a voice. Find an open radio channel that you can secure, and send him the new frequency via SMS.”

  The techs shared a look and then dialled the cell. Prearranged protocol was being broken.

  “Jake, what have you got?” Hutchinson said into the headset’s mic. “What do you see? What do you hear?”

  The FBI agent in the café was reading a newspaper at a table littered with a couple of empty coffee cups and a plate of hardly touched pastries. Special Agent Jake Duhamel knew that if it came to it he would have enough time to get the drop on the two guys in the room he knew to be threats. They were without doubt Babich’s guys, thick-necked goons sitting facing the door. He had an H&K USP Compact Tactical pistol locked and loaded in a quick-release hip holster under his jacket; he had brought a couple of spare mags of .45 rounds, but he was unlikely to need them: he was an Olympic-grade marksman with a pistol, and had a silver from Sydney to prove it. Outside in the nondescript, idling Mercedes van, he had three men ready to rock with an arsenal of heavy firepower.

  “They’re talking, nothing happening,” Duhamel said, turning pages of the International Herald Tribune. He looked around. “What’s with the comms being down?”

  “We’re working on it,” Hutchinson said into his mic, looking over the tech’s shoulder at a thermal image of the café on the laptop: it showed the staff milling about, the dozen or so customers, the heat flare of the espresso machine. Another screen showed a noise-frequency graph, which indicated that the demodulating sound pointer being aimed at the glass pane in front of Fox was picking up too much background noise to get a clear vocal feed. “The guy to your immediate right,” Hutchinson said into his mic. “Who is he? Is he anything to be worried about?”

  “Well, I have been before such animals, Mr Fox,” Babich said, sipping his coffee, looking out to the lake. “Almost twenty years in the KGB and FSB; I have even seen it in the eyes of men.”

  He turned to Fox with a hard, measuring gaze, and lit a cigarette. Babich’s left eyelid drooped, so that it looked half-closed; the slight scarring could have been from a burn or a bomb blast. His hands were gloved.

  “Killers, assassins, murderers…” Babich said, his accent well Westernised, without the usual heaviness, the kind of practised elocution no doubt honed for media appearances. He licked at his top lip, picked off a speck of tobacco as he blew out smoke. Saliva glistened in the corner of his mouth, which he occasionally patted away with the thumb of his cigarette hand. “Some were on my team. Some weren’t. They weren’t so lucky, but then those kinds of men never really are. Not when it comes to being so close to death. It’s just a matter of time, do you see?”

  Fox watched and waited, conscious that he still didn’t have a measure of this guy. He knew his bio, knew his life—everything the media and intelligence agencies of the US and her allies knew about him—but he didn’t know where this meeting would go. Babich was unpredictable.

  “It’s something that I see now, in your eyes,” he said with a small smile, thumbing away more saliva. “You have killed before … more than once.”

  He leaned back a little, gave Fox a look that said he knew everything he needed to know about him. “You know what it means to take lives, Mr Fox. To live by the gun. To serve your country. One would think you have been doing this all your life.”

  Fox drained his coffee and motioned to the passing waiter for another. He gave Babich a tired look. “What makes you think I haven’t?” Fox spoke for the first time.

  Babich focused his gaze out the window in front of them. The left side of his face had a slight tic. He tapped a fresh pack of Stuyvesants against the timber table.

  “You are ex-military,” he said. He stirred his coffee, stubbed out his half-burned cigarette. “And you know pain. Pain of many kinds; the kind of hurt that only the sentimental suffer. That is a weakness, Mr Fox. I know that much about you. In fact, I think you would be surprised by how much I know about you.”

  Babich paused for effect, squinted out across the lake. “That’s why we are here.”

  “He’s local,” Duhamel said quietly.

  His cell-phone speaker carried the reply: “You’re sure he’s not a threat?”

  The Special Agent knocked a spoon off his table, sending it clattering loudly to the tiled floor. No one bothered to look towards the commotion. Duhamel took his time picking it up, getting a good eyeball of the guy to his right: early thirties, black hair, Roman nose, short but stocky—any more local and he would have roots growing into the ground.

  “Negative,” Duhamel said. “Definitely local.” Only a threat to the mountain of spaghetti in front of him, he thought to himself.

  “Tell me,” Babich said, rubbing his gloved hands together. “Why would a reporter still have that look?”

  Fox looked out over the lake, his patience waning. He managed a half smile.

  “Perhaps you are working for the FBI … Counter-terrorism or espionage division maybe … Some kind of economic outfit?” Babich sucked at his teeth. “You think I’m the problem here? That what I do is evil? I am a businessman; I see opportunities and sell whatever can be sold, to whoever is willing to pay.”

  Babich looked at Fox, long and hard. He spoke quietly. “Do you think I am any more corrupt than an American company? A British one? An Australian one? Hmm? Corporate greed, gross negligence that led to a global credit crisis? That had nothing to do with my country, my people. It took America two hundred years to get to where the West wants us to be in just a few years—Putin came in when the country was in chaos, our people were starving, and men like him, men like me, have created something from that chaos, you see? While I shape history, men like you stand in its way, trying to cling to something, to have your fifteen minutes of fame.”

  Babich sat back in his chair, eyes still on Fox: “I will be remembered by my country as a maker of better lives—that is important to me. Who will remember you? A few literate liberals, members of some small elite club who read the foreign affairs crap you write and talk about? Certainly not your Young Republicans—they know the truth as they see it, and it’s not what reporters like you try to ram down their throats; they’re smart, patriotic, like our own Nashi.”

  Fox sipped his espresso, signalled to the waiter for pastry.

  “This is some anti-American thing?” Fox said. “You know, they don’t look at your country that way. They’ve moved on. And you want to know how? Because their problem wasn’t with your people, it was with a political system that was forced onto innocent people who had no choice but to accept it or be purged.”

  Babich shook his head. “Perhaps you should accept that you won’t be remembered—not your work, nothing. Maybe you will get lucky one day, and have a woman around long enough to care, hmm?”

  Babich let it hang i
n the air. Fox, a little unsure, smiled it off.

  “For the record, I have nothing against your people or your country,” Fox said. “Just its leaders. Just people like you. You’re the same the world over, whatever the nationality—driven by nothing but greed.”

  Babich laughed. “Greed?”

  “How much are you getting for selling one country’s water to another?” Fox asked. “Where does that money go? Was it worth killing all those people to silence this story? The hundreds who worked on the water-diversion plant? I worked with some of those people; they were good, innocent people who did nothing but their jobs. How many lives is this cover-up worth? What was the dollar amount for all those lives? For trying to kill me and my friends? How much did it cost to take so much water, the lifeblood of a nation, from hundreds of millions of Indians?”

  Babich looked around the café, spoke a little more quietly: “I had expected you to talk more, to ask more questions,” Babich said. “Now that you have your audience with me, you say this? You accuse me of killing all these people? Do you think I am some kind of terrorist?”

  “You’re not a terrorist, Roman,” said Fox. “You’re a tourist.”

  “Okay, okay,” Babich seethed. “This water-utility project? Pakistan will prosper, that is undeniable—where are my accolades for that? You say India will lose out? Maybe they should have done this first, instead of making nuclear weapons. Instead of spending billions on arms, they could have taken a billion people from poverty. These deaths, these Indians you say will miss out—Mr Fox, surely you realise that these are the kind of externalities that corporations contend with every minute of every day. Someone, or something, always loses out—that is your economic system. I am just better at it than most of your guys. Can you not see that?”

  Fox squinted to look at the far-off boats on the lake: such a perfect-looking, temperate place to be.

  “Can you?” Babich said, leaning towards Fox. “Or are you unable to accept that?”

  Fox exhaled deeply, concentrating on slowing his heart rate. He was tempted to end this conversation right now; career- and perhaps life-ending violence would be so easy, like driving the coffee glass into Babich’s face and grinding it in while thinking of all the pain and death this man had dealt out to ordinary people. Maybe the Feds would intervene in time to stop Babich’s bodyguards blasting him away—but probably not. Either way, he would think of those people while he killed this man; either way, both their lives would be over.

  He took a breath and spoke to Babich. “Look, Roman, you know that I know what you’re doing with all this water running through Pakistan.” Fox watched Babich for a reaction, and was satisfied to see the facial tic resume. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got to offer?”

  Babich smiled. Fox felt that this was it: an admission of guilt. On tape. Enough to get this guy into court.

  “Tell me what you’re after,” Babich said, brushing an invisible speck from his jacket sleeve. “This is not your fight. This story you are chasing, it does not concern you … well, it didn’t. So, tell me, what will make you go away, this whole story go away? Maybe if you left this alone, I could get on with things—back to business.”

  “If.”

  Through the scope of his rifle Sirko watched the door of the café. Every now and then he checked over the optical sight to get a bead on activity occurring around the building and in the street. His watch beeped a warning. He had tipped a waiter fifty euros to deliver a very particular plate of food to Babich at an agreed time: in five minutes that food would arrive, and it would carry such meaning it would haunt him in the afterlife.

  Sirko picked up the detonator while still supporting the rifle on its tripod. Babich would be served his last supper, and then, as he walked out of the café, Sirko would either press the button or pull the trigger. He would either blow him up or shoot him through the heart; Fox too—either way, they would both be dead.

  “Just the truth would be good,” Fox said. “And the justice it will bring.”

  “Ah, the truth,” Babich said with barely concealed contempt. “Mr Fox, do you really believe the truth will set you free? Are you really that foolish?”

  “Justice comes to all of us, Babich, no matter how much money or power we have,” Fox said, watching the tic jump in the older man’s angry face. Fox stirred his coffee, his arms tense. The thought of breaking this guy’s face was more tempting with every second, but he needed to stay in control a little longer.

  “Why don’t you tell me why we’re really here?” he said, palms open to receive. “Finally, you and me, face to face. Now.”

  “Okay, killer,” Babich said, looking out the window. He smiled and leaned forward, his arms crossed on the timber bench. “We are here because I want to make you an offer. You want to know about water going into Iran? Sure, it goes there.”

  Gotcha, thought Fox. “Why?”

  “Money. You think that water was used for something specific—who knows, hey?”

  “You know.”

  Babich smiled. Yeah, he knew.

  “I am here because I have an offer for you,” Babich said. “An offer you can’t refuse. And remember, you are the one who wanted a stake in this. You rolled the dice…”

  “Hub, this is Water One, we’ve got a boat coming in hard and fast southbound towards the target’s location,” the agent said from aboard a nondescript white speedboat, just another speck on Lake Como. He tracked the craft with his hand-held high definition camcorder, zoomed in while his partner kept the long-lens pointed at the café.

  Hutchinson watched the real-time footage of the speedboat flash by the agents.

  A guy was at the wheel, two were in the back, and someone smaller was in the passenger seat.

  “Can you zoom in closer?”

  “That’s as good as it gets, unless you want the café lens—”

  “No, keep it on the café.”

  “Copy that, Hub,” replied the agent on the boat. “Shall we pursue?”

  “Negative, keep your cover and stay put,” Hutchinson said. He turned to the room and pointed at the ops agent. “Get one of your snipers to get a bead on that boat ASAP.”

  Fox watched as Babich placed a small pair of binoculars on the table in front of them.

  “Are you telling me to go to the opera?” Fox quipped.

  A crooked smile. “Take a look out there,” Babich said. His stubby finger pointed out over the lake. “Look out there and tell me: why would you want to save another country’s water supply when the stakes are rising for you so fast?”

  “Keep on Babich,” Hutchinson said into his mic. “Why don’t we have sound from the café yet?”

  “Still working on it.”

  “Damn it!” Hutchinson turned to the op leader. “Get another agent in there with—”

  “Look,” replied the agent firmly. “I’ve got vision set up; I’ve cut into existing CCTV feeds at four locations; I’ve installed a high-res camera clocking both exits of the target building, and another on a boat in the lake with a long-lens to watch Fox and Babich. I’ve got a helicopter on standby. Sending in another agent will only—”

  “I’ve got something!” interrupted a tech.

  “What?” Hutchinson said.

  “Intel from the FBI database search … Coming through now—a hit on the guy who did the Gori bombing. Sirko—Petro Sirko. He visited the café this morning, about an hour before our guy went in. Facial rec just ID’d him.”

  “We’ve got a known bomber who just took out a bunch of delegates—in the area?” said Hutchinson. Fuck. “Get everything you can on him—”

  “We’re getting Agency and MI5 files through now,” the tech said, bringing up files onscreen. “He’s a known associate of … Vladimir Kolesnik.”

  “And?”

  “Kolesnik is Babich’s son,” the Russian cop answered. “Took his mother’s family name to stay under the radar. And this Sirko—he was raised like
a son by Babich.”

  Hutchinson turned to the Russian, his eyes wide and angry: “And you didn’t tell us any of this before now because…?”

  “It’s all in the files,” the Russian said. “Kolesnik runs clubs, maybe he was set up by his father, but he’s never done anything of interest to us. Sirko, on the other hand, served in Chechnya—fighting for both sides before being kicked out of the Army. We want him.”

  Hutchinson’s mind raced.

  “Yeah, well, if he’s responsible for killing the US and EU delegation in the Gori bombing, you’ll have to step in line,” Hutchinson said. “We’ve got to find him, we’ve got to keep eyes on him; we take him down as soon as we get Babich.”

  The tech brought up the footage that had just been sent through: in the background, Petro Sirko, dressed in a local police uniform, walking though the square … past the statue of Stalin … past a young girl signalling to the cameraman to give her a moment to compose herself by the base of the statue … The camera followed Sirko … his hand came out of his pocket, holding a small object.

  Hutchinson knew immediately what it was: “That’s a remote—”

  Over the speakers came the tinny sound of the blast. The cameraman was almost blown over but steadied himself. The image panned back around—the Town Hall was all fire and debris and smoke and dust.

  The camera snapped back to Sirko, remote detonator still in his hand. He turned and looked directly down the lens. The image froze on his face as he smiled.