The electronic beeps and warbles seemed to go on forever, before finally there was the sound of ringing. It was a familiar ringtone. “Somewhere in Europe,” he murmured.
“It’s a cell phone number. Europe’s just where the phone came from,” Nelson said, crouching over the flat box between the speakers, pressing buttons. “He could be sitting in Saskatoon, for all we know.” He sounded calm, in control. This was his area of expertise, where he was master.
The call was finally answered, after what felt like a couple of years. “Speak,” came the single command. It was a light male voice, with a strong accent that distorted the single word almost beyond recognition.
“This is Logan Wilde.” He realized the pounding of his heart was echoing in his ears.
“Set up a Hotmail account. Use the address ‘freedom for Payam at Hotmail dot com’. Do it now. You have three minutes.”
Then there was nothing but the flat monotone of a disconnected phone.
“Fuck!!” Nelson screamed, scrambling backward and trying to regain his feet. He lurched for the van. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He wrenched at the door to the van and stumbled inside. Logan hurried after him, leaving Elias to trail and Peter to stand watch.
“What? What was that all about?” Elias demanded.
Nelson thrust Brad aside, ignoring him and Seoc. “Out of my way!” he yelled, pulling down a keyboard and slamming it on the monitoring console. He started stabbing keys, staring at one of the monitors. “Fuck!” he repeated. “Hurry up!”
“Will someone tell me what the panic is about?” Elias complained. His grasp of electronics was almost nonexistent, so Logan explained.
“He has to set up a free email account in three minutes, so that Malik can send a message to that account.”
“Yeah, that I got,” Elias said. “Magic boy here could set up the account in a nanosecond, so what’s making him green around the gills?”
“It was a cell phone call, Elias. If anyone knew the call was going to take place, they could have arranged to listen in. If they beat Nelson into setting up that account, then they would get the message instead of us.”
Elias looked at Seoc, who was sagging in the chair, his face bloodied and his lips swollen. There were dark red spots that would develop into spectacular bruises later. Seoc seemed to shrink even further into his chair at Elias’ look.
Nelson was typing at machine-gun rate, totally focused on the screen. He hit “enter” and held his hands above the keyboard, waiting, his breath frozen.
Then he let it out and his shoulders relaxed. “Got it,” he murmured. “The address wasn’t taken.”
“This is a wireless internet connection, isn’t it?” Logan asked, suddenly aware of how open and vulnerable their communications were at that moment.
“Yeah but I have a feeling this guy knows that,” Nelson said. “He got off the cell phone in seconds.” He crouched, as there was no chair left for him to use and finished setting up the account. “There it is,” he murmured, as a new email appeared in the in-box window.
“The address?” Logan asked, peering over his shoulder. “The New York Public Library?”
“It’s a blind,” Nelson assured him. “Any two day old hacker knows how to mask their real IP address. This guy is a genius, right?” He opened the email and he and Logan read it together.
The drink of desire?
“Open code?” Elias speculated.
“He’s asking for credentials,” Nelson said. “That’s the next step. Confirming Logan is who he says he is.”
“It’s not code, it’s a straightforward question—for me it is, anyway,” Logan said. “Desire is the name Countess Desideria Leggièri would allow her closest friends to use. Malik knew her and knows I knew her enough to know her favourite drink.”
“Their family’s private label wine, or champagne,” Nelson guessed.
Logan saw in his memory a glass of neon green liquid in the countess’ hands, her long French-polished fingernails stroking the stem. “Green apple martini,” he said. “The foulest drink on earth.”
“Green…apple…martini,” Nelson repeated, typing. He hit send and stood up, stretching his back. “The next move should be a cut-out of some sort.”
Elias considered the monitor. “He’s a wily little scientist, isn’t he? All the right moves. Almost like he’s been trained in our business.”
“He’s been hiding from the entire world for nearly a year. He’s been trained in the school of hard knocks,” Logan said. “What payoff would there be, if this was a set up?”
“Depends on who was doing the setting up,” Elias growled.
“You’re being paranoid,” Logan told him.
“Damn right.”
“Reply is here,” Nelson murmured and hunkered down again. He opened up the message.
Delete this account. Open Messenger under your public address. Wait.
“There’s the cut-out,” Nelson said, typing furiously. The screen went blank and he opened the Seurat’s public network interface and brought up the log-in screen. He stepped back. “Log in,” he told Logan.
“He knows I’m with the Seurat,” Logan said, typing in his password.
“It’s probably the reason he picked you,” Elias pointed out.
“Of course it has nothing to do with who I was once married to,” Logan said sourly.
Nelson opened MSN Messenger and quickly set up an account under Logan’s password. Then he stood back and waited. Three minutes elapsed by Logan’s watch but it might as well have been three years before a chat window opened up with a quiet chime.
Logan?
“It’s Celia,” Nelson murmured, sounding puzzled.
“You’re at the keyboard,” Logan told him.
Nelson bent over again. C? It’s Nelson. Wozzup.
Someone opened our backdoor FTP site. Inserted Word file. Top of file says give to Logan via MSN.
Nelson looked at Logan over his shoulder. “FTP. Probably the most secure way of handing over anything electronic. It’s directly computer to computer and if he’s using a landline, no one can pick it up midair.”
“Can we get it from Celia securely?” Logan asked.
“Sure. Now we’re on our network, it’s as secure as Fort Knox.” He typed in. Can I have it, please, thanks, gotta go.
There was a minute pause, then the program asked if they wanted to accept a file. Nelson hit “yes” and watched as the file downloaded, then shut down the program and logged off the network. “I’m going to shut down the wireless router before we look at this sucker,” he added, hitting more buttons with the mouse.
“Just print it,” Elias growled.
Nelson blinked. “Yeah, I could do that too, couldn’t I?”
Logan held back his laugh and reached up to the high speed printer bolted to a shelf up near the roof, as two sheets spat out of its maw. He glanced at the dazed, sagging Seoc. “Nelson has to get the cell phone back and I’d kill for coffee. Let’s find a diner somewhere, huh?”
He glanced down at the sheets and the world halted around him as he processed the phrase that seemed to leap out at him from the rest.
You and Mrs. Wilde will move on to Los Angeles and have your picture taken by the paparazzi on Thursday night, so I may—
Mrs. Wilde.
Micky.
Malik wanted Micky to pick up the notebook.
“Logan!” Elias said, using a tone that told Logan it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. When Logan looked at him, his eyes narrowed and he tugged the sheets out of his numb fingers and read it.
“Oh, mother Mary….” Elias breathed.
“What? What’s up?” Nelson asked.
“Not here,” Elias said. “Let’s find that diner.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” Nelson demanded.
“I said, not here!” Elias tugged on Logan’s jacket sleeve, pulling him into motion, forcing him to stumble from the van. He kept the suede bunched in his fist all the way to the diner. L
ogan didn’t protest. He knew it was the only way he was going to force movement from his body.
Chapter Seven
The coffee tasted like watered-down cardboard but it was hot and with enough sugar and cream, Logan found he could swallow it. He forced himself to keep drinking. He was going to need the caffeine in an hour or so, when the last of the adrenaline trickled out of his system.
Nelson was thumbing out a text message on his cell phone, which was slightly more secure than a voice call. Then he snapped the phone shut and put it away.
Elias lifted a brow.
“Yeah, so, Brad confirms that Seoc told Malik that Micky was alive and well and living here on Ocean Beach.” Nelson picked up a spoon and dug into a huge hot fudge brownie sundae with relish.
Elias swivelled his head to look at Logan across the table. “This just gets better and better,” he said, his tone ominous.
“Someone’s got to tell him Micky’s dead. Send him the Mpeg file. I’m sure it’s parked on someone’s hard drive,” Logan said bitterly.
“Who gets to tell him? Seoc? He’s retired from the go-between business, in case you didn’t notice.”
“We’ve got a direct channel now,” Logan pointed out.
Nelson shook his head quickly. “It’s still one way. The NYC Library address will be dead now. The first cell phone was probably a throwaway and at the bottom of a large body of water already. And he used an anonymous FTP client.”
“You’re going to up the security on that FTP thing when we get back, right?” Elias growled.
“Celia’s working on it as we speak,” Nelson assured him quickly.
“So, no way to get in touch with Malik until he contacts us,” Elias concluded.
“He’s not going to contact us until he sees Micky and me in the LA Times social pages,” Logan said.
“It’s a pretty good way of confirming you’re who you say you are,” Nelson observed around a mouthful of chocolate ice cream. “We should use it sometime.” He glanced at Logan, then at Elias’ thundery face. “Well, it is,” he protested and dropped his head to concentrate on his sundae.
Logan forced himself to take another swallow of coffee and grimaced hard as it hit his taste buds. “What if we flew Celia over here? Dressed her up in couture and a blonde wig?”
“You think anyone’s going to believe she’s Micky?” Elias shot back. “The paparazzi aren’t going to take photos of anything but the real McCoy and they’re smart as hell at figuring out who’s who. Besides, why use Celia?”
The three cups of coffee Logan had already imbibed solidified into a curdled cream brick in his stomach, as the meaning behind Elias’ question hit him.
“No,” he said flatly.
“Why not?” Elias asked with the tone of a reasonable man. “Seoc still swears it’s her and we haven’t even started in with the couture.”
Nelson’s eyes widened. “Hey, yeah! The woman from Noriega!”
“I said no.”
Elias didn’t even twitch. “Last I looked, this was my unit.”
“You can pull rank and you can even bust my tail out of here. It won’t make a damn bit of difference,” Logan said, trying to keep his voice steady and his temper contained. “You need me to pull this off and I said no.”
Elias picked up a sugar sachet and flicked it with his forefinger. “Nelson, give us a minute, huh?”
Nelson looked from Elias to Logan and back. He slid out of the booth and headed for the front door of the diner, pulling out his cell phone as he went. He was already thumbing out a text message, one-handed, before his other forearm hit the door.
Logan leaned back, giving up on the coffee. He jumped in first. “You’re a real prince.”
“Thanks. But that doesn’t change a thing. We have to use her and you know it.”
“No, I don’t know it! There has to be another way. Think of something.”
“You’ve been in this game as long as me, when you count your military intelligence background. Can you think of another way?”
Logan licked his lips. Dry mouth again. “Then get everyone together. Brainstorm.”
“You know damn well we don’t have time. He wants you out in public on Thursday night. We have to use someone. Turning up without something resembling Micky at your side will unravel the whole thing. You agree on that much, right?”
“Right,” Logan growled, although he didn’t like the admission.
“Of everyone that we might use, the redhead will need the least adjustments and changes to her appearance to make her look like Micky and it will still be a major operation that is going to take a minor miracle to pull off in forty-eight hours.”
“She’s a strawberry blonde and worse, she’s a civilian, Elias. A complete and utter civilian. She collapsed at just the sight of a gun this afternoon. How do you think she’s going to hold up under something like this?”
“Well, you’ll just have to use what charm and persuasion you can find, won’t you?”
Logan gave a short, insincere laugh. “You’re going to send me in to deliver the bad news? Classy, Elias. Classy and gutless.”
“And I love you too.” Elias scrubbed his hair tiredly. “It has to be you to tell her and you know it.”
“Tell her?” Logan was genuinely lost for words, for there were too many protests, angles and arguments—too many goddam disgusting points to be made over such an outrageous statement. He finally just picked one of them. “First up, Elias, I’m not going to tell her anything. I’m going to ask her and if she says no, then I’m going to back up her refusal with my Glock. Got that?”
Elias considered this for a moment. “You’d better hope she says yes, then, hadn’t you? You know what’s at stake here. Just imagine the North Koreans being the only country in the world with cold fusion technology. Something cheap, easy to reproduce, clean enough to be built in the middle of Hanoi. They could build a dozen in a month, once they got rolling. All those warheads, with power ten times greater than the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever built.”
“You have no idea if Malik’s process converts easily to weapons-use—” Logan began.
“Give me a break,” Elias returned, with a sour curl of his lip. “Fusion’s fusion. Once they know how the process works, they can adapt. Don’t dodge the point.”
Logan swallowed the rest of his protest, because Elias was right.
But Elias wasn’t done squeezing him yet. “All those cheap, easy-to-produce warheads. How long before their paranoia drives them to take out China or Thailand? How long after that does China take to strike back with conventional fission warheads that make us all glow in the dark for a century?”
The sick feeling wasn’t going away. Logan swallowed. Swallowed again. Finally he took another sip of the horrid coffee. It didn’t help.
“We have to ask her,” he insisted but it sounded weak even to him.
“Fine. Ask her then.” Elias threw the sugar sachet so it skidded across the table and onto the floor and straightened up so that his full height and girth were evident and made the booth shrink. “But here’s another thought to chew on. If she does agree, we can protect her. She’ll be right at your side, the loving Mrs. Wilde, with a full security detail around her at all times. Lots of high profile types have details these days. It’s not even unusual.”
Logan grew very still. “So?” he pressed, wanting Elias to complete the thought in actual words.
“So….” Elias shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “If she says no, we can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t…. Shit, Logan, you know what I’m saying.”
“Say it, you asshole.”
“Can’t protect her.”
“And she would need protection…why?”
Elias just stared at him.
“Why, Elias? Why would she need protection?”
“Because if she doesn’t do this, then we don’t get the notebook and the other guys will. They’ll get Malik and the notebook. And Ma
lik thinks Micky is alive and hiding out on Ocean Beach.”
Logan swallowed. Dry, dry, dry…. “Finish it,” he croaked.
Elias looked like he wanted to strangle him. “Micky was moving into the business. She wasn’t just your ex anymore. They’ll come after the redhead because they think she’s one of us.”
Logan gripped the edge of the table. “I’ve always known you were a ruthless son of a bitch, Elias. I never knew until today that you were heartless with it.”
Elias was twisting another sachet in his big fingers. “Just get her to say yes and then you can personally ensure her safety. Once we’ve got Malik under our wing, it’s over.”
“It’ll be over in all ways, Elias. Either I get my desk job, or I quit. Your choice. But I will never work for you in the field again. Clear?”
Elias pushed a hand through his hair. Finally, he nodded.
Logan pushed his coffee cup away and stood up. “This is Belgium, all over again.”
“You didn’t get Micky killed,” Elias said sharply.
“No, you did. You’re the one who let her out in the field over my protests. And now here we are again.”
* * * * *
Sahara worked like a field hand all evening but even after she had shut the store for the night, she couldn’t relax. Time was running directly through her veins, making her throb with each passing second.
She headed upstairs and hung the keys on the nail next to the door. She looked at the kitchenette, considered eating and dismissed the idea.
Instead she picked up her pruning shears and began working in her “garden”—her big collection of pots and window boxes scattered around the apartment. In these she grew most of her food, including salad greens and miniature versions of vegetables and herbs that made up most of her diet. Over the years she had slowly retreated to an almost pure vegetarian diet, simply because the cost of meat was beyond her financial reach. What she grew cost almost nothing except time and attention. Some of her most soothing hours were spent caring for her garden.
Even tonight it worked its magic, until she reached the herb boxes on the window ledge beneath the front windows. Pippin had been in amongst the pots, digging and chewing. Half the crops were gone, thanks to his enthusiasm. She had been going to freeze-dry and sell many of these plants.
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