by Ani Fox
She nodded. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“I want you to save Fitzwilliam Darcy.” Then I just stared at her, my face a study in stone.
She looked flustered, which I knew she was not. “Excuse me? Darcy?”
“You heard me.”
We stayed that way for a while. I can outstare Pina, we’d already proven that. I also had a major gun to her head. If I could hack her systems, I could blow up the ship. Those DARDOs could be turned on the deck, not to mention all the fabulous missiles her crew had sequestered. But I made no threats, didn’t even frown. I stared and waited.
I’m sure my hacker was running elaborate searches, trying to figure out what agent or program this referred to. But I was fairly certain Pina already knew. My conference call all but confirmed her suspicions about Oslo’s hacker. The wheels in her head had to be moving at breakneck pace.
“You want me to save Darcy?”
I nodded. “Physically extract Darcy and place my asset under full protection until the end of the war.” It was a serious ask. Team Karthago had a lot on its plate. Ditto The Syndicate in general. They would need to put a lot of resources and a lot of very dangerous people in harm’s way to get my hacker out alive.
“What do I get in return?’ She flashed that electrifying smile and her towel accidentally slipped to an inappropriate level of cleavage.
“You get nothing.”
This brought her up short and her face went blank. Pina’s eyes started to darken. “The Syndicate is not a charity. You’re demanding quite a lot.” Not five men in all the world had ever talked to her like this. Fewer had lived. She was furious beneath her placid façade.
“I’m demanding nothing. I’m telling you to do this. I’ve already paid in advance for the service.”
That got her attention. Pina was foremost a rational being, a demon of intellect. She was parsing my words, taking them past the literal meaning, seeing the connections. I had indeed paid for this. My hacker had already given her the BBW and my files. But Pina was really thinking and she had to realize I absolutely could make good on the implied threat. Coupled with the name I’d given our hacker, plus the hint I’d thrown in by naming Jeeves, meant that sooner or later, she’d intuit what I had surmised about our faceless agent.
Instead she sneered and let her anger peek through. “I don’t take orders from you.” The words dripped with a little fire.
“Today you do, Pina.”
She started to say something, likely something threatening when she stopped and her eyes went wide. I just smiled and she looked at me, transforming into that slack faced terrifying monster of pure reason I’d met before. Unconsciously, she rubbed her fingers, likely thinking of something tactical. “Once we have Darcy, then what?”
“I’m going to hang up and interdict the North American airspace. Hans brought the war to the East Coast. I’m going to end it. With him, with the Russians, and with your mole in the Syndicate.”
“What mole would this be?” She gave me a sad smile as if to say she was humoring my delusions. I knew better and I supposed she knew I knew. Our hacker likely didn’t catch the nuance nor did the eavesdroppers who’d have started trying to get a feed from within the BBW. It told me she had no earthly idea what I was talking about, that she didn’t realize she’d been betrayed from within the Syndicate. Which narrowed my choices considerably. San Valentin could have had her shot out of hand at any time. Harv the same. So they were clearly her allies. I’d had Murray show me her crew records and reviewed a few hundred agendas and reports to be convinced Pina meant to reform The Web. I could not find enough of a pattern to name a specific person.
Someone had to have been helping their version of Roger. Preferably someone beyond reproach, whose contact with Roger would have seemed inconsequential and who used little electronic communications, had a small footprint. Someone who traveled frequently, was in public places often, and who could manage an effective dead drop. Most of all, it would have to be someone Pina had already vetted, someone she trusted with her life, who knew the inside story on her secret plans. Likely someone who had risked much to help her.
The art and science of betrayal happens to be a personal fascination. I’m kind of the poster child for biting the hand that feeds you. In my case, I had always despised the work of the Abschnitt and felt myself a slave from my earliest memories. Because, of course, we were slaves, bred in captivity and hardened by torture and brutality to serve a martial purpose. Murray and I apparently shared that rage. But we are in point of fact the minority when it comes to betrayal. Most good Bruti (seriously, that’s the plural of Brutus) start out good friends, loyal friends to their Caesar, and turn for the same reason. Sold on Caesar’s vision of a world, they see their General corrupt that view, they feel betrayed by the great man or woman’s actions. In their eyes, they are the true, the loyal, the righteous and, as any jihadist can tell you, with a righteous man and some Semtex, you can bring the world to its knees.
If Murray was correct, then Pina had betrayed the singular nature of The Web, and to a much greater degree, The Syndicate. She wanted to make our amoral world play by ethical rules, however minimal. She represented a prison of limits, a weakening of the will to power and the law of the jungle. Even a loyal ally, a true friend, might balk at implementing a credo that so deeply violated the core paradigm on our shadow world. Pina was willing to trade power and profit for the lives of women and children.
Someone had gone mole and handed over the inner workings of The Syndicate to Hans Gutlicht. San Valentin had sent Pina into the world, bait on a hook. There was simply no way the most powerful and connected player of the game did not know what was afoot. He might not have details, but he had people who would give him the broad outline. Perhaps Pina herself.
I suspected she had made it a core condition of her employment. Something very pragmatic like, any time we can do the right thing and it does not interfere with business much, we will. Her value as a ruthless practitioner of the Grand Game was such that were I Bernard, I’d have signed on the dotted line with enthusiasm. It would give me a restraint on her influence while absolutely guaranteeing her fanatic loyalty. Because The Syndicate had what she wanted: power.
Who was gaming whom? I was in a dark room in Rochester, New York, calling a ship on the Atlantic, playing blind man’s bluff with Pina and, at the same time, trying to understand the interconnected tendrils of conspiracy that had wormed through Section 22, The Syndicate, the newly energized Russian mafiya, and the mysterious American connection, not to mention Zeus’s White God cult and now an Oslo level independent hacker gone rogue.
I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. To some degree, even Bernard and Hans likely did not know the whole story. I could make an educated guess, however. A shrewd hunch told me the real power player here had a fabulous sense of endgame.
Because I am so limited in my strategic abilities, I’ve done my best to shore up this glaring weakness. I created something I like to call the Tao of Covey, my simple, no fuss approach to figuring out who is trying to kill me and why. Steven Covey wrote a bunch of time saving books about management, and he was famous for telling people to Begin with the End in Mind. I start by assuming my opponents have done just that, planned this with a set goal. That all their strategy, conniving, and move/countermove, gets them to a specific, desired result. I figure out that end result and work backwards to stop them, usually by blowing something or someone up, often several someones. It’s crude, childishly simple, and overwhelmingly effective because no one ever thinks at my level.
I didn’t know who the mole was, but I knew what they wanted. They wanted it all. What would the Anti-Karthago be? Not Hans and his crew. They want eugenic perfection via world domination. They want ovens and camps and dramatic operas playing with big parades. The opposite of Pina would want power, pure and simple. Effective control of The Web, which meant breaking The Syndicate and any apparent rivals while keeping the power structures whole enough to
realign them when a new overlord rose. I’d been calling him or her Wickham inside my head.
Wickham wanted to kill both Pina and Bernard, eliminate Hans, degrade Zeus, likely wipe out a few of the older, wiser heads among the mafiyas, maybe upgrade a few young Turks and black ops orgs to create a new New World Order, exactly like the old one but with more centralized power, less limits, and one absolute, undisputed master. Seemed simple enough. So, said Wickham precipitated a war, playing each side against the other. To what end? To have one leader kill off the other leader and so on, until with a quick stab of the knife, s/he murders the last weakened few and with crocodile tears in the eyes, rallies the troops, makes peace in The Web, and immediately consolidates several broken orgs into a fearsome fighting power. Only later, as enemies disappear, as rogue agents and rival leaders succumb to assassination, extortion and loss of face in a war of proxies, will the real victory of Wickham be comprehended. Our villain would be patient. Charming in the extreme, s/he could manipulate and maneuver endlessly until all rivals had been smashed.
That meant only a rare few individuals could be the mole. They had to be high ranking power players within The Syndicate who could, nonetheless, be taken seriously by Section 22 and her sister cabals. Far enough from the seat of power to not set Hans’s teeth on edge when our Judas wanted to switch sides but close enough to power to make good on converting the organization once the key managements’ heads had been removed from their shoulders. Able to connect with both mafiyas and black ops teams but hard to trace, difficult to implicate and somehow bearing enough credible power to woo smaller rogue operatives to their banner.
In The Syndicate, that position would likely be The Mystery Shopper. Head of the wetworks, the Mystery Shopper has no face or name. Only the General Manager, his Concierge, and Chef de Cuisine know the real name and status of the Shopper. To all others, this person is a low ranking entity inside the hotel, usually someone in a service capacity, like a maid or night manager. They are anonymous to a high degree.
Now imagine if our conspirator had access to inside materials, special codes and resources, delivered by the trusting Pina, to a valued associate. Suddenly they could impersonate the Mystery Shopper and none would be the wiser. As long as they knew the real Mystery Shopper’s location, their contacts, what operatives they controlled, this impostor could freely recruit outside that network in The Syndicate’s name and, here’s the kicker, they could build power and credentials by doing good things on behalf of Pina Karthago. She would hide their connection until she could act openly. Perhaps through Oslo, perhaps with Bernard’s blessing, Karthago likely had a dozen operatives around the world, working on missions of mercy. Funneling money, erasing crime scenes, making it all the easier for the conspiracy within the conspiracy to hatch.
Would Hans and Casandra work with The Mystery Shopper? If that person convinced them, that with Pina’s elevation, they feared involuntary retirement, absolutely. It’s a simple story and often true. Concierges rarely tolerated the Mystery Shopper installed by prior regimes. It fit the facts and while I could not prove it, Occam’s Razor told me it far more likely than Zeus somehow duping Hans and Cassandra to run a global power play from within Section 22. So Hans let Zeus play out his little Oedipal drama with an eye to the vaunted triple cross, where he used the Mystery Shopper to nix Zeus or vice versa. Section 22 Roger had set up the opening acts of the war, using the intelligence fed to him by the faux Mystery Shopper. It explained the last puzzling component of this cascade of strange intelligence failures. Roger should have known about Bernard’s sexuality.
Which meant he had been briefed by Wickham and not the real Mystery Shopper. The low level player had not known, likely Pina had never mentioned it, the fact being beneath concern for operational issues. Fact: Roger’s impostor had never met the real Mystery Shopper. Fact: the impostor had been briefed by the fake Mystery Shopper and accepted as the real thing. Fact: Pina and Harv had recognized that their Roger was an impostor but not that their Mystery Shopper had been cut out of the loop.
That could mean that the little arranged explosion which had killed the real Roger Stenwaite had also killed the head of Syndicate wetworks. I rated this unlikely. Or the real Shopper had gone underground, perhaps because it was unclear from the various signs whether Pina was trying to kill him (or her) off or if there was a Syndicate endangering plot afoot that required their unique skillset. We had an unseen hand still out there, perhaps waiting to make a move. Waiting for a sign. Poised to help end the war. Or worse, to take Wickham’s place and make a bid for power.
Games within games. I’m terrible at those. But great at breaking stuff. So I try to play to my strengths. Pina was watching me, her eyes dark embers burning in the cold pitiless night. Thinking and likely able to run through a few thousand moves and countermoves.
When I didn’t answer, she repeated herself. “Spetz, what mole do you claim exists in our network?”
Ha. She was trying to feed me a clue. Or sell a lie. “Not your network, Pina. The Syndicate has been betrayed from within. Ever read the Silver Blaze?”
She nodded. “You’re making Conan Doyle references now? That’s pretty thin for a man who would be suspect number one.” She smiled and I could swear she winked. “You did just threaten to sink this ship, did you not?”
I shrugged. “To save my asset, yes. I would sink any number of ships for Darcy.”
“Because you’re loyal. To a fault.” She gave me a false smile but her eyes never changed.
“I might say the same of you.” Oh, but she suddenly realized what I had told her. One by one, you could see the little dominos fall in her mind.
“No one has ever thought me loyal and certainly no one has mistaken me for a trusting soul.” You could feel the chill threat across the miles. But I knew better.
I gave her a slight bow of clear acquiescence. “Then I am mistaken. You have no mole. I’m all bite and no bark.” Oh, ho, when I said that she looked as I’d punched her. Which with Pina was a subtle shift of cheeks and lips, a touch of red and a very strange darkening of the eyes that spoke volumes in fractional micro expressions. If my hacker had Murray’s micro-expression sub routine running, she also had a ringside view of Pina’s near freak out. We’d stolen it from Oxford University and had the Ekman Group tweak it for a cool $500K. It catalogued emotions in real time using facial recognition and set algorithms to identify feelings expressed in under 1/10 of a second. It’s a skill I’d honed naturally and which, for whatever reason, my bugs helped me improve.
Pina would be putting together all the different pieces of the conversation. She’d be connecting my reference to the dog that didn’t bark and realizing that I was telling her about Roger’s familiarity to his contact. From there it would be a few seconds before she hit on what I’d worked out over the last week. I watched the whole thing play across her eyes for a few moments. Then she closed down, ice and emptiness her entire being.
“I was wrong about you.” It was all she said. But I knew she meant it. Knew she regretted screwing me over twice, realized that I’d played her fair, and done a great deal to assist her in genuine good faith. I could see her assess her situation, realize the dangers, the opportunities, the reality of who Darcy had to be. She might even have time to extract our hacker.
“Yes. You were wrong about me.”
“Now what?” A good question.
“I told you. I’m going to hang up and interdict the airspace, then hunt down my enemies.” I did not make them hers. We had already had that conversation and she needed time to put together some kind of defense. The holes in her defense had to be extensive. We had to hope that Wickham had not realized the extent of our understanding and collusion.
I did my best arrogant asshole look and gave her a good defiant huff. “When you have Darcy safe, I will speak with my asset directly. At that point you can power your DARDOs on and continue on your way.”
She smiled and I thought there was that fraction of a wi
nk. “So once again, Spetz. I have something you want.”
“Not yet.”
She laughed and the chill of eons seeped into the room. If a reaper with scythe appeared, I’d not have been shocked. “Soon. Very soon we will.” Then she cut the connection, which told me a lot about her countermeasures.
Chapter 10
Cookie Monster’s Revenge
I stood there in the room for a good thirty seconds, getting my breathing under control. I’d risked much and with very little hope that Pina had understood all I’d told her. It irked me that I’d been gambling with my life to save this hacker. Bargaining and scheming, taking responsibility for more lives. All things I deplored and here I was, doing it on a global scale and fighting a war that was absolutely not of my making and had nothing to do with me. Nobody’s perfect. Even I apparently had feelings. I’d unpack them when I had time, starting with how much I’d bungled fighting Zeus and killed Cassandra in the process. I didn’t even want to go near how badly I hurt knowing they’d murdered little Sonia.
Murray flashed the lights and I turned, realizing I’d blanked out for a moment. “You’re crying.”
I touched my cheek and it was true. My face was wet. I wondered how far gone I’d gotten, how long Murray had watched me. “They killed my godchild.” What the hell was I doing talking to the computer? I knew this was suicide, that it opened me up to the hacker’s influence. But I stood there and continued to leak tears.
“You loved her?” It wasn’t something Morris Moses would ask and I didn’t bother trying to play along. Pina might be extracting the hacker in minutes.
“I loved them all. Olga was the only woman who’d ever made me laugh. Until Sonia was born.” How she lit up a room. Six years old and in love with life. She had a giggle that would fell trees. Arkady let me buy her dresses and spoil her with Linzer cookies. We used to make ice cream together during the summer, sitting on my cousins’ porch, watching the fireflies blossom in the dusk. She called me Cookie. When she was tiny, she couldn’t pronounce my name, so they told her I was the cousin who brought her cookies. After Sesame Street and Cookie Monster, the name stuck. I was her Cookie Monster, her own personal fuzzy monster. And they’d killed her.