by Ben Coes
“Fao Bhang,” said Chalmers. “Obviously, he was behind this. We’ve drawn him out, just as we wanted. Unfortunately, his response was much more lethal than we anticipated.”
“Forgive me, Derek, it’s been a long day. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Take me off speaker,” said Chalmers.
Calibrisi picked up the handset.
“Jessica was assassinated by Fao Bhang,” said Chalmers, his voice sharp with impatience. “It’s clear. Our little package to Li’s granddaughter had an impact, just as we intended it to. This was revenge for Dillman. He wanted Dewey Andreas dead.”
A feeling of uneasiness came over Calibrisi. Had their operation resulted in Jessica’s death? There was no way. He pushed aside the thought. But a pang of guilt washed over him. The thought that he might have inadvertently done something that led to her death was too terrible to even contemplate.
“We don’t have anything linking Beijing to this,” Calibrisi said. “Dewey Andreas has a lot of enemies. China isn’t one of them. What evidence do you have?”
“Our sources inside Beijing say the premier’s granddaughter has been under medical care for three days now, and Li is extremely angry at Bhang. In addition, we’re seeing heightened activity out of the clandestine service. Ming-húa has canceled all vacation for his agents across the Eurasian theater. He’s exercised the retainers on an army of mercenaries they keep at the ready. Beijing is preparing for something.”
Calibrisi stared at the photos of Jessica.
“Are you there, Hector?” asked Chalmers. “Look, I know this is a hard time for you, but you need to keep your head. Jessica was, tragically, collateral damage in a larger war. It’s terrible. But this is our opening. We can’t lose sight of the objective. Bhang has popped his head out of the hole. We need to figure out how to chop it off. And we have to be careful. As Jessica’s death demonstrates, Bhang doesn’t play nice.”
Calibrisi’s door opened and Missy entered, placing a coffee down on his desk.
“Katie Foxx is on hold,” she whispered. “They found Dewey.”
“Derek, I have to call you back,” said Calibrisi.
35
MOTEL TRASO
LIMA
Pascal clicked send. His intended recipient, Raul, had yet to return even one of his texts. Not to mention the phone calls. Pascal had left so many voice mails on Raul’s cell phone that eventually the automated voice of a female came on and told him the mailbox was full.
With each passing minute, Pascal became more vulnerable. Pascal had information, valuable information. It was China who was behind Jessica Tanzer’s death. Properly leveraged, that information was worth a great deal. But that knowledge could also be his death knell.
Pascal walked to the window. In the distance, he could see the lights of downtown Lima. The motel room he stood in was disgusting. It reeked of old cigarettes, sex with prostitutes who wore cheap perfume, johns who sprayed on too much cologne, and room deodorizer. The bed was small. He’d slept most of the night on the filthy carpet because he could feel the springs pressing into his back as he’d tried to sleep. Sure, he could have stayed at the Four Seasons, but that’s what Ming-húa would be expecting. Ming-húa knew Pascal had expensive tastes, and that’s the first place he’d think to look for him. Pascal knew he needed to lay low.
Pascal had begun the slow, ineluctable realization that he had to run. Through the evening, he tried to convince himself that he could reach out to Beijing, to Ming-húa, and appeal to them to trust him. But it was a naïve illusion. He had to run. He had more than forty million dollars squirreled away, and he could afford to go wherever he wanted.
He heard the chime from his computer.
It was from Raul. Finally.
Help. Need to talk
Pascal double-clicked the chat icon on his laptop. A small video box popped up.
Where are you
Pascal waited for the photo to sharpen. He didn’t get a response from Raul. He typed in again.
WHERE ARE YOU
Finally, letters appeared:
Beijing
Suddenly, the video focused and became lighter. It was a live feed showing a hallway. Someone was holding a camera as they walked. Pascal stared into the screen. A door appeared, the number 6 on it.
“Fuck,” he said to himself, staring at the video.
Pascal reached for his pack of cigarettes. Behind him, he suddenly heard the sound of the door being opened.
“Maid,” came a female voice from behind him.
“Stay out,” he barked.
Pascal’s eye moved from the computer screen to a red plastic room key on the desk. A gold 6 was etched into the plastic.
In the same moment that the video feed showed a black boot kicking a door, the motel-room door behind him exploded violently, kicked in from the outside.
Turning, Pascal saw a woman. She was Chinese, with a camera on her forehead, and tight black shirt and pants. She clutched a PP-19 Bizon submachine gun, suppressor jutting from the muzzle.
Pascal charged the assassin, but she triggered the weapon. A spray of bullets sliced horizontally across his torso, stopping his forward progress, then catapulting Pascal backward. The assassin stepped forward, stood above him, then watched as Pascal’s eyes rolled back in his head. She sprayed another suppressed hail of slugs down at his head, grabbed his laptop, then turned and walked quickly out of the room, leaving the door open and Pascal’s cigarette burning on the carpet next to his destroyed skull.
36
DISTRICT 7 REGIONAL HEADQUARTERS
ARGENTINE FEDERAL POLICE
CÓRDOBA
Colonel Arman Marti closed the door to his temporary office on the third and top floor of AFP’s regional headquarters. The room was dark. He did not turn on the lights. Instead, he groped through the large bottom drawer of his desk, feeling for a pair of night-vision goggles. He pulled them out, then flipped on the power button.
On the desk in front of him was a small manila envelope.
It was 3:00 A.M.
It had been four hours since he’d left Charlie Couture, the CIA chief of station, at the hotel bar, where the entire team was staked out for the duration of the investigation into Jessica Tanzer’s death.
Couture was like a bulldog, and Marti was sick of him. The young American clung to Marti like a spider monkey. Marti knew full well he was just obeying orders from his bosses at Langley, but it was grating nonetheless.
Marti knew the CIA didn’t trust him, or anyone at AFP, for that matter. Couture and his team from the CIA, as well as an even larger contingent from the FBI, had demanded access to all aspects of the investigation and all phases of the autopsy, as well as deliberations by the AFP forensics team afterward. It was, Marti thought, overkill. As far as he was concerned, he wished AFP didn’t have jurisdiction over the death of Jessica Tanzer. It was turning out to be a grade-A pain in the ass, and he would be happy when it was over.
But then, just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, it did.
The phone call had come to his eighty-four-year-old mother in Buenos Aires. In his typical Machiavellian way, Ming-húa had called Marti’s mother, knowing most other avenues to Marti were likely being monitored by the National Security Agency and the CIA. Ming-húa had asked Marti’s mother, politely, to call his friend Juan in Mexico City. In the precise code Ming-húa had forced Marti to memorize many years ago, Juan meant Ming-húa, and Mexico City meant “extremely urgent.”
Over the years, China had paid Marti more than a million dollars to do nothing more than keep Beijing apprised of activities in Argentina. For the most part, Marti often wondered if MSS even cared about what happened in Argentina. Marti knew he was just another investment, sprinkled across the country and the world by Fao Bhang—an investment that might never get cashed in.
But when his frail, aging mother Francita muttered the words “Mexico City,” Marti knew the time had come to pay the piper.
Of c
ourse, Marti could say no. But Marti didn’t want to find out what happened to people who said no to Ming-húa or, God forbid, Fao Bhang. Ming-húa had called his mother. The message was clear. It wouldn’t just be Marti who paid the price.
After leaving the Sheraton, Marti had driven to Córdoba airport. There, taped to the underside of the wing of an aging Cessna turboprop with peeling paint, he’d removed a small tan envelope.
Now at his desk in the darkness he removed its contents. Inside were two sheets of thick paper, almost like cardboard, each showing ten separate squares, each of the squares with dark, inky fingerprints.
The typeface at the top of the page showed the AFP crime-scene investigator’s specific logo, dark orange font with slightly raised, embossed lettering, a security precaution.
Marti left his office. He skulked down the hall. Removing a key from his pocket, he unlocked a door, went inside, then closed the door behind him. He went to the desk of AFP’s lead investigator, Sandoval. Marti searched through three neat piles of folders. He found the folder that held the dead Chinese agent’s prints. He removed a piece of thick paper and replaced it with a duplicate, then put the folder back. He folded the original and stuffed it in his back pocket.
Marti moved to Couture’s desk. The American’s files were stacked on the desk. He flipped through the thick pile. He found the original sheets of prints, replaced it with the new one, then put it back on Couture’s desk.
Half an hour later, Marti sat on the brown sofa in his hotel room. He opened a beer from the refrigerator, then lit a cigarette. After lighting the end of the cigarette, he put the match to the corners of the two sheets of fingerprints. He watched as the true identity of the dead Chinese agent vanished up in smoke.
37
MIAMI
It was the sound of the hotel housekeepers that awoke Dewey.
“Housekeeping,” called a voice through the door.
Dewey opened his eyes, looking in front of him, trying to remember where he was. Pain kicked the back of his skull.
“Go away,” he said, without moving.
“Sir, what time would you like us to come back?”
“Fuck off,” said Dewey.
He fell back asleep.
How many hours later it was, he didn’t know, but it was knocking at the door that stirred him again.
“Fuck off,” he said, barely above a whisper.
He heard the sound of the lock turning. The door pushed in and stopped on the chain. Then came a kick. The chain ripped from the wall as the door slammed open.
From the ground, all Dewey could make out was a blur. A tall green hazy figure. The alcohol was still teeming in his system. He barely moved. Then he felt his stomach tightening. He fought against another wave of nausea.
His eyes began to focus and he saw the man’s feet: he had on flip-flops. His eyes moved up. He wore madras shorts and a green T-shirt that read I’D RATHER BE WATERBOARDING. He had long brown hair, past his shoulders.
Dewey looked behind the man, suddenly noticing a woman stepping slowly into the room. She had short blond hair, wore white jeans, and a blue T-shirt.
“Get up, grampa,” said the man in the green T-shirt, and Dewey recognized the voice.
“Rob?” Dewey whispered.
Tacoma helped him up, putting his arm under his shoulder and lifting him.
“Fuck, you’re a goddamn load, Andreas,” said Tacoma, struggling. “You’re getting fat, old man.”
“Fuck you,” said Dewey. “It’s all muscle.”
“Yeah, right.”
Katie and Rob looked around the bedroom. It was a mess of broken glass and vomit.
“I wasn’t expecting company.”
“It’s okay,” Katie said, smiling. She walked over to Dewey and gave him a hug. She stepped back and looked up at him.
“How are you doing?” Katie asked.
“Not too good.”
“I’m sorry about Jessica,” she said.
“Me too.”
Dewey walked to the minibar and removed two small bottles of Jack Daniel’s from the refrigerator as Katie and Tacoma watched, then glanced at each other. He unscrewed the caps, then stuck the ends of both bottles in his mouth and chugged them down in one gulp. He felt the warmth immediately, and the pain in the back of his head went away.
Dewey went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He looked into the mirror. He’d been there before. Staring into the eyes of a dead man.
He inspected his mauled right fist. The knuckles were worse than he remembered, the skin missing. He saw a sparkle near the knuckle of the index finger. He reached down and yanked a thin, inch-long piece of mirror that had slid into the skin between the knuckles, easing it painfully out. Blood trickled from the hole, which he unconsciously put to his mouth to try to stop.
Hector had sent Katie and Rob, Dewey knew. Tacoma, a former SEAL, and Katie, who had been number-two inside CIA Special Operations Group, were about the closest friends Dewey had right now, other than Hector. Part of him appreciated the gesture from Hector. But Dewey knew he didn’t want to get them involved in what he was about to do.
He dried his face and looked one last time at himself in the mirror.
You need to risk it all, Dewey. To strike back at the one who wants to kill you, you need to put everything you have at risk. In order to fight, you must be willing to be hit. In order to kill, you must be willing to be killed.
Back in the bedroom, Katie was stuffing his belongings into his leather bag.
“What are you doing?” Dewey asked.
“Packing your stuff. We’re going back to D.C.”
“There’s no ‘we,’ Katie. There’s me. Me and the motherfuckers who did this. Remember Iran? You didn’t want to take unnecessary risks? You didn’t want to die? Remember all that?”
Dewey’s face was flushing red. Several moments of awkward silence passed.
“Hector exercised our retainer,” said Katie icily. “Whether you like it or not, we’re going to be working on this.”
“This is not going to be some sort of Langley shit show,” said Dewey.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No one is going on trial at The Hague or being flown to Gitmo,” said Dewey. “Whoever did this is dead. Whoever helped is dead. This isn’t about justice.”
Katie glanced at Tacoma, then nodded.
“We’re on the same page,” she said.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, they were airborne. The three sat around a small conference table as the black CIA Citation X flew north.
“Someone tracked you to a remote ranch in Argentina,” said Katie. “That fact alone indicates a level of organization that could only be a foreign intelligence agency. They did an assessment of the security rotations, then timed the strike around them. They used a sniper, who took a night shot, which, as you know, is much more difficult. That’s what we know.”
Katie reached into a light blue leather handbag. She pulled out a manila envelope. Inside it were photographs of the corpse, more than twenty in all, from various angles, displaying the crater in the back of his head, and several close-ups of his destroyed face. The fact that he was Asian was obvious. Yet they all knew it was irrelevant. He could have been from anywhere.
Tacoma was looking at his laptop.
“Langley just finished the print runs,” he said. “Looks like he popped up at INTERPOL. I’ll print them out.”
Tacoma walked to the front of the jet. He took the sheets of paper off the printer and returned to the conference table.
The first sheet showed two photos. On the left was a photo of the destroyed skull of the Asian man who’d been found in the field at Estancia el Colibri. On the right was the same man, taken while he was still alive, with a mustache and short black air.
The second sheet was a short INTERPOL dossier:
NAME:
Chiong-il
AKA:
Kwoong, Namkung, Kwon
Seoul, South Korea
RES:
Mogadishu, Somalia
DOB:
22/07/69
SERV:
1991–2001
National Intelligence Service (SK)
CURR:
Security consultant
MISC:
Freelance mercenary working out of eastern Africa. Ties to SSNK (North Korea), Al-Qaeda. Mark X sniper (NIS)
The last sheet displayed what looked like a checkerboard. Two sets of fingerprint blocks were lined up side-by-side, taken from the dead man before and after his death. There were red lines connecting all ten print blocks on the left, the prints taken by AFP, to the ones on the right, from INTERPOL, indicating a perfect match. The AFP logo was stamped across the top of the page.
“The prints match perfectly,” said Katie.
“So the question is, who hired Chiong-il?” said Tacoma.
“And why,” said Katie.
Dewey sat in silence for several minutes. Finally, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, dark object that looked a little bit like a sausage link. It was shriveled, slightly bent, with a long fingernail at one end, dirt beneath the nail, and tendrils of dried scab and skin at the other, with a white nub of a small bone sticking out.
He tossed it onto the conference table.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Tacoma.
“That depends, Robert,” said Dewey.
“On what?”
“On what the fuck you think it is.”
“It looks like a finger.”
“Then, yes, it is what you think it is.”
Katie picked it up.
“That’s disgusting,” she said, inspecting it. “Care to illuminate us as to who the lucky individual is whose finger you now possess?”