by Dana Haynes
Finnigan said, “Who?”
Renard shrugged. “There’s not much security on the ground floor. Far too many civilians coming and going.”
“A code to do what?”
“Call security,” he said. “Activate the police alarm or the fire alarm. Or announce a terrorist incident.”
“CC cameras in the dining hall?”
Renard shook his head. “The ground floor has the least security in the complex. It gets better as you move upstairs. And before you ask: Her Honor has not dined in the Fireplace Room since you showed up and warned us about the threat.”
Finnigan thought about that for a while. “Whose code was entered?”
“That’s the thing. Nobody’s. It was an eight-digit code, and all security, maintenance, and administrative personnel are given nine-digit access codes. Here’s something else: this happened twice, but the codes weren’t identical. They were one digit off from each other.”
Finnigan stared at the guy, as if to say, annnnddd …?
“I told Her Honor that this wasn’t worth bothering anyone with. She felt it important you hear about it.”
“Read me the codes.”
Renard drew a smart phone and brought up the note function. He read two strings of eight numbers. The last two digits were inverted in the second string.
“What’s Shan’s code?”
Renard said, “Who?”
“Thomas Shannon Greyson.”
“Ah. It’s been deactivated.”
“Yeah, but what was it?”
Renard seemed to ponder that. “Hold on.” He stood and stepped away, into the attached kitchenette, and made a call.
Finnigan turned to the phone resting in the center of the coffee table. “Appreciate you letting us know, ma’am. It does sound weird. I’m not sure that makes it related but—”
Renard said, “Damn it!” He walked back into the living room, and now his face had a pink tinge. “We should have spotted this. Greyson’s code. It’s the same as the first one, from the day before yesterday, but in reverse order and with the last digit missing.”
Finnigan grinned. Someone got Shan’s code out of him. He was alive.
Or at least he had been as recently as the day before. Someone had been seeking his security code and he’d given it up, after more than a week’s captivity, but scrambled enough to be useless.
But was that all this was? Proof of life and a desperate gamble by a man being beaten, or worse? Finnigan felt his brain whirl, throwing together facts as quickly as he could.
He said, to both the man in the room and the woman on the phone, “What was the name of the dining hall?”
“The Fireplace Room,” Renard said. “The fireplace mantle is made from a single redwood tree. It dates back to 1810, when—”
Finnigan said, “Get a hidden CC camera in there, right now. Shan lured one of the guys who’s got him into the dining room. Twice. If he’s freaking lucky, it’ll happen a third time.”
“All right, but they can’t get to the judge from there. We—”
“Doesn’t matter, buddy. Go.”
Renard glowered down at him.
Judge Betancourt said, “It seems a sound idea.”
He nodded brusquely and walked back into the kitchen, making another call.
Finnigan whisked up the cordless landline phone and moved to the far end of the houseboat, sliding open the glass door and stepping onto the deck. He let the door glide shut behind him. “Ma’am? Renard can’t hear us now. Listen: how many rooms on the first floor could Shan have lured these guys to?”
“I’m not sure. A few dozen.”
“But he chose the Fireplace Room.”
“Indeed. I don’t see the importance, though.”
He turned back to see Renard in the kitchen, glowering at him through the glass slider. “What are fireplaces famous for? In popular culture?”
“Fireplaces? I’m not …” The jurist’s voice faded.
Finnigan grinned. “You got it.”
“The means of egress of Saint Nicholas, on the eve of Christmas.”
“It’s Shan’s way of telling us he’s alive. And that the bad guys are coming for you. Hang on, I’m getting Renard back on this conversation.”
He slid the door open and stepped back in. Renard had returned from the kitchenette. Finnigan said, “Let’s say the access code worked, day before yesterday, and somebody set off alarms. Where would you have evac’ed the judges?”
Renard straightened up to his full height. “I’ve no intention of answering that question.”
He thrust the phone toward Renard. “Your Honor? Tell him. Everything. I think I know what the bad guys want. And I think I know what Shan wanted us to figure out. It’s time to bring Renard inside the tent. Tell him.”
C65
Italy
The four refugees were from Mosul, Iraq. Their Arabic was sufficiently different from Fiero’s Algerian that they picked their way gingerly through the introductions, like stepping over vines in an overgrown orchard.
Two of them were brothers. The others hadn’t met until they’d reached Macedonia. There, soldiers in a civilian truck picked them up and drove them to a Quonset hut in some country—they didn’t know which one.
The soldiers had kept their passports and had taken all their money. They could have fled that first building, or this one, but to go where?
The tall, shy woman sat hunched in on herself and barely spoke above a whisper. She kept her hijab close to her face. She identified the civilian truck as belonging to Ragusa Logistics because she read and wrote English, having studied briefly in London before returning home to protect her parents from the rise of ISIS, or Daesh, as she called the group.
The foursome had been taken next by truck to this old factory. Again, they had no idea what country they were in and, despite their fugue of anger, boredom, fright, and sheer exhaustion, their faces lit up when Fiero informed them that they’d made it to Italy.
“We don’t know what’s next,” the eldest boy, twenty, told her. “I speak a little Serbian because my father does business with Serbs. I heard the guards say we would be sent to Slovakia. But that was more than two weeks ago. Now, over the last couple of days, they’ve changed their story. We’re being sent to the Netherlands.”
That caught her attention. “Do you know why?”
The foursome shrugged. The eldest boy said, “In Slovakia, we were to work in a sweatshop.”
“Have you tried to escape?”
The men glanced at each other. The woman glanced at her shoes.
Fiero pushed them. “What?”
“It’s not just that they have our passports and our money,” a boy said. “They have guns. And they’re soldiers. They know how to use them. Besides—”
Another boy cut in. “A sweatshop in Slovakia, or go back to Daesh? I’ll take the sweatshop, thank you please. That’s no choice at all.”
The others nodded. Except the girl, who might have been nineteen or twenty.
“Not you?”
She shook her head.
“How come?”
She bit her lip, then replied in a whisper. “I have an aunt in Italy. In Rome. Also, nieces and nephews.”
Fiero made the shh symbol, finger to her lips, and moved to the door connecting their room to the guards. She heard the faint audio of a televised cricket match. She looked back, noting how tall and angular the girl was. She moved back to the cluster of cots, drawing her smart phone. “Do you want to go to your aunt?”
The girl’s eyes glittered with tears. She nodded vigorously.
“Do you know her telephone number, or email?”
“Both!”
Fiero quickly tapped out a text message for Finnigan. She glanced at the three boys. “And you want to go north? Even to the
Netherlands?”
“If we get to the Netherlands,” the eldest said, “my brother and I can get to Brussels. We have family there.”
Fiero turned to the girl. “Can you ride a motorbike?”
“Of course not!” She sounded scandalized.
Stupid question. “My name is Katalin. I’m a soldier, too, and my best friend in all the world is a sort of police officer. We are trying to stop these soldiers from kidnapping refugees. Now, I’ve an idea. It requires everyone to help me fool these soldiers. Are you in?”
All four nodded.
“Okay. Follow my lead.”
Before driving back to the rental house on the coast, Finnigan typed up a text message for Fiero. It read:
Shan’s alive. Bravos want to fake a terrorist threat to Courthouse and lure Target out of Courthouse. Got to be an Ambush planned. I brought in Target’s security detail. Plan: Let the Ambush happen, w/o Target. When Bravos make move, we hit UFO House. Need you back here Quick. Finnigan.
Just as he was about to hit send, a message from Fiero popped up.
MPF: Found 4 refugees being shipped Netherlands 2night. 3 boys, 1 girl. My guess: Muslim fall guys for whatever Bravos have planned. Boys want to go north, girl wants out. I’m taking her place. After U get this, giving girl my phone so she can reach aunt. I’m off comms. Will find nu phone up north. Should be in Nthrlnds 2morrow. Don’t make move until U hear from me! Xoxoxo KFD.
Finnigan read it through and groaned. He sent his message, hoping against hope he wasn’t too late, thinking, Xoxoxo, my ass.
For the first time since this gig started, the partners would be out of touch. And not on the same page.
C66
The Hague
In the seventeenth century, a Dutch tailor named Pieter de Key moved to The Hague and built a shop and a home for his family of twelve children. The narrow house featured an impressively tall, pointed roof and tightly bunched windows. Each floor was one or two rooms deep, and each featured massive open-beam ceilings. Pieter de Key never imagined that his backyard would, one day, house a portion of the International Criminal Court complex.
In 2010, the Security Directorate of the ICC bought the rights to the old house. They excavated World War II bomb shelters and added tunnels between the court complex and Pieter de Key’s tailor shop and home. In the event of a terrorist attack, the justices and senior personnel could be escorted to a subbasement, through tunnels lined with battery-powered lights and forced-air blowers, to the half-timbered house. Once there, simple staff cars could pick them up. Or police cars, or an armored personnel carrier, or a heavy-lift helicopter.
But getting them out of the court complex, in the event of an attack, and into the old house was the first step.
Driton Basha had had access to a wide array of European soldiers during the era of the United Nations’ KFOR, or Kosovo Force. Most had been fine and decent soldiers, but a few had been amenable to corruption. Some of them had returned to their home countries after their time in Pristina but had retained their ties to Basha and his unit.
One of those soldiers had sold the major the plans for the emergency evacuation of the International Criminal Court—including the tunnel to the Pieter de Key house—for a mere ten thousand euros. Cheap at twice the price.
If a terrorist alarm went off inside the courthouse building, Basha knew where the judge’s bodyguards would take her. His people would be waiting for them. Also, a couple of Muslim immigrants with suicide vests. The judge would be dead, and the Muslims would get the blame.
Basha gathered his strike team inside the flying saucer house of Miloš Aleksić. They had taken over a recreation room carved into the bedrock of the North Sea cliff, moving aside an entertainment center and pool table, to make room for the bivouac. The kitchen, one floor up, had been churning out hot meals for more than a week as the team of nine noncommissioned soldiers and three officers waited for their moment to strike.
Basha gathered everyone at 11:00 a.m. on their second Tuesday in the house. He was accompanied by a captain and a lieutenant—the last officers of his formerly elite squad.
Marija and Miloš Aleksić had made themselves scarce.
“Listen up!” Basha began as the men fell into standing parade rest. Basha nodded to his lieutenant to begin.
The man stepped forward. “At oh eight hundred hours today, I walked into the first-floor dining hall of the court and input a code into the ten-key pad. Within seconds, fire alarms went off.”
A soldier raised his hand. Basha nodded to him. “The other times it didn’t work, sir. What was different this time?”
The captain said, “Sodium thiopental. Under torture, the prisoner gave us false codes. When we drugged him up, he gave us the real one.”
The lieutenant resumed the narrative. “I triggered the fire alarm then sat down and waited to see if I’d get arrested. I guess you know the answer to that. There are no cameras in the Fireplace Room, so the English bastard told us the truth about that, at least. Which means we now control the security override system.”
The men grinned.
“At oh seven hundred hours tomorrow, Judge Betancourt is scheduled to arrive at the court. Our surveillance shows she’s never, ever late. Captain?”
The senior officer nodded. “The judge’s code name for this operation is Deborah. At oh seven twenty tomorrow, the lieutenant will again access the security override. He will input the code for a terrorist attack, Level One. Now, everyone? Understand: the code that the lieutenant inputs will show that terrorists are inside the building. And the code is specific to Deborah. She’s the target, and she’s the one they’ll evacuate. Leading the evac will be this man.”
They passed around photos of Michel Renard, Betancourt’s head of security.
“His code name is Atlas,” the captain said. “We will be in the evac site, the tailor’s house behind the court complex. I’ll lead First Team. We’ll include the Iraqi shits we’re having sent up from Italy. We’ll put them in suicide vests and make sure they die on the scene. We’ll be able to point to ISIS having planned this entire thing. Second Team will wait outside with the transport. After we make our kills, we will head to the Alpha rendezvous site.”
The lieutenant pointed to a map thumbtacked to the wall of the rec room.
“We’ll be monitoring all police and military bands. If Rendezvous Alpha is compromised, we’ll meet at the Beta or Gamma sites.” The lieutenant tapped the wall map twice more.
“Questions?”
Someone raised a hand. “The prisoner …?”
Major Basha stepped forward. “Mr. Greyson is going to attempt to swim to America.”
The soldiers laughed.
Access to the North Sea made for a convenient way to dispose of bodies.
C67
The Netherlands
For Fiero’s plan to work, she was counting on both sexism and racism. And when had either of those ever let her down?
She used grease from the plumbing under the bathroom sink to smudge up her face. She rolled her jeans up to above her calves and borrowed a long, demure skirt form the Iraqi girl—who, by now, had contacted her aunt in Rome and would be on a bus, well on her way to safety. Fiero also borrowed a large and shapeless sweater and the girl’s extra hijab.
They had the same height but didn’t look particularly alike. Fiero was twelve years older than the girl, but the girl had been painfully shy and tended to hunch, so as not to draw attention. Fiero was counting on the Kosovar soldiers being sexist enough, and bigoted enough, that they hadn’t ever looked at the girl all that closely.
When the refugees were paraded at gunpoint into the back of a Ragusa Logistics truck, her guess had proven correct. The guards also seemed to rotate out; these likely weren’t the same ones who’d brought the refugees to Italy in the first place.
The truck rolled north over the Alps,
through Austria and Germany, then into the Netherlands. In the back, planks had been added above the wheel-well mounds to create two facing benches. Two of the boys sat on the left-hand side of the truck; one rode on the right next to Fiero, but kept a good and proper distance between them. Fiero studied the interior carefully. Tie-down rings studded the interior walls, including the front-facing wall with the narrow, horizontal window separating the cargo bay from the cab.
The drivers stopped occasionally for fast food and tossed the greasy bags and soft drinks into the rear of the truck without comment. Fiero kept her head low each time.
The boys turned to her several times during the trip and asked her what was going to happen to them next.
Fiero’s answers had been more or less the same each time.
“If there’s trouble, flee. And if there’s no trouble—still flee. I’ll take care of the rest.”
C68
The Hague
Michel Renard, head of the judge’s security detail, used St. Nicholas’ voice-over-internet site to call Finnigan, who was making himself pasta with lemon and olive oil in the cottage by the sea.
“A man in a suit walked into the Fireplace Room at oh eight hundred hours and got a cup of coffee,” Renard said. “We had hidden cameras placed around the room. When he thought he wouldn’t be observed, he keyed in a code on the wall pad.”
Finnigan was using the speaker mode on the tablet computer, set up next to the stove. The call had been obscured by a vast lace of intercontinental connections and was untraceable.
“Shan’s code?” he asked.
“Almost. No longer in reverse order, but still only eight digits long.”
Unbelievable. Whatever they were doing to Shan Greyson, they’d been doing it for more than a week. And he was still feeding them false information.
Renard seemed duly impressed as well. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Greyson is really something. I, ah, never thought much of the fellow. I was wrong.”