The slap on the roof sounded friendly enough as Gallen started the Dodge. Easing out of the customs enclosure, onto Canadian territory, Gallen could sense Winter craning his neck.
‘Don’t attract attention, Kenny.’
‘Sorry, boss. Can’t keep my eyes off that ass.’
Handing Winter his passport, Gallen swung the Dodge onto Highway 4 for Lethbridge and hit the gas. ‘Keep your eyes on that instead.’
Opening the passport, Winter pulled out the scrap of paper that Officer Langtry had placed there.
‘What does it say?’
‘Says, US intelligence about to be notified that Gerard Gallen just crossed the border.’
‘Shit,’ said Gallen.
‘Least she gave us a heads-up,’ said Winter, turning in his seat and looking behind. ‘Nice work on the meat auctions.’
Gallen lit a smoke and inhaled deeply as he keyed his Nokia and looked at the list of call centres he could use for his long-distance card. He rang the Miami one, then input his PIN and the number he wanted to call in Jakarta.
The call went to voicemail and he hung up before the beep sounded.
He was sinking off the grid, just like he’d been trained. The fear he’d been feeling at the border crossing was evaporating into a cold, hard sense of what he had to do.
He was back in the game, and he was liking it.
CHAPTER 40
Pulling into a shopping centre on the north side of the Crowsnest Highway in Lethbridge, they found a parking spot and changed their US dollars at a bank that was just opening. They walked to a line of used-car lots on the south side of the highway where Gallen found what he was looking for: an eight-year-old Chev Impala for $2499, before taxes. After he’d changed the registration with his Roland Smith driver’s licence, they took the closest on-ramp and gunned the car north for Calgary.
Gallen grabbed his phone as he found a comfortable speed between the armada of trucks that were heading for Calgary and on to Edmonton. This time he dialled the call centre in Boston then, after inputting his PIN, the Jakarta number.
‘Pete,’ he said as the American voice answered. ‘Gerry.’
‘Hey, Gerry,’ said the intel man. ‘You in Boston now?’
‘Alberta’s too cold, even in spring,’ said Gallen.
‘Maybe getting even colder when you lose a billionaire, hey, Gerry?’
‘It wasn’t a great first week.’
‘I haven’t spoken to Piers yet, but he’s in town next week.’
‘Thanks, buddy,’ said Gallen. ‘But it’s not that.’
‘What you need?’
‘You must know a good hacker, someone who can access a file on a corporate server?’
Morton sighed. ‘Shit, Gerry. You had to do this on the open air? You clean?’
‘I’m clean, Pete,’ said Gallen as he overtook a line of semis. ‘Are you?’
‘Don’t get smart,’ said the ex-DIA man. ‘Maybe you don’t need a hacker. What are you looking for?’
‘You remember my employer?’
‘Yep.’
‘I need a residential address on two names. Can do?’
‘Spell them,’ said Morton. The NSA’s voice-recognition software scanned for names, numbers and words. It was less efficient with strings of letters.
‘Why don’t I just tell you their positions?’ said Gallen as he slipped back into the long line of trucks.
‘Try me.’
Gallen listed the acting chief executive and the vice-president, security and after thirty seconds of tapping and clicking, Morton came back on the line.
‘Can’t break in. I’ll ask my guy. Where do I send the results?’
‘I’ll call in an hour.’
Morton laughed, a cackling smoker’s laugh.
‘What’s funny?’
‘You, buddy,’ Morton said. ‘You’re obviously dodging our friends in DC and, just so you know, it suits me that I think you’re in Boston. Clear?’
‘Crystal,’ said Gallen. ‘I’ll call in an hour.’
The Elf cafe was perfect for Gallen’s needs: the internet bunker was tucked away in Calgary’s Chinese-Korean sector, on the corner of 17th and 34th streets. The place had no coffee, no trendies and no one wanting to be friendly.
Setting up a Gmail account under the name ‘Zamboanga1103’, Gallen went into settings and set up email forwarding. Opening another window, he went to a website that collected spam databases and cut and pasted two thousand email addresses into the forwarding rules of his Zamboanga1103 account. Scrolling down the addresses he stopped about halfway and inserted his Igor Olafnowsky email address and then shut down the computer.
Opening his Igor Olafnowsky Gmail account, Gallen looked around and saw Winter smoking on the street outside the window. Selecting the Fort Worth number on his long-distance card, Gallen got Morton on the second ring.
‘I’ve got ‘em,’ said Morton. ‘What have you got for me?’
‘An IOU you can cash in anytime, so long as it doesn’t endanger my life.’
‘I’ll hold you to it,’ said Morton. ‘You want this on the air?’
‘Gmail,’ said Gallen, looking around at the Asian faces in the bare room. ‘The city we met in plus the month and year. Thirteen characters.’
‘Gotcha, buddy,’ said Morton. ‘On its way now. Don’t be a stranger.’
The line went dead and Gallen hunched over the monitor as youngsters milled. Hitting the refresh button on the Gmail program, he waited for a shade over a minute. The email arrived and he scribbled the addresses on a piece of paper as fast as he could.
Turning off the server stack and the monitor too, Gallen paid with a Canadian ten-dollar note and left before the owner could complain.
Winter drove for two blocks to a drive-through McDonald’s before heading down to a river park where they decamped and ate at a picnic table in the weak sun.
‘So, Aaron’s got a surname and he hasn’t listed his Calgary address?’ said Winter, burger spilling from his mouth as he looked down at Gallen’s scrap of paper. ‘Think they put him up at the same hotel where we stayed?’
‘Not a bad bet.’
Finishing their lunch, they made a plan. They’d book into the Sheraton: Gallen would case Florita’s house; Winter would source firearms and try to find Aaron.
‘What are we looking for?’ said Winter, sipping on Sprite.
‘I want to know who Florita and Aaron are talking to and where they’re going,’ said Gallen.
‘I know you keep saying that they’ve done nothing wrong, that we’re just doing recon,’ said Winter, slightly exasperated, ‘but shit, Gerry, you must have some suspicions.’
Looking at two scullers powering down the river in the lee of the skyscrapers, Gallen wiped the grease of the French fries off his fingers before opening his new pack of smokes.
‘Suspicion might be the wrong word,’ he said, lighting up. ‘Let’s just say that a week ago I was blown out of the sky, and only two people seem to have gained from the experience.’
Winter took a smoke. ‘I hadn’t seen it that way.’
‘I lost Durville to a bomb, but they want me back? With a promotion?’
‘Not like any army I ever fought in.’
‘No,’ said Gallen, turning for the car. ‘So let’s do this the military way.’
‘Remind me.’
‘We start at the beginning,’ said Gallen. ‘By understanding how much we don’t know.’
CHAPTER 41
The news backgrounder on CNN showed a group of European and American activists from an organisation called ArcticWatch parading a few bedraggled Inuit in front of a press conference in Paris. A woman with a strong French accent said something about global warming and decimation of hunting grounds for the Inuit and tied it all up with a bromide about corporate greed, Big Oil and the global mining oligopoly.