Gavin’s voice displayed his confusion. “Right. What do you think that means?”
Jack thought quickly, knowing time was in short supply. He’d listened to Salvatore get the message about coming to the Sofitel. He didn’t seem to know where the place was. It made no sense that he was already renting a room there, in addition to the one in the Stanhope.
Jack looked up suddenly. The hotel was dead ahead.
He said, “It means Salvatore is being set up. Someone called him there so he’d be at that location. A location they’ve tied him to by taking a room in his name.”
“But who?” asked Chavez from behind the wheel.
Caruso’s head spun around and he looked at Jack. “The bomb at the LNG facility in Lithuania.”
“What about it?”
“The body that washed up, the female diver. The Lithuanians thought she was just a patsy. Set up by the Russians, brought to the scene thinking she was part of some sort of protest and then killed. Just to throw off the scent that it was an FSB op all along.”
Jack didn’t know much about the bombing in Klaipėda. He hadn’t been following it closely at all. As far as he knew, he was involved in an entirely different type of operation. “Are you suggesting someone is bringing Salvatore here to use him to take the fall for another attack?”
“We know that the Russians have used him before.”
Jack looked down at his laptop and typed in “EU Brussels conferences” and the current date.
A quick glance showed him more than two dozen things going on in Brussels, most of them right here in the European Quarter in the various meeting spaces around the EU buildings. He scrolled down slowly, then his eyes locked on one event. He said, “The European Oil and Gas Conference kicked off this morning. It says it’s an annual meeting with three hundred attendees, men and women at the pinnacle of the European oil and gas industry, as well as many government ministers from all over the continent.”
Caruso asked, “Where is it?”
Jack typed the name of the conference center in Google Maps. While he looked it up Chavez pulled into a parking place on the Place Jourdan, right in front of the Sofitel.
Jack looked up from his computer. “The conference center is next door to the Sofitel. Right around the corner from us right now. He held his phone back to his ear. “Gavin, give me the real-time feed for the fifth floor of the hotel.”
Nothing happened on Jack’s laptop. “Gavin?”
Over the line he said, “It’s not coming up. Someone else has hacked the feed, maybe? No, that’s not it… The entire camera system in the hotel is turned off. It had to have been physically switched off from inside the hotel. Guys, I don’t know what’s going on, but be careful in there.”
All three Americans then piled out of the Audi, unsure of what they would find on the fifth floor of the hotel in front of them, only certain now that Salvatore was not here to take pictures of celebrities.
73
Salvatore sat on the edge of the sofa in the middle of the suite, confusion on his face. He had no idea what was going on, only the suspicion that he had been tricked somehow, and now he was in a great deal of trouble.
Three minutes ago he’d been standing in the hallway when the door to the suite opened and an attractive brunette came out wearing a blue blazer and blue skirt. She smiled at him and took him by the hand.
He was confused, but pleasantly so, because he thought he knew her from somewhere, and she seemed so happy.
She led him back into the living room of a big suite with an explanation about working with the same Russian handler who contacted Salvatore, and the promise that what they were doing here in Brussels would be a great step forward for the environment.
The environment?
She said she knew about the work he had done in the past. The protests, the arrests. Surely he wanted to do more.
Salvatore nodded distractedly, more interested in getting paid than in helping the environment. And then he looked over the large suite. The furniture had been moved around; a table and a chair had been placed close to the wall by the bedroom door on his right, in front of a white flag pinned on the wall. On the flag, planet Earth was represented by a globe-shaped maze of twisted pipelines, and an oil well protruded from the top. A red drop of blood dripped from the Earth at the bottom of the flag, just over the words Le Mouvement pour la Terre.
Salvatore blinked in surprise when the others entered the living room of the suite from the bedroom next to the flag. The men wore dark suits with ties, and the women wore conservative business attire. They were all young, not one of them appeared to be older than thirty-five, but other than that he saw nothing similar about them. One of the women was black, one Asian. Of the six armed men in the room, most wore short beards; a few were clean-shaven. A couple of the women, Salvatore couldn’t help noticing, were very attractive.
He counted ten here in the room with him.
He didn’t need to see the guns stacked against the wall by the bedrooms to know what was going on, but he did see them. There were ten rifles of some sort. Salvatore didn’t know guns, but it didn’t matter, because the flag told him something about what was going on. That flag on the wall filled in the missing pieces of this puzzle.
He was certain he’d seen this group before now. On television.
The explosion of the liquefied natural gas facility in Lithuania, the event that set off the events of the war that had just begun a two days’ drive from where he now sat, had been conducted by this very group of men and women. The Spanish girl who’d collected him from the hall had been the masked woman reading the statement taking responsibility for the attack. He recognized her voice easily. Salvatore wasn’t that dialed in to international news, but this story had been impossible to miss.
Now, while the others stood silently, the Spanish girl sat next to him and told him they had a mission, he had been chosen by the “Russian benefactor” to join them, and they would reveal it as soon as they recorded a video press release.
But the truth was, Salvatore didn’t need them to report anything. He knew their mission, perhaps better than they did.
Salvatore’s Russian contact had been using him all week to photograph the facility at the Albert Borschette Congress Center, to use his press credentials to get into other conferences and record the security, the placement of cameras, even the thickness of the walls and the makeup of the ceiling tiles.
He’d known all week the Russians were planning something with the Borschette Center, but he’d thought they were just going to bug it or install cameras of their own for the upcoming European Oil and Gas Conference.
Now he realized the men and women who blew up the LNG facility were a part of all this, and he knew they were in the hotel directly adjacent to the conference center. And he understood without a doubt what was happening. There was going to be a terrorist attack, right here, right now, and he would be complicit in it all.
He leapt off the couch, surprising some of the men and women around him, but not all. Others reached out for him, grabbed at his arms, and tried to pull him back to the couch. But Salvatore’s sudden burst of adrenaline allowed him to pull away, knocking two of the women to the floor.
He bolted for the door, flung it open, and pulled away from more hands grasping from behind.
He stumbled halfway out of the room before he saw the large man standing in the hall in front of him, with a pistol pointed directly at his face.
The Italian raised his hands, and the men and women behind him tackled him and pulled him back into the hotel room.
His panic took hold of him completely now. His arms and legs flailed, he tried to scream, but a hand covered his mouth.