“And tonight’s the night?”
“Tonight’s the night, Mike.”
“Mind me asking��”
“You’ve had your questions. Listen up. I need your help. You know everybody in Baghdad and everybody in Beirut, and everybody in Dubai. And more people than you should know in Kabul.”
“I own a nightclub. I know my patrons.”
Janson showed his teeth. “Don’t waste my time, Mike. I know who you are and what you’ve done.”
“The Lamborghini was years ago. I was a kid.”
“The Lamborghini was the beginning. You want to hear a story about Tehran? No? How about Kandahar. You’re still a U.S. citizen. They’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
“I didn’t do anything in Kandahar anybody else didn’t do.”
“Mike, I don’t care. I’m not judge and jury. But I want what I want. And I’m not leaving Baghdad until you find for me a freelance outfit, possibly French, that can field a Harrier jump jet.”
NINETEEN
Two days later, Janson texted Jessica Kincaid a heads-up.
Not sar. SR. Securité Referral. Bad-guy rescue squad. Watch self. SR lethal.
He left Baghdad on an Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna.
A name was golden. A huge step forward. Securité Referral was an outfit that might or might not exist. It might or might not be French. If it did exist, it apparently served a unique clientele, dictators about to be toppled. Michel Sarkis claimed that he had no idea nor the means to find out who they were or where they were or how they ran their business, and Janson believed him.
Needless to say, Securité Referral did not maintain a Web site for dictators. Janson guessed they solicited their business by contacting their clients directly before they were needed. Convincing an autocrat he was about to be overthrown was tricky stuff, as such men would react violently to intimations of failure. But the smart ones who had planned ahead would be amenable to hearing out a rescue scheme. Such men would have sent fortunes abroad for just such an event, and such men would be very lucrative clients. No one ever went broke presiding over the collapse of an empire.
With a name to trace, Janson was ready to wheel out the big guns.
Striding through the new Skylink Terminal corridors to connect with another Austrian Airlines flight to Tel Aviv, he got an urgent text from Jessica. It was the first he had heard from her since she had reported in detail on their secure sat line her encounter with the “diver” and the weird conclusion that they were not the only ones the doctor was running from.
Doc mayb Cape Town. Can u intro SA security?
Janson sat-phoned Trevor Suzman, deputy national commissioner of the South African Police Service, to arrange a helpful welcome.
“And what do I get in return for this generosity?” Suzman asked.
“Interesting company.”
He texted the contact number Suzman gave him back to Jessica.
* * *
AT BEN GURION Airport, a brusque Israeli immigration officer with the face of a teenager and the close-cropped hair of recent military service scrutinized Janson’s Canadian passport. He waited calmly, maintaining a neutral expression. Security-services executive Adam Kurzweil was in their computers from previous visits. Unless there had been a monumental screwup with Kurzweil’s renewed passport, he would be welcomed as a free-spending outfitter of corporate security departments and private militias who did business with Israel’s enormous arms industry.
The officer asked to see the stub of his boarding pass.
Janson turned it over.
The officer typed on his keyboard, stared at his monitor, and abruptly wandered away, carrying Janson’s passport and boarding pass. This was fairly typical behavior on the part of officials at Ben Gurion Airport, and he could expect to be left standing awhile and/or even be grilled in an interview room about his background and his contacts in Israel.
It would turn into a problem, however, in the duplication lab that the Mossad, the Israel espionage service, maintained in the bowels of the airport. The Mossad was equipped not only to inspect the veracity of a document but also to clone it. The joke, a bad joke, would be an Israeli operator penetrating another nation under the cover of a forgery of Janson’s forged passport. Worse, no joke at all, would be the Mossad technicians discovering flaws in the document in the course of copying it.
The security cameras sprinkled in the ceiling were trained on the lines of the travelers awaiting entry and on each and every immigration desk. Janson let an expression of irritation cloud his face. He looked around impatiently and after a while longer began drumming his fingers on the desk, the picture of a busy man who, while he understood the need for security, was getting fed up. A full ten minutes passed. The lines behind him grew longer with this desk out of commission. Finally, the official returned with a superior, a woman about thirty who ordered Janson to follow her to an interview room. His passport was not in sight.
She sat behind a computer on a plain desk. He could not see the monitor, nor was there a chair for him. She typed and stared at the monitor. Janson studied her face: nice ears and nose, high tanned forehead, hair scrunched back tightly, mouth hard, eyes bleak. Central Casting, he thought, send me an unpleasant functionary.
“It’s been a while since you visited Israel, Mr. Kurzweil,” she said, addressing the monitor.
Janson said, “I’d have returned sooner, but my back surgeon ordered me to lift nothing heavier than a wineglass and it took considerable postoperative therapy before I could carry my bag.” It was hanging from his shoulder and had been searched repeatedly.
“And that is your only bag?” She looked offended by Kurzweil’s expensive lightweight parachute fabric trimmed with calfskin.
“I travel only with carry-on,” Janson answered, adding with a smile, “It gives the baggage security people less to worry about.”
The smile had no effect. “And what is your business on this visit?”
“Shopping.”
“For what?”
“Before I answer that, I wish to respectfully inform you that the government of Canada has followed the lead of the British Foreign Office and advised its citizens not to surrender travel documents to Israeli airport officials unless it is absolutely necessary.”
“It is absolutely necessary,” she shot back. “I repeat: What is your business on this visit?”
Janson spoke quietly. No one won a shouting match with an Israeli. That went triple for officials at Ben Gurion Airport. Nonetheless, he put an edge in his voice. “I do not want to hear of a passport identical to mine being carried by a member of a hit squad who resembles my photograph gunning for a Hamas leader.”
“If you are referring to an incident in Dubai distorted by the media, you are laboring under a common misconception.”
Israeli espionage could be very, very good or unbelievably clumsy. Most of the time the Mossad enjoyed quiet successes, but now and then it perpetrated clownish excesses, like sending twenty operators to murder one terrorist while allowing themselves to be caught for YouTube on security camera videos.
“Please return my passport.”
To Janson’s relief, the interviewer slid it out from under her keyboard and placed it on the desk in front of her. At least they weren’t cloning it while she stalled him. But she wasn’t exactly handing it back. She said, “What are you shopping for?”
“Submachine guns, light machine guns, and pistols.”
“For your government?”
“For my clients.”
“Who are?”
Tradecraft said, Trust your legend. As Paul Janson he’d be smooth. Adam Kurzweil was not smooth. Janson was unflappable. Kurzweil was a prickly son of a bitch. He reversed a heart-slowing exercise to speed it up. His face grew red.
“You’re out of line, lady, and you know it. You know who I am. You know I’ve come here before to conduct business. You’re jerking my chain for the hell of it.”
“Mr. Kurzweil, in the course of executing my responsibilities I can make your life considerably more unpleasant than a ‘jerked chain.’ ”