“Does it matter if they’re on the run?”
“They have to be able to go back to Corsica.”
“That eliminates most of them.” Freddy pondered a moment. “I’ll find a couple.”
“There’s a chance Iboga’s hiding up in Capo Corso. See what you can find out.”
* * *
“ARE YOU AWARE that you are bleeding?” asked the civilian fuckhead in the South African Airways seat next to Hadrian Van Pelt.
Beads of blood were popping from the stitches in his forearm. Ninety red dots, one for each stitch, had spread until they joined their neighbors, soaking the bandage and oozing through his shirtsleeve. He should have worn red. Or he shouldn’t keep squeezing a hard rubber ball, rhythmically as a heartbeat. But he was obsessed by a weird fear that the muscles in his right arm would shrink like beef biltong if he didn’t work them. That’s what the bitch had done to him. It was crazy how bad it was bugging him. He had been wounded, before. No big deal. It went with the business. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that she had exposed the flesh of his arm like a slab of dried meat.
“I say, sir. Are you aware you’re bleeding?”
“Yes, I am aware I am bleeding,” he answered in measured tones so the fuckhead didn’t summon the flight attendants, who might signal the air security agent pretending to be a businessman in the back row of the Business Class cabin. “I was in an automobile accident.”
The fuckhead reached for the call button. “Shall I summon help?”
“No, thank you,” Van Pelt said, adding a cool smile to shut the fuckhead up. “It’s not as bad as it looks. My doctor changed the dressing just before I boarded the plane.”
He picked up the handset in his armrest and checked yet again for text messages. At last!
Arrangements complete. We’ll have her waiting for you in Sydney.
Awesome. Van Pelt’s hard mouth parted in an anticipatory smile. But a second text message was anything but excellent. The American hired by Ferdinand Poe to hunt Iboga was changing planes in Bangkok, from a commercial flight to a faster aircraft provided by the Royal Thai Air Force.
Van Pelt placed an urgent voice call to the SR camaradewho was functioning as facilitator on the Isle de Foree project. The animateur de groupe, as the Frenchies put it, pretended to be an NGO administrator directing a rice shipment to starving Pakistanis while his phone swept for eavesdroppers. When it finished, he said, “Clear.”
Van Pelt said, “Charter me the fastest jet in Perth.… Why? Because if you don’t, he’s going to get to Sydney ahead of me.”
TWENTY-TWO
Jessica Kincaid received no messages from Paul Janson and no replies to her calls and texts when she changed planes at Johannesburg. She left more messages, then popped an Ambien and slept for eight excellent hours over the Indian Ocean. When she awoke, she flicked her phone on for a moment to surreptitiously check messages and still found none. Strange. She ran a credit card through the airliner’s handset to text Janson.
She had her finger on the button and was one millisecond from pressing Send when she remembered that in Spain the diver had somehow broken into her locked Audi without setting off the alarm. “Hadrian Van Pelt” or “Brud Vealon” likely had access to hot electronics. She put down the airline phone. Then she picked up her Iridium 9555 G and eyed it speculatively.
Assume the worst.
Her sat phone had been hacked.
At the moment, it didn’t matter how.
Assume the worst, again. If her phone was hacked, then when she had called Paul’s, whatever virus or bug the hacker put in hers had migrated into Janson’s. The messages she left for Janson could have been captured by Securité Referral. Maybe SR couldn’t crack the encryption. Maybe they could.
Using the Qantas handset, Kincaid dialed a distress number she knew by heart. Back when she had worked for Consular Operations, if she suspected that her phone or laptop had been tapped or hacked the procedure was to telephone a secure subbasement in the State Department’s Truman Building where high-tech guys with tool belts would try to help. When you were working with Janson, the procedure was similar, though who picked up the phone or where they were was anyone’s guess.
CatsPaw, the Phoenix Foundation, and the eponymous Janson Associates were more virtual than physical. Brick-and-mortar headquarters were expensive, distracting, and vulnerable. Employees in them were identifiable and exposed to attack at work, on their way to work, and in their own homes. Rather than maintain—and have to defend—a fortress, Janson used the Internet and the Web to link independent contractors into a organization that had no physical existence.
Kincaid had never met the expert she was telephoning and knew him only by his number. What distinguished him from his State Department counterpart was his independence. It was unlikely he wore a security badge—government or private—and was jockeying for a closer parking space in a vast employee lot. As the phone rang, she pictured a skinny long-haired guy in a windowless room humming with computer cooling fans and illuminated by walls of backlit monitors. He might work alone or he might work with other geeks who looked like him. He could be in a suburban tech park in Silicon Valley or Beverly, Massachusetts, or the Czech Republic.
* * *
JERRY’S SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE, a bar in a New Jersey strip mall off Route 17, was a fifteen-minute drive from the expensive bedroom communities of Saddle River, Ho-Ho-Kus, and Wyckoff. Of the twelve patrons watching football reruns and horse races on the flat-screens midafternoon on a weekday, four were unemployed, three were retired, and five were engaged in the business of suburban housebreaking—three as thieves, one as a fence of stolen jewelry, and the fifth as a steerer who had an uncannily unerring ability to tell the thieves whose house was unoccupied.
The housebreakers knew him as Morton, an unassuming white guy with the beginnings of a potbelly, a pasty–always-indoors complexion, a very expensive leather jacket, and a gray porkpie hat. He was not often at Jerry’s, showing up once or twice a month, but his information was good as gold. He sat at the corner of the bar, where he could see the room, smiling faintly.
Morton was smiling because he liked what he was hearing through his iPod buds, which connected to a mini-dish amplifier. At the far end of the bar a thief he had dealt with before was putting a new dude hip to Morton’s talents.
“If Morton tells you the home owner has gone to St. Barts and the housekeeper takes Monday off, then the guy’s in St. Barts and the housekeeper ain’t there on Monday.”
“How does he know?”
“Fuck knows. But he knows.”
“Maybe he’s psychic.”
“Whatever, he’s good at it. Check him out.”
The new dude walked down to Morton’s end of the bar. Morton pretended to turn off his iPod. “Hey, buddy. What’s up?”
“I hear sometimes you have information.”
“Sometimes,” said Morton, who had already satisfied himself that the thief wasn’t a cop by eavesdropping on a cell phone conversation the guy had earlier with his wife about picking up their kid from soccer practice.
“I hear it’s good.”
“It’s gold,” said Morton. “Gold is expensive. Twenty-five percent.”
“Can you give me an idea where you get it?”
Morton looked at him. Did this jerk really think he was going to explain that geotags embedded in the smart phones of rich fools who posted photos on Twitter gave away home addresses and vacation locations, not to mention a picture gallery of unattended swag worth stealing? Or did he think that Morton was going to confess that he, the best computer hacker in the world, was a “white-hat” do-gooder who protected corporations from criminal “black-hat” and “gray-hat” hackers—except when sometimes he came down to Jerry’s Sportsman’s Paradise to pick up a couple of extra bucks, stick it to some rich bastards, and get off on hanging with lowlifes good geeks weren’t supposed to know?
“No,” said Morton. “I cannot share such an idea with you.”