“You told me that in London. Corsica’s a powder keg. Separatists, Union Corse mafia, poor fishermen, and environmentalists. Not Securité Referral.”
“To be sure,” Ondine agreed. “Arson and vendetta are endemic in Corsica. Corsicans routinely take matters into their own hands.”
“You told me that in London, too. You also told me that you had never heard of SR. May I ask you again? Is Securité Referral a Corsican organization?”
“Non.”
“Then what is the connection? You’re baffling me, Monsieur Ondine.”
“Securité Referral thrives under such lawlessness.”
Janson and Kincaid exchanged smiles visible only to them. SR thrived among the lawless? So did CatsPaw.
“Continue, monsieur,” Janson said brusquely. “What do you want from me?”
“Work. The consulting business is slow.”
“Can you give me information that will help me fight Securité Referral?”
“Do accountants fight?” Ondine smiled.
“Don’t get cute,” said Kincaid.
Ondine looked at her sharply. Kincaid stared back.
The Frenchman dropped his gaze. “I cannot give you such information.”
“Can’t or won’t?” asked Janson.
“I cannot. I do not know it. But if I could, I would not. I am not inclined to suicide.”
“At least we agree that you know of them.”
“A little. Securité Referral is international, but it was conceived by French intelligence officers—servants of their country turned criminal—who learned their trade spying in Russia. Now it is everyone—Russians, Serbs, Croats, Africans, Chinese. That is all I can tell you.”
“There is something else you can do for me.”
“Name it.”
Janson nodded at the burned-out hotel. “Do you see the sign they hung from the roof?”
“Of course.”
“By midnight tonight, I want a secure meeting with the operators who hung that sign.”
“You’re not serious. The separatists are my enemies. As a policeman I hunted them.”
“You better believe he’s serious,” said Kincaid. “If you work for us, when you see a job that needs doing you do it. This meeting job needs doing. You’re the man. Set up the meeting.”
Ondine swallowed hard. “What may I offer them to come?”
“Money.”
“How much?”
“One million euros.”
Ondine gasped. “One million euros to come to a meeting?”
“No. One million if they do the job.”
“What job?”
“The job they’ll learn about at the meeting.”
“What is my cut?”
“Ten percent finder’s fee. After they do the job.”
“I will do my best.”
“Midnight,” said Janson.
“And when we leave this party,” said Kincaid, “tell those two cops moonlighting as waiters not to follow us.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The only problem with heroin was getting it. With a consistent supply it was a very fine drug. Snort it and nothing ever hurt, particularly when a man’s brain spun every day of his life like a turbine, always at full speed, consuming his mind and soul and spirit faster than Abrams battle tanks burned kerosene. Heroin put the brakes on for a moment, long enough to recharge and come out swinging. It helped not to have an addictive nature and it was vital to understand that only losers shot up with needles. Many in the veterans hospital spiraled down from lesser drugs into heroin. He had ascended.
It was night. Almost.
Doug Case had been talking nonstop on his sat phone since the sun was high in the sky. Seated in his wheelchair, staring out his office window at the sea of electric lights that the vast, powerful city of Houston spread from horizon to horizon, he felt neither pain nor anxiety but increasingly in charge of what had started out as a bad situation.
His phone rang. He answered, saying, “Did you get the plane?”
“C-160 Transall twin-engine turboprop.”
“What color?”
“Well, there’s a little problem with that. It’s camo, like you asked, but blue.”
“I told you camo green.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Camo green! I don’t care how you do it. Paint it or get another one. Camo green. Standing by tomorrow.”
Case stabbed END. He weighed the relaxing prospect of doing a line or two against the possibility of nodding off at a crucial moment. He decided not to. Drugs were not addictive. Losers were.
He endured ten full minutes of quiet and was sick of the lack of action when his phone finally rang again. He guessed who it was before he checked the screen and was right. The Voice. Clockwork, every five days. He doubted that the caller recognized his own pattern.
“Hello, Strange Voice,” Case answered. “How are you tonight? If it is night where you are.”
“You sound very chipper, Douglas. How are you?”
The caller’s voice was disguised. The sound emitted by his telephone was digitally morphed by a voice transformation system originally developed for psychological warfare and to fool voiceprint ID systems. Case recalled it from his early days at Cons Ops. Digitization, miniaturization, new understanding of articulatory position, and software advances from VTS1 to VTS14.8 had improved it mightily. It enabled the caller to change timbre, transpose pitch, add confusing vibrato and tremolo—even capture and synthesize signals to generate impersonations. The Voice could sound like a robot. He could sound like a little girl. He could sound like Jon Stewart or Hillary Clinton. Tonight he sounded like a cross between Stewart and WALL•E.
The Voice’s phone line was secure. It revealed nothing to Case about his identity or where he was calling from. Nor, Case presumed, did the caller necessarily know where he was, such was the anonymity of cells and sat phones. The difference was that if The Voice asked for Case’s location he would reveal it immediately. While Case would not dream of asking where the caller was.
Case presumed the caller was from within the American Synergy Corporation, high in management—one of the vipers, most likely—or on the board of directors, or the mysterious Buddha himself. Though he could be from outside the corporation, he had a very clear concept of what was going on inside it. Case had received his first call two years ago. “You were the most talented covert officer ever to serve your country,” The Voice had flattered him. “Serve me and be rewarded.”
Their relationship had already made Case the wealthiest man he knew and, he suspected, a man with a golden future if he stayed loyal, obedient, useful, and discreet.
“I amchipper, thank you, sir. What can I do for you?”
“I want a member of Ferdinand Poe’s circle replaced.”
“By whom?”
“First create the vacancy.”
“When?”
“Soon. Be prepared.”
“Who?”
The Voice named Ferdinand Poe’s chief of staff, Mario Margarido.
The steady Margarido was the glue that held Ferdinand Poe’s ramshackle new government together while it struggled to repair infrastructure and right the economy of the war-torn island. With Margarido suddenly gone, the acting president’s only strength left would be his spy turned security chief, Patrice da Costa, and his own formidable will. Case wondered if The Voice was planning a coup. To ask would be presumptuous. Better to remain loyal, useful, obedient, and discreet.
“Do you have any preference how Margarido is removed?”
“It would be best not to have him machine-gunned in public.”
Case recognized the studied sort of dry sense of humor calculated to flatter the knowledgeable listener on his sophistication and to pass on additional information without saying it aloud.
“Beyond that limitation, use your best judgement. The least suspicion the better, but a soupçon of doubt will keep others guessing.”
It sounded very much like a coup. “I’ll take care of it. As soon as you want it done.”
“I will give you word when the time comes. Will you farm it out to SR?”