“Something tells me you might be right that those fake Legionnaires weren’t SR,” said Kincaid. “But that was a slick operation to launch on such short notice. It was almost as if someone expected us to snatch Iboga from SR.”
“Set up by someone who didn’t want him to stand trial in The Hague,” Janson agreed. “Who could include the Nigerian Directorate of Military Intelligence, the mysterious GRA, and American Synergy Corporation.”
“Maybe you should ask your friend Doug.”
“Not quite yet.”
Janson used his sat phone to call CatsPaw Research.“GRA? What have you found?”
“Nothing. No such company exists on the record.”
“Are they possibly a subsidiary of American Synergy Corp.?”
“That was one of my thoughts. I found no connection to ASC.”
Janson thought hard. “Are they possibly a government front? A CIA front or …” He let the thought lie between their telephones and the researcher finished it for him, “Cons Ops?”
“Well?”
“Could be. But there is no record. No paper trail. And certainly no digital trail.”
“The only piece of paper I know of was a business card.”
“What did it look like?”
“I didn’t see it. I was told about it. How would you like a trip to London?”
“Could I fly Business Class?”
“You can fly Business Class. Look up a fellow named Pedro Menezes. He’s a former oil minister of Isle de Foree. He says he took money from GRA.”
Kincaid reached across and tapped his arm. “The Amber Dawn. Didn’t somebody say it was owned by the Dutch?”
Janson said into the phone, “Look into a Dutch connection. Ask Mr. Menezes about Dutch independents.”
They rang off.
Kincaid reached over and tapped again. Urgently. “Paul!”
“What?”
“Where are his cigarettes?”
“Whose?”
“Iboga’s cigarettes. He had a lighter, but no cigarettes. No cigars.”
“Maybe he smoked the drug.”
“No, you eat ibogaine. You don’t smoke it.”
They looked at each other in astonished disbelief. What had they both missed? “Where’s his stuff?”
“My backpack.”
Janson scrambled for her backpack and found the mesh bag inside that contained the items she had taken from Iboga. He plucked out the Zippo cigarette lighter and brought it to the first officer’s chair. It looked like a lighter. The brand “Zippo” was stamped on the bottom of the case, with a flame dotting the letter i. He opened it. Inside, it looked like a lighter, with a rough steel wheel and a blackened wick. He held it to his nose. It smelled of lighter fluid. He flicked the wheel. To Janson’s disappointment, a spark flew from the flint and the wick ignited. He blew out the flame, pulled the mechanism out of the case, and turned it over. There was the cotton wool that absorbed the fluid with a screw head. He unscrewed it. Out fell a normal flint. He opened his pocketknife to an awl blade, snagged the cotton wool, and pulled it out. He looked inside the case. The interior was empty. He squeezed the cotton wool.
“Aha.”
He spread it on Ed’s keyboard and peeled the fibers off something hard inside and held it up for Kincaid to see. “What is this, a key? It looks like a key to a safe.”
Kincaid gave him a pitying look she reserved for covert operators who began their careers in the twentieth century. “Janson, it’s not a key. It’s a flash drive that looks like a key. You hang it on your key chain.”
Janson stuck the flash drive inside the nearest USB port and looked at Ed’s screen. “Numbers. Routing numbers. A list of them.” He called CatsPaw’s forensic accountant on his Iridium. “Try these,” he said, and read them off.
She called back in minutes. “Four banks in Zagreb.”
“Can you get into them?”
“Whose rules do you want to play by?”
“Corrupt dictator rules.”
“We can try to get in with the help of a certain third party to whom we’ve already hinted that a million-euro gratuity might be authorized.”
“Consider it authorized,” said Janson.
* * *
AS THEY APPROACHED the Strait of Gibraltar at an altitude of forty-two thousand feet, Janson switched off the Embraer’s radar so as not to broadcast their presence, leaving them dependent entirely on what their own eyeballs could perceive beyond the Embraer’s blind spots astern. He was searching the sky when suddenly a Royal Moroccan Air Force Mirage F1 rocketed up from Casablanca Air Base Number 4.
It would have nailed them for sure if Janson hadn’t glimpsed an early flash of sun on its swept wings. His hand had been poised over the flare switch since they drew within two hundred miles of Gibraltar, and he pressed it instantly. The chaff and flare nacelle departed the Embraer with a sharp bang. Moments after it ejected, its internal rocket fired and it flew astern, putting miles between it and the Embraer before it exploded open like a flower, scattering reflective chaff and burning hot points designed to show up on the Mirage’s acquisition suite as myriad targets.
“Up or down?” asked Kincaid.
Janson debating diving to the deck again, versus the attention that maneuver would draw before they made it under the radar. “Up. Fast.”
Kincaid fire-walled it west.
Perplexed and angry controllers queried them on the radio with swiftly increasing urgency. Janson ignored those who spoke fluent English and bullshitted the rest. Five minutes passed slowly. Had the Mirage given up? Or was it coming back for them? He cast his eyes in every direction he could see, praying that the immense blue sky would not be split by the silver dart of a warplane.
At last it looked like they had escaped notice. The Mirage had given up. Nor did additional interceptors appear in the windshield. Ahead and to either side all they could see was the blue North Atlantic Ocean. Eleven hundred miles to the southwest lay the Canary Islands, two and a half hours’ flying time.
Kincaid confirmed that the autopilot had the course, stood up, and stretched.
“Mike would have been proud of his pupil,” Janson told her.
“If they were SR, I don’t understand why they didn’t kill us. Iboga sure as hell wanted them to.”
“Maybe Iboga wasn’t calling their tune. That was as much a capture as a rescue.”
“You mean to take his dough? But they had him weeks before we took him. If they wanted his money they could have forced it out of him.”
Janson’s sat phone chimed the bell-like note that indicated Quintisha Upchurch was calling. “Yes, Quintisha.”
“Acting President Ferdinand Poe would like to speak with you, urgently.”
Janson called Poe. The old man answered in a voice high-pitched and anxious. “Do you have Iboga?” he shouted.
“I did, Mr. Acting President. I’m afraid I lost him. I’m working at getting him back.”
“I told you he would escape.”
“Yes, I know and—”
“You don’t understand. They killed Mario Margarido.”
“Who killed him?”
“Who knows,” Poe said, adding bitterly, “He supposedly drowned in his swimming pool.”
“Where is Chief of Security da Costa?”
“I don’t know.”
“I will be there in thirteen hours.”
“Iboga is coming back. I know it.”
“I will be there ahead of him. I guarantee it.”
THIRTY-NINE
Janson telephoned Doug Case. “Anything new underground?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m forty thousand feet aboveground on a company jet drinking champagne and thirty-year-old Bordeaux and eating beef Wellington.”
“You’ll miss that luxury in your new government job.”
“It was great the first hour; now all the guys and the too-few gals are text messaging their kids at home. Folks don’t know how to party anymore.”
“Where are you headed?”