"I had assassinated a general in Egypt who had your card. I asked around, and saw that your company had been involved in a disproportionate number of cases where Palestinian missions had failed. I deduced that you were both effective and free of informants."
"Informants?" Douglas asked.
"I had no idea what informants Fatah or the other Palestinian organizations might have in the Israeli Defense Force. We must have had at least a few, because we always seemed to know about Israeli troop movements. But I knew Colonel Douglas's outfit would be clean if it had been so uniformly successful.”
I inquired, “And what happened next?”
"Colonel Douglas's men set up an ambush in the tunnels for the Hezbollah unit, killing them to the last man. After that, we pieced together where the other chemical weapons would be coming in.
"Douglas's organization had excellent intelligence on Hezbollah because of his work for the Saudis, the Sunni kings who had been studying and infiltrating the Shia networks for decades. Between what they knew and what I knew, we pieced together where the weapons would be coming through. The chemical attacks were all successfully thwarted."
Douglas asked, “And Fatah figured out that you were involved?”
Taleb answered, "Oh, I imagine my commander suspected me when my assigned Hezbollah team failed to reach its target. The simultaneous destruction of so many tunnels had to mean an informer, and not too many people knew where all the tunnels were."
“And your fiancee?”
Taleb cleared his throat. "After every Hezbollah unit had been destroyed, I went back to Gaza City, to retrieve what was left of my family. I found my parents home burned out, my parents themselves…" Taleb's voice cracked, and he paused a moment before continuing. "My parents themselves were dead in the street in front of the house, a single bullet wound in the back of each head. I went next to my fiancee's home, an apartment above the bakery where she worked. She had also been shot in the street."
No one spoke as Taleb's lip twitched, his iron will the only thing maintaining his composure. Finally, he said, "I don't know how Fatah operatives didn't see me when I came back to my fiancee's apartment. Obviously, they would continue to watch the area to catch me. I can only assume that some old comrade let me slip through his fingers. Hezbollah put a substantial bounty on my head after that, which is why I never work in the Middle East anymore."
Jed said, "That's quite a story."
“Indeed.” With that, Taleb walked off to his room, leaving the rest of us to digest his story.
A few hours later, it was time to head out. Taleb showed no sign of the emotion that had come out earlier. He's a professional, I told myself. He's made it this far. I decided to focus on the immediate prospect of the operation.
Chapter 10
Taleb looked down at his phone as he strolled down Citong South Road in Quanzhou at dusk on a cool spring day. Ostensibly a new model softscreen from HTC, Taleb's phone appeared to be streaming a soccer game. Nothing out of the ordinary, especially since HTC, a Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer, was so manifestly successful that it was still the most popular brand in China.
This particular device differed slightly from the hundreds of thousands of superficially identical phones in Quanzhou. First, it had a military-grade, theoretically unbreakable quantum encryption system developed by Taiwanese computer companies. Unless someone got a hold of Taleb's phone or the other end of the secured line, which was in the van I was sitting in a few blocks away, it was literally impossible for the Chinese to listen in.
The other little trick, perhaps more impressive, was that anyone walking near Taleb would see that he was watching a streaming video of a soccer game. This would have been unremarkable, but for the fact that Taleb was also wearing electrically-manipulable glasses. The image displayed by the phone had a second layer of information embedded, one that was unscrambled by the glasses. In that way, Taleb could, in a completely innocuous way, watch a video that was the farthest thing from innocuous.
A block and a half down the street and seventy feet overhead, a bee buzzed, ascending through the cool evening air. Dozens of people had seen it flying around, and if anyone had bothered to track its progress through the sky, it would seem as if the insect was stopping at flowers and various perches on a random path. Such was not the case, however.
The bee was, technically, a cyborg, not a drone. A computer chip wired into the neural network of the bee guided its movements. Sophisticated digital cameras embedded in the insect's abdomen and head recorded and transmitted the sights and sounds of Quanzhou. The signal from the Bee streamed out to Taleb, who needed operational intelligence on his target, and to Douglas, Fei, and me in the van, so that we could guide the overall operation, as well as the bee itself.
The bee made its way over to a tall, plain concrete building that stopped just a bit short of being a skyscraper. The Hu Jintao Medical Center had not been designed with aesthetics in mind, merely efficiency. The bee flew within a dozen feet of the windows, making its way slowly up from the second floor, where the patient rooms began.
Since it was about 9:30 PM local time, the Bee’s camera had been switched to thermal mode.
As the bee flew from room to room, briefly turning to take a still picture of the inside of each with the thermal camera, Douglas saw the pictures come up on Fei's laptop. “No… no… no…”
In ten minutes, the bee had reached the seventh floor, room 703.
Room 703 contained a patient lying in bed. Three other men (you could tell by their size and heat signature) were sitting in the various corners of the room. The shades were drawn, but that only necessitated turning the sensitivity of the Bee’s sensors up to see the finer details of the room’s occupants. All of the men were large, strong-looking, and appeared to have hand-sized metallic instruments strapped to their right legs. “Pistols,” Fei whispered.
Such a group would not be assembled for any ordinary patient.
Taleb, also watching the output, tapped a side button on his phone and said quietly, “Is that it?”
Douglas clapped his hands excitedly and answered, “Roger that, Taleb, it's our man. Keep heading to the target. Ivanov and Dietrich will be on station in two minutes. Out.”
Colonel Douglas ran his hand through his thick Scottish beard and added, “Of course, finding him is the easy part. There are quite a few aspects to this little operation that I haven't ever seen before.”
I borrowed a line I felt certain I had read in a pop business book: “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
“Yeah, but that's just as true for bad ideas as good, Mr. Cortez.”
Fei, Douglas and I were sitting in a van on a sidestreet in front of an apartment building. The sides of the van bore signs identifying the vehicle as a government cable service maintenance vehicle. The Chinese military hospital in Quanzhou stood out against the lights of the city four blocks away.
Douglas glanced at the digital clock display. “Let’s get this show on the road.” He leaned in to speak into a microphone mounted next to the Bee’s computer display. “Dietrich, Volodya, move into position. Taleb’s en route, ETA thirty seconds. When he arrives, move in.”
I watched the video feed from a camera on Volodya's glasses and listened to the audio collected by the microphone in his shirt. He and Dietrich crossed the street from the bar where they had been sipping beers, conversing nonchalantly in Russian. Both were dressed as seamen, with greasy overalls, thick stubble, and a callous manner. They looked like typical itinerant Russian sailors, just a few of the thousand whose ships delivered raw materials to China and departed the harbor carrying finished consumer products.