Текст книги "Robert Ludlum's The Janson Command"

Автор книги: Robert Ludlum

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

* * *

IN THE PRIVACY of a First Class sleeping pod, Paul Janson worked the airline phone. His first priority was to drastically reduce his flying time to Sydney. He called a general in the Royal Thai Air Force. Their conversation got off to a bad start.

“I recall that you were against me,” said the general, a fighter pilot who had risen quickly in the ranks thanks to excellent connections and ordinary skills enhanced by extraordinary bravery.

“You recall,” Janson replied bluntly, “that I determined you were the lesser of two evils.”

“What do you want?”

“Recompense for that action.”

“Why?”

“You profited by it. You’re an active serving general. The other guy is dead.”

Thai Chinese, like all overseas Chinese, were not the sort to pontificate about honor and respect. They weren’t like Pakistanis and Afghans, proud of “honor killings,” or Italian Mafia clinging to their secret societies and omertà. But these children of the Chinese diaspora who peopled the merchant class of Southeast Asia practiced a code of honor no less strong for their reserve. As strangers in strange lands, they divided the world into two categories. Strangers were by definition enemies. People they knew were friends. What Janson had always admired most was the fluidity—once they knew you, once you had done business or traded favors or shared a kindness or taken their side, you were a friend.

After a long silence, the general asked, “What do you need?”

“The fastest jet in Bangkok capable of flying four thousand, six hundred, and eighty-five miles to Sydney ahead of my commercial connection.”

“That’s all?”

Janson could not tell whether the general was being sarcastic. But they both knew he could have asked for so much more than a fast long-haul jet. Janson thanked him warmly. The debt was settled. That which was needed most was most valuable.

Janson left urgent messages with a contact in Sydney who worked undercover for the Australian Crime Commission, thinking he could look out for Jessica at the airport. While Janson waited for a response, he followed up on the SR names. Bloch, the French mercenary, was believed to be in a Congo jail. Dimon, the Serbian computer wizard, was reported active in the Ukraine. Viorets, the Russian, was currently on leave from the SVR, and the Corsican Andria Giudicelli had been seen days earlier in Rome. Van Pelt, Janson already knew, was headed for Sydney.

Iboga, who had supposedly left a trail through Russia, the Ukraine, Romania, and Croatia, had now been seen simultaneously on the French island of Corsica and in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, which were six thousand miles apart.

Janson closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He was wondering what light, if any, the doctor might shed on ASC and Kingsman Helms’s schemes in Isle de Foree. He was really no closer to Iboga than when he took the job from Poe. He hadlearned SR existed and must have fielded the Harrier jump jet, but not enough more to do anyone any good. He knew nothing yet about who had launched the Reaper attack. And so far he hadn’t added a single dollar to the Phoenix Foundation’s treasury. Five percent of zip recovered loot was zip.

He gave up on sleep and telephoned the forensic accountant leading the Iboga money hunt. They’d had some success, some indications of accounts in Switzerland and Croatia. “These days,” the accountant warned Janson, “Zagreb’s a tougher nut than Zurich.”

“Can we get to the dough?”

“At this point,” she said, “we’re still in locating mode.”

When the airliner began its descent into Bangkok, Janson dialed Quintisha Upchurch. “Have you heard from Ms. Kincaid?”

“No, Mr. Janson. I’ve left messages.”

Janson heard a familiar loud noise in the background and smiled despite his concern. The blatting roar of a compression-release “Jake” brake slowing a forty-ton eighteen-wheel Peterbilt 379EXHD told him that Quintisha was in CatsPaw’s rolling “home office,” a Brinks armored tractor-trailer driven by her husband.

Jessica had named Quintisha’s husband “the single scariest dude I have ever laid eyes on.” A former Force Recon Marine officer and a deeply troubled vet until he married Quintisha, Rick Rice drove the interstates delivering Brinks bulk shipments of credit cards, precious metals, and casino tokens. The tractor’s cab was bulletproofed and fitted with gun ports, but as Jessica had noted, “When the driver looks like he’s hopingyou’ll try to rob him, folks tend to go rob something else.”

Guarded by her husband and always on the move as they crisscrossed the United States, Quintisha administered CatsPaw and Phoenix from the phones and computers in the Peterbilt’s stand-up sleeper. On Sundays, they parked the truck in VFW lots. Rick would hoist some beers with the vets while Quintisha, an ordained deacon, would take herself to the nearest African Methodist Episcopal church and sing in the choir, teach Bible study, or preach a sermon. Sunday supper would be at the home of some local police chief or a highway patrolman who had served under Rick in the Gulf War, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

“I was about to telephone you, Mr. Janson. A couple of your young men report sighting Iboga in Corsica.”

“Who? Daniel?”

“Yes. And Ian, in England.”

Janson called Protocolo de Seguridad’s HQ in Madrid. “Freddy, can you tap any Coriscans?”

“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.”

The guy wasn’t stupid enough to be surprised. He shifted gears and asked a different stupid question: “I hear that it won’t cost me anything until I put it to use.”

Morton looked him in the eye. “You don’t pay me until you’ve sold whatever you’ve got that my information enabled you to get.”

“Yeah?” he asked in a tone that said, What’s the scam?“What makes you so sure I’d pay you, ever?”

“Self-interest,” said Morton. “You will pay me because you will want another tip– Excuse me a sec.”

One of five cell and sat phones tucked in a row of custom-tailored pockets in the lining of his leather jacket was vibrating. He checked the screen. SITA SATELLITE AIRCOM. Someone calling from an airliner telephone. And that was all. Not who they were, what plane they were on, where they were going. Just somebody who flipped over their in-seat handset, ran their credit card through it, and punched in Morton’s number, which SITA’s OnAir service routed through a satellite to vibrate his phone. Not as much as he wanted to know, but they did have his number.

“Hang on a minute; I have to take this,” he said to the thief, hurried out to the parking lot, which contained the sort of recently detailed, certified preowned Audis and BMWs you could cruise a bedroom community in without drawing the attention of the police.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t hang up.”

“CatsPaw,” said a woman.

“Go ahead,” he said, trying not to sound too eager. CatsPaw meant money. A lot more money than walking the wild side with house thieves.

“Has my sat phone been compromised?”

“Give me the number.”

She did. He said, “Turn your phone on, ringer off. Call me back using the airplane phone in five minutes.”

The thief had stepped out the door to smoke a cigarette. “Hey, what about—”

“Later.”

Morton got into his unassuming Honda, locked the doors, Wi-Fied into a large computer under the backseat, and punched up her number. When she called in five minutes he said, “They scored you big-time, sweetheart.”

She muttered something that sounded like, “Fuck.”

He waited a second for the usual indignant How did they hack into my phone?At that point he would explain that since he hadn’t been there he could only guess that they got her by walking alongside her in the airport terminal with a powerful transmitter disguised as a laptop or sitting next to her in the lounge or even on the plane. Unless they simply “borrowed” her phone for a minute when she left it lying around, which, being CatsPaw, she probably hadn’t. Instead of asking a dumb question, she asked the only pertinent one: “When did it happen?”

“Twelve hours ago,” he answered, which would tell her where it had happened. “Do you remember how to upload your SIM card?”

“Yes,” she said in a pissed-off voice that made that single syllable sound like, Fuck, yes, who the hell do you think you’re talking to here?

“Upload immediately to this number.” He gave her a number. “Okay, turn your sat phone off. Turn it on again in ten minutes. Wait five minutes, then call me back on the AIRCOM phone.”

He got another yes. Hey, not his fault she got hacked.

He found the routing drone they had slipped onto the SIM card. It was a sophisticated East Europe jobbie that redirected her voice and text signals to some number in Bucharest. Oddly, it also blocked her communications; the usual way was to let the messages through; that way the target wouldn’t know she was hacked and would keep sending more messages to spy on. He wiped the drone and uploaded the contents of her SIM card back to her otherwise intact.

First thing she wanted to know when he told her the sat phone was now clean was, “What did it do to the guy’s phone I’ve been calling?”

“His is clean as a whistle.”

“How do you know it didn’t give his the virus?”

“I know because he called a half hour ahead of you with the same sort of problem and I checked it for him.”

“He called before I did?”Now she sounded pissed off she’d come in second.

“Yeah. He was hip to the issue.”

“Fuck! Did it give the hackers his number when I called him?”

“Well, yeah. If we’re talking about the same guy. About whom I can tell you nothing, just like I can’t tell nobody nothing about you, because I don’t know nothing.”

“Did you change his number?”

“Well, yeah. Like I’m going to change yours.”

“How do I know how to call him?”

“The old number will ring through. If he wants to answer you, he will.”

“Okay. I got that. What about these people who hacked me? Were they able to see where he is?”

“Only if he was dumb enough not to disable his GPS when he answered their call.”

“He’s not.”

“I didn’t think so,” said Morton, “but let me give you some advice.”

“What?”

Why am I doing this? he wondered. The answer was, he could not help himself. Deep down—way deep down—he was a white hat.

“What advice?”

“Don’t call him from where you’re at now. For all you know, whoever hacked you twelve hours ago could be on the same plane you’re on.”

“Thanks for the help.”

“Pleasure doing business with you.”

Morton returned his phone to its slot in his jacket, chose another, and called his mother. Thankfully, the machine answered. He left a message that he would not be home for supper. Then he drove to New York City to find an expensive woman to celebrate earning in two twenty-minute sessions of private security consultation more than top IT guys earned in a month.

Hours later, avidly watching his reflection in a mirror over a king-size bed, Morton suddenly remembered the routing drone’s odd feature of blocking the woman’s calls when it passed them on to Bucharest. He probably should have mentioned it to her. But she would figure it out in the end, Morton supposed.

* * *

HURRYING FROM THE arrivals gate, looking for the first place she could call Janson without getting arrested for violating the rule posted on huge signs that you couldn’t use a mobile phone in a security area, Kincaid paid close attention to the crowds streaming off their planes. Had one of them hacked her in the Johannesburg airport?

She got through Immigration and past Customs.

Finally, in an exit corridor that led to the terminal hall, she called Janson. And wouldn’t you know it, the goddamned phone dropped the call. As she redialed she noticed other people were staring perplexedly at their phones and poking buttons as if they, too, were losing calls. She looked at her screen.

“No Service.”

She felt the skin prickle on the back of her neck.

She looked around to see who was jamming the signals. Passengers, tired from the long international flights, were all carrying and rolling bags big enough to conceal electronic blocking devices. She slowed down and watched the faces of the people she had been tracking since she went by Customs. Businessmen and -women, tourists, homecoming Aussies with backpacks, families, two look-alike tall, stocky blondes, sisters, each dragging a yellow-haired kid.

Ahead the corridor opened wider and Kincaid could see people lined behind ropes hopefully gazing to greet their loved ones. She slowed more and let people overtake her. One of the blondes went ahead with both kids. The other was bumping into Kincaid, making excuse-me gestures as she jammed a pistol into her side and whispered in a nasal Australian accent, “It’s wearing a can, doll. No one will hear.”

Kincaid saw a sound suppressor screwed onto a Beretta, a quiet weapon to begin with.

“Hollow points. No blood, either. The bullet won’t leave your liver.”