Ark Storm (32 page)

81

SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE, FOUR DAYS LATER, FRIDAY, LATE AFTERNOON

Dan put down the weight, picked up his shrilling cell phone, grimaced when he saw the caller ID.

“Yeah?” he said.

“You haven’t been into the office all week,” declared MackStack acidly. “You avoiding me?”

“Nope.”

“I’m getting a kinda disappointed feeling here, Jacobsen.”

“Why? Couldn’t get it up last night?”

“Cute. Nothing on Falcon, nothing juicy on ARk Storm. Professional failure kind of disappointment.”

Dan glanced at Gwen. She was lying on a bench, pressing 140 pounds. Sweat ran down her face and she was breathing hard. Her hair fell from the bench, tumbling toward the floor. Her muscles bulged and shone. Her bandage covered half her forearm. She wasn’t supposed to be working out. Had a blithely contemptuous attitude toward personal injury, which he shared, and loved. She looked to him like a warrior princess. She looked magnificent. And oblivious.

Foreigner pumped from the speakers: “Dirty White Boy.” That was how Dan felt right now, and not in the good sense. He walked from the gym onto the lawn.

The sun was setting and the air was chill. Dan hunched in on himself.

“I get the feeling you’re getting sweet on the meteorologist,” murmured Mack, as if psychic. “It would be a shame,” he added silkily, “if she knew how you stage-managed your meeting with her. She might think you only got close to her to get close to her boss, to get yourself a story. Makes you a kind of prostitute in her eyes. Not to mention making a dupe of her.”

Dan stayed silent. Thought of fifty different ways to kill his editor.

“Stay on the job, Daniel. Deliver us what we need.”

“Adding blackmail to your box of tricks now, Mack?”

“What d’you mean,
adding
?”

Dan ended the call. He gazed out at the ocean: cool, blue, pure. It offered no comfort this time. He felt the darkness creep, remembered too much. The memories flooded back. No matter how hard you tried to wash your mind after a task, you never could. He shut his eyes. It would be so easy to pick up that mantle again, to do what he had done so effectively in years gone by for his country. He could do it for himself without a qualm. And, most likely, get away with it. What difference would it make to spill a little more blood?

82

THE SUPER-YACHT,
ZEPHYR
, FRIDAY EVENING

Sheikh Ali sat with Gabriel Messenger in the large stateroom. A wind had blown up and the yacht pitched slightly. Sheikh Ali had instructed the captain to motor downwind, minimizing the disruption to his guest, who he knew suffered from seasickness. Despite that kindness, Messenger looked pale and his face was pinched. In his black trousers and black shirt, he looked more ascetic priest than venture capitalist.

The golden coffee cups lay before them, empty, sides stained dark. The sweet smell of the
shisha
pipe hovered in the room, almost alive, like a visiting spirit borne round the room by the air conditioning that the Sheikh loved.

They covered much Falcon business before the Sheikh asked his main question.

“Zeus. And the meteorologist. What news?”

Messenger nodded. “Gwen Boudain is proving invaluable,” he replied, enthusiasm overcoming his latent queasiness. “I’d say she has boosted our rain yield by close to six percent. That’s very sig—”

“I know it’s significant,” cut in the Sheikh in a rare show of temper. “It’s more than significant. It’s impressive.”

Messenger sat in silence, his wordless reaction to the insult.

The Sheikh looked away, calculation in his eyes. It was a full minute before he turned back to Messenger. The German was used to his silences, and to his very occasional outburst of temper. He had seen much worse. He knew just to wait, to let the storms pass.

“We need to press on with the next parts of the plan,” Al Baharna declared at last.

“Gwen thinks she can get more still out of Zeus,” Messenger said quietly, steepling his hands. “She says there’s one input she’s still struggling with.”

“Keep pushing her.”

“I will.”

“In the meantime, I think it’s time to start acquiring farmland. Marginal farmland wherever we can, subject to the minimum humidity requirements.”

“What’s our budget?” asked Messenger, eyes quickening.

The Sheikh paused, brain scrolling through his assets. He should call Marcel, get a current tally. He gazed out at the sun, which was dipping into the water in a blaze of red, setting fire to the waves. He knew to the closest fifty million. That would do.

He turned back to Messenger.

“Let’s start with one billion US,” Al Baharna said levelly.

Messenger kept his face impassive. Inside his blood raced.

“I’ll get Kevin and Peter identifying the targets,” he replied equally levelly. He wondered if the Sheikh had so much money that it merely bored him, or if like many of those who dealt in astronomically large sums he depersonalized it for rationality’s sake, reduced it to a number so that the power of it would not seduce, so that the emotions of it would not cloud clarity.

“Is she happy, with you? Satisfied?” asked the Sheikh.

Messenger frowned, tilted his head, wondered what he’d missed.

“With Falcon!” exclaimed the Sheikh. Messenger further wondered what had upset Al Baharna. The Sheikh seemed unusually febrile.

“She seems to be. Been smiling a lot recently, so yes, I think she’s happy. Sometimes she looks like she’s just sucked a lemon, like she doesn’t want to be there, in Falcon, but it passes. She’s unused to the constraints of corporate life. But her work is excellent and I tell her as much.”

“Good. Keep her happy. She is essential to our plan.”

Messenger nodded. “Perhaps I’ll give her a bonus…”

“Do that. And please allow me to add one of my own.” The Sheikh paused. “Let’s say a million dollars. Five hundred from each of us.”

Messenger thought that the Sheikh threw money like punches.

“That’s a big kickoff,” he said. “We don’t want her to get enough money to want to leave.”

The Sheikh laughed, a mirthless sound. “She won’t leave! You know how it is with money, Gabriel. The golden rule, I call it. You hook someone on an amount they had previously only dreamed of. Then they get used to it. They need a bigger dose. So you feed them a bit more, and they get used to that. Once they take the first hit they keep on coming back for more. It’s a very rare person who can break the habit. I’ve never met one who could.”

Messenger felt a twist of distaste. The Sheikh had no compunction in using his wealth to corrupt. Messenger had seen it too many times firsthand to doubt.

“She has her Oracle to be financed, does she not?” continued Al Baharna. “That will keep her on the leash.”

“Yes,” replied Messenger frowning. “She does. She’s been working hard on that too.”

“What’s the latest prognosis on the Niño?”

“Roaring in. Far as I can gather.”

“Excellent!” exclaimed the Sheikh, clapping his hands together. He rose to his feet, signifying that the audience was over.

Messenger rose too, shook the Sheikh’s hand, and headed for the helicopter and his ride home.

Sheikh Ali watched him go. He paced the deck in the falling night, seeking to walk off his restlessness, the source of which he had tried and failed to identify. The pacing did not work.

“Hussein!” He yelled to one of the polo-shirted patrollers. “Meet me in the gym.”

Hussein, a fellow Saudi Shia, was known for his ruthlessness, whether in training his master or in following his orders to kill. The Sheikh knew Hussein could assuage his restlessness, at least for a while.

One hour thirty minutes later, Al Baharna finished his grueling exercise regime. He nodded a curt farewell to Hussein, then he left the cool grays of his customized gym for the warm splendor of his cabin.

He stripped, dropped his clothes on the heated marble floor of his bathroom, eyed his naked body in the mirror; privation and rigorous exercise had honed him to a wiry strength. He was pleased, even though he recognized in it the sin of vanity.

“
Zakharf ad dunya wasawis ash Shaitan
,” he murmured to himself—
the adornments of the world are the whisperings of Satan.
But the feverish training was prompted by more than mere vanity. As the days neared what Al Baharna thought of as Nemesis for the Californians, he trained as if he were personally going to war. It made him feel connected, not just the mastermind with the money. He smiled. It would seem it was all going according to plan.

It was time for a woman. The workout had charged his physicality, replaced one form of restiveness with another. He felt the urge, the warmth in his belly going lower. He thought of the pretty meteorologist, wondered how she would be lying under him, naked. Might it be worth an attempt to seduce her, before she became redundant? Of course, if there were any question of her talking, of her going to the police with what she knew, or thought she knew, then seduction too would be redundant, but the Sheikh disliked coercion, it was inelegant and usually beneath him.

He pulled open the glass shower door, suddenly froze. His own complacency hit him. He knew enough of the affairs of commerce, and of jihad, to be aware that whenever you thought things were going according to plan, they rarely were. Things seldom went according to plan.

He closed his shower door, pulled on a heavy toweling robe, padded through to his private sitting room, took a seat at his desk. He would normally have preferred to have the ensuing discussion face-to-face, but the urgings of his instinct allowed no delay.

He picked up his phone, the one with the Telsey encryption, and dialed The Man. They exchanged codes by text message. The background beeping on their handsets ceased, confirming the encryption was in place. Only then did they speak. The algorithms rolled, shrugging off all attempts of interception as they had been designed to do. For the first fifteen seconds of the call, they worked. Then, due to a mixture of skill and the plain luck that furnishes many triumphs, they failed to work and the call was intercepted.

At the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the intercept was downloaded and saved.

83

SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE, THE SAME NIGHT

Gwen lay in Dan’s bed, swathed in a thick duvet, the warmth from Dan’s body heating her right side, suffusing her whole body. She had spent five of the past six nights with him. Being with him, having sex with him in her own home with a listening device capturing it all, was unthinkable. And she did feel safer here with him. That made her annoyed, made her feel like the feeble female she had resolved never to be, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot she could do about it. Or wanted to.

Beside her, Dan slept. He had made love to her, they had walked on the lawn before the sea, wrapped in dressing gowns. Then they had come back in, and he had fallen asleep. She looked at him, his profile lit by a shaft of moonlight cutting through the gap between the curtains. It was getting harder to keep her feelings in check, to deny what she had felt from the first time they had been together.

Finally, she fell asleep, dreaming of waves, of huge monsters screaming in, breaking on her, holding her down, keeping her down. Those dreams segued into visions of storms, or rivers running through the skies, of a Ferrari speeding through the Carmel Valley, scything down all in its path.

She woke at four thirty, shivering, alone, the duvet on the floor. She pulled on one of Dan’s shirts, padded through the dark house. He could, she had noticed, navigate very well in the dark. Before they went to bed, he turned off almost everything electrical save the recording stack.

Gwen found him sitting before it now, in his study, his back to her, headphones clamped to his ears. He turned before she got close, his own internal alert system warning him as it always seemed to do. He smiled up at her, flicked a switch, and removed the headphones.

Gwen leaned over him, kissed his mouth. “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

“I like waking early, as you’re getting to know. I like the dark.”

Gwen nodded. He did seem to love darkness, like some kind of a nocturnal animal. He loved sunshine and blue skies and blue seas too, but he was, unusually, equally at home at night. One of his favorite things was to run late at night, after the streetlamps had dimmed. She’d gone with him a couple of times. It had spooked her, but Dan came alive. There was still inside him, for all her brave demands, a side that was utterly unreachable. It made her all the more determined to probe it, even though she felt subconsciously that it was better left alone. She still got the feeling that she had never seen Dan completely lose control. She did when she was with him, when he was deep inside her, almost torturing her with a pleasure so intense she felt it would brand her. But he never did.

“What news from the bug?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Still nothing incriminating. A bit of business, a bit of pleasure. Nothing that paints him as a killer. No mention of the elusive Haas or Hans.”

Gwen nodded. “I don’t suppose he’d ring a friend and rehash the details.”

“Exactly. I’m just looking for an aberration, a phone call or a meet with someone out of his pattern, any conversation that’s just a bit opaque, a kind of coded speech.”

“And?”

“And still nothing.”

“At what stage do we go to the cops?” Gwen wondered.

“We’d get laughed out of town with what we’ve got now. We need proof. It’s all just hearsay this far. We’d blow our chances of getting the real proof if we’re premature.”

“Are we looking in the wrong place, d’you think?” asked Gwen.

“You mean with him, or geographically?”

“Either? Both?”

“Give it more time. It’s not even been one week. Get digging in the office. I can always plant a device in Falcon if we don’t make any progress in the next few weeks.”

Gwen raised an eyebrow. “With all that security?”