The Insider Threat (23 page)

J
acob saw the alarm on Chris’s face and wondered if he shouldn’t just tackle the man, flinging him into the boat. As quickly as the thought entered, he discarded it. They had to navigate up the small waterway to the major hub called the Grand Canal, and would be passing underneath several bridges to do so. They couldn’t accomplish that with a writhing, screaming kidnap victim.

He said, “We only want to talk. Away from the crowds. On the water, where it’s safer for us.”

“Why? I don’t have anyone with me. I promise.”

“We mean you no harm. You agree, and you’ll be on your way shortly.” He held up a thumb drive. “You get this, and your wife will never know.”

Jacob saw he wanted to believe, and knew it would be enough. Chris nodded and gingerly slid into the boat. Jacob untied the bow and Carlos started the motor. They began gliding down the canal, headed to the larger one.

Chris said, “What do you want? Why have you been following me?”

Jacob had known this question was coming, and had thought about his answer. He knew that Chris would have formulated the
why
already. He had no idea what that would be, but he knew it existed, and had decided to use Chris’s beliefs against him. He said, “You know why.”

Chris sagged back into the metal seat and said, “Okay, okay. Tell your boss he can have it. I’ll leave Europe to him. I’ll go to my meeting tomorrow and bow out, then tell my people it didn’t work in our favor.”

Jacob had no idea what he was talking about, but liked hearing about the meeting tomorrow. One question answered.

When he didn’t speak, Chris said, “Is that not enough? Why are we still going anywhere?”

They passed under a stone bridge, Carlos waving at the tourists on top like a goofy local, then they entered the Grand Canal, an expanse of water seventy meters wide that threaded through the island city-state like a snake. Carlos turned to the north and opened the engine up, drowning out further talk.

They passed by water taxis and other boats, some big, some like theirs. They rode in silence, Jacob keeping his eyes on Chris. Going underneath the Rialto Bridge, one of the few that spanned the Grand Canal, Chris finally shouted something, and Jacob waved his hand, indicating he should wait.

He felt his weapon shift and clamped his other hand on the sleeve to stop its fall. He wasn’t quick enough. The filet knife fell to the hull of the boat, clattering silently in the shadow of the engine.

Jacob looked at Chris and saw fear. The canal curved toward the west, the Rialto Bridge receding behind them. Chris tensed, and Jacob jumped toward the knife, instinctively thinking that was his goal.

Chris dove over the side.

Jacob screamed and Carlos cut the engine, the boat immediately slowing to a crawl. Carlos whipped his head to the rear, scanning the water and shouting, “What happened? Why’d he bail out?”

Jacob snatched the knife and glanced around, seeing no other boats. He heard Chris shout, churning about in the water, and jumped over the side.

He paused, getting a bearing on Chris, seeing him flailing toward the nearest bank, swimming in a modified dog paddle, hampered by his suit and lack of ability. Jacob, a much better swimmer, began stroking toward him.

Jacob came abreast of him and grabbed Chris’s collar, saying, “Stop, stop. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

Chris screamed, “Help me! Someone help me!”

The shout seared Jacob with panic. He jammed the blade with an overhand strike, stabbing Chris in the chest. Chris let out a piercing shriek, and one thought exploded through Jacob’s mind:
Silence him.

He reached up and grabbed Chris’s hair, pulling his head backward, dragging the man down below the surface, the scream becoming bubbles under the water. Chris began to fight in blind panic, and Jacob swam deeper, kicking his legs and pushing against Chris’s body.

Jacob fended off the ineffectual thrashing of Chris’s arms and felt the pressure in his ears. He knew he’d gone deep enough. He wrapped his legs around Chris’s torso and cinched his hand deeper into the hair. He pulled the head back and jabbed the filet knife into his prey’s neck, the water and darkness causing him to hit high, sinking the blade into Chris’s jaw. He tried again, and found his target.

He missed the carotid artery, but caught the esophagus. He ripped out, feeling an explosion of bubbles. Chris’s fight became feeble, then stopped altogether. Jacob held on until his lungs felt like they were about to burst, then swam upward, dragging the body with him.

He broke the surface with an explosion of air, treading water and cradling Chris’s head as if he were a lifeguard. He scanned around and saw Carlos slowly circling in the boat. He waved, and Carlos increased speed toward him. Jacob looked toward shore, but saw nobody. They were across from the Rialto Market area, and at this hour, it was closed, the market nothing more than empty tables and stands, waiting for tomorrow’s fruits, fish, and vegetables.

Carlos pulled up next to him and said, “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jacob looked down for the first time, seeing Chris’s head bobbing in the water, blood leaking out from the massive tear in his neck, his hair floating about like a halo, his eyes open and wet.

Jacob said, “We didn’t get any of our answers.”

Carlos said, “We know he’s having meetings tomorrow.”

“Yeah, but he might be meeting the woman as well.”

Jacob hoisted the torso toward the boat and said, “Hold his arms.”

Carlos did so, awkwardly leaning over and tilting the hull with the weight of the body. Jacob went through the dead man’s pockets, pulling out his wallet, passport, hotel keycard, and cell phone. He threw them into the boat, then began punching the blade into Chris’s chest like he was using a fork on the plastic of a microwave dinner. Venting the body to allow water to enter the lungs.

He tossed the knife into the boat and said, “Tie him to the side. We need to drop him in the ocean, where we planned. We can’t risk him being discovered.”

Carlos dropped the rope into the water and Jacob began lashing, keeping the body below the waterline, Carlos helping where he could. A barge towing a bucket loader appeared around the bend and they stopped working, Jacob crouching below the gunwale.

It passed on without incident.

Carlos put in one final cinch of rope and said, “What are we going to do?”

Jacob pulled himself over the side of the skiff, water running off of his clothes.

“Continue on. What else is there?”

O
pening his ProtonMail, Rashid was pleased to see a message. It was from someone called UnionJack7883 and the subject was “Timeline.” He assumed it was from al-Britani, and used the word
Timeline
as his decryption password. It failed.

He tried again, this time in all lowercase, and the email opened, both pleasing and aggravating him. Al-Britani clearly had an issue with attention to detail.

The message was brief, saying the timeline had been pushed back a few days. The hotel had shifted the hours their inside man was working, going from days to nights. As the Gulf Cooperation Council conference ceased work at five, gaining access to the hotel after that hour wasn’t conducive to an attack. Apparently, the inside man’s schedule returned to a daytime shift in three days, and that was when al-Britani intended to attack.

All in all, not the message he was hoping for, but still a good sign. Al-Britani was communicating directly with him, and appeared to be committed to conducting the attack in the name of the Khorasan group.

Rashid typed a short message back, telling him to maintain the operational security, and included the new password for them to use for all future messages.

He hit send, satisfied with the Jordan side of things, but he was still unsure about his own mission. The real mission, not the one his masters in Jabhat al-Nusra believed he was conducting.

The thought made him realize he hadn’t updated his leadership since he’d arrived, and they would want to know what was occurring. They might even go so far as to contact the Albanian cell that had been chosen to transfer the weapons, which would not be a good thing.

He pulled up another ProtonMail account in his saved contacts. One he’d used many, many times in the past two years. Before that, it was all Gmail. But even Gmail was better than Twitter direct messaging.

It had been an uphill climb convincing the leadership of just how enormously broad the collection capabilities of the crusaders were. He’d known it from his time spent with the DGSE—the French version of the CIA—but they had been convinced that nobody could find a needle in the haystack as large as Gmail. The vastness of the Internet was their protection, and it was just unfeasible that someone could track them in it. It took a spindly-armed, wispy-bearded man-child releasing a trove of secrets on the NSA before they believed.

They’d read the news reports the same day as Rashid, and he’d been brought in immediately, the leadership now asking him what they should do.

Initially, he’d given them Tor and PGP encryption, becoming the in-house expert on evading the crusader net. Later, he convinced them to switch to ProtonMail, which had been developed by kids at MIT and Switzerland specifically because of the man-child’s revelations, and he’d thanked that American ever since, absolutely convinced that there would have been many, many more believers martyred without his childish vision of right and wrong. He remembered the initial leadership meeting well, after the man-child had fled to Russia. As a joke, he’d told the emir
they
should offer him asylum for his contributions.

He heard the bell above the door to the café tinkle and glanced reflexively toward it, seeing nothing but two Albanian teenagers. He returned to his email, typing a short message detailing a false account of what they’d been doing and saying he was happy with the professionalism of the Albanians. He was debating creating a lie about meeting Omar when his phone vibrated on the table.

He picked it up, seeing a text message from his team. Omar had been seen walking into Tirana Park. He felt a little stab of adrenaline.
So the meeting is going to occur on schedule. Good.

He looked at his watch, feeling an inescapable desire to leave. He saw he still had close to an hour, though. Time enough to complete the message to his command. He resumed typing.

*   *   *

Sitting inside the American Bar, Shoshana and I drank Cokes and watched some random soccer game on the one wide-screen TV, surrounded by a group of die-hard loyalists for whatever European team was playing.

I turned my head to the street outside the window, seeing a stream of people walking back and forth, the Internet café right below us and out of sight. We’d been on the trigger team for the surveillance for close to two hours, all timed with the soccer game to give us a reason to be here. Unfortunately for Shoshana, between the two of us, she was the only one that knew what Rashid looked like, so I got to watch soccer, and she had to stare at the street.

I’d staged the rest of the team, minus Jennifer and Aaron, at potential avenues of escape to pick up surveillance once the target had been acquired. So far, they’d just sat.

“Aaron is due in for rotation with Jennifer in ten minutes. You want to go get a bite to eat?”

She looked at me and said, “You want to eat with a murderer?”

“Damn it, Shoshana, would you stop that? You have to admit, you screwed things up in Jordan. No telling what we could have gotten from al-Britani. Maybe we wouldn’t even be doing this surveillance.”

Eyes on the street, she said, “Mission comes first. Always.”

I said, “It didn’t in Brazil. Your mission was over. You could have walked away.”

For the first time, I saw cracks in the ice princess. She said, “You could have too.”

She’d volunteered to sacrifice her life to save hundreds of thousands of people in Brazil, and I’d decided that wasn’t going to happen. We’d done something borderline stupid, but it had succeeded. Both of us working toward a greater good, regardless of our given mission. Which is why I knew, at her core, she wasn’t just an assassin, killing men she disliked. At least I hoped so, because right now she disliked me.

She smiled, playing me a little, saying, “Okay, Nephilim. I’ll go to lunch with you. I’ll give you some deep introspection into Jennifer. Is that what you want?”

I said, “No, no. We’re going to talk about
you
. Where you grew up, what you did as a child, that sort of thing. First-date stuff.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Hmm . . . no games?”

“Nope.”

“And I can ask the same of you?”

I hesitated for a moment, and she said, “If it’s
really
a first date, I should be able to ask you whatever you ask me.”

I said, “I thought you could read that
without
asking. That’s what Aaron says.”

I saw hurt flit across her face and wondered what I’d done. I said, “Okay, yes. You can ask whatever you want. I don’t care.”

She leaned forward, her eyes bright and clear. “I want to talk about something other than death. I want to talk about living. Like what you talk to Jennifer about.”

Her gaze scored me like a laser, searching, and I felt pity. She was a creation of events beyond her control, manipulated by operations conducted before she even understood the cancer they would generate in her soul, and those actions had permanently twisted her. She had an ability few on Earth possessed, and her government had harnessed it, ignoring the toll it would take. And she was now trying to claw her way out of the abyss, to find a normalcy she’d seen between Jennifer and me.

I feared it was too late. After seeing what she’d done to al-Britani, I knew the abyss would swallow her, the undertow dragging her down no matter how hard she fought.

She leaned forward and took my hands, saying, “You were once like me. I feel it. How did you crawl out?”

The words caused me to recoil, pulling my hands away, afraid she could read my soul by touch. I’d felt it before with her, but it still scared the hell out of me.

She said, “What? Was it Jennifer? Is that it?” She reached out again and said, “I want to know. I want a life.”

I kept my hands in my lap, saying, “You should look at Aaron. He’s your Jennifer.”

She scoffed and said, “Aaron. All he cares about is the mission.” She saw the surprise on my face and said, “What?”

I said, “Really? You’re some type of psychic spoon-bender and you can’t read the man you’ve worked with forever? The guy’s crazy over you. Regardless of your sexual orientation.”

She looked back to the street, searching for our target. “He’s my boss. All he cares about is success. The mission.”

“I think you’re selling him short. Is that why you left Mossad when he asked?”

Still looking out the window, she said, “Don’t confuse trust with emotion. I trust him. He believed in me, and that was enough. I won’t work for anyone else, ever again.”

She returned to me and said, “You don’t know my history. What I’ve done. What I was forced to do. Aaron isn’t that way, but he’s still Mossad. He’d sacrifice me in a heartbeat if it meant mission success.”

I saw her eyes grow wet and she said, “I made fun of you in the aircraft because of your protection of Jennifer. I . . . wish . . . someone cared. . . .”

I felt such profound sadness at her words I didn’t know what to say. She was convinced she was only a tool. Something to be discarded when the weapon was no longer useful.

I started to say something, and my earpiece clicked. “Pike, Pike, this is Retro. I’ve got Taskforce on the line, and Rashid’s on a box, right now.”

I leaned forward, eyes on Shoshana, saying, “We’ve been here the whole time, and he never entered.”

She flicked her eyes to the street, looking for a ghost. Retro said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. The Taskforce did a malware inject via email. Long story short, he’s online right this second, and it ain’t your café.”