The Janson Command (22 page)
“He was putting feelers out the other day. He’s looking for Iboga.”
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t you watch the news?”
“I don’t watch the news,” said Daniel. “I don’t read the papers. I don’t surf the Internet. If I walk by TV in the airport, I look the other way. Whatever is going on out there, I don’t give a flying fuck. Who’s Iboga? Why’s the Old Man hunting him?”
“He was an African dictator who stole the country’s money when the insurgents kicked him out. The Old Man must have hired on to get it back.”
“African? What does he look like?”
“Big black bastard weighs twenty-five stone at least.”
“Give it to me in pounds.”
“Three hundred.”
“Does he sharpen his teeth?”
Ian looked at Daniel. “Why do you ask?”
“I seen him.”
“Go on!”
“I did. Didn’t get a good look, but how many three-hundred-pound guys are black with pointy teeth?”
“Where?”
“Corsica. Where I live.”
“What, he’s just walking around Corsica?”
“No, he’s holed up with a crew on Capo Corso. Up north. I seen him last week at Bastia, where the ferries come in from Nice and Marseille.”
“If you didn’t get a good look, how do you know his teeth are sharpened?”
“A guy who was closer told me. They got off a yacht, piled into SUVs, and convoyed north.”
“Why are you saying they’re holed up?”
“The locals were saying they were like a crew hiding out or setting up a job. The locals are into that shit, so they keep track of the competition. Corsica’s a wild place.”
“Tell me again what you’re doing there?”
“I’m down in Porto-Vecchio, way down south. Other end of the island.”
“Mind me asking what you’re setting up?”
“Nothing. I got a dive shop for the tourists.”
“Really?” asked Ian. “Was that expensive, to set up a dive shop?”
“No big deal. I always saved my money. No way I was going to get treated like garbage and come out of it poor. Hey, you should come down sometime. I got room in my house. Beautiful water. Beautiful fish. Beautiful girls. Nice people, Corsicans, long as you don’t piss ’em off. Don’t fuck with them and they’ll give you the shirt off their back.”
“Excuse me, young man,” said a small voice.
The two big men looked down at a tiny white-haired woman carrying a handbag on her arm.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Is this where we get the bus to Exeter?”
“No, ma’am,” said Daniel. “It’s back there in the restaurant, where they’re serving your lunch.”
* * *
QUINTISHA UPCHURCH ANSWERED
her “graduates’” line, the phone number that was given to the growing flock of Janson’s saved. Calls came in for help and to help. She could tell by the tone of the voice which it would be. This was a “to help” call, and she recognized the British Midland accent as belonging to a boy named Ian.
“Ms. Upchurch, if you were in communication with Mr. Janson, you might mention that a certain former president for life was spotted in Corsica. Up north on Capo Corso.”
Quintisha Upchurch promised to pass it on.
The professional qualities that had convinced Paul Janson that she was the woman to administer CatsPaw and Phoenix included a habit of discretion grounded on innate reticence. She would never dream of mentioning that Daniel, the rough American with whom Ian had been discussing Iboga in a Cornwall nursing home, had telephoned her minutes earlier with the same message. Or that since similar messages were flooding in from widely scattered parts of the globe, she would first shunt them through the research person assigned to collate and vet before they were passed to the boss.
* * *
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
had
learned 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
hoping
you’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
camarade
who 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.”
J
essica 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.
