Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  Athena stepped out wearing a silk Armani suit with a leather Hermès bag on her arm and took the elevator to the top floor. It was half past six, and most of the employees had already departed for the evening, but the receptionist greeted Athena and escorted her to the agent’s office. It was furnished like a British bank from the 1800s, with dark wood paneling and tufted leather furniture.

  “Miss Romanos, you honor me with your presence,” said the agent. He was in his midforties and wore a gray sharkskin suit, a shiny gold chain around his neck, and matching cuff links.

  “Please, call me Athena,” she said with a smile. While she would have liked to break his outstretched hand, she took it and gave it a polite squeeze.

  He held on for several seconds.

  Athena liberated herself and walked to the windows behind his desk. The city was built on a gently sloping hill and the office overlooked the port. Before her were half a dozen large ships, bathed in the port’s work lights. It was an imposing view, but Athena thought only of her dead brother.

  Until she noticed the agent checking out her ass.

  She turned around. She had no desire, and no need, to use her looks to get what she came for.

  “How is your father?” asked the agent.

  “His memory ebbs and flows, but his brilliant mind is still there.”

  “Which you’ve obviously inherited.”

  Athena tuned out the agent as he droned on about how his business had grown and how he could give her guidance as her father continued to fade. She ignored her burning desire to cut out his tongue and started her mission—strolling around the office and mentally cataloging everything in sight.

  In ten minutes, she was ready to leave. The agent armed the alarm system and locked the door as they passed by the night cleaning crew on their way to the elevator.

  “Dinner?” asked the agent on the ride down.

  Athena’s gut tightened, but she kept her composure and smiled.

  “That’s very kind of you, but I already have plans.”

  The agent wrote his mobile number on the back of a business card.

  “Then maybe a drink later,” he said as he grasped her elbow with one hand and gave her his card with the other.

  The elevator doors opened.

  Jake was standing there—all six feet, two inches of him, tanned and fit—his hands tented in front of him, almost as if he were praying. But he wasn’t. The stance would save a few fractions of a second if he had to strike someone in the head or throat.

  Like the agent.

  Athena’s cell phone was transmitting audio to an earpiece Jake was wearing, and he was feeling protective of the woman who’d put herself at risk to help him.

  Jake’s eyes bored into the man.

  The agent released Athena’s elbow and bid her good night.

  “That wasn’t very subtle,” she said as Jake followed her to the car.

  “I want him to know that someone is watching your back.”

  “Oh, he already took care of that . . .”

  * * *

  —

  JAKE SPENT TWENTY minutes running a surveillance detection route through the narrow streets of Piraeus.

  “Where are we going?” Athena asked after the fifth seemingly random turn.

  “We’re meeting someone.”

  Jake stopped in front of a roadside café. A petite woman about Jake’s age opened the door and sat in the rear seat next to Athena. Jake pulled away.

  “You can call me Thanya,” the woman said to Athena. “Thank you for your help. Do you have the device Jake gave you?”

  Athena pulled a dog-eared paperback book from her purse and handed it over.

  “Thank you. Now can you describe everything you saw from the time you got out of the car until the time you were back in it?”

  Athena closed her eyes and recalled the agent’s office as if she were still inside the building: the exterior, the lobby, the layout of the office suite, the manufacturer of his telephone and laptop, and the decorations in his private office.

  “That’s impressive,” said the woman from CIA’s Office of Technical Services.

  “I can draw you a map,” Athena said without a hint of self-importance.

  Thanya handed her a pad and a pencil and Athena made good on her offer.

  “You said he had a collection of tombstones,” Jake said. “Were any of them from deals he’d done with your company?”

  Athena stopped drawing and stared out the window.

  “He had the one from the Lindos,” she said with ice in her voice.

  Jake made eye contact with Thanya in the rearview mirror. She’d also been listening to the conversation inside the office.

  She looked at Athena. “So, about that drink tonight . . .”

  TWENTY-SIX

  IT WAS TWO and a half hours later when Athena’s regular driver dropped her off at the Varoulko Seaside restaurant in Piraeus. It was a Friday night and dozens of heads turned as she walked through the crowded bar. She was a beautiful woman, but it was more than her looks that generated all the attention. Shipping was big business in Greece, and she was the head of one of the largest lines in the country.

  The front of the restaurant was well-lit and open to a scenic harbor where nearly a hundred pleasure craft were docked—but the agent was in a darkened booth in the back. He popped the cork on a bottle of Cristal as soon as he caught Athena’s eye.

  * * *

  —

  THANYA WAS LAUGHING out loud as they walked down the sidewalk. She was wearing a short skirt and a wide hat and had her arm tucked inside Jake’s. He wore a fashionable pair of sunglasses and a jacket. Except for the nearly translucent latex gloves they were wearing, they looked like a couple having a night out on the town. They stopped in front of the agent’s building and Jake smiled at something Thanya had said as he held his wallet against the keycard reader that controlled after-hours access.

  Earlier in the day, when Athena had walked through the same building, she’d been carrying a device in her purse that had queried every keycard within a three-foot radius and stolen its radio frequency identification data. She’d been especially diligent about passing within range of the cleaning crew and the agent, who would have the access the CIA team needed.

  Thanya had taken the device from Athena and created a duplicate keycard for Jake.

  The door beeped, the magnetic lock released, and they were in. There was a closed-circuit surveillance camera at the end of the lobby, positioned exactly where Athena said it would be, and Jake stared into the lens as they walked to the elevators. Invisible infrared LED lights in the frame of his sunglasses and sewn into the band of Thanya’s hat blinded the camera until they boarded the elevator. There was another camera in the elevator’s ceiling, but the two CIA officers stared at the floor for the entire ride.

  * * *

  —

  THE SHIPPING AGENT poured the champagne into a pair of crystal flutes and handed one to Athena. He proposed a toast to her father. It was a gratuitous move, and the agent’s ceaseless attempts to bed her stoked her temper, but they each had their secrets, and Athena decided that it was worth playing along to avenge her brother’s death.

  She raised her glass, then settled down and got into character.

  * * *

  —

  THE ELEVATOR OPENED onto the top floor. Jake and Thanya did a quick tour of the floor to ensure that the cleaning crew was gone and check for anyone who might be working late, but the area was deserted. There were two more CCTV cameras mounted in the corners, but Athena had spotted them both, and the infrared LEDs rendered them blind.

  They paused outside the agent’s office suite. Athena had noted an alarm sensor on the other side of the door and, from the description, Thanya was 90 percent sure that it was a wireless model. />
  “Black bag jobs,” as they were known in the trade, were usually planned days or weeks in advance, but another pirate attack could happen at any moment and Jake had decided to compress the planning phase for tonight’s operation into just a few hours. With more time and different equipment, Thanya could have learned the model of the alarm system and fooled it into thinking that all of its sensors were functioning normally even when they weren’t, but she had confidence in Athena’s recall, and defeating a wireless model was much easier and faster.

  It was a calculated risk.

  Thanya switched on a device she’d pulled from her purse and nodded to Jake. He pressed his keycard against the reader and opened the door.

  The device started flashing red—never a good sign—as the door sensor began transmitting to its base station that the door had been opened.

  But the red light went out a second later and began to flash yellow. The device had discovered the alarm sensor’s frequency and instantly jammed it using a higher power signal on the same frequency. The original signal had made it to the base station for only a fraction of a second and had failed to trigger the alarm.

  The two CIA officers entered the agent’s suite and closed the door behind them. Thanya located the alarm panel, plugged the jammer into a wall outlet to boost its power, and placed it next to the panel to block the signals from any other sensors they might trip while they were working.

  She and Jake entered the agent’s inner office at the end of the hallway. Their cover story was that they were friends of Athena’s who were supposed to pick her up after her meeting with the agent but were running late. It was the thinnest of covers. Neither was armed, and they had good identification, but their only real chance in an encounter with the police would be Athena’s word and the hope that the agent wouldn’t press charges against his largest client.

  They entered the agent’s personal office and found it exactly as Athena had described. Thanya inserted a flash drive into his laptop and stole his password in forty-two seconds, then uploaded a piece of software that would transmit copies of every document stored on the hard drive to an untraceable NSA server somewhere in Germany.

  Also in Thanya’s purse was the acrylic tombstone Jake had noticed in Athena’s office. It was identical to the one owned by the agent—a souvenir from the Lindos ship transaction—except Thanya had converted it into an electronic surveillance device by drilling a hole into its base and installing a miniature camera, microphone, battery, and transmitter, before resealing the hole.

  * * *

  —

  ATHENA SIPPED HER glass of champagne while the agent drank the rest of the bottle. Several times he placed his hand upon hers, ignoring the engagement ring, as he told another tale of his acumen in business or on the soccer field. Athena sat with a pleasant smile on her face and pretended to enjoy the childish stories—until eleven fifteen.

  He’d just brushed his leg against hers when she stood up and patted her jacket pockets.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just remembered that I need to make a call and I’ve forgotten my phone. I need to go to my car.”

  The agent didn’t like that idea at all.

  “Please,” he said. “Use mine.”

  Athena took the phone and dialed her office, but the loud restaurant made it impossible to hear. She excused herself and walked outside, along the waterfront, where all the sailboats were docked.

  * * *

  —

  JAKE WAS ABOUT to replace the agent’s tombstone with the bugged one when Thanya signaled him to freeze. She tapped the Bluetooth headset she was wearing.

  “Yes?” she said in Greek. She listened for a moment and gave Jake a thumbs-up to replace the tombstone and put the old one in her bag.

  She pulled out her mobile phone. “I just texted you an executable file,” she said. “Open it.”

  Athena did as she was told and Thanya confirmed that the software had been installed on the agent’s phone. It was an XCell Stealth, a high-security phone that was resistant to remote penetration, so the team had decided to breach it via physical access. Twenty seconds after the software began running, it had already transmitted all of his contacts and his call history. Once the agent’s phone was hooked up to a charger and idle for an hour, the software would steal his emails and his photos as well.

  “We’re in,” Thanya said to Athena. “Now do three things: Delete this call from his call history, call your office for a few minutes so the record is there if he checks, and delete the text message I sent you.”

  Thanya ended the call and looked at Jake. “We have control of his device. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  ATHENA WAS STANDING on the dock, facing the sailboats in the harbor. She’d just deleted the phone call to Thanya and was speaking to her office voice mail account about a fictitious deal with an American oil company when she felt a tug at her elbow.

  It was the agent.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  JAKE ARRIVED AT the Romanos estate around ten the next morning.

  It was the weekend and Athena met him at the front door, wearing a tailored pantsuit with low heels and her hair pulled back. Jake was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before and his wavy brown hair was completely disheveled.

  She gave him a quick once-over and frowned.

  “Busy night with Thanya?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s cute.”

  “She’s good at her job.”

  They walked to the glass-walled living room where Athena could keep an eye on her father. He was on the terrace, huddled comfortably under a blanket, watching a sailboat heeling under a gusty, gray sky.

  “I didn’t realize the U.S. State Department broke into people’s offices and hacked their phones,” she said.

  “We discovered a link to Somalia in the agent’s contacts late last night . . . while we were working.”

  “Is it the man you’ve been searching for?”

  “Probably just an intermediary. It’s a Swiss national who has regular contact with a banker in Mogadishu.”

  “So the banker is the pirate leader?”

  “No—just another cutout. He doesn’t fit the profile of the man we’re looking for.”

  “Which means you don’t want me to bring the Symi back to port . . .”

  Jake shook his head. “Not until we’ve found the man calling the shots.”

  Athena stood. “Then I won’t keep you, because you obviously have a lot of work to do in the next three days.”

  “You’re still planning to turn your ship around before it reaches the Arabian Gulf?”

  “My crews won’t sail there as long as the pirate is free.”

  * * *

  —

  JAKE WAS WHEELS-DOWN in Mogadishu just after midnight. Given the late hour, the G550’s aircrew had radioed ahead to request that a Somali customs agent be available to clear them into the country. The officer walked out to the plane wearing a Kevlar vest and a sidearm over his uniform.

  Most of the Somali underworld, and nearly everyone who worked at the airport, knew that U.S. intelligence was running a detention center on the premises. The big Gulfstream often arrived and departed in the middle of the night with no flight plan and no manifest, but those were joint operations with Somali intelligence and not subject to customs oversight.

  This was the first time the customs officer had been aboard the big jet.

  The Agency pilot pulled out his wallet.

  It was always a tricky decision, deciding how much to bribe someone. Too little and he might be insulted, but too much could make him wonder what you were hiding.

  “What’s the ‘fee’?” the pilot asked.

  Sometimes it was better to let him set the price.

  “Sixty thousand shillin
gs,” said the agent—about a hundred U.S. dollars.

  Not good, thought the pilot. Way too low for a guy who wants to play ball.

  “Nothing extra for the late hour?” the pilot asked, holding out two hundred thousand.

  The agent took sixty and wrote out a receipt. He was either the only honest cop in Somalia or already on someone else’s payroll.

  Jake handed over a false passport, often called a “shoe” in the intelligence community. The agent pulled out a handheld scanner and interrogated the RFID chip inside the passport’s cover to corroborate the information printed between its covers.

  But the shoe fit and the agent continued his inspection, checking the aft baggage compartment and looking under the seats with a flashlight. He opened all the luggage and examined the lavatory. He examined the cockpit and especially the communications gear. Apparently, whoever he was working for wanted a detailed report on the U.S. jet.

  “What is the nature of your visit?” the officer asked.

  “I’m looking for investment opportunities,” Jake said. He still had to play the game.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The Jazeera Palace Hotel.”

  The officer wrote it down and handed Jake the receipt.

  Jake entered the glass-walled terminal. It was nearly deserted, with only AMISOM troops, Somali soldiers, and bomb-sniffing dogs inside. He caught a taxi to the Jazeera Palace, adjacent to the airport, where he ordered breakfast. He went to the lavatory before it arrived, changed his clothes, and slipped out the back of the hotel, where he took a second cab to another hotel.

  Pickens was waiting down the block in the Toyota SUV.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  “A shipping agent fed the pirates targeting data for the two Romanos ships.”