The Devil's Triangle

by Catherine Coulter

“Yes,” Mike said. “Thank you, Kitsune, for keeping a watch on us, for keeping us safe.” She paused. “You’re not a bad shot, either. I thought you hated guns.”

  “I did. I do, but Grant—my husband—said I would occasionally find them useful and that meant I had to learn how to shoot. When he was satisfied, he gave me two Walther PPKs. I like them.”

  Nicholas said. “I want to meet Grant and shake his hand. He taught you well. Sit down, Kitsune, and tell us what’s going on here.”

  She sat forward. “Listen, time is of the essence. They have Grant, they kidnapped my husband.” Her voice cracked, just a bit, then she shook her head at herself, got it together. “I was told to set up a contact email account. My only message from his kidnappers was to be in the Piazza San Marco on the time and date—today. Nothing else.”

  Nicholas looked at her closely, saw the fear in her eyes, not for herself, no, for her husband. And he knew without question that she would trade herself for him.

  “Somehow they found out I’d called you, how, I don’t know, but they knew. They knew everything. And that’s why they were there in the piazza, waiting and watching for us to hook up and take care of all of us. I don’t think they have Grant here, I don’t even know if he’s still alive.” Kitsune hated saying those words aloud, hated how they sounded so stark, so final. She wanted to fold in on herself, but knew she had to keep it together, she had to move forward. It’s what Grant would expect of her. It’s what she expected of herself.

  Mike said, “You realize, of course, that your clients have buddies in the Carabinieri, probably on their payroll?”

  “I didn’t, not until the shooting started and they were nowhere to be seen.”

  Another knock on the door, and Nicholas covered Mike as she went to open it. This time, it was their dinner. Mike gave the server a big tip and wheeled the cart inside, wincing only slightly at the pulling pain in her arm. She’d been lucky—this was nothing.

  She set the tray on the table. “Everyone, dig in.”

  Nicholas took a bite of carbonara, then another. It tasted nearly as good as Pietro’s on East 43rd in Midtown.

  “Kitsune, let’s start at the Topkapi. I want to hear how you managed to steal the staff of Moses, a priceless artifact. Just like you stole another priceless artifact, I might add, from another well-guarded museum.”

  Kitsune chewed on a bite of gnocchi. “Suffice it to say the orders to give me a slot with the palace guards came from the very top. I look good in green and carrying an M5.”

  Mike said, “So you were a guard. You watched and you waited, learned everyone’s routines, the timetables. When you were ready, you put the security feed on a loop, turned off the infrared and bypassed the alarms, and did a weighted replacement for the staff.”

  Kitsune smiled. “You should get into the business, Mike. You think like a thief.”

  “Why, thank you,” Mike said.

  “Wait a minute,” Nicholas said. “The Topkapi is guarded by the Turkish military. How in the world did you get around them?”

  “I will say only that General Akar’s signature is remarkably easy to duplicate. How I stole the staff is irrelevant. The Topkapi’s security has many holes, as any museum does. We need to talk about Grant and how we’re going to find him. And save him.”

  “First, Kitsune,” Nicholas said, “we want you to tell us about how the sandstorm in Beijing wasn’t a natural disaster.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Kitsune nodded. “Very well. I’ve been doing some research on recent storms in the Gobi. I discovered a pattern. There have been a spate of sandstorms, always starting from the same quadrant, every few months for the past three years. If you check your email, Nicholas, I sent you a report before I came here.”

  Nicholas pulled his mobile from his pocket, opened it to his private, secure FBI mail app. “I won’t even ask how you got my secure email address.”

  “Truly, Nicholas, if the Americans have any hope of remaining at the top of the world food chain, they need to realize that giving every agent the same-patterned email address isn’t a safe road to security, no matter the level of encryption.”

  He tossed the phone to Adam. “Adam, please offload it.”

  Louisa asked, “But why would someone want to be causing sandstorms in the Gobi? Why would someone want to control the weather at all? And how is that even possible? You think someone’s figured out how to damage their competition one storm at a time? It’s all about money?”

  Kitsune said, “It usually is. But now I believe the systematic sandstorms are about something bigger than money. I believe whoever hired me to steal the staff of Moses in the Topkapi has something to do with these sandstorms.”

  “The Gobi is a big place,” Mike said. “I assume there are many lost treasures.”

  Kitsune nodded. “The Mongolian Empire was quite large. Whole cities were lost along with their treasures, their gold. As I told you on the phone, Nicholas, I think they’re looking for the Ark of the Covenant in the Gobi Desert.”

  “The Gobi Desert?” Adam looked confused. “How can that be possible? I mean, Indiana Jones was nowhere near the Gobi.”

  Mike said, “Adam’s right, tell us more, so we’ll understand. Why is your client looking for the Ark of the Covenant? And why in the Gobi Desert?”

  Kitsune said simply, “I believe they want the power the Ark holds. God’s power. You see, the staff of Moses belongs inside the Ark. I’ve read the Ark’s power is inconceivable. With it, they’d be unstoppable. If I’m right about this, they’ve already found a way to control the weather.”

  Adam looked up from his laptop. “Kitsune’s right. There is a pattern to the sandstorms. It’s hard to see if you didn’t go in already expecting to find it. Their inceptions concentrate in a single area.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  Kitsune said slowly, “I can’t prove it, but I believe it to my soul. If you wish, call it intuition.

  “I stole the staff of Moses for them, and they tried to kill me. Why? I know you don’t consider my profession to be particularly noble, but there is a code of conduct. They broke it. I could see no reason why, certainly not to save themselves five million euros. I did my job and did it cleanly, no chance of any blowback on them. So why do they want me dead?”

  Mike said, “Because you’re a loose thread.”

  Kitsune nodded. “Yes, that is true, but surely—”

  Adam raised his head. “Why do you believe these sandstorms tie directly into finding the Ark? Do you have any proof?”

  “The only thing I have is this. When I was in Turkey, standing around guarding the palace, a woman came for a VIP tour, and with the director of the museum, no less—very unusual. She was tall, fit, blond. I didn’t see her face, nor was I close enough to hear her talk, but she was treated with the utmost respect by the museum’s director. I remember he fell all over himself to get her inside as quickly as possible. I heard she spent most of the time she was there in front of the staff of Moses. She left less than thirty minutes later. The guards were talking about her, how they’d like to get her into bed, you know how men can be. I heard several of them call her hazine avcisi, some sort of professional treasure hunter, but more, they said she was an expert on the Ark of the Covenant. I looked up the visitor records later that night. All references to her being there had been deleted. Gone. Completely.

  “I couldn’t ask about it, clearly, but there was something to her visit that felt wrong to me. I never found out who she was. But I know it has something to do with the Ark, perhaps why they’re trying to kill me.

  “It’s said it takes one to know one. I think she’s a criminal, a pro, there to check out the staff.”

  “Did you see enough to sketch her?”

  “I told you, I wasn’t able to see her face. But there was something about her that alarmed me. She must be well connected, probably very rich and powerful, given how the director fawned over her.

  “Is she th
e client? I don’t know. You have to help me figure this out.” She drew a deep breath. “But the most important thing is what I heard the man and woman speaking about when I went to the drop site to deliver the staff, what I told you, Nicholas.”

  Nicholas drew a small notebook from his jacket pocket and read aloud: “ ‘I wish I could see it, the Gobi sands—a tsunami sweeping over Beijing.’ ‘We will see it all on video. All the sand . . . Could Grandfather be that good?’ ‘You know he is. And we will see the aftermath . . . leave in three days after things . . . imagine, we are the ones to drain the Gobi?’ ”

  Nicholas looked at Kitsune. “And you believe they drained the Gobi to find the Ark of the Covenant?”

  “Well, they already have the staff of Moses,” Kitsune said. “But you see, as I said, the staff is supposed to be inside the Ark of the Covenant. So what does it mean?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Adam thought about it. Build the code himself, encrypt it, and build a special back door so the Italians would never know he’d broken into their CCTV feed for Piazza San Marco? He knew they’d be able to identify the shooters, and maybe connect them to Kitsune’s client. Or, turn to Istanbul and find the blonde? Adam knew she had to be the key. He heard Kitsune say, “It was certainly a man and a woman speaking about the storm in the Gobi. Now that I think about it, their voices sounded young.”

  Adam went on the DarkNet. Here, he was Dark Leaf. His former name, Eternal Patrol, had been well buried when he’d come on board with the FBI. He and Nicholas had regularly pulled white-hat jobs together to establish the credentials of the new hacker name on the block. Dark Leaf was a dissident, a hacker with multiple website takedowns and proxy raids, and now a popular member of the online world of anonymous. As a result, Dark Leaf had a growing reputation and was known in all the wrong circles. No one would ever guess it was all a fabrication.

  A message window opened, four other hackers popped up and greeted him in their own special language.

  Hellop!

  Foo?

  WYB?

  Adam started to type, using his own peculiar hacking shorthand, not Dark Leaf, simply DL. Were someone to look over his shoulder, they’d see what at first glance looked like nonsense, strings of letters and characters and numbers. But to Adam, this was his world, the place he was most comfortable.

  The conversation was general for a few minutes, catch-ups and bragging, then he singled out a hacker named Ham for a private-messaging session. The window opened on the top right, yellow words on a black background, graying out the rest of his screen.

  DL: Has anyone had contact with GR8T lately?

  Ham: He went to join ISIS.

  DL: Please, that’s not true.

  Ham: Of course not, haha. Last I heard he was still in Constantinople. But flaky.

  DL: I need a pipe in. Can you help?

  Ham: 5

  Ham logged out of the chat. Adam bit a thumbnail. Five minutes later Ham’s handle popped up again, and a second name appeared.

  Ham: DL, here’s your genie.

  And he disappeared before Adam had a chance to thank him. He knew Ham would be back soon enough with a request or requirement of his own. That was fine. This was the price of doing business in the hacker world.

  Adam addressed the new chat mate.

  DL: Good to see you. Can you help with a project?

  GR8T: What do you need, and how much are you paying?

  DL: Enough. I need a feed for the cameras surrounding the Topkapi.

  GR8T: Military-grade, dude. Gonna cost ya.

  DL: Sky’s the limit. Bring it.

  GR8T disappeared from the chat. A long string of numbers appeared. Adam used it to wire transfer five thousand dollars. Good-faith money. Moments later a file appeared, floating in lazy circles in the middle of his screen. Adam scanned it, found exactly what he needed, then downloaded it. With two more clicks, he transferred another twenty-five thousand dollars, then logged out of the chat.

  Hackers were predictable, thankfully. Wave some cash and you could get whatever you wanted. Adam appreciated the fact that Nicholas had created the “bank,” as they liked to call it, and given Adam approval for up to $100,000 in transaction fees without extraneous approval. It made working the DarkNet so much easier. Plus, the hackers knew when Dark Leaf asked for help, they got paid. It was a win-win for everyone.

  Opening the file GR8T had sent him, Adam disguised himself further, coded open a slick back door through the museum’s firewall, and tapped directly into the ultrasecure video feed at the Topkapi Palace.

  He worked quickly, fingers crossed this ploy would work, that he hadn’t just wasted a quarter of his bank on nothing. So many museums recycled their feed at the end of the day, or the end of the week. From what Kitsune had said, he’d need the feed from about two weeks earlier.

  He was in luck. The Topkapi didn’t recycle their feeds weekly. They kept them all, bless their paranoid little souls.

  He saw the feed appear for the time frame in question.

  He made a quick copy of it, exited out the back door, closed it thoroughly so no one would know he’d been in the system, wiped all his tracks, and shut down the link.

  All in all, it had taken him less than five minutes to make the grab.

  Should he tell Nicholas now what he’d done? No, better to wait, see if he could identify the blonde who’d visited the Topkapi before he said anything. He heard their voices; he really liked Kitsune’s voice, the Scottish lilt. He started running the feed from the Topkapi against the FBI’s NGI facial recognition databases.

  If the woman Kitsune had seen was a criminal, Adam would find her.

  While that was running, Adam decided to open a fresh window and tap into the Venice CCTV video feed. He wasn’t interested in the shooters in Piazza San Marco today. He wanted to zero in on what happened the day Kitsune had nearly been killed.

  The Venice CCTV did recycle daily, but he quickly found the archive where they dumped their old files. He pulled twenty-four hours of feed, downloaded them, released the cameras, and started his search. He combed through hours of footage quickly, running the feed at ten-times speed, looking for Kitsune jumping from rooftop to rooftop.

  He was about to give up when he caught sight of her, leaping through the air like an inky blackbird. He stopped the video, ran it back, and watched in total awe as the woman flew off the edge of the building, soared in an arc fifty feet wide, and landed in a boat below. Switching cameras, he saw her shoot out of the canal into the lagoon, bullets smashing into the water behind her. Adam whistled, low. He thought at first she’d been really lucky, then changed his mind. She was that good.

  And it occurred to him. What he really needed to see was the man chasing her. He rewound the video and changed the camera angle, looked closely toward the area he assumed the bullets had come from. Sure enough, a face appeared at the edge of the building, watching Kitsune escape unscathed. Taking a screen grab of the face, Adam sent it to Gray to run, while he searched through the NGI database for the blonde.

  It was a half an hour before the computer dinged. A match. But it wasn’t what he expected.

  He’d struck gold.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Adam walked into the living room, a huge grin on his face. “Hey, kids, gather around. Daddy’s got a nice surprise.”

  Some laughter, then Mike said, “What do you have for us kids, Daddy?”

  “I found the blond woman Kitsune saw at the Topkapi. Nicholas, I’m sure glad you got your buddies in MI-5 to sync with us, because that’s where I found her—the MI5’s facial recognition database. Her name’s Lilith Forrester-Clarke.” He handed Kitsune a printed screen grab. “Is this the woman?”

  Kitsune frowned as she touched her fingertips to the woman’s face.

  Nicholas said, “Do you recognize her?”

  “Yes, from somewhere, maybe a long time ago. It’s going to take some thought for me to remember. But that name—Lilith—unusual name and
it’s familiar.”

  Mike hugged Adam, kissed him full on the mouth. “I’m so glad I talked Nicholas into bringing you on board.”

  “Wow! Wait, wait—” There was another ding from his computer. “Hey, look at this, guys, I’ve got another hit. Kitsune, I got footage and saw you flying over rooftops, and that made me see if I could find the guy chasing you. Yep, here he is, name’s Antonio Pazzi. He’s got a sheet, minor stuff mostly, lots of charges, but he seems to have a Teflon coating. He’s Venetian, and we should be able to find him here. The local cops will have him on their radar for sure. Unless he’s one of the dead shooters in the piazza. In which case, he’ll be even easier to find.”

  The two grainy shots were passed around.

  Kitsune stared down at Pazzi, looked over at Adam. She rose slowly, walked to him, and took his face between her hands. “You are remarkable. If I were not already married to the very best man in the whole world, I would marry you, young Adam.” And like Mike, she kissed him. “You’re a genius. Thank you.”

  “I’m not going to kiss you,” Nicholas said.

  “I will,” Louisa said. “But later. Maybe, depending on what you do for me.”

  Adam was grinning from ear to ear. “Louisa, you’ve got a ways to go to beat Mike.”

  “That’s why we pay Adam the big bucks.” Nicholas punched Adam on the arm.

  Adam said, “Hey, is there any food? I’m starving, my brain’s starving.”

  “You just ate.” Mike laughed. “Forgive me, I forgot. You’re still growing. There are potato chips in the minibar.” She turned back to Kitsune, pointed to the photo. “You’re sure this is the man you made the delivery to? The man who chased you, tried to kill you?”

  Kitsune nodded. “He’s the one, all right. Antonio Pazzi. Adam, wait a moment. The blond woman at the Topkapi . . . oh yes, I remember her now. But it’s so hard to believe it could really be her.

  “It was a long time ago, when I was very young. She was a bit younger than I, and I remember she had lots of dark brown hair, and she was pudgy, but then again, many kids are.”