by Brad Taylor
She whirled to the other fight, seeing Brett on his back, with his legs locked around the neck of his opponent in a triangle choke, his hands controlling the Korean’s arms. He fought back furiously, but Brett was relentless. The man went limp, and Brett took a breath, then kicked him away.
Brett touched his nose, the blood running freely, and said, “Shit, that didn’t work out.”
He rolled over, seeing the man she’d taken down, and said, “Remind me never to make fun of you again.”
She smiled and pulled him to his feet, saying, “What do we do now?”
He withdrew a micro beacon the size of a quarter, slit a seam at the base of the Korean’s jacket, and dropped it into the hole. He said, “Search them. That’s all we can do. We’re done for any further operations against these targets.”
12
The sun spilled its fading light across the Côte d’Azur, a spectacular view spread across some of the most expensive real estate in the world, but Amena was not impressed, having seen it every day for the past two months. Sitting on the roof of the old fort, she was more enthralled with her new iPhone X.
She had intended to go into town and sell it today, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so, clinging to it like Gollum’s ring. Amazingly, the phone had been unlocked, and her first order of business had been to change all the security parameters. After she had complete control, she’d used the data connection to access the Internet. Unlike most of the civilized world, she didn’t often have the chance to visit the World Wide Web, and was reluctant to give up the phone. She knew eventually the Syrian would shut off the connection, but until he did, she could search the internet for news stories of her homeland, and watch YouTube videos of the United States. She knew Aleppo was lost to her, but someday, she was going to America, and she wanted to know how to act when she did.
She was fascinated by Kim Kardashian, endlessly watching clip after clip of her television show, convinced that the Kardashian family was stereotypical of the United States. Midway through the latest video, the phone died. She’d stolen a lightning port charger, but had forgotten to use it last night.
She sighed, put the phone in her jacket pocket, and let her legs dangle over the roof of the fort, not wanting to go back inside just yet. She finally noticed the view, seeing the village of Eze below her, the Moyenne Corniche snaking in front of the hill the town was built on.
Like the aquarium, Eze was one of her favorite places in her new land. She told Adnan that it was because it was full of tourists, and thus ripe for fleecing, but in reality, it reminded her of home. Of Aleppo. It was an ancient town not unlike her own destroyed city, complete with narrow cobblestone footpaths and stone structures built eons ago. She loved wandering its alleys pretending she was home. A bittersweet feeling, because she knew she was never going back to Aleppo. Not after her mother had been slaughtered.
Her father had realized that remaining in Syria would be a death sentence for the remainder of his family, regardless of whether it came from the rebels or the government. Using every bit of money he had, he’d bought the family a way to Europe through the notorious smuggling industry that had sprung to life after the civil war had turned into a bonfire. Once a respected pharmacist—a man of means—he’d been reduced to a rat on the run. He’d done what he could to save them, and now worked as a janitor in a hotel. She understood why they’d made the perilous journey, but still couldn’t come to grips with the fact that she was an alien in a land that hated her, for no other reason than she’d fled a land that hated her. It was confusing.
She saw a flash of headlights on the road leading to the fort and pulled her legs up, away from view. Two men exited the car, and she immediately thought they were geocaching—a game where people placed items in caches around the countryside, and then posted them online for others to find with a GPS. The fort had a couple of caches, and she’d met the players in the past. Geocachers would be the only people who came to the park after it closed. It had happened before.
The driver of the vehicle studied what she thought was a GPS, the screen glowing on his face. She saw he was tall, and not a teenager—the usual types who did the searching. He was old. Maybe even thirty. And he was big. He looked like an athlete, even through the clothes. The other man was slender, with a large gold chain around his neck. He, too, was older than the usual cache hunters.
The driver turned to the gold chain and said, “It disappeared.”
Amena was surprised he was speaking English, even more so because his accent was Russian.
Gold Chain said, “What do you want to do?”
“It’s here. We just need to search for it. Someone turned it off. There was a light at the back of this place. We’ll start there.”
The driver stowed his device and stalked into the park. She knew where the cache was from previous attempts, and waited on him to start down the hill, toward the fence line at the base of the park. He did not. He circled directly underneath her, heading toward her new home.
They had been granted a small room at the back of an old French defensive fortification called Fort de la Revère, plopped in the center of a national park. An ancestor of the Maginot Line, ensconced in hectares of walking paths, the fort had been built in the nineteenth century because the terrain could control the coast. It was now a place where tourists came for the same reason—because it was the best place to obtain a view of the coast. It had last been used in World War II to house British pilots who had been captured, and her family now lived in what had once been a prison. And still was one, to a certain extent.
While their corner had intermittent power, allowing them to use a space heater and a small electric stove, the rooms were definitely austere, with nothing more in the way of modern conveniences, forcing them to walk down the hill to a construction site to use porta potties and fill water buckets from an outside faucet. She didn’t complain, because she knew the risks the people who’d helped them were taking.
They had made the arduous crossing of the Mediterranean in a leaky dhow with fourteen other families. Just shy of the Italian shore, the boat had capsized, spilling all of them into the water. Bobbing among the waves, the refugees all fighting for a piece of flotsam to stay above the water, the Italian navy had arrived, saving their lives.
They’d been transported inland to a brutal refugee camp on the French-Italian border with the nickname the Jungle, where Amena had earned her first taste of the hatred and fear she brought with her.
After a month living like animals, her father had had enough. He’d begun seeking options, eventually meeting a kind old man who’d turned his retirement years into building an underground railroad. They’d been spirited across the border in the dead of night, then given the contact of a Frenchman who worked for a nongovernmental organization specializing in renewable energy. On the side, he helped refugees escape the squalor of the camps.
He’d facilitated their travel into France, and had set them up at Fort Revère, where he had a contract with the French government to build a plethora of sustainable energy projects, to include an education facility to showcase his efforts, which was key, because it meant the old fort had been provided power.
They had been at the fort for nearly two months, and she could tell her father was growing tired again, just as he had in the camp. He had been an important man with a college degree, and it grated on him to mop floors, especially since the majority of French people were unwelcoming toward refugees.
They needed to get deeper into Europe. To Germany, or even Norway, and her father had told her it would happen, but in her mind’s eye the United States was the prize. If she could get there, the world would open up. Everyone hated her here, but she’d read the stories about the United States. They didn’t care where you came from. There was no such thing as a French superiority complex or Nordic royalty in America. They only cared if you would work to achieve what you wanted. And sh
e knew she could work. She doubted many in America had dodged barrel bombs just to get a bucket of water.
She watched the men circle the edge of the fort and continue on. She scurried across the roof to keep pace. They continued straight to the corner, where the light from her father’s single lamp spilled out, and she became alarmed. She ran to a roof access, a bastion porthole to allow the reloading of guns that no longer existed, and one her father kept open to facilitate a breeze through their little corner of the old prison. She looked down, and saw her father quizzing Adnan about their activities the day before.
He had no idea his children had become common pickpockets, and she had no desire to disabuse him of the notion that they were just scampering about, acting like kids the world over. She knew he hated leaving them alone, feeling he was failing them, but she understood it was the opposite. She was failing him by her actions, but in her mind it was necessary. He didn’t want to confront how they existed. He didn’t ever question how they had more milk than they should have, or had a meal when they should be eating dirt. His paltry earnings as a janitor in no way matched the money she made fleecing tourists. He chose to pretend. And now that mistake was coming home.
She leaned into the gap in the roof, caught Adnan’s eye, and the men knocked on the door. She retreated from view.
Startled, her father looked at Adnan, then went hesitantly to the door. He cracked it, his face reflecting fear. He said, “Yes?”
The man said, “As-Salaam-Alaikum.” And Amena felt her own fear sink deep into her belly. Nobody who spoke English with a Russian accent would also speak Arabic. He was something special.
Confused, not knowing if he should slam the door closed or talk, her father gave the answer, “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.”
In English, the man said, “My Arabic is a bit rusty. May I come in?”
Her father said, “Why? Who are you?”
The man smiled and said, “I’m your worst nightmare, or maybe your best friend. You have a cell phone that was stolen, and I’ve been tasked to get it back. I can pay in money, or pay in blood.”
She saw the confusion on her father’s face, and felt the heat of the phone in her pocket. He said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. How did you find us here?”
And the man quit the charade of civility. He slammed the door open, saw Adnan scampering to escape, and grabbed him by the throat. He said, “Tell me where the phone is, and I’ll let him live. I don’t have time to negotiate.”
Her father stammered in shock, and Adnan said, “Amena has it! Amena has it!”
Stunned yet again, her father stood mute. The man said, “Where is Amena?”
Her father didn’t answer, and the man looked down at Adnan and said, “Did you play with the phone?”
He said, “Yes, but just to look at the Internet. I’m sorry. We didn’t do anything bad with it. It still works, and she has it. She’ll give it to you.”
He said, “Too late for that.”
He placed one hand on her brother’s skull, the other on his throat, bent his head back, and a snap reverberated through the old cell, like a dry stick broken over a knee. It was that quick. He let the body drop, and Amena felt her world collapse, a blighting of the sun, a retreat from humanity that she’d only felt once before, when they’d found her mother’s body. An impotent rage consumed her, just as it had staring at her mother’s broken corpse. The fragility of human existence was driven home yet again, only this time she was at fault.
She rolled over onto the roof, taking in great gasps of air, and heard the man talk again.
“Where is Amena? I need that phone.”
Her father screamed, a feral, animal sound, and she rolled over to the hole. She saw her father attack the man, then saw the man stop the assault like he was batting a kitten away.
Gold Chain wrapped her father in his arms, and the driver put a blade to his neck, holding him still. He said, “Where is the phone?”
Her father struggled, babbling incoherently, and the driver said, “Is it in here?”
Her father lashed out with a foot, kicking the driver in his groin, causing him to double over. When the man rose, she saw the rage, and he drew the knife across her father’s carotid arteries, the head falling back and exposing a gaping wound, the blood jetting over her father’s shirt. Amena screamed. The driver let the body drop, and looked up. Amena saw the lifeless eyes staring right into hers.
He said, “Come down here, girl.”
She fell back, and then began running to the front of the fort, hearing her steps echoing off the stone.
13
David Periwinkle looked at the grainy image in front of him and thought, What the hell is he doing here?
He’d been aggravated at getting jerked from Turkey to assist some ridiculous SOCOM gung ho military team, knowing they’d be a clown fest, but now they’d actually found something. Last night, they’d done their usual bull-in-a-china-shop routine and gotten into a fight with the North Korean agents, something he’d expected to happen because those jerks had no idea how espionage worked. But instead of pulling back, they’d forged ahead, swapping out teams. The only smart thing they’d done. The other team had picked up the follow, which had led to the man in the photograph.
A man Periwinkle recognized. They’d actually found a connection between North Korea and the upper echelon of the Assad regime. Unfortunately, they’d also found his most highly placed source in the wilderness of mirrors that was Syria. And now Periwinkle had to make a choice—was this mission worth the price the United States would pay for losing access? If they took this guy down, Periwinkle—and the United States—would lose the ability to see inside the Syrian machine. Was the OPM hack worth that? The data was already out in the wild, and there was nothing the US could do about it. China could give it to anyone it wanted, and that country wasn’t in Periwinkle’s portfolio. His area of expertise was Syria, something he considered much more important to US national security.
He knew the team was going to take the Syrian down tonight in some misguided attempt at closing off an intelligence leak that had already happened, like closing the barn door after the horses had fled. When they did so, they’d close off all intelligence into the Assad regime.
He tapped his pencil on the table, trying to make a judgment. Trying to justify what he was about to do. He decided the intelligence coming out of the source was too sensitive to risk. What General Yasir al-Shami could provide the United States was much more important than a two-year-old hack, and Periwinkle was his sole contact.
Yasir had broken off all contact when the United States had begun backing the Kurds in the fight against the regime, and then, one month ago, he’d resurfaced, promising a final burst of intelligence before dropping off the net yet again. Surprisingly, just two days ago, he’d reinitiated contact through an intermediary in Turkey. Periwinkle hadn’t even had time to shack up a cable reflecting the news because he’d been pulled into this Monaco fiasco, and now the general was here, about to be taken down.
He reached into a bag at the feet of the desk in the makeshift embassy office he’d been given and pulled out a flip phone. He dialed a number, knowing the Syrian would have a similar phone with him. Or at least he hoped the general did. For both of their sakes.
14
Colonel Kurt Hale booted up his laptop, typing in the multiple passwords required to get past the NSA type-one encryption standards. He watched the members of the Oversight Council fill their seats while he waited. He saw Secretary of State Amanda Croft enter, then approach. Uh-oh. None of the council ever talked to him before he briefed. They didn’t want to appear as if they supported what he was about to say, knowing they would have to vote on the outcome afterward. It was an unwritten rule, and one that he liked. All he wanted to do was brief and get out. He didn’t come to these meetings to make friends.
George Wolffe, his deputy c
ommander, stood up in an effort to intercept her, but it did no good. She ignored him as if he were a stray cat. At thirty-five, she was younger than most who’d held the post, but before getting tapped for the SECSTATE job, she’d been a fire-eater at a global energy company, and had worked all over the world spinning deals with every country on earth, be they despots destroying human rights or liberal democracies. Kurt was sure she was a ball-breaker, not the least because she was attractive, an attribute he knew had worked against her in the rarefied corporate air where she strived to be seen as intelligent.
She reached him, and he waited, unsure of what to say.
She said, “Before this gets started, I want you to know that I will not use emotion in my vote. I want you to understand that.”
He nodded, confused.
She said, “And I’d appreciate discretion in this matter. It will have no effect when it comes to my vote, and there’s no reason for the rest of the Council to start second-guessing my actions based on my personal life.”
Now really confused, he said, “Yes, ma’am. I understand.”
She took her seat, and Kurt caught George’s eye. He just shrugged. He had no idea what the discussion was about either.
Kurt saw two Secret Service men enter, sweep the room, then one talked into a radio. Ten seconds later, the president of the United States, Philip Hannister, entered. A slender man with thinning gray hair, he looked more like the economist he was than the president, but Kurt knew from experience the bifocals he wore hid a spine of steel. A man who never wasted words, President Hannister took his seat and simply nodded.
Knowing that everything he said was going on the record, Kurt started with an introduction: “As requested by the Council, this is the update briefing on Operation Nickel Steel, the first joint CIA/Taskforce operation.”
He punched a button and a long-view picture of a group of men appeared on the screen behind him.
