by Aiden Bates
"Chief?" Trent blinked.
"It's medicinal." He winked and turned to Ginger. "Technically, alcohol isn't allowed on Navy vessels. We are allowed to carry some for medicinal purposes. Since we caught you in an Al Qaeda base, armed, sabotaging evidence, yeah. I think you could use the fortification."
Ginger smirked. "Very generous of you, Chief." He held out his manacled hand. "You can call me Mal."
Chief chuckled. "That was easy." He shook Mal's hand while Trent fetched a bottle of rum. "Of course, that's just one of eight names we found for you in the system. Why that one?"
Mal blinked, nonplussed. "Well, it's me name. The one me mum gave me. And we told you before, the facility wasn't Al Qaeda. It was Daesh. They don't play so nicely together these days." He accepted the paper cup of rum Trent put in front of him. "Thank you kindly." He turned to meet Trent's eyes and curved his lips into a seductive little smile.
Trent blushed.
"We have reliable intelligence that says otherwise. Of course, you’re right in the middle of it, so I guess you'd know." Chief watched Mal carefully.
"Oh, I wouldn't say I'm in the middle of it. The guy who gave me the information is. He's not such a bad bloke."
"For a terrorist?" Trent snorted. "Tell me another one."
"Oh, big boy, I'll tell you anything you want to hear." Mal winked at Trent. "Seriously, though. The man in question is not a terrorist, but some of his relatives are. That's how I got the information, anyway."
"And you didn't bother to vet it with anyone." Chief's smile was indulgent, paternalistic. It was also a lie.
Mal didn't know that, though. Mal didn't know Master Chief Boone. "Oh, I vetted it." Mal sipped his rum. "Listen, gentlemen. You can believe me or not, but that was hardly a base. It was just a machine. It was a server room, basically, for a relatively low-tech solution."
"According to you."
"Well yeah. I'm the one I trust." Mal smiled, brilliant and beguiling.
Chief reached down onto the ground. "Your backpack contained a laptop. Open it up for me."
Mal opened it. The wallpaper was a scene from a gay porno.
Trent's face burned. Chief looked away. "Young man, that is repulsive. Pass me that machine."
Mal's face was the picture of innocence as he passed the laptop over.
Every file turned out to be gay porn.
Chief drummed his fingertips on the table. "I have a theory." He reached down into Mal's backpack and pulled out an impressive variety of sex toys. Trent was fairly certain some of them weren't even physically useable. "Would you like to hear it?"
"I suppose you're going to tell me regardless." Mal sipped from his drink.
"My theory is that no one sits around and uses a bodyguard, multiple false identities, and multiple weapons of his own to guard a porn and sex toy collection." Chief made a face at Mal. "You want to try again?"
Most people quailed when they got that face from the Chief. Most people wouldn't have tried to pull one over on him in the first place. Then again, Mal had been found messing around in an Al Qaeda bunker in Spain. It was probably safe to say he wasn't most guys. Swirling the rum around inside his paper cup, he said, "I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to prove that there was anything at all besides porn on that laptop. And are you really all that suspicious of a single omega's sex toys, Chief?"
Chief curled his lip. "Get him out of here."
Mal chugged back his rum. "Can I at least bring the toys with me?"
Trent grabbed him and dragged him back to his cell. "You shouldn't flirt with the Master Chief," he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead and not on the hot body pressed against him.
"Why?" Mal snorted. "Too much of a straight arrow?"
"No. Because he's married. His husband's pregnant with their fifth kid back at base." He leaned down into Mal's ear. "This whole team? Alphas."
Trent expected Mal to cringe, flinch, or something. Instead, he just gave that little feline smirk of his. "Isn't that interesting?"
Trent locked him away again, and then returned to the Master Chief. "What do you think, Chief?"
Chief stared at the door the man had just gone through. "I think there's a lot more there than meets the eye, that's for sure. Who carries six sex toys around the streets with him?" He picked one of the toys up. "These are unused. This one still has the price tag on it."
Trent grinned, in spite of himself. "Seriously? You're kidding. That's…kind of brilliant, actually."
"What do you mean, brilliant? "Chief scowled.
"Think about it. So many people have ideas about omegas. He throws a few toys into his bag, fills his laptop with porn, and all the security agent or the border patrol guy can think to do is to close that bag up and go wash his hands. He could probably smuggle a whole kilo of heroin in that backpack and no one would ever know."
Chief nodded slowly, stroking his chin. "You're not wrong. Here's the thing. Of the eight different identities linked back to that set of fingerprints, none of them are linked to heroin. We've got Malachi O'Donnell, Demetrio Torres, Ignacio Felix, so on and so forth. They're all just normal guys. And they're all living and working around Europe and the Mediterranean right now."
"Wait, right now?" Trent sat down across from Chief. "Because I know he's in the brig. I saw him in the brig.”
"You did. And someone else is seeing him sitting in a cafe in Istanbul, in a restaurant in Beirut, and working in a clinic in Gaza too. He's probably been in all of those roles. No one seems to know who he really is, or was. What they do know is that large sums of money go missing from some exciting accounts when he's around." He pulled out a file. "After the Bank of Ireland Tracker scandal, money was mysteriously rerouted from the bank to a series of charities, who routed the money to a series of other charities and so on and so forth until the money was ‘donated’ to people who'd been scammed."
"Robin Hood. I see."
"That clinic in Gaza is now being funded by a major anti-Palestine lobbyist in the US, much to his chagrin. Every time he tries to stop the charges, he springs another leak. Money for food aid to Syrian refugees is getting funneled through Beirut, and money for people fleeing ISIL through Kurdistan through Istanbul. Which, for the record, Ankara is none too pleased about. The only thing we have to go on is that set of fingerprints."
"Which might be hacked." Trent tapped his jawline.
"Could be, but I doubt it. You saw how well he played us. Played me." Chief chewed on his fingertip for a second. "I guess it doesn't really matter. We know he's probably not Al Qaeda. It's a European problem. I'm tempted to just let Europe have at it. Call Interpol and let them deal with it."
"Right now?"
"No. Wait until we get to port. We'll worry about it then."
Trent accepted his dismissal. He didn't think waiting was a great idea. These guys were smart and resourceful. He'd rather transfer these prisoners to European control as soon as possible and have done with it.
He retreated to his bunk. His teammates were joking and laughing, but he couldn't join in. He was too worried about what these prisoners were going to do next.
When he got the call in the middle of the night that they'd escaped the brig and stolen one of the life rafts, he knew the other shoe had dropped.
Chapter Two
Mal looked up at the ceiling, as what sounded like a herd of zebras trampled by overhead. "We should have sprung for the better housing," he grumbled, as he booted up his laptop.
Morna scoffed at him. "Are you kidding me? After how much it took to replace your laptop, I'm surprised the old man didn't want us camping out in the woods."
Mal pursed his lips. He couldn't deny the truth of her words. "It's Alexandroupoli," he said with a shrug, instead. "The woods around here are kind of scant, yeah?" The zebras overhead stampeded in the other direction. "Do you think the ceiling is structurally sound, or is the place going to come crashing in on our heads?"
"Get a helmet." Morna stuck her tongue out at him. "H
ave you found the specifics for the attack yet?"
He mimicked her higher voice. "Have you found the specifics for the attack yet? Jesus, woman, I've only just got the computer open. Would you let me log into the damn network before you start hounding me about tracking down terrorists?"
"The sooner you get on it the sooner we can get away from the holiday crew upstairs." She looked up at the ceiling, just in time to see a little piece of plaster crumble to the ground. "My God this place is a dump. Make it snappy, before the neighbors invite us to their kegger."
Mal didn't need to be told twice. He found a signal he could use to get onto the net, and from there it was all over. He knew more or less where to look already. His contacts were good enough to keep him in the loop. He found a local hotel's website and slipped into their employee pages. Once there, he slid into a two-year-old policy discussion thread related to the dress code. Deep inside, he found a section about overt religious symbolism while in the company uniform and followed a link to another, theoretically more secure discussion group. That led him to yet another website, this time in Arabic.
Fortunately, Mal knew Arabic, better than he knew Greek. “Well, I'll be damned." He sat back and let out a long, low whistle. "Well. This was unexpected."
"What? Porn?" Morna popped up over Mal's shoulder. "You find porn in those guys' files all the time. It's usually terrible porn too. They need to start paying for some quality stuff."
"Well, yeah, they do. You always get what you pay for. But seriously, not the point here. The way this stuff here is phrased?" He pointed to a handful of messages on one side of the screen. Morna didn't speak Arabic. She was better with Slavic languages.
"Yeah?"
"No native speaker of Arabic would phrase things like that." He wrinkled his nose. "They're not even trying to fake it. Like when I go into a discussion group and pretend to be one of the bad guys, I actually try to be one of the bad guys. And I'm pretty good at it, if I do say so."
"Oh my God, Mal, stop fluffing yourself and start making sense, would you?" Morna elbowed him.
"If I had to make a guess, I'd say these guys here are English speakers." He sucked in his cheeks. "This is probably a lot more complicated than we thought it was."
"Should we call in the big guns?" Morna worried at her lip. "We're just two people."
Mal tapped his fingers on the table as he considered. "No," he said after a moment. "I don't think we need to do that." He scanned over the rest of the messages. "No, I don't think we need to do that, and I'm not sure that we have time, either."
"Why is that?" Morna sat up a little straighter. "We don't have to be done with this job for another week. Liam and Sean are just up in Sofia. They can be down here in a couple of days, tops, and they can pull in a few other folks who wouldn't mind getting their licks in."
Mal made a face. "Good Lord, it's hardly getting their licks in, is it? It's not a street brawl in Belfast, it's a targeted strike against a bunch of people bent on destroying the world as we know it." He shook his head a little. "But it says right here that they're looking to move faster than we'd expected. The English guys want to get back to their base before Ramadan starts, which is next week. Apparently they don't want to 'interfere' with their partners' observance."
Morna sneered and stepped away from the computer. "I suppose that's nice of them."
"Sure." Mal stood up. "I'm pretty sure I know where they are. We should be able to get in and get out over the next couple of days."
"Why take so long?" Morna looked up again, just as the herd of holidaymakers thundered across their flat again. This time, their door slammed open and the stairs groaned ominously. They were apparently going out to enjoy the nightlife in Alexandroupoli.
"Because, little sister, only a fool thinks they're going to just waltz in and make things go the way they want because of some plans they saw on the internet." He cleared himself out of the site and opened up town maps. "It's a new town. We don't know our way around, and we don't know what their final plan is. We should do what we can to figure it out, yeah?"
She stuck her tongue out at him. "This is why they pay you the big bucks, big brother. You think of these things."
"Someone has to. We can't all be impetuous gingers, you know."
She flipped him off. "You're just as ginger as I am."
He chuckled and focused on his maps.
The next morning, as their neighbors slept off ouzo hangovers, Mal and Morna went out to explore the town.
They looked like any other tourist pair out to enjoy some sun and take pictures. They made sure of it. Morna wore a bikini top over low-slung shorts. No one attracted to women would remember seeing anything more than a cute, if pale, young redhead with a better than fit body out to see the sights. If anyone noticed Mal at all, they'd see the most garish tourist ensemble he could think up. His button-up shirt even had pink flamingoes on it.
Mal could have put light-up signs over their heads that said ‘We're harmless tourists’, but he'd decided that might be overkill.
They explored some old ruins — nothing fancy, since Alexandroupoli was only about a hundred and fifty years old. This was still Greece, though, and if a place was habitable there was a good chance someone had inhabited it at some point in history. They saw monuments to the interminable wars suffered by inhabitants over the course of the past century and they looked at a wide variety of sport facilities and educational institutions. They got pictures, and plenty of them.
They even had dinner at the restaurant where Mal had found the original link he had used to get into the terrorists' message board. It was a fairly standard seaside restaurant, intended for tourists with a menu in six languages, and none of them Greek. Their waiter's name tag proclaimed his name to be Yiannis, but he pronounced it more as Yunus and spoke English with an accent that sounded like its origins were much more Eastern than Greek to Mal's practiced ears.
But proximity to something suspicious didn't necessarily mean the waiter himself was suspicious. Mal resolved to look into the man later and put his heart and soul into playing the role of a good brother out on vacation with his sister. When a couple of other pale-complected tourists approached their table and offered to buy them drinks, Mal and Morna agreed heartily.
Their new companions were in their thirties or forties and seemed affable enough. Both of their eyes were glued to Morna, but that was the intent behind her outfit. The older-looking man had a slight accent, maybe Australian. His name was Piers, and the most memorable feature in his face was his perfect, bright white teeth. The other man had a dark tan, a stark contrast to his shocking blue eyes, and sounded American. His name was Phil.
Yiannis brought their drinks, along with little paper coasters from Mythos Brewery. He gave Mal a little nudge as he passed by. Mal had been in this kind of situation before, so he discreetly checked the underside of his coaster.
Someone had written, in clear and careful print, Do not leave your sister alone with these men.
All right then. It was good that Yiannis, or whoever he was, looked out for his customers.
He paid closer attention to their drinking companions as they chatted. They were in town, they said, on a consulting gig related to the airport. They didn't give a lot of details, and Mal wouldn't expect them to. They did make sure to hint they were getting paid a lot of money to be there, especially when they spoke to Morna. By the time they left, Morna had both of their numbers and a probable date for Saturday evening.
Of course, both of the O'Donnells would be long gone by Saturday.
Mal made sure he left an extra tip for Yiannis. It wasn't necessarily customary, but Yiannis had given him a good lead.
When he and Morna got back to their flat, they put their photos onto the laptop and considered their options. "What are the odds that those guys are actually working on a consulting project at the airport?" Morna asked, toying with a short lock of her hair.
"Nil." Mal sifted through the pictures when an idea struck him.
"Here, let me have their numbers, would you?"
"I didn't think they'd be your type." She wrinkled her nose, but passed over the napkin on which they'd written their phone numbers.
"They're not. I mean really, what kind of useless consultant doesn't even have a business card?" He scoffed and set the napkin down with a bit more force than necessary. "They've been around the area quite a bit, long enough for our waiter to warn me not to leave you alone with them. Let's see where they are right now."
It didn't take much to trace the phone numbers the men had given. Technically, this was illegal. Pretty much everything else Mal did was illegal, so he didn't worry about it more than he had to. Finding their phones only took a few minutes. Getting a fix on their position took a few minutes longer, but Mal was good at what he did. He turned to his sister with a look of triumph. "I think our job just got easier."
