The NSA team sat frozen in their vehicles. Within seconds, the roar of the southern convoy’s pursuing vehicles echoed into the ravine. Just as quickly, the noise faded.
Mastana sat forward and looked at Alton, who shook his head.
Three or four minutes later, another rumble of engines approached, this time from the northern search party. These transports moved at a deliberate pace, conducting a more exhaustive search. The NSA team waited ten minutes for the sound of this search to fade into the distance.
Alton reactivated his mike. “I’m not sure if the search parties will make another lap, and I don’t propose sticking around to find out.”
“Roger that,” said Silva over her mike.
“Keep the blackout conditions. We’ll head for our other two vehicles. They’re too far away to have been found so soon.”
“Roger,” said Silva. She backed her vehicle around the curve and continued another dozen yards along the culvert’s straight path. Shifting the transmission, she powered up the concrete slope, landing with a thump back on the desert floor.
Alton followed suit and pulled back into the lead vehicle position. He scanned all directions but saw no indication of any pursuers.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, “and find out what Pasha Tech is so anxious to hide.”
CHAPTER 33
Rala Vaziri poured milk into a steaming cup of black tea and stirred the mixture at a leisurely pace. Late afternoon shadows stretched across her al fresco café table. An opportunistic red-capped robin flitted nearby, examining the ground for a fallen crumb or two.
The waiter checked with Vaziri again, but she waved him off. She needed no more than the plate of scones and pastries she had ordered with the tea.
Thirty minutes late, Ian Finley arrived and flopped into the opposite seat. “How ya goin’, Vaziri? What’s up with the sunglasses? You worried about the Paparazzi?”
“In my line of work, it’s best to keep a low profile. You might consider adopting that approach yourself.”
Finley laughed, a harsh, cruel sound. “That’s the difference between you and me. I don’t hide from nobody.” He eyed Vaziri’s formal attire, replete with a knee-length cream dress, pearls, dainty white gloves and a smart, white hat. “I know it’s time for high tea, but I didn’t know you’d be all dressed up. And here I am in jeans. I feel so embarrassed.” He laughed again, a sneering noise suggesting anything but remorse.
Finley called out to the waiter. “Hey, bring me some tea.”
The waiter arrived and poured a second cup. Finley dumped in sugar and cream. He swirled the mixture in a clumsy manner, clanging his spoon against the side of the enamel cup in a noise reminiscent of a medieval skirmish.
“You asked for this meeting,” said Finley, eyeing Vaziri. “What’d you wanna talk about?”
“You and I had an agreement, Finley. The Director started working on your request in good faith. He assumed you would honor the contract. Now I understand you want to change it. What seems to be the problem?”
“The problem? I did some checking around. You guys overcharged me. I ain’t paying fifty grand, not for something I can get half price somewhere else.”
Vaziri took a sip of her tea. “But you can’t get our product anywhere else, not for any price. It’s custom made, remember?”
Finley shrugged. “Whatever. Either I get it for thirty grand or I walk. And if I do, I might just let ASIS know what you and boss are up to.”
Vaziri knew this mobster well enough to know he rarely issued idle threats, especially those involving the police. “You’re not worried about implicating yourself?”
“Nope. They’ve been after me for years, but they have a little problem: they got no evidence on me.”
“I see.” Vaziri sliced a scone in two, placing half back on the plate and taking a bite from the other half. She chewed slowly, as if deep in thought contemplating Finley’s words. “I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“Now you’re talking,” he replied with a leer.
Vaziri shrugged. She looked at the plate of high-tea morsels, then at Finley. She extended the plate. “Cupcake?”
The mobster eyed her with skepticism. He reached past the cupcake and snatched up the other half of the scone Vaziri had sliced in two. After slathering the pastry with butter, he crammed it into his mouth and swallowed without any obvious chewing. “Where do you want me to drop the payment?”
Vaziri produced her own grin, a serpentine smile she knew to be devoid of mirth or mercy. “Oh, you’ve already made your payment.”
“What do you mean?” Finley ran a hand over his throat and took a deep breath.
“Did you know,” said Vaziri, “that if you put toxin on only one side of a knife and slice something—a scone, for instance—only half the sample is poisoned? Guess which half you got?”
“Bitch!” Finley started to rise, then collapsed into his chair, struggling to draw enough air into his lungs.
“If it’s any consolation, the product you just ate isn’t that street crap you could get for half price. No, it’s the Director’s custom blend, the first batch of the product you were too cheap to buy.”
Finley’s last effort to rise simply righted him in his chair. He stared at her with unblinking eyes.
“The neurotoxin acts quickly,” continued Vaziri. “But there’s good news. Even though you won’t be able to move, you’ll still be able to see and hear and feel everything, at least for a few minutes. But, I’m sad to say, before long the toxins will reach your lungs. You’ll be dead before the paramedics arrive.”
Finley tried to speak but produced only a gurgling sound. His eyes began to glaze over, and he sagged onto his chair’s right armrest. The red-capped robin returned and examined him with a cocked head.
“You should consider yourself honored,” said Vaziri, whose white gloves had prevented the inadvertent deposition of fingerprints or DNA. “This is the first time we’ve used this particular formula on a human. It’s so good, in fact, we predict no one will suspect your death is anything but natural.”
Finley slid down a few inches in his chair.
Vaziri stood and threw a banknote on the table, preparing to leave. “If you weren’t going to die in the next few minutes, I’d tell you to warn your associates not to fuck with us. But I think they’ll get the message.”
CHAPTER 34
Oncoming headlights began to blur. Alton shook his head in an effort to stay awake, surprised the throbbing pain in his damaged leg hadn’t done the job.
Mallory stirred in the passenger seat. She sat up. “You want me to drive for a while?”
“Are you any less exhausted than I am?” In the past twenty-six hours, stolen cat-naps had served as the team members’ only form of rest.
“Ug. I don’t know. Maybe.” She ran a hand across a brow still streaked with the green and black shades of camouflage paint.
“If you can keep me talking, that would help,” said Alton. They’d need a few more minutes of traveling up the Kabul-Kandahar highway before reaching their hotel.
Mallory sat up straighter. “I was meaning to ask you…the Pasha Tech building was deserted. How did the guards know we were there?”
“We must have triggered a silent alarm or a motion detector, probably when we blasted the vault door. I was afraid of something like that happening from the very beginning. But I figured if it was going to happen, it’d be when we entered the administrative building in the first place.”
“You didn’t say anything about that ahead of time.”
Alton slowed to navigate an unlit curve on the desert highway. “What would’ve been the point? The rest of the team had enough to worry about without stressing over something we couldn’t control. Either Pasha Tech would have a silent alarm, or they wouldn’t.”
Mallory shrugged. “I suppose.”
In the space of a silent sixty seconds, Alton’s focus once again began to fade.
He dialed the members of the other th
ree vehicles, once again spaced ten minutes apart, and teleconferenced them into a joint call. “You guys did an amazing job. I know we all want to see what’s in the Pasha Tech R&D boxes and body-cam footage, but we need some shuteye first. Head back to your hotels and rest. We’ll reconvene in my hotel room at eleven-hundred hours. I’ll have breakfast waiting.”
“Roger that,” said David, the relief palpable in his voice. Silva and Gilbert also confirmed and signed off.
“Can you send a text to Vega?” Alton asked Mallory. “I’m sure he saw us hijacking the infrared satellite imagery, so he’s got to be wondering about our status.”
“Okay,” said Mallory, her fingers dancing over the surface of her phone. “Anything in particular you want to tell him?”
“Just that we all made it out safe. And that we have some intel we’ll start to review tomorrow our time.”
Back in the hotel room, Alton needed extra time to scrub the camo paint and desert dust from his pores. He probably would have nodded off in the shower had the discomfort of standing on his fatigued leg not provided unwelcome stimulation.
Mastana and Mallory had showered before him and now lay sprawled on separate beds. Deep breaths indicated both had already fallen fast asleep. Alton lowered himself beside his wife. He closed his eyes, and within moments, all went blank.
Alton’s eyes snapped open as the chime from his phone went off. Shafts of sunlight penetrated a crack in the curtains, stabbing a sliver of bright light through the room. Mallory was dead to the world, but Mastana sat up with a worried look.
“It’s okay,” said Alton. “It’s just my alarm clock. I wanted to leave us time to get breakfast for the rest of the team before they arrived.”
“Would you like me to help?” asked the teen.
“Sure. I have a hard time working with the street vendors who don’t speak English. You could probably get a better deal, too. You know how they jack up the prices for Americans.”
A few minutes later, Alton and Mastana returned with four bags filled with fruit, stuffed pastries, hard-boiled eggs, and disks of flatbread known as naan. Mallory had awakened and helped them spread the assortment—along with water, tea, and coffee—on the table.
Within the next fifteen minutes, the rest of the team trickled in. They bore lingering signs of fatigue but looked reasonably ready to dig into the treasure trove of information that had required such effort to obtain. Alton walked to each corner of the room, turning on the screamers as he went. With the devices activated, no one could eavesdrop on their conversation.
Silva was the last to arrive. Once she did, Alton stepped to the table. “Grab some breakfast. I’ll outline our go-forward plan while we’re eating.”
“No rest for the weary?” asked Gilbert, grabbing a piece of the naan bread and eyeing it with curiosity while flipping it over several times.
“You know the Afghani military must have put out a BOLO for us, so there’s no time to waste,” said Alton. He cracked a hard-boiled egg and began peeling it. “Mastana, I need you to focus on the records contained in the two Pasha Tech R&D boxes we recovered last night.”
“I will do this, but it might take a long time.”
“Gilbert and I are going to sit with you. You’ll translate out loud, and we’ll assess the importance of the information.”
Mastana nodded.
“Mallory, David, and Silva, I want you three to review the footage from our body cams. See if you can spot anything important. Make stills of any shot containing writing in Pashto. Once you have it all, let’s sit down with Mastana so she can translate.”
Their mouths full, the team members grunted acknowledgements.
“First, we’ll finish our meal,” said Alton. He took a bite into a date and chewed, deep in thought. “You know, there’s one thing I don’t get. Pasha Tech builds a super-fortified storage room and hides it in the middle of a labyrinth, but then they guard it with mall cops.”
David cut short his sip of coffee to respond. “Maybe they thought the building’s security measures were enough. They might have viewed the guards as an afterthought. You gotta admit, that was a hell of a door you broke through. If I was in charge of Pasha Tech security, I might have figured that door would stop just about anyone.”
“True,” said Alton. With several years of Secret Service experience, David represented the team’s resident expert in the field of physical security.
After finishing their meal, the team members broke into groups to commence work on their separate tasks.
“Let’s see what these records reveal,” murmured Alton. He opened the first R&D box and laid out the contents—reams of papers stuffed into several dozen manila folders—into four piles for Mastana to review. As Alton arranged the piles, the Islamic call to prayer blared over a loudspeaker on the street below.
Mallory walked over to Alton. “You mentioned we should show Mastana screen shots of any writing in the local language. I pulled some of those together when you all went to get breakfast. Do you want to review what I have so far, or would you rather wait until it’s complete?”
Alton ran a hand through his hair, considering the question. “Let’s take a look at it now. Who knows? It may give us more insight into whatever’s waiting for us in the boxes.”
Mallory nodded and handed over her cellphone to Mastana. “I put all the photos in a folder. You can scroll through the lot of them.”
The teen studied the figures on the first screen. She swiped to the second image, then a third. After a few seconds of scanning it, she froze.
“What is it?” asked Alton.
Rather than answering, Mastana swiped through another half-dozen images in quick succession. Her sense of alarm grew with each photograph.
She exhaled and sat back in her chair. “This company we visited last night…it is not Pasha Tech.”
CHAPTER 35
“What?” exclaimed Alton. “Are you sure?”
Mastana nodded, her face the picture of confusion.
“If it’s not Pasha Tech, who is it?” asked Mallory.
“The sign over each door says the name of the departments,” said Mastana. “But before each department name, it says ‘Huda Industries.’ That is the name of the company.”
By now, the rest of the team had gathered around.
Alton rubbed his chin. “That means either Vega’s intel was wrong, or Pasha Tech really did go belly up around the time Cutter Wilson died.”
Mastana pivoted her gaze between the photos on Mallory’s phone and grimy labels plastered on the R&D boxes. “I don’t understand…”
“What is it?” asked Alton.
“The boxes say ‘Pasha Tech.’ Why would they say that if the company is Huda Industries?”
“Maybe there’s a third option,” said Alton. “Perhaps Vega’s intel was right, but Pasha Tech moved to some other location during the past fifteen years.”
“Nice theories,” said Silva, “but how do we know which one’s right?”
“Good question,” said Alton. “Let’s do this…I’ll get on the horn with Vega and let him know what we’ve discovered. He can have his analysts cast a wider net for Pasha Tech. In the meantime, let’s review the R&D boxes and body-cam footage. They might also suggest what happened to the company.”
Alton stepped over to the window. He activated the phone’s deep encryption algorithm and dialed Vega’s number.
On the fourth ring, the manager picked up. “Hello?”
“It’s Blackwell. Sorry if I woke you up.”
“No worries. I just hit the sack a minute ago. Anyway, I’m glad you called. Your wife’s message had me curious. What’s the latest?”
Alton summarized the previous day’s activities, beginning with the attack at the roadside food stand on the way to Ghorak and concluding with the early-morning trek back to Kabul. As he spoke, the imam’s call to prayer on the street below ceased, producing an odd silence.
Alton wrapped up his debriefing. “We had just
started reviewing the R&D boxes when Mastana made a surprising discovery.”
“What’s that?” asked Vega.
“The boxes are labeled ‘Pasha Tech,’ but the body-cam footage we took shows department signs that reference some other company called ‘Huda Industries.’ Either Pasha Tech isn’t there anymore, or they decided to change its name.”
“Actually, if they left,” said Vega, “that could explain some of the intel my guys have gathered since we last spoke.”
“Do tell.”
“When the US invaded Afghanistan after nine-eleven, the Taliban deserted a lot of facilities, including the Pasha Tech site, as they retreated. All the intel we could gather shows company documents being produced for years but then stopping once the U.S. invaded.”
“Could they have relocated to somewhere else in Afghanistan,” said Alton, “or maybe even to some other country?”
“I doubt it. The metadata searches my guys run would have picked up something. Speaking of that, guess who was the lead researcher at Pasha Tech back in the day?”
“Farid Safi?”
“You got it,” replied Vega. “From what we can tell, he was an expert in his field.”
“That would explain why Creighton mentioned his name before he died,” said Alton. “Maybe Safi was running the show.”
“Yep. We’re guessing he fled the country. That’s why the searches we’ve been running on Afghani locals haven’t turned up anything. He’s probably not there anymore.”
“But you’re saying he used to be here?” asked Alton. “You’re sure?”
“As sure as you get in this business. We tracked down a toxicological scientist named Farid Safi in Kandahar.”
“That’s pretty close to the Pasha Tech site.”
“Exactly. But like I said, he’s not there now, at least from what we can tell. I’m waiting to hear back from a couple of local informants to confirm. Unless they have unexpected news, it looks like Safi’s gone. It’s not surprising, really. We have evidence that all of Pasha Tech’s scientific staff scattered once the U.S. invasion started. There is some good news, though.”
Tears of God (The Blackwell Files Book 7) Page 12
