An electronic chime gave out with a grating electronic bing-bong as DeGroot entered. There was a plump teenage girl busy at the espresso machine. She and DeGroot were the only people in the café. She looked up and smiled at him through a mouthful of braces. “Be with you in a minute, hon,” she said. DeGroot took a seat at the counter.
After a moment, she finished what ever intricate operation the machine required and turned to DeGroot. “Welcome to Chez Espresso,” she said in a cheerful mountain twang. “What kin I gitcha?”
“Coffee. Black,” DeGroot said. “And I need to check my e-mail.”
“Ain’t even turned the computers on yet,” the girl said. “But it’ll be two shakes.”
DeGroot was baffled. “What?”
“It’ll be a just a couple minutes, hon,” the girl said. She bustled off toward a back room.
“Dankie,” he said absently.
In a moment, she was back. “Okay,” she said. “They’s bootin’ up. Don’t get much call for the Innernet this early in the mornin’. Most people just want the coffee. You want a granday or a molto granday?”
Degroot rubbed his hand over his face. What the devil was the bitch saying? “Just the coffee, dank…ah, thanks.”
“Yeah, but what size? Granday or molto granday?”
“Ahh…small.”
“That’d be the granday. Just a sec.” As she busied herself behind the counter, she chattered merrily. “I love your accent,” she said. “Are you from Germany?”
“Ah, sure,” DeGroot said. “Germany.”
She nodded sagely. “I knew it. That’s why you’re up so early. You musta just got here. Jet lag, huh? I went to Los Angeles once to visit my cousin. I had jet lag somethin’ awful.” She handed a steaming Styrofoam cup across the counter. “That’s three fifty,” she said, “And five bucks for the Innernet.” He handed the money to her across the counter. “Computer’s in the back, hon,” she said. “Enjoy your granday.” She winked. “Hope you get good news.”
“Thanks,” DeGroot said. He shook his head as he walked to the back room. The computers were lined up on a counter that ran along three walls of the room. DeGroot glanced back over his shoulder. He hated sitting with his back to the door. He especially hated having the screen visible from the door. But the girl was busy setting up for the day. He would take the chance. He sat down and logged on. With another glance over his shoulder, he typed an address into the browser’s location bar.
The site had no name, just a series of numbers separated by periods. In a moment, he was looking at an online bulletin board only he and a very few men like him knew of. He scrolled through a few of the most recent messages for a few moments and found nothing of interest. Then he began to type. The message was brief and cryptic, containing few particulars. He ended the message with a cell phone number. It wasn’t his real number.
Anyone reading the message who knew the code would know to subtract one from the first digit of the number, two from the next, and so on, to get the real number. It was a simple enough cipher and wouldn’t stop a professional, but it would discourage anyone who had stumbled across the site by accident. He finished the message and logged off.
He took a long drink from the coffee cup. It was awful, but he’d had worse. He ran his hands roughly over his face again. He needed rest. There’d be a few hours before he began getting responses to his bulletin board message.
Who knew how much time after that before he assembled his team? No, the smart thing to do was find a cheap and anonymous hotel and park off for a bit. No use staggering around in a dwaal. He swigged down the last of the coffee in one gulp and headed for the door.
“Good news?” the girl asked as he was walking out.
He flashed her grin. “Don’t know yet,” he said. “Fingers crossed, hey?”
***
“Where are we going?” Powell said. “And do you mind not pointing that thing at me while I’m trying to drive?”
“Just drive,” Keller said. “I’ll decide where we’re going after we talk. I’ll also decide whether to stop pointing the gun at you.”
“All right, all right,” Powell said. “Mikey, you tell him.”
“What do you want to know?” Riggio said.
“First off,” Keller said, “who the fuck is that guy?”
“His name’s DeGroot,” Riggio said. “He’s South African.”
“And how do you know him?” Keller persisted.
“We met in Afghanistan,” Riggio answered. He didn’t go on.
“Tell you what,” Keller said, “I’m really not in the mood for Twenty Questions right now. So why don’t you two get out of my car and walk home.”
Riggio sighed. “First thing you need to know,” he said. “He wasn’t one of us.”
“He wasn’t Army,” Keller said. “So who does he work for?”
“Now?” Riggio said. “He works for himself, looks like.”
“And what about then?”
Riggio shrugged. “It was kind of a weird time,” he said. “There were all sorts of people crawling all over those fucking mountains. Army. Agency. And a buttload of these contractor guys.”
“Mercenaries,” Keller said.
Riggio nodded. “Some of them…like DeGroot…were really in demand. They had, ah, special skills.”
“I think I know what DeGroot’s was.”
Riggio made a face. “A couple of Agency guys told us he was a ‘HUMINT specialist’. Supposedly he was contracting for ISI—Pakistani Interservice Intelligence. But the Agency guys told us if we found someone we thought might have some intel we needed, we should bring him to DeGroot.”
“And he’d start cutting pieces off until whoever you caught gave up what you wanted to know,” Keller said.
“Hey,” Powell spoke up. His voice was low and filled with venom. “You remember the World Trade Center, Keller? You remember the Pentagon? Some of those cocksuckers were behind it. Or they knew where we could find the ones that were. You want apologies, you’ve come to the wrong fucking place.”
“And before you get too goddamn high and mighty,” Riggio added, “you were the one who was threatening to gouge a guy’s eye out to get some intel.”
There was a long silence. When Keller spoke again, his voice was quiet. “You said some,” he said.
“What?”
“You said some of them were behind it.”
“Yeah,” Riggio said. “Well, there were all kinds of assholes roaming around. Warlords. Drug lords. Plain old everyday bandits. Sometimes it was hard to figure out who was on whose side. And sometimes it changed from day to day.”
“We should have just nuked the whole fucking place and been done with it,” Powell snarled.
“Roger that,” Riggio said fervently. “If they give the world an enema, they’ll stick in Afghanistan.” He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “Anyway,” he said, “we were out on patrol. Me, Dave, and Bobby. We had a couple of locals along as translators. We caught this guy coming through one of the passes. He was dressed a little bit better than you’d expect for that part of the hills. The local guys swore up and down he was a bad guy. ‘Osama, Osama,’ they kept pointing at him. We knew he wasn’t OBL, but they seemed to be telling us the guy knew where he was.”
“But he didn’t,” Keller said.
Riggio shrugged. “Like I say,” he went on, “there was more than one flavor of asshole roaming those hills. It was hard to tell who was who. For all we know, our guys may have owed the guy money and that was a good way to get rid of him.”
“But you took him to DeGroot anyway.”
Riggio looked glum, but nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We did. He was working out of this old house up in the hills. He’d set up with a couple of his merc buddies. They were running their own private prison camp up there.”
“And DeGroot got something out of him.”
Riggio looked haunted. “It took all night. We were outside the house. We could hear the guy screaming from in
side. After the first hour, the locals bugged out. Even they couldn’t take it anymore. And we’re talking about some real mountain hard cases here.”
Marie spoke up for the first time. “Did you even try to stop it?” she said softly.
“Yeah,” Powell said. “Dave did. But it was too late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The house was one of the type owned by relatively well-to-do Afghans in that part of the valley: a low, mud-brick compound with a main house consisting of several large rooms and several smaller outbuildings in a walled courtyard. An olive grove stretched up the gentle slope of a hill behind the main house. In front, the slope continued, down to the slow-moving river below.
The house had long been abandoned as its original occupants fled the region’s endless conflicts. The roofs of some of the outbuildings had fallen in, and the untended olive trees drooped raggedly. But the main house was still in fairly good repair. DeGroot and the men he had working with him had turned some of the rooms into makeshift cells, stripping them of all furniture and placing heavy padlocked wooden doors in the doorways. Another room was where DeGroot and his cronies bunked. The remaining room, at the back of the house, had been set aside as the interrogation room. Only DeGroot and his “subjects” ever entered the room; even the other mercs avoided it as if it were a place of ill omen. Which, for the subjects who entered, it invariably was.
The three of them were camped out in the courtyard, huddled around a small fire they had built to ward off the evening chill. They were dressed in local garb. DeGroot had been the only one there when they delivered the prisoner. The other mercs were off on errands of their own. Lundgren was poking the fire morosely with a stick. The screaming from inside the house had subsided for the moment.
“You think he’s done?” Riggio said.
“I hope so,” Lundgren replied. After a short pause, he said, almost reluctantly, “This shit isn’t right, man.”
“Don’t pussy out on us now, Lundgren,” Powell said belligerently. “This asshole’s getting every fucking thing he deserves.”
Lundgren and Riggio glanced at each other. They all believed in the mission. None of them had forgotten the sight of the towers falling or the Pentagon in flames. But Powell seemed to be the one most willing to push the envelope. He seemed to have taken it personally. Rumor was that he had known someone in either the Towers or the E-Ring of the Pentagon. No one asked, though. Personal questions were bad form.
It started again. The first sound was a high-pitched babbling with an edge of desperation, a frantic plea for mercy. Then it rose into an inhuman howling, a sound of agony, horror, and despair mixed into one awful shriek. It sounded like the gates of hell being pried open with a rusty crowbar.
Lundgren threw down the stick and picked up his assault rifle. “Fuck this,” he said. He started for the house.
“You secure that shit, Sergeant,” Powell began, but his voice lacked conviction.
Riggio picked up his weapon as well. “Come on, bro,” he said. “Dave’s right. This is fucked up.”
“You know what this guy does,” Powell said.
“Yeah,” Riggio replied grimly. “But knowing about it and having to listen to it all night are different things, man. We’ve got to do something.”
Powell hesitated. Then he picked up his own rifle and followed them in.
The screaming had been bad enough from outside. Inside, in the narrow hallways, it rebounded and reverberated off the walls until they wanted to throw themselves on the ground and cover their ears. As they reached the door to the interrogation room, the noise weakened again. Only an indistinct murmuring penetrated the door. Lundgren pounded on the door. There was no response, just the blurred sound of voices pitched low.
“Open up, DeGroot,” Lundgren said.
After a moment, the door swung wide. DeGroot stood there, stripped to the waist. His chest glistened with a thin film of sweat mixed here and there with stripes of blood.
“What is it, hey?” he said irritably. “I’m busy.”
“No, sir,” Lundgren said firmly, “you’re done.”
DeGroot looked at him for a moment, then burst into a laugh. “Right,” he said. He started to close the door. Lundgren pushed Forward. DeGroot, startled by the sudden aggressive move, stumbled backward before catching himself. They noticed something glistening in his right hand. A surgical scalpel. All three weapons came to bear on him at once. “Drop it, asshole,” Powell snarled.
The scalpel clattered to the floor. “Jislaaik,” DeGroot said with an expression of wonder. “What the fuck is wrong with you three? You forgot your orders?”
“Our orders don’t include letting you do…whatever it is you’re doing in here,” Lundgren said.
DeGroot’s laugh was nasty. “That’ll come as a surprise to my employer,” he said. “Now if you don’t mind…”
There was a sound behind DeGroot, a low bubbling groan. “Step aside, sir,” Lundgren said. DeGroot started to say something, then shrugged and stepped aside.
There was a man seated in a chair at the back of the room. There was a table in front of the chair. Various objects glittered on the table. The man’s wrists and ankles were bound to the arms and legs of the chair with heavy wire that cut cruelly into the flesh. Then he raised his head to look at them.
“Oh my motherfucking God,” Riggio said.
The skin on half of the man’s face had been flayed off. They could see the white of teeth shining through the ruined flesh of his cheek. More white bone glistened here and there where DeGroot had cut through the soft tissue, digging to find and torment the sensitive facial nerves before slicing through to the skull beneath. It seemed impossible that anyone with that much damage done to him should be alive. The figure in the chair tried to speak, but the words came out as faint whimpers. Powell bent over and retched. Lundgren swung his rifle back to bear on DeGroot.
“You’re under arrest,” he said flatly.
“You’re making a mistake,” DeGroot said.
“I don’t think so. Mikey, get your medical kit. See what you can do for this guy.”
“Roger that,” Riggio said. He ducked back out the door.
“My employer’s not going to be happy,” DeGroot said. “And neither will your commanders.”
“I’ll take that chance, sir,” Lundgren said.
DeGroot shook his head. “You don’t understand, do you, boet? You can’t arrest me. There aren’t any laws. Not up here.” He gestured at the table. “Don’t you want to know what that fellow was carrying?”
Riggio came back in, clutching an olive-drab satchel. He strode over to the man in the chair and began undoing the wires around his wrists.
“Why don’t we discuss it outside,” Lundgren said.
DeGroot shrugged. “What ever. I was about done with him anyway.” Lundgren stood aside to let him pass. He plucked his shirt off the nail where it was hanging by the door. They followed him into the courtyard.
DeGroot stood by the fire, warming his hands as nonchalantly as if they were on a campout.
“That one was a good find, brus,” he said. “You might even get a medal for it. If”—he looked at them—“you decide to tell anyone. If you don’t…well, let’s say there might be a better reward than another pretty ribbon and a bit of tin.”
Riggio came out of the house. He looked at them and shook his head. “He was too far gone,” he said.
“Ag well,” DeGroot shrugged. “He wouldn’t have wanted to live like that anyway.”
“You might consider shutting the fuck up,” Powell snarled.
“In a minute,” Riggio said. He held up a slender silver object. “First, I want to know what this is.”
“Right,” DeGroot said. “Let’s talk business, hey?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There was a brief silence in the car. “Did you ever find out who the guy was?” Keller asked.
Riggio shook his head. “Not really. But no one up there, carrying what that
guy was carrying, was any kind of innocent civilian.”
“What was it?” Marie asked.
Another pause. “One thing all the bad guys up there have in common…the Al-Q’s, the Talibs, the drug lords.. is money. Lots of it. They need a way to move it from place to place. And it’s not real bright to be carrying big satchels of cash over the hills and through airports. These days, most money doesn’t move that way anyway. It’s all just numbers on a computer screen. Why carry a bunch of green around when you can punch a few buttons and move it around the world?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“The guy was carrying a flash drive,” Powell said. “You plug it into a computer. Into the USB port. They hold a lot of data.”
“Including bank information.”
“Right,” Powell said. “Except that these gizmos took it one step further. You needed two of them. If you had them both, they acted like the keys to a safe-deposit box. Stick one into the computer, it loads a miniature Internet browser and takes you to a net address you won’t find on Google. The second one unlocks the account and lets you send the money anywhere you want. All done electronically.”
“How much money?” Keller said.
“DeGroot said it was between sixty and seventy million. The guy didn’t know exactly. But it’s a shitload. That’s why it took two. Checks and balances. Whoever the money belonged to, it was probably more than one person. Or one group. No one can get to it with just one key.”
“And DeGroot said he’d cut you in if you let him go.”
Riggio shook his head glumly. “Yeah. Like I said, we may not have known exactly who the dead guy was or who he was working for, but we knew he was an asshole working for assholes. Stealing their money didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Plus, Dave had something else working on him.”
“His daughter,” Marie said.
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