Dark Asset

by Adrian Magson

  No sign of Petrus, though. I felt a tingle of alarm; he should have been here.

  I was going to give it a count of ten, then leave. Not being at an arranged meet in a hostile environment like Mogadishu is hardly like standing up a hot date at a restaurant. It happens, but only if you’re blown, incapacitated or dead. If you think you’ve got a tail, you make sure to let your contact know and stay clear. And in a crowded place like this, there was too much room for danger to be hiding; the kind of danger Masse’s killers represented if they were looking for me.

  Then I spotted Petrus. He was standing at the far end of the terminal by a recess in the wall. He had two obvious security guys with him who were keeping the crowds away, giving him a clear safety zone of several feet. Petrus himself was in a lightweight suit with an open-neck shirt, while the two others were dressed in tan pants and soft boots, with their hands inside sleeveless protective jackets. I could feel the tension coming off them all the way over here, and their style of dress and prickly attitude was pulling far too much attention from passengers nearby.

  I didn’t like it. Petrus was supposed to be keeping a low profile, the same as me. Instead he was making himself stand out, especially with the two goons on show. Anybody eyeballing them would spot me the moment I stepped towards them. In covert terms I’d be lit up like a Christmas tree.

  A hefty, perspiring Frenchman nearby was spitting into a cell phone and asking why they weren’t getting processed a lot quicker out of this place. He didn’t use the words shit-hole, but it was there on the tip of his tongue. I didn’t blame his anger; if anything kicked off here in the terminal, he and his buddies would be a lot safer airside.

  I used the Frenchman as cover to dial Petrus’s number and watched him snatch up his phone.

  ‘Portman – where are you?’ He sounded pissed, but in that cold, regal way that French officials have of letting you know you’ve dropped the ball. I guess it’s a skill they learn in the École Nationale d’Administration – the civil service school that pumps out the suits who end up running the country.

  ‘You said to meet by the franchise. So why aren’t you there?’

  ‘A precaution, that’s all. There are too many people here. Where are you?’ He was scanning the crowd and signalling to his men to put their eyes to good use. It wasn’t going to do any good unless they could identify me, and I was already moving away towards the outside using other travellers as cover.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I told Petrus as I stepped through the entrance. I didn’t like the feel of the whole set-up and his change of position; it was too obvious that he was no ordinary passenger waiting for a flight. As far as I was concerned I’d accomplished what I was paid to do. Hanging around to criticise his lazy trade craft wasn’t going to help me any. ‘See the crowd of Europeans near the main doors?’

  ‘Yes, I see them. So?’

  ‘The big shouty guy with the loud voice and the red face? He’s French so you should get on fine. Have one of your guys check out his left-hand jacket pocket. I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Wait!’

  I walked back across the access road, which was now back to normal. The military truck, coach and pickup were gone, leaving behind a dense cloud of blue smoke. I got into my car and checked my surroundings. It would take me thirty minutes to get to the airfield where my taxi flight was waiting, and then I’d be out of here and on my way home.

  I really should stop thinking thoughts like that. It always leads to trouble. A couple of hours later I felt the seat shift beneath me and opened my eyes. I was sitting behind the pilot of a single-engine Cessna C208b Caravan, along with a press group of reporters who’d got hazed into leaving Mogadishu in a hurry when a colleague had been shot by a sniper. The flight had been a quiet one, and I’d been glad of the chance to catnap and avoid answering questions about what I’d been doing in Somalia.

  The pilot was on the radio to the tower at Djibouti’s Ambouli International airport, talking in the flat tones of what sounded like a South African accent and shaking his head wearily at the answers he was getting. Through the window ahead I could just about make out the airport through the heat haze, dwarfed by the large military Camp Lemmonnier, the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) site stretching across the south of the city. From this angle I could also see in the distance the busy sea port and the lines of cranes towering over the boats below.

  The pilot was beginning to make a wide turn to the east, so I leaned forward and asked, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘They told me to circle and wait,’ he muttered, his voice flat. ‘Every day it’s the same here in Djib; we have to give way to American and French military.’ The way he sucked his teeth showed which side his allegiances lay, although I was willing to bet most of his passenger income came from ferrying around press personnel from both those countries.

  To be fair it wasn’t only the French and American forces who’d taken up a semi-permanent and heavy residence in the country; a number of other nation’s armed forces had joined them in the fight against terrorism, and it meant a lot of extra flight movements in and out and more congestion in the skies and on the ground.

  As we drifted out over the blue waters of the Gulf far below I got a buzz on my cell phone. At first I didn’t recognise the voice over the roar of the plane’s engine, and missed the name he gave me. Then he repeated it and I felt a chill touch the back of my neck.

  It’s not every day that I get a call from a dead man.

  ‘It’s André. André Masse,’ the voice repeated. ‘Please, I need your help.’

  FOUR

  ‘We have a problem.’ Victor Petrus was staring out at the evening sun from his room in Djibouti’s Hotel Kempinski and trying to hide his irritation at the day’s events. He hadn’t been looking forward to making this call but there was no way round it. His superiors in the Boulevard Mortier in Paris’s elegant 20th arrondissement, barely a hop and a spit from the city’s famous Père Lachaise cemetery, were not known for their patience, and he was expected to come up with a positive report on his mission to Mogadishu.

  ‘This is not being recorded,’ the voice on the other end said softly. There had been no introduction but he recognised it as Alain Degouvier, one of the operations directors. ‘Go ahead but keep it brief.’

  That didn’t help Petrus’s state of mind. He said, ‘The meeting with Masse did not go as expected. The courier arrived and found Masse dead at the rendezvous, an abandoned building close to the port in Mogadishu. It appears he was knifed and robbed – probably in a random mugging.’

  ‘That is unfortunate. What about the package?’

  ‘The courier recovered a hard drive hidden on the body. The contents are on the way to you as we speak.’ Petrus glanced at his laptop on the table nearby, currently buzzing softly as it transferred the contents of the hard drive to a zip file ready for sending. Once done, he’d be able to give a sigh of relief and leave this godless place; it would then be somebody else’s headache.

  ‘So, not really a problem, then.’ Degouvier’s voice carried a faint tone of sarcasm. ‘Once we assess the information received, we can get on with business. What about this courier – does he know not to talk about this?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think?’ Degouvier’s response was sharp. ‘It’s your job to read people. If he had just found a dead body he must be wondering what happens next. You briefed him, saw him at the handover, did you not? How did he look?’

  Petrus hesitated. ‘I didn’t actually have eyes on him. He made the handover by a drop through a clean third party – a passenger at the airport.’ He went on to describe the situation at the airport and the phone call from Portman; how his men had retrieved the hard drive from the angry French traveller, who had expressed outrage at having his pockets searched until Petrus had pulled strings to get him processed immediately through departures to the safe comfort of a small lounge.

  A huff of impatience came down the line. ‘Did you check the drive before send
ing it?’

  ‘No. I thought it best to get it on its way for evaluation.’

  ‘So you have no idea if it carries anything of value.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be as promised,’ Petrus insisted quickly. He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘I have faith in Portman having done what he was hired to do. He would have had no benefit in making a switch—’

  ‘So why did he not show up in person for the handover? It was a clear break in standard operational procedure, was it not?’

  Petrus didn’t want to mention that it was probably his own lapse in procedure that had driven Portman away, or that one of the reasons for hiring an outsider like Portman was because he was free of such restraints and able to act as he felt fit. Besides, he already had a problem in being the man who had hired the American to begin with. Instead he said quickly, ‘I agree. But I think he was probably spooked by finding Masse dead and then finding an unusually heavy military presence at the airport. There had been another attack in the city centre and the authorities were on high alert. I gather from local reports that Portman had to use force to extricate himself from the building after finding Masse.’

  ‘What did that entail?’

  ‘He killed one man and injured two others. They were government troops – I have no idea why they were there.’

  ‘So he’s no ordinary courier, is he? Portman, you said?’

  ‘Correct. He’s a freelance and came recommended by sources in the United States.’

  ‘An American? Was that wise, in view of the … situation?’

  ‘You said not to use any of our own people. I checked through another source and they verified his credentials. He has worked in this region before so it seemed an advantage to use his experience.’

  ‘Very convenient. Talking of Americans, have you heard from our new cousin?’

  ‘He is arriving tomorrow.’ He shook his head at the lengths some of his colleagues went to avoid saying certain names. This ‘cousin’ was Clay Lunnberg, a senior operative working for the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS), a new elite espionage group run by the US Department of Defense. Created as a smaller rival to the vast Central Intelligence Agency, it was already running its own operations across the world and forming partnerships where few had existed before, in this case with new elements of the French DGSE. Lunnberg was responsible for a specific operation in this region of North Africa, and was going to brief Petrus on the next stage of a joint Franco-American initiative that had the highest security clearance possible.

  ‘Very well. What about Masse’s body? We cannot have anything rebounding on us.’

  Petrus winced at his superior’s cold approach, but he knew he was right. ‘Portman said there is nothing to identify him. I should perhaps arrange for recovery—’

  ‘No.’ Degouvier’s voice was sharp. ‘It’s too late for that. It’s regrettable but there is too much that can go wrong if you send anybody else over there. We’ll let the Somalis deal with it. It’s their problem now.’

  ‘Were the Somalis sent in to intercept the package?’ Petrus asked the question before thinking, the suspicion coming from some deep, dark corner of his subconscious. He’d been alarmed at the idea that the soldiers had gone in on orders from Paris while his own man was going to be there, but also conscious that the Somali military might have stumbled on something themselves and launched a raid without telling anyone. Whichever the situation, it was out of his hands. Neither did he have any regrets about Masse’s death. It had become clear to him over time that the man had been on his way out; he’d spent too long in the field in this part of the world and in Petrus’s opinion had lost a lot of his edge.

  ‘I’m sure you would know more about it than me,’ Degouvier replied smoothly. ‘Whatever the Somalis choose to do is not in our control; it’s their country, after all. We also do what we have to in the best interests of ours.’

  Petrus listened to the terminal click on the line and breathed deeply. As convoluted and impenetrable answers went, that one had to be world class. But at least he had survived another day. The worrying thing was that there were questions being asked about Portman. The American had been his choice going on what he’d considered reliable information. If Degouvier found anything dubious about him, then Petrus himself would be in a very weak position. And in this game, that could be fatal to one’s upward mobility.

  Ten minutes later, as he emerged from a cool shower, his phone rang. He snatched it up.

  ‘You were wrong about your man.’ Degouvier launched straight into the attack, his voice glacial. ‘The data has been checked; it’s worthless rubbish. File after file of nonsense culled from the internet.’

  ‘What?’ Petrus’s towel slipped to the floor as shock took over. ‘I don’t understand … he would not have been able to do that – and why would he?’ He clamped his mouth shut, aware that he was gabbling. This was a disaster. And it would all fall on him.

  ‘I don’t care how or why it was done. Either Masse failed to get the information he was promised or somebody tampered with the hard drive before it reached us. From the chain of events you describe, if you trust Masse implicitly, the only other person who could have done that is your man Portman. The question is what is he going to do with the original information, assuming he still has it?’

  Petrus swallowed, the repeated emphasis on ‘your man’ a clear indication that this talk was being recorded and would be used against him in any subsequent evaluation. As would Masse’s failure. ‘I’m not sure what you expect me to do—’

  ‘Simple. I want you to find him and rectify the situation.’

  ‘Pardon? I don’t see how …’

  ‘That is up to you to sort out. It is now even more important than ever that this situation is cleared up before the information you were promised gets out and goes viral. Lunnberg has been advised of this development and a team is on its way to assist. I suggest you prepare for their arrival and arrange to give them whatever support they might need.’

  ‘A team? To do what?’ But the phone was already dead. He recovered quickly and dialled the number of Portman’s phone. He should have done this earlier, but there had seemed no need. There was no answer.

  He sat down on the bed, sensing his future teetering on the edge of an abyss.

  FIVE

  I’d worked with the French before, although not in the same way as this. A few years back I’d been part of a special ops training group on attachment to the French military – the 13th Demi Brigade of the Foreign Legion in Djibouti. It had been an illuminating experience and given us an insight into working in this part of Africa. After two weeks of hard training and a couple of anti-piracy sorties, the attachment had ended badly, with the loss of a legionnaire named Lameuve. I hadn’t known him well but he’d seemed like a nice guy. We’d run into a crazy dust storm while tracking a suspected extremist group and Lameuve, who was on point, had gotten separated from the rest of us. We were already very close to the border with Somalia, and he must have become disorientated and turned the wrong way. It was easy to do when there were no landmarks and radio signals in the area were unreliable. By the time we found him a couple of days later, after some arguing with the brass, it was too late. He’d been staked to a tree and left as a clear warning to the 13th Demi Brigade and others: don’t come back.

  By group agreement and against orders, we had done the opposite and tracked down his killers. Sometimes you just want to leave a warning of your own, to even up the score.

  The air taxi didn’t land at the main Djibouti airport, but was diverted to a small airstrip outside the city. At least it avoided any awkward questions from customs officials, and I was able to catch a ride from a mechanic who dropped me in the city centre. As soon as I was checked in, I called the number Masse had given me on my way in.

  ‘Last time I saw you, you weren’t looking so good,’ I said. ‘Care to explain what’s going on?’

  He gave a dry chuckle. ‘That’s very good, Portman.
You want proof I’m actually breathing and not lying stabbed and beaten to a pulp on the sixth floor. I get it.’ His English was good and colloquial, if overlaid with a definite French accent.

  ‘Something like that. First, tell me what was by the elevator.’

  ‘A rope. I put it there in case … well, you know why. The elevator was smashed at the bottom of the shaft. Always have an escape plan, right?’

  ‘Correct. Where are you right now?’

  ‘Here in Djibouti. I got out of Mogadishu as soon as I could. I tried for hours to get hold of you to stop you going to the building but I couldn’t get a signal. The African Union troops were running an operation in the suburbs clearing out suspected al-Shabaab cells, and had requested the Americans put a block on all communication networks. I also sent a messenger to your hotel to warn you but he didn’t show up.’

  It sounded plausible; although I wasn’t too sure how hard he’d tried to contact me. If at first you don’t succeed in a critical situation and the life of an asset or colleague is involved, you try again. And again.

  Going into details over the phone was too risky, so I suggested we meet up, and named another hotel I’d scouted earlier a few blocks away. It was small and busy and had a garden courtyard out back with access from the street.

  ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘Say, eighteen-hundred?’ He disconnected without waiting for my reply.

  I left the room and made my way to the meeting point. I’d be early but I wanted to check out the area before meeting Masse. The streets were noisy and brash, which was fairly normal, and crowded with a mix of locals, traders and new military arrivals, the latter easily spotted by their buzz-cuts and raw sunburn. A group of young male Asians in civilian clothes, possible Japanese or Chinese military, were looking around like tourists on vacation, eyes wide but cautious. In among the German, and US-accented English, I heard a lot of French, and wondered if any of the speakers were men I might have worked with the last time I was here.