by Ben Coes
Exactly twenty-four seconds after his sedan sped away, an image appeared. A Ford Taurus station wagon, which slowed at his driveway, stopped for ten seconds, then sped off.
“Fuck,” he said to himself. He knew it was coming, but the confirmation stung. They had started the hunt.
Buck exited the system, then turned to the second computer screen. He again entered a series of passwords, moving through a succession of screens that were blank, save for the password entry boxes. Finally, at the fourth such screen, he paused.
Buck was now preparing to connect to the Internet through a system that had been put in place more than a decade ago, a “safe circuit” system designed by CIA technologists during the early phases of wireless encryption. These circuits enabled secure side routes through dial-up access points throughout the world, a low-tech but secure way to gain access to the Internet without the fear of signal and thus content theft. With the improvement in encryption methods, the CIA safe circuit system had long ago been shut down, except for one circuit that Buck himself had, as Kiev station chief, kept active, against orders. The actual circuit was the size of a penny, and was housed on a small telephone switch at the Hotel Budapest in downtown Kiev. No one at the hotel knew about it.
Buck entered the digits of a local Kiev phone number which he had long ago committed to memory. Suddenly, unbeknownst to any other human being in the world, he was online.
A black screen appeared with a small yellow dot, which Buck clicked twice. Russian words appeared.
PROMINVESTBANK
He went to the customer log-in page, typed an account name and password, hit Enter. After a few moments, an account page appeared. It was the bank account of a man named Petr Dmitrov.
For more than fifteen years, Vic Buck had also been Petr Dmitrov. And Petr Dmitrov was very, very rich.
A smile crept across Buck’s lips as he read just how rich Petr Dmitrov in fact was.
The wire from Fortuna had already hit: $15,100,008.77.
Not bad for a kid from Fresno.
Buck had long ago learned to put aside any kind of guilt or moral quandary caused by his actions. He knew he was harming his country, that the blood of innocent Americans was on his hands. But it didn’t bother him. Unlike other turncoats and traitors whose stories he’d studied or knew so well, Victor Buck’s treason had no epic moment, no single event that pushed him to decide to betray his country. No, he knew his decision had been all about greed. He’d grown up poor, without a father, raised by a mother who worked so hard as a cleaning woman that she was dead before little Vic was even out of elementary school. His poverty was the fuel behind it all, the chip on his shoulder that had led him down this miserable path.
Now, as he looked at the account balance on the screen, Buck again asked himself whether he should leave the United States now and forgo the remaining payment. Fifteen million was a lot of money. But was it enough? Buck hoped to live a long life, lavishly, and protecting himself from the combined might of Alex Fortuna and the U.S. government would be costly.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. Don’t fuck this up, he thought. You’re so close.
It had become exponentially more dangerous since the failure at Madradora. If they had just terminated Andreas, everyone would have assumed it was the terrorists, following him. But now, the failure demonstrated just the opposite; the ineluctable, indisputable fact that someone within U.S. interagency betrayed the exfiltration plan and set up Andreas for termination.
Buck felt his world quickly closing in. Yes, he could run, but he needed the money. He wouldn’t see it if he left now. But the longer he stayed, the more likely it was he would be found out. He felt his heart racing. Calm the hell down.
Buck exited the screen and reached into the middle drawer of his desk, taking out a Valium, which he broke between his fingers. He popped half into his mouth. He dabbed at his forehead with a shirtsleeve. Despite the bitterly cold temperatures outside, he was sweating like a pig.
They were now in the part of the game where everything could go wrong with one false move, one bad decision.
And he knew they knew.
He’d been around enough mole hunts to know they had narrowed it down. Tanzer was the one. She knew. He saw it in her eyes. It had hit him the moment Jane Epstein told the group the Deltas were dead. Jessica hadn’t looked at him, and that was it. It was the way she’d willed herself to precisely not look at him, at that moment. A quick glance, then to Scalia. Assiduously avoiding his eye. Then the way she acted oh-so-casually, as if she didn’t know Andreas had narrowly escaped. As if he hadn’t called in. Yes, Jessica Tanzer knew. And unfortunately, she would also be the one running the hunt.
Buck thought quickly now. First things first. It wasn’t only Jessica Tanzer that he had to deal with. He also had to handle Dewey Andreas. He went to his third computer screen, clicked the interagency sheet. He scanned the names, contact numbers of everyone on the sheet. What he was looking for wasn’t there. He got up, walked to the sofa at the far side of his office, unbuckled his briefcase. He picked up a sheaf of papers. He found a sheet, the same interagency contact sheet, but a printout of it. At the bottom, in his own neat handwriting, he saw the name: Terry Savoy. His cell phone number. Savoy would have been the one who’d gotten the call from Andreas.
Buck went back to the first screen. He went into a simple CIA cell-trace database, entering his password. He came to a light blue screen, no writing. At the center of the screen, a rectangular box. He entered Savoy’s cell phone number. After a full minute, a long list of phone numbers appeared. He scanned the list quickly, finding mostly domestic numbers. Then, he saw a number that stood out. A phone call Savoy had received the day before, an international number, the exchange 537 in front of it.
Buck knew the exchange by heart. After all, he’d visited the country at least two dozen times during his long career. Havana. Clever choice, Cuba. Andreas couldn’t have chosen a better place to escape the influence of a U.S. government mole.
Next, Buck used a reverse directory to pinpoint the location of the call. The Parque Central. Buck sighed. He had stayed there himself.
Suddenly, his cell phone buzzed.
“Yeah,” he said.
“How was that?” asked Fortuna.
“Long Beach?” responded Buck. “Last count, there are more than two thousand people dead. I thought this was about infrastructure.”
“Does it hurt your tender conscience?” asked Fortuna. “You already sold your soul. You didn’t complain about hundreds dead when you cashed the first ten million. You won’t be saying anything when you’re lying on a beach somewhere. I’m striking economic targets. If I wanted to kill people there would be many, many more dead. But right now, there’s only one person you and I both need dead.”
“I know I’ll be in hell after all is said and done. But I’ll be several floors above where they put you.”
“Blah, blah, blah. You’re boring me.”
“You’re the devil,” said Buck.
“Then who is the guy who helped the devil?” asked Fortuna. “Is he better or worse?”
Buck rubbed his right temple, staring in front of him. A photo of his father and mother sat in a wooden frame.
“Well?” said Fortuna. “You get the next five?”
“Yes.”
“And how close are they getting?”
“Close enough. The mole hunt’s official now. I’m being watched. There’s only one move that makes sense, for both of us. Alex, let me run. Be smart about this. If they capture me, I will trade you for my life. It’s that simple.”
“What ever happened to loyalty?”
“Loyalty? Have you ever been waterboarded, Alex? Loyalty is the first thing to go.”
“Listen to me well,” said Fortuna. “I am not telling you this again: you will not get another penny until this is over. And if you run, I will find you. And I will kill you. And then I will kill your wife. You stay until we finish the job, starting
with the death of Dewey Andreas. Are we clear?”
Buck struggled to control his temper, reminding himself that—money aside—Fortuna posed as much of a danger to him as he did to Fortuna. They were at a standoff, at least for the moment. And he needed the rest of the money.
“I know where he is,” he said at last.
A predatory silence inhabited the other end of the line.
“Where?”
“He’s in Cuba. Havana.”
“Can you take him out?
“In Cuba? No. Anywhere else, maybe. But I’m limited there. At least on this kind of time frame. Besides, I have someone else to take care of.”
“Who?”
“The person who suspects I’m the mole. She also happens to be running the mole hunt.”
Fortuna remained silent for a moment. “Havana,” he said, thinking aloud. “Do you have a location?”
“The Parque Central Hotel. That’s where he made the call from.”
“All right. I’ll clean up your mess.”
“My mess?” asked Buck. But before he could continue, the line had gone dead.
Fortuna left his office and took a cab uptown.
At home he went to the kitchen. Karim poured him a cup of coffee as Fortuna told him what he’d learned.
“Call the airport,” said Fortuna. “I’m going to do this myself.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Karim.
“I don’t care what you think,” said Fortuna. “Who else can we send?”
“Mahmoud.”
“And jeopardize Notre Dame?”
“Notre Dame is ready,” said Karim. “The detonator is set.”
“The sketch of Mahmoud that the police made with Marks is everywhere. Plus Mahmoud’s injured. We can’t send him.”
“Actually, sending him out of the U.S. may be the best for all of us,” said Karim. “And he’s our toughest.”
Fortuna gave him a look.
Karim shook his head. “No, Alex. It can’t be you. You’re too important here. Besides . . .” Karim paused.
“Speak,” Fortuna said. “What’s on your mind?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Goddamn it, say it!”
“We hunt Andreas as if he’s the devil himself,” said Karim, shaking his head. “I ask myself, why? If he poses such a threat, then we should set off the rest of the bombs—the ones that are ready—and be done with it. Not risk all on the pursuit of one individual. We’re losing sight of the big picture.”
Fortuna grabbed a mug and pulled the carafe from the coffeemaker, pouring himself a cup.
“We’ve made billions,” said Karim. “We have the resources to go on forever. Long Beach was a fantastic success. We have more than twenty cells ready to be set off. Let’s set them off, then get the hell out of here.”
Fortuna laughed heartily, but his eyes showed no humor. “With no trading positions established? I’ve just begun reallocating money from the energy project. What do you know about this? Nothing! Do you realize how difficult it is to move a billion dollars, much less ten, twenty? We’ve worked for more than five years now; I’ve worked my whole life for this. To attack now without the trading positions in place would be pointless.”
“I thought the point was to harm American economic infrastructure. That’s why we were sent here. It’s why you were brought up here. ‘Silence, anonymity’; isn’t that what your father wrote? We’ve done our harm, and we can do more, right now. Fifteen or twenty more bombs will devastate America. Why do we need to make money from it? You’ll be in a league with Bin Laden after this.”
Fortuna drank the last sip from his coffee cup, then suddenly hurled it in Karim’s face, striking him squarely above the right eye, shattering the cup into pieces and causing Karim to fall back, holding his head as blood began to trickle from the gash.
“You compare me to Bin Laden? That mouse who hides in the mountains and fucks goats because he’s too scared to stand up and fight? You compare me to a dirty Saudi whose only goal is the taking of innocent lives when I’ve stabbed a blade into the heart of the guilty, into the soul of the infidel? Do you even understand what it is we do, what we’ve done, what we’re going to do, you stupid fuck?”
Fortuna stepped toward Karim, who held his hand over his badly bleeding right eye. Fortuna struck him hard across the skull, sending him flying to the floor.
“You think we’ve won because we blew up a fucking dock? An oil rig? A dam? Because we made money? You quote my father? The man who abandoned me when I was five years old? Oh, yes, he had so many ideas, didn’t he? They all had their ideas, didn’t they?”
Fortuna kicked him hard in the ribs, two, three, four times, each kick more vicious than the last. He finally stopped and stood over him.
“I was the one who was torn from his bed as a child. I was the one who lost his family because of these great ideas and words you now quote. Now you want to walk away because it’s too dangerous? Because we might get caught? We might die?”
Fortuna walked to the counter and lifted the carafe. He poured himself another cup of coffee, then walked to Karim. He stood over him and began pouring hot coffee on the unconscious man’s head and back. After a few seconds, Karim moved and screamed as hot coffee burned his neck and back.
“Get up,” said Fortuna. “Before I kill you.”
Slowly, he turned over onto his side and looked up at Fortuna.
“Get up,” said Fortuna. “Go to South Bend. Get Mahmoud. But he can’t go alone. You need to send in two men.”
Karim nodded from the floor, tried to stanch the blood flowing from above his eye.
“You’ll need to bring weapons. Mahmoud will not have time to prepare.”
“I know. I’ll make all the arrangements.”
Mahmoud pushed the wheeled bucket down the empty hallway. He used the mop, which was stuck into the top, to push the yellow bucket past the bank of elevators. He opened a large green door and went inside. Inside the large maintenance facility, a line of lockers was empty except for a lone black man, who was buttoning his dark green uniform.
“Hey, Mahmoud.”
“C. J.”
“How’s it going?”
“You know. Not bad.”
Mahmoud stood at six feet four inches, broad-shouldered, muscled, and tan. He limped slightly as he walked, though his physical strength still emanated from his powerful frame as he walked. His arms were thick with muscles. A red and green tattoo of a snake covered his right biceps. Mahmoud’s neck was wrapped in a bandage. He had told his coworkers, those who asked, that he’d fallen off his mountain bike on a gravel road, hence the neck wound, his limp, and the broken nose.
In truth, he felt lucky to be alive. His battered body now showed the side effects of his vicious battle with Marks, a battle he’d barely won. The fact that Marks had somehow survived the battle, after he’d left him for dead, made Mahmoud more ornery than usual.
Mahmoud wheeled the bucket to a large utility sink in the corner, lifted it up and emptied the bucket, then wrung out the mop. Above the sink, a clock on the wall read two forty-five.
He finished putting the mop and bucket away. He walked to a small, windowless office behind the line of lockers. He knocked on the office door.
“Yeah, Mahmoud,” said the man who was seated at a desk, Mahmoud’s boss, John Garvey, the head of maintenance for Notre Dame’s Stadium.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Garvey.”
“For the thousandth time, call me John.”
“Sorry, yes, John. I need to ask a favor.”
“What is it?”
“My uncle died,” said Mahmoud.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’d like to ask if I can leave early today. I need to take a day or two off.”
“How early?”
“Right now.”
“Now?” asked Garvey, pausing. “I don’t see why not. How much time off do you need?”
“I
don’t know. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps I return day after tomorrow.”
Garvey typed a few strokes into his computer. “You haven’t taken vacation in more than a year.”
“I know.”
“You lose vacation time if you don’t use it.”
“I know. It’s just—”
“Go be with your family. See you Thursday. If you need to stay longer, go ahead.”
“Thank you.”
Forty-five minutes later, Mahmoud stood to the side of the Atlantic Aviation tarmac at South Bend Regional Airport. Next to him stood a wiry, tall man named Ebrahim, like Mahmoud a maintenance worker at Notre Dame Stadium.
Mahmoud stared at the dark black tar of the landing strip, waiting. It was a cold day out, but sunny, in the forties.
To the north, he saw the outlines of the jet. By the time it hit the end of the landing strip, he knew it was his flight. The Gulfstream 450 had a distinctive look, completely black. It glided down the tarmac. The sound of the jet’s thrusters being reversed was loud, but smooth. The door fell open to the ground and the two men walked across the tarmac and climbed aboard.
Mahmoud was first up the steps. He looked around the cabin. Karim sat on a leather seat in the back of the jet.
“Hello,” said Mahmoud as he took his place in the seat diagonally across from Karim. Ebrahim took the other seat. He remained silent.
“What happened to you?” asked Mahmoud, staring at the cut above Karim’s eye.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Karim. He stared out the window. After a minute, he turned and looked at Mahmoud, taking in his bruised nose, still swollen from its break, and the bandage wrapped like a handkerchief around his neck.
“Are you strong enough to do what we must do?”
“I’m alive.” Mahmoud stared down at Karim. “That’s all that matters.”
The Gulfstream took off and headed southeast toward Havana. Karim, Mahmoud, and Ebrahim stood up from their seats and sat on the ground, on their knees, facing the left side of the fuselage. They prayed for the next twenty minutes.
After they prayed, they sat in their seats.
