Pinnacle Event

by Richard A. Clarke

  Etienne had come off his barstool as soon as he saw the blond man walking quickly toward Marcoux’s table. He kneeled and pulled his Smith & Wesson M&P340 Scandium ankle gun from his leg. By the time he stood up, Marcoux was shot. Etienne aimed the small revolver and fired at the shooter, hitting him in the head with the .357 round just after the man fired at Stroh. The tiny revolver created a powerful sound. Women screamed. The blond man fell to his knees. There was a stampede of diners toward the door. Etienne moved closer and fired again. The blond man fell sideways onto the floor, his gun landing next to Stroh’s iPhone in the pool of fresh blood spreading on the tiles.

  39

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13

  HIGH SPEED COMPUTING CENTER

  LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA

  “I can tie the shooter to Olympus Security,” Dugout blurted out as Ray and Mbali entered the room. It was almost one in the morning. They had been working flat out since the word reached Mbali that Marcus had been killed in Mayotte, near the Comoros. Mbali had been on the phone to his family, helping them make the arrangements to get the body back, planning for an official funeral, making sure his dependents would get a full pension, talking with the French Sûreté about the investigation into who the shooter was.

  “Cell phone?” Ray asked. “What does the shooter’s phone tell us?”

  “Nothing, I can’t associate him with a mobile device, except the burner he had on him when he died. No, the Bulgarian passport he was carrying was a fake. No such person. Bulgaria doesn’t have him or a passport by that number in their database. But the picture from that passport that we got from the French police,” Dugout said, tapping keys that put a mug shot on the large video screen, “I ran that picture against a bunch of databases and got a .97 confidence match against this picture of a guy in the Cyprus passport database. Different name. In Cyprus, he was Karl Alfson, born in Stockholm. Except there was no Karl Alfson in the Stockholm birth and death database that matches. He made up a Swedish identity in order to get a Cypriot citizenship and passport.”

  “Sweden, Cyprus, Bulgaria. So where did Marcus’s killer really come from?” Mbali asked. “What was his real name?”

  “I don’t know. I just know Cyprus granted him citizenship five years ago and that he listed his employer as Olympus Security of Polis, Cyprus.”

  Mbali sat down. For the first time since he had met her weeks ago, Ray thought she looked not just tired, but dejected. Losing Marcus Stroh had hit her very hard. It had hit Bowman, too, who kept thinking about how Stroh had saved his life in Cape Town.

  She looked to Ray, “I say we hit every Olympus Security office in the world, round up every one of them.”

  Bowman winced. “Not yet. We get all of our friends to tail them, yes. And where we don’t have cooperative local services to do it, we do it ourselves. We do surreptitious entry into their offices, we copy all of their comms, e-mails, phone calls. I don’t want to spook anybody into going early. We need to know who they are working for.”

  “Exxon, Alcoa, Microsoft,” Dugout read out. “They have a lot of the international Fortune 500 listed as clients somewhere in the world. They also work for NGOs like UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, the Purpose Fund, providing security. Also BBC, WNN, other television outfits that have reporters in war zones.”

  “You got that client list from hacking into their headquarters in Cyprus?” Bowman asked.

  “No, from their public Web site. There doesn’t seem to be anything in their Cyprus office to hack into. I can’t find an IP address for it. All I can find is a cloud e-mail service that they use worldwide, it’s Rackspace. Their web page is hosted there, too, but connected to nothing. The employees all access the e-mail service from their own devices. Talk about BYOD, I don’t think this company has any computers of its own. Nothing to hack.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?” Mbali asked.

  “It is, but it’s also brilliant,” Bowman said. “Do they have any files stored in the cloud, other than e-mail?”

  “Not that I can find,” Dugout said. “Payroll and accounts payable seem to be done by banks in about twenty countries. The banks get funds transferred in every month. Then an authorized payer logs into the banks accounts, always from a public Internet site, and gives the banks instructions on what payments to make.”

  Bowman shook his head. “No, they must have another identity somewhere, with its own data storage, files, maybe encrypted e-mails. We just haven’t found it.”

  “If they did, one of the guys we know as Olympus would have to access the other network. And every time one of those guys goes online now, we are watching. So far, nothing,” Dugout said.

  “We do know one damn thing,” Mbali asserted. “This Sergey Rogozin is listed as the Head Man of Olympus. Let’s assume that is true, that he’s not a false front for the real Head Man. If he’s the real deal, he will know it all. He will know who paid him to try to kill us, to kill Marcus, to steal the tritium. He will know where the bombs are. I say bring him in and let me at him. Where is he?”

  “He was in London last time I looked,” Ray said, looking at Dugout to find out.

  “MI5 says he got on a private jet for Teterboro.”

  “Where’s that?” Mbali asked.

  “New York,” Bowman and Dugout said simultaneously.

  Mbali stood up. “Raymond, steal yourself another plane from somebody and let’s go to New York.”

  “This time, I think it might be quicker just to buy a couple of tickets. Dug, can you book two seats on the Virgin America flight first thing in the morning?”

  “You drag me out here and now you’re going to leave me here?” Dug joked.

  “We should leave you here until you crack the code on the Potgeiters’ computers,” Mbali replied. Dugout could not tell if she was serious.

  “We may not need that, since we have other leads now. Can’t you just leave it running by itself and go back to DC? Or do we just shut it down?” Ray asked Dug.

  “There is no way to know if we are halfway there or one percent of the way. I think even with the massively parallel structure and the power of this machine, the biggest and fastest in the world, it’s still a shot in the dark. I’ll give it one more day and then hand it over to NSA and go back to DC. But there’s still a lot of leads I can run on my own from Foggy Bottom.”

  Dugout sensed a feeling of hopelessness in his two colleagues. He tried to rally their spirits. “We are narrowing it down. For the first time since we started, I feel like we are on the trail of the bombs.” He was not sure his attempt succeeded with Mbali and Ray. They were so tired, it was hard for them to think beyond Marcus Stroh’s death.

  Bowman drove Mbali back into San Francisco, over the Bay Bridge, its halogen lights blinking into artistic patterns in the middle of the night. He wondered why they kept those lights on, when so few were awake to see them. They drove in silence, until he dropped her off at the Marriott on Market Street. “I’ll see you at the airport in a few hours,” she said. “Try to get some sleep.”

  Bowman then drove up Market a few blocks to his friends’ apartment in a new luxury, high-rise. They were out of town and had left the key with the concierge. So far, Ray had spent little time in the apartment and almost all of that asleep. As he dropped the car with the twenty-four-hour valet, he wished his friends were home, wished somebody friendly, some “civilian” would be there to welcome him, as Emma and Linda did back home. He then realized he had just thought of St. John as “back home.”

  Throughout his mad dash around the globe, he only once called Emma and Linda. He did not want anybody detecting a connection to them, thereby putting them at risk. In the lobby, he saw the twenty-four-hour concierge at the desk, watching television. “Sorry to bother you, but my phone died and I need to make a call. Can I borrow your mobile for a minute? I’ll pay you,” he said pulling a crumpled twenty from his pocket.

  It would be six in the morning in St. John. T
hey would be awake, but still in bed. They had programmed their old iPad to start playing softly at six every morning, a random shuffle. It was a nice way to wake up and see the sunrise on the water. He dialed the number from memory and heard the connection click through a few switches. It rang, once, twice, three times. Emma answered on the fourth ring. “Is this you?”

  “Yes, honey, it is,” he said.

  “I didn’t recognize the number, so I wasn’t going to answer, but Lin said it was you. She knew, didn’t you? I’m putting you on speaker.”

  He didn’t know what to say. “Are you both okay?”

  There was chuckling and then Linda answered for them.

  “Not ‘both,’ remember? All three of us.”

  “How big are you now Em?” he asked.

  “Lin says I waddle like a duck.”

  “Tell him,” Linda said.

  “No, you tell him.”

  “Somebody tell me something,” Ray laughed.

  “Linda and I went to St. Thomas on the ferry to the clinic for the ultrasound,” Emma said.

  “Well, Daddy, you’re going to have a son,” Linda almost yelled across the line.

  “Wow,” was all that he could think to say.

  “That means he has to live in the boys’ house with you and the dog, Cody,” Emma said.

  “I can’t breast-feed. He’s going to have to stay next door with you for a while,” Ray heard himself replying.

  “Well, you can change diapers and there will be a lot of that to do and feeding him milk we pump for you to give him at three in the morning,” Linda added.

  “What’s his name?” Ray asked.

  “We don’t know yet, but we have the last part,” Emma answered.

  “Middle names Reed, Handley. Last name Bowman.”

  “I like using your mothers’ maiden names for his middle names, even if it does give him four names like some British prince,” Ray thought out loud.

  “We agreed you get to pick his first name,” Linda said.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Emma asked.

  “Marcus, let’s call him Marcus.”

  Emma replied first, “Nice. Family name, or somebody you know?”

  “Yeah, I like it. Marcus Bowman. Sounds strong,” Linda added.

  “I’ll explain the connection when I get back home, and before you ask, I still don’t know when that will be.” He hated saying it.

  After the call, as he was riding up in the elevator, he realized he was crying. He wasn’t exactly sure what emotion had triggered the tears, but he didn’t try to stop them. He realized as the elevator stopped at the thirty-third floor that he knew what one of the emotions whirring through him was. It was fear, fear of failing, fear of a messed-up world Marcus Bowman would be born into.

  He didn’t even try to sleep. He knew the dream would be back, the drone flying in the window, or if not, then the restaurant in Jaffa flying apart.

  40

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13

  DZAOUDZI, PETIT-TERRE

  MAYOTTE, INDIAN OCEAN

  It had taken Etienne Kafotamaki quite a while to get the French Sûreté to understand that he was a contract employee of the DGSE, licensed to carry firearms, and that he had shot the man who was attacking the island’s DGSE chief. For a long time, the Sûreté could not piece together who had shot whom, although all the witnesses agreed that the blond man had shot the two men at the table and that Etienne had intervened to stop it.

  Etienne was slightly sympathetic with the Sûreté. When was the last time they had a triple shooting here? Probably never. It had helped that Etienne knew many of the officers and had worked with them. It was just that with Pierre Marcoux dead, there was no one to officially vouch for him. Finally, the DGSE man from Comoros’s capital Moroni had flown over to Mayotte, and the formalities were completed to let Etienne free.

  Etienne took his liberator, Marcel Baize, back to the DGSE office, unlocking it for him. Baize had been ordered by La Piscine to investigate what the late Pierre Marcoux had been up to that had resulted in his untimely demise. As far as Paris had known, nothing was going on in Mayotte.

  “We were helping the South Africans on an urgent case,” Etienne explained to Baize. “The white man who was shot with Pierre, he was a South African special services officer. He had called Pierre three days ago and that had sent us scrambling to find out about flights into Comoros and about ships.”

  “Odd,” said Baize. “Why didn’t he just call me to find out about Comoros. There I was sitting in Moroni, capital of the Comoros, with nothing to do but try to teach these local fellows tradecraft. Hopeless. I could have done the legwork for Pierre. Who did?”

  “I did,” Etienne admitted. “And a few other guys he uses.”

  “Totally out of line, against the rules,” Baize said aloud to himself. “I should have been informed.”

  “Here it is,” Etienne said, rummaging through the debris on Pierre Marcoux’s desk.

  “What?”

  “What he was going to give the South African,” Etienne replied. He held up a small blue file card.

  Baize grabbed it from his hand and read it aloud.

  “‘5B-01739, MV Rothera, MV Nunatak.’ Pierre died for this? What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we should tell the South Africans,” Etienne insisted.

  “We shall do no such thing,” Baize replied, tucking the card in his coat pocket. “It will be in my report to Paris, when that is completed. Along with the fact that you were operating in my territory without my permission. We shall see whether you are to be kept on.”

  Etienne looked at him as he would a drunken tourist getting behind the wheel, with a combination of horror, disdain, and pity. “If you will not be needing me further now, I shall go to my wife, who will have been wondering where I was.”

  Etienne, who was not married, walked down the street, turned the corner, and took a card out of his wallet. Then he took out his mobile and called the number in South Africa that Marcus Stroh had given him. Stroh may be dead, but someone would answer.

  Pierre had told Etienne that he paid him more than the others because Etienne had a photographic memory, he could remember names and numbers after just seeing them for a few seconds. Etienne thought everyone could do that, until Pierre Marcoux had told him it was a special gift. He would miss Pierre, he did already.

  He heard the phone ring through. It was picked up on the third ring. “Legal offices,” a female voice answered. “Do you need bail money?”

  “I need an airline ticket,” Etienne responded. “The late Mr. Robinson said you would buy it for me, so I could be there for the reading of his last will and testament.”

  There was a pause. He thought he could hear her hitting a keyboard. “And who is this calling?”

  “I was the man at Mr. Robinson’s funeral.”

  Another, longer pause. Then a man spoke. “Yes, will it be in your name?”

  “My name is Charles Dupré,” Etienne said. He spelled it out.

  “Yes, of course. The ticket will be at the Thomas Cook desk at the airport where you are. We look forward to seeing you. For the reading of the will. Good-bye.”

  41

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14

  ABOARD 737-800

  TAIL NUMBER N237RX

  APPROACHING NEW YORK CITY

  “I think we just turned back north. Why would we do that?” Jonathan Kinder asked Sergey Rogozin. They were flying in from London aboard one of Kinder Industries’ corporate jets. This one was an aircraft that could carry 189 people in coach, or 12 in this Boeing Business Jet configuration. On this flight the passenger total was 3.

  “I’ll find out what’s going on,” Rogozin said, unbuckling his seat belt and walking forward to the flight deck.

  “What time is your speech?” Kinder asked his daughter, Victoria. “Not that things at the UN are ever on time.”

  “It’s in the afternoon. I’ll be fine, besides it’s just to an IPCC Working
Group,” she replied.

  “I don’t know all the UN jargon, Vicki, but I know it’s important that they hear from you the results of your work,” he insisted. “And when you are done, we’ll blast it out to all the media, all the blogs, e-mail it to everyone on our lists. I have paid for full-page ads about it in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times. We have to insure that when they think of you, of us, that they think of the good work we did. We will be the last people they think of as the culprits.”

  “Air Traffic Control is keeping us circling for the next twenty minutes. Morning density over New York, normal,” Rogozin explained as he walked back from the cockpit.

  “Teterboro is always crowded now. They park the Gulfstreams, BBJs, and Falcons three and four deep. Billionaires’ row. You have to wait for them to rearrange all the planes to get yours out. It’s like some damn valeted parking garage,” Kinder complained.

  “It’s a nice problem to have, yes?” Rogozin asked. “To be a billionaire?”

  Kinder muttered something unintelligible. Rogozin leaned toward him. “Have you thought anymore about what I said? Montana will not be the safest place for you after it happens.”

  “Sergey, we are going to Montana. I have three hundred and fifty thousand acres, that’s almost five hundred square miles. Boston is less than fifty square miles. I have enough room for ten cities that size. I have enough former Special Forces and Delta guys to secure it, my own sources of electricity, water, food.”

  “And stockpiles of everything in warehouses and storage tanks,” Victoria added. “Sergey, he’s thought of everything out there.”

  “With respect,” Rogozin pushed back, “I am not sure you have thought of what will happen if they do figure out you are among the, what did you call them, ‘the culprits’? Everybody knows it’s you that owns that ranch. You may need to be somewhere where no one knows you are there. We have places like that. Very nice places.”