“You think I am?”
“It’s what you did with the Vatican. You had a personal agenda, right? Becoming a priest allowed you to serve that agenda.” Raoul locked eyes with Daniel. “My concern is that you have a personal agenda here.”
“And that would be?”
“Revenge for your uncle’s murder.”
“I’m not in the revenge business,” said Daniel.
“I hope not. Because the man who engineered Trinity’s death is one of the Council’s top operatives.”
“We’re talking about Conrad Winter, right?”
Raoul nodded. “And he’s moved up in the world since you last saw him. He’s been put in charge of the Council’s efforts with regards to Anomalous Information Transfer. What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” said Daniel, “just getting used to the term.” Like the rest of the world, Daniel thought of it as the Trinity Phenomenon. Of course the rest of the world didn’t know it was happening all over the place.
“Anyway, there’s a good chance you and Winter will eventually cross paths and I have to know you’ll keep your head. We’ve been at war with the Council a long time. Right now it’s a cold war, and it’s in everybody’s interest to keep it that way. Even in a cold war there are casualties, but we do not issue kill orders on each other’s field operatives. So if you came to us for that, you came to the wrong place.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” said Daniel. “I’m not the assassin type.”
4: I AM THAT I AM
After reading to the end of the scouting report, Daniel flipped back to the top and re-read the executive summary—his vital statistics, known skills and relevant experience, and this one-paragraph conclusion:
Smart and resourceful. Doesn’t play well with others and has a problem with authority. Adrenaline junkie—an asset if he can harness it, a huge liability if it graduates to a death wish.
Recruitment strongly recommended.
It was signed Raoul Aharon.
Daniel couldn’t ignore the vulnerable feeling of intimate exposure to people who were strangers to him. He felt not violated but formulated, sprawling on a pin . . . pinned and wriggling on the wall. Such a feeling was itself obvious and undeniable evidence that Raoul had pretty much nailed it.
Looking past the initial discomfort of exposure, Daniel knew this was good news—it would’ve been a red flag if they’d gotten it wrong. But Raoul’s concern was unnecessary. Daniel had no interest in coming in half-assed, and he wasn’t chasing miracles, or death, or revenge.
He was chasing truth.
5: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL
Your goal this morning is simple,” said Raoul. “Your goal is to hit me.” They were standing on the mats of the Foundation dojo, a large, windowless white room, brightly lit by an array of fluorescent tubes suspended high above. One wall held racks of wooden swords, batons, and daggers. On another, a framed black-and-white photo of an old bearded Japanese man. A heavy bag hung from chains in one corner. Away from the mats, a small but well-equipped fitness center took up a section of the cavernous room. Beyond that, a climbing wall loomed over everything, reaching to the thirty-foot ceiling.
Large black letters stenciled on the fourth wall read: Somewhere in the world someone is training harder than you. When you face him, who will live?
Both Daniel and Raoul wore traditional white cotton Japanese gis, with white belts.
“You might want to put on some headgear,” said Daniel. “You know, I—”
“Golden Gloves wunderkind. Yeah, I know. I spent five years attached to Tokyo Station for Mossad, trained in several of the world’s best dojos. A thousand dollars says you can’t even touch my face.”
“Maybe I should put on some headgear.” Daniel smiled.
“I’ll be gentle with you. Now shut up and hit me.” Raoul brought his fists together in front of his chest and offered a quick and shallow bow, then stood with hands open and knees slightly bent.
Daniel presented, falsely, as a southpaw. Because Raoul was a righty, Daniel circled right, away from the man’s power punch. Midstride, he stopped and shuffled his feet and threw a fast left jab.
The world flipped upside down and Daniel hit the mat hard, his left hand burning, wrist joint screaming, bolts of lightning shooting up his forearm, his face pressed into the mat. He double tapped the mat with his right hand, Raoul let go, and the pain eased.
Daniel took his time in standing, working his wrist around, holding his left hand in his right. “Perhaps we should start with me trying to snatch a pebble from your hand,” he said.
Raoul didn’t smile. “You were a fine boxer, Daniel. And we’ll use those skills—footwork, hand speed, parry and counter—but in our world, if you’re fighting, it’s for your life. No gloves, no rules, one survivor. You only throw a knuckle punch if you’re damn sure it’s going to land on flesh and not bone. Opponent ducks his chin and you break your hand on his forehead? Now you’re fighting one-handed and consequently you die. If I fail in my responsibility to train you properly, you die. So you can take your pebble, Grasshopper, and shove it up your ass.”
“Hey,” said Daniel, “I didn’t—”
“At the end of each day, we gather for drinks at the commissary bar. That’s when we joke around. You set foot in this dojo, you are all business. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” Raoul set his stance once more. “Again. Don’t box with me, Padre, just hit—”
Daniel’s right fist flew forward even before Raoul had finished speaking, but again the world flipped upside down and an elbow slammed into his nose on the way to the mat. Again lightning shot through his wrist and up his forearm as the lights above went in and out of focus. He tapped out and Raoul let go of his hand.
“Get up.”
Daniel stood and used the sleeve of his gi to catch the blood dripping from his nose. “I had to try again,” he said with a shrug. “Like you said, I’m a boxer—it’s what I know.”
“You came to me as a boxer. You’ll leave as a street fighter, or you won’t leave at all. Instead of knuckle punches, you’re going to learn hammer blows, elbow strikes, you’ll use your knees and shins and feet. You’ll learn to scratch and claw and gouge and bite—whatever it takes to survive.”
Raoul continued talking as he walked to a plastic cooler at the edge of the mat. “We take a multidisciplinary approach to fighting. We start with aikido and judo, but we borrow heavily from a half-dozen other martial arts as well.” He opened the cooler, pulled a white facecloth from the ice water, and wrung it out. “We like to call it Applied Aikido. Use aikido to control the body, then apply your knee to the ball sack, your forehead to the bridge of the nose—whatever works best in the moment. You’ll study pressure points, nerve clusters. You’ll learn how to knock a man unconscious with an open-handed slap. How to dislocate joints, incapacitate limbs. How to kill with either hand. When we’re done with you, you won’t walk into a room and see chairs, lamps, telephones, books; you’ll see improvised weapons. Why hit with your hand when you can hit with something harder and save your hand from injury at the same time?” He handed the facecloth to Daniel. “Press on it, it’s still bleeding.”
Daniel pressed the freezing wet cloth against his nostrils.
“It’s not busted. But it will be. You can expect at least a half-dozen trips to the infirmary over the coming months. You’ll play connect-the-dots with your bruises and your new best friend will go by the name of Epsom salts. But you will learn. And you will be a skilled street fighter by the time you limp out of here.” Raoul pointed at Daniel’s face. “Left nostril’s stopped, focus on the right.”
Daniel folded the now-pink cloth, pressed the coldest part to the right side of his nose. “Look, Raoul, I don’t want to be accused of jocularity, but you guys really need to work on your sales pitch.”
Raoul caught his eye, held it. “I’m not selling, I’m telling. Not everyone is up for this life. No shame in saying it isn’t the life for you. Doesn’t matter if it’s day one, day twenty, day sixty—you quit today, you still get the severance payout. I don’t want you here unless you want to be here, fully knowing what that means.”
Daniel pulled the wet cloth away from his face. The nosebleed was over. He tossed the cloth aside and squared his stance.
“Teach me.”
6: ARE YOU READY (FOR THE FUTURE)?
It hasn’t even been three full months,” said Raoul. “I’m not sure he’s ready.”
“Well, I think I’m ready,” said Daniel.
Carter Ames raised a hand. “Your opinion will be heard in full, Daniel. After we finish hearing the assessments.” A sensible way to run the meeting, no doubt. But Daniel didn’t particularly enjoy hearing himself discussed as if he weren’t in the room.
Ames turned to Dave Christleib. Before coming to the Foundation fifteen years earlier, Christleib spent twenty years at the University of Chicago following in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s footsteps, deconstructing the psychology of optimal experience. He’d studied elite athletes, surgeons, chess masters, musicians, mystics—the full range of human endeavor. He was in charge of the Foundation’s psychological training, which included meditation but went far beyond it. There was a training program for everything from stress management and critical thinking, to memory and perception, to telling and spotting lies.
Christleib didn’t hesitate. “From my perspective, he’s ready.” To Raoul he added, “He’s shown remarkable ability, aced every simulation.”
“Simulations,” said Raoul. “That’s my point. We’re talking about a high-risk undercover op. In the real world.”
“He did forty-nine hours, no sleep, no food, minimal water, blazing strobe lights and 130 decibels of death metal around the clock. Remembered the details of his legend perfectly and never broke character under interrogation.” It had been Daniel’s least favorite part of the training program, and the memory of it put a chill through him, even now.
Raoul tapped his copy of the case file. “He breaks character in here, he won’t have to worry about interrogation—they’ll just put a bullet in his head.” He shifted his focus to Daniel. “Red Ridge is a black ops facility, an off-book project of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s an old coal mine in the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia. All below ground, only one way in or out. Once the door shuts behind you, you’re on your own. You mess up in there, no way we can get you out alive.”
From the other side of the table, Pat Wahlquist sucked air through his teeth, said, “I’ve worked with Daniel in the real world. Twice. I’m tellin’ you, he came here ready. For Christ’s sake, he killed Lucien-frickin-Drapeau.”
Daniel knew Pat would be on his side, and he could see that the others gave the man’s opinion significant weight. Although Pat had once been a Navy SEAL, he wasn’t a joiner by nature and identified with no particular tribe, maybe because of his background. Part Cajun, part Irish, part African American, and part Choctaw, Pat was a tribe unto himself, and he had an independence of mind that people immediately sensed and respected.
“Raoul,” said Carter Ames, “we can’t very well connect the dots and get a picture of this game until we have more dots. The opportunity before us could yield information that the Council knows and is acting on, information at which we’ve been merely guessing thus far.” He glanced at the same folder Raoul had been tapping, giving it an emphasis of his own. “This Major Blankenship may be experiencing Anomalous Information Transfer, and he may be gravely ill. Even if he doesn’t die, we have no way of knowing when they might move him to a different facility. Daniel’s experience makes him the right man to evaluate on-site, but I must defer to your judgment vis-à-vis training. If you have a substantive reason to believe he is not able to handle the assignment, now is the time to give it a name.”
Raoul directed his answer at Daniel. “If I’m being a hard-ass, it’s for your own good.” He thought for a minute, came up with an idea. “All right, how about this: a simple challenge. Improvised pretexting, working solo. He passes it, I’m happy.”
“What do you want me to do?” said Daniel.
“I want to see the front entrance of the Plaza Hotel shut down at exactly noon tomorrow.” Raoul glanced at his watch. “Twenty-four hours from now. No calling in a bomb threat, nothing like that. I want to see hotel staff cheerfully shut the entrance and clear all pedestrians off the sidewalk in front. I want the place totally clear.”
“Don’t be a dick,” said Pat. “What’s that gonna—”
“Naw, it’s cool,” said Daniel. “I’ll do it.”
It was just before one o’clock that afternoon when Daniel hopped out of the taxi on the west side of Central Park, in front of the elegant white facade of the Plaza Hotel, the wide sidewalk bustling with tourists and businesspeople. Uniformed valets took car keys and handed people claim chits and moved cars with Busby Berkeley precision. An almost constant stream of limousines and taxis pulled to the curb and away as bellmen assisted with luggage and doormen opened doors for guests coming and going.
The Plaza was a five-star hotel with five-star security, and now Daniel had to improvise a pretext that would convince them to shut down the main entrance and clear the sidewalk in the middle of the day, inconveniencing their five-star guests. It was mid-August with highs in the mid-nineties—guests would not love being ushered around the block to a side entrance, and the hotel would not love making their guests angry. And Daniel had to get them to do this cheerfully?
A simple challenge, Raoul had called it. Daniel smiled to himself. He’d grown to like Raoul, but the guy could be a bit of a bastard.
Better get to it. He strode through the doors and into the opulent lobby, crossed under the chandeliers to the far end, past the reservation desk, where an electronic board on the wall displayed the hotel’s event listings.
The screen scrolled through the events for the following day. There was a pharmaceutical conference, a meeting of the International Broadcasters Association, a local Chamber of Commerce luncheon, a society wedding. None were of use to him. But then the screen scrolled over again.
Here was something: the annual banquet of the Tri-State Area Canadian Women’s Clubs would take place the next day, cocktail reception at eleven thirty followed by lunch an hour later.
An idea began to form in Daniel’s imagination. The seed of a plan.
It just might work.
Daniel left the hotel and cabbed it down to Macy’s. Along the way, he used the web browser in his smartphone to read through the website of the Tri-State Area Canadian Women’s Clubs. The New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut clubs each held separate monthly luncheons but tomorrow was when they all came together for a big, boozy brunch to plan joint events for the coming year. The website proclaimed it the premier event of the season. He navigated to the Bios page and studied the names and faces of their senior officers—president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. All elegant ladies of a certain age and substantial means.
Yes, Daniel decided, this plan was tailor-made for them.
At Macy’s, he bought an off-the-rack navy-blue single-breasted suit, a white shirt, a dark-blue tie with red and white diagonal stripes, a pair of shiny black leather shoes, and mirrored aviator sunglasses. He changed into his new clothes in a Starbucks men’s room down the block, leaving his old clothes in the trash. At a souvenir shop on Sixth Avenue, he picked up two lapel pins, which he pinned on his right lapel. One was an American flag and the other featured the Great Seal of the United States with the spread-eagled eagle. He stopped at an electronics store to buy a Bluetooth earpiece. Then he had his hair cut very short at Mike’s Barbershop on Thirty-Seventh Street. He cabbed it back uptown, arriving just before four o’clock. He had the driver drop him a block from the ho
tel, using the walk to prepare for his big bluff.
To run a pretext like this properly, Daniel really needed a team. All he had was a costume and a hip pocket full of attitude, so he’d have to focus on the basics. You don’t sell the con, you sell your persona. If you start selling the con, the illusion falls apart. But sell the persona, and with a gentle nudge, the marks will sell themselves on the con.
Daniel took a few decompression breaths, straightening his posture to perfection, slipping into his new persona as he’d slipped into the new suit.
He decided on the name Mitchell as he crossed the street. He would be Mitchell. It had a solid sound, reliable. And it could be either a given name or a surname. So it was reliable, but also cagey.
With the earpiece in place and a copy of the Washington Post folded under his arm, Daniel crossed the lobby to the reception desk. “I need a suite for the next two nights,” he said to the model-pretty Asian woman behind the desk as he pulled out his wallet. Her nametag said she was an assistant manager. Perfect.
“I’m sorry, sir, we’re booked solid. We did have a cancellation—the Royal Terrace Suite. Three bedrooms, formal dining room, over twenty-five hundred square—”
“It’ll suit us perfectly.”
“All right. Two nights at twenty thousand dollars a night. How would you like to pay?”
Daniel put a black Visa card on the counter. It had no spending limit. The name on the card was UNEX Incorporated. As the young woman swiped his card, Daniel turned slightly away, pressed the button of his earpiece, and said, “Advance One to Base One: Accommodation for Celtic is confirmed.”
The young woman tried to hide her curiosity. She handed his Visa back to him. “Would you like the room under a person’s name, or . . .”
Daniel relaxed his posture a little, leaned forward on the counter. “We’re traveling under the radar, Ms. Chen, so we need to keep this very low-key. I’m going to ask you not to share this with anyone who doesn’t need to know.”
The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2) Page 3
