“You sold a bunch of phones to a terrorist group a few weeks ago,” he told the other man, who was now shaking. “You’re going to tell me all about it.”
The man said something in either Hindi or some other local language that Junior couldn’t understand.
“We’re not fucking around, asshole,” said Trace. “You tell us what we want to know, or we plug you like we plugged your friend. And then we’ll call the cops.”
The man and his partner ran a thriving black market operation, and I’m sure he didn’t want to let the local police in on it. But odds are that the threat of that buckshot in his groin had a little more to do with his willingness to talk.
According to him, they never sold to terrorists — not directly, anyway. Most of their illegitimate business was carried on directly with the Indian underworld. There were, however, a few stores where the phones might have been obtained.
Prompting from Trace got the most likely one — a place not far from the slum where little Leya and her friends lived.
“If you’re wrong, we’ll be back,” said Trace.
“I swear it on my mother’s head,” said the man.
“And your gonads?” She aimed the gun at his privates.
“On those, too. I swear.”
He looked sincere. Trace gave him a whack anyway.
“If there’s a next time, I’ll be packing buckshot,” she told them as she left.
( V )
Meanwhile, our friend Igor had found his way to a junkyard on the other side of the field. There he got a piece of metal sharp enough to slice through the thick plastic binding his hands. He cut his arm to hell, but given everything else that he’d been through, that was a minor consideration. Waiting until dark, he crossed into the nearby residential area and stole some clothes. Changed, he began walking in the direction of the city.
We took turns following, one car going ahead, the other trailing, as he slowly worked his way toward the heart of the city.
By ten P.M. he had arrived at a squatters slum not far from Deer Park, a large preserve intended by the city planners to provide some green space in the dense urban gray. The park is a beautiful place, with wildlife and an art gallery, a skating rink and sports facilities. There’s a shopping area nearby that tourists visit, and, yes, even a place for deer, who are fenced in so as not to bother the visitors.
And then there’s the slum. It’s basically the same sort of place that Leya lived in, nicer in some spots, worse in others. There were a few more alleys, and the largest huts might have been a little bigger and arguably in better shape, but Better Homes and Gardens wasn’t going to be doing a photo shoot there anytime soon.
We mapped the place with the help of some satellite photos off the ’net. We stayed out of the slum itself — we would have stood out like pimps at a church social.
Igor went to a hut about fifty yards from the entrance to the slum. That distance is as the crow flies. The convoluted path he had to take to get there was five times that. The hut turned out to be visible from the roof of an office building about a half mile away. Within an hour, Special Squadron Zero had a team with an infrared scope there; they could see anyone coming in or out of the house.
Igor’s sensor had stopped moving, except for the occasional shudder; he had gone to sleep.
Sometime around then, Junior and Trace came to update me on their cell phone adventure. This earned Trace a tongue-lashing — she was supposed to be with the field hockey team.
“What?” she asked. “I hit some balls with a stick. Wasn’t that my assignment?”
Everybody’s a wiseass.
With things under control, I told Doc to take Trace back to the school. Then I had some of Captain Birla’s men swap out with Shotgun and Mongoose, who’d been working nearly nonstop for the past few days and needed a break.
Junior and I hung out with Captain Birla for another hour or so, getting a tour of the area in the process. Then I had him drop us off at a restaurant a few blocks away, telling him we’d join his relief in the morning.
While the goal of our little operation was primarily to gather intelligence about India for Islam’s local network, I did have an ulterior motive: find the traitor in Special Squadron Zero, assuming there was one. Someone had told the terrorists where their people were, and the main suspects were still the members of the squadron. Just because Captain Birla didn’t think any were turncoats didn’t mean they weren’t.
And yes, he was a suspect, too.
We had supplied the team radios and had the encryption codes as well as the frequencies, so eavesdropping on the radio circuits was child’s play. The units also had an always-on feature. Under normal circumstances, that allowed you to talk to everyone on the team without having to press a talk button, obviously convenient during an operation. With a little engineering — very little, though that’s easy for me to say since I didn’t do it — Junior had programmed the function so we could use the radios basically as bugs, listening in on everyone on the surveillance team. I’d also planted a few bugs back at the headquarters building.17
All of these sources gave us a tremendous flow of audio — far too much for one or two people to sort through. Then there was also the problem of having to translate the conversations that weren’t in English, as most weren’t.
We partly solved the problem of information overload by using Junior’s computer network to send the data streams to Shunt, who was working from New York. He managed to turn out near real-time transcripts of mostly remarkably dull conversations.
I assumed that Shunt had concocted some sort of computer program until I checked in with him.
Uncharacteristically, he had taken a low-tech though admittedly modern approach to the problem: he’d outsourced the real-time translation to a company in southern India.
“Isn’t it great?” he asked. “These guys do ticket sales for the World Series and stuff. This is their downtime.”
I could have kicked his ass.
“How fuckin’ secure do you think that is?” I practically shouted — and I have to say, I’ve removed most of the four-lettered words here.
“I told them it’s for a TV show. No worries, Dick.”
“Shunt, when I get back to the States, I’m going to put your head under a magnet and pull your skull apart.”
“Won’t work,” he said cheerfully. “Everything inside is aluminum or plastic now.”
“Cut the translators off right now,” I told him. “And find another way of figuring this out.”
“Oh.” There was a tone of deep regret in his voice, your puppy after it’s peed on the rug. “Sorry, skipper.”
A thorough review of the transcripts to that point revealed that most of the discussion was about getting something to eat. Igor was mentioned once — and called Igor — and the context gave nothing away.
Luckily for Shunt.
Junior and I had a little time on our hands. We got something to eat, checked back with Shunt, who was in one of his Asian moods: “Translator still offline, boss. Very sorry.”
With things slow, I decided to pay the phone retailers a visit.
The store was a narrow wedge of space in a one-story building made of what looked like a sampler collection of every brick known to man. Every conceivable size and color was represented in the walls. The only thing they had in common was that all were rectangular, after a fashion. They ranged from about two inches by two inches to eighteen by twenty-four. The mason who had assembled the place must have been a killer on jigsaw puzzles.
The store — Muwhat & Sons — had a glass door reinforced by a metal grid. The floor and nearby shelves were lined with old appliances and gadgets, radios, toasters; there were even a few crates of old shoes. A small sign on a cluttered table near the front proclaimed that they could “fix U while U wait.”
The place was closed, not surprising given the late hour. We took a walk around the block and found a back entrance. I proposed a reconnoiter. To my surprise, Junior o
bjected. And not without reason.
He pointed out that we were unlikely to come away with any real information. It was doubtful that the proprietor was keeping records.
“Even if we find a bunch of phones, that’s not going to tell us anything,” said Junior.
“If we go in now, it’ll help us know what to expect when we come back and pay the owners a visit during the day.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that we shouldn’t go in,” he said. “I just think we should do more than look around.”
“Like what?”
“I think we should bug the place. Better yet, we should bug the phones.”
Damn bright kid.
* * *
Bugging the store was easily accomplished — we’d just return to the Maharaja Express, grab a few goodies, then come back and put them in place.
Tapping into the phones, however, was a more ambitious project involving special sim chips18 that, unfortunately, we didn’t have in India.
Special Squadron Zero didn’t have them either. I wasn’t sure, in fact, whether any of the Indian intelligence agencies did.
I knew the CIA did, though. It was just the sort of technical assistance the Christians in Action loved to provide.
So I gave Omar a call.
You would have thought I asked for a million dollars. Actually, getting a million dollars would have been easier.
It wasn’t that Omar didn’t want to help. On the contrary, he sounded almost pleasant — for Omar, at least. But as soon as he mentioned that he had to talk to “home base” first, I knew there would be trouble.
Home base being a euphemism for CIA headquarters at Langley, I assume.
He called me back a half hour later, saying that he had preliminary approval to proceed.
“Good. When can I pick up the chips?” I asked.
“Whoa, hold your horses. I didn’t say we got an OK. I got approval to put in a request.”
I won’t waste your time with the tortured trail of approvals he needed before he could actually requisition what we needed. I’m going to guess that a dozen lawyers were involved in the process, each vetting a different aspect. There was a political officer who would weigh in on the political ramifications, a PR officer who would decide on what the public relations angle would be, a parking officer to figure out where we would park …
I’m exaggerating. I’m sure they would have let us park where we wanted.
It was a moot point by then anyway. Junior had come up with an alternate idea.
We didn’t necessarily need to use special sim cards. As long as we knew what the numbers were, we could use our connections to get into the lines.
Of course, the fact that the numbers had not yet been assigned was a problem. But that, too, could be easily solved — all we needed were the serial numbers. Once they matched, bingo.
Except that the numbers were protected by a scratch-off strip. Once the strip was gone, anyone paying attention would realize that the number had been recorded.
I’d have been willing to bet that ninety-five percent of the people who bought the phones wouldn’t realize that. But we had to worry about the other five percent.
Junior’s solution was easy — we’d have Special Squadron Zero go to the Indian phone company and have some new cards made. Then we’d slip them into the store. No high-tech wizardry — the Indians could do this all on their own.
The only problem was knowing which service provider to use. Unlike the U.S., India has a lot of providers — I stopped counting at two dozen.
The only way to find out was to take a look. Which brought us back to my original plan.
* * *
There were three locks on the rear door. While Junior went to work picking them, I went and had a look in the nearby window. A light was on in the back, just bright enough for me to see inside.
When originally built, the architect had made the stores of medium size, forty or sixty feet across. This had proved much too large, and the individual spaces were gradually partitioned smaller and smaller. Some of the partitions were standard walls, all the way to the ceiling, as the wall on the right side of the shop was. But the wall on the right side at the back had apparently been built as a temporary structure, and stopped a good two feet from the ceiling.
A lot of people lock their doors but forget their windows. Muwhat & Sons’ neighbor was a case in point. I was inside the building before Junior got the second lock picked. I pushed open the door and ushered him inside.
“Where do you think they keep the phones?” he asked.
I was about to answer when I heard footsteps charging in our direction.
Or should I say, paw steps?
I made it to the doorway to the interior just in time for a set of fangs to snap onto my arm. I’m not sure what kind of dog it was, but it was big. The jaws felt like a tiger’s.
Yes, I have had the unfortunate pleasure.19
Junior kicked the mutt in the side while I pushed it out of the room. The bastard refused to let go until we were able to wedge the door closed against its snout.
I must’ve tasted better than its usual dog food. The damn thing was so determined to get another piece of me that it threw its head against the door, yapping and barking, scraping its paws against the thin wood. The door had obviously been built by the same carpenter who’d fashioned the low partition — it shook violently, threatening to give way.
I’m sure Murphy’s Law has a whole set of corollaries regarding ferocious dogs and the whereabouts of items protected by them. Suffice to say that a quick search failed to turn up the sim cards or the phones. The dog huffed and puffed the whole time.
“He must be hungry,” said Junior.
Good guess.
“Go down to that Chinese restaurant we spotted,” I told him. “Get some chicken. I think there was a drugstore near there — get some child’s cough syrup with lots of antihistamines.”
“Not a tranquilizer?”
“If you can find a tranquilizer, go for it,” I told him. “Get the strongest thing you can get.”
Junior came back in a half hour. He had persuaded the druggist to give him twenty-four pills of a generic Ambien drug, your basic sleeping pill.
I had no idea whether it would work on a dog, but we decided to try it. Junior ground the pills into a fine powder and mixed them with kung fu chicken. Getting the door open without letting the dog into the office was tricky, but once the mutt had its snout in the container of takeout, he was a changed animal. He practically inhaled the food, then tore the cardboard apart and chewed it up as well.
He gave a few growls in our general direction, took a few steps toward the front of the store, then promptly collapsed. Within seconds, he was snoring peacefully, undoubtedly happily chasing cats in his dreams.
The interior of the store was Martha Stewart’s worst nightmare. There were layers of grime that had been old when the British first reached the continent. Boxes of everything from razor blades to toothpaste lined the shelves.
“I’ll work from the front back,” I told Junior. “You start here.”
There were old fans and baby carriages that had more rust than metal on them. Some of the shoes looked like they had been made in the eighteenth century.
I did find a nice pair of winter gloves.
“We interested in AK47s?” asked Junior. “How about grenade launchers?”
A half-dozen Russian-made RPG-7s were stowed in a pair of metal footlockers beneath a pile of Indian porn magazines. The AK47s were across the aisle with canned goods.
We found the phone section near the iPod knockoffs. There were sim cards with keys for eight of the country’s largest cell providers. Right next to the phones were radios that featured encryption as good as the units I used.
“This place is a Wal-Mart for criminals,” said Junior. “We just going to leave it all here?”
He had a point — the items weren’t exactly going to be used to cure cancer. But blowing up the place wasn’t g
oing to help our immediate goal. We had to leave the goodies in place.
We did compromise in one area — I undid the grenades and modified the fuses so they wouldn’t explode.
I was just finishing the last grenade when a foul odor nearly knocked me over.
“Not me,” said Junior. He glanced at the mutt, slumbering peacefully back by the office partition. “It’s Chinese food dog farts.”
“Don’t light a match,” I said, quickly finishing with the grenade.
( VI )
Captain Birla came up with cards for two of the country’s largest cell phone providers; Junior made the swap the next morning while one of the Special Squadron Zero members pretended to be in the market for some gravy boats.
He remarked later that the place smelled like the best Chinese food he’d ever eaten.
The two days that followed were a mixture of surveillance, frustration, and dead ends. The cell phones stayed unbought and silent. Igor remained in his little hut for twenty-four hours, then went to an even smaller house on the other side of town. Special Squadron members tracked him across the city, and now we had two houses under surveillance.
The first house held six people in a single room that couldn’t have measured more than ten feet square. The sole adult male — we figure he was the father — picked rags at a local dump and brought them home; the oldest woman, his wife, cleaned them in fetid wastewater outside their hut, then sold them. One of the children helped the father get the rags. She was about eight. The others, none older than six as far as I could tell, stayed with the mother while she worked.
We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the family’s relationship to Igor. We eventually decided that he had chosen them at random, so exhausted he simply took the nearest open door. He may have told them a story about having been beaten up by robbers. Or maybe he had managed to find a few coins in the clothes he stole, and paid them for the night’s stay.
However it worked, it turned out to be a big mistake. Their possible link to the terrorist network was passed on to the state secret service after we left the country. The unit promptly took all of them into custody. Mom and Dad were questioned and eventually got prison sentences for helping a terrorist. The kids went to an orphanage. I’m not sure how any of that made India safer, but I’m sure some local politician there made the claim.
RW16 - Domino Theory Page 17
