Strokk clutched the small guide while walking down Strand, past Charing Cross Station, turning right two blocks later on Carting Lane, going across the Victoria Embankment Gardens, reaching the crowded embankment itself. Tourists and locals filled this area, many sitting on the benches facing the Thames.
According to the instructions, the pay phone was located by Cleopatra’s Needle, London’s oldest monument. First erected near Cairo by Pharaoh Thotmes III around 1475 B.C., the obelisk was relocated, along with its twin, to Alexandria in 14 B.C. One of the obelisks eventually made its way to London. The second stood today in Central Park, New York.
He reached his destination exactly fifteen minutes before nine o’clock, giving himself a buffer in case the phone was being used.
The phone was indeed being used. Two young American women were trying to make a collect call to the United States. For a moment Strokk shared the businessmen’s irritation at the tourists.
Briefly considering his options, narrowed down to one when he spotted a pair of policemen patrolling the embankment, Strokk chose to stand a short distance from the Americans, far enough away to give them privacy, yet close enough to let them and others know that he was next in line. Shoving the guide in a back pocket of his jeans, Strokk rested against a lamppost, feeling the 9mm Sig Sauer pistol pressed against his spine, beneath his jacket.
He became anxious after a couple of minutes went by and the women didn’t appear to make any progress. He felt exposed standing here, at a location known by at least a dozen people, half of them his own, the other half business associates who contracted his services on a regular basis. Still, Strokk didn’t trust them. He barely trusted his own people, much less voices on the phone who made requests and transferred funds to Strokk’s Swiss accounts upon delivery of services.
The anxiety made him shift his weight from one leg to the other, rubbing the Sig against the post, subconsciously trying to get reassurance from the weapon secured in a holster clipped to the inside of his jeans by the small of his back. Failing to do so, he checked his watch as the girls toyed with the phone for another minute before one of them turned to him.
“Sir?”
Strokk regarded her briefly. A college girl. Medium height, slim, blond with blue eyes, and dressed in a pair of denim jeans and a matching jacket, which she wore over a turtleneck sweater. He gave the two policemen another glance and decided to be polite. He didn’t want to draw unwanted attention to himself. Although his face had been altered by the finest surgeons in Germany and his credentials described him as a Venezuelan businessman on holiday, Antonio Strokk could not take chances.
“May I be of assistance?”
“Yes. My girlfriend and I are trying to—”
“Call home collect?”
She smiled. “Do you mind showing us how? We can’t figure out the instructions.”
Strokk hid his amazement. The instruction plate on the booth had been designed for a five-year-old. That observation, however, triggered his answer. “The problem is that this phone is only for local calls. The international phones are located on the other side of the embankment.”
The girl exchanged a glance with her friend before turning back to him and slapping the side of her thigh. “Well! That explains that!”
The other girl brought a hand to her face. “I feel, like, sooo stupid. I told you we should have called from the hotel.”
Strokk smiled, hiding his growing annoyance. “Actually, that’s the best place to make international calls. Pay phones are too unreliable.”
The college kids thanked him and walked away.
Strokk checked his watch. Four minutes before nine. Keeping an index finger pressing down the phone’s hook, he lifted the receiver and held it against the side of his face, pretending to be listening while surveying the embankment. An old lady was selling flowers from a white bucket. The two policemen chatted with a tourist pointing to a map. A couple held hands while watching the vessels on the Thames. He remained tense, having much to fear from this particular customer, who was just as demanding as his Libyan, Colombian, or Irish clients, but equally generous. His clients often commissioned him for tasks needing a lot of casualties, like the mission he’d completed three months ago in Colombia, which had required him to kill over fifty people, some of them American tourists, at a crowded nightclub in Bogota, just a month before the country’s presidential elections. He had done this to convince voters that the current president could not guarantee their safety. Four weeks later the president lost the election to a younger candidate owned by the political party who’d hired Strokk as an insurance policy during the elections. Unlike the old days, when a government faction would openly cheat to get in power—or to remain in power—nowadays the Colombians had learned the art of manipulation and deception to achieve their political goals—a lesson learned from more developed nations.
The phone rang at exactly nine o’clock. Strokk released the metal hook.
“Is it raining in London?” asked a voice tinged with a French accent.
“No, but it is storming in Paris,” Strokk replied, completing the code.
“The National Gallery,” continued the voice, “behind the wastebasket between Monet’s Water Lilies and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.”
The connection was broken. Strokk calmly hung up and made a brief phone call before returning to Trafalgar Square, stopping on the way at a sidewalk café for a cup of espresso and a toasted bagel, which he ate while watching the traffic thickening on Strand, as well as on Northumberland.
Having operated out of London for the past ten years, Strokk knew that the National Gallery didn’t open until ten. At nine forty-five, he left the café and continued down Strand, taking a left on Ducannon, walking past St. Martin’s church, and stopping amid a dozen tourists admiring the equestrian statue of George IV, the first monument erected in Trafalgar Square. Children played beyond the monument, one of them, a girl not older than five, clung on to her father’s leg while glancing oddly at the gentleman atop the horse wearing a Roman toga.
Strokk regarded them with the stoic indifference of someone who could kill without remorse, of someone who had laughed at men, women, and children bellowing in agony, of someone who had never needed friendship, of someone who trusted not loyalty but fear. His small army feared him. He paid them handsomely for their services, but they obeyed and never betrayed because of fear. They all had seen firsthand what happened to those who dared break faith with Antonio Strokk, often provoking the most inhumane of punishments.
Ten o’clock.
Strokk turned away from the soft tourists and ascended the steps leading to the National Gallery’s main entrance, for a moment glancing at the huge millennium clock atop the ornate structure. The massive numbers, almost ten feet tall, had been flickering for over a year.
He looked about him. A small crowd had already gathered there. A woman wearing black jeans and a dark brown jacket approached him from the side, brushing against him, her left hand moving too fast for anyone but Strokk to see, before briskly walking away. Strokk verified that his operative had removed the Sig Sauer clipped to his back before stepping into the gallery’s lobby and going through the metal detectors installed years ago to protect the priceless works of art from the bullets of a madman. He would retrieve his weapon after obtaining his instructions. In the event that he needed to defend himself while inside the building, Strokk’s hands and feet qualified as deadly weapons, as well as the fiberglass blade strapped to his left ankle, or the garrote he could strip off his belt in seconds.
He reached Gallery One a few minutes later, walking down a wide hallway flanked by some of the world’s finest paintings. Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait. Da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks. Rubens’s Le Chapeau de Paille. He finally found Monet’s and Van Gogh’s works, his dark eyes zeroing in on the trash receptacle against the far wall. This early in the morning only three other people were visiting this section of the gallery, a couple engaged in low-level conv
ersation while pointing at someone’s artwork, and a security guard standing by one end of the hallway.
He had observed six surveillance cameras, two at each end and two toward the center of the long and wide corridor.
Strokk walked up to Monet’s Water Lilies. He had never cared much for the work of the French artist but pretended to enjoy it nevertheless while inspecting the metallic receptacle just a few feet to his right. He walked casually toward the wastebasket and leaned down, while pretending to tie the laces of his sneakers. Peeking in between the wall and the receptacle, he spotted a manila envelope, which he quickly slipped into his jacket before proceeding to the nearest exit.
Once outside, he retrieved his weapon from the same female operative. Together they walked straight to a nearby underground station, Embankment Station, catching the yellow Circle Line to High Street Kensington Station.
“¿Lo encontraste?” Celina Strokk asked. She was as tall as her brother, with closely cropped blond hair, and a gaunt face that made her brown eyes and full lips quite pronounced, giving her a somewhat unrefined but appealing look. Her pale skin came from her Russian heritage, but her Latin features made her look more Hispanic than Slavic. Celina could pass as either not just because of her physical appearance, but also because, like her brother, she was fluent in several languages, including Spanish, Russian, and English.
“Sí,” Strokk replied while patting the right side of his jacket. Together they often reverted to their native tongue.
The ride on the “Tube,” as the London underground was locally referred to, was uneventful. They got off at the High Street Kensington stop. Walking up the oval-shaped tunnel—its brick walls layered with advertisements—they reached a long escalator leading to the surface. Strokk and Celina went up, reaching the street, heading down Kensington High Street, toward Holland Park, taking a left on Earl’s Court Road.
Strokk kept a safe house three blocks away, a two-story brownstone near the intersection of Pembroke and Earl’s Court Road.
Once inside, he sat at the kitchen table while Celina made some coffee. He tore open the envelope and inspected its contents, a couple of typed reports, a city map of Washington, D.C., and vicinities, and a half-dozen photographs taken with a telephoto lens. He studied the first brief, a report from the European Economic Community relating to software preparations for the year 2000. By the time Celina brought two cups of dark Colombian coffee, he had already moved on to the second brief, which described the global virus and the ongoing investigation at the FBI. He glanced at the photos, the reverse side of each containing an explanation.
Celina sat down next to her brother and asked, “¿Quién es ella?”
Strokk stared at one of a handful of photographs of an FBI analyst named Susan Garnett. “The lead investigator at the FBI on the strange computer virus that’s causing all of the commotion.”
Celina reached behind her and removed her pistol, a Beretta 92FS, and set it on the table. She planted both elbows on the polished mahogany surface and brought the cup of coffee to her lips. “And our mission is?”
“Same drill as the executive from California a year ago.”
Her right eyebrow rose. “Yes … I remember.”
He pointed at the laptop on the small desk in the open living room. “Log in. Check the account.”
Celina brought the cup of coffee with her and began to pound the keyboard.
As he heard the laptop’s modem dialing, Antonio Strokk returned his gaze to the photographs. A medium-height, slim woman in her mid-thirties. The brief dossier on the back of the largest photo, a color eight-by-ten, mentioned the deaths of a husband and a child a couple of years back, victims of a traffic accident caused by a computer virus. Strokk would have felt sorry for her, but he had no such feelings left in him. This was just another job for the former Russian Spetsnaz officer, and the thumbs-up that Celina gave him while pointing at the screen officially initiated this operation.
As Celina logged off the system, Strokk stood. “Gather the team. We’re leaving immediately through the usual route.”
2
Paris, France
A wave of Fiats, Renaults, BMWs, and Mercedes rushed past the tourists gathered by the obelisk in the center of the Place de la Concorde, at the south end of the Champs-Élysées. The wide boulevard, known to Parisians as the Voile Triomphale, or Triumphal Way, began at the Louvre, passing through the lush Jardin des Tuileries, across the Place de la Concorde, and up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.
The Paris vista known the world over bustled with activity during the lunch hour. Horns blared. Street vendors shouted. The mellow tunes from a sax player outside the American embassy blended with the sounds of children singing Christmas carols on the steps leading to the terrace overlooking the Louvre and the Seine. Beyond the Arc de Triomphe, down Avenue Kléber, across the Seine, rose the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889. High up on this world-class monument stood a millennium clock, its constant flashing marking the passage into a new era, a new one thousand years of human history. Its powerful display stained the steel beams with its crimson light, pulsating upon them, bringing them to life, the surreal effect visible even beyond the Louvre and the world-famous Hotel Crillon, past the gardens surrounding the Palais de l’Élysée, home of the Ministère, the various ministries of the government.
Philippe La Fourche, minister of industry and economy, stood by the windows behind his desk, gazing at the Palais de l’Élysée, the presidential residence across the Boulevard Saint Honoré. The elderly politician, dressed in a fine Italian suit, kept his hands behind his back while contemplating the arched entryway to the elegant palace. The president was not home today. He was traveling to Brussels to meet with the leaders of the other EEC nations to discuss final preparations for the transition into the year 2000. Included in the discussion would be the level of preparedness of Europe’s vast computer networks.
La Fourche pressed his wiry lips into a frown at the state of his country’s computer systems, the result of negligence on the part of his president for failing to dictate stern policy to force corporations and government offices into a unified plan to get Year 2000 compliant, like the Americans had done.
“Quel imbécile,” La Fourche mumbled, his eyes gazing at the palace. His president, as well as the presidents of the other European nations, had underestimated the task, and had further ignored the severe economic consequences of such neglect. While the United States led the Y2K-compliance race with their systems approaching the ninety-five percent compliance mark, France was still in the low eighty percent range.
La Fourche, whose future as minister of industry and economy depended on how well France survived the millennium bug, had spent the past months desperately searching for ways to get his country higher up on the compliance ladder. But he had found that there was no quick way to fixing France’s remaining Y2K problems, mostly in embedded computer chips—those controlling equipment ranging from elevators and copy machines to medical monitors, traffic lights, fuel-injection systems, and a variety of military applications. The mighty United States had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the past three years to get to where it was today. France didn’t stand a chance this late in the game to get past eighty-five percent, even with so much help pouring in from the United States and England.
And the president is going to let me take the fall for this, even though it was his negligence that got us in trouble in the first place, he thought, anger swelling up in his gut at the thought of the many times he had requested his president to take action. A week ago, frustrated, La Fourche had been on the verge of resigning, having explored all viable avenues and seeing no way out of his predicament.
But then this global virus had struck, threatening all countries, regardless of their level of preparedness—in a way, leveling the playing fields. And a thought had struck him: Control of the potion that killed this virus meant control of one of the most powerful pieces of software in the world. The value
of such software was beyond his imagination. If America spent hundreds of billions of dollars fixing Y2K problems, it would not blink at spending a fraction of that to acquire the cure for this potentially dangerous virus.
And so, Philip La Fourche, resigned to the fact that he would be politically ousted, had opted to use his last days in office to find a way to get his hands on that potion.
Turning around, La Fourche faced a man in his early fifties sitting across from his desk.
“All set then?” the minister asked, also sitting down and crossing his legs.
Henri Jourdain, the corpulent chief of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the French version of the CIA, gave him a slight nod. “The contractor should be on his way today, monsieur.”
La Fourche shifted his gaze from Jourdain’s square face to the computer on the corner of his desk. “Is the mission clear?”
The seasoned spy nodded. “The contractor’s mission is three-fold. First he will spy on the FBI as it struggles to crack this global virus. Second, in the event of a breakthrough, he will be ready to steal the potion from the Americans and deliver it to us. And third, he will make sure that the Americans can’t reconstruct the potion, leaving them at our mercy.”
Philippe La Fourche nodded, keeping his eyes on his computer system, not wanting to know exactly how this contractor was going to achieve all of that in such short time. “Have you used him before?”
“Oui, monsieur. With the most satisfactory of results last year in California.”
La Fourche nodded, remembering an operation that had resulted in the recipe for manufacturing a faster video controller. The contractor had forced the Sunnyvale executive to yield the schematic database, before killing him and setting his company ablaze. “That was him?”
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