And Brother It's Starting to Rain

by Jake Needham

  Woods nodded again. He took a white ceramic mug off a shelf, filled it from the pot in the coffeemaker, and placed it on the bar in front of the last stool at the end, the place where August usually sat in the mornings. Then he went back to reading the Bangkok Post.

  August pulled a MacBook out of his backpack, put it on the bar next to the mug, and tucked the backpack behind the foot rail that ran along the bottom of the bar. He sat down, flipped up the lid of the MacBook, and logged onto Secrets’ Wi-Fi network. He took a long pull from the mug. The coffee tasted as good as it smelled.

  There was a time when August couldn’t imagine coffee in the morning without a newspaper in his hands, but he had adapted to the digital age. These days he could use his laptop to skim half a dozen newspapers from all over the world before he had even finished his first cup of coffee. It was a lot easier than folding the pages of a newspaper back and forth, and the lighting was certainly better, but the whole process still had one thing in common with reading printed newspapers. In both cases, after he was done reading, he usually wondered why he had wasted his time.

  August checked his email. He found a pitch to buy cheap ink cartridges for laser printers, a proposal to invest a fortune for a Nigerian prince, and a promise that he could add three inches to the length of his dick. He figured he already had all the ink, money, and dick he needed. He hit delete three times.

  After that, August logged into a website called the Chess Board that he visited regularly. The site hosted a community of chess players from all over the world and organized online games among them. He checked the messages left for him on the board and found an invitation to play a game waiting for him from someone he didn’t know.

  That’s where August’s story got a little complicated.

  You see, John August doesn’t play chess.

  Chapter Six

  August bent down and fished a pack of Camels and a box of matches out of his backpack. When he laid them on the bar next to his laptop, Woods lowered his newspaper.

  “We got a gig, boss?”

  “Are my habits that transparent?”

  Woods shrugged, but he didn’t say anything.

  “There’s a signal on the Chess Board,” August said.

  “I hope this job is somewhere good.” Woods raised his newspaper again. “Hyderabad was a shit hole.”

  August shook out a Camel and lit it. Then he reached down the bar, pulled an ashtray toward him, and dumped the match.

  A message at the Chess Board asking for a game was a signal to check the draft folder at an iCloud account to which he had access. Leaving instructions in the draft folder of an email service was a little bit more secure than actually sending the email. Since the message was never actually transmitted through a chain of servers, the likelihood of accidental interception was significantly reduced. Intentional interception was another matter altogether. If your digital traffic was being monitored, your access to the draft folder would be tracked and the message would no longer be private.

  For that reason, the iCloud account was generally used for routine communications. When operational security was required, the Chess Board message was signed with a name August didn’t know, which told him to switch to CryptoCat.

  CryptoCat isn’t actually an email program, but a desktop application that allows users to set up chat conversations through CryptoCat’s own encrypted servers. August had done a little research about it once, just in the interest of broadening his education, and found CryptoCat described on its website this way.

  CryptoCat uses a Double Ratchet-based encryption protocol that combines a forward-secure ratchet with a zero round-trip authenticated key exchange.

  He never did figure out what that meant.

  Regardless of how CryptoCat worked, however, it was a neat little commercial solution to establish secure communications without the need to lug around special gear like encrypted sat phones that make you look a little conspicuous. All you need is your laptop and an internet connection and you’re pretty much secure wherever you are.

  Of course, pretty much secure doesn’t always cut it. Since all electronic communications are vulnerable in one way or another, when you need to be certain your communications are secure, absolutely secure, there’s only one way to do it. You communicate face to face. You put a guy on an airplane and send him to deliver your message in person. Old school, sure, but that’s the only way to guarantee complete security.

  That was the irony about the explosion in technology. The only sure way to maintain secrecy now was to avoid technology entirely. The world had progressed a century into the past.

  Of course, the message could still leak but, if it did, you could be certain that nobody had found a clever way to listen in somehow and you didn’t have to run around like crazy trying to figure out how they had managed to do it. All you had to do was shoot the guy who delivered the message and the leak was plugged. Simple as that.

  That was why generally the CryptoCat sessions were used only to communicate that a courier was on the way, to tell August when he would arrive, and to give him the identifying phrases they would each use to establish their bona fides.

  August laid his Camel on the edge of the ashtray and opened CryptoCat on his MacBook.

  It only took a few moments for him to establish a chat session with whoever it was who used the name Uncle George. August had no idea who that actually was, of course, but it didn’t really matter. CryptoCat handled the exchange of random keys in a manner which was supposed to guarantee both that you were communicating with whoever you thought you were communicating with, and that you were doing it securely. August never entirely believed that, of course, having no idea on earth what a double ratchet-based encryption protocol actually was, but he figured maintaining a healthy level of cynicism about such things was probably a good thing.

  As soon as the CryptoCat server authenticated the chat session, August began typing.

  This is Aunt Susie.

  Uncle George, Aunt Susie. August frequently wondered who had come up with something so idiotic.

  He picked up his Camel and smoked quietly while he waited to see what Uncle George had in store for him this time.

  After two or three minutes the first line of the session appeared on his screen.

  Expect visitor Thursday approximately 1100 Zulu.

  11:00am GMT on Thursday would be 6:00pm, Thai time.

  Authentication phrase: Do you think the Redskins will make it to the Super Bowl? Response phrase: They might if their passing game doesn’t let them down.

  Since the Redskins hadn’t been in the Super Bowl in at least twenty-five years and looked like they might never go to a Super Bowl again, August figured that pass phrase was as unique as anyone could possibly come up with.

  Acknowledged, he replied.

  And with that Uncle George, whoever he was, terminated the chat session.

  August stubbed out his cigarette and finished his coffee. It had gone cold, but he drank it anyway.

  The origins of the Band went all the way back to the time of Ronald Reagan, but when Bill Clinton became President the gray eminences behind it started to worry. They decided that it would be better to move the Band entirely outside of government rather than risk exposing its workings to the scrutiny of politicians who might be unsympathetic, even ready to score political points for themselves by exposing some of the things the Band had done.

  An international business consultancy was quietly organized under the wonderfully bland name of Red River Consultants and all the functions of the Band moved into it. The Band still did the same stuff, but it did it without risking attracting attention from some Congressmen who might get curious about its activities or people from the Office of Management and Budget who might wonder what those bland looking entries in the national intelligence budget were really for.

  That was all quite a bit before August’s time, of course. The CIA recruited him out of Delta a year or so after 9/11 and he got all fired
up about joining the Agency. It felt like a chance to get right out on the edge and go face to face with the worst of the bad guys. And that was exactly what it turned out to be. He thought he had been part of some serious shit when he was Delta, but over the next twenty-two months he discovered he didn’t have any idea what serious shit really was.

  After a couple of years in Washington, the Agency posted August to the American Embassy in Thailand under diplomatic cover. His title was National Security Council Liaison to the Department of State. The title didn’t make much sense to him, and it made even less sense to the Foreign Service Officers he knew around the embassy. The truth was that nobody at the State Department had the slightest idea what August was really doing there in their embassy, but they all had the good sense not to ask. He was glad they didn’t. If they had found out, they would have had a fucking cat.

  The truth was that August’s job was pretty straightforward. He was the Agency’s go-to guy whenever some kind of off-the-books action was needed in the Asia-Pacific region. Putting it plainly, mostly he was called on to kill people when people in Asia needed killing.

  Those assignments generally fell into three distinct categories.

  The first category was simply to make somebody dead, and how August did that was up to him. That was the rarest of all his assignments.

  The second category was to make somebody dead, but for it to appear they died accidentally rather than on purpose. That was his most common assignment.

  The third category was complicated. It was to make somebody dead in a way that would appear to be an accident to almost everyone, but to a specific and very limited audience the death would have a very different meaning and convey a very distinct message.

  August quickly discovered he had a real knack for killing people and making their deaths look accidental. It’s not the kind of talent your mother brags about to the neighbors maybe, but in the right hands and for the right purposes it can be very, very useful.

  August killed terrorists, mostly, but also a few criminals and some money launderers and a couple of traitors, too. The people whose lives he took for his country all needed killing, as far as he knew, and he thought killing them had saved the lives of other people, perhaps a great many of them. Could he be absolutely certain of that? Of course not, but when he was a soldier he never spent a minute wondering whether the deaths for which he was responsible were really necessary. When he was with the Agency, he continued to think of himself as a soldier, and he didn’t spend a minute wondering about it then either.

  August used to believe the truth would set people free, but he came to understand that a bullet was a far more dependable bet.

  August was working under diplomatic cover in the embassy in Bangkok when he was recruited into the Band during the last years of Bush the Younger. He was approached by a senior Agency figure who had recently retired and taken up employment at Red River Consultants where he ostensibly offered his wisdom on world affairs to the firm’s clients. The reality of it, however, was that he led the Band. And he was referred to by the few people who knew what he really did, perhaps inevitably, as the Conductor.

  August had no idea the Band existed, of course, but when the Conductor read him in on it, a lot of things he had heard about during his time at the Agency started to make sense to him. He had always thought it awfully strange how from time to time certain people who meant harm to the United States committed suicide or died in accidents or simply disappeared without a trace. Since he hadn’t been involved in arranging their deaths and was pretty sure the Agency hadn’t been involved, he generally assumed that the operation had been carried out by another friendly intelligence organization like the Mossad. Or for all he knew they really had all died in accidents or committed suicide, although he doubted that.

  He liked and admired the man who was the Conductor so it wasn’t hard to convince him to leave the Agency and join the Band. Once he knew there was an organization so secret he had never heard the slightest whisper about it, an organization that took on the most sensitive and important operations at the personal direction of the President of the United States, he had no doubts. He wanted to be part of it.

  The Conductor asked August to remain in Thailand and put together a small team to operate from there. He had built up a good deal of experience in moving through Asian cultures without making unnecessary waves, and that was something not many white guys could do. The Conductor told him they had guys who knew the Middle East, guys who knew Europe and Africa and South America, but guys who knew Asia were much rarer. August knew it was probably bullshit and the Conductor was just flattering him to get him to sign on, but he really didn’t care. He wanted to be part of the Band.

  And that was how August wound up owning a bar in Pattaya. A middle-aged white guy who retired early from the State Department and bought himself a bar in Pattaya as a retirement gig?

  No one would think twice about why August was in Thailand or what he was doing there. He was a walking cliché.

  Chapter Seven

  On the second floor of Secrets there was a small office where August worked when he needed to do the things required to keep the place running and as solvent as possible. That’s where he was on Thursday afternoon when Woods gave the door a single sharp rap, opened it, and leaned in.

  “Visitor downstairs, boss.”

  August looked at his watch. Ten minutes before six. The messenger was pretty much right on time.

  “Bring him up here.”

  Woods hesitated.

  “What?” August asked.

  The corners of Woods’ mouth twitched. It was as close as August had ever seen him come to an actual grin.

  “It’s not a him,” he said.

  That stopped August. The last half dozen times the Conductor had sent out a messenger it had been the same fellow. A young guy with dark brown hair brushed straight back who was slightly built, wore heavy black glasses, and dressed with the preppy consistency of a man whose clothes were ordered in bulk from Ralph Lauren catalogues. He told August his name was Lawrence. It probably wasn’t, but August didn’t care. The name fit the guy perfectly and it led August to coin the ideal nickname for him.

  “You’re telling me that the messenger isn’t Lawrence of Princeton?”

  Woods shrugged. “This is some chick.”

  “Maybe it isn’t the messenger.”

  Woods shrugged again.

  “Do you know her?” August asked.

  Woods shook his head. “Never seen her before.”

  “She’s a Thai?”

  “Looks a little Chinese to me.”

  “Chinese? I don’t know any Chinese chicks.”

  “You might want to know this one. Pretty outstanding.”

  Woods did the thing with the corners of his mouth again.

  Sending a woman people would notice and remember as a messenger didn’t sound like something the Conductor would do. The timing had to be just a coincidence, August decided. This couldn’t be the messenger. It had to be somebody else.

  But now he was curious. Who was this woman Woods felt compelled to describe as outstanding-looking, and why was she at Secrets asking to see him?

  “Don’t bring her up here,” he told Woods. “I’ll come down.”

  August stood in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs and examined the woman who had asked for him. He was certain he had never seen her before.

  She was slim and on the short side and her black hair was pulled tightly into a braided bun at the back of her head. She was wearing jeans and black ankle boots with low heels and a shirt buttoned at the cuffs that was so white it could have been a puff of fresh meringue. The woman’s back was to him so August couldn’t see her face, but her body language as she stood at the bar was confident. It radiated impatience and even disdain. She had a big dark-green leather bag hanging over her right shoulder that looked expensive. Actually, everything about her looked expensive.

  Secrets wasn’t very crowded since it w
as early. There were a couple of guys at the bar and three couples up at the front of the room had pulled two tables together and were sharing bottles of wine. August walked to a table as far away from everyone as possible, caught Woods’ eye, and made a little circling motion with his forefinger. Woods leaned toward the woman and touched her on the elbow. He pointed to where August was sitting and she turned.

  August saw that she was less than beautiful, but a good deal more than pretty. She had a high forehead and sculptured brows above big almond-shaped eyes that were more green than brown. Her wide cheekbones and oval face reminded him of a bust he had once seen of some ancient Egyptian queen whose name he couldn’t quite remember. Chinese looking, to be sure, August thought, but with a good bit of Dutch trader or Portuguese sailor somewhere back there in her gene pool. There was a murmur of nineteenth-century Eurasia about her, a whisper of exotic aromas and spicy tastes.

  The most striking thing about her was her pale complexion, so achromatic that her skin appeared almost entirely without color. Her face looked nearly translucent and seemed to glow with a formless light from somewhere within her. It gave her features the wan luminescence of an angel in a Tintoretto painting.

  He rose from his chair.

  “I’m John August,” he said, offering his hand. “How can I help you?”

  She took his hand with a slight smile and it felt just like he knew it would. Soft and firm at the same time. When she took the chair opposite him, she said nothing at first. She seemed to study him as if she was trying to remember something, then she leaned forward against the table on her forearms and spoke in a voice that was throaty, like a smoker, and surprisingly low pitched. She spoke just loudly enough for August to hear what she was saying without it carrying to anyone else.

  “Do you think the Redskins will make it to the Super Bowl?”

  Oh shit. Seriously?

  August was badly enough wrong-footed that it took him a few seconds to dredge the confirmation phrase out of his memory. Finally, it came to him.