Crocker liked her style.
She drove them to a modern apartment building located on a bluff overlooking the port and waited in the SUV. Crocker and Akil hurried through the white lobby decorated with mirrors and fake flowers.
Up on the sixth floor a pale man with glasses and thinning, disheveled reddish blond hair answered the door. Wearing sweatpants and a dirty white tee, he introduced himself as Albert Hayes.
“You guys want coffee?” he asked, listing to his right. “It’s in the kitchen.”
Hayes took the laptop from Crocker and hurried inside.
The apartment was dark, disorderly. Magazines, newspapers, half-empty containers of food strewn over sofas, tables, counters. A framed poster from Chinatown on the wall.
Crocker poured himself a cup of black coffee and walked back into a narrow bedroom where Albert Hayes sat at a long desk covered with computers. The shades were drawn, the bed unmade.
“What’d you do to it?” Hayes asked, waiting for the laptop to boot.
“Someone threw it into a lake.”
He shook his head and hooked up the laptop to another computer, started punching keys. “They generally don’t like water. What are you looking for?” Hayes asked.
“Information.”
“What kind?”
There was movement on the laptop screen. Code scrolling slowly.
Hayes looked disappointed. “Well, I can tell you one thing: the hard drive is fucked.”
“Then thanks for the coffee.”
“Not so fast.”
Hayes worked the keyboard, disconnected cables, reconnected them again. Then slipped a disk in the drive and waited.
Something happened. A message came up on the screen. The tall man leaned forward and slapped more keys.
“I found some e-mails,” Hayes reported. “Recent, it looks like. Check ’em out.”
Crocker and Akil leaned in over his shoulder. Some were in French, others in Arabic. Akil started translating.
Most of them didn’t make sense. “The furniture has been moved to Naples.” “JS has a new carpet. Returning home.” “Give the girl three candy bars after lunch.”
“It’s in some kind of rudimentary code,” Hayes offered.
“Looks like.”
“Not my department.”
Crocker instructed Hayes to stop at one, subject “Carpets,” which read: “We have stored the carpets here. The one you ordered for the sheik will be delivered to the port in K-P on the 25th. I hope he appreciates its exceptional quality.”
Crocker asked Akil to read it again.
“Could be something.”
“The sheik.”
“Yeah, the sheik.”
“What’s K-P?
“Karachi, Pakistan?”
Crocker remembered that Dorina had said that Cyrus was taking the girl east.
Hayes found references to S. Rastani in two other recent e-mails.
“Any mention of a leader, someone named Zaman?” Akil asked.
“No,” Hayes answered. “Even though the e-mails come from different addresses, I believe they’re from the same source.”
“Why?”
“They’re all directives. They sound like they’re coming from someone who is moving pieces on a big chessboard.”
Crocker turned to Hayes and said, “I need to use your phone.”
He pointed to a console on the nightstand. “Use that one. It’s secure.”
Crocker handed Hayes the DVDs he’d been carrying. “Check these out.”
He reached Mancini at the hotel in Islamabad as he was finishing breakfast. “How’s your knee?” he asked.
“A hell of a lot better. Thanks.”
“Good. I need you to jump on two things. First, call Donaldson in Islamabad and tell him to contact Mikael Klausen. They both need to meet us in Karachi as soon as possible.”
“Wait a minute. Where are you?”
“I’m still in Marseille, but I’m on my way to Karachi as soon as I get authorization. So are you.”
“Me?”
“All three of you.”
“When?”
“As soon as we get a nod from Donaldson, drop what you’re doing, fly to Karachi, and go directly to the port.”
“That’ll take several hours.”
“You’ll be looking for a Norwegian girl named Malie Tingvolclass="underline" eighteen, blond, beautiful. She’ll be with a Middle Eastern-looking guy named Cyrus. He’ll either be hustling her onto a ship or handing her off to representatives of a sheik possibly named Rastani.”
“All right. Let me write this down.”
“The important thing is to get there fast.”
“Understood.”
“Akil and I are leaving as soon as we get an okay.”
“You want me to wait for you?”
“Don’t leave the port until we get there.”
“I understand.”
“Maybe Donaldson has someone in Karachi who can help. Tell him we’ve got to recover the Norwegian girl and stop this sheik character and this guy named Cyrus from leaving the country.”
“You got a description?”
“Cyrus is in his late twenties, early thirties. Middle Eastern looking. Medium height. Big smile.”
“The sheik?”
“No idea.”
“Roger.”
Crocker hung up and turned to Akil, who pointed at a large computer monitor on the desk and said, “Boss, look.”
It was Justine-the young girl with the mole over her mouth-the one they’d last seen in the barn, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the floor.
On the screen she wore a pink dress and had her blond hair pulled back. She looked beautiful and innocent, walking through a garden in bare feet. As she bent to pick a yellow flower, the camera zoomed in on her face, which was glowing from within and unmarked.
Next she stood inside the farmhouse, in what Crocker thought was the living room, looking away from the camera. Someone out of the frame said something that couldn’t be heard, and she turned and crossed her arms over her chest.
The girl looked frightened. She hesitated. A man stepped into the picture and with his back to the camera slapped her across the face.
“Fuck.”
Casting her eyes to the floor, she started to slowly remove her dress until she stood naked, trembling, hands at her sides, tears splattering her upturned breasts.
Crocker wanted to punch something.
“What the hell is this?” Hayes asked.
A man out of view of the camera shouted something, and the girl turned abruptly and bent over until her hands touched the floor. The camera zoomed in on her ass as she reached back and spread her cheeks.
“Turn it off!” Crocker shouted, holding out his palm to Hayes, who ejected the DVD and handed it over.
If Crocker had even a smidgeon of regret for blowing the men away, it disappeared now.
“They used the DVDs to sell the girls,” Akil muttered, breaking the silence.
“We’ve got to stop Cyrus. Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirteen
You’re not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.
– Humphrey Bogart
An hour later Tom Crocker was still in Marseille, stuffing clothes into his bag and waiting for authorization to fly to Karachi. Minutes earlier he had spoken to Mikael Klausen in Oslo, who told him that Cyrus was the name of the man who was last seen with Malie Tingvoll at the café there.
His mind was working feverishly. There seemed to be a million things he needed to do.
Why was Donaldson taking so long?
He started pacing the little room and stopped. The texture of the yellowish morning haze through the dirty hotel window reminded him of summer days on the beach in Nantucket. Suddenly he felt a strong desire to be with Holly, to tell her how much he missed her.
He thought how good it would feel to hold her hand and walk barefoot across the wet sand. Blueberry pancakes with fresh maple syrup. Broiled lobster with red wine for dinner. The smell of her hair. Making love.
As he started counting the days he’d been away from home, the phone rang. It was the North African CIA officer.