What do you know, I thought. Not what you suspect; what you know. Start with that.
What it boiled down to wasn’t very much. Someone had gotten to Dox. Whoever it was, they were good. They’d forced him to give up the bulletin board, which meant they were ruthless. Now they wanted something from me.
What else? The board was compromised. If they were good enough to take out Dox, they’d be good enough to hack the site and determine the location of the terminal from which I’d just accessed it. In fact, I had to assume they’d just gotten a ping confirming for them that I was currently in Paris.
Shit, I thought. Shit.
If I called from Paris, it would give them a second means of determining my current position. But if they’d already hacked the bulletin board, what they’d get from a phone call would be redundant.
I thought about using the remaining time to go somewhere else, another city in France, maybe, or a quick train trip to Brussels, or Frankfurt. But I immediately rejected the notion. If they logged the time and location of the bulletin board access and then the call came hours later from elsewhere, it would look like I was trying to obscure my current location, which would mean Paris was in some way significant to me. Better to act as though my presence here was as fleeting as it was irrelevant. Which meant making the call right now, right here.
I turned on the prepaid GSM phone I was carrying. I had bought it in New York months earlier, and hadn’t yet used it in Paris, or even in Barcelona. If they tracked its provenance it would create another distracting datapoint about where I might be found.
I slipped a Bluetooth earpiece in place, input Dox’s number, and waited. It rang once, twice, three times. This was theater, I knew. The people who had set this up would have the phone close at hand. The wait was intended to suggest nonchalance, power, control.
On the fourth ring, someone picked up. A voice I didn’t recognize said simply, “Yes.”
“I got your message,” I said.
“Wait a moment,” the voice said. There was a slight, indeterminate European accent.
I looked at my watch, tracking the second hand’s gradual sweep. Five seconds, ten. The wait was supposed to put me on edge. Having the underling answer was intended to let me know I was dealing with a group, an organization, and to make me feel alone and powerless by comparison.
That’s all right, I thought. I’ve gone up against groups before. Maybe I’ll get to show you how it’s done.
But intelligence first. Action after.
A full minute went by. Then a voice I did recognize said, “Hello, John.”
I waited a moment, then said, “Hello, Hilger.”
If he was surprised I knew it was him, he didn’t reveal it. Not that he had too much cause for astonishment, after the way we’d locked horns in the past. The first time, Dox and I had killed a half-French, half-Algerian arms dealer named Belghazi whom Hilger was working with; then, just a few months later, Delilah, Dox, and I had taken out another bad guy Hilger had recruited, a terrorist named Al-Jib, along with a bad-apple Israeli access agent called Manny. That was the op in which Delilah’s colleague, Gil, had died. Hilger had shot him.
I realized that with someone as dangerous and connected as Hilger, I never should have treated any of it as concluded. My understanding was that he’d left the government and opened up his own shop, a kind of privatized intelligence operation, more shadowy, better connected, and substantially less accountable than private security firms like Blackwater and Triple Canopy. I thought Hong Kong had blown his operation out of the water, but apparently Hilger had been wearing a life vest.
A long moment went by. The silence was intended to get me to blurt something out, to betray eagerness. More tactics, I thought. He’s still shaping the battlefield.
I looked at my watch again. It was a stainless steel Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Grande Taille with a brown leather band. I might have worn a Traser, but I tend to avoid anything that could be recognized as tactical. People who know, know. Besides, I just have a weakness for a fine watch like the Grande Taille. I thought about all the care that went into its design and its manufacture, imagined the craftsmen working on it, wearing spectacles, using magnifying glasses and precision tools to get the complications just right…
“I have a job I want you to do,” Hilger said, finally. “Three of them, in fact. Do the jobs, and Dox lives. Don’t do them, and he dies.”
“Put him on the phone,” I said, keeping my voice casual.
I wondered if he would refuse. I would have judged that stupid-I wasn’t going to do a damn thing without what’s known in the kidnap trade as “proof of life”-but on the other hand, in a negotiation, you don’t give anything away for free. Hilger might want to position a few words with Dox as a concession. He’d been staging this thing carefully so far; maybe he’d want to stage it a bit more.
But he didn’t. He just said, “Wait.”
Thirty seconds later, I heard Dox’s baritone twang. “Howdy, partner.”
I was about to admonish him not to call me that because I didn’t want Hilger to think we were close. But he went on: “Just so you know, these four boys have got us on the speakerphone.”
Speakerphone. I should have anticipated that, and it was smart of Dox to tell me. It was also smart to slip in the mention of their numbers. Hilger might not have minded that; he probably hoped to intimidate me with the odds.
There was a down note in Dox’s tone that was entirely unlike the rampantly cocksure persona I had come to tolerate, and eventually to like. A flood of emotions wanted to engulf me again: relief that he was alive, worry about what might happen next, anger that he’d allowed himself to be taken. I struggled to push it all aside, then felt that deep, icy part of me breaking through to the surface and taking the controls. And the feeling that came with it was nothing but relief. Finally, a reason for my fear. A reason not to struggle against the creature inside me.
“You all right?” I asked.
“I’m alive. I reckon that’s what this conversation is intended to establish.”
“You know where you are?”
“On a boat. Wish I could tell you more.”
Then he was gone, and Hilger was back on the line. “We’ll use the bulletin board,” he said.
From the suddenness with which he’d grabbed the phone, I gathered he was concerned Dox might tell me something more, something useful. But what?
“No,” I told him. “What you’ve got to tell me, you can tell me to my face.”
“No. We do it my way, or…”
“Or you can fuck off.” And with that, I pressed the “End call” button.
Or rather, the iceman did. The iceman knew that if I didn’t establish some measure of control early on, I’d always be reacting, always trying to recover, every step of the way, until finally, no matter how desperate my efforts, or feverish my hope, Dox would be dead, and probably I along with him.
I looked at the Grande Taille again, watching the second hand’s smooth sweep. I could feel my heart beating steadily, my pulse rate just a little above normal. I was inside myself, suspended somewhere only I could recognize, disconnected, severed from events.
I watched the second hand’s slow sweep. One circuit. Two. Another. The street was gone. My focus was no larger than the movement on the watch face.
The second hand was beginning its fifth rotation when the phone buzzed. I saw Dox’s number on the screen and pressed “Answer.”
Hilger said, “You’re lucky your number got stored in this phone’s caller ID just now. Otherwise your friend would already be dead. Now listen, there’s something I want you to hear.”