Palmer’s team had done a fair job of scrubbing both Quinn and Thibodaux’s online personas, but information invariably popped up. Even pizza delivery companies sold phone numbers and addresses to online people searches. The only way to combat the true information that leaked out was to flood the Web with so much content that the first ten to fifteen pages of any Internet search showed only hits related to the cover identity.
It was the pop-ups that made both Blessington and Tuckwood candidates for the Chechen’s British contact and had drawn Zamora’s attention.
Five pages into a Google search, a Daily Mail article told the story of a Newcastle teen who’d gotten into a fistfight after a rugby match. Since this was his third ASBO — antisocial behavior order — he had been offered the choice of military service or incarceration. Given the secret branches of many governments’ propensity for recruiting redeemed social misfits, Basil Tuckwood was a good candidate.
Joey Blessington was an HR executive for a large oil company based in England, but the sheer lack of information online about anything else he’d ever done made Quinn suspicious of him as well.
Now, all Quinn had to do was figure out which one was the agent and get to him before Zamora or his man Monagas did.
A pink orange line ran along the eastern horizon as if a lid over the black ocean had just been cracked open. Dust and gasoline fumes hung with the excitement of race jitters in the chilly predawn air. Riding gear squeaked and heavy boots crunched on gravel between blatting engine noises. Thousands of people lined the streets to cheer on their favorite riders. Some revelers had been up all night from celebrating the New Year and looked as though they might keel over from exhaustion at any moment in the predawn haze.
The motorcycles would start first, battling not only each other but racing to stay well ahead of the other vehicles, especially the monster trucks that threw up huge clouds of dust that choked riders and left them blind and disoriented.
Each day started with the Liaison, the section of the race where riders rode over marked roads and trails, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers, sometimes just a few. During the Liaison, riders were expected to keep to the speed limit and obey all traffic laws. The Liaison route took them to the Special Stage, where they would leave the beaten track and navigate their way through mountains and desert and monstrous, bike-eating dunes to various checkpoints before racing for the finish. Navigation was done without the aid of electronics, using a paper scroll known as a road book that was mounted on each racer’s motorcycle. Once a rider made it within two kilometers from any checkpoint their GPS would turn on and help guide him in. Each bike was also fitted with an IriTrak, the tracking system that let race officials keep tabs on everyone — as well as a proximity alarm to warn riders if one of the giant race trucks was looming up in the dust to crush them like a bug.
Helicopters would provide oversight on the route, shoot approved media footage, watch for rule infractions, and ensure rider safety.
Each day while racers battled away on the dunes, Dakar staff would strike the tents housing medical, catering, and mechanical support, pack them into trucks, and engage in their own race to the next staging area to set everything back up in a new bivouac before the first riders arrived.
It took a very complicated and intricate dance to make it all work.
Beginning life as the Paris Dakar in 1978, the rally beat its way through the deserts of North Africa until terrorist activity in Mauritania stopped the 2008 race. After that, officials moved the rally to the remote stretches of desert in South America and changed the name to simply the Dakar.
Grueling and deadly as it was beautiful, it was a race made for Jericho Quinn.
Prowling on the KTM, Quinn found the number 121 bike next to a row of portable toilets across the parking lot from the Liaison starting line.
Tuckwood, a tall, lanky fellow with a bobbing walk and thinning blond hair, came out of the green plastic toilet nearest to the bike. His face was ghost pale in the predawn light. He glanced up at Quinn with a wan smile.
“Had too much wine and song last night, I did,” he said with a deep Yorkshire accent. “I’m lucky to be alive, me.”
Quinn sat straddling his KTM, helmet in hand. “I hear you,” he said. If Tuckwood was a hired gun, he was a pretty good actor. Goofy didn’t even begin to describe him — and at the moment he seemed to be suffering from acute discomfort of the lower intestine.
Quinn rolled on, closer to the starting line.
Joey Blessington was a completely different story. Quinn recognized a dangerous man when he saw one. There was a certain air, a heavy confidence about him that said, “I’m not here to fight, but if you insist, I’d actually enjoy the chance to oblige you.”
Quinn shared the sentiment.
Blessington sat on his bike a few yards back from the start, goggles up, ready but relaxed. He periodically scanned the area around him, just enough to stay apprised of possible dangers, but not enough to draw inordinate attention to himself. He kept to himself, but met the other competitors’ eyes and didn’t appear standoffish.
He had to be the one.
Team Quinn stood behind the barrier tape with other support crews just a little closer than the mass of chanting onlookers in the Spectator Zones. Signs for race favorites Caine and Geroux dominated the group, but local favorites from Argentina, Chile, and Peru had their share of screaming youths and handsome Latin women. Jericho pushed thoughts of Veronica Garcia out of his mind as he rolled by Thibodaux and Bo, giving them each a high-five. Aleksandra, to her credit as a professional, leaned across to touch his shoulder, a tender move a female companion might do when her man went off on a race.
“Number one-sixty-eight.” Quinn took off his helmet, holding it in on his lap. He kicked up a foot for the last few moments of rest he’d have for the day. “I think that’s the guy to watch.”
Aleksandra nodded. “You’re right,” she said, her face growing dark. “It is obvious.”
Monagas stood on the other end of the start on the spectator side of the tape, scanning the crowd. If he’d identified Blessington as the threat, he didn’t show it.
Zamora, with the number 159, would be the one hundred fifty-ninth bike to leave on this first day of racing. Blessington would be the hundred sixty-eighth to start and Quinn would follow four bikes later with number 172. Future starts would depend on race results each day, with the fastest times starting first.
“What’s your plan, Jer?” Bo stood beside Aleksandra. A little too close, Quinn thought. Bo was a big boy, though, and could, in theory, take care of himself.
“The important thing is to finish near Zamora,” Quinn said. “That will put us starting near each other tomorrow and on subsequent days.” He shook his head. “The Special Section is a short one today. It’ll be crazy out here, but we’ll be bunched up most of the day. My biggest worry today is getting mobbed by the spectators.”
Bo smacked him on the arm. “Zamora is away,” he said. “You best be getting your game face on.”
Quinn pulled on his helmet and fastened the chinstrap. Lowering his goggles, he gave one last salute to his team and rolled forward to enter the line of bikes waiting to depart down the cordoned-off streets of Mar del Plata.
“How do you read?” he said, his voice muffled inside the helmet.
“Slurred and stupid,” Thibodaux chuckled. “Seriously, bro, you’re five by five. You got me?”