Mr. Gray stood in front of the Tyrannosaurus rex and was carefully cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief as McElroy approached. “I heard about what happened in Istanbul. Pretty nasty business, that.”
McElroy nodded. “You might explain to me why the US government is so anxious to cozy up to a known terrorist.”
Gray shrugged. “I wasn’t in the loop on that op, but one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Besides, since when have you cared about who we choose to do business with, as long as you collect your incentive?”
“That’s just it,” McElroy said. “Stonewell put up quite a bit of money for the operation.”
“And I’m sure you’ll be adequately reimbursed. But I didn’t ask you here to talk about your budget concerns. I have an acquisition for you. One that should make up for this unfortunate business in Turkey.”
“Oh? What is it?”
Mr. Gray tucked away the handkerchief, slipped his glasses on, and smiled. “Shall we walk?”
As they moved slowly through the hall, pretending to be interested in the various exhibits, Gray said, “You remember the rail yard bombing in New York six months ago?”
McElroy nodded. “I heard it was a couple of meth heads who had some kind of grudge against the MTA and decided to go DIY.”
“There was nothing DIY about it.”
“Oh?”
“The device was assembled by someone who was very well trained.”
“So they weren’t meth heads after all?”
Gray gave him a tight smile. “We felt it prudent to let the public believe that it was the work of a couple of disgruntled morons.” He paused. “The truth is that one of the bombers was a young woman by the name of Malina Zupan.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” McElroy said. “Croatian?”
Gray shook his head. “Serbian American. Her parents immigrated here from Belgrade before she was born. But she’s been on the watch list for a while now. Her uncle is a radical Serbian nationalist whose wife and daughter were killed in a hospital strike during Operation Noble Anvil in ninety-nine. He’s held a grudge against the US ever since.”
“Can’t say I blame him.”
“Maybe so, but he’s dangerous and unfriendly and Malina visited him in Belgrade two summers in a row. So, after the mishap in the rail yard, we naturally thought it might be a good idea to visit him ourselves.”
“And?”
“His procurement wasn’t particularly difficult, but it did take us a while to get him to talk. It turns out that what we thought was an accidental detonation wasn’t an accident at all.”
“You mean they meant it to go off when no one was around?”
“Oh, it wasn’t set off by Malina or her partner in crime or even her uncle, but it was triggered intentionally.”
McElroy frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”
They reached the end of a hall and stepped through a doorway into a dark, narrow room lined on either side with lighted glass tanks. Inside the tanks was a collection of reptiles that brought to mind several members of Congress McElroy had known over the years.
As they moved up to a tank containing an iguana, Gray said, “The bomb was set off in order to convey a message. Not to the public or the government, but to Malina’s uncle himself. He loved his niece very much.”
“Okay, so what was the message?”
“It seems that Mr. Zupan owed a significant amount of money to someone, and when he didn’t pay up, that someone wanted to teach him a lesson. This man coerced Zupan into giving up the number of the cell phone detonator, and called it while Malina and her partner were less than a foot away from the bomb. His timing was impeccable.”
“That’s pretty cold,” McElroy said. “Who is this guy?”
“Someone who’s been on the Stonewell acquisition list for nearly two decades now.”
McElroy smiled. “If you give me a minute, I could probably narrow that down to half a dozen people.”
“This one is German.”
The smiled faded. “Valac?”
“The one and only.”
Reinhard Beck, aka Valac, was a former member of Germany’s Red Army Faction who split off in the mid-nineties and formed his own terror network, the Black Hat Battalion. Beck’s nickname was taken from a book called The Lesser Key of Solomon, which claimed the demon Valac was one of the rulers of the Kingdom of Hell. McElroy had always felt the name was appropriate, and apparently Beck did as well.
Valac had been a fugitive since 1994, after he was accused of the brutal and very bloody assassination of a German businessman and his two young sons while they were vacationing in France. Valac had since been linked to a number of terrorist attacks, both directly and behind the scenes, and had been a fixture on the FBI’s and CIA’s Most Wanted lists through three administrations.
Whoever was lucky enough to catch the man could name his reward, which was why Stonewell International and at least five other top-flight security firms had long considered Valac a priority. Unfortunately, he was very good at evading capture. The best ID the intelligence services had on the guy was a murky black and white surveillance photo from an Italian bank robbery fifteen years ago.
Just the mention of his name set McElroy’s heart pounding. If Gray was offering him a chance at grabbing the guy… “You know where he is?”
“Let’s just say we know where he will be in the next couple days, if he isn’t there already.”
“Where?”
Gray raised a brow. “Your impatience is unbecoming, Jason. You need to learn to temper that. Pretend you don’t care, like the rest of us do.”
“And you need to learn to get to the point. Where’s Valac?”
“Somewhere private and isolated,” Gray said. “But I can’t tell you until you ask me how I know.”
It was a game Gray had always played. He took great pride whenever his people uncovered a juicy bit of intel, and he enjoyed sharing the details.
As usual, McElroy played along. “Okay, so how do you know?”
Gray offered him another smile, this one more generous than the last as they moved on to the next glass case — a desert sand snake.
“Malina’s uncle had a contact number that he used to get in touch with Valac. It went through a third party, of course, but our friends in the NSA were able to sift through the go-between’s calls and find the ones that directly coincided with Zudan’s attempts to reach Valac. This in turn led them to yet another individual, and when they tapped his phone, they soon found themselves listening to a call from Reinhardt Beck himself and were able to piggyback his private line.”
“I’m impressed,” McElroy said.
“You should be. Unfortunately, Valac is smart enough to change phones frequently, so it didn’t last long. But before he discarded this one, they managed to record an exchange that turned the simple acquisition of a fugitive into something slightly more intriguing.”
“Meaning what?”
“I’ll need to give you some background,” Gray said. “Are you sure you have the patience for it?”
McElroy eyed him dully. “I’m listening.”
“Three weeks ago we suffered a loss in the field. A young scientist we had high hopes for was captured while vacationing in Switzerland and tortured by an ex-patriot and newly minted French citizen named Frederic Favreau. Yet another American gone rogue.”
“I didn’t hear about this.”
“You wouldn’t have. Unfortunately, what Favreau managed to extract from the man were some highly sensitive codes that only a handful of people are privy to. Codes that, if obtained by the wrong party, could prove quite deadly.”