‘The brain?’ Hannah asked.
‘Stephen had major trauma to his frontal lobes,’ Hinkley explained, ‘consistent with a foreign object being repeatedly inserted into his brain via his nasal cavity, which also showed signs of long — term damage. Whatever he endured at the hands of the Chinese it went on for a decade and a half and eventually killed him. The Chinese must then have dumped his body in the water and hoped the problem would float away and become fish food.’
‘Do we have any idea what they were putting into his brain?’ Vaughn asked, somewhat appalled.
‘No,’ Hinkley admitted, ‘but whatever it was left a basic impression on the interior of the nasal cavities, which the Medical Examiner was able to scan and reproduce using a 3D — printer.’
Hinkley produced from his pocket a small plastic evidence bag, and inside it was a slim plastic cylinder barely an inch long. Hannah frowned as she looked at it.
‘Small, no identifying marks.’
‘Nothing that we could see,’ Hinkley confirmed, ‘but the brain’s tissue is not good at retaining impression from something so small. Still, whatever this is it seems to me to be central to what everybody’s out here looking for.’
‘Everybody?’ Hannah asked, confused. ‘I thought that we were the only people out here looking for this?’
‘There was some guy here this morning,’ Hinkley said, ‘big guy, African American. He was working for the FBI too.’
‘The FBI? But we’re here under LeMay’s direct orders. Who the hell else could there be working for the Barn out here?’
‘Beats me,’ Hinkley said, ‘but he was legitimate, had all the right credentials.’
Hannah shot Vaughn a concerned glance. ‘Do you have any CCTV of this person, a name? Anything?’
Hinkley shook his head.
‘The guy was an agency heavyweight, had priority access to the building through the car pool gates and carried enough authority to have the security systems disengaged down near the sally port. I had to meet him down there personally and talk this over with him.’
Hannah hissed a sigh out as she glanced out of the windows at the traffic outside.
‘What kind of vehicle was he driving?’ she asked.
Hinkley shrugged. ‘Limousine, private plates, tinted windows. Didn’t look like something the Barn would finance, but then this is Hong Kong. You kind of learn to expect anything.’
‘Mitchell,’ Hannah said to Vaughn. ‘He’s onto this as well.’
‘Could be a coincidence,’ Vaughn said without conviction. ‘But if he’s out here he may have the jump on us. He must be impersonating a federal agent.’
‘But then how would he get in here so easily?’ Hannah challenged.
‘If he’s high enough up the chain, he can go anywhere he wants,’ Hinkley said. ‘Who is he?’
Hannah stood up and shook Hinkley’s hand. ‘We’re working on that. If anything shows up in the paperwork regarding Stephen Ricard, please do forward it to us.’
‘Will do,’ Hinkley promised.
Hannah did not speak again until she reached the sidewalk outside the Consulate, the traffic noise helping to shield her conversation with Vaughn.
‘Mitchell’s chasing the same thing as us?’ Vaughn asked. ‘You think he’s on — side this time?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah replied. ‘If what Jarvis was suggesting is true then Mitchell is working for this Majestic Twelve, so presumably whatever the NSA lost out here will be something that they’re looking to acquire.’
‘So you’re buying Jarvis’s line now?’
‘Not exactly,’ Hannah replied, ‘but if Mitchell’s the enemy then it’s our job to get to this before he does.’
‘Or maybe he’s actually working for the FBI,’ Vaughn said, ‘which would mean that LeMay at the very least knows about him.’
Hannah stared at her partner. ‘Jarvis said we’d be hung out to dry.’
‘If Mitchell gets whatever it is LeMay wants first,’ Vaughn confirmed. ‘We don’t know that’s the case, but whatever the hell’s going on here our best bet is to beat Mitchell to whatever it is people are looking for out here.’
‘Mitchell must also have left the Consulate empty handed,’ Hannah said, ‘so what would be his next move?’
Vaughn glanced around them at the city and then toward Kowloon Bay.
‘If Stephen Ricard was only dumped a couple of weeks ago it’s possible we could find evidence of the boat that did it, although it’s a long shot with all the maritime traffic moving through the bay.’
‘We could check currents, work backwards from where the body was found to give us an idea of where the body was originally dumped.’
Vaughn winced. ‘There are too many variables and we don’t know exactly how the body was placed in the water. It could have been upstream somewhere on the mainland, not out in the bay.’
Hannah felt her shoulders slump as she realized that Vaughn was right. Without more details they couldn’t accurately plot the movements of the body, and that meant they couldn’t pinpoint where Stephen’s remains had entered the water. They had only one option left, and that was to let Mitchell do the work for them.
‘We’ll get traffic camera footage of the street out here and get the plate of Mitchell’s vehicle,’ she said finally. ‘Let’s find him instead and figure out what he’s got in mind.’
XXI
‘Salaam, my friend.’
The old man greeted Abrahem with a warm embrace and held his shoulders firmly in his hands as he looked the younger man up and down in the darkness, the sound of waves crashing far behind them. Tariq Adel was elderly now but the fire of insurgency burned as brightly in his eyes as it had decades before in the killing fields of the Iran — Iraq war that had taken so many lives.
‘Every day, you make your father proud Abrahem,’ Tariq said. ‘He would have smiled upon you here as he smiles upon you now from Paradise.’
‘And I shall continue to do so, Tariq,’ Abrahem replied.
‘Come,’ the old man beckoned. ‘There is much to say.’
Abrahem followed Tariq up to the small village, an isolated group of low buildings huddled against the east African coast in the Harardhere District. Barren beaches stretched for miles to the north and south and there were no roads across the boundless desert wastes to the west. The village’s presence in the darkness was betrayed only by a handful of flickering fires, beacons in the absolute blackness around them.
Abrahem’s journey had been long, cramped aboard a tiny boat that had chugged its way out of the Persian Gulf and turned south along the coasts of Oman and Yemen, travelling through the night and all of the next day and then the following night also. The smell of grease, metal and smoke stained Abrahem’s clothes with the hated odour of western civilization, their love of oil and petroleum like an addiction surging through their veins. He was grateful for the fresh breezes billowing across the Somalian coast and rippling through his shirt as he followed Tariq to one of the larger buildings, built the old way from compacted earth that had been baked into bricks in the harsh sunlight. He wondered how many long centuries these homes had stood, lived in by people who had known nothing of the troubles that would face their ancestors.
Dark eyes watched him from the blackness, reflecting the firelight that glinted off the smooth metal of Kalashnikov AK–47 rifles slung over the shoulders of Islamist pirates. Their ancestors had likely also been men of the sea but fishermen, not the callous murderers who watched him now, devoid of any morsel of humanity. Abrahem could not say it out loud for he needed their assistance, but he despised their bigotry, their ignorance and their addiction to death and theft. To Abrahem they were no better than the infidel Americans.