Didn’t it?
His phone rang. He answered and listened and hung up, then he went upstairs to a makeshift office and locked the doors. Then he called the CIA headquarters back.
We have a phone-in, Langley had told him on his secured phone. Asking specifically for you, to call him at this number. It’s an Amsterdam exchange. Prepaid phone, no record of owner. That only meant the phone had been purchased in Amsterdam; the caller could be anywhere.
It rang. Nine times. Nine. Novem. Did that mean something? Then a male voice came onto the phone. ‘Hello?’
The tracking would begin immediately, August thought. The phone was connected to a laptop, showing on its screen a map of the world. Numbers began to flash across the top as the software traced the caller’s location. ‘Yes. My name is August. I understand you’ve been trying to reach me.’
‘Yes. I have.’ Male, American. No discernible regional accent.
‘About a subject of mutual interest.’
‘Oh, my God, you sound like a bad movie,’ the voice said. Young, August thought, younger than me. ‘Novem Soles. You’re one of the guys looking for them, aren’t you?’ A slight shaking in the voice.
‘Yes.’
‘Well. I can give Novem Soles to you.’
‘How?’
‘I have information for sale.’
‘Information for sale,’ August repeated. He would be repeating much of what the caller said. It was a standard ploy to extend the call, simplify the trace.
‘The price is ten million dollars.’
‘I can’t pay that amount.’
The laptop screen’s map trimmed down where the call was originating from. Europe. Then western Europe.
‘They’ve got their fingers and reach into governments around the world. I think I am giving you a bargain.’
‘Let’s say I agree to the price. What are your terms?’
‘I will deliver the information to you and you will place the funds in a numbered account in the Caymans. I want immunity from prosecution for any crimes I may have committed. Then the CIA gives me a new identity. I want sanctuary where they can never find me, in an English-speaking country.’
August listened carefully. Did he know this voice? Its tone tugged on the frail strings of memory in his mind. ‘I can’t commit that kind of money without seeing what the proof is.’
‘I have the proof.’
‘What is it? Names? Locations? Operations?’
‘It’s a notebook.’
‘A notebook.’
‘Full of details on the people in government and business that Novem Soles owns.’
‘Scan the pages and email it to me.’
The call searcher narrowed. The Netherlands/Belgium/ Luxembourg glowed bright green on the map.
‘And once I’ve done that, then you have the proof, August, and I’m left out in the cold without money or immunity.’
‘What’s in the notebook?’
‘Everything you need to decapitate Novem Soles. They’re not just a criminal ring. They’re worse, a lot worse. It’ll be the best ten million you ever spent.’
‘How did you know my name?’
‘I have the information and I can either sell it to you or I can sell it to any other number of interested buyers.’ Not an answer to the question.
‘Well, I’d have to see the notebook, you understand that.’
‘I am willing to meet.’
‘Where? When?’
‘I’ll call you back. Give me a number.’
‘I’d prefer to call you again.’
‘Oh, no. Not how I play, August. Give me a number or I vanish.’
August fed him his cell phone number. ‘I can’t get you any funds, or any promises, until I know what evidence you have. Until I see it. Tell me your name.’
‘Now knowing my name would be dangerous for you, and since we’re just getting to know each other, and you’re going to get me my beautiful ten million, I don’t want you getting yourself killed. We’re going to enjoy doing business together, August, you’re going to make your career and I’m going to buy my safety and my future. I’ll meet you in New York in two days.’
‘Where and when exactly in New York?’
‘I’ll let you know.’ The line went dead.
August sat and studied the laptop readout. The call had come from Amsterdam. The city where Sam had wrecked the Novem Soles plot.
Novem Soles. In English, the Nine Suns. The name for the criminal syndicate that had been behind the London bombing that had branded Sam Capra a traitor. Their reach was unknown but they had co-opted at least one high government official in the United States and had attempted to deliver a shattering blow to American society. Their ambitions, Sam had claimed, were limitless.
A criminal organization, not terrorist in its ideology, but one that had tried to destroy a CIA office and wreak political havoc in the United States.
What kind of criminals were these?
He had no answer. The entire Novem Soles cell in Amsterdam had been killed. The only survivor was Lucy Capra, caught in that comatose netherworld between life and death. Lucy knew some of the secrets of the group. But she was beyond helping him.
August replayed his recording of the conversation.
Who was this guy? he wondered. He kept using my name. Like it was a point of pride that he knew it. He said I was a nice guy. Have I met him before? I thought I knew the voice. But now he wasn’t sure.
Sam Capra might be paranoid about how deeply the criminal network’s claws reached into the government, but August Holdwine was not.
He dialed his boss’s number. He had to report the offer. But he knew what the bureaucratic response would be. Why pay off an informant when you could fold him under your wing and keep him shuttered up until he was ready to talk for free?
11
Miami, Florida
Fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds after August Holdwine said the phrase Novem Soles into his phone a text message appeared on another smart phone’s screen. Outside of intra-Company communications, there had been no mention of the phrase in the government’s phone and email monitoring database for weeks, since Sam Capra made his one and only statement for the CIA. The public did not know the phrase.
A large percentage of the world’s communications were vacuumed into the data tanks of the National Security Agency, to be studied and filtered. In the never-ending torrent of words, Novem Soles was a distinct outlier. Novem Soles were two words so unusual, so unmistakable, that the small bit of software hidden on the servers was able to find, within a few hours, any mention of the phrase and identify the sender and the recipient and provide a text transcript of the conversation during which the magic words were uttered. This transcript was sent to one man’s cell phone; he knew then, any time, when anyone in the United States was discussing Novem Soles.
It was, as the Watcher put it to his peers, an eye that never blinks.
The Watcher stepped out from the thrum of a restaurant on South Beach, a place that supposedly provided the best gourmet breakfast in Miami but the Watcher was unimpressed. He knew he could have done a better job in running it and he’d thought of buying it; how nice it would be to run a restaurant and have a simpler job. It was a cloudy, rainy day and in the morning haze of patio he studied the readout: it was the transcript of the entire call from the Langley office to August Holdwine. Someone had information on Novem Soles to sell, someone who had called from an Amsterdam number, and had called the Central Intelligence Agency with an offer.
He felt a jolt of nervous energy ride along his bones.
The Watcher closed the phone. He thought: Sam Capra, now. As soon as he had it rang again. He studied the phone log and answered.
‘ Bonjour,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘We have a problem.’
12
Greenwich Village, New York
Braun didn’t return from Langley to New York until mid-afternoon. The study in the Special Projects office smelled of fine cigars and exquisite coffee. August felt he should decline the coffee; he felt jittery enough. But you did not often say no to a legend, and Ricardo Braun was a legend. So August sat down in a heavy leather armchair, a fragrant Brazilian brew steaming from his cup. He had only been to the study once before; Ricardo Braun was an early retiree from CIA who’d come back into the fold a few weeks earlier when Special Projects needed mature, steady guidance after the disasters of the past few months. He made August feel like an ox; Braun was a spare, sleek man, bald, with a strong runner’s build, in his late fifties, with gray eyes and an air of unfailing confidence. He wore black slacks and a crisp white shirt. He had what appeared to August to be the world’s most elaborate coffee machine and he turned from it now, holding a thick mug of a brew that smelled amazingly rich, a curl of steam snaking from the porcelain.