And then a call to Jerry at Olympic Travel. Duration, three minutes. She could hear Salt’s gruff voice in her head: “Get me out of here, now.” It made sense that he had an exit strategy on the shelf. Alex guessed that Brazil, with its flimsy extradition regulations, would be Salt’s refuge of choice. Or was it South Africa? A visit to his friend Skinner?
She opened the e-mail application. One unread message from Olympic Travel. A first-class seat on a flight to Rio de Janeiro for nine that evening, booked under the name George Penrose. Alex was right about Brazil.
Several innocuous messages followed from friends, confirming a golf date, dinner at the club, and then a missive from a woman named Regina asking if he’d been “a naughty boy and required punishment from his mum.” To which Salt had replied, “Very naughty.”
Alex rolled her eyes. Englishmen.
And then an e-mail from “BeaufoySLT.” The message ran to one line. It was at once familiar and cryptic. “The Eagle Has Landed. Gott mit uns.”
The full address was BeaufoySLT@orange.sa. “Sa” for South Africa. Message sent at 3:33 Greenwich Mean Time, 9:33 Eastern Standard Time.
Was BeaufoySLT from South Africa Salt’s friend Skinner?
Alex looked away, the hackles on her neck standing at attention. She needed no translation to know what the message meant. The Eagle Has Landed. Gott mit uns. The bad guys were in the States.
This was happening now.
The phone rang. The incoming call was from C. Rees-Jones. Alex knew better than to answer. It was imperative that the woman know nothing about Salt’s death. She let the call roll to voice mail. She waited until the message was complete, then listened.
“Jim. It’s me. You’ve really got us scared. We’ve decided to go to our solicitors this afternoon. We have to get in front of this. Whoever you’re working with, I am pleading with you to call it off. Do you hear? You’ve lost your mind. Call me. Now.”
Alex listened to the message again. Rees-Jones was right to be flipping out. Her business, not to mention her life as a free woman, was at stake. She was smart to be proactive. She wasn’t so smart to have worked with James Salt.
Opening her purse, Alex snatched the mesh bag holding her electronic toys and plucked out the small rectangular unit she called the vacuum. She freed the SIM card from Salt’s phone and inserted it into the vacuum’s slot. Thirty seconds later the vacuum had copied the SIM card’s data to its own internal memory. Alex returned the SIM card to Salt’s phone, then slipped the phone back into Salt’s pocket. She wouldn’t want anyone accusing her of tampering with the evidence.
Alex popped the trunk. Inside was a beautiful set of golf clubs and, tucked to one side, an even more beautiful calfskin briefcase. The case was locked, so she borrowed Salt’s thrusting knife and broke it open. So much for tampering with evidence. Inside it were files and more files. A vial of cocaine. Condoms. A container of barbiturates. Salt wasn’t lying. He really had been a naughty boy.
And there beneath a legal pad, one crisp white envelope addressed to Mr. George Penrose from the Bank of Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Against every rule, she removed the letter with her bare hands. It was a computer-generated confirmation of deposit into his account in the amount of one million British pounds paid by Excelsior Holdings of Curaçao N.V.
The smoking gun.
And the map leading to Salt’s “old friend.”
Alex closed the trunk, then placed the briefcase on the passenger seat. She checked her watch. It was one-thirty. Seven-thirty at home. She grabbed her cell phone, mustering her courage. Where was her picture of J. Edgar Hoover when she needed it? She counted to three, then placed the call.
“You’re up early,” said Janet McVeigh.
“Actually, I’ve been up quite a while,” said Alex.
“Can’t sleep?”
“Not exactly. I’m in London.”
A period of silence followed. For once Alex appreciated McVeigh’s ability to hold her temper. “Go ahead,” she said finally.
“I know I broke the rules. You can fire me later. Right now there’s a lot you need to know. I was right about Lambert’s ties to GRAIL. The company was involved in hiring him and twenty-nine others. Not directly, but it provided introductions to Major James Salt, the officer who ran Executive Outcomes alongside Trevor Manning. Salt also played a large part in the Comoros raid. I’m e-mailing you a recording between Salt and Chris Rees-Jones, GRAIL’s director. This conversation took place ten minutes after I met with Rees-Jones and asked her about Lambert. I bugged her office during our meeting, so there’s only one side to the conversation, but it’s enough.”
McVeigh’s diplomacy deserted her. “How did you-”
“Let me finish. As I said, Salt hired thirty men and women and sent them to a training compound in Namibia. Six of the recruits washed out. Lambert’s dead. That leaves twenty-three. It’s my guess they were the ones who came through Mexico City two nights ago.”
“So you spoke with Salt, too?” McVeigh’s anger was laced with a grudging admiration.
“I tracked him down to his club in London and interrogated him in his vehicle.”
“Voluntary or coerced?”
“Somewhere in between. I asked him a few questions. He tried to kill me. I shot him. He’s dead.”
Alex looked at her reflection in the window. Her hair was disheveled. She was bleeding from the nose, and her eye was starting to look like an eggplant. “Jan? You there?”
“You killed Salt?”
“Yes.”
“Let me get this clear-and I’m talking to you as your supervisor and as AD of the New York office, not as a fellow investigator. You disobeyed my express orders not to return to work. Also against my express orders, you traveled to London. I imagine I should be thankful that you didn’t hijack one of the Bureau’s jets. You conducted an illegal surveillance operation in a foreign country, then you killed a person of interest during the course of a hostile interrogation.”
“He pulled a gun and discharged his weapon twice in an effort to kill me. When I disarmed him, he attempted to stab me instead.”
“Are you all right?”
“Except for a black eye, yes. Thank you for asking.”
“You’re in trouble, Alex. You know that?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. We’ll deal with that side of things when you get back. Did you get any useful information out of this escapade at all?”
“A confirmation of deposit from Salt’s account at the Bank of Vaduz, Liechtenstein, in the amount of one million pounds from an Excelsior Holdings of Curaçao. My guess is that that’s who is bankrolling this whole thing. Find out who’s behind Excelsior and we find out who’s pulling all the strings.”
“Good luck with that. Between Liechtenstein and Curaçao, we’ll be lucky to have a call returned three months from now.”
Alex had other ideas, but kept them to herself. “There was also an e-mail on his phone sent last night at nine your time from someone named Beaufoy. South African e-mail address. It read, ‘The Eagle Has Landed. Gott mitt uns.’”
“And that means?”
“You know what it means.”
“No, I don’t. And neither do you.”
“Bullshit. You’ll know when you hear the tape. I’m going to contact a friend of mine at Five and tell him what happened. I don’t want to end up in jail for the next week. You might want to brief the director. I imagine the shit’s going to hit the fan pretty good.”
“Alex-”
“Listen to the tape.” Alex hung up before McVeigh could scream at her. She felt faint and paced back and forth until the blood returned to her head. The concussion was worse than she thought. She crossed her fingers that McVeigh would see things her way and vote with her badge instead of her rulebook.