Testing the fitness of his pursuers, Knox turns to head uphill. Faces a dead end. Squeezes between two buildings ornately covered in ironwork. He vaults a low fence and finds himself in another narrow winding street.
The hill is terraced with major streets, cul-de-sacs and tighter lanes jammed between them. Knox moves in bursts of speed, gaining ground quickly but preserving endurance. He arrives at another thoroughfare and crosses through heavy traffic. Manages to do so without drawing the peal of a car horn. On the opposite side he reenters the puzzle of steep streets cluttered with parked vehicles. Zippered into the pockets of the Scottevest are the tools necessary to jack a car, but he fears the traffic. It’s faster on foot.
He smells spicy meat and fried bread and his mouth goes wet with saliva. Hears Jay Z and Justin Timberlake cursing through an open window. Could be Brooklyn.
He pops out onto Khaled Ben Al Waleed and is crossing the wider avenue when a minivan skids to a stop on the skim of windblown sand. The side door slides open.
“In here!” The driver is leaning well out of his seat. Knox can’t place the accent. It’s definitely not Jordanian. The driver rolls a balaclava down over his face.
Knox pauses. He’s not getting into the van.
“Now! Or you’re with GID.” General Intelligence Department. The accent is vaguely Eastern European. Possibly forced. Croatia? Bosnia?
Knox’s efforts have done nothing to slow whoever’s coming up the hill; he knows only too well the training required.
“Shit,” he mumbles as he climbs reluctantly into the tiny van. “Go!” he says.
The van lingers.
“Go!”
Knox reaches to slide the door shut. A hand grabs hold from the other side — Knox assumes it belongs to the man following him, a man also wearing a balaclava. He shoves Knox out of his way as he boards. The van takes off. They don’t cuff him. Don’t speak.
“What the fuck?” Knox says. There are no weapons showing. He can take the man in the balaclava if he has to.
The flashing blue lights of police vehicles coil slowly up the hill. The van is well out ahead and currently in the clear; the police are searching for a man on foot. Knox puts it together: the one following him radioed how and where to intercept Knox. The why of it lingers. Dulwich is the easiest answer: Knox is being driven to Dulwich.
He wants to connect these two to the man who followed him to the Internet café, but it’s too big a leap. The easy answer is never the right one. The Iranian agencies recruit men and women who look like Israelis; the Israelis recruit Palestinians. There’s no Who’s Who of black-ops agents. These guys could be on Dulwich’s payroll for all Knox knows.
“Someone going to say something?” Knox says.
The van obeys the modest speed limit as it climbs through a series of turns and then descends, slowing at an intersection.
Knox grabs for the handle, slides open the door and rolls out. He’s on his feet and running.
He hears, “Have it your way, asshole.” The vehicle pulls away.
He assumes the second guy followed him out. Knox has forced their hand: they’re going to kill him.
Or try to.
He glances back to measure his lead.
No one.
Have it your way, asshole! What kind of an accent was that?
He’s alone, suddenly wrapped in a swirling dust-dog of wind and sand.
“What the fuck?” he shouts, spinning in a full circle to see who, if anyone, he missed. The night air holds only a red glow, remnants of the sandstorm. The haze crystalizes the millions of lights. White diamonds in a ruby haze. He bends over and grabs his knees, his heart racing out of control.
13
Grace has arranged herself an apartment rented by the week in a building suited for Westerners. The idiosyncrasy — that in a Middle Eastern nation she might be considered Western — is not lost on her. She and Besim made three stops: grocery store, pharmacy and liquor shop. She has everything from feminine products and mascara to Greek yogurt and vodka.
The apartment is furnished and well appointed, with a kitchenette, nice linens, Wi-Fi and a flat-screen television with full satellite. It keeps her out of a hotel, allowing a lower profile.
Already at work attempting to hack Mashe Okle’s investment accounts, she maintains an open videoconference with Xin in Rutherford Risk’s Data Sciences division, which operates 24/7/365. Her VPN connection has been pinged around the world, aliased and encrypted. Slipping into an investment server undetected is impossible, so once again she must cloak herself. The going is tedious. Data Services is advising her as to the exact time to make the hack. She waits, her finger hovering above the Return key.
Her phone rings, the caller ID on her screen. She mutes the video and takes the call.
“Ma’am.” She doesn’t like being addressed this way but didn’t have the heart to tell her driver. By arrangement, he remains parked outside, on call through midnight.
“You have man friend maybe watching building?”
“Explain, please, Besim.”
“Man park twice. First time, west of building. Get out. Walk around building. Move car to see east side.”
“How alert of you, Besim,” she says.
“This is man you follow, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.” She thanks him for his attention. Asks him to let her know if anything changes.
Ending the cell call, she takes the videoconference off Mute. “Xin?”
“Wei.” Yes. Thousands of miles away on an island in the South China Sea, Xin sounds as if he’s next to her.
“You have my coordinates?”
“Within one meter.”
“How long for you to account for every cell phone turned on within one hundred… no, let’s say, fifty… meters of me?”
“How many carriers?”
“Enough to cover in the ninetieth percentile of coverage.”
“Soonest? Fifteen minutes. Longest? An hour.”
“Put someone on it, will you please?”
“Copy.”
A symbol indicates he’s muted his line. She does the same, taking note of the time. The minutes drag out. After five minutes, she’s reconnected as Xin gives her a countdown to the hack.
She’s in. She celebrates the success by pouring herself warm vodka. Wishes she’d given it time to cool. Now, data-mining a major investment firm, she envisions herself as a salmon or sperm swimming upstream, seeking out a specific destination. It’s a journey. She knows she must be patient. As in a video game, there are dragons and demons lurking, traps set, awaiting a misstep on her part. Having extracted Mashe Okle’s password from the bank server, she uses it here, hoping he’s a man of convenience, and gains entrance to his investment portfolio.
She laughs at the irony of the Iranian’s savings being heavily invested in the U.S. stock market. She’s feeling the vodka.
He’s a wealthy man, but it’s not the kind of money she might have expected. The stocks and mutual funds favor scientific companies. She is annoyed by the worming thought that this doesn’t pass the sniff test for an arms dealer. Did Dulwich ever confirm that, or was it her assumption? She’s eager to speak with Knox; he knows Dulwich better. At the very least, he’ll have a keener sense of what’s at play. Knox is not one to take on in a game of cards.
She clicks through to the portfolio’s history, increases the time sample and prints to a PDF file. On point, she flies through menus so quickly another’s eye would be unable to keep up. Multiple files are saved and archived in a matter of seconds for later analysis. This is not a time for window-shopping. She prides herself on the speed and agility with which she extracts every morsel of relevant data. When she logs out of Mashe’s account, she’s at forty-seven seconds. She closes the firm’s web page at forty-nine, giving her a total of under a minute. She celebrates by throwing her arms in the air, an Olympian sprinter at the tape.