Elliot said, “Play it again.”
He did.
Chase looked him in the eye. “Does that sound like someone who is voluntarily betraying his country?”
Elliot raised his voice. “How the hell should I know?”
“I think that this is connected to what we’ve been working on. Yes, David was on that list. But the police reported that they thought my brother was taken outside of his car a few weeks ago. So maybe this list isn’t of volunteers. Maybe it’s something else.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Have you seen anything through official channels about my brother? Any official policy on what we’re supposed to do with him?”
“No. Just this stuff on the news. And what Langley said a few weeks back about Gorji’s list not being a good enough source to go on.”
“Then you probably have some license to solve the problem your own way, right?”
Elliot’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, what if my brother was taken into custody by the CIA? Since he may have information that’s relevant to our work, could Dubai Station take hold of him?”
“Now, how are we going to do that? They don’t even know where he is and there’s supposed to be some doggone international manhunt out for that boy.”
“Not anymore.” Chase pointed at the TV screen. Manhunt ends in Darwin, Australia, as two US men taken into custody by Interpol, it read.
Elliot scoffed. “What are you asking, Chase? You can’t really be suggesting what I think you are.”
“Hear me out. Let me bring him here. We’ll ask them some questions and find out what’s really going on. You know as well as I do that this could be related to Abu Musa and to Lisa Parker’s exploits.”
“How are you going to bring him here? He’s in custody? You want me to ask Interpol to give him to us?”
Chase said, “I don’t want to ask anyone. Where there is confusion, there is opportunity. Let’s create a little confusion.”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind? Even if I was going to authorize it, which I am NOT, how would you do it?”
Chase smiled. In his experience, very few people wanted to know how to do something that they were not interested in doing.
Chapter 14
Henry Glickstein sat on his cot, biting his fingernails. The two young Australian military police guards sat outside his jail cell watching TV.
The rotating groups of MPs had watched the twenty-four-hour news channel all night long. They were excited. The news reports kept referring to David and Henry being captured in Darwin.
Henry was pissed. Since the TV had been on all night, he couldn’t get a lick of sleep. This place sucked. It reminded him of a jail cell in a John Wayne Western. Half the room was where they sat, behind bars. The other half of the room was the area where the Australian military police sat.
Supposedly they were going to be moved soon. The MPs said that they would get a shower at the next place. They had only been here for twelve hours, they were told. Just be patient. Right. Patience. That was what Henry needed.
Several weeks ago, David and Henry, along with another eighteen Americans, had been taken to a remote island under the pretense of participating in some top-secret CIA project. There were experts from a variety of fields that were with them. Some people were experts in defense, others in information technology, and others in military tactics. A lot of them were in the government or military. Each of them had been sent there by a trusted superior at their place of work.
Once on the island, they were told why they were there. China was planning to attack the United States. Everyone on the island was part of an American Red Celclass="underline" a team of experts that would plan out how China could best attack the US. The idea was that this would then help America to prepare its defense. They were told that Chinese spies had already infiltrated many of the US defense and intelligence agencies, so this carefully vetted team had to do their work on the island — a secret compound where no one would find out what was going on.
One minor problem — the entire operation was a ruse. The head woman there, Lena Chou, claimed to be a member of the CIA. Everything had seemed legitimate until David Manning discovered that the other half of the island was filled with Chinese military. Lena was working for them.
David had led the group in a revolt, but Lena and her mole, that no-good Indian bastard Natesh, had foiled that plan. As a storm pummeled the island, three Chinese helicopters landed and began to take over the buildings where the Americans waited.
Henry and David had escaped. David swam halfway around the island and commandeered one of the Chinese motorized rafts. The two of them had barely survived that night in the deadly storm. But luck was on their side. A day later, they had been picked up by an Australian fishing trawler and taken to Darwin.
Already paranoid about the Chinese coming after them, David and Henry didn’t tell the people on the trawler what was really going on. They also decided not to make any communications that might allow the Chinese to catch up with them while they were vulnerable and at sea. They needed to speak with the right people, and make that first communication count.
During the week or so that it took the trawler to reach Darwin, however, Lena’s spy network had apparently been hard at work. When David and Henry had called one of David’s trusted friends at his work, they had been too late. A bulletin had been put out by Interpol that David and Henry were wanted for selling cybertechnology to Iran. So when the two men thought they were being picked up by the Australian government and taken to safety, they were actually being taken to jail. Even the good guys were against them now.
David held on to one of the cold bars and asked the guards, “Can you at least tell us when we’ll be able to speak with an American representative?”
Henry knew what the answer would be.
The skinny guard looked like he’d just hit puberty a few weeks ago. Thick Australian accent. “Afraid we can’t help you. Interpol is in charge. We’re just doing them a favor, keeping you here until they can move you.”
Henry checked the spot on his arm that normally housed his Rolex. It must have been the tenth time he’d done so. Habit. A pale patch of skin told him nothing of what time it might be. He had traded his watch to a pawnshop the day before and used the funds to buy phones and pay for hotels. Their grand plan to get word out about the Lena and the Red Cell and the island. Lot of good it had done them.
The wall clock said six fifteen. About ten minutes had gone by since the last time he checked. Henry kept telling himself that this would all get sorted out. That any minute now a lawyer would come through that door and demand that his clients get fair treatment. But the TV had been tuned to the news channel, so Henry knew that no lawyer would be coming.
They were being called international terrorists. The TV was saying that US authorities had audio evidence that David Manning and Henry Glickstein had conspired in an Iranian cyberattack on allied nations. This was total horseshit.
Yesterday, soon after they had arrived in Darwin, they had called David’s office. Got hold of someone he knew and thought he could trust. Told him and a group of people on the phone everything. But Lena’s crew had already put plans into motion. They had put out information that David and Henry had given classified information to Iran. Which was a complete lie. But in the information age, perception was reality. Neither David nor Henry knew whether the people on that phone call were really American loyalists who had been tricked, or Chinese agents posing as Americans.