The man held a bottle of champagne and two flutes.
Dalca smiled. “Nice.” He was feeling better by the minute.
Alexandru Dalca climbed the stairs into the Hendley Associates G550 with a satisfied smirk on his face, and as he entered the cabin he reached out to shake the hand of the man he presumed to be Albanian.
He spoke slowly and clearly. “Hello. Do you speak English?”
Ding Chavez took his handshake and clamped down. “’Bout as good as any other East L.A. Chicano, ese.”
“I’m sorry?”
Dalca turned now, and he saw three more men in the cabin. One was older and heavy, but he sat in the back. The two men in cabin chairs feet away were bearded, muscular, closer to his age, and armed with handguns.
“Wait. Who are you?”
Chavez put the champagne and glasses in the galley, and then he spun Dalca to his knees, pushed him facedown into the aisle between the armed men.
Behind him, Country came out of the cockpit. “All cargo loaded?”
Chavez said, “Loaded. Time to make a trash run.”
Ding handed off the backpack to Jack, who immediately started going through it. As soon as he pulled the black hard drive out of the bag, he waved it at the stunned man with Chavez’s knee in the back of his neck.
“What’s this?” Jack asked.
With as much insolence as he could muster, Dalca said, “What does it look like?”
“It looks like something that will get you killed, if your smart mouth doesn’t do it first.”
Jack nodded to Country, who immediately closed the hatch and returned to the cockpit.
Chavez frisked the man carefully, zip-tied his arms behind his back, and then blindfolded him tightly and securely. He yanked Dalca into a seat, and then sat down in front of him. “The good news is, we aren’t the Chinese. The bad news is, you didn’t fuck over the Chinese as badly as you did the Americans.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I can help. The U.S. government has had a nice conversation with the ambassador to Macedonia, who grounded the flight that was on its way here to pick you up. On top of that, two of the guys on that plane — and I hear it wasn’t half as nice a plane as this — had some outstanding warrants, so your Albanian buddies are almost, but not quite, as fucked as you are.”
The Gulfstream took off and began heading to the west. It would be eight hours in the air till D.C., which meant to the men of The Campus that they had eight hours to get every last bit of intel out of the bewildered but still smug man tied in the cabin.
The men converged in the back of the plane, leaving Dalca tied in a cabin chair, and they talked about their strategy to get information from him.
They had their man, and they should have all been happy right now, but they’d learned about the attack in Chicago just hours before, so none of them were anything of the sort. Dom himself had called the plane when they were taking off from Bucharest and told them Adara had been shot, but doctors said she’d make a full recovery.
All four of them tried to shake the tragedy in Chicago out of their minds so they could begin the work of extracting information from the man who was, in large part, responsible.
Midas just jerked a thumb at Dalca. “All this stuff this asshole is responsible for, and he’s off by himself. His escape plan was a rope ladder, a bike, and some Albanian dudes in Macedonia he didn’t even know. That’s his nod to PERSEC. No bodyguards, no well-paid goons to shadow him. No affiliation with a state actor, or a nonstate actor, for that matter. Yeah, he’s got the deal with the Albanians, but he just worked that out in the past twenty-four hours.”
Chavez asked, “What are you thinking?”
“Dunno, chief. Like maybe we’re missing a piece to the puzzle. Like there is more to this whole thing than we understand.”
Chavez turned to Jack. “What do you think?”
“I think this guy started playing in water that turned out to be too deep for him. He didn’t think anything could be traced back to him, so he went for the cash.”
Midas next said, “The question is, how do we get him to talk?”
Chavez answered, “He obviously doesn’t care about others. Let’s see if he cares about himself.”
Jack moved up and sat in front of Dalca, Ding and Midas moved nearby, and Gavin remained at the back of the aircraft, working to get into Dalca’s laptop computer. The hard drive sat next to it, already attached to a clean computer that Gavin had brought along for just that purpose.
Jack said, “Time for you to tell us what you know.”
The Romanian replied, “I want a martini.”
Jack blinked in surprise. “And I want to shoot you in the face.”
The corners of Dalca’s mouth turned upward, disappearing under his blindfold. “But you can’t, can you?”
Jack did not reply.
Dalca added, “Very dry, up, with a twist.”
Jack thought about the people who had died because of this man. Jennifer Kincaid, a woman he’d never met, but whose husband had sat in the very chair in which Dalca now sat, was at the front of his mind.
Jack said, “Fuck you and your twist,” and he hit the blindfolded Romanian in the face.
Chavez looked to Midas, who was seated closer to Jack, and Midas grabbed Jack’s arm right before he delivered an even harder blow.
“Slow down there, Sugar Ray,” Midas said. “Chill out a minute. This cockbreath’s not going anywhere.”
Dalca spit blood down the front of his shirt. “You need me. I am the only one who knows which targeting folders I sent, and to whom.”
Jack nodded to Midas that he was under control. He took a deep breath and said, “We know who you sent them to. Musa al-Matari. And we know who you worked for. The Chinese. We don’t need you as much as you think. Even without you, the Chinese still have the ability to compromise U.S. government employees, just as you did, because they have copies of the files.”
Dalca sat there without moving for several seconds. “I am the only one with the files. ARTD got access to them accidentally, by hacking into an Indian security company that had a contract with the American company hired by the OPM to evaluate its network’s susceptibility to a hack. The Indians had the data, but it was just sitting on a server, unnoticed and unexploited. When we realized what we had, we pulled it off and air-gapped it to make it safe, then began looking into it.”
Jack was astonished by this. “You are saying that the Chinese do not have these files?”
Dalca shook his head. “None of them.”
“Bullshit. You are lying because you think it improves your negotiating ability.”
Dalca shook his head adamantly. “They didn’t want to touch them. We aren’t even working with the Chinese directly. We were hired by a front company called the Seychelles Group.”
Jack wrote the name down on a notepad, planning on researching the firm when the interrogation was finished.
To Dalca he said, “I want a list of everyone you targeted. Everyone.”
Dalca shrugged dramatically. Finally he said, “I’ll talk. But not for free. I want some things in exchange.”
Gavin called Chavez to the back of the aircraft. “It’s going to take me days if not weeks to get past his encryption and get on his machine. If he’d give us the password, it might save a lot of lives in the meantime.”
Jack couldn’t hear the conversation in the back, but he could tell by Gavin’s gesticulations that he was getting nowhere with Dalca’s machine. He balled his fist up again, started to raise it toward Dalca, but Midas put a gentle hand on his shoulder.