The Devil's Ransom, page 13
It was going to be rough.
He returned to Pushka, and they began laboriously dragging the trunk down the incline. Sweating and swearing after the third narrow switchback, Pushka said, “What’s in this thing, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Some type of papers or something that Andrei wants hidden. I didn’t open it. It’s locked up tight.”
Eventually they reached the bottom, the lake and waterfalls of the park visible in the moonlight outside the entrance, a wooden boardwalk leading in to where they stood. Branko said, “Okay, this is what the tourists do. Where did you go for a smoke?”
Pushka said, “Leave the trunk here. Follow me.”
Branko did as he asked, and they crossed the iron railing designed to corral the tourists, entering a tunnel of stone that led away from the main chamber. Pushka ducked his head, the ceiling getting lower and lower, finally entering another chamber that allowed him to stand up. Branko flicked his headlamp around and saw water bottles and cigarette butts.
“This isn’t going to work. Clearly, people climb that railing and explore. We can’t leave it here. I thought you said it was secret?”
“This isn’t it. If I smoked here, I’d have been found either by smell or sight.”
He went left, got down on his belly, and crawled through one of the myriad holes in the side of the cave, disappearing into the darkness. Branko followed and eventually found himself in another chamber, this one much smaller, forcing him to crouch, with a natural chimney showing the starlight above.
Pushka said, “Nobody comes here. There are plenty of tunnels like you just crawled through, but all of them end up in a dead end, where getting back out is hard as shit. I know from experience. This is the only one that ends up in an open chamber, and as far as I know, I’m the only one who’s found it. Outside of cavemen, I guess.”
Branko looked around and saw no signs of human presence. He said, “Does it flood? Like in a heavy rain?”
“No. Some dripping down that chimney, but it’s higher than the lake level. Even when the main chamber floods with, like, a foot of water, this one is always dry. Take it from me. I used it plenty of times.”
An hour later they’d pushed and pulled the trunk into the small chamber. Branko checked the AirTag, saw it functioning, and then checked the signal all the way out. The tag worked on Bluetooth, and he lost the signal just outside of the main chamber, but—with the location—it was enough for someone from Andrei’s organization to find it. The AirTag was crowdsourced with anyone who owned an iPhone with Bluetooth enabled, and every time someone explored the larger chamber with an iPhone, that trunk would register without them even knowing. With a battery that lasted a year, he was comfortable that it was safe.
They’d traveled back to the apartment in Zagreb and had crashed, exhausted. Now, the next morning, Pushka was still surly. In fact, he seemed more aggravated than he had the night before, when he was lugging the trunk to the cave.
Pushka repeated, “I do computer work. I’m not Andrei’s personal servant. There are plenty of people who want my skills. My back is killing me, and my knuckles are scraped raw from last night.”
Branko bristled, saying, “You won’t have to do anything like that again. It’s not like I control everything. Maybe next time, you can fly to Liechtenstein for an update. Leave me here to drink beer and do nothing while getting paid.”
Pushka backed down, saying, “Buy me lunch and we’ll call it even. But I’d really like to know when the next attack is happening. That last one got us zero. I’ve heard absolutely nothing from the target. I think they’re going to suck it up.”
“They might, but it’s irrelevant. With that trunk, I got us the money to keep working even if they don’t pay. I know the next target, I’m just waiting on the gateway. When we get it, we go operational again. I’m thinking the place in Split.”
“What’s the target?”
Branko gave him a sly look and said, “That’s a secret. Andrei’s orders. But it’s big. Biggest one we’ve ever hit.”
Pushka grinned and said, “You owe me for this.”
Branko turned back to the computer, saying, “I told you, I’m paying for lunch.” He clicked on his email and brightened, saying, “I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“You want to go out tonight? Get someone else to pay for it?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Remember I told you about that guy from Afghanistan I met in Liechtenstein?”
“Yeah. The one who looked like he’d hiked to the house? That one?”
“Yeah. He was a good dude. I gave him my burner email. He’s in town and wants to party.”
Chapter 24
Brett tapped into the website Creed had provided and we got a blurry mess, like looking at something through glasses smeared with Vaseline. After a second it cleared up, as if the camera were waking from a slumber and shaking its head to focus.
He said, “Looks like Creed’s little backup attempt is working out. At least we have a view down the hall.”
I leaned over his shoulder and saw the door of one Branko Markovic. Or at least the door that Creed said was his. Creed had never let me down before, but then again, he’d never been working with the shoestring computers like he was now due to the ransomware. He’d built an emergency backup out of old tools, and that’s all we had.
We’d packed up our dig site tents and tools and met the aircraft at the Bokhtar airfield in the final hours of darkness, everyone happy to be exfiltrating successfully. Amena was ecstatic to see us, and the pilots were ready to get home. I didn’t say a word until we were in the air, but I knew my team was suspecting something when I spent about ten minutes in the cockpit giving the flight crew new directions.
We were in the air for about thirty minutes before I gave them the new mission, waiting until we were out of Tajikistan airspace. They were understandably a little confused, since we were also transporting a terrorist with a blindfold across his eyes and sound-canceling earphones on his head, bound and stuffed in the back of the plane, along with Jahn and his niece, who were expecting to land in the United States.
Most took it in stride, as I would expect. Jennifer was the only one who was a little put out, asking what the hell we were going to do with Amena. I glanced at the rear of the plane where she was sitting, staring at me with daggers, and said, “Jenn, she’s going home with Jahn and the rest. The Taskforce will escort her to Charleston. Kylie’s house-sitting, so she’ll be fine.”
“We’re going to send her home with a terrorist and some guy we just rescued?”
I saw Brett, Veep, and Knuckles looking at me and said, “Could I see you in the galley for a minute?”
We got there and she was spitting mad, like a momma grizzly, but I was having none of that. She started to talk and I held up my finger, saying, “Wait a minute here. I’m the one who said we shouldn’t bring her on a cover development trip. You’re the one who said it would be fun to show her the world. And it was fun. But the reason I didn’t want her here is precisely this. She’s going home, and that’s it. You need to pull back from the family thing and get your head in the game here.”
She looked at me with a little bit of venom and then shook her head, saying, “So that’s it, huh. Mission before family. We’re going to run off doing something else when Carly is in a box headed to the United States. The mission will always trump anything else.”
I leaned back, now knowing what this was about. It wasn’t Amena. I said, “That’s what you think?”
She slammed a fist into the wall, then felt the pain. She curled up, holding her hand, and I saw the tears. I went to her, wrapping her body. Carly had been one of her best friends, and I should have known this would be hard. I was so worried about Knuckles, I’d forgotten about her. She’d seen a friend and operator called Decoy have his head split open right next to her once, and she’d blamed herself for the death. Now, Carly was gone, and she was wondering if the loss was her fault.
They’d worked many, many missions together, and she was now letting that out, incensed that the Taskforce could simply give us another mission like some mechanical part had broken and it had shifted to another piece of the machine.
She brushed her eyes and said, “Do you think this is right? Leaving like this?”
I cupped her chin and said, “Yes. I do. We fucked up with Carly, and we did what we could to fix it. Now, we have another mission. The guys hitting us with ransomware don’t care about Carly. The mission never ends. We can do some good here.”
“It doesn’t seem right. We should at least have a pause to remember her. Somebody in the Taskforce should give a shit.”
“They do. Trust me, they do. We’ll celebrate her in time. Remember Guy? Remember that?”
Her hitching stopped and she said, “Yes.”
“It’s the same way here. Let it go for a while. Dislocate yourself from the death. We have a mission, and we’ll execute that mission.”
She chuckled without any humor and said, “Like a bunch of robots.”
“No, not like robots. Like what you did twenty-four hours ago. Look in the back of this plane and tell me that wasn’t just.”
She nodded, and I could see her remembering breaking the trigger. She said, “That was just.”
I said, “Okay, then, let’s get this done. We’ll mourn Carly’s death, but we have a mission. Are you in?”
She looked at me like she had way back in the day, when I was the only thing standing between her and certain death. When she’d believed in me for the first time. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, saying, “I’m always in. As long as you are.”
The trust she placed in me was disconcerting, and I hoped to live up to it.
We’d landed the plane in Zagreb, Croatia, at their general aviation terminal, and sure as shit, George Wolffe had executed. We were met by a group of guys who looked like Croatian immigration, but were not. Well, they might have been—I don’t know—but they certainly didn’t do any immigration work.
We bundled off the terrorist outside of prying eyes, and then escorted Jahn and his niece to the new aircraft. Surprisingly, Amena hadn’t put up a fight at all about going home alone. She seemed to know what was happening, spending all of her time with the niece.
I took Jennifer and Knuckles to do the transfer, because I wanted them to see what the loss of Carly was earning. We reached the plane and Jahn looked at me, saying, “Is this for real? We get to leave for good? To the United States?”
I said, “It’s for real, but don’t let anyone on the far end try to leverage you. You’ve worked with the CIA, right?”
He said, “Yes, why?”
“Because they might want to use you again. You’ve done your duty to our country. You’ve done more for our nation than most of the people in my country. They get to enjoy the freedom out of an accident of being born there. You get it now because you earned it. Don’t let anyone fuck with you. If they do, use my name.”
He laughed and said, “What, just say ‘Pike says this isn’t right’?”
I said, “Yes. That’s exactly what you say. When you meet my people, say that. It will hold some weight.”
He looked at me with new eyes and said, “Why?”
“Because if they don’t do what they say, they know I’ll rip off their heads.”
He kept my gaze, trying to determine if I was telling the truth. And he saw I was.
Jennifer broke the tension, saying, “Because Pike has a way with people. Let’s get on the plane.”
Jahn said, “I hope this is the right thing.”
I said, “Better than being chained to a bed.”
He chuckled and said, “What about my niece? She doesn’t have the same pedigree as me, to say the least.”
“She’s good. Trust me. I have a little experience in that department.”
“But I have no proof about her. I have no birth certificate, no identification, no nothing.”
Amena came forward at that point, taking the niece’s hand and saying, “I’ll take her home. Does she speak Arabic? I don’t speak Pashto.”
Jahn nodded, confused.
Amena spoke a few sentences to the girl and put her arm around her, turning and pointing at me. The girl smiled for the first time ever, and they walked up the stairs.
Jahn said, “Who is that? Why is there a kid here on this?”
I said, “She’s with me. She’s like your niece, only she’s from Syria. She’s now my daughter. Trust me, you’re in good hands.”
He looked at me dumbfounded, then said, “I don’t know what to say.”
I said, “You don’t need to say anything. You helped our country, now you get to enjoy it. Give me a call when you get there. We’ll have a beer.”
He laughed and said, “I don’t drink.”
I said, “Well, you’d better learn, because that’s going to be a detriment in my world.”
He laughed again, and then did what I’d hoped he would. He shook Knuckles’ hand and kissed Jennifer on the cheek, saying, “I’m so sorry that saving my life cost the life of your friend. If I could reverse it, I would.”
Knuckles heard the words and they seemed to mean something to him. He patted Jahn on the shoulder and said, “You getting out is what she wanted. Don’t dwell on the past. Plan for the future.”
Jahn nodded, and in five minutes they were gone.
Chapter 25
Jennifer waited until the computer screen cleared, showing a long hallway, then said, “It’s going to be hard to get down that thing without being seen.”
I was glad to see she was thinking about the mission. I was worried about both her and Knuckles, about their ability to continue. I wouldn’t tell the Taskforce that, because I trusted them both, but they were still feeling the loss of Carly.
In Hollywood, someone dies and it’s just a flash of film. In the real world, it bites deep, in ways that could explode like the Challenger, with one small O-ring failure causing a catastrophic event. They could pretend all day long that nothing was wrong, but when the pressure on the O-ring happened, it either held, or it was total destruction.
And I was the NASA scientist who should be calling for a delay of launch. But, like that guy back in 1986, I didn’t.
I said, “Yeah, well, Veep got the camera in there with no issue, so it’s not like it’s impossible.”
We’d been given an address for the supposed mastermind in the target package, and it was in the upper town of Zagreb, where all the old shit existed. We were holed up in a hotel in the lower town called Esplanade, right outside the train station. It was a good place to plan because it had robust Wi-Fi that our VPN could access, and it was only a fifteen-minute walk to the upper town.
The difference was really just a function of time: the upper town was the original part of the city, on a plateau, where the parliament and historical sites were located, and where the streets were built before anyone thought about a car. The lower town was where the real world lived, full of hotels and glass buildings that were the engine of Zagreb.
The target in question was a four-story building that was a mix of apartments and businesses. The bar we’d been given as the source of the penetration was deeper in the building on the same floor, with the Wi-Fi extending weakly to this hallway, although even my Cro-Magnon brain thought it was stupid for anyone to attack anything in the United States using their open Wi-Fi network. And Creed agreed with that assessment.
Using the enormous reach of the United States government, he’d found an apartment under Branko’s name, but had sent a note in the target package saying it made no sense for Branko to use the bar Wi-Fi. Basically telling me it smelled, but that what Dylan Hobbes had said did, in fact, pan out. The apartment was in the same building as the bar.
Made me wonder.
I’d sent in Knuckles and Veep to penetrate the building, looking for cameras and other surveillance, then plant a small Wi-Fi camera on the wall to surveil the apartment. They’d managed to do so without any high drama, and now we were looking at the feed in our hotel using the very same open Wi-Fi network of the bar upstairs.
We had no idea if anyone was in that apartment, but with enough watching, we’d figure it out. This was only Alpha, so sitting and watching was the whole point. No rush. The plan was to see the guy leave, put someone on him for early warning, then crack the apartment and rip through it for evidence of the ransomware attack.
The president of the United States was screaming for results, but that mattered little with me. Slow and steady wins the race.
I said, “Jennifer’s right. That’s a long hallway with a lot of doors, so we need to get in without a lot of dicking around. We can’t be sitting on the ground working the door when someone else comes out. Did you guys take a look at the locks when you put the camera in?”
Knuckles said, “Yeah, we did. It’s old-world crap. If he doesn’t use the bolt lock, it’s a credit card. If he does use the bolt lock, it’s like seven seconds with a pick kit. We can get in.”
I said, “Alrighty then, we have a winner. Knuckles and I will get inside, with Knuckles doing the work. Jennifer, you get surveillance right here, watching the computer. Brett and Veep take the follow, giving us early warning. Any questions?”
Jennifer said, “Yeah, why do I get computer surveillance?”
“Because that’s the way it is.”
“But you’ve got Brett doing the follow. He sticks out like a sore thumb here. I should do the follow.”
“What the hell are you talking about? He’s one of the best I’ve ever seen at that.”
