‘I’ll call you back. Give me a number.’
‘I’d prefer to call you again.’
‘Oh, no. Not how I play, August. Give me a number or I vanish.’
August fed him his cell phone number. ‘I can’t get you any funds, or any promises, until I know what evidence you have. Until I see it. Tell me your name.’
‘Now knowing my name would be dangerous for you, and since we’re just getting to know each other, and you’re going to get me my beautiful ten million, I don’t want you getting yourself killed. We’re going to enjoy doing business together, August, you’re going to make your career and I’m going to buy my safety and my future. I’ll meet you in New York in two days.’
‘Where and when exactly in New York?’
‘I’ll let you know.’ The line went dead.
August sat and studied the laptop readout. The call had come from Amsterdam. The city where Sam had wrecked the Novem Soles plot.
Novem Soles. In English, the Nine Suns. The name for the criminal syndicate that had been behind the London bombing that had branded Sam Capra a traitor. Their reach was unknown but they had co-opted at least one high government official in the United States and had attempted to deliver a shattering blow to American society. Their ambitions, Sam had claimed, were limitless.
A criminal organization, not terrorist in its ideology, but one that had tried to destroy a CIA office and wreak political havoc in the United States.
What kind of criminals were these?
He had no answer. The entire Novem Soles cell in Amsterdam had been killed. The only survivor was Lucy Capra, caught in that comatose netherworld between life and death. Lucy knew some of the secrets of the group. But she was beyond helping him.
August replayed his recording of the conversation.
Who was this guy? he wondered. He kept using my name. Like it was a point of pride that he knew it. He said I was a nice guy. Have I met him before? I thought I knew the voice. But now he wasn’t sure.
Sam Capra might be paranoid about how deeply the criminal network’s claws reached into the government, but August Holdwine was not.
He dialed his boss’s number. He had to report the offer. But he knew what the bureaucratic response would be. Why pay off an informant when you could fold him under your wing and keep him shuttered up until he was ready to talk for free?
11
Miami, Florida
Fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds after August Holdwine said the phrase Novem Soles into his phone a text message appeared on another smart phone’s screen. Outside of intra-Company communications, there had been no mention of the phrase in the government’s phone and email monitoring database for weeks, since Sam Capra made his one and only statement for the CIA. The public did not know the phrase.
A large percentage of the world’s communications were vacuumed into the data tanks of the National Security Agency, to be studied and filtered. In the never-ending torrent of words, Novem Soles was a distinct outlier. Novem Soles were two words so unusual, so unmistakable, that the small bit of software hidden on the servers was able to find, within a few hours, any mention of the phrase and identify the sender and the recipient and provide a text transcript of the conversation during which the magic words were uttered. This transcript was sent to one man’s cell phone; he knew then, any time, when anyone in the United States was discussing Novem Soles.
It was, as the Watcher put it to his peers, an eye that never blinks.
The Watcher stepped out from the thrum of a restaurant on South Beach, a place that supposedly provided the best gourmet breakfast in Miami but the Watcher was unimpressed. He knew he could have done a better job in running it and he’d thought of buying it; how nice it would be to run a restaurant and have a simpler job. It was a cloudy, rainy day and in the morning haze of patio he studied the readout: it was the transcript of the entire call from the Langley office to August Holdwine. Someone had information on Novem Soles to sell, someone who had called from an Amsterdam number, and had called the Central Intelligence Agency with an offer.
He felt a jolt of nervous energy ride along his bones.
The Watcher closed the phone. He thought: Sam Capra, now. As soon as he had it rang again. He studied the phone log and answered.
‘ Bonjour,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘We have a problem.’
12
Greenwich Village, New York
Braun didn’t return from Langley to New York until mid-afternoon. The study in the Special Projects office smelled of fine cigars and exquisite coffee. August felt he should decline the coffee; he felt jittery enough. But you did not often say no to a legend, and Ricardo Braun was a legend. So August sat down in a heavy leather armchair, a fragrant Brazilian brew steaming from his cup. He had only been to the study once before; Ricardo Braun was an early retiree from CIA who’d come back into the fold a few weeks earlier when Special Projects needed mature, steady guidance after the disasters of the past few months. He made August feel like an ox; Braun was a spare, sleek man, bald, with a strong runner’s build, in his late fifties, with gray eyes and an air of unfailing confidence. He wore black slacks and a crisp white shirt. He had what appeared to August to be the world’s most elaborate coffee machine and he turned from it now, holding a thick mug of a brew that smelled amazingly rich, a curl of steam snaking from the porcelain.
‘What do you want me to do?’ August asked.
‘Well, write the informant a check, of course,’ Braun said. ‘Am I supposed to do all the thinking?’
August realized it was a joke so he ventured a smile. ‘Above my pay grade. But not yours.’
Ricardo Braun said, ‘We’re not paying this guy ten million dollars. Not someone who isn’t willing to come in. Not someone who wants to hand us off what might be worthless information and vanish before we can confirm it.’ He sipped at his coffee.
‘He can’t vanish, he said he wanted protection from us.’
‘Exactly what I’d say if I planned to vanish.’ Braun arched an eyebrow.
‘He can’t think he can hide from us.’
‘Novem Soles certainly has hidden themselves well. What do we truly know about them? Nothing. Dead ends and nowheres.’ Braun looked at the bourbon in his glass but didn’t taste it.
‘Do I open a case file?’ Special Projects operated by a unique set of rules, free from CIA bureaucracy. But records still had to be maintained, for the branch’s own reference. Special Projects could access and use Company databases, but it was not a twoway street. The branch had its own computer network, its own protocols for accessing information from police and corporate databases; some were illegal. It was this willingness to bend the rules that put Special Projects apart from the regular operations of the CIA.
‘Yes. Do. But we don’t report anything yet to the Company.’ He got up and walked to the reinforced glass in the study. ‘We know this group penetrated the Company once already, more than once, through bribery. Well, not on my watch. I didn’t give up daily rounds of golf and marlin fishing to come back and fail.’ He turned back with a stern stare at August. ‘We are not alerting any other traitors who are looking for a mention of Novem Soles in an email or a report or a conversation. I want this off the books, for now. Find this informant, bring him in, and we’ll see what he’s got.’ Braun paused. ‘Did you get anywhere with Capra?’
‘He spotted our shadows, took out one who got too close, and then bought me a martini at a bar he now owns, over by Bryant Park. Called The Last Minute.’
