me, they started throwing the stuff my way.”
“Let me see it.”
I pulled the Nikon SLR out of my bag and tossed it to him. Jennifer began packing her suitcase, saying, “If we get out of here quick enough, we can catch today’s bus to Siem Reap. This little detour won’t cost us a day at Angkor Wat.”
Knuckles turned the camera over in his hands, then put it to his eye like he was taking a picture. He cocked the film lever and said, “Hey, I think this thing’s loaded.”
“Really?” I went over to him. “Careful. Don’t break it.”
He held it away from my hands. “I’m not going to break it. I’m going to get it out.”
He unfolded the rewind lever and began to crank, with me hovering around like a nervous hen.
Jennifer put her hands on her hips. “Come on, guys, let’s pack. We’ve got plenty of time to mess with that camera on the bus. Bull, can you pack up the laptop?”
“Don’t force it,” I said. “If it won’t crank, let it go.”
“I’m not forcing it. Calm down.” He continued winding until we both heard the lead spin inside the camera. He smiled. “See. It’s done.”
Opening the back, he pulled out a roll of black-and-white Kodak TRI–X film. Exasperated, Jennifer said, “Pack up your stuff. Please. We’re going to miss the bus.”
From behind her, Bull said, “Yeah, pack your stuff. But don’t worry about the bus.”
He was looking at our corporate Web site, pulling up our e-mail through a VPN.
“What’s up?” I said.
“We got a mission.”
Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Jakarta, Indonesia, playing with my smartphone. Jennifer was sitting across from me, looking a little peeved. I guess I didn’t blame her. We had left Cambodia immediately, without going to Angkor Wat, and chances were we wouldn’t be going back.
She said, “I thought we weren’t allowed to do this stuff until we had the business established.”
“Well, ordinarily that’s true, but it’s the risk that counts. This can’t be too much adventure. Probably something simple that Johnny would rather not do for whatever reason.”
All the message on the VPN had said was that Johnny — meaning Johnny’s team — needed some help and had given the location of the coffee shop with a time. Because of our separate covers, Johnny wouldn’t contact us directly but would use a digital dead-drop instead. We’d never even see anyone from his team. Someone would just walk or drive by and launch the message from their smartphone to ours, using an encrypted Bluetooth connection. When it was done, there’d be no history of the transmission that would connect us, unlike a cell phone text message, e-mail, or a call.
Jennifer said, “What if it’s not something simple? Maybe it’s something that could jeopardize our company. Are you going to do it?”
“It depends. I won’t know until I see it. Anyway, you know how I feel about that. The company’s just a means to an end. Not an end unto itself. You start worrying too much about that shit, and you end up paralyzed, never doing anything for fear of burning something.”
A long time ago, I had had a teammate almost die because another government agency refused to help. He survived, but in the after-action review, I found out that we’d been left high and dry because the other agency was afraid of blowing its cover. The method that facilitated the operation had superseded the operation itself. I had decided then and there that I’d never let cover stand in the way of a critical mission. I wouldn’t do anything stupid, but I also wouldn’t let it paralyze me.
She said, “Yeah, I remember what you told me, but we haven’t even started yet, and we might be destroying what took six months to build. That’s something to consider, isn’t it?”
Apparently, she was still wondering if I was a loose cannon like I had been when we first met. Before I could answer, my phone vibrated.
“It’s here.”
Jennifer looked a little startled, then glanced around trying to spot the teammate, which I knew was a losing proposition.
The message was a location for a physical dead-drop. I called Knuckles and relayed the directions.
Jennifer said, “Did it even say ‘should you choose to accept it’ or anything like that?”
I smiled. “Nope. Let’s get Bull and Knuckles their coffee orders and see what this is about.”
By the time we returned to the hotel, Knuckles had serviced the dead-drop, retrieving an encrypted thumb drive. He had it in our computer and was reading the screen.
“Well,” I said, “what’s the mystery?”
“Nothing big. Looks like Johnny’s tracking a guy named Noordin Sungkar. He’s supposed to be a facilitator for Jemaah Islamiyah and runs a travel agency here in Jakarta.”
Jemaah Islamiyah, or JI, as we called them, was an Indonesian terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda. Like every other fanatic associated with AQ, they wanted an Islamic state based on Sharia law and were constantly blowing shit up to accomplish it. They were responsible for the Bali massacre in 2002 that killed more than two hundred innocent tourists.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s that mean to us?”
“Well, they’ve been trying to get a handle on this guy for a while. They’ve been watching his travel agency for over two weeks now. So far, nothing. All they want us to do is go inside and see if we can confirm or deny he even works there. If eyeballing the place is a waste of time, they want to know.”
“I still don’t get why they called us. Just go in there, for Christ’s sake.”
“There’s CCTV cameras all over the building. They’re afraid of pulling a Dubai if they have to hit the guy here in Indo.”
A couple of years ago, someone had whacked a Hamas leader named al-Mabhouh in Dubai. Since he’d freely admitted to the stone-cold killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, the odds-on favorite was the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Whoever it was did it pretty smartly and had successfully exited the country, but the Dubai police unraveled the plot by looking at every CCTV video in the entire city, piecing together who had done what, starting with the dead guy’s hotel. It had turned into a huge diplomatic row when it was discovered that the killers had used falsified passports from European Union countries. Dubai had also spread the killers’ faces, taken from their passports, all over the worldwide news. Johnny was afraid of the same thing happening to them and wanted to avoid any CCTV footage linking anyone on his team to the target. Which made sense to me.
“So all he wants us to do is go in there and confirm or deny his presence?”
“Yep. And I don’t want to do it, for the same reasons as Johnny. I could end up with this target two months from now.”
“I don’t want you to do it either. I want Jennifer to go.”
Jennifer jumped up. “
“You’re not what?” I said.
Knuckles said, “I think that’s a great idea. It’s a travel agency, so you can just do what we were already doing. Find some old shit here in Indo that we can go look at. That should make you happy.”
She looked from Knuckles to me, then at Bull, who nodded his head with a grin.
“Jesus Christ. What a bunch of babies. Let me see the instructions.”
13
Congressman Ellis looked at his watch. He had rushed over to the Cairo convention center to meet his contact while the rest of the delegation got over jet lag at the hotel, but he couldn’t spend a great deal of time here before the delegation began to wonder where he was. He expected a quick meeting, and now didn’t like the answers he was getting.
“What do you mean you can’t do anything?” he said. “This guy has a camera that might have my picture on it with Chinese officers. It could destroy our relationship.”
Han Wanchun gave a little shrug. “What on earth do you want me to do? I’m a simple businessman. I cannot
