‘I can’t.’
‘I can’t have you hovering over me.’
‘How are you going to find him?’
She patted the laptop, raised the cell phone. ‘It’s what I do, bullet.’ She tried a smile but it was an awful, desperate thing and she knew it. ‘Sorry. Just trying to stay sane.’
‘Jin Ming vanished from Holland, no trace.’
‘There is always a trace,’ she said. ‘Always.’
19
New York City
Jack had a window seat on the flight from Brussels; no way he was going to fly from Amsterdam – Novem Soles would be watching, he thought, the train stations and the airports. Ricki drove him to Brussels and left him at the airport. He went into a bathroom stall and shut the door. Then he oiled and combed down his hair to look like his new passport picture. He stuck a thin, bulbous piece of plastic in each cheek, to subtly change the shape of his face. He put in the false teeth; they slid over his own teeth. This meant he could not eat during the flight but he didn’t care. He put on a pair of slightly tinted glasses. They were not to change his eye color but Ricki said that every bit that made him look less like himself, or hid him, helped. She’d almost cried as she slipped the glasses on his face.
He exited the stall and gave himself a short, quick glance in the mirror. He couldn’t stand and preen or adjust the implants. He still looked like Jack Ming but not exactly, and with any of the biometric scans at customs in the United States, if he was on a watch list, perhaps this would give him a cushion. He wore a white shirt and jeans and sneakers and looked anonymous.
He had no trouble in the Brussels airport. He tried not to watch everyone, for fear of looking paranoid, but he kept scanning faces, looking for another face looking back at him. He took his seat. An older lady sat next to him, immediately produced a thick novel with a swordsman and a dragon on the cover and opened it at the first page, almost defying him to try and make conversation with her. He sighed in relief. He cocooned himself with his iPod and wrapped himself in Beatles music. He closed his eyes then woke up with a start, one of the cheek implants almost half out of his mouth. I could have swallowed this. Not awesome if he choked on his own disguise in the middle of a transatlantic flight. He tongued the implant back into place and glanced at his traveling companion. She was lost in her own world, paying him no heed.
New York, shrouded in cloud, opened up beneath him and he stared down. Home. Never thought he’d see it again. Never thought he’d come back. But what choice did he have?
He walked through customs, the new burgundy passport identifying him as Philippe Lin, a Belgian national, remembered to breathe while the customs agent inspected it, scanned it, asked him his business in the country. He was here to visit family. She asked for the address where he would be staying; he gave her one provided by Ricki’s friend. She asked if he was traveling anywhere else other than New York. He said he was only visiting New York because no other city could compare. She looked hard at him, as though his affable tone were an affront to the seriousness of the moment. He thought: what the hell are you doing, trying to make a joke? His stomach twisted, dropped. She was a big-built, older lady who did not seem at all bored by her work. She glanced at her computer screen, glanced at him. He willed himself toward calm.
In Amsterdam, Ricki sat with her hands on the keyboard. She had pierced the main database for Belgian passport information, kept in the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs department in Brussels. The database was accessed if there was a question about any Belgian passport from a friendly nation. The imprinted number could be scanned via a watermark or entered into the host country’s passport inquiry database. The confirmation was sent, a returning ping of approval coming back to the country’s host system.
She had made a few phone calls past midnight, and found a hacker in Antwerp who was willing to help her.
‘All I need,’ she said, ‘is for you to trick the system into approving every Belgian passport in a time window.’
‘I can do thirty minutes. I don’t want to leave an open feed into the system longer than that, and I don’t want to leave code behind,’ the hacker said.
‘Thirty minutes.’ And if it took Jin Ming longer than thirty minutes to get through customs…
‘Now,’ she said into the phone.
The hacker pressed the button.
According to the airline’s website, the flight from Brussels had landed. Don’t be in the back of the line, she thought.
Ricki heard a knock on her door. She stood up. Then she leaned down, typed a code into the program. The system logged out, encrypting itself to await further instructions.
Ricki put her eye up to the keyhole to see who was there, and the door smashed inward.
The customs agent glanced back toward her terminal screen.
Oh dear God, Jack thought. I’m sunk. The irony that he was an American trying to get into America under a false name and flag hit him hard. My face. How much is my face like what might be in their database? What if Ricki’s scheme hadn’t worked? And if he was arrested, what deal could he cut? I’m here to give the CIA proof that they need to bust a crime ring. Yes, you’re welcome, let me go now.
Then the customs agent stamped the passport, slid it back to him. ‘Thank you, Mr Lin, enjoy your visit in the United States.’
He nodded and he walked on, the agent’s eyes already turning toward the next arrival in line.
He kept the implants in place. The customs agents searched his bag and waved him through. He kept his head down as much as he could, navigating through the rest of the terminal, sure that he was being photographed on security cameras, just as everyone else had been. Novem Soles had already shown that they could pluck data from police and government, and he knew from the printouts in the notebook that they owned people inside several governments; maybe they were looking for him even here. He took the AirTrain to the Howard Street station and boarded the subway to take him into Manhattan. No one glanced at him, no one paid him any attention. As the subway chugged toward Manhattan, he ducked his head down and spat the teeth and the implants into his palm. Then he slid them into his bag.
He needed to be Jack Ming again, just for ten minutes. Just long enough to say goodbye.
Thank you, Ricki, he thought. You got me here, you’re the best.
20
Amsterdam
‘You know, a friend is a good thing to have.’ The Watcher sat down across from Ricki; she perched on the edge of the couch, shivering. He had forced his way in, the gun steady on her.
‘You don’t need to be afraid.’ He smiled. ‘All I want is information and then I’ll leave.’ And to prove it he put the gun down. ‘We have a mutual friend. Pierre in Brussels, who just rushed creating documentation for a friend of yours. A Chinese boy.’
She said nothing.
‘Pierre found out that we were looking for your friend after he overnighted you the false IDs.’
‘Pierre doesn’t work for you.’
‘He doesn’t have to work for me. He’s just afraid of me.’ As soon as the Watcher had received the tip that someone using an Amsterdam exchange dial-up had contacted the CIA with crucial information on Novem Soles, he had known it must be the Chinese boy, the one their hireling had failed to kill. He was the only remaining loose end from the spring offensive. And now he was a real danger.
‘I don’t know anything about Ming’s business.’
