16
As she drove to the meeting where she was to talk to Carruth, Lewis considered her new problem. She had started this knowing that there were some risks when dealing with people who wanted the ability to raid U.S. Army bases. Like Aziz, such men would not be above killing anybody they needed to in order to get what they wanted. She had thought to mitigate this risk going in. She had first strained possible buyers for her information through a series of blind e-drops and cutouts strung out around the world. She used a server in North Africa, piggybacked on a military communications satellite in geosynch over the Virgin Islands, and a wireless plexus in Argentina, all of these, and others, feeding their sigs back and forth among themselves before forwarding it to a generic server she kept in a rented apartment in Delaware. The server put things into a file that she could access anonymously and only via a password, and in theory nobody knew it existed save her and the domain-namers. This was a weave complex enough so that nobody was going to thread their way through it to show up on her doorstep. And if they opened the apartment door in Delaware without deactivating it, there was a block of C4 wired to a detonator that was going to reduce the server and anybody standing too close to it to little pieces, so even if they got that far, there wasn’t going to be any
Some of what came her way were half-assed offers, some she was sure were law enforcement agencies from different countries, including, probably, the U.S., and a very few seemed legit.
These latter, she had separated out.
She had a highly discreet investigator working for her, and she sent him the names. Simmons had been a military intelligence op, then a contract agent for the CIA and NSA until he had been caught dealing in the black market in Syria. He apparently knew where too many bodies were to risk any public legal action, so he had been quietly cashiered out of government service and told to keep his mouth shut and a low profile, or risk being nailed using antiterrorist laws.
Being able to dig down and uncover bodies was useful to Lewis.
This was how she had wound up with Aziz, and had he not been greedy, he might have panned out.
With that buyer dead, she had to start over again. So she had gone back to the cutouts, and come up with a couple more potentials.
One of them was supposedly another Middle Easterner, the other, of all things, an Australian. Before she met anybody else, she had to make sure that they weren’t cops, and that they had some references she could run down. So she sent the names to Simmons as she had before. This was the riskiest part of the whole operation, and she was very careful here.
She couldn’t assume that the next potential buyer would be some kind of fundamentalist terrorist who would be impressed by the gun of a dead martyr, so it looked as if Carruth might need to make another run at an Army base. And this time, best he return with something of more substantive value than a fancy handgun.
The clock was ticking. But Simmons hadn’t gotten back to her, and that was worrisome. Could be any number of valid reasons for this—but even if he didn’t have anything useful for her, he was usually quick to pass that along. Whenever she had something for him, she got herself a cheap, one-time phone, sent him the number via an encrypted file, and he would get back to her the same day, or sometimes the next day.
But it had been three days since she’d heard a word from him, and this was bothersome.
The place where she was to meet Carruth was just ahead. A ratty cafe on a street that was torn up for roadwork. You had to park a block away and walk in, and it wasn’t worth the effort. The food was crappy and, of course, the coffee was commercial brew that sat in the pot all day. . . .
She grinned. She and Carruth both were going to lose weight if they kept meeting at such places.
She parked her car and alighted.
“Simmons. Here’s the address,” Lewis said.
“Who is this guy?” Carruth asked.
“He’s a former intelligence op—worked for Army Intel, JMTS, then freelanced for the CIA and NSA—now on his own. He’s the man I’ve had running down potential buyers for our product.”
Carruth nodded. “Okay. And I’m going to see him why?”
“To find out why he’s not answering my e-mail and calls.”
“Maybe he forgot to pay his cable bill.”
“And maybe he turned into a butterfly and flew off to Central America.”
Carruth looked at the address and grinned. “What do you want me to do when I find him?”
“See why he hasn’t gotten back to me on the two names I sent him to check out.”
“Which are?”
“You don’t need to know,” she said.
He laughed. “Remember when you were standing on the walk down in New Orleans and Abdul and his Ugly Brother stepped out of the trees with pistols, ready to shoot you?”
“I recall it, yes.”
“Captain, we are together in this to our eyeballs and I demonstrated my loyalty by punching holes in those bad guys and killing ’em deader than black plastic. I’m not going to run off and start a business of my own here. Aside from which, if I ask this guy Simmons about the names, he might just, you know, blurt them out by accident.”
She considered it for a few seconds. “All right. I take your point. One of the men is an Australian, name of Brian Stuart; the other one is another Middle Easterner, using the name Ali bin Rahman bin Fahad Al-Saud.”
Carruth shook his head. “One of the princes? These guys are big on naming every man related to them, aren’t they? Bin-this and bin-that.”
“I expect the name is phony,” she said. “No more a prince than you are.”
“So I get the dope from Simmons on Brian and binwhosit, and we’re back in business, right?”
“If one of them turns out to have access to the kind of money we’re talking about, we are. But I suspect they won’t be as impressed with that PPK you lifted, so I’m thinking we need to hit another base and come back with something a little more useful.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, I have a couple ideas. We’ll meet again when you get back. Here’s the new place, and the new one-time phone number.” She handed him a yellow sticky-pad sheet with an address and telephone number written on it.
“Another hole-in-the-wall with bad coffee?” he said. He read the note, apparently memorized it, then wadded it up and put it into his pocket.
“Yes. Places with good coffee have customers, and we don’t want the attention.”
“You could always come to my apartment,” he said. “I got Seattle’s Best I can grind up and brew.”
“Yeah, and hell could freeze over, too.”
He laughed.
This guy Simmons had an office on Connecticut Avenue, not far from the old art-deco Uptown Theater. Nice enough area, mostly low-rise commercial, and still part of Cleveland Park. The office was a brick building, the address upstairs over a storefront. Must not be doing too bad.
Carruth looked around for cameras. He didn’t spot any looking right at the place he was going. If Simmons
