“Clear.”
“Clear.”
The rest of the apartment consisted of a bathroom and a second bedroom, both off the short hall. Both rooms were empty, as were the closets. They found Bari’s second bodyguard in the bathtub, fully clothed, with a neat hole in the back of his head. They returned to the front room, which they realized was in fact a living room/kitchenette. Bari lay where they’d left him, face-first on the table, arms spread.
“Christ,” Brian said. “What the fuck…”
In the short five minutes in which Bari’s visitors had worked on him, they’d managed to cut two fingers off his left hand.
“Somebody green-lit this guy,” Dominic said.
“Yeah. The question is why?”
66
WHATEVER HIS EFFECTIVENESS as a bureaucrat, one thing about Agong Nayoan became quickly apparent to Clark, Jack, and Chavez: As an intelligence operative, either the man was untrained in the ways of fieldcraft or he’d chosen to ignore the rules, and nowhere was this more acutely obvious than his choice of online passwords, which Gavin Biery cracked within hours of Clark and company leaving Nayoan’s home. The Web browser on Nayoan’s laptop had the normal array of bookmarks-from shopping sites to reference sites and everything in between-but he also maintained several online e-mail accounts, one at Google, one at Yahoo!, and one at Hotmail. Each mailbox contained dozens of messages, mostly from friends and family, it seemed, but also junk mail and spam, these heavily laden with banner images that Biery would be scanning for traces of stego.
Nayoan was also an avid user of Google Maps, which Jack found heavily annotated with digital pushpins. Most of these turned out to be restaurants, cafes, or similar San Francisco hot spots within walking distance of both the embassy and his home. One pushpin, however, caught Jack’s attention, a private home in San Rafael, about fifteen miles north of the city across the Golden Gate Bridge.
“What’s the pushpin called?” Clark asked.
“Sinaga,” Jack replied.
“Sounds like a last name.”
“Checking,” Jack said, before Clark could make the suggestion. He had Biery on the phone a minute later. “Need you to scan Nayoan’s accounts for a name: Sinaga.”
Biery was back ten minutes later. “Kersan Sinaga. Nayoan has written him seven checks in the last two years, ranging from five hundred to a couple thousand bucks. One of the check abstracts I pulled up at his bank’s website has a notation: ‘computer consultation.’ Here’s the interesting part, though: I ran his name through Immigration; they’ve got him flagged. He was supposed to show up for a hearing eight months ago and never showed. He’s also flagged on the watch list.”
“Double whammy,” Chavez said. “Skipping an ICE hearing doesn’t get you a place on the list all by itself.”
“No chance,” Clark agreed. “What else?”
“He’s wanted by the Indonesian POLRI,” Biery replied, referring to the Polisi Negara Republik Indonesia. The Indonesian national police. “Seems your Kersan Sinaga is a top-notch forger. They’ve been looking for him for four years.”
The drive north out of the city took thirty minutes. According to Jack’s own Google map, Sinaga lived on the eastern outskirts of San Rafael, in a sparsely populated mobile-home park. They drove through once, then circled back and parked a hundred yards north of Sinaga’s trailer, a double-wide surrounded by a rusted waist-high hurricane fence and hedges.
“Ding, there’s a legal pad in my briefcase back there,” Clark said over his shoulder. “Grab it for me, will you?”
Chavez handed it over. “Whatcha thinking?”
“A little neighborhood survey. Be back in ten minutes.”
Clark climbed out, and Jack and Chavez watched him walk down the lane to the nearest trailer, where he mounted the steps and knocked on the door. A woman appeared a few seconds later, and Clark chatted with her for thirty seconds before moving on to the next house, where he repeated the process until he reached Sinaga’s trailer. When he reappeared, he walked to three more trailers before walking back to the car and climbing in. He handed the legal pad to Jack. It was covered in names, addresses, and signatures.
“Care to clue us in?” Jack said.
“I told him I was trying to open a restaurant down the road and I needed five hundred signatures from nearby residents to apply for a liquor license. Sinaga’s not home. According to his neighbor, he works part-time at the Best Buy off one-oh-one. He gets off at two.”
Chavez checked his watch. “An hour. Not enough time.”
“We’ll wait for dark,” Clark said.
“And then?” Jack asked.
“We’re going to kidnap the sonofabitch.”
Clark’s reasoning was sound. Nayoan rarely contacted Sinaga, and even then only by e- mail, so the man’s disappearance wasn’t likely to raise an alarm. Better still, if they worked the scam correctly, they might be able to parlay their electronic association into an information dump from Nayoan. Worst case, they would have a warm body who had, more than likely, forged documents for the URC, perhaps both here and overseas. Whether Gerry Hendley would like the idea of The Campus having custody of a URC stringer none of them knew.
“Easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” Clark observed.
They drove to the Best Buy and waited for Sinaga to emerge, then followed him to a nearby grocery store, then home. They waited thirty minutes, then Clark reprised his bar-owner role, this time taking the houses on the opposite side of the street before crossing over to Sinaga’s trailer. He was back five minutes later.
“He’s alone. Playing Xbox and drinking beer. I didn’t see any feminine touches, so it’s a good bet he’s a bachelor,” Clark reported. “He’s got a dog, though, an old cocker spaniel. Didn’t bark until I knocked on the door.”
They killed time until nightfall, then drove back to the trailer park and circled the block once. Sinaga’s car, a five-year-old Honda Civic, was parked under the carport awning, and lights showed in the trailer’s windows. A bare bulb cast the porch in white light. Clark doused the Taurus’s headlights and killed the engine, then scanned the legal pad.
“His neighbor-the one that knew he was at work-is a guy named Hector. Looks a bit like you, Ding.”
“Let me guess: I’m borrowing a cup of sugar.”
“Yep. There’s no screen door, so he’ll have to open the door. When he does, you bulldoze him and I’ll grab the dog and put it in the bathroom. Jack, you go through the side gate and cover the back windows. Not much of a chance he’ll have time to get to them, but better safe than sorry.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t skulk around. Walk like you’ve got purpose. The neighbors were pretty friendly, so if somebody sees you, just wave or say hi like you belong. Let’s do it.”
They got out and started down the street, chatting quietly and occasionally chuckling, a trio of residents walking back from somewhere. When they drew even with the trailer, Clark and Chavez turned toward it. Jack stepped into the shadows beside the gate and watched as Clark pressed himself against the wall beside the door and Chavez mounted the steps. Clark turned and nodded to Jack, who gently pushed open the gate and stepped
