sliding glass doors from the library. He wore a blue blazer with a collar open to reveal his thick neck. He’d come up from Cannes, and he moved like a man who had someplace to be.
Laska stood from his chair by the infinity pool when the man approached.
“How wonderful to see you again, Paul.”
“Likewise, Fabrice. You are looking healthy and tan.”
“And you are looking like you are working too hard over there in America. I always tell you, ‘Come to the south of France, you will live forever.’”
“May I fix you a Cognac before dinner?”
Laska stepped over to a rolling cart near his table by the pool. As the two men discussed the beautiful villa and the beautiful girlfriend of the actor who owned it, the Czech billionaire poured Cognac into a pair of brandy snifters and passed one to his guest. Fabrice Bertrand-Morel took the snifter, sipped, and nodded in appreciation.
Laska motioned for the Frenchman to take a seat at the table.
“You are always the gentleman, my dear Paul.”
Laska nodded with a smile as he warmed the cup of the snifter with e='3'>his hand.
Then Bertrand-Morel finished the thought: “Which makes me wonder why you allow your bodyguards to search me for a wire. It was a little too intimate.”
The older man shrugged. “Israelis,” he said, as if that somehow explained the frisking that had just taken place inside the house.
Bertrand-Morel let it go. He held his snifter over the open flame of a tea-light candle on the table to warm it. “So, Paul. I enjoy seeing you in person, even if it comes with demands to lift my shirt and to loosen my belt. It has been so very long. But I am wondering, what could possibly be so
“Perhaps the matter can wait until after dinner?”
“Let me hear it now. If it is important enough, then dinner can wait.”
Laska smiled. “Fabrice, I know you as a man who can assist in the most delicate of affairs.”
“I am at your service, as always.”
“I imagine you know of the John Clark matter that is on the news in the United States?” Laska inflected the statement as a question, but he had little doubt that the French investigator knew all about the matter.
“
“It is every bit as grave a scandal as that. I need you, and your operatives, to find Mr. Clark.”
Fabrice Bertrand-Morel’s eyebrows rose slightly and he sipped his drink. “I can see how I could be asked to get involved with the hunt for this man, as my people are all over the world and very well connected. But what I do not understand, at all, is why I am being asked to do this by you. What is your involvement?”
Laska looked out at the bay. “I am a concerned citizen.”
Bertrand-Morel chuckled; his large frame shifted up and down in his chair as he did so. “I’m sorry, Paul. I need to know more than that to agree to this operation.”
Now the Czech-American turned his head to his guest. “All right, Fabrice. I am a concerned citizen who will see that your organization is paid whatever you wish to capture Mr. Clark and return him to the United States.”
“We can do this, although I understand the CIA is working the same mission at present. I worry there is the potential for stepping on one another’s toes.”
“The CIA does not want to catch the man. They will not get in the way of a motivated detective like yourself.”
“Are you doing this to help Edward Kealty?”
The older man nodded as he sipped his Cognac.
“Now I see why President Kealty’s people did not come to me about this.” The Frenchman nodded. “Am I to assume he has information that would be embarrassing to candidate Ryan?”
“The existence of John Clark is embarrassing to candidate Ryan. But without him captured, without the footage on the news of him being dragged into a police station, President Kealty looks impotent and the man remains a compelling mystery. We do not need him as a mystery. We need him as a prisoner. A criminal.”
“‘We,’ Paul?”
“I am speaking as an American and a lover of the rule of law.”
width='1em'>“Yes, of course you are,
“You will give me the figures personally, and I will have my foundation reimburse you. No invoice.”
“
49
The wealth and connections of Gerry Hendley came in handy at times like these. Across four hundred meters of water from the Dubai safe house of Riaz Rehan in Palm Jumeirah sat the five-star Kempinski Hotel & Residences, and here a three-bedroom water bungalow was owned by an English friend of Gerry’s who worked in the oil and gas business. Hendley told the man he needed to borrow his place, and the American financial manager offered an extraordinary sum for the property, paid out on a per-week basis. It would have been too perfect for the home to be empty at that moment. Instead the “friend of Gerry’s” was there with his wife and young daughter. But the oil and gas man was only too happy to pack up his family and move over to the opulent Burj Al Arab, an exquisite “six-star” hotel in the shape of a sail that jutted out into the Persian Gulf.
All on Gerry Hendley’s dime, of course.
The oil and gas man left his home just in time. The Gulfstream G550 landed at Dubai International Airport, cleared customs, and then parked in a great sea of corporate jets billeted at an FBO there on the ramp.
As Ryan, Caruso, and Chavez began unloading their gear from the baggage compartment, Captain Reid and First Officer Hicks stood glassy-eyed on the hot tarmac — not from exhaustion after the long flight but in amazement at what they figured to be something in the neighborhood of five billion dollars’ worth of machinery parked around them.
Luxury jets and high-tech helicopters were lined up tip to tail, and Hicks and Reid both planned to get a closer look at each and every one.
The three operators had plans themselves to get a closer look at one of the craft. A Bell JetRanger owned by the Kempinski was waiting to ferry them and their baggage directly to their residence.
Twenty minutes after deplaning from the Gulfstream, Dom, Ding, and Jack were back in the air, lifting into the glorious morning sunshine. They flew low along Dubai Creek at first, the wide waterway that separated Old Dubai and its congested streets and low sprawling stone structures from the skyscrapers of New Dubai along the coast.
Soon they headed out over the water, flying over the five-kilometer-wide Palm Island itself, developed roads built up over the water in the shape of a tree trunk and fifteen palm fronds, all these surrounded by a crescent- shaped island that served as a breakwater.
On this breakwater sat the Kempinski Hotel & Residences, and here the helicopter landed.
The three Campus operators were led to their property, a luxurious bungalow alongside a placid lagoon. Four hundred yards away, Rehan’s safe house sat on the end of one of the palm fronds. They would be able to see it from here with the Leupold binoculars they brought with them, though they planned on getting a much closer look once night fell.
