“When we get in the apartment. The normal audio equipment should work fine.”
“Does Anna Wade have other houses?”
“At least one in Hollywood Hills and a ranch in Wyoming.”
“Americans… Get all three places covered but focus on Manhattan if that’s her primary home.”
“It will take a lot more people.”
“Then get a lot more people. We’re getting paid for it.”
Twelve
October in Borneo ushers in the rainy season following what is almost always a dry September. But this October, now nearly ended, one would never have guessed it was the start of the monsoons, for it had not yet rained. The creeks were a trickle, water was being rationed, the ground was gray and cracking, people were grumbling, plants were dying, and animals were crowding slimy waterholes.
Samir wished for something more effective than Valium. Before his face tropical fish swam in a large tank. They floated and moved in rhythmic muscular ripples, ordered symphonies in motion. He watched the fish only because he had heard that they were found in waiting rooms where their effect was touted as calming.
Perhaps they were helping. He could not be sure. His mind was like a curtained room, round and full with secret fears, massing just out of his sight. He found that if he didn’t keep his eyes on the fish, they cast furtively about. At times his body shook as if he were cold, and then out of sheer weariness it would stop. Usually at those moments he slept.
He played a strange mental game, forcing himself to remember what he used to be like, trying to pretend to be the man he once was and to make decisions he once would have made. Frequently he asked Fawd what he might have done before, just days ago, and Fawd tried to conjure the right memory of his boss in full command. Fawd had given him a shot of Thorazine and he was waiting, hoping for some results.
Samir remained determined to break into the laboratory, but it was hard to maintain inertia in the face of his anxiety. Just this morning, while shaving and making a giant O with his mouth, Samir had caught himself wondering if he was still Samir Aziz. DuShane Chellis had done something to him, to his mind. Samir knew that Chellis had gone to a great effort to gas him in the lockout chamber. He also knew Chellis was lying about the entire incident, but he had no idea concerning Chellis’s reasons, except that it probably related to the Mossad visit and the new technology Colonel Schenkel had hinted at when he was holding a gun in his face.
He needed to know the truth.
Fawd had spoken on his behalf with Chellis, but the man had only smiled an insolent smile and offered his sympathy for Samir’s “anxiety attacks.” Before leaving for Paris, he had offered to have Samir seen by a distinguished neurologist in France. It would be a cold day in hell before Samir put his life in the hands of DuShane Chellis. He also recommended a masseuse, but Samir would have none of it.
The man was a strange kind of Frenchman. Chellis’s grandparents on his father’s side had emigrated to the United States, but had kept their French ways and their French language. Chellis himself was born an American, educated in American schools, and attended the first two years of a university in the United States, but finished in France. His education in France ultimately turned into citizenship. As far as Samir was concerned, the man thought like an American, lived and spoke like a Frenchman.
Thanks to his hookup with Chellis, Samir had become a force in the arms industry-a man with a lot to lose. His company was a major presence at the Paris Air Show, the Abu Dabai International Defense Exhibition, the Singapore Marine Arms Show, and other lesser shows. In the spacious halls of IDEX 2002, Samir could offer just about anything military, from boots to bombs, ready-to-eat meals, fighter jets, and helicopter gunships. He had a very popular air defense antitank system, and was even trading in medium-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. It was up to the buyer to supply the nuke.
It was Samir’s relationship with Chellis and their mutual projects that had propelled his net worth to more than five hundred million Eurodollars and the Frenchman’s to more than three billion. Their secret joint venture continued to use medical technology, computer software, and hardware in military applications, but the Grace Technologies name was on nothing. The parts made a circuitous journey to a South American medical supply manufacturer, and from there through many distributors (all paid a small portion for keeping their mouths shut) back to Samir, and then on to China and other interested nations and organizations.
Chellis’s association with Devan Gaudet was a new and troubling development for Samir.
Recently, a fellow arms dealer had exchanged a $100-million shipment of surplus Soviet weapons for trunks full of U.S. stocks and bearer bonds. When the bearer bonds disappeared without a trace and the tons of merchandise with them, rumor had it that Gaudet had killed the dealer and several of his men while making it appear the work of Samir Aziz. Most people considered Gaudet a myth; Samir knew better.
It now made sense in retrospect that Chellis might have forged a business relationship with the elusive assassin. Not long ago a French minister who had called for investigations into Grace Technologies died suddenly in an apparent drowning accident. What good fortune for Chellis, Samir had thought at the time.
Samir knew more than most about Gaudet, but it still added up to precious little. He had started out as a thief and a loan shark enforcer, become a hired killer, amassed a fortune, gotten into business, and worked for only a select few. His clients included men with oil money who funded terror. Samir had never seen Gaudet-at least that he knew of-but it was said that the killer favored a beard. Perhaps he would discover something of Gaudet in the lab, but he doubted it. More likely he would discover something about himself-probably something he didn’t want to know.
Fortunately Kuching was an easy place to move men and materials. Samir stopped watching the fish and told Fawd that the drug cocktail was good enough-it was time to perform the break-in.
As he waited for his men to take care of the security guards, he hoped he wouldn’t fall apart. He tried to calm himself by acknowledging the degree to which he’d planned and prepared for this operation. Long before this trip to Kuching, Samir had had his best men study the Grace lab. He had always known there might come a time when he’d have to look in on his partner’s business without Chellis knowing. In general, no laboratory staff members worked between midnight and 6:00 A.M. Only the janitors visited the building, and when they were in, the alarms were off.
Trained security men walked the buildings and grounds, but there was fatal regularity to their attempts at random patrols and they undertook their duties in the somnambulistic fashion of the underpaid. By five minutes after midnight Samir’s men had all four guards trussed and blindfolded and sleeping soundly from a narcotic. They would wake in twelve hours on their front porches, smelling of whiskey and with no memory of anything that had happened to them. Clinical experience had proven that the drug erased the memory, and further that recipients would unconsciously manufacture self-protective and context-appropriate explanations for unexpected happenings. These men would convince themselves, upon awakening on their front porch to the smell of alcohol, that they had finished their jobs and had a drink. Despite his panicked state Samir savored the irony that he had originally gotten this drug from Chellis.
Once his men had carted off the security staff, they merely waited for the janitors to finish the northernmost wing. At 3:00 A.M., Samir and his men moved down the hall methodically. It was just as Samir remembered. Walls bare and off-white, the floor shined, everything clean, nothing fancy, the faint odor of caged primates.
They went straight to the neurology wing in the primate building and there they found no files. Apparently security discipline was being enforced. Samir had to take another tranquilizer and gather himself. He sent his men to do the work while he sat in an office and shook.
His men backtracked to the offices of the scientists nearest neurology. There they went through locked file drawers, Samir hoping that human nature would yield some stray documents. He had told his men that he wanted files on people, not apes, and that any such files should be immediately photographed. He sent another group to administration, and fell asleep because of the heavy doses of medication.
Fawd reported that the large walk-in safe at administration was hard to miss, but it was locked, had a timing device, and his safecracker could not gain entry. To use powerful enough explosives to open the door of the safe would wake the city and destroy the building. Samir was not about to get thrown in a Malaysian jail-especially with his new anxiety problem.
