The Last Spymaster (37 page)

“They’re buying submarines? Tanks? Nuclear missiles?”

Gul Shah shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.” But for several more minutes he added other details.

Ben listened carefully then asked, “Do you have any of their names?” “The man who approached us called himself Faisal al-Hadi. He seemed to be their leader, although he denied it. He didn’t take our refusal well.”

Ben hid his surprise. “I’ll bet he didn’t.” He extended his hand. “Thank you. There’s no time to lose.”

The warlord shook Ben’s hand then nodded to the guard at the door. “Escort Mr. Kuhnert out of camp to his car.”

Gul Shah dropped into his desk chair and picked up a report from his top spy in Kabul. But before he had finished two pages, a noisy scuffle erupted outside, and his door swung open. Noor Yusufzai skidded inside. Noor wore the ash-colored turban of the Wazir tribe. He was one of the oldest enlistees, nearing thirty.

“Says he has to talk to you,” one of the guards who followed explained. He carried Noor’s British Bullpup.

Shah repressed irritation. “Knock next time.” He focused on Noor. “Speak.”

Noor’s face was flushed with outrage. “A few years ago I checked out the trial of the Turk who was accused of smuggling explosives to blast the Brooklyn Bridge. The man who just left was one of the CIA witnesses. I
don’t know who he told you he was, but I know he’s CIA. He must be spying on us!”

Shah felt a chill. “You’re sure he’s CIA?”

“May Allah strike me dead!”

Gul Shah scooped up his AK-47 and ran.

Ben and his escort were halfway out to the road when he heard men racing toward them from camp. Immediately he slashed the rigid edge of his hand into his escort’s windpipe and, when he fell, kicked his solar plexus, knocking the air from his lungs. The man scratched uselessly at his throat and grabbed at his chest.

Scanning the drive and trees, Ben confiscated the guard’s M-16 and a wicked-looking Afghan knife and jumped up as eight guerrillas rounded the bend, their assault rifles at high port, ready to fire. Ben plunged into the forest.

Shots erupted, biting into the dirt and sending puffs of dust mushrooming.

Ben raced past boulders and around a blue spruce and flopped down behind a log. His heart pounded. Sunlight shafted down around him, leaving him in shadows. He raised his head. The men had hesitated over the fallen escort. Some crouched in an effort to get him to talk, to reassure them he was all right, showing how young and inexperienced they were.

Still, it would not be long before their training reasserted itself. He needed to slow them and at the same time lure them. He opened up with a long burst over their heads—but not too far over.

They dropped flat. He fired three more bursts, provoking them to scramble into the timber for cover. As he watched them vanish, he rose. They would expect him to go in the opposite direction, deeper into the woods, to escape. Instead, he checked the angle of the sun and trotted south, paralleling the pitted drive, thinking. Just eight pursuers. That meant Gul Shah had likely ordered the rest on a variety of paths to cut him off.

Soon he heard the eight again, back on their feet and running carefully, some toward him. He loped to the road’s edge, fell onto his belly, and
crawled to where he could check both directions. A brisk wind had risen, whistling along the route. Tree shadows wavered. The road was deserted.

Cradling the M-16, Ben crab-walked across and ran again, looking for duff to muffle his footfalls. In his mind, he pictured his goal—his camouflaged Range Rover—parked not at the entrance to the camp and not before it, but two miles beyond. He had come prepared for escape.

His strides ate up the distance, but his chest heaved, and his years began to weigh heavily on him. Tree leaves brushed his face. Briars tore at his clothes. A low rustling sounded behind him. The volume rose quickly. Men were approaching.

He quickened his pace. But when he finally spotted his Range Rover, covered with branches, a team of armed guerrillas hurtled out from the forest to his left. Praying he had time, he dove inside, fired up the engine, and gunned out of the timber, leaves and branches flying off. As his wheels hit the mountain road’s blacktop, he was already turning east, toward Washington.

At the same time, another team spilled out onto the blacktop. Their heads swiveled as they took in the situation. There was an explosion of noise as bullets rained into the Range Rover’s tail. He floored the gas pedal. His back tires spun, and the car shot forward like a cannonball. They raced after him, firing.

In his rearview mirror, he watched them grow smaller until at last they stopped in the middle of the road. They looked young and confused. Ben shook his head, fearing for them in Afghanistan. Then he put them from his mind and took out his new cell phone. He had calls to make.

Alexandria, Virginia

Frustrated, Elijah Helprin ran his fingers through his brush of wiry hair as he trotted up the spiral staircase in the darkened town house. He had spent hours on the phone and interviewing people before arriving at this pricey place. Upstairs was his best hope for information about the StarDust sub-miniature computers.

Elijah slipped back into the bedroom. It reeked of last night’s booze. Karel Dudek flung an arm out from beneath the covers of the king-size bed and reached across to the other side. His eyes were still closed.

“I told her to leave,” Elijah said. “You can send the escort service the money.”

“What?” Dudek sat up, long hair a sweaty mess, eyes wide not with fright but with outrage. “My wallet’s in the bureau drawer. Take what you want. Get out!”

Elijah nodded to himself. You did not rise to be CEO of a high-tech electronics giant like Nanometrics, Inc., by being fainthearted. “Tell me about this.” He tossed the Bubble Wrapped package of StarDusts onto the bed and held up his CIA identification.

Dudek snatched up the StarDusts and stared at Elijah’s ID. “These are top-secret—DoD cleared, not CIA.
How did you get them?
”

“From a killer’s car. Your contract doesn’t allow you to sell StarDusts to anyone but DoD. So either you’ve been flogging them illegally or you’ve had a robbery. DoD will breathe down your neck with a flamethrower—if I tell them.”

The CEO seemed to disintegrate. He collapsed onto his pillows. “Someone stole them from our headquarters in Santa Barbara. My people are investigating.” He rallied. “We’ll find out who did it. Believe me, it’ll
never
happen again.”

“When were they taken?”

“Yesterday. We didn’t realize it until late afternoon.”

The crime might seem last-minute, but Elijah had no doubt it was planned carefully and long before. He glared. “You were at a big DoD dinner last night, Dudek. Who else has had military product stolen recently?”

“You think we talk about that sort of thing? You’re crazy!” But his bleary eyes narrowed, and he looked away uneasily.

“You and your pals were drinking heavily. All of you were up until dawn. In conditions like those, people let things slip.” Elijah held up his cell phone. “You want my cooperation? Or do you want me to call DoD?”

Dudek stared at the cell. He licked dry lips. “If the fed’s checks weren’t so goddamned big, I’d never bother. Yeah, there was another one. It was . . . strange.”

Elijah leaned against the bed’s foot rail. “I’m listening.”

“It’s camouflage material called Mirror-Me. The deal is, it makes things seem transparent by displaying whatever’s behind, in front. See, nanometric video cameras record the images and send them in real time to nanometric projectors that display them on the cloth. Mike—the head of the company that makes it—had some photos in his billfold. The stuff is creepy. Of course, the Pentagon loves it because of its military potential. Fighter pilots can ‘see’ through the bottom of their planes for safer landings and to dodge attacks. There’s all sorts of ways to use the cloth in urban warfare. The public’s not going to be able to buy Mirror-Me for quite a while—if ever.”

“How much was stolen?”

Dudek looked up uneasily. “Mike said they lost enough product for a hundred thousand cloaks. No way to know what it’ll actually be used for.”

As a wave of disquiet rolled through Elijah, his cell phone rang. He checked the LED—Ben Kuhnert’s number.

“I was never here,” he told Dudek. “Clear?”

Karel Dudek grunted agreement, and Elijah turned on his heel and left.

Once outside, he answered Ben’s call: “Did you get anything?”

Reston, Virginia

Palmer Westwood had spent the morning making phone calls, checking into Global Motors, Inc., the monolithic multinational that made and sold GyroBird drones. When he arrived at the office of the corporation’s regional security chief, he found a cup of steaming coffee and a cheese Danish waiting.

“Hell, Palmer,” Clyde Ypres told him, “I never expected a legend like yourself to call. Your favorite Danish is the least I can do.” He had a horsey face and auburn hair that had lost its vibrant color, but his eyes were still as intelligent as ever.

“It’s good to see you, too,” Palmer said. “It’s been a lot of years. I’d better skip the Danish. Show me around.”

Carrying their mugs, the two men walked out into the world of modern defense manufacturing. As they passed windows showcasing scientists in white coats and goggles working over lab benches, Palmer led the conversation back to a mission that had unmasked Soviets secretly selling fissionable material to Third World countries.

“You’re damn good, Clyde. I always admired the way you cracked that ring.” With that compliment, Palmer changed the direction of the conversation: “I hear Global’s got a hot new military product called GyroBird.” First he encouraged Clyde to describe the drone, and then he got to the point: “How are you handling the thefts?”

Clyde stopped so quickly his coffee mug shook. “There was only one event.” He looked around. A door opened, and the noise of metal being cut whined through. Two men dressed in coveralls and gloves passed by and through another door. “I guess I’m not surprised.” Clyde followed the pair. “There had to be a reason you were here.”

Once they were moving alone along a concrete sidewalk, Palmer lit a cigarette and pressed his point: “I’m doing some contract work for Langley. You know how short-handed they are these days. If you tell me everything, I’ll try to keep you and Global out of it.”

“Yeah, and it’ll be my good deed for the year, too.” There was no bitterness in Clyde’s voice, just tired reality. “A week ago a shipment vanished
off the dock. The next day, one of our warehousemen was killed by a hitand-run driver. Naturally, the dead man turned out to be my prime suspect. My people are still investigating, but I basically have nowhere else to go. Not a single lead. Whoever put him up to it knew what he was doing. I interviewed the widow, but she didn’t have a clue. I don’t know who got the GyroBirds or where they are.” His long face toughened. “If you know, tell me. I’ll take care of them—through legal channels, of course.”

Palmer inhaled his cigarette, studying him. “You checked with security people at other companies?”

“I did.” It was Clyde’s turn to peer thoughtfully at Palmer. “And, yes, a couple had thefts, too. One was called the Sky Sword. It’s a missile, fast as hell—Mach 3 at high altitude; or when it’s flying low to the ground, just sixty feet—Mach 2. At its fastest, it gives targets a maximum theoretical response time of just twenty-five to thirty seconds. That means it’s almost impossible for anyone to employ jamming and countermeasures, let alone fire missiles and quick-firing artillery in return. It’s got a guidance system you need only a laptop computer to control. But the real kicker is it’s shoulder-launched, and it’ll break down so small you can pack it into a music case. Once you slip into a country, you don’t actually need to get any closer than a hundred fifty miles to the target before you fire. That’s its range. And before you ask—their count is five hundred missing.”

Palmer stared. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Terrifying, isn’t it? The second one is a tiny gun. It hangs off your key chain and looks like a car’s remote control but a little bit larger than normal. But if you punch the four buttons in the right sequence, it separates into a handle and a barrel. The darn thing has amazing firepower. It shoots two bullets. At the same time, aviation security machines can’t identify it. You just dump the key chain into the airline’s dish with your watch and pens, and it sails right through. It’s called the Retaliator and was developed for undercover forays into less-than-friendly nations. Two thousand are missing.”

“Two thousand!”

Clyde nodded soberly. “That’d take care of a lot of planes. Scares the shit out of you to think what terrorists could do then.”

“It does indeed.” Palmer thanked him and walked back to his car, mulling. As he climbed behind the wheel, his cell phone rang. He whipped it out.

“What’s your report, Ben?” He could hear the deep growl of a car’s big motor in the background. Ben was somewhere on the road.

“Hold on. I’ve got Elijah on the line, too. I’ll call Frank now.”

Georgetown