Dark Zone (22 page)

“Truck coming,” warned Rockman.

Karr got up and found LaFoote, who was looking through what had been his friend’s office. The office’s walls had been battered; one had crumbled entirely and the other leaned toward the front of the house at a thirty-degree angle.

“Truck coming,” Karr told LaFoote. “Turn off your flashlight.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you. Birds talk to me,” Karr said.

The pair squatted down behind a metal desk, watching as the headlights swept briefly across the front corner of the building and then back onto the road.

“Clear,” Rockman told Karr.

“OK. What are we looking for?” Karr asked the Frenchman. “Papers?”

“Non,”
said LaFoote, opening the bottom drawer of the desk. He glanced in for a moment, then started to close it. Karr stopped him.

“What’s all this?”

“Old soccer clippings,” said LaFoote. “He was a fan.”

Karr riffled through the yellowed papers. That’s what they were.

“How about bank statements? Where’d he keep them?”

LaFoote shook his head—a little too quickly, Karr thought.

“You wouldn’t happen to know his account numbers, would you?” asked Karr.

“Of course not,” said LaFoote.

“We’ve got that already,” said Rockman.

“You know where he banked?”

“There is only one bank in town,” said the Frenchman. “You think you can trace payments?”

“Possibly I could get someone to trace his accounts,” said Karr. “So what, the bank in town?”

“There’s nothing there,” said Rockman.

“He had another account,” said LaFoote.

“Where?”

“I don’t know the name.”

“France?”

LaFoote kept his lips pressed together.

“Ah, come on. You can tell me. We’re partners, right?”

“Austria.”

“Austria’s tough,” said Rockman. “We’re going to need account numbers.”

“So what was the bank?” asked Karr.

“I can’t remember the name. But I have a copy of a statement.”

“Where? Here?”

“Non.”

“Austria, OK, Vefoures took two train trips there four and five months back. Used his credit card,” said Rockman. “Good going, Tommy.”

“Yeah, but you know, I really need to know the name of the bank,” said Karr, talking to LaFoote. “And an account number. I mean, if we’re going to work together, we have to be kind of up-front with each other. You know?”

LaFoote nodded. “I’ll get it for you. It’s not here.”

He opened another drawer of the desk and pulled out a small but solid-looking crowbar. Tommy looked through the drawers himself—there were no financial papers that he could see—then went to find LaFoote. The Frenchman had walked to the room at the front of the house and begun using the crowbar as a pick against the front wall near the corner. As in the other room, the two outside walls were intact, the interior ones badly battered. The wall that separated this room from the front hallway was about two-thirds gone.

Karr laughed as the Frenchman hacked at the wall. “Mad?” he asked.

“
Non
.” LaFoote took a mighty chop at the wall, the edge of the crowbar chipping off a piece of plaster.

“If you hit it too hard it’ll fall on us,” Karr warned.

“The brick is far from the wall,” said LaFoote, swinging again. “It won’t fall.”

“Car—two cars,” said Rockman.

“Hold on, partner, hold on,” said Karr, dousing his flashlight.

LaFoote took another swipe at the wall, breaking through part of the plaster, then ducked down just as the car lights appeared. The cars passed by quickly; the Frenchman started to rise.

“No, no, hold on,” Karr told him. “Wait. Give them time to go where they’re going.”

“They’re stopping, Tommy,” said Rockman. “I think you’d better get out. Coming back,” he added. “Go on. Get out of there.”

“No time,” said Karr. He pulled out his pistol and glanced at LaFoote, who had taken out his own weapon—an old revolver.

“We don’t fire unless we absolutely have to,” Karr told him. “And if we do, I want you to go through that window and run like hell,” Karr added.

“I’m not running away.”

“It’s all right. I’ll be right behind you.”

37

When they reached the airport, Lia got out of the cab and went into the terminal, leaving Dean to deal with the driver.

The young man in the restroom apparently had wanted to rob her, not rape her. If the old lady was to be believed, he was an Algerian, not a local.

“Probably bribe her into keeping her mouth shut,” Chafetz had said. “She’ll be well off for a few months. Assuming he recovers.”

Lia wasn’t in much of a mood to add her own cynical comment. Maybe the old woman thought the slime had only wanted money; Lia knew differently.

Someone grabbed her shoulder. Lia spun, ready to deck him. Only at the last instant did she realize it was Dean.

“Hey, our flight’s this way,” he said.

He had a look in his eyes that she had never seen there before.

Pity?

She began walking in the direction of the airplane gate. Dean hurried to keep up.

“Hold on a second,” he said, grabbing her again.

“What do you want?” she said harshly.

“I wanted to talk to you for a second.”

“What?”

“Get on the plane by yourself. I’m going to go back and get into the office and look around. I couldn’t earlier because someone was there.”

“What?”

There were people around. Dean stopped speaking, waiting until a pair of Moroccans passed.

“I’ll catch a flight in the morning,” said Dean.

“You think it’s a good time to go back?”

“As good as any. There’ll only be one guard, if he’s not busy taking his friend to the hospital.”

“Well, let’s go then.” Lia started back toward the terminal entrance.

“No, you take the plane.”

“Let go of me, Charlie Dean,” she told him as he grabbed her. “I’m not letting you go in there alone.”

They locked stares. The taste of her stomach rose into her mouth, but she pushed her teeth together hard, steeling herself against it.

“All right.” said Dean finally. “Let’s talk to the Art Room about it and get something to eat.”

“No, first we figure out how we’re going to do it, then we tell the Art Room,” she said. “Let’s get a taxi.”

38

Karr watched the two men approach the house. Both had military-style night-vision goggles strapped to their heads. They also wore dark clothes, and the bulk of one of the men in the shadows made Karr think he was wearing a bulletproof vest. One carried a submachine gun, probably an MP-5N; the other had a small backpack but no gun in his hand.

They came into the house through what had been the front door. Karr had a clean, easy shot on the first man in, the one with the gun; most likely he could get the second man as well. But that would leave whoever was in the other car, as well as seriously complicating the situation.

Then again, he might not get such a clean shot again.

Karr held off. The men passed through the house into the back.

“They’re looking over the kitchen,” said Rockman, watching the feed from the Crow. “Checking out the bomb crater. All right. Now they’re going into the office.”

Karr didn’t need the play-by-play; the house was so small that it was obvious where they were.

LaFoote stirred next to him. Karr tapped the old Frenchman on the shoulder and held his hand to his lips.

The Frenchman nodded—then sneezed.

39

Rubens took his eyes off the screen at the front of the Art Room long enough to glance at his watch. The meeting with the judge about the General was due to start in forty minutes; he had to leave in ten minutes or risk being late.

So be it. It was just an informal session, after all. And his lawyer would be there.

When Rubens glanced back at the screen, it was blank.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

“I’m losing some of the communication bandwidth,” said the man flying the Crow from a piloting bunker on the other side of the underground complex. “One of the satellites has a power glitch and we may blow some of the circuits. I had to shut down the feed as a precaution.”

“No!” thundered Rubens. “Visual now, whatever the consequences ! Show us what’s going on with Tommy! Now, damn it.”

Rubens never, ever raised his voice in the Art Room, and if he’d said half a dozen cusswords during his entire NSA career, it was news to the staff. Everyone stopped what they were doing.

“Yes, sir,” said the pilot, and the image snapped back on the screen.

40

Dean took the napkin and sketched the basic layout on it for Lia, diagramming the alley and the charity building.

“You could stand right at this comer here and watch the office,” Dean told her. “You’ll be able to see everything.”

“And be run over by anyone who comes up through the alley in a truck,” Lia told him. She reached into her travel bag for her PDA and pulled up the photos of the area they had been given as part of the earlier briefing. “I can get up on the roof from this fire escape,” she said, pointing. “I’ll have just as good a view.”

“OK,” said Dean. She seemed a little more herself, he thought. “I saw a place at the eastern end of the medina where we can rent bikes. We can stash them so we can use them to get away if we need to. We could use them to get to the airport if we have to.”

“It’ll be closed by now.”

“You can’t pick the locks?”

“That would get us in more trouble here than if we killed someone,” said Lia. “They don’t like thieves.”

“So what do you suggest? Hire a cab?”

She didn’t answer, instead turning the PDA toward him. “How are you going to get into the window? There’s nothing to climb on.”

“It’s only one story up. There are some crates behind the building in that alley there,” he said, pointing at his napkin. “We can bring them over.”

“They’ll hold you?”

“I hope so.”

“I should be the one who climbs in.”

“You can’t have all the fun,” he told her.

Something flashed in her eye—relief? But if so, it turned into a scowl.

“I should go,” she said.

“If the crates won’t hold me, OK. Otherwise, this was my idea; I get to take the shot.”

“All right. Listen, did the Art Room tell you I puked?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, I got sick in the women’s room. I threw up. I think it was the solvent, because it smelled wretched.”

“You all right now?” Dean asked.

“Yeah, I’m OK.”

Dean stared into her face. “You told them back in the Art Room?”

“I didn’t have to. They could hear me. I spilled solvent all over the place. Junk.”

“That’s what did it?”

“I’m
fine,
Charlie Dean. I just wanted you to know. In case they pointed it out. Like I was sick or something.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t.”

41

Karr steadied himself in a crouch as the two men approached. They were talking, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

There was another sound—a cat, mewing.

Something creaked in the room. The cat mewed again.

The man without the gun appeared in the opening. Karr didn’t have a shot on anything but his chest, which was protected by a vest.

The cat screeched. Something fell across the room as it ran off.

The man started laughing and cursed. The two men went back to the office.

“He’s got an Arabic accent,” said the Art Room translator. “He’s saying he would have killed the stupid cat if he’d seen it. The other one said maybe it was the cat that caused the explosion. They were laughing.”

“They’re going under the desk—looks like there’s a strongbox there,” said Rockman.

One of the men used his gun to get it open. They started exclaiming happily; Karr didn’t need the translator to tell him that they had found a whole wad of cash.

“Tommy, we’re having trouble with the Crow and the satellite system that’s controlling it,” said Rubens, cutting in. “We’re going to lose its feed and the ability to control it in a little under two minutes. We can either fly it down the road and have you recover it later or self-destruct it as a diversion. I can see you. If you want me to self-destruct the Crow, move your left hand. Otherwise, move your right. You have ten seconds to decide.”

Karr thought about it. The problem with using it as a diversion was that he couldn’t predict what the men might do. An unexplained explosion might give them more reason to hang around.

“Very well,” said Rubens when Karr moved his right hand. “We’ll have it land in a field and we’ll give you the GPS point.”

“They have the strongbox—they must have wanted the money,” said Rockman. “Looks like that’s all they got from there, money. It’s—ah—feed from the Crow’s gone. Hang tight, Tommy.”

The two men started back toward the front of the house but stopped as the car lights flashed on and off. A truck passed by; as soon as it was gone they left, the car quickly driving off.

“Where’d the cat come from?” Karr asked LaFoote as soon as he was sure they were gone.

“Meow,” said LaFoote. He put his hand to his mouth and this time the mewing seemed to come from the other side of the house. Then he picked up a small piece of debris from the floor and tossed it across the room, timing his screech perfectly so it sounded as if the cat had been startled and run off.

Tommy laughed.

“I learned a few things in my day,” said the Frenchman.

On the third slap at the wall with the little crowbar enough of the plaster gave way so that LaFoote could reach inside and take out the small box Vefoures had hidden there. The box contained three CD-ROMs with information Vefoures had copied from his work computers. Vefoures had hidden them there soon after he had begun work. He’d had a bad premonition of what would happen to him.

Or perhaps a guilty conscience.

“Let me take a look at them,” said the American.

“How do I know I can trust you?” LaFoote asked.