Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (42 page)

Ty considered the plan. “So you propose to prod him with one program and do surveillance of him with another?”

“Simultaneously,” Delilah said. “It's simply a matter of superimposing one lens upon another, then determining what we've trapped in the intersection of both sets of data.”

“How much have we learned about the people on the other end of Frost's transactions?” Ty asked.

“Alphabet soup again,” Bingo explained. “By and large their real names never make it online, and even when they do, that's seldom all there is to the story. There's a whole sorry cast of in-betweens out there, from the A-list to the penny-ante. From time to time, we have our suspicions, which are eventually confirmed or contradicted, but whoever they are, they're just one more set of hands through which bad things pass on their way to the really dangerous fellows, most of whose names are household words. Not even Santal would have dealt directly with them. It would have been far too dangerous for both parties. No, Frost's clients will be mere cutouts, über-hedgies, in-and-out types. Only instead of some broad, it's the world they fuck.”

“We haven't talked about one thing,” Ty said.

“The odds,” Nevada shot back.

“You read my mind,” Ty said. “Do we have any idea of the odds of a cybersearch like this actually working?”

“How could we? We're playing on a far frontier,” Jonty said. “And on far frontiers there is never enough history to draw that kind of conclusion.”

“That's what I thought you would say.”

“It's still our best shot,” Bingo said.

“We're long past the point of being able to reconsider that question,” Ty said, “but you know the old military maxim, don't you? ‘No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.' So right now it's up to you and Lady Luck.”

Bingo smiled. “Luck's where you come in,” he said.

Chapter Fifty-one

Philip steeled himself. For
a man of his age, he had been required to make many fateful decisions, yet never before so many in one day. Had he made them with admirable resolve, or had impetuousness gotten the better of him at any stage? It was still too soon to tell, but as the summer afternoon lengthened, he felt not only the thrill of the impending moment but an apprehension he could not identify. Before him in the pilot house of one of the two trawlers that he, with Ian's sanction, had had fitted in Majorca sat a Sony VAIO laptop, its seventeen-inch screen alight and subdivided into graphs, much like the home screen of a Bloomberg machine. Unlike those on a Bloomberg machine, however, the functions expressed on these graphs reflected highly privileged information. These were, in fact, functions Philip had designed himself to express not merely the times and amounts of the myriad wire transfers that were now under way but the orderliness with which they were being completed. Suspicious by nature, he was especially afraid of shenanigans now that his own life and future were on the line and so had conceived an imaginative list of variables that, when put into equations elaborated from the basic
y = f(x)
structure of calculus, would alert him to trouble in time to adjust his plans and resolve it.

So far no such alert had been raised, but forty-seven minutes ago there'd been a thirty-second hiccup when one of the subdivided screens had frozen. Doubtless it had had to do with transmission or reception, he'd told himself. They were at sea, after all. Still, the fear that it might, just possibly, have been more than either of those had begun to torment him.

For the moment the Mediterranean was still, although a front was predicted to bring unsettled weather overnight. Because of this, Philip was tempted to advance his schedule, set sail sooner. The schedule had been carefully worked out, taking into account all imaginable contingencies. The trawlers were seaworthy. To alter such an intricate plan at this stage would risk the introduction of unknown factors. To find himself closer to Arabia than Europe even a moment before the funds were where they should be would be to chance fate and human nature with an abandon only a fool would summon.

So long as the functions reported on the laptop were satisfactory, with money flowing toward him in millions of small, innocent-seeming increments, he decided he would not deviate from his course. The arrangement, of his devising, still struck him as ingenious. A deposit of one-third of the total was his already. A second third would be held by his various banks in various lockboxes, either to be transferred to his accounts when the warheads had crossed over the halfway mark, defined as the north latitude of 35.575242 degrees, or returned to their originators if for any reason the warheads had not done so by a time certain. The final third of his new fortune would be released to his accounts from the same or similar lockboxes at the very instant the warheads had passed inspection and changed hands. An encrypted code to authorize such releases had already been provided to the purchasers.

The ever more brilliant western sky drew his attention, turning his thoughts to the Atlantic and, across it, to Washington. He wondered how the government there would react—indeed,
if
it would. It might be a long time, or no time, before the American security services found out. Even then it would take them longer to trace the weapons back through Europe to the Strait of Kerch, at which point suspicion might begin to settle on him or, more likely, the authorities would ironically seek his help. Confident that he possessed the wit, charm and reputation to placate—and would by then possess the resources to fend off—anyone, Philip was prepared for either eventuality.

Would he miss
Surpass
? In a way, as one mourned the loss of any luxury, he expected he would, but he was not meant to live on the sea or against a canvas of incessant hospitality. His psyche was more private, more selfish and, in its cool insistence upon logic, perhaps even more rational than Ian's. Where would he live? In Switzerland, probably, for Switzerland was the most orderly state in the world. And perhaps he would have an estate somewhere in eastern Germany, where the wild forests only appeared to have been tamed.

His mobile rang. It was a new and, as usual, temporary telephone. He knew that it was Andrej, for Andrej was the only one who had its number. “Yes,” Philip said.

“I don't know if you've heard. Tragically, there was a fire at Mr. Santal's former office,” Andrej said.

“No,” Philip said, his voice aghast. “I hadn't. When?”

“Not very long ago,” Andrej said softly. “I just heard about it from someone who had seen the smoke. My first thought was, what a run of bad luck. My second was that someone really was out to get him.”

“It would certainly appear that way,” Philip said. “I hope no one was hurt.”

“I don't know about any of the staff,” Andrej replied, “but you will be much relieved to know that your friend Miss Cavill and that actor—what's his name?”

“Ty Hunter,” Philip said, struggling to disguise the rising irritation in his voice.

“Yes. In any event, fortunately, they did manage to escape. I don't know what they were doing there, but according to the person I spoke to, theirs was a feat of real derring-do. Apparently they were hanging by ropes from one of those old gun emplacements until they were rescued. I am sure it will be on television.”

“They had probably come to see me,” Philip said. “I'd been trying to help Isabella.”

“I know you are close to her. That's why I thought you'd want to know.”

“I
was
very close to her,” Philip said, with feigned melancholy. “I'm not sure if I am anymore. That's her call. But thank you for telling me. I'm sorry, but much relieved.”

“You are most welcome.”

“And how are you, by the way?” Philip inquired as an afterthought.

“One has a plan and one sticks to it.” Andrej sighed. “That's how I am: on course to die, like everyone else, but hoping for a modicum of fun in the meantime.”

“Oh, yes indeed, concentrate on the fun,” Philip advised, then switched off his phone. This was a complication he had not expected but was nevertheless prepared for. If, eventually, he were to be confronted by Isabella, he would shatter her with a simple narrative. He had not received her call nor contacted her because he himself had been kidnapped by the same Slavs who had attempted to sequester her and Ty. He had no idea for whom they were working, but it was no secret that a man in Ian's position would have enemies, not all of them known to him. As for Ty, Philip would dismiss him and his theories, if there were any, with flattery. What was an actor but a fabulist, weaving imaginary tales? The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the ploy could work. At the end of the day, Isabella was a European. So was Philip. Ty was something else, dazzling but as transient and unstable as a comet. He might have a face and a form ripe for infatuation, the careless investment of young girls' idle dreams, but surely not for commitment.

Philip relished his newly hopeful thoughts, discerning not only danger now but opportunity in the still sea through which the trawler slowly sailed. Only when, from the corner of his eye, he registered unfamiliar motion did he return his full attention to the transaction at hand.

One of the functions displayed on his laptop had frozen. He stared at it as if his gaze might correct a false image, but instead of unfreezing, the function began to reverse itself. Did this mean that money was being taken from him or simply put into escrow until the second and final payments were made? Uncertain, he watched attentively. Again the function froze. Again it reversed itself. In the right angle where the
x
and
y
axes intersected, when he right-clicked on the touch pad, a small green neon wheel cycled rapidly backward, signaling, he feared, the unraveling of his expectations. Then it stopped, jerked forward as if to park, and that square of the screen went momentarily dark. When, with a jolt, it subsequently restored itself, it was back to where it both had and should have been, and Philip breathed a sigh of relief.

It was not to be a long sigh, however, for another screen, displaying yet another function, suddenly began to tremble, showing a rate of transfer at first accelerating far beyond what was prudent, then halting entirely.

For ten minutes that status quo prevailed.

Disciplining his agitation, Philip stood. “I'm going for a breath of fresh air,” he informed the captain, a sullen veteran of North Sea rigs and also one of the Slav mercenaries who had remained with him.

When he returned to the pilot house, he was relieved to discover absolutely no changes on his computer's display, but shortly thereafter, one by one, not in sequence but randomly, all the functions began to misbehave, to shiver, or fast-forward, or rewind at intemperate, unsteady speeds. He lowered the special program, called up Google, which was at once steady as a rock. So was the
Financial Times.
No, Philip concluded, the problem resided in neither his software nor his device. Someone—perhaps one or both of the Al-Dosari twins, or al-Awad, or a rogue banker, or perhaps, God forbid, a government—was toying with his accounts. He had to resign himself to that probability quickly, and he had to act in light of it.

He immediately picked up his mobile and telephoned Andrej. “I think it's time to let the dog out,” he instructed.

“He hasn't been asking to go. Are you certain?”

“Trust me. He's bound to give you problems later if you don't.”

No sooner had Philip disconnected than Andrej pressed in a number that activated a small motor that only partially retracted the lid of a lead box he had the day before managed to place in the hold of an Airbus 330 cargo plane on the tarmac of Gibraltar Airport. He then telephoned the leader of the team of Slavs who had taken up position in the galleries above Ian Santal's office. “Is Mrs. Potyomkin there?” he inquired, according to a preestablished code.

“I'm afraid she's not here at the moment,” answered the gravel-voiced mercenary, “but she is expected.”

“Suppose I call back in a quarter of an hour, then?”

“Please. That should be fine.”

Chapter Fifty-two

“The bastard's got titanium
nerves, I'll give him that,” Jonty Patel said. “We've been pulling his chain for over an hour, and he's still steady as you go. I wouldn't be.”

“Or he isn't and the CVP's missed it,” Ty said.

“I'm not sure what he's seeing,” Delilah said.

“They have to be functions of some sort,” said Nevada Smith. “I'm assuming he doesn't possess our capabilities, because, as far as we know, no one else does. So there's no way he'd be able to penetrate and then deencrypt data from so many different financial institutions. No, what he'd have to do would be to rely on his access to his own accounts, meaning de Novo's and those of whatever other nominees he has, and to be watching not only their balances but—somehow, according to some algorithm—the habits of those who are depositing into them. I say we go for broke. If we can't arouse his suspicions to the point where he'll act on them, let's make him
sure
he's being played.”

“You mean, steal everything?” asked Jonty gleefully. “I agree. That ought to do it.”

“Actually, more now you see it, now you don't,” Nevada said. “We can't keep it, of course. We'd be thieves if we did. Eventually they'd have to prosecute us, and they would, somewhere. And, what's just as important, our cover story wouldn't hold up.”

“Regrettable but true,” replied Jonty. “Where shall we park it?”

“In Bingo's current account,” suggested Delilah.

“Hardly fair,” said Jonty, “when it could do so much more good in mine.”

“The problem is, I doubt that Frost's afraid of either of you,” Delilah ventured. “He
will
be afraid of the people who gave it to him, though.”

“Let's go, then,” Jonty acceded grudgingly.

But before Bingo could reply, Admiral Cotton appeared at the side door of the geeks' office. Stepping forward, he beckoned both Bingo and Ty toward him. “We have a lead,” he said quietly. “One of the radiation sensors at Gib Airport has picked up something from one of the cargo planes.”

“I'm on my way,” Ty said.

“Not yet,” said Giles Cotton. “Let the hazmat crew go in first. In the meantime there are both police and military cordons around the plane and all air traffic's been grounded.”

“Do you want us to hold off?” Bingo queried.

Giles Cotton looked at Ty.

“I don't really see any reason for you to,” Ty said. “Do you, Admiral?”

“No,” the admiral told Bingo. “Keep doing what you're doing.”

When Bingo stepped back into the camera's line of sight, Ty followed Giles Cotton into the corridor. “Was it about to take off?”

“No,” the admiral replied. “Which is surprising, isn't it?”

“Unless Frost was following a hide-in-plain-sight strategy,” Ty said. “Does Oliver know?”

“He does. I spoke with him just before I came to find you. Until we hear back from the hazmat team, he's staying put organizing the task force.”

“How long will it take for us to hear back?”

“I shouldn't think very long. In fact, this may be the word we're waiting for,” Giles Cotton replied, directing Ty's attention to the rapid approach of a young naval aide.

The plane in question had been parked as far from the new civilian terminal as was possible without trespassing on the domain of the Royal Air Force. Surrounding it now were members of that air force's police detail, as well as of the local constabulary, their vehicles arranged like the points of a compass at a safe distance from the aircraft. Only the van bearing the hazmat crew was permitted through the perimeter. It halted forward of the plane's wing assembly. Four men emerged from it, anonymous in camouflage Type 1 Nuclear Biological Chemical suits. The last of these proceeded swiftly to a set of portable stairs that had recently been abandoned by a departing flight, then drove the stairs across fifty meters of restricted tarmac to the forward cabin door of the Airbus. When it was in place, the others followed him up it. He had just withdrawn the door's recessed handle and begun to turn it counterclockwise when a sharp backfire resounded in the distance. The men on the lower steps turned at once, unsure what it was or where it had come from. A second backfire followed, then a third, a fourth and a fifth. The first round from the Heckler & Koch PSG1 struck the hazmat worker at the door in the right shoulder. He stumbled against the stair rail before crumpling onto the top landing. The third entered the man one step from the bottom on the ladder at the base of his neck as they fled for cover. Within a minute he was dead.

“What in God's name is going on?” Admiral Cotton raged when informed of the sniper's shots by his lieutenant. “Do they have any idea where the gunfire originated?”

“It's too soon for forensics,” the lieutenant said.

“I know, I know.”

The wail of sirens rose outside, piercing even NATO's mountain fortress.

“I expect this answers our question,” Admiral Cotton declared. “Someone had better get hold of Molyneux.”

“Of course,” Ty said, “but I'm not so sure it answers anything. Why would you store warheads, if you had them, on a high-security tarmac where access would be difficult at the best of times and where, if you aroused the least curiosity coming and going, you'd be outnumbered by a whole garrison?”

“Because it's the only airfield in the area. Because air is how you brought them in, and air's how you mean to take them out. It's hardly long-term storage we're talking about.”

“That could be,” Ty said. “I'm just not convinced.”

“Let me ask you this,” Giles Cotton said. “Presuming you had imported them by air, why would you take the risk of transferring them first to ground, then to sea transport?”

Ty paused. “I wouldn't.”

“Is the sniper still firing?” Cotton asked his aide, who detached his mobile from his belt and repeated the question into it.

“No,” the lieutenant replied finally, “and the airport's locked down.”

“As it damn well should be!” exclaimed the admiral. “How many shots were fired in total? Does anyone know?”

“Yes, five,” the lieutenant answered.

“So far,” said Giles Cotton.

“Why would he stop at five?” Ty wondered aloud.

“You're asking me?”

“If he meant to head off a search, even temporarily, he—or they—would need to fire many more rounds than that.”

“Temporarily is the best they could achieve,” Admiral Cotton mulled, his expression signaling a sudden appreciation of Ty's perspective. “You'd need an army to take the airfield.”

“That's correct, sir. And some help from a navy and an air force, too.”

“You think it's a diversion.”

“It's possible. What isn't possible is for a plane without a pilot to get off the ground. So we've got some time.”

“Unless there are more shots,” the admiral said. “It's difficult to imagine where the bastard's hidden himself.”

“Not that difficult,” Ty said. “You've been to Ian Santal's office.”

“Indeed I have.”

“I was there earlier today, as you know.” Ty smiled. “I looked out the window behind his desk smack at the airport. There are galleries all through that mountain, many of them left over from the Great Siege, I'm told. I realize they're closed to the public, but you and I both know that that's only in theory. From Ian's office, and no doubt from other points of entry as well, a sniper could make his way up or down the Rock to just the vantage point he required. He wouldn't be seen. He couldn't be hit. It wouldn't matter how far his shell casings flew. And he could almost certainly get away before attention turned to those galleries and that emplacement. He'd have multiple routes of escape,
if
he didn't linger.”

Giles Cotton nodded. “All too true,” he said, “but if the objective is merely diversion, what about those positive readings from the radiation sensors?”

Ty shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “We'll find out eventually, but not until they secure the whole site, throw a tent over it and send in an armored crew, which could take . . . what? At least an hour, probably a hell of a lot longer.”

“I'm sorry to interrupt, Admiral,” Isabella said, coming into the corridor from Bingo's office. “Bingo's looking for Ty. He says it's urgent.”

“I'll come with you,” Giles Cotton said.

“Here's news you can use in a nutshell,” Bingo said. “Bingo Chen wins the Nobel Prize.”

“There is no Nobel Prize for computer science,” Nevada Smith interjected.

“Or even for mathematics,” added Delilah Mirador.

“And it's not
really
physics,” commiserated Jonty Patel.

“Peace, then,” Bingo said. “They can give me the Nobel Peace Prize. Watch this! On the lower central screen, which is formatted to 1080p, is a real-time satellite picture of the seas around Gibraltar, extending six miles out from the coast of Spain as far north as Málaga, as far west as Tarifa and the straits and including the Bay of Algeciras. Over it I have dropped the soon-to-be-prizewinning, fortune-making CVP filter. One feature of the CVP is its ability to display timelines. The one you're looking at records the stimuli we've put out there since we began this operation. Remember, the image beneath the timeline will in all cases correspond to that timeline. Let me put it into motion.”

Ty studied the scene, which reminded him of the focus groups that studios sometimes did after sneak previews of their movies.

“Heavy traffic at sea,” Bingo continued, “and why not, on a beautiful day at the peak of summer? So here's the way our little corner of the Med looked when we set off on our adventure. We teased. No change. Correction, one boat did suddenly change course, but on inspection it was below our minimum capacity constraint and had turned around because it was running out of petrol.”

“You followed it?” Isabella asked.

“The satellite is naturally nosy,” Bingo said. “Moving forward, we raised our tease to a tickle. In the aftermath of that, we waited and kept waiting for a reaction, but once again none came. Obviously we hadn't catalyzed any second thoughts. Next we advanced to titillation. At this we were both more clever and insistent, but not sufficiently. In hindsight I suppose we should have done more. Remember that old question ‘How do you titillate an ocelot?' Answer: ‘Oscillate its tit a lot.'”

Isabella rolled her eyes. “You're too much, Bingo,” she said.

“One hour ago here we are. But as of fifty minutes ago, we were still stuck with the same result. Either Frost wasn't paying attention, which I don't believe is possible under the circumstances, or the man has the most stifled emotions on the planet.”

“You guessed it,” Ty said.

“Look carefully at what you are about to see. It's just minutes old. We sent a signal we were pretty sure would wake him up, as you know. The signal goes out. Now his money's gone, except for what he's skimmed and taken offline. All the funds de Novo's been accumulating have been wiped. He can't be sure what's happened. Sometimes, when you play with rogues, the rogues get the better of you. Has one or have the lot of them taken it back? Or has someone else? In either case or any other that comes to his mind, how? He's got to wonder. Fixed as he is to his plan, he can't go forward until he gets to the bottom of what's happened and why. As you can see, the Med's a bathtub full of toys, many of them tracing circles or ellipses anyway as they cruise or troll for fish or pull water-skiers. That makes things more difficult for the CVP, but, alas, not impossible.”

“Cut to the chase, will you, Bingo?” Ty asked.

“That's just where I was heading,” Bingo said. “Five minutes after that signal, out of literally thousands of vessels in our field, only fifty-four make discernible changes to their patterns of speed and direction. Of these, fifty-two can be eliminated because they would not have the capacity to carry cargo the size of warheads. The two we are left with are both trawlers. You can see them toward the right edge of the screen, lit in lovely phosphorescent green. Pinning them and then rewinding the satellite feeds, we can trace them back to where they came from, which of course was Majorca, the day before yesterday.”

“Where are they now?” Ty asked.

“Less than a third of the way from Gibraltar to Ceuta, but they're standing still or drifting back rather than going forward.”

Ty smiled. He had to admire not only the ingenuity but also the deviousness of Bingo's program. That deviousness more closely resembled Ian's or Philip's nature than Ty's. Only the end served, not a habit of mind, separated Bingo Chen from them. Ty was savoring the irony of this fact when his BlackBerry vibrated. He looked down at the bright letters on its dark screen then, to the surprise of the others, immediately took the call.

“Hello,” he said

“Mr. Ty Hunter?”

“This is he.”

“White House operator, please hold for the President.”

“Apparently I didn't know or you didn't understand what I'd signed off on!” barked Garland White.

“I'm sorry, sir.”

“There is a rumor out there, fast gaining currency, that the systems technology that underlies our international banking system has been penetrated and corrupted.”

“Really?” Ty said in a theatrically deadpan voice. “I hadn't heard that. I've had other things on my mind in the last few hours.”

“Well, the Secretary of the Treasury hasn't, and neither have his counterparts in other capitals. They are not yet certain of what's going on, but at first glance it appears that while invading a small Swiss bank, technothieves instructed not only that bank's computer but the computers of
all
Swiss banks to forward all funds on deposit to a checking account in Mumbai. I kid you not!”