The Director: A Novel (28 page)

“Maybe it is U.S. user account information that is a problem for your clients. These names are Social Security numbers, DOBs, which is the date of the birth, and the address and phone number, of course.”

Another glance at the sheet and few more keystrokes, here beginning
jppc
, and he was once again inside an online warehouse of data, with identities priced by the thousands this time.

“Better,” said Dr. Li.

“And now, finally, I will take you to Silk Road, famous online market, where you can see many more services that can be harmful, even drugs, you will see, very dangerous even to be here online.”

This time Bo typed in an http address that began with
silkroad
, which did indeed take them to a marketplace of illicit goods and services that could be acquired online. It required a username and password, and then a PIN number, all of which he executed flawlessly. Obviously, he had been to these places before.

“Acceptable,” said Dr. Li.

Li looked toward Morris, who passed him a note with one word,
mule
, dashed on the paper. Li nodded.

“Is there anything else you would like me to perform?” asked the student.

“No, Mr. Bo. Mr. Birkman and I can see that you are a diligent man. Do you have any questions?”

“Well, let me think . . .” Bo knew that you are always supposed to ask a question in an interview, but he was stumped for a moment. Then a query occurred to him.

“Are you connected to Fudan University in Shanghai?” He looked at Morris, then at Dr. Li. Both were silent for a moment while they considered what lie to tell, for in truth they had no connection whatsoever. The American spoke up.

“We work with some of the best Fudan faculty. Not with the university itself, of course, but with some of their top computer science people.”

“Thank you very much.” Bo seemed relieved at the thought that there would be Chinese academics along for the ride, whatever this vehicle was.

Dr. Li looked again at Morris, who rolled his hand in a gesture that said,
Let’s get on with it
.

“We can offer you work here,” said Dr. Li. “We pay rather well, I think.”

Bo Guafeng could not suppress a quick smile. It was the first unrehearsed gesture of the interview.

Morris handed over another One World contract. He repeated the ritual of the nondisclosure agreement, this time not quite as aggressively as with the Israeli. He wanted to get the details finished so he could hand the Chinese kid off to Dr. Li. He didn’t have to elaborate the legal details. He could tell from the look on the Chinese man’s face that he already knew that Morris “owned” him, had owned him from the moment he walked in the door.

“We are going to need you to do some traveling for us. Do you like to travel, Mr. Bo?”

“Oh, yes,” said the Chinese student. “I like travel.”

“Good. Because we’re going to send you to Switzerland. You have your passport, right, no visa problems, no difficulty getting in and out of Britain?”

“My passport is fine, Mr. Birkman. What do you want me to do in Switzerland?”

Morris shook his head. He was tired. He’d had too much sex and too much anxiety, and now one too many conversations with people who were irrelevant to him, except as tools in his kit.

“Tomorrow,” said Morris. “Dr. Li and I will explain it all to you tomorrow. But tonight we want you to stay here with us at the institute. We have a bedroom upstairs, where some of the other fellows will be staying, too. We can send someone to Girton to get anything you need tonight. How does that sound?”

“I don’t know,” said the Chinese.

Morris’s voice was sharper now. This was not the time to challenge him, not when he needed to crash.

“I’m sorry, I must not have heard you right, Mr. Bo. Did you say, ‘I don’t know’? That’s the wrong answer. The right answer is, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Birkman. Yes, I would be happy to stay here with you and Dr. Li.’”

The Chinese nodded. Morris called for Dr. Li and the guard to get the kid out of the way so he could sleep.

Before he went to bed, Morris opened the Scala manual that Roger had given him. Stuck between several pages in the middle were an index card and a stapled list of information that ran several sheets.

Morris studied the list. It showed the usernames and passwords of the systems administrators of several dozen central banks around the world, along with their routing codes and SWIFT addresses for depositing payments or making withdrawals. It was a carefully chosen list: Some of the banks represented countries that were very rich, and others were from impoverished nations where people lived on several hundred dollars a year. Included with the information for each bank was the account number and administrator password for its treasury account at the Bank for International Settlements. It was information that could only come through an intelligence service, but Morris knew that it wasn’t one associated with the United States.

He put the stapled list in his safe. It was a sublimely useful document, in the way that Ramona Kyle knew it would be.

Morris looked at the index card, which was the other item tucked into the computer book. It listed an address in London and a time and date less than a week hence. Morris told himself that he would stay away from this meeting; he would use this “Roger’s” material, wherever it came from, but he would keep his distance from the man himself.

24

MILTON KEYNES, ENGLAND

Edward Junot traveled to
England by cargo container. It was fitted with a bed, a reclining chair for reading and listening to music on his headphones, a store of food and drink, a chemical toilet and, at Junot’s particular request, a set of free weights. It resembled an isolation cell in a high-security prison, except that the ventilation was worse. Junot had protested that he would rather swim across the North Sea, but his handler in Denver said he had no choice; this was the most secure route back to England, where the boss was waiting for him. His identity had been blown, and the authorities had him on watch lists at the regular air and sea border crossings. If Junot didn’t like his travel arrangements he could complain to Hubert Birkman personally on arrival.

Junot sat in the crate in Rotterdam for two days before it was loaded onto a container vessel bound for Britain. He could hear the noise of the port, day and night: the trucks and trains arriving with their cargoes, the cranes loading them in great stacks onboard the container vessels; the hulking ships steaming out of the water maze of the port. He heard the pelting of rain on the crate and the creak of the metal frame as it rattled in the wind. The intense sounds made it seem like living in an iron lung. He could hear everything but see nothing. For Junot, compact and heavily muscled, the only release was to work the weights, curling the heavy pods toward him with arms taut as metal cable.

On the third day his carton was loaded onto its mother ship. He could feel the pincers of the crane tighten around the steel frame and imagined the metal crate floating through space, a wingless flying box, and being lowered toward its stack on the boat.

The container hit the deck with a hard thump. Junot heard the shouts of the ship’s crew, voices spattering out English, Greek, Tagalog and a half dozen more languages. The crew moved in ordered chaos as the ship cast off its lines and headed out of port, chugging slowly at first, guided by a pilot and nudged along by tugs, and then faster with the ship’s wake breaking at the bow and washing astern in a continuous waterfall. They steamed free of port and into the North Sea, where the roll of the ocean waves settled into a regular rhythm.

The voyage itself took less than twenty-four hours, passing from Rotterdam across the North Sea toward the Humber Estuary. Junot’s handler had told him that his container would be off-loaded in Grimsby, an ancient port at the southern mouth of the Humber. The larger port of Hull farther upstream was too busy; too much cargo and too many watchers. Better to land in the secondary anchorage.

Junot heard the shouts near his container while the vessel was still out in the rolling swell. His crate and a few others were readied for this first stop on the big ship’s voyage. The ship slowed, banking its engines and reversing its propeller and then eased forward toward the quay. From onshore came the shouts of the dockside crew, in the thick knotted dialect of north England. The boat slowed to an idling drift; when the lines were secure, the vessel jerked backward and then forward, before it came still. The giant crablike claws of the dockside crane grabbed Junot’s metal box and cranked it ashore, where it landed with a thud.

Outside, beyond Junot’s view, the afternoon was a cool cerulean blue, the color compacted in the low light of the northern latitude. The vessel that had brought him from Rotterdam was docked just inside the lock that guarded the quay, past an old brick lighthouse ten stories high that had guided the passage up the North Sea for several centuries. Now that Junot knew he was on land, he felt claustrophobic in the box. He had arrived but remained trapped inside his metal container.

The crate sat on the dock many hours more: Inside, Junot gorged on what was left of his larder; he defecated in the chemical toilet whose stink now filled the metal box.

Night had fallen, bringing a sharp drop in temperature when the truck arrived to load Junot’s container for the last leg of his journey. A smaller crane lifted the box; he heard the dockhand joke in his thick Geordie accent that the cargo had so little weight it must be a drug haul. They loaded it onto another pallet, this time the bed of a sixteen-wheeler, and let it sit awhile longer until Junot finally heard the cab door swing shut, and the engine spark, and a few moments later the freight truck was winding its way down the docks, and then picking up speed as it reached the open highway.

Junot made another meal, and opened another beer. He was tired of the music he had brought along, so put aside the earphones and listened to the whistle of the wind and the whirr of the road and felt that peculiar sense of pressure on his body as the airflow bowed the metal box.

The truck rumbled south through the night along the motorway, past the smells and noises of industrial cities whose lights were barely visible through cracks in the metal shell. The truck’s rhythmic sway on its fat tires produced a low hum that lulled Junot to sleep in his reclining chair, making him forget even the rank smell inside his box.

Junot awoke when he heard someone pounding on the heavy lock on his door, and then banging the metal levers that sealed his container. He roused himself, gave his bearded face a slap and pulled up his trousers.

“Is this the Denver cargo?” called out a familiar voice, thin but insistent. There was a pause and then he repeated the phrase: “Is this the Denver cargo, goddamn it?” Junot had forgotten the recognition code.

Junot pounded three times on the metal frame, paused and then banged twice more. He repeated a second time this encrypted drumming; three beats, then two. The man outside swore as he struggled with the steel bars that fastened the crate, and then the metal door swung open wide.

“Jesus! It smells like shit in there,” said James Morris, peering into the dark vault.

“Fuck you,” said Junot, emerging unsteadily from the crate and walking down the metal cargo ramp. “You put me in here, you prick. It’s like being buried alive. Try it yourself next time, Pownzor.”

Junot was rubbing his eyes. His legs were wobbly. He stood in the unloading bay of a warehouse. The driver had vanished. From the angle of the sun, it appeared to be early morning. He hadn’t recognized Morris at first with his wig.

“Where the fuck are we?” asked Junot.

“Milton Keynes,” answered Morris.

“Who’s he?”

“It’s not a person, it’s a place. Milton Keynes is north of London. It’s near Wolverton, if that’s any help. Denver picked it because nobody would care what arrived here.”

“Well, thanks for that.” Junot looked back at the container and shook his head. “Fucking nightmare, this was, for a trip that should take an hour in an airplane. What’s going on? Why are you shipping me around in a box?”

“You are very hot, my friend. Headquarters has put out a detain-on-sight order on you. You’ll have to disappear for a while.”

“What do they know?”

“Don’t worry about it. It will all blow over. Meanwhile, take a shower so I don’t have to smell you anymore. Then we’ll talk.”

Morris led Junot to an old Vauxhall station wagon. They drove a few miles west to a bed-and-breakfast overlooking a well-mown green lawn. Junot disappeared for a scrub in the bath. He lay down on the bed after he had toweled off and was going to take a few minutes’ rest, but he quickly fell asleep and was awakened an hour later by Morris pounding on the door.

“Get up. We need to talk,” said Morris. He was animated, even jocular, in directing a member of his secret staff.

Junot dressed quickly and followed his boss down to the Vauxhall in the parking lot. He had shaved his scalp and face while taking his bath, so his head looked once again like a slick and durable piece of cement. He had put in his ear studs, too.

They drove a few hundred yards down a small road to a pub called the Ostrich. Morris had already made arrangements with the owner and they were shown to a private room. The publican assured Mr. Birkman that nobody would disturb his business luncheon.

“Will you tell me what the fuck is going on?” asked Junot when he was seated at the little table and provided with a pint of pale ale.

“Don’t talk so loud,” said Morris in a low voice. “You’re hot because I’m hot, and people have figured out that you work for me. They can’t find me, so they’re going after you.”

“Which people are we talking about?”

“Headquarters. The London station chief has put you at the top of her personal shit list. She has alerted Five and Scotland Yard and the tooth fairy. That’s why we could not bring you back in business class. Sorry.”

“Susan Amato is a worthless analyst piece of shit,” said Junot. “What’s she doing as a station chief, anyway? Let alone making me travel in a goddamned outhouse?”