The History Thief: Ten Days Lost (The Sterling Novels) (38 page)

He was old, but his eyes fortunately had not met the typical ocular degeneration of a man his age.

He was startled by what he had seen and jumped instinctively to his feet—a movement that wasn’t fast enough, given his age and bad hips. He shouted out and pointed.

“Thief! Thief! Help him, someone, help him!”

A few men jumped up and ran in the direction that the old man pointed. Out the back door, one of them stumbled over Michael’s victim and fell roughly to his face.

Michael was already gone.

Inside, the old man had shuffled toward the commotion and saw that the restroom door was open. Looking in, he saw the young man who was now waking. The boy looked around and was groggy.

The old man was confused.

Another man wasn’t.

Outside, still on the ground but waking also, Charney sat up to a growing crowd of onlookers and the curious.

A dull throb echoed from his left temple. He reached up to his nose and felt the blood. When he touched it, he cringed. Blood covered his fingers; one of the baristas handed over a towel.

Taking it, he wiped his bloodied fingers and then his nose.

He started to chuckle, to the confusion of the crowd, and then said out loud, “That man is damn good!”

The crowd became even larger and more confused.

Charney stood, dropped the towel to the ground, and casually walked away.

He wasn’t worried about Michael and York getting away. Quite to the contrary—sometimes success requires sacrifice. His sacrifice was the bloodied nose and headache. The success, however, was the small tracking device that he had placed in Michael’s pocket during their brief interaction.

Charney distanced himself from the coffee shop and took out his smart-phone. Tapping the screen, he entered a few simple commands. The screen now displayed a map, upon which was a small blue dot.

“Hello, Dr. Sterling,” said Charney, “let’s just see where you are headed, shall we?”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

DEAD FISH & TRACKING
CHIPS BELÉM TOWER
LISBON, PORTUGAL

M
ichael quickly walked around the corner and immediately saw the cab. An old white Mercedes 190E, replete with rusted wheel wells, one door of a differing color, and multiple dings and dents. A mixture of black and gray exhaust seeped from the tailpipe.

York opened the door from the inside and slid over in the back seat to make room for Michael. The cab was musty and stank of stale cigarettes and years of unclean, sweaty Portuguese men. The Plexiglas divider was etched with the tags of too many names and expletives to count. Time had aged the protective divider, making it less than opaque, if not cloudy.

“Drive,” commanded Michael.

“Where to?” replied the driver.

“Belém Tower,” answered Michael. The early sixteenth-century Manueline structure was to Lisbon what the Eiffel Tower was to Paris. It was the only tourist attraction that Michael could remember in the city—the only one that could offer a moment of help.

It was also in the open.

Michael looked at York, who stared back quizzically, and shrugged. “Just buying us some time.” He flipped the laptop over on his lap and opened it. Since it was already on, there was no password request, to his relief.

In the coffee shop, Michael had noticed that a small antenna with a blinking blue light was plugged into one of the laptop’s USB ports. It was for cellular Internet.

York watched as Michael pulled up an Internet page. Within moments the recognizable logo of the Central Intelligence Agency flashed across the screen. Michael logged into the secured system, using his personal username and password.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked a confused York.

His question was ignored.

“Doc, they’ll know you are logged in! They will ping the IP and find us within minutes!”

Michael lowered his voice so the driver couldn’t hear and said, “That’s the point, kid. Do you still have that flash drive?”

York dug into his front pocket and pulled out the memory stick. He handed it to Michael. He wasn’t sure what the endgame was, but he didn’t like it.

Sticking the flash drive into one of the ports, Michael murmured, “Now let’s see what this is all about.”

Michael opened up numerous files and scanned them feverishly.

York watched from his left side, trying to digest everything as fast as Michael was.

Without removing his eyes from the screen, Michael said out of the corner of his mouth, “Tell me about Afghanistan.”

York was more concerned about their current situation. “You’ve got to shut that thing down; they’re going to find us! Crap, they probably have a bunch of your agents on their way to us right now!”

Michael’s eyes morphed into fire; he shot a heated glare at the young soldier. “I will not ask the same question twice. You are about two seconds from being thrown out of this cab, and I don’t mean when it has come to a stop. And they are officers—they are called officers. What are we in, a bad spy movie!? Why does everyone always get that wrong? Now, tell me about Afghanistan.”

York felt his skin go hot. He clenched his teeth and his nostrils flared, but he backed down. He knew that he had to trust Michael. Through teeth still clenched, he outlined the events that had occurred in Afghanistan:

“My team was southwest of Jalalabad; at the foot of the White Mountains. Our objective was an al-Qaeda cell, to capture its leader if possible, and to secure any intelligence. It was a hard and long climb to its entrance; the location was unmapped, and I had to use satellite imagery of the locale’s rock just to keep us on the right path. When we got to the top of the climb, the cave was empty. They had bugged out but returned when we were inside. The team was pinned down, and the firefight was fierce; we lost a few men during the fight. We called in for heavies. They arrived and finished the fight. But the extraction team—”York paused. His teammates had been more than just coworkers: they were friends; they were family.

Michael sensed York’s emotions but didn’t match them. This was not the time for empathy. His words came out cold, stopping just short of callous. “Kid, this won’t be the last time you lose someone on your team; it doesn’t get easier, but it is a risk that we all face. It’s our business, and we have to accept it. Our lives do not consist of sitting in cubicles, lamenting how fat our asses are getting or gossiping about that guy in accounting banging that chick in marketing. We don’t punch time clocks or play office politics, and we certainly don’t fight rush hour traffic. Death is a part of our lives. Focus on the mission: it will help. Mourn your men when we make it out of this.” Michael may have said what he needed to say to York, but he was having a hard time believing his own advice. Sonia was out there—somewhere. She was scared, and he was petrified.

If
we make it out of this,
thought York. Instead, he only nodded at the diatribe and started to understand why Michael had needed that drink. Promising himself that he wouldn’t end up like that—that he would be different—he swallowed hard and continued from where he had left off. “The extraction team was a setup. Three Blackhawks with full crews got us out of there, but the fuckers killed those of us that were still alive! They threw my men out of the goddamn choppers like sacks of potatoes!”

If this affected Michael, he didn’t show it. He kept his focus on the laptop in front of him, but he did see the driver eyeball the men in his rearview mirror through the thick Plexiglas divider.

Seeing this, Michael glared slightly at York. York understood the silent message and took a breath, lowered his voice, and finished. “They wanted the flash drive and my map book. Somehow they knew I had them.”

“They were monitoring your communications, kid,” Michael interjected matter-of-factly. “They were hired guns. Mercenaries for the Order.”

“The Order? Who the hell are they?”

It was time to tell him. “York, you remember three years ago when we first crossed paths?”

“Sure,” answered York with no semblance of being humble. “How can I forget? I saved your life—twice.”

Michael smiled, but continued, “Then you also remember that three years ago, Iran’s ayatollah was assassinated, and the pope was the next target. The killings were made to look like the CIA was behind the ayatollah’s murder and that killing the pope was to appear as retaliation by Iran. It was meant to draw both Iran and the US into war. It was designed to replace both the ayatollah and the pope with pawns.”

“Pawns that belonged to the Order?” asked York.

“Correct.” Michael said. “The pope survived the attack—”

“And Iran still launched their missiles,” interrupted York.

Without skipping a beat and ignoring the interruption, Michael finished, “—and the Order launched Iran’s nuclear missiles. It wasn’t Iran that ordered the attack; the Order had the launch codes and used them by overriding Iran’s central missile command. As you recall, we were able to get control of them; most of the missiles fell without consequence into the Atlantic—all except for one.”

York remembered. One missile had made it into US airspace but fell harmlessly (relatively speaking) into the uninhabited desert eighty miles outside of Las Vegas.

Michael was still speaking, “Kid, the Order was defeated, and a number of their leaders were removed from the picture, but the Order didn’t disappear—far from it. This is an organization whose roots can be traced to the first century. Their only goal is to infiltrate governments with their own people; to have complete control of all economic, political, and military aspects of society.”

“So you think that the Order is behind this, that they’ve resurfaced?”

“It’s not what I think, it’s what I know,” said Michael as he turned the laptop around to show York.

He had seen the files before, back in the cave in Afghanistan. The data he now stared at was the same, but he still had a hard time digesting it. He asked Michael the same question that he had asked Captain Scott back in the cave. “Doc, what does it mean?”

Michael reached over and pointed at one of the opened files on the laptop. “See these? These are purchase orders and invoices for aluminum centrifuges. And these ones here are shipping and transportation bills of lading to ship them from Russia to Afghanistan on an Antonov. This one here is for the jet fuel used by the cargo plane. Here is the manifest for the shipment.” Michael moved one of the open files out of the way to show another window with what was clearly a manifest and flight plan.

“Crap, Doc: centrifuges? You mean to enrich plutonium.” It wasn’t a question; York knew enough about munitions to know what was most critical in making a nuclear bomb.

“Correct, kid; it looks like al-Qaeda is trying to make a nuke. These invoices make that pretty straightforward. It would appear that they are pretty close to completing their mission. Take a look at the flight manifest.”

Leaning in, York saw that the flight was planned to leave Russia in two days.

“There’s still time, Doc! We can stop this!” York paused; a moment of clarity hit him. “That’s why you tapped into the CIA’s database, isn’t it? You wanted them to see this, didn’t you?”

Michael didn’t answer; instead, he tapped a few keys on the keyboard. All of the opened files disappeared, except for one. He showed it to York and said, “What do you make of this?”

“Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” said York with a bit of trepidation.

“York, that is the blueprint for a TBA-480 high-voltage firing block—the firing block for a nuclear weapon. It is exactly what you think it is.”

“Holy shit! How the hell did they get that? Who would give al-Qaeda the ability to put together a nuclear weapon?”

“We did.” Michael’s response was pithy but had the effect of an eloquently penned diatribe.

York sat back and digested what he had heard. The information on the screen implied that he and Michael were the ones responsible. But the way Michael had said it—
we did
—York knew there was more behind it.

Before he could ask one of the numerous questions swirling in his head, the cab came to a halt, and the driver opened the small window built into the Plexiglas divider. “Belém Tower. Twenty-three euros.”

They paid the driver and left the cab.

Fifty meters behind the cab, another Mercedes 190E—a second cab—was dropping off its passenger, too.

Charney stepped out onto the boardwalk that straddled the side of the Tagus River. Even though he stood near fresh waters, the cool breeze was salted and gently brushed across his cheeks. A bit of his hair fell out of place and across his right eye. Tucking it back into place, but never taking his gaze from the two men, he enjoyed the smell of the pungent, trimethylamine-filled air—some fishermen were nearby stretching out their seine, no doubt exacerbating the smell of dead fish.

He liked it.

The aroma was strong, landing first on his taste buds, then aided and amplified by his nose. It was like a shot of adrenaline making him feel more alive.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a nearly empty pack of cigarettes. Lighting one, he inhaled and watched as the two men walked through the front gate of the tower.