The History Thief: Ten Days Lost (The Sterling Novels) (41 page)

“But, Senator, the chief is…”

Faust cut him off. “I don’t care what or who he is: just get rid of him! Fix this, Stanford! Now, are you clear?”

Justine watched from the corner as the senator’s face took on a look of pure evil.

Stanford had to hold the phone slightly from his ear, but he answered anyway. “Clear, Senator. I am clear.”
You should have let me have that Green Beret killed along with his captain.

The senator hung up and, annoyed, immediately searched for his woman scorned.

Justine had wrapped her body in one of the Paris hotel room’s exquisite sheets, but it did little to hide her contempt. She now sat like a hurt child on one of the epoch-style chairs tucked into the vast room’s corner.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Faust shouted at her.

Justine wanted to scream at him, but even more so, she wanted to cry. She wouldn’t let him see her like this. She jumped to her feet and stomped to the bathroom. Once inside, she slammed the door emphatically shut. The bathroom’s nearly all-marble interior echoed greater inside than it did throughout the suite.

“Fucking women,” Faust quietly snarled as he searched the room for the clothes he had so eagerly tossed aside the night before.

In his office, Stanford tapped into the closed-circuit camera system. He was soon staring into a room where he saw the section chief and Jorge Juan Garrido standing over a computer screen. Stanford manually maneuvered the camera’s aperture, panning the room. It was empty. He powered down his terminal and rose from his seat. Collecting himself, his next steps would require a bit more precision than running a satellite diagnostics program.

He was about to do what had never before been done.

And he had only a few minutes to put the plan into action.

He walked over to his wall safe and spun its lock. With the combination entered, he opened the safe and pulled out his CIA-issued Colt 9mm handgun. Reaching into the safe once more, he pulled out a silencer and slowly attached it to the handgun’s bore.

Once it was secure, he slipped it into his front suit coat pocket and walked to the elevator. Inside, he lightly touched the button for floor number B3.

The elevator ride was smooth and quiet. It was uninterrupted by any of the four floors that it passed. Stanford had closed his eyes in conjunction with the elevator’s door. He concentrated on his breathing and slowed his heart rate. He visualized the next few minutes; he saw each action that was about to take place. He replayed them over and over, preparing himself for what was next.

He emptied himself of all emotion.

The elevator door opened to the slight, overhead chime; his eyes did too.

Stanford walked down a quiet hallway until he stood just opposite a heavy, secured door. On the wall was a list of the room’s occupants.

Eyeing the list, he stopped and read one of the names: Mr. Augustus X. Tennille—Section Chief.

Stanford swiped his card across the digital card reader; a tiny, round light switched from red to green.

He walked in and quickly scanned the room. Two men were hunched over a terminal and had heard him enter.

There would be few words exchanged between him and the two men.

The two men felt secure in the annals of the CIA—they had no reason to fear the man walking toward them.

There was no sense of danger, as there shouldn’t have been. They were inside the safest building in the country—safer than the White House. They were inside the CIA’s headquarters. They were annoyed by the intrusion more than anything.

The section chief stood and stared at Stanford; his eyes were those of a confused man.

Stanford looked at the section chief; he pointed the gun his way and said, “Augustus, things aren’t going as planned.”

The chief reached into his coat.

Jorge looked from Stanford to his chief; then it hit him. He spat out at the chief, “You—you are a part of this?”

There wouldn’t be time for an answer.

Stanford’s movements were swift and well trained. The silenced bullets fired with no measurable time between what it took for one round to exit and the other to be chambered.

His aim was better than precise; it was perfect.

One bullet entered the section chief’s forehead. His fall was awkward. His body fell backward but twisted at the waist. His head struck the corner of a desk, which contorted his upper body even further away from his lower half. A horrible gash split across the side of his temple. His hand was still in his coat reaching for his weapon. It didn’t matter: he was already dead.

The bullet that entered Jorge struck exactly dead center of his heart.

Violently, he was rocketed off of his feet. His body fell heavily to the floor. So quick were Stanford’s shots that not even a look of surprise was on either fallen man’s face.

Stanford stood stoic for a moment and then bent to the ground to retrieve the spent casings. His weapon was still pointed instinctively at the downed men. Standing with the two casings in his hand, he slipped them into his pocket along with the weapon. He estimated that it would be morning before their bodies would be found, giving him just enough time to erase the card reader logs and the digital video still being recorded of the room’s activities.

It paid to be one of the best hackers in the world.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

BELÉM TOWER
LISBON, PORTUGAL

I
t was fortified, that much York could see. The rest of the early sixteenth century Manueline structure, with splashes of other forms of architecture, was lost on the young Green Beret.

But not on Michael.

This was his academic field of expertise.

Special operations was his career, but his private love was history, in particular, the history of the Middle East. When the Middle East is discussed, most think solely of Israel, Palestine, and the Islamic and Arab nations.

But the Middle East had been much more, at one time stretching across the Mediterranean and throughout the ports of Spain and Portugal.

Although the influence on the tower is attributed primarily to the time King Manuel the First reigned, there were, nonetheless, Moorish hints throughout. Its architect, Francisco de Arruda, was affected by his prior work completed in North Africa—in Morocco—and it showed in Belém Tower. Subtly included in its design, the arched windows and ribbed cupolas both whispered of Islam.

Michael walked slowly, almost nonchalantly, down the wooden walkway that connected the boardwalk to the tower. He thought about how the warping, dull wood failed in every way possible to blend in with the magnificently carved lioz limestone of the four-story tower.

The prematurely salt-aged wood creaked loudly as the two men walked toward the tower. Behind them, the shrill of joyous, screaming young boys and girls filled the air, followed by parental threats in multiple languages, which, undoubtedly, if translated, were shouts to
slow down, stop running,
and
be careful!

Michael’s head hurt. It pounded, really, and he wasn’t sure if the throbbing was from his face smashing against the steering wheel of a stolen car or from the withdrawal of alcohol. He tried to ignore it, which wasn’t so difficult given that the fiery pain in his thigh overpowered it to some degree. Further helping to mask the hammer against his head, his chest throbbed from having had a long, thick hypodermic needle plunged into it.

He was—officially—a wreck.

The two men walked underneath a circling swarm of gulls as they neared the entrance to the tower. Once inside, Michael picked up his pace as he headed straight for the north side of the tower.

York said nothing as he followed Michael.

They were in the casemate of the bastion. Sixteen cannons—iron guns—filled the emplacements of the irregularly shaped, hexagonal room. The room was just above the water and basked in both the light shining through the casemate and the light reflecting off the water and through the emplacements.

The light-colored lioz cast an odd, greenish glow into the room.

Michael stopped moving. They were dead center.

Outside, still on the bench near the boardwalk, Charney was flirting dangerously with the still-seated young woman. The two were laughing, and he had inched closer.

His phone rang.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said as he pulled out his phone and looked at its screen.

His eyes bulged slightly at what he saw. Jumping to his feet, he quickly ran off. The young woman was confused; not ready yet to feel slighted.

She hadn’t a clue, of course, just how lucky she had been.

Charney made his way toward the tower, staring back and forth at his phone and the tower’s entrance.

The tracking device he had placed inside of Michael’s pocket had stopped sending a signal. The ring of his phone had been a warning.

Inside of the bastion, Michael had walked toward a wall and slowly traced his fingers across its cold surface. It felt wet to his touch.

York only watched, but hovered close by.

Michael said nothing and just continued to walk slowly, his hand all the while on the tower’s wall.

York couldn’t take the silence. “What the hell are we doing here, Doc?”

“You know, kid, this limestone is rare. Close to one hundred million years old.”

So,
thought York.

Michael continued as he walked. “It is quite compact and abundant with fossils. You can’t see them, but they are there. This is the only place in the world that you can find this type. Lioz is what they call it.”

“Doc, I don’t mean to be rude, but so what! We need to get moving. There has to be a team on the ground by now.”

Michael smiled, but that was as much acknowledgement that he would give. “The limestone—this limestone—can only be made in a very specific ecosystem: shallow seas with warm and clear water. It had to be the right combination of temperature, seasonal changes, plant life and sodium content; the perfect combinations, really, to attract and proliferate a delicate society of organisms—organisms with calcium carbonate skeletons.”

“Shit, Doc, I think that lump on your head is affecting your brain; you ain’t making any sense!”

Michael stopped moving.

“Come here.”

York hesitated for a moment but then complied.

“Put your hand on the wall, kid.”

Michael did the same thing.

The two men stood appositional to the wall; both of their hands were on it.

“Okay, Doc, I’m playing your game. Now what?”

“Look carefully at the wall. Do you see it—do you see them?”

“See what, Doc?”

York’s impatience started to seep through; Michael could see it wrap across his face. Michael waited a moment more.

Finally unable to hold his patience, and much like the puerile children running down the wooden walkway, York threw a fit.

“Jesus Christ, Doc! I have barely escaped two hostile countries with my life, watched my team and my commander die, been blamed for the assassination of the next president, and now I’m stuck with a man who is clearly one drink away from a twelve-step program who can’t seem to,” York held up his first finger and pointed at it, “a, not get hurt in the most ridiculous ways, and b, is taking me on a fucking tour of a goddamn castle that is sitting in the middle of a rotten fish-smelling river!”

York’s chest was heaving, and his face had grown red.

Michael smiled coyly and then reached out and grabbed York by the shirt collar. In one swift motion, he threw him violently against the wall, pinning his back to it.

“Ow!” York painfully spat out. “What gives, Doc?”

Michael leaned in and growled, “I asked if you could see them, kid!”

“Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about—see what?”

Michael grabbed York and spun him around. His voice was low, his mouth near York’s ear. “Put your hand back on the wall.”

York did.

“If you can’t see them, then maybe you can feel them.”

York hesitantly moved his hand over the limestone; the pocks of the wall undulated across his fingertips.

“That’s it, kid. Seeing isn’t always done with your eyes. Now you can feel them. Those little bumps are the pieces of shells long ago fossilized. Your fingers are running over the hard substance that was once an organism living nearly one hundred million years ago. Those tiny, nonexistent, and seemingly weak creatures have just saved your life.”

“What?” Michael let York go, and he slowly turned around. Standing face-to-face with the CIA officer, he continued, “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t understand. Why would you? You are impetuous and impatient. Big biceps might get you up that rope, but they won’t save you against a smarter enemy. You have been taught to use more of your brawn than your brain. That stops now. If we are going to make it out of this, you will need to tap into that—what so far can be best described as worthless—brain of yours.”