in guerrilla warfare who seems to have connections with al-Qa'ida. What is he doing here in the Taliban region? Does he buy opium for his own use?”
“I see him. If he is here it means that we’re on the right track. As you know, Bouda is a former ISI agent. Kamaal, what are they saying to those in charge of the plantation?”
“That the Master is beside himself because the others, given the delay of operations, did not make the advance payment. They say that the load must be ready for tomorrow morning, and it must cross the border at 6:30 am and arrive at the laboratory.
“Others will come and pick up the raw goods directly, because they don’t trust their organization. The Master will not be there, but a trusted collaborator will be there to negotiate with the two of them,” Kamaal said.
“I think tonight we're not going back to your brother’s warehouse,” BAT FK23 Bantam said. He had now fully recovered from the scorpion sting.
“When night falls, we’ll send the report and the data to the agencies saying that we will follow the convoy to Peshawar, we have to cross the border with them in order not to lose track of them.
Kamaal, you have to contact logistics and change vehicles. Bring new documents along with you as well. We'll stay here and wait for you, and keep an eye on any changes in the situation.”
Li-2 amicably shook Kamaal’s hand as soon as he got up to go back to the jeep and leave.
The Afghan Pashtuns returned at night with supplies, a new vehicle, a load of wheat, and new documents that would allow the three of them to enter Pakistan as traders.
At 9:00 pm local time, they sent a report to the two agencies and ate some chicken kebab wraps while drinking beer. Each one took guard duty for an hour while the other two rested.
On the plantation they did not notice any movements after late evening, but more guards had joined the others and had been placed along the perimeter. Three empty trucks had arrived ready to be loaded.
20
Mark had hidden the three VHS tapes in the false bottom of his bag where he kept his weapons.
He was going to send the tapes to his friend Pavel in Sofia, Bulgaria. Pavel was a computer engineer who led a double life; he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Sofia and also one of the most famous hackers in Eastern Europe, code-named "Digitrevenant69."
Pavel Doko was single and had no friends. He lived with a female robot that took care of the cleaning in a bunker he had built “ad hoc” in the basement of a building in the city center, where his experimental laboratory was located.
During the day he had a room on the University Campus and he received people in his office in the department. His “official” life was thus apparently only academic and moved within the walls of the university.
Mark had met him at King's College during a conference in which Doko presented an app that he had developed in both Objective-C and Android versions. The app made it possible to use the new generation of smartphones for the optical analysis of cross section images of the layers of the sub-basal nerve fibers of the cornea.
Doko's app had been tested in several trials conducted in Florida, Ohio, Texas, Paris and London, where it had achieved excellent experimental results that had confirmed its use as an aid to clinicians in the early diagnosis of diabetic neuropathy.
Doko had already sold the rights to the app to a non-profit organization, keeping only some royalties that he used to finance the development of his experimental laboratory.
He and Mark got along with each other right from the beginning. They had long discussions about discovering new diabetic neuropathy diagnosis methods and they had begun to spend time together as good friends. Pavel had then opened the doors of his bunker to Mark, the only person who had ever crossed the threshold and had won the trust of the solitary and genial Pavel.
When Mark joined the British
Drew Hunt
Robert Cely
Tessa Dare
Carolyn Faulkner
Unknown
Mark Everett Stone
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Suzanne Halliday
Carl Nixon
Piet Hein