winter breeze, shoulders hunched. A multitude of urgent questions and frightened thoughts were crowding me, trying to get inside, and for a few minutes I concentrated only on my breathing, letting the cold air work to clear my mind.
What do you know, I thought. Not what you suspect; what you know. Start with that.
What it boiled down to wasn’t very much. Someone had gotten to Dox. Whoever it was, they were good. They’d forced him to give up the bulletin board, which meant they were ruthless. Now they wanted something from me.
What else? The board was compromised. If they were good enough to take out Dox, they’d be good enough to hack the site and determine the location of the terminal from which I’d just accessed it. In fact, I had to assume they’d just gotten a ping confirming for them that I was currently in Paris.
Shit, I thought. Shit.
If I called from Paris, it would give them a second means of determining my current position. But if they’d already hacked the bulletin board, what they’d get from a phone call would be redundant.
I thought about using the remaining time to go somewhere else, another city in France, maybe, or a quick train trip to Brussels, or Frankfurt. But I immediately rejected the notion. If they logged the time and location of the bulletin board access and then the call came hours later from elsewhere, it would look like I was trying to obscure my current location, which would mean Paris was in some way significant to me. Better to act as though my presence here was as fleeting as it was irrelevant. Which meant making the call right now, right here.
I turned on the prepaid GSM phone I was carrying. I had bought it in New York months earlier, and hadn’t yet used it in Paris, or even in Barcelona. If they tracked its provenance it would create another distracting datapoint about where I might be found.
I slipped a Bluetooth earpiece in place, input Dox’s number, and waited. It rang once, twice, three times. This was theater, I knew. The people who had set this up would have the phone close at hand. The wait was intended to suggest nonchalance, power, control.
On the fourth ring, someone picked up. A voice I didn’t recognize said simply, “Yes.”
“I got your message,” I said.
“Wait a moment,” the voice said. There was a slight, indeterminate European accent.
I looked at my watch, tracking the second hand’s gradual sweep. Five seconds, ten. The wait was supposed to put me on edge. Having the underling answer was intended to let me know I was dealing with a group, an organization, and to make me feel alone and powerless by comparison.
That’s all right, I thought. I’ve gone up against groups before. Maybe I’ll get to show you how it’s done.
But intelligence first. Action after.
A full minute went by. Then a voice I did recognize said, “Hello, John.”
I waited a moment, then said, “Hello, Hilger.”
If he was surprised I knew it was him, he didn’t reveal it. Not that he had too much cause for astonishment, after the way we’d locked horns in the past. The first time, Dox and I had killed a half-French, half-Algerian arms dealer named Belghazi whom Hilger was working with; then, just a few months later, Delilah, Dox, and I had taken out another bad guy Hilger had recruited, a terrorist named Al-Jib, along with a bad-apple Israeli access agent called Manny. That was the op in which Delilah’s colleague, Gil, had died. Hilger had shot him.
I realized that with someone as dangerous and connected as Hilger, I never should have treated any of it as concluded. My understanding was that he’d left the government and opened up his own shop, a kind of privatized intelligence operation, more shadowy, better connected, and substantially less accountable than private security firms like Blackwater and Triple Canopy. I thought Hong Kong had blown his operation out of the water, but apparently Hilger had been wearing a life vest.
A long moment went by. The
What do you know, I thought. Not what you suspect; what you know. Start with that.
What it boiled down to wasn’t very much. Someone had gotten to Dox. Whoever it was, they were good. They’d forced him to give up the bulletin board, which meant they were ruthless. Now they wanted something from me.
What else? The board was compromised. If they were good enough to take out Dox, they’d be good enough to hack the site and determine the location of the terminal from which I’d just accessed it. In fact, I had to assume they’d just gotten a ping confirming for them that I was currently in Paris.
Shit, I thought. Shit.
If I called from Paris, it would give them a second means of determining my current position. But if they’d already hacked the bulletin board, what they’d get from a phone call would be redundant.
I thought about using the remaining time to go somewhere else, another city in France, maybe, or a quick train trip to Brussels, or Frankfurt. But I immediately rejected the notion. If they logged the time and location of the bulletin board access and then the call came hours later from elsewhere, it would look like I was trying to obscure my current location, which would mean Paris was in some way significant to me. Better to act as though my presence here was as fleeting as it was irrelevant. Which meant making the call right now, right here.
I turned on the prepaid GSM phone I was carrying. I had bought it in New York months earlier, and hadn’t yet used it in Paris, or even in Barcelona. If they tracked its provenance it would create another distracting datapoint about where I might be found.
I slipped a Bluetooth earpiece in place, input Dox’s number, and waited. It rang once, twice, three times. This was theater, I knew. The people who had set this up would have the phone close at hand. The wait was intended to suggest nonchalance, power, control.
On the fourth ring, someone picked up. A voice I didn’t recognize said simply, “Yes.”
“I got your message,” I said.
“Wait a moment,” the voice said. There was a slight, indeterminate European accent.
I looked at my watch, tracking the second hand’s gradual sweep. Five seconds, ten. The wait was supposed to put me on edge. Having the underling answer was intended to let me know I was dealing with a group, an organization, and to make me feel alone and powerless by comparison.
That’s all right, I thought. I’ve gone up against groups before. Maybe I’ll get to show you how it’s done.
But intelligence first. Action after.
A full minute went by. Then a voice I did recognize said, “Hello, John.”
I waited a moment, then said, “Hello, Hilger.”
If he was surprised I knew it was him, he didn’t reveal it. Not that he had too much cause for astonishment, after the way we’d locked horns in the past. The first time, Dox and I had killed a half-French, half-Algerian arms dealer named Belghazi whom Hilger was working with; then, just a few months later, Delilah, Dox, and I had taken out another bad guy Hilger had recruited, a terrorist named Al-Jib, along with a bad-apple Israeli access agent called Manny. That was the op in which Delilah’s colleague, Gil, had died. Hilger had shot him.
I realized that with someone as dangerous and connected as Hilger, I never should have treated any of it as concluded. My understanding was that he’d left the government and opened up his own shop, a kind of privatized intelligence operation, more shadowy, better connected, and substantially less accountable than private security firms like Blackwater and Triple Canopy. I thought Hong Kong had blown his operation out of the water, but apparently Hilger had been wearing a life vest.
A long moment went by. The
Similar Books
