The Red Room (7 page)

G
race has arranged herself an apartment rented by the week in a building suited for Westerners. The idiosyncrasy—that in a Middle Eastern nation she might be considered Western—is not lost on her. She and Besim made three stops: grocery store, pharmacy and liquor shop. She has everything from feminine products and mascara to Greek yogurt and vodka.

The apartment is furnished and well appointed, with a kitchenette, nice linens, Wi-Fi and a flat-screen television with full satellite. It keeps her out of a hotel, allowing a lower profile.

Already at work attempting to hack Mashe Okle’s investment accounts, she maintains an open videoconference with Xin in Rutherford Risk’s Data Sciences division, which operates 24/7/365. Her VPN connection has been pinged around the world, aliased and encrypted. Slipping into an investment server undetected is impossible, so once again she must cloak herself. The going is tedious. Data Services is advising her as to the exact time to make the hack. She waits, her finger hovering above the Return key.

Her phone rings, the caller ID on her screen. She mutes the video and takes the call.

“Ma’am.” She doesn’t like being addressed this way but didn’t have the heart to tell her driver. By arrangement, he remains parked outside, on call through midnight.

“You have man friend maybe watching building?”

“Explain, please, Besim.”

“Man park twice. First time, west of building. Get out. Walk around building. Move car to see east side.”

“How alert of you, Besim,” she says.

“This is man you follow, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.” She thanks him for his attention. Asks him to let her know if anything changes.

Ending the cell call, she takes the videoconference off Mute. “Xin?”

“Wei.”
Yes.
Thousands of miles away on an island in the South China Sea, Xin sounds as if he’s next to her.

“You have my coordinates?”

“Within one meter.”

“How long for you to account for every cell phone turned on within one hundred . . . no, let’s say, fifty . . . meters of me?”

“How many carriers?”

“Enough to cover in the ninetieth percentile of coverage.”

“Soonest? Fifteen minutes. Longest? An hour.”

“Put someone on it, will you please?”

“Copy.”

A symbol indicates he’s muted his line. She does the same, taking note of the time. The minutes drag out. After five minutes, she’s reconnected as Xin gives her a countdown to the hack.

She’s in. She celebrates the success by pouring herself warm vodka. Wishes she’d given it time to cool. Now, data-mining a major investment firm, she envisions herself as a salmon or sperm swimming upstream, seeking out a specific destination. It’s a journey. She
knows she must be patient. As in a video game, there are dragons and demons lurking, traps set, awaiting a misstep on her part. Having extracted Mashe Okle’s password from the bank server, she uses it here, hoping he’s a man of convenience, and gains entrance to his investment portfolio.

She laughs at the irony of the Iranian’s savings being heavily invested in the U.S. stock market. She’s feeling the vodka.

He’s a wealthy man, but it’s not the kind of money she might have expected. The stocks and mutual funds favor scientific companies. She is annoyed by the worming thought that this doesn’t pass the sniff test for an arms dealer. Did Dulwich ever confirm that, or was it her assumption? She’s eager to speak with Knox; he knows Dulwich better. At the very least, he’ll have a keener sense of what’s at play. Knox is not one to take on in a game of cards.

She clicks through to the portfolio’s history, increases the time sample and prints to a PDF file. On point, she flies through menus so quickly another’s eye would be unable to keep up. Multiple files are saved and archived in a matter of seconds for later analysis. This is not a time for window-shopping. She prides herself on the speed and agility with which she extracts every morsel of relevant data. When she logs out of Mashe’s account, she’s at forty-seven seconds. She closes the firm’s web page at forty-nine, giving her a total of under a minute. She celebrates by throwing her arms in the air, an Olympian sprinter at the tape.

“Three hundred seventy-one.” It’s Xin from the video window in the corner of her screen.

“Within fifty meters?”

“Affirmative.”

“Of those, how many have called or been called by known law enforcement, domestic or foreign, in the past ten days?”

“Published, or known to us?”

“Known to us,” she says.

“Back at you.” His line mutes. Xin loves this stuff as much as she does.

She pours herself another drink, this one on the rocks. Warns herself to take it easy. She likes vodka a little too much. Has no remorse about drinking alone. She’s always alone. Even in a mixed group she feels isolated, believing her mind more facile than most, her personal history more complicated. The truth is, most people bore her.

“No joy,” says Xin.

The trouble with vodka: it skews her sense of time. Ten minutes have passed. She’s been surfing Mashe Okle’s investment files offline. The vodka level is halfway down the ice.

“Calls and texts placed outside Turkey in past ten days,” she states.

“Hang on. That shouldn’t take but a moment.”

She finds the British accent on her fellow Chinese appealing. It’s either Xin or the vodka warming her.

“Fifteen.”

“Better,” she says. “We can work with that. You’ll need a phantom caller ID. Untraceable. Australia. UAE. Israel. UK. Washington. Maybe a rotation.”

“Copy.”

“I want you to ring each of the fifteen numbers in thirty-second intervals. Wrong number, but sell it. Maybe a child’s voice asking for mother.”

“Copy.”

“Let me know when you’re ready. I’m here.” She mutes the video window. Considers another three fingers of vodka. Convinces herself it doesn’t negatively affect her thought process—if anything, it enhances it. Knows damn well it’s a lie. Pours more anyway.

Yum.

She calls Besim. “Can you see him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He can see you?”

“Not probably. My seat low whole time. Resting. Who knows?”

“I’m going to keep you on the phone. You need to tell me if he answers his phone. The moment he answers his phone. You un . . . derstand?” She slurs. Thinks nothing of it. Checks the glass. Half of what she poured is gone. She obviously shorted herself. Wouldn’t mind topping it off.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Stay on the line please.”

Feeling incredibly good, she closes her eyes, celebrating the vodka’s ability to cleanse her fatigue, settle her racing mind and warm her limbs. What’s not to love? Opens her eyes again when Xin speaks.

“You napping on me?”

“Ready?”

“Will call all fifteen, thirty seconds apart.”

“Correct.”

“Here we go.” Her head clears; she is instantly sober despite her efforts otherwise. This is not the first time this has happened; where the alcohol haze goes, she has no idea, but it’s undetectable. She has the cell phone to her ear. She watches Xin. He’s gotten a young woman in her early twenties to make the calls. The woman’s face glistens with a sheen of nervousness. Grace wants to caution her to do it right, but knows it would only add to the woman’s anxiety. She has to trust Xin. She chuckles to herself—his name, a common one, means “trust.”

“Something amusing?” Xin asks.

“You had to be there,” she says. She drains the remaining vodka. Trust is not found in her personal lexicon. She knows its absence is the source of much of her inner struggle.

The calls go out. The young woman does an excellent voice, sounding about thirteen and troubled. Three calls. Five. Grace keeps eyeing the vodka bottle, knowing she’s over her efficacious limit but wanting more.

“He’s on phone,” Besim says in her left ear.

“Joy!” Grace says to Xin, whose typically quiet face registers a thrill. “That’s the one we want.”

“Got it.”

“Off phone.”

She mutes the video. “Thank you, Besim. That’s all for the night. But please, don’t leave for at least another thirty minutes. I will tell you when.”

“As you wish.”

She will turn off the apartment light before allowing Besim to drive off. She wants as little connection to the wrong number as possible.

Back with Xin, she says, “I need all calls, text messages and web access to and from that number over the past ten days to two weeks.”

“It will take a few hours. Likely a lot of data. I will post here. You can access it once I post. I will let you know.”

“Give me the GPS data as well.”

“Copy.” Xin ends the video call.

Grace is left with nothing on her computer screen but her wallpaper photo of a dog and cat curled together at the foot of a wingback chair. They’re not hers. She has no pets. No wingback chairs.

She isn’t who she pretends to be. She isn’t who she is.

As bad as that makes her feel, she feels damn good.

N
ee-hao.”
Knox speaks over the phone’s earbud wire to retain his peripheral vision. His feet are tired, his belly empty; he’s back down the hill in Jabal, the nearest thing Amman has to a historic district. With each conquering army, one civilization has replaced the next, going back millennia. While the Jabal neighborhood is arguably also the most modern, these contemporary edifices are built cheek-to-jowl alongside ancient ruins. It’s a human stew of body odor, food scents and fossil fuel. Livelihoods are made on the streets, other lives are lost on the streets, and still others repair the streets.

Now they are teeming in the evening hour.

“Nee-hao,”
Grace answers.

“Can you change a FedEx delivery address for me?” He speaks Shanghainese, a specific dialect of Mandarin. Of all the words, only “FedEx” is in English. It stands out like a black sheep.

“Are you sender or recipient?”

“Recipient.”

“Must be sender.” Grace’s tone is deliberate, professional.

“Electronically? Can you hack it?”

“I could check with Data Services, see if we have that capability. I would guess it would come down to timing.”

“Immediately.”

“No. I would think not.”

He hesitates. Victoria turned him in to the police, who will have located the shipment using her address as the point of origin. He’s counting on FedEx being so fast that the Harmodius is already in the air, or perhaps landed in Istanbul. The trick is to move it while the Jordanians debate how much to share with the Turks, and if they come to terms, the Turks set up surveillance to trap the recipient—Knox. Given the bureaucratic tangle likely to ensue, he can’t see either side anticipating the delivery location changing; it’s his one chance to steal the piece back before they seize it. And him.

Grace informs him that the sender can change the delivery address for a small fee.

“Can you impersonate the sender?”

“I am no expert on this. I would imagine there are safeguards. The sender must call from the phone number listed on the air bill. Something like this.”

“Shit.” Knox put Victoria Momani’s number on the air bill.

No names. No small talk. No locations. He and Grace haven’t spoken in several months. He likes hearing her voice. It’s an unexpected reaction.

He ends the call, knowing no offense will be taken.

—

F
ROM
A
SECOND
-
STORY
stairwell window across the street, Knox keeps watch on the cars—mostly European subcompacts—and pedestrians outside the apartment building across the street. It’s a residential area with no cafés or coffeehouses or galleries to hide in. It’s going on one
A
.
M
.
, yet swarms of youth and pairs of both men
and women fill the sidewalks. Oddly, there are few couples over thirty seen together; the Jordanians in this neighborhood separate by gender when out for the evening.

Knox takes note of every twitch of every tree leaf. Nothing escapes his eye. He spots no solo surveillance, though the complexities of spotting team surveillance that combines mobile and pedestrian remains. He gives himself an extra twenty minutes to make damn sure. The success of the op depends on the next hour. If the Obama bust is studied in depth by Jordanian authorities, if it should end up confiscated, Dulwich’s plan is compromised.

He wraps a white scarf bought from a street vendor in an open-air market around his head to fashion a turban. Angles his chin low as he descends the stairs and crosses the street. Enters the apartment building and climbs to the second floor.

Knocks. Waits. Knocks again.

Victoria Momani opens the door. She wears a large scarf like a robe. “Go away,” she says. “I was asleep.”

“It can’t wait.”

“You have been hurt.”

Knox hasn’t gotten to a mirror. The scuffle in the van, he assumes. “It’s been a busy evening.”

She checks the hall before she admits him. Once the door is shut: “Are you out of your mind?”

“Regularly.”

“I could be watched.”

He shakes his head.

“Who are you?” She waits. “I knew you people would not stop.”

“Stop what, Victoria? I told you: you got me wrong the first time. I am as I represented,” he says, still weighing his options. “Why else would you have let me in? You believe me. That’s important to me. To us both.”
If only Grace were here,
he thinks. She could make
this smoother. “But let’s stay here for a moment: who do you think I am? What have these people done?”

She appraises him. Shakes her head.

“‘You people,’” he repeats to her. “Organized crime?”

She is incensed by the suggestion.

“Police? Special police?” he asks.

His ignorance is winning her over. Her second evaluation of him is more forgiving.

“Are you police?”

She coughs up laughter. Doesn’t know what to do with him.

“Innocent bystander,” he says. Her eyes go glassy, contradicting her outward confidence. He’s a dentist with a pick.

“I need a favor,” he says.

“Because we are such old friends.”

“What caused the split with Akram?”

Impressively, she manages to keep her obvious emotion from her voice. “It is not yours to consider.”

“His brother,” Knox says. “Mashe.”

It is as if all the air is let out of her. As she contracts, she finds a chair to sit upon while she coils inward. “I knew it.”

“I am neither what nor who you think. I am, in fact, as I told you, a merchant. But I am helping others, as I know you would, were you able.” He stares her down; he’s reached her.

“You think me so gullible?”

“I think you’ve been hurt. Lied to, more than likely.”

“And you are the great purveyor of truth.”

Her command of English suggests he should avoid talking down to her. He regroups.

“I fashion the truth as needed,” he says. “I lie about another’s beauty, my own politics, my vices. But not about this.” Having little to no idea of what he speaks, he says, “Mashe Okle is trouble. He
can be stopped. I am offering you that chance. The crate contains a piece of legitimate art. I promise you that. But, believe it or not, it’s important to my effort. I do not work for any government or police. I am a merchant enlisted by others—neither government nor police, nor any kind of criminal effort—to help expose the man for what he is. By now the Jordanians have alerted the Turks to monitor my package when and where it is delivered in Istanbul.”

“I do not believe you. It is a bomb. Something like this. I will not hurt Akram or have him involved in hurting Mashe, no matter what I think of the man. I will not be part of this.”

“It is not any kind of weapon or device, nor can it be used to make a weapon or a device. It is as I said.” He considers her. “Very well.”

He makes for the door, a gamble that causes each stride to seem artificially long and slow. Has he judged her incorrectly? Since when?

“Wait!”

He works to hide the smirk. Successful, he turns.

“A phone call is all. One phone call,” he says.