Troubleshooters (Jackson Chase Novella Book 2) (8 page)

I
woke
to a kick to the head delivered by a smelly sandal-clad foot. The upside was I knew I was alive and at least cognitively functioning. The downside was—well, it was a dirty, smelly foot.

I blinked through the cobwebs of a serious bell-ringing, ran my tongue through my mouth to find that all my teeth were there, and moved my toes and fingers. All present and accounted for.

I was lying on my back in the crumpled cockpit of the van. Twisting my head to the side, I could see Naseeb’s feet. I took as deep a breath as I could handle and then, with as much speed and force as possible, thrust my hand out at an ankle and pulled it forward. I caught him slightly off balance and he collapsed onto his back. As quickly as I could, I pulled myself through the window.

Not quickly enough, however, because Naseeb had regained his footing and delivered another kick to my abdomen just as I made it out. I took the blow full force, and some combination of the concussion from the crash and his kick caused me to vomit.

“Yes, you filthy pig. That will teach you!”

He dialed up for another kick. But this time I knew it was coming and was able to tighten my abdominal muscles enough to take the blow. I reached out to grab his foot after the impact, but was too late. The energy of that small effort had taken its toll, and I realized that my noggin was not in the best of shape. I stayed down, my cheek resting in the dirt, giving myself a second to build the strength to get to my feet.

Seeing that I didn’t counter attack immediately, Naseeb stood above me, a nasty smirk on his face. He pulled a phone out of his pocket, likely to call his fellow bombers to pick us up. As he dialed, he said to me, “I would like you to know that every second I was with you, I thought of ways to kill you.”

“Well, at least the feeling is mutual now.”

He pulled the phone away from his ear and uttered a curse in Arabic.

“They won’t answer, Naseeb,” I said. “They can’t. We killed them all.”

In response, he delivered another kick. This time, though, I was ready for it and turned to take the brunt of the blow on a shoulder. As his foot made contact, I pivoted and drove my arm back, hoping to further the momentum of his kick and put him on the ground once again. His reflexes were dialed in and he simply spun, but that extra movement gave me the second I needed to get to my feet.

Again, his quickness surprised me. He came out of the spin swinging. I took a brutal punch to the ribs, but countered with a fist to his stomach. My strike was met by a substantial layer of flab, which likely lessened the impact quite a bit. I quickly transitioned the strike to an elbow to the jaw, throwing as much hip into it as I could.

He wavered slightly and blinked, letting me know I had found the right target. I stepped into a solid combination to both sides of his jaw. He countered, but his blows had half the strength as his body focused its attention on staying conscious.

As his arm came forward, I grabbed it. Bending my knees and bringing my hip into him nice and low, I flipped him to the ground. Instantly, my knee was on his chest, and I had one hand on his chin and the other on the back of his head. It was time.

The fake Naseeb’s breath was labored. And, to be honest, so was mine, but I was finishing this. I firmed my grip. His eyes bulged and his hands darted to my wrists as he realized that I was about to snap his neck.

Behind me, there was the noise of vehicles approaching. The police, no doubt.

“Killing me will not change anything. He will keep sending us,” Naseeb said as I prepared to exert the pressure needed on his jaw.

He will keep sending us
. So Chen was right, there was someone directing the attacks.

I lessened the pressure.

“We will come and come again, until every infidel is dead!”

“Who will keep sending you, Naseeb?” I shouted into his face. He didn’t reply, but fixed me with a cold stare. I renewed the pressure on his jaw, knowing he could feel the bones in his neck turned near their limit.

There was a scuffle of feet on the dry road surface behind me.

“I have him, Commander” came a shout. It was Lieutenant Kahembe. “Move to the side!”

“Don’t shoot, Kahembe!” I shouted. “I know what he’s done, and there’s nothing I would like more. But I have him.” I needed just one answer, one minute, and then this could be over.

“Move away, Commander. Now!” Kahembe repeated. I heard the bolt on a carbine slam home and turned to see the Lieutenant pointing it at Naseeb. Given that I was astride the terrorist, it was pointed at me as well. I rose slowly, and noticed that several policemen had formed around us in a circle.

The man before me was a terrorist who had bombed the Lieutenant’s city. To Kahembe my role was now complete, and my needs had evaporated to irrelevant. At this moment, all he could feel was the justice needed for what the man beneath me had done to the city of Arusha.

He will keep sending us
.

I kept my eyes on Lieutenant Kahembe, and said, “He’s not working alone, Lieutenant. There’s someone above him, someone else pulling the strings, providing the money and orders. There is nothing I would like more than to kill this man. But he has a handler, a boss. And that’s who we need to find, Lieutenant, to stop this from happening here again.”

Kahembe kept his weapon on Naseeb, but I saw his shoulders soften slightly and his finger move to the trigger guard.

But at the same time, I heard a noise. A very specific noise.

Hearing is a funny thing. There are certain sounds that, no matter how short in duration, are instantly recognizable. A gun slide closing, a tap on a window, or the popping of a beer bottle. The sound I heard through the wind and the noise of vehicles arriving was very distinct.

“Grenade!” I shouted—out of instinct more than anything—as I looked down at Naseeb. He had a smile on his face. And a grenade in his hand, moving to his chest.

“Allahu … ” he started, but I was instantly over him, cutting him off. With one hand I pushed the grenade to his side. With my other hand and all the force I could muster, I rolled him on top of it. The movement put me right on his back, and I pulled my arms and legs in behind his body frame. I tucked my face in between his shoulder blades, opened my mouth slightly, and instantly thought this might not have been my best idea.

The detonation of the grenade lifted the fake Naseeb and me at least half a meter off the road, and upon landing I felt more than heard the damage it had done to my human cushion. He had absorbed both the energy of the explosion and—thankfully—the casing fragments.

The concussion wave generated by the grenade’s detonation had absolutely wrecked my hearing. As if my head didn’t hurt enough from the crash, it was absolutely pounding now. But still, I went through my routine. Teeth all present and accounted for, fingers still mobile, and toes felt functioning. A sharp searing pain in my right leg let me know that at least one of the grenade fragments had passed through to me, but I had otherwise escaped damage. Thank goodness our fake Naseeb had been overweight. Those extra kilos had likely saved me.

The throbbing in my head remained nearly unbearable as I rolled off Naseeb and onto the rough road. Kahembe came immediately to my side. He spoke, but with the ring in my ears so loud I couldn’t hear a word he said. But the look of relief on his face was clear enough.

“
W
hile this is booting up
,” Chen said after opening her computer, “I would just like it on the record that I disarmed a bomb, and he couldn’t even put the pin back in a grenade.”

“He is pretty hopeless, isn’t he?” replied Sterba. “Maybe Director Nichols only needs two of us after all.”

Chen laughed. I rolled my eyes, which only worsened the pain in my head.

Kahembe and his men were tending to the remains of the fake Naseeb and closing the investigation into the hotel bombing. He had been kind enough to let us use his office, something I sincerely appreciated since it had a couch. Despite it being rather threadbare, and smelling slightly of curry and sweat, it was glorious.

“Fine, I hereby declare that you two are genius,” I said. And while I delivered it with a bit of cheek, Chen was, in fact, rather clever. Sterba had certainly trained in disarming ordnance, and had been prepared to run through the procedure of determining how the shells in the van were to be detonated, but Chen, despite having been knocked about quite seriously, had the presence of mind during her brief captivity to see that the phone to be used as the detonation trigger had a side slot for the SIM chip. She also knew that following a more traditional protocol would take time, and the fake Naseeb was likely dialing straightaway. So she simply popped the SIM card out, rendering the trigger useless without cutting a single wire and risking setting off an anti-tamper device.

“I thought so,” she said. “Ah, here we go.”

I looked up from the couch to see her at Lieutenant Kahembe’s desk. The sour blue of a bruise had begun to appear around her left eye, and the swelling on her cheek had spread.

“You sure you’re up for this, Haley?” Sterba asked. “I can kick his royal laziness off the couch.”

She waved him off. “No. I want to let you know what I found while you two were playing in the bushes.”

Even Sterba rolled his eyes.

“OK,” she began. “Remember how we used NSA call data to locate the stolen SIM cards used in this portion of Africa?”

I nodded, which wasn’t a good idea. A small whimper passed my lips unchecked. Whimpering is not a good trait for a former NZSAS trooper.

“I wanted to map the call vectors outside of Tanzania as well. I synced time, location, and some of the numbers we knew our Naseeb was using, and arrived at this.”

She turned her computer around so that Sterba and I could see. It showed a map that spanned North Africa and the Middle East. A single yellow line connected Tanzania to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

“Naseeb made this call?” Sterba asked.

Chen shrugged. “Based on locations, and the phones he was using, yes.”

“Jeddah,” I observed. “Didn’t expect that.”

“The Jeddah phone had no history before Naseeb’s call. So it was a burner used only for this attack. But it did make two calls immediately after the detonation. The second call is a mystery. There’s some sort of encryption on the connection. I can only tell there was a call, nothing else. Eighteen seconds.”

“If that was the second call, what was the first?” I asked.

“Now that is the interesting one,” Chen said. She tapped a couple of keys, and a green line connected Jeddah to Antibes, France. “The call lasted only four seconds.”

“How did you get a location on a call that was that short?”

“It only takes a fraction of a second for the identifiers to transmit, and we have them for one side of the call. NSA pulls in a huge amount of calls every second, along with all of the identifiers. We matched it against other electronic intelligence, and narrowed the location down to the port area of Antibes, France.”

“I think we should have called the NSA instead of Langley when we were trying to find you,” I said.

“Yes, we need to do something about that,” Chen said.

Sterba brought us back on track. “So what’s so special about this one call?”

“NSA knows exactly who that phone belonged to: Ivan Vatchenko. He’s a…”

“Billionaire,” I interrupted.

“Exactly,” she said, puzzled that I knew the name.

“Why only four seconds?” Sterba asked.

Chen made like she was holding a phone to her ear. “Ivan, we did it!” she said in a crude imitation of Naseeb’s sing-song voice. She then changed to a gruff voice, imitating the other end of the call. “What are you doing calling this number, idiot? You were supposed to call the other phone!”

Sterba made a face that conceded this was a possibility. He then turned to me and asked, “How did you know who he was?”

“Because he’s sailing one of my boats.”

He paused a second, remembering his visit to Auckland to pick me up for our second mission together. “When you told me your family made boats, I was thinking eight-footers you go out on to catch a few fish,” he said.

I was a bit uncomfortable here. I generally avoid discussing the boat building business my grandfather started so many years ago, mainly because it is rather successful, and I never want to be judged on that. If I’m to be judged, I prefer it to be on my own strengths. And weaknesses.

But the business had suddenly become rather relevant.

“Well, Joe, it did begin with sailboats not much bigger than that. But those little boats were extremely well built, and their success in international sailing races led to bigger boats. And bigger wins. Eventually, someone asked if the same craftsmanship and speed could be applied to a pleasure boat. Our first superyacht won some prestigious awards, and the
Waiata Yachts
name began to spread.”

This was news to Chen, and she simply stared.

“So this Vatchenko owns a sailboat you built?”

“
Trance
. Delivered her only a couple of months ago.”

Chen had been typing, and as she spun her computer around for us to see it showed a picture of Vatchenko’s yacht. “So you built
this
?”

“Haley, to be perfectly honest, I had nothing to do with it,” I said, smiling. “A man named Hamish actually runs the business. They just call me when extra cleanup is needed in the toilet.”

“I’m sure.” She looked up to the ceiling and exhaled, letting me know that questions about my life back in New Zealand would have to wait for another day. “The real question I’ve been asking myself is: what does a billionaire have to do with this attack?”

“That is the question,” Sterba said. He turned to me and asked, “What do you know about him?”

“Self-made investor, commodities trader as well, I think. Worth close to a billion, I recall. Hamish was never a fan, always complaining about how arrogant he was. But in the superyacht world, that tends to come with the territory.”

“Doesn’t help us much.”

I sat up and looked out of Kahembe’s window. The sun was low, bringing a golden cast to the dirt road below and the thick bush beyond.

“I’ve got an idea, though,” I said. “I know you briefed Director Nichols on the completion of our mission while the doctors were looking after Haley and me. Think he’s up for another call?”

“Guy was over the moon that his ‘troubleshooters’ idea worked. He’ll take your call in a second.”

I looked at Chen, my eyebrows raised. She spun her computer back around and began tapping some keys. We waited a minute as a secure connection was made, and then the face of the DNI appeared on her screen.

“Bravo Zulu, Jackson,” he said, a smile on his face.

“Thank you, sir,” I replied. His voice and image were so clear, I felt my shoulders pull back at attention as if he was in the room with us. Chen and Sterba adjusted their chairs so that they too appeared on the Director’s monitor back outside of D.C.

“Joe, we’ve already begun to act on some of your recommendations. Fort Benning will be sending some men to provide training for the Arusha police. And State will be putting together a plan to assist in digitizing Tanzania’s various databases. We’ve just had word from Dar es Salaam that the man who impersonated Naseeb Aman has a history. With some electronic record, that may have come to light sooner.”

Chen looked over at Sterba. “I was going to ask for something similar. Good call, Joe.”

Sterba gave a shy smile and shrugged. “Kahembe’s a good man, and his people are good. If we can give some training and equipment, the region will be safe with these men.”

“Sir, Commander Chen has been working calls made by our Naseeb impersonator. There was only one to a phone in Jeddah. It was a burner. But it made two calls.”

“Go on.”

“Nothing on one call. But the other was made to Ivan Vatchenko.”

The director tapped away on his computer.

“OK, I have a very thin dossier on him. Not much, and likely public domain. Ukrainian. Nearly one billion in assets, gives some details on his investments, along with a few suspicions about how he became successful so quickly.” He looked up from his screen back into the camera, and asked, “Do you think he is involved in the attacks there?”

“The call to him from a burner we’ve connected to the attack certainly puts him in the mix,” I replied.

“I’ll have Langley look into him. We’ll get a location, see if we can get eyes and ears on him.”

I looked at Chen, then Sterba, who nodded.

“Sir, I may be able to take care of that.”

The DNI paused. “Explain.”

“It’s probably not in my file, but my family’s business in New Zealand is building yachts.”

“I did know that, Jackson. Landon and I went a lot deeper than just your files.”

Chen’s eyes went a little wide, thinking about the DNI reviewing her youthful indiscretions as a Stanford undergrad. Sterba had likely expected as much, because the corner of his mouth turned up slightly.

“A couple of months ago, we delivered
Trance
, a beautiful 40-meter sloop, to Vatchenko in the South of France.”

“You
know
him?” the DNI asked.

“No, sir, I haven’t met him. Our managing director, Hamish, has. I recall he wasn’t impressed. Hamish is a rather proper bloke, and Vatchenko came across as a bit of a blowhard.”

“So what do you propose?”

“I’d like to show him how important customer service is to all of us at Waiata Yachts.”

A
s we walked back
to the hotel, I gave Chen and Sterba the broad strokes of my plan. They were skeptical to say the least. But knowing that we needed to walk these attacks back to the source, and without a better approach available, they reluctantly agreed.

For now, though, we needed sleep. Upon entering our suite, we noticed a basket of oranges sitting atop the coffee table that hadn’t been there before. A ribbon was tied into a bow on the handle.

Chen pointed to it. “Looks like the hotel management sends their compliments,” she said.

There was no card on or near the basket. I ran my finger across the ribbon. It was a blue that triggered a memory. I stared at it for a minute, trying to think why this mattered. But the chase, not to mention the grenade, had taken their toll, and I was simply too tired to bring it to the surface.