Unacceptable Risk (18 page)

"If you find him. Kill him," Sam commanded.

"Roger that." And the man was gone.

They took Michael to his room, where nurses swarmed him, checking the sutures even before the doctor arrived. Dr. Ayala's death had produced many somber faces. Soon the off-duty guards began congregating and Sam began with the new instructions. Grady showed no emotion whatsoever and Sam knew it was a tour de force of self-control that would end when the danger was past. When the last of the guards was in place and Yodo had returned from a fruitless search, Grady stepped out of the room. Sam followed and found her sobbing against a wall. Without waiting for good-byes Sam walked her to the elevators and out to the front of the hospital, where he hailed a cab and took her to her room at the Copacabana Palace. Safe at the hotel, she still had a bit of a strange look in her eyes and there was terrible bruising on her neck. When he nudged her to take a shower, and he tried to close the bathroom door, she started crying. When he opened it, she clung to him—and so he waited for what seemed a half hour, just holding her. This time when he closed the door, she took a shower. When she had donned new underwear and a T-shirt, he crawled, fully clothed, in bed with her. Wrapping his arms around her back, he held her tight and taught her to breathe in her nose and out her mouth—slow, regular deep breaths. Then he told her things that Grandfather had told him when he first knew him. He told them as Grandfather had told them to him as best he could remember them. Then Grady slept.

Baptiste walked through London's Heathrow Airport to the location where he was to meet Rene. It was like a rat maze and didn't have the open feel of the tall-ceilinged de Gaulle International Airport. The smells from the abundant restaurants, which according to Baptiste ranked among the worst in the world, forced him to breathe through his mouth.

He met Rene at the gate to the flight to Turkey.

"Are you getting anything out of Benoit?" Rene asked without preliminaries.

"She's cooperating. I think she's dribbling out the information. I'll see her again soon. Have you found Bowden's location? Confirmed that he survived?"

"Neither, though I can't imagine the shots killed him. I'll tell you, if Sam and his people spy as well as they fight, we'll never find Bowden now."

"Don't let the admiral hear you say that. I'll expect a report when I return from Turkey. Make sure you learn
something."

"Shall I use Meeks?" Rene asked.

"No. Stay away from Figgy."

"Why?"

"Because I don't trust him completely."

"But you're basing this Turkey trip on intel he gave you," Rene countered.

"Just do your job."

This was hardly a typical business trip to Turkey. It started with a flight from London to another international airport, followed by a ride in a government car down a highway, followed by a descent into the bowels of a government building in the desert that Baptiste hoped never to see again. When he arrived at the building, he encountered a gate in the midst of a Cyclone fence topped with razor wire. It wasn't as secure as a prison, but, then, when people were brought to this place, they were quickly reduced to physical wrecks and it didn't take much to hold them.

At the gate the guard spoke Turkish. Baptiste shrugged his shoulders, lapsing into English.

"I am a special contractor for the CIA."

"And I am Mickey Mouse." The man smirked. "How would I know this?"

"Because if I lied to your officer, you would make me drink camel piss and send me home a eunuch. That or kill me. Look, Figgy Meeks sent me."

"Why didn't you say so?"

Inside the building they stopped at a desk manned by a sergeant and two guards. The sergeant looked up with a steady, confident stare.

"What do you want?"

"Figgy Meeks, a CIA contractor, said you had a prisoner that I could interview. This man allegedly knows about a plot against the United States."

"We don't allow foreigners here. There must be some mix-up."

"I'll need to speak to your superior officer, then," Baptiste bluffed.

The sergeant stared at him a moment, then went down the hall and turned into a room. In a moment an officer appeared. Baptiste couldn't tell his rank from his shirt.

"What do you want?"

Baptiste repeated himself.

"I was told you might come. I can brief you. Alfawd knows nothing of significance, as I'm sure you already know."

"I still need to talk with him."

"Please, you are not the CIA. You are the French. So go to hell."

Baptiste felt a wave of fear and anger. He pulled his gun and stuck it under the officer's nose.

The sergeant jumped up and pulled his gun at the same moment the two guards leveled their M-16s.

"I am from the
C,
fucking
I
, fucking
A.
I am on contract. Figgy Meeks, retired agent of the CIA, was told by the director of the CIA to send someone here. If you want to be responsible for a bloodbath, you go ahead. I am ready to die. Are you?"

The officer looked to his men, then back at Baptiste.

"Don't think of me as French," Baptiste said, his tone softening. "Think of me as American. I work with Figgy Meeks. Figgy works with a man named Sam. Do you understand?"

The officer's eyes shifted again. "I have not heard of any Sam."

"I don't believe that."

"I need to call my commander."

"There's the phone."

The officer stepped to the sergeant's desk. He spoke rapid Turkish for a moment, then waited. There was more talk. Then they waited a long time, the officer still on the phone.

"My colonel called the CIA. The CIA called this Figgy. Figgy says to prove you are Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste Sourriaux."

Baptiste was sweating now in earnest. It was fear sweat, not heat sweat. It had finally sunk in—what he was doing here. The Turks were merciless.

He handed his wallet to the officer.

"Still, I am not satisfied," the Turk said at last. "Tell me the number of your office, Mr. French SDECE man."

Baptiste gave it to him.

'Tell me your boss's name."

"Admiral Larive."

The Turk raised his eyebrows.

"The very one," Baptiste said, sweat trickling under his collar.

The Turk dialed.

"I want to speak with the admiral." He looked at Baptiste and seemed perplexed. "They say I need an appointment."

"You will not get through to him like this."

"Tell me, madame," the officer said. "You are familiar with Jean-Baptiste Sourriaux? Could you describe him for me?"

There was a pause while the Turk listened.

"I will hand the phone to him and maybe he can convince you. His manhood depends on it. So, if you don't want him back with no balls, you better figure out a way."

"What does she say?"

"They don't give descriptions of army officers."

Baptiste took the phone.

"Marie, this is Baptiste. You need to tell this man what I look like and what my wife looks like. He has a picture of my wife to compare."

"How do I know it is really you and not a ruse?"

"Ask me something."

"Who does the admiral want to screw?"

"The new office girl. The blonde with a flat stomach and no tits."

"Put him back on."

The Turk listened for two minutes, then hung up the phone and looked to Baptiste. Faster than Baptiste could register it, he'd slapped the gun out of his hand, and two of his men had grabbed him from behind. The officer's expression remained impassive.

"If you ever pull a gun on a Turk again, I'll have you flayed alive." He nodded at the men, who released Baptiste. He put Baptiste's gun in his desk, then sat in the sergeant's chair. "We have already broken Alfawd. It was not a pretty sight. You can ask him whatever you want and he will tell you. He will suck your dick or give you his daughter if you want."

Baptiste nodded.

"Now get out of my sight."

The soldiers escorted Baptiste down two flights of stairs and past agonized graffiti on bare concrete walls into the bone-dry, gritty hell of the lower level. It smelled of blood and excrement even before they reached the small, miserable cells. Alfawd was a spindly little man with his shirt off; he was covered in caked-on blood. Unfortunately for him, he had been convicted of corrupting Turkish officials in high places. Some of them would be tried and thrown in jail forever, while the luckier ones would skate. The Turks were angry at the instruments of their own corruption, and one of these instruments was chained naked to a chair and muttering about the afterlife.

In the presence of two Turkish "investigators" and an Arabic translator, Baptiste was allowed to ask anything he wanted. The electrodes were still connected to the man's burned testicles.

"You know a man who calls himself Gaudet, Girard, Jean Valjean, and a host of other names, and who probably has French citizenship under some other name, and who is rumored to live in Quatram, and who was rumored to have lived in French Polynesia? You know this man?" Baptiste spoke in French and the translator restated it in Arabic.

Then the translator came back with the answer: "I have met with others and a man like that. I don't know if it is the same man."

"He has some science that works magic on people's brains. You know about that?"

"I have heard."

"What did you hear?"

"Not much. That he has a clever plan called Cordyceps. I have told this all before. I don't know much."

One of the guards flipped a switch. The man bounced off the chair, arching his back and screaming in Turkish, saliva foaming at the mouth. He urinated a trickle onto the seat. As a conductor it exacerbated his misery until the guard stopped the flow of electricity.

Baptiste flinched but only slightly. Alfawd choked and moaned incoherently.

"You need to tell it again, but with more details. Last time you left things out," the Turkish interrogator said. "We will need to wait a couple minutes. He will be confused now and incoherent." They all sat as if they were waiting for a bus. For the Turk it was all in a day's work.

"Tell us now about Gaudet."

"This man you are calling Gaudet had a beard, wore a hat and sunglasses even though it was indoors. There was no way at all to tell what he looked like."

Alfawd stopped for the translator and then the translator proceeded. "His body seemed normal, maybe five feet ten, but he was always sitting in my presence. He did not move. You could not tell his age, he was in the shadows, he spoke very quietly, and you had to strain to hear."

"What is Cordyceps?"

"Some sort of disease or fungus. It kills bugs by eating them inside out. It is what he is going to do to the United States."

"How?"

"I don't know. That was for later. But the stock markets of the world would collapse. Prices would drop. He could not kill the United States forever, but for a while they would be hurt. Crippled."

"How were you and Gaudet to make your money?"

"Precise details, I don't know, but we all know that you can make money if you can predict ahead of time what the world financial markets will do. The exact execution of it, we were not yet told."

"When is this to happen?"

"I don't know. We were to hear next week. I invested."

"How much?"

"Three million. The minimum. Others invested more."

"What exactly did you invest in?"

"It is like... what do the Americans call it... I cannot explain it. I am a little guy. I go with Habib and he understands. You put the money somehow in things that do good when America does like the beetle."

"Habib got you into this? You invest in what Habib invests in?"

"Yes. That is right."

"Who is Habib?"

The man rambled about a rich Saudi family that didn't interest Baptiste.

"Who else invested?"

"Other Saudis mostly, people with big money, one Lebanese man, a couple of Turkish men, and an American."