Sanam bowed his head in concession.
"You are alone?" Archer asked.
"Those were your instructions."
"Good," Archer said, then he smiled broadly. "Shall we walk?"
They headed across the field in no particular direction. Archer could sense Sanam reluctant to start the conversation, so he took the lead.
"Your message mentioned a problem," Archer said.
"Yes," Sanam said.
"Well?"
"The remote controls for the detonators. We've tested them, but the thickness of the dam prevents them from working."
Of course they didn't work. But he now raised his voice in indignation. "Are you saying I gave you faulty equipment?"
"No, I am not saying that. The remotes under normal conditions work fine. But the radio signal is unable to penetrate the concrete."
"Perhaps you don't have them rigged properly," Archer said. He was enjoying toying with this man who thought of him as an ally.
"They are rigged exactly per the instructions."
Archer grew silent, acting as if he were in deep thought. "Somehow the security services must have added special masking material in the dam," he said. "But we cannot miss this opportunity."
"I agree. We are hoping you can get replacements that will work in time?"
"I will try. But the window is short and I fear they may not make it."
"But if they don't, we will be forced to abort."
Archer paused for effect, then leaned toward the Pakistani.
"Actually, that's not entirely true."
Sanam played Archer's words over and over in his mind on the drive back to the hut where he would be spending the night. Archer had promised to do all he could to get the new remotes, but Sanam knew the probability of this was very low.
It was Archer's suggested alternate plan that was troubling Sanam most. It would solve the problem, but Sanam wished he could come up with something better. Unfortunately by the time he arrived, nothing had come to him.
Umer and two of his other men were waiting for him inside.
"So?" Umer asked.
"He is trying to get us replacements."
"Trying?" Umer said. "If he doesn't get the replacements, all our work will mean nothing."
The other two men voiced their agreement.
"What do you expect to happen?" Sanam said, more anger in his voice than he meant. "That they appear out of the air?"
No one said anything for several moments. Then Umer asked, "Did he at least say when he would know if he could get them?"
"He told me he would contact us by the morning."
Umer nodded. "Then we will at least know if we will be able to carry out the plan. If he can't get them in time, we can use the explosives elsewhere. There are plenty of other worthy targets."
"But none as big as this," Sanam said.
The room fell silent, everyone knowing he was right.
With a deep breath, he looked at his men. "The plan will go forward with or without the remotes."
"What are you talking about?" Umer said. "How will we set the explosives off without the remotes?"
"There is a way," Sanam said.
"What way?" Umer asked.
Sanam paused, still hoping an alternative answer would come to him, but none did. "We will set them off manually. They can be rigged so only one man can do it."
Umer stared at him.
"It is the only way," Sanam said.
"It can not be just anyone," Umer said. "It would have to be someone we trust will not back out. We don't have anyone I trust that much."
"We have one," Sanam said.
Sanam locked eyes with his friend, and in that moment he knew Umer realized the only possibility.
"Me," Umer said. Not a question.
Sanam said nothing.
14
LEE CHILD
The trouble with laptop computers was battery life. The trouble with stolen laptop computers was that they rarely came with chargers. Unless you were lucky enough to target the kind of dork who carried an ugly nylon case everywhere, full of wires and accessories. But the Sorbonne student hadn't been that kind of dork. All Nora and Charley had was the guy's MacBook Air, thin, sleek, naked and eating power like it was starving. An icon shaped like a black empty battery suddenly changed to a red empty battery. Then it started flashing. It was winking away to itself, upper right margin of the screen. Directly above Wiki Chang's face.
Tesla told him, "This thing is going to shut down any minute. We'll have to find an Internet cafe."
Chang said, "No, don't do that. You're in Paris. For all we know the Internet cafes are hooked up to the security services."
"So what do we do?"
"Duh? Go buy a charger."
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"It's an Apple. It's got a weird little doohickey."
Chang's eyes left Tesla's and flicked away to another screen. Then they came back. "They were planning to build an Apple store under the glass pyramid at the Louvre. Maybe it's open now."
"OK. We'll find it."
"Not yet. Stay with me. I have news. At least, I think I do. The trace on the destination cell? It's still bouncing around. I got Kashmir, Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand and Canada."
"That's not news. It means their software is still working, that's all."
"I'm not so sure. It switches every two seconds. Like clockwork. Which is how I would expect it to be written. But at the beginning it showed Kashmir for three seconds. Not two. I'm wondering if it failed to lock first time. Maybe it exposed its true location."
"That's a leap."
"Not really. Think about it from the other end. Who wrote this program? A guy like me, that's who. And what do I know about countries of the world? Not much. I can't sit here and name them all. I certainly don't know them all. To me, Kashmir is a Led Zeppelin song."
"So?"
"So I would need some kind of list."
"They're called atlases."
"A printed book? I don't think so. Not for a programmer. He'd hack a list from somewhere. The UN, maybe, but that's probably too secure. My guess is he tried an inside joke and hacked Nokia or someone for cell phone sales by country. And you know what? Turns out, Kashmir isn't a country. Not officially."
No answer from Tesla.
"And even if it was, I bet Nokia doesn't sell much there."
The red icon was still flashing.
Chang said, "OK, I know, it's only a hunch, but I think I'm right. I think the software failed, just briefly. I think Kashmir is the true location."
"We've got to tell Harold."
"Still no word on my end. You?"
"No."
"Well, there's more."
"Be quick."
"I have other programs running. Mostly for fun, but they're all linked. I got a flag from a Federal Aviation Authority database. There's a flight plan filed from D.C. airspace to Lahore, which is the nearest long runway to the Kashmir region. The tail number comes back to a crop duster in Kansas."
"Wiki, make your damn point, will you? We have no time."
"OK, a crop duster from Kansas doesn't need to file a flight plan and it certainly can't fly intercontinental. So it's bogus. It's something I've seen before. It's what they do when one of the Air Force Ones is prepping to fly."
"What do you mean, one of? There's only one Air Force One."
"No, there are three. Whichever, if the president is on board, that's called Air Force One. Otherwise it's just a government plane."
"So what are you saying?"
"Either the president or some big-shot cabinet member is going to Kashmir. Soon. And that's where the bad guy is."
The laptop screen died.
The helicopter came low over an outer Moscow suburb and banked and turned toward an airfield a mile away to the east. Not Domodedovo. A private field. Maybe once military and now civilian. Or shared. But it was a big place. Runways and taxiways were laid out in a huge
triangle. There were enormous hangars and long low buildings. There were parked planes of every size. Small Gulfstreams and Lears and Grummans, big Airbuses and Boeings. Nothing less than twenty million dollars. The biggest was a wide-body Boeing 777. Two hundred feet long, two hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip, probably two hundred million to buy. Chernayev's, Middleton thought. It was a definitive Russian-rich-guy statement, and the helicopter was heading straight for it.
The transfer was fast. Chernayev and Middleton ducked low under the beating rotor and ran bent over to a set of steps set on a pick-up platform. They hustled up and entered through the Boeing's forward door and stepped into a space that reminded Middleton of the house off Pyatnitskaya Street, where he had met Korovin, which in turn had reminded him of Boodle's Club in London. There was oak paneling everywhere and dark patterned carpet and oil paintings and heavy leather furniture and the smell of Cuban cigars.
"Business must be good," he said.
Chernayev said, "I can't complain."
The door sucked shut behind them and the world went quiet, except for the hiss of air and the whir and tick of the spooling engines. The cabin PA was relaying the cockpit chatter, every statement made first in Russian and then again in English, world aviation's default language. Clearance for takeoff was immediate. Middleton guessed that no one ever kept Chernayev waiting. The engine noise got louder and the plane started to taxi. No delay. It turned onto the runway and didn't even pause. It just accelerated hard and bucked and strained and then took off, carrying two men in a space fit for three hundred.
Chernayev said, "Enjoy the flight, Harry."
Which Middleton was prepared to do, except that his musicologist's sense of harmony was disrupted by two things. First, the oil paintings were wrong. They were Renoirs. Beautiful canvases, no question, rich, glowing, intimate, and worth probably thirty million each. But inappropriate. London club decor was frozen in a time before Renoir ever picked up a brush. Gainsborough or Stubbs or Constable would have been more authentic.
The second thing on Middleton's mind was exactly the way the plane's interior recalled the club in the house off Pyatnitskaya Street. He couldn't get over the way he had pulled the SIG's trigger and nothing had happened. He had been ripped off. Which wasn't the end of the world, although it might have been. But it could be the end of the world for Chernayev and people like him.
Middleton said, "Do you own a guy called Volodya?"
"Own?" Chernayev said. "I don't own people."
"He's a gun dealer in an antiques store on the Old Arbat. Right across from where the Praga restaurant was. A guy like that in the new Moscow, someone owns him. Could be you."
"I know him. That's all I'll admit. Did he displease you in some way?"
"He sold me a SIG P229 for two grand. Plus five hundred for the ammunition. The gun didn't work."
"That's not good."
"Damn right it's not. Business requires trust. You'll suffer in the end. You'll be back in a plain old Gulfstream before you know it."
"I apologize. I'll make it up to you. When we're done I'll give you a SIG that works."
"I don't want a SIG. I prefer Berettas."
"The American military always did. But you must let me give you something."
Middleton smiled. "There was a stall selling Russian nesting dolls with foreign leaders' faces on them. My daughter would like them."
"Those things? They're just crude attempts at humor. You know how paranoid Russians are. The assumption is that behind our leaders are other leaders. And behind them, others still. Who do you suppose they paint at the very center?"
"I don't know," Middleton said.
The other trouble with stolen laptop computers was that people generally wanted them back. The student from the Sorbonne sure did. Not really because of the euro value of the hardware. But because of the value of the files it stored. His poems were on there. His play. The start of his novel. The stuff that would win him the Prix Goncourt one day. Plus some term papers. Like everyone else in the world, his back-up routine was haphazard.
He went to the cops. He took witnesses. No one had seen the actual snatch. But three friends recalled two American women. The cops weren't very interested. Paris was full of bigger stuff--Muslim unrest, terrorism, heists, dope. But then one of the three friends said that one of the two American women had been pale and moving awkwardly, like she was in pain, and she had a dark stain all over her shirt, like blood.
A possible gunshot wound, in a city where guns were still rare, and in a city where two victims had just turned up shot to death.
The cops weren't dumb. They knew the chances were that the laptop would be trashed when the battery ran out. On the other hand, the MacBook Air was an attractive thing. Very desirable. So maybe the thieves would try to buy a charger. Which gave them a limited number of destinations in Paris. Easy enough to stake them all out. No shortage of young officers willing to hang around such places. When they were bored with the shiny toys, they could look at the tourist girls.
Archer looked again at the picture of Charley Middleton, dead. He revered it, because he liked dead people, and because it came from Jana. It was like a love letter. It showed the girl down and crumpled, in a bloody shirt. The resolution wasn't great. But it was good enough to be interesting.
And good enough to be a little unsettling.
There were two things Archer wasn't quite sure about. The first was the dead girl's posture. Archer had seen plenty of dead people, some quite recently. There was nothing like the slackness and the emptiness of a corpse. And he wasn't sure those characteristics were there, in Charley Middleton's body. And the bloodstained shirt didn't look . . . organic. It didn't look like she had been wearing it at the time of death. It looked . . . thrown on, maybe afterward.
Which made no sense.
And there was a scrap of paper that had apparently spilled out of a trash-can. Scribbled green handwriting that seemed to make no sense either. A code, perhaps, or a foreign alphabet. Maybe Cyrillic. Or a combination of foreign letters and numbers. He stared at it for a long moment.
Then he turned his phone upside down.
GREEN LANTERN. EVAC.
He thought of Harris, immediately. For a moment he wished it had not been necessary to eliminate him. Harris had loved comic books. Which was a part of what had made him a useless wastrel. But he would have understood the reference, maybe.
Archer texted Jana: CALL ME NOW.
Jana's phone made a sound in Nora's pocket just as she and Charley stepped into an Apple reseller on the Boulevard Saint Germain. There had been no Apple store under the Louvre pyramid. Planned, but not yet built. Mired in bureaucracy. Old Europe. The Saint Germain place had been recommended by a clerk in an Orange cell phone store. Orange was the old France Telecom and was the exclusive carrier for the new iPhone in France. An iPhone charger was OK for an iPod, but it wouldn't fit the MacBook Air doohickey. Hence a taxi ride and a short search along a row of chic boutiques.
There were two guys loitering in the corner of the store. Tesla noticed them immediately. She thought: cops. Then Jana's phone made the sound and she delayed for a crucial second. She saw the cops staring at her, at her face, at her shirt, at her awkward posture.
She said, "Charley?"
"Yes?"
"Run."
"What?"
"Now."
The big Boeing flew on, straight and level, thirty-eight thousand feet. Middleton finished his soda and said, "Dams are big things."
Chernayev said, "Tell me about it. I paid for most of the concrete."
"Too big to destroy with explosives. The problem has been studied many times, both defensively and offensively."
"I know. So whatever wild card is in play here is not only wild but also quite possibly stupid."
"So why worry?"
"The dam will survive. No doubt about that. But we can't issue the same guarantee about your secretary of state."
"She dies, there'll be a world war
."
Chernayev said, "I don't want that."
"Just a regional war?"
"First things first, Harry."
Tesla was hampered by the raging pain in her shoulder, so Charley got out to the street first. Nora turned at the door and flung the first thing that came to hand, which was Jana's cell phone from her pocket. It caught the leading cop hard under the eye and he spun away and crashed into a glass display case and sent small technical items skittering across the floor. The second cop stumbled and sidestepped and Tesla had a two-yard lead by the time she hit the sidewalk.
Charley had bolted straight through the traffic. Panic, probably, but smart too. Tesla plunged after her through yelping tires and blasting horns. Together they made it across.
They ran.
They had no idea where they were going. They turned randomly left and right in alleys and entrances and barged through knots of people. Every step sent bolts of agony through Nora's body and every accidental contact with passersby nearly killed her. But adrenaline kept her moving.
Moving, but not fast enough.
The cops were in their own city and they had radios. To Tesla and Charley, the streets were a maze. To the cops, the streets were a map they knew by heart. Alleys had exits and exits could be blocked. Sirens were howling everywhere, feet were pounding, whistles were blowing, radio chatter was loud in the air. Twice Tesla and Charley had to jam to a halt and spin around and take off again in the direction they had come. Twice the streets behind them were blocked, so they ducked into stores and barged through and came out through rear entrances to start all over again. Once a cop got his hand on Charley's sleeve, and she whirled and ducked and pulled loose and fled.
In the end, Tesla's pain saved them. They stopped running. Counterintuitive, but the right move in a mobile game. Fugitives run. Pursuers look for rapid movement. People sitting still pass unnoticed.
They dragged themselves through a shirt maker's door and collapsed breathless on a sofa. Two seconds later a squad of police ran past the entrance to the store without a second glance. The shirt maker approached, tape measure around his neck.
Charley said, "We're waiting for my father."
The shirt maker withdrew.
Charley whispered, "What now?"
Tesla said, "Airport."
"But our stuff is at the hotel."
"Passport?"
"Here."
"We'll leave the rest of our stuff. We have to go."