“For God’s sake, Alan,” growled Harper. “How the hell are we supposed to operate if State keeps sticking its nose in? We’re at the sharp end here.”
“I’m aware of that, Gordon, but State had to patch up the tears the sharp end made in our relationship with the Pakistanis after the last STS mission. They don’t want to have to do it again with Russia or China. And that’s direct from the president. State’s still in shock after Sandra Easton’s assassination—and the international situation is already tense enough without American agents causing a diplomatic incident.”
Morgan was unhappy with the development, but had no choice but to take it on board. “So, we need a deniable plan, then. Suggestions?”
Levon raised a hand. “Are we talking a straightforward grab, like Mr. Baxter wants, or do we need this guy to stay oblivious?”
“The latter would be better,” said Morgan. “If Zykov’s contacts realize we got to him, they might go underground, and take Lamplighter with them. If al-Rais is willing to pay seven million dollars for it, he’ll be able to find another middleman to replace Zykov. And we might not know who that middleman is until it’s too late.”
Bianca hesitated before speaking, feeling extremely self-conscious and out of place. “Ah … what else do you know about this Zykov?” All eyes turned to her. “You said he was paranoid—was that based on any specific assessment, or just because he’s got six guys with no necks surrounding him?”
Kiddrick was about twelve feet from her, but his mutter of “So now we’re listening to the hired help?” was perfectly audible. Others also voiced similar feelings, though more quietly.
Tony stared them down. “Dr. Childs makes a good point. He is paranoid, yes—because people really are out to get him. He has friends in high places, but he’s also made a lot of enemies. His file—and criminal record—says he’s prone to violence. He’s even attacked close friends because they did something to make him mad.”
“Sounds like a nice guy,” Bianca said sarcastically. “But could you use that against him? Do something that makes him mad enough to drop his guard?”
“Something like taking him for a quarter million dollars at poker?” Everyone looked around as Adam spoke. He was standing unobtrusively at the edge of the group.
Tony grinned. “Something like that, yes. If we use the persona of a world-class card sharp …”
“I’m sure we’ve got someone suitable,” said Morgan. “All right! We know the person, we know the place. What we need now is a plan. Get on it. I want first proposals by eleven AM, and we’ll take things from there.”
The assembly broke up, everyone dispersing with purpose. As Morgan departed with Harper and Sternberg, Tony came over to Bianca. “Good call.”
She felt a little embarrassed at the praise. “It was fairly obvious—someone else would have said it if I hadn’t.”
“But you said it first. Looks like Roger was right—you really are the perfect choice to take his place.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But thanks for backing me up.”
“No problem.” He smiled at her, then addressed his colleagues. “Okay, I want everyone to divide up into working groups. We need as much information as we can find on Zykov, Hadrami, known associates, and the Imperial Casino in Macao, plus any local assets we might have. We have forty-eight hours to work out how to crack this guy, and seventeen of them will be taken up by flying there. So get those brains started, people!”
For the second time in four days, Bianca found herself aboard a private jet.
This aircraft was considerably larger than the one that had brought her to Washington; she didn’t know the type, but she had been aboard similarly sized airliners on regular commercial flights. It seemed excessive, since the team going to Macao comprised only thirteen people including herself, but she assumed that STS had simply requisitioned the first available US government jet.
It gave her room to stretch out, though. A general plan had been worked out in Washington, and was now being fine-tuned en route, Levon and others offering contributions from the other end of a satellite link with the Bullpen. Tactics were not her concern, however, so she was taking a break from the discussion in the VIP section at the front of the cabin.
She looked out of a porthole. Nothing was visible beyond except blue, the empty sky and the Pacific mirror images against the pale line of the horizon. A shift of focus, and she caught her own reflection in the window. “What the hell am I doing here?” she whispered.
It was not the first time recently that she had asked herself the question.
Someone opened the dividing curtain. She looked around. “Hey,” said Tony, coming to her seat.
“Hi. What’s up?”
“Work, I’m afraid. We have a plan. We’re about to present it to Martin.”
Bianca stood and followed him out. Most of the team were seated at a large table, others overflowing onto the rows of standard aircraft seats behind it. There was a space at the table for her. She took it, then looked up at the screen on the bulkhead.
It was divided into three windows, the faces of Morgan, Levon, and Kiddrick occupying them. Morgan finished talking to someone off camera and tapped a button to unmute his microphone. “Okay. Let’s have it.”
Tony took his own seat between Bianca and Adam. “Right. We know that Zykov is staying in one of the Imperial’s penthouses, and Levon got the plans from the French firm of architects who designed the place.”
Levon beamed on his screen. “Right down to the position of the last faucet. There might be a lot of security in the casino, but there was hardly any on the architects’ servers!”
“The penthouses have private elevator access and twenty-four-hour concierges, as well as full CCTV coverage of the hallways outside,” Tony went on. “The chances of entering unseen that way are almost zero. We thought about getting into his penthouse from the roof, but it’d be tricky—especially for Dr. Childs.”
Bianca blinked in surprise. “What?”
“Wherever we grab Zykov, you need to be there, remember?” said Tony. “You have to administer the drugs. And we figured that you probably wouldn’t want to climb along the edge of a fiftieth-story rooftop.”
“While carrying about twenty pounds of PERSONA gear,” Kiddrick added with sardonic pleasure.
“So the penthouse was out. But,” Tony said, nodding at Baxter, “John came up with an alternative that we think will work.”
“It follows on from what Dr. Childs suggested,” Baxter began. “We make Zykov mad as hell by having Adam clean him out, and get in his face about it. Really gloat, maybe even drop a hint that he was cheating.”
“Which he will be, of course,” said Holly Jo. “Every edge we can give Adam, he’ll have.”
“Even Zykov won’t be dumb enough to do anything in the casino itself—there are cameras covering every square inch, and probably a couple hundred security guards. If he gets arrested, he won’t be able to complete the deal with al-Rais. But if we can get him outside the casino …”
“That gives us freer rein to operate,” finished Morgan, nodding. “What are you thinking?”
Tony took over the explanation once more. “The Imperial is brand new; it only opened this year. It’s in a part of Macao called Cotai, which is reclaimed land between two of the other islands. The whole area is still being developed—right now, some parts of it are actually empty. Our thinking is that if we can get Zykov riled enough to follow Adam out of the casino to somewhere with nobody around, we can catch him there.”
“How?” asked Morgan.
“We can’t just mug him, like we did with Syed,” said Baxter. “We have to deal with his bodyguards at the same time. We’ve got to take them all out simultaneously.”
Bianca was shocked. “Wait, you mean—kill them?”
“That’d be kind of a giveaway to Zykov that something untoward was going on,” Kiddrick sniped. “Of course not.”
“He means knock them out,” Tony assure
d her. “There are various fast-acting drugs we can use. It means setting things up very carefully—we can’t just shoot tranquilizer darts at them. But if we play things right, Zykov will have to follow Adam from the casino in a cab. And we can make sure he gets into one of ours. Billy”—he glanced at the team’s technician, a skinny, taciturn young man who was typing on a laptop with intense concentration—“has worked out a way to rig the cab so that all the passengers will be unconscious just a couple of seconds after the collision. He’s sending the details on to our people in Macao. They should have started fitting it by the time we land.”
“So, a staged car crash?” Morgan asked.
“Yeah. There are risks, but we’ve done it before. Like in Rio.”
Adam spoke for the first time. “How did it go?”
“Fine,” said Tony. “The target suffered some minor scrapes, but he bought the story that he’d been knocked out. It gave us enough time to get his persona.”
Bianca suddenly realized the comment’s implication: The Persona Project had been carrying out missions before Adam joined it. So he wasn’t its first agent?
“If you’re sure you can make it work, then yes, do it,” said Morgan. “So how are you going to make sure Zykov gets mad enough to follow Adam? Can you actually beat him?”
“We think so,” said Tony. “The persona Adam will be using is a top-flight card player. He knows every trick in the book—and some that aren’t.”
“He’s a cheat?”
“He spent three months in a Nevada prison for it.”
Kyle was unimpressed. “So maybe he’s not that good.”
“He was sold out by his accomplice—nobody caught him during the game itself,” Tony reassured him.
“And we can help Adam out as well,” said Levon. “I’ve got a program that counts cards. It won’t be perfect, ’cause the casino switches decks every few games, but it’ll still give him an edge. If we rig him with a camera so we can see the other cards in play, the computer can calculate what the other players might have in their hands. Then Holly Jo tells Adam that through the earwig.”
“It’s still not a guarantee that you’ll win, though,” Bianca pointed out. “I read Zykov’s file—as well as being just a really unpleasant guy, I’d say that he has intermittent explosive disorder. It means he sometimes has a disproportionately angry response if he’s provoked,” she added by way of explanation. “It’s often linked with other disorders like pathological gambling, and he fits the bill for that as well. But it doesn’t mean that he’s going to explode with rage whenever he gets a bad hand, or start sweating uncontrollably if he’s bluffing. His responses might be very subtle. I mean, he usually wins, so he’s probably got a very good poker face.”
“He’ll have everybody at STS watching that face,” countered Kiddrick. “The slightest tell, and we’ll see it.”
Tony looked doubtful. “Maybe not. The Imperial’s VIP rooms have metal detectors at the entrance, according to the architects’ plans. With that much money at stake, they don’t want anybody sneaking in gadgets to help them cheat. The only camera we’d be able to get in there without tripping an alarm would be a skittle.”
“Excuse me?” said Bianca.
“A skittle—it’s our nickname for a micro video camera and transmitter. It’s about the size of a Skittle; you know, the candy.”
“Oh right. Wow, that’s tiny.”
“Yeah. But because it’s so small, the picture quality isn’t great. It should be able to read cards on the table, but I don’t know about spotting tiny changes of expression on somebody sitting on the far side.”
“We need more eyes in there,” suggested Morgan. “Someone who can watch the other players as well.”
Tony nodded. “We’ve got enough contingency cash to cover a second player.”
Kyle immediately stuck his hand up. “I volunteer!”
“Point one,” said Holly Jo, “you’re not exactly an expert at picking up subtle changes in people’s emotions. Point two, nobody would ever believe you were worth a quarter of a million dollars.”
“Hey!” he protested.
“Besides,” said Tony, “we need you tracking Adam and Zykov with the UAV once they leave the hotel. No, it would have to be someone else. Someone with …” He turned slowly to Bianca. “… a background in psychology. How are your poker skills?”
“What?” she said, almost laughing before realizing that he was serious. “Wait a minute! I’m only supposed to be here to work out the drug dosages, and now you want me to be an agent? Forget it!”
“No, it could work,” said Morgan. “Everyone else on the team will have an active role, either during the poker game or in capturing Zykov. But you don’t need to do anything until we actually have him. Someone else at that table working with Adam increases our chances of taking Zykov to the cleaners.”
“Think of it as a night on the town—with two hundred and fifty k, on us,” Tony added. “All you’ll have to do is make sure you lose to Adam. It might even be fun.”
“I was thinking more that all that money could do an awful lot of good for society,” replied Bianca. “Rather than risking it ending up in the pocket of some arms-dealing scumbag.”
“It will be doing good,” said Morgan, with a firmness that warned Bianca the decision had been made, no matter her opinion. “It’ll be helping to prevent the world’s most dangerous terrorist from committing a major attack. I think that’s worth an evening of your time, don’t you?”
She couldn’t come up with any objections that didn’t sound selfish and petty. “You seriously want to give me a quarter of a million dollars and have me lose it all at poker?” she asked instead. “How do you know I won’t just run off into the night with it?”
“Because that wouldn’t be like you,” said Adam. The quiet comment surprised everyone, not least Bianca.
“Okay, then,” Morgan said. “Unless someone comes up with anything better by the time you land, that’s the plan. Clean Zykov out, get him mad, set up a car crash, get what’s in his head. Tony, give me an update on the operational details in … six hours.”
“Will do,” said Tony.
“All right. Good luck, everybody.”
He disconnected, his third of the screen going blank. Kiddrick followed suit almost immediately. “If you guys need anything, let me know,” said Levon. “I’ll get to work on this card-counting program.”
Holly Jo raised an eyebrow. “I thought you said you already had it.”
“Well, I’ve got it in my head—I’ve got to write it, obviously! Don’t worry, it’s just calculating probabilities. Ain’t no big thing. Catch you later.”
He disappeared from the screen. Tony looked at the others around the table. “Everyone knows what they’re doing? Good. Let’s grab this guy.”
The meeting broke up, its members dispersing into smaller groups. Bianca watched Adam as he stood. Since the incident with her car more than a day before, he had revealed no more of the brief glimpses of an actual personality behind the expressionless face—until his comment about her personality. It suggested that he was not as disinterested as he appeared … but now the blinds had come down again. If he was thinking about anything other than the mission, it didn’t show.
“Bianca?” said Tony, gesturing toward the forward compartment.
She nodded and went with him. She hesitated at the dividing curtain, looking back at Adam.
“Something wrong?” Tony asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said, still regarding Adam before finally turning away. “When you were talking about setting up the car crash, you said you’d done it before, to get a copy of someone’s persona, but Adam didn’t know anything about it.”
“No, he wouldn’t have.” He motioned for her to take a seat, waiting politely until she was down before sitting beside her.
“So Adam isn’t the Persona Project’s first agent?”
“There was someone else before him.” A pause. “Me.”
>
She was surprised. “You?”
He turned his head and used his thumb and forefinger to part his hair in a particular spot, revealing a small scar. “I’ve still got the electrode filaments inside my skull; they decided it was too risky to take them out. So in theory, I could still use the PERSONA device to take on someone else’s personality. In practice, though …”
“What?”
He chewed on his lower lip, reluctant. “It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long flight.” They were still more than eight hours from Macao.
“Okay. Just keep it to yourself. Not everybody out there”—a nod toward the other cabin—“knows the whole story, and some of it I’d prefer to keep that way. Not for security reasons, just … personal ones.”
“I won’t say a word,” she promised.
“Thanks.” He smiled briefly. “So, before I became the Persona Project’s head of field operations, I was its first field agent. In other words, I was the guinea pig.”
“How short a straw did you draw to get that assignment?”
“Actually, I volunteered. I used to be US Army—First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta,” he said proudly, before clarifying to the uncomprehending Englishwoman, “Delta Force. Like the British SAS.”
Again, she was surprised. “Really? You don’t look like …”
One side of his mouth creased into a sardonic grin. “A grunt?”
“I was going to say some sort of grim-faced super-soldier, actually. Aren’t they all supposed to have macho names like Flint or Stone, or Gristle?”
“What’s wrong with Carpenter?” he said in mock-offense. “There have been some badass carpenters in history. One had a whole book written about him. Two thousand years ago, or thereabouts.”
“No besmirchment of your good name intended. I meant, you don’t look … I don’t know, like a strip of old leather that’s been chewed by the dog. That’s the mental picture I have of those guys. Like John Baxter.”
Tony burst into laughter. “Oh, that’s fantastic!” he said. “But you’re right, he kinda does, doesn’t he?”