The cat and mouse game continued on with Helena playing disinterested and hard to get. It drove Damien wild. He wasn’t used to women saying no to him.
He kept “coincidentally” bumping into her. His unsettling
manservant
-cum-assistant, Jeffery, had been following her. She had spotted him each time, but had never let on. Finally, she gave in and agreed to dinner.
To his credit, he didn’t overdo it. He picked a small, local restaurant with exceptional food. He was a gentleman and very charming.
For their second date, he asked her what kind of food was her favorite. She said Italian. He flew her to Rome in his private jet, and she ate the best meal of her life.
After their third date, she began sleeping with him. It was the best sex Pierre Damien had ever had.
Bentzi had given her one task—to capture the man’s passwords so that they could access his hard drive and cell phone.
To do that, she had been issued what looked like a wall charger for her cell phone, but what in reality was a covert keystroke logger. It had the ability to sniff, decrypt, log, and report all keystrokes within its immediate vicinity. It even had a small, rechargeable internal battery that allowed it to work even after being unplugged. All she had to do was to position it near Damien when he was logging onto his devices.
As she had explained multiple times to Bentzi, that was a lot harder than it sounded. Damien never used his laptop around her and the only phone she ever saw him use was his iPhone, which he unlocked with his fingerprint. Eventually, she assured him, she would get the passwords. It would just take time. But then everything changed.
Bentzi had told her she was being recalled and told her to go back to her apartment, wait for his call, and not have any contact with Damien other than to feign illness. How Bentzi thought he would ever be able to get anyone closer to Damien was beyond her. He was going to toss it all away, toss his precious Israel to the wolves. It was beyond insane.
Then her phone had rung. It was Bentzi. He wanted to make her an offer, or more appropriately, he wanted to offer her an
incentive
.
“Go ahead,” she had said.
Gripping the phone, she listened as the Mossad agent laid it all out. Her first reaction was panic. He had used a name they had agreed never to speak of. Like Damien previously showing up every time she went out, she didn’t believe this was a coincidence either. Bentzi was either lying to her, or had been lying to her all along.
“How do I know I can trust you?” she asked.
It was one of the biggest enticements he could have ever placed in front of her. The Israeli known as “Enoch” ran the trafficking ring that had kidnapped her back home and had forced her into the sex trade. She wanted to exact her revenge on him almost as badly as she wanted out of her life with the Mossad.
Almost
.
Offering up Enoch was an act of desperation. Bentzi knew he couldn’t pull off his operation without her. Whatever Damien was planning, it was already in motion. If it was as devastating as the Mossad feared, they needed to get to the bottom of it, now.
She, on the other hand, didn’t care what happened to Israel. She didn’t care what happened to the United States either. If everything went according to her plan, she would be so far away from both, anything could happen, and it wouldn’t matter. All she cared about was getting out.
But if she could figuratively run over Enoch and drag his corpse through the parking lot as she made her exit, it would close several disturbing chapters in her life and allow her to move on from a very troubling part of her past.
Bentzi knew she had been dragging her feet, he just didn’t know why. After threatening to recall her to Tel Aviv, he was now offering her an incentive to stay and finish the job. Typical Mossad—stick first, then carrot.
She was going to have to push things, which meant there was a good chance she might screw up and walk away with nothing. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her lingerie drawer and said into the phone, “Deal.”
CHAPTER 21
C
ONGO
H
arvath never took his eyes from the man or his deaf son. Speaking to Jambo, he said, “Ask him again.”
The translator did, and Harvath studied the man’s face for any indication that he was lying. He was looking for microexpressions, sometimes referred to as
tells.
They were subconscious facial cues that indicated that a person was under duress because they were lying or had intent to do some other type of harm. So far he didn’t see any.
When the man replied, Jambo translated. Harvath didn’t see any signs that the man was lying. In fact, everything about him suggested he was telling the truth.
“Ask him about the video,” Harvath said. “Who filmed it?”
Jambo posed the question and then listened to the man’s response. Finally, he turned to Harvath and said, “He took the video.”
“
He
did?”
Jambo nodded.
“With what?”
Jambo asked the man and then replied, “With his cell phone.”
Harvath didn’t believe him. There was no reception anywhere near this village. “Tell him I want to see his phone,” he said.
Jambo bobbed his head up and down as the man spoke and then turned back to Harvath. “He doesn’t have it anymore.”
“Where is it?”
“He hid it in one of their trucks. The men who killed everyone in the clinic and then killed everyone in the village.”
“Why?”
“He was worried he would be killed too,” said Jambo. “There is no cellular service here. He pressed
send
and then hid the phone in a truck. He assumed that eventually the truck would pass into an area with reception and the message would be sent.”
Smart
. Harvath had to give the man credit. There was something, though, that was bothering him. “How did he know where to send it? How did he know that email address?”
Decker cleared her throat, and all eyes turned to her as she looked at Harvath. “Didn’t you see all the signs in the clinic?” she asked. “The banners?”
Harvath had seen lots of things, but he had been focused on figuring out what had happened. “What signs?”
“The ones advertising CARE International’s support of the clinic. Each of them has CARE’s web address, as well as an email for more information. That’s the address the video was sent to.”
Harvath turned his attention back to the villager and said to Jambo, “Tell him I want to know about the trucks.”
Jambo asked him, and the man rattled off a short description. There were no distinctive colors or markings. They appeared to be commercial, not military. Nothing special.
“How about the men themselves?”
“Mzungu,”
the villager replied.
“What’s
mzungu
?” Harvath asked.
“It’s Swahili for
white people
,” said Decker.
“
White
people?”
She nodded.
Harvath asked Jambo, “Were they military?”
Seconds later he replied, “Apparently they carried rifles, but they were not wearing uniforms.”
“How about their hair? Long? Short? Any beards? Mustaches? Tattoos? Anything at all that stood out?”
Jambo asked the man and then said, “They acted military. One man gave orders and the others followed. They all had short hair. No beards, no mustaches. No tattoos.”
“How many were there?”
“He says somewhere between eight to twelve.”
About the size of a military squad
, Harvath thought. “What language were they speaking?”
Jambo translated the question and then said, “He’s not sure. He didn’t recognize it. He says maybe German. Or Russian.”
“Would he recognize any of them if he saw them again?”
Jambo asked the man, and then nodded.
Harvath stepped outside, retrieved a pen and a piece of paper, and walked back into the dwelling.
“Tell him I need his cell phone number,” he said, handing the pen and paper to Jambo.
Once he had it, he left Decker with Jambo to ask more questions and stepped back outside.
Positioning his Iridium system, he fired up his phone, waited until he had a strong signal and then placed his call.
When the man on the other end picked up, he apologized for waking him and then said, “I need you to locate a phone for me. It was tossed into a truck in Congo several days ago. The battery is probably dead, but I want to know all the other towers it touched. I also want a list of phones that touched those same towers at the same time, as well as where those phones are now.”
“How soon do you need it?” the man asked.
“Right away,” Harvath replied. Ending the call, he stepped back inside to join Decker. Jambo was in the middle of translating the villager’s tale.
His name was Leonce, and he talked about a stranger who had shown up at the Matumaini Clinic, sick with a high fever. No one knew how he had gotten there. He lost consciousness soon after coming in. He had no ID, no money, nothing.
They placed him in a bed, started an IV, and began trying to figure out who he was and what was wrong with him.
He regained consciousness twice, but only briefly. Both times he screamed to be protected and begged the clinic staff not to “send him back.” They were never able to figure out what he was talking about. A nurse said she thought he might be Muslim, a very minority community
in Congo, as it sounded at one point as if he had moaned the word for the Muslim god, “Allah.”
Per their protocols, they contacted the Health Ministry hotline in Kinshasa. The rather blasé bureaucrat told them it was probably nothing, but to take full protective measures.
An hour later, the clinic received a call from the World Health Organization representative in Kinshasa telling them to prep blood and tissue samples and deliver them to the airport in Bunia for transport. The rep also asked to be emailed pictures of the patient.
The clinic had one very small, very old, and very unreliable car. Leonce offered to make the trip to Bunia. When the clinic staff agreed, Leonce invited his son, the deaf boy named Pepsy, to come with him.
The staff took great pains to make sure the samples were completely airtight and properly packaged. Leonce was given money for fuel. Any food or lodging would be his responsibility. They had already given him all the petty cash they had.
Leonce had been to Bunia many times and knew the route well. He had a relative there, and he and Pepsy would spend the night before returning the next morning.
With their package safely on the backseat, Leonce ground the gears of the little car, he and Pepsy waved out their open windows to the staff, and they began their journey.
Their problems began almost immediately.
First came the rain. It was so heavy, it sounded like rocks being poured onto the roof of the car. Each enormous drop landed with a great splash.
Leonce activated the wipers. They swung to the left. They swung to the right. Then, they stopped. He and his son had to try to use their shirts to keep the windshield clear, but the rain was so bad, that they could barely see the road. Then they hit a roadblock.
“Roadblock?” Harvath asked.
“It would be more appropriate to designate it a toll,” Jambo clarified. “Bandits set them up to extort money from motorists.”
Ash and Mick, who had been listening to the interrogation, shot Harvath a look.
“Does Leonce know who these bandits were?” Harvath asked.
Jambo nodded. “FRPI. The Front for the—”
“Patriotic Resistance of Ituri,” Harvath said, finishing the translator’s sentence for him. “What happened?”
“They demanded that Mr. Leonce pay their toll. He had very little money with him. When they tried to take his package from the backseat, he struggled with them. One of the rebels struck him in the stomach with the butt of his rifle.”
“And then what happened?”
“They wanted to know why Mr. Leonce was so protective of the package. They thought maybe he was transporting drugs. They moved his car to the side of the road and took him and his boy to see their commander.”
Harvath looked at Decker. He could tell that she was thinking the same thing he was.
“Then what?”
“The commander did not believe Mr. Leonce. He opened the package and dumped out its contents. He says one of the vials broke.”
“Ask him to describe the commander.”
Jambo did and replied, “Medium height, medium build. Thirty-five with a thick scar across his forehead.”
“Shit,” Decker exclaimed.
Harvath couldn’t have put it better himself. “So much for yellow fever,” he said to her.
“We still don’t know enough,” she replied, composing herself.
“I know enough,” he stated, turning back to Jambo. “Keep going.”
“Mr. Leonce and his son were allowed to leave. They repacked the box and drove to Bunia. The plane they were supposed to meet had already taken off, so they had to wait until the following day for the next one.
“The car gave them trouble on the way back. They had no money for repairs, so they left it with a mechanic in a village several kilometers away and walked back. When they arrived at their village, they saw their animals being slaughtered and thrown into the back of a truck. None of the other villagers were anywhere to be seen.
“They ran through the jungle toward the clinic. They could hear gunshots from the area where they burn the trash. When they got to the edge of the clearing, they ducked down and watched as a group of four men put on protective suits.
“It was then that Mr. Leonce thought to film what he saw. The men
walked into the clinic and began shooting. The rest of the story you already know.”
“And Mr. Leonce and his son have been in hiding ever since?” Harvath asked.
Jambo nodded.
Harvath was about to say something else when his phone chimed.
CHAPTER 22
E
ven though his digital guru, Nicholas, was groggy and angry from having been awakened at such an ungodly hour back in the States, he had made quick work of the assignment Harvath had given him.
With his laptop balanced on the hood of LC1, Harvath scrolled through the satellite images. Nicholas had highlighted all the cell towers that Leonce’s phone had shaken hands with.
The pictures drew a path back to Bunia.
“That’s not good,” Ash said over Harvath’s shoulder.
He didn’t bother turning to look at him. “What do you see?”
The Brit reached over, put his finger on a cluster of buildings near a cell tower on Harvath’s screen, and said, “MONUSCO HQ.”
“Let me guess,” Harvath replied. “That’s Swahili for
rebel central.
”
“Worse. United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. MONUSCO is the acronym for the official name in French. You could probably pronounce it, but I don’t
parlez
le frog.”
The historical animosity between the French and the Brits always made him laugh. “Why is it worse than
rebel central
?”
“You ever work with a UN stabilization force?” Ash asked.
Harvath shook his head.
“Then trust me. As the old saying goes, you can’t spell unprofessional, unethical, or unaccountable without the UN. The cholera outbreak the old blue helmets caused in Haiti? Over ten thousand dead, and it has
spread to the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The rapes and sex crimes they have committed in Mali and everywhere else? The stories of their depravity and brutality are legion.
“Their entire ‘military,’ if you can call it that, is shot through with corruption and rampant lack of accountability. They even allowed two of their own unarmed military observers in Bunia to get slaughtered years ago because none of their fellow UN troops wanted to risk a rescue operation. They’re pathetic.”
UN troops were indeed known for a lack of honor and discipline. Harvath was familiar with the horror stories surrounding their deployments. He could think of no greater nightmare than to have his country reliant upon the UN to provide “peace” and “stability.” He’d rather take his chances combatting whatever was causing the war and instability in the first place.
A fish rots from the head down and any organization that boasted a human rights council, yet accepted human-rights violators like China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and even slavery-infested Mauritania as members couldn’t be taken seriously, much less be expected to police and field an effective and honorable military. In short, Harvath didn’t have much use for the UN.
“What about this?” Harvath asked, advancing to another image.
“Downtown Bunia,” said Ash. “About three clicks from the hotel we stayed at.”
Harvath pushed a button and the red dots representing cell towers dimmed, and a cluster of green dots became visible.
“What do those represent?” Ash asked.
“Opportunity,” Harvath replied.
•••
Decker felt certain about one thing. If Leonce and his son were not already exhibiting symptoms of whatever illness they were looking at, they likely weren’t going to.
Her emphasis on the word
likely
didn’t put Harvath or the security team at ease. None of the men were willing to roll their personal dice on
her assessment. She had signed on to be a doctor and willingly commune with the sick of Africa, they hadn’t.
After Harvath gave her a wad of bills, Jambo drove Decker to the village where Leonce had left the clinic’s vehicle. The repairs had been minimal, and the car was already waiting. She and Jambo returned twenty minutes later. In an act of solidarity, she would be driving back to Bunia with Leonce and his son while the rest of the team rode in the Land Cruisers.
Decker didn’t have to worry about the harrowing river crossings they had conducted on their way in. Her little vehicle would never make it. They had to go far out of their way and cut back toward Bunia. All the while, Harvath and the security team were keeping their eyes peeled for roadblocks. None of them had any desire to bump up against the FRPI again.
Their trek was long, but thankfully uneventful. When they arrived at the Bunia Hotel, it was well after dark. After checking in, they unloaded all of their gear and secured it in their rooms. Ever eager to spread money around the family, Jambo had offered to ring up his relatives and have them come back and babysit the trucks, but Ash had said it wasn’t necessary. Harvath, though, thought he might have another use for them.
Those green dots on his laptop earlier corresponded to six cell phones Nicholas had traced to a walled, concrete structure on the other side of town. It reminded Harvath of a poor man’s version of the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
He wanted to do a drive-by and Ash had agreed to go with him. They brought Jambo just in case.
When the hotel security guard opened the gates, Ash put the Land Cruiser in gear and pulled out into evening traffic.
Motorbikes carrying passengers, known as
boda-boda
, weaved in and out between cars, while bicycle riders piloting
black mambas
, so named because they left trails in the dust that resembled those of the deadly snake, grabbed onto trucks and other vehicles to hitch free rides. Harvath and Ash kept their Glocks under their thighs, hidden from sight.
The GPS system on Harvath’s phone guided them toward their target. Along the streets, small, ramshackle shops sold everything from cheap Chinese televisions to cooking pots.
Harvath had long held that with its incredible resources, Africa should be the most powerful continent on the planet. But because of its tribalism and terrible governments, it was relegated to permanent third world status. Seeing it firsthand always made him appreciate even more what he had back at home.
Thinking of back home, he checked his phone again. Lara still hadn’t texted him back. It was for the best. He didn’t have time to get involved in any additional drama. His time with Decker in the jungle shower had been bad enough.
Decker hadn’t liked being rebuffed, but that was her problem. He had tried to make it clear that he wasn’t interested. She had persisted anyway, sensing that there may have been some sort of opening with him. She had been wrong.
When she had stepped into the shower and had tried to press herself up against him, that’s when he steered her back out and told her in no uncertain terms what the situation was.
He couldn’t have been the first man to say no to her, but watching the Brits continue to drool all over her, he wondered if maybe he was. Not that it mattered to him. He had something much better waiting for him at home—provided he could salvage it.
His fidelity seemed to turn Decker on even more. That, or she saw it as a challenge. In either case, he was glad to not have to ride to Bunia with her and was equally pleased to be away from the hotel and not have to deal with her there.
Nearing the compound, he tried to put Lara, Decker, and everything else out of his mind.
They would only get one look tonight and as their Land Cruiser rolled slowly by, he took in everything—the wall heights, window and door placement, the lighting, security measures, adjacent buildings, as well as all of the nearby businesses.
“I vote no,” Ash stated as they kept on going.
Harvath looked at him. “No to what?”
“No to everything you’re thinking right now.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
“The same way I knew yesterday morning that you wouldn’t radio us even if it did go tits up out in the jungle.”
“Technically, you said to call only if it went
pear-shaped
,” Harvath replied.
“Are you taking the piss now? Is that what this is?”
“No, but that’s a good idea. Pull over.”
“I didn’t say take
a
piss,” Ash clarified. “I said taking
the
piss. It means—”
“I know what it means,” said Harvath. “And yes, I’m pulling your chain, but I still want you to pull over. Up there by that bar. Pardon me, by that
pub
.”
“I know what a bar is, you nonce.”
Harvath smiled. “Just taking the piss again. Don’t worry.”
“Something tells me I’m going to have plenty to worry about soon enough,” Ash replied as he pulled off the road and put the Land Cruiser in park.
From the backseat, Jambo looked out his window at the bar and asked, “Are we going in for a beer?”
“Ash and I are,” said Harvath. “You’re going for a walk.”