“The joint is jumpin’,” he told his translator, flummoxing the earnest young student. In fact, the blast walls, the zigzagged stairs designed to baffle the impact of an explosion, and the absence of window glass made for a relaxing atmosphere.
He told the translator to wait in the roped-off area set aside for bodyguards.
“How will you understand, sir?”
Traveling in Adam Kurzweil mode, the normally reticent Paul Janson conducted himself more openly. The Canadian security-services executive appeared sure of himself, forthcoming, brash, and even boastful. “The owner of Club Electric,” he explained, “speaks English.”
The translator was in awe. The new Club Electric was the hottest nightclub between Vienna and Mumbai. Janson might well have claimed kinship with Iraq’s prime minister, whom Janson had already spotted in a far corner of the big room eating dinner with the mayor of Baghdad. “You
know
Michel Sarkis?”
“When I knew ‘Michel,’ he was ‘Mike.’ Wait over there, please. I’ll call you when I need you.”
Sarkis, a stocky Lebanese with jet-black hair, was table-hopping. Janson drifted through the big room, tracking Sarkis to a table of Iraqi businessmen and German bankers near where the mayor and prime minister were dining. The club owner stood bouncing from foot to foot, smiling and brimming with energy, bantering in French-accented English.
“From where am I?” he replied to one of the German bankers. “The answer is as complex as any international affair.
Conceived
1975 in Beirut the night the civil war broke out.
Born
on the high seas crossing to America. What ship? The SS
France
, of course. The last truly elegant liner ever built. She bred in me a taste for beauty and pleasure.”
In fact, the
France
make her final westbound crossing in 1974. But Janson had no need to challenge Sarkis on the small stuff.
“
Then
Greenwich, Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Paree.
Always
Paree.”
Janson passed close behind him and whispered so only the nightclub owner could hear, “What about Florida?”
Sarkis whirled around. “
Bonjour!
” he cried, a welcoming smile and widespread arms failing to mask the panic in his eyes. Janson was not surprised that Sarkis didn’t recognize him.
“Sarasota, Florida, Mike. When you have a minute I’ll be out on the deck.”
“I’m very busy, sir; let me buy you a drink and—”
“How’s the Lamborghini running?”
Sarkis’s smile went rigid. “I’ll meet you on the deck.”
Janson followed the neon palm tree arrows that pointed the way through blast walls to the outdoor deck that overlooked the Tigris and the city lights. Few patrons braved the heat. The waiters were wilting. The river was low. Janson smelled burning plastic, oil, and sewage.
He chose a spot on the railing just beyond the glow of the red, white, and blue Pespi display coolers and stood with his back to the water. Sarkis kept him waiting ten minutes, as if sending a message that he was a fleet-footed survivor who had already recovered from the shock of Janson’s blast from the past.
“How’s the Lamborghini running?” Janson asked again.
“Sold it to a Russian,” Sarkis answered brusquely. “What’s up?” Out of earshot of his elite Iraqi customers, Sarkis sounded like an American who had grown up in Danbury, Connecticut, dropped out of state college, and used his smiling good looks to sell Florida vacation condos to well-fixed widows.
Janson answered, “What’s up is that you are rich and well connected and can help me buy a Harrier jump jet.”
Interestingly, Sarkis did not deny it. All he said was, “Why would I help you?”
“Gratitude for saving your life. Or terror that I know enough about your life to destroy it.”
“I don’t know you. I don’t know why you think that Sarasota is somehow important to me.”
“It was a while back,” said Janson. “I’ve followed your career since with admiration.”
“To blackmail me?”
“Only to call in a marker.”
“How much?”
“Not money. Information. Actually, let me amend that. I want truthful information.”
Sarkis snapped his fingers. Two bouncers hurried toward them.
Paul Janson said, “Imagine a hot night on the Florida ‘Suncoast.’ Envision a good-looking college dropout in his twenties. He’s wearing the two most valuable things he owns: a white linen suit one of his girlfriends gave him and an expensive watch from his refugee parents’ Danbury, Connecticut, jewelry store. He has a French accent he can turn on and off because at home Mom and Dad spoke French, their language back in Lebanon.
“Picture him charming old ladies into buying Sarasota condos. His commissions are small and he has to kick back a bunch to his manager. He’s living hand to mouth, money all around him, none of it his. He’s aching for a break. And here’s the thing I admire about this kid: He is ready to seize it if it comes his way. And that night it does.”
Sarkis looked at Janson. He had a look of queasy fascination on his handsome face. “Go on!”
“Call off the muscle.”
Sarkis banished the hovering bouncers with a gesture. “Go on!”
Before Janson could speak the lights went out. The entire city was suddenly dark. The reflections on the water vanished. The sky was too murky to admit the stars. Baghdad’s notoriously embattled electrical grid had died again.
“Ten seconds,” said Sarkis.
“Go on.”
The deck shook. Diesel generators rumbled to life, and Club Electric was ablaze in light again, though still surrounded by the dark. “Best generators the American taxpayers’ money could buy,” said Sarkis. “Haliburton left them at the airport. Still in their crates. Go on.”
“Sarasota Film Festival. A thousand people drive inland to a party thrown by a Realtor attempting to sell million-dollar condos in a swamp too many miles from the beach. The dropout in the white linen suit is hoping for a commission, but nothing’s selling and he leaves early, just as the party is beginning to wind down, figuring he’ll drive out of the swamp ahead of the traffic jam. But when he tries to claim his car, he discovers that the valet parking system has completely broken.
“The car parkers are drunk. The boss has run for it. They stopped tagging the keys and the keys are piled in a huge heap. A thousand people are about to attempt to collect their cars. A hundred are already there shouting, ‘Where’s my keys?’ The locals are worrying about their Mercedes and Range Rovers and Aston Martins, and the tourists are trying to remember what color was the rental they got at the airport.
“The dropout thinks quick. He collars the one parking attendant not drunk but terrified, and he waves his last two hundred dollars under the kid’s nose: ‘Find the keys to my yellow Lamborghini and the dough is yours.’
“The attendant finds the keys, and the guy in the white suit with the expensive watch and the French accent drives away in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar automobile thinking he’s going to blast straight across the country—do not stop for girlfriend, do not look back—all the way to Beverly Hills, California, where rich women are kind to young Frenchmen in Lamborghinis.”
Sarkis stared at Janson. “Then what happened?”
“The kind of twist he couldn’t make up, except that’s the way life works, sometimes. The guy who owns the Lamborghini is a terrible, terrible person.”
“And chases him?”
“Was the guy who caught you the owner of the car?” Janson asked.
Sarkis’s eyes got even bigger. “Wait a minute! Was that you?”
“That was me and you never knew it until now, but I saved your life.”
Sarkis looked across the river where other generator-driven light clusters were popped up around the city like white fireworks. He said, as if describing a half-remembered dream, “Somehow you passed me in a stupid Honda and cut me off.”
“The Honda was customized. I knew how to drive fast. You didn’t.”
“You shined a light in my eyes. You asked to see my license. I thought you were a cop. But you didn’t ask for my registration. Then you took my keys and told me not to move. It was dark. I couldn’t see for sure, but I thought you were lying down under the car.”
“I was removing a radio-triggered explosive device so it wouldn’t blow your front wheel off and flip you into a swamp at eighty miles an hour.”
Sarkis digested that quickly. “An explosive device that you had attached?”
“Correct.”
“Why?”
“The owner was a terrible person. You were innocent. At least by comparison.”
“How did you know it was me, not him, driving?”
“I didn’t. I picked up the Lamborghini on the side road out of that development and followed, waiting for the right moment to blow the wheel. He had to be going fast, which you were, safely clear of other drivers, and next to water or some kind of drop-off he wouldn’t survive. When we reached such a spot and I was just about to key the signal, I realized something was off. The Lamborghini was all over the road. But the owner was not such a clumsy driver. Which meant the driver I was following was probably not the person I was supposed to, uh, kill.”
“You gave me back my license. You gave me the keys. You said, ‘Disappear. Get out of the state and don’t come back.’ You asked if I needed money. I said, ‘Yeah.’ You gave me a wad of twenties and hundreds— How did you know about Danbury and my parents?”
“I took your name off your license. You struck me as a guy who was going places—bent places—and I figured you’d come in handy some night. I checked you out and have kept track of you ever since. This morning I saw your picture in an article about Club Electric.”
“And tonight’s the night?”
“Tonight’s the night, Mike.”
“Mind me asking��”
“You’ve had your questions. Listen up. I need your help. You know everybody in Baghdad and everybody in Beirut, and everybody in Dubai. And more people than you should know in Kabul.”
“I own a nightclub. I know my patrons.”
Janson showed his teeth. “Don’t waste my time, Mike. I know who you are and what you’ve done.”
“The Lamborghini was years ago. I was a kid.”
“The Lamborghini was the beginning. You want to hear a story about Tehran? No? How about Kandahar. You’re still a U.S. citizen. They’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
“I didn’t do anything in Kandahar anybody else didn’t do.”
“Mike, I don’t care. I’m not judge and jury. But I want what I want. And I’m not leaving Baghdad until you find for me a freelance outfit, possibly French, that can field a Harrier jump jet.”
T
wo days later, Janson texted Jessica Kincaid a heads-up.
Not sar. SR. Securité Referral. Bad-guy rescue squad. Watch self. SR lethal.
He left Baghdad on an Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna.
A name was golden. A huge step forward. Securité Referral was an outfit that might or might not exist. It might or might not be French. If it did exist, it apparently served a unique clientele, dictators about to be toppled. Michel Sarkis claimed that he had no idea nor the means to find out who they were or where they were or how they ran their business, and Janson believed him.
Needless to say, Securité Referral did not maintain a Web site for dictators. Janson guessed they solicited their business by contacting their clients directly before they were needed. Convincing an autocrat he was about to be overthrown was tricky stuff, as such men would react violently to intimations of failure. But the smart ones who had planned ahead would be amenable to hearing out a rescue scheme. Such men would have sent fortunes abroad for just such an event, and such men would be very lucrative clients. No one ever went broke presiding over the collapse of an empire.
With a name to trace, Janson was ready to wheel out the big guns.
Striding through the new Skylink Terminal corridors to connect with another Austrian Airlines flight to Tel Aviv, he got an urgent text from Jessica. It was the first he had heard from her since she had reported in detail on their secure sat line her encounter with the “diver” and the weird conclusion that they were not the only ones the doctor was running from.
Doc mayb Cape Town. Can u intro SA security?
Janson sat-phoned Trevor Suzman, deputy national commissioner of the South African Police Service, to arrange a helpful welcome.
“And what do I get in return for this generosity?” Suzman asked.
“Interesting company.”
He texted the contact number Suzman gave him back to Jessica.
* * *
AT BEN GURION
Airport, a brusque Israeli immigration officer with the face of a teenager and the close-cropped hair of recent military service scrutinized Janson’s Canadian passport. He waited calmly, maintaining a neutral expression. Security-services executive Adam Kurzweil was in their computers from previous visits. Unless there had been a monumental screwup with Kurzweil’s renewed passport, he would be welcomed as a free-spending outfitter of corporate security departments and private militias who did business with Israel’s enormous arms industry.
The officer asked to see the stub of his boarding pass.
Janson turned it over.
The officer typed on his keyboard, stared at his monitor, and abruptly wandered away, carrying Janson’s passport and boarding pass. This was fairly typical behavior on the part of officials at Ben Gurion Airport, and he could expect to be left standing awhile and/or even be grilled in an interview room about his background and his contacts in Israel.
It would turn into a problem, however, in the duplication lab that the Mossad, the Israel espionage service, maintained in the bowels of the airport. The Mossad was equipped not only to inspect the veracity of a document but also to clone it. The joke, a bad joke, would be an Israeli operator penetrating another nation under the cover of a forgery of Janson’s forged passport. Worse, no joke at all, would be the Mossad technicians discovering flaws in the document in the course of copying it.
The security cameras sprinkled in the ceiling were trained on the lines of the travelers awaiting entry and on each and every immigration desk. Janson let an expression of irritation cloud his face. He looked around impatiently and after a while longer began drumming his fingers on the desk, the picture of a busy man who, while he understood the need for security, was getting fed up. A full ten minutes passed. The lines behind him grew longer with this desk out of commission. Finally, the official returned with a superior, a woman about thirty who ordered Janson to follow her to an interview room. His passport was not in sight.