Power Down (45 page)

“Do you like to dance?”

“Sure.”

They put their drinks down on the bar and went to the dance floor. They danced for several songs. Sanibel was a natural dancer and she moved around Dewey in time with the music, smiling at him. She rubbed against him. He was loose from the alcohol and he let it course through him, and tried to keep up with her. At some point, she took his hand as they danced and they held hands through several songs, dancing closer to each other. He leaned forward and kissed her. She tasted sweet, and her lips were soft. He wanted to take her back to the Parque Central. He would, if she would let him. Perhaps one more dance, another drink, then back to his suite. He liked her.

Then, over her shoulder, across fifty feet of dimly-lit room and hundreds of people, Dewey saw the man who had come to kill him.

He was Arab, dark-skinned. He stared at Dewey from across the room. He held no drink. He was dressed in a gray T-shirt, muscled. His eyes were dark and serious; they traced Dewey as he moved.

Dewey continued to dance with Sanibel. He stayed close to her, but kept a subtle eye on the stranger. He didn’t want to let him know he knew he was there. He looked for others but saw no one. Sanibel moved in closer again and put her hands around him. First on his back, then lower, as she kissed him. Her tongue entered his mouth this time. It tasted sweet, of champagne. He kissed her back. The man kept his eyes on him from afar. Then, suddenly, almost imperceptibly, he glanced behind Dewey, toward the bar. Dewey swung Sanibel around.

At the bar stood another killer, this one shorter, with a mop of hair, younger than the thug in back. He too looked dangerous, and he did nothing but stare. They’d surely seen him before then. Had the alcohol dulled him? It was too late to worry about that. He had a situation on his hands. He would need to kill them.

The thug in back moved first.

He stepped quickly through the crowd, pushing aside people. Dewey turned. His partner at the bar moved forward at the same time. Dewey spun around again. The man at the back reached for his waist. Through the crowded dance floor, he could see the man raising his gun.

Dewey’s first concern was Sanibel, whose arms were wrapped around his neck. As the first man approached, he attempted to throw her to the ground, out of the firing line, but she resisted, a look of fear crossed her face, fear of Dewey, who she thought was trying to harm her. She pulled out of his grip. The man in back fired.

Suddenly, a silenced slug missed Dewey and ripped through Sanibel’s neck, and she was knocked backward, screaming, but still upright. Blood coated her neck, her hand reflexively reached for the wound. Another bullet, this one through her chest, and Sanibel tumbled over backward as the dancers in the immediate vicinity spread apart amid screams and pandemonium. She collapsed in Dewey’s arms, rapidly bleeding out. Screams echoed above the loud music and soon the dance floor was chaos as people ran for the door.

Dewey ran with the crowd as the two men chased him. He ran to the left of the crowd and kicked open a door near the bar, away from the entrance. He sprinted down Paradiso, then took a left on a side street. Halfway down the small, darkened street, he saw a woman reach into her handbag to get a set of keys. She stopped at an old Mercedes sedan.

At the end of the street, he saw the two killers running quickly through the crowd.

“Give me the keys,” he said. He held the Colt against her side. “Scream and you die.”

He took the keys from the woman, pulled the car out, and sped down the narrow street, leaving the woman standing in the middle of the street. He turned left to go back toward the Parque Central.

As he drove up Paradiso, he saw a set of lights go on in the small rearview mirror. The terrorists were a quarter mile back. They had marked him. The lights of a white van came into view behind him, several blocks to the south. He sped past the Parque Central.

Dewey drove up the central hill that ran through the middle of
Havana, past the Capitol. He sped through the city’s business district, a handful of tall cement office buildings. Behind him, the lights of the van twinkled in the rearview mirror, getting closer.

The business district transitioned into suburbs, tidy streets lined with small, squat brick and cement houses. Dewey kept the pedal to the floor, pushing the sedan as fast as it could go. But the killers closed in. Dewey kept the pedal down, but it wasn’t good enough, and by the time the suburbs started to turn into farmland they were at his back bumper.

In the rearview mirror, he saw one of the killers lean out, a black machine gun in his hand. Bullets flew at the Mercedes, the sound of lead striking metal, then the rear glass shattered. The small roadway tightened into a dilapidated one-lane road, and Dewey swerved at a telephone pole, down another road, creating a temporary gap between himself and the killers.

In the distance, twenty yards ahead, he saw a rusty shack at the edge of the road, next to a break in the fields of tobacco. The van’s lights came into view again behind him, then more bullets, and he ducked as a spray of lead shattered the windshield of the Mercedes. Suddenly, Dewey swerved the Mercedes toward the rusty shack, aiming straight for it before skirting it at its edge and barreling the old car down through the break in the field. He was on a dirt road that went through the fields. The tall green tobacco stalks cascaded over the dirt roadway and brushed across the broken windshield of the Mercedes, pushing shards of glass down onto Dewey’s lap. He pressed the accelerator down to the floor and sent the old car lurching forward as fast as it would go down the dirt path.

In the mirror, he saw the lights behind him as the sedan entered the field road.

He drove for a hundred yards. Clouds of dust shot out as the tires of the car tore down the small path. He reached forward and cut the headlights of the old car. He now drove in blackness, trying to stay straight, not letting up on the accelerator, letting the sound of the stalks of tobacco rattling against the roof guide him through the field.

In a sudden motion, he swerved the car to the left, pulled back on the emergency brake, down into a row of tobacco stalks, swerving wildly in a 180-degree turn that left the car facing back toward the dirt path
from the edge of the stalks, then jumped out of the vehicle, taking the Colt with him, lunging behind the Mercedes as the lights from the terrorists’ van shot down the path. He felt it then, the adrenaline, coursing down through his legs and arms. A smile spread across his lips as their vehicle plunged through the thick dust and tobacco. He moved back, behind the Mercedes, and braced himself. The lights grew brighter and the engine revved as the van closed in. Without warning, the killers’ van barreled into the darkened Mercedes, crashing into the steel front of the parked car. The noise was horrendous, the unnatural sound of metal meeting metal, glass breaking, and screams from inside the van as the terrorists were caught by surprise by the parked car. The van flipped on its edge, slid, then flipped completely over onto its roof, which crushed the van in upon itself.

Dewey stood up and stepped into the pathway behind the wrecked van. The engine whirred as one of the tires continued to gyrate in the night air. Moans of pain came from inside the destroyed van. Dewey reached inside the Mercedes, turned the headlights on. Only one worked, and it illuminated the overturned, destroyed van that lay smoking in front of the Mercedes.

He moved quickly toward the van with his Colt in front of him. He walked to the driver’s side and looked in. It was the short one from the bar with the mop of hair. He lay on the ground, what had been the ceiling of the van, crumpled up. His face and head were covered in blood. He was young, early twenties. Dewey reached in and felt for a pulse; still alive. He felt for a weapon as the man looked up at him. He found a silenced handgun next to the man’s left leg. He picked it up and tossed it into the tobacco field.

He walked around to the passenger side and pulled the dented door open. It fell off its hinges to the ground. The tall killer was wedged against the dashboard, his head turned helplessly toward him as he kept his handgun aimed at him. He was covered in blood; it was the terrorist from the back of the club, the one who shot at him, who killed Sanibel. He reached in and grabbed his thick, muscled arm, pulling it behind his back and yanking it up until the humerus bone snapped. He then put both of his hands on the man’s head and pulled him from the van, placing
him on the ground in front of the Mercedes’ shining headlight. He checked him for weapons, pulled a knife from a sheath at his left ankle and a handgun tucked into his pants below his back. He threw both weapons into the field.

He went back and dragged the driver from the van and set him next to the other man. Dewey pulled a knife from a sheath at the man’s calf, finding him equally badly injured. The driver’s legs were broken, the right badly contorted in the middle of his thigh. The taller man was in slightly better shape, though dazed and bloody.

Dewey propped them up. The bright headlight shone in their eyes. He leaned against the dented front of the old Mercedes, next to the light, and kept the Colt trained on them.

“Welcome to Cuba.”

KKB WORLDWIDE HEADQUARTERS

Joshua Essinger stuck his head inside the office door.

“Got anything yet?” he asked.

Igor Karlove sat at his computer, back to the door. He said nothing. In fact, he didn’t even turn around. His long, blond hair was combed back and it covered his ears. From earbuds his iPod blasted
Exile on Main Street
so loudly that the vocals were audible from the doorway.

On the computer screen in front of him, lines of letters and numbers were scrolling down quickly. Every once in a while, Karlove would hit the keyboard, type something, then sit back and watch as script rolled across the screen.

Essinger walked up behind Karlove. He reached down, pulled the buds from his ears. The Russian looked up nonchalantly.

“Hey, Josh.”

“How’s it going?” asked Essinger.

“It’s going.”

“How long’s it going to take?”

“There’s a lot of data here. It’s going to take a while. I had to take down the KKB network and tap capacity. Any CPU not logged in is helping out. I also asked a buddy over at EMC to let me use one of their stack farms. It’s just a lotta fucking lines.”

Karlove reached out, hit the enter key, typed something furiously, then sat back.

Eight hours after Essinger’s meeting the evening before, most of the data was in: a list of all energy complex–related trading activity in the month leading up to the attacks that had cleared through Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Credit Suisse, the four major broker-dealers in the world. The information was held in secure, heavily encrypted databases within each financial institution. With approval had come not a big file or set of files, but rather, a temporary entry provision, essentially a password, that enabled Karlove to access the data and extract it from the four databases within each firm. Karlove had had to write a program that accomplished three objectives; extract the data, format it in a common framework, and purge any trades that were made by one of the big “vanilla” mutual funds. The data involved was massive—more than seven billion lines of code. But the program that Karlove wrote was elegant, brilliant, and stunning in its simplicity and efficiency, and less than five thousand lines of code. It would have taken one of the big consulting firms weeks to develop a program to accomplish what was needed by Essinger. It had taken Karlove less than four hours.

The problem was, once written, the execution of what was in essence a toll system—weeding out good data from irrelevant data—required an almost unbelievable amount of computing capacity.

“So how much time are we talking?”

“Hours, not days,” said Karlove.

“How many hours?”

“I don’t know. But once we have the blocks of data sets, that’s when the real art comes in. We need to build a force-rank algorithm. That’s what I’m going to do while I’m waiting. So once we get the data into buckets, we can whittle it down to the specific institutional events.”

“Okay. I have no fucking idea what you just said, but obviously keep me posted.”

“I’m assuming you want me to omit any firm that was long in KKB or Anson? I’m assuming any firm buying KKB and or Anson wouldn’t be behind the attacks, right?”

“Yeah, weed those guys out too.” Essinger patted Karlove on the back, then turned to walk out. At the door, he suddenly stopped.

“Actually, Igor, don’t remove those guys. I’m assuming whoever did this is as smart as you or me. If it was me, I would’ve bought some KKB and Anson for appearances’ sake.”

“Ten four.”

As Essinger left Igor’s office, the renewed blast of the Rolling Stones faded quickly behind him.

CENTRIX-LASSA SECURITY, LP
GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA

It took Qital less than an hour to call Savoy with the information he needed. Marks, Savoy, and Spinale had been waiting in the KKB jet back at the airport, where Dr. Getschman had time to rebandage Marks’s shoulder.

“She was working for an outfit out of Guatemala City,” Qital told Savoy over the phone. “A security company called Centrix. They do corporate work, guarding development projects, senior executives, that sort of thing. I don’t have an address for the outfit, but if you ask the right people, you’ll find it.”