The Janson Command (17 page)
The family of experts Janson had gathered served both sides, often unknowingly.
The information miners, the eyes and ears who brought him word of a derelict agent, also alerted him to paying jobs and dug up information to perform those missions. The money managers who held the IRS at bay and kept the nonprofit side both solvent and legitimate could move cash and dispense payments where needed. Facilitators, specialized operators, computer wizards, and hackers, all were put to work on various aspects of the hunt for Iboga, Iboga’s rescuers, and the elusive doctor whom Janson was starting to think of, ruefully, as Fleet-Footed Flannigan.
The CatsPaw Associates machine was operating at full bore. Results, however, were disappointing. The accountants were making some progress on where Iboga had hidden Isle de Foree’s millions. But in a fruitless week of polling the clandestine world Janson’s people had found nothing about who had dispatched the Harrier jump jet that rescued Iboga and nothing about where the dictator had gone.
The freelance researchers coordinated by the home office had pointed out what Janson already knew: In a world that contained more than one hundred thousand “superrich” fortunes of over $30 million, plenty of individuals could afford to buy an elderly Harrier. And complex aircraft support systems were not necessary if they intended to fly it only once and ditch it in the sea when they were done with it.
An intriguing hint came from a recording in the Gulf of Guinea Maritime Security database of a radio exchange that had occurred the night before Iboga’s defeat on Pico Clarence. Supertanker watch officers hailing each other as their vessels passed close in the dark a hundred miles off Gabon were interrupted by a thunderous noise. One officer, who had served in the Royal Navy, identified the never-forgotten sound of a Harrier storming down to a vertical landing. On their radars they spotted a large ship, a freighter or another tanker, on which a Harrier could have landed. But the ship showed no lights and did not answer their calls.
Janson speculated that if the Harrier had night-fighting capability it could have joined the ship by flying offshore from Gabon, a former French colony. That ship could have steamed within Harrier range of Isle de Foree when Iboga made his escape the following afternoon. Janson ordered CatsPaw to canvas aviation officials in Gabon. But the fact was the nation had many remote airstrips where the Harrier could have jumped off after flying in from Angola or Congo, coming and going in complete secrecy.
So while the CatsPaw Associates and Phoenix Foundation machines continued to grind away and Jessica Kincaid hunted for the doctor, it was time for “the boss” to disappear. Time to go back to what he did best, alone.
He had Jet Aviation’s limo run him over to the main passenger terminal. He wandered around the terminal until he felt comfortably un-���followed. Then he boarded the train to Zurich, where he roamed the underground shops of the Hauptbahnhof. Only when he was absolutely sure he was not being followed did he leave the train station. From the station plaza he rode the escalator up to the Bahnhofstrasse and cut through a neighborhood of narrow, tree-lined side streets.
He crossed a shallow branch of the Limmat on the Gessner Bridge and onto Lagerstrasse. Lagerstrasse paralleled the enormous railroad cut that brought the sleek trains into the center of the city. Four blocks on, he entered the lobby of a low-rise commercial building beside the tracks, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and knocked at the door of a freight-forwarding business.
In the outer reception room he gave his name.
This gained him admittance to an inner reception room.
An iris scan confirmed that he was expected.
A receptionist led him to a back office where the floor vibrated at a fine pitch set by the trains whisking past the building. A clerk wordlessly handed him a Tyvek polyethylene envelope and left Janson alone, closing the door behind him. Janson locked it.
He dumped the contents of the envelope on a bare table and carefully examined the paper and plastic that supported a legend he had not used for several years. The identity package for security-services executive “Adam Kurzweil” was so meticulously assembled that the crisp new Canadian passport was accompanied by its expired predecessor, which Janson recalled he had last used to enter Hungary. The new one had the latest radio frequency identification chip issue encoded with Kurzweil’s particulars and a biometric profile designed to slide Janson past the scanners. It was a reminder, not that he needed it, that in the post-9/11 decades when transportation security employed ever more sophisticated digital technology, one had to pay for the best countermeasures to stay ahead of the game. Happily, the best was still found in this nondescript building on Lagerstrasse.
He emptied his wallet into the Swiss Post Priority envelope they had supplied, and addressed it to a cell phone shop on the nearby Uetlibergstrasse. A CatsPaw Associates private shell corporation owned a nonparticipating interest in numerous such shops in Europe and Asia. The investments bought the key codes to their front doors, mail drops, and exclusive access to safes in their cellars.
He refilled his wallet with the new passport, driver’s license, medical insurance cards, credit cards, dog-eared family photographs, and business cards—both Adam Kurzweil’s, which were expensively embossed, and several that Kurzweil would have received from sales prospects.
He walked back to the train station, posted the envelope, bought an expensive carry-on shoulder bag, two changes of clothing, a tan raincoat, and a windbreaker. He left the station and boarded a tram. He got off at the Stampenbachplotz stop and walked to the Hotel InterContinental. He left his distinctive raincoat in the men’s room and walked out into the streets, where he eventually hailed a taxi to a residential neighborhood. He walked some more, removed his necktie, folded it and his suit jacket into his shoulder bag, put on the windbreaker, and rode a tram to the industrial Oerlikon quarter.
He walked from the Oerlikon tram station out of the central district of shops and cafés, passed factories old and new, and at the end of a cobblestone alley knocked on a windowless steel door. He stepped back and unzipped his windbreaker to let the cameras have a good look. To his surprise, the door was opened personally by the man he had come to see.
Neal Kruger was tall and tanning-bed bronzed, with thick curly hair turning gray and the slightly quizzical expression of a handsome lifeguard or ski bum shocked to discover he had stumbled into middle age.
“Hello, Neal.”
The weapons dealer clasped Janson’s hand, pulled him inside, and hugged him hard. “Too long, my friend. How are you?”
“Very, very well,” said Paul Janson. “You look like you’re prospering.”
“The United Nations’ failure to impose world peace continues to stoke the human desire to accumulate arms. I am, indeed, prospering.”
“Since when do you open your own front door?”
“It is a luxury to feel so secure that I don’t need armed men to welcome old friends.”
“You’re taking a damned fool chance,” said Janson.
“A luxury by definition is an indulgence.”
“You’ll get yourself killed. Or snatched.”
“There are four concealed cameras over the alley.”
“I saw them. And the gas port. It would not be easy to take you, but not impossible.”
“Will I get a bill for security advice?”
Janson did not smile back. “You should be more careful. If not for you, for your wife and son.”
“She left me. She took the boy.”
“I’m sorry.” That explained the lapse. “Then the advice is on the house. There’s no protecting a man who doesn’t give a damn.”
Kruger led him inside. His office was a mess. He had laid out a tray of bread and cheese on his desk and opened a bottle of Cote de Rhone. Janson sipped sparingly, though he dove into the cheese, having not eaten since early morning. They traded information on old friends and then Janson got to the point. “Any luck with the jump jet?”
Kruger nodded. “Twelve old T.10 Harrier two-seaters from the nineties were updated to a T.12 capability to train pilots for the Brits’ GR.9 fleet. Marvelous aircraft. Fully combat capable. Even night fighting. Now they’re being replaced by the F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which means that for a while there were a dozen vertical-slash-short takeoff and landing two-seaters for sale around the world. Nine of them are currently serving the Spanish and the Turks. The Nigerians managed to crash two of them, after which they put the third back on the market.”
“Who bought it?”
“A fellow I know who deals with mercenaries.”
“
French
mercenaries?”
Kruger shot Janson an admiring glance. “Why come to me for answers you already know?”
“Not this time,” said Janson. “It’s just that…”
“It’s just that what?”
Janson hesitated only a moment. His instinct to conceal was tempered by the knowledge that Neal Kruger lived on information. Any information Janson gave the arms dealer would cause him to return the favor, though at the risk that he would trade on it with others. Janson said, “I interviewed two of Iboga’s wives.”
“How many does he have?”
“They caught three of them. God knows how many others escaped into the bush. Illiterate peasant girls. Little older than children really. Anyway, they both said the same thing when I asked about how Iboga got away: ‘The French, the French.’ It was like a chant or a prayer. I doubt they know where France is, but they were parroting what Iboga kept saying near the end: ‘The French will save me. The French will save me.’ It was pretty clear he had arrangements with someone. Now you’re telling me that a Harrier jump jet ended up in the hands of a merchant who deals with the French.”
“It hardly sounds like the French government. They muck about in their former colonies like the Ivory Coast, or Senegal. But Isle de Foree was Portuguese.”
Janson agreed. “Have you heard of a freelance outfit called Sar?”
“Sar? No. What is it?”
“They might have been who sent the jump jet. Or they supplied operators on the ground for whoever did. And it appears they do assassinations.”
“That’s a crowded field.”
Janson swirled the wine in his glass, eyed the ruby color against the light. He was glad he had come personally instead of continuing with Kruger on the phone. The phone couldn’t show the disorderliness of a man’s office or provide such a window on his state of mind. Kruger would become increasingly less useful unless Janson could help him change the course of his life.
“Why did she leave?” He recalled a younger, athletic woman with a warm smile, a ripe body, and erotic eyes that rarely left Kruger’s face.
“She said I took her for granted.”
“Any chance of getting her back?”
Kruger shook his head. “In my experience, when you lose your glow in the eyes of a woman it does not rekindle.… She was right. Sort of. I didn’t mean to take her for granted. But I was working harder than ever. Traveling more. Hugely distracted.”
“By what?”
“Drones. Everyone wants them. Few have them.”
“Like Predators? Reapers?”
“The smaller stuff. The Israelis are making some amazing machines. The Chinese are trying. Russians, of course.”
“With Reaper capability?”
“Small rockets, perhaps. Not the big stuff.”
“Take out tanks?”
“No, no, no. But they’ll make short work of a terrorist in an SUV. Or a parliamentary rival in a Mercedes. Guidance is the big problem. If you don’t have your own cloud of satellites like the U.S., you’re juggling rented satellite space with all the discombobulation that can breed, not to mention deeply compromised security. A drone can be a big disappointment if an enemy hacker redirects it back at you.”
“Have you ever heard of a Reaper or a Predator in private hands?”
“A real one? No way.”
“It would have to be government, wouldn’t it?” Janson asked.
“
United States
government.”
* * *
JANSON CAUGHT THE
tram at the Oerlikon station and was back at the Hauptbahnhof minutes later. He took an overnight train to Belgrade and had breakfast with a Serbian militia contractor, a former army officer who had built a business supplying brilliantly trained bodyguards capable of offensive operations.
But the Serb knew nothing. The trip to Belgrade was a waste of time. Other than Neal Kruger’s speculation about some sort of “French Connection.” Paul Janson was no closer to discovering the source of the jump jet, no closer to picking up the trail of the escaped Iboga.
He took a ramshackle taxi to the airport, not sure what next, thinking maybe Paris. On the way, scanning the
New York Times
on his cell, he caught a lucky break—an unexpected opportunity to call in a valuable debt. Instead of flying to Paris, he boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Baghdad.
T
he haughty sheik arguing with Club Electric’s bouncers was demanding to keep his guns, Janson’s translator told him.
“Now what is he yelling?”
If he could not keep his guns, the sheik insisted that his bodyguards keep theirs.
Club Electric’s bouncers were unimpressed. All patrons of Baghdad’s premier nightclub checked their guns at the door. No exceptions.
It was hot, 114 degrees, hours after dark. Janson’s translator kept glancing up the street that paralleled the Tigris River, as if wondering which of the Hummers, Land Rovers, and Cadillac Escalades approaching the valet parkers was hauling a car bomb. Patrons lined up behind them looked as anxious to get inside the blast walls.
The sheik surrendered at last.
Janson exchanged the automatic he had purchased on the way in from the airport for a plastic claim check. Bouncers whispering into walkie-talkies ushered him through Kevlar-reinforced doors. He paused at the top of the stairs to let a group of Iraqis catch up with them and slipped inconspicuously among them. They descended switchback flights of green-lighted Lucite steps into a cavernous, windowless room pulsing with Arab music. Hundreds of prosperous men in shirtsleeves were drinking Pepsi-Cola, smoking water pipes, and watching soccer on flat-screen TVs.