Midnight Empire (19 page)

The man would surely look. You didn't find a memory stick in a computer stolen from your unfaithful wife's lover's apartment without giving it forensic study. And what would he see? A high-altitude picture of a group of men in a foreign street. Nothing he could put in context, alright, but certainly its form spoke volumes—what entity would produce a shot like that unless it was the military or secret service of a state? And Ania's husband seemed pretty good at following. What if he already knew where Daniel worked? He could have no true inkling of the picture's significance but he might decide that he could blackmail them with it, force Ania to meet with him, make her do God knew what.

‘What?' Ania said. He could hear chips clicking in the background.

‘I said your husband's robbed us. He's broken into the loft.'

‘What? How do you know?'

‘He's punched the wall. He's almost smashed a window with a chair.'

‘Bastard,' she said.

‘You have to come home.'

‘I'll get a taxi.' She paused. ‘But maybe this isn't so bad. He has broken the law now. We can tell the police and it will be up to them to deal with him.'

‘He took my laptop,' Daniel said. ‘There was information on it. Important data.'

‘Even better. Tell your friends. They will kidnap him in five minutes and fly him to a prison in the Ukraine.'

‘Don't joke.'

‘Who's joking?'

‘It's not good. There's data . . . there's information I shouldn't have had.'

‘You sound worried.'

‘I am.'

‘I've not heard you this way before. Your voice is shaking.'

‘I'll go to jail.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘I need to get what he has back.'

‘Don't worry, Daniel. If he has your computer it will be to do with sex. He will be looking for pictures of us. When he doesn't find any he will be looking at pornography on the internet.'

She hung up to get her taxi. He paced for a while in front of the windows, put a fast boot into the toppled chair. He felt sick. If by chance the man did decide to send the USB stick or the image to the base, then—with what was going to happen when Wright published—Daniel would be caught, certainly. He'd be arrested. He'd end up in a US jail in the desert, an institution of men and heat and impenetrable walls. The CIA would make sure of that. Raul especially.

He stood at the blue resin benchtop in the bathroom, rubbed water on his face and tried to calm down. Nothing had been done yet. The situation was serious but there would be something he could do. He thought, what action would Dupont have taken? What would a man alone in a hotel room in a foreign city attempt?

He'd just have to find him. Take the memory stick back. He could do that, couldn't he? How difficult would it be to track Ania's husband down and make him hand it over?

He thought about the mugging in the cul-de-sac. The killer energy of the two of them in struggle. He stood at the window and considered that he could do this. That he was capable of this.

He breathed deeply. The thought was a small revelation: he could act, he could find Ania's husband and take his property back; make someone do what he wanted for a change.

The first hints of dawn were beginning now, a rumour on the valley's rim. Looking down on the city he somehow found himself thinking about Peshawar, the teeming millions. Who would he be had he been born there? Nobody probably. Dead almost without doubt. Trodden on.

He looked again at the hole in the plaster. The crack here in the glass.

•

LinkLock's unified communications system for video chat connected automatically at start up, whenever the laptop was turned on. By checking the time stamps on the server side, he could see whether or not the machine had been powered up.

It hadn't yet. He checked using his BlackBerry. What was interesting was that the log listed the laptop's MAC address, the unique identifier of its network interface.

He could solve this, he realised. He just needed to treat it as a problem of science.

He was in Radio Shack on Lake Mead Boulevard as soon as it opened, 8 a.m. He bought a netbook with a built-in 3G modem, a charge pack, a 1000mW wireless adapter and amplifier with antenna. He felt a little less sick to be doing something. He might yet get this under control.

He built his apparatus in the front seat of the car. He knew the chances of this working were slim, but for the moment it was his best idea. The laptop had a wireless-on function, meaning it could be booted by sending it a particular packet: a broadcast frame that contained the signal FF FF FF FF FF FF followed by the machine's MAC address, repeated (he would need to double-check) sixteen times.

To wake the laptop he would need to be broadcasting near it: he thought within a range of fifty yards. If it booted, he'd be able to detect it using the wireless antenna. From there, he wouldn't necessarily be able to pinpoint its location, but he'd know that it was near. What this amounted to was that if he got within fifty or a hundred yards of the machine, he'd be able to know roughly where it was. If he managed that, he'd just have to hope that Ania's husband was keeping it with the stick.

At Starbucks, he wrote a script to broadcast the wake packet. Now he only needed to decide where to start looking. The Bellagio? The Venetian? What he knew of the man was that he was a fisherman and had money. It was probably his first time in Las Vegas. Most likely, he'd be at a hotel on the Strip, perhaps on a package deal with whatever airline he'd flown. Daniel looked it up. The Luxor, the Palazzo, the Monte Carlo: there were more than fifty hotels on the Strip, almost one hundred thousand rooms.

He put the kit in a backpack and walked. The Bellagio had four thousand rooms. He started in the east wing. The layout of each floor was the same. He walked head down, eyes on the carpet.

The netbook was set to beep. A few times he mistakenly thought it had and his fingers shook as he got it out of the pack but these were false alarms.

Three minutes per floor. There were thirty-six floors in this tower, the same in the western wing. He wanted to go faster but as a man with a backpack he didn't want to draw attention. He passed doors, drink machines and ice dispensers. The elevator landings were mirror and black marble, families and people in groups and Daniel's reflection in the glass.

He had to cut his time. He decided he could stop twenty yards from each corridor's end and still reach the laptop. He decided he could skip floors, that his signal would penetrate one storey below and one up—in fact he could scan three at a time.

There were cameras. He tried to think of an excuse should a security guard quiz him about his behaviour, a fighting-age male casing a hotel with a backpack. He couldn't think of anything. Nobody quizzed.

The sunlight, where it penetrated, was bright through the glass. By the time he was halfway up the west tower, he was certain that he wasn't going to find Ania's husband here. He checked his watch. There was just time to try the Luxor before he needed to be at Creech.

•

He knew that he looked tired. He couldn't fix that but he could try not to appear strange or stressed. If they asked, he planned to say he was ill.

He showed his pass at the gate and walked in the direction of the huts. He tried to proceed as normal. He thought, what is my normal pace? A group of pilots were coming off shift. They didn't know him from anyone, but still, he thought they looked at him suspiciously.

He slowed for breath outside the briefing hut and concentrated on putting everything that had happened out of mind. Gray looked up when he entered the hut. Daniel made eye contact and felt himself physically react, his gaze dart to the floor.

‘The two flights again today,' Gray said. ‘Stations two and three.'

‘Okay.'

‘The first at seventeen hundred . . . And Afghanistan . . .' He looked to the clock. ‘Twenty after that.'

‘Alright.'

‘Did you see Wolfe out there?'

‘No.'

‘If you do I need him.'

‘Okay.'

He went to the coffee pot. It wasn't his regular routine but he didn't want to be seen to rush to get out and over to the ground stations. He chose a mug and poured the black liquid, added sugar then UHT; it was the most focused coffee of his life. He was walking for the door when Gray spoke.

‘They've found a body,' he said.

Daniel stopped but did not turn around. ‘Oh?'

‘That NOC who got lost in the forest in Virginia. It was suicide. Mid course.'

‘That's awful.'

‘Crawled under a log to do it. First time such a thing has happened in the agency's history.'

Gray said nothing more. Daniel went to prepare the stations.

Later, both flights launched on time and encrypted.

He sat quietly at the back of the border flight, witnessed a white bird riding an air column, its wings outstretched like sails.

Ania had had enough of this. He was behaving like a spoilt child. She never wanted to see or hear from him again. But to sort this out, she was prepared to meet one last time.

Daniel listened while Ania left this message. Her husband's mobile had been going to voicemail all day and all evening. They sat on the sofa. Ania was drinking chardonnay. She said she was sorry. She felt awful about this, truly. Then she began to cry.

‘Men are pigs,' she said. ‘They are the worst.'

She wiped her cheeks slowly with her hand. She leaned over and kissed him gently. Her face was warm and wet. ‘This is why I like you, Daniel. You are a boy and you are not cruel.'

‘Will he agree to meet you?'

‘If he doesn't then I will threaten to disappear.'

‘Probably I should know what he looks like.'

‘He is thick and wide. He has brown hair and very strong shoulders and he smells of the sea.'

‘If he agrees to meet you, we can get my things back.'

‘Yes. This is what we will do. This is what you want.'

‘You have no idea where he is staying?'

‘I have absolutely none.'

Ania had gone to the Venetian and Daniel was standing in the kitchen when he heard the beep, the solid, clear tone. At first unbelieving, he opened the netbook; in the list produced by the wake script, the laptop was truly there. The fact turned him cold. For a moment it didn't make sense. Was the laptop in the apartment still? Had it been here all along?

No. It must have just arrived.

Staying out of sight of the windows, he turned off the lights. Then he went to the windows to look out. There was nothing out of the ordinary down there that he could see.

He thought for a moment, his heart in his throat. What was the maximum range of his antenna—one hundred yards? Two? He packed the netbook into his bag and moved to the front door. The man could easily have been on the other side of it but Daniel felt sure that he wasn't.

He swung it open. The corridor was empty.

He walked to the lift. What was his plan exactly? What did he think he would do?

When he got to the lowest level of the car park he stood and listened. There was nothing but silence and the noise of the city. He walked up the ramp to the next floor, where the car park was just below the level of the street. There were gaps just above head height. You could lift yourself up and see the street at rat level. Daniel tried Flamingo Road. He stood quietly on the tyre of a car and observed. The streetlights gave the scene a yellow, fading varnish. He couldn't see anything.

He repeated the process at intervals along the road, until almost at the end he looked across the street at a small red sedan. He was instantly convinced that there was someone in the driver's seat.

He thought about it. I will cross the road and demand the computer and the USB stick and then tell the man to fuck off.

But what if the guy simply drove off? No, it was better to watch him, see what he did first.

Daniel went to his own car. He drove it out of the car park, headlamps out. He turned right, and, two blocks later, right again. This allowed him to approach the occupied car from the rear, and he parked on the same side of the street, fifty or so yards behind.

Ten minutes passed in which the sedan did not move. Daniel tried not to feel anything; tried to imagine that he was elsewhere, miles away, so that he could sit here in cool remove. He was certain that the figure in the car was watching the loft. He must have been waiting, hoping to see Ania arrive.

Daniel checked the netbook carefully using one hand, wary of the screen glow. His laptop was still in the list of near devices.

He wanted desperately for this to be it: for his laptop and the stick to be somewhere in that sedan.

He looked up again at the loft and was pleased that it was difficult to see into.

Finally, the red sedan came to life. Its headlights were turned on and it pulled out onto the road. Daniel waited then did the same. He had a sudden thought: What if this wasn't Ania's husband at all but a scout for the terrorist cell?

The car crossed the Strip and got onto the Las Vegas Freeway to go north. Daniel watched the netbook: his laptop was still there, it could only be in the car. The lights of the casinos went by on the right and there was not much traffic. He kept the sedan (plate 815-TUV) four or five lengths in front, relieved that it wasn't speeding.

When they reached downtown the car came off the freeway.

Daniel saw the tower of the Plaza Hotel and he followed along Grand Central Parkway, the railway on their right. They took Ogden Avenue and then the boulevard. He followed past pawn and bond shops, a wedding chapel and a topless cabaret.

At last, the car slowed. It turned off the road into the driveway of the Riviera Inn, a two-storey motel where the balcony faced a parking lot. Daniel pulled over on the boulevard and jogged to the motel's drive. He heard the slam of a car door and walked past a closed office then edged into the motel's central lot in time to see Ania's husband (it could only have been him—the wide, hulking frame) move to the door of one of the rooms and go in, carrying a bag.