Marcados-Sariga set down his glass and looked from Savoy to Marks. “What does it have to do with the projects?”
“Nothing,” said Marks. “Other than we expect cooperation and discretion. Otherwise, you can kiss the projects good-bye. We’ll take our business elsewhere.”
“I understand,” said Marcados-Sariga. “This can certainly be arranged.”
“How quickly?”
“Certainly within the week,” said Marcados-Sariga. “Sooner if possible.”
Marks opened his briefcase. He pulled out several bricks of $100 bills and placed them down on the table.
“That’s a hundred thousand,” said Marks. “For you. We want a meeting this afternoon.”
The Panamanian’s eyes bulged as he stared at the money.
“Let me make a call.”
Two and a half hours later, with a slightly lighter duffel bag in the trunk of the sedan, Marks, Savoy, and Spinale pulled into a gated compound an hour’s drive from downtown Panama City.
The location served as the headquarters of Panama’s special forces commander, General Sarijo Qital. It was one of more than a dozen such compounds spread out through the Panama countryside. Qital, a Western-educated man of fifty, had been brought in by Panama’s president to help clean up the country and attempt to rid Panama of
its legacy drug industry and private militias. Consequently, the outlaw groups who still controlled the large drug trade in Panama despised Qital. He had been targeted many times and needed to rotate on a nightly basis between the “camps,” as he referred to them.
“He will meet with you,” Marcados-Sariga had said after arranging the meeting. “The president himself is forcing him to do it. Qital is a difficult man, I must tell you. He has a short temper. Good luck.”
After driving from the city into the hills, they followed the directions that had been given them, taking a left-hand turn up a small, nondescript dirt road. After a mile, they came to the gates. Two men dressed in plainclothes bearing automatic machine guns met the sedan at the gates. They asked Marks, Savoy, and Spinale to step from the vehicle and patted them down. Searching the car, they looked at the duffel bag, opening it up, then zipped it back up. It wasn’t the first bag full of money the men had seen. They signaled Marks, Savoy, and Spinale up the long gravel road through lush, yellow Guayacan trees. At the end of a winding slope, a massive brick building sat in the midst of a clearing.
Spinale parked the sedan in front of the building as six men emerged and surrounded the car. All of the man were soldiers and wore khaki military fatigues except for one man, a tall figure who wore a Navy blue suit with a yellow and green striped button-down shirt, no tie. The man walked in the middle of the soldiers and approached Marks as he walked up the paved pathway toward the building.
“
Señor
Marks,” said the man. “I am General Sarijo Qital.”
Marks, Savoy, and Spinale followed Qital to the brick building, Marks carrying a slim steel briefcase, Savoy and Spinale the duffel bag. They walked down a long, windowless hallway and followed him through a door that led to a veranda overlooking miles of jungle.
General Qital sat first in one of the wicker chairs that occupied the deck.
“Thank you for meeting with us, sir,” said Savoy as they sat down.
A soldier brought four bottles of water and placed them on a table in front of them, then left.
“I was
ordered
to meet with you,” said Qital. “I know of the attacks
of the past week, and I understand the extent of your losses, Mr. Marks, and please accept my regrets, but you’ll have to forgive my bluntness: I am a busy man with problems of my own. I don’t appreciate being pressured by my own president to meet with some wealthy American who needs a favor.”
“Our country is at war, General Qital,” said Marks. “And when we’re at war, so are you. Forgive
my
bluntness, but we need your help to win that war.”
Without looking chastened, Qital subtly softened his voice. “What do you want?”
“Information,” said Marks. “And your discretion. And we need it immediately.”
“Information?” Qital said, leaning back. “Let me give you some information.” He laced his fingers together, as if in prayer, and placed them before his mouth, speaking in audibly restrained tones. “Two days ago, a group of four men entered a schoolhouse an hour from here and opened fire, killing eleven children. Why? Because one of the children is the daughter of a Panamanian who is responsible for buying farmland in Panama on behalf of the Starbucks Corporation, land they can grow coffee on. They killed the man’s daughter, and all of this little girl’s classmates, because the cocaine lords need the land for their own use.
Eleven children!
Can you imagine? They don’t kill the father himself, no. They kill his daughter, her friends,
children.
If you think you’re the only one at war, you’re gravely mistaken.”
Marks stared at Qital in silence, nodded. “I understand, General. We will find our information from another source. Thank you for your time.” Marks stood up to leave.
“One second,” said Savoy, still in his seat, now leaning forward and staring Qital in the eye. “What you don’t know is there’s a traitor inside the U.S. government,
actively
working with the terrorists. That person hired one, maybe two, Panamanian assassins to kill American soldiers and attempt to assassinate a material witness. A photo of the assassin is our only hope of finding the mole, and maybe stopping the terrorists.”
Qital looked intrigued, despite himself. “Obviously I didn’t know
that. Please sit down, Mr. Marks.” He whistled. When a soldier came he held up three fingers. The soldier returned carrying four bottles of Heineken. “I’m sorry for my insensitive words.”
Marks and Savoy shared a look, then Marks returned to his wicker chair. In a hostlike gesture, Qital toasted them and took a big sip from his beer. “I know what happened in Colorado, Mr. Marks. I know the feeling to be hunted in your own home.”
Marks nodded and took a drink while Savoy opened the briefcase and removed a manila folder. Savoy pulled a grainy, somewhat blurry photograph from the folder. Despite its low quality, the photo’s subject came through: the startling face of a dead woman, eyes open, staring blankly up into the sky, blood lining her lips, her stunning beauty acting as a disturbing counterpoint to the stark violence the photo implied.
“We need to know who she is, and who she worked for. That’s it. We’ll pay handsomely for the information.”
Qital held the photo for several moments, staring at it. Finally, he shut his eyes and, with his other hand, reached up and rubbed the bridge of his nose in thought.
“Can you help us?” asked Savoy.
“I trained her,” said Qital finally, opening his eyes and looking at Marks. “Her name was Sassa Cortez. We . . . well, we had a very close relationship, one time.”
“Did she work for PPF?” asked Savoy.
“She left a year ago,” said Qital. “I don’t know where she went.”
“Can you find out?”
“Yes,” said Qital. “I will help you. But I have to ask. Why isn’t the CIA digging into this?”
Marks gestured to Spinale, who pulled the duffel bag from behind the chair.
“Earlier I mentioned discretion,” Marks said. “There’s almost ten million dollars in that bag. If you can find out who hired Sassa Cortez and keep it between us, it’s worth that much to me personally to not have to answer that question.”
J. EDGAR HOOVER FBI BUILDING
Two doors down the hallway from her office, Jessica walked into the windowless conference room. The table was large enough to accommodate more than twenty people, and it was packed.
“Okay, everyone,” Jessica said as she moved to a seat in the middle of the table. “I apologize for being late. Let’s get moving.”
“Where should we start?” asked a middle-aged man sitting directly across from her, Jessica’s chief of staff Tony Fogler.
“Long Beach,” responded Jessica. “Then interdepartmental, closing with the explosive chain. We need to make it quick.”
“Got it,” said Fogler.
“I’ll start,” said T. J. Chatterjee. “We’re at level red across—”
“No, start with ports,” interrupted Jessica. “Long Beach specifically.”
“Yeah, good point,” said Chatterjee. “Oliver’s running that.”
“Ports are shut down everywhere,” said Oliver Smith. “No boats out, no boats in. We’re scouring employee manifests—”
“Long Beach?” asked Fogler. “Come on.”
“Yeah. We’re looking at every employee who worked at Long Beach in the past two years. There were more than four thousand. It’s taking time. But the new Homeland database is working extremely well.
It’s grabbing flags from a bunch of places we would have had a tough time locating, Customs, Interpol, DEA, local police, et cetera.”
“I assume you’re not just running a criminal profile—”
“That’s right. We’re running a criminal profile as well as three ancillary modules. The database is extremely extensible. We have a traveler profile running, looking at any employees who visited the Middle East in the last decade. With few exceptions, it pulls from an Interpol data set, so they would not have had to fly a U.S. carrier nor travel directly to or from the U.S. It’s very powerful stuff. Let me tell you, you travel to someplace in the Middle East and unless you got there on a bike or a camel, you’ll be in the database basically until you’re dead. We’re also pushing employee data against purchase criteria, seeing what, if anything, the credit card companies have.”
“What would that surface?” asked Jessica.
“Weapons, bomb components, certain subscriptions. We’re even running what the credit data people call a ‘cuisine’ profile, flagging anyone who ate at certain types of places in Orange County, falafel joints, that sort of thing, cross-referencing all of it. We’re going to be thorough here.”
“I like it,” said Jessica.
“Same with wireless and wireline data from the telcos,” added Smith. “If any Long Beach employee had Middle East ties, made phone calls over there, we should find it, though, of course, the disposable calling cards don’t get tracked. That said, if they bought disposable calling cards with credit that will get flagged.”
“Make sure you’re hitting service providers,” said Jessica. “Food crews, railroads, trucking companies that do business at the port.”
“Absolutely,” agreed Smith.
“You mentioned the other ports—”
“We’ve shut down all ports in the U.S., including LNG facilities. No boats in or out until Coast Guard does a level-seven screen, then we’ll let them move. Should be tomorrow sometime.”
“Airports?” asked Fogler.
“Every airport has elevated threat level clearance, according to TSA. Things are starting to slow down dramatically, especially in the East,
compounded by the snowstorm, which is moving up the coast. You know, when they go from random bag checks to serial the impact is just dramatic, really slows things. We’ve asked the carriers to consider rationalizing schedules in the coming week. But they’re all pushing back. This is a very critical time for them, lots of travelers, profits, you know the drill. That said, cancellations by travelers are spiking since the explosion, as you might imagine.”
“Is Customs working the profile?” asked Jessica.
“Yes,” said Chatterjee. “It’s all we have at the moment. So far, there have been several dozen flags, three of which are being detained for further questioning.”
“What are we doing with them?”
“Two were East Coast. Boston, Baltimore. They’re both at Quantico. But there’s nothing there.”
“The third?”
“Customs flagged someone at LAX last night. Iranian on a student visa, coming in from Puerto Rico. We have him at FBI regional. We have a team that began an interrogation sequence last night. So far, it’s been unproductive; we may need Lou’s authorization for a pharmaceutical package.”
“Get the paper,” said Fogler. “Run it through me.”
“Borders?” asked Jessica.
“Lock down,” said Sarah Wells. “The Canadians have been somewhat helpful. If anything, we’re seeing lines building up getting out of the U.S. We have a book profile going and so far nothing relevant has popped.”
Jessica reached forward, grabbed a glass, poured herself some water, and took a sip.
“Barry, what about the explosive?” she asked. “Anything?”
“Yes,” said Barry Urquhart. “We have two tracks going and we might have gotten lucky in, of all places, Canada. The team we sent up to Savage Island was unable to take any kind of water or soil samples. It’s basically open ocean now. There’s just too much current and the throughput is too cold to spend a great deal of time in. Whatever was there is gone. What we were able to pull out was a bolt, part of some steel rebar. It was
a monumental effort. One of our divers almost drowned. But we have the piece. It has trace factors of the octanitrocubane on it. By tonight, we should have a quick test on the material.”
“Meaning we’ll have the sniff test that soon?”
“Yes, and we’ll FedEx it immediately to TSA, Customs and Border Patrol, DEA, and any other government entity that has canine capability set. By around 9:00
P.M.
tonight, keep your fingers crossed, we’ll be sniffing for octanitrocubane at every travel or shipment nexus in the United States. East Coast will have it by supper time.”