True Faith and Allegiance

Dragomir Vasilescu’s voice cracked. “I… have my best man working on your case. Dalca. Alexandru Dalca. We can go talk to him now. He will tell you. He is the only one with access to—”

Dragomir Vasilescu put it all together quickly. He remembered that long-ago conversation with Alex Dalca. The one where he said the Chinese were thinking too small and ARTD could exploit the data and sell it to the highest bidder. Clearly, Dalca had been doing just that.

And he thought of the very odd fire this afternoon. Clearly that was Dalca’s doing, a diversion to take the hard drive.

The man leaning into Vasilescu’s ear from behind noted Vasilescu’s hesitation. He said, “We will talk to this man Dalca. Perhaps he can answer questions that you cannot.”

As Vasilescu came to the realization of what was actually going on, he knew for his own self-preservation he had to somehow convince the men surrounding him now that they were completely off base. He couldn’t have Chinese intelligence roughing up one of his people. The information they might uncover could be bad for ARTD, and bad for Vasilescu himself.

The fury that burned inside him was almost enough for him to punch his fist through the monitor in front of him. He said, “Dalca is my very best employee. And a good man as well. His discretion is beyond reproach.” But while saying this, his inner monologue was singing a very different tune. I’ll fucking kill you myself, you deceitful, betraying sack of shit!

“Where do we find this Dalca?”

“He… he will be at work at nine o’clock tomorrow. Let’s all meet again and—”

The man with the strong hands grabbed the back of Vasilescu’s neck and yanked him up, turned him for the door.

As they waited for the elevator, two men said something in Chinese, and then one of them stepped in front of Vasilescu, opened his suit coat, and revealed a short-barreled submachine gun hanging from a sling under his arm.

The English speaker behind him said, “You communicate danger to your guards, and you will all die. We want security camera files from this building removed.”

Vasilescu stepped behind the front desk in the lobby a minute later, and immediately pulled one of the keyboards to him. He began deleting security camera files. As an explanation to the two very confused guards, he just said, “My clients here are the shy type. You know how it is.”

The two guards just looked at each other, but they did not respond to their boss.

With a final press of the Enter key, the files were erased and the cams turned off. He stood back up and left with the Asian men and climbed back into the van, and the lights went out when the black bag slipped back over his head.

As they drove through the night, with the interior of the vehicle perfectly silent, Vasilescu realized his only hope for survival at this point was finding Alexandru Dalca and convincing the Chinese that he alone was responsible.

57

Midas was nearly halfway through the ten-p.m.-to-one-a.m. watch, which consisted of little more than gazing bleary-eyed at a few images from low-light security cameras and listening to a mechanical droning sound — the slight vibrations of Dalca’s snores from his bedroom, into his living room, picked up by the laser on the sliding glass door, and translated through the headphones Midas had hooked over his right ear and the back of his head, giving him room for the Campus-encrypted earpiece he kept in his left in case he needed to talk to the team.

He sipped water from one of two bottles he had on the floor next to him. The other was empty, for now. He had a standard two-water-bottle system; one full of water and one to use as a receptacle so he wouldn’t have to leave the storage room and take the several-minute walk to the apartment to relieve himself in the bathroom there.

He was just about to make use of the empty bottle when he noticed the headlights of a vehicle moving up the street. As it rolled under a street lamp he thought it might be some sort of delivery van on a late-night run, but it slowed even more in the intersection, then backed into the side alley between Dalca’s apartment building and the adjacent fenced parking lot. Here it turned off its lights, but Midas could tell the engine was still running.

Midas watched the vehicle in silence for several seconds, thinking it would shut down and the driver would get out, but to his surprise the side door opened. Four men climbed out, all wearing different types of dark clothing: tracksuits, cotton work pants, and hoodies.

Midas snatched his secure mobile off the desk and dialed Chavez. He assumed Ding was sacked out on a cot in the safe house apartment on the other side of the building, but this event across the street warranted waking him up.

Midas’s earpiece came alive in his left ear with Chavez’s voice, and though he answered quickly, it was clear he’d been sound asleep seconds earlier. “Yeah?”