True Faith and Allegiance

While Chavez was still on the phone with Clark, the minivan picked up Gavin and all the team’s gear in an alley two blocks from their safe house. The heavyset IT director had lugged everything down five flights of stairs and over a hundred yards, making two trips to do so, and they found him sitting on stacked Pelican cases and North Face backpacks, a sheen of sweat on his face and his chest heaving more than that of any of the three men who’d just fought off a half-dozen armed hostiles and escaped from local police ten minutes earlier.

Gavin loaded gear through the open lift-back, and then recoiled in shock as he realized the big form in the very rear of the minivan was not a duffel bag but, instead, a dead body. He didn’t know why the team was hauling a corpse, but he was too winded to say anything at the time.

He just shut the back and climbed into the side door.

They took off again, and by the time Chavez finished his conversation with Clark and was driving farther south, Gavin finally caught his breath.

He said, “I got a good look at the shooters. Did you see them?”

Chavez said, “My guess was Chinese.”

Gavin said, “Yeah. Looked like it to me. I got fair pictures of a couple of faces. We can run them against known Chinese intelligence officers to see if anything turns up.”

Jack said, “Considering their track record with cyberintel breaches… a fair assumption.”

Midas said, “Why are they after Dalca if they’re working together?”

Jack said, “One of the theories Gavin and I had was that this was some sort of inside job at the cyberfraud company, and one person, Dalca, stole the data from whatever state actor had commissioned the breach. If that’s the case — Dalca’s the thief, and China’s the state actor — then it follows that Dalca would not be thrilled about serious-looking Chinese gents knocking at his door.”

Gavin asked, “Are we going to the airport?”

Chavez shook his head. “We don’t have Dalca, so we’re not going anywhere. We need to find a place to hole up while we figure out our next move.”

Felix spoke from behind a faceful of gauze handed to him by Midas. “I know a place. My nephew is in the Army, deployed with NATO. He has a little farm in Sinteşti, just fifteen minutes out of the city. It’s not much. He’s a bachelor and never home, but it’s quiet.”

Chavez said, “Lead the way, Felix. We’ll get you patched up when we get there.”

Finally Gavin asked, “Who is the dead guy in the back?”

The other men in the vehicle all turned to look his way.

“What dead guy?” Jack asked.

“See for yourself.”

Jack crawled over some of the luggage and used a penlight to look over the body. The man was clearly dead, with a bullet wound in his forehead. Digging through his pockets, Jack pulled the man’s ID and shined a light on it. “Dragomir Vasilescu.”

Gavin said instantly, “He’s the director of ARTD. Why’d you guys shoot him?”

“We didn’t. He came with the car. Either the Chinese executed him, or else he got hit in the crossfire of the gunfight. With a hole right between his eyes, my guess is it was the former.”

Chavez said, “We don’t know if he was working for Dalca or not, and we don’t know for sure those were Chinese. Either way, whoever was after Dalca decided to hold Vasilescu responsible.”

“Yeah,” Midas said, “those guys weren’t playing around back there.”

Chavez looked at him in the low light of the van. “Clark said you told him you were looking to make a difference. Does this qualify?”

“We didn’t get Dalca, but if we just kept the guy with all the secret intel against our military and spooks from getting picked up by the Chinese, then I guess that is better than nothing.”

“Damn right,” Chavez said. “Now let’s finish the job.”

60

Dominic and Adara spent the afternoon and evening seated at a table in the lobby of the Chicago Athletic Association hotel, their laptops in front of them and their Bluetooth connections to their cell phones wedged in their ears.

They’d been at it for hours, but so far they’d been unable to find any one obvious Islamic State target here in the city.

Adara said again that the single biggest target was the JTTF itself, but again they dismissed it as too hard an objective for al-Matari and his people, since they’d lost a lot of cell members in the past week on attacks that had been utterly unprotected.

At ten-fifteen they’d finished a dinner of pizza in the lobby, and were about to pack up for the night, when Dom’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but saw it was local.

“Yeah?”

“SA Caruso? This is Special Agent Jeffcoat.” Dom could hear obvious excitement in the man’s voice, which surprised him, because that morning Jeffcoat couldn’t have been less interested in talking to him.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Well, either you were holding out intel on me, in which case you and I are going to have words later, or else you are one lucky son of a bitch.”

“How so?”