The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(29)
“We offered him a deal,” says the man standing at Yael’s side. He is wiry, muscled, in his mid-thirties. A long purple birthmark reaches from his left ear down the side of his neck.
“Which was?”
“Better than that,” he replies, gesturing at the police launch.
“An orange jumpsuit?”
Cyrus Jones laughs. “Any color he wanted.”
*
Yael grimaced at the memory. She closed the window with Sami’s story, opened her anonymizing software program, and connected to her neighbor’s Wi-Fi network. His password was based on his birthday, which she had long ago remotely extracted from a file on his computer. Despite her caution she knew nothing was totally secure, especially in the age of Edward Snowden, but the NSA software on her iPad was as good as it got.
She relaunched her web browser and typed a series of numbers and letters, interspersed with dots, into the address bar. The secure website had been set up for her by Joe-Don. A plain gray window appeared, asking for the password. The numeric code, which changed every day, was based on the first letters of the words in the headline of the lead story in that day’s New York Times. Each letter’s numeric value was based on its position in the alphabet—A being one, M thirteen, for example—and was then multiplied by that day’s date. The results were added together and the total was then divided by the number of pages in the newspaper’s national section. That final number was the password. Yael glanced at the news section of the newspaper on her coffee table. “Republicans Continue Push to Impeach President” was above the fold.
She picked up her phone, opened the calculator application, and started work, jotting down each set of numbers on a notepad. After a minute or two she checked the last page of the newspaper’s national section, did the final calculation, and entered the result into the password field. A new window appeared. A series of folders appeared, including one holding the details of Eli’s missions. But now she wanted to check a folder marked with a video player logo. There were two files inside. She clicked on the first. It showed a bare, windowless concrete room. A wiry, well-muscled man stood naked from the waist up. His head was covered with a black hood, a dark smear was visible on the lower right side of his neck, and his legs were manacled. A dog ran around the room, barking and snarling. Yael watched the clip for the twenty seconds that it lasted, then closed the window. That file was freely available in the Internet. The second one was not.
Yael watched herself appear onscreen, with her hair wild, her face scratched and sweaty as she breathed heavily. “My name is Yael Azoulay. I work for the United Nations,” she said to the camera, which spun around to show a man in his thirties sitting on the floor of a washroom. He was bruised and bleeding, his clothes were torn, and he was panting. His ankles were bound together with a white plastic tie, his hands cuffed over a water pipe.
Yael’s voice returned. “This is Cyrus Jones. He works for a black-ops department of the US government known as the DoD, the Department of Deniable. He is somehow connected to the Prometheus Group, which is trading illegally with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Cyrus Jones tried to kill me today on the Staten Island Ferry.”
The camera shakily zoomed in on Jones’s face so that it filled the screen. His eyes blazed with hatred and fury. The birthmark on his neck pulsed so strongly it seemed to be alive.
“This film will be uploaded to a secure server. If anything happens to me it will be posted on YouTube. Remember: Cyrus Jones. Clarence Clairborne. The Prometheus Group. The Department of Deniable.”
Yael watched the clip until the end, closed the window, and logged out. She picked up a notebook from the coffee table and drew a triangle on a sheet of paper. She wrote Prometheus on one side and DoD on the other. At the top of the triangle she wrote Efrat Global Solutions, adding KZX? next to Prometheus. She understood that Prometheus, EGS, and the DoD all wanted a new war in the Middle East; Prometheus and EGS because it would be the most spectacular bonanza yet for the military-industrial complex, bringing in billions of dollars’ worth of contracts. The Department of Deniable needed a new war, because without one there was no reason for it to exist. The renditioners, the waterboarders, the interrogators, the prisoner freezers, and rectal feeders, the legion of half-crazed ex–Special Forces soldiers who could never function in civilian society, had nowhere else to go.
But what was the KZX connection? KZX was the world’s largest media conglomerate. The German firm had bought up newspapers and television and radio stations across eastern Europe on the cheap after the collapse of Communism, before expanding into Russia, India, and Brazil. But the firm had several other interests. KZX’s pharmaceutical division was less well known but was extremely powerful on the global drugs market. That part of the company dated back to the 1930s and had recently been embroiled in a scandal in eastern Europe. There were reports that KZX scientists had attempted to produce a genetically engineered drug to reduce the fertility of Romany women, even that the science used dated back to Nazi experiments during the Second World War.* The furor had faded away after KZX announced a deluge of scholarships and endowments for Romany students and organizations.
But KZX was still aggressively seeking new pharmaceutical markets and opportunities. Yael had recently heard that company officials had secretly met with a Taliban leader in Doha, Qatar, to discuss plans for large-scale cultivation of hashish across Afghanistan, as more and more countries legalized its possession. For KZX, as well as Prometheus and EGS, instability also meant opportunity. Freshwater had made no secret of her dislike of international corporations and her plan to limit their global reach. It would certainly suit KZX for Freshwater to be out of the way, and have another, more pliant and amenable president in the White House.