And so on and so forth. At noon they broke for a lunch of cold poached salmon with hollandaise, and capers and cucumber salad, freshly prepared in the Pomona’s galley, brought in with decorum by a pair of adept servers, and eaten with corresponding appreciation.
It was not by chance that they had waited until after their meal to bring up the previous spring’s sabotage of a NASA space shuttle carrying UpLink orbital technology, and Sword’s presumably connected encounters with paid terrorists in southern Brazil and Kazakhstan-the “nasty affair” to which Scull had alluded. A number of
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major issues surrounding those events remained unresolved, and Gordian had wanted everything else on the agenda out of the way so they could devote the latter half of the meeting to them without digression.
The empty dishes carried off, he’d turned his penetrating blue eyes toward Rollie Thibodeau.
“Okay,” he said. “Any progress to report?”
Thibodeau pursed his lips.
“Some,” he said. “Got to do with Le Chaut Sauvage.”
Nimec would later recall seeing Ricci tense with something between edginess and anger at Thibodeau’s mention of the tag he’d given the terrorists’ otherwise nameless field commander, Cajun French for “The Wildcat.” A man who had twice eluded their efforts to capture him, the second time after tearing away from Ricci during a fierce hand-to-hand struggle at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
“Up till a few days ago, we didn’t have anythin’ would give us a firm lead on him,” Thibodeau had continued. “Was plenty for guesswork, though, startin’ with what we knew about that American botanist in Peru got kidnapped and ransomed for seven million back in ’97. He say the guy callin’ the shots with the narco-guerrillas who did the snatch was tall, blond, an’ light-skinned, body like a weight lifter. Ordered him returned to his family minus both eyes.”
Gordian shook his head in horror. “Making a positive ID by the victim close to impossible, if any of his abductors were ever captured,” he said. “The cold-blooded logic certainly fits our man.”
Thibodeau nodded. “Ain’t the worst of it, either. Word out of the Sudan was that someone with the same looks headed up mercenary extermination squads in the
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south, part of the country they call the triangle of death. This’d be two years ago, when the civil war heated up. Wiped out entire villages hostile to the radicals in Khartoum. Men, women, children, the old an’ sick, wasn’t no difference to him.” He scowled. “Son of a bitch ain’t just cold-blooded. Be a monster.”
“And he gets around,” Nimec said. “Remember the Air Paris flight that was hijacked in Morocco last year? Another hostage situation, another large payoff. The Algerians who took responsibility threatened to start killing the children first and convinced the authorities it wasn’t a bluff. They were provided with a private jet as a condition of the hostage release, flew off to an unknown location, and got away clean with twenty million francs. Or mostly clean.” He leaned forward. “This one has a silver lining, Gord.”
Gordian had waited.
“The hijacker giving the orders never removed his stocking mask on the tarmac outside the plane. But inside with the air-conditioning down, no ventilation, it was another story,” Nimec said. ‘Take one guess how he was described by the passengers who saw his face when the mask came off.”
Gordian looked at him. “Blond, light-complected.”
“And a heavy lifter,” Nimec said, nodding. “Definitely wasn’t Algerian, spoke with an accent that might’ve been either Swiss or German.” He paused. “I prepared a brief on the incident when it happened, but because we didn’t have any involvement, it had kind of escaped my mind. Then I came across my thumbnail on the computer while reviewing data for our own investigation, and got to thinking the blond guy responsible might be the same guy we’re after. So I went back into the files
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and out popped the most crucial detail as far as we’re concerned. Namely, a French ambassador being held on board managed to get a photo of him when he wasn’t paying attention. He was so traumatized, it was months before he remembered the film and had it developed.”
Gordian had raised his eyebrows.
“Did you actually see a copy of the photo?”
“Not then, I didn’t,” Nimec said. “But thanks to Rol- lie, I have.”
Thibodeau minimized this accomplishment with a wave of his hand.
“Couldn’t beat Pete’s source for the info, a unit commander in the Gendarmerie National crisis intervention team at the airport,” he said. “Only trouble was that he gave it off the record and uncorroborated. No GIGN official would admit there was a snapshot for a couple reasons. One, they’re supposed to be the best, and it embarrassed ’em that the hijackers escaped. They wanted to save face, make it harder for competin’ agencies to run ’em down before they did. Two, the ambassador got scared, pulled strings to make the picture disappear. Figured the terrorists might take revenge on him or his family if it was ever used as evidence in court and they found out who took it. I was in his spot, maybe I’d feel that way, too.”
“Tell me how you got hold of it,” Gordian said.
Thibodeau shrugged. “The ambassador ain’t the only one has contacts. I called in an IOU with somebody in Europol, who did the same with somebody else. Like that, soil. Took a while for anything to shake. Then one morning last week, I turn on my computer, and there’s the photo attached to an encrypted E-mail. Right away I recognize our man from that airstrip in the Pantanal,
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but I punch up the satellite image the Hawkeye-I got of him just to be a hundred percent sure. Forwarded the pair of ’em to Ricci, since he actually seen him up close.”
Gordian glanced across the table at Ricci.
“And?”
“It’s him,” Ricci said. “No question.”
Gordian looked thoughtful.
“Got another thing in the works,” Thibodeau said into the momentary silence. “Might turn out to be important, gonna have to see.”
Gordian gave him his attention. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
“Wasn’t no small favor I used up with that friend of mine, but my whole nest egg,” Thibodeau said. “Besides wantin’ the picture, I asked to tap into Europol’s database of known terrorists. Took longer for him to swing that, but he say it could happen any day. I’m gonna run every at-large be a general match for Le Chaut Sauvage through that new Profiler system the techies been wor- kin’ on, see if we get any hits.”
“The software’s designed to recognize suspects hiding behind full-face masks or disguises, even ones who’ve had plastic surgery, by comparing digital file images with each other and a checklist of hard-to-alter physical characteristics,” Nimec said. “When it started to look like the Europeans might open up for Rollie, Megan and I became mildly optimistic about getting some cooperation from domestic security agencies. We’ve been trying to convince them to let us input their intelligence tech.”
“Any luck?”
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“CIA’s my albatross,” Nimec said. “I’m still being routed through channels.”
Gordian glanced at Megan. “What about the FBI? Have you gotten in touch with Bob Lang in D.C.?”
She nodded. “He’s sympathetic to my request, and I seem to be making headway.” A shrug. “We’ve arranged a face-to-face meeting for early next week.”
“Try to goose him along,” Gordian said. He jotted a notation on the yellow pad in front of him. “Meanwhile, I’ll place a call to Langley. We should stick to our game plan, at least as far as this aspect of the probe’s concerned -”
“That isn’t close to good enough.”
In retrospect, Nimec guessed Ricci’s interruption had surprised him less than the fact that he hadn’t spoken up much sooner. He’d been at constant odds with his colleagues over how the probe was being handled and had expressed his unhappiness to Nimec on a multitude of occasions.
Gordian turned toward Ricci, as had Nimec and everyone else in the room.
“What bothers you about it?” he asked in a level voice.
“I was asked to join this team because you wanted somebody to help retool it, make it more proactive, not tinker with the status quo,” Ricci said. “That was what I heard when I got the hiring pitch, anyway. And here we are talking about putting in phone calls to the Euros and feebs.”
Gordian regarded him steadily a moment.
“You believe we should be doing something different,” he said.
“A whole lot of somethings,” Ricci answered. “I think
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we need a special task force on the job twenty-four/ seven. I think it should have a separate command center with the capability to send rapid deployment teams after the people that hit us in Cuiaba and the Russian launch site. I think we have to be willing to dig them out from under rocks, pull them out of the trees, whatever it takes, wherever they’re laying low or being protected. They killed our people without provocation, and we’ve lost months that should have been spent running them down. We have to go on the offensive.”