The Recruit: A Taskforce Story Page 8

  But only if Billings wasn’t around when it happened.

  As much as he wanted to, Kurt didn’t need to get in a fight right now. He chose the better—and honest—answer.

  He said, “Yeah, I’m with you. If anyone could do it, it would be Pike’s team. Unfortunately, he’s engaged right now in Africa. As a matter of fact, trying to shut off some Islamic State funding from a corrupt Saudi citizen.”

  4

  I felt a fingernail stroking my back, right between my shoulder blades, then a whisper. “Wake up, sleepyhead. I have to go. Before one of those early birds comes and knocks on the door.”

  Meaning, Before someone finds out I’m here.

  We’d been out very late the night before developing a pattern of life on our target, who wasn’t what one would call a pious Muslim, and I figured everyone from the mission was still asleep. The target wouldn’t be doing anything until at least noon.

  I rolled over, leaning on an elbow. “Jennifer, I don’t think we’re fooling anyone anymore.”

  She said, “Pike, appearances matter. I know they know, but there’s no reason for the team leader to throw it in their faces. I think Knuckles tolerates it, but only because we make an effort to not let it show during operations.”

  Knuckles was my second in command, a Navy SEAL who, strangely enough, was a stickler for the military prohibition on fraternization within the chain of command. I think it had something to do with a bad experience in the close quarters of a ship with a male supervisor. Or maybe he was just a stickler. Either way, unfortunately for him, neither Jennifer nor I were in the military, and it was my company. My team. But she had a point.

  “So you want to scuttle out of here doing a walk of shame to keep up the appearances of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’?”

  Before she could answer, I heard the door to our room fly open. Like a high schooler hiding from her mother, Jennifer threw the covers over her head. I bunched up the thick bedspread to hide her form, tossed a pillow over her pile of clothes, then turned to rip into the idiotic maid who’d entered.

  Instead, I saw Knuckles standing in my room.

  He said, “Retro’s finally cracked into the backbone server for the hotel. We’ve got Panda’s computer, and he’s making plans.”

  I scowled and said, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know how to knock? How’d you get in here?”

  He held up a keycard and said, “I just told you Retro got into the server. We can make a key for any room in the hotel.”

  “So you figured you needed one for my room?”

  He smiled and said, “I figured you’d be asleep and didn’t want to bang on the door.”

  “I was asleep. Asshole.”

  “You want to dress and come up? Or stay in bed?”

  I was already out and throwing on my clothes. He turned back to the hallway leading to the door, disappearing from view. I heard the door open, then, “Oh, Jennifer, you can come too. We won’t say anything about you wearing the same clothes as last night.”

  Shit. The door closed and she poked her head out. “Well, that’s pretty embarrassing.”

  I said, “Tell me about it. Getting caught skulking around like kids is more embarrassing than getting snagged red-handed.”

  She kicked over the pillow, grabbed her clothes, and went into the bathroom, saying, “I’m using your toothbrush.”

  I started shoving things into my pockets and unplugging my phone from the charger, saying, “I guess that makes it official.”

  I was putting on my shoes when she came back out fully clothed, brushing her hair. She said, “It wasn’t before?”

  The words caught me off guard, because I was just making a joke. Jennifer and I had definitely become partners in more ways than just our business, but we’d never verbalized it. I’d made one statement in the heat of the moment on our last mission, then we’d just sort of dropped it. I was a shit show when it came to such things, and she knew it. She was patient, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last.

  I said, “Well . . . yeah . . . I mean . . . I was just . . .”

  She hit me in the chest with a towel and said, “Oh, please. Spare me. Should I go up?”

  Relieved, I stood and held out my arm to the door. “Yeah. Get it over with. You show any weakness with these guys, and they’ll start ribbing us forever.”

  We got in the elevator and I noticed her clothes, stained from our mission last night and wrinkled from lying on the floor of my room. She looked like she’d slept in them. I said, “You’re really going to wear what you had on last night?”

  She snapped her head to me and said, “I was. . . . Should I go change?”

  The car stopped and I said, “Too late. Welcome to the lion’s den.”

  I stepped out and she said, “I’m not going in if you think they’re going to laugh at me.”

  “Come on. They know better than to laugh at the managing partner of Grolier Recovery Services. You can fire them.”

  Jennifer and I were the owners of GRS, ostensibly a firm that specialized in archeological research around the world. We worked for private entities, universities, and others to help facilitate excavations around the world. Since most archeological digs were in areas that were borderline Wild West—like Nairobi, Kenya, where we were now—I handled the security side of things, something that fit my military background. Jennifer, with her anthropology degree and insatiable appetite for annoying anyone within earshot about ancient history, had the hard part of acting like we really were a legitimate archeological firm.

  In truth, the whole thing was a shell company that cloaked a top secret counterterrorism unit called the Taskforce. Back in the day, when I was on active duty, I had been a team leader in the unit. Now, I was a civilian co-owner of a cover organization and a team leader yet again. It had been a rocky road, starting with recruiting Jennifer—a pure civilian and a female to boot—and getting her read on, trained up, and admitted to the unit, and had ended with me convincing the commander, Colonel Kurt Hale, to let my company start operating not as a support asset, but as an actual team.

  On the surface, for anyone looking at the pure black and white, the demands were insane. Let a female Operator into the Taskforce? Let a civilian company start running missions? No way. But there’s much more to special operations than what could be tallied on a sheet.

  Jennifer had passed selection with flying colors, and had put away a few bad guys with her innate skill alone before even attempting that trial, and I . . . well, I was fucking Pike Logan.

  Enough said.

  That might be a little big-headed, especially given some of the mistakes I’d made in my past, when I’d slipped into the abyss and lost my way. But that was history now, and at the end of the day, even with the stains, I was the most successful team leader the Taskforce had ever used. Just ask all the people walking around today because I was there to prevent their death. You couldn’t, of course, because they didn’t know I existed.

  The Taskforce command and I had been going back and forth, with me running things off the books and the Oversight Council wetting their pants because of my actions, but finally Kurt had said I was officially in charge. Which gave some members of the Council fits, but since I’d personally saved the lives of Oversight Council family members on my last mission, those idiots were shut down.

  Kurt had told me not to screw it up, then sent me to Africa to chase a fat Saudi with bags under his eyes that made him look like a Panda bear.

  5

  I knocked on the door of our makeshift tactical operations center, a suite at the InterContinental Hotel in Nairobi, feeling foolish that Knuckles had waltzed right into my room while I had forgotten to get a key to my own TOC.

  I waited for the door to open, knowing someone was eyeing me through the peephole. It took forever, making me wonder if they were screwing with us. Brett finally
turned the knob, saying, “Retro’s in back, working the computer. Someone’s on it right now, but it ain’t Panda.”

  A short African American built like a fireplug of solid muscle, he moved aside and I said, “Did you need to get a box to see out the door?”

  I walked in and waited on a reaction to Jennifer. All he said was, “Hey, Jenn. Good work last night.”

  That was it.

  Whew.

  She gave off her brilliant megawatt smile and said, “Thanks.”

  I started back to the bedroom and heard Brett say, “Yeah, it was a long night, huh?”

  Good work? Long night? I slid my eyes his way, but he was innocently standing by the door. No grin or anything else to indicate a double entendre.

  I went to the back bedroom, where Retro had set up all of our computer network stuff, and saw him staring at a screen, Knuckles standing over his shoulder.

  I said, “What’s up?”

  “Retro’s accessed Panda’s computer through the hotel Wi-Fi. He’s covertly turned on the laptop camera and we can see who’s typing, and it’s not him. It’s the security chief.”

  “And? Why do we care?”

  “He’s setting up a visit from an escort. You know, because Panda’s forty-two wives aren’t enough. Real pious.”

  A thought hit me. I said, “Hey Retro, if you can see what he’s typing, can’t you just rip through the computer? Image the hard drive and end this mission right now?”

  “Already did. This laptop isn’t the one we want. I’m willing to bet that one is air-gapped from the Internet. We still need to locate it and physically access it.”

  Ali Salim al-Naggar—aka Panda—was a wealthy Saudi businessman with strong indicators he was providing money to Salafist jihadist groups. One of many around the world defying their governments—or, in some instances, operating with its tacit approval—to fund extremists. In this case, we believed he was using his business connections as a clearinghouse to funnel money to the Islamic State—otherwise known as ISIS, ISIL, or Da’esh in the shifting sands of Arabic naming conventions—the rampaging lunatics running amok and beheading everything in their path in Syria and Iraq.

  This mission was strictly intelligence collection. Ordinarily, we would physically remove the terrorist from the playing field, but in this case, Panda was a well-known businessman with ties to the royal family. There was no way to remove him covertly. Unlike the usual assholes we usually chased, his disappearance would cause an unacceptable investigative effort, so we decided to simply gather irrefutable evidence of his wrongdoing, then feed it into the system.

  Our relationship with the kingdom went from hot to cold, depending on the political vagaries of the day, but the Saudis were scared spitless about the Islamic State, and worried about the growth of jihadist insurgents in its own country. There wouldn’t be a lot of tolerance and love once we boxed up Panda’s transgressions. Which is where the laptop came in.

  So far, we’d been stymied because his penthouse was always manned, and nobody had been allowed past the door, including the daily maid service.

  I said, “Why do we care about his sex habits? It’s not going to help us. Going in when he’s with her is the worst time because his security force will be on edge for the duration she’s there.”

  Brett said, “That’s true. We can’t get in behind the escort, but if we can control the escort herself, maybe she could do it.”

  They were all looking at me and I could tell they’d already come up with some half-baked plan. Had already talked it out. I said, “Okay, spill it. You want to pay off an escort to attack his computer? No way. I’m not trusting some prostitute to do it.”

  Retro said, “He’s not requesting some skinny local. He wants a white girl. A very expensive white girl. Over a thousand dollars for the night.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  They all looked at each other, gathering their courage, then Knuckles threw it out. “We have a white girl.”

  It took a moment for his words to register. Jennifer? I said, “No fucking way. You have lost your mind.”

  Brett saw me winding up and said, “Wait, Pike, wait. Just listen. This’ll work. She goes in as the escort; we go in as security. We’ll be there the entire time.”

  Retro kicked in, “Yeah, come on. You’ve been saying all along that Jennifer offers the team something because she’s a female, and this is it.”

  I said, “Acting like a whore? Really? That’s what you thought I meant?”

  Jennifer interrupted, “Hey, you’ve got a short memory. You threw me out on the streets in Prague as a streetwalker. Remember?”

  Everyone quit talking and looked at her. I said, “That was just an act to get a reaction from organized crime. I wasn’t sending you in with a man. No way.”

  Retro said, “She won’t be with him. . . .” He started to continue, but dribbled off at my glare.

  She said, “I’m willing to listen. What’s the plan?”

  I said, “Jennifer, no way. If you think I’m—”

  She cut me off with a raised hand, something I would never have tolerated from the men. She said, “What’s the plan, Knuckles? I’m sure you’ve thought this through.”

  He looked at her, then at me. He waited a beat then said, “Well, first we interdict the real escort. Then, Brett, Pike, and I go with you as security. You get in the bedroom with the guy and swipe him with ABS. When he’s in the bathroom shitting his guts out, you clone the computer.”

  She nodded, thinking, then said, “How quickly does ABS work? I don’t want to fend him off while I’m waiting.”

  Knuckles grimaced and said, “Trust me, it works within seconds.”

  I heard the discussion and realized the plan might actually succeed. In fact, it most likely would succeed. ABS was a chemical compound applied to the skin in the form of ChapStick, lipstick, or other ingenious methods. It was absorbed into the bloodstream and caused massive, explosive gastric distress. Being knuckle-draggers, we couldn’t pronounce its complicated chemical formula and called it ABS—for Atomic Blow-Shits. We’d used it on a past operation, and Knuckles had accidentally gotten it on himself as well as the target, and had suffered the consequences.

  He said, “It’s fast, but if you get it on yourself the mission’s over. Then you’ll both be fighting for the toilet.”

  I said, “But we don’t even know where the computer’s located. What if it’s not in the bedroom?”

  “Then we call it a wash and she leaves. Panda will be in no condition to do anything either way. The only risk is that Jennifer’s potentially out of play for future operations.”

  I said, “You’re good with this?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s just a mission, and Retro’s right. Unless that guy’s asking for a male, I’m the only one who can do it. You’d do the same if he was gay, right?”

  Not on your life.

  “Uhh . . .”

  Brett cut in, saying, “She’s already proven she can sneak in and out of hotel rooms at night. She’s a natural.”

  I whipped my head to him, catching a smirk, which wound me up. He said, “Whoa, why are you getting pissed? She’s climbed walls as slick as marble to access rooms all over the globe. That’s all I meant.”

  I glared, seeing all of them trying mightily to stop from grinning. Even Knuckles. Jennifer said, “Yeah, Pike. You’re the one that’s always making me climb and break in somewhere. Let’s do it.”

  She started walking to the door and I felt the shame of her being the butt of a joke she wasn’t even getting. I was disappointed in the team’s lack of respect.

  I gave them a death stare, then caught up to her with the team trailing behind. I stopped her, wanting them to admit they were secretly giving her a slight. “That’s not what Brett meant.”

  She rolled her eyes and said, “Pike, I kn
ow exactly what he was saying. I just didn’t think it required a response. They’re juvenile boys playing juvenile games. Just like you do. But it’s the first time they’ve ever made fun of me to my face. Progress.”

  And it dawned on me she was right. It wasn’t a lack of respect. It was the opposite. They felt comfortable enough with her on the team to actually start ribbing her. Just like the guys on the team did with one another. As I had done when I’d entered the room with Brett.

  She continued, glancing from man to man. “But they’ll be a Taskforce team tonight. Wired for the mission. Right?”

  Knuckles smiled. “You better believe it.”

  6

  Under his breath, I heard Knuckles say, “Holy shit.” I turned and saw Jennifer coming out of the bathroom of the cheap hotel room we’d rented to prepare for the mission. She looked stunning. I mean, I might be biased, but she was breathtaking. I wondered if it was just me, but I saw that Brett was slack-jawed. Mesmerized.

  She caught the looks and said, “What? Is this not what a high-end escort would wear? Should I look sluttier or something?”

  Nobody said anything, and she said, “Hey, what’s the problem?”

  Knuckles finally managed to find his mouth. “Man alive, Jennifer, you clean up nice.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing . . . It’s just that you’re always wearing jeans or something. Hair in a ponytail. No makeup. I’ve never seen . . . I mean, you never . . .”

  “So my natural state is ugly?”

  He started stumbling over his words, and I saw her smile.

  She’s going to have no trouble with Panda.

  We’d spent the better part of the day getting ready for our little adventure, going to the Westgate mall in Nairobi, the same one those assholes from al-Shabaab had assaulted in 2013, slaughtering over seventy people. The men had spent all of thirty minutes buying cheap suits. Jennifer, on the other hand, went hog wild. She was allowed to shop on the Taskforce dime, and she’d spared no expense, buying a black cocktail dress with a modest décolletage, jewelry, makeup, a mani-pedi, a high-end wig, and some sort of ridiculously expensive high heels called Jimmy Choos. I had no idea how she knew what to purchase, because she routinely wore nothing but work clothes for the business, but apparently, it was in the female DNA.