Juan Gómez-Jurado - Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

‘What did the logo look like?’

‘What difference would it make?’

‘You’d be surprised how many wars are won because of unimportant details.’

Andrea concentrated again. She had an excellent memory, but she had glanced at the scattered sheets for only a couple of seconds and had been in a state of shock. She pressed her fingers on the bridge of her nose, screwed up her eyes and made odd little noises. Just when she thought she couldn’t remember, the image appeared in her mind.

‘It was a red bird. An owl, because of the eyes. Its wings were open.’

Fowler smiled.

‘That’s unusual. It could help.’

The priest opened his briefcase and took out a mobile phone. He pulled out its thick antenna and proceeded to turn it on while the two women watched in astonishment.

‘I thought all contact with the outside world was forbidden,’ said Andrea.

‘It is,’ Harel said. ‘He’s going to be in real trouble if he’s caught.’

Fowler peered closely at the screen, waiting for coverage. It was a Globalstar satellite phone; it didn’t use normal signals but instead linked up directly with a network of communication satellites that had a range covering roughly 99 per cent of the earth’s surface.

‘That’s why it’s important we check something out today, Ms Otero,’ said the priest, as he dialled a number from memory. ‘At the moment we’re near a big city so a signal from the ship will pass unnoticed among all the others from Aqaba. Once we reach the excavation site, using any kind of phone will be extremely risky.’

‘But what-’

Fowler interrupted Andrea by holding up a finger. The call had gone through.

‘Albert, I need a favour.’

Wednesday, 12 July 2006. 5:16 a.m.

The young priest jumped out of bed, half asleep. He knew straight away who it was. That mobile rang only in an emergency. It had a different ring tone than the others he used and only one person had the number. A person Father Albert would have given his life for without a second thought.

Of course Father Albert hadn’t always been Father Albert. Twelve years ago, when he was fourteen, he was called FrodoPoison , and was the most notorious cyber delinquent in America.

Young Al had been a lonely boy. Mom and Dad both worked and were too busy with their careers to pay much attention to their skinny blond son, despite the fact that he was so frail they had to keep the windows closed in case a draught of air carried him away. But Albert didn’t need any draught to soar through cyberspace.

‘There’s no way to explain his talent,’ said the FBI agent in charge of the case after his arrest. ‘Nobody taught him. When the kid looks at a computer he doesn’t see a device made of copper, silicon and plastic. He just sees doors.’

To begin with, Albert had opened quite a few of those doors just to amuse himself. Among these were the secure virtual vaults of Chase Manhattan Bank, the Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group and the BNP, the national bank of Paris. During the three weeks that his brief criminal career lasted, he stole $893 million by hacking into the banks’ programs, redirecting them to credit commissions to a non-existent intermediary bank, called Albert M. Bank, in the Cayman Islands. It was a bank with only one client. Of course giving the bank his own name wasn’t the brightest thing to do, but Albert was barely a teen. He noticed his mistake when two SWAT teams broke into his parents’ house during supper, ruining the living-room carpet and stepping on the cat’s tail.

Albert would never know the inside of a jail cell, confirming the saying that the more you steal the better they treat you. But while he was handcuffed in an FBI interrogation room, the meagre knowledge of the American jail system that he had acquired through watching TV kept running through his head. Albert had a vague notion that jail was a place you could rot in, where you could be somonised . And even though he wasn’t sure what the second thing meant, he guessed it would hurt.

The FBI agents looked at this vulnerable broken child and sweated uncomfortably. This boy had shaken up a lot of people. It had been incredibly hard to hunt him down, and had it not been for his childish mistake, he would have kept on fleecing the megabanks. The corporate bankers certainly had no interest in bringing the case to trial and having the public find out what had happened. Incidents like that always made investors jittery.

‘What do you do with a fourteen-year-old nuclear bomb?’ asked one of the agents.

‘Teach him not to blow up,’ replied another.

And that’s why they handed the case over to the CIA, which had use for a raw talent such as his. In order to talk to the boy, they woke up an agent who, in 1994, had fallen from grace inside the Company, a mature Air Force chaplain with experience in psychology.

When the sleepy Fowler entered the interrogation room early that morning and told Albert he had a choice between spending time behind bars or doing six hours of work a week for the Government, the boy was so happy he broke down and cried.

Being babysitter to this boy genius was imposed on Fowler as a punishment, but for him it was a gift. In time the two forged an unbreakable friendship based on mutual admiration, which in the case of Albert entailed embracing the Catholic faith and eventually entering the seminary. After he was ordained a priest, Albert continued to cooperate with the CIA sporadically, but, like Fowler, he did so on behalf of the Holy Alliance, the Vatican’s intelligence service. From the start, Albert had got used to receiving calls from Fowler in the middle of the night, which was, in part, pay-back for that night in 1994 when they had first met.

‘Hello, Anthony.’

‘Albert, I need a favour.’

‘Don’t you ever call during regular hours?’

‘Watch therefore for ye know not what hour-’

‘Don’t piss me off, Anthony,’ said the young priest, walking to the refrigerator. ‘I’m exhausted, so talk fast. Are you in Jordan already?’

‘Do you know of a security outfit that has a logo of a red owl with its wings spread?’

Albert poured himself a glass of cold milk and went back to the bedroom.

‘Are you joking? That’s Netcatch’s logo. Those guys were the new gurus for the Company. They won a good chunk of the CIA’s intelligence contracts for the Department of Islamic Terrorism. They also did consultancy for several private American firms.’

‘Why are you referring to them in the past tense, Albert?’

‘The Company issued an internal bulletin a few hours ago. Yesterday a terrorist group blew up Netcatch’s offices in Washington and wiped out the entire staff. The media knows nothing about it. The whole thing’s being passed off as a gas explosion. The Company has been getting a lot of flak for all the anti-terrorist work they’ve contracted to private outfits. A job like this is going to make them look vulnerable.’

‘Any survivors?’

‘Only one, someone named Orville Watson, the CEO and owner. After the attack, Watson told the agents he didn’t need protection from the CIA, then split. The chiefs at Langley are pretty angry with the jerk who let him get away. Finding Watson and putting him under protective custody is a priority.’

Fowler was silent for a minute. Albert was used to his friend’s long pauses and waited.

‘Listen, Albert,’ Fowler continued, ‘we’re in a mess and Watson knows something. You have to find him before the CIA does. His life is in danger. And what’s worse, so is ours.’