Mike Maden - River of Gods

Suddenly, Guo’s mission had become exceptionally interesting. He called in the failed battle and the discovery of the two Americans to Zhao, still in Bamako.

Zhao residence

Bamako, Mali

Zhao thanked Guo for his report and the two formulated a revised plan. With any luck, it just might work.

Unfortunately, Zhao didn’t believe in luck and he couldn’t afford to take any more chances. Failure was not an option. An avid martial artist, Zhao studied the greats. One of his favorite fighters, Mike Tyson, once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Zhao felt like he’d been punched by Mossa in the face now. Twice.

He picked up his secure phone and called an old friend in the United States, a very well-connected man who could help him solve his problem—for a price. A man who was in desperate need of something Zhao could offer him. A man who preferred to be called The Angel.

L’Argent Bar

Washington, D.C.

Jasmine Bath played dumb. Funny how easy it was to do. A change of tone, a furrowed brow. A lie becomes the truth. And the truthfulness of the liar, once established, never questioned. People wanted to trust her, to believe she was on their side always. She was happy to oblige.

No, of course I will never monitor your calls. Your privacy is important to me. Trust is important in this business. You know that. Without it, we’re both dead.

That’s how the first meeting always went with a new client, even one as powerful and savvy as The Angel. But that had been a while ago. They hadn’t had a face-to-face since then, so when he called and asked for a meeting, she obliged. It would go one of two ways, and one of them might prove fatal to her.

The Georgetown bar he picked was one of the oldest in town, and one of her favorites. Low light, high-backed leather chairs, wood walls, and superb yet unobtrusive service. It was a public meeting in an intimate, exclusive setting. That was a good sign.

Jasmine sipped her WhistlePig straight rye on the rocks, listening attentively. She pretended she hadn’t parsed every syllable of Zhao’s recorded phone call to him demanding to know why Americans were protecting the Tuareg terrorist Mossa. Pretended that she hadn’t recorded his postcoital bedroom chat with his wife, asking her who Troy Pearce was, what Pearce Systems was all about, and why Pearce was in Mali. Bath just smiled and nodded and sipped and listened. Waited before asking the obvious questions.

“And what did your wife say about Pearce? I mean, who is he, really?”

“She pled ignorance because she really doesn’t know anything about him. She tried to explain Pearce’s connection to Myers, which, frankly, I never fully understood.”

Neither did Jasmine. Pearce was an open secret, hiding in plain sight. The few times she tried to access data on him, she was either shut down or sidetracked. At the time, it was interesting but not important.

“It’s a damn shame we never got to those impeachment hearings on Myers. Probably a lot of things got swept under that rug,” he said.

“No doubt.”

“Do we know if Myers has any interests or concerns in Mali?”

“Part of my contract with you is to monitor all of President Myers’s communications—”

“Just ‘Myers.’” The Angel visibly stiffened, took another sip of his Old Fashioned. “She’s a former president who quit the office. She doesn’t deserve the title.”

“It’s funny you should ask me about Myers and Mali. She made a recent phone call that seemed harmless enough.” Bath had run a search of all of Myers’s e-mails, calls, and texts, sniffing out references to Pearce and Mali after The Angel’s little bedroom chat with his powerful wife. It paid to be on top of these things, to appear omniscient when really one needed only to be proficient. Only one reference popped up a few days ago.

“A call to whom?” he asked.

“Pearce. He was in Mozambique when he took it. Sounded like he was in the cockpit of a plane when he spoke with her. Myers was sending him to exfil Mike Early out of Mali. That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Nothing about Mossa?”

“No.”

The Angel jiggled the ice in his glass, thinking. “The call makes sense. Myers would send Pearce to Mali to fetch Early, because Early worked for Myers, too. One of her security advisors, as I recall. But Pearce never left Mali.”

“How do you know he’s still there?” Bath knew the answer was Zhao. She had to feign ignorance; otherwise, The Angel might suspect she’d listened in on his call.

The Angel smiled. “I have my sources.”

Bath frowned, thinking. “Maybe Myers was speaking in code. Maybe she wasn’t really sending Pearce in to rescue Early, but was really sending him in to help Early.”

“Help Early with what?”

“Mossa.”

“If that’s the case, then they’re both in Mali at Myers’s behest and now they’ve both been seen helping Mossa. That means she must have ties to Mossa, too. When you find out what those ties are, let me know. But for now, at least, I’ve got Myers connected to Mali and to Mossa. That’s all the ammunition I need. One more thing: I want you to begin seeding the blogosphere with stories and pictures about Mossa, the Tuaregs, terrorism, Africa—you get it. I want to push the themes the senator raised on Finch’s gawd-awful show last Sunday. In fact, here—”

The Angel forwarded a video from his phone sent by Zhao. It was an edited version of the video shot by Guo’s hawk drone, showing Tuaregs shooting helpless, wounded Mali soldiers.

Bath pulled it up. “Oh my God. This is terrible.” Of course, she didn’t tell him she had already seen it, having captured it from his phone earlier.

“Use it. Turn it viral.”

“No problem.” Bath wasn’t kidding. She ran one of the world’s largest virtual click farms. Her operation could generate up to three million fake “likes” per day on any given YouTube or Facebook page by deploying malware that hijacked legitimate IP addresses and using them to “like” the page, thus making the fake “likes” look real to the site managers. She justified her actions, in part, because she didn’t resort to the click-farm “sweatshops” in Third World countries like Bangladesh, where human drones pounded away for hours at keyboards registering thousands of “likes” per night for a dollar or two. Thanks to The Angel, the Department of State recently paid her $630,000 to get over two million automated fake “likes” on its Facebook pages.

For a hefty fee, Bath could turn almost anything into a viral hit. It was well known that Twitter and Facebook had millions of fake users, so she clearly wasn’t the only one doing this kind of thing, but nobody did it better. Her malware programs could also boost the “star” ratings of products offered by online vendors like Amazon or iTunes, blasting her clients’ sales through the roof and tanking their competition with equally bad reviews. Two best-selling authors and one Grammy-nominated musician had hired her in just the last year. For wary consumers of all stripes, it was becoming increasingly difficult to trust the ratings systems.

“You saw my e-mail about Myers?” Bath asked. “That she’s still sniffing around the Tanner issue?” Bath saw Myers’s pursuit of Tanner’s suicide as a far greater threat to both of them than the sideshow in far-flung Mali.

“Yes. That’s a problem.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

Bath wanted Myers dealt with, soon. She wondered if The Angel had the guts to pull the trigger if it came to that. If killing an ex-president had to be done, she preferred his fingerprints be on the corpse, not hers. But then again, it might provide CIOS with a very lucrative billing opportunity.