Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

Jack leaned in, straining to catch every word, but most had nothing to do with drugs, or Mexico, or anything else he was investigating. He sat back, disgusted and angry that he’d paid the informant who led him to this meeting. Angry at the risk he had taken. Something bad was going on, but it wasn’t anything he cared about.

Wasted money. Wasted time.

Through the speaker, he heard the door open again, not really listening anymore, cataloging how he could reconnect with his sources and informants. Trying to figure out how he could get back on the pulse of his story.

A voice in Spanish splayed out, begging for mercy. The sound punctured his thoughts, not because of the words, but because of the terror, the cheap acoustics doing nothing to mask the dread. Jack stared at the screen, but the man remained outside the scope of the lens. He begged for his life, the fear seeping through like blood from a wound. On camera, the American contact had his hands in the air, his mouth slack, clearly unsure what was going on. Jack heard his own name and felt terror wash over him like an acid bath.

Jesus Christ. It’s the desk clerk. He’s sold me out.

He slammed the lid to the digital recorder closed and shoved it under the bed, then grabbed the speaker and yanked it out of its connection to the wireless receiver. He threw it in the bathroom, then fumbled for his phone, his hands shaking, looking for a way out that wasn’t the door. He realized there was none. Realized he’d made a catastrophic mistake.

He pulled up speed dial and hit a button. The phone went straight to voice mail. He shouted, “Andy, Andy, I’m in trouble. I’m in big trouble. Where the fuck are you?”

The door burst open and he remained standing, the phone trembling in his hand. Two men entered, both pointing pistols at him. He shouted, “No, no, no!” throwing his arms into the air. One snarled in Spanish, and he feigned ignorance. The other said in English, “Get on your knees. Now.”

He did so, the fear so great he thought he would pass out. He’d studied the Mexican drug cartels for over four years, seeing the savagery they would inflict on those who attempted to thwart them, and in no way did he want to provoke their ire any more than he had.

They handcuffed him with efficiency, no outward abuse, no punches or smacking just because they could, which did nothing but raise his alarm. They weren’t local thugs. They were trained and had done this many times before. He began calculating what he could do. How long he had. He knew they wouldn’t kill him here, in El Paso. The drug trade was vicious, violent beyond the average human’s comprehension, but it still wasn’t here. They’d move him, which meant some time. At least a day while they tried to get him across the border, to Ciudad Juárez, where they could torture him freely.

One day. Twenty-four hours. He looked at his watch and saw the seconds begin to disappear.

4

I opened the door and felt like I needed an oxygen mask from the smoke spilling out, the nightclub so full of fumes from cigarettes that I was having a hard time seeing five feet.

Guess this place hasn’t heard of the secondhand dangers.

I felt Jennifer recoil and pulled her inside. Sometimes you get to play baccarat at Monte Carlo in a tuxedo, sometimes you have to belly up to a smoke-infested bar in Turkmenistan. Story of my life.

The room reminded me of the bar at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones met up with his ex-girlfriend. A bunch of burly men and raunchy woman yelling and shouting at one another. All I needed to do was get Jennifer to challenge some big-ass bear of a man to a vodka-drinking contest, and the image would be complete.

Sotto voce, Jennifer said, “This place looks like the cantina in Star Wars.”

I chuckled and said, “Wrong movie. Come on. We’ve got thirty minutes before the meet. Let’s see if we can blend in that long.”

We found a table in the corner, and I checked my phone, seeing I had lost service yet again. The cellular infrastructure inside Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was pathetic to say the least. It was making our surveillance effort very difficult, but in truth no harder than it had been for our commando forefathers who worked through the Cold War. It just meant we had to go old-school.

I keyed the radio strapped to my leg and leaned into Jennifer, as if I was talking to her. “Knuckles, you staged?”

“Yes. We got a box. You send the photo and trigger, and we’ll do the rest.”

“Roger all.”

Jennifer glanced at her watch and said, “This guy is cutting it close.”

“I know. He’s not stupid. He’s aware of the curfew, and he’s going to use it.”

Nobody was allowed to walk around after eleven at night in the capital, but really that was a crapshoot. A lot of people did, and the police then usually picked on the westerners to fleece for bribes. Or other unsavory things. There had been reports of them arresting women, taking them to jail, then extorting sexual favors. It would make a surveillance effort after the witching hour very, very hard.

“What if he doesn’t show? Are we going to push it and try again tomorrow or head to Gonur?”

“We still have forty-eight hours. One more night. If he doesn’t show then, we’re leaving for Gonur. We can’t blow off the contract. This was just a freebie anyway.”

Gonur was a four-thousand-year-old archeological site set in the middle of the Karakum desert, and we, as the proud owners of a company called Grolier Recovery Services, had been hired to help a team of experts take a look at the dig. Well, at least that’s what the government of Turkmenistan thought.

In reality, we were a cover corporation using counterterrorist operators as employees, all working for an organization so removed from the traditional US defense and intelligence infrastructure it didn’t even have a real name. We simply called it the Taskforce, and it had sent us to Turkmenistan to identify a wealthy Saudi Arabian who was funding the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, our cover took precedence over the mission, so if we didn’t locate the contact, we were looking at spending a few days sweating in the desert. Something Jennifer would love. She enjoyed anything and everything dealing with old crap.

She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to clear the smoke, while she surveyed the bar, looking for our linkage target. She said, “I can’t believe Pedro would meet a rich Saudi in this dump. Why not in a mosque? Or any number of coffee shops? The intel seems off to me.”

Pedro was our nickname for a terrorist affiliated with the IMU. He was all set to be removed from the playing field in Uzbekistan when the Taskforce learned he was meeting a contact in Ashgabat. They decided to see if we could identify the contact, implant a collection device in his personal effects, and try to swim upstream to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the end state being identification of the money man.

I said, “The mosques here are all owned by the government. In fact, the government monitors everything here, like it’s still part of the Soviet Union. He’d need someplace noisy. Someplace that self-defeats the bugs all over this damn country.”

Which was why we wouldn’t be doing anything overt against Pedro. Much easier to take him down when he returned to Uzbekistan. Our mission was pure snoop and poop. No high adventure.

I went to the bar, happy to see a smattering of Europeans, including one old couple clearly forcing themselves to enjoy the “culture.” Jennifer and I wouldn’t stand out. I got a couple of glasses of hot tea, and by the time I had returned to the table, Jennifer said, “Pedro’s at the door.”

I casually glanced that way and saw him, our linkage target. He was swarthy, with a full head of chestnut hair and a red beard that looked like a briar patch. Dressed in a striped shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the tails hanging out over a pair of black slacks made of rough cloth, he looked like every other regular. He glanced around, locked on something, then began walking toward our three o’clock. I followed his line of march and saw a single man sitting at a table smoking a cigarette. Bingo.