Rogue command a troy sta.., p.22
Rogue Command (A Troy Stark Thriller—Book #2), page 22
Troy shook his head and smiled. “It should be one for the time capsule.”
“Troy Stark, meet Carlo Gallo.”
Gallo raised a strong hand. “Carl. Please. My parents called me Carlo, but Carlo Gallo? It doesn’t go. For some reason, Miquel insists on calling me that.”
Troy held out a hand and the two men shook.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Troy. And read a lot.”
Troy nearly sighed but contained himself. Already, the guy was at it. They were always this way, the freelancers. They had been inside, and they still had friends inside. They had a million contacts. They wanted you to know that. Classified paperwork got legs, walked out the door, and somehow found its way into their hands.
“You’ve seen my files, I guess.”
Gallo shrugged. “I was Special Operations Group for ten years. You know how that goes. If someone has worked for SOG, I’ve probably seen the file. Metal shop? That’s quite an assignment. They only take the baddest of the bad. You’re an impressive guy, Stark. You step in sheep dip from time to time, but I don’t have anything against that. You might say I’ve done the same.”
Troy shook his head. He was taking a disliking to this guy immediately. If Gallo was hoping to endear himself, this wasn’t the way to go about it.
“See, it’s already wrong. You don’t announce that you were SOG. You don’t tell me you know I was SOG once upon a time. Who does that? It’s a not a social club. You’re not supposed to acknowledge that it exists. This other thing? Metal shop? I haven’t heard that term since the seventh grade.”
Troy looked at Miquel. “Who is this guy, really?”
“He’s who he says he is.”
Troy shook his head. He turned back to Gallo. “Why didn’t you just stay with the agency? You could have walked off with a nice pension at the end. A guy your age, you’d probably be retired now.”
Gallo shrugged and smiled. “Why didn’t you stay with the Navy?”
That slowed Troy down a step.
“Okay. Point taken.”
“I go where the money is,” Gallo said. “I run my business out of Amsterdam. There’s a lot of money in Amsterdam. There’s a lot of money in Europe, and Amsterdam is right smack in the middle of it.”
“Why are you with us, in that case? If you’re about money?”
“Miquel and I are old friends. I’m sure he told you that. He asked me to jump on board.”
“And you’re coming in? If we go?”
Gallo patted his flat stomach. “Of course I am. I stay in shape for a reason.”
“I am thinking that you and Carlo could be partners for this operation,” Miquel said. “Just one time. We’ll see how it goes. Agent Dubois has concerns, as we talked about, and I respect those. Carlo doesn’t have the same concerns.”
“We haven’t done any training together,” Troy said.
Gallo laughed. “I have a feeling that we’ll be on the same page in the playbook pretty quickly.”
“It’s not supposed to be an open book,” Troy said.
Gallo slowly removed his sunglasses. “You have a lot to learn, Stark,” he said. “You just entered private life. You’re not government-issue anymore. You can say anything you want out here. Guys who were in Delta Force are writing books now. They’re not supposed to admit Delta exists, but they do, and they do it in public. Guys who were on Top Secret JSOC infiltration and assassination teams are writing books.”
“And that’s okay with you?” Troy said.
Gallo shook his head. “I don’t even know myself. Not really, I guess. Look, don’t listen to me. Half the time I just prattle on, and it makes no sense. I must have early-onset dementia.”
He glanced at the kitchen counter. “Hey, is that coffee fresh? I’m dying for a cup.”
“Help yourself,” Troy said. “I just made it.”
Gallo nodded. “Good man.”
He went about getting a white ceramic cup out of the cabinet and poured himself some of the coffee. It didn’t look like great coffee. In fact, it looked like an oil slick. Troy and Miquel watched him while he worked. Troy looked at Miquel. Miquel had a sort of half-smile on his face. He seemed to think this guy’s performance was funny. Or maybe he was just remembering old times.
“The way I see it,” Gallo said. “You got big problems.”
“We do? Does that include you?”
Gallo shrugged. “Sure. I’ll own it with you. I’m on the payroll now. For now. We got big problems. This operation is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
He paused. There wasn’t much to his coffee making. He took the oil slick black, so he just poured it into the cup, and he was ready. He shook his head.
“No, that’s not right. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole at the carnival. There’s no way of telling if the terrorists are going to hit here or not. But I do think Miquel is right, and they are going to hit here.”
Troy nearly smiled again. It was the consultant’s job to agree with the boss. The boss was paying him because he thought a terrorist attack was coming. So, as a matter of course, Gallo was going to think the same thing.
“But if they do, who’s to say they’re going to hit the Large Hadron Collider? Why would they? It’s the hardest thing to hit in the whole place. It’s the hardest thing to reach. Why not hit one of the gatherings or parties during the event? Why not hit one of the smaller inventions, one with a lot of radioactive material stored up? There are over a dozen high-tech gizmos here, and at least twenty separate projects. There are at least two highly secret projects with military applications. Why not hit those, if you know what they are? Why not wait until the hubbub dies down and hit two weeks from now?”
He paused, and Troy jumped in.
“Secret projects with military applications.”
Troy looked at Jan. Jan was still immersed in his computers and digital readouts. This was the first anyone had mentioned secret projects.
Gallo scratched his face near his white beard. “Yeah. At least two. Don’t ask me what they are because I don’t know. What I do know is there’s traffic of encrypted messages going out of here, to the United States Department of Defense, in particular the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. That’s been going on for years. Whatever they’re doing, the Yankee doodles are keeping an eye on it.”
“You know they’re sending information to the feds, but you don’t know what it is,” Troy said.
Gallo nodded. “That’s right.”
Troy didn’t like that, either. The United States had its own high-tech research. It had entire industries, universities, and government agencies devoted to it. It didn’t really need CERN. Also, CERN was far from a top-secret facility.
“The terrorists are supposed to be environmentalists,” Troy said. “That’s the assumption we’ve been going with. The enviros don’t like modern technology. They don’t like scientists playing Frankenstein.”
Gallo shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it. I can’t be sure at this stage, but my gut tells me no.”
“Do tell.” Again, Troy didn’t like this. He didn’t like Gallo’s style. He also didn’t love the unsettled feeling that came when some guy walked in at random and claimed to know things nobody else knew.
“Have you ever been around environmentalists?” Gallo said. “I mean the ones that blow things up. I used to do surveillance on them. They aren’t good at what they do, generally speaking. They get lucky here and there, but you can’t expect them to consistently pull it off. They don’t usually have any military training. They hate the military. They have no resources. The people themselves are eccentrics. Getting them all rowing in the same direction is like herding a thousand cats. Also, they don’t want to hurt anyone. In all the so-called green scare attacks I saw going back twenty years, no one, not one person, was killed. It was rare that anyone even got hurt.”
He paused and shook his head. “If this was really environmentalists, I wouldn’t be concerned about it. And I am concerned.”
“In that case, what is it?”
Gallo shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you notice any countries that do high-tech research conspicuously missing from the CERN members list?”
“Sure, lots of them. Russia, China, Japan, Iran, South Korea, South Africa. And that’s just for starters.”
Gallo nodded. “Right. Leave off Japan for now since CERN scientists likely share information with them willingly. Leave off South Africa and South Korea because they’re small potatoes.”
“Okay, so Russia, China, and Iran.”
“Right. Leave off Iran because they’re a pariah state. Almost nobody wants to deal with them. But then you’ve got China and Russia, two world powers, locked out of some of the highest tech projects on Earth. Dismissed. They can’t like that. I think we know for a fact that they don’t. And if there’s military applications…”
He didn’t bother to finish the sentence.
“I think you see my point.”
“Is this the consultant?” a voice said.
Troy looked toward the door and Dubois was standing there. She had slipped in silently and unnoticed. She was already dressed in a black jumpsuit, ready for action. It was the middle of the afternoon. Troy supposed she liked to get a head start on things.
She looked great, as always. The jumpsuit was tight to her body. Her hair was subdued by a black bandana. She had big black boots on. She would be in her urban guerrilla fighter style, except for one thing—the black jumpsuit said INTERPOL in white letters across the front of it.
It was pretty snazzy. Troy didn’t dare say a word about it. Miquel must have broken the piggy bank and sprung for new outfits. Thankfully, he went with INTERPOL instead of ERRIU.
Gallo’s eyes lit up at the sight of Dubois. “Well, well, well. What kind of exotic creature do we have here? Yes, I am the consultant.”
Dubois’s dark eyes shifted from Gallo to Troy and back again.
“So, you’ll be the one Agent Stark gets killed, instead of me?”
“I will die for you, little lady.”
Dubois nodded. “Thank you. I’m too young to die. But you look like you’re the perfect age.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
3:45 pm Central European Time
An old sewer works
Geneva, Switzerland
“Killing people will not help us.”
The man who once called himself Purple Hays was speaking. His name was Scott Free now. When she knew him before, it seemed like he had an accent from somewhere, maybe Eastern Europe. There was a vague hint of a vampire voice to him, like Transylvania. Now he had no accent of any kind. It wasn’t even the Midwest of the United States. He was the man from nowhere.
“Necessary murders are one thing,” he said. “Frivolous murders are quite another.”
Princess Dye watched him. He was a big man, with medium length dirty-blonde hair. Not long ago, he had been bald. He couldn’t have grown the hair in this short time. It must be a wig, but it was a convincing one.
The scar that had marked his face was gone. He had tattoos of anchors on the backs of his hands. The tattoos were very noticeable and would probably be gone tomorrow. So would the hair and the dark eyes.
The eyes cut like lasers. His big hands, and really his whole body, moved when he talked, almost as though he couldn’t stop them. He seemed to have explosive energy in that body, just barely contained. She could picture him as a younger man, playing rugby or some other violent contact sport, blasting through men who were just like him.
He had always seemed big, but now he seemed like a giant. She looked at his feet. Naturally, he was wearing platform shoes. They were probably adding two or three inches to his height.
She could almost picture how he would look tomorrow afternoon. Tall, but not gigantic. Blue-eyed, bald, with a visible scar but no visible tattoos. Perhaps he would have a beard. She could see him hanging out at an ex-patriot pub in the south of France or the south of Spain, affecting an English accent and acting as though he had always been there. Would it be enough? She supposed that was his problem.
He was addressing them in some sort of underground tunnel system. This was a large open space made of brick at the confluence of five tunnels. The tunnels were below them, and some dark, fetid water trickled through them. Everything was dirty, muddy, or caked in grease.
Somewhere nearby was the sound of water rushing. It sounded like a lot of water. There were several metal wheels mounted on the walls, with pegs protruding from them that seemed like hand grips. Princess Dye guessed that at some point in the past, men came down here and opened and closed water tunnels by hand. Maybe they still did.
There were ten people at the meeting. Princess Dye was the only woman. Oil Derek from the Massachusetts operation was here. He was calling himself Izzy Bad. He had brown dreadlocks now. She couldn’t seem to remember what his hair had been like before. There had always been something nondescript about him. He rarely spoke during their time in Massachusetts. He didn’t want you to remember him. When those dreadlocks were gone, he would evaporate into just about any crowd.
Marcus Aurelius was also here. Princess Dye hadn’t talked to him and had just barely acknowledged him. She didn’t know what he was calling himself now. He looked much the same as the last time she had seen him. He was a fool, and as far as she was concerned, his operation had been a disaster.
The group had coalesced here, after entering the sewer system at different points, so as not to call attention to themselves. Thomas had known the way to this spot, and Princess Dye had simply followed along with him.
“We’re not here to hurt anybody,” Scott Free said. “On the contrary. We’re here to save them. We can’t completely destroy the target, but we can do massive damage to it, and we can call the world’s attention to its dangers. But bear in mind. Every hostage is precious. Not only are they someone’s mother, father, sister, child, or lover, they’re also our ticket out of here. We’re all going to walk away from this, and we’re going to do it the same way the hostages do.”
Princess Dye glanced at Thomas. She would love to know what was going on in his mind right now. Last night, he had wanted to leave, at least partially, because he thought Scott Free was a madman and a gleeful killer.
He sounded nothing like that now. He displayed complete confident in himself, in this team, and in the plan they were about to carry out. Why shouldn’t he? The last operation had gone off as smoothly as possible. No one got caught. The enemy facility had been utterly destroyed. Some people had died, but they were ones who were complicit in the operation of the facility.
“Where are my runners?” Scott said.
Princess Dye raised her hand, so did Thomas and Izzy. They stood close together. They were a team. They had pulled off a thing of beauty once before. They were assigned to carry out nearly the exact same task on this job.
“You guys are rock stars,” Scott said. “Okay? Rock stars. That’s nearly all I have to say.” He seemed like he was on the verge of saying something more specific about the previous operation but stopped himself. “Move fast. Faster than you’ve ever moved before. But be meticulous. The rest of us, my people here, will be holding down the fort. We’re going into action at precisely 6:45. When you guys turn up, we all know it’ll be time to leave. So give us an extra minute or two. You do that by moving fast.”
He raised one big finger, a pointer. He was either a natural born leader, or he practiced this stuff in front of a mirror.
“But be meticulous. There’s no sense going fast and not having it work.” Now he raised his hands in the air, almost as if in supplication. “If it works, we will all walk away. If it doesn’t, they’re waiting for us.”
Compartmentalize.
The word occurred to her again. Princess Dye didn’t know what Izzy Bad was going to be doing after they planted the charges, but she and Thomas had an appointment in another part of the building. They were going to have to move very fast, even faster than Scott Free suggested. They were just never going to show up at the main event.
She felt odd about that. It was a betrayal. But there were betrayals on top of betrayals now. She had also betrayed Silvio.
If Scott was the crazy murderer that Thomas believed him to be, then he was betraying Silvio too. Silvio wanted to create a better world. It was his passion, the reason he had come here in the first place.
“Are there any questions?” Scott said now.
He looked around at the group, meeting each set of eyes.
“Don’t hold your tongue, then wish you hadn’t.”
Again, he waited.
“No? Good. Let’s do it. We can’t know what the future will bring, but I hope I will see you and work with you again one day. And I hope the spirit of the natural world guides you and protects you.”
Princess Dye smiled. He was laying it on thick now. This wasn’t his personality at all. The last time she had known him, he was a stern taskmaster.
Everyone changed, all the time. People in this movement changed at warp speed. They were constantly shifting, moving, disappearing, and turning up somewhere else, looking and acting different.
Sometimes, it exhausted her. At that flat in Brooklyn and at that flat in Berlin, she had felt dead inside, empty, and completely alone. But now, here, among these people, on the move, and about to make it happen one more time…
She loved it.
She could almost forget that she was playing for two teams at once.
“Let’s go,” she said to Thomas and Izzy. “Let’s hit it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
6:15 pm Central European Time
8th Floor, Center 42
CERN
Meyrin, Switzerland
“You people can go to hell.”
The white-haired man sat at his desk in an unkempt office piled high with papers, several stories above the black-tie opening gala that was slowly gathering force on the main floor. His name was Oleg Karolyi, and the very large handgun he normally kept in the top drawer of his desk was in his right hand. The gun was a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum Model 29 revolver. It was loaded with six bullets, though he would probably only need one.
