Julian Carson wasn’t allowed into the meeting. This kind of meeting was far above his pay grade. He sat in a booth at the back of the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue drinking coffee and watching the bar traffic. Nobody was likely to pay much attention to a young black man wearing a conservative suit, sitting by himself and communicating only with the cell phone on the table in front of him, so he supposed he was the man for the job.
Of course they hadn’t brought him in. He wasn’t even an agent. He was a special ops contractor. That meant that he had no title, no rank. He got paid only when he was actually working, a fee for his services, paid once a month through an electronic transfer into his checking account. At first it had been interesting to see the names of the entities that paid him—companies that sounded familiar, universities, city governments, a hospital. But whenever he checked the names online, they always turned out to have no existence outside their bank accounts.
Julian had been spotted for this job while he was in the army in Afghanistan. They had waited until his second tour was over and he had returned to Fort Benning before military intelligence approached him. After roll call the first sergeant had called him aside and told him he was scheduled for an interview. He stood while three officers sat behind a long table and asked him questions about his tour. When the questions were over the senior officer asked him if he was interested in going to a-school for special assignments. He had already been through a few schools, including Ranger NCO school, which was about as rough as the army could make it, so he accepted.
When he was through the training they sent him to several places where his brown skin and his youthful face would help him—Liberia, the Central African Republic, Brazil. He usually worked with a small team, never fewer than three men, never more than five. He had helped close down three smuggling rings—two of them moving armaments and one cocaine—and the money-laundering networks they fed. One of his teams had kidnapped a guerrilla leader; another had stalked a corrupt minister of finance until they had photographed him with so many recognizable gangsters that the president had no choice but to remove him and have him indicted.
It was when Julian was on his way home from that one that they had called him in the airport while he was waiting for his connecting flight home to Arkansas. They had told him to cancel and fly to Chicago for a meeting.
That meeting, they had invited him to. It had been held in a cheap hotel near the airport where he could sit in the bar and watch the women complete their negotiations before inviting traveling businessmen into their rooms. A few hours after he checked in, two agents knocked on the door of his room. When he let them in, one of them held up a tablet and said, “Here is a picture of a man we’re looking for. About thirty-five years ago he was supposed to deliver a large sum of money to a pro-America go-between in Libya. The money was to support a group of insurgents who were trying to overthrow the Gaddafi government. Instead of delivering it, he killed a few friendlies and took off with the money. At some point he made it back to the United States. We know he’s been here for at least twenty years, but it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that he turned up again. He had been living in Vermont. An operator was sent to see him—the guy who took the picture.”
The blurred picture was of a man walking a pair of big black dogs across a long bridge over a river. It looked as though the picture had been taken from a car passing him on the bridge, and the side window had not been very clean. The face was just a dark spot against a bright backdrop of snow, and the man could have been any age. “What’s his name?”
“He was living under the name Daniel Chase.”
“What’s his real name?”
“That’s classified.”
“His name is classified?”
“Yes.”
“Can I talk to the operator who took the picture?”
“He’s dead. He was Libyan, and his English wasn’t great anyway. Chase killed him and took off. We think he might be living in Chicago for the moment. I’m sending the picture to your phone so you’ll have it with you.”
There was a knock on the door, and the other agent opened it. The two men who entered were both in their forties, wearing sport coats and baggy slacks. When he heard them talk he realized they must be Libyan, like the agent who had taken the picture.