The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) (23 page)

Chapter 29

He indulged himself for an extra minute under the hot, almost scalding, shower. In a moment, he’d turn the water to cold like he always did. But he liked it warm to help him think, to relax. Just let the water hit the back of his neck while rotating his head side to side, up and down. The ritual was rhythmic habit from way back.

It was 5:15 in the a.m. and Lance had just come back in from a brisk well-before-dawn five and a half mile run through the quiet streets of Augsburg. It had taken a little more than 31 minutes, which kept him nicely in the six-minute per mile range. Two hundred pushups and 200 sit ups rounded out the morning workout. The shower was the reward. He’d learned at boot camp and on several of his assignments, including four weeks at Green Beret training, that showers are indeed a luxury Americans far too often took for granted.

One of the great benefits Seibel had worked out for Lance was his own apartment. Most single soldiers were required to live in barracks on base. That just wouldn’t do for one of Seibel’s operatives. A long shower with hot water was another benefit those in barracks didn’t get.

This particular shower allowed him to consider the events of the previous 24 hours. He’d actually been enjoying the days and days of monotonous listening to his new friends in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and a few here and there from Jordan, Syria, Iran. The variety of foreign tongues and dialects challenged his abilities. He would finish listening to a conversation and practice the dialect until the next conversation was piped into his headset.

He had heard it all in the past few weeks. From simple troop and armory movement orders to oil pipeline sabotage by locals outside Mosul, Iraq who were then summarily executed; to an Iraqi colonel in Kuwait crying to another officer about his wife’s inability to give him a son, only daughters. Lance especially enjoyed the sessions where those communicating over the airwaves attempted to speak in some sort of code. Most of it was downright hilarious. And quite obvious that the counterparts were not working from the same code sheets. They would often try it for a few minutes, then curse the damn codeset and speak in Arabic for all to hear.

But it was two specific conversations yesterday morning that perplexed Lance as he stretched the shower well past another minute of comforting warmth. He had already gone over the conversations last night and during his run this morning. So the shower was actually the third or fourth time he’d rerun them in his mind.

The first started out like most others from the past few weeks. Two Iraqi individuals exchanged military pleasantries across the miles. One was stationed outside Mosul and the other on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Both cities were in northern Iraq dominated by Kurdish populations. The boredom in their tones was obvious and it was clear after a few sentences that both would rather be down in Kuwait where the action is. Their conversation was grade “A” boring, right up until the moment the guy in Kirkuk mentioned an incident the day before at a roadblock. Four soldiers were killed by a small group in a single vehicle. Nothing too strange there. But his detailing of eyewitnesses seeing a young woman doing most of the killing was strange.

Lance jotted this little tidbit of info down for consumption by NSA analysts who would be reviewing his work. He put the conversation in a compartment in his brain for later digestion. Then, near the end of his shift, his tracer/interceptor brought online a conversation that had just started up.

“Coordinates confirm source location is Baghdad. Feed is live as of 48 seconds ago,” the handler piped the feed into Lance’s listening station and got off the line to search the frequencies for another exchange happening somewhere else in the world.

Lance joined the conversation in progress and didn’t notice for a full seven seconds that he was listening in on an exchange being spoken in Russian. He sat up and buzzed his handler in the next room.

“Are you sure this is Baghdad?”

“Confirmed. Coordinates put it in the southeast sector of the city.” Corporal Billock from Oregon responded.

“Did you notice this is Russian?”

“Yah. That’s why I shoved it over to you. These other guys have all been brought in during the past month for Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish. You’re my only regular Russian on the clock right now.”

“Got it,” he wasn’t quite done. “Russian from Baghdad. You don’t think you should have told me that up front?”

“I thought it was a little funny to pass it to you blind.”

“Funny. Thanks.” Lance pushed the button again to disconnect the line and turned back to the Russian conversation. He knew right away it was a coded language exchange. The speaker in Baghdad had a pronounced lisp. Sounded fake. His accent sounded educated, but that also fake. Sounded like an Englishman doing a bad Russian accent.

“Pyotr is not embellished by the paradigm.”

“Is the maze distracted?” was the reply.

“Torrential downpour. Illusory.” The Englishmen/Russian replied in turn.

Lance buzzed Billock again.

“Yah?”

“Location of receiving party?” Lance asked.

Lance could here him shuffle a couple of papers. “Not able to confirm.”

“Region?”

“Radio signature indicates Eastern Europe. Probably the Ukraine; maybe Romania. Just guessing though.”

“Nothing more?”

“That’s it.”

“Thanks.” Lance clicked off and returned to the coded conversation. He pressed the earphone to try to put him closer to the one in Baghdad. Tried to see his mouth speaking and then his face.”

“Partial retainer payment received.”

“Maze completion?”

“The benefactors must be incorporated. Benefactors polished.”

Lance concentrated only on the one he considered the Englishman.

“Portions in hallmark and gratuity.” The speaker from Eastern Europe changed subjects.

“Ballast competitive. Portions ship after shave.” Lance saw the mouth speaking. “Ballast front, left of front.” He saw the mouth working to control an accent, not a natural act. Contrived.

“Farm to sea.”

“Venice before rain.” The words ended the conversation. The radio went quiet before becoming static. Lance repeated the words in Russian, “Venice before rain.” He’d heard them before, more than once, just as he’d heard “farm to sea, ballast, portions and maze.” They were words he’d heard while listening to countless conversations over radio traffic and sometimes phone lines emanating out of the former Soviet bloc. He knew their meanings because NSA and CIA had broken their code several years ago. This particularly rare codeset was a definitive legacy of Russian attempts at colonial expansion in that garden spot of the world otherwise known as Afghanistan.

Venice before rain
simply meant same time tomorrow. The two pseudo Russians obviously planned to speak again tomorrow at a planned time. This implied military protocol and precision. Lance picked up something else. It was in the way the words were spoken. There was affection in them. When the gent in Iraq signed off with his partner somewhere in Europe, it was quite evident to Lance that he was saying goodbye to his lover. He jotted this down.

Farm to sea
was an order given to agents in the field to continue as planned. Orders given to KGB agents.

Ballast
usually meant the contact or element being contacted.
Portions
referred to a meeting or discussions, maybe dealings.
Maze
definitely equated to a transaction. Put it all together and the conversation indicated meetings involving a transaction were taking place in Baghdad between some Russians, or at least fake Russians, and someone else.

Lance let the static ring in his ears as he wondered how quickly NSA computers could analyze the earlier conversation along with this one and get back with likely meanings. Probably 48 hours.

That was last evening.

Lance turned off the cold water and dried off. At 5:22 a.m. his phone rang in the next room. It rang just two times. Seibel calling. Were the events of the day before and this early morning beacon connected? Lance was fairly adroit at recognizing patterns amid the flotsam and jetsam of seemingly everyday life. He’d only gotten better over the last three years. A roadblock massacre led by a woman and a coded Russian conversation during the same day followed by a very early morning communication alert from Seibel were not happenstance. The little fact that Lance was schooled in espionage, Russian and Arabic languages and deciphering basic codes all led to the same conclusion. He wouldn’t be in Augsburg much longer. If he had to guess, he was probably headed back to the desert.

He put on his uniform and stepped out the door at 5:45 sharp. Walking from his unremarkable apartment less than a mile from Gablingen Kaserne – his base, he considered the pay phone options at his disposal. He knew of 41 within a 10 minute walk from his apartment. He chose Adolf von Bayer Strasse, which didn’t take him too far off course from his usual trek to the base. He’d used that phone one time two years prior.

As he began his stroll over to the base this early morning, he saw the usual light activity for a Bavarian morning, plus one person way out of the norm. The individual Lance spotted about 200 yards from his apartment moved from shadow to shadow well behind him.

Now, this really elevated the activities of the past 24 hours above coincidence. Lance had only been followed twice outside of training. Once in Dallas the first day he’d met Seibel. The other in London after leaving a drop site a few blocks from Piccadilly Circus. The tracker in that instance had been particularly good and obviously experienced at urban maneuvers. Lance successfully shook both tails.

What was this about? He hadn’t been anywhere outside Augsburg in the last month except his day trip to visit al-Bakr. Before that, he’d been in Jeddah for two weeks and at Harvey Point for two months prior to that. His instruction in eluding tails had been thorough, maybe a bit over the top, but Seibel and Fuchs had been adamant. The training included elusive and aggressive points.

Lance decided this situation called for interaction with his follower. He turned left on Bergstrasse and then ducked into a doorway on the right side of the road where he could view Bergstrasse to his left and Ludwig-Hermann Strasse on his right. About 35 seconds later, he spotted the individual moving from one shadow to another. In the flash of a streetlight illumination, he saw it was a man wearing a hat and holding a large device to his ear. A cellular phone. Lance knew the network for cell phones in Augsburg was still tiny and talking on a mobile phone was basically talking on the radio. The frequency was easily detectible and decipherable. Basically not smart unless you didn’t care about your conversation being overheard by fairly low technological means.

The lone man approached the intersection of Berg and Ludwig-Hermann. He avoided the streetlights at the intersection and crossed 50 yards earlier than Lance had. He walked past Lance’s hidden location on the other side of the street scanning side to side. Lance didn’t like the way the guy had his left hand in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t resting in the pocket. It was rigid, holding something. All bets were that it was holding a gun.
What the hell?

Just then it flashed for Lance. He never forgets a face. He’d seen this guy before. Harvey Point. Maybe 18 to 20 months ago. He was Spanish, at least he spoke only Spanish at the Point. And he was always with another Spaniard. Seibel had brought them in to work with Lance and three other youngsters. Their four-day drill involved radio recon, detection and rescue of multiple captives. It was Lance’s third live-action drill and he’d shot several terrorists with live rounds. They were terrorists with sandbag bodies and mops for heads, but it was satisfying to see the dust splatter out the backs. The two Spaniards expertly determined location, room specs and numbers of captors and hostages using radio and audio listening capabilities. He’d never been offered or inquired about their names.

Lance knew if this one was here, the other Spaniard must be at the other end of the phone line. As he watched from his hidden vantage point, Spaniard One increased his pace as he went under the Gersthofen-Bergstrasse overpass and continued to the corner of Am-Flugplatz. Lance leaned out and took a few steps to be able to see several hundred yards down the street as Spaniard One was indeed met by Spaniard Two at the street corner just a couple hundred yards from the base’s main gate. He could see them take their phones from their ears and look around in all directions -- obviously looking for him.