Shoshana said, “Just tell him.”
Growing irritable, I said, “Tell me what? What the hell are you two avoiding?”
Jennifer said, “Look, don’t get mad, but we did in fact have to kill someone.”
She saw my expression and hastily said, “Wait, wait, I only knocked my guy out. Shoshana did the killing.”
I heard the words and my jaw went slack. I said, “What? You had to kill someone? And you didn’t lead with that when you came in the door?”
Truculent, Jennifer said, “I led with the intelligence. Isn’t that what’s important?”
I heard Brett chuckle. He leaned back in his chair and said, “Wow.That’s a first. Instead of making up a story to show how much high adventure you got, you literally hid the high adventure.”
Shoshana spit out, “Because Pike is a jerk about such things.” She made a face like she was mimicking me, saying, “Don’t screw this up. We need the information. Don’t make them suspicious. Don’t cause this mission to fail because you’re stupid.”
She glared at me and said, “Jennifer knew you’d be mad and blame her. Well, you can blameme, becauseIextended the mission. And I was right to do so. She told me to keep quiet about it until she could explain, but I wish now I’d have told the room like I did Aaron.”
Everyone was speechless for a split second, then erupted into laughter. Shoshana looked confused, and I gave up. I held up my hands and said, “Okay, okay, the intel is in the system, so you didn’t screw it up. Can you two tell me what happened?”
And they did, the room finally getting the war story they wanted, only this one was real, without exaggeration. When they were done, the apartment was silent.
Knuckles finally said, “That’s some serious shit.” He looked at Shoshana and said, “You’re batting a thousand.”
Confused, Shoshana said, “Batting a thousand? What does that mean? I didn’t miss a thousand times. I was right.”
He smiled and said, “It means every time you’ve told me someone was bad, they tried to kill me. And your streak continues. One hundred percent record. I’m impressed.”
She took the compliment and grinned, then looked at me. She would never, ever admit it, but as much of an apex predator as she was, she held a well of insecurity deep inside. She wanted my approval, and I gave it to her, because I did, in fact, approve.
I said, “You think this pockmarked guy is a better lead than the credit card info? You think we should focus on him?” Telling her without saying it that her actions had been correct, and far from harming the mission, she might have accelerated its success.
She said, “I would have agreed with that before they decided to attack,but I think now we’ll spend too much time trying to find that weasel. Time that could be better spent looking elsewhere. If he appears again, then yes, we should track him, but make no mistake, he’s not showing up at that souvenir shop anytime soon, and we have no other data point.”
I agreed with her, not because I wanted to, but because she was probably right about him disappearing. While chasing a known target was always the easiest solution, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of mistaking motion for forward progress. That guy was long gone, so we resigned ourselves to sitting in the hotel room and waiting.
The Taskforce had come back with the known usage of the card, and I’d focused on dates past our time in Iguazú. We’d found a few hits, some of them seriously sketchy.
The number on the card had been used at both a fireworks store and a car rental agency, which raised the hairs on my neck, but the crucial charge had been renting a suite of hotel rooms here in Buenos Aires. I’d immediately wanted to saddle up and hit that place, but the Oversight Council had judged such an operation too risky. They’d decided to solve the problem with conventional means.
I’d fought that tooth and nail—this was the Ghost we were talking about, after all—but I’d been overridden. I understood the reasoning, as having the police bash in a door and roll up the Ghost was just as good as using my team—if they succeeded—but he was one slippery son of a bitch. I knew that having some Argentinian JV squad whose only expertise was putting on a plate-hanger correctly wasn’t the same thing as a Taskforce operation.
I had been proven correct. The police had stormed the hotel and found absolutely nothing. No Ghost, no people from Qatar, no luggage, no nothing. They’d cleared out before the police had shown up. And now I had only a rental car—location unknown—and a shit ton of fireworks, all purchased on the card. Which spelled one thing: VBIED.
The rental plates were out in the system now, so if it showed up hopefully the local authorities could stop it without blowing themselves up, but the bigger problem was the Ghost.
He likely had a plan to kill the prime minister of Israel, and along with it the United States secretary of state, and he was a devious son of a bitch. The VBIED was a threat, for sure, but I wasn’t convinced it was the only one, although it was my only lead.
Aaron and Shoshana told me a Kidon team was en route from Israel—the unit whose sole reason for existing was killing—but that didn’t give me a lot of hope. All it did was complicate the entire scenario. They were good at executing targets once pointed at them, but not so good at finding a target to execute. That was Aaron and Shoshana’s skill. And my team’s, to be honest.
We were now not only working against the Ghost, but against both the host nation of Argentina, since we’d spun them up with the failed hotel raid,andMossad, since the Kidon team wouldn’t be coordinating with us at all. I’d have to make sure we didn’t bump heads with either organization while we chased the Ghost.
Our best-case scenario was a new lead that none of them had. After the hotel hit, I wasn’t going to feed anything into the system before I checked it out, but that didn’t matter yet, as we had nothing new. I was rethinking visiting Shoshana and Jennifer’s smuggler guy, just to see if we could find him, when the Taskforce came back.
Veep turned from his computer screen and said, “We have another hit on the card. A restaurant near the Recoleta cemetery. Pulling up the data now.”
We crowded around, seeing a ping in a restaurant along a chain of them just south of the famed Recoleta Cemetery. I immediately contacted Creed at the Taskforce for a hack on the video, crossing my fingers.
Usually, video security from public establishments was set up one of two ways: a professional company was hired to establish a full-scope view of the perimeter, with an infrastructure including firewalls and a local network cloud server air-gapped from the internet, or the establishment just bought a bunch of cameras off the shelf and set it up themselves. I was hoping for the latter, as that was much easier to penetrate, and luckily that’s what it had been.
