Within minutes, Creed had the feed from today and we were watching the patio of the restaurant, the patrons coming and going in a jerky manner. I’d had Creed hit rewind, skimming through the afternoon, and like magic, there he was.
The Ghost.
Honestly, seeing him was a little surreal. I mean, I knew he was down here in South America, but his face on the screen was final proof, and it didn’t seem real. Like I was watching a deepfake video and I had to parse truth from fiction.
I turned to the other members of my team, and they were having the same reaction. It was real, alright. He was eating calamari with what looked like a local guy, his face pockmarked like his mom had pressed it into a bunch of tacks in his youth.
Jennifer saw him and exclaimed, “That’s the guy who attacked us!”
Knuckles said, “Well, there’s your answer on why the hotel was a dry hole. This guy tipped them off.”
I looked at the time stamp on the video and said, “Yeah, and if we’d been allowed to hit it, they’d have been there. We spent so much time dicking around with host nation police, the Ghost had the time to meet this guy and split.”
Shoshana said, “What now?”
I said, “I honestly don’t know.”
Chapter 48
Gazing out the window of their new hotel room, the Ghost tapped his fingers on the sill. He said, “You’re sure you got away clean?”
Behind him, Omar said, “Yes. How many ways can I say it? We left without any interruption, and now we’re here. We went right past the police and nobody was stopped.”
The Ghost turned around and said, “They had Yassir and Fatima’s passport information. They are no good to us for the primary mission.”
“They’re returning to the Triple Frontier this afternoon. They’ll be fine. It’s not a compromise of the plan.”
“How are they getting there? Renting a car with the same card?”
“No. They have their own contacts.”
The Ghost took a seat and said, “Tell them I need them for the diversion. They need to remain here, hidden, then they’ll extract the VBIED from the garage when I give the command. The card won’t trigger until they exit, and at that point, it won’t matter.”
Omar said nothing for a moment, then, “They aren’t Pasdaran. They’re Hezbollah. I can’t order them to do anything.”
“Just ask them. Let them know how important this is. They can still use their travel arrangements after this is done. We’re close to the endgame here, and they’ll want the success instead of running with their tails between their legs back to the Triple Frontier. They’ve suffered almost as much as the Palestinians from Little Satan.”
Omar nodded and said, “You’re probably right. I’ll ask them. I’ll get them to continue, but how do you feel about the mission now?”
The Ghost toyed with his counterfeit press pass and said, “I think we’ll be okay. They found the card and obviously have made a connection to it and to the Pasdaran, but they have no idea of the actual threat vector. If anything, it may create enough smoke to allow us to succeed. Are you worried?”
The Ghost understood implicitly that whatever Omar said next would be tainted, as Omar would have none of the risks that he, Ramzi, and Khalil would. He wasn’t entering into the lion’s den. His job was transportation only, and he would fly away whether the rest of them showed up to the aircraft or not.
Omar said, “I agree with you. Unfortunately, we will only know there is a problem when the Zionists close their claws after we’ve voluntarily entered.”
The Ghost chuckled and said, “True, true, so tell me the new card you used for this hotel isn’t connected to the last. There is no way for Mossad to unravel that knot, is there?”
“No, we have plenty of different accounts to use, this one is from Brazil. They’re all fed from an offshore Tether account, so money will not be an issue.”
Alarmed, the Ghost said, “All are fed from a single account? What is Tether? Can someone find this Tether account and trace it to the new cards?”
Omar raised his hands and said, “No, no, that’s not possible. Quite the opposite. Tether is a method of transferring funds using cryptocurrency.” He saw a look of confusion on the Ghost’s face and said, “You know what crypto is, right?”
“No.”
Omar said, “Well, it’s too difficult to explain. Suffice to say it’s like a digitalhawala, and its outside normal banking systems. It’s safe, and we have plenty of funds to continue.”
The Ghost understood thehawalasystem well—an ancient Middle Eastern method of transferring money that simply relied on two trusted agents, without any real funds going from one to the other. He’d financed plenty of operations in the past usinghawala, and if Tether was the modern equivalent, he was satisfied about the security of future expenditures. He still had doubts, however, about ones made in the past.
