Miss Metry,
I am a colleague of your father’s here at the U.N. I am afraid that circumstances have transpired regarding your father that I am unable to elaborate on through correspondence. If you areable, I will be in Cairo next week and would be willing to meet for a brief period. I will meet you at the Naguib Mahfouz Café in the Khan El Khalili.
There was a time and date written at the bottom. It was in less than a week. There was no other information on who “Miss Metry” was; however, the email address denoted that the first name began with the letterA, and it had a European Union suffix.
Either this woman was of interest to Richter, or she was of interest to the person who had killed him. It depended on who had sent the email. Either way, she was somehow tied to the Saudi hydrology report. Nate wasn’t sure what part she played in the drama that was rapidly unfolding, but he knew he needed to find out. She was his only lead now.
Nate briefly wondered if he should email the woman and warn her but thought better of it. Perhaps Richter had sent the email. As of now they had a last name and nothing else to go on. He didn’t want to spook her, and right now he knew where she would be and when. Regardless, he wasn’t going to figure it out at this exact moment and decided he should probably get out of the dead man’s office before he got caught.
He turned off the computer. They had pushed their luck far enough. It was time to pull on this thread and hope that Miss Metry was holding the piece of the puzzle that Richter was meant to have provided.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Major Ahmed Malik sat at his computer, drumming his fingers on the desk. He had a dilemma he was attempting to work out in his mind. The truth was, he already knew what he was going to do, and was just building up the courage to do it.
He was sitting in his office in the General Intelligence Presidency building. The GIP was Saudi Arabia’s premier intelligence organization charged with maintaining security both inside and outside the kingdom. Ahmed was on a liaison assignment here after making the rank of major, which he had obtained by no small measure of help from the man who had emailed him last week asking for his assistance.
Being a career special forces officer, Ahmed knew how to get around the internet firewalls that the kingdom put up, and he used a VPN to check his Proton Mail, a secure email service protected by Swiss privacy laws. He used the account to maintain communication with friends outside Saudi Arabia, including Nate Wilde, the source of his current predicament.
Ahmed owed much to Nate. Not only had the man’s work in counterterrorismhelped Ahmed rise within his own ranks, but Nate had saved his life years ago by taking a full terrorist assault on the encampment in Yemen head-on. It was a debt Ahmed felt he could never repay but he knew he had to try.
So when Nate emailed him asking for his assistance, he felt obliged to help. His friend had asked for two things: satellite imagery of camel trails and a permit for an archaeological expedition. The imagery was fairly straightforward. They were technically classified documents, but they had also been originally provided by the Americans in the first place, and Nate had been the one to give them to him. However, now that Nate was out of the military and no longer had clearance, it was illegal to provide those same images to him.
The whole affair was ridiculous, and Ahmed saw no reason why he should not provide the images. He knew Nate wanted to use them for academic research. He was not giving them to terrorists who intended to harm the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The second request was more difficult. Things were tense in the country at present. The proxy war with the Iranians was gaining steam and the conflict in Yemen was regularly spilling over the border. Rockets fired from the south occasionally landed in the Arabian Desert and sometimes even made their way as far north as Riyadh. It was not a good time for such a request. Ahmed had asked anyway and, as expected, had been denied by the Ministry of Culture’s Heritage Commission.
It troubled Ahmed that he was not able to help in that regard. Perhaps in a few years, when things calmed down, Nate would have the opportunity to launch his expedition. On that day, Ahmed thought, he would gladly join his friend in searching for the lost city of his ancestors.
Making up his mind, Ahmed hit print, ensuring that the grid coordinates were displayed. Nate would be able to superimpose the trails onto a new map given a few known points. Ahmed knew this, as hehad seen him work his magic before. He walked over to the printer and scooped up the papers, shoving them in a folder.
When he left for the day, Ahmed made his way to a café that provided Wi-Fi access, where he used his laptop to log back into his Proton Mail. There were no new messages. He composed a letter to Nate, telling him that he would provide what he asked. He would be able to travel locally in the coming days and could meet him in Oman, Egypt, or Jordan, and asked which would work best. When he was finished, he logged off and headed home. He owed this man a great debt, and he hoped that this would be the beginning of his repayment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Northern France
As the BMW 3 Series sped through the French countryside, Wally feathered the 386-horsepower engine around curves and opened it up on straightaways while Nate furiously typed and clicked away on his laptop. He had connected to a global Wi-Fi hotspot and was searching deep in the bowels of the internet. He was engrossed in his research and Wally didn’t want to bother him with the radio, so they rode mostly in silence.
It was late in the day and the light was starting to fade. After searching Richter’s office, the two had decided that they wanted to put at least a country or two between themselves and the events in Germany, so they’d checked out of their hotel and left immediately, heading back to London. Wally felt safer there, in control of the situation in his flat where he stored multiple firearms, against British law. There was also the fact that they had broken into the house and office of a dead man, and they had no desire to hang around and become suspects in a murder investigation.
Nate still had access to many open-source programs and he searchedthem to queryA. Metryof the European Union. He foundAnastasia Metryfairly quickly and was able to determine that she was an Egyptian who worked for the EU, which he found unusual considering she wasn’t originally an EU citizen. Digging deeper he discovered that she worked for the European Environment Agency based out of Copenhagen, which provided new threads for him to pull on. There were no photos, but there was a short bio of the credentials of each member of the agency. It was when he found out that she specialized in hydrology that he started to get excited. She might very well be able to shed some light on this mysterious report that was worth killing for.
Still, it was strange. Richter had been working with her father, not her.So what did her father do?It took a little more effort to locate him, but Nate discovered that he worked in Bahrain for the United Nations Environment Programme. There was an obvious connection there, but Nate didn’t know enough to make it, so he kept digging until he found the website for the office. He briefly checked the time before figuring it was nearing the end of the workday, but someone might still be in the office. He pulled out his cell phone and placed a call. After several rings, someone answered.
“Hello, United Nations Bahrain. How may I be of service?”
“Hello,” Nate said. “I’m looking for a Mr. Youssef Metry.”
“Oh.” There was hesitation on the other end of the line. “Please hold.” Nate was on hold for several minutes. Wally glanced over and Nate shrugged. Finally, a new voice spoke.
“Hello, this is Pierre Dufort of the United Nations Environment Programme, Middle East office. May I ask who is calling?” The voice on the phone spoke English, laced with a heavy French accent.
Nate thought about it for a second, but didn’t want to give his real name. There was something strange going on, and the less he expressed his intentions, the better.
“Yes, hello. My name is Professor Melvin Bradley of Harvard University.” The name of his most hated professor was the first that came to mind, and he hoped the tag of Harvard would grant him some credibility. It did.
