One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [80]
I CAME BACK FROM EXPLORING THE TOWN and entered our room, calling out to Jennifer. She came out of the bathroom freshly scrubbed and wearing her new clothes. I was a little surprised by the transformation. She had a couple of cuts on her cheek and a little swelling around her left eye, but she certainly wasn’t ragged anymore. Huh. She’s a damn hammer. How’d I miss that before?
“What’re you looking at?”
“Uh . . . nothing. I was just surprised to see you without those Arab rags on.”
“Well, speaking of Arabs, have you thought about what we talked about earlier?”
And she’s crazy.... What is it with her family and conspiracy theories?
“Man, you’re like a dog with a bone. I told you I’d think about it, but we can’t do anything until we get to the U.S. anyway. Let’s focus on that right now.”
“I found something in the shirt. A bunch of e-mail addresses and passwords. I think we need to tell someone sooner rather than later. They may have already robbed the temple and smuggled out the artifacts.”
I paused, torn because I wanted to stomp this latest request, but intrigued by the find.
“How many addresses?”
I knew that terrorists used hundreds of e-mail addresses to communicate, a move and countermove continually fought between intelligence agencies and Al Qaeda. AQ switched addresses so frequently it made me wonder how they knew which ones to use, but somehow they did.
“Six different addresses, with six different passwords.”
“Well, that will be something we want to turn over to whoever we talk to in the States. When we get there.”
“Pike, please, I think this is important. We need to tell someone now. Can’t we go to the U.S. embassy? Won’t they do something with it?”
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, no. They would listen to us, but they wouldn’t do anything with the information. It’d be put into some report and buried in a ton of other information. You wouldn’t believe the amount of reports that embassies get on crime and terrorism. We’ll get quicker action by flying to the States first.”
I could tell she didn’t believe what I’d said. “Nobody in the embassy deals with crime? Who gets called when an American citizen is a victim of something?”
“The legal attaché. He’s the representative of the FBI at the embassy, and if we go to him, he’s going to be more concerned with the death and destruction we’ve done than any story of a temple vandalism. They’d listen to us for about five seconds. Then they’d put us in handcuffs. Remember, we don’t have any proof of what you think. The only thing we have in concrete is that I’ve killed folks both in the U.S. and in Guatemala. Going to them isn’t going to get the action you want. It’s just going to get us in trouble.”
“Well, couldn’t we talk to the CIA? Wouldn’t they listen to us?”
“Jennifer, trust me on this. I have a lot of experience working with country teams. We wouldn’t even get in to see the CIA. They won’t have a sign out front saying, ‘Spying Done Two Doors Down.’ They aren’t acknowledged publicly. If we went to the embassy and said, ‘We’d like to talk to the head spy,’ we’d be shown the door.”
“Look, how about this? We go to an Internet café and check out these e-mail addresses. If we see something in them that leans toward some type of illegal activity, we take that to the embassy. How does that sound?”
I gave up. “Okay, fine. We’re safe here. We can either take some time out walking the beaches and seeing the sights, or we