CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Interpol Headquarters
Lyon, France
Nick Dial leaned back in his chair and smiled.
Somehow he had gotten through the day without a crisis.
His meetings had gone smoothly. His employees had behaved. He even had time to eat lunch without any interruptions, an event that happened roughly once a decade.
All things considered, it had been a good day for Dial.
Which was a rarity during the past few years.
As the director of the homicide division at Interpol—the largest international crime-fighting organization in the world—Dial was tasked with coordinating the flow of information between police departments whenever a murder investigation crossed national boundaries. All told he was in charge of 192 member countries, filled with billions of people and hundreds of languages.
All of which kept him extremely busy.
Just not in the way he would prefer.
He would much rather be on the streets than in an office.
For the first few years, he had been thrilled with his position. He wrote the rules. He set the budget. He handpicked the personnel. On a few occasions, he even went into the field to work on high-profile cases, including one that involved multiple crucifixions and another that involved several dead scientists in Stockholm.
Dial didn’t get involved because he had to.
He did it because he wanted to.
Being an investigator was in his blood.
Unfortunately, the election of a new secretary general at Interpol had changed Dial’s ability to get his hands dirty. Dial’s new supervisor wasn’t a former cop; he was a politician. And he had introduced Dial to a concept that he had quickly come to despise: optics.
It didn’t matter if Dial was effective when assisting police departments in the field. His new boss was only concerned about the possibility of an international incident, which could potentially lead to bad press. An angry Dial had protested fiercely. He didn’t give a shit about perception; he only cared about justice. But he had been told in no uncertain terms that his participation in an active case would lead to his suspension and/or termination.
And just like that, he hated going to work.
Somehow his dream job had become a nightmare overnight.
As luck should have it, a few of his friends were going through similar problems with their high-profile careers. One in particular had finally pulled the plug after ten difficult years. Dial had been tempted to call him during lunch to get an update, but had decided against it due to the time difference in the States. He knew his buddy had been a night owl when he had a job. There was no telling how late he would sleep in retirement.
With nothing better to do, Dial decided to write him an email to see how things were going. He pulled out his cell phone, scrolled through his contacts, and found the name he was looking for. His finger was just getting ready to click the envelope icon when—
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
The sound was so loud and piercing that he could feel it in his—
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
Dial cursed loudly as he tried to turn down the volume, but for some strange reason, the master volume didn’t have any effect on this—
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
“What the fuck!” Dial yelled at his phone. Not only had this never happened before, but he didn’t even recognize the sound effect. His normal ringtone wasn’t a—
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
“Answer your phone!” screamed Henri Toulon from outside Dial’s office. He was one of Dial’s best investigators but a royal pain in his—
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
Now Dial was pissed. He stared at his locked screen, but no name or number appeared. In fact, the only thing on his display was a large, green—
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
Toulon screamed even louder. “I swear to Buddha, if you don’t answer your phone, I’m going to shoot you in your—”
Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
Dial finally relented and hit the green button. “Who the fuck is this?”
There was a slight delay before he heard a response.
“The Pentagon calling for Director Nick Dial.”
That took the starch right out of his shorts.
“The Pentagon?” he said in a much calmer tone. “For me?”
“That depends. Are you Director Nick Dial?”
“Yes,” Dial said as he stood from his desk and closed his office door. As he did, he flipped off Toulon, who was already doing the same to him. “What’s this about?”
“Please hold.”
So he held.
Seriously, what else was he going to do?
It was the goddamn Pentagon.
A few seconds passed before there was a click on the line, followed by a few more clicks, a couple of pops, and then finally a voice.
“Nick? Are you there?”
Dial recognized the caller at once. “Jon? Is that you?”
“Hey buddy, how ya doin’?” Payne asked casually.
“How am I doing? Holy shit, how do you think I’m doing?”
Payne noticed his irritation from hundreds of miles away. “Is this a bad time?”
“No, Jon, it’s not. It’s not a bad time at all. At least, it wasn’t until the air-raid siren—or whatever that fuck that was—went off on my phone!”
“Air-raid siren? What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Believe it or not, I was just getting ready to write you an email when my phone started making the most god-awful sound. It was this hideous ding-a-ling that just wouldn’t quit until I answered your call.”
“Nick, I hate to break it to you, but that’s how phones work. They keep ringing until you hit the button and pick up.”
“Aha! You knew about the button!”
“All phones have buttons! Seriously, man. Have you been drinking? I know work’s been kind of rough for you lately, but you shouldn’t be hitting the bottle at the office.”
“The Pentagon! Your call came through the Pentagon!”
“Wait,” Payne said defensively. “How did you know that?”
“Because the goddamn operator said this is the goddamn Pentagon! I thought there had been a missile launch or something!”
“Randy!” Payne shouted into his phone in case Randy Raskin—the computer genius who worked as a researcher in the Pentagon’s subbasement but was Payne and Jones’s high-tech secret weapon—was still listening. “I just needed a clean line, not an introduction!”
“Did you just call me ‘Randy’?” asked Dial, who was getting more and more confused by the second. “And why do you need a clean line to speak to me?”
“Let’s start there. Are you somewhere you can talk in private?”
Dial nodded. “I’m in my office, and I sweep it daily for bugs. I haven’t found one yet, but I know my asshole boss is looking for an excuse to push me out.”
“Wait. I thought you wanted to leave?”
“I do, but I want to leave on my own terms. I don’t want to get fired.”
“In that case, maybe we should end this call right here.”
“Not a chance. First things first: who is Randy? And how did he hack my secure phone? This thing is supposed to be unhackable.”
Payne took a deep breath. “That’s a long story.”
“Well, you have my attention. In fact, you have my whole building’s attention. Seriously, you have no idea how loud that sound was.”
“Trust me, it could’ve been worse. Randy once took the audio track of a gay porn movie and uploaded it to DJ’s phone as his ringtone. Anytime he received a call, he’d start hearing grunts and splashes and all kinds of nasty stuff, all at full volume. DJ tried his best to ignore it, but after two days, he was so embarrassed and angry that he literally shot his phone.”
Dial laughed. “You’re right. That would’ve been worse. So who is this guy?”
Payne knew that Dial still had a high clearance from his time at the FBI, so he felt comfortable giving him some basics. He didn’t reveal Raskin’s full name for security purposes, but he was able to explain some of the ways that Raskin had assisted them during their military days and how a friendship had grown from there.
Dial sat down and took it all in before he asked the question that still hadn’t been answered. “And why did he hack my phone?”
“I’m guessing boredom. To someone like Randy, a secure phone at Interpol probably sounded like a challenge. Obviously it wasn’t since my phone rang for less than thirty seconds before I heard your voice, so yeah, you should probably look into that—especially if you think your boss is trying to bug your office.”
Dial shook his head. “No, you misunderstood my question. Why did you feel the need to call your hacker friend at the Pentagon to place a call to me in the first place?”
“Oh, that. Well, it seems that DJ and I may have gotten ourselves into a little situation, and we were hoping our good buddy at Interpol may be able to lend us a hand.”
Dial groaned. “Define little.”
Payne glanced at the carnage in the library. From where he was standing, he could see multiple bodies, plenty of blood, and several bullet holes. Plus, for some strange reason, Jarkko was working the arms of one of the dead goons like a creepy puppeteer, just flipping and flopping his lifeless arms around, much to the amusement of Jones.
“Actually,” Payne admitted, “little may be an understatement.”