Headhunters

Chapter Forty-One

Matilda drove them out of town. Milton opened the glovebox and found a pistol and a spare magazine. It was good to know that it was there, but he was confident that it wouldn’t be needed. There was nothing to suggest that the Yakuza had stationed any more men in the vicinity. They would have expected that a crew of three was more than sufficient to deal with a nobody like Ziggy. There was no way that they could have foreseen that he would have been able to call upon reinforcements, and certainly not reinforcements who were as able as Milton.

That didn’t mean that they would just give up, though. They would assume that Ziggy would flee the city. And they would be right. It wouldn’t be safe for Ziggy to stay here. Tokyo was closed to him now. He would have to leave.

Ziggy turned as the car passed the turn-off for Narita airport and kept going, headed southwest. “Where are we going?”

“Nagoya.”

“Why?”

“They’ll be expecting you here. It isn’t worth the risk.”

“And then?”

“You’re going to help me. Like we discussed.”

“We didn’t really discuss it, Milton, did we? You said you needed me. That was it.”

“Okay. We’re going on a trip.”

“Where to?”

“Tel Aviv.”

“Tel Aviv?”

“That’s right. Israel.”

“I know where it is, Milton. You want to tell me why we need to go there?”

“I’ll explain when we’re in the air.”

“Give me a clue.”

Milton turned and regarded him evenly, and Ziggy’s mouth stopped flapping. “You’re going to hack the Mossad for me.”

He fumbled for a response. “The Mossad? Israeli intelligence?”

“You always said you liked a challenge.”

It was a three-hour drive to Nagoya. They spent most of it without speaking, listening to J-Pop on the car’s Internet radio station. Matilda was pensive and Ziggy was sour; Milton left them to their introspection and ran through the details of what he was going to propose once they reached Tel Aviv.

In truth, he wasn’t absolutely sure what they were going to do. He would make sure that Matilda wasn’t involved; she had already been hauled halfway around the world on his account, and that was more than enough. The actual operation — the reason for their journey — would depend on Ziggy.

They passed through Ina, Komagane and Komaki, finally reaching the airport at two in the morning.

Matilda parked the car in the long-term lot. Milton thought about leaving behind the gun that he had confiscated from the driver of the car, but decided that it would be better to be safe. The men he had disabled would have been roused by now, and they would have reported what had happened. They had no way of knowing what Ziggy would do next, of course, but they would likely assume, at the very least, that he would try to leave the city, probably headed for Narita. Milton knew that the organisation had a long reach and, however abundantly cautious it might seem, he wasn’t in the business of ignoring even the smallest of risks.

He put the gun into his bag and led the way to the terminal building. He paused and scanned the departures lounge but saw nothing to arouse his suspicion, nothing to suggest that the gangsters had been prescient enough to guess how thorough he would be. He couldn’t take the gun any farther than this, so he went into a restroom and dropped it in the trash.

Milton and Matilda were going to pose as tourists when they got to Eilat. A handful of the terminal’s stores were still open, so they bought the luggage and clothes that would be expected for vacationers. They stopped in the cafeteria and removed all of the tags from the clothes. They added bottles of sun cream, dark glasses and books.

They bought tickets and checked in together. Ziggy produced his passport from his rucksack, and the smiling clerk made no reference to it or to any of their documents as she quickly examined them. She asked Ziggy whether he wanted to check his rucksack into the hold, as it was too large to be taken on board as carry-on luggage, and he said no, hugging it a little closer to his chest. Milton calmly told him that he could put the most important items into his empty bag, and, after a little extra persuasion, Ziggy took out a laptop and a portable drive and told the clerk to be careful because the contents were fragile. She smiled indulgently, told him that she would, pressed a sticker onto the bag to denote that it was delicate, and then pressed the button to activate the conveyor belt. The bag jerked away and dropped onto the main belt with an audible clatter that made Ziggy close his eyes and mutter a silent prayer.

The first leg of their journey was aboard a Thai Air 747, and they had a row of three seats in the middle of the jet. Milton was finally able to relax as the plane hurtled down the runway, launching itself into the air and putting the glowing lights of Nagoya behind and beneath it. The pilot banked them to port and, after a five-minute climb, levelled them out at thirty thousand feet. It would take them six hours to fly to Bangkok, where they would have a nine-hour layover. The connecting El Al flight to Ovda would take another eleven hours. Not for the first time, Milton found himself hoping that the effort to collect Ziggy would be worth it.

And then he reminded himself: he had no other option. Ziggy, for better or worse, was his best chance to eliminate Bachman’s main advantage over him.

Matilda wedged her jacket against Milton’s shoulder and quickly fell asleep. The flight attendants circulated through the cabin with refreshments. Milton took a bottle of mineral water for himself and another for Matilda. Ziggy grinned at the woman and asked for a gin and tonic. She returned his smile with a perfunctoriness that Ziggy missed, because when she moved on, he turned to Milton and gave him a sly wink.

“What’s the matter with you?” Milton asked with exasperation.

“What do you mean?”

“You think she doesn’t have to put up with that every day?”

“Come on, Milton. Just a little fun.”

“How old are you?”

“Not as old as you.”

“You’re behaving like a teenager. Look at the trouble you got into the last time. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe give it a break?”

“Whatever, Milton.” Ziggy paused to take a sip from his drink. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

He nodded to the recumbent Matilda and said quietly, “You and her.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“She’s gorgeous.”

“She’s the sister of a friend.” He shook his head. “I’ve got no idea why I’m defending myself to you, of all people.”

He grinned. “Sore point?”

“Shut up, Ziggy.”

Ziggy had recovered his old spirit quickly. It wasn’t that long ago that he had flown to New Orleans to help Milton in his struggle with Bachman, but the intervening months had been long enough for Milton to have forgotten that Ziggy had a particular talent for annoying him. He was always trying to wisecrack, to make a smart comment, to win a point, and it could grow wearying after a while. Milton was no psychologist, but it was obvious, even to him, that Ziggy was driven by the need to find acclaim. He had never spoken of his childhood, but Milton guessed that he had been marked out as different thanks to his geekiness and his intellect. It had not, most likely, been a very happy time for him. He was overcompensating for it all now.

Ziggy stood up, took off his jacket and stuffed it into the overhead compartment. As he sat back down again, an unusual necklace fell free from the collar of his T-shirt.

“What’s that?” Milton asked, pointing to it.

Ziggy reached down and slipped his fingers beneath the necklace. He held it up so that Milton could look at it. It was about the size of Milton’s thumb, with exposed circuitry and a plug that looked like it would fit into a USB port.

“A thumb drive?”

“Sort of. It’s a microcontroller with a USB connector.”

“In English, Ziggy. What does it do?”

“What doesn’t it do?” He grinned. “If this gets plugged into an open port, it tells the computer that it’s a mouse or a keyboard. Fools it into letting down its defences and then it goes to town. It opens the terminal, messes with network settings, installs a backdoor, and then tidies up after itself in about a minute. Works on PCs, OS X, Linux. Everything, practically.”

“What does that mean, Ziggy? What does it actually do?”

“Means I can control the computer. Your computer. Her computer. Any computer.” He grinned again, even more broadly. “It’s called BadUSB. What do you think?”

“I think you have too much time on your hands.”

“Been working on it for six months. I’ve tested it in the field half a dozen times now. Works like a dream.”

Matilda stirred, settling herself again against Milton’s shoulder.

Ziggy indicated her with a nod. “She just get caught up in your shit?”

“Yes.”

“You’re bad news. Trouble follows you around.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Ziggy cocked an eyebrow, but didn’t follow it up. Milton did know that, of course. It had been the thing he had found most difficult to get off his mind ever since they had been abducted outside Broken Hill. He had travelled halfway around the world to get away from trouble, but it seemed that he had been wasting his time. There was nothing he could do. He attracted it. It stuck to him the way iron filings stuck to a magnet.

“You want to tell me what you want to achieve when we get to where we’re going?”

“I told you.”

“Yes, you said you wanted to hack the Mossad. I’m just checking: that wasn’t a joke?”

“No. It’s not a joke.”

Ziggy asked him to elaborate and Milton did. He explained what he wanted to do and, more importantly, why he wanted to do it. Ziggy sat and listened, asking the occasional question, but generally absorbing the information. He was attentive and Milton could see that he was starting to work out a possible plan of attack.

It took ten minutes and, when Milton was done, Ziggy was quiet for another minute.

“Well?”

“Between you and me,” he began cagily, “I might have tried to hack them before. This was a long time ago, when I was working for the government.”

“And?”

“They’re pretty keen on security, as you might imagine. They get plenty of hostile attention. Everything they have is best in class: firewalls, systems redundancies, network hygiene. They don’t cut corners anywhere.”

“So you didn’t get in?”

“No. And that was with everything GCHQ fired at it. A server room as big as a football pitch. And all I have with me now is my laptop. I don’t think there’s any way I’ll be able to get in from the outside.”

“What are you saying, Ziggy? You can’t do it?”

“Didn’t say that.” He tapped his finger against his chest, where the necklace was hidden beneath the cloth of his shirt. “You know me: I like a challenge. I said I didn’t think I could get in from the outside. But there are other ways, Milton. Have faith. I have a plan.”