True Faith and Allegiance

56

Dragomir Vasilescu finished his glass of pinot noir, said good night to his friends, and left Bruno Wine Bar with a slight sway in his walk. He stepped out to Strada Covaci and checked his phone for the time. It was just after ten p.m., but with the amount of wine he’d consumed, he knew he would have a hangover of epic proportions when he woke in the morning.

He looked around hopefully for a taxi, but instead he saw a white Renault Trafic, a light commercial vehicle, pull to a stop in front of him.

The side door was already open, and two sets of hands grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him in.

“Hey! What the hell?”

He was pushed to an open floor in the minivan, and then a bag was shoved over his head. He tried to push himself up, but he was held facedown. Two sets of zip ties were secured to his wrists, then he was rolled onto his back, yanked up into a seat by impressively strong hands, and shoved upright.

Dragomir was no longer alarmed. Now he was scared.

In Romanian he said, “What… what do you want? I have a wallet. A phone…” When he heard no response he said, “I have a car, a Mercedes at home. It’s parked in the garage on—”

A voice interrupted him, speaking English. “How long have you been working with the Muslims?”

He knew instantly this would be the Chinese from the Seychelles Group, but the voice was not that of Mr. Peng.

“We… we are not working with the Muslims.”

“The data you have in your possession. Data you have been managing on behalf of the Seychelles Group. This data is being used to kill Americans in America. Did you not understand that we would see your scheme for what it was?”

“Scheme? There is no scheme. I can assure you, gentlemen, that—”

“The United States government has identified the location of the breach of their data. It is Office of Personnel Management, the e-QIP data, the exact data that you have in your possession, that you are using to develop product for us. No one else has that product! Only ARTD!”

Dragomir shouted through the bag over his head, “That’s right! No one else has it! And that means we don’t hand it out to fucking terrorists!”

“Where are the files now?”

“They… we house them on an air-gapped server in the office. Your data is completely safe.”

“We will go to your office now.”

“Now? It’s past business hours. Come back at nine tomorrow and I will give you the entire computer. You will see there is no way anyone could possibly remove the files without—”

The voice leaned in close to Vasilescu’s face, silencing him with the threatening tone. “We will go. Right now.”

The ARTD building had a pair of security officers who worked a desk during the overnight hours, and they were suitably concerned about the fact the director of their company showed up with three unknown Asian men at ten-thirty, but Dragomir Vasilescu simply greeted them without any explanation for his evening visit and made no introductions of his companions.

He had been warned when still in the back of the van that any alert to the guards that he was there under duress would be met with instant and overwhelming violence, and he assured the men he wanted to continue a good working relationship with the Seychelles Group after this misunderstanding was straightened out, so he would do exactly as he’d been told. They cut off his zip ties but remained close enough to reach out and grab him if he tried anything.

Now Vasilescu stood at the front of the elevator, his eyes down, with the Chinese standing behind him. He’d been instructed to keep his eyes to himself since the bag was removed in the back of the van, and he had every intention of carrying out this order. He felt like everything would be okay the moment these psychos saw there was no way to access the computer with the files on it, although he had no real way to prove the material had not been copied earlier and then placed in the air-gapped room with the terminal.

Still, he was hopeful he could satisfy them and they would leave him alone and return to China convinced they were barking up the wrong tree.

The director of ARTD flipped on several lights in the hallway on the fourth floor and walked straight to the door to the air-gapped room, and here he put his hand over the biometric scanner. A green light glowed and he opened the door, then stepped right up to the machine in the center of the otherwise empty space.

“Gentlemen. All the files we have been working from are right here. Perfectly safe, as I have assured you from the outset.”

“Show me,” one of the men behind him said.

Vasilescu turned on the monitor, waited a few seconds, then clicked the monitor button on and off again. There was only a blank screen.

“Problem?” the man doing the talking asked.

Vasilescu sat at the desk now, tried to restart the computer, but after a few seconds he just said, “It’s… that’s not right.”

One of the Asian men leaned behind the desk, looked around. As he was doing this Vasilescu said, “Just a software issue. I’ll try to restart the device and—”

The Asian man reached down and lifted the cover off the computer tower. It had not been screwed in place. The man clearly knew something about computers, because he said, “Hard drive gone.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Vasilescu said, then he stood, peered over the monitor, and saw for himself.

Instantly his knees weakened and he slumped back into the chair. His heart began to pound and he felt a sick nausea and light-headedness.

The man who had been doing all the talking stood close behind him now. “Who has access to this room?”

Dragomir Vasilescu’s voice cracked. “I… have my best man working on your case. Dalca. Alexandru Dalca. We can go talk to him now. He will tell you. He is the only one with access to—”

Dragomir Vasilescu put it all together quickly. He remembered that long-ago conversation with Alex Dalca. The one where he said the Chinese were thinking too small and ARTD could exploit the data and sell it to the highest bidder. Clearly, Dalca had been doing just that.

And he thought of the very odd fire this afternoon. Clearly that was Dalca’s doing, a diversion to take the hard drive.

The man leaning into Vasilescu’s ear from behind noted Vasilescu’s hesitation. He said, “We will talk to this man Dalca. Perhaps he can answer questions that you cannot.”

As Vasilescu came to the realization of what was actually going on, he knew for his own self-preservation he had to somehow convince the men surrounding him now that they were completely off base. He couldn’t have Chinese intelligence roughing up one of his people. The information they might uncover could be bad for ARTD, and bad for Vasilescu himself.

The fury that burned inside him was almost enough for him to punch his fist through the monitor in front of him. He said, “Dalca is my very best employee. And a good man as well. His discretion is beyond reproach.” But while saying this, his inner monologue was singing a very different tune. I’ll fucking kill you myself, you deceitful, betraying sack of shit!

“Where do we find this Dalca?”

“He… he will be at work at nine o’clock tomorrow. Let’s all meet again and—”

The man with the strong hands grabbed the back of Vasilescu’s neck and yanked him up, turned him for the door.

As they waited for the elevator, two men said something in Chinese, and then one of them stepped in front of Vasilescu, opened his suit coat, and revealed a short-barreled submachine gun hanging from a sling under his arm.

The English speaker behind him said, “You communicate danger to your guards, and you will all die. We want security camera files from this building removed.”

Vasilescu stepped behind the front desk in the lobby a minute later, and immediately pulled one of the keyboards to him. He began deleting security camera files. As an explanation to the two very confused guards, he just said, “My clients here are the shy type. You know how it is.”

The two guards just looked at each other, but they did not respond to their boss.

With a final press of the Enter key, the files were erased and the cams turned off. He stood back up and left with the Asian men and climbed back into the van, and the lights went out when the black bag slipped back over his head.

As they drove through the night, with the interior of the vehicle perfectly silent, Vasilescu realized his only hope for survival at this point was finding Alexandru Dalca and convincing the Chinese that he alone was responsible.