“Our mission was to stop Messerly from releasing the information. But he and the information he has are secured behind the walls of the Chilean embassy in London, where he was granted asylum. Since then, we’ve been scouring the Chilean embassy staff for a turncoat. Someone with enough bad habits to be blackmailed or possibly bribed.”

“Cut to the chase, Emerson. Clock’s ticking, remember?” Gannon said.

He took a deep breath.

“But the problem is that Messerly is very well protected even in the embassy itself. A guard is staffed 24/7 outside his room, and only a handful of people are actually allowed to come into his tiny windowless third-floor suite. That’s why we finally homed in on the embassy doctor, Raphael Santos, who has routine access to Messerly. We looked for a way to blackmail him into knocking out Messerly and retrieving his data, but it turned out that we were digging a dry hole.”

Emerson took another deep breath.

“So that’s why we kidnapped the doctor’s kid,” he said.

90

“You kidnapped his kid! His kid?”

Emerson blinked at him.

“Isn’t the FBI supposed to solve kidnappings?” Gannon said. “Now you commit them?”

“His name was Scott. He was a college kid. He went to Cambridge. He was nerdy but real smart and caring and socially aware. We learned that he had an internship with the French refugee relief group, Cesse de Pleurer, that was going into eastern Gabon for the summer. The CIA had contacts in the rebel groups just across the border in the Congo. So we hired one of the Congolese warlords down there to grab him.”

Gannon shook his head, dumbfounded.

“So the young guy with the headphones on the plane was the embassy doctor’s son? That was Scott Santos?”

“Yes,” Emerson said.

“And the dead black man was your African warlord?” Gannon said. “He was the kidnapper you hired?”

Emerson nodded.

“Yes. His name was Biyombo. Terrence Biyombo. After he grabbed Scott, he read from the script we gave him. At first, he asked the doctor for money like in a regular kidnapping. But after three million dollars was delivered, he called Santos back and told him that he had learned who the doctor was and where he worked and the Russians he bought his weapons from now wanted something else.”

“Messerly’s data,” Gannon said.

“Yes,” Emerson said. “Messerly’s data.”

“Why was the FBI director involved?” Gannon said.

Emerson looked up at the rusted ceiling.

“For a bunch of reasons. Dunning was neck deep in Messerly’s data, for one. Also, Dunning worked with MI6 during the tail end of the Cold War, and we needed him to smooth things over with the British intel people in London who were helping us in the operation.

“But most of all, we needed his radar-jamming G550 to smuggle Scott and Biyombo out of the Congo. The area where Biyombo was holding Scott was in a war zone, and it was becoming increasingly unstable. So Dunning agreed to stop there covertly in the jungle on his way to an Interpol conference in Milan.”