Chaos in Jeopardy: Chapter 1: The Port of Baku, Azerbaijan
Rick woke and popped his eyes open with a start. Clad only in a undershirt and boxers, he was ice cold sitting in his darkened room in a sleazy hotel at a narrow desk below an unshuttered open window. His head still lay on his hands, wrapped around the pair of binoculars he had been looking through, the last thing he could remember doing. Twenty-four hours straight he had been sitting at this desk watching intently the movement of everyone and everything into and out of the bustling strategic port of Baku, just below the window, on a peninsula jutting into the Caspian Sea, 300 miles due north of Tehran.
Cool clammy air wafted over him, carrying with it the clamor of the jostling ships at dock, the frigid night air intensifying the clanking and rattling of the chains, the rhythmic slop, slop, slop of the oily water against the creaking docks, the drunken shouts, and reedy flutes piping intricate Turkish melodies over the thumping beat of drums rising from the decrepit bars that lined the lane below. He'd had his binoculars trained on the ships and the cargo, and on the tattooed muscular men who wove and stumbled across the lane from bar to bar propelled by tawdry harlots with a loose grip on their morals and a tight grip on their purses.
The room's only illumination was the garish yellow glare from cheap helium street lamps. How long had he been asleep? His arms tingled and a painful sensation of pins and needles flooded his senses as he regained awareness and memory of his unaccustomed surroundings. Just as he was about to jump up and shake his arms to restore their blood flow, he froze instead. Could he hear someone breathing?
A puff of dank sea air lifted a discarded chocolate-bar wrapper and it skittered across the desk and fluttered against his finger. Rick heaved a silent sigh of relief, guessing the spooky breathing sound was merely a figment of his half asleep brain. Then he hesitated and froze again, perceiving an unexpected odor in the room, something different that he could not explain. The odor wasn't the smell of diesel fumes or rotting fish or the salty sourness of the working-sea air which he had been breathing for two solid days since Casey had delivered him and his luggage to that tiny dingy backroom that just happened to have a spectacular view of the grimy industrial port.
Irritatingly, Casey had gone over and over all of Michael's detailed instructions, which included a free pass to improvise if the situation warranted, like he was some kind of clueless greenhorn. Which, fortunately, he wasn't. And Casey should talk! He wouldn't stop lamenting over his beloved Bengay ointment, confiscated at the airport, as though no local lotions could ever be good enough for his prized and babied muscles. But that kind of mishap would never happen to him because he was prepared! In fact, he had prepared his whole life for this mission. All his youth, he had been scraping together cash to pay for spy studies such as weaponry and languages and applying himself to learning the skills with a single-minded devotion. He was determined that in this operation he would distinguish himself and prove that he was a top-notch member of their team, amply capable of pulling his fair share of the weight.
It was unfortunate that he'd fallen asleep. That was a slip up and he wasn't proud that it had happened.
They'd been sent to Baku, a minor middle-eastern backwater, because the agency had received intelligence of a recent dramatic uptick in the quantity of inorganic fertilizer shipping through the city, and the nature of the chemical ingredients were a sign that pointed an incriminating finger towards bomb manufacture, possibly for use by local terrorist cells to further destabilize the country's weakening political alliances, or possibly for drug cultivation, or a third, rather remote possibility, one much less likely in this particular region, for a laudable interest in increasing food production. His team's task was to investigate the suspicious shipping and to determine what it was about, with the expectation that it wouldn't take more than a couple of days to discover the answer. Was the fertilizer intended for peaceful or nefarious purposes? And if nefarious, to find the answers the usual questions: who, what, where, when, why.
He'd been asleep for a couple of hours, he decided, based on the color of the light - it was well past midnight but not yet approaching dawn. Goose bumps rose on his skin as his intuition warned him that someone was behind him and so he remained face-down, quiet and immobile assessing the curious odor. He strained to listen intently with every fiber of his being focused to the task. Ah ha, he decided, it was just Casey sneaking up on him. He'd come back to check up on him and had slipped into his room unannounced. It would be just like Casey to try to give him a fright, trying to embarrass him for falling asleep on his first solo stake-out. Rick imagined his legs were coiled springs, and tensed his stomach muscles in preparation to twist around and leap up at Casey to show him that he couldn't catch him unprepared. He may not have the Human Weapon's fighting skills but he was small and athletic, and he could pull off moves like a trained dancer. Casey would soon find out that Rick Martinez was not to be trifled with!
But before he moved he suddenly identified the odor - a repugnant mix of garlic, olive oil, tobacco smoke, and something else he couldn't quite pinpoint - and it was not a smell he associated with Casey, that is, not unless Casey had spent the last couple of days staked out in a smoke-house in Italy. Rick crept his fingertips off of the binoculars and towards his torso, towards his gun, slung in a holster near his armpit. He instantly froze again, his stomach turning into a leaden ball, when he heard the sound of a click inches behind his head.
It was the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.
"Don't move," said a voice in perfectly enunciated English. It was the kind of perfect enunciation that a native English speaker would never possess. "Put your hands out where I can see them."
Rick slowly slid his hands on the desk, spreading out his fingers, all the while building an impression of the threat behind him. There was a single man, standing directly behind him and holding a handgun pointed at his head, a man who was very light on his feet, and tall, based on the direction of speech. Therefore slim, skinny even. Who was he? Most likely one of the people of interest to their team, someone that they'd come to Baku to spy on.
Using his unmatchable skill for languages he analyzed the barely perceptible trace of an accent. It was distinctive, but what was it? His mind whirled like a rolodex as he scanned over the possible candidates that his boss, Michael, the notoriously paranoiac over-planner, had drilled into him in preparation for this mission. He'd wondered at the time why he needed to memorize all of them. Why couldn't he just take notes? Now he knew why. But there were too many on the list. He needed to hear more of his speech before he could possibly hope to identify even his country of origin.
"What are you doing?" asked the voice, supplying Rick with a fresh sample of speech to study.
"Bird watching," replied Rick with an ironic tone, hoping to draw out more conversation.
"At night?" said the voice, with a guttural laugh. "No birds around at night."
"Not watching that kind of bird," said Rick with a cynical jauntiness.
The man laughed again, and Rick decided he could hear a definite Germanic note in the laugh. His rolodex of possibilities thinned, cards flying out as he discarded suspects of other nationalities, meanwhile he also considered all the room's possible exit points, the door behind him, the window in front of him, and the adjacent bathroom's window. There was the slight problem of a sheer drop of four floors from the windows to the lane below, but he could deal with that problem when he came to it.
"Who are you?" The man pressed the steely muzzle of the gun against Rick's ear forcing him to bend his neck forward and push his face flat on the desk.
"Thomas Smith." That was Rick's alias for this mission, the name on his passport and other papers he was carrying.
"So ... Tho-mas Smith," drawled the man, making it clear by his tone that he did not for a moment believe it was Rick's real name. "Why are you -"
He cut off his question and growled, releasing the pressure of the gun. Rick heard the scrape of the door opening, lumbering footsteps, and a snorting laugh, as an evidently large and uncouth man entered and observed Rick's awkward position. Another goon, thought Rick, just what he didn't need. A second man, one that was much bigger than the first, was going to make it even harder to slip out of their grasp in one piece. Perhaps he could make his move now, he wondered, should he spring into action while the first man was distracted by the second man?
"Don't move," said the man, turning his attention back to Rick. An increase in pressure made the gun's muzzle bite painfully into Rick's ear, and he squished his face onto the desk's cold polished surface.
Rick felt the goon's powerful hands pat him down and then pull his gun out of his holster. Damn it, thought Rick, he'd missed his one golden opportunity. Did he have a hope of another one as good as that presenting itself?
Rick thought of his teammates: Michael, his megalomaniac boss, who thought this trivial assignment in nowheresville was punishment for badmouthing Higgins over the rat incident, staking out the airport; and Billy, the scruffy-faced Scot, who thought he was God's gift to women-kind, staking out the train station; and Casey, the prickly gym-rat, who always thought first of his own comfort, acting as a roving gardener - cultivating contacts, sowing rumors, and planting bait.
How could he alert his teammates? He'd been out of touch with them for almost two days. What were they doing now? How could he let them know he needed their help? He had no cell phone, his only method of contact was by using the room's land-line to leave them coded messages. That was part of the plan, they were working completely independently with a minimum of cross talk.
The goon picked up Rick's passport from the desk and handed it to the man with the gun.
"What are you doing in Baku?"
"Business," replied Rick. "Nothing you'd be interested in."
"Really?" said the man skeptically. "I doubt that."
"Check my luggage," said Rick.
Michael had made the agency supply Rick with a full complement of business gear tailored to his cover story: business cards, product samples, product literature, and the like. Say whatever else you might about Michael, by far the agency's most abrasive loose cannon, no one would dispute he was a meticulous and thorough strategist.
Rick heard the man grunt and the goon lifted the bag onto the bed, unzipped it, and pulled everything out. Both men grunted. Rick was hoping they'd start to converse in their native tongue since that would help him to identify them, but unfortunately the second man remained mute.
"This is an odd hotel for a business man to choose, isn't it?" said the man, flipping opening the passport. "I can't see."
The goon stopped pawing through the things on the sagging bed, stepped to the door, flicked the switch lighting the single pallid bulb hanging from the pitted damp ceiling. Rick heard the first man flipping through his passport. The false passport - the photo, the name, the stamps in it - were all done to an exceptional quality, a high enough quality to fool an expert with a magnifying glass and bright illumination.
"You've got the wrong man," said Rick. "I'm not who you're looking for. Someone gave you bad info."
"I don't think so ...Tho-mas Smith." The man drawled and grunted again, evidently not fooled by the fake passport, evidently someone even more knowledgeable of American passports than an expert. "But I'm looking at your photo and I don't recognize this face. And I know every one of you. Isn't that strange?"
"That's because I'm not who you think I am," said Rick, adding flippantly, "or I'm the new guy. One or the other. "
Rick's voice was steady but he shook inside. There is a first time for everything, he assured himself, this was nothing worse than what had happened at one time or another to Michael, Casey, or Billy. Still he took a moment to pray he'd live long enough to grow out of the new guy title. Forcing his mind back to the task at hand, he concluded that the man's faint accent was definitely Germanic, and, taken together with what he already knew, that left only one card in his mind's rolodex. One card for a tall, slim, German man with impeccable English. He mentally scanned the index card, bringing every one of its meager number of details fresh into his mind.
"Well, Tho-mas, you must be the new guy and perhaps I should explain to you what is going to happen next."
"Sure," replied Rick, adopting a light breezy tone despite the fact he was sitting in his underwear, unarmed, his face flat on the desk and his hands spread out, with the loaded gun of a well-known freelance assassin pressed menacingly against the back of his head.
Forcing himself to breathe normally, Rick said distinctly, "What did you have in mind, Fritz?"
The goon guffawed loudly from surprise that Rick had identified his captor without even seeing him, and the sound of the laugh confirmed for Rick that he had gotten it right.
"Halten!" yelled Fritz, cursing the goon in fluent German. Then he said to Rick, "Bah, lucky guess."
Ha! Rick thought triumphantly, the man thought he'd just guessed the name Fritz because he was German, and, certainly, it was true that Fritz was a common German name, in fact so common that in some of its regions you could walk into a bar, yell out the name Fritz, and more than a third of the men would look up. But Rick knew exactly which Fritz was standing behind him. At the agency they called him Fritz the Rottweiler.
The thought of falling into Fritz's hands made cold drops of sweat prick into the back of his neck. Using a series of minute inconspicuous movements, Rick rubbed his fingertip onto his forehead to pick up some sweat, and traced the letters F and R onto the desk's polished wood top. Although the letters were invisible to the naked eye under ordinary light, the sweat marks under an ultraviolet light would stand out as plain as if he'd written them with black ink on white paper. All they had to do was to examine the desktop under ultraviolet light to see his message. And that was something his teammates would definitely do if they found him lying in this room with his head blown off.
"Well, Tho-mas, you're going to get dressed and we're going to go for a little car ride. Then you're going to have a little talk with my boss. He wants to ask you a few questions. You can stand up now. Slowly. Slowly."
The pressure of the gun was released. Rick's arms were tingling and aching and he rejoiced at the opportunity to escape from his cramped position. He felt enormous relief from having the gun withdrawn from his head. Slowly and carefully, he rose to a standing position, flexing his arms to stop them from shaking, and turned around.
"Aussteigen," snapped Fritz to his goon. He spoke rapid-fire German ordering him to get out because the room was too small for the three of them to stand in comfortably.
German wasn't one of Rick's best languages but he had a serviceable level of it. But despite fully comprehending the exchange, his face wore a bewildered look, so as to give the impression he did not understand German.
In the back of his mind, Rick wondered if he was taken away by Fritz how long it would take for Michael, Casey, and Billy to notice he was missing and to come and search the room. Once they knew that Fritz the Rottweiler was involved they would realize they were onto something big! At least his disordered luggage would tip them off that his departure was not due to him improvising, but instead meant that something was wrong.
"Get dressed," said Fritz, waving his gun towards the clothes on the bed. "And pack up."
"Time for a shower?" said Rick, smiling and rubbing his hand across his spiky black hair. There was still the window in the bathroom. "Don't want to meet your boss with bed head."
"No time," answered Fritz. "Hurry up."
Rick quickly pulled on trousers and a dress shirt thinking it'd be better to escape fully clothed anyway, and, once dressed, gestured a hand towards the bathroom, raising his eyebrows.
"No," repeated Fritz, in answer to his unspoken question.
"Come on, have a heart," said Rick. "Can't you see you're scaring the crap out of me?"
"Ha ha, funny guy," said Fritz humorlessly. "Pack up, we're taking everything with us."
Rick obediently tossed everything back into the suitcase, zipped it up, and carried it to the doorway. He glanced back longingly at the window and towards bathroom. He was in no hurry to open the door and come face to face with the goon again. He assessed his options. It would be one against one but there was another man only a door's width away, and his opponent had a gun, cocked, and pointed right at him. No, without the element of surprise it'd be suicide, he didn't stand a chance. He had to cooperate.
While Fritz yanked his arms behind his back, threading and fastening a cable tie tightly around his wrists, Rick glanced around the hotel room, examining it as a trained expert would, concerned that nothing besides his invisible letters remained to tell the others that he was in trouble and being forcibly taken away. How would they know? He knew they would stop at nothing to find him, they had demonstrated their loyalty and dedication before, but how would they know that he needed them? How would they know where to find him? How would they know to look for his message on the desk?
An unsettling thought crossed his mind. Maybe he was just one of the items of bait that Casey had planted around the city? Certainly Casey had been very careful, even frisking him before he left, to make sure his cover as Thomas the business man was perfect. Was this a part of some bigger plan they didn't tell him? Did they not trust him with the whole story? Did they not trust him to wait patiently for the snake to slink out of its hiding place, without tricking him into it? But if that was the case, did it mean that he himself was under surveillance now? No matter what, he was determined to live up to, no - more than that, he was determined to exceed, their expectations.
But - what were their expectations? Was he meant to escape, now that Fritz had shown himself, or was he meant to go to Fritz's boss, to find out who he was, to find out what he was up to, to lead them to him? The questions zipped in staccato bursts through his brain, distracting him like fireworks and explosions, as his gaze flitted around the room and he tried to puzzle out the best course of action.
"Walthur, kommen in," demanded Fritz and the goon opened the door. He grabbed the suitcase and hauled it through the doorway. Fritz flicked off the light and stepped behind Rick, crowding behind him, the doorknob clasped in his hand.
It was now or never, his last chance, thought Rick, and he twisted suddenly, shoving the man forward, banging his and Walthur's elbows painfully into the metal doorjamb. A sharp blow to an elbow can disable a man temporarily. And, as they fell writhing into the hallway, Rick kicked at Walthur, struggling to regain his footing, kicking and wriggling towards the fire exit, struggling to get himself upright. But before he could get free of the goon's iron grip Fritz brought the gun down on hard across Rick's face knocking him sprawling onto the hallway's filthy threadbare carpet. The goon quickly regained control, yanking Rick to his feet, and shoving him and his baggage, towards the back staircase.
No one heard the ruckus in the hallway, or, if they did, they didn't dare come out to interfere.
Rick trudged quietly ahead of them to the staircase, the muzzle of the gun jabbing painfully into the bruises forming on his back, watching the cherry red beads of blood grow on his scraped arm, satisfied that the injuries were a small price to pay for what he had just left for Michael, Billy, and Casey. Without his captors being aware of it, he'd placed an unmistakable message, a clear cry for help – in the form of his skin and blood on the hotel room doorjamb - and not only was some of his own DNA left behind, but some of Walthur's, to boot. Now began the nagging worry of whether the hotel's abysmal housecleaning might suddenly improve and erase his clues before his teammates had a chance to find them.
