Chapter 76

  Ali sat in his favorite garden spot under a large Travelers Palm. If anyone happened to observe him, he appeared to be very calm and contented. But in reality, that was far from the case. Inwardly, he was fuming. He read the coded and encrypted e-mail for the third time, folded the paper, and placed it in his breast pocket. Ali had no idea how this could have happened again. The report stated that the operation in Phuket must have failed. There had been no word from Smith or any of his men and no police report of any disturbance at the Harris home. All of Smith’s men were instructed to place a coded message in an untraceable e-mail drop box if anything happened to Smith, but none was placed. Smith’s handler attempted to contact him on a clean, one-and-done cell phone. Smith didn’t pick up. It was inconceivable to Ali that one man could have wiped out all these highly trained killers by himself. Ali paused to think…unless? He waved at his personal assistant, and the young man approached him immediately. Within seconds, he was standing before the Sheik. He never made eye contact and bowed his head in his presence. Ali was unaware of a young man. His head was lowered in deep thought.

  He finally noticed the boy and said, “I would like some fruit.”

  The young man bowed his head lower and spoke softly in Arabic, “Yes, Your Excellency.”

  Could Harris have gotten help from the U.S.? Ali doubted it. All his sources in Washington had assured him otherwise. Then there was Bennett. His miraculous survival skills baffled him. Now, Harris seemed to have possessed the same abilities. His moles inside the CIA had heard nothing. More than likely, the help was acquired in Phuket somehow. Still, there was an outside chance. Yet another possibility accrued to him. Could Smith have switched sides? The more he thought about this, the more he doubted it. He was paying the man far too much for him to turn. Besides, he knew how much Smith loved things money could buy. He also knew the man had no ideological concerns about right and wrong. He was a hedonist who loved money regardless of where it came from. Now, as the young man returned with his stainless steel food and beverage cart, he wondered what his precious asset in the United States was thinking at that moment.

  *****

  Janet had done this hundreds of times, yet everyone was different. The trick was to filter out everything except the target text. Joseph Martinez’s confidence in her abilities was not unfounded. She had established himself as someone who could find a needle in a haystack. She possessed extremely high analytical skills and was never detoured by a complex task. In fact, she enjoyed the challenge. But what made Janet a bit nervous was the level of secrecy that Martinez had placed on the document. She was to work alone in her lab without any assistance. He made it completely clear that her findings were to be shared with no one but him and only on an encrypted and password-protected flash drive. No record of her finding was to be found anyplace else. In all the years that she had known him, he had never requested this before.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Janet looked at the yellowed page with all the random letters and numbers, placed it under a UV light, and quickly ruled out any hidden text written in security ink. Next, she used a highly sensitive laser scanner to search for any text or numbers that had been transferred from anything that had been written over it. The page was clean. She found no other writings. Janet set the page aside and concentrated on the envelope. Janet carefully cut the envelope at the seams into two separate pages. She started on the half that contained the closure flap, and using the same techniques she used on the yellowed page, she found no security ink. She did the same test with the other half of the envelope and got the same results.

  Then she scanned both halves for pressure imprints and wasn't surprised to find that both were covered in text and hundreds of surface scratch lines as shallow as a few microns that were completely invisible to the naked eye. The next step was to take the images and filter out everything but the written text. After that, she could separate them further into coherent lines of text, knowing that many different lines of text were possibly written on the travel envelope that had been used repeatedly. Janet found that at least eight different hands had written something on top of the two envelope pages. With the use of a filter program, which she helped develop, she quickly separated the different handwritten notes or text by pressure depth and point width. Martinez had given her no background information or indication as to the content of the encrypted document. Her only task was to unravel its meaning. When the computer finished its task and arranged the separated text documents in order of length, she read the once-invisible text one by one. It took her only a short time to assess the documents' time frame. Several notes were dated and addressed to high-ranking military and CIA officials. Some contained assessed VC and NVA troop movements and strengths in various South Vietnamese towns and cities. Janet finally came to the last and longest text document and immediately knew what she had. Above each word were very small numbers or letters that precisely matched the numbers and letters on the yellowed page inside the envelope. She leaned forward in her chair and read the document several times before leaning back and sighing. Janet had no idea who wrote the letter but felt pain and sorrow for whoever penned it.