Smith stared over his shoulder, breathing hard. “Fuck me,” he said, pointing. “Look at this!”
The article sported a small photograph of a group of agents at the graveside. And there, standing with his hands folded, was a tall, pale man in a black suit. While his face was blurry and indistinct, everything about the figure matched the man in the hold—the paleness, the blond hair, the pale eyes and lean physique.
The caption named him as Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast.
“Christ,” Filipov breathed out. “He’s a fed.”
There was a silence, broken only by the pattering of rain on the windows.
“Well, that’s it,” said Smith. “We throw the motherfucker overboard.”
“You really want to kill him?” asked Filipov.
“We’re not killing him. We’re just putting him back where we found him. Nature will do the rest. Who’s gonna know? He’ll wash up somewhere weeks from now and nothing will connect him to us. We sure as hell can’t keep a fed on board.”
Still Filipov said nothing. He was sorely tempted. The prick had really gotten under his skin. He opened a small cupboard below the chart table, removed a bottle of scotch, unscrewed the cap, and took a pull. He felt the liquid make its fiery way down his throat. It felt good. He took another.
“I say we go back offshore of Crow Island,” Smith went on. “Dump him there. Not far from where he must’ve disappeared. No one’ll connect us to him.” He paused, then grasped the scotch bottle. “Mind?”
“That’s pretty strong stuff for a Mormon,” said Filipov.
“Lapsed,” said Smith with a grin, sucking down a mouthful. “We put the watch back on him. And the ring. No evidence left behind.”
As the scotch set his belly afire, Filipov could feel a remarkable clarity taking hold in his mind. He waited for Smith to talk himself out.
“Fuck the watch,” Smith went on. “We can’t take the risk. With Arsenault maybe about to talk, we can’t take any risks at all.”
“Arsenault,” said Filipov.
“Yeah, Arsenault. I mean, if he talks, they’re gonna be after us hammer and tongs. And if they find a kidnapped fed on board, the drug charges will be the least of our worries—”
“Arsenault,” Filipov repeated.
Smith finally stopped talking. “What about him?”
“The feds have him.”
“What I’m saying.”
“So…we’ve got ourselves a fed.”
Silence.
Filipov turned his gaze full on Smith. “We offer a trade. This man Pendergast for Arsenault.”
“You fucking crazy? You want to pull that shit on the feds? We’ll be dead so fast, you won’t have time to finish pissing off the stern.”
“Not if we go to ground. And I know just the place. Listen. The feds have no idea where he is. There’s been nothing in the papers about it. They don’t know he’s on a boat, and besides, that would be the last place they’d look. As proof we have him, we’ll send them the ring and amulet.”
“This is crazy.”
“If Arsenault cracks, it’s over. We spend the rest of our lives in prison.”
“You really think he’s gonna crack?”
“I think it’s possible. They’ve had him now…what? Almost a month?”
“But to kidnap a fed for an exchange…” Smith lapsed into silence.
“The beauty of it is that it’s simple. The work is half-done: we already have him and nobody knows where we are. We’ll drop one of the crew on shore with the ring and amulet. He’ll mail it to the feds from, say, New York City. Our demand is simple: release Arsenault and give him a one-way ticket to Venezuela. When we hear from him, we set this Pendergast free. If not, Pendergast dies.”
“Set him free? He’s seen our faces.”
“Good point. So when Arsenault’s freed, then we put the fed back in the water. Where we found him.” This idea gave Filipov a sense of satisfaction.
“Son of a bitch.” Smith furrowed his brow. “I don’t know. We kill a fed, they’ll hunt us to the ends of the earth. This guy’s elite. He’s got friends.”
“But we’ve got money. And a boat. It’ll take awhile for them to piece it all together—and by the time they do, if they do, we’ll be long gone. If Arsenault talks, we’re going down anyway.” He delivered the clincher. “It’s a miracle this guy just fell into our laps. We’d be crazy not to take advantage of it.”
Smith shook his head. “It just might work.”
“It will work. Roust up the crew. I’m calling a meeting.”
19
FILIPOV STOOD ON the forward deck, breathing in the perfume that wafted from the great spruce boughs jutting from the trees growing out of the bluff just above and ahead of the boat. It was a calm, cold, sunny fall morning. All was going as planned.
The captain had discovered Bailey’s Hole when he was a teenager running pot from Canada into the United States in a sixteen-foot Boston Whaler. He’d never told anyone else about the hole—ever. Not even when he began running Charlie from Phinneys Cove, Nova Scotia, to Fairy Head, Maine, on a succession of lobster boats and draggers. It was a perfect hiding place, and Filipov had saved it for a time when he really needed it.
That time had come.
Bailey’s Hole lay on that wild stretch of coastline between Cutler and Lubec, not far from the Canadian border. It was a deep cut in the granite coastline, with sheer cliffs on three sides, overhung with giant spruce trees whose shaggy limbs provided cover from above. The northern side of the hole was actually undercut, the granite rock forming a sort of frozen wave of stone under which a boat could be hidden so completely as to be totally invisible. The few lobstermen who worked the area shunned the hole because of its wicked, fifteen-foot tides and jagged underwater terrain that ate their lobster traps and sliced their lines.
It had been no joke easing the Moneyball into Bailey’s Hole. Filipov did it at slack tide, at night, when the currents had ceased and the surface was calm. There was no way to drop anchor: the ground would eat an anchor just as readily as a lobster trap, and in any case there wasn’t enough swinging room to accommodate an anchored boat. Instead, Filipov had strung cables from both shores, wrapped around spruce trunks, leaving enough slack to allow the Moneyball to rise and fall with the tides.
It was a tricky operation that had taken half of the night. Filipov was happy with the result. They were well hidden along a wild shore, with the nearest town twelve miles away and the closest house at least eight. There were no roads and no trails anywhere nearby. The shore was part of a large piece of forestland owned by the Montrose Paper Mill, in Lubec. The only people who ever came out there were loggers…but there was no logging at this time of year.
On the way to Bailey’s Hole, they had dropped off one of the most reliable and resourceful members of his crew, Dalca, with the ring and amulet and a wad of money. His mission was to go to New York City and mail the two items and a photograph of Pendergast, along with their demands and instructions, to the New York Field Office. Dalca would then disappear into the city, lie low, and await the outcome.
After dropping off Dalca on a lonely stretch of coast, Filipov had taken the Moneyball north to Bailey’s Hole.
He had taken careful precautions. Long before reaching the hole, Filipov had ordered the boat’s GPS and all cell phones to be turned off, their batteries removed. Anything that could be used to track them was shut down.
He’d considered the problem of communicating with the FBI. There had to be a way to do it without betraying their position. Fortunately Smith, the first mate and computer guru, knew how to set up an untraceable, encrypted email system. Filipov himself understood a good deal about computers, and together he and Smith had worked it out. They used a program similar to Tor, but more advanced. Called BLUNT, it quadruple-encrypted all Internet communications using PGP and re-routed them through myriad computers around the globe, making it almost impossible to trace the signal back to its original IP
. Within BLUNT he and Smith had set up a temporary, disposable email service called Insurgent Mail on the dark net, which was—so they believed—impregnable even to the NSA.
There was only one small problem with this setup: Bailey’s Hole had no Internet connection.
Which meant that Smith had to get himself and his laptop computer to a place that did have an Internet connection in order to send and receive messages. That place, they had decided, would be the town of Cutler, a dozen miles down the coast. A motel in Cutler called Goderre’s Downeaster offered free Wi-Fi. This is where Smith would go.
The Moneyball carried a launch that doubled as a life raft. It was an almost new Zodiac inflatable, nine feet, six inches, with a 9.8 Tohatsu four-stroke. In a calm sea with one person, the boat could plane along at a good twenty knots. But the seas between Bailey’s Hole and Cutler were anything but calm, and twelve knots was about the max a man could make without being beaten to hell by the chop, and then only in good weather. In stormy weather—forget it.
They had to be careful. The coming and going of a small Zodiac in a harbor wouldn’t merit a second glance, but seeing one tooling along the coast in open water would be noted—especially by fishermen who would think it pure insanity to be driving a small boat in late fall, on a rugged coastline known for its epic storms, currents, and tides. If they saw him, they’d want to know who the hell the crazy bastard was. Fishermen, Filipov knew well, were infamous gossips.
For all these reasons, Smith would have to come and go from Cutler at night, greatly increasing the danger of an accident. But there was no other way.
Despite taking painstaking care to set up a secure email system, Filipov knew it was more than likely that cell phones would be needed, too. It was entirely possible, for example, that Smith might at some point need to speak with Dalca in New York. And he knew enough about feds to expect them to insist, sooner or later, on communication by voice.
He had this covered, as well. On board the Moneyball were a couple of dozen GSM cell phones, prepaid minutes included, purchased with cash from a variety of foreign countries—very useful for conducting his kind of business. Filipov gave two to Dalca and four to Smith, with explicit instructions for Smith in particular: when speaking to the FBI, use a different phone for each call and keep the conversation short: a phone’s cell ID could be triangulated in as little as thirty seconds. Smith, not the FBI, would be the one to initiate the calls. After completing a call, the battery would be taken out and the phone disabled so that it could not send “heartbeat” messages back to the cell network.
Filipov inhaled the pine-scented air again. Smith had left that night for Cutler, his laptop computer and burner phones securely wrapped in multiple layers of plastic against the salt spray of the ocean. Smith was not the mariner one might wish for a dangerous sea journey at night, and Filipov had briefed him carefully: he would hug the coast, keeping close to shore but well out of the surf zone. He would need a powerful spotlight, which he would turn off before entering the harbor.
Filipov had watched him go, heard the tinny engine as it faded into the darkness. It was a risk but, again, a necessary one. The plan had been put into action and there was no going back. They would hear nothing for three days, maybe four at most.
But it was a good plan. He had gone over it in his head a hundred times, and the crew had discussed it ad nauseam. Smith would check into Goderre’s under the pretext of being a Mormon missionary. He was just young looking enough to pull it off. Not only that, but he—and indeed all of them—had brought along conservative suits: a crisp, expensive suit was an invaluable accessory in certain drug smuggling situations. Best of all, Smith was a Mormon, or had been until a gigantic lapsus, and he had in fact put in his year of missionary work. He knew how to talk the lingo.
Three days of silence. While in Cutler, Smith could not, of course, communicate with them. But Filipov had given him precise instructions on how to respond to a large variety of possibilities in his negotiations with the FBI. He was to stick to a basic message: if Arsenault wasn’t in Venezuela in a week, the FBI agent would die. Simple.
In negotiations like this, Filipov knew, SOP was for the authorities to push for more time and ask for small things, gradually piling up requirements and requests, dragging things on and establishing dominance over the hostage takers. He wasn’t going to fall into that trap. One week. If they hadn’t heard from Arsenault via Skype, standing in front of the Simón Bolívar statue in Plaza Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela—a venue that could never be faked—then they would take this fed son of a bitch out to sea, dump him, and leave the country. Of course, if they did hear from Arsenault they’d dump him anyway.
Filipov knew that bluffing the FBI did not work. He had to make up his own mind: to be determined, up front, without question, to follow through and do what he said he would, no matter what. The FBI negotiators were experts and would see through a bluff. If he showed the slightest weakness, the tiniest hesitation, the slightest accommodation to one of their demands, it would all be over.
Again, Smith had been carefully briefed on all this. He had strict orders. Filipov had confidence in him. It was perhaps an advantage that Smith could not communicate with them while in touch with the FBI: he had no choice but to stick to his guns. Meanwhile, it was important to keep Pendergast alive and healthy for the next seven days, in case the FBI demanded proof of life before releasing Arsenault.
As Filipov stood there, in morning light, with the sound of the wind sighing through the spruce branches over the boat, mingling with the regular cadence of the sea brushing the rocks, he decided there was no reason to tell the man below anything about what they were doing, what was going on. He would be dead in a week either way.
Filipov had one final annoyance. Two of the crew, DeJesus and Miller, had a special hatred of the FBI due to bad history. Neither one had truly gotten with the program. In the meeting, both had argued for tossing the FBI agent into the sea right away. They had voted against the plan of exchange and had gone off angry. That night, Filipov had caught both of them down in the hold, shitfaced, pissing on Pendergast to much raucous laughter, after having roughed him up pretty bad. Filipov had been annoyed, but there wasn’t much he could do to punish them, beyond locking up the liquor. Fact was, he had to admit part of him was glad to see the arrogant bastard get taken down a notch. And quite a notch it was: they had left him unconscious. The captain needed to keep the peace, keep everyone together, for seven more days.
Filipov had been disturbed at the breakdown in discipline. But something else had troubled him even more: the look in the FBI agent’s eyes as those two drunken idiots, cursing and laughing, had been draining their hosepipes all over him, just before DeJesus clocked him with a mooring hook. What Filipov had seen in those eyes was damned frightening.
20
SPECIAL AGENT IN Charge Rudy Spann ran a hand through his whiffle cut and stared at the evidence bag on his desk, inside of which gleamed a worn gold ring and a bizarre, partly melted medallion, along with a letter and envelope. He had mixed feelings about this case that had suddenly, and with such big noise, arrived on the doorstep of the New York Field Office of the FBI. An agent had been kidnapped. It wasn’t just any agent, either, but A. X. L. Pendergast. Spann, who had only recently become SAC of the New York FO, did not know Pendergast well. But he had certainly heard the rumors. This Pendergast had a kind of special dispensation; he was a sort of agent-at-large, who picked and chose his own cases. Apparently he was enormously wealthy, accepting only a one-dollar annual stipend—a far cry from the salary normally earned by a GS-15, Step 10. Rumor had it that Pendergast was a maverick, even something of a rogue agent, who pushed the rules and was protected from above. Frankly, he was not well liked among the younger agents; they resented his freedom, his wealth, his elitist mannerisms. The old-timers in the office, on the other hand, held him in a kind of awe: a wary sort of respect. But nobody loved him; he was not a warm personality, he wasn’t the kind to g
o out after work for a beer or hang out at the shooting range on weekends. For those reasons Spann had little to do with him directly, beyond providing the basic support of the field office. The agent rarely showed up at Federal Plaza.
But he was a federal agent. And if there was one thing that was absolute in the FBI, it was the loyalty and camaraderie that bound them together. If an agent was killed or under threat, the Bureau would move heaven and earth to get the perps.
For this reason, the kidnapping of Pendergast had caused an immediate furor; and it was Spann’s case to win—or lose.
He glanced at his cell phone, lying on the table. The initial contact with the kidnappers would be in a few minutes, and he was determined to handle it with vigor. This was the kind of case that could make his career. Spann was apprehensive, but also stoked: he knew he was a damn good agent, he’d graduated at the top of his class at Quantico, and his career since had been stellar. At forty, he was one of the youngest SACs in the FBI, in the most important field office in the country. This was the sort of opportunity that came knocking only once. If he cleared this one—and he believed he could—the sky would be the limit.
Since the package had arrived that morning, he had exploded into action, dropping everything; he’d put together a small but powerful strike force, who would be arriving in minutes. He’d kept it small, elite, and nimble. An “agent down” was priority one. Whatever was needed—warrants, lab work, forensics, analysis, IT—would be done instantly, taking priority over every other case. He had already put out the word to all their labs, to ensure everyone was ready at a moment’s notice.
His secretary announced the arrival of the strike force. He rose and went into the outer office, carrying the evidence bag. They all appeared at once: three men and one woman, all top-class agents, filing in the door, silent, grim. They took their places in the small seating area. Spann nodded to everyone and signaled his secretary for coffee; he strode to the end of the room and placed the evidence bag on the display table, below a whiteboard.
The Obsidian Chamber Page 10
