The Wrong Man (Complete 3-Book International Thriller Box Set)

by Fritz Galt

  Had their system really worked?

  Terry Whitcomb came dashing down the stairs.

  Anthony stood and saluted. He pulled out his chair for his commanding officer to take and study the results.

  Whitcomb glanced at the watch list and rubbed his jaw. Then he pulled on the headset and replayed the transmission.

  Anthony couldn’t tell from his reaction whether he was stunned by their success or overcome with emotion.

  At last Terry spun around, confusion written across his face. “We’ve caught Cooper,” he said to the room at large.

  The cheers were muted.

  “I’ll have to tell the Pentagon.”

  All of a sudden the full import of the news hit Anthony. They were about to sink their own commander-in-chief. He felt a strong resistance rise up within him.

  “We can’t do that, sir. Maybe the voice print got into our database by accident.”

  “That’s right, sir,” another radioman piped up. “The Admiral will can us if we get this wrong.”

  Terry was still rubbing his long jaw.

  “I can’t avoid it,” he said, all emotion drained from his voice. He dragged himself out of Anthony’s chair and slowly climbed the stairs.

  The others stood and watched him go.

  Was he a traitor to turn in a traitor to the president? Or was he just a good soldier?

  Chapter 16

  Defense Secretary Kenneth Spaulding entered the Cabinet Room at the White House with a grave air.

  President Bernard White conducted business for a few minutes, reading off his major points from white index cards.

  The entire Cabinet listened dutifully, but their thoughts were elsewhere.

  With a divided House and Senate and a presidential election that year, not much was going to happen by way of legislation. Which meant that it was not a time for new ideas, initiatives or any sudden change of course. In fact, it was a time to consolidate their gains, package them to the public, and hope that the fickle voters would not vote them out of office.

  Then the president went around the room, polling his various secretaries for political advice. The Secretary of Energy thought it was time to enlist the Saudi’s support in holding down oil prices before energy became an election issue. The Director of Central Intelligence offered a bleak assessment of future troop casualties in the Persian Gulf. Attorney General Caleb Perkins seemed to have little to offer except to stay the course. The Secretary of Commerce suggested hopefully that the country could cast their military action in the Gulf states in the light of her pet project of opening up foreign markets.

  Then the president turned to Kenneth. “Why so serious today?”

  Kenneth had received some remarkable news while in his motorcade crossing the Potomac. But he had spent the entire meeting mulling over how to present it.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said, opting for the trite approach. In fact, by making the president choose between which news he wanted first, Kenneth was distancing himself from being the bearer of bad news.

  “I could use some good news,” Bernard said.

  “Okay, then. Thanks to the inspired work of your chief of staff and the Director of Counterterrorism, we’ve found ourselves a terrorist ship. An al-Qaeda-owned ship, in fact.”

  The room full of solemn business suits broke out in spontaneous pep rally-type applause. It was a rare moment for a Cabinet meeting.

  “We just received information about the vessel: its name, its country of registration and its whereabouts.”

  Attorney General Caleb Perkins swiveled toward him and blurted out, “Where is it?”

  Kenneth shot him a look. Why was Caleb chomping at the bit? This was no longer an FBI matter. The Navy had located the ship.

  Nevertheless, he read from the notes he had scribbled while riding in his official sedan. “It’s several hundred nautical miles east of the Philippines.”

  “In a shipping lane?”

  Boy, that Caleb was annoying. Kenneth shook his head. “We don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going. It’s in relatively uncharted waters where very little exists in the way of land.”

  Caleb was taking notes. “And its name and country of origin?”

  Once again Kenneth referred to his notes. “It’s called the Ariana and it’s sailing under the Panamanian flag.”

  The president had the most muted praise for the military of the group. “And now for the bad news…”

  Kenneth knit his eyebrows and swallowed hard. “It appears that the terrorists have Sean Cooper onboard the ship.”

  Dead silence reigned. Individually, the members of the Cabinet could shrug off the president’s Chinagate scandal. And they were sworn to fighting terrorism around the world. But mixing the two was playing with political dynamite.

  Bernard sat back in his seat, a look of resignation on his face. “I knew the time would come,” he said.

  A mild chorus of support rose up from the room. “You can’t quit now. This is just a speed bump. We’re one hundred percent behind you.”

  He waved them off, somewhat heartened by their encouragement, but dread still written all over his heavy features.

  Kenneth cleared his throat once more.

  “Ah, we do have one option, sir.”

  No response.

  He went on. “We could choose to ignore the ship.”

  The president looked troubled by the suggestion. “Are you trying to involve me in another scandal, this time letting terrorists off the hook?”

  “Not at all,” Kenneth said, finding his stride. “The mission of our armed services is a military one. We have no mandate to engage in civilian criminal investigations. Our job is not to hunt down common thieves. How Cooper showed up on that ship I’ll never know. But there is no law on the books that compels me to pursue him.”

  Bernard began nodding. “I think we can strike the last five or so minutes from the record, can’t we Jill?”

  He looked at the elderly stenographer, who began pounding away on the Backspace key of her laptop.

  The president stood, and the rest of the room rose with him. “That’ll be all for this morning’s business,” he said. “Have a good week.”

  The president brushed past Kenneth as he was gathering his papers. “Nuke the ship,” he whispered and left.

  Kenneth found himself standing in an empty room. Was the president serious?

  Her blonde hair pinned up elegantly for a romantic evening, Sandi DiMartino stood in the lobby of the Garden Restaurant at the Hainan Resort waiting for her dinner date to arrive.

  She hadn’t seen Merle Stevens around the hotel, pool or beach all day. What kind of work did a diplomat do at a tropical getaway anyway, and how could she get such a job?

  He arrived precisely on the hour. She liked a punctual man. Then her eyes fixed themselves on his dapper blue dinner jacket. He looked down at his attire. “I wore this to match your eyes,” he explained.

  “Oh,” she said, trying to recover from a feeling of being inadequately dressed in her casual, if not slinky, evening gown. “I was just wondering if I’m underdressed.”

  “Not at all. Less is more.”

  She didn’t mind a man with a subtle sense of humor, even if she was the target of his zingers. They moved as a couple into the restaurant and were shown to a corner table that overlooked the dark restaurant with its straight lines, paper room dividers, square dishes and elegant hanging light sculptures. Southeast Asian fusion, she concluded.

  A pale, gawky Chinese waitress served them ice water with lemon grass swaying among the ice cubes of their glasses.

  “May I order?” he asked. “Any preferences?”

  She shook her head.

  Within a minute, he and the waitress had worked out a suitable fare that would last them well into the evening.

  Meanwhile, Sandi watched a trio of Portuguese musicians serenading guests at another table. God, she hoped they wouldn’t try that on her. The stiffn
ess of a first date was pressure enough.

  Finally, they were alone, with only a dish of stiff, hot spring rolls and her overly exposed breasts between them.

  She wanted to ask him more about himself, but they had jumped into the relationship so quickly that it would seem like backtracking to cover such mundane details as his marital status. In truth, she regarded their intimacy as a personal accomplishment and she wouldn’t relinquish it by resorting to such mundane topics as their jobs, place of birth and so on. Although she only wanted to charge ahead, she knew that custom called for them to pass some time together before jumping into bed. She searched desperately for a topic of conversation. She needed to find some intellectual connection between them.

  “Tell me about Cooper,” she shot out.

  He looked at the bouquet on the table, then up at her. Cooper, she got it. The unspoken pun left them with a new intimacy, and left her dazzled by the breadth of his sense of humor, a range that reached from nuanced to sophomoric.

  Then he put on a more serious expression. “I knew Sean in Beijing last spring. His family was struck down by SARS.”

  He looked up to see if she was following him.

  “I wasn’t aware…” she said, suddenly moved. Nobody had told her that. Poor Sean had lost his family less than a year earlier. And what horrible deaths those must have been, struck down on the streets of China by a frightening epidemic!

  Apparently concerned by the emotional impact that the news had on her, he tried to venture back onto familiar terrain. “Actually, I have another secret to tell you.”

  Again the intimacy. She liked that, and needed it at the moment.

  “If you want to know the truth, that’s only a story. Don’t worry. His family is still alive.”

  That confused her. Either they were alive or they weren’t. Sean wouldn’t be just sitting around a resort picking up strange women if he still had a family. “Is he aware that they’re still alive?”

  Merle shook his head. “No.”

  “Why don’t you tell him, for God’s sake?”

  He raised a finger to his lips. “Shh.”

  What was this? A state secret? How could anybody let a fellow human being roam the earth thinking that his family was dead when he knew they weren’t? Was Merle actually some cruel kind of monster? “How do you know that they are still alive? Have you seen them?”

  “I have,” he replied cryptically.

  “Then are they still sick?” She tried to imagine an American family languishing in a Chinese ward for respiratory diseases.

  “No. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “But where are they now?” she persisted.

  “Still in China.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. And Sean isn’t aware that they’re still alive? He’s walking around in grief and loss, thinking their dead?”

  Merle shrugged his shoulders.

  “How could this be?” she breathed, suddenly aware that her breasts were heaving dangerously close to popping out.

  He reached across the table for her hand to calm her down.

  “I was hoping that you would be relieved to know that they are still alive,” he said. “Don’t worry about Sean Cooper.”

  What kind of a diplomat was he anyway? People didn’t withhold such information from fellow human beings, much less fellow countrymen! She closed her eyes and tried to let her vision of Sean’s family trapped somewhere in China pass from her mind. The horrifying thought that they were most likely being held against their will, and presumably unable to reach Sean or tell him of their fate, sickened her. Then she remembered how she had tried to seduce him, and he had resisted. What an admirable man! And how despicable Merle Stevens looked across the table.

  She would have to get word out to Sean that his family was alive. But she wouldn’t be able to get very far with this big oaf grinning at her all evening, or worse, not letting her go.

  “Don’t worry about him,” he repeated.

  She swept a hand across her face. “He’s gone from my mind,” she said with her best attempt at a bright smile.

  She reopened her eyes and the tall, dark stranger materialized before her with his irresistibly handsome smile. And she had been all set to take him to bed by the end of an evening of intimate talk with great eye contact and strong undercurrents of passion!

  Then her cell phone rang.

  Attorney General Caleb Perkins couldn’t wait until he got back to his fifth-floor suite at the Justice Department. He looked around to make sure that his receptionist and staff weren’t listening, then closed the door and took his seat.

  He pulled his notes from the Cabinet meeting out of his briefcase and studied them one more time. He had a ship and her fairly specific location. It was his chance to nab Cooper, turn him over to the special prosecutor and knock the president clean out of the ring and off to Leavenworth.

  He snatched his phone, consulted his Rolodex for a card that Stanley Polk had sent him, and dialed the listed cell phone number.

  An annoyed female voice answered.

  “Sandi?”

  “Yes? Who’s calling at this hour?”

  “This is Caleb Perkins. I have some information that might be of interest to you.”

  “I’m always ready to hear you out,” she said brusquely.

  He heard a clatter of dishes and a pen clicking at the other end of the line.

  When she was ready, he announced, “It seems that we have located your key witness.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Cooper. The one and only.” Caleb read off the ship’s name and location in the eastern waters off the Philippines.

  When Sandi stopped scribbling, he heard her set her pen down. “To what can I attribute this highly unusual gesture of goodwill between your department and my office?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Let’s put our gloves down just for one moment,” he said. “I’ve told you where Cooper is, but you have to do the rest.”

  “Can’t you deliver him to me?” she asked.

  “That would be nearly impossible. My hands are tied.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ve got the means and I’ve got my methods.”

  “Well, bon appetit. Good luck to you and your investigation.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be eating tonight.”

  Just before he set his phone down, he heard a young man’s perplexed and incensed voice shout at Sandi, “Hey! Where are you going?”

  “I don’t have time for sex—” he heard her respond before she clicked off.

  He set down his phone, the tenderness in his own voice still reverberating in his head. Was he coming on to Stanley Polk’s head of investigations?

  If he were going to pursue his romantic inclinations, he’d have to date within his own political party, and well within secure channels.

  Sandi didn’t have time to change out of her evening dress, more suited for a samba than a series of puddle jumps across Asia.

  She caught an eight pm flight to Hong Kong. There, a quick check at the ticket counter revealed a flight to Manila leaving within minutes. Hustling down the long people movers to the far end of the new airport, she flew into the loading ramp just as the doors were sliding closed.

  Whew.

  She joined a plane half full of bleary-eyed businessmen and lively Filipina ayis eager to get home. She felt somewhere in-between. On the one hand Sean was pure business, deadly dull in many respects. On the other hand, her body had been primed for a night of action, and she was determined to get it, one way or another.

  She arrived in Manila just past midnight, fully expecting to find yet another city that was fast asleep.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong. The taxi ride downtown from the airport proved to be one of the liveliest experiences of her life.

  The skies were dark, but nobody seemed to notice. Along both sides of the slow-moving Roxas Boulevard, neon lit up entire buildings: nightclubs, discos and restaurants.

  Jeepne
ys, silver-sided remnants from the war in the Pacific were decorated to the hilt with political signs and swirling colors. Riders hopped on and off at will.

  Men sported flowery shirts and embroidered sheer barongs that hung over their belts and women, squeezed into tight dresses, clunked around the crowded streets in platform shoes. The crowd was a laughing, smiling, lipstick smeared, highly coiffed, dancing, flirting mixture of men on the make and women out making themselves seen.

  The thought of joining the fray exhausted her.

  She tried to remember the date. It wasn’t a major holiday that she knew of. Could every night be like that?

  The sultry air hardly moved, and only a gush of air conditioning from the old taxi’s air vents kept her from completely melting away.

  Once past the showy clubs, the city relaxed behind walled compounds of single-story bungalows, or slinked down alleyways to compounds of two-story family homes. Trees spread overhead and vegetation pushed against the restraining fingers of myriad gardeners. At last, embedded amidst convenience stores, indoor malls and potholed streets, several tall hotels sprung up, their rooms glittering like stars against the otherwise dark night sky.

  Yet, she didn’t intend to sleep long. She had a ship to find.

  Chapter 17

  The rusty freighter was steaming briskly across the sunny Pacific into the early morning sun when Sean climbed up to the bridge.

  He knocked, and the skipper unlocked the door. He was reviewing nautical charts spread out on a table.

  “So, where are we going today?” Sean asked brightly.

  The skipper looked at him without expression.

  Once again, Sean had been rebuffed trying to obtain information on their destination. And the skipper no longer found it funny.

  “So I guess we’ll just float around out here forever.”

  He took a moment to study the skipper as he labored over the map. The man was impressive. An Oxford graduate and a revolutionary, how did the guy know so much about ships? A frightening thought entered his mind. The skipper had the kind of raw intelligence, connections and know-how his oil company craved when hiring employees. How many of these revolutionaries were already embedded in the ranks of international corporations?