by Rick Chesler
He gave a solemn nod. “From a guy or guys they killed.”
“Bingo. I wish they would have given us more info but they must have felt the fax wasn’t secure enough for any more than this.”
“If they were there to guard Jasmijn in the lab, then something must have went down there for them to have come into contact with tangos.”
Tanner nodded. “And in another town, too. The lab must have been compromised in some way.”
“They had university police and our guys, though.” Liam looked puzzled. “Must have been some heavy action to get through that.”
“Seeing as how they’ve already killed masses of people in two different public crowd settings, I’d say that heavy action is something they’re used to.”
* * *
About thirty minutes later Danielle returned to the conference room with a laptop. She set the computer down on the table across from Tanner and Liam and took a seat in front of it.
“Based on the two items contained in the facsimile, I picked up some intel on the Internet that I think may be worth looking into.”
Tanner urged her to continue.
“Using the name on the driver’s license — Berg Minten — I was able to trace some interesting Web activity that indicates Minten is — or was, as the case may be — a Hofstad operator.” She held up a finger to indicate more was forthcoming. “Not only that, but following his name I came across specific details of an operation Hofstad apparently refers to as The Poseidon Initiative.”
“As in the Greek God?” Liam wanted to know.
“God of the Sea, that’s correct,” Danielle returned.
“What’s the objective of this initiative?” Tanner studied the driver license photo again.
Danielle tapped a key on her laptop and focused on the screen for a second before responding. “To…and I quote…’harness the power of the sea’s unique biochemicals to exact vengeance on enemies of a pure State.’“She looked up at Tanner and Liam.
“This was posted publicly under the Hofstad name for all to see?” Liam looked incredulous.
Danielle shook her head. “News site message board postings under an alias I tied to Minten’s real name. Minten is Hofstad, though, for sure, so on the chance that he was mouthing off about Hofstad’s future plans thinking it was safe to do so as long as he didn’t specifically mention Hofstad and used a message board moniker, I searched other known Hofstad members for web activity related to Poseidon. ‘You can spell poison from the word Poseidon’, one of them noted on a known anarchist website forum.”
“An anagram,” Tanner clarified.
Liam gave him a stare. “What are you, an English major? You pack a poetry book in your go-bag?”
Tanner gave him a mock punch to the shoulder, which Liam deflected.
Danielle interjected. “I also found several references — all under assumed names tied to known Hofstad members — to ocean-related inquiries, including red tides and the micro-organisms that cause them.”
Tanner perked up, recalling one of his conversations with Jasmijn. “Anything about STX?”
Danielle raised an eyebrow. “Yes. Saxitoxin and its abbreviation, STX, were both mentioned in tactical and logistical discussions. Not actual Hofstad discussions, mind you, but informal strategizing or brainstorming online sessions with at least one Hofstad member participating anonymously.”
Tanner picked up the fax and dropped it back on the table again. “Okay. So this guy’s definitely in Hofstad and was researching something called the Poseidon Initiative, which sounds like it may be related to the STX terror attacks. We don’t yet know for certain. But what about the business card? Any leads on that?”
Danielle glanced briefly at the fax as she answered. “That yacht dealership — Royal Yachts, Ltd., is a well-established London business. So well-established, in fact, that I don’t think we need to worry about this company being a front for anything. It’s the real deal. But there is something that raised a flag.”
“What’s that?” Tanner eyed the simple business card.
“They sold President Carmichael his current yacht.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
OUTCAST Facility
“The Presidential yacht?” Tanner asked.
Danielle shook her head. “There is no official Presidential yacht right now, that is, a yacht paid for and maintained by the government for the exclusive use of the president. There hasn’t been since the USS Sequoia in the late 1970s.”
“So we’re talking about a private yacht, here?” Liam asked.
Danielle nodded. “That’s right, President Carmichael’s private yacht, which he named Lincoln, after his hero and distant predecessor in office.”
“Does he ever use his yacht, or does it just sit around like a lot of them, or get rented out?”
“Good point, Tanner,” Danielle said. “I was able to confirm that he does not rent it out — I’m sure Dante could tell us how the Secret Service would object strenuously to that. However, he does in fact use it from time to time. More importantly, he’ll be using it tomorrow, on a publicized vacation to Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The Lincoln will already be there with full crew when he arrives by Air Force One. A cocktail party for unspecified VIPs of the president’s choosing is also scheduled.”
“I’ve been to Boothbay,” Tanner said. “It’s a Summer hotspot, crowded with tourists. Beautiful place.”
“And it’s Labor Day Weekend,” Liam added. “End of Summer blowout.”
“So he’s going to be there tomorr—” Tanner cut himself off as he realized the implication of what he was about to say.
Liam perked up. “Tomorrow’s when Hofstad’s forty-eight hour deadline is up.”
Tanner rubbed his temples while he looked down at the tabletop in thought. Slowly, he raised his head and looked at Danielle. “Coincidence? This yacht dealership is a major business, known all over the world. Just because a Hofstad operative had one of their cards doesn’t necessarily mean they plan to attack the President on his boat tomorrow.”
Danielle frowned in his direction. “Unfortunately, it also doesn’t mean that they don’t. Combined with my other Internet data mining results, my modeling program puts the odds of a Hofstad attack on the president tomorrow at seventy-seven percent.”
Tanner quietly issued a curse under his breath. Danielle’s program-driven estimates were usually spot on.
“Hold on,” Liam interjected. “Tell me exactly how having the card of the dealership means that Hofstad intends to target the Lincoln tomorrow, the timing of it aside. It’s a big leap.”
Danielle’s fingers erupted in a flurry of activity across her laptop keyboard for a few seconds and then she turned to face the two men. “It goes back to the Poseidon theme. The ocean. To eliminate the POTUS on a yacht would represent the ultimate expression of Hofstad’s power via the sea. I’m picking up a steady stream of insurgent chatter that leads me to believe it’s something they’re considering.”
“Even without the president there,” Tanner said, “Boothbay Harbor will be full of waterfront tourists. They just hit a beach, so it’s not like they don’t see any value in the location alone. If they did strike Boothbay, it would be symbolic—we can strike your shores anywhere from Hawaii to the eastern seaboard.”
“The president is just the icing on the cake, is that it?” Liam asked.
Tanner replied at length, his expression thoughtful. “Anytime you go for a president, there are no guarantees of success. The odds are long, especially when it comes to the POTUS. Being on a boat may lower expectations of security, but even so, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a backup target should the POTUS hit prove too problematic.”
Liam nodded. And that backup target is the Boothbay waterfront?”
“I think so.” Tanner addressed Danielle. “Start gathering intel online for Boothbay. Maybe something will turn up.”
She nodded and left the room.
“Liam, you ever been there?”
&n
bsp; The former SEAL shook his head. “I do like cold water, though,” he said with a grin.
“Good. Let’s get packed. While the Netherlands team guards Jasmijn so she can hopefully develop that vaccine, you and I are taking a little vacation to Maine.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Den Hoorn, Netherlands
Naomi and Jasmijn walked side by side up to the lab door, Stephen and Dante trailing behind. The scientist carried the bag of sea anemones, the mesh dive bag now hidden within a an ordinary looking shopping bag. They saw no security presence. It seemed the bodies of the murdered security guards had not been discovered.
Thankfully, no surprises awaited them in the lab. It was as they left it. Even so, Stephen and Dante performed a crouching sweep of the space, making certain that no person or booby-trap lurked behind one of the lab benches.
“Clear.” Stephen stood from behind a counter by the back wall.
“Clear.” Dante popped his head up from another.
Jasmijn immediately set to work preparing the anemones. She ran tests on the water quality of one of the aquaria. Once the conditions were optimal, she carefully released the anemones into the tank, where they drifted down to the bottom. Then she moved to a rack of chemicals and began preparing a mixture.
While Jasmijn worked, the OUTCASTs circled the lab slowly like hyper-aware sharks sniffing out blood in the currents. They occasionally peered from a window, put an ear to the door, or monitored radio frequencies in their ear buds. While the male operators roved the lab, Naomi was planted beside Jasmijn at all times like a personal bodyguard, her pistol always drawn.
An hour went by, Jasmijn lost in her complex procedures, and then Stephen received a communication via his earbud from Danielle. She filled him in on the Poseidon Initiative intel, and how Tanner and Liam were en route to Maine. She cautioned them not to let their guard down in the Netherlands, since it was anyone’s guess what Hofstad was up to. They may even be planning to flex their budding international terror muscles by maintaining operations on two fronts. Stephen gave a brief sitrep on the lab and signed off.
The OUTCAST team kept a coffee pot brewing and passed the time by having one of them leave the lab for an external check every hour or so. They avoided exact, to-the-minute scheduled watches lest they create suspicion should the lab be under some type of surveillance. This type of VIP guard duty could be boring, but the specter of Hofstad’s looming deadline kept them on edge.
After a while Jasmijn moved from the chemistry equipment to a computer workstation. She placed a well slide into a machine connected to the PC and it began analyzing the compound in a program, displayed as a colorful graph on screen that meant nothing to the OUTCAST operators. Suddenly she thrust a fist in the air in a triumphant gesture.
“Yes!”
The outburst caused Dante to whirl around with his gun at the ready. He immediately lowered it with a roll of the eyes upon seeing Jasmijn staring at the computer monitor. She got up and bounced over to the anemone tank, clearly excited.
“Stage 1 is complete.” She grabbed a long-handled dip net. “I’m ready for the combinatorial phase.”
The three agents looked at one another and shrugged while she scooped two of the invertebrates from the aquarium, their tentacles waving as they were dragged up through the water. “First I need to extract the active compound from our friends here,” she said, talking to herself, or perhaps the sea anemones, as much as to her escorts, who understood none of the lab procedure and knew only that she needed to try to make an antidote to the STX in order to save lives should there be another attack.
Jasmijn took the anemones over to a wet station where she proceeded to snip tentacles from the creatures and place them in a beaker of the solution she’d prepared earlier and verified with the computer program.
“Hey, if you guys want a thrill while you wait, touch your tongue to one of these anemones,” Jasmijn said, smiling. “You know how if you touch your finger to one, they feel sticky? That’s the stinging cells — nematocysts — firing. They can’t really pierce the skin on your finger, though — it’s too thick. But on your tongue the epidermal layer is very thin. It’ll give you a nice shock, but isn’t really dangerous. If you need a wake-up shot…”
“Pass,” Stephen said without hesitation, glancing out one of the windows.
“Ditto,” Nay said, wrinkling her nose while looking at the anemones.
“I’ve licked some strange things before, but…maybe later.” Dante eyed the sliver of light underneath the lab door, then resumed his patrol.
“Suit yourself.” Jasmijn placed one of the isolated tentacles under a stereomicroscope and adjusted the device’s focus for a close look. “But you must agree. It’s amazing that this simple animal developed such a sophisticated chemical weapons system through evolution, isn’t it?”
Stephen nodded. Hopefully they’d be able to put it to use. He knew that as the hours wore on, they would find out one way or the other.
THIRTY-NINE
Boothbay Harbor, Maine
It was a town defined by seafood like no other — and shellfish in particular. Lobster, blue crabs, shrimp, clams, oysters, mussels, scallops… A thriving harbor fishery brought them to shore each day, and the social scene revolved around it. There were seafood restaurants galore and right now a huge summer seafood festival was in full swing at a grassy park. Tanner and Liam threaded their way among the open air booths that were crowded with long lines of tourists waiting to sample the offerings. Although the seafood looked delectable and smelled great, neither of them had the stomach to sample it, knowing that it was the ultimate source of such a deadly poison that might currently be the focus of Hofstad’s sinister initiative. They opted instead for hamburgers and corn on the cob.
The hair on Tanner’s neck raised when he saw a young boy start to throw up into a trash can. He and Liam rushed to his side, wondering how Jasmijn was progressing with the STX antidote back in the Netherlands, but after hearing the boy’s mother elicit from the child that he’d eaten three plates of lobster, they quietly walked away, leaving the mother to scold her child for overeating.
They wended their way through the park until they reached a fence on a bluff overlooking the town’s namesake harbor. There were several wooden piers with harbor tour boats, a multitude of moored fishing trawlers and shrimp boats, and numerous small pleasure craft flitting about the picturesque harbor. In the bay beyond, large sailboats plied the waters with several small islands in the background.
One boat in particular stood out — a yacht. Blue in color and easily one hundred feet long, the sailing vessel lie at anchor near the edge of the harbor, as if overlooking the entire town. Looking carefully, they could see the U.S. flag proudly displayed from one of the masts. A smaller tender vessel hung from a crane on the ship’s stern.
President Carmichael’s yacht, the Lincoln.
Tanner and Liam both knew that in addition to the Secret Service Agents on board the vessel, there would be others in some of the neighboring boats, attempting to blend in; they couldn’t tell which by looking. Liam produced a pair of binoculars and scanned the harbor, looking for suspicious vessels. He saw nothing to indicate anything out of the ordinary.
“Time to deadline?” he asked Tanner from behind the glasses.
Tanner glanced casually at his watch and replied, “Six hours.” That put the zero hour at 4:00 P.M., when the bay, harbor and town would be in full swing. The sound of gulls wheeling above mingled with the festival crowd as Tanner wondered how a scene like this could go bad. But he knew all too well that it could.
Presently his earpiece crackled with Danielle’s voice. “News update: major media outlets running a piece on The Hague embassy, how it’s still open for business. White House says it will remain open, over.”
“Copy that. It’s a beautiful day and we’re having fun. Out.”
Tanner frowned as he watched the sailboats take their tourists a
round the islands. Not that he expected the President to kowtow to the terrorists’ demands, but it would have been nice had the embassy shut down for any reason ahead of the deadline. If Hofstad had plans in place to do something about it, no doubt they would be putting them into effect now. His reply to Danielle had been simple coded language. “It’s a beautiful day” meant that they were on site, and “we’re having fun” signified that they were actively monitoring the situation but had encountered no action yet. The transmission itself was nearly as secure as possible, but you never knew who was listening physically, possibly even with long-range directional microphones.
Tanner searched the sky while Liam continued to scope out the water. Aircraft of all types were a serious threat, too. Small fixed wing planes, helicopters, drones…Hofstad had proven their versatility when it came to methods of attack. Of concern to Tanner right now were the numerous sky-ad planes that pulled banners over the bay, visible all across town. Presently, one reading LABOR DAY SEAFOOD FEST IN THE PARK was being towed through the air. In Hawaii, Hofstad had used a tourist helicopter to camouflage their assault. One of these banner planes could achieve the same purpose — it could be used to dump STX over the President’s yacht, the whole Seafood Fest, or both.
They could issue an alert to the White House, giving them the same intel that OUTCAST had. But would tipping their hand really achieve anything? Either the President would dismiss the information and decide not to act on it, or if he did, what could he do? Evacuate Boothbay Harbor and cause a panic? Hofstad would simply move the strike somewhere else. It would cause a delay, but wouldn’t solve the problem. They needed to catch Hofstad in the act and stop them.
And there was already a palpable defensive presence here, Tanner noted, switching his attention back to the water. It was not as if threats in general had been ignored. A sizable Coast Guard cutter was stationed about a quarter mile out from the president’s yacht, while Boothbay Harbor Police and Harbor Patrol boats crisscrossed the harbor at regular intervals. Should a suspicious aircraft be sighted, fighter jets could be called to the space within minutes. Up here in the park, police patrolled on foot as well as on horseback. Volunteer Community Ambassadors, wearing bright yellow shirts and carrying radios circulated throughout the event, assisting visitors, looking for anything out of the ordinary and notifying police when necessary.
