B003IKHEWG EBOK

by Mack Maloney

  He dropped to the deck, dead before he hit the floor.

  THE CRUISE SHIP returned to Kronos two nights later.

  The guests were ushered off, each picked up by a limo or armored SUV. Once again, the Greek police were nearby, but did their best to ignore what was going on at the berth.

  Up on the top deck, Bebe and Nolan sat at the bar again, a bottle of vodka and two glasses in front of them. Nolan was finally drinking, finally feeling relaxed. The team had done their job well here—and it was good to know they could again save a ship without destroying it.

  Bebe was in the best mood Nolan had seen him. From the Russian’s point of view, the trip couldn’t have gone better. The guests were safe, and there were no more incidents after the first night. Those who knew about the grisly episode in the kitchen had nothing but admiration for Bebe’s skills.

  As for the worker who had poisoned the caviar—well, he was now sleeping with the fishes along with his busboy accomplice.

  “You men are good,” Bebe said to Nolan. He passed him a briefcase. Nolan opened it—it was full of U.S. greenbacks.

  “What’s this? You already paid us.”

  “Is your tip—your bonus,” Bebe boomed.

  Nolan scanned the money. He was getting good at estimating just how much money a briefcase could hold. This one looked to contain $50,000.

  “This is too generous,” Nolan heard himself saying.

  “Stop with the shit of a bull,” Bebe said. “Just count it!”

  Nolan downed his shot of vodka. “I’m not going to count it,” he said. “I trust you.”

  “Count!” Bebe insisted. “If you guys want to make it in this business you must learn this: Never to trust anybody. Never to trust especially those peoples who owe you money.”

  Nolan counted the money. He was right: It was an extra $50,000.

  “Put money down on new copter,” Bebe said. “You ride around in dinky car that barely flies. You need SUV with rotor blades.”

  “I’ll look into that,” Nolan told him.

  “You can go far in this business,” Bebe said again. “But secret is, be careful who you do business with. Some criminals more trustworthy than others. Never trust Syrians. Never trust Iranians. Never trust French. And never, ever trust Chinese. No good to even be considering business with them, because they will stab you in back when you’re not looking and then sell someone the knife. Everyone else, though, just count money. Always count money.”

  They did another shot.

  “Thanks for the advice,” Nolan told him. “I—we appreciate it.”

  Nolan hesitated a moment, then said: “I must ask you something. And please don’t take it as a sign of disrespect.”

  Bebe laughed. “Be careful, Cyclops,” he said, patting his wool suitcoat. “I still have gun.”

  Nolan went on. “I looked in on you and your friends during your first business meeting, when you were making your deals. I thought I would see gold, or jewels, or raw diamonds. But all I saw was rocks.”

  Bebe roared bearishly. “You peeked?” he said. “You are good spy, because peeking gets you shot and you did not get shot.”

  He poured out two more vodkas.

  “You see us not with rocks,” he said. “You see us with this.”

  He reached into his pocket and produced a plastic bag containing . . . a rock.

  “Is rock, true,” Bebe told him. “But not rock from here.”

  He pointed up at the stars. “Is rock from up there.”

  Nolan had to think a moment before this made sense. Then it came to him. “Meteorites?” he asked.

  “Is meteorites, yes,” Bebe said. “Per pound, most valuable commodity in world these days. More precious than gold. Jewels. Plutonium. Anything. We steal them. We deal them. We trade them. Is why six professors were here, to verify what we have is real. Do you understand, my friend? Our big new business is selling chastitsa zvyozd. ‘ Pieces of the stars.’ ”

  Another two shots of vodka. “Never stop looking for something more valuable than what you already have,” Bebe told him. “That’s the secret. And here’s a few more . . .”

  Over the next thirty minutes, Bebe imparted a boatload of knowledge and intelligence to Nolan. He told him about the various people he’d dealt with over the years. A surprising number of his contacts were intelligence operatives from European countries, and not just those of the former Soviet bloc. Weapons always were at the center of these dealings. Weapons for cash. Weapons for gold. Weapons for pieces of the stars.

  “Many guns out there,” Bebe said. “Problem is, many people don’t know how to use. They just feel bigger and better if they have them. Countries or criminals. Having weapons makes dicks grow longer. It’s very dangerous situation.”

  Nolan just shrugged. “We are not naïve enough to take sides,” he told Bebe. “We know what this world is like. We are just trying to make as much money as quickly as possible and then give it all up before someone who doesn’t like us locks us up.”

  Bebe laughed and took a huge gulp of vodka. “Is story of my life,” he said. “But if it is just money—quick money that you want—you should always be looking for the ship, Dutch Cloud. But you must know this already.”

  But Nolan shook his head no. He’d never heard of the Dutch Cloud.

  “Is container ship that goes missing right after 9/11,” Bebe told him. “Top secret. Big secret around the world. Is ghost ship. People see it, then they don’t. What is in its containers? No one knows. Lots of guesses, rumors, speculation. But of this is sure: big bounty on that ship. Find it and you get fifty million, cash.”

  Nolan was fairly drunk by now. Still, he was fascinated by the story—and the prospect of making fifty million.

  “Fifty million?” he asked Bebe. “To be paid by who?”

  The mobster laughed again.

  “By your own CIA,” he said. “Who else?”

  At that moment, their attention was diverted by something in the sky. They both looked up as a shooting star passed over their heads.

  Bebe laughed out loud again.

  He shook Nolan’s hand vigorously, then said: “Is God telling me—I must get back to work.”

  • PART SIX •

  South to Zanzibar

  18

  Port of Aden

  Yemen

  MARK CONLEY UNLOCKED his office door and stumbled inside.

  It was midnight. He was hot, sweaty and exhausted. He snapped on the air conditioner and collapsed onto the couch. He’d left here a week ago, but it seemed more like a year. He’d spent a piece of that time on the DUS-7, helping Team Whiskey get what they needed to recapture the Vidynut. Then he went on to Mumbai to await the outcome and, at the end, finally collect the team’s fee. He’d met them on Mauritius, paid them and left them on the beach with the topless waitresses.

  He hadn’t talked to them since, which was fine with him. They needed a rest and he needed a break. The onetime gig to kill Zeek and stop him from being a problem to Kilos Shipping had, with the Vidynut incident, unexpectedly turned into something much larger and much more visible. Despite asking the Indian military for confidentiality in the matter, Conley had been dodging calls about Team Whiskey since leaving Mumbai—inquiries from rival shipping companies that needed the team’s brand of security were pouring in. Conley was familiar with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, texting and plain old e-mail. But never did he think that word about Nolan and company would make the rounds so quickly.

  But now that he was back at his home base, he hoped it was over, that the wave had crested. Though he’d turned into something akin to Team Whiskey’s booking agent, it was also important that he get back to doing his real job, running security for Kilos’s Middle Eastern operations.

  No such luck. A glance at his blinking answering machine revealed fifty-four waiting messages, three times the normal after a week away.

  Maybe I should get voice mail, he thought.

  He wearily hit the play button and l
istened to each one. Many were from the same people he’d avoided earlier, representatives from rival shipping companies looking to hire Team Whiskey.

  Of the fifty-four messages, one stood out. It was from a friend of a friend, a British doctor who lived on the Channel Island of Jersey, off the west coast of France. As his was the only call that didn’t involve maritime security, Conley called him back.

  Dr. Stevenson lived in a small village on the western edge of the island and frequented a pub that sat on a cliff looking out on the Atlantic. The pub also served as a boardinghouse, one of whose recent guests had prompted Stevenson’s call. The middle-aged man had shown up at the small hotel about a month before. He didn’t have much money and, when he was sober, which wasn’t very often, was wary of the other guests. He especially feared anyone connected with the sea—shipping, pleasure boating, the Royal Navy—and in his more inebriated moments, expressed particular concern about a man with one leg. Oddly, the guest was a naval officer himself of some sort, or at least he signed in with the unusual name of Lt. Commander Q. Zee.

  The strange man spent his days on the cliff near the pub, looking out to sea in good weather and bad, trying to separate the container ships from the yachts, waiting for something he seemed to hope would never come.

  At night, after partaking of a few drinks and other intoxicants, he would hold court in the pub’s bar, telling horrible stories of murder and mayhem on the high seas. He would also hint that he held a secret of immense proportions, something that would wreak havoc on the entire planet if the wrong men learned of it. All this he would tell the pub patrons and the tourists, as they bought him anisette until he passed out and the pub owner’s son carried him to his room.

  Though at first the owner feared the man’s presence would eventually drive business away, this was not the case. The tourists loved him, and even the locals liked to listen to him. He was that much of an oddity.

  One night, the man collapsed and died. Dr. Stevenson performed the postmortem and attributed the death to alcohol poisoning and an overdose of cocaine. The stranger’s body was laid out in the village’s small clinic. His few possessions, including a change of clothes and a BlackBerry, were stored in the pub’s attic.

  The following night, people came looking for the dead man—but they weren’t interested in claiming his body. Wearing dark clothes and ski masks, five men invaded the pub just before closing time, terrifying the owner, his wife and a handful of drunken patrons. They were looking for the man’s possessions, tossing his room with the precision of people who’d done this sort of thing before. But on finding nothing, and fearing the police would soon be on their way, the raiders departed, leaving in a helicopter that had landed on the far side of the cliff.

  The pub owner’s son had stolen the man’s BlackBerry just minutes before the invaders arrived, justifying it as payment for back rent the stranger owed when he died. Confessing the theft to his father, the young man gave the BlackBerry to Dr. Stevenson, who at one time had served as a medical officer with the British SAS. After examining the device, the doctor began to believe the stranger’s claims that he knew a dangerous secret that had worldwide implications. His clue? The seemingly ordinary BlackBerry turned out to be a sophisticated communications and data storage device of the sort used by intelligence services.

  On the device, the doctor discovered entries that indicated something extremely valuable was buried on a pinprick of land off eastern Africa, close to the island of Zanzibar. The device contained information on this small island—a place that showed up on very few maps—and directions on how to get there. It also held personal data on the dead man—much of it encrypted—that further indicated he was not some kook.

  Judging by some of the security codes he found, Stevenson determined that the dead man had been a highly trusted courier for some country’s intelligence service.

  Possibly Great Britain’s MI-6.

  Or even the CIA.

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND why this character buried this thing in the first place,” Crash said, draining his glass of Egyptian beer. “If it was so freaking valuable, why is it hidden on an island no one has ever heard about?”

  Conley had anticipated the question. The team was sitting in a dockside bar near the Kilos building in the Port of Aden.

  The team had just returned from their side-job with Bebe and the mobsters, picking up the DUS-7 in Mauritius and finally making the twice-delayed sail back to Yemen. Conley was astonished to hear the story about their gig on the cruise liner, shocked that the team had worked for the Russian Mob.

  “Dangerous people who do dangerous things,” Conley told them. “I don’t know many people crazy enough to get in bed with the Krasnaya mafiy. No Americans, anyway.”

  At this, Nolan told him point-blank. “We’re not Americans. Not anymore.”

  They’d retired to the bar on the water and ate and drank, and Conley told them about his conversation with Dr. Stevenson and the saga of the mysterious courier.

  “The doctor was able to break into the guy’s personal information on the fake BlackBerry even though it was encrypted up the wazoo,” Conley said. “Whoever this guy was, he was an expert in handling extremely sensitive items, many of them stolen. Intelligence documents, industrial espionage, weapons designs, things like that. He’d been doing it for years, always worked alone, and he wrote everything down. He’d been using this little-known island to bury the especially hot items until things cooled off. Because this place doesn’t even show up on a lot of maps, he thought it was better hiding valuable stuff there than using safes or security boxes. He would hire seaplanes or private boats to drop him off, telling them he was doing scuba diving or survival training or some such bullshit. He would bury the item and then come back for it the same way.

  “This last time, though, the plane he’d hired to go pick up the item crashed on the island. He was the only survivor and now he was stranded. He eventually ran into some drug-dealing pirate types who were also using the place to hide their stash. He paid them to take him off the island, but he didn’t want to carry the item with him while he was traveling with them. So it stayed behind, still buried.

  “When he got back to civilization, he came to believe that certain people were chasing him, thinking he had the treasure with him. Instead of going back for it, he went into hiding. This drove him a little nuts, I guess, because he also developed a powerful drug habit and a drinking problem, which added to his paranoia. By the time he made it to that boardinghouse on Jersey, he was a mess. The thing was, he was right—people were after him. And if he had waited just one more day to die, those people would have gotten the most important thing Dr. Stevenson now has in his possession.”

  “And what is that exactly?” Nolan asked.

  “A treasure map,” Conley said with a straight face.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Batman said.

  Conley shook his head. “It was hidden on the faux BlackBerry along with all the other secret stuff. It’s a map of that island, and it shows where he buried this ultravaluable something-or-other.”

  “And what does this have to do with us?” Nolan asked him.

  “Well, how else will you know where to dig when you get there?” Conley replied.

  The team members laughed, even Twitch.

  “Why are you so convinced we’d want to do that?” Batman asked him.

  Conley refilled his beer mug. “One reason is, Stevenson says he thinks he knows what the treasure is, and that he can get it back into the hands of the right people.”

  “So?” Nolan asked.

  Conley smiled. “So, in addition to giving me a finder’s fee, he’s agreed to pay you five million to get him there and back safely.”

  The team was stunned.

  “Five million?” Crash said. “The doctor knew how to save his pennies.”

  “Ever meet one who didn’t?” Conley asked.

  “Plus, there must be something in it for him at the end of the road,
too,” Batman said. “Something gy-normous.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Conley replied. “But in this case, you guys are little more than taxi drivers. Get him there, help him dig for the buried treasure, and get him back. Maybe a week’s work—and you got another five million to lug around with you.”

  The team was almost overwhelmed; it seemed like the big money just kept rolling in.

  “But why us?” Gunner asked this time.

  Conley shrugged. “The island is located in pirate-infested waters off Africa,” he said. “Stevenson needs someone he can trust, and he wants to do it quickly and quietly. You might have to work on that quiet part, but as far as getting him there and back, I think it’s doable.”

  Conley replenished his beer once again.

  “Besides,” he said, “what else you guys got to do?”

  DR. STEVENSON FLEW in the next morning.

  He looked the part of a man of intelligence and leisure; middle-age, in good shape, with a shock of graying hair. He was dressed plainly, thank God. The team had fretted he might show up wearing a safari suit, a pith helmet, jodhpurs or worse.

  They met him at the dockside bar. He was accompanied by a younger man named Squire who appeared to be hired security. His tattoos ID’d him as ex-SAS, as in Special Air Service, the elite British special ops group. A good guy to have along.

  Stevenson had the map, taken from the encrypted fake BlackBerry. But he had some unsettling news for Team Whiskey.

  “Once I was able to fully decrypt this, I discovered I wasn’t the first one to get into its pants,” he told them.

  “Translation, please?” Crash asked.

  “Someone else logged onto the device shortly before I got ahold of it,” Stevenson said. “Possibly right before the owner moved into the boardinghouse on Jersey. They might not have gotten in as deep as I did, but they were able to extract some information.”