by Tom Clancy
“Tracking their activities being a fringe benefit,” Eckers said.
The woman nodded.
“Our partners understandably do object to having some of their programs, or specific program files, interface with our central database . . . There are degrees of overlap in the merchandise and services they provide, and that creates occasional competition between them,” she said. “An example of what they like to keep private might be their accounting and inventory figures. Scheduling information is another very pertinent example, as I’m about to show you. The business owners are often insistent about maintaining the confidentiality of this data, which is why we slip trojans into their computers over the intranet. They’re self-updating and undetectable to any firewall or spyware-detection program compatible with our system infrastructure. And we have built-in alarms should they try to install any other such programs.” Chandra placed a hand over her computer mouse. “To get back to my global search, it gave us several immediate hits. But the tracking data we needed would usually take from several hours to a day before being transferred between their computer subsets and our host by the trojans.”
“Why’s that?” Eckers asked.
“Too routine to red flag other than for a special action,” she said. “Then it suddenly becomes important. But an unregulated flow of traffic would overtax the system’s capacity, so we use automatically staggered cycles.”
“Like timed stoplights on a busy intersection.”
“Yes . . . unless circumstances dictate that we go into the computers, override the predetermined cycle, and extract the information packets as I did from here,” Chandra said, and then moved and clicked the mouse.
Eckers watched closely as she highlighted one of the orbital subnet circles on the galaxy view and then zoomed in on a specific point along its circumference. It grew large on the screen, a numerical internet protocol address appearing above it.
Beauchart saw the American’s eyes narrow with curiosity. Again, he had to stamp down on his distaste.
“The computer we’ve identified belongs to one of the resort’s licensed agents . . . a water sports shop that also schedules a range of excursions,” he said. “The Nimecs are booked for an outing this afternoon. One that I believe will present the singular opportunity you desire.”
Eckers caught his quick, meaningful glance.
“The shop’s name?” he said.
Chandra clicked her mouse and it appeared over the IP address.
Eckers read it off the screen, grunted as his interest was further stirred.
“Okay,” he said. “Give me a look at the details of what they’ve got scheduled.”
Chandra gave them to him.
They were, as Beauchart had predicted, good enough.
BONASSE, TRINIDAD
Jean Luc winced when his blackline cell phone rang on its docking station first thing in the morning—the caller ID display told him it might only complicate what was set to be a busy day. At the top of his schedule was a ten o’clock meeting in Port of Spain to settle down the apprehensive gentlemen at the Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries. Then it would be across Independence Square to the Finance Building, where he’d no doubt have to apply more verbal palliatives. And then an international call to Reed Baxter, during which he’d be obliged to pass on a filtered and edited version of the gaining worries in the Capitol and tolerate Reed’s whining on about his own. So much nervous energy generated on both sides, and he the transoceanic conductor that made it flow smoothly back and forth rather than build to some dysfunctional system overload. Jean Luc hated to think what might happen if he decided to let it go. The whole shebang, everything. And sometimes he felt he could, even would, inherited alliances and duties aside. He had an ample bequest and many interests. He could travel the globe for the rest of his life and never grow tired of its sights and cultures. The past bore on him only to the degree that he allowed it, and by no means would Jean Luc continue shouldering its burdens if he grew convinced they’d add up to his personal ruin.
Now he entered his study in a robe and slippers, thumbing the cellular’s talk button and shooting a glance at the antique Boullé clock on his mantel.
“Toll, it’s barely eight,” he said. “I’ve got my fingers crossed you’re calling with good news.”
“I wish I was, sir,” Eckers said. “There’s been a development that’s going to need our attention.”
“Involving our elusive islander?”
“Elusive if alive,” Eckers qualified. “The perimeter watch has been maintained around the village, but Team Graywolf gave me nothing to indicate a substantive change in that situation when they last reported in. They’re convinced he wouldn’t have made it out of the southern preserve, and are combing it day and night.”
“Then what’s this about?”
“The visitor from San Jose,” Eckers said, and then paused. “I think this has to be considered highly time-sensitive, sir.”
Jean Luc closed his eyes and released a breath.
“Let me hear it,” he said.
Eckers did, his summary delivered cool-headedly enough—he was a man whose calm outward demeanor rarely if ever gave a read of his true level of concern. Jean Luc appreciated that, considering what little it took to induce fits of panic in too many of his business and political associates. But Eckers’s haste to contact him was itself a measure of the seriousness of what the cameras had apparently picked up at the harbor last night.
“You don’t suppose he could’ve missed the transfer, do you?” Jean Luc said. He was reaching, of course, and could tell from the momentary silence in his earpiece that Eckers knew it.
“We’d have to rule that out,” Eckers said. “Our surveillance video’s close-up, and digital quality. And I reviewed it in various enhanced modes to eliminate any guesswork.” He paused again. “He observed the whole thing, sir. Those were high-magnification surveillance NVG’s he was using . . . advanced military grade optics. The ships would have been well within their range at the point of rendezvous, and he was looking directly out at them.”
“And I don’t suppose we can gain any comfort by telling ourselves he probably doesn’t know what he saw.”
“He’ll know he saw something,” Eckers said. “If he didn’t realize what it was, he’s going to want to find out.”
Jean Luc sat behind his desk and stared at the glass-door bookcase against the wall to his right. On its upper shelf were four thick, leather-bound volumes that comprised the family record, notably minus the diary pages of Ysobel Morpaign, wife of Lord Claude, which had remained locked away in a vault for over a hundred years after her suicide. The Morpaigns had always revealed more truths about themselves between the lines than in them, but on occasion Jean Luc would read through their handwritten memoirs and try to decipher the reality of who his ancestors had been compared to how they’d wished to show their faces to the world—in some indescribable way, it helped put his responsibilities in their rightful place. He was the family scion. The keeper of its legacy, obliged to oversee its commercial holdings and carry through its immediate and far-reaching goals. A now kind of person, as he’d put it to Eckers. But that was his own outward face. Privately, he dwelled on the past more than he would have cared to acknowledge, and time and again found himself wondering about old Lord Claude, plantation owner, bootlegger, and forerunner of an oil dynasty in Trinidad. Claude, whom Ysobel’s sad, secret writings claimed would have ordered his only son thrown into the pitch lake as a newborn infant, his body left to sink down into the tar with the bones of nature’s failures and discards, had not letting him live been a wiser expedient. Childless in his marriage, Lord Claude had desperately wanted a male heir. That it had been conceived out of his lust for a black slave woman was something he could abide, just so long as the light-skinned son could pass as his legitimate issue, and its birth mother could be made to disappear forever. And so long as fragile, vulnerable Ysobel, who had assumed her husband’s disgrace as her own by b
laming it on her infertility, could be manipulated into spending the nine months of a supposed pregnancy in her Spanish homeland to enable the lie.
It was, Jean Luc knew, all dust and cobwebs. Ancient history that shouldn’t matter to him, let alone be a kind of closet obsession. And what did his preoccupation with it signify if not a shameful lack of pride in who he was, a hunger for acceptance from elitists and polite society bigots about whom he shouldn’t give a good God’s damn?
“The visitor,” he said now, turning from the bookcase. “He’s supposed to be staying at Los Rayos a few more days, that right?”
“It’s my understanding, yes.”
“Which means he can be expected to do more poking around.”
“I’m convinced he will.”
“And how do you feel we should handle this problem?”
“Honestly?”
“I rely on you to be honest with me, Toll.”
“We know what he’s up to. We know his background and capabilities. It makes him a threat that has to be eliminated.”
“He’s with his wife, isn’t he?”
“Right, sir.”
“You sound as if you’ve considered that.”
“I have. And it could be to our benefit.”
“How so?”
“I recommend we take care of them together,” Eckers said. “There are scenarios that will give authorities on the mainland a plausible explanation. And that should also take the legs out of any progressive investigation by his people at home.”
“You sincerely believe their suspicions won’t be raised?”
“Of course they will. But they can suspect whatever they want. We just have to be careful not to leave them any solid proof.”
Jean Luc thought a moment.
“The one hitch in all this might be Beauchart. He’s been difficult before—”
“Beauchart’s already aware of what I have in mind.”
“And he hasn’t objected?”
“No,” Eckers said. “And if he does, I’ll quiet him. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Jean Luc held the phone silently to his ear, seized at once by a kind of morbid humor. In a few minutes he would have to get dressed and ready for his meetings—discussions meant to reassure his partners that their illegal oil shipments were being successfully covered up despite a glorified bookkeeper’s aborted attempt at snitching them out. But not until he’d started his day with some brief words about double murder.
“And He shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end,” he mused aloud. “Is that line by any chance familiar to you?”
“No, sir, it isn’t.”
“It’s a quote from the Christian scriptures I memorized a long time ago,” Jean Luc said. And shrugged a little in the stillness of the room. “Go ahead, Toll. Do whatever’s necessary. Keep us among the quick. Because if I’m going to be judged at all, I’d rather it be that way than the other.”
BOCA DEL SIERPE, TERRITORIAL TRINIDAD
It was a quarter to ten when Vince Scull called back. Nimec had hung around the villa’s pool all morning, watching Annie take some laps and admiring how graceful and relaxed she looked. He’d learned to swim in the military as part of his combat survival training and, even so many years later, found that being in the water made him revert to the tight discipline the training had instilled.
“Okay, Petey, what am I interrupting?” Scull said.
Nimec shrugged with the satphone to his ear.
“Me getting a kick out of Annie enjoying herself,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Scull said. “Don’t suppose I should want to go there.”
Nimec frowned. At least Vince sounded wide awake now—maybe even excited, the way he did when his juices got flowing.
“Your noggins find out anything?” he said.
“Haven’t talked to a single one of them who’s heard of combo tanker-freighters. but they’re on it,” Scull said. “Meanwhile, Bow—I mentioned him, didn’t I? Cal Bowman?”
“Yeah, Vince. You did.”
“Bow helped me with some groundwork, basic shit just might interest you.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“You told me the feeder ships you saw were maybe three-hundred-footers, right?”
“Be my guess,” Nimec said.
“Give or take, it puts them in line with the size of industrial oil barges,” Scull said. “They’d be anywhere between two forty and two eighty feet long and carry loads of crude, refined, gasoline, home fuel, asphalt, or all the above and then some. The number of tanks in a barge’s hold depends on how many types of product they’ve got aboard. Might be one, two, four . . . there’d need to be different tank linings for different grades of petroleum.”
“And different ways of filling the tanks,” Nimec said. “I figure if the feeders were taking oil, it would have to be a lighter type. Put crude in the hoses I saw and it would gum them up like thick molasses.”
“Bow said about the same,” Scull answered, and then paused for a long while.
“Vince? You still with me?”
“Don’t get your bathing trunks in a knot, I need to look at my notes.” An audible shuffling of papers over the phone. “Okay, here we go . . . It’s twenty-four thousand.”
Nimec’s forehead creased.
“Must’ve missed something,” he said, sure he hadn’t. “What’s twenty-four thousand—”
“Barrels, Petey. It’s the typical load on one of those barges. Talking equivalents, that comes to one million gallons. You want another example, imagine a convoy of a hundred twenty tanker trucks, because that’s how much rolling stock it’d take to move it by ground.”
Nimec let that settle in for a minute. He was wearing a short-sleeved Polo shirt and the morning sun was already hot on his bare arms. He reached for the icy glass of Coke on a table beside his lounger, sipped, watched Annie from under the bill of his Seattle Mariners cap. Stroking to the deep end of the pool, she dove like a seal, then executed a kind of acrobatic loop-de-loop that left her long, toned legs briefly sticking straight up out of the water before they submerged with the rest of her. He’d promised they would go snorkeling together that afternoon. A boat would take them out over the coral reef beds for a couple of hours, and there would be exotic fish, and maybe dolphins and sea turtles. Then Annie was hoping they could hit another restaurant on the beach—it had a steel drum calypso band performing at dinner. After dark he’d leave her alone in the villa, head over to the harbor again, do a little undercover work like a character from a spy movie. That was the main thing on his mind right now and he felt lousy about it, but not lousy enough to bump it down on his list of priorities.
Pete Nimec, Man from UpLink, he thought. Some vacation you’re having . . . some great husband you are.
“Got anything else for me?” he said into the phone.
“You sound testy all of a sudden, Petey,” Scull said.
“I’m not,” Nimec said. “Anything else?”
“Maybe,” Scull said. “Remember what I told you about those disguised tankers in the Big One?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, here’s some history I found in our computers that’s a lot more recent—don’t know why it wasn’t right in my head, because it should’ve been,” Scull said. “A few years ago, around the time Uncle Saddam had his ass kicked out of Baghdad, two thousand troops from the Thirteenth MEU were assigned to a Brit naval operation to choke off oil smuggling on the Iraqi coast. There’s that city there, Umm Qasr, you might’ve heard of it. The country’s biggest port. What the smugglers did was tap crude from the Rumeila pipelines, run it down the al-Faw Peninsula in tanker trucks, then pass it off onto barges at Umm Qasr. Our troops pulled in dozens of non-Iraqi flagged ships moving about five hundred thousand gallons of oil out to sea every night—and, guess what, some of them were converted freighters.”
Nimec sat quietly for a moment. Oil. According to his company travel and intellig
ence briefs the area certainly had a rich supply—it’d accounted for most of Trinidad’s export economy for decades. In fact, they had those tar pits in the south where a British outfit built the first well rigs in the Americas, maybe in the world . . . a plantation owner had leased them drilling rights to a pitch lake on his land after his father, or grandfather, or somebody like that, had made a fortune marketing kerosene that had been distilled from it. Nimec believed the family still owned some processing plants, but would have to glance over the briefs again to be sure. In any case, it was oil that had indirectly brought UpLink here through its wiring deal with Sedco. There were the onshore fields and refineries, and some new deepwater patches. Lots and lots of oil. But oil smuggling . . . who would be doing it? Why? Where would it be going? And more to the immediate issue, what were the chances of his having stumbled onto something like that after just an hour or two of compulsive peeping through his five-thousand-dollar binoculars?
Probably much slighter than the odds that he was starting to let his imagination carry him away, Nimec admitted to himself. Still, he’d seen something peculiar at the harbor. No getting past it. He could hardly wait to head back tonight for another—and if he could swing it, closer—look around.
“Thanks for getting on this for me, Vince,” he said. “Keep in touch, okay? Something turns up, I want to know ASAP.”
“Got you,” Scull said. “And be sure to send my regards to the missus . . . that’s if you wind up seeing her before I do.”
Nimec blinked his eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.
“Figure it out, honeymooner,” Scull said, and terminated their connection.
Nimec let the phone sink from his ear and exhaled, staring at Annie in the pool.
Figure out what Scull meant? It would have been too easy.
The rough part was that he already damned well knew.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
