Phil’s cheeks flushed red. “Sure,” he smiled. “Sorry, I was thinking of something else,” he offered as means of explanation.
Susan let him off the hook. “I know what you mean,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, coming here for beer and wings was just what I needed, but my mind keeps drifting back to work.”
“Oh shit, that reminds me. I forgot to tell you that Tom called back this morning,” Phil said.
“Tom?” Susan asked.
“Tom Eckert, my buddy in the Agency.” Phil always felt more important when he referred to the Central Intelligence Agency simply as “The Agency.” As if that moniker was only used by seasoned professionals in the spy business—which Phil fancied himself to be. “Tom said the comments on your friend’s website originated in Saint Petersburg. Russia, not Florida. He couldn’t tell me who sent them, just where they came from. Apparently they’re real busy over at Langley right now, so he didn’t have time to dig much deeper.”
Susan had to think for a minute before Phil’s announcement registered. Savannah. Casey Shenk. She had forgotten that she asked Phil on Wednesday morning to find out who had sent the quasi-threatening comments to Casey’s blog after his post about the Baltic Venture. She had asked Phil for the favor as an act of thanks for Casey’s help in her search for information on the hijacking/arms smuggling case, and she had promised to call Casey yesterday afternoon, fully expecting Phil’s friend to deny the request. That promise had slipped her mind. Just as well, since she didn’t have an answer until just now.
“Russia,” she mused.
“Tom said it was easy to find out where the comments came from,” Phil said. “They weren’t encrypted or masked, so he was able to find out pretty quick. Beyond that, though, he said it would take a lot more work, and he didn’t have the resources to dedicate to it at the moment.”
Susan stared at the bits of uneaten food in front of her. “Russia,” she said again, more to herself than to Phil. She was trying to work out the significance of the find. The information didn’t give her any insight into who in Iran was looking to buy Russian missiles on the sly, but that wasn’t why she asked Phil for help in the first place. To her surprise, though, the origin of the comments might still be useful to IWG, if not her directly.
“That means Pete Grozny’s source wasn’t making the whole thing up,” she said. She picked up her glass with both hands and took a sip, her gaze now fixed on the beer inside as if she was looking for Nostradamus-like insight.
“What do you mean?” Phil asked.
Susan set the glass back on the table and looked at Phil. “Well, Casey—the guy with the blog—came up with the idea that maybe the MV Baltic Venture, which was hijacked, just happened to be carrying a load of stolen Russian military equipment. He thinks the Russians sending warships to get the ship back is proof of that. Until now we...,” Susan paused and looked around quickly to verify they really weren’t being eavesdropped on. She leaned closer and continued in a lower voice. “Until now we knew only that one of IWG’s sources in Kaliningrad overheard talk of a missile deal between Russians with access to S-300 missiles and someone in Iran. The threats against Casey were in response to his theory. The fact that they came from Saint Petersburg tells me that Casey was close enough to the truth that his little extracurricular investigation ruffled some feathers.”
“Why didn’t IWG get any threats?” Phil asked. “Hell, we even had confirmation of the missiles from someone inside Russia. I’m sure that would get somebody’s goat.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t publish that fact,” Susan said. “Casey put his theory on the web for everybody and his brother to see. I just stumbled across it by accident. Well, pretty much by accident.”
Phil inwardly acknowledged Susan’s logic. He picked up his own beer and, before drinking any, added, “Well if this guy’s getting threats from the Soviets, I mean Russians, someone should tell him to stop posting more theories that could get him into trouble. These people don’t mess around.” Phil drank his beer, smug in his ability to evoke a self-realized Double-Oh status twice in one night. He began to think his job wasn’t so bad, after all. James Bond would have gotten a Master’s Degree in economics if he had the chance to go to Princeton, too. Wouldn’t he?
“I think Mr. Shenk is pretty safe down in Georgia,” Susan said. “Besides, it’s just a theory that someone happened to read and wanted to scare him away from digging any deeper. He does this stuff for fun. Plus, he was concerned enough to call me for advice when he got those threats, so I wouldn’t doubt if he just dropped the whole thing all together.”
“According to Tom Eckert, he didn’t,” Phil said.
“Didn’t what?”
“Drop it,” Phil said. “Tom said he read another post, a more recent one, when he was trying to find the threat comments. Tom said your Mr. Shenk has now decided to throw Israel into the mix.”
“Israel?” Susan asked. Now she wished she had been reading Casey’s blog regularly since she talked to him on the phone. “Israel?” she thought, turning the question over in her head. “How the hell did Israel fit into the story?”
“Yeah,” Phil answered. “I didn’t read it, myself. Truth is I forgot the name of the site, but Tom said this guy should be careful who he accuses of doing stuff.”
“It’s just a damn blog from some guy in Savannah, Georgia. He probably works at a gas station for chrissakes.” Susan didn’t know why she was defending a guy she didn’t know against conspiratorial accusations from someone else she didn’t know to downplay the possibility of a danger that probably didn’t exist. What she really wanted to do was go home and read Casey’s post for herself. That would give her something else to discuss with him when she called him that night. She had promised to call him when she found anything about the threats on his blogsite. Now she wanted to call him and ask about what he wrote that had the CIA saying he should watch what he posted.
“I’m just telling you what Tom said,” Phil offered. He didn’t feel like an international spy anymore. Now he just felt guilty for somehow upsetting his friend.
Susan noticed the concerned look on Phil’s face. She reached over and took his hand in hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you.” She smiled and tried to deflect the conversation from the way it had suddenly turned. She realized that she reacted the way she did because she was upset with herself, or more precisely, her situation. She wondered what Casey had thought up now. Apparently he had come up with the idea that Israel was somehow involved in the Baltic Venture hijacking. Or maybe with the arms deal? That was just one more added dimension to the puzzle she had wrestled with for days and come up empty. Well, almost empty.
Casey had obviously been right with his initial theory. Susan had piggybacked on Casey’s efforts and even turned in a report to her boss restating that theory. Wasn’t she the professional analyst here? What if he was right about Israel? She knew she would appreciate any more out-of-the-box thinking he may have done, but it did nothing to help her own deflated ego, as fragile as it was to begin with. She was afraid Casey might be right again. She hadn’t even thought about looking at the Jewish state, but Casey had. Whatever connection he had come up with between Israel and the Russia-Iran arms deal, all it did, in Susan’s mind, was spotlight her own inability to do the job she was paid to do.
“Would you like another round?”
Susan looked up at the waitress who was standing right beside her. She had been so lost in her own thoughts that she didn’t see the petite blonde with a tight-fitting white shirt and even tighter black skirt—not their original waitress—as she approached the table. Phil did. He quickly pulled his arm back as if he had been stung by a bee. Susan looked down to her now-empty hand and then to Phil, and she laughed.
“Just some water, please,” Susan told the waitress. She didn’t take her eyes off Phil, who didn’t take his eyes off the waitress’ breasts. The young woman put a mark on her order pad, followed Phil’s stare and winked. She tur
ned and went to get their order.
“You’re awful,” Susan laughed. Phil smiled at his fellow analyst and joined her.
Susan got back to her apartment before nine. She and Phil finished the buffalo wings and washed them down with the water faithfully delivered by Phil’s latest infatuation. They didn’t talk about work the rest of the night, except to gossip occasionally about some of the other IWG employees.
Susan changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt and made a cup of hot chocolate. Not that August in New York City was even remotely cold, but she thought a warm drink might counteract the beer she had at Baxter’s and help her get a decent night’s sleep. She took her mug to the desk in the corner of her living room and turned on her computer. The Hewlett-Packard desktop computer and 19-inch CRT monitor served as end tables on either side of her desk. She placed her hot chocolate on the CPU—the monitor serving to display a single yellow daisy, desperately in need of water.
Susan had purchased a Toshiba Satellite notebook three years earlier. Although it had been eclipsed by other models in terms of speed and memory since then, it was still much more powerful than her old HP. She found that as long as she didn’t load video games onto the hard drive, or even play them online, her Toshiba did everything she needed it to do, quickly. And it was portable.
She went to the internet and entered the web address for Casey’s Middle-Truths blog. The newest post, added the night before, was at the top of the main page. Obviously Tom Eckley didn’t read this post until this morning, but, she thought, at least he didn’t sit on the information he found and called Phil the same day.
The headline pointed to the hijacked ship and referenced back to Casey’s first post about the Baltic Venture. As she read more, she was amazed at Casey’s ability to take seemingly unrelated tidbits of news and piece them together into his own version of the truth. However outlandish his version happened to seem at first glance, when Susan followed his reasoning, it was entirely plausible.
“Why can’t I ever come up with shit like this?” Susan asked herself. She knew she was a good analyst. She could translate a speech or document, put it in historical or political context, and come up with a very accurate assessment of the speaker’s or author’s real intentions. But grabbing onto a story of Benjamin Netanyahu’s public absence and claiming he was secretly meeting with the Russian president about stolen missiles on a hijacked ship? The guy, this Mr. Casey Shenk, gas station attendant, or whatever he did..., he really knew how to make a four-course meal from scraps. Maybe Jim wasn’t joking. Maybe IWG should hire this guy.
Susan picked up her phone and reached into her briefcase for a small notepad. She thumbed through the pages until she found Casey’s number on the list of possible “Caseys” in Savannah she had written down on Monday. She dialed his number and waited for an answer. Instead she was greeted by a computerized woman’s voice informing her that the call could not be completed and that she may leave a message if she so desired.
Susan did not desire. She wanted to talk to him, but was afraid if she left a message tonight, Casey would call back at 2 a.m., or whenever his shift at Texaco was over. She really needed to get some sleep. Susan decided it could wait until morning, finished her lukewarm chocolate, and got ready for bed.
Chapter 14
MV Baltic Venture
The satellite phone rang in the pilot house. The man on watch was startled by the unexpected chirping. He had been monitoring the ship’s radar repeater and searching the horizon with binoculars in six-hour shifts for almost two weeks. Phone guard was also part of that duty. It hadn’t rung once since they came onboard, as far as he knew. The fact that it was ringing now must mean someone had important information to get to them. By them, he meant Egorov.
“Cutlass,” the man said, using the pre-arranged code word for the group. They were ordered by Viktor Egorov, the group’s leader, to answer in this manner should the phone ever ring. So he did.
“Get me Sparrow,” the distant voice on the other end ordered in heavily accented English.
“Stand by,” the hijacker on watch said, also in English, but with a different accent. He almost laughed at the cartoon-like set-up of the whole operation. Sparrow? As in “Jack Sparrow?” He shrugged it off. As silly as it seemed, the man really did enjoy playing pirate—mostly. “Sparrow, Crow. Call on the sat phone,” he announced in his native tongue on the bulky Falcon III VHF handheld radio the group used for internal communications. They refrained from using their real names on the air or in the company of the hostages from the Baltic Venture. Why give someone information that could land them in jail sometime in the future?
“On my way,” Egorov responded.
Viktor Egorov, former officer of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Spetsial’nye Otryady Bystrogo Reagirovaniya, or SOBR, made his way from the Captain’s Cabin to the bridge. He had been waiting for the call. Because of the connections he made as a member of Russia’s anti-crime commando unit, it was not hard for Viktor to switch sides when the unit was being disbanded and parsed out to work under local law enforcement jurisdictions. He had grown accustomed to living fat on the hog thanks to the many bribes he was able to elicit when he had the weight of the Russian Government to push around, and the average Russian still equated “central government” to “Soviet government.” They remembered the heavy-handed tactics of the various arms of the Communist Bear. And well they should. Just because the Berlin Wall was torn down did not mean that those who believed in the Party and everything the Soviet Union represented had become democracy-loving capitalists overnight.
Viktor Egorov was not one of these people. He could care less about politics. But he was fond of the power of fear, and more importantly, the money he could make by manipulating that fear. When his current employer approached him with the proposition of hijacking a cargo ship in the Baltic Sea, it was an easy sell. He was able to assemble the team in short order—men he had worked with before in one fashion or another. With varying skill sets and no allegiances. Except money. It was the common bond that kept them together and kept them focused. The amount of money they were getting for this job was more than any of them had made in the past three years combined.
Viktor wasn’t worried about anyone getting out of line and turning on the group, or him. He had negotiated a set payment for each member of the team. If you were dead, that money stayed in the employer’s pocket. There was no single pot of money to be divided. Every man’s share was equal, and payments were to be delivered when each went his separate way after the job was complete. It was about as good a deal as a criminal could ask for. And all they had to do was babysit.
Egorov entered the pilot house and took the phone from the man on watch with only a curt nod of acknowledgment.
“Sparrow,” Egorov said into the satellite phone.
“Tomorrow night. Two fast boats will come to extract you and your men. Leave nothing behind,” the voice on the phone informed him. The person who called did not use a Disney-inspired moniker. Or a name. Viktor knew who it was. He was the only one who had the phone number.
“The crew?” Viktor asked.
“Secure them in the salon. They will be home with their loved ones soon enough.”
The connection was broken as the caller hung up. Viktor pressed the “end” button on the phone and handed it back to the man on watch who stared quizzically at him, having heard his team leader say only three words in a conversation that lasted all of fifteen seconds. Viktor stopped at the doorway through which he had entered and turned to the man on the bridge. “Have the team assemble in my cabin in fifteen minutes. Leave two men with the crew. I will fill them in afterwards.” Egorov left the bridge, and the other man made the call.
Chapter 15
Savannah, Georgia
The taxi driver dropped Casey off in front of his house in Thunderbolt at 10 a.m. after the doctor who saw him the morning before insisted that Casey stay in the hospital overnight for observation. Casey didn’t buy that reason
ing, because after the nurse removed his dinner tray at about six-thirty that night, he never saw another human being until he was given a banana, a cup of orange juice, and his discharge papers the next morning. He figured someone must have come in the room to check on him while he was sleeping, but he didn’t discount the possibility he was ignored all night. It made for a better story that way, if anything.
“Hey, Casey! What happened?” Vince called out to Casey from across the street as the taxi pulled away. He did a cursory look for oncoming cars and quickly walked over to Casey’s yard, his perpetually dirt-covered Yorkie in-tow. Vince’s partner, Allen, had been married before coming out of the closet, and he had a now-twenty-year-old daughter. Vince’s only child was Pepper, his noisy but friendly Yorkshire terrier. Pepper had never seen a single day at the end of a leash. Vince chose to ignore that law, among others.
Casey didn’t acknowledge Vince until he had retrieved the mail left in his box from the day before. It wasn’t that Casey was mean, he just knew that as soon as he closed the mailbox and turned around, Vince would be well-inside his personal space, and Pepper would be sniffing his ankles. He was just conserving energy.
“Hi, Vince,” Casey said to his neighbor who was, as expected, a mere four inches away.
“Where were you?” Vince continued his line of questioning. “I thought maybe you found a nice girl, or guy, to spend the night with,” he said with a wink and a smile. Vince was smart enough to know that most males were heterosexual, but he also believed that was purely a consequence of society, and given the chance, every man in America would choose to be gay over being straight any day of the week. Casey had argued this presumption ad-nauseum with Vince on more than one occasion, but he failed to get the problems of procreation and the survival of the species through Vince’s skull. “At least I thought you might have spent the night out until that big ‘ol wrecker showed up yesterday and delivered your truck.”
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