Death Ship

by Joseph Badal

  “That’s odd,” Ierides said. “But what’s your interest in this, Walter. Since when does a camera shop owner care about insurance company stocks?”

  Zeller had anticipated this question and knew Ierides was too smart to fall for bullshit. “That’s a difficult question for me to answer, Pavlos. In fact, it would really be best if you forget you asked it and just decide whether or not you want to help me. One thing I will tell you is that this has nothing to do with me trying to get insider knowledge so I can trade stocks. It’s much more important than that.”

  Ierides stayed silent for a good five seconds. “I detect a high level of tension in your voice, Walter. Is this critically important?”

  “Maybe life or death important, my friend.”

  “How do you propose I approach my contact in the insurance department?”

  “I’ll send you a list of the insurance companies whose stocks have been shorted. I suggest someone call those companies and ask if they’ve sold any unusual, large-dollar policies on properties in Greece over . . . say, the last thirty days. Emphasize the words large and unusual.”

  Raymond Gallegos sounded groggy when he answered the call from Walter Zeller.

  “Ray, it’s Walter.”

  Gallegos didn’t immediately respond, as though he needed to process which Walter was on the phone. Finally, he said, “How’s the weather in Deutschland?”

  “About as nice as the weather in D.C.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “If you’ve read Farhami’s after-action report, she’s come up with interesting information. I believe she’s hit on something.”

  “Which part of her report?”

  “The securities trading activity. We know that previous unusual trading activity in insurance company stocks presaged terrorist events. But recent trades have been in local and regional insurance companies, in addition to the big international companies. Something’s about to happen.”

  “Okay?”

  “We should place people in Athens and Rome.”

  “People?”

  “Maybe Special Ops. I’ll send you a secure email within the hour and explain why those specific cities.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. I need someone to call the Italian Ministry of Insurance. Several of the insurance companies in which short sales have occurred are Italian and Greek domestic firms. Farhami believes this trading is a signal there may be terrorist activity planned in one or both of those countries.”

  “Send me your email. I’ll see what I can discover on the Italian insurance side. But what kind of information do you want?”

  “I’ve already talked to a contact in Athens about this. I asked him to check on any large, unusual insurance policy purchases that occurred in the last thirty days, especially at insurance companies whose shares have been shorted.”

  CHAPTER 50

  The two police officers who arrested Carlo Marchetti were about to transport him to the Georgetown Police Department when a pair of unmarked cars drove up and bookended their patrol car. A passenger in one of the unmarks leaped out of his vehicle, rushed over, and flashed a badge at the female cop, who bailed out of the cruiser.

  “U.S. Homeland Security,” the man announced as he closed his cred pack and put it away. “We’re confiscating your prisoner.”

  The cop protested, but before she could make her case, the patrol car’s radio squawked. She pulled the mobile mic from her shoulder and responded.

  “This is Captain McComber. There are people from Homeland Security on the way to your position. You will hand over your prisoner to them.”

  “But—”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes, Captain. They’re already here.”

  “Just do as I said. And you will make no report of the arrest. It didn’t happen. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir. I hate paperwork anyway.”

  Carlo Marchetti was thirty-two years old in 1984, in Dallas, Texas, the last time he was arrested. It had been a bullshit arrest. Some cop had taken him in for driving twenty-five miles over the speed limit. All in all, it turned out okay. He was booked and arraigned and fined two hundred dollars. No big deal considering that when he was caught speeding he was on his way to DFW to catch a plane back to Baltimore after shooting an accountant who worked for an oil company. The accountant had provided information to the Feds that would have ultimately sent the company’s CEO and CFO to prison. So, Marchetti was out two hundred bucks and missed his flight back to Baltimore. But he’d made fifty thousand dollars for the hit.

  He thought about that arrest, about what that Dallas police station looked like, and the booking process he’d gone through. This time, the experience was totally different. No uniformed cops around, no hookers being booked, no druggies nodding off. He had been thrown into a room and manacled hand and foot to a metal table bolted to the floor. And then he’d been left alone for hours.

  Finally, a man who looked so Irish as to be leprechaun-like, entered the room and sat across from him.

  “Carlo, you really fucked up this time.”

  He had no ID on him, or in the car, Marchetti thought. He’d lied to the cops about that. How the hell did this guy know his name?

  “You want to know how we ID’ed you?” he said, but didn’t wait for an answer. “We used a facial recognition program off the camera images we took of you when you walked in here.” He pointed at a camera in a corner near the ceiling. “We’ve got cameras in every room and hallway.”

  “Where’s my dog?”

  “She’s upstairs.”

  “She’s very delicate; needs to be handled gently.”

  “You’ve got me confused with someone who gives a shit, Carlo. I want to know why you tried to murder the Director of Central Intelligence.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The man stared at him and seemed to want him to continue. When he didn’t, he stood and left the room.

  Two hours passed and then two hooded men in suits entered. They moved with speed and force; manhandled him. They removed the manacles and handcuffed his wrists behind his back. Then they rushed him from the room, along a corridor, dragged him down a flight of stairs, put him in a cell, and secured his handcuffs to a large ring embedded in a wall.

  Within minutes, three black-clad, hooded men came into the cell. They brought a towel, a bucket of water, and a small pallet. After they threw him onto the pallet and placed the towel over his face, they tipped the pallet back so that his legs were above his head, and then slowly poured water over his face. The water boarding lasted less than thirty seconds, but seemed to Marchetti to go on for an hour. He thought he would die at any moment, from a heart attack or drowning. His heart beat a machine gun riff in his chest.

  The men suddenly righted him. One of them stripped the towel from his face. They watched until he stopped choking and coughing up water. Then a voice blasted from a speaker somewhere in the cell’s ceiling.

  “Carlo, we know who you are, what you do for a living, and that you tried to kill Director Cole. What we don’t know is who paid you. I assure you that you will tell us the name of your employer. Sooner or later, you will tell us.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Marchetti shouted. “You have me confused with one of those chickenshit A-rabs in Guantanamo.”

  “That’s a shame, Carlo,” the voice said. After a few beats, the voice ordered, “Again.”

  The water boarding occurred again. Even though Marchetti knew what to expect, even though he thought that knowledge would make the experience less frightening and less painful, he was wrong. The second episode was worse than the first.

  The voice reappeared: “How do you feel, Carlo? How’s your heart?”

  Marchetti opened his mouth to curse again, but all he could do was cough. After a few moments, he decided that pissing the voice off was just plain stupid. It would be better to just keep his mouth shut.

  “You’ve got fifteen seco
nds, Carlo, and then it will start again.”

  After the third water boarding, the men left the room after they secured him to the wall ring. His back hurt, he was wet, and his throat was raw. Then the temperature in the cell dropped and he shook from the cold. This lasted for well over an hour and then he heard a dog bark. The cell door opened and Pooh ran inside. She came over to Marchetti and whined.

  “Hey, g-g-girl,” Marchetti stammered.

  Then the man from the room upstairs entered.

  “We are prepared to keep this up. You will ultimately break and—”

  Marchetti coughed a laugh. “There is nothing you can do to me that will ever make me talk.” He laughed again. “Isn’t this illegal? I thought the Senate and the President already ruled on that.”

  “You didn’t let me finish, Gino,” the man said. “If you tell me now what you know, I will personally make sure your dog is well taken care of. If you don’t cooperate, I will turn her over to a kill shelter.”

  Marchetti glared at the man. “You’re a monster.”

  “That’s a strange thing for a hired killer to say.” He wheeled around and walked to the cell door. Just as it was about to shut, Marchetti rasped, “Wait!”

  CHAPTER 51

  According to weather reports, the prevailing winds in Piraeus Bay blew in a north by northeast direction, directly toward the city of Piraeus’s two hundred thousand inhabitants and many of the four million people beyond Piraeus, in Athens. Ahmed Boukali checked the charts aboard the Kerkira and felt an inner rush of excitement. Allah truly looked over his shoulder and was surely on the side of the true believers.

  “Jalil, have you heard from the port authority? What’s our estimated time of arrival in the bay?” Boukali asked the Kerkira’s captain.

  “Tomorrow, Friday, at 1800 hours. That’s when we’ll take the pilot on board.”

  “Good, Jalil. We are not scheduled to dock at the refinery until the next day. That gives us plenty of time to complete our mission before the refinery wonders where we are.”

  “If all goes as planned, there will be no one at the refinery to wonder anything. In fact, there won’t be a refinery.”

  “Inshallah,” Boukali said. He nodded, walked from the pilothouse, descended the ladder to the main deck, and walked its great expanse. Elation flooded his mind. He shivered as he went over the timing for the thousandth time. This would be a great triumph for Islam, maybe one of the greatest victories in over five hundred years. Surely, it would make the attack on the Twin Towers in New York seem like nothing.

  After Walter Zeller’s email arrived with the information about insurance stock short selling, Raymond Gallegos forwarded it to Tanya Serkovic and called her ten minutes later.

  “Sorry about calling so late,” he said. “I thought I’d better run this by you.”

  “No problem, Ray. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

  “Right.” Ray briefed Tanya on the information he’d received from Zeller. “Did you get a chance to read my email?”

  “Yes. Interesting.”

  “This was all generated by Laila Farhami.”

  “As soon as her assignment in Berlin is complete, we ought to bring her to Langley. That’s a very clever young lady.”

  “She’s very smart, and based on a recent conversation I had with her, she’s ready for something new. But why in God’s name would we bring her here to headquarters? I mean, why turn a damned fine field agent into a bureaucrat? Don’t we have enough of those here already?”

  Tanya cleared her throat and said, “We’ll deal with Farhami’s career later. What do you need me to do now?”

  “You’ve got contacts inside the Italian government. I think you should talk to someone over there who can check with Italian insurance companies on the short-selling list and see if they’ve had any strange new policy activity. We believe the only reason that GA shorted smaller, local insurers is because those firms might be about to take huge losses. Maybe, if we can identify unusual activity in the sale of insurance policies by those companies, we might be able to predict where an attack will occur.”

  “But that would presume the owner of a building, for example, had knowledge of where an attack would occur and then insure his building. But wouldn’t that owner have already insured his property? And no insurance company will insure a building for more than it’s worth.”

  “Tanya, I don’t know. But what if the owner of an already insured building changes coverage to include acts of war or terrorism?”

  “Interesting.”

  “That’s what I meant when I referred to strange new policy activity.”

  “And what if there haven’t been any weird policy purchases?”

  “Then we’re no further along than we are now. I’m convinced Farhami and Zeller are correct. Something big is about to go down, but the trades in insurance company stocks don’t give us anything specific to go on, except that some of the shorts are on companies that almost exclusively insure assets in Greece and Italy. We know previous short-selling trades preceded terrorist attacks, so we suspect there will be a terrorist incident, but we don’t know the where, when, why, who, or what.”

  “Okay. What about Greece?”

  “Zeller has a contact in Athens.”

  Tanya went quiet for a few beats. “Your email said that Zeller recommends we send in Special Ops personnel.”

  “That’s correct. The only people we have in the area are on Sicily. Michael Danforth and seven men. I think we should call Mike and tell him to put four of his men in Rome and the other four in Athens. Our Status of Forces Agreement with NATO allows us to deploy Lone Wolf teams in NATO countries for up to seven days without notifying the local country. If we get any more information about a possible attack, we can deploy them from there. And then we should alert the 6th Fleet commander and have him muster every SEAL team he has available.”

  “Assuming there is an attack planned, and Greece and/or Italy are the targets, and it won’t occur before the Lone Wolf team arrives, and they can do anything about an attack. Hell, Ray, if there is an attack, we could just be sending eight men to their deaths.”

  “Or on Greek and Italian holidays.”

  “One other thing. Your email mentioned that the German investment firm executed large dollar amount transactions of defense contractor stocks. What’s that about?”

  “Farhami surmises that whatever is about to occur might drive up defense stocks because the U.S. and other nations will increase their purchases of military equipment, armaments, ammunition, and the like.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d better call the DCI. He needs to have a conversation with POTUS.”

  “Good idea. Besides, there’s no point in him sleeping when we’re up.” Ray laughed.

  “I doubt he’s sleeping.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You haven’t heard? Someone tried to assassinate him last night.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ve been so preoccupied with Farhami’s report that I haven’t answered all my calls or read all my emails. What happened?”

  “Jack’s all right, but his bodyguard was killed. We’ve got the shooter in custody.”

  After Raymond ended his call to Tanya, he called Michael Danforth and described the situation.

  “You don’t have much to go on, Ray,” Michael said.

  “What else is new?”

  “You think the hijacked boats are somehow tied in here?”

  “Mike, I have no idea. But, the more I think about the planned attacks against the ships berthed at Sigonella, the more suspicious I get about the whole scheme. What chance did those three-man terrorist teams have to succeed in their mission? Even if they’d been armed with nuclear weapons, with our sophisticated radiation detectors we would have noted radiation in the air and taken protective action before fallout blew over the ships’ crews. These guys were either
stupid or terribly anxious to board the paradise express.”

  “Yeah, but that equipment isn’t one hundred percent protective. And the blast would have done damage.”

  “That’s true. But the weapons weren’t nuclear. So it’s irrelevant.”

  “Are you saying the hijackings and aborted attacks were not solitary incidents? That they’re part of something bigger.”

  “Yeah,” Raymond said. “That’s my best guess. I mean, what are the odds of terrorist events near Sicily being independent of a terrorist event or events in Greece or Italy a few days apart?”

  “That assumes something’s about to happen in Greece or Italy.”

  “I want you to place part of your team in Rome and the other part in Athens. We’ll use those cities as staging locations in case we come up with anything else. By the way, what about the guys wounded in Afghanistan and on the fishing boat?”

  “They’re still operational.”

  Normally, Walter Zeller was able to remain calm under almost any circumstance. He’d survived assassination attempts, gun battles, and political infighting at the Company. But there was something about a potential terrorist attack that might kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people that broke down his usual equanimity. He’d made himself a sandwich and poured a beer, but left both untouched as he paced the hall between his living room and bedroom. He picked up his cell phone a dozen times to check that it was on. Exhaustion finally drove him to sit. He reached for the television remote control and pointed it at the set when his cell phone chirped. The screen read P. IERIDES.

  Zeller barked, “Pavlos, what did you find?”

  “Bear with me for a moment. I want to explain what we did. I called my contact at the Department of Insurance. I gave him the names of the insurance companies from the list you provided. The department has an emergency email chain in place, so querying them was relatively easy. The insurance companies are required to have an employee monitor their emergency email account twenty-four hours a day.”