The Wreck Emerged

by Joseph Webers

  “I think so,” Paul said. “I wasn’t trying to process anything yet, just accumulate everything. That list looks familiar, though. Give me a minute.” He thumbed through several file folders already out on a table and selected one labeled “International Bread Consortium.”

  “Here it is. It’s mostly handwritten notes. The first appears to be from a meeting in April. There are the cities, except Delhi is missing.”

  In pencil, about halfway down the page, was the following list:

  1. India – Ranbir – Patel – Ludhiana, Khanna, Gwalior, Kanpur, Allahabad, Raipur

  2. Serbia – Jovan – Dmitri – Tetovo, Skopje, Naples, Tirana, Turin

  3. USA – me – Wilson – Madera, Visalia, Hanford, Bakersfield, Long Beach

  4. China – Zhang Li – Ming – Baoding, Hengshui, Xingtai, Tangshan

  Jon checked Kim’s list of foreign phone numbers. “Look,” he told Paul, “Ranbir Varma from India, Jovan Stojanović from Serbia, and Zhou Zhang Li from China.”

  Paul pointed to the map above them. “The USA list matches the cities on what we thought was a route map,” he said.

  “It is a route map! But not for cake delivery.”

  About that time, Mark came back from the other Wilson’s Bakery. “I questioned them pretty thoroughly, and I’m convinced there is no connection.”

  “Someone needs to wipe out these other locations,” Jon said as he dialed Bob McGee.

  Bob answered on the first ring. “I got your access key and I’ve been looking through what you sent. You wouldn’t have called so soon unless there’s something bigger.”

  Jon told him about Rishaan Chabra’s FIS convention speech. “It was a word-for-word transcript, not a copy of a prepared speech. It started off with data and pollution sources, but quickly degenerated into a rant, complete with doomsday predictions and seeming threats to certain cities.”

  He read off the lists from the penciled notes.

  “This is grim,” Bob said. “Let me have the phone number list. We have friends in Europe and India, so that should go quickly. China will be delicate, but that should end as soon as we tell them the details. Let me know as soon as that other shipment arrives. Are there any other name lists?”

  “Under that list I just read off,” Jon said, “there is this line: ‘R. C. – project lead; R. S. – advisor; D. K. – advisor; K. B. – financial.’ There are two other meetings, but no new names. The meeting at the end of June mentions the airplane and deliveries of baking supplies. The last sheet had details about a visit from Rishaan Chabra on March 12, where he stayed, where they took him to dinner, et cetera, but no other names.”

  “See if you can find the solicitations and responses. That should lead to the other suppliers.”

  “Oh, one other name might be important. Rushil Singh, from India, made several phone calls here over the last few days.”

  Mark came back in as soon as Jon hung up with Bob. “Where are the keys to that delivery van?” he asked. “I’d like to open everything up.”

  “There’s a bunch of keys in the desk,” Jon said. “See what they all open.”

  Mark looked in the drawer. “There’s a truck in the bay and none outside, but there are two different sets of Chevy truck keys,” he said. “Let’s keep an eye out for a second truck.”

  “Rushil Singh, from India, is the next name,” Kim said. “Called five times in the last four days.”

  “There are whole files with his name everywhere,” Paul said, pulling several files together on the table.

  In the files were detailed technical drawings of the steel tank and the LED array they found inside earlier. There were also blueprints for the steel frame in the back of the delivery van as well as specifications for strengthening the undercarriage. There was a list of personal protective equipment to be purchased. Street maps of various California cities including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento, Fresno, and the five cities from the list. A rental agreement for a one-vehicle space at a private garage on Main Street.

  “It looks like Singh was Chabra’s right-hand man,” Jon said, “the one nailing down the details and doing all the communicating.”

  “Does it say what space he was renting at Mac’s Long Term Parking?” Mark asked Paul.

  “Yes, bay three. I’ll take you there.”

  A minute after Paul got back, Mark drove up in a Wilson’s Bakery delivery truck identical to the one already in the bay. Inside was a second steel tank mounted on a frame matching the one in the first truck.

  Mark said out loud what the other three were thinking. “Why do you suppose they needed to park this in a garage and not here?”

  “I don’t know,” Jon said. “What was the date of the rental agreement?”

  Paul turned back to that page. “March 10, two days before their visitor arrived.”

  Around 2 p.m., they finished their work. The other chemical shipment had come at noon. There was one last call from Bob McGee before they posted a guard and left the building.

  “We have three or four analysts going through what you sent,” Bob said. “Our counterparts are already taking action. The phone numbers may lead to their operations locations quicker than trying to track down the chemical deliveries.”

  “Two other things before we’re done here,” Jon said. “There was a personnel roster for this location, and we caught everyone on the list. In a safe, we found a box of a hundred atropine injectors. What are those for, an antidote for bee stings?”

  “No, those would be strictly for nerve agent poisoning. Those bastards knew what they would be making!”

  132

  The phone rang just after 3 p.m. on Saturday, at the Central Bureau of Investigation Headquarters in New Delhi, India.

  “This is not Rishaan Chabra, and I would like to report a murder.”

  “This is Deputy Deshpande, please wait a second.” He gestured wildly to the other man in the room to pick up the phone to listen, then punched the record button.

  “Yes, Mr. not Rishaan Chabra,” Deshpande said for the recording, “where did you get our number?”

  “It was online. Look, I know what you’re doing. This is a prepaid phone. In sixty seconds, I will crush it under my foot, and you can find it in a trash can if you know what city to look in. Do you want my information or not?”

  “Yes. Tell me about the murder.”

  “Mr. Rushil Singh shot Mr. Luka Stanković to death at Mr. Stanković’s home about ten days ago. Luka lived at —” Here the caller gave an address in Allahabad. “I know both Singh and Stanković. I saw Singh throw his body on his motorbike, Luka’s motorbike, and ride off with it.”

  “Do you know where he took the body?”

  “No, I was scared. I heard the shots and ran toward the house when I saw it.”

  “How did you happen to be there?”

  “I might or might not be a neighbor.”

  “Why did you wait so long to call?”

  “When he came back—he wasn’t gone too long—he threatened to kill me if I squealed. It’s been weighing on me, and I finally decided I ought to do the right thing.”

  “Where can we find Mr. Singh?”

  An address came back from the caller.

  “Do you know why he killed him?”

  “I’m sorry, time’s up.” Click.

  Somewhere in western India, Dasya Khatri found a trash can, then rejoined his family. He hated that he had to tie Rishaan’s name to the murder, but he figured the authorities would be astute enough to realize if Rishaan were really the murderer, he wouldn’t have called and used his own name in denial. And even if they weren’t astute enough for that, he hoped they would use the facts he presented to arrest Rushil. Dasya never did trust him, in spite of Rushil’s enthusiasm for the project. Hopefully, when they asked Rishaan about it, he would have the good sense to act puzzled and deny everything.

  In New Delhi, Deshpande turned to the other man, who was removing his headphones. “You don’t k
now Hindi, do you, Chuck?” he said.

  “No, but I could tell he was calm and purposeful, whatever he was saying.”

  Deshpande sent the recording through a translation program and handed the page to Chuck, who consulted the printout they had both been studying when the phone had rung.

  “Rishaan Chabra. Rushil Singh. Luka Stanković. This is like a gift from heaven.”

  Fifteen minutes later, a squad of police found the bloodstained floor and motorcycle seat. After two radio calls, a phone call, and fifteen more minutes, Rushil Singh was handcuffed and sitting in the back of a police car, loudly protesting his innocence.

  The police chief in Allahabad called Deputy Superintendent of Police Deshpande to report the capture.

  “He is wanted as part of an international terrorism group,” Deshpande told him. “We believe he may be a spy, and therefore he may have some tool with him to help him escape. I’ll send someone over for his phone, and we need to search his house. Keep him in isolation if that would make it easier.”

  “That was clever,” Chuck said after he hung up. “You just took away all his rights, and they won’t even tell anyone he’s there. I wish we could do that in the States.”

  133

  Bob McGee had called the meeting for 7 a.m. on Saturday at the CIA lab, but Phil and JC had come early so they started at 6:30. JC brought his notes from his Brazil trip and Phil brought his from Emergent and the operation in Bakersfield. Penny, Harper, and Jeff Peterson got there at seven.

  “Perfect timing!” Phil told his interns. “We just reached a dead end about the money. Barry’s folks tracked the transfer to an account in Bakersfield, which was owned by a woman with Alzheimer’s. She has four living children and a dozen grands. Turns out one of the grandkids is Michael Walker, so we didn’t need to follow the money to find him. Not really a dead end. Just a trail we don’t need to follow.”

  JC wanted to start with the MiGs. “I added the two steel external tanks to the internal fuel capacity to get a reasonable estimate of about forty-seven hundred miles for how far they could have flown. That would include the half-hour loiter they did while in the vicinity of flight 94. So they had to have been based less than twenty-one hundred miles from the island. They were heading due south toward Macapá, but that’s over three thousand miles, and there’s no place there to land a MiG discreetly. So where did they come from?”

  “Didn’t you find a list of abandoned airfields?” Bob asked. “Harvey mentioned that.”

  JC handed him the list, which he read out loud. “There’s nowhere on this list for them to land. I’ll send word out to check them,” he said, “with a requested deadline of tomorrow morning. I’ve already greased the skids with all the locations yesterday, when I told them about the nerve agent terror cells. Especially the one in China.”

  Penny was looking up abandoned airfields on the Internet. “There are several in Cuba,” she said. “Could that have been one of Kevin Bhatt’s stops when he shipped his wood?”

  “Harvey is still down there accumulating Bhatt’s records,” Bob said. “I’ll have him check. We’ll table that for now and try to figure it out later. Let’s move on to the device in the luggage.”

  He handed a collection of photos to each person. “It’s a rather ingenious device. Tom took these pictures as he was disassembling the suitcase it was in. There’s no metal and no explosives in it. There was a glass sphere inside nested rubber cups holding the nerve gas as a liquid under pressure. As the luggage was opened, a plastic cable would cause the glass to break, releasing the liquid, which energetically became a gas. The rubber was simply to protect the glass sphere. At the bottom of the ocean, the pressure caused the glass to be crushed, but it also divided the nerve gas into its component liquid parts.”

  “That’s probably why the plane was shot down,” Phil said. “They realized the device never functioned and it might have been possible to trace it back, via the binary components, to their supplier, and thus to them. It sounds like a long shot, but I can’t think of any other reason to shoot it down.”

  They discussed the shooting briefly. Harper asked for clarification on the weapon which shot the American explosive bullets.

  “Tony Barlowe told me all about that,” Jeff said. “It’s the bullets that made it sound like the American gun system, rather than the gun barrels themselves. They couldn’t mount the GAU-8 in a MiG.”

  “Ah, I was wondering about that,” JC said.

  “At this point,” Phil said, “it doesn’t really matter. We may eventually find the planes and we’ll know. The Brazilian intelligence folks will be asking what modifications were made to the planes down there.”

  “It’s probably too early,” JC said, “but have they found out anything from the Brazilian prisoners, other than that they’re all Americans?”

  “Yes, it’s too early,” Bob said, “but you gave us some good intel. The cities on your list match the cities on the list in Bakersfield. That, together with the IP address and the steel tank, definitely ties Brazil to this whole puzzle. Speaking of what we found in Bakersfield, Jeff and I did some research into this Rishaan Chabra. At the Federation of Indian Scientists website, we found not only his rant at the FIS convention last year, but other possible solutions he had proposed for the pollution problems in his country.”

  “Every time,” Jeff added, “the Indian government had turned a deaf ear to his pleas for help. In his articles, he didn’t blame the government so much as the industries that made fortunes by ignoring the pollution. It was only in the past year that he really started becoming concerned with global warming, blaming it on all the pollution in India.”

  “Here’s the other thing we found out about Chabra,” Bob said. “In Barry’s email, he mentioned Hem Laghari and a transfer of money gone awry. He was trying to transfer money to a company called India Quality Air. Laghari owns several companies causing massive unchecked pollution, and India Quality Air is a figurehead company owned by Rishaan Chabra.”

  “So here’s a company which exists in name only receiving funds from a major polluter,” JC said. “Sounds like maybe some extortion going on?”

  “Could it be,” Penny asked, “that Chabra would wipe out those cities to stop the pollution? Stop the pollution by killing the polluters?”

  “Why the other countries, then?” Phil asked.

  “To stop global warming over the whole planet,” Jeff said. “The nerve gas would be virtually undetectable, right? Who would ever suspect a bread delivery truck?”

  134

  It was mid-morning on Saturday. Maggie and Lisa had strolled their infants early in the morning to Matt’s house and had made breakfast. Gert had brought Madeline, and left with her before it was time to wash the dishes. Matt had parked Maggie in the study looking over the legal papers concerning Emergent, and he and Lisa were in the kitchen cleaning up.

  Matt pulled a credit card out of his pocket. He handed it to Lisa and said, “Maggie’s a different size now, and will need all new tops before she starts school. See how much room she has left in her suitcase and take her shopping. On me.”

  “Wow! You’re taking this daddy thing seriously. She has you wrapped around her little finger!”

  “Yes, and I’m loving it. You know I would do the same for Rachel. Besides, she has some catching up to do.”

  “I know, Matt. Twenty-eight years’ worth. You should hear her speak of you. Like you’ve been her real father all her life. I can tell she loves you like I love Dad.”

  “It’s amazing to see how God is working in her. It’s been hardly more than a week, and she is acting like she’s been a follower of Jesus her whole life.”

  “Yes, and I’ve seen she is so willing,” Lisa said. “She told me that before she met you, her life was going exactly nowhere. She understands why you won’t take any of the credit, but she’s glad—ecstatic—that God drew her to you. She gave you a score of one hundred on pulling helpless and hopeless losers out of the ocean, being t
heir eyes and ears, and letting God use you for him to heal them and fill them with a passion to live for him.”

  “Wow, that was quite a mouthful!”

  “She made me say it three times before we got here this morning.”

  Matt laughed. “Does she speak of her mom?”

  “Yes, and she can hardly wait to get back. I told her, ‘Just let her hold you.’ She’s afraid she might be a little prickly. I told her to simply relax. They have a lot of lost time to make up.”

  “I might be like the third wheel if I go back with her. They need some alone time, just the two of them.”

  “If you went back together, the pluses for her would far outweigh the minuses.”

  “I’ve already decided that, but let me tell her.”

  Presently, Maggie came back from the study. “I think it will work, including your pencil notes. For rent you put, ‘Larry input.’ What does that mean?”

  “Larry Williams has an interesting passion, which you’ll find out about when he gets here. Did you bring the box from Paul?”

  “Yes, it’s in Jenny’s stroller.”

  “Emergent has probably millions of dollars’ worth of those manganese nodules. I’d like to make him a deal to harvest all that he can. He’s a businessman, and this would give him a project to fulfill a dream he’s had for many years. I think he could be wildly successful on just my half of the island, but if you agreed, he could work the whole island, and you and I would split any profits.”

  “Oh, Matt! You know, Wayne Smith was kind of right. I feel like I do owe you something special, but not in the way he was trying to imply. When I talk to God about what’s ahead, I get the impression his plans for me don’t involve a lot of money. Yes, he can work my half too. We can talk about the money later, but I want you to have my half. What does this have to do with rent?”

  “If rent were in money, it would come in too slowly to be of any help to Larry. I was thinking of them transporting things there instead of giving us cash. It would cost them very little and would be an enormous help.”