by Ward Larsen
Davis doubted this last point, but he said nothing.
“Let me show you the video,” Stevenson offered.
Davis watched a two-minute marketing clip on Stevenson’s desktop computer. It was impressive. After that he spent twenty minutes asking logical questions, covering things like reliability and performance. Then he made his last request.
“This all sounds good. I think my principals might be interested. Do you by any chance have an extra copy of the technical manuals—in particular the modification specs? Our engineering staff would need to look those over.”
Davis felt like a modern-day Medusa as the man looking at him turned to stone. “What company did you say you were with?” Stevenson asked.
“I didn’t say.”
The mood in the room descended. Stevenson stood, which was a protest of sorts, but the effect probably wasn’t what he was after. Davis towered over most men, and in this particular case his physique, suited perfectly for rugby, only accentuated the disparity.
Stevenson said, “I don’t know who you are, maybe a lawyer or an insurance goon, but I think you should leave right now.”
“I’ll say it again,” Davis replied, as if not hearing Stevenson, “I’d really like to see the tech manuals for your modified MD-10.”
“Go to hell!”
Davis backed away one step, but he didn’t turn toward the door. During the two minutes Stevenson had been yakking on the phone, he’d spotted what he was after. Second bookcase on the right, third shelf: MD-10 VLAT Aircraft Reference Manual, MD-10 VLAT Maintenance Procedures Manual. Davis pulled them from the shelf, two manuals, each fully four inches thick.
Ray Stevenson, incandescent with rage, responded by opening a drawer on his desk. Davis knew what would be inside. It was Stevenson’s last mistake of the day.
Ten minutes later Davis was steering his Avis rental past the timber-railed airfield entrance, back to the main road with its opposing walls of hardwood forest. The shoulders were curbed with mountains of plowed snow, and as he backtracked his way to Portland International, Davis drove cautiously. The two thick manuals on the passenger seat would make for heavy reading later, particularly given the all-night nature of his flight. But Davis had what he’d come for.
By the time he got to D.C., eight hours from now, he would know exactly what they were up against.
* * *
Jack Kelly found Sorensen in the employee cafeteria.
“We’ve found another one,” he said.
She didn’t have to ask—he was referring to their Group of Seven. “Is this one alive, at least?” She’d meant it as a joke, but a solemn look came over Kelly’s face. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Wangen, Switzerland, another gunfight. There was a second casualty as well, a woman who’s been identified as the executive assistant to the banker who was killed two days ago in Zurich—the Swiss police had been looking for her.”
Sorensen leaned back and put a hand to her forehead, the way people did when they needed an aspirin.
“The Swiss are all over this,” said Kelly. “The woman was killed by a sniper after getting out of a car. The driver got away by running down the shooter with the car and then executing him at close range.”
“And this driver?” she asked tentatively.
Kelly nodded. “A witness saw him ditching the car, and her description matched perfectly. It’s our man from Malta.”
She blew out a long breath. “That’s three down. But at least he can’t take credit for the death of the two pilots in Brazil.”
Kelly gave her a plaintive look.
She said what he was thinking. “Yeah, I know. The good news is … there’s only two more names left on the list.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
The quickest route from Frankfurt to Cyprus involved British Airways. Unfortunately for Slaton, the Sunday afternoon schedule forced him to first travel westbound to be subjected, for twelve hours, to the debatable charms of London’s Heathrow Airport before making his connecting flight. He arrived at Larnaca International Airport at three minutes before noon on Monday.
Slaton was dressed like the other tourists escaping an unusually harsh European winter—khaki slacks, loose cotton shirt, wraparound sunglasses—and he breezed through immigration before navigating the steel-and-glass arches of the new Larnaca terminal. He hired a cab into town, and the driver had little to say to yet another boorish visitor from the West who would gawk out the window and tip poorly. This was the standing relationship between Cypriots and Europeans, established some eight hundred years earlier when Richard the Lionhearted, cast into a fit of rage when a ship carrying his future bride had not been welcomed ashore, summarily sacked the island. Soon after, and with his point well made, Richard sold the island to the Knights Templar for a token sum of gold Byzantines.
Slaton kept the tradition alive, adding a lamentable tip to his fare when he was dropped along the palm-lined beaches of Foinikoudes. The beach was as ever, a copper-tan playground at the crest of high season, the attendant cafés and hotels riotously busy. Slaton moved cautiously amid the crowds, even though he was increasingly confident the killers of Zurich were no longer tracking him. And if the scope and intent of their operation remained a mystery, he was reasonably sure of one thing—Ben-Meir had gone to Beirut seeking an address in the northern suburbs. Seeking a man named Moses.
He turned toward the city, and two streets removed from the beach he found a secondhand clothing store where he bought what he needed and a canvas bag to carry it in, and took a smile from an old woman behind the cash drawer who didn’t care what he was buying or why he was buying it when a twenty-euro note slid across the counter. From the central district he walked east to the harbor’s main pier where grand yachts, invariably flying the flags of nations with favorable tax laws, lay moored in wait for their well-heeled owners, professional crews polishing rails and sanding teak. A northerly turn at the water’s edge brought a more humble nautical district, row after row of locally owned pleasure boats ready for a day’s sail on the Eastern Mediterranean. He heard halyards tapping masts, and the occasional deep-throated rumble of a diesel springing to life. Beyond these tidy docks, past the protective breakwater, Slaton reached his end.
The quay here was far different. Gone were the thick precast seawalls, replaced by piles of concrete riprap that had been bulldozed to the shoreline. Foot-long steel cleats were absent, as were the broad finger piers planked in pressure-treated timber. In their place were makeshift wooden wharves that might have been assembled by a storm, a collision of wooden pallets and planks and old mooring lines. Some were kept afloat by oil drums, others strapped to derelict boat hulls, all of it joined together with a seeming aversion to right angles.
The vessels berthed here—there had to be fifty—were equally rough-hewn, their decks stained with rust and seabird droppings, and when they rolled on the swells their undersides evidenced a hidden battle beneath, barnacles fighting algae for parasitic dominance. Some of the craft were powered by sail, but most had some manner of diesel propulsion, and the smell of fuel oil hung heavy on the air. The few seamen Slaton saw reflected the fleet, not professionals in their prime suited in crisp white liveries, but leathered old men and young boys whose uniforms were shredded T-shirts and worn sandals, and who moved with a sun-infused languor. It was all just as he remembered.
He found the boat he wanted moored close to shore. Kosmos was forty feet of warped wood and chipped paint, a stout and wide-beamed bitch whose diesel exhaust stack was black with soot and whose worn rigging sagged in the warm afternoon air. Old, tired, and fitted for longline fishing—these days a second cousin to far more efficient purse seines—she was a model to economic ruin. Here, however, traditions were not taken lightly, and the Nicosian people, like few others, knew how to endure.
On her main deck a young man, bronze skin and clear eyes, was tending to a winch. The kid pinned a wary gaze on the fair-haired man who drew to a stop at the warped plank that
was Kosmos’ gangway. Only two types of foreigners came onto these docks, and Slaton stood with a firmness that proved he was not a tourist gone adrift. Knowing better than to step aboard, he called across the divide, “I’m looking for Demitriou.” Slaton said it in English—Greek was more widely used, but if there was any vestige of cranky King Richard’s invasion it was his language.
The breeze shifted, mixing the odor of drying fish with the oily scent of bilge water. The young man stared a little longer, then nodded down the pier. Slaton looked and saw the man he wanted.
He had last seen George Demitriou eight years ago, during a time when Mossad was engaged in one of its routine skirmishes with Hezbollah. The scheme that day had been the maritime insertion of a team from the northwest sea, a direction in which the watchful eyes of Hezbollah were rarely turned, and from there the destruction of an unusually large arms cache. To make their approach, Mossad needed good local knowledge, and they’d hired Demitriou based on his reputation, his lack of scruples, and because the longline tuna catch was in the middle of a ten-year free fall. The raid was a qualified success, and Slaton had paid the man in full and not seen him since.
Demitriou was a big man with a heavy gut and thick forearms, and coarse black hair carpeted every bit of exposed flesh. His gait up the dock was less a stride than a roll, a wheeling slab of momentum. Slaton remembered the man’s gruff demeanor, and also his opaque eyes, scored by decades of sun and salt—eyes that recognized him eight years later from a hundred paces. Nearing the boat Demitriou tipped his head sharply to one side, and the young man aboard Kosmos stepped ashore and disappeared into a clapboard shack at the top of the pier that served, as Slaton recalled, as the community lavatory, bar, clinic, and administration building.
“It’s been a long time,” Demitriou growled, stopping a few steps away. Neither man bothered with the façade of a handshake. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I’m sure you can guess.”
“Mossad has lost its nautical charts again?”
Slaton did not hesitate to build on Demitriou’s mistaken assumption. “We still have them. But charts in these waters can be notoriously inaccurate. It’s almost as if governments intentionally leave things off the surveys.”
“You don’t have to tell me. My brother lost his first boat to a damned cable trap you people put three hundred yards off the shore of Nahariya.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t have been so close.”
The big Nicosian chucked brusquely. “You know how it is. One must go where the big fish are.”
Demitriou had once made a living as a fisherman, Slaton knew. He was also the kind of man whose leanings to less reputable sidelines was not wholly tied to the decline of longlining for tuna. Slaton had met many such operators in his years of clandestine work. He’d seen truck drivers and helicopter drivers, police captains and bell captains. There was no one common thread, but a fabric of the usual inspirations—adventure, vengeance, sex, religion. George Demitriou, brigand and smuggler, operated on the most common principle.
“Five thousand euros up front, five on the back end.”
“To go where?” asked a cautious Demitriou.
“All the way north, to Aarida.”
Demitriou scowled. “How many?”
“Only me. An early morning arrival.”
“How close?”
“Close enough to swim.”
“You are crazy! That is practically the Syrian border. The Lebanese are as nervous about the north these days as they are the south. They have new patrol boats, faster and with better radar. They’ll have no trouble running down my old bathtub. As for the Syrians—only God knows what runs in those waters these days!”
Slaton waited. Unlike the bar in Valletta, there would be no price negotiation. He had made a generous offer for a night’s work.
The Nicosian wavered. “You have it now?”
Slaton pulled a thick envelope from his pocket. The Cypriot reached out his hand, but Slaton left it empty. “There’s one condition.”
The smuggler’s gaze narrowed.
“We leave now.”
“What? Tonight?”
“Not tonight. Now, this minute.”
“But my mate has gone home. And I don’t have enough fuel to—”
Slaton cut him off by stepping onto a boat he had first boarded years ago. He went to the wheelhouse, and turned on the battery. The fuel quantity gauges sprang to life, indicating three-quarters full.
True to his nature, Demitriou only laughed, displaying a shockingly rotted set of yellow teeth. “The gauges, they are working again? Imagine that!”
Slaton smiled. The man was as treacherous as the waters he plowed, but it was an open, even expected duplicity, cementing all his relationships in mutual suspicion. Slaton found it oddly comforting. He set the cash on the helm. “I’ll get the docking lines.”
Demitriou hesitated, then said, “All right, we will go now. But I cannot keep the money on board. If the patrols board me in Lebanese waters I can talk my way to freedom. But if they find that,” he gestured to the stack of bills, “I will never see it again. You can’t expect me to go to such trouble for nothing.”
It was Slaton’s turn to pause. He had pushed the man hard, and the Nicosian made a valid point. “All right. Find a safe place for it.” He tossed the envelope across to the dock and the fisherman caught it surely. Slaton watched carefully as Demitriou walked to the shack at the head of the pier. He stayed inside precisely eighty seconds. Longer than it would have taken to simply lock the money in a safe. Not long enough to have counted it.
Fifteen minutes later Kosmos was clearing the breakwater, and the playground of Larnaca faded as the boat’s crooked pulpit settled to an easterly course. One hundred miles ahead lay one of the most embattled regions on earth, and home to Israel’s most vitriolic enemies. Skirmishes between the countries dated to the day of Israeli independence, in 1948, and had continued on various levels ever since. In recent years, the government to the north had begun avoiding direct conflict, preferring the role of serial facilitator: harboring, funding, and encouraging every brand of anti-Semite known to exist. For a former Mossad assassin, Lebanon was the viper’s pit itself.
To complicate matters further, Slaton knew that by appearance or speech he could never pass as Lebanese. He was operating with no external help, no supporting assault team or emergency extraction plan. He had but one advantage: motivation. He was fighting for the safety of his family.
So with Demitriou at the wheel and the compass steady, Slaton went below to prepare.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Frank “Jammer” Davis was not an official employee of the CIA. For that reason, he was met at a secondary security station by Anna Sorensen.
“Hello, Jammer.”
Davis stopped two steps away from Sorensen, a judicious distance he supposed. It only made him realize how unprepared he was. He’d thought she was off his emotional books, but as she stood in front of him now, blond and blue-eyed against the sterile hallway, Sorensen took his breath away. She looked better than ever, perhaps a few new pounds, but in a good, curving way, and her eyes were as ever: made for drowning. They stood parted in an awkward moment, and he wondered what thoughts she was having.
To hell with it, he decided. Davis reached out and put a hand to her cheek. It was soft and warm, and she leaned into it.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
Sorensen smiled, and said, “You too.”
They might have said more, might even have embraced, but with two uniformed guards hovering, she handed over a visitor’s pass on a lanyard. Davis hung it on his neck, then walked through a scanner while one of the security men inspected the heavy binders he was carrying.
“You look great,” he said after running the gauntlet.
“And you don’t look tired,” she mused. “You’ve been all over the hemisphere in the last two days—you should be exhausted.”
He shrugged. “In Arctic s
urvival training I built an ice cave and slept like a baby. So a Delta red-eye in business class, with a lie-flat seat? No problem.”
“Business class?”
“It’ll all be in the expense report.”
Sorensen shook her head. “You’ll never change, will you?”
“Not likely. Is that a bad thing?”
“No—I suppose that’s what I like about you, Jammer. Utter predictability.”
He smiled broadly as she led them down the hallway.
“The director is waiting for us.”
“What’s he like?”
“How should I know—I’m only a minion.” She made a point of looking him up and down. “Is that your best suit?”
“It’s my only suit. I stopped at Goodwill on my way from the airport.”
Sorensen looked to see if he was serious. The jacket’s fit told her he was. “I got a call from a sheriff’s office in Oregon last night.” The discomfort in her voice was clear.
“Really?”
“They were running an investigation—some poor deputy went through a half-dozen agencies before he reached me, and by then he was pretty steamed. Apparently somebody roughed up the owner of a flight operation out in Oregon. A janitor found the guy out behind a hangar—he was hog-tied and left in the passenger cabin of a mothballed helicopter.”
“What kind of lunatic would do something like that?”
“The poor guy almost froze to death. He gave a description of his assailant, which narrowed things down pretty well. Lone male, six foot eight, built like a truck. It seems the guy had been asking about modifications to a large aircraft. The sheriff found a security video, and he was able to identify the license plate of a rental car. Eventually they tracked it to us.”
“I thought the CIA was supposed to be good at keeping secrets.”
“We’re a government agency, so we cooperate with other government agencies. Honestly, Jammer … concealment is not one of your strengths.”
“You mean I’d never get a full-time job here?”
“Unlikely.”