Dark Hunt: A Ryan Weller Thriller

by Evan Graver

  Maria showed her the conference room, a narrow dusty room with mismatched chairs, a scarred wooden table, and a coffee maker. She helped herself to a cup of coffee and sat down to study the file. The last person to charter Everglades Explorer was Archibald Taliaferro, owner of Taliaferro Exports. She made a note of his address before leafing through the rest of the file.

  She saw nothing of interest among the receipts, bills of laden, contracts, and customs forms. The coffee left a bitter taste in her mouth, and she was hungry for lunch. Deciding there was nothing more she could learn there, she returned the folder to Maria and knocked on Spataro’s door.

  After being called inside, she said, “I think I have everything I need, Mr. Spataro. I’m going over to Taliaferro Exports.”

  “Tell him I’ll have a ship ready to sail for Haiti next week if he wants to send anything.”

  The insurance investigator nodded. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Spataro.”

  Before going to Taliaferro’s place, she stopped at a Pollo Tropical and grabbed a chicken Caesar salad. She ate in the car while thinking about where the ship could have disappeared to. She pulled a picture that showed an overhead view of the Explorer from her briefcase and studied it.

  Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s disappearance over the Indian Ocean had spurred many innovations regarding the search for missing ships and planes. As with anything, time and technology had helped to refine search software, and now companies were claiming to be able to identify a ship either in port or on the open ocean by using artificial intelligence and algorithmic analysis. Emily had approached Kyle Ward about purchasing such software. He had taken the idea to the board of directors, and they had declined. Instead of purchasing the software, they would pay for the software developer to run a search if they deemed it necessary.

  She dialed Kyle’s number and reached his secretary, who said he was unavailable, so she left a message for him to call her back.

  Finished with her salad, she drove to Taliaferro Exports. The building was a bland structure on the edge of Miami International Airport, where screaming planes accompanied the sounds of vehicle traffic.

  She waited an hour to see Taliaferro. He was a light-skinned mulatto with a round face and a heavy dose of freckles across his cheeks and nose. He nodded when Emily told him about the theft of the Everglades Explorer.

  “I was sorry to hear about it,” Taliaferro said. “I enjoy working with Lorenzo and Captain Smith.”

  “Mr. Spataro said to tell you that he’ll have a ship going to Miragoâne next week.”

  “That’s wonderful news. Like I said, I contracted with Spataro Shipping to move goods to Haiti. I have relatives there, and I like to do what I can for them.”

  She watched his face when she asked, “Do you know who took the Explorer?”

  He stared right at her. “No. I had nothing to do with it. My business depends on those ships.”

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. Taliaferro.” Emily stood and handed him a business card. “If you think of anything else, please call me.”

  The exporter shook her hand, assured her he would call if he heard anything, and escorted her to the door.

  Back in the hot car, Emily started the engine and let the air conditioning cool the interior. She leaned her head back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and concentrated on her conversations with Spataro and Taliaferro. She’d once taken a class given by a former Secret Service agent on how to read a subject’s face for micro expressions or tells. Most happened in fractions of a second, but a trained individual could spot them easily. She wasn’t as skilled as some, but she’d put her training to use on both Taliaferro and Spataro and was certain neither of them was lying to her.

  What now? she thought. While I’m sifting through data and interviewing possible suspects, the ship is getting farther and farther away, or it’s getting chopped into little bits.

  Her phone rang through the car speakers. She’d connected it via Bluetooth as soon as she’d gotten into the car at the rental agency. She pressed the button on the steering wheel and answered the call with, “Hey, Kyle.”

  “How’s Miami?”

  “Sweltering. Is there any chance you could get the board to approve of Hobbins Group searching for my missing ship?”

  “None whatsoever. As a matter of fact, they want you to end your search so they can pay the claim.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, feeling let down that the board wouldn’t back her up, but she knew they didn’t want to spend unnecessary funds to look for a thirty-year-old ship that had reached the end of its service life five years ago.

  “You know them. It’s all about the bottom line.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks, Kyle.”

  “I’ll see you when you get back. We can go to dinner.”

  She heard his golf club slice through the air. “All right. I’ll call you when I’m back in Tampa.”

  “Love you, babe.”

  The call ended before she could respond. It was just as well because she didn’t want to say those words back to him.

  She booked herself on a flight back to Tampa the following morning. Rush-hour traffic was just beginning as she threaded her way toward a hotel near the airport. She told herself she’d get a bottle of wine and wind down, although the reality was that she’d keep working the case and she knew it. The men who had needlessly died aboard the Explorer deserved more than her abandonment of them, and their families needed closure.

  After returning to the hotel, Emily called Spataro and told him of the board’s decision. With defeat in his voice, he told her he would start hunting for another ship. She promised him she would keep looking for the Explorer in her spare time, which brightened his mood, and he agreed to fund her expeditions if she needed financial help. She thanked him and hung up.

  Next, she spread her charts and files on the bed and desk. She checked the distance between her suspected destination of Bluefields against the time it would take for the pirates to steam there. At max speed, it would take them just under five days, meaning they wouldn’t arrive there until tomorrow. She thought about calling Greg Olsen and having his people keep a lookout for the ship, but she figured they were too busy.

  Her eyes fell on the sketch of the pirate leader. She reached for her phone again and dialed a friend in the Tampa police department. Detective Kaya Takao answered on the third ring.

  “How are you, Emily? We need to get together for a glass of wine.”

  “I know, Kaya. I’ve been meaning to call, but I’ve been out of town. I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”

  “Sure, but you have to promise me that we’ll get together when you get home.”

  “Absolutely,” Emily assured her.

  “Good. Now what can I do for you? Do you have more criminals for me to arrest?”

  “No.” Emily laughed. “I wanted to know if you can run a sketch of a suspect through your facial recognition software?”

  “Yeah, that’s tricky. It’s tough to get a hit, but we can try.”

  “Great. Want me to fax the sketch?”

  “Fax? What century are you in, girl?” Kaya laughed. “Send it by email.”

  “Okay. I’ll need to find a scanner. I’m sure my hotel has one.”

  “I’ll watch for it. I’ve gotta run. I’ll call you if we get a hit.”

  “Thanks, Kaya. I’ll talk to you soon,” Emily said, and she hung up.

  She took the sketch to the hotel’s business center where she scanned it and emailed to herself. Within a few minutes, her phone chimed with the incoming email, and she forwarded it to Kaya. She put the sketch back in her briefcase and walked to the restaurant to get dinner and a glass of wine. With her work done for the night, it was time to relax and enjoy her posh surroundings, despite having no one to share them with.

  As she ordered her second glass of wine, her thoughts centered on the pirate leader and just who he was. If Kaya’s people were any good, they would find out for her, but she had
no clue how big of a lead the sketch would actually be.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tampa International Airport

  Tampa, Florida

  The American Airlines Airbus A319 landed mid-afternoon, and Emily took an Uber to her apartment. She had a cozy one-bed, one-bath unit on the third floor of a gated building with an easterly view of the Courtney Campbell Causeway and a cove of Old Tampa Bay. She tossed her briefcase onto the counter and dropped her travel bag on the floor beside her bed. The laundry could wait until after she’d swam laps.

  She was in the middle of changing into her swimsuit when her cell phone rang.

  “Hey, Kaya. How are you?”

  “I’m good. Can you come down to the station?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “We got a hit on the sketch.”

  “Great.” Emily looked at the clock on her nightstand. “Will thirty minutes be all right?”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  Emily changed into a pair of dark slacks and a white blouse before getting into her four-door Jeep Wrangler. She had to control her speed on account of wanting to race through the streets to see Kaya’s results.

  She downshifted the manual transmission as she approached a red light. When she came to a stop, she raked her hair back into a ponytail and pulled it through the band she kept on her wrist. Traffic seemed to get worse every day, and she hated it a little more every day.

  The light turned green and she shoved the shifter into first, but not before someone several cars back beeped their horn. A small part of her fantasized about shutting off the motor and faking car trouble just to make the person wait, but she mashed the gas and shot away from the light. She was in a hurry herself.

  At the police station, she asked to see Takao. A few minutes later, a short, attractive woman with jet black hair appeared and ushered Emily to a small conference room where two men in black suits were waiting. Both were average-looking, with no remarkable features. She suspected they were federal agents.

  Kaya made the introductions: James Stickney and Charles Gordon were from the FBI. Both men shook Emily’s hand and asked where she had gotten the sketch of her suspect and why she had asked Takao to run it through the system.

  Emily explained about the stolen ship and that the sketch depicted the pirate leader. “Why? What’s this all about?”

  Stickney cleared his throat. “We’re not at liberty to say, Ms. Hunt, but thank you for coming in.”

  “I came all the way down here and you’re not going to tell me who this guy is?” she asked.

  “As I said, Ms. Hunt, we appreciate your cooperation,” Stickney said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the agent said. The two men stood and left the office.

  “What was that all about?” Emily asked her friend.

  “I’m going off duty now. How about we go get that glass of wine?”

  “Okay, but first tell me what’s going on.”

  Kaya led her out of the building to the street and they walked toward the Tampa Riverwalk. “After you sent the sketch, I tried to put it in the system, but I got a call from one of the tech guys who said there were some problems with it. He asked if he could play with it and I told him to go ahead, figuring you’d be okay with it.”

  Emily nodded.

  “Anyway, he used some modeling software and came up with a 3D rendering. Then he ran the model against some faces of famous people.”

  “What?”

  Kaya shrugged. “It’s a common thing. They run the sketch against celebrities to match points like the nose or chin, and when the computer says it’s a match, it builds a set of nodal points. It’s sort of like doing one of those Facebook celebrity who-do-I-look-like? programs. To be fair, it’s not the best way to do it and we don’t use the facial data to make an arrest, only to develop suspects and work the case. The tech thought your guy shared facial features with an actor named Wentworth Miller.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Neither had I, but the tech said he’d been binge-watching a TV show called Prison Break.”

  “I don’t think I’ve heard of that either,” Emily said.

  Kaya smiled. “You’re not alone. Anyway, once the AI seized on those nodals, the search took very little time to come up with a man named Masoud Sadiq, and that’s when the FBI called.”

  The women arrived at the Hillsborough River and went into a restaurant. Both ordered a glass of wine and carried them onto a patio that overlooked the river.

  “Why is the FBI interested in him?” Emily asked.

  “Sadiq is a member of the Syrian Army.”

  Emily sipped her red wine and stared at the river. Why would the Syrian Army steal a ship in Haiti?

  “Apparently,” Kaya continued, “he’s been heavily involved in the fighting in Iraq and Syria. That’s all I could get out of them, and I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

  “Was he ISIS?” she asked.

  Kaya took a sip of wine. “That would be my guess.”

  Emily took out her phone and searched for the man’s name. There were no references to Sadiq, which didn’t surprise her. If he were a member of a terrorist organization, he wouldn’t want to broadcast his face or location to the world. She then searched for Wentworth Miller and thought he resembled the sketch, but she would have never put the two together on her own.

  The two women made small talk until their glasses were empty, then walked back to the police station. After a quick hug and agreeing to get together again soon, Emily drove to her office. She needed to file a report on Spataro’s ship and get the claim prepared so he could purchase another one.

  It was late by the time she wrapped up her paperwork and went back to her apartment, where she took a long swim in the complex’s pool and did laundry. Emily was settling on the sofa with her last glass of wine for the evening when her phone rang.

  “Ms. Hunt, this is Lorenzo Spataro.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “After we first spoke, I offered a reward for anyone who spotted my missing ship. There’s a man in Bluefields, Nicaragua, who claims that it just turned up at the breaking yard.”

  Emily couldn’t believe that a member of the Syrian Army would suddenly turn to stealing ships and selling them for scrap—if that was even who had stolen the vessel. The guy in the sketch could be someone completely different from Sadiq, whom they only suspected because the celebrity facial features might have skewed the results. Still, she couldn’t discount a good lead. “Are you sure?”

  “He’s positive. You need to get down there now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Everglades Explorer

  Puerto Cortés, Honduras

  The Everglades Explorer entered Puerto Cortés, Honduras, the largest shipping port in Central America, five days after fleeing Haiti. They’d encountered rough seas during the passage, but it had been otherwise uneventful, and Sadiq was thankful for it. After securing the ship to their assigned berthing, he went ashore and met with his contact who had the cargo manifests and transfer paperwork for a bulk load of ammonium nitrate in one-thousand-kilo bags and drums of diesel fuel, arranged by General Golnar and paid for through shell corporations.

  The stevedores craned the bags into the Explorer’s Number One and Three Holds and loaded the diesel into the Number Two Hold. In addition to the cargo, the port workers loaded a single shipping container onto the deck, across the middle hold after they’d put the hatch cover in place.

  Sadiq stood by the railing, checking his clipboard to ensure all was aboard, and once again cast his gaze to the dock for what seemed like the thousandth time. He looked up and down the long concrete quay, covering most of the southern edge of the peninsula that sheltered the port. At the western end were oil and gas terminals; closer to him were storage and grain bins. To the south, beside the causeway that crossed the Alvarado Lagoon, a sea of multicolored containers awaited shipment. He wondered if anyone thought hi
s load was suspicious or if they even cared. He hoped not, yet he continued to scan the docks for anyone who seemed overly interested in him or his ship.

  Mounted on the warehouses and on poles all along the waterfront were a multitude of security cameras. Sadiq knew that after his mission was over, the FBI would backtrack his movements and look at the endless hours of footage from the cameras. He stared directly into the camera closest to him and smiled. He wanted the FBI to know exactly who was responsible for the attack on their country. They were excellent at finding the evidence after an attack, but not at preventing them. Soon the world would bear witness to his plans, and when the Prophet Mohammed welcomed him into Paradise, it would be as a hero.

  Once the crewmen had chained the cargo container to the deck, the ship needed to fill their bunkers to capacity with diesel and to replenish their freshwater tanks. A tug came alongside the Explorer and moved it to the fueling station. Sadiq knew this was a necessary step, but he was ready to get underway. They had a berthing scheduled at Port Everglades, just south of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

  The longer they were here, the easier it would be for someone to find them, if anyone was looking for the ship. They had chosen this freighter because it was long past its service life but still in good shape. The engine ran smoothly, and her smaller size made her more maneuverable. They’d also chosen one of the most lawless places in the world to swipe her from. He doubted anyone cared about the mixture of Haitians and Hondurans he’d dispatched and dropped over the rails. And he doubted that anyone would miss this old rust bucket. Every year, at least two dozen ships disappeared around the globe. The Explorer would be just one more ship in a string of statistics.

  He turned his attention to the container. It was in serious need of a paint job and covered in rust, which was part of the disguise. Inside were four Russian-built 3M-14T Kalibr cruise missiles in a self-contained launch system designed specifically to fit into a forty-foot-long shipping container. It was better known as the Club-K container missile system. The Russians had developed these weapons to allow for strategic strikes anywhere a semi-truck, railcar, or ship could carry the container. These Kalibrs carried a one-thousand-pound conventional warhead and had a maximum speed of six-hundred-miles-per-hour with a range of over one thousand miles. They were perfect for what Sadiq had planned.