Walking on the balls of his feet, exactly as he’d watched the Russian doing it downstairs in the lobby, Graham approached the Jacuzzi and turned off the jets. He touched two fingers to the side of Slavin’s neck, the water very warm, but, as he expected, there was no pulse. Nonetheless for a man in his profession it paid to be methodical. His life often depended on the care he took with his actions.
He had the entire evening to make his preparations, but he wanted to be finished in time to make a little test of his new persona by ordering room service. Captain Slavin had checked in this early afternoon, interacting with a desk clerk and a bellman, and later this evening he would interact with a room service waiter.
Continuity. A Russian checked in, a Russian ordered dinner, and a Russian checked out. The same Russian.
He took his pistol and gloves back into the bedroom where he stripped off all of his clothing, laying his things on the bed next to the Russian’s leather satchel and garment bag. He was nearly two inches shorter than Slavin, but with the same general build. It had taken him two months to find a ship captain whom he could impersonate. And another two months studying the man’s mannerisms and habits before he was certain he could fool everyone, except someone who’d sailed with the real Slavin before. And finally, the necessary strings had been pulled with GAC to have Slavin assigned to the right ship.
That had been the easy part for bin Laden. GAC, which was responsible for carrying all of Venezuela’s oil around the world, maintained its international headquarters in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and brothers in Dar al Islam did each other favors, no questions asked. It was the symmetry of the thing that Graham most admired.
Back in the bathroom, Graham grabbed hold of the Russian’s elbows and heaved him up over the side and onto the tiled floor like a landed fish. It was difficult because the body was slippery, and out of the water it was more than eighty kilos of deadweight. He rolled the corpse over and dried it with a bath towel, making certain that it was leaking no fluids that could stain the carpeting downstairs in the sitting room.
He rolled it over again on its back, and grasping it under the armpits, dragged it out into the bedroom and then down the curving staircase, where he left it across from the dining table.
Slavin’s right eye had rolled up into its socket, only the bloodshot white showing, while his other eye had turned inward, making it appear as if he was staring at the tip of his nose. No one looked dignified in death, at least not the ones Graham had assassinated, and he idly wondered how he would appear to his killer when the time came.
He’d checked into the hotel yesterday afternoon with two ripstop nylon sports bags. Last night he’d smuggled an aluminum footlocker into the hotel and up to his room, making absolutely certain that no one had seen him. He’d brought all three items with him to Slavin’s room, taking the chance that someone might see him, in which case he would have had to kill them. But his luck had held. He’d used a universal key card to open the door, and again luck was with him. The Russian had not latched the security chain, nor had he been right there in the sitting room.
“You will need to depend upon a certain amount of Allah’s good fortune,” Osama bin Laden had told him eleven months ago in Karachi when they’d first hatched the canal mission.
Graham had met with bin Laden and four of the man’s top advisers in the M. A. Jinnah building in the heart of downtown to work out the details. Afterwards, bin Laden had taken him aside for a private talk.
“They don’t understand,” bin Laden said. “Luck has played a very important role in what we’ve accomplished, what we will do together.”
“Luck is what we make of it,” Graham had said. As a submarine commander in the British navy he’d had a career blessed with plenty of luck because he’d been the best. But in his personal life the opposite had been true, right up to the time his wife had died of cancer while he was out on a ninety-day patrol beyond recall.
After that he’d had no use for luck. It was as if he were a cat that had used up eight of its lives, and was recklessly speeding toward its own final destruction. He no longer cared.
“And you’ve done well at it these last two and a half years, but you are not expendable,” bin Laden had replied seriously. “Your life is mine. Do not forget it.”
Graham smiled bitterly. His life was his own. Bin Laden and al-Quaida only provided him the means to hit back at the kinds of bastards who’d allowed Jillian to die alone and in pain.
He brought the aluminum footlocker across to the Russian’s body and opened the combination lock. The lid came up stiffly because of its thick rubber hermetic seals. It wouldn’t do for any odors to be released at the wrong time. Even a corpse-sniffing dog would smell nothing.
Graham hoisted Slavin’s body with great effort and stuffed it facedown inside the footlocker. Only its head and torso fit. Its arms and legs from the knees down stuck out. Jamming a foot against the body’s back, Graham pulled one of the arms backwards until the shoulder joint broke free of its ligaments with an audible pop, and suddenly it was loose and folded neatly inside the trunk over Slavin’s neck. He did the same with the other arm. The Russian’s hip joints were much stronger than his shoulders, and it took every bit of Graham’s strength to dislocate them in such a fashion that they could be folded over the body, and the lid closed and locked.
When he was finished, he dragged the heavy footlocker across the room next to the entry hall table. In the morning he would check the case with the bellman for storage until he was scheduled to return in three weeks. It was his master’s library, which he wouldn’t need on this trip. Reference books, for the most part, all of them dreadfully heavy. He didn’t think anyone would ask where it came from. He was a VIP.
He carefully examined the beige carpeting where he’d laid the body, and the carpeting up the stairs into the bedroom, for any signs of blood or other stains. But there was nothing.
He took the smaller of his two nylon bags into one of the twin bathrooms, where he laid out hair clippers, dark hair dye, soft brown contacts, and a makeup kit with the ingredients to thicken and darken his eyebrows, soften the lines in his face, and tone down his skin color several shades.
First he cut his hair so that it was the same length as the Russian’s, and then worked in the hair dye, making sure that he didn’t miss a spot. Slavin was forty-six, but he had no gray hair. Possibly he dyed it, but whatever the case, it made Graham’s transformation all the easier if he didn’t have to add gray to his coloring job.
The instructions on the hair-coloring kit required a forty-five-minute wait until the dye could be rinsed out and a conditioner applied. He used the time to flush the hair clippings down the toilet and make sure that the bathroom was devoid of any trace of what he’d done so far. Then he padded on bare feet downstairs where he turned on some music, poured a glass of Dom Pérignon—which was quite good, he thought—and went back upstairs where he stared out the windows at the lake until it was time.
When his hair was finished, he worked on his eyebrows and skin tone, put the contacts in his eyes, and got dressed in Slavin’s clothes. He’d brought lift shoes with him, which he slipped into, giving him an extra two inches to match the Russian’s height.
He found Slavin’s passport, which he took into the bathroom where he compared his appearance in the mirror with that of the photo. No customs officer in the world would question his identity.
Finally, he transferred his two nylon bags and their contents into Slavin’s luggage; it was a tight fit, but not impossible.
Downstairs, he poured another glass of champagne and then called room service. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and maybe some blinis and caviar with iced vodka would make a nice start.
“Poshol nakhuy.” He was hungry.
LAGO DE MARACAIBO
Lake Maracaibo, which stretched nearly two hundred kilometers from the small farming town of San Antonio, Zulia, in the south to the large city of Maracaibo in the north, was studded with hundr
eds of oil derricks and loading platforms that stretched in many places across the entire one-hundred-kilometer width. Sixty percent of Venezuela’s oil and natural gas was pumped from beneath the lake. Ships ranging in size from small crude carriers to the 275-meter Panamax tankers that were the largest ships able to transit the Panama Canal, and even some Very Large Crude Carriers capable of loading four times as much oil, arrived and departed the loading platforms and docks 24/7.
Rupert Graham, dressed in khaki trousers, a yellow Izod polo shirt, and a dark blue windbreaker with MASTER, APURTO DEVLÁN sewn over the left breast, followed a young bellman across the roof to the helipad where a Bell 230, its rotors slowly turning, was waiting to take him out to his ship. The morning was crisp and sunny, with a light breeze out of the east keeping the heavy gas and oil stench offshore.
Last night and this morning had gone smoothly, though the room service waiter had shot him an odd look when he’d given the man a generous cash tip. But he’d not been questioned about his heavy aluminum footlocker by the bellman, who’d come to collect it for storage earlier, or that large tip.
The real test, of course, would come once he stepped aboard the Apurto Devlán and began to interact with the crew.
The young, handsome bellman stuffed the two bags into the chopper’s storage compartment aft of the open cabin door. Graham handed him a twenty-dollar bill and climbed into the helicopter.
“Thank you, sir,” the bellman said, “but it is not necessary.”
“Da,” Graham replied gutturally. “It’s only money.”
The bellman gave him a very odd look, but Graham pulled the door closed, gave the helicopter pilot the thumbs-up, and put on his seat belt. Moments later the seven-passenger chopper lifted off and headed to the east, out over the lake.
The shipping lanes were busy this morning. Graham counted at least twelve tankers headed north toward the narrows out to the Golfo de Venezuela, and at least as many still docked at their loading platforms strung out as far as the eye could see. This place represented Venezuela’s lifeblood, just as the Panama Canal represented the lifeblood of nearly half the planet.
He was the only passenger aboard the helicopter, and he closed his eyes for a moment to compose himself. He’d been tempted to get roaring drunk last night, like he’d done in the old days before he’d been kicked out of the Royal Navy. But he’d finished the bottle of Dom Pérignon and had left it at that. He was going to need his wits about him for the next few days, all of his wits.
But when it was over he would get drunk and stay drunk until the next mission. It was the only way he could live with his memories. If only she hadn’t died, if only she’d been strong enough for him.
THREE
GUANTANAMO BAY
Nine pale green, ghostly figures emerged from the drainage pipe at tower two east, hesitated for a moment as if they were expecting an ambush, and then headed south. They kept to the brush above and parallel to the no-man’s zone. Four of them were armed with what looked like Heckler & Koch carbines that the tower-mounted low-lux closed-circuit cameras picked up in reasonably good detail.
Lieutenant Commander T. Thomas Weiss looked up from the surreal images on his computer monitor and shook his head. No one in Ops had picked up on the break. There would be some serious shit coming down from above, of course, but it would be nothing he couldn’t take care of.
The CO, Brigadier General Lazlo Maddox, had already jumped his ass this morning, wanting to know, “What the hell in Christ was going on with security?” And he was just the first. The director of the Office of Naval Intelligence was sending down a hit squad to find out how Weiss had managed to screw the pooch so badly.
He turned back to his computer as Ibenez and Talarico emerged from the drainage ditch, and his jaw tightened.
“The CIA has no business here,” he’d told them ten days ago. “We’ve got the press snooping around, and if that isn’t enough of a headache, Amnesty International has inspected us three times in the past five weeks. Now you.”
“You’re naval intel, Commander, which means we’re supposed to work together,” Ibenez had said sweetly. “And as long as you can refrain from the obvious shit like they pulled at Abu Ghraib, and keep a lid on your people if something does go down, we’ll all be okay.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Weiss had shot back, his anger spiking. His boss had sent the woman’s jacket down last week, to give him a heads up, and it had chapped his ass that not even the Pentagon could stop the CIA from sending people to stick their noses into navy business. Not only that, they’d sent a woman who thought she was hot shit.
At thirty-two, Weiss was still in superb physical condition; he worked out nearly every day not only to keep the same edge he’d maintained lettering in football three years at Annapolis, but to keep his same physique that he knew women found attractive. He was six-two, at two hundred pounds; his face was craggy, what an old girlfriend had once said made him look stalwart. Along with snow-white hair and wide, coal-black eyes, he cut a dignified figure. It was an image he’d carefully cultivated since high school when he first realized that he was good-looking.
Weiss turned back to the digital images on his computer monitor, these now from the rescue helicopter’s nose camera, as the mujahideen incursion team opened fire on the prisoners they’d broken out from Echo.
As the helicopter came around for another pass, the first of the mujahideen committed suicide in a bright flash. “At least one kilo of plastic,” the chopper pilot reported. “I saw the same thing in Iraq.”
Weiss could not tear his eyes away from the screen.
In addition to the five prisoners and four intruders, three MPs were down, and the bitch’s partner had taken a round in the head. This was truly a cluster fuck, and a lot of heads were going to roll.
It was the navy way.
And so was covering your own ass. He was damned if he was going to take any heat because the CIA had come down here and fucked up.
Gloria Ibenez lay propped up in bed at the hospital while she talked via encrypted satellite phone to her boss, Otto Rencke, at Langley. He was in charge of Special Projects under the DDO. She’d been working for him nearly three years, and every minute of that time had been nothing short of amazing. And at times like these she felt close to him, as if he were her uncle, or a very longtime dear friend. She had a lot of respect for him.
“It wasn’t your fault, ya know,” Rencke said. “You were doing your job. Anyway, it could have been you taking the bullet. Would you have liked that better?”
Rencke was the most brilliant man she’d ever met. He was also the strangest, and at times, the sweetest person. He’d designed the CIA’s entire computer system from the ground up, but he seldom dressed in anything fancier than old blue jeans, torn and dirty sweatshirts, and battered sneakers that never seemed to be tied. Most of the time he came across as an aloof genius, his head in the clouds, his brain processing some esoteric mathematical equations, when suddenly he would come out of his daze, hop back and forth from one foot to the other with a big grin on his face, and tell you what a fine person you were.
“I was in charge, and I went against a direct order not to follow the prisoners outside the fence,” Gloria said. Her drug-induced dreams from the painkillers she’d been given last night had been like watching a sci-fi movie. She was inside Bob’s head when the bullet exploded in his brain. She’d seen a billion stars, but there’d been no pain. She hoped there had been none for Bob, but she couldn’t be sure and it was driving her nuts.
“Adkins got a call from General Maddox complaining about you,” Rencke said. Adkins was Director of Central Intelligence. “You must have struck a nerve.”
Gloria’s husband Roman Ibenez had been a good man, with a sweet face and a disposition to match. He’d fancied himself an opera singer and he did have a wonderful voice. But he was also a fine intelligence officer, and they’d made a great pair working together in Havana. Until the evening Cuban In
telligence Service operatives had stormed their apartment, and dragged him away. Gloria had gone around the corner to get a bottle of wine for their late supper and she’d stepped back into the shadows as Roman was being dragged down the stairs. She’d been close enough to see the look of resignation on his face. He was as good as dead; he’d known it and so had Gloria.
She’d been as helpless then as she had been last night, unable to prevent the death of someone she cared deeply for. And she didn’t know how many more times she could go down this path.
“Apparently I did,” she told Rencke. “But the prison break was a setup by someone inside who had the cooperation of the Cubans.” She’d already come to that conclusion last night, and yet she had led Bob under the fence. For what? Her ego?
“Okay, Gloria, what do you want to do about it? Stay down there and create some waves? See what shakes out?”
Gloria’s jaw tightened. “I have a few ideas.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but Adkins is getting pressure to pull you out of there ASAP,” Rencke said. “Might be for the best if you came home to file your field report. If you’re right, it could give the bad guys a false sense of security after you’ve left. They might screw up, ya know.”
“You have a point.”
“But, how’re you doing?” Rencke asked. “You were wounded.”
“I took one in my hip, but it didn’t break the bone,” Gloria told him. “The doc says I’m going to be sore as hell for a couple of weeks and I’ll probably have a limp for a few months, but I’ll live.” She closed her eyes, and she could see Bob’s slack death mask when she held him in her arms in the chopper. “I was lucky.”
“Yeah,” Rencke said quietly. “When do you get out?”
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