Joshua's Hammer

by David Hagberg

  “I’ll put him in the dry storage locker in the galley,” Schumatz said. “He won’t be bothering anyone. I’ll get his gun.”

  “Just get him out of here, I’ll take care of the gun,” Panagiotopolous said.

  “Do you want me to send Rudi up?” Rudi Gunn was the second officer.

  “He’s scheduled to come on at midnight. I’ll stay until then,” Panagiotopolous said. He looked at Green. “See if you can get anything out of him, Lazlo. Something is going on around here that I can’t quite put my finger on.”

  CIA Headquarters

  “I don’t think so, Liz,” McGarvey said.

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but I’m not leaving until you see my point,” his daughter said. It was seven and they were alone in his office. He’d known that she was bringing trouble by the took in her eyes and the set of her shoulders. Girding herself for a battle.

  Yet what she wanted to do went way beyond the pale of her duties as a CIA case officer, even in this instance in which she had so much personally at stake. Elizabeth had almost lost her life on the golf course. It was just luck that McGarvey had gotten there in time to spot the van heading out onto the fairway and recognize it for what it was. Just blind luck that he was there to break up what would have been a good hit. Both shooters had been heavily armed and both were well motivated. Since Elizabeth had been cut off from her weapon, she’d done the only thing left open to her, and that was to run. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do. The terrorists had herded her and her mother into a killing ground and would have finished the job if Liz hadn’t gotten to her father’s gun.

  Now she wanted to step up to the plate again; deliberately put herself into harm’s way. He was proud of her and angry with her at the same time. And vexed too. Goddammit, nothing was ever simple. But she had a point and he knew it.

  “I’m going to your mother’s,” he told her. “I need something to eat and a few hours’ sleep. You can ride down with me to my car.”

  “Good, maybe Dick can talk to you-”

  “This has nothing to do with my driver,” McGarvey said. “You’re an intelligence officer, not a Secret Service bodyguard.”

  “But I know her, Dad,” Elizabeth said.

  McGarvey stopped. He tried to work out where she could possibly have met the President’s daughter. It was impossible, he told himself. They came from two different worlds.

  “What are you talking about, Liz?” he asked her.

  “I’ve been doing my homework on her and Sarah bin Laden,” she replied. She looked away for a moment and shook her head. “We’re all cut out of the same cloth, you know.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does! We’re about the same age, our fathers are, for better or worse, important men and we all have handicaps. Sarah couldn’t have any kind of a normal life because there was a price on her father’s head and they were stuck in the mountains. Deborah has Down syndrome. And I—” Her lower lip quivered.

  “And you what, Liz?”

  She looked up into his face, searching, as if she was looking for an answer. “I want to be just like you, Dad. I want to follow in your footsteps, but I can’t. I can’t.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, sweetheart.”

  “But I wanted it all my life,” she said. “And now I’m falling in love with Todd, and he wants me to get out of the Company. My mother and father want me to quit. Somebody is trying to kill me. And I’m scared.” She was appealing to her father for help that he could not give her. “But Sarah was scared too, and so would the President’s daughter be if she knew what was going on. It’s why I have to be with her until we stop the bastard.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to, Dad. It’s what we do for a living.”

  “The Secret Service is watching her. Twenty-four hours a day. She can’t make a move without them seeing it.”

  “That’s the difference. They’re watching her. I want to go out there and be with her. She deserves at least that much from us, don’t you think?”

  McGarvey nodded after a long time, and he never suspected how much pain such a simple gesture could bring him. “Take Todd with you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  New York City

  “His name is Gordon Guthrie,” Cheryl Cook said in the main saloon of Papa’s Fancy. She was distraught. “But I don’t know where he came from. England, maybe.”

  Jim Lane, NYPD gold shield detective, looked up from his notebook with interest. “Why do you think that it was this guy and not one of the crew, or maybe a burglar caught in the act?”

  Cheryl had come down to New York to be with Captain Walker for a few days. They had been having an affair over the past six months, and although she knew that it would never come to anything, she did love him in a way. They were supposed to meet at the Plaza, but when he didn’t show up she came over to see what was going on. She still couldn’t believe what she had walked into. She looked over to where she had found his body. She could still smell the foul odor of his death lingering on the air.

  “The captain got along real well with the crew, but Mr. Guthrie showing up all of a sudden was creepy.”

  “Creepy how?”

  “We were in the middle of our annual haul-out when Mr. Richter, the owner, ordered us to drop everything and get up to Washington to meet him.”

  “What’s so creepy about that?” Lane’s partner, Nicole Nickles, asked.

  Cheryl shivered. “Just the way he came aboard, smiling all the time. But there was something wrong with his eyes. Like he had X-ray vision, or something. Whenever he was around I felt like I wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

  “Where’d he go?” Lane asked. The young woman had made the initial 911 call, and until the ME had taken a look at the body and found the probable cause of death, she’d been a chief suspect.

  “The day after we got back from Bermuda he told us that he was done with the yacht for a couple of weeks. He packed up everything except the aluminum case and left.”

  “You already told us about that. But the case isn’t on the boat now. Could he have come back and got it?”

  “Anything’s possible,” she admitted. “But if you find him, you’ll have the captain’s murderer. I’d bet anything on it.” She lowered her head and began to cry. “Damn.”

  Nicole put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “We’ll find him. Guaranteed,” she said. “But we’re going to need your help. Is that okay?”

  Cheryl looked up and nodded.

  “We’re going to need a better description of him. You can work with a police artist to come up with a drawing of his face. And then you can look at some photographs. Are you up for that tonight?”

  “Whatever it takes to catch him.”

  “Okay, just hang in there. We have a few things to take care of here, and then we’ll drive you downtown.”

  The yacht was filled with evidence technicians who were going over everything with a fine-toothed comb. So far they hadn’t come up with much except that the man identified as Guthrie had fine, light brown hair, which they found on the pillows in his cabin.

  Lane turned back to the girl. “By the way, why did Captain Walker pick last night to check on the yacht?”

  “I think Mr. Richter asked him to do it.”

  “Any idea why? I mean was this something that normally happened when the crew was away for a while?”

  “Not often, but sometimes. Especially if there was a storm, or something like that.”

  Lane pocketed his notbook. This case wasn’t going to be as open and shut as some of the ones they got. In fact he had a gut feeling that it wouldn’t even be theirs for very long. He’d shared his feeling with Nicole and she agreed with him. A federally documented yacht just returned from a long trip outside the U.S. A suspect who might not be an American. An absentee owner. No apparent motive. And worst of all the lack of fingerprints. Ed Bowser, their chief evidence technician, said that they were finding only one set of fin
gerprints throughout the boat, plus a second set that was probably the young woman’s confined to a few spots in the main saloon.

  “If you want my best guess, I’d say that someone who knew what they were doing wiped down the entire boat. The prints we’re finding will turn out to be the captain’s.”

  “He came back to check on the empty boat, so what exactly did he check?” Lane asked.

  “That’s the best part. Besides here in the saloon and up on the bridge, the only other area that we’re finding prints are in the guest stateroom. And they’re all over the place in there. Looks like the good captain came in, checked something on the bridge and then tossed the one cabin.”

  Looking for an aluminum case, Lane thought. He took Nicole aside. “Let’s get a dog over here to sniff out what we might be missing.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Could be,” Lane said. “In the meantime I’m going to put what we have so far on the wire, see if Guthrie’s name turns up anyplace else. And we’ll get it over to the feds. Who knows, we might even catch a break.”

  Nicole chuckled. “Yeah, right.”

  CIA Headquarters

  Rencke left his office a little before midnight and walked down the corridor to the bathroom surprised that everything was so quiet. When he was working he sometimes forgot about time. All that mattered was the job at hand. And so far he was coming up empty-handed and it puzzled him.

  He had a half-dozen computer search programs going simultaneously, searching the Net and every database he could think of for a number of basic bits of information: bin Laden’s whereabouts and movements, Ali Bahmad’s whereabouts and movements and the bomb’s whereabouts and movements, plus anomalies in the entire investigation. The bits and pieces that didn’t seem to fit into any pattern; the stray telephone conversation, the odd satellite shot, the interrogation of a prisoner somewhere that turned up something that seemed out of place.

  Anything. Anything at all.

  Back in his office he telephoned Lieutenant Ritter at NSA. “Hiya, kiddo, anything new?”

  “Nothing from the Rome exchange,” she answered. “We’re checking across the board with the vorep upgrades. If bin Laden talks to anybody by phone or radio we’ll know about it.”

  “He’s still holed up in Khartoum, or at least we think he is, so you can concentrate there,” Rencke said, dismally. “What about the programs I gave you to use?”

  “Otto, if I’d gotten them from anybody but you, I’d have to say that they’re worthless.” She sounded just as frustrated as he did. “Whoever knows anything about the bomb, they’re keeping quiet about it.”

  “Nothing out of Afghanistan, maybe Iran or Yemen, or even Saudi Arabia?”

  “Zippo.”

  Rencke ran a hand across his eyes. “Anyway, thanks, Johanna. Keep on truckin’.”

  “One of them is bound to make a mistake somewhere. We’ll catch up with them.”

  “Yeah,” Rencke said, and he hung up. He sat back and closed his eyes, not even interested in having a Twinkie at the moment. Maybe he was losing his touch. Maybe he could no longer see the colors. Maybe he’d used up his edge. It happened to everybody sooner or later, even to McGarvey, or so the DO’s gossip mill was saying.

  Fifteen years ago when he was trying to work out an exceedingly complex CIA computer program system that involved multidimensional bubble memories and intricate mathematics, he hit on the notion of thinking of systems as colors. A shade of lavender, for example, brought into his head the LaPlace transformations. Red was for curl, blue for spin, and more involved melding of colors were for tensor calculus matricies, quantum mechanical statements, chaos equations and a couple of new fields that an Indian mother of three had come up with that only a handful of people in the world understood or had even heard about.

  The color this time was orange. He opened his eyes and looked at his monitors, all of them presenting steady streams of data, diagrams and pictures. The information was useless, less than useless without the one piece that would start tying the bits together. Even the universe had been created one pair of particles at a time after the Big Bang. For a minute or two he thought about going home to get some sleep. But he didn’t want to leave because he would have to admit that he had failed. He picked up the phone and called Louise Horn next door in the NRO.

  “Tell me yes, and make me the happiest man on the planet,” Rencke said, trying to keep it light.

  “I’d love to, Otto,” she said. “But nothing’s changed. They’re all bedded down over there.”

  A faint spark stirred in Rencke’s gut. “It’s only seven in the evening in Khartoum. Nothing’s stirring right now? Not even a mouse? All day, maybe?”

  “What are you getting at?” Louise said, but then she stopped herself. “Oh, I see,” she said. “No one has been in or out of the compound in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Not so much as a delivery van?”

  “Nothing,” Louise said. “What’s going on?”

  “They’re bunkering. Means the battle is going to start any second,” Rencke explained excitedly. “If anything moves in or around the place, and I do mean anything, I want to know about it right then.”

  “Will do—”

  “Gotta go,” Rencke told her. He broke the connection and called Johanna Ritter again. “I think whatever’s going to happen is going down any minute. Within a few hours maybe, but certainly before the end of the weekend. Have there been any calls whatsoever to the compound?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve just been looking out for bin Laden or Bahmad.”

  “I want you to start monitoring every single call, in or out of there, and get them over to me immediately.”

  “Okay, I’m sending the heads-up right now,” Johanna said.

  One of his computer programs began to chirp. The screen went pale orange. Rencke broke the connection and slid over to the monitor. The screen was split. On the left was a FBI advisory and APB from its New York office. Gordon Guthrie, a Caucasian male, early to mid-forties, five-eight, a hundred fifty pounds, thining light brown hair, brown eyes, no distinguishing marks, possibly a British citizen, was wanted for questioning in a homicide aboard the yacht Papa’s Fancy docked at the Hudson River boatyard, New York City. No fingerprints. Police artist drawing to follow.

  On the right was the reason his search engine had picked out the bulletin and went orange. Papa’s Fancy had been docked at the Corinthian Yacht Club here in Washington, and had cleared customs for departure to Bermuda the day after the Chevy Chase attack.

  Rencke pulled up the artist’s sketch and grinned like a kid at Christmas. “Oh, boy,” he said. “Ali Bahmad. Gotcha!”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Aphrodite Southwest of Ensenada, Mexico

  There she is,” Captain Fernandez shouted over the terrific noise. A very strong radar return was showing up on the twenty-mile ring.”How do you know that it’s the right ship?” Bahmad demanded. It was getting too late to make stupid mistakes.

  “She’s heading in the right direction, she’s going at the right speed, she’s the right size and she’s the only fucking ship out here, amigo,” the captain replied tightly. He wasn’t used to being questioned.

  They were alone on the Aprhodite’s open bridge; the captain at the wheel, Bahmad seated next to him and the radar screen between them. It was midnight, and the other two crewmen, Antonio Morales and Hernando Mendoza, were below. They’d been drinking beer for the past four hours since they’d left Rosario, but the captain assured Bahmad that when the time came they would function with their cojones intact. The seas were fairly calm, but the motion and noise aboard the speedboat slamming through the water in excess of sixty miles per hour was tremendous.

  Before they’d left the dock, Bahmad had finally made SSB radio contact with the Margo. Green had foolishly allowed himself to be discovered by the captain and locked up. It might necessitate eliminating the entire crew immediately rather than later.

  “Can the three of us ope
rate the ship?” he’d asked his other contact aboard.

  “With all the automatic systems it’ll be no sweat. We can set the autopilot to work with the GPS navigators and thread a needle ten thousand miles away without touching a control.”

  “Very well.”

  “The port quarter ladder will be down starting at midnight, and I’ll block the radar sets aft.”

  “What if one of the crew spots us?” Bahmad asked.

  “I’m on top of it. Can you bring some extra muscle to do the job tonight? Someone we can trust?”

  “Yes.”

  “See you soon, then. Insha’Allah.”

  “Insha’Allah,” Bahmad muttered. He switched off the SSB and smiled.

  “Is there trouble?” Captain Fernandez asked. He’d heard only half the conversation. He and the other two were seated at the saloon table while Bahmad made the call from the nav station.

  “Nothing that we can’t handle, providing you’re willing to carry out your orders.”

  “For a million dollars I’d screw the Pope.”

  “Nothing quite that drastic,” Bahmad assured him. He glanced over at the other two men. Morales, the man he’d first met on deck, was staring at him and Bahmad made a mental note to keep an eye on him. He’d done nothing out of the ordinary, however, since they had left the dock and slipped out of the harbor. But there was something about the man that didn’t sit right with Bahmad.

  They were one hundred miles off shore now, and not even the strong lights of Ensenada were visible on the horizon. The stars were out, but there was no moon. The night was so dark that Bahmad could not tell where the sky ended and the sea began.

  “We’re to make our approach from the port quarter,” he shouted to the captain. “Their radars will be blinded from the rear, and a boarding ladder will be lowered for us.”