“The Sun King’s going to have to wait for another day,” I told him. “Maybe even another trip.” I filled him in and told him he’d better head over to his French friends and fill them in tout de suite. They might want to roll up anyone likely to hear the news from America.
“Why the hell did the FBI close in?” Doc asked.
“Besides inbred stupidity? They got some sort of tip. Wannabe claimed they’d been watching the containers for weeks, but you know that’s bullshit. I’ll have Danny Barrett check his contacts out West to see if they were the source. It’s possible that they did alert New York, but I doubt it.”
“Maybe they have an agent inside the cell and they don’t want to tell us. Or the French,” suggested Doc. He’s a kind soul. He gives people far more credit than they deserve.
“If they did, raiding the containers wouldn’t make any sense. It’d make people suspicious of the agent.”
“Unless they arrested him with the others.”
“They killed both guys.”
“Killed them?” said Doc. “Why the hell would they do that? You sure those guys weren’t set up?”
If you were there watching it happen, it looked like a bad dream unfolding in front of you—but it also seemed to make some sense, at least according to the crazy logic of real life. But standing where Doc was—in his skivvies across the ocean, probably badly in need of a shave and coffee—it looked and felt like a setup.
“You send two guys out on a bullshit mission, then call the FBI to kill them for you,” he said. “Make sure they have guns. No muss, no fuss.”
Two immigrants, thus far without IDs. But what if they were friends of His Swarthiness? The only connections between His Swarthiness and Shadow?
Which would explain why they’d been assigned to sneak worthless chips into the truck. Or would merely be the latest blind alley in a tangled mess of blind alleys. Maybe His Swarthiness knew which one it was. But if so, he wasn’t telling it to me, at least not at Danbury. He wasn’t talking to anyone there, as I discovered the next morning when I showed up at the compound around eleven. The Tango had been taken to twist elsewhere.
“To where?” I asked Twenty Questions.
“Part of the protocol is that they don’t tell us,” said the interrogator apologetically, shrugging and frowning. “If I had to guess, I’d say Gitmo, but it might also have been to Texas. There’s some new place there. One of ours.”
“Why’d they move him?” I asked.
More shrugs and citings of protocol. Even when I got Twenty Questions to stop reading from his script, he seemed honestly not to know why the prisoner had been moved. But I thought my new best friend in the department might.
“Dick, I’ve been trying to track you down for hours,” said Cox when I called him a short while later. “Where the hell are you?”
“In a McDonald’s in Brewster, New York,” I told him. I was actually in a Burger King in Connecticut, but it was close enough for government work—and for anyone who might have been listening in and really trying to track me.
“That hard drive you guys planted worked like a charm. We’ve got great information. I want—I mean, if you’re interested, if you’d consider it, I have a possible mission. Can you get to D.C.?”
“Possibly.”
“Do you want to hear about it?”
“Not now. I’ll meet you in your office tomorrow to talk about it.”
“When?”
“When I get there,” I said.
Whether or not he had his promotion wagon hitched to me, Cox wasn’t used to being talked to that way, so there was a pause before he told me that would be fine. He’d be around all day. I then proceeded to grill him about His Swarthiness. He did know about the transfer; in fact, he had requested it.
“There’s this new facility down at Lackland, Texas, that we’re running with the CIA. People are supposed to be A1,” he said. He went on, sounding like he was recommending a resort rather than an interrogation facility. Some sort of psychological expert had designed a state of the art interrogation system supposed to unlock a prisoner’s “inner soul.” Those were the words Cox used, and they were completely in context. If he had told me they gave the prisoners massages, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I know what kind of massage I would have recommended.
“I want to talk to him,” I told Cox.
“Any time, Dick. Not a problem. As soon as he’s settled.”
“Settled? What the fuck, settled?”
“Settled is what they call it. They condition him for a response. Takes a couple of days.”
Maybe we were talking in code about torture; there’s always hope.
“I’m going to send somebody down there. They’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Fine,” said Cox. “I’ll clear the way.”
“Have you heard about the container port?” I asked.
“Oh yes, the FBI called us about that this morning. From what I heard, they claimed you were interfering. I covered for you, though. The liaison called me directly and I told them you don’t work for me.”
“Who’d you say I worked for?”
“I didn’t, but, um, I did say, uh, that if they had a beef they should talk to Karen.”
He tossed out some bullshit about how thorough I was, ass-kissing for the inevitable question: “So you will help out on that other matter, right?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I said.
I made it back to Jersey in time to take a watch with Trace. I’d given some thought to turning the operation over to customs or maybe having the ATF people do more than simply stand by, but for the time being I held off. As tenuous as it might be, this remained my best link to Shadow. I’d also been racking my brain trying to remember if I’d come up against anyone in Yugoslavia or its successor madhouses who might hold a grudge. The answer remained negative, but the world’s a small place; it was certainly possible that I’d axed someone in a previous lifetime who was now out to do me in—and cause serious mayhem in the meantime.
Or not. I couldn’t quite see the elephant yet.
Trace and I were watching the video monitor we’d placed from a Chevy SUV a short distance from the facility. When my stomach started growling, she surprised me by revealing a secret hankering for a Big Mac.
“And large fries,” she said. “With a strawberry shake.”
“You eat that?”
“Once a month. Helps keep me regular.”
Sometimes you can have a little too much information about people. She grabbed lunch and brought it to the car while I checked in with each member of the team.
“You like Texas?” I asked Trace.
“Not particularly.”
“Good. That’ll put you in the right mood. They moved His Swarthiness down there so he can be conditioned.”
“Conditioned? What the fuck does that mean?”
“I haven’t a clue. Maybe they ran out of shampoo. Should I send Danny with you?”
“To chaperone?”
“To apply more conditioner.”
Trace looked at me. Secret sauce leaked out on her chin: very attractive.
“I can handle it.”
“Should be set up by tomorrow,” I told her.
“What’s up with Danny and his kid?” Trace asked.
“What’s up what?”
“He’s pining after some long-lost daughter or something. He wants to meet her.”
“It sounded to me like he wasn’t even sure it was his daughter.”
“Well, he’s sure now.”
I chewed on that as well as the burger I’d ordered. Neither was very well-cooked, but then I always prefer my meat raw and bloody. After I finished, I got out of the car and went to the phone booth. I managed to get hold of Doc, who stopped grousing about his postponed trip to Versailles long enough to tell me that the French were not particularly grateful that the Bureau Without a Clue had made the bust before the weapons got to France.
�
��They think it’s a racket to protect some American,” said Doc.
“Or someone involved with the smuggling operation,” I told him. “Did that DNA sample Danny arranged to send ever arrive? Maybe he thought they were after him and went on the lamb. That would make sense if they had these guys axed.”
“It turns out they don’t have a sample to compare it to. I can’t tell if they slipped up or they just don’t routinely take one. I’ve heard it both ways.
The Frenchies were looking for Pierre’s sister, though they weren’t sure exactly where she lived. If they could get a sample from her, they should be able to use Danny’s to get a close enough match for an ID. And, yes, the package had arrived.
Doc had more news: the FBI had decided to throw some of its muscle into the case. A “high-level delegation” was en route to Paris to compare notes on the M16 case and ooh and aah at the Eiffel Tower.
“If they’re obnoxious enough, the French may toss them off the top,” he said hopefully.
“What do you think they traded for the guns?”
“Dunno. The mustard gas is still missing.”
“Could be. What if it’s not?”
“Just about anything. The French keep bringing up flowers as if there’s money in that. And speaking of euros, there’s a network of bank accounts that they’ve been trying to track. They keep getting lost in Austria. Banking laws there make the Swiss look like big mouths. The Frenchies think the money gets smuggled in as cash or gets distributed somehow through credit cards or lines of credit. It’s supposedly pretty tangled.”
Pretty tangled was the order of the day. While I’d been gone, the two men the FBI men had killed were IDed as Bosnian immigrants in America on tourist visas—which had expired six months before. Obviously they were having so much fun that they just lost track of time. The Jersey State Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had thrown themselves into the investigation, which allowed Danny to learn from them that the FBI’s tipster had called Wannabe directly. We thought that might be significant until we found out that his office, home, and cell phone numbers were listed on an official website. Guess he wanted terrorists to know how to get hold of him if they decided to surrender.
Danny’s sources also opined that the FBI had no idea what was going on with these Bosnian and French connections.
Unfortunately, they weren’t the only ones. And so we waited. Nothing happened that afternoon. Or that night. Or the next morning. I left the team around ten to head for D.C., planning to be back in time for my next shift at eight.
Chapter
13
The NSA’s virus—Shunt said it was more like a Trojan horse with a Pony Express messenger service attached—that we had planted in the bank had tipped the NSA to a string of coded messages concerning a mission being bankrolled by an outside group. The messages gave Web addresses for information about different ports, and gave a credit card number along with security information. The credit card had been used for three days only, making five-hundred-dollar withdrawals each day, the card’s limit. The withdrawals had been made in Baltimore. The account owner lived in Wyoming and was a retired teacher. He was almost certainly the victim of identity theft but just in case was under surveillance. The account was also being watched.
“The long and the short of it is, we think they’re aiming for a natural gas port,” explained Cox, laying the situation out for me in his office with his usual obsequiousness.
“I’d like to hear the long and the short,” I told him. “And everything in between.”
Cox glanced at Shunt, whom I’d brought along as a technical consultant, and then asked about his clearance.
“Code-word level,” I said. “And I can vouch for him personally.”
“This is very need to know, Dick. Very need to know.”
“And Shunt needs to know.”
There was some fretting and sweating, but in the end Cox anted up with apparently everything he knew, which frankly wasn’t all that much. The NSA had identified a ship called the Methane Duke—honest to God, the real name—which had shipped out of Algeria and was due at Cove Point, Maryland, in three days. There was also a website featuring Japanese dragons; the intel boys thought it was some sort of code for a fire strike.
They were all obviously thirty or younger. Dragon was the nickname for the M-47, an antitank guided missile used by the Army in the early 1970s and still around in an improved version. The latest version has a range out around fifteen hundred meters; it’s wire-guided and can puncture armor up to 500mm thick. It’s not particularly known for its accuracy—but liquid natural gas tankers are pretty big.
“Could it take out an LNG tanker?” asked Cox after I explained it.
“I don’t know. The missile would have to go through an outer tank or the hull before it got to the cargo tank. There’s a vacuum and insulation, sometimes as much as two feet of it. The arrangement is a little like a thermos bottle. The LNG would be pretty cold so it might be that if you hit it right, the whole tank would blow up. Coast Guard might know.”
Cox frowned, then seemed to remember that the Coast Guard was part of his department. He grabbed at the phone and began jabbing madly at the keypad. Within a few minutes, two lieutenant commanders emerged from somewhere deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, blinking their eyes like molemen suddenly summoned to the surface world. I gave them a general rundown of what the situation might be, then sat back and listened as they discussed the matter between themselves. The sum total of their knowledge and expertise could be summarized in a single sentence, which, when stripped of its bureaucratese and translated into standard English, amounted to:
Dunno.
Neither man was an expert on LNG tankers or weapons or hazardous situations—even though, according to Cox’s flowchart on the bureaucracy, they were supposed to be all three. I was eventually able to reach a real expert, however. The Coast Guard has done considerable thinking about the problem of the tankers in general, but most of their studies were concerned with structural failure and collisions. They had been complaining for years that they needed more inspectors just to handle these concerns.
Fire a missile at it? No one had actually studied that.
“I think, given the amount of insulation, the way the tanks are structured—I don’t think a small shell like the one you describe would rupture the tank, at least not with one shot,” said my expert. “They’re made to withstand pretty strong collisions.”
“Would you bet on it with your life?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything. Which was all the response I needed.
I know a little bit about LNG carriers and ports and had the good fortune to lend a few of my thoughts on security at Cove Point, Maryland, the largest liquid natural gas port in the country. If you remember your high school chemistry, you know that gas becomes a liquid when it’s cooled. That’s true of H2O, and it’s true of natural gas. One of the tricks in transporting natural gas is to keep the tank cool; as long as you can do that the fuel is about as easy to deal with as oil. The guys who work on these big boats have busted a lot of pencils and worn down a lot of erasers, but they’ve come up with a pretty efficient system, and one that’s surprisingly safe.
Of course, we are talking about natural gas, and if it’s not dealt with correctly things can get ugly. Spill a whole bunch out on the water and you’re likely to create a cloud of gas. A big cloud—anywhere from a mile to fifty miles wide, depending on the leak. The scientists say that such a cloud is less likely to explode than a similar cloud of liquid petroleum gas, which really helps me sleep at night. The Coast Guard has conducted a variety of tests that show a small explosion probably can’t be used to trigger the gas cloud to explode. All that will happen will be a massive fireball.
Like I say, very reassuring. Especially since the scientists have recently developed a new theory that shows the gas could explode after all if the conditions are right.
Even if the LNG cloud didn
’t go boom or torch a fifty-mile radius of earth and sky, the psychological damage of an LNG “event” would be immense. You probably don’t give much thought right now to that black pipe routing through your basement to the clothes dryer. Watch a video of a floating birthday candle torching the night sky five or six hundred times over a weekend, though, and your attitude is going to change. And when the experts come on to tell you how “lucky” we were that the fire cloud was fueled by natural gas rather than petroleum gas, that white tank of propane you’ve got out on your deck beneath the Sunbeam grill is going to look awful suspicious.
LNG ships are massive. There are a couple of different ways to construct them, but basically they look like oil tankers with a wedge or a row of fat Christmas ornaments on the front deck. The wedge covers a series of double-lined and -insulated tanks; the ornaments represent a slightly different approach but do the same thing: keep the LNG contained, cold, and at the right pressure so it doesn’t decide to evaporate into gas.
Armed with his intelligence, Cox did what bureaucrats do when they sense a problem. He formed a committee, officially called a “task group,” which was supposed to coordinate protection efforts. The Coast Guard, Navy, and port and local police authorities were all players in the task group, which had already met twice and was planning a video conference later that afternoon. They’d made fantastic progress so far. Their agenda included an agenda to make an agenda, and to take steps toward forming several subcommittees.
Even though he’d developed the intelligence and gotten the disparate authorities together, the law of bureaucratic pecking orders made Cox a bit player on the Ad Hoc Emergency LNG Protection Task Force Team/Provisional. Rare for a bureaucrat, he actually seemed to realize this and suggested that my ideas about beefing up the security operation ought to be directed to the lead Coast Guard official on the project, a vice admiral from the Fifth District. He also wanted me and my merry band to play the role of roaming patrollers, darting across the harbor area in Zodiacs.
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