Patrick Carlton 01 - The Diamond Conspiracy

by Nicolas Kublicki

  The telephone rang. Not the main house line that Maxfield answered, but the office line. Only those closest to MacLean had the number.

  “Excuse me, Abraham.” MacLean leaned toward the side table, picked up the green Bang & Olufsen receiver. “MacLean.”

  “Max. Channy.” André ‘Channy’ Chanzeransky was the general manager of MacLean’s Star casino in Atlantic City, one of the few employees who could get away with calling MacLean by his first name. “I have horrible news.”

  “It seems to be following me these days. What is it?”

  “The Atlantic Star just sank.”

  “It what?” MacLean shouted and stood. “What about the passengers and crew?”

  “The Coast Guard just sent a rescue operation to the area, but it doesn’t look good. The boat was six hundred miles off the coast. The waters are very cold.”

  “How did—”

  “They don’t know how it happened. She left yesterday night, taking some Mexican high rollers for a two day cruise. Her mayday signal didn’t say what happened, just that she was sinking. I hired a private rescue team to join the official search. If there are any survivors, we’ll find them.”

  “Keep me posted, Channy. Every hour on the hour.”

  “You bet. I’m sorry, Max.”

  MacLean replaced the receiver slowly and turned to Cohen, smiling. “Things are looking up.”

  “What is it?”

  “One of my casino’s yachts just sank in the Atlantic.”

  “Sank? You’re happy because your yacht sank? You’re completely meshugenne!”

  “First two aircraft, now one of the boats. About $70 million lost in ten days. I bet the boys at Lloyd’s have my face on a dart board.”

  44 TRANSFER

  Atlantic Star Lifeboat

  Atlantic Ocean

  697 miles East of Atlantic City

  12:45 A.M.

  The plan had worked.

  By the time the missile plowed into the Atlantic Star, the lifeboat was far away. Too far away for the lifeboat passengers to see the yacht sink, close enough to hear and see the fuel tank explode. The fireball illuminated the sky and sea for miles but did not last long. Four hours later, they were approximately a hundred miles away. Carlton could see the people in the lifeboat clearly in the light of the moon.

  To call the vessel a lifeboat did not do it justice. This was a twenty-foot enclosed motorboat with room for ten persons and full navigational lights and equipment. Commander Ramey was at the helm and kept the motorboat heading due east at a steady twenty-five knots. Carlton stood next to him, with Erika snuggling against him. Despite the fact they were shielded from the exterior elements, it was fiercely cold. To minimize the chances of being discovered, Ramey had turned on neither the running lights nor the emergency radio beacon.

  “If I haven’t thanked you enough, Jack, thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, Pat. Thank Mr. MacLean. He’s the one who allowed this insanity.”

  Pink climbed on deck from the cabin below. “I can’t figure it out. How the hell did they find us? We didn’t communicate outside of normal boating channels, and they couldn’t have just—”

  Carlton turned to Pink. “Actually, we did.”

  “What do you mean?” Pink stared at him, on the thin edge between praise and reproach.

  “Jack and I arranged it. I knew they’d keep following us. And between the FBI and the other agencies Fress was using to track us, it was only a matter of time before they found us. So I decided to make their kill as easy as possible: I contacted MacLean to thank him. As I figured, the FBI or NSA or whoever else was listening to MacLean’s conversation heard the call. They must’ve tracked us down that way.”

  “But how will—”

  “Before I called MacLean, Jack arranged for a pick-up with another of MacLean’s ships, a cargo ship traveling from New York to Europe.” Pink stared at him in silence while the boat gently rocked in the Atlantic swells.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Pink demanded, more hurt than angry, gripping a rail for support.

  “Like you did back at Langley, I had to make sure you were legit. If you were working with Fress, he wouldn’t have killed you. So now we’re safe because Fress thinks we’re at the bottom of the sea and we know you’re clean. I guess that makes us even.”

  Pink turned to Erika. “You knew?”

  “Sorry, Tom.”

  Pink turned back to Carlton. “I don’t know whether to kiss you or punch you.”

  Carlton smiled. “Her I’ll kiss. A handshake from you will do.”

  Several minutes later, Ramey pointed starboard. “Here she comes,” He announced. “Right on time.”

  Carlton could not see what the man was pointing at, then finally noticed faint running lights in the distance. The running lights grew steadily until the outline of a behemoth cargo ship grew clear. Using Morse code, Ramey flashed a small handheld spotlight at the vessel several times. After several tries, the vessel responded in kind. Ramey moved out of the vessel’s path, followed on its port side as it slowed to a stop over the distance of nearly one mile. Bright lights illuminated the cargo ship’s superstructure. Giant white letters spelled CLAIRE SAILING on its dark hull.

  It was clear that the Claire’s crew was highly experienced. Within five minutes, they had transferred all the passengers onto the cargo vessel and hoisted the lifeboat on deck. The Claire’s enormous dual screws started back up and began to push the cargo vessel forward on its original course, heading northeast.

  Christened in New England twenty years earlier, the Claire was a 30,000-ton vessel based in New York Harbor. It plied the Atlantic, serving as a general cargo ship between the United States and Europe for gastronomic delicacies wherever good deals could be found based on MacLean’s agents’ purchases.

  The great majority of the Claire was devoted to cargo space, refrigerated and unrefrigerated, above deck and below deck. Despite its function as a cargo ship, MacLean believed that a happy crew made a good crew. The stern portion of the vessel contained the crew’s quarters, cabins for occasional passengers, a galley, a dining room, a gymnasium, a small library, and a small theater room with satellite television and an extensive DVD collection. Instead of being shown directly to their cabins, Carlton, Erika, and Pink were ushered into a large wood-paneled dining room on the top floor dominated by a long, varnished wood dining table. A portly man in his sixties wearing a spinnaker-sized white apron stained from years of cooking greeted them enthusiastically.

  “Ah, my dinner guests! Good evening. Please come in.” He pumped each person’s hand vigorously. “I am Paul DesJardins, ship’s cook. I was told you were coming, but only two hours ago. I wasn’t able to prepare anything very interesting, but I hope you will enjoy what I have prepared. Sit down, sit down. Please sit down.

  “For dinner tonight, we have a lobster, crab, and tomato cream bisque, followed by cornish hens stuffed with lemon and rosemary accompanied by steamed baby vegetables with a vegetable broth reduction. After that a three-lettuce salad with...”

  After the meal, Carlton torched a Padron 3000 maduro cigar with his DOJ Zippo lighter and turned to Pink.

  “Well, I agree with your conclusion about your material on Pyashinev. A road map to the diamond stockpile it sure ain’t. And it doesn’t really tell us much else except the guy had one hell of an apartment.” Carlton blew a large cloud of smoke upward. “And an obsession with boats.”

  “His obsession with boats?” Pink cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you notice that? Maybe I’m focusing on it because I’m Navy, but the guy was nuts about boats.” He waved at the inventory of Pyashinev’s apartment. “He had a whole library full of books on boats and a virtual art gallery of boat paintings, photos, and models all over his walls and tables.”

  “I didn’t really focus on that, but okay, so he was obsessed with boats. What follows?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a sentimental obsession abo
ut life at sea. I mean, the bio doesn’t say he was Russian navy or merchant marine. Still, he was crazy about boats. And—” Carlton half-lifted himself out of his chair. “Wait a minute. Read his note to me over again.”

  “Russia, third layer. Must not let them get it.”

  Carlton paused, massaging his chin. “I wonder if there is a boat called ‘Russia’. Or—what’s the word in Russian?”

  “Rossiya. I’m sure a lot of Russian boats are named Rossiya, Pat. Just like there are a lot of boats named the America and the California.”

  “You think the Rossiya in Pyashinev’s note was a boat?” Asked Erika.

  “Why not? Let’s look at what we know.” He touched off the fingers of his left hand. “One, Pyashinev had authority over the Russian diamond stockpile. Two, he wanted to keep the stockpile secret from the Orlov government. Three, since the Orlov government doesn’t know about the stockpile, he did keep it a secret. Four...” He paused to clear his train of thought. “Four, he was a boat nut. Five, he left a cryptic note about not letting ‘them’ get the ‘Rossiya’ right before he died.” He continued with his right thumb. “Six, as sure as God made little green apples, like you said there must be boats named Rossiya. Seven, based on what you told us during the past two days and we’ve got here, there are no other clues. It’s not like we’re choosing this clue and excluding others. After days of research, this is what we’ve got, right? And it looks as though it’s all the GRU’s got, too.”

  “Yeah. But there’s got to be a harborful of boats named Rossiya. What do you suggest, track them down on the high seas, board them with eye patches and cutlasses?”

  “It’s worth exploring. Besides, it’s not like we have any other leads.”

  Pink rose to stretch his long legs. “Well there’s only one way to find out from here.” He turned on his titanium Macintosh.

  “You’re not going to call Langley on that thing are you?”

  “Well, I’m not ordering books on Amazon.”

  “Tom, Fress has eyes and ears all over the place. That’s how they found us on the Star. He’ll trace—”

  “No, he won’t. The National Security Agency is powerful, but it’s not omnipotent. I’m routing it through Saunders’ system, then through the L.A. office. And it’s encrypted. Forbes and I encrypted our systems before I left. We’re the only ones with this encryption code. Highest level CIA code. Generated by random atmospheric patterns.”

  “Right.”

  Pink waited while the system dialed the CIA computer database number and automatically fed it the multiple identification codes and passwords required before the laptop screen showed the CIA computer system was ready. He typed his search command.

  Nearly 1,000 miles west in Northern Virginia, now armed with the command, the seven liquid nitrogen–cooled Cray supercomputers—the ‘Seven Dwarfs’—rifled through the Agency’s massive electronic database. Seconds later, the screen showed the search had obtained forty pages of information. Pink hit the print command. An HP laser printer nearby started producing a hardcopy of the research. “Here we go.”

  Pink collected the pages, bent over them, and began to read.

  “Let me know what you find. I’ll be on the bridge.”

  “I’ll just follow the stench. Now stop infecting me with that cancer stick and let me read.”

  Pink waved away the billows of blue cigar smoke theatrically and began to pore over the pages, highlighting the important information with a yellow fluorescent marker.

  A half hour later, Pink walked onto the bridge, handed the sheaf of papers to Carlton. “You were right.”

  Carlton read the highlighted sections. “It looks like there are twenty mid to large ships named Rossiya.”

  “Eighteen have sunk or been decommissioned.”

  “The other two?”

  “One has been on duty with the Cuban navy since before Chernenko. The other is an icebreaker on active duty escorting cruise ships through Arctic ice floes out of Murmansk.”

  Carlton paused and stared at Pink for several seconds. “Murmansk? That’s where Pyashinev—”

  “Bingo.”

  “So, what next?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? We’ve got to get to Murmansk.”

  “Murmansk? In this boat?” Carlton reflected about it a moment. “It’s a cargo boat. Not a bad cover.”

  “And Murmansk is a commercial port in addition to being a naval base.”

  “Murmansk it is, then. You do know this is insane, don’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “But it’s even more insane if we don’t try, I suppose.”

  45 ORDER

  International Seat

  The Order

  Rome, Italy

  3:12 P.M.

  The Order was founded in the early 1500s to provide intellectual and doctrinal shock troops to a Catholic Church unprepared to stem the spreading influence of the Protestant Reformation. Handpicked for their brilliance, talent, and devotion, its priest members were educated far beyond the level of other priests and unwaveringly obedient to the pontifex maximus—the pope. In addition to the vows of celibacy, poverty, and chastity that priests generally took prior to receiving Holy Orders, each member of the Order also took a vow of obedience to the pope.

  For the first 200 years after its founding, the Order’s leaders and members remained obedient, and a special relationship evolved between the papacy and the Order. In doing so, the Order played an important, if not pivotal, role in the education, politics, and science of nearly every power—and powerful figure—in Europe and America. The Order founded and ran schools, universities, research centers, observatories, libraries, and hospitals. Its priests taught, wrote, persuaded, advised.

  But after 200 years of total devotion to the papacy, in the 1700s, the Order began to turn against its master and closest ally. Imperceptibly at first, then rapidly. Subtly, then blatantly. To such an extent that the Order’s leader, the Father General, the only cardinal in the Order, who wore a black cassock in imitation of the Order’s sixteenth-century canonized founder, was often referred to as the ‘black pope’. Many of the Order’s priests did not stray, but those who did strayed far. In the late twentieth century, believing violent retribution was the solution to dictatorial oppression, members of the Order took up arms in support of liberation theology, the religious movement with an appealing name but based largely on communism. Certain members of the Order went so far as to become high-ranking ministers in brutal communist regimes. Others embraced the human-centered New Age movement. Finally, they attacked the very basis and legitimacy of the papacy. Nothing short of blasphemy for a formerly obedient Catholic order.

  The relationship between the papacy and the Order was now one of undeclared yet outright war. The battle continued nearly unchecked until it slammed into the doctrinal and intellectual fortress of the Polish Pontiff. Though the Order wielded tremendous power, so did John Paul II, the most traveled, most famous, and most beloved pope in recent history, backed by the historical power of 2,000 years of uninterrupted papal reign. As a man who had witnessed the inhuman evils of Nazism and communism in his Polish homeland, the pope equated the war against the Order with the Church’s war against communism. He understood the intellectual bases of the war, joined the fight, and won decisive battles. Ranks were reorganized, undesirable programs terminated, unchecked influence curtailed, heretics silenced, doctrine corrected. There was, however, one facet of the Order the papacy failed to grind: finance. So finance was the aspect on which the Order’s Father General—Cardinal Pedro Altiplano—focused.

  A consummate player in the Roman Curia, Pedro Altiplano was a master of subterfuge and obfuscation. He had the same goal as the Order’s leaders for the past two centuries, particularly after the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s: the destruction of the papacy. But by the time Altiplano acceded to the post of Father General, the Polish Pontiff had succeeded in closing nearly all avenues of battle open to the Order, except for
finance.

  Years before he became Father General, Altiplano realized that, technically, over $1 billion flowed through the Order’s coffers annually in the form of private donations to the Order’s legion schools, universities, and hospitals. As head of the Order, Altiplano controlled those funds, but only theoretically. In practice, the funds were solicited, obtained, invested, and disbursed by individual principals, chancellors, and chief executive officers of those institutions. Altiplano’s plan was simple: for the good of the Order, he directed all of the Order’s funds channeled to a central depository and from there disbursed them according to need only upon his consent. The plan had great PR value: take from the rich and give to the poor. Only a handful of the Order opposed his plan.

  In fact, what happened was quite different from the publicly lobbied plan. By taking personal control of the Order’s global finances, Altiplano had possession of funds he could use to wage the Order’s war against the papacy. He was sufficiently wise to recognize he could not win against the Polish Pontiff in a test of wills within the Roman Curia. But if he played his cards right, Altiplano believed he could influence key voting members of the College of Cardinals when it assembled in a conclave to elect the Polish Pontiff’s successor, the cardinal who would be elected to stand in the shoes of the fisherman and first pope, Peter.

  He would use the successful formula of Washington special interests: he would promise to fund the pet projects of the key voting members of the College of Cardinals in exchange for their support of his chosen candidate - himself. Once elected pope, Altiplano would dismantle the papacy from within: by his own edicts.

  But how would he transfer these funds to the key voting princes of the Church in an electronic day and age when flows of funds could be followed so easily? He would divert some of the funds in his newly acquired control into easily concealable, movable, salable goods.

  Diamonds.

  He quickly placed his plan into motion. Enormous sums of the new central depository funds controlled by Altiplano were siphoned off to secret offshore accounts. The monies were replaced by monies borrowed against the Order’s gold-plated name at high rates of interest. Promissory notes were secretly executed and delivered. Obedient agents of the Order sworn to secrecy under penalty of excommunication by the Father General himself were dispatched to purchase diamonds outside the scrutiny of the Waterboer monopoly. Diamonds were deposited in one of Italy’s best known banking institutions, whose chief financial officer’s favorite nephew Altiplano allowed to become a priest of the Order despite his obsessive penchant for conquests of members of the opposite sex. Ledgers were falsified.