Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  “Sir,” the guard said even as the stranger raised his hands.

  “In a holster behind my back,” the man said and slowly turned. “There’s another in my pocket.”

  The guard nodded to the nurse, who unarmed the stranger. The man knew the routine and stepped out of the room and back into the hallway. The door’s threshold, though innocuous to look at, was a body scanner that had detected the taped-up revolver he’d taken off the kid and the FN Five-seveN pistol he’d been carrying. This time through, the alarm remained silent, and the guard relaxed his defensive posture. A phone on his desk rang. He listened for a moment before replacing the handset.

  “Give him back his guns. He says that this one is just as deadly without them.”

  The man took the automatic back from the pretty nurse and secured it in its holster. He made a dismissive gesture toward the broken-down revolver, so she kept it. The stranger finally took notice of the room. It was like the lobby of a discreet boutique hotel, one of those places in London or New York that were so exclusive, there usually wasn’t a sign out front. The floors were marble tile, the walls’ wainscoting deep mahogany, and the lighting luxurious crystal fixtures. The view out the two windows was what threw him for a moment. It should have shown the garbage-strewn streets of a Brazilian slum, but instead he was greeted by a cobbled road in what looked like an Eastern European town — the Czech Republic, maybe, or Hungary. The light streaming in appeared natural, and yet the two “windows” were flat-screen displays with curtains so the people here wouldn’t be reminded of the squalor outside. A far door opened, and another nurse, a virtual twin of the first, beckoned the newcomer farther into this surreal building.

  The next rooms were even more luxurious than the reception hall. More flat-screen panels displayed views of the same street. An old woman was leading a horse on the opposite curb, and he felt as if the clip-clop of its hooves could be heard through the glass. He was finally shown into a sleek executive office with a fireplace and sofa cluster in one corner and a modernist glass desk at the far wall. In another corner were the closed doors of an elevator that would lead to an apartment on the third floor just as opulent as this room.

  “Chairman,” the scarred and wheelchair-bound man behind the desk greeted.

  “L’Enfant,” Cabrillo said back.

  “I suppose if you had wanted me dead, you would have struck in the night and I never would have known it was coming.”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” Cabrillo replied.

  Two weeks had passed since the encounter with the stealth ship. The Oregon was still in Hamilton Harbour, her refit just about complete. He had given up tracking Admiral Kenin once he fled Russia. This had to have been his last big score, the one that would set him up for life. A man in that situation plans his escape down to the finest detail. He would be completely untraceable ten seconds after implementing it. He would have a new identity that was unbreakable, a new place to live, bank accounts that had been in place for years. In all, a new life that was just as real — at least, to those looking — as the one he’d left.

  “I must be getting sloppy,” L’Enfant said, waving his good right hand. “First Kenin tracked me, now you.”

  “The first time you were sloppy,” Juan agreed, “the second you were just in a hurry.”

  So rather than waste time tracking a man they would never find, he put Murph and Stone on locating the slippery information merchant. They had the advantage of knowing that he would have run soon after Kenin contacted him to get information on the Corporation. With that starting point, it still took twelve days of data mining and fact-checking to discover another of L’Enfant’s lairs, one in a most unlikely place.

  Cabrillo added, “You’re also becoming predictable.” He shot a significant glance at the attractive nurse.

  “Ah,” L’Enfant said, “I wasn’t aware you knew my penchant for pretty nurses.”

  “Now you’re deluding yourself. If it was just pretty ones, we never would have found you. But sisters who are also nurses are a rarer breed of cat.”

  L’Enfant’s single eye glittered as he looked at the nurse. “My last ones were actually twins. Not identical, mind you, but twins nonetheless.” He clapped his right hand into the claw-like pincer of his disfigured left. “Leave us, my dear.” When the nurse had gone, L’Enfant said, “You have not tracked me here to discuss my medical staff, I presume.”

  “You presume correctly.” Cabrillo waited for the shadowy man to figure out why he’d come.

  L’Enfant studied him for a moment and finally asked, “Why the disguise?”

  “I needed to cross through some nasty neighborhoods to get here. I didn’t want to look like an attractive target for a mugger.”

  “You always were a careful planner. Okay, what else may I presume? I have wronged you by speaking of the Corporation to Kenin, something for which I must atone.”

  Juan nodded while L’Enfant adjusted the oxygen cannula under the ruin of his burned nose.

  “I presume that my atonement comes in the form of tracking down Admiral Kenin for you.”

  “Correct.”

  “And you came to me in person rather than reaching me through more conventional ways in order for me to understand that if I fail to find him, my life is then forfeit.”

  “Four for four. You should go into the soothsaying business. Do you know where Kenin went to ground?”

  The man shook his reptilian head. “No. Don’t think I don’t have feelers out there, but he knew what he was doing when he rabbited.”

  “‘Rabbited,’ really?” Juan said with a smile. “Last time I read someone ‘rabbiting’ was an old spy novel.”

  “You prefer ‘on the lam’?”

  “I prefer to know where he is,” Juan said sharply to remind the information broker that this wasn’t idle banter.

  “I will find him.”

  “Now call Amo and have him send the pickup. I’d rather not walk all the way back to where I can find a working bus that will eventually take me to a part of the city that has taxis.” It might have sounded like a joke, but Cabrillo had had to traverse ten miles of urban jungle on foot to get here because buses, let alone cabs, never ventured into this part of the city.

  “I will do you one better. I have an old Mercedes that doesn’t attract too much attention. Where are you staying?”

  “The Fasano,” he lied.

  “I figured a guy like you would go for nostalgia and stay at the Copa Palace.”

  Had Juan not been a better poker player, he would have given away that L’Enfant had guessed where he was actually staying. He loved the stately deco-style Copacabana Palace Hotel and stayed there whenever he was in Rio.

  “No matter. I will have my man drop you at the Fasano. No buses or taxis. It is the least I can do.”

  Juan put a little menace in his voice. “The least you can do is lead me to Pytor Kenin.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Container was in play.

  That’s what it was called, The Container. Capital T, capital C. The. Container.

  That it was finally in play had sent bells ringing at the CIA, FBI, Homeland, Treasury, NSA, and just about every other acronymic entity in Washington, D.C. Cabrillo wouldn’t have been surprised to know his old friend Dirk Pitt and NUMA had been read in on The Container.

  The rumors swirling around it were the stuff of legend and myth. No one was certain how or why The Container came into being or who was behind it, but from every souk and bazaar, from one end of the Middle East to the farthest island of Muslim Indonesia, word of its contents had spread.

  In the first years of America’s invasion of Iraq, massive amounts of cash were used to buy loyalty, as was custom in many parts of the region, though loyalty ran out when the money did or someone had a better offer. That left Washington in the position of having to pour unimaginable streams of cash into Baghdad, Başrah, and every hamlet up to the Kurdish border with Turkey.

  Oversight o
f this bounty was thought to be foolproof but in actuality was an utter joke. Vast sums of cash were siphoned off by yet another layer of corruption in a corrupted society. The problem for those partaking of Uncle Sam’s largesse wasn’t how to get the money but how to get it out of the country. Sure, individuals could smuggle a few bundles of hundred-dollar bills, but what about those on top of the scheming and stealing? Packing a hundred K across a desert outpost was one thing. But what about the billion in hard currency that was unaccounted for? It would take a tractor-trailer to move it, or a container.

  So that’s what happened to it. It went into a conex shipping container and then it sat in a warehouse because those who stole it also knew the Americans would never stop looking for it. So they did what Arabs were especially good at. They outwaited their enemies. It took years, but eventually the U.S. drew down its forces. Patrols no longer guarded every street corner and intersection. Tanks and up-armored Humvees disappeared. Black Hawks and Cobras no longer buzzed over the cities in multitudes that rivaled a hornet swarm. After a decade, the Americans wound down their presence in Iraq until the crime bosses decided it was finally safe enough to move the cash. It would need to be laundered, of course, and a deal was struck with several banks in the Far East. To do it locally would set off alarm bells among the international monetary watchdogs.

  So The Container would have to be shipped to Jakarta. The question arose as to who would smuggle it out of Iraq. American and other NATO warships still patrolled the Gulf and boarded vessels with disturbing frequency. They needed a smuggler. Several names were discussed in a heated exchange between the crime bosses who’d amassed the fortune until one was finally selected: Ali Mohamed. He was Saudi but could be trusted. He and his ship were away from the Gulf when the decision was made to finally move The Container, so there was a delay of two weeks before he could do their bidding. And then the day arrived when his ship docked in Iraq.

  The Container was in play.

  There was only one slight problem with their plan. They had underestimated their enemy’s patience.

  The Americans never forgot the money that had slipped through their fingers. Over time, they began to learn of the existence of The Container and made several logical deductions about its dispensation. They knew too that it couldn’t be laundered in Iraq or any neighboring country. It would need to be shipped overseas.

  That was where they laid their trap.

  Because the American Navy and her NATO allies controlled the waters of the Persian Gulf, they controlled which ships were boarded. Three ships were selected to go unmolested even though it was well known that they were smugglers. The ships made only infrequent trips up to Başrah, but their illegal cargos always reached their destination. Where other smugglers were caught in boarding raids or were forced to toss their cargos over the side while being pursued, these three cargo ships seemed to live charmed existences. They were never boarded, or, if they were, nothing illegal was ever found.

  So it was little wonder that the crime bosses would choose among these three. To narrow the odds further so that the bosses would choose the one ship they wanted chosen, the American spymasters had played one more trick. The three ships and their legendary captains were one and the same.

  Juan Cabrillo and his ship, the Oregon.

  Without a doubt, this was the most sophisticated and time-consuming gambit the Corporation had ever pulled. It was the brainchild of Langston Overholt, Cabrillo’s old CIA boss. Every few months, the Oregon would be reconfigured to look like one of three ships and sail into the deepwater port of Umm Qasr, Iraq. At first, CIA agents had to pose as the clients needing goods smuggled into or out of the country, but eventually the criminal underworld heard about these three smugglers who seemed never to get boarded. It took five years, but it worked. Whenever one of these three captains was willing to risk a run under the American’s noses, there was a crime boss willing to hire him.

  Now the years of preparation were about to pay off. The government would get its billion dollars back, and, just as important, should be able to trace which Americans had helped the Iraqis to amass the money in the first place.

  Langston had taught Cabrillo years ago that for a democracy to flourish, it must have an incorruptible bureaucracy. This whole operation was about punishing someone who had profited from his position of power.

  The Oregon looked like her old tramp freighter self, but with a red hull, cream upperworks, and a blue band around her yellow funnel. She appeared a little more shipshape than normal, but that was part of her disguise as the Ibis.

  Cabrillo too was disguised as he stood next to the harbor pilot overseeing the final stages of docking the ship. His skin was darker than normal, and his hair and thin mustache were nearly black. His eyes were made brown with contact lenses.

  The pilot keyed his walkie-talkie. “Okay, snug fore and aft lines.” He crossed through the bridge to the starboard side, switched channels on his radio, and told the tug pressing the freighter to the big Yokohama fenders to back off. He turned to Cabrillo, extending a hand, “Welcome back, Captain Mohamed.”

  Cabrillo shook it, and the pilot pocketed the pair of hundred-dollar bills as smoothly as he handled the ship. There was no inherent need to bribe the pilot, since this is the last time the Ibis would ever dock in Iraq, or any other port in the world, but the Chairman liked to keep up appearances.

  On the dock down below sat an eighteen-wheeler, with a container on its flatbed trailer, and two Toyota minivans that looked as though their odometers passed a hundred thousand about ten years ago. A sedan parked near them didn’t look much younger. Towering over everything was a skeletal crane with a boom that could stretch fifty feet over the water. Lights rigged from it bathed the dock in an artificial twilight. This was an older section of the harbor. The cranes for unloading containers from the massive panamax freighters were farther up the roads. The tankers, which made up the largest portion of traffic coming into and out of Umm Qasr, were loaded out at sea using pipelines.

  Juan had his own handheld radio, and he called down to the men near the gangway to lower the crane. It rattled through its chain fall and came to rest on the concrete pier. “If you will excuse me…”

  “Of course.” The pilot stepped aside to wait for the captain to conclude his business on the dock. He would then guide the ship back out into the open waters of the Gulf beyond the al-Başrah Oil Terminal.

  Cabrillo took a second to square his uniform shirt into his black trousers and make sure his shoulder boards were even. Eddie Seng met them at the head of the gangway. He acted as first officer on the Ibis, while Hali Kasim played that role on the other two incarnations of the Oregon in this grand ruse.

  The two men strode down the gangplank together. A customs official, this one truly corrupt, stood by as men piled out of the minivans. There were no visible weapons, but Cabrillo knew all of them were armed.

  That was the other tricky aspect to this whole deal. Three different criminal syndicates collectively owned The Container along with their unknown American partner or partners. No one trusted one another, so there was tension on the dock even without the presence of a container full of cash. No one spoke as a few minutes elapsed. Then three more vehicles approached. They were all Mercedes SUVs, black with dark-tinted windows. Each would be as well protected as a bank’s armored car.

  The bosses had arrived. More guards alighted from the vehicles when they stopped, and these men did nothing to hide the compact submachine guns they carried. Finally, the crime lords themselves exited from the backseats of their SUVs. They wore casual, Western-style clothes and looked as innocuous as tea merchants. Each was followed by a Westerner. These men were larger than their Iraqi hosts, and while they wore civilian clothing, each moved with military precision. They wore baseball caps pulled low and wraparound sunglasses despite the sun having set an hour before.

  As Ali Mohamed, Cabrillo greeted the three crime bosses by name. He’d met two of them in the past and had
dealt with the other’s son on previous deals. That boss was well into his seventies and his son was about to take over, but for something as significant as The Container, he wanted to be here himself.

  After the flowery exchange of greetings and displays of respect, the men turned earnest. Cabrillo pointedly wasn’t introduced to the Westerners, and these men remained well back from the base of the gangway.

  “I see more than four guards here,” Cabrillo said at length. “That was our deal, four men only.”

  “Do not worry, my dear captain,” the boss from Baghdad said. “Until this container is on the ship and away from port, we like to afford it extra protection. You will only have four men with it on the ship, as promised.”

  “I wish them to be unarmed,” Cabrillo pressed. This had been a negotiating point from the beginning.

  “I wish it too, but, alas, we must insist. What was it Ronald Reagan once said, ‘trust, but verify’? Four groups are represented here, four men on your ship, as well as four guns to, ah, verify, yes? Perhaps you will need their help if you are attacked by those mongrel Somali pirates.”

  Cabrillo laughed and said truthfully, “I think we can handle the Somalis. The last batch that attacked us fared quite poorly.”

  “You know what is in this container, yes?”

  “I have not been told, but I can guess.”

  The boss, who had been convivial up to this point, lowered his voice and hardened his eyes. “It would be in your best interest not to guess. Anything happens to it and everyone you’ve ever known and loved will die.”

  Juan waited a beat to reply. “There is no need for that. We have done business in the past and will continue to do so in the future. You pay me well for my risks. I pay my crew well. Everybody is happy. I see no need to add troubles to my life and theirs by upsetting that balance.”

  The Iraqi kept his face stony before nodding and saying, “Very good. I think we understand each other.”

  “Yes, we do. I will be at dock 43C, Port of Jakarta, in ten days.” Cabrillo added, “As you trust me with this container, I so trust you that we will not be greeted by Indonesian police when we arrive.”