“Come on—” Latham chanted, staring at the phone.
“Come on. …”
Only minutes before, he’d gotten the call: Somewhere in the expanse of Heathrow airport MI-5 had lost Vorsalov. “Quite embarrassing, Charlie,” the contact said, “but it seems we’ve mislaid your package.”
“You what?”
“Not to worry, he’ll turn up.”
“Damn it, Roger, how—”
“Oh, he’s slick, that one. Did a bit of dry cleaning in a lift. A quick turn to loose our close-in boys, then a slip out the back door of a gift shop. No worry. He won’t get away again. …”
Latham checked his watch: ten minutes before Vorsalov’s flight boarded.
The secure phone trilled. Latham grabbed it. “Latham here.”
It was Roger. “You’re back in the game, Charlie. He’s smart and fast, your boy. Made it all the way to another concourse before we spotted him. He’d done a quick change in a bathroom: heel lift, doffed his coat, picked up a cap. He’s first rate. Professional, I assume. Ivan?”
“Yes. Semiretired.”
“It shows. Anyway, he’s boarded a BA flight with a different passport. I’ll fax the details straightaway.”
“Where’s he headed?”
“Montreal. He touches down in seven hours.”
Somehow Latham had known Vorsalov wasn’t going to make it easy. Rule 26 in the professional spy’s handbook was: “Always assume you’re under surveillance and behave accordingly. Change your route, change your destination, do whatever it takes to shake up the opposition.”
Now they had seven hours to regroup, get the Canadians into the loop, and organize a net that would not only track Vorsalov but also hand him off at the border without so much as a hiccup.
“Apologies for the scare,” said Roger. “Anything else we can do for you?”
“No. Thanks, Roger, I owe you.” Latham hung up and turned to Stucky. “Art, you’d best get your boss down here. Paul, get on the horn to the RCMP in Quebec.”
25
Japan
Tanner doused the Range Rover’s headlights and coasted to a stop in the tree line. He and Cahil sat still, waiting for their eyes to adjust and listening to the jungle’s symphony of squawks and buzzes.
“Gotta love the jungle,” Cahil whispered, slapping a mosquito.
“Amen.” Like the water, jungle was darkness; jungle was cover.
They got out, shouldered their rucksacks, and started down the trail. In a few minutes, they reached the outskirts of Mitsu’s village. In the distance, a dog barked, then went silent. As if on cue, Mitsu appeared on the trail before them.
“You are late,” he whispered, smiling.
Cahil mussed his hair. “You’re early, scout.”
“You have the boat?” Tanner asked.
“Yes. Come.”
After a few hundred yards, the boy stopped at the crest of an embankment; through the foliage came the sound of gurgling water. Tanner’s flashlight beam illuminated the nose of a skiff.
Mitsu said, “Shall I come with you?”
“No, wait here. We need you to hold the fort.” Mitsu frowned, confused. “Keep this place safe while we’re gone,” Tanner added.
Mitsu smiled. “I will hold the fort.”
“If anyone comes around, stay out of sight. I’ll want a report when I get back.”
Mitsu nodded solemnly and saluted.
Tanner half-expected company tonight. Earlier that afternoon, Cahil had returned to the dive shop to exchange a defective regulator. When he came out, one of Takagi’s security trucks was sitting across the street. They followed him, but he was able to shake them on the way back to the hotel.
“So they know we’ve got dive gear,” Tanner said.
“Sorry, bud. I screwed up.”
“Forget it. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Now what?”
“Now it gets interesting. They’ll probably assume we’re going for the shipyard.”
“Or Ohira’s mystery X-mark off the village. If there’s anything to it, that is.”
The previous few days had dragged by as they waited for the weather to improve. It gave Briggs plenty of time to ponder the strange course DORSAL had taken.
Truth be told, he was surprised Mason had given them the week. Ohira’s investigation appeared to be a tangent: a pair of mystery ships, one of which had skulked away into the night, “sold” to a company on whose board Takagi secretly sat; the other a floating fortress packed with advanced electronics gear. And what of the mysterious X-marks-the-spot chart with which Ohira had seemed obsessed? Was it all connected, and if so, how? Tanner couldn’t shake the feeling there were larger, unseen forces at work.
He’d experienced the same sensation before and had come to trust it. In special ops this was called the k-check, or kinesthetic check. It was intuition, plain and simple, and he was a believer, not only because he’d seen it work but because he’d seen the effects of ignoring it.
With DORSAL, he felt as though invisible pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. He suspected Mason was withholding something. For Ohira to be working so far outside DORSAL’s mission without their knowledge seemed impossible.
None of that mattered, he decided. He would see this through to the end. Unprofessional though it was, he felt his hatred for Hiromasa Takagi growing. Takagi had Ohira executed, tried to do the same to him, and was likely up to his neck in black-market arms dealing. Those things alone made him easy to loathe.
They loaded the skiff and began pushing their way through the mangrove roots. Above their heads, the canopy shook and squawked with night birds. Soon they heard the roar of waves and the jungle thinned. When the water reached their chest, they climbed aboard, and Cahil began rowing.
“Once more unto the breech,” Bear murmured, working at the oars.
Cahil was, in Tanner’s opinion, the most unlikely Shakespeare aficionado on earth. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” Briggs countered.
With Cahil following his steering orders, Tanner matched fixes from Ohira’s chart against landmarks onshore until he felt they were in position. He called a halt and tossed out the anchor. “We should be right on top.”
“The question being, of what?” Cahil said, shrugging on his scuba tank.
With Briggs in the lead, they followed the anchor rope to the bottom.
Their flashlights cut narrow arcs through the black water. When Tanner’s fingers finally touched the sand, his depth gauge read forty-two feet. To their right, lost in the darkness, lay the hundred-meter curve where the seabed dropped away into the depths. Divers called it the “deep black.” He felt that familiar prickle of anticipation and fear.
Cahil stopped beside him. They inspected one another’s gear, exchanged thumbs-up signs, hooked themselves to the twenty-foot buddy line, and started out.
The current was negligible so they moved quickly, skimming over coral and rock formations teeming with fish. Here and there crabs skittered over the sand. Momentarily caught in Tanner’s beam, a moray eel stared at them with its doll’s eyes, then snaked back into its cave.
They reached the end of the first 100-meter leg. Tanner set himself and signaled Bear to make the swing north.
Now the terrain began to change. Open sand gave way to low ridges blanketed with sea grass. Briggs felt an almost immediate increase in the water temperature as well, then remembered the same warm current from his previous dive. It came from the oyster beds, Mitsu had said. They must be close by.
He was skimming low over a ridge when he dropped his flashlight. It bounced off a clump of coral and dropped into a crevice. He signaled Cahil to stop and went after it.
Sea grass billowed over the opening, partially obscuring the beam. He reached for it, fell short, and reached again. Suddenly the rocks crumbled and he fell headfirst into the hole. The edge of his mask struck a rock. Water gushed int
o his eyes. He fell into the blackness.
The line went taut. He jerked to a stop. He swung free for a moment, then cleared his mask, groped around, and pulled himself to the ledge. He felt two rapid tugs on the line: Cahil questioning. Tanner tugged back the okay signal. The flashlight lay a few feet away. He retrieved it and looked about.
This was no crevice, he realized, not even a cave in the strict sense. The sea grass had formed a canopy over what appeared to be a ravine. Rising above him, the rock lip disappeared in a forest of sea grass.
He gave the line three short jerks, and a few seconds later, Cahil dropped through the canopy and hovered beside him. What? he mouthed.
Tanner pointed. Ahead, the ravine sloped into the darkness.
Cahil nodded, and they started forward.
The darkness absorbed all but a sliver of light from their flashlights. Fish swirled around them and up along the ravine’s walls.
A pillar of rock loomed in their path. Tanner played his beam over it, saw nothing unusual, and kept going. He stopped suddenly, backpedaled, and finned closer to the rock. Something was there, a dull glint in the stone. Using his knife, he chiseled at the rock until he’d cleared away a patch.
Heart pounding, he waved Cahil over and gestured for him to hover beside the rock. What for? Bear mouthed.
Scale. Just do it.
Tanner backpedaled and looked again. There was no mistake.
This was no rock. It was a propeller.
They had traveled fifty feet when Briggs noticed the walls widening. His depth gauge read seventy-six feet, thirty feet below the seabed proper. He checked his watch: thirteen minutes of air left. If they went much deeper, they would have to make a decompression stop.
Ahead, Cahil was shining his flashlight along the curve of the hull where it met the sand. However it had come to be here, the vessel’s hull was tightly wedged in the ravine, with only a couple feet of clearance between it and the rock walls.
Cahil finned up along the hull and disappeared. Tanner followed. He found Cahil standing on a steel platform. He gestured with his flashlight: Look!
Tanner saw the three vertical, polelike structures behind him, but the shapes didn’t register. He shrugged. What?
Cahil tapped two fingers on his face mask: Look closely!
Bear traced his light along the curve of the railing, then up the three poles. Now Briggs was seeing it. He backed up, looked again. Suddenly everything snapped into focus: the vessel’s narrow beam, the cigar-shaped hull, the tapered screw blade …
Cahil was standing on the bridge of a submarine.
26
Langley
British Airways flight 9701 was four minutes from touch-down at Montreal’s Mirabel International Airport.
We’re ready, Latham told himself. They’d done everything they could. Still, the practical pessimist in his head was prattling away. Something would go wrong. No matter how exhaustive its design, some piece of the plan, whether significant, trivial, or something in between, would go awry. All they could do was to be ready.
“Agent Latham, we’re patched into the RCMP command van at the airport. We’ll hear exactly what they’re hearing from the field units.”
“About damned time,” Art Stucky muttered, crushing out his cigarette.
“Put it on speaker,” said Latham.
“All units, this is Command, the flight is on final approach,” a voice from the RCMP command van said. “Radio check by section.”
“Gate team in place.”
“Concourse team in place.”
“Mobile teams in place.”
“Roger. Gate, you’ll start us off; notify us as soon as the subject disembarks.”
“Six teams?” Stucky asked Latham.
Latham nodded. “Three in the airport and three mobile. Almost forty Mounties in all, plus Mirabel Security. They’ll have a dozen cameras on him.”
“If this guy can give the slip to the Brits, he sure won’t have any trouble—”
“All units, this is Gate, the subject is on the ground.”
“Here we go,” said Latham.
As Vorsalov stepped off the jet way, he was invisibly surrounded by a fluid cordon of RCMP watchers who shadowed him through Immigration and down to the baggage claim area. As the concourse team—which consisted of almost a dozen officers, none of which Vorsalov would see twice in his passage through the airport—took over, the radio reports became increasingly brief.
“Concourse Three, this is Two. Subject descending escalator east two.”
“Got him.”
Latham and the others studied a map of Mirabel Airport. “There he is,” Latham said. “There are three more levels below this one: the taxi stand, garage, and car rental desks.”
They didn’t know whether Vorsalov had any baggage to claim; in the commotion at Heathrow, MI-5 had missed that detail. He had several transportation options available, all of them problematic; whichever he chose, the RCMP would have to scramble to catch up before he escaped the airport grounds.
“Command, this is Concourse Two. Subject is off the escalator. Stand by.” There were thirty seconds of silence. “Command, he’s got baggage … single piece, a brown suitcase … East escalator now, descending. Concourse Four, he’s yours.”
“Roger, got him.”
Two minutes passed.
“Come on,” Stucky muttered. “Where is he?”
“Wait,” said Latham.
“Command, Four. Subject is descending again. Five, he’s coming your way.”
Going for a taxi, Latham thought.
Sixty seconds of silence. Heart thudding, Latham stared at the speaker.
“Five, this is Command. Report.”
“Stand by … I think we’ve lost him…”
“Goddamn it!” Stucky roared.
“Shut up, Art,”
“I knew it! Shit, I knew—”
“Command this is Five, he’s done a U-turn … Going back up the escalator. Four, have you got him?”
“We see him.” Long pause. “Command, subject is at Avis counter.”
“Understood. Mobile Units converge. Subject is on rental car level.”
Latham turned to Randal. “Paul, have the Mounties fax us his rental receipt. I want to see that credit card.”
Vorsalov drove his rented Lumina directly to the Ramada Inn Parc Olympique. To the surprise of the Mounties, he made no U-turns or quick backs. In fact, his driving was so sedate the mobile units had to adjust their pace to avoid overtaking one another. Vorsalov pulled under the hotel’s awning, tipped the valet, and walked into the lobby.
“All units, Command. Subject is inside. All units take secondary positions.”
Randal walked into the conference room and handed the fax to Latham.
“What is it?” said Stucky.
“He’s still traveling under the Karnovsky alias.”
“So?”
“If he was going to switch, Mirabel was the perfect place; he could’ve hit the ground clean.”
“That’s good for us.”
“His paper trail is too long. It’s out of character for him.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Latham shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Montreal
In addition to being the youngest member of the surveillance team, Corporal Jean-Paul Lemond was a walking recruiting poster for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Clean-shaven and lantern-jawed, he stood six foot three inches and had a face that seemed both stern and boyish. He also had an uncanny eye for detail.
Lemond could look at a picture of a suspect at age eight and pick him from a lineup as a middle-aged man; from a crowd of hundreds he could single out a blond-haired, clean-shaven man who had once been a black-haired, bearded felon. On one occasion he even fingered a Quebec Separatist who had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery. The giveaway, Lemond later explained, had been his ear-lobe
s.
Had anyone told Lemond this unusual talent would save the Vorsalov operation from disaster and make the day of an FBI agent he’d never met, he would have laughed at them.
Ten minutes after Vorsalov entered the lobby, Lemond walked into the hotel’s parking garage and jogged up the ramp until he came to the valet section. A red-coated attendant walked by. Lemond stopped him and flashed his badge. “The green Lumina that just came in. Where is it parked?”
“Uh … over there, by the red Puegot.”
“Anyone else on this level?”
“No.”
“The stairwell and elevator are the only ways up here?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to wait by the elevator. If anyone comes up, make some noise. I need to inspect this car. Can you do that?”
“Uh, sure, I guess so.”
It took Lemond only a minute to slip inside the Lumina, search it, and plant the transmitter under the bumper. He gave the valet a wave and started back down the ramp.
Suddenly, from below, he heard a door slam shut. He waited for the wail of an exit alarm, but none came. He stopped, listened. Rapid footsteps echoed on concrete. Lemond walked to the railing just in time to see a figure exit the ramp and turn onto the sidewalk. He got only a glimpse of a black fedora and a khaki trench coat before the figure disappeared beneath an elm, but it was enough. Something in the figure’s stride, the tilt of his head as he turned to look for coming traffic …
He pulled out his radio and started running. “Command, this is Lemond…”
As the surveillance commander was scrambling to respond to Lemond’s report, Lemond himself was jogging up to the corner Vorsalov had just turned. “Command, subject just passed Sherbrook and Ontario.”
“Roger, stand by, hold position.”
Lemond peeked around the corner. A block away, a La Salle taxi swerved to the curb beside Vorsalov. “Command, I need instructions. We’re going to loose him.”
End of Enemies Page 22