“We don’t know that. Let me do it my way?”
“Okay, sure.”
“You hearing me?”
“Yeah, dammit, I said I was.”
Chavez walked back into the room and knelt down again. To Ibrahim he said, “I’m going to take the towel out. If you scream, it goes back in.”
Ibrahim nodded. His face was slick with sweat. Beneath each of his knees, Frisbee-sized puddles of blood were soaking into the plywood.
Dominic removed the towel. Ibrahim gasped but snapped his jaw shut and went quiet. His lower lip trembled. “My friend’s a little touchy today. Sorry. Let’s talk about the U.S.; give us something, and we’ll get you to a hospital.”
Ibrahim shook his head.
To Hadi: “How about you? Give us what we’re looking for and we won’t take you back with us.”
Ibrahim rasped, “Don’t, Shasif…”
Dominic walked over and knelt beside Chavez, gesturing I’m okay with his palm. “Hadi,” he said. “Let me put this together for you: Did anyone see you during the refinery job?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“So who knew what you looked like? Who could have leaked the sketch? Either Ibrahim or someone higher up. No one else.”
“But why?”
“Loose ends. Maybe somebody thought you were unreliable. Think about it. Ibrahim gets the order from the higher-ups to kill you; the sketch and message gets you to run. Ibrahim uses that to convince the other two to join the hunt. Otherwise, Ibrahim has to convince them to kill their friend for no good reason. Which is easier?”
Hadi considered this for a few moments, then glanced sideways at Ibrahim, who was shaking his head. Saliva leaked from the corners of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. “It’s not true.”
Dominic said, “Hadi, he betrayed you, and now he’s sitting right here beside you, lying about it. Doesn’t that piss you off?”
Hadi nodded.
“I know it really pisses me off.”
Dominic jerked his gun up, extended it toward Ibrahim, and shot him in the eye. Blood and brain matter sprayed over the wall. Ibrahim slumped sideways and went still, save his left arm, which twitched and flopped for ten seconds before stopping.
Chavez slapped Dominic’s arm up and away. “Christ almighty! What the fuck!”
Dominic stood up and backed away a few feet. Hadi curled himself into the fetal position and started whimpering. Dominic took two strides to him and pressed his gun to Hadi’s temple.
Chavez shouted, “Don’t! Not an inch, Dom.”
Dominic glanced sideways. Chavez had his own gun half raised in the direction of Dominic, who just shook his head and returned his attention to Hadi.
“Dom, don’t do it…”
Dominic leaned down and said to Hadi, “Unless you’ve got something to tell us, shithead, I’m done with you. I’m going to put a bullet in your ear. When I say go, you either nod or you die.”
82
JACK AND CLARK made it to Virginia Beach in twenty minutes and found some public parking a block from the beach. All of the purchases the Salim kids had made were within three blocks.
“So what’re you thinking?” Jack asked as they got out.
“They checked in at one of the hotels around here using a new card but did some shopping on the old one. We play marshal and deputy again, and show their photos around.”
For the next hour, they walked from hotel to hotel, checking them off Jack’s list as they went. They were walking into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn at Atlantic and 28th when Jack said, “They’re here.”
“Yeah, where?”
“Swimming pool. Two loungers near the diving board.”
“I see ’em. Keep walking.”
They stepped into the lobby. Clark stopped, pursed his lips. “Remember that flower shop we passed on Twenty-seventh? Go back there, buy some daisies or something. And one of those card envelopes, too.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll explain. Don’t come back the same way. Meet me in the rear parking lot.”
Jack was back in fifteen minutes. He found Clark in the rear parking lot, standing beside a Dumpster. “They’re checked in under the same first names, last name Pasaribu. Their room is on the north side, facing away from the pool.”
“So we pick the door, go in.”
“Maids are up there. Flowers will work better.”
Jack went up first, carrying the daisies. Clark went up the opposite stairwell and stopped at the top, out of view around the corner. When Jack reached the Salims’ room door, he stopped and knocked, waited for ten seconds, then knocked again. Four doors down, a maid came out of another room and grabbed some towels off her cart. “Excuse me, miss,” Jack said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I got these flowers for my girlfriend. I have to get back to the base, but I wanted to leave them for her. Problem is, I already turned in my card key. Think you could pop open the door? I’ll put the flowers on the bed and be out in five seconds.”
“I’m not supposed to-”
“In and out in five seconds.”
A pause. “Well, okay.”
She opened the door and stepped aside.
“Thanks,” Jack said.
Clark took his cue and came around the corner. “Miss, hey, miss…”
“Yes, sir?”
“I need some towels.” Clark walked up to the cart and began pawing through the supplies, knocking soap bars and shampoo bottles on the ground. The maid walked over. “Let me, sir.”
Inside the Salims’ room, Jack dropped the flowers on the bed and looked around. Card key, card key… He spotted it lying on the ashtray, snatched it up, and headed for the door. Back outside, he called, “Thanks,” and headed for the stairs. Clark got his towels and headed in the opposite direction, circling back to Jack’s stairs, where they met at the top. They waited until the maid stepped into the room she was cleaning, then walked to the Salims’ door, swept the card, and slipped inside.
“How’d you know about the card?” Jack asked.
“They always offer couples two cards, and most people take both with them-but not to the pool.”
“What’re we looking for?”
“Credit cards and IDs. Past that, anything that catches your eye.”
They were out in three minutes. Clark dialed The Campus as they walked back to their car. “They’ve got four more credit cards and three passports each,” he told Rick Bell. “E-mailing the details to you now.”
A side from their new hotel in Virginia Beach and yet more meals from McDonald’s and Frappuccinos from Starbucks, the Salims had only one other charge: a rental car from Budget. Jack and Clark drove back to the Holiday Inn and found the platinum Intrepid in the rear parking lot.
“Now we wait,” Clark said.
Shortly before two p.m., Citra and Purnoma came down the hotel’s back stairway and got into the Intrepid.
From Virginia Beach they got on the 264 heading east, through Norfolk, then into Portsmouth on the 460 before turning north and taking the tunnel across Hampton Roads Bay. On the far side, they got off at Terminal Avenue then Jefferson to King Lincoln Park at the southern tip of Newport News Point. Clark followed them into the parking lot and watched the Salims climb out and head into the park. They gave the Salims a hundred-yard head start, then got out, separated, and followed.
The park was only a quarter-mile long. At the halfway point, Clark and Jack met back up at the basketball courts, where a shirts-skins pickup game was going on.
“Where the hell are they going?” Jack asked. The park was bracketed on two sides by water. “They just traded the sun and surf capital of Virginia for this.”
“Doesn’t feel right,” Clark agreed.
The Salims reached the far edge of the park where it formed an arrowhead between the beach and Jefferson Avenue. As they watched, the girl got out a camera and started taking pictures-not of the ocean but across the highway.
“The
cargo terminal,” Clark muttered.
They’re doing reconnaissance,” Clark told Hendley and the others over the phone an hour later. They’d just followed the Salims’ Intrepid back to the hotel; now they sat on Atlantic Avenue, a block away, where they could see every car coming and going. “The Newport News Marine Terminal. What exactly they’re interested in, we don’t know, but they took dozens of pictures.”
“Any military ships berthed there? Chemicals, fuel depot?”
“Nothing,” Clark said. “Already checked. Mostly box ships with dry cargo. We’ve been on them since this morning. Aside from the pool and the terminal, they haven’t gone anywhere, and no one’s come up to their room.”
“If they’re scoping out targets,” Granger said, “this could go on for weeks. We’re not really set up for extended stakeouts. I say we tip the FBI and let them have it.”
“Give us another day,” Clark said. “If nothing pans out, we’ll pull the plug and come home.”
At the Claridge Inn in Saint George, Utah, Frank Weaver was showering off a day’s worth of grime and looking forward to a Law & Order mini-marathon on TNT when he heard a knock on his door. He wrapped himself in a towel and padded across the room. “Who is it?”
“Front desk, Mr. Weaver. We have a problem with your credit card.”
Weaver unlatched the door and opened it a crack. The door flew open and banged against the wall. Two men stepped inside, one shutting the door, the other taking two quick strides at Weaver, who began backpedaling across the room but not fast enough. He felt something hard pressed against his solar plexus, then felt a hammer blow, then another. He felt himself falling backward. He bounced once on the edge of the bed, then rolled to the floor on his back. He lifted his head and looked down at his chest. Just below his sternum, two pencil eraser-sized holes were bubbling blood. The man who shot him walked forward and stood over him, one leg on either side of his chest. Frank Weaver saw the gun’s muzzle lowering toward his face, and he shut his eyes.
83
THE SALIM SIBLINGS left the hotel at nine p.m., and almost immediately Jack and Clark realized they were retracing their earlier route to the Newport News Marine Terminal. In Portsmouth they turned off the highway and drove to a U-Haul Storage on Butler Street. Clark kept going past the entrance, turned onto Conrad, shut off the headlights, then did a U-turn and pulled to a stop ten feet short of the intersection.
Down the block, the Intrepid had pulled into the parking lot and stopped beside the first row of storage units. Citra Salim climbed out and trotted up to a unit, which she opened with a key.
“Don’t like this,” Jack said. “What do two kids on vacation need with a storage unit?”
“No good reason,” Clark replied.
Citra was back out. She closed and locked the unit, then returned to the Intrepid. She was carrying two small canvas backpacks.
Within minutes they were back on the highway and headed into the bay tunnel. Once through to the other side, the Intrepid continued to retrace the afternoon route, ending up once more at King Lincoln Park. They didn’t pull into the parking lot, however, but drove past it, then turned right onto Jefferson and headed back in the same direction.
“Think they made us?” Jack asked.
“No. They’re just careful. We’re okay.”
They were in an industrial-park area: trucking companies, gravel suppliers, scrap yards, and boat repair shops. The Intrepid took another right.
“Twelfth Street,” Jack said. “Heading east again.”
Clark let them get a little farther ahead, then shut off his headlights, made the turn, and pulled to the curb. Three hundred yards down the road, the Intrepid was turning left into an apartment complex.
“Visiting new friends?” Jack wondered.
“Let’s find out.”
Clark turned on the headlights and pulled out again. As they drew even with the apartments, two figures walked out of the parking lot and started down the sidewalk. The Salims. With their backpacks. Clark passed them and looked in the rearview mirror. They were heading back toward Jefferson. Clark turned the next corner, stopped again, headlights off.
“See them?” Clark asked.
“Yep, got ’em.”
At Jefferson, the Salims crossed the street and disappeared down a grassy median behind a trucking company.
“Time to move,” Clark said.
Lights still off, he did a U-turn and rolled down Twelfth to Jefferson. As they reached the intersection, they saw the Salims turn left and disappear behind the trucking company’s fence.
“They’re running out of room,” Jack said. The trucking company backed up to 664, a raised, four-lane highway.
“Let’s hoof it,” Clark said.
They parked, got out, and trotted across the street to the grass median. At the rear of the trucking company, they found a marshy creek bordered by thick brush and a narrow trail. They were halfway down it when Clark realized where they were. “It’s the Six sixty-four canal. Remember to the right, as we came out of the tunnel?” They’d seen dozens of motor yachts and speed-boats berthed in the canal.
Down the trail, an engine gurgled to life. Clark and Jack sprinted forward. Fifty yards away at the end of a dock, the Salims were sitting in a speedboat. The boy sat down in the driver’s seat and eased the throttle forward. The boat pulled away from the dock and headed into the canal.
Jack and Clark were back to their car a minute later. They pulled onto Jefferson and headed south. After a few blocks, the canal came into view through the passenger window. They could see the Salims’ boat motoring toward the mouth of the canal.
“They’re going for the terminal,” Clark said.
“What about the harbor patrol?”
“Jack, once they get around the jetty, they’re a quarter-mile from the first berth. We’ve got five minutes, if that.”
Clark did a U-turn and headed in the other direction.
They crossed under the 664, turned south onto Terminal. At the bottom of the ramp the road forked at a tank farm. Clark veered right and followed the winding dirt road. Halfway down the tank farm, Clark braked to a stop. A hundred yards away was a lighted guard shack. A swinging gate blocked the road.
“Shit.”
“Marshal’s badge get us through?” Jack asked.
“Once inside, yeah, but main gates switched to TWIC in January-Transportation Worker Identification Credential. You don’t have one, you don’t get in.”
“How do you know that?”
“Rainbow had an E-Six devoted to keeping up with ID protocols,” Clark replied. “Bad guys are all about going where they don’t belong. Figure out what they’re trying to counterfeit, you’re halfway to figuring out what they’re targeting.”
Clark backed down the road, arm draped over the seat as he steered through the back window, until they reached the fork. He veered left and pulled into a gravel turnaround beside the tank farm’s fence.
“Back on foot,” Clark said.
To their left, on the other side of the tank farm, they could hear the traffic rushing by on the 664. To their right, across the dirt road, was a dirt berm overgrown with underbrush. They jogged over and up the embankment, then pushed through the foliage, then down the opposite slope. They found themselves in a scrub field about the size of a football field. At the far end, they could see the guard shack they’d spotted earlier. They sprinted across the field, up another slope, and through some brush, and ended up on a dirt road. To the left lay a dirt parking lot with rows upon rows of boxcar-sized shipping containers and two Quonset huts. Clark and Jack were down the road and among the containers thirty seconds later. They stopped to catch their breath, then kept going.
They picked their way through the rows of containers to the edge of the parking lot. Two hundred feet away were the docks, three of them extending into the harbor, with a ship berthed on each side, for a total of six.
“A lot of open ground between here and there. And a lot of da
mned lights. Looks like a stadium. Which ship?”
“Just a hunch, but I’d say the one that’s not unloaded yet.” He pointed at a box ship berthed on the far right. Bulktainers crowded the foredeck. “Can you make out the name?”
Jack squinted. “Losan.”
Three hundred yards away, Citra and Purnoma Salim were pulling their boat alongside the pier beneath the stern of the Losan. “You’re sure this is the one?” Citra whispered.
“I’m sure. Here.” She took the backpack and donned it.
Purnoma reached out, grabbed the steel maintenance ladder, and knotted the bow line to upright. He steadied the boat, and his sister started up the ladder. When she reached the top rung, she extended her arms above her head, snagged the bowline, then swung her feet up and hooked her ankles in place. Once she was halfway across, Purnoma followed. They were on deck a minute later.
“There should be no more than two crew members aboard. You take them, and I’ll head for the tanks. When you’re done, let me know and I’ll start.”
Remember, act like you belong and you do,” Clark said, then stood up and walked into the parking lot. Jack followed. A trio of men smoking outside one of the Quonset huts were watching them. Clark raised his arm. “Hey, guys. How’s it going?”
“Okay. You?”
Clark gave an exaggerated shrug. “Another day, another buck-fifty.”
The men laughed.
Clark and Jack kept walking, leaving the parking lot and walking down an alley of tractor trailers. They emerged on the wharf and turned right, passing the ships. They reached Losan’s pier.
“Can’t be this easy,” Jack muttered.
“Don’t jinx it, boy.”
They turned left down the pier. Fifty yards away, they could see that the Losan’s accommodation ladder was down, the base resting a few feet off the pier.
“They gonna have a guard?” Jack wondered.
“Watch, Jack. In the maritime world, we call them ‘watches.’ We’re about to find out.”
Dead or Alive Page 62