Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766)

by Caplan, Thomas

  Ty and Isabella studied Oliver as he listened. After less than a minute, he looked back up at them and said, “It wasn’t on the published schedule, of course, but you’re right, Wayfarer did encounter a propeller problem en route from Naples to Gib—”

  “A propeller problem,” Ty repeated, inflecting the phrase as if the very notion were preposterous.

  “It has been known to happen,” Oliver said, “although rarely so conveniently. Anyway, as you suggested, the ship did put into port two days ago.”

  “Which port?” Ty asked.

  “Palma, Majorca,” Oliver said.

  “And what’s Palma known for?”

  “It’s the marine servicing center of the Med,” Oliver said. “It’s full of dry docks and moorings, shipbuilders and repairers, chandleries and brokers. Everyone and his uncle is a broker. Any sort of boat or ship you’re looking for you can buy or sell or charter in Majorca.”

  “That’s right,” Ty said, “and do you know what else it is? It’s a puerto deportivo.”

  Oliver smiled. “Luke says there is no record of cargo being loaded or offloaded there.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that!” Ty exclaimed. “There never was and never will be. Whatever ship or ships, boat or boats those funds bought will be as invisible as the money that bought them.”

  “Thanks, Luke,” Oliver said.

  “From all of us!” Ty called out, in a voice loud enough to reach the mouthpiece of Oliver’s open phone.

  “We’re going to need aerial surveillance and all kinds of support in one hell of a hurry,” Oliver said as soon as he had disconnected.

  “Indeed we are,” Ty agreed, “but we’re also going to need a better idea of what we’re looking for before we institute a search. You’ve seen how many boats there are on the water, just around here?”

  “And there are even more than usual at the moment,” Oliver said.

  “Why do you say that?” Isabella asked.

  Oliver pointed to the enormous green-and-white marquees flapping in the strong breeze on the mainland shore.

  “Ah, the La Línea Boat Show,” Isabella observed, in a tone that suggested she had been there more than once.

  “Everyone at HQ’s been chattering about it,” Oliver told her. “We need to zoom in, but we don’t have a lens or even a target. What do you suggest, Ty?”

  “Even if we’re lucky and even though we can eliminate any that are under a certain size, it will require days to track down the vessel or vessels we’re looking for. That’s too long. And we can’t initiate a ship-by-ship search unless we want to bet the fate of the world on our coming up with an ace-high straight flush on the first inspection. If we don’t, we’ll succeed only in alerting Philip so that he can then slip quietly away. I suppose we could quarantine Gib Harbor, but how can we be sure the vessels are really in Gib Harbor rather than Algeria or Tunisia or you name it? And if we did that and they weren’t there, they’d soon find their way to wherever they are going.”

  “Maybe they’re not going anywhere right now. Maybe Philip’s planning to hold on to them for a while,” Isabella suggested.

  “Not likely,” Oliver told her. “They’re far too hot to handle, and there’s too much money moving for that to be the case.”

  “You’re right,” Ty said. “It’s Philip’s show now, but Ian wrote the original script, and Ian was a broker, not a long-term investor.”

  “I don’t want to ruin your day,” Oliver said, “but there is another possibility.”

  “It’s already been ruined,” Ty told him. “Go ahead. What is it?”

  “Just because Majorca is famous for boating, that doesn’t mean they bought a boat. It could have been a plane or planes.”

  “That is reassuring,” Ty said.

  “Maybe not, but it’s true.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Isabella said. “Majorca’s an island. So we can rule out cars, lorries and trains.”

  “As I see it,” Ty said, “if Philip Frost has a weakness, it’s that he’s a perfectionist who can’t abide loose ends. Whenever one appears, his instinct is to tie it up. We’re going to have to tear at the fabric of his deal in a way that will force him into actions he hadn’t expected or planned. And we’re going to have to be alert to them.”

  “So that’s all there is to it,” Oliver said.

  “Not quite,” Ty said. “We have to do it all in the next few hours.”

  “Not a problem,” Oliver replied, “but we’d better get rolling, and you’d better call the President.”

  “I’ll do that on the way,” Ty told him. “We Americans can also multitask.”

  Chapter Fifty

  “The President,” announced the White House operator as she put through Ty’s call.

  It took almost no time for Garland White to come onto the line. “Hello, Ty,” he said. “What can I do for you? Whatever it is, my daughter sensed it must be urgent.”

  “Daphne was right,” Ty replied. “It couldn’t be more so, Mr. President.” He drew a deep breath. They were in a Royal Navy Land Rover racing toward the dockyard at the waterfront. “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “And it isn’t over? Is that what you are trying to tell me,” the President replied.

  “Yes, sir,” Ty said. “In a way it’s just begun.”

  “Welcome to politics.”

  “I’m not suited to politics,” Ty said.

  “Really?” said Garland White. “I would have thought you’d be a natural. If I was mistaken, count yourself fortunate. Go ahead, Ty, shoot!”

  “As I’m sure you’ve heard, your suppositions do appear to have been correct, but it’s not going to be easy to find the warheads. Even with the combined force of the British and Spanish navies, the Sixth Fleet and every radiation sensor in Europe, it will be almost impossible to locate them without giving ourselves away. You heard that the senior partner was murdered?”

  “I did,” said the President.

  “Dr. Kenneth told us you had rejected the idea of letting the geeks loose on Santal’s and Frost’s bank transfers.”

  “That’s true. Not only would it be unconstitutional and a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, but I’ve been convinced that such action could well—indeed would—undermine faith in the sanctity of the international banking system and thus risk putting an already fragile world economy on life support.”

  “Not if it’s done correctly,” Ty said.

  “You’re very accomplished in many fields,” the President replied. “I didn’t realize economics and cyber-warfare were among them.”

  “They are not, but you know what Albert Einstein said: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’”

  Garland White laughed. “What do you propose? How can I help you when no one else can?”

  Ty exhaled. “I don’t want to put you in the position of having to balance a flutter in the world’s economy against the survival of its cities or the millions of people who live in them, even though to me it’s not a close call.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re doing nothing of the kind. And I agree with you. It wouldn’t be a close decision if there were a guarantee that whatever stunts the geeks pulled off would work, but there isn’t. In fact, it’s the remotest of long shots.”

  “As I understand it, the geeks are contractors.”

  “They are contractors with one client,” said Garland White.

  “I would like you to release them from that exclusivity. Temporarily, of course.”

  “Who else would they be working for?”

  “Me,” Ty said. “At the same time, I would like you to instruct the various NATO commanders in the area that they are to give Oliver Molyneux whatever other more conventional resources he feels he needs. He may h
ave to move quickly.”

  “You’ve got that,” said the President.

  “What about loosening the reins on the geeks?”

  “That depends upon what you plan to do with them.”

  “Mr. President,” Ty asked, “do you really want to know?”

  Garland White hesitated. “I’ll have hell to pay with George Kenneth, not to mention others in my administration and elsewhere, especially on Wall Street. But I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Ty said.

  “What you mean is that if it works it will be seen as having been the right thing to do.”

  “Mr. President, contrary to the impression my military record may have given you, I have always hated fighting. But if there is one thing I hate more, it’s fighting with one hand tied behind my back. We’ve done too much of that. If we don’t use everything we have in our arsenal, sir, and do it now, those warheads are going to escape.”

  “I’m betting more on you than any studio ever has,” Garland White observed.

  “We both know what an understatement that is.”

  “Are you going to pay them?”

  “In some currency,” Ty said.

  “Well, it’s your money, I suppose.”

  “Easy come, easy go,” Ty said.

  At the dockyard Oliver vaunted jauntily out of the Land Rover, almost like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, Ty thought. “I’ll catch you up at HQ,” he said. “I want to check on things here first. We’re going to require every high-speed patrol boat and flat-bottomed inflatable we can get our hands on. You’ll check in with the airfield?”

  “Better than that,” Ty said, “I’ll get the admiral to do it. I’m going to need him to put some drones in the air and to download in real time from the satellites.”

  “It was a short conversation,” Oliver said. “Do you think White meant to authorize all that?”

  Once he had shifted into the driver’s seat, Ty gave an affirmative nod. “Implicitly,” he answered.

  “What more can a man ask for?”

  “We’ve got to get this right,” Ty said. “My dad always said, ‘There are many wrong ways to do the right thing—’”

  “‘But no right way to do the wrong thing,’” Oliver chimed in, completing the maxim.

  “The last part’s Frost’s problem,” Ty said.

  Giles Cotton was on the telephone when Ty arrived. “We meet again,” he said, “under rather different circumstances.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry for that part of it,” Ty said, “and I am sorry about the loss of your friend Ian.”

  Giles Cotton issued a faint smile. “He was probably the most intriguing man I’ve ever met, but I always thought better of him than this.”

  “He paid the price,” Ty said.

  “Sadly,” said Admiral Cotton. “The person I was speaking to when you arrived just now was the Supreme Commander of NATO.”

  “That was fast,” Ty said.

  “Apparently you and Molyneux are to have the run of things. As far as this whole business is concerned, the two of you are in charge.”

  “Whatever must be done will be done through you,” Ty demurred. “We will not disturb the chain of command.”

  “I appreciate that. Molyneux’s involvement doesn’t surprise me. Yours, I must admit, does.”

  “It surprises me, too.”

  Ty followed the admiral down the hall to the cool, interior room in which Bingo sat before two levels of LED screens arranged in a crescent. On the three upper central of these were the faces of Delilah Mirador, Jonty Patel and Nevada Smith.

  “Don’t worry,” Bingo said. “They can’t see you, and as long as you stay out of the cone whose borders you see painted on the floor in bright yellow, they won’t. Nor will they be able to hear you until I turn the audio back on. Of course, I realize that your voice is almost as famous as your face. But as long as you speak into this microphone, it will be unrecognizable.”

  “Thanks,” Ty said. “I’m sure it would be safe even if they knew.”

  “It would,” Bingo said, “but they have no need to know.”

  “Shall we start?”

  “Counting down,” Bingo said. “Five, four, three, two, one . . . Lights, camera, action!

  “Good morning, evening, afternoon, boys and girl,” he continued as the images of his colleagues unfroze. “As I suggested, we’ve got a variation of the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack problem. We have to find, and effing quickly, a moving object in this area of the Med—an object, not a person. It is very likely to be a boat or a barge, though it could be a plane or both. It is probably bound south, but not necessarily so. It might reveal itself to radiation sensors, but depending upon how its storage hold has been constructed and its cargo packed, it might not. Come on, children, you’re paid for your bright ideas!”

  “Is there a minimum size?” inquired Nevada Smith.

  “My omission, sorry,” Bingo said. “It would have to be large enough to carry a crate at least four by two by two meters. It might help to visualize a crate that could accommodate a grand piano.”

  “Or a nuclear warhead?” speculated Delilah Mirador.

  “That would be of about the same size, yes,” Bingo agreed.

  “We don’t know from what direction it has come?” asked Jonty Patel.

  “Not with a high degree of certainty. Two days ago it would have been in Majorca—in Palma, to be exact.”

  “We could rewind the satellite coverage, see what the drones saw if any were doing practice runs off the fleet.”

  “Let’s do that,” Bingo said. “Nevada, will you take care of it?”

  “Done,” Nevada said.

  “Great, but we’ll still be swamped,” Delilah said, “and a lot of the recognition won’t be exact. Sure, we’ll narrow down the field, but we won’t find it, not in time.”

  “Precisely my thought,” Bingo said. “We need to lure it our way, or at least out of its routine.”

  “But how?” inquired Ty.

  “Whose voice is that?”

  “The brass,” Bingo explained. “Again, I’m forgetting my manners.”

  “Well, hello there,” said Delilah.

  “Yes, hello there,” Jonty and Nevada echoed, almost in unison.

  “Is he camera shy?” asked Delilah.

  “Just insecure,” Bingo replied. “He doesn’t think he’s photogenic.”

  “You can’t fool us that easily,” she said. “A spook’s a spook.”

  Bingo paused until the matter dropped. “Can we answer his question?”

  “What do we know not about the cargo but about the personality involved?”

  “We’re talking about the same personality we have been all along,” Bingo said.

  “Philip Frost or Ian Santal?” asked Jonty.

  “Santal’s dead,” Bingo said.

  “Did you see the body?”

  “It burned.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “No, but it is a safe assumption. It’s Philip Frost we want to provoke.”

  “How hard can that be?” Jonty asked.

  “Extremely,” Delilah said. “We have gloves on, remember?”

  “They’ve been taken off,” Bingo said.

  “Really?” asked Delilah. “By whom?”

  “They’ve been taken off,” Bingo repeated evasively.

  “Use your imagination! They were put on by Kenneth. Only one person could remove them,” Nevada Smith said.

  “Let’s keep the ideas rolling,” Ty said.

  “Here’s the protocol,” Jonty said. “We rewind the satellite and download all drone data. What we’re left with, just as Delilah suggested, will be our field,
except that we’ll add to it everything we pick up from port and airport logs. Once that’s been done—”

  “How long will it take?” Ty asked.

  “Longer than you’d like, but less time than you think,” Bingo said, “with help from Fort Meade and GCHQ Cheltenham.”

  Jonty resumed. “As I was saying, once that’s been done, we’ll begin to send out stimuli. Do I have a free hand with the lords of finance?”

  “You do,” Ty said. “Don’t anyone ask again. Just do what you have to.”

  “This is great,” Jonty said, with an incandescent smile. “All the thrill of bank robbery with none of the consequences.”

  Ty laughed. “Maybe for you,” he said.

  “Like, am I free to park money in my account? Think how great that would be for my street cred—well, at least with my bank manager.”

  “Calm down, Jonty,” Delilah said. “The trick is going to be to make our friends suspect each other. Most of all we want to engender suspicion in Frost, but to the extent that we can make the others just as wary, they’ll be bound to act in ways that will trigger the desired reactions from him. Desired from our point of view, that is—dangerous from his. As soon as we can, we take a snapshot. Then, once we’re positive our boundaries are actually wide enough, we put it into motion. Slow motion at first, then gradually work up to real time. Bingo, you have access to the beta CVP we were playing with a while ago, right?”

  “How could I not?” Bingo demanded. “I wrote it.”

  “Like most authors, you love your own writing, don’t you?” Nevada said.

  “No, not always, but in this instance yes, damn it, I do. I love my beta CVP. Tell me there’s better wanking material anywhere out there! If anyone would know, it would be you.”

  Ty chuckled to himself. The longer he listened to these geeks, the more they reminded him of certain players in the movie business. “What exactly is a beta CVP?” he inquired.

  “It’s a hybrid derivative of both facial-recognition software and aggressive-driver imaging. It finds not an image or a form but a pattern of movement. Once it has established that pattern, it begins to look for deviations from it, especially inexplicable deviations. Say you’re walking down a street that runs north by northwest for two blocks and then suddenly you turn east. The CVP, which stands for ‘characteristic variation program,’ will pick that up.”