“What in God’s name is going on?” Admiral Cotton raged when informed of the sniper’s shots by his lieutenant. “Do they have any idea where the gunfire originated?”
“It’s too soon for forensics,” the lieutenant said.
“I know, I know.”
The wail of sirens rose outside, piercing even NATO’s mountain fortress.
“I expect this answers our question,” Admiral Cotton declared. “Someone had better get hold of Molyneux.”
“Of course,” Ty said, “but I’m not so sure it answers anything. Why would you store warheads, if you had them, on a high-security tarmac where access would be difficult at the best of times and where, if you aroused the least curiosity coming and going, you’d be outnumbered by a whole garrison?”
“Because it’s the only airfield in the area. Because air is how you brought them in, and air’s how you mean to take them out. It’s hardly long-term storage we’re talking about.”
“That could be,” Ty said. “I’m just not convinced.”
“Let me ask you this,” Giles Cotton said. “Presuming you had imported them by air, why would you take the risk of transferring them first to ground, then to sea transport?”
Ty paused. “I wouldn’t.”
“Is the sniper still firing?” Cotton asked his aide, who detached his mobile from his belt and repeated the question into it.
“No,” the lieutenant replied finally, “and the airport’s locked down.”
“As it damn well should be!” exclaimed the admiral. “How many shots were fired in total? Does anyone know?”
“Yes, five,” the lieutenant answered.
“So far,” said Giles Cotton.
“Why would he stop at five?” Ty wondered aloud.
“You’re asking me?”
“If he meant to head off a search, even temporarily, he—or they—would need to fire many more rounds than that.”
“Temporarily is the best they could achieve,” Admiral Cotton mulled, his expression signaling a sudden appreciation of Ty’s perspective. “You’d need an army to take the airfield.”
“That’s correct, sir. And some help from a navy and an air force, too.”
“You think it’s a diversion.”
“It’s possible. What isn’t possible is for a plane without a pilot to get off the ground. So we’ve got some time.”
“Unless there are more shots,” the admiral said. “It’s difficult to imagine where the bastard’s hidden himself.”
“Not that difficult,” Ty said. “You’ve been to Ian Santal’s office.”
“Indeed I have.”
“I was there earlier today, as you know.” Ty smiled. “I looked out the window behind his desk smack at the airport. There are galleries all through that mountain, many of them left over from the Great Siege, I’m told. I realize they’re closed to the public, but you and I both know that that’s only in theory. From Ian’s office, and no doubt from other points of entry as well, a sniper could make his way up or down the Rock to just the vantage point he required. He wouldn’t be seen. He couldn’t be hit. It wouldn’t matter how far his shell casings flew. And he could almost certainly get away before attention turned to those galleries and that emplacement. He’d have multiple routes of escape, if he didn’t linger.”
Giles Cotton nodded. “All too true,” he said, “but if the objective is merely diversion, what about those positive readings from the radiation sensors?”
Ty shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “We’ll find out eventually, but not until they secure the whole site, throw a tent over it and send in an armored crew, which could take . . . what? At least an hour, probably a hell of a lot longer.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Admiral,” Isabella said, coming into the corridor from Bingo’s office. “Bingo’s looking for Ty. He says it’s urgent.”
“I’ll come with you,” Giles Cotton said.
“Here’s news you can use in a nutshell,” Bingo said. “Bingo Chen wins the Nobel Prize.”
“There is no Nobel Prize for computer science,” Nevada Smith interjected.
“Or even for mathematics,” added Delilah Mirador.
“And it’s not really physics,” commiserated Jonty Patel.
“Peace, then,” Bingo said. “They can give me the Nobel Peace Prize. Watch this! On the lower central screen, which is formatted to 1080p, is a real-time satellite picture of the seas around Gibraltar, extending six miles out from the coast of Spain as far north as Málaga, as far west as Tarifa and the straits and including the Bay of Algeciras. Over it I have dropped the soon-to-be-prizewinning, fortune-making CVP filter. One feature of the CVP is its ability to display timelines. The one you’re looking at records the stimuli we’ve put out there since we began this operation. Remember, the image beneath the timeline will in all cases correspond to that timeline. Let me put it into motion.”
Ty studied the scene, which reminded him of the focus groups that studios sometimes did after sneak previews of their movies.
“Heavy traffic at sea,” Bingo continued, “and why not, on a beautiful day at the peak of summer? So here’s the way our little corner of the Med looked when we set off on our adventure. We teased. No change. Correction, one boat did suddenly change course, but on inspection it was below our minimum capacity constraint and had turned around because it was running out of petrol.”
“You followed it?” Isabella asked.
“The satellite is naturally nosy,” Bingo said. “Moving forward, we raised our tease to a tickle. In the aftermath of that, we waited and kept waiting for a reaction, but once again none came. Obviously we hadn’t catalyzed any second thoughts. Next we advanced to titillation. At this we were both more clever and insistent, but not sufficiently. In hindsight I suppose we should have done more. Remember that old question ‘How do you titillate an ocelot?’ Answer: ‘Oscillate its tit a lot.’”
Isabella rolled her eyes. “You’re too much, Bingo,” she said.
“One hour ago here we are. But as of fifty minutes ago, we were still stuck with the same result. Either Frost wasn’t paying attention, which I don’t believe is possible under the circumstances, or the man has the most stifled emotions on the planet.”
“You guessed it,” Ty said.
“Look carefully at what you are about to see. It’s just minutes old. We sent a signal we were pretty sure would wake him up, as you know. The signal goes out. Now his money’s gone, except for what he’s skimmed and taken offline. All the funds de Novo’s been accumulating have been wiped. He can’t be sure what’s happened. Sometimes, when you play with rogues, the rogues get the better of you. Has one or have the lot of them taken it back? Or has someone else? In either case or any other that comes to his mind, how? He’s got to wonder. Fixed as he is to his plan, he can’t go forward until he gets to the bottom of what’s happened and why. As you can see, the Med’s a bathtub full of toys, many of them tracing circles or ellipses anyway as they cruise or troll for fish or pull water-skiers. That makes things more difficult for the CVP, but, alas, not impossible.”
“Cut to the chase, will you, Bingo?” Ty asked.
“That’s just where I was heading,” Bingo said. “Five minutes after that signal, out of literally thousands of vessels in our field, only fifty-four make discernible changes to their patterns of speed and direction. Of these, fifty-two can be eliminated because they would not have the capacity to carry cargo the size of warheads. The two we are left with are both trawlers. You can see them toward the right edge of the screen, lit in lovely phosphorescent green. Pinning them and then rewinding the satellite feeds, we can trace them back to where they came from, which of course was Majorca, the day before yesterday.”
“Where are they now?” Ty asked.
“Less than a third of t
he way from Gibraltar to Ceuta, but they’re standing still or drifting back rather than going forward.”
Ty smiled. He had to admire not only the ingenuity but also the deviousness of Bingo’s program. That deviousness more closely resembled Ian’s or Philip’s nature than Ty’s. Only the end served, not a habit of mind, separated Bingo Chen from them. Ty was savoring the irony of this fact when his BlackBerry vibrated. He looked down at the bright letters on its dark screen then, to the surprise of the others, immediately took the call.
“Hello,” he said
“Mr. Ty Hunter?”
“This is he.”
“White House operator, please hold for the President.”
“Apparently I didn’t know or you didn’t understand what I’d signed off on!” barked Garland White.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“There is a rumor out there, fast gaining currency, that the systems technology that underlies our international banking system has been penetrated and corrupted.”
“Really?” Ty said in a theatrically deadpan voice. “I hadn’t heard that. I’ve had other things on my mind in the last few hours.”
“Well, the Secretary of the Treasury hasn’t, and neither have his counterparts in other capitals. They are not yet certain of what’s going on, but at first glance it appears that while invading a small Swiss bank, technothieves instructed not only that bank’s computer but the computers of all Swiss banks to forward all funds on deposit to a checking account in Mumbai. I kid you not!”
Ty laughed. “It sounds like a short circuit,” he said.
“It had better be something like that,” Garland White said. “Are you having any luck with your search?”
“Yes, but it’s a long story,” Ty said, “which I don’t have time to go into right now if we’re hoping for a happy ending.”
“Understood,” said Garland White. “And, Ty, make sure there is one. And call me the moment it happens.”
When he had hung up, Ty at once turned to Bingo. “You’re going to have to press the reset button,” he said.
“If I do, if I can, it will turn the clock back on, you understand that. Frost will assume it was a systemwide error of some sort, in which case he will be bound to revert to his previous schedule.”
“He’ll assume that anyway,” Ty said, “before very long.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the entire international banking system is in crisis, as will no doubt be reported in the news momentarily. Apparently Jonty lifted not only Frost’s funds but those in all accounts in all Swiss banks.”
“Oops!” said Bingo. “How much time do you think you’ll need?”
“How can I possibly answer that?” Ty asked.
“Good point,” Bingo said. “Suppose I hold off for two more hours.”
“Can you restore everyone’s funds but Frost’s in the meantime?”
“Can we? Of course we can. We can make Peru rich and bankrupt Switzerland, as we’ve just shown. But if we do that, Frost may well get wind of it, assume his will be the next account to recover, and go on about his business.”
Ty considered this. “Two hours,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will take him to find out, but once he discovers where his money has landed, he’ll know that what happened wasn’t due to his partner’s treachery. Of course, he’ll probably also kill Jonty.”
“We’ll have to find a way to keep him in the dark, then.”
“More likely we’ll have to put him there,” Ty said. “Bye, Bingo, gotta go.”
Bingo shook Ty’s hand. “Jonty,” he said a few seconds later, “you got a bit overzealous, didn’t you?”
“Sure, it was a mistake,” Jonty demurred. “But not just mine. How was anyone supposed to know that the Swiss had recoded their damned prefixes the night before? I meant all accounts with de Novo’s prefix, not Switzerland’s.”
“Whatever, the result’s not great,” Bingo scolded him sharply.
“Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, please,” Jonty protested. “I am a very, very, very rich man, you know.”
Chapter Fifty-three
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Admiral Cotton asked as Ty stepped aboard a high-speed patrol boat at the dockyard. Oliver, nearby, had assumed command of an identical vessel, and there were four more, each containing twenty petty officers, a machine gun and one M79 grenade launcher. Additionally, six flat-bottomed inflatables, carrying six petty officers each, were in the process of shoving off from the harborside.
“I’ve done it before,” Ty told him.
“I don’t mean on film.”
“Neither do I, and those were darker waters than these.”
“What’s he talking about?” Giles Cotton asked Isabella, who was standing beside him.
“I have no idea,” she said.
On the telephone Oliver said, “Once the trawlers are in sight, we lie back in our respective positions, then advance at once together. The attacks have got to be simultaneous.”
“They appear to be about the same size. Which do you want?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Oliver said. “We’ll take the first. The important thing is to bracket them, leave them no choice, but not to fire a shot if we don’t have to. We can’t be sure where the cargo is.”
“Surely it must take more than a single shot to detonate that sort of weapon,” Ty said.
“You would think so, but I’ve never tried it.”
The eastern sky was filling with clouds that turned the sea behind them to dark topaz. Ahead, beyond the straits, where the Phoenicians had imagined the Unknown to begin, the sun still sparkled on waves and ripples, on the casual motorboats and sailing craft, the determined tankers, fishing rigs, barges and ferries that defined the life of the basin at high summer.
On Oliver’s order the vessels of the task force had left port one by one then assembled a few miles out to sea. There they had formed a loose collection, soon dividing into two discrete but equal groups. The forward task force, which was Ty’s, required an extra eighteen minutes to be in place behind the second trawler, and while it advanced, the three patrol boats and three inflatables under Oliver’s command did their best to feign idle exercises. Both trawlers had blue hulls and white decks, but the farther of them was several meters longer, and the roof of its pilot house, while not quite a gargoyle, was a peaked rusty red cone.
As Ty began to advance from Oliver’s position and the craft with Oliver gathered into a lethal fighting force, Philip stood in the center of that pilot house, his eyes fastened to his laptop. When the Slav mercenary who was captaining the trawler approached him, Philip initially waved the man away, but the captain was insistent. “What is it?” Philip asked.
“Intelligence,” the captain explained.
“Go on.”
“You asked me to see to it that we enjoyed eyes on the ground.”
“I did, just yesterday. Did you think I wouldn’t remember?” Philip asked.
“No, of course not.”
“You told me you had made a friend of the chandler.”
“That is true. He has just telephoned.”
“Saying?” inquired Philip.
“That the navy has gone to sea.”
“The navy is always at sea. That’s precisely its point.”
“But this time, the chandler said, they put out in a manner that reminds him of task forces.”
“I see. One can never be too cautious, I suppose,” Philip said. “It does seem the least of our problems at present, but here is what I want you to do: Launch the barco. Make sure it is equipped with a GPS transponder. Whoever goes with it should be a strong swimmer.”
“They are all strong swimmers,” the captain replied.
“He sho
uld also be prudent, because in my experience,” Philip told him, “it’s always the strong swimmers who drown. They are simply too confident and leave too much to chance.”
“I understand.”
“If necessary, I’ll find him, which means he can go far afield, but not too far.”
“As we discussed,” the captain said.
“As we discussed,” Philip confirmed. “I will inform Andrej.”
The chandler’s recognizance, Philip understood at once, was what he had most feared and labored so assiduously to avoid. As he struggled to stave off the sense of defeat and depression that now enveloped him, that he knew would destroy him if he yielded to it, he began to conjure ways to loosen and escape from the net in which he was suddenly trapped. Even now he was a realist. He would no longer be able to take for granted those profound benefits upon which he had come to rely. Rather than a model son of the establishment, he would be a hunted man, a high-value target of both intelligence agencies and their adversaries—the despots and middlemen whose funds he had skimmed—all over the world. How this had happened concerned him less than the fact that it had. He had no time for regrets or retrospection. He had to play offense. Other men in other times and other places had been hunted, he reassured himself, yet with cunning had eluded fate and survived to reinvent themselves in triumph.
Eight minutes later, over Channel 16 VHF, the emergency channel all vessels were supposed to monitor, the lieutenant who was in nominal command of the task force carrying Oliver delivered an ultimatum. “Attention, Paradise,” he declared, slowly and in the lustrous voice of his native Wales. “This is Royal Navy vessel Stalwart, off your starboard. Stop your engines! We are coming aboard.”
Ignoring this command, Andrej stared at the small book he had been reading. Riviera, it was called, The Rise and Rise of the Côte d’Azur. “Full speed ahead,” he instructed the captain.
The captain regarded him with incredulity. In the distance, uninvolved in the navy’s present attempt to capture them but near enough to be co-opted if necessary, an American destroyer, doubtless on its way to rejoin its battle group, formed an ominous and moving silhouette against the southern sky and the North African coast.
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