Gingerly the guard reached out and took the box, scowling at it as though it might bite him. "I'll have to check this out, sir."
"Sure, sure. You do that." Akulinin waited while the guard ran the box through the carry-on luggage X-ray machine, confident that the guts of the device looked like what they were supposed to be.
The woman operating the machine nodded at the first guard. He picked the box up at the other end of the conveyor. "Looks okay," he said, returning to Akulinin. "We'll lock it up in security and see if the guy comes to claim it."
Which, of course, was exactly what the Desk Three operators had expected the man would do.
"Great. You guys are careful, aren't you?"
"Better safe than sorry. You have a nice day, sir."
"I intend to."
From a safe vantage point, he watched as the guard took the device into a back room marked: "No Admittance," almost directly below the upper-floor security room where Dean had planted the microphone. Perfect! Better than they'd hoped. The Art Room reported that it still had a clear signal.
The best plants were those you could get your target to make for you.
Akulinin checked his watch. He would rendezvous with Dean back at the hotel. This op was going slick as grease, just the way he liked them.
There wasn't a thing now to worry about.
Lower Mortimer Road Woolston, England Thursday, 1315 hours GMT
The two thugs had kept Ghailiani waiting for almost an hour and a half, ignoring his increasingly frantic pleas for news of his wife. Finally, though, the front door banged open, and a third man entered, carrying a briefcase.
Ghailiani knew him. His name was Yusef Khalid and he was another employee of the Royal Star Line. He'd approached Ghailiani two days before, telling him that a number of crates would be delivered to the Atlantis Queen the day before she sailed and that it would be in Ghailiani's financial interest to accept those crates aboard without checking their contents.
The Moroccan had refused the offer, of course, at which point Khalid had become abusive and threatening. "You'd better change your mind, Mohamed," the man had told him. "Play it our way, and you pocket some extra money. Report this, and something very nasty could happen to your family. Understand me?"
It had been the threat against his family that had kept Ghailiani from reporting the incident to his bosses in the company security office. Khalid was an Arabic name. He might be Jihad.
Ghailiani desperately hoped that it was something else. Mafia business, maybe. Or the Camorra or the 'Ndrangheta. Some criminal underground group involved in smuggling something out of England to Greece or the Near East.
Please! he thought. Not Jihad!…
"What… what have you done with my wife?" he demanded. Zahra was always home at this time of the day. His long wait with the two gunmen had convinced him that they'd done something with her. "If you've hurt her — "
"Be quiet, Mohamed," Yusef Khalid said with a deadly, oily calm. "I am going to talk. You are going to listen. Understand?"
Ghailiani nodded, the movement a sharp jerk of his head. Terror warred with rage, but as he looked up into Khalid's hard eyes, terror began winning.
"You disappointed us the other day, Mohamed," Khalid said. "I asked you for help in the name of Allah, and you refused. I told you that you might wish to reconsider. And what did you tell me, Mohamed?"
"Th-that I would see what could be done."
"And I told you that you would do what we required, or your family might suffer. You remember?"
Ghailiani nodded.
"I gave you a cell-phone number to call when you were ready to cooperate."
"Please, Mr. Khalid. What you ask simply is not possible!"
"It is possible. All I need are the appropriate clearance codes, and an approval from the Purser's Office. You have them in your computer on the ship. I am afraid you are going to force us to use… stronger measures."
"Please, sir," Ghailiani said. "Please, for the merciful love of Allah!"
"The love of Allah has very little to do with this, Mohamed," the man said. He began opening his briefcase. "This is about jihad. It is about the martyred dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is about justice."
"Please.. please… I tried to do what you told me, Mr. Khalid," Ghailiani said, sputtering. "I really did! But the security measures are simply too tight! I cannot — "
"Mohamed, you are the second-ranking security officer on board that ship, are you not?"
"Yes, but…"
"Then you will find a way to do this. If not, the consequences might well be unfortunate. For you… and for both of them"
"Wha — " Mohamed blinked, confused. "Both of…?"
Fresh terror took him. He'd been so focused on Zahra, he'd forgotten about their daughter. She was supposed to be at school for several more hours, but…
Khalid dropped the photographs on the kitchen table in front of Ghailiani. There were three of them, horrifying and brutal, digital photos printed out in color on white stationery. Each showed a slightly different angle of two women sitting on a bed in an unfamiliar room. Both had their hands tied behind their backs, and both had strips of white cloth pulled tightly between their teeth and knotted behind their heads. Nouzha's blouse had been ripped open, exposing her bra. Zahra had what looked like a bruise on her right cheek, dark beneath the gag.
They stared up at the camera, the fear and the pleading evident in their moist eyes. To one side, a standing man was partly visible, though his head was cropped in each photo. He was holding a newspaper — the Sun — folded so that the date, today's date, was visible.
"Zahra and Nouzha," the man told Ghailiani. "We picked up your daughter on the street this morning, as she was walking to school." He shook his head sadly. "Education is wasted on females, you know. And it is such an unwholesome environment for an innocent girl." He gave a theatric sigh. "In any case, Mohamed, their lives truly are in your hands now."
For an instant, rage flared in Ghailiani, overpowering the fear, and he started to rise. "Where are they, you devil? What have you done to — "
One of Khalid's men put his hands on Ghailiani's shoulders and slammed him back down on the chair.
"They are in a safe place, and we've done nothing…
yet." Khalid's emphasis of the final word was chilling. "But if you do not get us the results we require, we have several interesting options."
Mohamed's momentary defiance shriveled. He knew he could not fight these men, and he knew that he would do anything, anything, to secure the release of Zahra and Nouzha. "Please…"
"Do we need to discuss those, options? Which one of these two shall we begin to work on first, Mohamed? Your wife?" He turned one of the pictures to look at it. "She really is quite attractive. Or shall we begin with your daughter?"
"Please, I beg of you…"
"I imagine our people will want to start with your daughter. So pretty. She is what, sixteen?"
"Fifteen! She's… fifteen. Look, Mr. Khalid — "
"Fifteen? Such a tender age. It would be a shame to see her… spoiled."
"Please, no! I'll try to do what — "
"You will do more than try, Mohamed! You will do everything we demand of you! Everything! Otherwise, the next things we show you will be photographs demonstrating step-by-step exactly what we are doing to them… and perhaps one of your daughter's fingers as well! Or an ear? A nose?"
Ghailiani screamed. The man standing over him swung his arm, catching Ghailiani's face with a vicious open-handed slap. The seated man subsided into a series of deep, choking sobs.
"The first shipment will be arriving late this afternoon," the man told Ghailiani. He nodded, and one of the others scooped up the photographs and put them back in the briefcase. "If you want your wife and daughter back again, unspoiled, you will see to it that that shipment gets on board the ship, with no questions, no alarm. If you fail, or, most especially, if you approach the police or your employers with any of this, you
r wife and daughter will suffer terribly, I promise you! Do we understand one another?"
"Yes. Allah… yes!" "Good."
The three visitors let themselves out Ghailiani's door. Behind them, the man continued to sob.
Chapter 3
Promenade Deck, Atlantis Queen
Southampton, England
Thursday, 1320 hours GMT
"Wow, mommy! this must be the biggest boat in the whole world!"
"Well, I don't know about that, sweetheart. But it is big, isn't it?"
"And Daddy's going to meet us here, right?"
"That's what he said, dear."
Nina McKay leaned against the railing on the main promenade, looking down at the line of passengers coming up the gangway and checking in with the ship's officer standing at the entrance. She still wasn't at all sure this cruise idea was a good one, Her mother could be… commanding at times, and often going along with her pronouncements was the simplest course of action.
"Mommy?"
"Yes, dear."
"When is Daddy going to come back and be with us?"
She sighed. "I don't know if that's going to happen, Melissa. We talked about that, remember?"
"I know, but I want him to come back home."
"I don't want to talk about that right now."
"You never want to talk about that."
"That's enough, Melissa. Mommy's tired!"
She looked up into the gray overcast, watching the wheel and plunge of seabirds. She didn't want to talk about it. Maybe it was time for that last phone call to her lawyer. It was time to end this.
"Daddy!" Melissa shrilled, standing on tiptoes and waving wildly. "I see Daddy!"
Nina looked down and saw Andrew McKay emerging from the glass doors to the cruise ship terminal and security area.
She resisted the momentary urge to wave.
It didn't look like he'd seen them up here in any case.
Andrew McKay crossed the pier toward the banner-bedecked gangway leading up to the Atlantis Queen's quarterdeck, and wondered again what the hell he was doing here.
Well, of course he knew. Nina's mother had explained it all to him quite carefully, in words a three-year-old could understand. The woman could be incredibly forceful when she put her mind to it — the perfect image of the rich, southern matriarch.
Nina had left him four months ago, and taken Melissa with her. Eleven years of marriage, flushed down the pipes for no rational reason that he could see at all. Nina's mother apparently thought that a little Mediterranean cruise was all that he and Nina would need to rekindle the romance and find each other again.
Fuck that…
Seabirds darted and shrieked, drowning out all else. He stopped and looked up at the enormous ship.
According to the travel brochure, the Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long, 106 feet wide, and displaced some ninety thousand tons, making her the largest, as well as the newest, of the Royal Sky Line's fleet. She was a damned floating city, with a passenger complement of almost three thousand and a crew of nine hundred, with so much glitter and glitz that passengers could spend two weeks on board and never see the ocean, never even know they were at sea.
Rich people doing rich-people things. He shook his head and continued up the gangway.
At the top of the ramp, a uniformed ship's officer greeted him with a public-relations-perfect smile. "Good afternoon, Mr. McKay," he said. "May I see your ticket and your passkey, please?"
McKay handed them across, and the officer made a note on his electronic pad with a stylus. "You're in Four-one-one-four. That's fourth deck, on the port side. Your wife and daughter are in Four-one-one-six, the adjoining stateroom, as requested." If he thought the living arrangements were strange, he gave no sign of it. "They both checked in about an hour ago. Would you like for me to page them?"
"Uh… no. That won't be necessary."
"Very good, Mr. McKay." He began explaining the need to keep his key card on him and that he should wear the plastic bracelet if he wanted to use the pool, the spa, or some other ship's surface where he might not have a pocket handy. McKay listened to the spiel, thanked the man, and walked on past into the ship.
He wasn't sure he was ready to see Nina just yet. Perhaps a drink at one of the ship's several bars first…
For Adrian Bollinger, this cruise represented a chance at a whole new life.
Tabitha Sandberg clung to his arm. "Oh, look at her, Adrian! Isn't she gorgeous?"
"She's all of that," Bollinger replied. "Not as gorgeous as you, of course."
"Oh, you…" She gave him a playful slap on the arm. "You're just saying that."
"No, Tabby. I'm not. Not now. Not ever."
They stepped through the glass doors and started across the dock toward the gangway.
A new life.
Bollinger had to admit to himself that he'd pretty much wrecked his old one. Trading shares on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been a lucrative life but an ungodly high-stress life as well. Too much money, not enough sense… He'd made mistakes. Bad ones. And he'd ended up as a guest for three years at a state correctional institution. His wife had left him; his daughter refused to talk to him. And they hadn't wanted him back at Tarleton Financial, not a guy with a prison record.
Somehow, though, somehow he'd managed to fight his way back. A friend with another firm, one of Bollinger's old competitors, in fact, had gotten him back on the trading floor at 11 Wall Street. He was damned good at what he did… and this time he was determined not to let the adrenaline or the stress get to him.
One day at a time. He'd been clean and sober for almost ten years, now.
At the bottom of the gangway, he stopped and turned Tabby to face him. "Happy us," he told her. "Not happy birthday, not merry Christmas. Happy us"
"You're the best there is, Adrian," she said. "Happy us!"
She sounded as though she meant it completely. Sincerity, Bollinger realized, was a damned rare commodity these days.
He'd met Tabitha at a party in New York City just a year ago, and she'd become an incredibly important part of his life… a constant reminder that there was more out there than Wall Street, more than stock quotes, more than work. She'd agreed to move in with him two weeks ago, and as a kind of celebration he'd surprised her with tickets for a flight to England followed by a cruise on board the Atlantis Queen. Tabby was something of an armchair historian, and a two-week cruise through the Mediterranean, stopping in at ports rich with history from Marseilles to Alexandria, was just what the stockbroker had ordered.
And why not? He could afford it. He'd gone from well-off to impoverished and fought his way back to wealthy. Money, he'd learned, definitely was not everything.
And now that Tabby was in his life, he could use his money to celebrate that fact.
"Good afternoon, folks," the officer at the top of the gangway said. He gave them his spiel and handed them their keys. "Stateroom Five-oh-eight-seven," he said. "That's four decks up, starboard side and aft. Enjoy your cruise!"
"Thanks," Adrian Bollinger said, grinning as he gave Tabby a squeeze. "We certainly intend to!"
Rubens' office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Thursday, 0825 hours EDT
"Shit" Rubens exploded. He stared at the bright blue screen on his computer monitor for a long couple of seconds. "Not again!"
Of the sixteen agencies operating within the U. S. government, the National Security Agency arguably was the most technically advanced. From the mammoth machines of the Tordella Supercomputer Center, to the secure internal server networks within the agency itself, to the various shared networks and databases theoretically connecting all of the various government and law enforcement agencies and departments both in the United States and abroad, the NSA had long prided itself as having the very best IT systems, personnel, and equipment of them all.
So why the hell did they have to put up with these system crashes that were becoming more and more routine?
He touched an int
ercom button. "Pam? NCTC is offline again. Get me Lowell on the phone."
"Yes, sir."
Charles Lowell was the closest thing the National Counterterrorism Center had to an IT head; he was in charge of the complex tangle of databases, some classified, some not, that were intended as a resource to be shared among all government agencies taking part in the War on Terror.
And the project had been a nightmare from the start.
It wasn't Lowell's fault, of course. The problem was that the database project itself was simply so big, so complex, and involved so many different programmers and design tracks that it was almost impossible for any one person to see all the parts and how they had to work together at once.
The NCTC had spent half a billion dollars to upgrade the foundering system through a project called Railhead, and things rapidly had gone from bad to disastrous. At the moment, the system was nearly useless, and a lot of data collected through enormous cost and effort had gone missing.
The Counterterrorism Center had been trying to address the issues for several years, but things looked little better than they had when a Congressional oversight committee had flagged the project in 2008.
Rubens had come up to his office from the Art Room to run the name Nayim Erbakan through the sieve. It seemed strange that the man was smuggling what appeared to be a kilo or so of drugs — heroin, most likely — from England back to the eastern Med, and on a cruise ship no less. Maybe the guy just hoped to sell his wares to the rich tourists, but after a while intelligence officers developed a hyper-paranoid sixth sense about anything out of the ordinary, and Rubens was curious about this one.
But as soon as he'd tried to run the search through the TIDE database, the Center's network, one of several connecting various government agencies, had crashed.
"Mr. Lowell on the secure line, sir."
He picked up the handset. "Lowell? Rubens."
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