Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  Nimec heard the man in ragged clothes screaming at them from the shore, looked his way, and then turned to Annie. The Stingray had veered off in the northerly direction of its approach, shrinking from sight even as the combined roar of UpLink’s oncoming birds began to drown out whatever the stranger was shouting at the top of his lungs.

  “What’s he saying?” Annie said.

  Nimec took a glance back over his shoulder as the Skyhawks swept in, then shrugged.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “But for some reason or other, I’m sure we’ll find out before too long.”

  EPILOGUE

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  “OIL,” VINCE SCULL SAID.

  “Rogue oil,” Nimec said. “Lots and lots of it.”

  “Going to Cuba and North Korea,” Scull said. “Two countries on the government’s long-term embargo list.”

  “And they were just the biggest customers,” Nimec said, nodding. “There are others that’ve had temporary sanctions against the import of U.S. fuel products slapped on them. Foreign policy and national security reasons.”

  Scull put his hands over his ears.

  “Enough, Petey,” he said. “Here I am thinking it’s love that makes the world go ’round, when you’ve got to show up and murder the idea.”

  Nimec gave him a faint smile. They were sitting in Scull’s office at UpLink Sanjo, a medium-sized room adorned with photos of Vince at some of the many corporate sites where he’d been stationed over the years. Here he was with the founding crew members in Johor, here with his arm around a pretty female staffer in snowy Kaliningrad, there posing beside a pack mule against the mountain spires at Ghazni . . . Scull was well-traveled to say the least, his footloose leanings having very possibly worked to the extreme detriment of his three marriages, all of which had come to their crashing ends in acrimonious divorce proceedings.

  Nimec had long wondered about the pictures of Vince’s three ex-wives in a heart-shaped frame on his desk, each a smiling head shot. Was their sharing space in a single heart an example of typically crooked Scullian humor? Or could it be a window into something deep and sad?

  One of these days, Nimec figured he’d find a tactful way to ask.

  “It was some racket,” he said now, and glanced at Scull across his desk. “A fifteen-hundred foot long oil tanker disguised as a container ship sets out from the oil field at Point Fortin with millions of gallons of refined aboard, anchors there in the water near Los Rayos to wait for feeders that’ve been converted to smaller oil barges. They get their fill-ups and head off to banned ports, or to rendezvous at sea with other smuggler ships.” He paused. “We still don’t know how often those runs were made, or exactly how long the operation was going before we caught onto it, or how much oil was moved in total, but the word is that it was all done on a scale nobody’s ever seen. Not from a single producer.”

  Scull grunted.

  “Gonna make a whole lot of high-priced international lawyers happy for a while,” he said. “Nothing puts smiles on their faces faster than a big cloud of stink in the air, and the fumes from this scam reach from Washington across the Caribbean.”

  Nimec rubbed his chin, thinking about that. An oil field holder in Trinidad, members of the Trinidadian parliament, and a top Sedco Petroleum exec . . . these were just a few of the parties under investigation or indictment in the scandal, and more names were surfacing every day. The facts and figures relating to specific transactions had come from the records of Udonis Roberts, the Los Rayos shipping accountant who’d tipped off Megan in a sudden fit of conscience and gotten murdered for it during an attempt to flee the island . . . a hack job that left him and the Trinidadian runners he’d paid to take him away by boat stuffed into some Florida-bound air transport crates. The body parts had turned up at Miami International in an episode that made for some lurid tabloid headlines a while back, but it had taken the rogue oil discoveries for authorities to eventually tie the case to Los Rayos. And the connection still might never have been made if it wasn’t for Roberts’s cousin, Jarvis Lenard, hiding out there in the mangrove forest with his knowledge of where Roberts had stashed his evidence. Impressively to Nimec, he’d not only been able to elude the island’s entire security force for weeks, but also a sort of elite ghost squad that did its dirty work—apparently the same group that had tried to off him, Annie, and Blake, then stage the pontooner’s crackup. The information about this so-called Team Graywolf, as well as many of the key names attached to the oil scam, had been provided by Henri Beauchart after his arrest, when he’d immediately started singing to prosecutors in two countries with hopes of cutting deals.

  Behind his desk, Scull sucked thoughtfully on his inner cheek a minute or two, then smoothed a hand over the crown of his mostly bald head.

  “The thing I keep wondering about is that invite you got to Los Rayos from those Trinidadian officials,” he said. “Between the e-mail to Meg and that islander being on the run from Beauchart’s security goons, it couldn’t’ve come at a worse time for the pols involved in the oil scheme. Or for the guy who gave Sedco distribution rights to what came out of his wells, and is supposed to have cooked up the smuggling operation with his pal on the Sedco board . . . Jean Claude Whatsisname.”

  “Morpaign,” Nimec said, nodding. “I’m with you, Vince, the timing would be some coincidence. And who knows, maybe it is. On the other hand, it could be the invitation came from parliament members that weren’t in the mix, and had an idea what was happening at Los Rayos, and maybe even got the same tip-off Meg did sent to their Inboxes. With all the high level government and industrial types involved, and a corruption investigation sure to come, I can see how they wouldn’t want to be known as finger pointers, and might decide it would be better for their careers setting me up to pull off the lid.”

  Scull chortled.

  “No good for a politician to have a rep for honesty with his cronies, huh,” he said.

  “Either that or have somebody get even with him by looking into his rotten business affairs,” Nimec said, and shrugged. “Hard enough finding a straight shooter in our own government, Vince. How much do we really know about what goes on behind closed doors in Trinidad?”

  Scull looked at him a moment, then grunted again.

  “Fucking Trinidad,” he said. “You and the new missus take a boat ride and almost get turned into guppy food . . . helluva way to remember a vacation.”

  Nimec was silent. He thought about that long afternoon in the villa with Annie after he’d gone kite-boarding, thought about her lying with her head on the pillow beside him, both of them out of breath, their bodies relaxed and coated with sweat. I think we did it, Pete, she’d whispered in his ear. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve carried two children in my belly, and think I feel that we did.

  No, he told himself, Vince was wrong. Whatever bad had happened to him on Los Rayos, Nimec believed he would always remember it more for something else.

  He rose from his chair now, stretched, and cracked his knuckles.

  “Taking off on me so soon?” Scull said. “Where’s the love gone, handsome?”

  Nimec gave him a look. “Got a meeting with Rollie and Meg later,” he said. “I need a chance to prepare.”

  Scull snorted.

  “Your meeting about Ricci by any chance?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Nimec said, “Ricci.”

  He stood there a second, hoping Vince would leave it alone, thinking he really did want to ponder the matter some more before he talked about it with anyone.

  “So’s it gonna be thumbs-up or thumbs-down for your boy?” Scull said.

  Nimec looked at him again, released a fatalistic sigh.

  “Before this morning I’d pretty much decided we needed to cut him loose . . . he’s going to stay out of touch, what can we do?” he said. “Then I see he left a voice mail on my cell phone last night, called right out of the blue, and I’m practically climbing right back on the fence.”

  Scull made a face.r />
  “Hah!” he said. “Figures he’d show up exactly in time to make life complicated.”

  Nimec shrugged, turned toward the door.

  “Not another step, Petey,” Scull said. “You want to leave my premises, you first gotta tell me what Ricci said in his message.”

  Nimec paused halfway into the corridor, glanced over his shoulder.

  “Just that he wants to talk,” he said.

  BONASSE, TRINIDAD

  “You’re positive the line’s secure?” Baxter said.

  The satphone to his ear, Jean Luc stood looking out the window at the men in flack jackets below, holding him under house arrest in his Bonasse mansion.

  “Reed,” he said with a dead calmness that surprised even himself. “Anything I hear stays right here with me in this room.”

  There was that odd, hollow silence in the earpiece distinctive of coded electronic communications.

  “I had two visitors arrive at my office together first thing this morning,” Baxter said. “One was a prosecutor from the Attorney General’s office, a spic named Herrera attached to the Terrorist Financing Task Force. The woman practically holding his dick in her hand was with Commerce. Ingrid Price. Agent Price, that is. The Export Enforcement Office.” He paused. “How’s this sounding to you so far?”

  Jean Luc gazed past his police guards at the elegant topiary gardens out front, let his attention roam to the thick ruff of cedars sweeping around the foot of the hill. Then he turned toward his desk and the flintlock atop it.

  “It sounds as if we’ve suddenly become very hot tickets with the law-enforcement set,” Jean Luc said. “A whole lot of those people are waiting in line to see us.”

  “How you can make jest of this?” Baxter snapped. “Didn’t you hear me use the word terrorist?”

  Jean Luc sat down at the desk, studied the demon-headed stock of the pistol, and took a small wedge of flint from the objects arranged beside it.

  “I heard,” he said. “And rest assured, I’m able to grasp the seriousness of our problems.”

  “They’ve prepared an indictment to put before a grand jury,” Baxter said. “Twenty counts, you should have heard that cunt rattle them off to me. Like she was reading a grocery list. Conspiracy to ship products to designated state sponsors of terrorism. Concealing shipments from authorities. Money laundering. And they’re threatening to tack on murder conspiracy charges. The Secret Service, Internal Revenue, even the State Department . . . they’re all jumping aboard.”

  Jean Luc lifted the gun and wedged the flint into the jaws of its hammer, slyly designed in the shape of a serpent’s mouth.

  “As I said, Reed, I understand,” he said.

  “I hope you do,” Baxter said, his voice raspy with nerves. “Because if one of us goes down, the other goes with him. Like it or not, that’s how it is.”

  Satisfied that the flint was securely in place, Jean Luc thumbed the pistol’s hammer into a half-cocked position and reached for another of the items that had been laid out next to it, a leather flask he’d bought at an antique gun shop a while ago. He removed its stopper, poured some gunpowder from inside it down the barrel of the weapon, then picked up the ball and ramrod and loaded up.

  “Reed, you border on insulting me, though I realize that isn’t your intent,” he said. Calmly again. “I know it’s tough where you sit. I understand the pressures you’ve always been under better than you might think. In Washington, it’s all in your face, all the time, and now more than ever I suppose it must be tempting to imagine it’s somehow easier for me to cope here in my tropical paradise.”

  “I’ve never said anything to give you that idea,” Baxter said. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  “Not in your head, though,” Jean Luc said. “I’ve developed a good sense of how you think, Reed. How you characterize our roles. You’re the mover and shaker. The executive who needs to be at the office at nine A.M. and the boardroom by eleven. The insider that plays the hard part. And I’ve always been the flighty one. The rootless traveler, dilettante inheritor of land and oil fields who returns from his wanderings to reap the free-flowing rewards of the family enterprise. Or do you want go on insisting that I’m off the mark?”

  “I’m not about to insist on anything,” Baxter said. “Look, this isn’t the time for either of us to be speculating about what’s on the other’s mind. Or arguing—”

  “You’re probably right,” Jean Luc said. “But I still feel it might be worth reminding you there would be nothing without the oil. No shining office towers, no conference tables, nothing. And the same goes for every dollar that you’ve pocketed or gambled away or stuffed into the fingers of your expensive casino whores these past few years. The whole thing, Reed, all of it, has flowed from my wells. From me to you.”

  Andrew Reed Baxter made a harsh, dry sound in his throat. It had an unhealthy quality, as if he were straining for air.

  “Damn it, Jean. Goddamn it. I don’t know where you’re coming from today,” he said. “We are in the deepest shit possible and need to stick together. No, it’s more than that. We’re bound together by fucking history.”

  Jean Luc was silent, taking a moment to admire the pistol in his hand, the cool gleam of its barrel in the daylight pouring through his window. He slid his thumb appreciatively over the detail work on its butt plate, over the demon’s head, and then his free hand went for the last of the implements he’d set out on his desk. It was a useful gadget that resembled an expensive brass cartridge pen, and a concession to modernity that hadn’t been invented back when old Redbone had given the gun to his ancestor . . . but hadn’t he once told Eckers he was a now kind of person?

  Inserting its tip into the flintlock’s pan, Jean Luc pushed down on the finely calibrated little primer to eject three pre-measured grains of gunpowder and finish his preparations.

  In his ear, Baxter’s voice was an abrasive croak. “Jean Luc, have you been listening? Did you hear what I’ve tried to explain?”

  Jean Luc Morpaign fully cocked the gun’s hammer now, raised the snout of the gun to the center of his forehead.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Yes I have.”

  “Then what’s the score?” Baxter said. “What do you have to say about it?”

  Jean Luc turned toward the window, smiled faintly to himself.

  “Consider us unbound,” he said, and then pulled the trigger on times present and long past.

  BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA

  Dressed in a tank top and jogging shorts, a digital music player clipped to her waistband, Julia Gordian was in her entry hall lacing her sneakers when she heard a car pull into the driveway.

  She rose from her crouch, glanced out the side lights bordering her door, and then turned around to face the greyhounds.

  “Hmm, kiddies,” she said. “What have we here?”

  The dogs stared back at her from the living room, Jill’s teeth chattering a little, all of them showing the typical mix of fretfulness and anticipation with which they met any potential blip in their routine.

  Julia looked at the car again. It was a small VW Jetta, and as its engine went quiet she saw Tom Ricci sit behind the wheel a moment, get out, reach in for a large white paper bag on the passenger seat, and start up her front walk.

  Though her hair had been pulled into an operable ponytail, Julia paused to smooth it back anyway. Then she unlocked her door and opened it before he could buzz.

  “Tom, hi,” she said. “This is a surprise . . . how’d you find my house?”

  Ricci looked at her.

  “I remembered from last year,” he said.

  “Oh, right.”

  “When you were missing.”

  “Right,” Julia said, and nodded. “I should have figured.”

  Ricci stood there on the doorstep holding his package.

  “This a bad time for me show up?” he said.

  “No, no . . .”

  “I can go if it is.”

  “Really, it’s fine.�
�� Julia waved her hands over herself. “Guess you can tell from these clothes I was about to head out for a jog . . . every other day, rain or shine, you know . . . but it isn’t like I’m on the clock.”

  Ricci nodded. He held his bag out to her, standing there in a white T-shirt, navy sweat pants, and sneakers.

  “I brought muffins from that place you like,” he said.

  “Michael’s?”

  Another nod.

  “They’re apricot and cherry,” he said. “The ones with the macadamia nuts were sold out.”

  Julia took the bag, opened it, and made a minor performance of sniffing its contents.

  “Yum-yum, I’ll settle.” She smiled. “Tom, this is really nice, but you didn’t have to go out of your way . . .”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “You did that for me last time.”

  Stuck for a response, Julia cleared her throat.

  “Speaking of last time,” she said, pretty much just to say something. “Did you enjoy your camping trip?”

  Ricci hesitated.

  “Got what I needed out of it,” he said. Then he looked slightly down and past her. “Hi, girl,” he said. “Good to see you.”

  Julia suddenly realized Vivian had managed to poke her head between her leg and the doorframe. She watched as Ricci slowly extended the back of his hand, keeping his knuckles loosely bent, giving Viv a chance to pick up whatever dogs did from his scent. After a few seconds she began licking and nuzzling his fingers.

  “Now you’re in trouble,” Julia said. “That hound’s an insatiable sponge when it comes to attention.”

  Ricci had crouched to scratch under Viv’s chin.

  “It’s okay,” he said, and brought his eyes up to Julia’s face. “Everything she’s been through in her life, she deserves it.”

  Julia looked at him silently a moment, not quite sure why she’d again found herself at a loss for words.

  “Well,” she said, hefting her bag of muffins. “I should probably bring these inside, brew us up some coffee . . .”