Allah's Scorpion

ONE

No one looked twice at the Russian sea captain as he got out of his cab in front of the Cabimas Hotel Internacional, paid the fare, and headed toward the lobby. Nor did any of the smartly uniformed bellmen stationed at the front doors offer to help with his battered leather satchel and matching garment bag. He smiled inwardly. He was used to such treatment, he didn’t have the look of a successful man. And this was a busy town of important oil executives, heavy hitters, big money.

He had the typical broad shoulders and barrel chest of a Great Russian, but his face was surprisingly round, with a delicate nose and soft, almost dreamy eyes under short dark hair that made him look like a poet-soldier. He carried his five-feet-ten like a man long accustomed to being at sea; on the balls of his feet, as if he were constantly working to keep a perfect balance.

The captain entered the deluxe hotel, and crossed the busy lobby to stand in line at the registration desk. He’d never stayed here before, but the woman at GAC–Vensport had booked a suite for him. Nothing but first class for the new captain of the Panamax oil tanker Apurto Devlán. In the morning he would be helicoptered out to his ship, currently loading crude, but this evening he would live in the lap of luxury and enjoy it.

When it was the captain’s turn, one of the clerks, a haughty young man in a crisply tailored blue blazer, motioned him up to the desk. “Do you have reservations?”

“Yes,” the captain said. He smiled faintly. Aboard his crude carrier he would be the undisputed lord and master, but the moment he stepped ashore and interacted with civilians he became a nobody. His wife, Tania, back in St. Petersburg, bought him expensive clothes in Helsinki and Paris, but on him even designer labels looked shabby.

He handed over his Russian passport, which identified him as Grigoriy Ivanovich Slavin.

The clerk handled the passport as if he thought his hands would get dirty. He glanced at the photograph and looked up at Slavin. All of a sudden something apparently dawned on him, because his face fell. He laid the passport down and quickly typed something into his computer. He looked up again, a broad smile plastered across his stricken features. “Captain Slavin, we were not expecting you so early.”

“Well, I’m here,” Slavin said. “Is my room ready, or will I have to wait?”

“Of course not, sir. Your suite is at your immediate disposal.” The clerk laid a registration card on the counter and handed Slavin a pen. “If you will sign in, sir, I’ll have your bags taken up and personally escort you.”

“Not necessary,” Slavin said curtly. He signed the card and laid the pen on the counter. He preferred being a nobody ashore, because he didn’t like being fawned over. Aboard ship he gave orders and his officers and crew followed them. No questions, no bargaining, no diplomacy. It was the discipline he enjoyed.

The clerk handed back his passport, and motioned for a young, handsome bellman, who scurried over from the bell station near the front doors. The clerk passed him a plastic key card. “Take Capitano Slavin’s bags to the Bolívar Suite.”

“It’s not necessary,” Slavin growled.

The clerk was suddenly nervous. “Sir, it’s hotel policy for all VIP guests. GAC–Vensport expects no less from us.” His rigid smile broadened. The company was responsible for all of Venezuela’s oil shipping, which was the major source of the nation’s income. It was big.

Slavin remembered one of the old Russian proverbs his babushka used to use when the family was poor. We’re all related, the same sun dries our rags. He nodded. “Da.”

The clerk gave him a relieved look and he came around from behind the counter as the bellman disappeared with Slavin’s bags. “Just this way, sir,” he said, and he escorted the captain across the soaring atrium lobby to a bank of elevators.

“A helicopter is coming for me at oh-eight-hundred.”

“Yes, sir, we’ll let you know when it’s twenty minutes out,” the clerk said. The hotel provided helicopter service with Maracaibo’s La Chinita Airport eight minutes away, and to the ships loading at fueling platforms out in the lake.

Slavin was impressed despite himself. In the Russian navy such perks were reserved for flag officers, and during his eleven-year career in the merchant marine he’d never had the privilege of such treatment. At 275 meters on the waterline with a beam of nearly forty-four meters, his new command, the Apurto Devlán, was the largest crude carrier that could transit the Panama Canal, and the largest and most important vessel he’d ever been given responsibility for. He’d transited the canal ten times before aboard smaller ships, three times as skipper of container vessels, but being helicoptered out to a ship of his own would be a first. He decided that he would try to loosen up and savor the moment. It was the other thing Tania had tried to change in him; he didn’t know how to relax.

When they reached the top floor, the clerk held the elevator door for Slavin, and then led the way to the suite at the end of the plushly carpeted corridor, where he opened the door. “I believe that you will find these rooms to your liking, Captain.”

Slavin suppressed a grin. “This will do,” he said.

The suite’s sitting room was very large, furnished luxuriously with long leather couches, massive chairs, and dining-table-sized coffee tables facing an electronic media complex that featured a huge plasma television hanging on the richly paneled wall. The opposite side of the room was equipped with a wet bar, a dining area for eight, and a home office corner. Recessed lighting softly illuminated the artwork on the walls and on display tables here and there. A sweeping staircase led upstairs.

The clerk went across the room, touched a button, and heavy drapes that covered the entire rear wall opened, revealing a stunning view of Lake Maracaibo through floor-to-ceiling windows. “At night when an electrical storm crosses the lake, it’s quite spectacular from this vantage point,” he said breezily.

“What’s upstairs?”

“The master bedroom, his and hers bathrooms and dressing rooms, an exercise area, a balcony, and, of course, a Jacuzzi.”

The bellman arrived with Slavin’s bags. “Shall I unpack for you, sir?” he asked.

“No need, I’m only staying the night. Put them on the bed.”

“Very well, sir,” the bellman said, and he took the bags upstairs.

The clerk crossed the room to the wet bar, where a bottle of Dom Pérignon was cooling in a bucket of ice. He opened the champagne, poured a glass, and brought it to Slavin. “Compliments of the hotel, Captain,” he said.

The wine was sour to Slavin’s taste, but he said nothing. The clerk was watching him closely for a reaction. In the old days, to be caught reacting in the wrong way or doing something that was socially inept was to be nekulturny. He’d never forgotten his lessons in humility at the Frunze Military Academy, where on the first evening in the dining room he’d been taught the proper use of the linen napkin and numerous utensils.

Once a word is out of your mouth, his grandmother used to say, you can’t swallow it again. He’d learned the hard way.

The bellman came downstairs. Slavin set his wineglass aside, and reached for his wallet, but the clerk shook his head. “That will not be necessary, sir. Vensport is taking care of everything.”

“I didn’t know,” Slavin said to cover his mild embarrassment. Tomorrow would not come soon enough.

The clerk handed over the plastic card key. “I hope that you enjoy your brief stay with us, Captain. My name is Mr. Angarita. If there is anything that you need don’t hesitate to call me.”

“Thank you,” Slavin said.

“Our La Terraza restaurant by the pool is first-class. Shall I make reservations for you?”

“I’ll decide later.”

“As you wish, sir.”

When the clerk was gone, Slavin took his champagne back to the wet bar and emptied it into the small sink. He found a bottle of Stolichnaya and a glass, and poured a stiff measure of the Russian vodka. He knocked it back, poured another, and then, jamming the bottle in his coat pocket, headed upstairs while loosening his tie with one hand.

The master bedroom was just as grand as the sitting room, with a huge circular bed facing large floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass doors that opened to the balcony. It was midafternoon and the late-afternoon sun was low behind the hotel, casting a beautiful gold light across the lake. At this point the west shore was fifty kilometers away, lost in the mist, but the view was spectacular. The two-hundred-kilometer-long lake was studded with oil drilling platforms, waste gas burning in long, wind-driven jets of fire from many of them; broad loading platforms where tankers bound for refineries all over the world loaded Venezuelan sweet light crude; and the ships themselves, outbound for the Golfo de Venezuela and the open Caribbean, or inbound under the five-mile General Rafael Urdaneta high bridge at the neck of the lake to take on their cargoes.

“Yob tvoyu mat,” Slavin swore softly. Fuck your mother. He raised a toast. Tania had computed that he had been at sea for twenty-one and a half of the twenty-four years they’d been married. She never complained, in part because the money was very good. But just lately she’d started to ask him about an early retirement. Not to quit the sea, rather she wanted to travel with him to some of the places he’d told her about, as civilians, as tourists, as lovers.

God help him, he did love it. And maybe he would do what she asked, retire before he turned fifty. But not to give up the sea, just to voyage differently. It was an intriguing thought.

He poured another drink and went into the whorehouse of a bathroom, where he found the Jacuzzi controls and started the jets.

Slavin was slightly drunk. Lying in the Jacuzzi, he’d finished the first bottle of vodka, and then, dripping wet, had padded downstairs to fetch a second bottle from the bar. That had been two hours ago, and that bottle was nearly empty. He was finally beginning to relax after the long air trip from Moscow to Paris with Tania, and from there across the Atlantic to Caracas, and finally the short hop up to Maracaibo.

Air travel was fast, relatively safe, and cheap these days, but no aluminum tube with wings, into which a couple hundred passengers were crammed like sardines for endless hours, could ever replace an oceangoing vessel in which a man had more room than even in his apartment ashore.

It was starting to get dark out on the lake. The waste gas flames, combined with the oil derricks and platform lights, and the lights on the ships, made a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colors and patterns that was comforting. Like watching waves coming ashore, or burning logs in a fireplace.

Someone came into the bathroom. Slavin saw the reflection in the window glass and turned.

For a moment he thought it was the idiot clerk again. A man of moderate height, dressed in a dark jacket and open-necked shirt, stood in the doorway, longish blond hair around his ears, with a round face and dark glasses hiding his eyes. The intruder wore latex surgical gloves, and it began to dawn on Slavin that something was very wrong.

“Who are you—?”

The man brought a small-caliber silenced pistol from where he’d concealed it behind his back, raised it, and fired one shot. Something like a hammer struck Slavin in his head, and a billion stars burst inside his brain.

TWO

The assassin, Rupert Graham, stood for a long moment gazing wistfully out the tall windows at the light show on the lake. Soon he would be at sea again, where he belonged. The Apurto Devlán was in the last stages of her loading, ready for sailing in the morning, her crew missing only the captain. So far as he had been able to determine, none of them had ever sailed with Slavin before. The only trouble would come if there was a last-minute replacement who knew the Russian.

But he would deal with that problem if and when it arose.

Graham looked at Captain Slavin’s body. The force of the .22 suppressed long rifle round had been enough to throw the man’s head back against the side of the Jacuzzi, before the body slid underwater. Only the face, its sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, remained above the furiously bubbling surface. An angry red and black hole in the Russian’s forehead, a few centimeters to the right of the nose, had bled very little. And there was no exit wound; the fragmentation round had broken up inside the skull, destroying a massive amount of brain tissue. Death had been nearly instantaneous.

It had been too easy, Graham thought with some regret. He laid his pistol on the toilet seat, removed his rubber gloves, and cocked an ear to listen. The suite was utterly quiet except for the noise of the Jacuzzi’s pumps and the swirling water.

Walking on the balls of his feet, exactly as he’d watched the Russian doing it downstairs in the lobby, Graham approached the Jacuzzi and turned off the jets. He touched two fingers to the side of Slavin’s neck, the water very warm, but, as he expected, there was no pulse. Nonetheless for a man in his profession it paid to be methodical. His life often depended on the care he took with his actions.

He had the entire evening to make his preparations, but he wanted to be finished in time to make a little test of his new persona by ordering room service. Captain Slavin had checked in this early afternoon, interacting with a desk clerk and a bellman, and later this evening he would interact with a room service waiter.

Continuity. A Russian checked in, a Russian ordered dinner, and a Russian checked out. The same Russian.

He took his pistol and gloves back into the bedroom where he stripped off all of his clothing, laying his things on the bed next to the Russian’s leather satchel and garment bag. He was nearly two inches shorter than Slavin, but with the same general build. It had taken him two months to find a ship captain whom he could impersonate. And another two months studying the man’s mannerisms and habits before he was certain he could fool everyone, except someone who’d sailed with the real Slavin before. And finally, the necessary strings had been pulled with GAC to have Slavin assigned to the right ship.

That had been the easy part for bin Laden. GAC, which was responsible for carrying all of Venezuela’s oil around the world, maintained its international headquarters in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and brothers in Dar al Islam did each other favors, no questions asked. It was the symmetry of the thing that Graham most admired.

Back in the bathroom, Graham grabbed hold of the Russian’s elbows and heaved him up over the side and onto the tiled floor like a landed fish. It was difficult because the body was slippery, and out of the water it was more than eighty kilos of deadweight. He rolled the corpse over and dried it with a bath towel, making certain that it was leaking no fluids that could stain the carpeting downstairs in the sitting room.

He rolled it over again on its back, and grasping it under the armpits, dragged it out into the bedroom and then down the curving staircase, where he left it across from the dining table.

Slavin’s right eye had rolled up into its socket, only the bloodshot white showing, while his other eye had turned inward, making it appear as if he was staring at the tip of his nose. No one looked dignified in death, at least not the ones Graham had assassinated, and he idly wondered how he would appear to his killer when the time came.

He’d checked into the hotel yesterday afternoon with two ripstop nylon sports bags. Last night he’d smuggled an aluminum footlocker into the hotel and up to his room, making absolutely certain that no one had seen him. He’d brought all three items with him to Slavin’s room, taking the chance that someone might see him, in which case he would have had to kill them. But his luck had held. He’d used a universal key card to open the door, and again luck was with him. The Russian had not latched the security chain, nor had he been right there in the sitting room.

“You will need to depend upon a certain amount of Allah’s good fortune,” Osama bin Laden had told him eleven months ago in Karachi when they’d first hatched the canal mission.

Graham had met with bin Laden and four of the man’s top advisers in the M. A. Jinnah building in the heart of downtown to work out the details. Afterwards, bin Laden had taken him aside for a private talk.

“They don’t understand,” bin Laden said. “Luck has played a very important role in what we’ve accomplished, what we will do together.”

“Luck is what we make of it,” Graham had said. As a submarine commander in the British navy he’d had a career blessed with plenty of luck because he’d been the best. But in his personal life the opposite had been true, right up to the time his wife had died of cancer while he was out on a ninety-day patrol beyond recall.

After that he’d had no use for luck. It was as if he were a cat that had used up eight of its lives, and was recklessly speeding toward its own final destruction. He no longer cared.

“And you’ve done well at it these last two and a half years, but you are not expendable,” bin Laden had replied seriously. “Your life is mine. Do not forget it.”

Graham smiled bitterly. His life was his own. Bin Laden and al-Quaida only provided him the means to hit back at the kinds of bastards who’d allowed Jillian to die alone and in pain.

He brought the aluminum footlocker across to the Russian’s body and opened the combination lock. The lid came up stiffly because of its thick rubber hermetic seals. It wouldn’t do for any odors to be released at the wrong time. Even a corpse-sniffing dog would smell nothing.

Graham hoisted Slavin’s body with great effort and stuffed it facedown inside the footlocker. Only its head and torso fit. Its arms and legs from the knees down stuck out. Jamming a foot against the body’s back, Graham pulled one of the arms backwards until the shoulder joint broke free of its ligaments with an audible pop, and suddenly it was loose and folded neatly inside the trunk over Slavin’s neck. He did the same with the other arm. The Russian’s hip joints were much stronger than his shoulders, and it took every bit of Graham’s strength to dislocate them in such a fashion that they could be folded over the body, and the lid closed and locked.

When he was finished, he dragged the heavy footlocker across the room next to the entry hall table. In the morning he would check the case with the bellman for storage until he was scheduled to return in three weeks. It was his master’s library, which he wouldn’t need on this trip. Reference books, for the most part, all of them dreadfully heavy. He didn’t think anyone would ask where it came from. He was a VIP.

He carefully examined the beige carpeting where he’d laid the body, and the carpeting up the stairs into the bedroom, for any signs of blood or other stains. But there was nothing.

He took the smaller of his two nylon bags into one of the twin bathrooms, where he laid out hair clippers, dark hair dye, soft brown contacts, and a makeup kit with the ingredients to thicken and darken his eyebrows, soften the lines in his face, and tone down his skin color several shades.

First he cut his hair so that it was the same length as the Russian’s, and then worked in the hair dye, making sure that he didn’t miss a spot. Slavin was forty-six, but he had no gray hair. Possibly he dyed it, but whatever the case, it made Graham’s transformation all the easier if he didn’t have to add gray to his coloring job.

The instructions on the hair-coloring kit required a forty-five-minute wait until the dye could be rinsed out and a conditioner applied. He used the time to flush the hair clippings down the toilet and make sure that the bathroom was devoid of any trace of what he’d done so far. Then he padded on bare feet downstairs where he turned on some music, poured a glass of Dom Pérignon — which was quite good, he thought — and went back upstairs where he stared out the windows at the lake until it was time.

When his hair was finished, he worked on his eyebrows and skin tone, put the contacts in his eyes, and got dressed in Slavin’s clothes. He’d brought lift shoes with him, which he slipped into, giving him an extra two inches to match the Russian’s height.

He found Slavin’s passport, which he took into the bathroom where he compared his appearance in the mirror with that of the photo. No customs officer in the world would question his identity.

Finally, he transferred his two nylon bags and their contents into Slavin’s luggage; it was a tight fit, but not impossible.

Downstairs, he poured another glass of champagne and then called room service. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and maybe some blinis and caviar with iced vodka would make a nice start.

“Poshol nakhuy.” He was hungry.

Lake Maracaibo, which stretched nearly two hundred kilometers from the small farming town of San Antonio, Zulia, in the south to the large city of Maracaibo in the north, was studded with hundreds of oil derricks and loading platforms that stretched in many places across the entire one-hundred-kilometer width. Sixty percent of Venezuela’s oil and natural gas was pumped from beneath the lake. Ships ranging in size from small crude carriers to the 275-meter Panamax tankers that were the largest ships able to transit the Panama Canal, and even some Very Large Crude Carriers capable of loading four times as much oil, arrived and departed the loading platforms and docks 24/7.

Rupert Graham, dressed in khaki trousers, a yellow Izod polo shirt, and a dark blue windbreaker with MASTER, APURTO DEVLÁN sewn over the left breast, followed a young bellman across the roof to the helipad where a Bell 230, its rotors slowly turning, was waiting to take him out to his ship. The morning was crisp and sunny, with a light breeze out of the east keeping the heavy gas and oil stench offshore.

Last night and this morning had gone smoothly, though the room service waiter had shot him an odd look when he’d given the man a generous cash tip. But he’d not been questioned about his heavy aluminum footlocker by the bellman, who’d come to collect it for storage earlier, or that large tip.

The real test, of course, would come once he stepped aboard the Apurto Devlán and began to interact with the crew.

The young, handsome bellman stuffed the two bags into the chopper’s storage compartment aft of the open cabin door. Graham handed him a twenty-dollar bill and climbed into the helicopter.

“Thank you, sir,” the bellman said, “but it is not necessary.”

“Da,” Graham replied gutturally. “It’s only money.”

The bellman gave him a very odd look, but Graham pulled the door closed, gave the helicopter pilot the thumbs-up, and put on his seat belt. Moments later the seven-passenger chopper lifted off and headed to the east, out over the lake.

The shipping lanes were busy this morning. Graham counted at least twelve tankers headed north toward the narrows out to the Golfo de Venezuela, and at least as many still docked at their loading platforms strung out as far as the eye could see. This place represented Venezuela’s lifeblood, just as the Panama Canal represented the lifeblood of nearly half the planet.

He was the only passenger aboard the helicopter, and he closed his eyes for a moment to compose himself. He’d been tempted to get roaring drunk last night, like he’d done in the old days before he’d been kicked out of the Royal Navy. But he’d finished the bottle of Dom Pérignon and had left it at that. He was going to need his wits about him for the next few days, all of his wits.

But when it was over he would get drunk and stay drunk until the next mission. It was the only way he could live with his memories. If only she hadn’t died, if only she’d been strong enough for him.

THREE

Nine pale green, ghostly figures emerged from the drainage pipe at tower two east, hesitated for a moment as if they were expecting an ambush, and then headed south. They kept to the brush above and parallel to the no-man’s zone. Four of them were armed with what looked like Heckler & Koch carbines that the tower-mounted low-lux closed-circuit cameras picked up in reasonably good detail.

Lieutenant Commander T. Thomas Weiss looked up from the surreal images on his computer monitor and shook his head. No one in Ops had picked up on the break. There would be some serious shit coming down from above, of course, but it would be nothing he couldn’t take care of.

The CO, Brigadier General Lazlo Maddox, had already jumped his ass this morning, wanting to know, “What the hell in Christ was going on with security?” And he was just the first. The director of the Office of Naval Intelligence was sending down a hit squad to find out how Weiss had managed to screw the pooch so badly.

He turned back to his computer as Ibenez and Talarico emerged from the drainage ditch, and his jaw tightened.

“The CIA has no business here,” he’d told them ten days ago. “We’ve got the press snooping around, and if that isn’t enough of a headache, Amnesty International has inspected us three times in the past five weeks. Now you.”

“You’re naval intel, Commander, which means we’re supposed to work together,” Ibenez had said sweetly. “And as long as you can refrain from the obvious shit like they pulled at Abu Ghraib, and keep a lid on your people if something does go down, we’ll all be okay.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Weiss had shot back, his anger spiking. His boss had sent the woman’s jacket down last week, to give him a heads up, and it had chapped his ass that not even the Pentagon could stop the CIA from sending people to stick their noses into navy business. Not only that, they’d sent a woman who thought she was hot shit.

At thirty-two, Weiss was still in superb physical condition; he worked out nearly every day not only to keep the same edge he’d maintained lettering in football three years at Annapolis, but to keep his same physique that he knew women found attractive. He was six-two, at two hundred pounds; his face was craggy, what an old girlfriend had once said made him look stalwart. Along with snow-white hair and wide, coal-black eyes, he cut a dignified figure. It was an image he’d carefully cultivated since high school when he first realized that he was good-looking.

Weiss turned back to the digital images on his computer monitor, these now from the rescue helicopter’s nose camera, as the mujahideen incursion team opened fire on the prisoners they’d broken out from Echo.

As the helicopter came around for another pass, the first of the mujahideen committed suicide in a bright flash. “At least one kilo of plastic,” the chopper pilot reported. “I saw the same thing in Iraq.”

Weiss could not tear his eyes away from the screen.

In addition to the five prisoners and four intruders, three MPs were down, and the bitch’s partner had taken a round in the head. This was truly a cluster fuck, and a lot of heads were going to roll.

It was the navy way.

And so was covering your own ass. He was damned if he was going to take any heat because the CIA had come down here and fucked up.

Gloria Ibenez lay propped up in bed at the hospital while she talked via encrypted satellite phone to her boss, Otto Rencke, at Langley. He was in charge of Special Projects under the DDO. She’d been working for him nearly three years, and every minute of that time had been nothing short of amazing. And at times like these she felt close to him, as if he were her uncle, or a very longtime dear friend. She had a lot of respect for him.

“It wasn’t your fault, ya know,” Rencke said. “You were doing your job. Anyway, it could have been you taking the bullet. Would you have liked that better?”

Rencke was the most brilliant man she’d ever met. He was also the strangest, and at times, the sweetest person. He’d designed the CIA’s entire computer system from the ground up, but he seldom dressed in anything fancier than old blue jeans, torn and dirty sweatshirts, and battered sneakers that never seemed to be tied. Most of the time he came across as an aloof genius, his head in the clouds, his brain processing some esoteric mathematical equations, when suddenly he would come out of his daze, hop back and forth from one foot to the other with a big grin on his face, and tell you what a fine person you were.

“I was in charge, and I went against a direct order not to follow the prisoners outside the fence,” Gloria said. Her drug-induced dreams from the painkillers she’d been given last night had been like watching a sci-fi movie. She was inside Bob’s head when the bullet exploded in his brain. She’d seen a billion stars, but there’d been no pain. She hoped there had been none for Bob, but she couldn’t be sure and it was driving her nuts.

“Adkins got a call from General Maddox complaining about you,” Rencke said. Adkins was Director of Central Intelligence. “You must have struck a nerve.”

Gloria’s husband Roman Ibenez had been a good man, with a sweet face and a disposition to match. He’d fancied himself an opera singer and he did have a wonderful voice. But he was also a fine intelligence officer, and they’d made a great pair working together in Havana. Until the evening Cuban Intelligence Service operatives had stormed their apartment, and dragged him away. Gloria had gone around the corner to get a bottle of wine for their late supper and she’d stepped back into the shadows as Roman was being dragged down the stairs. She’d been close enough to see the look of resignation on his face. He was as good as dead; he’d known it and so had Gloria.

She’d been as helpless then as she had been last night, unable to prevent the death of someone she cared deeply for. And she didn’t know how many more times she could go down this path.

“Apparently I did,” she told Rencke. “But the prison break was a setup by someone inside who had the cooperation of the Cubans.” She’d already come to that conclusion last night, and yet she had led Bob under the fence. For what? Her ego?

“Okay, Gloria, what do you want to do about it? Stay down there and create some waves? See what shakes out?”

Gloria’s jaw tightened. “I have a few ideas.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but Adkins is getting pressure to pull you out of there ASAP,” Rencke said. “Might be for the best if you came home to file your field report. If you’re right, it could give the bad guys a false sense of security after you’ve left. They might screw up, ya know.”

“You have a point.”

“But, how’re you doing?” Rencke asked. “You were wounded.”

“I took one in my hip, but it didn’t break the bone,” Gloria told him. “The doc says I’m going to be sore as hell for a couple of weeks and I’ll probably have a limp for a few months, but I’ll live.” She closed her eyes, and she could see Bob’s slack death mask when she held him in her arms in the chopper. “I was lucky.”

“Yeah,” Rencke said quietly. “When do you get out?”

“Sometime this morning, I think.”

“Okay, sit tight, I’ll get back to you.”

Gloria broke the connection, laid the phone on the bedside table, and looked out the window toward the bay and the ferry landing. One of her senior instructors at the Farm had told the small graduating class that sooner or later every field officer comes to the point in their career when they question their validity. The good ones keep asking, “Am I making a difference?” but the bad ones stop caring. In reality, the really bad ones sold out — like Aldrich Ames had to the Russians for nearly five million dollars. Or they ate the bullet. Suicide was more of an occupational hazard in the intelligence community than death at the hands of your enemy. Bob had been one of the exceptions.

The CIA had been on a quiet but intense worldwide hunt for Osama bin Laden for sixteen months, ever since Don Hamel had been appointed the new director of National Intelligence. Bin Laden’s capture or assassination would serve as a showpiece for the supposedly overhauled U.S. intelligence system. All fifteen intel agencies, including Homeland Security, the FBI, and the military units, were in on the hunt. But the CIA had taken the lead.

There were more than one thousand al-Quaida fighters in U.S. custody, some of them in Afghanistan and Iraq, but many of them here in Camp Delta. Gloria and Talarico had been sent down to chase a few leads they’d unearthed last month in Afghanistan. Three al-Quaida messengers, who might have clues to bin Laden’s whereabouts, had supposedly been arrested last year, and were being held here. But the three had come in as Unidentified Alien Combatants along with several hundred other UACs.

Gloria had a hunch that they’d somehow been tipped off that the CIA was closing in on them, their transfer to Echo along with two others had been arranged, and an al-Quaida incursion squad had been sent to get them out or kill them.

It was a pretty morning outside. Just across the bay, past the airfield, the western fence separated this base from her homeland. There were times when she missed her childhood with her mother and father. She’d been an only child, and doted upon. But that was dead and buried forever. There was no peace here now. The tropical sun was shining, the trade wind breezes were blowing just as they had yesterday, only this morning her partner was dead, and his blood was on her hands.

She closed her eyes and began to cry silently, something she hadn’t done since her mother’s death.

In addition to the five hundred prisoners, nearly three thousand military personnel, dependents, and civilian contractors were housed on the base. The navy hospital, which served them, was very much like a small county general medical center, taking care of everything from sprained ankles to birthing babies. It was noisy around the clock; nurses checking on their patients, televisions and radios playing, and announcements coming over the PA system.

A few minutes after eleven, Lieutenant Commander Weiss, looking sharp in his summer undress whites, showed up at Gloria’s door, his hat in hand. He was angry. “Nice night of work, Ms. Ibenez. The body count was sure as hell impressive.”

“I think you guys call operations like that a cluster fuck,” Gloria said. She was done crying for now. But there’d be more when she spoke to Bob’s widow, Toni, and saw the kids.

“That’s about what General Maddox said to me this morning,” Weiss said. He came the rest of the way in the room and closed the door, but didn’t come closer than the end of the bed. He didn’t want to get contaminated. “What were you thinking?”

“We stumbled into the middle of a prison break, I called it in, and we went after them,” Gloria said. “Anyway, who were those guys?”

“Suspected al-Quaida,” Weiss replied tightly. It was obvious he was holding his temper in check.

“Was that why they were being held in Echo?” Gloria shot back. She knew why Weiss had come to see her, and it wasn’t to find out how she was faring.

“That’s none of your business.”

“That’s exactly my business, Commander.”

“Cuban television is all over this deal of yours like stink on shit,” Weiss said. “They’re reporting that our people opened fire on nine unarmed prisoners. They’re calling it a massacre, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and just about every other fucking news organization in the world has shown up in San Juan wanting permission to come here.”

“They must have had help,” Gloria said.

Weiss’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“They knew that the Frontier Brigade would be on the opposite side of the base making a racket, which gave them a clear shot at coming ashore, which means at the very least they had the Cubans on their side. But how’d they get past the tower guard?”

“They took him out. One shot to the head.”

“No one heard anything?”

“There was a lot of noise,” Weiss replied, his lips compressed.

Gloria felt a bit of compassion for him. Although the Army MPs ran Delta and the other detention centers, the overall security and intelligence mission belonged to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and Weiss was the officer in charge. Last night’s fiasco had definitely landed on his lap, and he’d already felt a lot of heat, with a whole bunch more to come. “I’m sorry, Commander, but I didn’t make last night happen. Bob and I just stumbled into it.”

“And you got him killed, Ibenez,” Weiss said. “What the hell were you doing up there at that hour of the night? There weren’t any interrogations on the schedule.”

Gloria refused to look away, even though her innards were roiling, and she kept seeing Bob’s face in death. “I had a hunch.”

“About what?”

“The Cuban probe on the perimeter went on longer than normal, it was way up north, well away from Delta, and it was happening in the middle of the night.”

Weiss was looking at her as if he was watching a lunatic who was babbling nonsense and didn’t know any better.

“I think that Bob and I might have been made, our mission compromised.”

Weiss nodded as if he’d come to a conclusion. “One of the prisoners realized that you were CIA, made a quick phone call to bin Laden himself, and in just ten days arranged an attack on the base so that you and your partner could get in the middle of it and be taken out.” He smiled. “Have I covered everything?”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Gloria flared. “You know goddamned well that there’ve been unauthorized sat phone emissions out of here.”

“Not for the last ninety days.”

She reached for her satellite phone on the nightstand. “Maybe you missed one.”

“No,” Weiss said flatly. “We picked up your encrypted transmission a couple hours ago. I just came over to tell you that you’ll be leaving on the first available transport.”

“You don’t have that authority.”

“General Maddox does,” Weiss said. “I’ll talk to your doctor about releasing you this morning. Short of that I can arrange a medevac back to Washington. But you’re out of here today. Get back to the BOQ, pack your things, and go home, and let us do our job.”

Weiss turned to go, but Gloria sat up. “Why those specific prisoners? And why were they killed?”

“I don’t know yet, but we’re looking into it,” Weiss said. He shrugged. “Who the fuck knows what those people are thinking?” He gave her a baleful look. “While you’re at it, you’d best pack Talarico’s things as well. His widow will probably want them.”

After Weiss left, Gloria telephoned Rencke again, to tell him that she would be ordered out of Gitmo sometime today.

“Adkins thinks it’s for the best,” Rencke agreed. “I’m going to take a quick peek into ONI’s system to see what shakes loose.”

“See if you can find out who the five prisoners were in Echo, and why they’d been transferred out of Delta, if that’s where they came from. Al-Quaida was concerned enough to spring them, and yet they didn’t want those guys recaptured.”

“Interesting question.”

“Yeah,” Gloria said. “Maybe we were closer than we thought.”

FOUR

Graham stepped down from the helicopter onto the loading deck amidships well forward of the aft superstructure. This was the only place anywhere aboard ship that was clear of the maze of cargo transfer and management piping for a helicopter to land. A young Filipino AB in dark blue coveralls was standing by to help with the captain’s luggage. He handed Graham a hard hat, which everyone wore on deck while in port.

As the crewman was pulling Graham’s things from the storage compartment, a slightly built man, his head shaved, his features dark, came out of the superstructure and quickly made his way forward. He was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and blue jeans.

“Mr. Slavin?” he shouted over the noise of the helicopter’s rotors. His Hispanic accent, which Graham could not place, was very strong.

“That’s correct.”

“I’m Jaime Vasquez, I’m your first officer.” They shook hands. “Welcome aboard, sir.”

The crewman headed aft with the bags, and Graham led Vasquez away from the helicopter, which immediately took off with a loud roar and strong downdraft. Graham had to hold on to his hard hat so it wouldn’t blow away.

“Where is your hard hat, Mr. Vasquez?” he asked in neutral tone once the helicopter was gone.

“We finished our loading procedures last night, and the ship is ready for sea, sir. I didn’t think it was necessary.”

“The AB who came to get my luggage brought me a hard hat. Apparently he’s more mindful of company regulations than you are.” Graham’s Russian accent was credible. He’d practiced for the past few months with a mujahideen from Tajikistan, and he could speak a few phrases. But the lingua franca aboard was English, because the Apurto Devlán, like most oceangoing cargo ships, employed many different nationalities. As long as there were no real Russians among the officers or crewmen he’d have to interact with, he would pass.

“Would you like me to return to my quarters to get mine, sir?” Vasquez asked. He was wary, but the corners of his narrow mouth wanted to turn up in a smile, as if he thought the new captain might be pulling his leg.

Graham fixed him with a penetrating gaze for several beats, but then shook his head. “In the future I expect my officers to set an example for the rest of the crew. At all times. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly. Won’t happen again.”

“See that it does not,” Graham said. He glanced at his watch. It was just eight thirty. “I’ll have my things stowed in twenty minutes. I want you and my officers, including my chief engineer, in my sitting room at oh-eight-fifty. I’ll brief you and then we’ll make an inspection tour. I would like to be under way at ten hundred hours. Precisely. Vy pahnemayeteh myenyah? Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Vasquez said. “May I show you to your quarters?”

“Nyet, it’s not necessary,” Graham said. “Oh, and bring the crew’s personnel records, if you please. All the records, including yours.”

The Apurto Devlán was 900 feet long at the loaded waterline with a beam of 110 feet. She was rated Panamax, the largest class of ships that could transit the Panama Canal, the limiting factor in her case being her width. Under extreme circumstances, her highly automated systems would allow her to be maneuvered by as few as five seamen plus the skipper. Normally her complement was twenty-four officers and crew, but for this trip she was shorthanded with nineteen crew and officers, which included a cook, a cook’s assistant, and two female stewards, plus the captain.

All the way aft was the superstructure, which rose sixty feet above the main deck, and housed the crew’s living quarters and recreation dayroom, the galley, mess, and pantries, and the small first-aid station. The uppermost decks housed the quarters for the ship’s first, second, and third officers, the chief engineer and his assistant, and the officers’ combined mess and wardroom. The uppermost deck contained the bridge; wing lookouts; a combined chart room and radio room, which contained the ship’s gyros and repeaters for all the electronic instruments used for navigation; and the captain’s relatively luxurious quarters, which consisted of a bedroom, a large bathroom, and separate sitting room. Just behind the bridge were the captain’s sea quarters where he bunked in emergencies when his presence was required around the clock, and which doubled as the ship’s office when customs and immigration officials came to inspect the ship’s papers and issue sailing clearances.

Directly below the superstructure were the engineering spaces where the ship’s two gas turbine engines were housed. The Apurto Devlán was less than five years old. She had been constructed in Cherbourg, France, and outfitted with the latest machinery and electronics, which not only took up less space, leaving more room for product, but which allowed the ship to make very fast, very safe transits with less crew, thus maximizing profit for GAC.

“My engines are in top form,” Chief Engineer Hiboshi Kiosawa told Graham. He was a very small, slightly built man, dressed this morning in spotless white coveralls, a very large smile on his narrow face. The ship’s gas turbines had been built by Mitsubishi, the first marine engines the Japanese corporation had ever designed, and Kiosawa was justifiably proud. Most oil tankers were powered by single slow-turning diesels.

Vasquez had brought the personnel files, which he laid on the table in Graham’s sitting room, and then had introduced the chief engineer; First Engineering Officer Peter Weizenegger; Second Officer William Sozansky; and Third Officer George Novak.

“Gentlemen, I expect a quick, trouble-free passage,” Graham said. “What about our product load?”

“We have aboard fifty-two thousand long tons as of midnight that gives us a draft of thirty-seven feet, maximum for the canal,” Kiosawa said. His assistant engineer doubled as loadmaster while in port, but the ultimate responsibility lay with the chief engineer, who answered directly to the captain.

“Fire suppression?”

“All tanks have been topped and capped.”

They were carrying light sweet crude that constantly evaporated a host of complex hydrocarbons, all of which were extremely flammable or even explosive. Once the product had been loaded into the ship’s twelve separate cargo oil tanks, inert nitrogen gas was pumped in to replace the air in any free spaces, and the compartments were sealed. Even if a blowtorch were to be lit inside one of the tanks, nothing would happen. There was no oxygen to support a fire or explosion.

“All notices to mariners have been noted and logged?”

“Yes, sir,” Sozansky said. His primary duty was navigation officer.

“Diagnostics have been conducted on all our electronic equipment, including radar?”

“Yes, sir,” Kiosawa said. “We are ready in all respects for sea.”

“Very well,” Graham said. Oil tankers were infinitely less complex than the Trafalgar Class nuclear-powered submarines he had commanded in the Royal Navy. And with a crew of only nineteen aboard versus seven times as many to operate a submarine, personnel problems would be infinitely less complex.

In any event, before the Apurto Devlán left the second Gatun lock she would be a ghost ship, with a dead crew and no skipper. The ultimate solution to insubordination and dissention.

Graham smiled, and his officers visibly relaxed. “I would like to see my ship.”

“Yes, sir,” Vasquez said. “Would you like to start with the product spaces, or the engines?”

“First I want to meet the rest of my crew, and inspect their quarters and workstations.”

“Sir?”

“Without them, Mr. Vasquez, we’d never leave the dock,” Graham said. He glanced at his chief engineer and other officers. “The heart of any ship is her people, not her engines, don’t you agree?”

“Naturally,” Vasquez agreed.

“Very well, everyone but Mr. Vasquez will return to work, we get under way at ten hundred.”

His officers nodded and left.

Starting three decks down, Vasquez led Graham on a quick tour of the crew’s quarters and mess. None of the twelve men and two women would be off duty now until they got under way, and started ship’s-at-sea routine of six hours on, four hours off, six hours on, and eight hours off.

In addition to the five officers, there were fourteen in the crew: three in engineering under Kiosawa, and the rest, seven able-bodied seamen, the cook and his assistant, and two stewards under Vasquez. Their sleeping quarters were grouped together down the main athwartships alleyway on B deck, with direct access to the stairways and the port and starboard deck hatches. They were unoccupied for the moment, but Graham insisted on inspecting each.

One deck down he was introduced to Bjorn Rassmussen, their cook from Oslo. He was a giant of a man with an infectious smile, a massive belly, a filthy bloodstained apron, and long blond hair covered by a hairnet. “Son of a bitch, Captain,” he boomed. “You’re going to like my cooking for sure.”

Graham considered for a moment reprimanding the man, and ordering him to cut his hair and get a clean apron before they got under way, but it didn’t matter. One hundred hours from the time they slipped their loading dock lines, they would arrive at the Panama Canal. It would not be long before the cook would be dead, the blood on his apron his own.

A woman came up behind them and said something in Russian that Graham could not understand. He turned around.

“Irina Karpov, assistant steward,” Vasquez said.

Graham stared at her for a long moment. “The language aboard this vessel is English, Ms. Karpov,” he said sharply. “Is that clear to you?”

She nodded uncertainly. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry—”

Graham held up a hand to silence her. She knew something was wrong, he could see it in her eyes. But she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t be sure. But if need be she would have an unfortunate accident.

“She was just trying to be pleasant,” Vasquez said on the way down to the engine room.

Graham stopped and fixed his first officer with a hard look. “I’m not master of this vessel to be made pleasant with. I’m here to see that the product we have loaded transits the Panama Canal and makes a smart run to Long Beach, takes on ballast, and returns. So long as you and the rest of my officers and crew understand these simple facts, we will get along fine.” Graham stepped closer. “I’m not your friend, Mr. Vasquez. Nor do I wish to be. I’ll be pleased if you pass the word.”

“As you wish, Mr. Slavin.”

In the fifteen minutes before the Apurto Devlán was to slip her lines, Graham had returned to his quarters to quickly scan the personnel folders of his four officers, beginning with Vasquez. Standing now on the bridge, the ship’s engines spooled up, line handlers aboard and on the loading dock ready, an AB at the helm, his second officer ready to radio the exact time of their departure to Harbor Control in Maracaibo, and his first officer standing by for orders, Graham hesitated.

Conning a 280-foot submarine away from a dock was different than directing a fully loaded Panamax tanker away from her loading facility in the middle of a lake. Completely different.

His officers were looking at him.

“I understand that this is Mr. Vasquez’s last trip as first officer aboard a GAC vessel,” Graham said.

A cautious flash of pleasure crossed the first officer’s face, but then was gone. Like everyone else aboard he wasn’t sure about the new master.

“He’ll be given command of his own ship.”

“Yes, sir.”

Graham handed him the walkie-talkie used to communicate with the line handlers. “Take us out to sea, Mr. Vasquez. I want to see how you do.”

FIVE

“They shot the men they came to rescue, and then blew themselves up,” Gloria Ibenez told Otto Rencke. They were on their way up to the DCI’s office on the seventh floor and Gloria was walking with a cane. The wound in her hip throbbed, but it wasn’t impossible.

Rencke held the elevator door for her. “I’m surprised they didn’t wait for the chopper to drop in on them. Could’ve bagged some of our guys.”

“I don’t think they were on a suicide mission. They just didn’t want to get recaptured.”

Just off the elevator they were subjected to a body scan with electronic wands, something that everyone visiting the DCI had to go through. Sometimes it felt like all of Washington had been on lockdown since 9/11 with no real end in sight. It was a couple minutes after 10:00 A.M., and the director had just finished his morning briefing via video link with Donald Hamel, the director of National Intelligence, and the heads of the other fifteen intelligence services. He had a few minutes for them, and in fact had specifically asked Rencke to bring her up when she got back from Guantanamo Bay. The incident at Gitmo was gaining momentum in the world press, and the White House was already beginning to feel the heat.

Down the plushly carpeted corridor, they entered the DCI’s office through glass doors etched with the CIA’s shield and eagle. The director’s secretary, Dhalia Swanson, a stern and proper white-haired older woman, looked up and smiled warmly. She’d been secretary to four DCIs now, and was practically a permanent fixture in the Company.

“My poor dear, how are we doing this morning?”

“It’s not bad, Ms. Swanson,” Gloria said, unable to stop from smiling, even though she couldn’t get Talarico’s death image out of her head. “Really.”

“Were you able to speak with Toni this morning?”

Gloria closed her eyes for a moment and nodded. “Yes.” It had been all the more horrible because Talarico’s widow had not blamed her for Bob’s death. Her husband had made her understand from day one that such a thing was ultimately possible.

Ms. Swanson picked up the phone. “Mr. Rencke and Ms. Ibenez are here.” She looked up. “Yes, sir.” She hung up and motioned them in.

The director of Central Intelligence, Dick Adkins, was sitting at his large desk in front of bulletproof floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Annex building, beyond which were the lush green rolling Virginia hills that ran down to the Potomac a mile to the east. He was a slightly built man with thinning sandy hair, and a slight stoop from back problems. He’d been deputy director of the CIA under Roland Murphy and then Kirk McGarvey after a twenty-year career during which he had steadily risen through the ranks. When McGarvey had resigned last year, Adkins had taken over as acting DCI until his overwhelming confirmation in the Senate. His was a steady, if unimaginative, hand on the helm; a nearly perfect fit as a subordinate to Don Hamel.

Across from him were the Company’s General Counsel Carleton Patterson, and Rencke’s boss, Deputy Director of Operations Howard McCann. Patterson had been a lawyer with a prestigious New York law firm before coming to work, temporarily, for the CIA. That had been ten years ago, but he still dressed for work every day in British-tailored three-piece suits, with an old-world manner to match, and talked about returning to New York. McCann, on the other hand, looked and acted like a factory worker. Before McGarvey had resigned he’d suggested that the old DDO, David Whittaker, be bumped upstairs as deputy director of Central Intelligence, working directly for Adkins, and that McCann, a former standout field officer, director of the Eastern European Desk, and chief clandestine operations adviser to the Company training facility near Williamsburg, be appointed to run operations.

Adkins got to his feet when Gloria and Rencke walked in. “Here they are,” he said. “How are you feeling, Ms. Ibenez?”

“Sore, but I’ll live,” Gloria said. She and the director shook hands.

“I don’t know if you’ve met our general counsel, Carleton Patterson.”

“No, sir,” Gloria said.

Patterson got to his feet and they shook hands. “My condolences on your partner’s death,” he said. “But you’ve created quite a firestorm.”

Gloria tried to gauge the mood of the others, especially Adkins, but no one seemed to be gunning for her. With any luck she might not be the main course for lunch, after all, something she’d worried about on the flight up from Gitmo yesterday afternoon. She’d disobeyed a direct order not to go under the fence, she had violated Cuban territory, thus putting herself at high risk for capture and interrogation, and she had caused the death of her partner. She’d thought that a firing squad might not be too extreme a punishment.

“Yes, sir, I guess I have,” she said. “But I wasn’t going to let them get away. It was just too much of a coincidence to my way of thinking.”

Adkins exchanged a look with the others. “That’s the whole point,” he said. He motioned for Gloria and Otto to have a seat. “Coffee?”

“No, sir,” Gloria said, and Rencke shook his head.

“Bob’s funeral will be sometime next week, we’ll let you know,” Adkins said. He shook his head. “It’s a bad business.”

Gloria lowered her eyes. She would not cry. Not here. Not now. “Yes, sir.”

“Have you seen the Post this morning?” Patterson asked.

“They’re calling it a massacre,” Gloria said. “It’s the same on TV. We’re not giving any answers, so the media are having a field day. It’s going to get as bad as Abu Ghraib. Maybe even worse.”

“That’s because we can’t give them anything,” Adkins said. “You were right all along, it wasn’t a coincidence.” He turned to Rencke. “Have you briefed her?”

“I was in the middle of a couple of search programs when she came in, and I wanted to see where they’d take me,” Rencke said. He had folded his legs under himself on the chair and sat on his heels, fidgeting like a kid in church. “It’s gone pink, ya know, and it’s gonna get worse.”

Rencke had devised a mathematical system, using tensor calculus to work out the highly complex relationships in any given set of circumstances — between hundreds, even thousands of people spread around the globe; between governments and intelligence organizations; law enforcement and military agencies; the weather; sea conditions; satellite and electronic intel; the historical record — to come to some predictions about what might be coming our way. He’d been able to reduce the mathematics to colors: Tan was safe, while lavender meant something very bad was looming on the horizon. Pink was a heads-up that something was going on that needed attention before it got out of hand.

Everyone who knew Rencke had a healthy respect for his abilities. He was a genius, and without him the CIA would practically cease to function as a viable intelligence agency. Under McGarvey’s quiet suggestion to Adkins last year, the Company was currently on an all-out manhunt for Rencke’s understudy, against the day he’d step down or have to be replaced.

“What have you come up with?” McCann asked. He was fairly new to the DDO’s desk, and he still hadn’t made his peace with Rencke. He didn’t understand the man.

“Well, first off, they knew the Frontier Brigade’s patrol schedule and they knew when the probe would start, which means they had Cuban help. And then they went to the weakest point in the perimeter at just the right time.” Rencke’s head bobbed back and forth as if it were on springs, his features animated.

“Do you think they had help from inside?” Gloria asked.

Rencke shrugged. “It’s starting to look that way, especially with what I came up with this morning just before you got here.”

“Whose system did you hack this time?” McCann asked, but Adkins held him off.

“You have our attention, Otto,” the DCI prompted.

“The five guys they sprung had been transferred from the main prison population in Delta to minimum security outside the fence at Echo that morning,” Rencke said.

“Whoever signed the order is our man,” McCann said.

“It ain’t that easy, kimo sabe.” Rencke shook his head. “Those guys weren’t al-Quaida, at least they weren’t directly fighting our troops in Afghanistan. They were Iranians that a Marine patrol ran into just across the border a few klicks inside Afghanistan. Way south, near the Pakistani border. They said they were lost.”

“It’s no secret that the Iranians sent people to help the Taliban,” McCann said.

“Navy officers?” Rencke asked. “Four hundred miles from the Gulf of Oman?”

All of a sudden it was beginning to make sense to Gloria. The Cuban help, the Gitmo contact, the transfer of prisoners. Even what they’d been doing inside Afghanistan, but very near to Pakistan.

“What the hell were they doing there?” McCann demanded.

Gloria interrupted. “Which way were they headed?”

“Northwest,” Rencke said.

“I’ll tell you what they were doing there,” Gloria told them. “Trying to get back to Iran after meeting with bin Laden.”

McCann and the others had skeptical looks on their faces, but Rencke was beaming, practically bouncing off the chair.

“Continue,” Adkins said.

“Either bin Laden called them across to parley, or the Iranians offered, but it was just plain bad luck on their part that they were caught,” Gloria said. “They were so important that al-Quaida was willing to risk its assets in Gitmo to get them out. But if something went wrong they had to be killed.”

It dawned on everyone else what she and Rencke were getting at.

“Are you trying to say that the bastards want to hit us by sea?” McCann asked.

“It’s something we gotta think about,” Rencke replied. “They could hijack a container ship after it’s cleared its outbound port.”

“That’s not out of the realm of possibility,” Adkins said. “It’s happened before.” He looked at the others. “We all remember the incident under the Golden Gate Bridge two years before 9/11.”

Al-Quaida had smuggled a small Russian-built nuclear demolitions device aboard a cargo ship bound for San Francisco. It had been set to explode while the presidential motorcade was crossing the bridge ahead of more than one thousand Special Olympians participating in a half-marathon.

“If it hadn’t have been for Mac, the president and a whole lot of people would have lost their lives.”

“There’s a lot tighter port security just about everywhere these days,” McCann said.

Rencke shrugged. “Okay, so maybe they could rendezvous with a private yacht somewhere offshore and load just about anything imaginable. From there they’d be virtually unstoppable.”

“We know the shipping lanes, we could watch them by satellite,” McCann argued.

“We know the shipping lanes, but they know our technical means schedules,” Rencke countered. “We can’t watch every piece of ocean 24/7. It just ain’t possible.”

Gloria’s gut was twisted into a knot. She’d been stationed at the UN, and was at her desk in the American Delegation’s headquarters across the street when the first airliner struck the World Trade Center. She’d been within a block of ground zero, helping with rescue operations when the first tower had collapsed. The following days and weeks had been made more surreal by the fact that she and a lot of other people had known that something big was on the wind.

They’d been so damned helpless. There was so much data coming in that it was impossible to process and evaluate even a small percentage of it in a timely manner. And in those days there hadn’t been nearly enough communication between the CIA and most of the other intel agencies.

“They could sail into New York Harbor and let it blow,” Rencke said. “A weekday, rush hour. They would kill a whole bunch more than twenty-seven hundred people, not to mention how badly another strike on Manhattan would demoralize the entire country.”

“How about something to cheer us up,” Patterson said to fill the heavy silence.

“Finding bin Laden is still the key,” Gloria said. “There’re still the three al-Quaida mujahideen hiding somewhere in Delta who might know where he’s hiding.”

“That, and finding a crew,” Rencke said. “Especially a freelance captain willing to work for al-Quaida. Those kinds of guys gotta be in short supply.”

“Have you come up with any names?” McCann asked.

“I’m working on it,” Rencke said. “But you know that Gloria is right, we have to find bin Laden this time and nail him. No shit, Sherlock. It’s gotta be done.”

“We’re working the problem,” McCann said. “We’ll go back to Guantanamo Bay as soon as the dust settles—”

“Now,” Rencke said. “And we’re going to need some outside help.”

“Do you think he’ll go for it?” Adkins asked. “And does anybody even know where he is?”

“I know,” Rencke said. “And all we can do is put it to him. He’s never said no before.”

“Will you go?” Adkins asked.

Rencke nodded. “I’ll leave this afternoon.”

“Who?” Gloria asked.

Rencke smiled at her. “Mac,” he said. “Kirk McGarvey.”

SIX

On the bridge a course-change alarm sounded on the main navigation systems coordinator. It was 0818 Greenwich mean time, 0318 local, under mostly cloudy skies, with an eighteen-knot breeze off the starboard beam, and confused two-meter seas.

“We’re coming on our mark, sir,” the AB at the electronic helm station called out softly.

Vasquez, who’d gone off duty at ten, had come back up to the bridge, not because he mistrusted their second officer, Bill Sozansky, but because this was the critical course change to clear Punta Gallinas, the northernmost tip of South America, and take them safely out into the open Caribbean for the run southwest to the canal.

He set his coffee down, and walked over to the starboard combined radar-course plotter display. The AB who had been looking at the radar returns stepped aside. Their current position was plotted on an electronic chart that was overlaid with a real-time image of what their radar was picking up.

“Have I missed anything?” Sozansky asked.

“Not a thing, Bill,” Vasquez said. “It’s your bridge, but it’s my ass if something goes wrong. I don’t think our new captain likes me.”

Sozansky chuckled. “I don’t think he likes any of us.”

Two large ships, probably tankers, were more than ten miles behind them and slightly to starboard, and one other was twenty-five miles ahead and already turning northeast out to sea, just passing the tiny Los Monjes island group.

The South American headland, fifteen miles to the west, appeared as a low green line that sloped from southeast to northwest across the radar screen.

Vasquez got a pair of binoculars from a rack and went out on the port-wing lookout. South America’s final outpost, the tiny town of Puerto Estrella, only a small dim glow on the indistinct horizon, was falling aft, leaving nothing but darkness ahead.

The evening was warm, nevertheless Vasquez shivered. His abuela would say that someone had just walked over his grave. He had a lot of respect for his grandmother, who had raised him from birth, and thinking about her now, dead for eight years, sent a chill of darkness into his heart. But he didn’t know why.

Back inside the bridge that was dimly lit in red to save their night vision, Vasquez checked both combined radars, but nothing was amiss. They were exactly where they were supposed to be, there were no hazards to navigation ahead, no other shipping on intercept courses, and yet he felt uneasy.

“What is it, Jaime?” Sozansky asked. “You’re getting on my nerves. Something wrong?”

Vasquez looked up, and slowly shook his head. “Not that I can see.” He’d been born in the slums of San Juan, Puerto Rico. His mother had died giving birth to him and he’d never known his father. If it hadn’t been for the strong hand of his grandmother, he would have turned out to be just another street kid. But she had made him finish school, and she had made him join the U.S. Merchant Marine, where after two years as an ordinary seaman he was offered a berth at the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, because he was bright and dedicated, and the service needed men of his caliber.

He’d graduated number three in his class, and since then his promotions had been very rapid. His superiors said that he was an officer with good instincts.

“If you’re going to act like our new captain and prowl around in the middle of the night when you get your own ship, you’re going to give your crew the crazies.”

“He was up here?” Vasquez asked.

“Twice.”

“What did he want?”

“The same thing as you,” Sozansky said. “Do me a favor, Jaime, go back to bed, let the computer run the ship, and let me do the babysitting.”

“Did he say anything?”

Sozansky laughed. “Not a word. Not one bloody word.”

Something about the captain wasn’t adding up in Vasquez’s mind, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure what it might be. He’d worked under a lot of sour, even angry masters before; men who were mad at the world. And they had the same smell about them, the same look. But with Slavin it was somehow different. Maybe because he was a Russian.

“I’m going to bed.”

“Oh, the last time he was here he took the watch schedule with him,” Sozansky said. “I thought you might want to know.”

“I gave him a copy this afternoon.”

Sozansky shrugged. “Maybe he’s going to change it. Captain’s prerogative.”

“Yeah,” Vasquez said. He left the bridge and went down one deck to officers’ territory. Just at his cabin door, he hesitated for a moment. If their new captain was prowling the ship, maybe he was looking for something; maybe the man’s instincts were telling him that something was wrong.

No one was out and about at this hour of the morning. The bridge was manned and the engine room would have someone on duty to watch over the machinery, and he supposed the cook and his assistant might be stirring by now, prepping for breakfast. But most of the crew and officers were in bed, asleep, as he should be.

He let himself into his cabin, careful to make as little noise as possible, so as not to wake up his girlfriend, Alicia Mora. She was one of the stewards, and she’d have to get up in a couple of hours to help set up the officers’ wardroom for breakfast.

None of them had gotten much sleep in the past few days, trying to make the ship as presentable as possible for their new master. Last night when she’d come to him, she’d been tired and a little cranky. After they’d had a couple of glasses of wine and made love, she’d fallen asleep and had not awoken when Vasquez got out of bed, got dressed, and went up to the bridge.

“Jaime,” she called softly.

“Go back to sleep,” Vasquez said. He got undressed, hanging his clothes over his desk chair.

“What time is it?” Alicia asked sleepily. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he told her. “Now, go back to sleep, you’ve got a couple hours.”

The bedside light came on. Alicia was sitting up in bed, her short dark hair standing on end in spikes. The covers had fallen away exposing her tiny, milk-white breasts. “British girls don’t get tans,” she’d explained to him. “We just burn and peel.”

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “I can see it on your face.”

He kissed her, and got into bed beside her, propping up his pillow so that he could lie back against the bulkhead. She came into his arms, and he held her against his chest. When they were first getting to know each other, they had sat up in bed talking like this sometimes the entire night. He was taking her with him aboard his new ship, and after their first cruise he was going to ask her to marry him. They were lovers, but even more important they were friends. She had become his sounding board.

“It’s our new captain,” he said.

“What about him?”

“I don’t trust him,” Vasquez said. “I don’t know what it is, but something’s not quite right with the man.” He looked down into Alicia’s large brown eyes. “He’s been turning up all over the place at all hours of the day. Like he’s looking for something.”

“It’s a new ship for him,” Alicia suggested. “Maybe he’s trying to get the feel for her, and for his crew.”

“The son of a bitch is waiting for us to fuck up,” Vasquez told her, all of a sudden understanding what had been bothering him. “He’s waiting for me to fuck up so he can take away my new command even before I get it. He had me take the ship out. He said he wanted to see how I did.” Vasquez shook his head. “He wanted me to fuck up.”

“So don’t screw up,” Alicia said. “You’re a good officer, otherwise the company wouldn’t have promoted you.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Neither do I.”

Something cold stabbed at Vasquez’s heart. “Has he tried to hit on you?” he demanded.

Alicia shook her head. “I almost wish he had,” she said. “When he looks at me, there’s nothing in his eyes. It’s like he was dead. Nobody’s home.” She laughed a little at herself. “Gives me the creeps.”

Graham held up in the starboard stairwell at the officers’ deck. Vasquez had returned to his quarters from the bridge five minutes ago, and it was likely that he was settling in for the rest of the night. It was also likely that the steward who’d come to his cabin around ten would be staying.

He listened to the sounds of his ship; the oddly pitched engine vibrations of the gas turbines, the air coming from the ventilators, perhaps a radio or stereo playing what sounded like American country and western, but from a long ways off, below, perhaps in the crew’s galley. The cook’s assistant was from Chicago, or someplace like that, and he’d been playing hillbilly music when Graham had passed the galley after dinner last night. He’d be up now, prepping for breakfast.

Timing would be everything. If his actions were to be discovered too soon, and an alarm raised, his mission could disintegrate.

Around midnight, less than twelve hours from now, conditions throughout the ship would be essentially the same as they were this morning. It would be the third officer and two ABs on the bridge. He would kill them first, and then send his message.

When he’d received confirmation that the rendezvous was set, he would immediately go to the engine room where he would kill the two or three men on duty.

If he could clear those two spaces without detection, he would return to the officers’ deck where he would kill the chief engineer, and the two remaining deck officers — Vasquez and Sozansky — and the first officer’s woman if she were with him.

He would reload then, and descend one deck to the crews’ quarters where he would work his way down the main alleyway, starboard to port, opening doors and killing everyone in their beds.

He had made up a new crew schedule, so that he would know where every single soul aboard would be located. But it was important that he maintain a running tally of the body count. He did not want to miss anyone who could reach the bridge and radio a Mayday.

It came down to timing and accuracy.

He was wearing a dark blue windbreaker with his name and the name of the ship stenciled on the left breast. In his left pocket was a stopwatch, and in his right a spare flashlight battery, which represented the eighteen-round spare magazine he would carry.

Stuffed in his belt beneath his jacket was a long, three-battery flashlight, which represented the 9mm Steyr GB pistol and silencer he would be using.

Graham turned and went back up to the bridge deck, his non-skid, rubber-soled sneakers whisper silent. He moved like a ghost, an avenging angel, but he felt no emotion other than a sharp desire to do the job right so that he could survive to strike the next blow. And the next.

Sozansky looked up in surprise as Graham came through the hatch. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

Graham managed a tight smile. “First night out aboard a new ship.”

Sozansky nodded. “I understand,” he said. He glanced at the integrated display, which showed the ship’s course and speed. “We just finished our first turn to northwest, round Point Gallinas.”

“Right on schedule, are we?”

“Yes, sir.”

Graham went over to the port-wing lookout, put his hand in his left pocket, and started the stopwatch. He turned back to Sozansky and hesitated a moment to simulate pulling the pistol from his belt.

Bang. The officer was down. The two ABs would be startled. They would start to turn. Bang, one of them would go down. Bang, the second would fall.

“Sir, is everything okay?” Sozansky asked.

“Just fine,” Graham said. He would move to the short-range VHF radio, careful not to step in any of the blood that would be pooling on the deck, and send the message.

“Yes, sir,” Sozansky said uncertainly.

The second officer was confused and a little irritated; it showed on his face. But by midnight the only look on his face would be one of death.

He would wait for the reply, which should come immediately.

“I’ll get out of your hair now,” Graham said, and he left the bridge.

The short alleyway to his cabin was empty, as was the starboard stairwell, which he took all the way down to the gallery one level up from the main deck, which housed the turbines and control panel in its separate space behind a plate-glass window. The noise was deafening.

Two men, including First Engineering Officer Peter Weizenegger, were seated in the control room, their backs to the main floor. One engineering AB, next to a tool cart pulled up to an electrical distribution panel directly below where Graham stood, was taking a measurement with a multimeter. He wore sound-suppression earmuffs.

Graham moved along the gallery catwalk to the center ladder, which he took down to the main deck between the two turbines. From here he could not be seen by anyone in the control room.

He stepped around the end of the turbine where it angled down through the deck. He was a couple of meters behind the AB.

Bang. The AB would fall. He was number four out of nineteen.

Keeping a neutral expression on his face, he walked across to the control room, and went inside.

Weizenegger and the AB looked up, startled. “Captain,” the engineering officer said.

“Is there something wrong with our electrical system?” Graham asked. Bang, the officer was dead. Number five.

Weizenegger glanced toward the AB on the main deck. “No, sir. Chiang is doing a scheduled P.M. routine.”

“Very well,” Graham said. He looked at the AB. Bang, the man fell. Number six. “Carry on.”

“Yes, sir,” Weizenegger said.

Graham headed topside toward the officers’ quarters, but he heard the music again coming from the galley. At midnight the cook might not be in the galley, but it was likely that his assistant and perhaps some of the crew coming off duty might be in the mess.

This morning it was Rassmussen, the cook, mixing pancake batter and frying bacon. He looked up when Graham appeared at the doorway. “Ah, Captain, can’t sleep? Son of a bitch I know how it is. Coffee?”

“No, I’m on my way to bed,” Graham said. Bang, the cook or whoever was in the galley would be down. Number seven. “Everything okay down here?”

The cook nodded effusively. “In my son of a bitch kitchen, it’s always okay.”

“Very well,” Graham said. He went back into the mess.

Four steel tables with six stainless steel stools were bolted to the deck. No one was here at this hour, but he had to count on at least some crewmen eating a midnight meal. Say three of them? Bang, the crewman at the coffee urn fell. Number eight. The two at their table were rising in alarm. Bang, number nine. Bang, number ten of nineteen.

Graham hurried up to the officers’ deck where he stopped at the chief engineer’s door. Bang, number eleven. He moved to Vasquez’s cabin where he and his girlfriend would be in each other’s arms. Twelve and thirteen.

Down one deck, he stopped at the doors of the remaining six crew members. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

The Apurto Devlán had become a ghost ship.

Graham headed topside to his quarters. He took the stopwatch from his pocket and clicked the Stop button. Nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds had elapsed, and the ship was his.

SEVEN

Kirk Cullough McGarvey raised the air horn and blew one long and one short, the signal requesting the tender to stop traffic and open the New Pass Bridge. It was a few minutes after noon, the spring Saturday beautiful. Although traffic was heavy the bridge tender immediately sent back the long and short, that the bridge would be opened as requested.

A part of him was reluctant to return to the real world after fourteen days of vacation, while another part of him was resigned. Something was out there. Someone was coming for him.

Four days ago at the Faro Blanco Marina in the Keys, the dockmaster had come out to where the Island Packet 31 sloop, which McGarvey and his wife Katy had chartered, was tied up. He said that he’d forgotten to get the Florida registration number on the bow. But that was a lie.

McGarvey had followed him back to the office, and watched from a window as the man tossed the slip of paper on which he’d jotted down the registration number into a trash can, then made a telephone call. It was a pre-coms; someone was sniffing along his trail.

Yesterday, anchored just outside the Intracoastal Waterway channel near Cabbage Key, they’d been overflown twice around dusk by a civilian helicopter. He was certain that the passenger had looked them over through a pair of binoculars.

He’d said nothing to Katy about his suspicions, but that evening while she was having a drink in the cockpit, he’d gone below for his 9mm Walther PPK that had been safely tucked away since the start of the cruise. He checked the action, and loaded a magazine of ammunition into the handle, racking a round into the firing chamber.

When he turned around, Katy had been looking at him from the cockpit hatch. “Gremlins?” she’d asked.

“I’m not sure,” McGarvey said. “But somebody seems to be interested in us.”

Katy shook her head, disappointment on her pretty face. “I thought it was over.”

“Me too.”

McGarvey was a tall man, fiftyish, with a sturdy build and a good wind because of a daily regimen of exercise that he had not abandoned last year after he’d resigned his position as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although there was no longer anyone to oversee his workouts, he went out to the Company’s training facility near Williamsburg as often as he could to run the confidence course and spend an hour or two on the firing range. Just to keep his hand in, and to see how his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Todd, were doing. They were instructors.

He had quit the CIA after twenty-five years of service — first as a field officer, and then for a number of years as a freelancer, working black operations, before he came back to Langley to run the Directorate of Operations, and finally the entire Agency — because he was tired of the stress.

Good times, some of them. Good people. Friends. But more bad times than he cared to remember, although he could not forget the people he’d killed in the line of duty. All of them necessary, or at least he had to tell himself that. But all of them human beings, whatever their crimes. Their deaths were on his conscience, especially in the middle of the night when he often awoke in a cold sweat.

Because of his profession his family had been put in harm’s way more than once. It was another reason he’d quit.

Kathleen came up on deck, shading her blue eyes against the bright sun. “Are we there yet?” she asked, a slight Virginia softness to her voice. She was a slender woman, a few inches shorter than her husband, with short blond hair and a pretty oval face with a small nose and full lips.

“We will be if they open the bridge for us,” McGarvey told her. There were several other sloops, their sails also furled, and a couple of powerboats whose antennae or outriggers were too tall to pass beneath the bridge when it was closed.

“Then what?” Kathleen asked.

“I’ll give Otto a call and see if he’s heard anything.”

Traffic up on the bridge was coming to a halt as the road barriers were lowered.

“I meant afterwards,” Kathleen pressed. She was serious. “You’re taking the teaching job at New College. We’re selling the house in Chevy Chase and moving down here. Permanently. Right?”

The roadway parted in the middle and the two leaves began to rise.

McGarvey pointed the bow of the Island Packet to the middle of the channel and gave the diesel a little throttle. The tide was running with them through the narrow pass into Sarasota Bay, giving them an extra three or four knots.

“Right?” Kathleen repeated.

McGarvey glanced at her and smiled. “That’s the plan, sweetheart.”

She shook her head and smiled ruefully. “God, you’re handsome when you lie,” she said. She came aft to the wheel, gave her husband a kiss on the cheek, then started pulling the dock lines and fenders from a locker.

She was wearing a bikini with a deep blue and yellow sarong tied around her middle; her feet were bare. McGarvey was dressed only in swim trunks, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. Except for the couple of nights they’d dressed for dinner ashore, they’d worn nothing else for most of the fourteen days since they’d slipped their lines at Marina Jack and headed out to the Gulf of Mexico.

They’d gunk-holed down Florida’s west coast, slowly heading for Key West; anchoring early in small coves, drinks in the cockpit at dusk, power up the barbecue grill for dinner. Awake with the dawn, the water flat calm for a swim before breakfast, then pull up the anchor, and sail farther south. Sometimes they’d stop especially early so they could snorkel along the reefs just offshore, or walk the beaches, or fish, or just lie in the cockpit in the shade of the bimini to read a book.

For two weeks they never turned on the radio, saw a television set, or read a newspaper or newsmagazine. And the trip had done wonders for both of them, after the hell they’d gone through because of McGarvey’s last assignment in which he’d resigned from the CIA in order to track down an al-Quaida killer. Kathleen, who’d been pregnant as a surrogate mother for their daughter Elizabeth, had very nearly lost her life in the ordeal. But Mac had saved her and the baby, who’d been born six months ago.

This trip had been exactly what the doctor had ordered. Or at least it had been until the incidents at Faro Blanco and yesterday in the Intracoastal Waterway with the helicopter. Like so many times before in his connection with the U.S. intelligence establishment he had to tell himself that the business was not finished for him. Perhaps it would never be over until he was dead, because there were a lot of people still very interested in what he knew, and any number of others who wanted to pay him back for what he’d done.

They made the broad turn south around Quick Point and the one-design sailing squadron toward the new John Ringling High Bridge. Sarasota’s downtown with its glass-faced office buildings, sixteen-story condos, and the Ritz-Carlton intermingling with palms, bougainvillea, and flowering trees, looked subtropical, laid-back, even peaceful.

Kathleen was rigging the dock lines on the bow cleats. McGarvey locked the wheel, and went below for a moment to get his pistol. He stuffed it in the waistband of his trunks, then pulled on a T-shirt, and went back up to the cockpit.

Kathleen turned around as he got back behind the wheel and gave him the resigned look of hers that she knew he was carrying. She didn’t like it, but she never complained now like she had in the early days, when their marriage had gone on the rocks. His abilities combined with his instincts had saved their lives more than once. She’d come to understand that when he armed himself it was almost always for a good reason.

They passed under the John Ringling High Bridge, and less than one hundred yards south, picked up the channel markers into Marina Jack where they’d chartered the boat. More than two hundred sail- and powerboats were docked on either side of the modern glass and steel restaurant that was located in its own quiet cove right on Tamiami Trail, which was much like the Quai d’Anglais along Nice’s chic waterfront.

McGarvey picked up the microphone and called the dockmaster on VHF channel 16. “Marina Jack, this is Sunday Morning.”

“Sunday Morning, switch and answer seven-one.”

McGarvey switched to the working channel. “Marina Jack, Sunday Morning. We’ve just passed marker eight A. Where do you want us?”

“Tie up at the fuel dock,” the dockmaster radioed. “Welcome back. Have a good trip?”

“We’re sorry to be back.”

“I hear you,” the dockmaster said. “You’ve got someone to see you. He’s been here most of the morning.”

A tall figure with frizzy red hair came out onto the dock. “Yeah, I know,” McGarvey said. Even from one hundred yards out he could recognize Otto Rencke. “Sunday Morning out.” He returned to channel 16.

“It’s Otto,” Katy called from the bow. She was relieved for the moment. She waved, and Rencke waved back.

A couple of dock boys came out as McGarvey throttled back and eased the sloop starboard side too at the fuel pumps, their speed bleeding to nothing. Kathleen tossed one of the boys the forward line, and McGarvey tossed the other a stern line.

“Hi, Otto,” Kathleen said.

Rencke, dressed in tattered blue jeans and a raggedy old CIA sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, leaned against the building, in the shade of the second-floor overhang. “Hi, Mrs. M,” he said. He didn’t look happy.

Lavender, McGarvey guessed, or something close to it.

They didn’t have to return the boat until tomorrow morning. They’d planned on spending the afternoon packing and cleaning up. This evening they would have dinner, and tomorrow they would fly back to Washington for the closing on their Chevy Chase house on Tuesday. Later in the week they would drive back here to get their new house on Casey Key up and running.

Shutting down the engine, McGarvey had a feeling that there might be a change of plans. Or at least that Otto had come down here to make an offer.

Katy came aft. “You didn’t know it would be Otto, did you?”

“No.”

“He’s got the look, darling. You’re going to turn him down, right?”

“You need your holding tank pumped out, Mr. McGarvey?” one of the dock boys asked.

“Please, and when you’ve filled the diesel run her over to the slip for us, would you?”

“Sure thing, sir.”

“Right?” Kathleen asked.

“He’s a friend, I’m going to listen to him, Katy,” McGarvey said. He went below, put his pistol away, and slipped into a pair of Topsiders.

Kathleen joined him. “What about me?” she asked.

“Otto and I are going for a walk. Why don’t you get dressed and meet us at the bar? We’ll have some lunch.”

“I meant us, goddammit,” Katy said, keeping her voice low.

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. He tried to kiss her cheek, but she pulled away.

“We’ll just be a few minutes,” he promised. “It’ll be okay.”

“I don’t think so.”

McGarvey went topside, opened the lifeline gate, and stepped up onto the dock. Rencke came across to him and they shook hands.

“Oh wow, Mac, Mrs. M didn’t look very happy to see me,” Rencke said. “Is she okay?”

“Depends on why you’re here,” McGarvey said. “Was it you looking over our shoulders the past few days?”

“Yeah.”

“You could have called.”

“Your cell phone was out of service, and I didn’t want to use the radio.”

McGarvey nodded. “Let’s take a walk.”

They headed around the restaurant to the parking lot and the sidewalk that followed Tamiami Trail over to City Park a couple of blocks away. There were a lot of people out and about, walking, roller-blading, biking, working on their boats, having picnics, flying kites, fishing. White noise. He and Otto were anonymous here and now.

“This is about Osama bin Laden again, isn’t it?” McGarvey said.

Rencke nodded. “Ultimately,” he said. “We’re on the hunt for him, just like you suggested, but we’ve stumbled on something else. Maybe even bigger than 9/11 or the suicide bombers you stopped last year.”

It felt odd to McGarvey to be back on solid land after two weeks, but not odd to be talking to an old friend about the business. Katy understood him better than he did.

“Who sent you, or did you come down here on your own?”

“Adkins. But no one was sure that you’d come back, or even agree to listen to me. He thought it was worth a shot, and so did I.”

They got off the path and walked down to an empty picnic table at the water’s edge.

“It’s nice here,” McGarvey said. He looked at his friend. “I’ve got a job teaching Voltaire at New College, starting this fall. Did you know that?”

Rencke nodded glumly. “Good school,” he said. “But you know that they’d like you to take over at the Farm. You could make a lot of difference for the kids coming in.”

“I’ve heard the offer,” McGarvey said. “Now get on with it, Otto. What’d you bring for me?”

“Nine months ago NSA began picking up references to something called Allah’s Scorpion, buried in a couple of Islamic Internet sites. Nobody knew what it meant, but we started to get the idea that it might refer to another al-Quaida strike. Possibly here in the United States, possibly elsewhere.”

“We’ve been getting those kinds of signals for a long time,” McGarvey said. “But there’s been no way of quantifying any of them; telling which one is real and which one is pure fantasy.”

“But the chatter has been pretty consistent, Mac,” Otto said. He was starting to vibrate. “Over the past few months the talk has spread to just about every Islamic Web site, sat phone, and courier network that we’ve got handles on. Allah’s Scorpion is al-Quaida, we’re pretty sure of that. And we think it’ll be another sea operation. They might try to hijack a ship, take on a cargo and hit us, or our interests, somewhere in the world.”

“Come on, Otto, you guys know that the real key is bin Laden,” McGarvey said. When he’d been DCI he’d gone over the same argument with the White House almost on a daily basis. The president had agreed, in principle, but the Company had never been given real marching orders. Find bin Laden, but don’t make waves; we have enough on our plate in the Arab world as it is.

Otto’s head bobbed up and down. “We’re looking for him, Mac. Big-time. Honest injun. But right now we’ve got this problem to deal with, and we think it’s become immediate.”

“They’d need a crew.”

“Two days ago an al-Quaida strike force broke into Camp Delta down at Gitmo, and tried to spring five Iranian prisoners,” Otto said. “They didn’t get out of there, in fact when they knew they were cornered, the al-Quaida guys killed the Iranians, and then blew themselves up.”

“Navy?”

“Bingo,” Otto said. “But they would need a captain. Someone who really knew what he was doing. And the good news is that there just ain’t that many guys out there, on the loose, or buyable, who’d go to work for bin Laden.”

“Have you come up with a short list?”

“As of yesterday morning, six guys,” Otto said. He was excited. “But on the way down I narrowed it to one strong possibility. Guy by the name of Rupert Graham, ex — British Royal Navy, till he got kicked out over some issues stemming from his wife’s death. Abuse of power. Excessive use of force. Poor judgment, leading to several international incidents that were embarrassing to the government.”

“Continue.”

“Until eighteen months ago we think he was pirating in the South China Sea,” Otto said. “And doing a bang-up job of it. Of course that’s mostly speculation, nothing could ever be proved against him.” Otto got up on the tabletop and sat on his legs, something he did when he was superexcited. “He dropped almost totally out of sight, but the Brits, who’ve got him on a watch list, may have spotted him in Karachi eight months ago, and Islamabad two months after that.”

“Bin Laden?”

“It’s a thought, Mac,” Otto said. “But best of all Graham might have been seen in Mexico City last week. One of our guys, spotting flights to and from Havana, shared the pictures with Gordon Guthrie, the MI6 chief of station there. Looked like a match.”

“So Mr. Graham gets around,” McGarvey said.

“You don’t get it, Mac,” Otto said. “He flew down to Maracaibo three days ago.”

“Oil tankers,” McGarvey said.

“Security is pretty tight in the lake. It’d be tough for an imposter to talk his way aboard a ship, and then convince the crew to sail it out of there for him. But the Venezuelan currency has taken a dump. Could be he’s shopping for a crew.”

“Has Venezuelan intelligence been notified?” McGarvey asked.

“On the back burner,” Otto said. “They’ve tightened security, but that’s about it. Al-Quaida isn’t their fight.”

How many times had he been called to arms like this? Dozens, and yet he could remember each and every incident as if it was the only one.

“You’d have limited cooperation down there from their Central Intelligence Division,” Otto went on. “They made it very clear to me that they didn’t want to get involved, but they won’t get in your way. In fact, your passport won’t even be stamped. You’ll never have been there.”

No coastal city on the planet would be safe. And it came down to one man — as it almost always had.

“Find him for us, Mac,” Otto said. “Take him out. We’ve got no one else who can do the job. If a guy like Graham gets his hands on a ship, even with a minimum crew, he could get to within spitting distance of New York, Washington, Miami, anywhere, and set off a dirty nuclear weapon, or even lob a missile into the heart of downtown.” Otto shrugged. “Could be done, ya know.”

The difficult part would be explaining to Katy why he had to do it. Only this time he was going to finish the job once and for all. He would stop Graham, but afterwards he would find bin Laden and put a bullet in the man’s brain.

EIGHT

Alone in his quarters Rupert Graham replaced the slide on his Steyr GB, clicking it home, and pressing the muzzle cap against its spring until it latched in place. With the pistol cleaned and reassembled, he methodically reloaded three magazines of ammunition, slid one into the handle of the gun, and the other two into the pocket of his dark jacket hanging in the closet.

“There must never be mercy for the infidel until our jihad is finished,” bin Laden said to him in the beginning. “It is something you might not understand.”

“But I’m an infidel,” Graham had responded. Eighteen months ago he did not care if he lived or died. “Does that mean I shall be killed?”

“We all die when Allah wants us,” bin Laden said indulgently. “For now you are an instrument of His Messenger.”

It was a lot of bleeding bullshit, only now that he was in the middle of a mission, he didn’t want to die. He wanted to continue with the fight; stick it to the bastards, and keep sticking it to them. He lowered his head and closed his eyes for a moment.

It was shortly after one in the afternoon. He had disassembled his weapons, spreading the parts out on his bed; cleaned them, reassembled them, and reloaded them, getting ready for tonight’s killing.

He’d risen early, before dawn, after only a couple hours of sleep, to be on the bridge when the first morning watch under Third Officer George Novak came on duty. He had stayed up there until an hour ago, when he’d returned to his cabin, and ordered a lunch tray to be brought up from the galley.

In the past few days he had started to get worried. He could bring up a picture of bin Laden in full detail in his mind’s eye. That was easy. But he was losing the details of Jillian’s face. His wife had been a small woman; her features round, her dark hair usually cut short, bangs across her forehead; she’d looked like a pixie.

He knew all that intellectually, but he couldn’t see her, and he was afraid that he might be losing his mind.

He opened his eyes when someone knocked at the door. He got up, flipped the bedcover over his Steyr, the .22 caliber pistol he’d used to kill Slavin, and the Heckler & Koch M8 baseline carbine, and went out to the sitting room, closing the door to his bedroom before he answered the outer door.

The Russian steward, Irina Karpov, was there with a tray. “Your lunch, Captain,” she said, smiling. She was a small girl, with narrow shoulders, dark eyes, and short dark hair that framed a round, pixie face. She was dressed in dark trousers and a crisp white jacket.

For just an instant Graham was struck dumb by the similarity between this girl and his wife. He hadn’t noticed the resemblance when he’d seen her for the first time yesterday. But her face was the same.

He stepped aside for her and she came in and set the tray on the small table. She took the covers off the dishes. “Cook has made borscht just for you, and some smoked salmon with creamed cheese, onions, capers, and corchinons, and toasted bagels.”

“It looks good,” Graham said. “Please thank Mr. Rassmussen for me.”

“We didn’t know if you wanted wine, beer, or mineral water, so I brought all three,” Irina said. It seemed as if she were stalling, for some reason, a sly look in her wide eyes.

“Very thoughtful of you, Ms. Karpov.”

“Spassibo bolshoyeh,” she said. Thanks very much.

Graham suddenly understood what she was trying to do. She was suspicious of him. He let his expression darken. “I hope that I do not have to continually remind you that the language aboard this vessel is English.”

She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“If it happens again, I’ll leave you ashore at Long Beach and hire another steward.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you understand this perfectly?”

She nodded. “I just wanted to thank you for your compliment, sir.”

And test my Russian. “I know,” Graham said. “Now return to your duties.”

“Sir,” she said, and she went past him to the door.

“Ms. Karpov,” Graham said, before she went out.

She turned back. “Sir?”

“Pazhaluystah,” he told her. You’re welcome.

She was startled. It wasn’t what she’d expected. She said something else in rapid-fire Russian that Graham didn’t catch, then nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said. She gave him a final, searching look and left.

Graham’s jaw tightened. It’d been a mistake to speak Russian to her. Even one word. He’d seen the immediate understanding on her face that she knew he was an imposter. He turned away from the door, his mind in a dark turmoil. He wanted to lash out; strike something; destroy someone; shatter them, drive them to their knees, kill the bastards who were responsible.

He slowly came back from the brink, unclenching his fists, willing his muscles to relax.

The stupid bitch had no proof. And in twelve hours she and the others would be dead.

No one was using the officers’ mess this noon, but Irina stopped by to make sure that the coffee and tea service was clean and filled. She busied herself loading the few dirty cups, glasses, spoons, and tea bags and wrappers onto a tray, and replacing the stale lemon wedges with fresh ones from the small refrigerator under the counter.

She didn’t want to think too hard about the captain, because that would lead her into places she did not want to go. But for the life of her she couldn’t understand why Captain Slavin was pretending to be a Russian, when clearly he was not.

Ever since she was a child in Moscow, her father, who had been a brilliant physicist, encouraged her to be an independent thinker. “Do not be shy,” he would say. Her mother, on the other hand, was a typical Russian who loved to quote proverbs to get her messages across. Her favorite for Irina was that once a word was out of your mouth, you couldn’t swallow it again. And another was, all the brave men and women were in prison. Her father wanted her to speak up, while her mother wanted her to keep her mouth shut. She’d been torn between the two all her life.

Only a couple of stragglers lingered in the crew’s mess room when she brought the tray of dirty cups and glasses to the galley. She rinsed them off and loaded them onto the dishwasher belt. She was confused.

Rassmussen was busy rolling out piecrusts for this evening’s dessert. He looked up, a sloppy grin on his broad Norwegian face. He always seemed to be in a jovial mood. “Son of a bitch, what’d the captain say about my borscht?” he boomed.

Irina was startled. She spun around. “What?”

“My borscht. What’d the captain say?”

“He said thank you.”

“Thank you!” Rassmussen shouted. His grin widened. “Son of a bitch, wait’ll he has my pumpkin pie tonight.”

“Russians don’t eat pumpkin pie,” Irina said absently.

“This one does, he asked for it. Son of a bitch.”

Irina turned back to work, rinsing the rest of the lunch dishes, loading them onto the belt, and starting the dishwasher. The galley was clean, as were all but one table in the mess room. Alicia had tided up before going off duty.

“I’m going to my cabin for a couple hours,” she told the cook.

Rassmussen nodded. “Be back at four. I’m roasting turkeys with all the trimmings. You’ll serve the wardroom.”

“Yes, sir,” Irina said tiredly. She dried her hands and went up one deck to her cabin in crew territory. She’d been up since four thirty to help with the morning meal for the change of watch standers, and she wanted to rest for an hour or so. Sleep. Shut her mind down. But she couldn’t stop from thinking about the captain. The man was pretending to be a Russian, and she could make no sense of it.

Alicia had just gotten out of the shower, and she was in her robe in front of the mirror drying her spiky hair. She looked around when Irina came in. “Hi, sweetie,” she said, smiling. But then she lowered the hair-dryer. “You looked bushed. Are you okay?”

Irina took off her jacket and tossed it on her bed. “I’m just a little tired, is all.”

“Nope,” Alicia said. She put down the hair-dryer and came out to Irina. “What’s the matter?” she asked, concerned. “Is George hitting on you again?” The third officer had been trying for three months to have Vasquez talk Alicia into setting him up. He wanted the same arrangement with Irina that Vasquez had with Alicia.

“No,” Irina said. “It’s the captain, he’s an imposter.”

Alicia was surprised. She shook her head and laughed. “That’s rich,” she said. “Would you mind telling me how you came to such a brilliant conclusion?”

“His name is Grigoriy Slavin. He comes from St. Petersburg.”

Alicia laughed again. “Don’t Moscow girls get along with guys from St. Petersburg?”

“He doesn’t speak Russian,” Irina blurted. “When I tried to talk to him yesterday, and just now when I brought his lunch tray to his cabin, he told me that we had to speak English.”

“It’s a sensible rule,” Alicia said. “We must have ten different nationalities aboard.”

“But I thanked him in Russian, and he said, ‘You’re welcome,’ in Russian.”

“Okay, so he was being nice.”

Irina shook her head. “But his accent was all wrong. Sounded like he was from Tajikistan or someplace like that. But that’s not right either. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Come on, kiddo, you’re just tired and you’re imagining things.”

“Just before I left his cabin, I said something else to him in Russian. If he’d understood he would have fired me on the spot.”

Alicia shrugged. “What’d you say?”

“Yob tvoyu mat …”

“In English.”

“I said, ‘Fuck your mother, but I think you’re a prick,’” Irina said.

NINE

McGarvey, carrying only an overnight bag, emerged from the American Airlines jetway at La Chinita Airport a few minutes after four in the afternoon. Katy had driven him over to Miami’s International Airport, where she made him promise to take care of himself.

“I’m not going to try to talk you out of this,” she’d said. “It’s what you do, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else with the guts to step up to the plate. They’re all hiding behind their bureaucracies, and whatever the politically correct flavor of the month happens to be.” She was bitter.

He’d taken her in his arms outside the security check-in area. “It’s not all that bad, Katy. There are some good people doing the best they can under the laws they have to deal with.”

“It never stopped you.”

“No,” McGarvey said heavily. Following the letter of the law, and especially political correctness, had never exactly been one of his priorities. He’d always done whatever was needed to be done at the time it needed doing, and damn the consequences. Depending upon whatever administration was in charge he’d either been admired or reviled all his career.

But no matter the administration, he’d always been called into action whenever his particular expertise was needed. He was an assassin; the means of last resort to reach a political goal, especially one in which a war could be avoided.

Lawrence Danielle, an old friend in McGarvey’s early days with the CIA, had told him that had we known in the mid-thirties what we know today, we would have been more than justified in sending an assassin to kill Adolf Hitler. “Eliminating that one man might have spared us World War Two,” Danielle said.

But there’d been some unintended consequences, what in the intel business were called blowbacks, to some of his missions. Instead of killing bin Laden he’d tried to negotiate with the man to give up a suitcase-size nuclear demolitions device. That al-Quaida mission to strike the United States failed, because of McGarvey’s intervention. But the ultimate consequence was 9/11.

There’d been other smaller blowbacks, none as spectacular as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but McGarvey remembered each of them in full detail; they were etched into his brain, like acid designs were etched into glass.

“Take care of yourself, darling,” Kathleen told him. “I’ll be watching for you to come up the driveway.”

Her words had stuck with him on the three-hour flight, but once they’d touched down, he’d put all of his thoughts about her into another, safe compartment in his mind, freeing his total concentration for the job at hand. Anything less could be fatal.

McGarvey followed the other passengers down a long, filthy corridor and around the corner to passport control where two lines formed, one for Venezuelans and the other for everyone else. The afternoon was much hotter and more humid than in Florida.

A slender, handsome man with long black hair, intense coal-black eyes, and a swarthy complexion that reminded McGarvey of the actor Antonio Banderas was waiting to one side. Like McGarvey he was dressed in an open-collar shirt and a light sport coat. He looked like a cop.

“Mr. McGarvey,” he said in good English.

“I am if you’re Juan Gallegos.”

“At your service, señor,” Gallegos said. Otto had assured McGarvey that Gallegos was a friend of the CIA, and although what help he would be allowed to give was limited, he would not tie Mac’s hands. But he seemed a little nervous.

“I sent a small package under diplomatic seal as checked baggage,” McGarvey said.

“Sí,” Gallegos said. He eyed McGarvey’s single carry-on bag. “Do you have any other luggage?”

“No.”

“Then if you’ll come with me, we’ll retrieve your package and go to the hotel. We can talk on the way into town.”

McGarvey followed the intelligence officer around passport control, a few of the passengers glancing at them curiously, then down another filthy corridor to a large hall where luggage from the Miami flight was already showing up on the carousel. An airport employee in dark coveralls came from the back and handed a small leather bag to Gallegos, who had to sign for it.

When he was gone, Gallegos handed the bag to McGarvey and they headed toward the customs counters beyond which were the doors out to the Departing Passengers exit, where several buses and taxis were waiting.

“I assume this contains your pistol,” Gallegos said. “If you fire it on Venezuelan soil, and especially if you injure or kill someone, there will be a very thorough investigation with possibly harsh consequences. Be very certain that your reasons are compelling and necessary.”

“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” McGarvey said, which was a lie. If he found Graham and if he could tie the man to an al-Quaida mission, he was going to take him out.

Gallegos stopped and gave McGarvey a harsh look. “Then why are you here?”

“To find a man.”

“And if you find him?”

McGarvey shrugged. “We’ll have to see.”

Gallegos nodded. “Yes, we’ll have to see.”

None of the three customs officers even looked up as McGarvey followed the CID agent out of the terminal to a waiting Toyota SUV with big off-road tires and splattered, mud-caked fenders and doors. A fair amount of traffic had built up from a couple of earlier flights.

“I spent the last week in the north outside of Paraguaipoa, in the rain,” Gallegos explained. “It’s on the border with Colombia.”

“Drugs?” McGarvey asked, tossing his bags in the back, and climbing up into the passenger seat.

Gallegos gave him another less-than-friendly look. “The U.S. market is never-ending and the money is very good. It’s a powerful aphrodisiac for poor farmers and fishermen. They can make a year’s wages for one night of work.”

“Maybe we should legalize drugs, and regulate them like we do alcohol,” McGarvey said.

Gallegos laughed, and pulled away from the curb ahead of a bus heading into town. The day was very hot and humid, and the air stank of crude oil, natural gas, and other petrochemicals. Oil pumped out from beneath the lake was a major contributor to Venezuela’s economy, and the people along the lake paid for it with lousy air.

“Otto sent me a file, which included a couple of decent photographs of the man you’re looking for,” Gallegos said. “If he came here within the past thirty days it had to be under a false passport, and possibly in disguise. The name Rupert Graham doesn’t show up on any list — immigration, customs, or hotel registrations. I had one of the photographs distributed to every port of entry official in the entire country, not just here in Maracaibo, but so far I’ve received no hits.”

“Thanks for the effort, but I don’t think he’s traveling under his real name. He’s on Interpol’s most wanted list—”

“Yes, we know this,” Gallegos said impatiently. “But what Otto failed to tell me was why he believes Graham came here. The man’s wanted for piracy. He couldn’t be planning on hijacking an oil tanker, unless he’s incredibly stupid. Vensport security is airtight.”

The Autopista 1 highway from the airport was in reasonable condition, although traffic was heavy, and trash seemed to be everywhere; garbage, the rusted-out hulks of old cars, a dead horse; and halfway into the sprawling city of more than one million people, a weed-choked field was covered with abandoned cargo ship containers. Windows had been cut into the sides of most of them, and half-naked children played in the muddy lanes between the rows. People were living here.

“Venezuela is in a depression,” McGarvey said. “The bolívar is down, oil exports are sagging, the World Bank is pressing for some of the hundred-billion-plus debt, and unemployment is right around thirty percent.”

Gallegos scowled, but he nodded. “Which makes the drug trade all the more appealing.” He looked at McGarvey. “And not just to poor fishermen and farmers along the border. What does that have to do with Graham?”

“Unemployment among sailors is just as high or higher than your national average. He might be here looking for crew.”

Gallegos shrugged. “Nothing wrong with that. Caracas would give him a medal if it were true.”

“He works for bin Laden.”

“That’s not our fight,” Gallegos said sharply.

“It will be if al-Quaida uses a crew of Venezuelans for its next strike,” McGarvey said.

They were set up in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Del Lago right on the lake with a fantastic view of the oil derricks, loading platforms, and heavy shipping traffic that never ceased 24/7. Gallegos was heading off to an old boy meeting at the Girasol Restaurant in the Hotel El Paseo with the chief of federal police for Stato Zulia, to see if a quiet APB could be issued. Graham had violated no Venezuelan laws, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out for him, in case he did something wrong.

“For the moment my government and yours are not on the most friendly terms,” Gallegos told McGarvey. They were in the hotel’s lobby bar. It was busy, but they were out of earshot of anyone. “I don’t suppose you’ll stay in the hotel until I get back later tonight.”

“I thought I might poke around,” McGarvey said. He knew exactly what he wanted to find out, and exactly where to find it. Having a Venezuelan CID officer tagging along wouldn’t help.

Gallegos nodded. “I’m sure you do,” he said. “But try to stay out of trouble, Mr. McGarvey. No gunfights, if you please.”

“When will you be back?”

It was already eight o’clock. “Not until late. We often don’t eat dinner out until midnight. So unless you need to speak to me tonight, I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Fair enough,” McGarvey said.

Gallegos gave him a last look and then got up and left the bar.

A couple of minutes later, McGarvey finished his beer, signed for the tab, and went back up to his room to change into jeans and a dark short-sleeved pullover. He stuffed his pistol in the quick-draw holster under his shirt at the small of his back, and outside took a cab down to the commercial waterfront district.

If Graham had come to Maracaibo to raise a crew, he had a four-day head start, which meant he’d have made some waves, ripples in a pond into which a rock had been dropped. There’d be someone who had been interviewed but hadn’t been hired who’d be willing to talk to an American paying cash.

The cabbie dropped him off at the head of a seedy-looking district that stretched for several blocks two streets up from the main drag along the commercial wharves. The area was ablaze with colored lights, bars or chinganas with open doors, and half-naked prostitutes sitting in the open second-floor windows of their burdeles. It was early on a Saturday night but the district was already crammed. It reminded McGarvey of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.

He bought a cold beer from a street vendor and headed into the district, trying to think like an ex — British naval officer looking for a crew. Unless Graham spoke gutter Spanish he wouldn’t get along with the average seaman down here; only the whores would listen to him because he would have money. Another possibility was finding an out-of-work, disgruntled Venezuelan merchant marine officer. If Graham had been able to make contact with such a man, hiring a crew would be taken care of in one stroke.

McGarvey’s problem of picking up Graham’s trail was solved in the first chingana he walked into. The girls from the burdel upstairs worked the long marble bar and the tables in the tightly packed saloon for marks.

The instant he sat down at a free table near the door, a small, narrow-hipped woman, with a tiny, round face, large dark eyes, and short hair came over with a big smile, and sat on his lap. She was wearing a nearly transparent white blouse that showed her large, dark nipples, and a black miniskirt so short that the fact she wore no panties was obvious.

“Hey, gringo, what are you doing here?” she asked in English. “Do you want to fuck me?”

“I’m looking for someone,” McGarvey said.

“It’s your lucky day. Here I am!”

A scantily clad, horse-faced waitress came over. McGarvey held up the beer from the street vendor. “A pink champagne cocktail for your friend?” she asked.

McGarvey nodded and the waitress went back to the bar to get another beer for him and the ten-dollar cocktail made of a few drops of Angostura bitters in a glass of seltzer water with a paper umbrella.

“You a horny gringo?” the girl whispered in McGarvey’s ear. “Around the world, fifty dollars.” She parted her thighs a little wider.

The going rate for an AB would be around ten or fifteen dollars. But all Americans and Western Europeans had plenty of money.

“What would I get for a hundred dollars?” McGarvey asked.

The girl pulled back to look into his eyes to see if he was kidding around. Her face lit up in a broad grin, two of her teeth missing. “Anything you want, baby!”

McGarvey took out the picture of Graham and held it up so that she could see it in the dim light. For a moment or two she didn’t seem to comprehend what was going on, but suddenly her face contorted, and she snatched the photograph from McGarvey’s hand.

“¡Qué hijo de puta!” she screeched. What a son of a bitch!

The waitress with their drinks at the bar looked up.

“You’ve seen this man?” McGarvey asked.

The whore jumped off McGarvey’s lap and screeched something else in Spanish at the top of her lungs, while brandishing Graham’s photograph over her head.

Some of the other customers were beginning to take notice, and the waitress was saying something to a very large, bald-headed man behind the bar.

“Two days ago, puta!” the whore shouted in his face. “Are you his friend?”

“I came here to kill him,” McGarvey said, just loudly enough for the girl to hear. He took a one-hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the table. “Where is he?”

A crafty look came into the girl’s eyes, and she reached for the money, but McGarvey batted her hand away.

“What was he doing here?” McGarvey said. “If you’re lying, I’ll know.”

The bald-headed bouncer started across from the bar. He carried a baseball bat. Several of the patrons had gotten to their feet and blocked McGarvey’s path to the door.

“If there’s a fight, you won’t get the money,” McGarvey said.

The whore understood the situation. “Cabimas,” she told McGarvey. “He said he was shipping out. He was going to Cabimas to get his ship. If he’s still in Venezuela he’ll be there, across the lake.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“No.”

McGarvey got to his feet as the bouncer reached him. The girl snatched the money and got out of the way. A crowd was gathering inside the bar and outside on the street. Sailors loved a good fight. But once it started it would become nearly impossible to get away before the police arrived.

He’d gotten an answer, although it wasn’t the one he’d expected. The girl had said Graham had come for a ship; he’d not mentioned anything about a crew. Either he’d been indiscreet or he had been covering his tracks.

The girl said he’d been here two days ago. But if Cabimas had been his target, why had he spent his first two days on this side of the lake, in this kind of a neighborhood? And why had he bothered to get a whore mad at him?

The bouncer planted himself a couple feet away from McGarvey, a fierce grin on his broad face. He knocked the baseball bat into the palm of his left hand with a flat slap. He was at least six-five and three hundred pounds, most of which was not fat.

McGarvey spread his hands and stepped away from the table. “No trouble,” he said. He wasn’t going to pull his pistol for fear someone innocent would get hurt, but he wanted to get back to the hotel, find Gallegos, and get over to Cabimas as soon as possible.

The bouncer poked the bat into McGarvey’s chest. “I don’t like gringos,” he said in good English. “Loud-mouthed bastards who come here with their money to buy the little Maracuchos.”

He poked the bat in McGarvey’s chest again.

“I don’t want any trouble,” McGarvey tried one last time.

“¡Bastardo!” he said. “You’re leaving feet first.”

The bouncer cocked the bat as if he were preparing to hit a home run. McGarvey stepped inside the man’s swing, and hit his Adam’s apple with a short, very sharp chop.

The bouncer reeled backwards, suddenly off-balance, unable to catch his breath through his badly bruised trachea. The horse-faced waitress came to his side as he dropped the bat and slumped to one knee.

A hush had come over the crowd, and they parted to make a path for McGarvey as he left the bar. “Bad attitude,” he said to one of the sailors outside. “I don’t think he liked me.”

TEN

It was midnight local when Graham held up at the door to the bridge. He’d managed to get a couple hours of rest in his cabin after dinner with his officers, but he’d not been able to sleep because of the recurrent nightmare about his wife, and he was very tired now. He would see her somewhere, usually downtown London in the workday crowds. He called her name, but she never heard him. When he tried to run to her, his legs were encased in mud.

Helplessly he watched her step out into the street into the path of a police car, its lights flashing, weaving in and out of traffic, and she was struck and killed instantly.

It was his fault that he wasn’t able to get to her in time. And now it was even worse because he could not see her face in his mind’s eye. Instead, he saw her likeness everywhere; the attendant on the Aeromexico flight to Maracaibo four days ago, the whore two days ago, and, aboard ship, the meddlesome Russian steward.

He saw Jillian in all of them, and the fact that they were alive and his wife was dead filled him with a nearly uncontrollable rage. He wanted to lash out. Destroy them. Beat them into the ground. Mutilate them so that they would no longer resemble her.

For a second or two longer, he stood at the door, swaying on the balls of his feet, a thin bead of sweat on his upper lip. This afternoon on the bridge and again earlier this evening in the officers’ wardroom his first officer, Jaime Vasquez, had given him odd looks, as if the man was searching for something, as if he were suspicious.

It was the Russian steward who’d probably said something to Vasquez’s girlfriend, who in turn had gone to her lover. Nattering bitches just like some other women he’d known; unable to keep their noses out of people’s business. In that, at least, Islam had it right; women needed to be kept silent behind their veils.

Graham took the pistol out of his pocket, checked to make certain that the silencer was tight, and slowly racked the slide back.

If Vasquez had become suspicious, as he had every right to be, he should have done something about it, Graham thought. At the very least call the company in Dubai to confirm Slavin’s background and description. Why couldn’t a Russian from St. Petersburg speak proper Russian? Had the tables been reversed it’s what he would have done.

He held the gun out of sight behind his back, squared his shoulders, and entered the bridge, closing the door behind him.

Third Officer Novak stood leaning against the chart table by the back bulkhead, several navigational charts, manuals, and plotting tools laid out. He was young and ambitious enough to study for his second officer’s test at every available opportunity. He’d confided that he had a fiancée in Detroit whom he would marry as soon as he made first officer. “An admirable plan,” Graham had told him.

Only one AB was on the bridge, at the starboard radar display.

Novak looked up, mild surprise on his face. “Captain.”

“Where is your other crewman?” Graham demanded.

“I sent him below for some coffee,” Novak said. “He should be back any minute.”

The AB, a young Pole, looked up. “Sir, I’m painting a small vessel about eight miles off our starboard bow. She’s coming right at us. Very slowly.”

“Damn fool,” Novak said, starting for the radar display.

Graham brought the pistol from behind his back and fired one shot, hitting Novak in the back of the skull, driving him forward facedown on the deck. The front of his head exploded, spewing blood and brain tissue across the instrument panels and the side of the AB’s face.

Graham switched aim and fired a second shot, hitting the AB high in the chest, staggering him backwards against the radar display. He was still alive. He raised his hand, as if to ward off another blow, his eyes wide, unable to believe what was happening. Graham steadied his aim and fired a third shot, this one hitting the AB in the forehead, killing him instantly. His body slumped to the deck.

Keeping an eye on the door for the second AB, who would soon be returning with coffee for his dead shipmates, Graham went to the VHF radio, switched to channel 67, and took down the mike.

“Ready one,” he said. “Ready one.”

“Ready two. Ready two.” The reply came immediately.

The door opened and the AB who’d gone for coffee came in, carrying a tray laden with two thermos pitchers and a plate of sandwiches from the galley. He spotted the mess in front of the starboard radar display, and pulled up short.

Graham calmly replaced the mike on its hook and raised the pistol as he turned toward the young crewman.

The AB dropped the tray and frantically scrambled back through the door as Graham fired one shot, hitting the crewman high in the left shoulder, and staggering him to his knees.

Graham calmly walked to the door. The AB, his blue eyes wide, his mouth open in shock, blood splattered on his long blond hair, held out a hand in supplication.

No one had heard the tray clattering to the deck, nor had the crewman cried out for help.

Graham fired one shot at point-blank range into the boy’s forehead, flinging him backwards onto the deck. Careful not to step in the gore, he dragged the body back onto the bridge so that it would be out of the way when the mission crew came aboard. The little messes throughout the ship would have to be cleaned up, of course, and the bodies either dumped in the bilges, or stuffed in the frozen food lockers. But all that would be accomplished long before the sun rose this morning.

The rendezvous was set for two hours from now but Graham needed most of that time to get the ship slowed down so that everyone could safely get aboard. First he needed to finish the job of eliminating the crew.

He had already fired five times, which left thirteen rounds still in the pistol, plus a full magazine of eighteen. More than sufficient.

Graham shifted his attention to the ship’s multifunction display. They were on the proper course at the proper rate of speed, there were no incoming messages from the company waiting for a response, and the AB at the helm hadn’t had time to push the Automatic Distress Signal button.

Everything was as it should be.

He closed his eyes for a moment, but he could not bring Jillian’s face to his mind’s eye. This time his rage was replaced with a sense of calm; he supposed that he was going crazy finally, but it was of no import. He was willing to take refuge in his insanity, just as bin Laden had done. It was plain by the expression in the man’s eyes, and Graham was sure that he too had the same intense, yet disconnected look.

Graham glanced at his watch. He was running a couple of minutes late, but he wasn’t seriously behind schedule. He took one last look at the multifunction display above the helm then went out into the corridor to the starboard stairway. He would begin with the engine room, just as he’d planned.

He started down, but something out of the corner of his eye made him stop and look back. For a second he didn’t know what had attracted his attention. But then he understood. A light shone from beneath his cabin door behind the bridge. But when he’d left a half hour ago he’d turned out his lights. He was sure of it.

His first thought was that the Russian steward had come to search his room. But she wouldn’t have the courage to do something like that on her own. She’d probably convinced Vasquez and his girlfriend to help her.

It was just as well, Graham thought as he walked back to his cabin door, his sneakers whisper-soft on the steel deck. If all three were there he’d kill them first, no matter what they had found.

Concealing the pistol behind his back as he’d done earlier, he opened his door and took one step inside. The situation was worse than he’d feared.

Vasquez, a 9mm Beretta pistol from the ship’s emergency locker in hand, was positioned at the doorway to the bedroom, obviously standing guard. He looked up, startled. “He’s here,” he said, and he brought his pistol to bear before Graham could do a thing.

Beyond him, Irina and Alicia had found his two leather bags, opened them, and spread everything out on the bed: Slavin’s clothing, as well as the Heckler & Koch M8 compact carbine with four magazines of ammunition, six one-kilo bricks of Semtex with a small metal box of detonators, leather gloves, a wire garrote, a stiletto and sheath, and an encrypted satellite phone/walkie-talkie.

“Good evening, Mr.Vasquez,” Graham said, weighing his options, measuring the angles. Vasquez was a seaman, not a cop or a trained killer. He would be slow to fire at a man he assumed was unarmed.

“What’s all this shit, Captain Slavin, if that’s really your name?” Vasquez demanded. He was nervous. It was obvious that he’d never held a gun on a man before.

“My personal property for starts,” Graham answered mildly. “What made you think that you could break into my quarters and rifle through my things?”

Irina came to the bedroom door, and said something to him in rapid-fire Russian.

“That’s not necessary,” he said pleasantly. He nodded toward the weapons laid out on the bed. “It’s obvious that I’m an imposter. Thing is, what are you going to do about it?”

“Call the company for one, to find out where the real Captain Slavin is,” Vasquez said.

“I killed him,” Graham said conversationally. “In Cabimas.”

Vasquez was visibly shaken. “In that case we’re going to arrest you and hold you for the authorities when we reach Colón in the morning.”

Graham shrugged, and held up his left hand as if he were giving up. “I guess I can’t argue with a man who’s holding a gun on me,” he said.

Vasquez started to say something when Graham stepped backwards into the corridor and slid away from the open door.

“Shit!” Vasquez shouted. A second later he appeared in the doorway, a frightened look on his face. Too late he saw Graham standing right there and he tried to rear back.

Graham fired one shot into the first officer’s left temple. The man’s eyes suddenly turned blood-red, his head bounced against the door frame, and he crumpled to the deck half in and half out of the captain’s cabin.

The women started to scream.

Graham hurriedly stepped over the first officer’s body, dragged it the rest of the way into the sitting room, kicked his gun aside, and closed the door lest someone hear the racket and come to investigate.

Alicia had come into the sitting room. Her hands were clutched to her breast, and she was wailing Vasquez’s name. But Irina had grabbed the M8 carbine from the bed, and was fumbling with a magazine of ammunition, trying to load the weapon.

“You should have minded your own business,” Graham told Alicia, and he shot her in the face, the bullet striking her at the bridge of her nose, killing her instantly.

Irina was frantically trying to get the magazine into its slot in front of the trigger guard, but in her haste she was forcing it in at the wrong angle.

Graham walked across the sitting room, careful not to step in Alicia’s blood.

Irina looked up at him, her face screwed up in a mask of absolute terror.

“You’ll never get it loaded that way, my dear,” Graham said. He smiled.

“You’re the devil!” she cried.

“Da,” he said in Russian, and he shot her in the forehead from a range of ten feet.

Her body bounced off the bulkhead and crumpled to the deck, leaving a bloody streak on the white wall beside the large square window. But no blood got on the bedcovers, which for some reason Graham found pleasing. He’d always liked to think of himself as a tidy man, and the sooner he could get his operators aboard the sooner the ship could be cleaned up.

Graham let himself out of his quarters, and headed down one deck. He had changed his plans. Now that the first and third officers were dead, it left only Sozansky and Chief Engineer Kiosawa alive, probably in their quarters. He meant to kill them first before sweeping through the galley and the crew quarters.

At the end he would descend to the engine room, kill the crew, and slow the big computer-controlled turbines to idle.

Nothing would get in his way. In less than ten minutes he would be the only one alive on the Apurto Devlán.

A few minutes after two, the oil tanker was making less than one knot through nearly flat seas, under an overcast, pitch-black sky. Graham stood on the main deck amidships on the starboard side. The forty-eight-foot Feadship motor yacht Nueva Cruz out of Santiago de Cuba, showing no lights, was directly below, its pilot matching speeds perfectly.

Ali Ramati came out on the yacht’s aft sundeck, and waved. He was a slightly built man who’d shaved his beard and his head to make him look very much like Vasquez. He was from the West Bank town of Ramallah, and he was a little crazy, but he was dedicated and bright. He had trained as Graham’s first officer for this mission, and, like the others, he was prepared to commit suicide for the cause without hesitation.

The rest of the crew, fifteen of them men, most from the Philippines, plus the two women from Cairo, would remain out of sight until the boarding ladder was safely secured to the tanker, and they were given the all clear.

Everything at this point was being done by hand signals. Although they’d detected no other ships out to fifty miles, well beyond the range of a walkie-talkie, Graham wanted to take no chances.

He waved back.

Ramati opened a large locker, took out a coiled, one-quarter-inch messenger line, and tossed it up to Graham, who caught it as it came over the rail.

The line was attached to a boarding ladder, which came up out of the locker as Graham hauled it in hand-over-hand. In five minutes he had the ladder attached to a pair of big deck cleats, and Ramati begin sending up the crew.

As soon as they were all aboard, the Nueva Cruz would immediately head toward Costa Rica a little more than four hundred miles to the southwest, where the four supposedly wealthy French-Muslim businessmen who had chartered the yacht would fish for blue marlin. They would be directly off the Panama Canal tomorrow evening.

First aboard was Mohammed Hijazi, one of their Syrian-trained explosives experts. He had dark eyes, a serious five o’clock shadow, thick shoulders and arms, but the delicate fingers of a piano player. As he came over the rail he smiled.

“Ahlan wa sahlan,” he said formally. Hello. He was from Nablus, but for the past half-dozen years he’d operated out of the Damascus al-Quaida organization. He had fought in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, with a lot of bridges, police stations, schools, and hospitals to his credit.

“As soon as everyone is aboard, get them started in the engine room, but watch out for the blood, I don’t want it tracked through the ship,” Graham told him.

Hijazi glanced up at the aft superstructure. “They’re all dead?”

“Yes,” Graham said impatiently. He didn’t have time for twenty questions. “I want to be back to cruising speed within the hour, and I want this ship cleaned up before sunrise.” There was a possibility, however remote, that one of the satellites GAC regularly bought time on to watch out for its interests, had taken notice that the Apurto Devlán had stopped in the mid-Caribbean for some reason and the company would call to find out why.

A second crewman came over the rail, with three behind him on the ladder.

“As soon as Ali is aboard send him up to me on the bridge.”

“Aywa,” Hijazi said. Yes.

“English,” Graham barked and headed aft.

He had a plausible story about a propeller shaft vibration, but someone had to be on the bridge in case a call from Dubai came.

ELEVEN

Gallegos wasn’t at the restaurant in the Hotel El Paseo when McGarvey showed up, nor was the maître d’ inclined to help out even when McGarvey flashed a one-hundred-dollar bill in front of him. There was nothing left for him but to return to the del Lago, and see if Gallegos had come back yet.

He stopped at the noisy lobby bar, got a couple bottles of Red Stripe beer, and brought them upstairs in his own room. He took off his jacket, laid his pistol on the desk, opened one of the beers, and telephoned Gallegos, but there was no answer. Next, he telephoned Otto Rencke on the secure satellite phone.

“Oh wow, Mac,” Otto answered on the first ring. He’d been expecting McGarvey’s call. “Have you come up with anything?”

“He’s here all right, or at least he was as of two days ago.”

It was coming up on ten in the evening, and a deep-throated ship’s whistle sounded somewhere out on the lake, but very close. It reminded McGarvey of how much he didn’t know about Graham, and the situation here and over in Cabimas, and the fact that Graham had a two-day head start.

“All the normal al-Quaida Web sites have gone real quiet in the past twenty-four hours,” Otto said. “Just the usual CDLR shit out of London, and the IALHP in Prague. But it’s just background noise.” The CDLR or Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, and the IALHP or the Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Places, had stepped up their fundraising activities ever since 9/11 had galvanized the Muslim world. Even the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq hadn’t stopped the influx of money to bin Laden — much of it from Saudi Arabia, but incredibly a lot of it from the United States.

“How about Louise?” Louise Horn was Otto’s wife. She ran the National Security Agency’s Satellite Photo Interpretation shop over at Fort Meade.

“Nada, kimo sabe,” Otto said. He sounded tired and a little depressed. “If they’re not talking on their Web sites or by phone, they have to be communicating via courier, but our Jupiter constellation is picking up almost nothing in infrared.”

The National Reconnaissance Office’s Jupiter satellite system had originally been put up to watch the India-Pakistan nuclear situation. But since 9/ 11 it had been pressed into service to also watch the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan where bin Laden was supposed to be hiding.

“Maybe they don’t need to talk to each other,” McGarvey said. “The mission has started and they’re keeping their heads down until it happens.”

“That’s the conclusion we came to,” Otto said. “But what have you come up with? Has Graham been trying to recruit a crew?”

“Apparently not,” McGarvey said. “Or at least not here in Maracaibo. But he made a big impression on one of the whores. When I showed her Graham’s picture she went ballistic. Claims he told her that he’d come down here to pick up a ship in Cabimas.”

“Shit,” Otto said. “What is Juan saying?”

“He’s at a meeting with the local chief of police. He promised to try for an APB, but the mood down here isn’t very good. In fact, if Graham did come down here to recruit a crew the government would probably help him. But Gallegos doesn’t think hijacking a ship is possible. He told me that Vensport security is tight.”

“Yeah, right,” Otto said. “And I’ve got some water-view property three hundred miles east of here I want to sell you. But he didn’t fly to Venezuela for his health. If he’s not recruiting a crew then he has to be hijacking a ship, no matter what Juan thinks.”

“That’s what I figured. I’m going to try to get to Cabimas tonight, but in the meantime I want you to find out what ships have sailed in the past forty-eight hours and their destinations.”

“I’ll get on it right away, Mac,” Otto said. “But why would a guy like Graham blab his guts out to a whore? Seems kinda sloppy to me.”

“He might have figured that someone was right behind him and he threw up a smokescreen. Make us think he was going to Cabimas when in fact he was staying right here. Or maybe he’s arrogant, and thinks he’s bulletproof.”

“Or maybe he’s nuts,” Otto said. “He was kicked out of the navy for some reason. Could be anything.”

“Do you have anything new on him?”

“Nothing other than the Interpol package that you’ve seen. But a friend at MI6 has promised to send over his Royal Navy personnel file. I should have it by morning. If I don’t, I’ll hack their mainframe and get it.”

There was no computer security system in the world that Rencke couldn’t break if he put his considerable talents to the job. But for him hacking wasn’t just getting into a system and raiding its files. It was getting in and out without being detected.

Three years ago, when McGarvey was still the DCI, he’d invited the top computer experts from all fifteen U.S. intelligence services, plus the top U.S. law enforcement agencies and a dozen key U.S. corporations such as Boeing that did considerable classified business with the government, to a one-day seminar at CIA headquarters. Rencke had come up with a foolproof way of hacking into the latest Quantum effects encryption algorithms, and McGarvey felt that the CIA ought to issue a warning.

One hundred and fifteen enthused computer division supervisors had entered the first-floor briefing auditorium at nine in the morning, and by four that afternoon only a handful of them went away with any understanding of what Otto had told them. The rest of what Otto called the geek squad left Langley wondering if perhaps they should change professions.

“For the moment at least I’ve got to go with the Cabimas lead, it’s the only thing I have, unless you come up with something new from his navy file,” McGarvey said.

“He had a four-day head start,” Otto said. “Why’d he blow two days of it staying there in Maracaibo to piss off a whore?”

Another possibility suddenly came to McGarvey. On the way in from the airport Gallegos had given him some background on Maracaibo. It was Venezuela’s second-largest city with a metro-area population of more than one million. “What’s the population of Cabimas?”

“Just a sec,” Otto said. A moment later he came back. “A hundred twenty thou.”

“Anonymity,” McGarvey said. “Maracaibo is ten times the size of Cabimas. He got down here too early, and it’s easier to hide out in a big city than in a small town.”

“He was waiting for something,” Otto said. “A ship.”

“A specific ship,” McGarvey said.

“I’m on it,” Otto said. “Give me an hour and I’ll have the name and crew complements of every ship out of Cabimas in the past forty-eight hours.”

“They’ll have a specific target, and whatever it is, it will be big.”

“He’s most likely after an oil tanker, which would probably head for the California refineries. If they blew it up at the unloading dock, it could hurt us pretty badly. The gas shortages would all but cripple us until a new refinery came on line. And that could be years.”

“You’d better give the Bureau a heads-up.”

“We’re supposed to go through Don Hamel’s office—” Otto said, but McGarvey cut him off.

“Say hello to Fred Rudolph for me,” McGarvey said. Rudolph had risen to head the FBI’s Counter-Terrorism Division. He was the one man over at the J. Edgar Hoover Building for whom McGarvey had total trust and respect.

“Will do,” Otto said. “I’ll get back to you within the hour.”

“Do that,” McGarvey said. He telephoned the front desk and asked that Gallegos call as soon as he arrived.

“Señor Gallegos has just walked in the door,” the front desk clerk said. “Un momento.”

Gallegos came on a house phone in the lobby. “He refused, and I can’t blame him. Graham has broken no Venezuelan laws.”

“Never mind that,” McGarvey said. “How far is it to Cabimas?”

“Forty-five minutes,” Gallegos said. “Is that where he went?”

“I think so. I’ll meet you out front, we’ll drive down there now.”

“What have you learned?” the intelligence officer asked, his tone guarded.

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“First thing in the morning,” Gallegos said. “We won’t do any good down there this time of night.”

McGarvey figured the man was right, but it was frustrating to spend the night doing nothing. “I think he’s here to hijack one of your ships.”

“Impossible,” Gallegos said. “I’ve already told you that Vensport security is airtight.”

“There’s no such thing,” McGarvey said. “But I’ll have the names of some possibilities for you within the hour. You can at least alert security down there to be on the lookout.”

“Look, Señor McGarvey, this is Venezuela. My service has agreed to offer you whatever help it can. But believe me when I tell you that our shipping security is the best in the world. It has to be, because oil is our lifeblood. If anything were to happen to that industry we would be in more trouble than you can imagine. Do you understand this?”

“If Graham’s not after a crew, he came to hijack a ship.”

“Sí, you’ve already said that.”

“He evidently figured out a way to do it, otherwise he would not have wasted his time coming here.”

“Then he’s in for a surprise, because his picture has been sent to Vensport Security.”

“When?”

“This morning,” Gallegos said. “Get some sleep. We will drive to Cabimas after breakfast, and you will see.”

The call from Otto came a few minutes after eleven. In the past forty-eight hours, twenty-seven ships had departed the various oil-loading facilities along the lake, bound for ports from Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo in the south, to St. Croix and New York in the north, and seven transiting the Panama Canal for ports in the Pacific, three of which were in California. Another eleven ships were due to head out over the next twenty-four hours, six of which were bound for U.S. ports.

“There’s been no trouble reported from any of the ships already at sea,” Otto said. “And the Vensport Lake Terminal Security net has been quiet. If Graham went to Cabimas he’s kept his head down.”

“Fax the list to the hotel,” McGarvey said.

“No need, Mac. While we were talking I downloaded the entire list to your sat phone. Just key your address book.”

“Good,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime give Homeland Security the heads-up on all the U.S. ports on the list. My bet would be the California refineries.”

“Me too, I think,” Otto said, somewhat distantly. “But we’ve got a little time. The Apurto Devlán, which is the first ship on the list, isn’t due at Long Beach for another ten days.”

“Keep me informed, Otto,” McGarvey said.

“Will do.”

TWELVE

Thirty minutes after they dropped their hook in the holding basin off Colón, a small ex — U.S. Coast Guard gig flying the Panama Canal Transit Authority pennant came alongside and tied up at the lowered boarding ladder. Immediately four men and two small dogs on leashes started up.

It was a few minutes after seven in the morning, and a soft warm breeze came from the southeast, bringing with it the pleasant, damp earthy odors of the rain forest that made the operation of the canal possible. The Apurto Devlán flew the tricolor Venezuelan flag from her stern, and the Panamanian courtesy flag and yellow quarantine pennant from her starboard spreader atop the superstructure.

Graham and his second officer, Mohammed Hijazi, watched from the port bridge wing as the boarding party was met by Ali Ramati, who was presenting himself as First Officer Vasquez.

“Why the dogs?” Hijazi asked.

“I expect they’re looking for explosives,” Graham said. Seeing the dogs and their handlers coming on deck, he’d had a momentary stab of fear that somehow this mission had been blown. But if that were the case, he reasoned, the ship would never have been allowed to come this far. They would have been stopped by a U.S. Navy warship while they were still well at sea.

Hijazi laughed disparagingly. “They should have brought trained fish.”

There was something about the two men with the dogs that was bothersome, however. They were taller than the other two, and they weren’t wearing uniforms, just dark jackets and dark baseball caps. One of them turned and looked up. Graham involuntarily stepped back. Emblazoned on the front of his cap were the initials FBI.

Hijazi spotted the cap at the same time. “Is it a trap?” he asked, his hand going to the pistol beneath his light jacket.

Graham touched his elbow. “I don’t think so,” he said. “The Panamanians have probably asked the Americans for security help. They’re afraid for their canal.”

The four on deck headed aft to the superstructure.

“I’ll deal with the paperwork myself,” Graham said. “But the FBI agents will want to let their dogs sniff around the ship. I want you to personally escort them. Take them to the product tanks, anywhere they want to go except for my cabin. They won’t find anything.”

Hijazi was clearly nervous. “We’re not ready,” he said. “If something goes wrong now we won’t be able to destroy the ship.”

“Nothing will go wrong,” Graham said. A possibility existed, however slight, that the FBI did, in fact, suspect something, and were here to take a preliminary look. If it came to that he’d order the four men and their dogs killed. The ship could be prepared to explode within a half hour. Within that time the Apurto Devlán could be driven to the middle of the narrow entrance to the Gatun approaches. If she sank there, it could take months before the canal could be put back into operation.

His crew would die the martyrs’ deaths they wanted, so that their families would be paid fifty thousand in U.S. dollars, and he would make his escape using the Transit Authority boat.

But first things first. There was no need to shed blood.Yet.

“Have Ali show the transit people to my sea cabin,” Graham said. “And keep your head around those FBI agents.”

Hijazi nodded uncertainly. He went back into the deserted bridge and headed downstairs.

Graham took a moment longer to study the eighteen or twenty other ships in the holding basin. All of them were either Panamax oil tankers like the Apurto Devlán or container ships. No U.S. warships were anywhere in sight. Nor did anything seem out of order, although at the moment no ships were entering or leaving the cut to the locks.

He contemplated that single fact. Was it a momentary lull in traffic, or had the canal been closed in the face of a terror alert?

A single piece of evidence could never be the basis for a conclusion. Yet something was happening. He could feel it in his bones. Ever since Perisher school he had learned to trust his instincts, and they were telling him loud and clear that someone was coming, sniffing down his trail, and he’d better be ready for them.

He walked back to his sea cabin directly behind the bridge. Leaving the door open, he sat down behind his small desk on which was stacked the crew’s passports. Since no one would be going ashore in Panama, health certificates would not have to be presented.

He got to his feet and smiled faintly as Ramati and two men came up the stairs and crossed to his cabin. One of them was in the dark blue uniform of the Panama Transit Authority, but the other much older and heavier man wore a dark business suit, white shirt, and conservative tie.

Ramati’s eyes were narrowed, his lips compressed, as if he was trying to warn Graham about something.

“Dobroyeh ootroh,” Graham said, extending his hand to the uniformed officer. Good morning.

“Good morning, Captain, I’m Pedro Ercilla, your canal boarding official,” he said, shaking hands. “And of course you must know Señor Almagro.”

Ramati’s eyebrows rose. He’d stepped aside and his right hand went into his jacket pocket.

“No, I’m afraid that I do not,” Graham said, shaking the man’s hand. “Should I?”

Almagro smiled pleasantly. “Actually not,” he said. “I’m the GAC agent for our ships transiting the canal.” He turned to the CBO. “This is Captain Slavin’s first voyage with the company. But I’m sure that his name will be quite familiar to us very soon. Isn’t that so, Captain?”

“I’m sure of it,” Graham said. “May I assume that our transit paperwork is in order?”

“Yes, Captain,” the CBO replied.

“I have the crew’s passports—”

“Were there any crew replacements at Maracaibo?” Ercilla asked.

“Other than myself, no,” Graham said.

“Then I need only see your passport,” the CBO said.

“Of course,” Graham said. He got his passport from the top of the stack and handed it to the transit official. This would be the first real test of his disguise.

Ercilla glanced briefly at the photo, but then took out a small notebook and jotted down Graham’s name, place and date of birth, and the passport number. He handed the passport back. “Thank you,” he said.

“I came out because I wanted to meet you,” Almagro said. “But also to bring you good news. Instead of the usual forty-eight hours’ waiting time, you’ll actually be able to begin your transit at midnight. In less than eighteen hours.”

“That is good news,” Graham said. They could not retrieve the explosive charges, put them in place, and prepare the product tanks when it was light outside. The shortened waiting time would make a difficult job nearly impossible. But they would make do.

“You may expect your pilot at eleven,” Ercilla said. “Please have your ship and crew ready, we have a busy transit schedule this evening.”

“Of course,” Graham nodded pleasantly. But then he hardened his expression. “Now tell me why you brought two American FBI agents and their animals aboard this ship without my permission.” He turned to Almagro. “I do not like dogs. I have an allergy.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, but you should have been informed before you left port,” the company agent apologized. “It’s new policy.”

“Since when?”

“It was instituted last week,” Ercilla said. “My government asked for help. In the present, shall we say, mood of certain international organizations, combined with the sensitivity of canal operations—”

Graham let surprise and relief show on his face. “They’re looking for explosives,” he said. “Well, very good. I’ll sleep better when they’re done.”

Ercilla smiled and nodded. “So will we, Captain. Believe me.”

“If a ship like mine were to suddenly explode in the middle of one of the locks it could conceivably close the canal for months,” Graham said.

“No, Captain Slavin,” the transit official said. “It would close the canal for years.”

“The effect on the world economy would be devastating,” Almagro added.

“I expect it would,” Graham agreed wholeheartedly. “Now, may I offer you gentlemen coffee or tea while we wait for the FBI to complete its inspection?”

THIRTEEN

“I’m sorry, señor, but we have reached a dead end, as I warned you we would,” Juan Gallegos said. He poured another glass of wine and sat back.

It was just nightfall, and he and McGarvey were having an early supper at a small but fashionable cafetería on the waterfront, but well away from the commercial district. Traffic had not yet picked up for the evening, and from somewhere they could hear someone playing a guitar, the melody coming to them over a gentle breeze.

They were missing something, just out of reach at the back of McGarvey’s head. It had been a frustrating day of running down the shipping agents for each of the twenty-seven tankers that had left port in the past forty-eight hours, plus the eleven scheduled to depart in the next twenty-four hours, showing them Graham’s photograph, and trying to get them to look beyond the simple black-and-white image, and imagine that man in a disguise.

Next they had talked to all the hiring agencies to find out if someone might have been trying to recruit a crew. But no one had seen a man who even closely resembled Graham.

All this late afternoon they’d talked to the clerks in several hotels where Graham might have stayed: taxi drivers, on the remote chance that they might run into someone who’d had Graham as a fare; restaurant waiters who might have served him a meal; and with ferry operators who might have taken a man matching Graham’s description out to one of the ships. All without luck.

“Will you be returning to the States in the morning?” Gallegos asked. He was polite now that he had done what he could for the gringo and had been proven correct. “I can make sure that you get a first-class seat on the Miami flight. They’re usually full.”

A waiter came to clear away their plates. McGarvey had scarcely touched his churrasco steak that had been cut into thin criollo strips, marinated, and then grilled. “Is there something wrong with your food, señor?” the young pock-faced man asked. His attitude was arrogant. He didn’t like North Americans.

McGarvey looked up out of his thoughts. “It was fine. I’m just not hungry.”

When the waiter was gone, Gallegos asked again if McGarvey would be leaving in the morning.

“We’re missing something,” McGarvey said. “Graham was in Maracaibo two days ago, and according to the whore he was coming here to meet his ship.”

“If you can believe her.”

“Graham might have lied to her, but she was telling the truth. Still it doesn’t matter. If he came to Venezuela to board a ship he could have done it just as easily from Maracaibo as here.”

“Easier,” Gallegos said. “There’re more water taxis out of Maracaibo than here.”

“Why did he come here?”

Gallegos shook his head, frustrated. “It’s a moot point. If he wasn’t here to raise a crew, and if he didn’t bring men with him, how could he expect to hijack one of our ships? One man alone could not do it.You can see that, can’t you?”

McGarvey nodded. “Maybe he wasn’t planning on hijacking a ship.”

Gallegos threw up his hands. “What are you talking about now?”

All at once it came to McGarvey. He motioned their waiter for the check. “Graham came here because he was after a specific ship. One that was being assigned a new officer, probably the captain.”

“If he stayed at a hotel his passport would have been checked.”

“He probably killed the captain, got rid of the body, and either switched photos in the passport or altered his appearance.” The waiter brought the bill and McGarvey laid down a twenty, which more than covered it and a good tip. “If a new captain was here to meet his ship, where would he stay?”

“The Internacional,” Gallegos said. “But we were there this afternoon.”

“We only talked to the desk clerk,” McGarvey said. “This time we’re going to talk to the rest of the staff, starting with the bell captain. Someone may have carried the real captain’s bags into the hotel, and Graham’s bags back out. Room service may have brought him a meal. The chambermaid cleaning his room may have seen him. Someone might have noticed something.”

The hotel was less than a block away. They drove over and parked under the canopy in front of the main entrance. “Leave it here, we’ll be just a minute,” Gallegos told the valet.

Inside, they approached the bell station where a young, good-looking man in the blue uniform of a bell captain was reading a newspaper. He looked up with interest, folded the newspaper, and put it away. “Good evening,” he said. “Are you gentlemen checking in?”

“Buenas noches,” McGarvey said. He handed the bell captain Graham’s photograph with a twenty-dollar bill. “Have you seen this man?”

Sudden understanding dawned on the bell captain’s face. “You were here this afternoon, speaking with Mr. Angarita,” he said. He pocketed the money. He looked at the photo and shook his head. “I’m sorry, this man is unfamiliar to me. But if you would care to leave the photo I can ask my staff.”

“That would be helpful,” Gallegos said.

“Do many ship’s officers stay here at the hotel?” McGarvey asked.

“Of course,” the bell captain said. “Often.”

“Any in the past two days?”

The bell captain nodded. “Sí.”

“A captain or a senior officer, maybe?” McGarvey asked. “Someone who stayed the night, and then left for his ship in the morning?”

The bell captain thought for a moment, and then nodded. “There was one.”

“But not this man,” McGarvey said. “Not even a man who might have looked like him, even faintly. Perhaps his shoulders. Maybe his eyes, or the way he walked. Or his manner: pleasant, indifferent, arrogant.”

The bell captain studied the photo again.

“Perhaps there was something different about him,” McGarvey pressed. “Maybe when he checked in he was relaxed, but when he left he was in a hurry, maybe anxious.”

“The Russian captain,” the bell captain said hesitantly. “Something was odd about him, I think.”

McGarvey kept a poker face. He shrugged. “Odd?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

“He was a GAC guest of the hotel two days ago. Stayed only the night. In the morning the Vensport ferry service took him out to his ship by helicopter.”

“Continue,” McGarvey prompted.

“I personally handle most of our VIP guests, so I took his bags up to his suite when he arrived. He tried to tip me, but Mr. Angarita who’d come up with him explained that GAC would take care of everything.”

“Is that common practice?”

“Yes, sir,” the bell captain said. “But Captain Slavin seemed a little embarrassed.”

“So?”

The bell captain looked at the photo again. “In the morning, Manuel took his bags to the helipad on the roof. He said that the captain tipped him and insisted he take it. It was odd, after his embarrassment the evening before.”

“Do you know the name of the ship?” McGarvey asked.

“No, but I can find out,” the bell captain said. He turned to his computer behind the desk and brought up the hotel folio for Slavin’s stay, which included the destination and charge for the helicopter ferry service. “It’s the Apurto Devlán,” he said, looking up. “But Captain Slavin, or whoever he is, will be back.”

“How do you know that?” Gallegos asked, in English for McGarvey’s benefit.

“He checked a large aluminum trunk with us,” the bell captain said.

“Where is it?” McGarvey demanded.

“Right here, in guest storage,” the bell captain said. He opened a door to a small room behind his bell station. Various boxes and pieces of tagged luggage were stacked on metal shelves. An aluminum trunk about the size of a footlocker sat in a corner.

“Evacuate the hotel,” McGarvey ordered.

“What—?” the bell captain sputtered.

“I wouldn’t put it past Graham to leave a little surprise for us,” McGarvey told Gallegos. “If he thought someone might be on his trail it would cover his tracks.”

Gallegos showed the bell captain his CID credentials, and said something to him in rapid-fire Spanish, but the young man backed up and shook his head.

“Get a bomb squad over here on the double,” McGarvey said. He walked back to the main entrance, where he’d spotted a fire alarm. He broke the glass with the little hinged hammer and pulled the lever. Alarms began to blare all through the hotel.

McGarvey and Gallegos stood outside under the canopy, while the police held the majority of the hotel guests and staff behind barriers half a block away. Police units, fire trucks, and ambulances were parked all over the place, their emergency lights flashing. A military bomb disposal squad had been choppered across the lake from Maracaibo within twenty minutes of Gallego’s call to the Zulia State barracks. They’d been inside for nearly a half hour, before the supervisor emerged from the lobby. His Lexan face shield was in the raised position.

He came over to where McGarvey and Gallegos were waiting. His complexion under the harsh entry lights was pale, and his face was shiny with sweat. He looked as if he was about to be sick.

He said something in Spanish to Gallegos, who shot back a rapid-fire response. The bomb disposal supervisor glanced at McGarvey, nodded, and headed across to his truck.

“I think it was Graham,” Gallegos told McGarvey. “The body of a man, who will probably turn out to be the Russian ship captain, was stuffed into the aluminum trunk.”

The news was more frustrating than surprising to McGarvey. “Was anything else packed with the body?”

“We won’t know until the medical examiner gets here,” Gallegos said. “But you were right all along. I’m sure that my government will ask your navy for help. If some maniac has actually gotten control of one of our tankers there’s no telling what will happen.”

“We’re already on it,” McGarvey told him. “The target’s probably one of our oil refineries in California, which means we have time to do something.”

“How can I help?” Gallegos asked earnestly. He’d been wrong, but he was sharp enough not to hold any grudges.

“I’m probably going to need some fast transportation out of here,” McGarvey said.

“I’ll have Air Force on standby for you. Whatever you need.” McGarvey walked a few feet away and made a sat phone call to Rencke, who was still at Langley. “It’s the Apurto Devlán. Graham probably killed the captain ashore here in Cabimas and took his identity. What can you tell me about the ship?”

“She’s a Panamax oil carrier, nine hundred feet on the waterline, beam of one hundred and ten feet.Twelve separate tanks, carrying fifty-thousand-plus tons of light sweet crude.”

“What about the crew?”

“Normal complement of a master and twenty-three officers and crew, but she’s been running shorthanded. Nineteen and the captain.”

McGarvey put himself in Graham’s shoes. He’d apparently come up with enough information about the ship and her officers to feel confident that he could get away with posing as the captain. Once aboard, and at sea, he would have to eliminate the entire crew and probably stop at some rendezvous point to pick up their replacements.

“Where’s the ship right now?”

“I’m just bringing it up now,” Otto said. He sounded excited.

McGarvey could see him in his pigsty of an office; empty classified files, NRO satellite photos, top secret Company memos, and empty Twinkie wrappers would be scattered all over the floor, on the desk and chairs, while Otto, probably dressed in ragged jeans and a dirty sweatshirt, would be working a half-dozen computer monitors and keyboards like a concert organist manipulating several registers.

“Oh wow, Mac, she’s in the Limón holding basin,” Otto said. “Scheduled to start her transit in a few hours. Midnight.”

“Have the canal authorities already cleared her?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, but she’ll stay anchored until the pilot comes aboard,” Otto said. “But I just had another thought. What if Graham isn’t targeting the Long Beach refineries? What if he’s after the canal?”

McGarvey had kicked the same idea around in his head all afternoon as they’d worked their way through the shipping and hiring agencies. The only mistakes that Graham had made were telling the whore he was meeting a ship and then making her mad enough to remember him out of all her johns. He was professional enough to have eluded capture for the past several years even though he was a hunted man worldwide, which meant he had a very definite plan, one which he believed would not fail. He would be professional enough to realize that time was against him. The moment he’d killed the Russian captain, the countdown had begun. Sooner or later the body that he’d stuffed in the footlocker would be discovered; sooner or later someone would come looking for him.

Once the Apurto Devlán cleared the Panama Canal it would take nearly ten days to reach California. Too many bad things could happen in such a long time.

“I think you’re right,” he told Rencke. “Where would he blow up the ship to do the most damage?”

“The Gatun locks, on the Caribbean side,” Otto said without hesitation. “I already worked it out. If he could take those out it would be a very long time before the canal could be made operational again. It’s even possible that it’d never get done. The whole thing is way too small for most modern ships. If it were going to be rebuilt, it’d be better to start from scratch. Make it fit the ships out there delivering cargo, not the other way around. But nobody’s got that kind of do-re-me these days.”

“Okay, hang on a minute, Otto,” McGarvey said, and he walked back to where Gallegos was smoking a cigarette and watching the police activity inside the lobby. They’d dragged the aluminum footlocker out of the storage room, and a photographer was taking pictures. The other officers were keeping their distance because of the smell. “Is your offer still open for a quick ride out of here?”

“Sí. Where do you want to go?”

“The Panama Canal,” McGarvey said. “Probably the international airport at Panama City.”

“How soon?”

“Right now,” McGarvey said.

“Give me five minutes,” Gallegos said, and he took out his cell phone.

McGarvey turned back to Otto. “Do we still have an Emergency Response Team in the Canal Zone?”

“Yes. They’re based in Panama City.”

“Alert them to what’s coming their way. But make it damn clear that they wait until I get there, they’ll have to chopper me up to Colón. Graham will have his own crew aboard, and they’ll be willing to go up in flames for the cause if they’re pressed.”

“They might have their own threat-response orders,” Rencke warned.

“If need be call Dennis Berndt at the White House, he’s got muscle.” Berndt was the president’s national security adviser.

“You’re going to have to hustle, Mac,” Rencke said. “We’re running out of time if Gatun is the target.”

“Juan is working on it for me,” McGarvey said, a tight smile on his lips. “I have a couple of things that I’d like to discuss with Mr. Graham tonight. I think he’ll find what I have to say interesting.”

FOURTEEN

It was approaching eleven o’clock. The transit pilot would be coming aboard in a little more than a half hour, yet the job wasn’t finished. Graham hesitated for just a moment on the open deck just forward of the superstructure to catch his breath in the clean air. The night sky was pitch-black, but they were surrounded by the lights of dozens of ships, large and small, most of them at anchor, although in the past two hours, three ships had headed into the narrow cut that led to the Gatun locks.

Spread out along the eastern shore of the bay, the city of Colón’s skyscrapers and business district looked like diamonds, rubies, and emeralds against a black velvet backdrop. The place reminded him in some ways of Singapore’s skyline at night. He’d looked at it through a search periscope from well offshore. But that was another time and place that he didn’t want to remember now.

Hijazi had taken charge of the engine room, along with one of the other operators, and they’d just finished packing enough Semtex around the rudder shaft to permanently disable the ship if something drastic went wrong. In the worst-case scenario they would jam the rudder, set the ship’s engines All Ahead Full, and ram the first lock gate. It wouldn’t do the same damage as exploding the ship inside the middle lock, but it would do enough to close the canal for months, perhaps even years.

The access hatch to the six starboard stairwells was open and a dim red light shone from below. The narrow stairs descended eighty feet to the bottom of the ship between the hull and the wall of the farthest aft product tank on the starboard side. Access hatches and stairs for each of the twelve oil tanks, plus the two slop tanks and six pairs of ballast tanks for when the ship was running light, ran left and right.

Graham took a last look around topside. A helicopter low in the sky was heading northwest, the sounds of its rotors against the other harbor and city noises faint on the light evening breeze. No threat there. And what was probably a commercial jetliner was coming in from the north for a landing at Panama City thirty-five miles across the isthmus.

Although the timing was uncomfortably tight, everything was going according to plan. After nightfall, they had retrieved the explosives and their weapons from the four streamlined trunks attached by powerful magnets to the hull five feet below the waterline. Fifty miles out they had attached them to the stern of the ship, where the water flow was the least disturbed, and none of them had been lost.

They faced no immediate threats to the operation. Everything was going according to plan. Yet Graham could feel that someone was coming. It was as if he were game, being stalked by a jungle cat he could not see but knew was there.

As soon as he stepped through the hatch and started down the stairs he was aware of a deep-throated hissing sound, as if he were hearing a powerful waterfall from a long distance, or compressed air being let out of a submarine’s ballast tanks. It was the inert nitrogen being vented out of the tank. They had to do it slowly so that no one in the harbor would hear what was being done and come to investigate. Once the nitrogen was gone, the air spaces at the top of the product tanks would fill with an explosive mixture of gases that continuously evaporated from crude oil.

When that happened, the entire tanker would become a time bomb waiting for a simple spark, or the explosion of a few kilograms of Semtex, to blow sky-high, destroying the entire ship and anything or anyone in its vicinity.

The steel plating of the hull was cool and dry to the touch, but the wall of the product tank was greasy with condensation, and the air stank so badly of crude oil gases that it was practically unbreathable.

Ramati was crouched at the bottom of the stairs, molding a four-kilo brick of plastic explosive to the base of the tank, while Faruq al-Tashkiri, who’d been an electrical rating aboard an Egyptian destroyer, held a red light.

The noise of the venting nitrogen was very strong down here, but it suddenly stopped and Ramati and al-Tashkiri looked up, their eyes wide as if they were deer caught in headlights.

“We’re almost done here,” Ramati said. “And this is the last tank.”

“Good,” Graham said. “The pilot is due aboard in thirty minutes, and you have to clean up, change into the first’s clothes, and be at the rail to greet him and bring him up to the bridge.”

“Give me one minute, Captain, and I’ll have the receiver wired to the detonator,” Ramati said. “But for Allah’s sake make sure that your transmitter is in the safe mode.” He managed a thin, pale smile in the red light. “After all this work I don’t want to go to Paradise empty-handed, with no infidel souls blown to hell.”

Graham took the transmitter out of his pocket and held it up. “No battery yet,” he said. The transmitter looked like an ordinary cell phone. But he’d not taken the battery out; he would only have to enter 9 # 11 and the Apurto Devlán would light up like the interior of the sun in the blink of an eye.

No one aboard would feel a thing. One minute they would be alive, and in the next there would be nothingness.

For just a moment Graham toyed with the idea of entering the code right now. End it once and for all. Maybe most of the rest of the world was right and he was wrong; maybe there was a god after all. Maybe by pushing the buttons now he could be with Jillian just as the Anglican priest at her funeral had promised.

Ramati read something of this from Graham’s expression. “Captain?” he said.

Graham managed a tight smile, and put the transmitter back in his pocket. There were times like these when he thought he might be insane. But it didn’t matter. He was what he was, a product of the world he lived in. “I want you both on deck in twenty minutes.”

Al-Tashkiri was looking at him with a religious light in his face.

Graham nodded. “Only four hours now,” he said.

The young Egyptian compressed his lips as if he was afraid to speak, but he nodded vigorously.

“See you on the bridge,” Graham told them, and he headed back up on deck.

It wasn’t he who was insane, it was Ramati and al-Tashkiri and the other bastards who were willing to blow themselves up for the cause. Even if there were a god, He, She, or It wouldn’t require suicide bombings to kill someone who didn’t believe in the right things. That was the face of insanity.

Maybe it wasn’t the people who were insane, maybe it was the gods.

Topside in the fresh air, he used his walkie-talkie to call Hijazi in the engine room. “Are you ready to answer ship’s bells?”

“Aywa,” Hijazi came back at once.

“English,” Graham radioed.

“Yes, everything is in order here,” Hijazi said.

Graham could hear the excitement in the man’s voice. He was just like the others; they thought they were going to be in Paradise in a few hours. The younger ones had written suicide notes to their families, which would be posted from Karachi when the operation was completed. The older freedom fighters like Hijazi hadn’t bothered. “It’s enough to know that we hurt the bastards,” he’d told the others during training.

“Then stand by,” Graham said. “We should be getting under way within the hour.”

The channel was silent for a few moments. Graham was about to pocket the walkie-talkie when Hijazi came back, his voice subdued.

“God be with you,” he said.

Religious mumbo jumbo, Graham thought. The engine room would be Hijazi’s final resting place and the man knew it. He was simply trying to say his goodbyes. Graham keyed his walkie-talkie. “Insh’allah,” he said.

Pocketing the walkie-talkie he headed up to the bridge. Mumbo jumbo or not, he needed Hijazi and the others for just a few more hours. And if it took mumbling blessings, then so be it.

FIFTEEN

McGarvey was flown across the lake to the military area of Maracaibo’s La Chinita Airport aboard a Venezuelan Navy Sea King helicopter. He was met on the tarmac by a dark-skinned air force captain who introduced himself as Ernesto Rubio.

“I have a Gulfstream standing by for you, sir,” the captain said. “It’s the vice president’s, so I think you’ll find the accommodations pleasant enough.”

The only activity at this hour was on the civilian side. A 747 was taxiing out for takeoff, the last flight of the evening, the one McGarvey should have been on. Gallegos had escorted him to the helicopter, which had landed in a parking lot near the commercial docks, but he had not come along for the ride. He’d been ordered back to Caracas to brief the chief of Venezuelan intelligence on the situation. It had the potential of becoming a major international embarrassment. Zulia State Security had allowed a Vensport ship to be so easily hijacked that the CIA had to intervene. If the Apurto Devlán actually made it to California and destroyed a refinery, the consequences for Venezuela’s already ailing economy would be nothing short of devastating. McGarvey was to be given all the help he wanted, while Gallegos briefed his boss on worst-case scenarios; one of which was that the ship had not been hijacked. If U.S. forces boarded her and found the legitimate captain and crew going about their lawful business, relations between Caracas and Washington would become worse than they already were.

McGarvey followed the air force officer fifty yards across the tarmac to a sleek bizjet with civilian markings already warming up inside a hangar. Its hatch was open and a young attractive woman in an air force uniform stood at the foot of the boarding stairs.

“We just got clearance to transit Colombian airspace,” Rubio said as they climbed aboard. “We can head straight across to Cartagena and from there, follow the coast southwest. Should be touching down at Panama City in under two hours.”

“I’ll need to use my satellite phone once we’re in the air,” McGarvey said. “Is that going to cause a problem?”

“No, sir,” Rubio told him. He said something in Spanish to the flight attendant, who smiled and nodded. Then he turned back to McGarvey. “Sergeant Contreras speaks excellent English. If you need anything just ask her. We’ll be taking off immediately.”

Rubio went forward to the cockpit while the attendant brought up the stairs, closed and dogged the hatch, and then stowed McGarvey’s overnight bag. They were out of the hangar and taxiing rapidly across to an active runway as McGarvey strapped into one of the very large, leather upholstered swivel chairs on the starboard side. Within less than two minutes they were accelerating down the runway, and then lifting off into the night, on their way to what could very well turn into a bloodbath before morning.

The attendant came back to him from the galley. “Would you care for a drink, sir?” she asked. Her hair was very dark, and her eyes were wide and warm. She seemed to be genuinely interested in serving him.

“A cognac if you have it,” McGarvey said. “Neat.”

“Certainly, sir,” she said.

He pulled out his sat phone and called Rencke, who answered on the first ring.

“Oh wow, Mac, the pilot is already on his way out to the ship,” Otto gushed. “We picked up the Transit Authority’s coms channels. Means they’ll lift anchor within the hour. Probably sooner.”

“How long will it take them to get into the locks?”

“An hour, once they get under way, maybe less, to make it to the first lock, and then an hour and a half or two at the most to make it through all three.”

“If you were going to do it, where would it be?”

“The middle lock,” Otto said without hesitation. “With any luck you’d take out all three, plus the control house, pumps, and electrical switches.”

Sergeant Contreras set his drink on the low table at his elbow then returned to the galley. She was trained to make herself scarce when a VIP guest was on the phone.

“That’s where it’ll happen,” McGarvey said. “What about the Rapid Response Team? Have they been briefed?”

“Yes, and you’re going to run into a buzz saw,” Otto said. “The on-duty squad is a SEAL fire team. Gung ho. The team leader is Lieutenant Ron Herring. I looked up his record; he’s a good man, one of the best. Kosovo, Afghanistan, and northern Iraq. Same team. He wasn’t going to back down even for Berndt, once he was briefed.”

“What does he want to do?”

“Take the ship right now,” Otto said. “In the holding basin, before she raises anchor.”

“They might pull the pin the moment someone sets foot aboard,” McGarvey warned. But even as he said it, he wasn’t sure. Graham’s crewmen were probably Muslim fanatics, al-Quaida-trained mujahideen. They’d sacrifice themselves. But Graham had a long record of terrorist attacks against Western interests. Just like bin Laden, Graham was one of the generals who led other men to die for him. He wasn’t planning on killing himself just to prove a point. He had an escape plan; one that he considered foolproof.

“Herring knows that you’re on the way. He’s going to sit tight for the moment, but he’s waiting for your call. He wants to talk.”

“Good, I want to talk to him,” McGarvey said. “What’s his phone number?”

“Just a sec,” Otto said. “Okay, I just sent it to you. Hit phone book, his number will come up first, then press Send.”

McGarvey smiled and shook his head. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re scary?”

Otto laughed. “Oh, boy. Not lately and not by you. Thanks, Mac.” He took it as a compliment. “Good luck.”

Lieutenant Herring was waiting for the call. He answered on the first ring. “Mr. McGarvey, I presume.” He sounded young, but no-nonsense.

“That’s right. I’m aboard a Venezuelan air force Gulfstream, and we’ll be touching down in Panama City in less than two hours. What’s your present situation?”

“My team is standing by on the ramp,” Herring said.

“What’s your plan?” McGarvey asked tersely.

“Save lives first, and the canal second,” Herring shot back. “If I’m allowed to do my job without civilian interference.”

“Look, Lieutenant, the ship’s real crew has probably been murdered, and the ship rigged to explode—”

“It’s my intention to prevent just that,” Herring said. “Before the ship gets into the canal.”

“You’d better be quick and accurate,” McGarvey said. “The moment they find out your people are aboard they’ll push the button and the Apurto Devlán will light up like a Roman candle. Anything nearby will be destroyed as well.”

“They may blow the bottom out, and the ship might sink, spilling its oil into the bay, but aside from an ecological disaster the damage won’t be as widespread as it would if the same thing happened inside one of the locks. My engineers tell me that the hydraulic shock of a substantial underwater explosion could put the lock doors out of commission.”

“Did your engineers tell you what would happen if the nitrogen gas in the oil tanks was bled off first?” McGarvey asked.

Herring hesitated for just a beat. “Someone at anchor in the holding basin would have heard it. From what I’m told the operation is noisy.”

“Not if it was done slowly, over the past half-dozen hours or so,” McGarvey countered.

“I’ll concede the point, Mr. McGarvey. But it’s all the more reason to hit the ship before she enters the locks.”

“Except for one thing,” McGarvey said. “Everyone aboard is a Muslim fanatic. Willing to die for the cause. Everyone except for the captain, who is ex — British Royal Navy. He won’t push the button unless there is no way out for him.”

“Continue,” Herring said.

“He has an escape plan.”

“How do you know that?”

“Men like him always do,” McGarvey said. He’d been going up against Graham’s type for more than twenty years. The names and some of the methods changed, but the mindset was pretty much the same; they were willing to kill for their twisted reasons, but none of them were quite as willing to die for their cause. “And I know this guy, do you?”

“No,” Herring admitted. “So what do you want to do, McGarvey?”

“He means to get into the second Gatun lock before he pushes the button,” McGarvey said. “I want to let him do exactly that.”

“Whose side are you on?” Herring shouted.

“The explosives will be on a remote detonator, which only Graham will have,” McGarvey explained. “All we have to do is throw a monkey wrench in his plan to get off the ship before he pushes the button. But without him knowing about it.”

“How in hell are you going to do that?” Herring demanded.

“Meet me at the airport and I’ll tell you,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime don’t alert the Panamanian authorities, I don’t want to start a panic.”

SIXTEEN

Graham lowered his binoculars and turned around from where he’d been studying the entry to the Gatun locks as Ramati came aboard the bridge with the Panama Transit Authority pilot. The dark-skinned, substantially built man wore dark slacks and a light blue short-sleeved shirt with his name and position, PILOTO, sewn above the left pocket. He carried a small leather satchel.

“Captain Slavin, our pilot has arrived,” Ramati said.

Graham laid the binoculars aside. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Sanchez,” he said, reading the name tag.

The pilot shook hands with Graham, but he had an odd expression on his face. “I don’t remember you, sir,” he said.

Graham shrugged. “I don’t believe that we’ve met.”

Sanchez shook his head. “No. But I was sure that the name was familiar.”

Graham considered the unexpected problem for just an instant, and then he smiled. “My cousin Dimitri is employed by GAC. You probably worked with him. We could be brothers.”

Sanchez was skeptical, but he shrugged. He walked past Graham, set his satchel down beside the helm station, took out a pair of binoculars, and looked through the windows at the foredeck. “Are your engines ready to answer the bells?”

“Of course,” Graham said. “We’re anxious to get started.”

Sanchez lowered the binoculars and turned around. His gaze lingered for just a moment on al-Tashkiri who would be standing by at the helm, then to Ramati who would relay the pilot’s orders to the deck crew, and finally to Graham. “Why are your line handlers not on deck?” he asked mildly, no hint of rebuke in his tone of voice.

He was just doing his job, but Graham felt sure that the man was suspicious that everything was not as it should be here. “I was waiting for your arrival, Mr. Sanchez,” Graham said evenly. “No need to have my people standing by in this heat and humidity until they’re required.”

“They’re required now, Mr. Slavin, if you please,” Sanchez said. “When they are in position, you may raise anchor and we shall proceed.”

“As you wish,” Graham said. He nodded for Ramati, who keyed his walkie-talkie. Just for an instant Graham had the terrible thought that his number one was going to speak in Arabic, in which case the game would be up, the pilot would have to be killed, and they would probably not make it to the locks.

His own escape was assured. If he had to abandon the plan out here in the bay, he would activate a small homing beacon, don a life jacket, and slip over the side. Within minutes the Nueva Cruz, which had followed them from the rendezvous yesterday, would pick him up. When they were far enough out, he would detonate the explosives and then head northwest to Costa Rica where he would be put ashore near Puerto Limón. From there he would make his way overland to the international airport at San José and then Mexico City.

On the other hand, if they did make it all the way into the second lock, he would simply step over the side in the shadows while the ship was at the height of the lift and the deck was nearly at the same level as the lip of the canal chamber. From there he would make his way out of the damage zone, push the 9 # 11, and in the confusion get back to the head of Limón Bay where a small boat would be standing by to take him out to the Nueva Cruz.

One man, moving alone and fast in the night, always had the advantage over a superior force. Osama had proved that for five years. But the thought of coming so far and failing ground at his nerves.

Ramati keyed the walkie-talkie. “Mr. Sozansky, send out the line handlers, please.”

“Roger,” one of the mujahideen responded in a reasonably good English accent.

All Panamax ships were guided through the locks by electric locomotives called mules, which ran along tracks on both sides of the canal. Leader lines were tossed down to the ship, which would be used by the line handlers to pull heavy cables down on deck that would be attached to cleats starboard and port, bows and stern. The ships would move in and out of the locks under their own power, but would be guided and held in place by the mules.

Graham picked up the ship’s phone and called Hijazi. “Mr. Kiosawa, stand by to raise anchor, please.”

“The pilot is here?” Hijazi asked.

Graham glanced at Sanchez, who had pulled a handheld VHF radio out of his satchel. “Yes. We’ll be getting under way shortly.”

“Insh’allah.”

“Yes, indeed,” Graham said, careful to keep the anger out of his voice. Hijazi was assuming that the pilot could not hear what he was saying. But he’d taken an unnecessary risk for the sake of his religious sensibilities.

Ramati stepped across to the starboard wing so that he could see astern as well as forward. He spoke into his walkie-talkie then came back onto the bridge and crossed to the port wing, where he spoke again into his walkie-talkie, then came back.

“Our line handlers are in position,” he told Graham.

“Very well,” Sanchez said, without waiting for Graham to confirm the report. He keyed his VHF radio. “Gatun Control, this is the Apurto Devlán with pilot ready for upbound transit.”

“Roger, Apurto Devlán, you are cleared for transit.”

Sanchez turned to Graham. “Mr. Slavin, you may raise anchor, and get under way. Course one-seven-four, speed two knots.”

Graham called Hijazi. “Raise the anchor, and prepare to give me two knots.”

“Roger,” Hijazi said, subdued now that they were actually getting under way. In a few hours everyone aboard ship would be incinerated, and it had finally gotten to him.

Graham replaced the phone. Hijazi and the others would finally get the answer they’d spent their lives seeking. They would probably be disappointed.

SEVENTEEN

The lights of Panama City had sparkled from a distance as the Gulfstream carrying Kirk McGarvey flew across the isthmus straight down the cut between the mountain peaks through which the canal had been blasted. When the VIP jet’s hatch was opened and the stairs lowered, a blast of hot, humid air, even worse than at Maracaibo, filled the cabin, bringing with it a combination of smells: burned kerojet, wet jungle, and big city garbage dumps.

Two sturdy-looking men, dressed in Navy SEAL night fighter uniforms, leaned nonchalantly against a camouflaged Humvee on the ramp as McGarvey came to the hatch.

Sergeant Contreras gave him a warm smile. “I hope your flight with us was pleasant, sir, and that good luck rides with you.”

“Thank you,” he told her. “I think I’ll need it.”

The captain opened the door to the flight deck. “I’ve not been authorized to wait for you,” he said.

“It’s not necessary,” McGarvey said. “Thanks for the lift.”

Sergeant Contreras handed him his overnight bag, and he stepped down from the airplane and crossed the tarmac to the waiting SEALs, who straightened up at his approach. They were young, probably in their twenties, McGarvey figured, and they looked impatient. He stuck out his hand.

“Lieutenant Herring, I’m Kirk McGarvey.”

Herring shook hands. He was a little shorter than McGarvey, and his grip was anything but hard, as if he didn’t have to prove anything. But he had the look: He’d been there, done that, and he wore his self-confidence like a politician wears his charisma. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “This is my assistant fire team leader, Ensign Tom Kulbacki.”

McGarvey shook hands with the taller, leaner man, but turned back to Herring. “I assume that you have a chopper standing by.”

“It’s under cover,” Herring said.

The Venezuelan air force jet had turned and was trundling back down the ramp toward the active runway. McGarvey glanced back at it. “You don’t trust them very much, do you?”

“The tanker is one of theirs, for all I know the crew is Venezuelan too.”

“They got me here with no questions asked,” McGarvey said.

“Yeah, just what we need tonight, a civilian,” Kulbacki muttered, but loudly enough for McGarvey to hear.

“I don’t trust anybody, Mr. McGarvey,” Herring said.

“That include CIA?”

Herring nodded tightly. “Anyone who has to use the big dogs to throw his weight around.” He gave McGarvey a very hard look. “Like I told you on the phone, we don’t need civilian interference. Just get the hell out of our way, and let us do the job we’ve been trained for.”

“Lieutenant, I assume that the Apurto Devlán is already under way.”

“She pulled up anchor ninety minutes ago,” Herring shot back. He glanced at Kulbacki. “We could have resolved the situation by now.”

“In that case we’re running out of time,” McGarvey said. “As much as I’d like to continue our pleasant little chat, I suggest that we get started. I’ll brief you on the way down.”

Herring was clearly frustrated, but he nodded. “Get in,” he said. He turned, climbed behind the wheel of the Humvee, and immediately took off, not bothering to see if McGarvey or Kulbacki had gotten aboard.

He drove with a vengeance a hundred yards along a line of hangars, making a sharp right behind what might have been some sort of an administration headquarters, closed at this hour of the night. An H-60 Seahawk, no lights other than a dim red glow from the cockpit, was parked beneath camouflage netting, in the shadows behind the building.

Several men in black were lounging beside the chopper. Even before Herring pulled up, they scrambled inside the machine, and the rotors began to turn.

McGarvey was dressed in jeans, a dark, short-sleeved polo shirt, and boat shoes. He grabbed his bag and followed Herring and Kulbacki across to the chopper, where they climbed aboard. Herring went forward to talk to the pilot while the assistant fire team leader helped McGarvey strap in. The other six operators, all dressed in black, and equipped with night vision goggles and a variety of weapons ranging from Beretta auto-loading pistols with silencers in chest holsters, Ithaca Model 37 short-barreled semiautomatic shotguns, and Heckler & Koch M8 carbines, were strapped in and ready to go.

“We’ve got a set of camos for you, and a Colt Commando if you need them!” Kulbacki shouted over the rising noise.

“No thanks,” McGarvey said. He took his 9mm Walther PPK out of his bag, checked the load, and stuffed the weapon in his belt. Next he took out a spare magazine of ammunition and put it in his trousers pocket. No one cracked a smile, but they all watched him. “What’s our flying time to the locks?”

“Fifteen minutes!” Kulbacki shouted.

Herring came back and strapped in beside McGarvey as the helicopter accelerated from beneath the netting. As soon as her tail rotor was clear, she lumbered into the air, swinging toward the north, but keeping low.

“The Apurto Devlán has already made it to the first lock!” he shouted to McGarvey. “So now you have my undivided attention. What do you want to do?”

“Are we carrying a gun crew?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes. The chopper’s equipped with a pair of 7.62 machine guns.”

“It’s my guess that Graham killed the original crew and replaced them somewhere between here and Maracaibo.”

“Your guess,” Herring said pointedly.

“That’s right,” McGarvey shot back. “But I’m not guessing when I tell you that Graham will not become a suicide bomber unless he’s given no other options. He’ll get off the ship, and once he’s clear he’ll detonate the explosives. The ship, the locks, and everyone close will be destroyed.”

“They’re all nuts.”

“From our point of view, you’re probably right,” McGarvey said. “But get one thing straight: They might be nuts, but they’re not stupid. Graham was a trained Royal Navy officer, he’s operated as a pirate in the South China Sea, and since 9/11 has been working for bin Laden. Interpol and every intelligence service in the world have been looking for him for more than five years. From what I’ve learned this is the nearest anyone’s gotten.”

“Well, he made a big mistake this time,” Herring said. “We’re going to take him down.” He glanced at his operators. “My people will not let him get away. No chance in hell. Guaranteed.”

McGarvey was beginning to lose his patience. “Graham won’t be impressed by a stealth operation.”

“I think he will be,” Herring said. He grinned. “We’ll disarm the explosives before he gets a chance to pull the trigger.”

“As long as we can keep him aboard in the meantime,” McGarvey said. “If he gets clear he’ll push the button.”

Kulbacki was following the conversation. He leaned closer to McGarvey. “Won’t matter, sir. We can block his radio signal. Most of them use a simple garage door opener code. We’ve got a high-power transmitter that blankets their signals.”

“We learned that the hard way in Iraq,” Herring said.

“I hope you’re right,” McGarvey said. “But if at all possible I want to take the man alive.”

“We’re going to be pretty busy,” Herring said. “I can’t guarantee that we’ll have the time to take prisoners.”

“I only care about Graham. Once we show up he’s going to jump ship. I want to take him before then.”

“I’m listening,” Herring said.

“We go in fast and noisy,” McGarvey said. “But there’ll be a civilian pilot on the bridge. So everyone has to be careful. I don’t want any civilian casualties. And the same goes for workmen ashore. No collateral damage.”

“We’ll do our best—”

“You’ll do better than that, Lieutenant,” McGarvey said. Before Herring could object, McGarvey cut him off. “I don’t want to come on strong. We’re on the same side; fighting the bad guys for the same reasons. But I’m here and I’m not going away. And that’s a fact.”

Herring held himself in check with a visible effort. “Go ahead, sir, I’m listening.”

“Assuming you can either find and disarm every explosive package they’ve set in place, and/or block the remote detonator signal, there are still two worst-case scenarios concerning Graham. One, he gets away. If that happens he’ll be even more strongly motivated to hit us, maybe with another 9/11. Maybe something worse.”

“What’s the second?” Kulbacki asked.

“That somebody kills him.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“If we can take him alive, I think he might be the key to finding bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “And that’s one man I’d very much like to get close to again.”

Herring exchanged a glance with Kulbacki. “Okay, Mr. McGarvey, you have my attention now. How do you propose we handle this?”

“Graham’s not going to be impressed by anything we do, but his crew will react to a shock-and-awe strike, which is exactly what I want your people to give him.”

“And what happens if you’re wrong?” Herring asked. “What happens if Graham isn’t aboard, and we start shooting at innocent Venezuelans?”

“I’m not wrong,” McGarvey said. “The real captain’s body was stuffed in an aluminum trunk and left in a hotel storage room.”

“I see.”

“I want the chopper gun crew to stand by to make sure Graham doesn’t jump ship.”

EIGHTEEN

The Apurto Devlán eased slowly into the middle lock leading to Lake Gatun fifteen minutes before one in the morning, slightly ahead of schedule. A second Panamax vessel, this one a cruise ship, was in the lock ahead of them and more than twenty-five feet higher and rising.

She was a Carnival ship, out of Miami, which gave Graham a particular pleasure. When he pressed the detonator code, not only would the Apurto Devlán go up in a ball of flame, completely destroying the Gatun locks, but the cruise ship would also be wiped out, killing Americans. Probably even more than died in the World Trade Center attacks.

“Engines Back All Slow,” Sanchez told al-Tashkiri.

“Back All Slow.” Al-Tashkiri acknowledged the order, just as he had been taught to do.

Ramati was starting to become agitated. Graham glanced over and slowly shook his head. His first officer acknowledged the warning with a nod. The ship would never leave this lock, and everyone aboard except for the Panamanian pilot knew it.

The ship’s engines responded to the order, and her forward momentum bled off as her bows approached the forward gate, and the stern mules took up the slack, keeping her centered.

“Stop All Engines,” Sanchez ordered softly.

“All Engines Stop,” al-Tahskiri responded. He was sweating, his face dripping, his khaki shirt soaked at the armpits and across the back.

The pilot looked at him, then went to the port wing to check their clearance aft.

“Get a hold of yourself,” Graham whispered urgently to al-Tashkiri.

When the pilot came back, he keyed his walkie-talkie. “Gatun Control, Apurto Devlán ready for number-two closure.” He held the walkie-talkie to his ear momentarily to hear the response then keyed the Talk button. “Roger,” he said. He looked pointedly at al-Tashkiri, and then Ramati. It was obvious he sensed that something was wrong.

From the moment they’d raised anchor and slowly made their way north up the seven-mile channel past docks, shipyards, and fueling stations, the pilot had been edgy. He’d not engaged in any conversation, other than to issue orders, and from time to time he gave them odd, searching looks.

“Are we in position, Mr. Sanchez?” Graham asked to distract the man. They only needed a few more minutes in case Gatun Control had something else to speak to Sanchez about.

“Yes,” the pilot said. “Mr. Sozansky, are you feeling well?”

It took a moment for al-Tashkiri to realize that the pilot was addressing him. He turned and nodded. “Yes, sir. Just fine.”

“Is this your first transit?”

Graham reached for his pistol.

“No, sir,” al-Tashkiri said. “I’ve been here before.”

Graham motioned for Ramati to move out of the line of fire.

The pilot pointed to the sweat stains on al-Tashkiri’s shirt. “You seem a little nervous to me.”

Graham’s hand tightened on the pistol in his pocket.

Al-Tashkiri choked out a strangled laugh. “Yes, sir. I’m always nervous. I’ve been this way since I was a little boy in … Poland.”

Sanchez shot a look at Graham as if to say it was the captain’s fault if a crewman was so nervous he was drenched in sweat at the helm. But then the massive steel gates began to close astern, and the pilot went again to the port wing to check clearances.

Graham snatched the ship’s phone from its cradle and called the engine room. “We’re done with the engines. It will happen very soon.”

“Insh’allah,” Hijazi said softly, and with great respect.

“Yes, God willing,” Graham told him. He hung up just as Sanchez came back.

The pilot laid his walkie-talkie on the shelf beneath the center windshield, took a thermos of coffee from his pack beside the helmsman, and poured a cup. He did not offer some to Graham or the others.

As soon as the gates behind them were closed, sealing off this lock, massive valves would be opened and water from Gatun Lake would rush into the chamber, rising the ship to the center level, more than fifty feet above the Caribbean, in about fifteen minutes.

At that point the lead gates would open, the cruise ship, which would be twenty-five feet higher, would be disconnected from the mules and would sail out into Gatun Lake, leaving the chamber to be filled for the Apurto Devlán. Before that happened Graham wanted to be off the ship and well enough away to trigger the explosives.

The timing was tight, but manageable. He would make it so. He smiled.

“Mr. Slavin, I’ve been thinking,” the pilot said.

Not for long, Graham thought. “Yes, Mr. Sanchez.”

“I don’t remember your cousin. But I’m sure that I remember the name: Grigoriy Slavin.”

“I’m flattered,” Graham said. “There must be thousands of vessels through here each year.”

“More than fourteen thousand,” Sanchez said. He was looking at Graham over the rim of his coffee mug. “A figure that as a Panamax master you should know.”

Graham glanced behind him through the port windows. They were slowly rising. The valves had been opened. He smiled. “I’ve never been one for someone else’s exact numbers,” he said.

The pilot shook his head. “You’re not Grigoriy Slavin,” he said. “You’re an imposter.”

“Yes, I am,” Graham said. He took out his pistol, and before Sanchez could move or even speak, shot the man in the middle of the forehead, blood splashing across the port radar set.

The pilot’s head was flung backwards. He dropped his cup, which shattered on the steel deck, and his body bounced against the forward bulkhead as he fell on his side, dead.

Al-Tashkiri closed his eyes and began to rapidly mutter something. Graham figured he was praying, preparing his soul for Paradise.

Ramati, on the other hand, was highly animated, flinging his arms outstretched as if he simply could not contain himself. Graham had to briefly wonder if it had been like this for the crazy bastards in the last minutes of the flights that hit the World Trade Center.

Graham switched aim and fired at Ramati, the shot catching his number two in the middle of the chest.

Ramati staggered backwards, but he was still alive. He desperately clawed for his pistol in his pocket, when Graham fired again, hitting him in the right eye, the back of his skull disintegrating.

Graham turned and fired almost at point-blank range into the side of al-Tashkiri’s head as the kid opened his eyes and started to step away.

For several long seconds Graham listened to the sudden silence, as the Apurto Devlán continued to rise. But then he got his cell phone and hit a speed-dial button. When the call went through to the operative standing by on the Nueva Cruz, it was answered on the first ring.

“Sí.”

“¡Ahora!” Graham said. Now! “¡Ahora!”

“Sí,” the man responded, and the connection was broken. Within minutes a small speedboat would be launched from the mother ship and come ashore.

Graham pocketed his cell phone and pistol, and went to the port wing as the ship continued to rise to the level of the mule tracks. The only people around were the canal operators in the control room, the mule drivers, and the canal workers who handled the lines.

No one would notice a lone man stepping ashore and disappearing into the darkness. And even if they did, by the time they reacted the ship would be gone in a brilliant flash of searing heat, and they would be dead.

NINETEEN

McGarvey and Herring had donned headsets so they could communicate with the flight crew. They’d flown low and fast straight south along the route of the canal, coming across Gatun Lake no more than twenty-five feet above the water, in excess of 140 knots. They were at hover two hundred meters out from the locks.

The side hatch was wide open, and Herring’s operators were ready to deploy. Two chopper crewmen manned the 7.62mm machine guns. There was no way Graham or anyone else was getting off the ship alive.

A cruise ship, all her lights ablaze, was in the forward lock, the Apurto Devlán right behind her in the middle lock.

“Do you see any activity on deck?” McGarvey radioed the pilot. The flight crew was wearing night-vision equipment.

“Two bad guys on deck, at the bow,” the pilot radioed back. “Look like line handlers.”

“What are they doing?”

“One of them is on his knees,” the pilot came back. He hesitated. “Almost looks as if he’s praying.”

“He is,” McGarvey told Herring. “It means they’re ready to pull the trigger. We have to take them down now.”

Herring motioned for his operators to lock and load. He radioed the pilot. “Take out the two bad guys on the bow as we pass over them. Set us down in front of the superstructure. Soon as we’re feet dry, I want you to dust off and stand by off the starboard midships. Anybody tries to jump ship, take them down. But watch out for the canal workmen ashore.”

“Wilco,” the pilot responded crisply.

Kulbacki had produced a ship’s diagram of the Apurto Devlán, and on the short flight down from Panama City he’d gone over the deployment orders with the team. The drill was a standard one that they’d practiced countless times on ship mock-ups in San Diego.

It was assumed that the Panamanian pilot would be topside on the bridge, so everyone on deck would be considered hostile and would be taken down.

A three-man team would head to the engine room, taking out anyone they encountered; their objective was to secure the engineering spaces from any kind of sabotage, including disabling the engines and/or the steering controls, before they swept the rest of the ship for terrorists.

Kulbacki would lead his team of three operators on a lightning-fast sweep, first to the twelve oil tanks to find and disable any explosive devices, and then into the bilges to look for kickers that might have been placed to take out the ship’s bottom and sink her in the middle of the lock. Their orders were to take down any and all hostiles they might encounter.

Herring would accompany McGarvey up to the bridge, taking down any bad guys they ran into, securing the Panamanian pilot, and subduing Graham without killing him, if at all possible.

“The knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, or wrists,” McGarvey said. “Anywhere but the head or torso.”

“That’ll be tough if he’s shooting at us,” Herring said. “You sure you don’t want to wear a vest? We brought one for you.”

McGarvey shook his head. “When he shoots it’ll be a headshot.”

The big helicopter suddenly banked hard to the left, the open hatch on the low side, and roared along the length of the cruise ship, the tips of its rotors clearing the ship’s gigs by less than ten meters.

Kulbacki and another man positioned in the hatch would be the first to hit the deck.

There were passengers on the promenade deck of the cruise ship. Some of them waved as the helicopter passed.

“Take out the two on the bow,” Herring radioed to the gun crew.

“Wilco,” someone responded.

A second later the pilot swung the tail around so that the nose gun was pointing at the men on the Apurto Devlán’s bow, and started to sideslip along the length of the open deck. Both machine guns opened fire at the same moment, and stopped almost immediately.

“Scratch two,” one of the gunners radioed.

The operator crouching next to Kulbacki in the open door suddenly lurched backwards.

“Incoming fire,” Kulbacki shouted, and he sprayed a deck hatch that was open amidships.

The helicopter set down hard just forward of the superstructure and immediately came under intense small-arms fire from somewhere aft. Small-caliber bullets pinged into the fuselage, and ricocheted off the ship’s deck.

Herring and another of the operators shoved McGarvey aside and hauled the downed man to his feet, as Kulbacki and the other SEALs exploded from the open hatch and laid down a heavy line of fire toward the port and starboard passageways.

The operator who’d taken a round in his chest armor would have a hell of a bruise by morning, but otherwise he was still good to go.

“Clear!” Kulbacki shouted.

McGarvey was next out of the chopper, rolling to the right so that he would be out of the way and in the shadows of the towering seven-story superstructure. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that the mule driver on the starboard bow had jumped out of his locomotive and was heading across the access road in a dead run.

Herring and the last operator jumped down on deck, and as soon as they were clear, the helicopter lifted off with a tremendous roar, banked almost over on its side, its rotors barely clearing the deck, and accelerated over the mule, while turning its nose gun back toward the ship.

Camera flashes were coming in a nearly continuous stream from the stern of the cruise ship twenty-five feet above them.

“Marchetti, go.” Herring pumped his left fist, and the three operators who would take care of the engineering spaces headed aft. They would leapfrog along the portside passageway, and thence into the ship and down the ladder, clearing the way ahead with flash-bang grenades, and then shooting anything that moved.

Kulbacki and his three men had already started forward to the product tank access hatches, to find and disarm the explosive charges. Each of them would take one tank, and with any luck they would run into light or no resistance and the job could be done in a few minutes.

If they did have to fire they would need even more luck that they wouldn’t inadvertently touch off an explosion in one of the tanks, which would set the others off like a string of firecrackers.

But, as Kulbacki had explained with a sardonic grin on the way down here, “That’s the chance we signed on for when we put on the uniform, sir.”

At that moment a light breeze sprang up, blowing the sounds of the chopper’s exhaust and rotor noise away, and the Apurto Devlán became as quiet as a ghost ship. The hairs at the nape of McGarvey’s neck stood on end.

It wasn’t this simple. They were forgetting something. He was forgetting something. Something in Graham’s file that the Brits had not yet sent to Otto. Something they were hiding?

“The next part is your show, Mr. McGarvey!” Herring shouted.

“Right,” McGarvey said. “The bridge.” He sprinted to the portside passageway, then aft to the first doorway. The hatch was open.

Two men dressed in dark blue coveralls, APURTO DEVLÁN stenciled on the backs, were down with headshots, blood spreading on the steel deck. Marchetti and the other SEALs heading down to the engine room had taken them down.

McGarvey hesitated only a moment to make sure they were dead. He didn’t want some fanatic filled with religious zeal coming up from behind. A tight-lipped Herring nodded his approval.

A stairway led six decks up to the bridge. McGarvey stopped at the first turn and motioned for Herring to hold up. He cocked an ear to listen for sounds from above. For a moment the ship was silent, but then he thought he heard someone talking.

Herring heard it too.

“Radio,” McGarvey mouthed the word. Probably from the bridge, which meant the door up there was open.

Herring nodded again, and McGarvey continued up, pausing for a moment at each turn, until they reached the third deck where someone from above opened fire, bullets ricocheting off the bulkheads, shrapnel flying everywhere.

McGarvey fell back and fired three shots up the stairs, aiming for the door frame to carom his shots off the steel plating into the corridor.

Someone cried out, and fired another burst from what sounded like an M8.

“Stay here,” McGarvey whispered to Herring. “I’m going to take the passageway one deck down across to the starboard side and see if I can get behind whoever’s shooting at us.”

“We don’t have much time,” Herring whispered.

“Keep them busy,” McGarvey said, and he turned and hurried down to the next deck, while above, Herring opened fire again.

TWENTY

The gunfire was coming from two decks below.

The big helicopter had come as a total surprise. But from the moment it had appeared from the north, Graham had known it was just a matter of minutes before he’d be cornered up here with nowhere to run. There was no time to be angry, or to try to reason how the authorities had uncovered the plan. There was only time to act.

He’d seriously considered punching the 9 # 11 detonator code on his cell phone, and ending everything in one brilliant flash of light. There would be absolutely no pain, and the deep ache inside his soul for Jillian would finally come to an end.

But there was more to be done. More blood to be shed, not for the cause the nutcases who surrounded bin Laden believed in, but for the pure sweet joy of the battle. Revenge by any other name became tactics. Outwit your enemy, kill him on the battlefield, and live to fight another day.

The helicopter had American navy markings. It hovered on station just across the road, waiting for someone to try to get off the ship.

The troops that had deployed were dressed all in black and apparently knew what they were doing. By now they would be finding and disabling the explosives, though there was still time to enter the code. If only one of the tanks went up, the rest would explode too.

But how had the Americans found out so soon? No one at the Syrian training camp knew the target, nor had any of his crew been told until they were already en route. Which left only a handful of bin Laden’s inner circle who knew all the details.

The first glimmerings of rage began to fill him with the determination to get out of here alive, so that he could make it back to Karachi and take his revenge on whoever had sold them out.

He wouldn’t be able to shoot his way out, and even if he was successful, and managed to slip over the side, the helicopter was standing by, probably with orders to kill anything that moved.

Nor could he hide aboard for very long. If this were his operation he’d order a thorough search of the ship for just that possibility.

The VHF radio was alive with chatter, most of it in Spanish, from Gatun Control, demanding to know what was going on. Graham caught the pilot’s name, and the solution came to him all at once. The Americans were going to give him a ride to the hospital, and from there, freedom.

Hurrying now lest he get caught, Graham put down his weapon and cell phone, and stripped the shirt and trousers from the pilot’s body.

There was a sudden burst of pistol fire one deck down, and someone cried out in Arabic.

Graham pulled off his shirt and trousers, and hurriedly put them on the dead pilot’s body, getting blood all over himself in the process.

“Now,” someone called softly. In English.

Graham donned the pilot’s trousers, which were slightly too small for him, and the light blue shirt, the front of which was covered in blood.

Someone was coming up the stairs, he could hear their footfalls.

Moving swiftly but silently, he laid his cell phone next to the pilot, then placed his pistol in the dead man’s hand.

Whoever was coming was just outside the door now.

Graham smeared blood all over his neck and face and in his mouth, then staggered back across the bridge where he fell to one knee next to the helm station and al-Tashkiri’s body. He was unarmed, and he no longer had the means to trigger the explosives. But as his operators would say, Insh’allah. If God wills it.

A tall, stocky man dressed in civilian clothes appeared in the doorway. He was armed with a pistol, which he swung left to right, centering on Graham.

“No, por favor, señor,” Graham shouted, holding up a hand as if in supplication.

The civilian moved aside, his pistol never wavering, to allow a much younger man dressed all in black, a black bandana on his head, a Heckler & Koch M8 in his hands, and a pistol strapped to his chest, to enter the bridge.

Graham didn’t know about the civilian, but the other man was definitely a U.S. Navy SEAL, almost certainly part of the Americans’ Rapid Response presence here in the Canal Zone. They were almost as good as the British Special Air Service paratroopers; highly trained to take down any force they encountered with a very high degree of accuracy and lightning speed.

“Por favor, senõr. ¡Ayúdame!”

“Do you speak English?” Herring asked.

“Sí,” Graham said. “I mean, yes.”

McGarvey had moved over to the dead pilot, and keeping one eye on Graham, kicked the pistol away, then bent down to check for a pulse in the man’s neck. He glanced at Herring and shook his head.

“What happened here?” Herring asked.

“The crazy bastardos killed each other!” Graham shouted desperately. “They tried to kill me, but this one interfered. They have bombs.”

Herring said something into the small mike at his lapel.

McGarvey checked for a pulse in Ramati’s body and then came to where Graham was kneeling and checked for al-Tashkiri’s pulse.

“What’s your name?” he asked Graham.

“Sanchez. I am the piloto, the pilot.” He looked up into McGarvey’s gray-green eyes and he could see wariness and skepticism. But the SEAL had lowered his weapon.

“The ship is secure,” Herring told McGarvey. “I’ve called the chopper back, they’ll take Mr. Sanchez to the hospital.”

“Por favor, we have to leave now,” Graham pleaded. “The dynamite will kill us all.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Herring said. “They didn’t use dynamite, and my people have disarmed the charges.”

“Can you walk?” McGarvey asked.

“I think so,” Graham said weakly. He held up a hand, but McGarvey stepped back, his pistol still pointed more or less in Graham’s direction.

Herring slung his carbine, came over, and helped Graham to his feet. “Where are you shot?”

“I don’t know. They hit me on the head, and then there was a lot of shooting.”

Herring keyed his radio. “This is Baker leader, we’re coming out.”

“Have your people found any of the real crew?” McGarvey asked.

“Fifteen of them so far,” Herring said, grim-lipped. “All shot to death.”

“We’ll need a new crew then,” McGarvey said. He went back to the body, dressed in the captain’s clothing. Something was wrong.

“Not until we make damned sure that none of the bastards is holed up somewhere,” Herring said.

McGarvey picked up the cell phone and removed its battery. “I’m taking this with me. It’s probably the detonator, and there might be some numbers in its memory.”

The helicopter came into view in the bridge’s windows with a tremendous roar and settled on the deck just forward of the superstructure.

“Whatever you want,” Herring said. “I’m going to take the pilot down to the chopper. Are you staying here?”

“I’ll be right behind you,” McGarvey said.

It was obvious to Graham that something was bothering the civilian; the man knew that everything wasn’t as it seemed to be.

McGarvey used the cell phone’s battery cover to scoop up some of the dead man’s blood, and then replaced the cover on back of the phone.

Herring stopped and looked at him.

McGarvey glanced up. “I want his DNA.”

“Good idea,” Herring said. He held on to Graham. “We’ll take it nice and easy,” he said.

Graham thought that the young man’s death would be eminently satisfying. But the civilian’s death would be more important.

TWENTY-ONE

McGarvey pocketed the cell phone and battery, and holstered his pistol as he followed Herring and the Panamanian pilot from the bridge. He stopped for a moment one deck down and looked back the way he’d come, his gray-green eyes narrowed in thought.

Maybe he was getting old, but he knew damn well that something hadn’t been right up there. Some little thing had been out of place. But for the life of him he couldn’t put his finger on what was bothering him.

Besides the two terrorists he’d taken down on deck four, and the two just inside the companionway on deck one, there would be bodies scattered throughout the ship. The ones he’d seen so far were dressed either in deck crew coveralls, or in civilian clothes that most merchant marine officers wore.

Nothing unusual. The terrorists had either come aboard dressed as crew or officers, or, after they’d killed the real crew and officers, had switched clothes.

Herring pulled up short at the hatch to the open deck, and keyed his lapel mike. “Baker leader at the hatch.” He waited a moment, then helped the wounded pilot out of the superstructure.

McGarvey stopped again for a moment to listen to the sounds of the ship, although it was difficult to hear much of anything over the roar of the helicopter’s engines and rotors. But he could feel in the soles of his shoes that the Apurto Devlán’s engines were not running. There was no vibration in the deck plating that was always present when a large vessel’s power plant was up and running.

The terrorists had meant for the ship never to leave this lock. The explosion of the twelve oil tanks would have taken out not only all the locks, but probably would have destroyed the cruise ship in the front lock, with a major loss of life.

It would have been another 9/11; a spectacular blow not only against the United States, but this time against the entire world.

Again he looked up the stairs he’d just come down. Graham’s plan was to destroy this ship and the Gatun locks. But he’d not been the kind of man to commit suicide for the cause. According to Otto’s research, the ex — British Royal Navy officer had had plenty of opportunities to do so over the past years. This time was to have unfolded in the same way for Graham as had so many of his other operations; he would walk away moments before the killing and destruction so that he could live to fight another day.

What had happened in the last moments up on the bridge? Why had the terrorists apparently gone berserk and shot one another to death?

He could think of any number of possible reasons — maybe Graham had a last-minute change of heart, maybe one of his people somehow found out that Graham had no intention of staying aboard — but none of them struck the right note for McGarvey. His intuition was telling him that there was another explanation.

He stepped outside. The main deck was awash in lights from the ship as well as from stanchions along either side of the lock.

Marchetti and the other SEALs who’d helped secure the engineering spaces and sweep the ship were on deck, but Kulbacki and his team that had disarmed the explosives had apparently shifted their search to the bilges.

Herring was leading the wounded pilot across to the helicopter, which had touched down one-third of the way forward from the superstructure.

McGarvey’s eyes were momentarily drawn to the stern of the cruise ship looming twenty-five feet above the bow of the Apurto Devlán. It was moving away. Camera flashes were still coming almost continuously. None of the passengers, however, could realize how close they had come to being incinerated.

Herring had reached the helicopter. A crewman jumped down from the open hatch and helped the canal pilot up into the machine. They didn’t have a medic aboard, though all the Rapid Response Team operators, including the helicopter crew, were trained in battlefield first aid. But it would be only a matter of a few minutes before the pilot reached the hospital in nearby Colón.

The man had been understandably confused on the bridge. He’d nearly lost his life, he knew that much, but it might be until tomorrow before he came out of shock and could talk about what happened.

The pilot had walked awkwardly. Probably because he was hurting.

Climbing up into the helicopter he’d moved stiffly, almost as if his trousers were too tight, restricting his movements.

McGarvey stared at him.

The ship’s engines had been shut down. Graham had been finished with them because the Apurto Devlán wasn’t supposed to move out of the center lock. Then why hadn’t he killed the pilot, whose services were no longer needed?

Herring said something to the crewman, then stepped back. A moment later the helicopter roared into the sky, banked to the right, and took off toward the northwest to Colón.

The answer was up on the bridge. Rupert Graham’s body.

McGarvey ducked back through the hatch and sprinted up the stairs, careful to avoid the pools of blood where the terrorists had gone down. The SEALs were mopping up the last of the terrorists as well as searching for and disarming any other explosives. The ship was all but secure. Nevertheless McGarvey had his pistol out, the safety catch off. He did not want to be caught flat-footed by one of the bad guys who might have been hiding.

On the top deck he held up at the door to the bridge and listened for several seconds. Now that the helicopter was gone, the ship was ultra-quiet.

He looked over his shoulder, the way he had come up, then slipped through the door, sweeping his pistol left to right.

Nothing had changed. The three bodies lay where they had fallen.

Once again he was struck by an odd feeling between his shoulder blades, as if someone were aiming a laser sight on his back.

Rupert Graham’s trousers were too long.

McGarvey holstered his pistol and carefully eased the body over on its back. The man’s eyes were dark, as was his hair and his complexion.

But Graham was an Englishman. Not dark.

There was a look of surprise and perhaps fear on his features. He hadn’t been expecting this to happen to him.

When the U.S. Navy helicopter had suddenly roared over the Apurto Devlán’s bows it must have been a shock. But Graham was a professional killer. He’d known the risks. He would have known how to instantly improvise when something went wrong in mid-mission.

It suddenly came together.

The man lying on the deck was the canal pilot, and Rupert Graham was making his escape off the ship courtesy of the SEAL team that had come to arrest or kill him.

McGarvey pulled out his pistol and went to the door, where he held up for a brief moment, then raced to the end of the corridor and took the stairs two at a time down to the main deck, where he held up again at the hatch.

“McGarvey at the main hatch!” he shouted.

“Come,” one of Herring’s men replied from a few feet around the corner.

McGarvey stepped outside.

The SEAL had his M8 at the ready, the butt just above his right shoulder, his shooting finger along the trigger guard. He hesitated for just a split second to make certain that he’d correctly ID’d McGarvey, then lowered the carbine. “We wondered where you went, sir.”

“Where’s Herring? We need to warn the chopper crew.”

“The boss is on his way to the engine room,” the SEAL said. “Warn the crew about what?”

“That wasn’t the canal pilot. It was the terrorist leader.”

“Are you sure, sir?” the SEAL asked.

“Just do it,” McGarvey told the young man, but it was probably too late already.

As the SEAL spoke into his lapel mike, McGarvey turned and looked in the direction the helicopter had gone. They hadn’t even thought to search the imposter.

This attack had been stopped. But there would be others if Graham and bin Laden were allowed to live.

This time, McGarvey vowed, he would finish the job.

TWENTY-TWO

Riding over to the White House from Langley in his limousine, Dick Adkins decided that he didn’t like being the director of Central Intelligence. In fact, he’d never liked the Washington power-broker game in which each White House administration wanted only the intel to support its agendas, and nothing else.

But ever since the creation of the director of National Intelligence, who was supposed to oversee all intelligence activities, the game had shifted into high gear. It was what the Company’s general counsel Carleton Patterson called the “9/11 syndrome.” No one wanted to be wrong, which meant that facts were bent and sometimes altered to fit the prevailing opinion.

Nuclear weapons in Iraq had been one of the prime examples. Another had come last year when McGarvey had been forced to resign from the CIA when he and the president had a falling out. McGarvey had wanted to go after a wealthy Saudi playboy who he thought was a top bin Laden killer. The administration wanted to protect its oil relationship with the Saudis, so the president would not believe McGarvey.

As it turned out, Mac and the president had both been right, after a fashion, but by then Mac was no longer welcome at Langley, or anywhere else in or around Washington. Going against a sitting president was not the thing to do and still expect to be welcome at the table.

And now this morning Adkins was bringing the president news that once again McGarvey had saved their asses. Coming down Constitution Avenue to 17th Street and the Ellipse, minutes away from the White House, he girded himself for what he expected would be a confrontational briefing.

Telling the truth, no matter how unpopular it was in Washington, was an ethic that Mac had instilled at the CIA.

For better or worse, tell it like it is. But whatever you do, don’t blow smoke up my ass. Don’t lie to me.

Those were McGarvey’s words, practically etched in marble over at the Building in Langley. And, for better or worse, Adkins had decided that he would tell the president the truth; the whole, unvarnished truth.

His limo was passed through the West Gate, and after he signed in and his attaché case was scanned, the president’s chief of staff Calvin Beckett was there to bring him over to the Oval Office. The former CEO of IBM seemed tense.

“He’s going to ask why you didn’t hand this to Hamel — whatever it is — instead of bringing it directly here.”

“It’s a little delicate,” Adkins said. “I didn’t want anything lost in the translation.”

Beckett smiled nervously. “You want to take the heat yourself,” he said. “Admirable, but your timing stinks. The man’s in a bad mood. He just got off the phone with Crown Prince Abdullah. The Saudis are cutting production by three percent. Oil prices are sagging, and OPEC is raising hell.”

“Four bucks a gallon for regular in L.A., and prices are sagging?”

“The United States should get in line with the rest of the world, where gas prices have always been four or five dollars a gallon,” Beckett said. “You know how it is. We’re one year out from Senate elections, and this time it’s going to be tough to hold the majority.”

“Yeah,” Adkins replied, he did know how the game was played. The Democrats were going to love this latest move by the Saudis. “He’s going to like what I’m going to tell him even less.”

“I was afraid of that.”

President Lawrence Haynes, his jacket off, his tie loose, and his shirtsleeves rolled up, stood looking out the thick Lexan windows at the Rose Garden in full bloom when Beckett rapped on the door frame. He was alone in the Oval Office, and it seemed to Adkins that he was a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and even though he could have been a lineman for the Green Bay Packers, the burden seemed too heavy.

“Mr. President, Dick is here.”

Haynes turned, and smiled the famous Haynes smile that had won him every office he’d ever campaigned for. “Good morning, Dick. I’m a little surprised to see you here this morning.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I felt that the issue was too important and the timing too tight to pass it through Don Hamel’s shop,” Adkins said. “And too delicate.”

“I see,” Haynes said. He motioned for Beckett to close the door, then called his secretary to ask Dennis Berndt, his national security adviser, to join them. “Coffee?” he asked Adkins.

“No, sir. My initial brief won’t take long, but I’ve brought over the book, which gives more details. It’s al-Quaida again.”

The president’s expression immediately darkened. “Christ,” he said softly. “Is there anything new in the search for bin Laden?”

“Nothing yet, sir,” Adkins said. “But we’ve committed considerable resources to the job.” He laid his attaché case on the coffee table, took the leatherette-bound briefing book out, and handed it across the desk to Haynes.

“What is it this time?” Beckett asked.

“They’re calling it Allah’s Scorpion—” Adkins said as Dennis Berndt walked in.

“Who are the they?” Berndt asked. He was a rumpled, tweedy man with a kind face. For the last year he had been trying to get back to academia to teach history, but the president wouldn’t let him go.

“Al-Quaida,” Adkins said. He handed a second briefing book to the national security adviser.

Like the president, Berndt’s mood instantly darkened. “Has Don Hamel seen this yet?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“He was just getting to that,” Beckett said.

None of them had taken a seat, nor did the president motion for them to do so. “You have my attention,” Haynes said. “Give me the highlights.”

“Al-Quaida has planned another big attack. This time by sea again, what they called Allah’s Scorpion.”

“Called?” Berndt asked. “As in past tense?”

Adkins nodded. “For the moment. But we’re confident it’s not over. They’ll try again, in part because the kingpin of the attack we stopped managed to get away.”

The morning was nice: clear blue sky, very little haze, but the sunlight didn’t seem able to penetrate into the Oval Office.

“Continue,” Haynes prompted.

“We started getting indications several months ago on a number of al-Quaida Web sites that something big might be in the works. Homeland Security took us to orange in mid-April, as you remember. But after ten days when nothing happened, we dropped back to normal.”

“The American public is sick of holding its breath,” Beckett said.

“Yeah, but then in the past couple of weeks the chatter started again, and earlier this week there was an attempted prison break at Guantanamo Bay.”

“I saw the report,” Haynes said. “It was incredible. They committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be recaptured. But there is no concrete proof that the Cubans were helping them.”

“No, sir,” Adkins said. “But the five men who broke out were all Iranian naval ratings. Which got us to thinking that al-Quaida was trying to raise a ship’s crew. And if that were the case, they would need to hire a captain, someone to run the ship. So we went looking for just such a man.”

Berndt and the president exchanged a look. “And?” Berndt asked.

“We got lucky,” Adkins replied. “The guy is a former British naval officer by the name of Rupert Graham. He was kicked out of the service five years ago, and for a couple of years he operated as a pirate in the South China Sea. And a damned good one from what we’ve learned. About two years ago he apparently came to the attention of bin Laden and he may have started working for al-Quaida, funneling money and material into the cause.”

“Why?” Berndt asked.

“I’m not sure of all the details, but apparently his wife died while he was at sea and the navy never notified him.” Adkins shrugged. “The man is nursing a grudge.”

“What about him?” the president asked.

“Three days ago he hijacked a fully ladened oil tanker in Maracaibo, Venezuela. He killed the entire crew, apparently took on a new crew somewhere in the western Caribbean, and this morning, less than six hours ago, he managed to get the ship as far as the center lock at Gatun, where he’d planned on blowing it up.”

Berndt whistled softly. “Would have shut down the canal for years,” he said.

“The engineers we talked to thought there would have been a good chance that the canal might never have reopened.”

The president nodded with satisfaction. “The Rapid Response Teams we put down there did the job,” he said, a glimmering of his smile returning. “Well done.”

“There’s more, Mr. President,” Adkins said. “Four days ago we’d traced Graham to Caracas, but then lost him. We — I—felt that the man was enough of a credible threat that we needed to go after him to find out what he was up to. But quietly because of our … somewhat strained relations with the Venezuelan government.”

The president, Berndt, and Beckett all had the same expectant look on their faces.

“Let me guess,” Berndt said. “You recruited Kirk McGarvey, and he did the job for us.”

Adkins nodded, his eyes never leaving the president’s. “We have assets in Caracas, but they’re under deep cover at the embassy. It would have been next to impossible to get one of them up to Maracaibo in time.”

“Where is he now?” Haynes asked quietly.

“On his way back here.”

Haynes nodded. “I thought that he and his wife were moving to Florida. He was taking a teaching position.”

“Yes, sir,” Adkins said. This would be the tough part. “But there’s more. Graham managed to escape in the confusion, while the explosive devices on the ship were found and disconnected. He’s still out there, and our analysts think that al-Quaida will try again. They still have their very capable and extremely motivated captain.”

“What is the CIA recommending?” Haynes asked, point-blank.

“I want to hire McGarvey to find Graham before he mounts another operation against us.”

“Yes?” Haynes said.

“Then I want to send McGarvey to find bin Laden.”

“And?”

“Mac’s brief will be to assassinate both men as soon as possible,” Adkins said. He pursed his lips. “Let’s end this once and for all, Mr. President. For this kind of operation McGarvey is our best asset—”

“Our only asset,” the president said. He was troubled. He turned away and looked out at the Rose Garden again. “After I’d won the first election, but before my inauguration, I came here so that the president could brief me. Just the two of us, in this room, discussing things and options that only the president is allowed to know. Frightening things. Impossible things. Unreasonable things. Enough so that I had to seriously doubt my sanity for ever wanting this job.” His shoulders seemed to slump. “It’s the moment of truth for every incoming president.” He shook his head. “You can see it in their eyes. They’re one person going into the meeting, full of confidence and expectations, and another completely different person coming out, worried, stunned.”

The president turned back to Adkins, hesitated for just a moment, but then nodded. “I don’t see that I have any other choice.”

“No, sir,” Adkins said, relieved. He gathered up his attaché case.

“Will he go for it?” Berndt asked.

Adkins shook his head. “I honestly don’t know, Dennis. One part of me thinks that he’ll tell me to go to hell when I ask him, while another part of me thinks nothing I say or do would stop him from doing it.” He smiled. “You know Mac well enough to know that when he has the bit in his teeth nothing can stop him.”

“He’s a one-man killing machine,” Beckett said.

“That he is,” Adkins agreed.

“Dick,” the president said.

“Sir?”

“Tell him Godspeed for me.”

TWENTY-THREE

Graham stood at the ninth-floor window of his suite in the downtown Tryp Corobici Hotel, waiting for his satellite phone call to go through. It was night, and the lights of the city spread out below him were beautiful. But he was seething with barely controlled rage because he had failed.

He could not get rid of the image of the U.S. Navy helicopter suddenly appearing as if out of nowhere at the bow of his ship, gunning down two of his crewmen. For the first time in his career he’d given serious thought to his own mortality.

The encrypted connection was made, and bin Laden came on the line. “There was nothing in this morning’s news broadcasts.”

“That’s because it never happened,” Graham said. It took every ounce of his resolve to keep from screaming obscenities at the stupid son of a bitch. Obviously there’d been a leak somewhere between Panama and Karachi.

“Where are you calling from?”

“The hotel in San José. I was the only one left alive, a Navy SEAL team was waiting for us at the locks.” Graham closed his eyes. He had to calm down. Taking a crewman’s sidearm and forcing the Seahawk pilot to set down in an industrial park in the opposite direction from the beach had been easy. They weren’t prepared for the hijacking or for their deaths when he shot them at point-blank range.

He’d radioed the Nueva Cruz from the helicopter, and before dawn had hitched a ride in a farmer’s truck back to Limón Bay, while overhead several aircraft, among them two helicopters, crisscrossed the night sky, presumably looking for the missing chopper and wounded canal pilot.

“You must have attracted some attention in Maracaibo,” bin Laden said, his tone maddeningly reasonable. “Or one of the ship’s crew may have suspected something and radioed a warning.”

The image of the whore screeching at him flashed through his head. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “There is a leak somewhere in your organization. It cost the lives of fourteen of my crewmen, and nearly got me killed.”

The sat phone was silent for several beats. Graham opened his eyes and looked out at the city. He could imagine bin Laden sitting on a prayer rug in his dayroom. It was a few minutes after seven in the morning in Pakistan, and the man was an early riser.

“Why didn’t you blow up the ship when you had the chance?” Graham laughed. “I’m a mercenary for the cause, not a martyr, I thought we’d already got that straight, chum.”

“I want to know everything, beginning with your arrival in Caracas,” bin Laden said. “It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that you were spotted and identified for who you are at the airport. The CIA has a presence there.”

“If I had been made, they would never have allowed me to board the ship. Vensport Security controls all the ferry operators on the lake.”

If he had sown the seeds of his own failure it would have been with the Russian steward who had spotted him as an imposter and reported her suspicion to the first officer. But they had only gotten to the point of searching his room when he’d walked in on them. They wouldn’t have had the time to make a call.

“Very well,” bin Laden said. “You got aboard and sailed out of there. What happened next?”

“I killed the crew, made the rendezvous, and picked up my people without a hitch. Then in Limón Bay we picked up the canal pilot and headed into the Gatun lock.”

The pilot had come to the realization that Graham was an imposter, but he’d not had a chance to radio for help.

“The explosives were set?” bin Laden asked.

“Yes, and we even made it to the middle lock, but before I could get ashore and press the button the U.S. SEAL team was on top of us.”

Bin Laden said something in Arabic that Graham didn’t catch. “How did you know that it was a U.S. strike team? Perhaps they were Panamanian.”

“They came in a Seahawk helicopter with U.S. Navy markings, and they spoke English,” Graham said. “The point is, what’s next? This operation is dead—”

“Only this operation,” bin Laden interrupted. “How was it you escaped, if as you say, your ship was taken over by the American military?”

Graham told him everything, including the parts about hijacking the helicopter, killing the crew, and making his rendezvous with the Nueva Cruz.

“That was inventive,” bin Laden said. “But then you are a clever man.”

“Only the civilian seemed to be suspicious. I have a hunch he was CIA, which is what’s bothering me the most. How did they get involved unless your organization has an informer?”

“What about the civilian?” bin Laden demanded sharply. “What made you think he was a CIA officer?”

“He was in charge, he was armed, and he knew what he was doing,” Graham said. It was the expression in the man’s gray-green eyes. He’d seen things, done things. “He was a pro.”

“What did this professional look like? Describe him.”

“Taller than me, husky, athletic-looking. Green eyes—”

“What?” bin Laden demanded sharply.

“Green eyes.”

“Did he speak with an accent?”

Graham was confused. “I’m not a bloody expert on American accents,” he said. “Southern, maybe. I don’t know. Oklahoma?”

Bin Laden was silent again for several seconds. When he came back his tone of voice was different, as if he’d received some bad news. “If the civilian is who I think he is, you may consider yourself lucky to be alive. How good a look did he get of you?”

“Very good, but I was in disguise,” Graham said. He decided not to tell bin Laden about the cell phone detonator. “Who is he?”

“A man I know very well,” bin Laden replied. “Now it will be necessary to kill him, no matter the cost, because he’ll not stop hunting until he finds you.”

“He’s just another CIA operator. They’re a penny a pound.”

“Not this one,” bin Laden said. “I want you back here as soon as possible, I have a new mission for you. Something much better, something more suitable to your training.”

“What mission?” Graham asked, his interest piqued and his rage subsiding for the moment.

“It’s called Allah’s Scorpion,” bin Laden said. “Come here and I’ll explain everything to you.”

TWENTY-FOUR

McGarvey stopped for a moment at the head of the stairs, as his six-month-old granddaughter, Audrey, giggled in the kitchen. It was nine thirty, well past her normal bedtime, but Elizabeth and Todd hadn’t been able to come over until past seven, and Katy wouldn’t have allowed them through the front door if they hadn’t brought the baby.

When he’d gotten home a little before one this afternoon, Katy had searched his face to find out if he was done. What she’d seen hadn’t pleased her. She knew without asking that her husband’s return from the field was temporary; he was on the hunt. He had the old look: lean, hungry, determined.

But they’d made the best of the afternoon because the kids were coming for a late dinner and they were bringing the baby, and she was the joy in their lives that they’d all desperately needed for a long time.

Adkins had called around four, wanting McGarvey to come to the Building first thing in the morning. He hadn’t pressed for any details, but he’d broadly hinted that the operation was far from over.

“Someone will have to go after Graham,” McGarvey had agreed. “I don’t think he’s a man who quits easily.”

“There’s more,” Adkins had said.

McGarvey had chuckled. “There always is.”

The house was in complete disarray. Boxes were stacked everywhere, waiting for the movers who were supposed to come on Thursday. Furniture was tagged, paintings, pictures, and mirrors were off the walls and crated, and his study had been completely disassembled.

They’d bought this house ten years ago for $350,000, just before he and Katy had split up and he’d run to Switzerland. They’d put it on the market two months ago, and it had sold in two days for $l.9 million—$200,000 more than they were asking.

Coming downstairs, he was suddenly struck by his history here. It was from this place that he and Katy had ended their marriage, and it had been here that they’d reunited.

But there had also been bad things. His wife and daughter had been placed in harm’s way, more than once. And just outside across the street his bodyguard and friend, Dick Yemm, had been assassinated.

Time to head for sunnier climes. Time to get back to teaching, and back to the book on Voltaire that he’d been writing for several years.

But first there was one remaining task, other than Graham. Something he should have done in 2000 when he’d had the opportunity. In many respects the failure to stop 9/11 was as much his fault as it was anyone else’s.

This time he would not stop until he had personally put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s brain.

He went down the stair hall and into the kitchen, where Audrey in her high chair had been pulled up to the counter and was eating her dinner. She had strained beets in her hair, her ears, her eyes, and in the creases of her neck.

Katy looked up. “Did you find the camera?”

McGarvey shook his head. “It’s in one of the boxes. I couldn’t find it.”

“Don’t worry, Mother, Audie does this with every meal,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll send pictures.”

“Your granddaughter is a slob, Mrs. M,” Todd said.

Katy smiled. “So was your wife.”

“She still is,” Todd added.

Liz shot a playful slap at him when the telephone rang.

Katy answered it, and her smile faded. “Of course,” she said, and hung up. She looked at Mac. “Otto’s just pulling into our driveway. Says it’s urgent.”

It had to be about Graham. Rencke had been working the problem around the clock ever since he’d come down to Sarasota to ask Mac to take the job.

“I’ll try to make it short,” McGarvey told his wife, then went to the front door to let the CIA’s director of Special Projects in.

Rencke had brought a young, good-looking woman with him. “Gloria Ibenez,” he introduced her. “She’s one of our field officers working the bin Laden search. And, oh boy, you just gotta hear what she came up with.”

She shook hands with McGarvey. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, sir.” She glanced at the boxes stacked in the stair hall. “You’re leaving?”

“In a few days,” McGarvey said. He ushered them into his study, where the walls and shelves had been stripped bare, and shut the door. All the chairs had been boxed, so there was nowhere to sit.

“It’s not over, Mac,” Otto gushed. He hopped from one foot to the other, his face animated. “It fact it’s just starting. The canal gig was bonus time; it wasn’t the real Allah’s Scorpion.”

“What are you talking about?” McGarvey asked. He’d had the feeling from the moment he knew Graham’s target was the canal and not someplace in the United States that there would be more.

“I finally got Graham’s navy file. The full file. His wife died while he was at sea on patrol, and his boss never notified him. Pissed him off and he went all to hell. Drinking, making really bad decisions that put his crew’s lives in jeopardy, that kinda shit.”

“We figured as much,” McGarvey said.

“But here’s the kicker, Mac, and, honest injun, this is the big one. Guess what Graham’s job was in the navy. Just guess.”

“What?”

“He was a Perisher graduate,” Otto gushed. “Top of his class.”

“Submarines,” McGarvey said in wonder.

“Bingo!” Otto cried. “He was a sub driver, and a damned good one from his early fitreps.” He glanced at Gloria. “But it’s even better than that.”

“I was in Guantanamo Bay last week, interrogating prisoners,” she said. “My partner and I stumbled into the middle of a prison break. We think it was al-Quaida trying to spring five guys. Iranians. When they were cornered they killed themselves rather than risk being recaptured.”

“Her partner was killed too,” Otto said gently.

“The five guys they were trying to grab were all ex-Iranian navy,” Gloria said. “And for some reason, which no one down there wanted to talk about, they weren’t in Camp Delta. They were in the minimum-security lockup for prisoners ready to be released back to their home countries.”

“Al-Quaida is planning to grab a sub somewhere, and hit us hard,” Otto said. “They’ve got the captain, and they’re searching for a crew.”

McGarvey had been watching Gloria’s eyes. There was a sadness there, and something else. “Sorry about your partner,” he said. “But are you trying to tell me that al-Quaida had help down there? Someone on our side?”

“I think so,” Gloria said. “It would mean that someone in the organization has a direct pipeline to the camp. I want to go back and find out. It could very well lead us to bin Laden himself.”

“I’m going with you,” McGarvey said. Gitmo would probably be difficult, he thought, but nowhere near as difficult as it was going to be when he told Katy.

“Yes, sir,” Gloria said, obviously impressed and pleased.

“I’ll come out to the Building first thing in the morning,” McGarvey told Otto. “See if you can come up with the names of any other of the prisoners who might have navy backgrounds.”

“Will do.”

“And put together everything you got not only on Graham, but on bin Laden.”

“Oh, boy,” Otto said, hopping from one foot to the other, and clapping his hands. “The bad guys are going down.”