Sea Of Terror

Chapter 5

"Right," Lia DeFrancesca said, her eye against the eyepiece of her camera's viewfinder. "Aquarius One. I have Sagittarius in sight."

She knelt on the rooftop of a five-story office building in Beirut's Hamra District, not far from the Paradise Residence hotel, on Cairo Street. To the west, late-afternoon sunlight flashed from the azure waters of the Mediterranean. North, hundreds of pleasure craft, sailboats, and yachts bobbed and shifted in the St. George Marina. Nearby, the clatter and rattle of heavy construction continued, incessant and pounding. Beirut was busy rebuilding itself from the devastation of its civil war twenty years earlier.

"Aquarius Two," Taggart's voice sounded in her ear. "Sagittarius acquired."

Lia shifted, following the target. She appeared an unlikely field intelligence operator at the moment. She'd hiked the skirt of her conservative business suit up around her waist so she could kneel and crouch more easily behind the wall, and her fashionable heels were on the roof beside her, her feet bare. She'd gained access to this building by looking the part of a Western-dressed businesswoman.

Resting on the wall in front of her, mounted on a small tripod, was the Sony camera, equipped with a powerful telephoto lens. Though it was impossible to tell through a casual inspection, the camera had been extensively rebuilt. While it could still take digital photographs, the image on the viewfinder was simultaneously appearing on computer monitors back in the United States, both in Desk Three's Art Room beneath NSA Headquarters at Fort Meade and in the Operations Center at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Leaning against the concrete wall beside her was a Mark 11 Mod Spec rifle, a weapon one observer had called an M16 on steroids. The weapon had been left for her, concealed in one of the building's rooftop ventilation ducts.

Howard Taggart — Aquarius Two — was across the street on top of the new Holiday Inn, farther up the street and only three floors up. Both Lia and Taggart were linked into the field satellite communications network through their com implants.

Through the powerful lens, Lia saw Michael Haddid from above and behind as he walked along Cairo Street toward the Paradise hotel. She raised the instrument slightly, sighting ahead along Haddid's path, and saw a man with sunglasses and a heavy mustache seated at a sidewalk table in front of a cafe.

"Aquarius One," Lia said. "Target acquired. I have Scorpio in sight." As she watched, the man dropped some coins on the table, stood, glanced around, and then began walking toward Haddid. "Scorpio is now moving. He's approaching Sagittarius." She estimated they were a hundred feet apart, now, walking briskly toward each other through the heavy late-afternoon foot traffic on the sidewalk.

"Aquarius, Crystal Ball," Debra Collins' voice said in Lia's ear. "Any sign of the opposition's overwatch?"

"None visible," Lia replied. "But they're out there. Count on it."

Lia and Taggart had been in Lebanon for the past month, setting up this meet, which had been dubbed Operation Stargazer. Technically, this wasn't an op for Desk Three or the NSA at all. The CIA was running Stargazer; Debra Collins was the Agency's Deputy Director of Operations, and the rumor was that Stargazer was her baby. Desk Three had been brought in to the op, however, because the NSA's highly specialized technical skills had been needed, especially as they applied to electronic intelligence.

It was not a comfortable alliance. Collins felt — and perhaps with some justification, Lia admitted to herself — that the NSA's Deep Black operations department, Desk Three, should properly answer to the CIA's Directorate of Operations. There were some at Desk Three who wondered if Stargazer might not be an attempt to wrest control of Desk Three away from the National Security Agency.

"Sagittarius, Crystal Ball," Collins' voice said over the net. "Scorpio is right in front of you, another thirty feet."

"Copy that, Crystal Ball," Haddid replied. Haddid didn't have the implants of the NSA operators, but he was wired, with a radio receiver that appeared to be a tiny hearing aid.

Damn it, Lia thought. The bitch is micromanaging. Shut up and let the man do his job.

Haddid was a CIA officer, and cupped in his right hand as he walked along the busy Beirut sidewalk below was a 40-gigabyte thumb drive, a device actually half the size of a man's thumb that could plug into any computer USB port.

Scorpio was the target of the operation — Colonel Assef Suleiman, a high-ranking officer of the Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawiyya (IMJ), Syria's air force intelligence service.

Despite the name, the IMJ was not primarily responsible for gathering intel for the Syrian Air Force. It was, rather, the most secretive, the most efficient, and the deadliest of Syria's four intelligence services. For thirty years, until his death in 2000, Hafez al-Assad had ruled Syria, President in name, dictator in style. When he'd first taken control of the country in 1970, he'd naturally given the most sensitive departments of his intelligence service to friends and trusted cronies in Syria's air force, which he'd once commanded, and the IMJ had become his favorite spy agency. The IMJ was primarily responsible for tracking down and eliminating Islamist opposition groups within Syria, but it also played a major role in terrorist operations covertly supported by Damascus, such as the well-publicized attempted bombing of an Israeli airliner at Heathrow International in 1986.

"Sagittarius, Crystal Ball. Ten feet!"

"I see him."

After occupying Lebanon for years, Syria's military had finally been forced to leave Lebanon in 2005 after the dramatic popular uprising known as the Cedar Revolution. That didn't mean that Syria had lost interest in its diminutive neighbor, however, or that it didn't continue to maintain a watchful presence in the country. All of the Syrian intelligence agencies were still well represented in Beirut. The CIA believed that Colonel Suleiman was running all IMJ operations inside Lebanon, including one designed to suborn Hezbollah and several other independent terrorist networks in the region and bring them firmly under Syrian control.

Haddid, a twenty-eight-year-old American of Arab descent, was a relatively junior CIA officer working out of an Agency sub-station at the American Embassy in Beirut. He'd been contacted five months ago by an IMJ agent at a cocktail party, and Collins had decided to use the opportunity to pull off a Trojan horse.

At stake was nothing less than an opportunity to penetrate the IMJ.

Lia watched through the camera as Haddid and Suleiman approached each other, carefully not making eye contact… and then they brushed past each other, right shoulder bumping right shoulder. For just an instant, their hands touched.

The technique was called a brush pass and was a standard bit of tradecraft. As they'd bumped, apparently by accident, Haddid dropped the thumb drive into Suleiman's waiting fingers.

"Pass complete," Haddid said.

"Okay," Taggart said. "Let's see if Scorpio takes the bait."

Haddid continued walking until he reached the sidewalk cafe where Scorpio had been waiting. Casually Haddid sat down, back to a hedge in a position where he could watch the street.

Almost directly below Lia's position overlooking the street, Suleiman got into the front passenger seat of a red Mazda. Tilting the telephoto lens to look almost straight down, she could just make out Suleiman's shoulder and thigh through the vehicle's open window.

"What's he doing?" Collins demanded.

"Aquarius One. Hard to see from this angle."

"Aquarius Two," Taggart said. "I can see the front seat from my position. Looks like he has a laptop… he's plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Yeah! Now he's plugging in the thumb drive."

The Art Room and Langley would be getting a better view through Taggart's camera. Lia shifted her camera back to Haddid, who was now talking to a cafe waiter. Over his communicator, she heard Haddid asking for Turkish coffee in Arabic.

"Aquarius One, this is Magic Wand." The voice was Kathy Caravaggio's, and she was the Deep Black handler watching and listening from the Art Room. "Can you pull back a little on your telephoto? We'd like to see more of the background."

"Copy that." Lia pressed the rocker switch on the barrel of her camera's lens, zooming out to show more of Haddid's surroundings. She could see past the hedge now, see the crowds of people on the sidewalks on both sides of the street.

One person in particular immediately stood out. He was behind Haddid and across the street, leaning against the side of a green Volkswagen, perhaps fifty feet away, though the foreshortening created by the zoom lens made him look much closer. Despite the warmth of the day, he wore a dark overcoat; despite the late hour of the afternoon, he wore sunglasses. And his gaze, judging from the angle of his face, never left the back of Mike Haddid's head.

Her nose wrinkled. Security types. You could always spot them.

"Thanks, Lia," Caravaggio's voice said. "You see him?"

"The guy by the Volkswagen? Yeah."

"He may be the paymaster. Or the trigger. Keep him in sight. We're designating him as Echo Whiskey One."

"Copy that." Echo Whiskey — EW. Enemy Watcher.

"Bingo!" Collins said. "We're in! We're online!"

The USB thumb drive was a highly sophisticated bit of engineering from the NSA's technical support center, with an even better software package from the Agency's programming department. A tiny 40-gig external drive, it looked and acted like a 10-gig drive, with the extra memory invisible behind a virtual wall. Stored on the accessible portion of the compartmented drive was data, lots of data, all of it pertaining to CIA operations out of the U. S. Embassy in Beirut.

A lot of the data was even true.

The NSA and CIA technical operations departments had collaborated on that data, compiling page after page listing Agency assets in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, and Syria, as well as giving details on a dozen different sensitive intelligence operations in the region conducted since 2001. Also included were extensive lists, reports, and, in some cases, speculations on some twenty-five Islamic terrorist and revolutionary groups, from well-known and active ones such as Hezbollah to groups that were insignificant or almost vanished, like the Japanese Red Army.

What was not immediately obvious was the fact that most of that data either was obsolete or mirrored information that the CIA knew the Syrians already possessed. Some was fabricated, to create the illusion that there was new and therefore useful information on the drive; some would confirm other, earlier fabrications, such as the existence of an Iranian mole inside the Shu'bat al-Mukhabarat al-skariyya, Syria's military intelligence service.

But the real purpose of Operation Stargazer was to get the thumb drive and its hidden memory hooked into the IMJ's computer network in Damascus. Once there, a carefully crafted bit of software would graft itself to the operating system running Syria's military and government computer networks, creating an invisible back door through which the CIA and NSA would have complete and untraceable access.

Back at Langley, Collins was now watching Suleiman check out the thumb drive's visible contents. He would be scrolling through menus and lists of files, perhaps sampling some to satisfy himself that the information was valid.

"Aquarius Two. Scorpio is taking out a cell phone," Taggart reported. 'The laptop's still open in front of him. He's placing a call."

"Echo Whiskey One is taking a cell phone out of his coat pocket," Lia said. "Three guesses who Scorpio is calling."

"Aquarius, Magic Wand," Caravaggio said, addressing both members of the NSA overwatch team. "Recommend you go to shooter mode."

"Roger that. Camera angle okay?"

"Looks good, Lia."

Leaving the camera aimed at Haddid and his immediate surroundings for the benefit of the watchers at Langley and Fort Meade, Lia shifted a bit to the left and picked up the Mk 11, easing its slender barrel with the long, vented sound suppressor over the top of the wall.

The Mk 11 did indeed look much like a standard-issue M16, though with a longer barrel and with a telescopic sight in place of the carry handle. In fact, about 60 percent of the parts were common to both weapons. The internal workings had been extensively modified, however, to create an exceptionally accurate weapon custom-tailored to clandestine operations.

Lia dropped her right eye behind the eyepiece and reacquired Echo Whiskey One. The man was walking across the street, now, coming directly toward Mike Haddid. She could hear Collins talking to Haddid, letting him know what was happening behind his back, but Lia wasn't listening. All of her attention was focused now on Suleiman's henchman as he approached the CIA officer in the cafe. She let the crosshair reticule rest on the man's chest, between throat and heart. The range was just less than two hundred yards.

This sort of thing, she thought, was more Charlie Dean's line of work. Charlie had been a sniper in the Marines and, according to his service jacket, a damned good one. But Charlie had been tapped for another mission, something in England, and Lia had already been in Turkey finishing up another mission. She had the requisite training, so when Stargazer had surfaced, she and Howard Taggart had been dispatched to Lebanon.

Normally, two people were deployed in a sniper team, a shooter and a spotter, and that had been the original plan. Debra Collins had recommended splitting Lia and Howard up, however, as two independent shooters in order to give better coverage of the street, one on each side. There hadn't been time to bring in more people.

With luck, they wouldn't need to shoot. If Suleiman had taken the electronic bait just now, Echo Whiskey was about to deliver to Sagittarius an envelope containing a bank note for 45 million Lebanese pounds — a bit under thirty thousand U. S. dollars.

Lia did not believe in luck. If Syrian intelligence suspected something was wrong, Echo Whiskey might have just been dispatched to eliminate Sagittarius. Hell, even if Suleiman had accepted the thumb drive's contents as genuine, the man was perfectly capable of eliminating Haddid simply to wrap up some untidy loose ends. The hope, of course, was that the IMJ would choose to keep Haddid alive and available as a regular source of intelligence inside the U. S. Embassy, but according to the jacket compiled by the CIA over the years, Colonel Suleiman was a paranoid and psychopathic thug. It was anybody's guess how the next few seconds were going to play out.

Which was why Lia and Taggart were there as over-watch. If Echo Whiskey produced a weapon from inside that overcoat, he was a dead man. If he produced an envelope, he would live. As simple as that.

She watched as he stopped next to Haddid's sidewalk table, exchanging words with the CIA man. Lia could hear words in Arabic but didn't understand them. A moment later, Echo Whiskey walked around to Haddid's right and took a seat, facing the street. One hand reached inside his coat, and Lia's finger tightened ever so slightly on the trigger.

"I've got the shot," she said.

Echo Whiskey's hand emerged from the jacket, holding an envelope, which he casually placed on the table between the two men. They continued to speak for a few moments, and at one point Haddid picked up the envelope, looked inside, then slipped it inside his jacket.

"That's it," Collins said. "Payment received. The fish bit."

"Aquarius, stay on Echo Whiskey," Caravaggio warned. "It's not over yet!"

But a few moments later, Echo Whiskey stood, exchanged a few more words with Haddid, then walked back up the street. Haddid visibly sagged in his seat, rubbed his jaw, then said, "Mission complete. I'm coming in."

Lia continued to cover the man, however, as he stood, paid for his drink, and left the cafe. Only when he was out of sight from her sniper's perch did she lean back from the wall and begin breaking her weapon down.

She worked swiftly and with no wasted motion. The Mk 11 had been designed to disassemble into a small package, and this special modification had several extra steps to make it smaller still. The barrel and sound suppressor unscrewed, then came apart into two pieces. Then the receiver assembly unsnapped from the stock, then clicked apart into two more pieces, until Lia had five parts, not counting the magazine, none more than twelve inches long. After she pulled a tightly bundled roll of cloth and a pair of sandals from her handbag, all of the parts went into the bag, which concealed them easily. Her shoes went into the bag as well, followed by the camera and tripod.

With a final look around to sanitize her rooftop observation post, she pulled on the sandals, then crossed the open roof to the small building sheltering the top of the service stairs. Once inside, with no possibility of being seen, she slung the bag over her neck by its long strap, so that it hung over her torso just below her breasts. Unrolling the dark cloth, she slipped it over her head and tugged it into place — a traditional Muslim woman's burka covering Lia from head to foot and effectively concealing the handbag.

Down the service stairs to the main level, where she stepped out into the building lobby. None of the people there — mostly men — gave her a second glance.

Lebanon was a remarkably progressive and Western nation within a sea of conservative Islam. Women could be seen on the streets in blue jeans, miniskirts, and other Western attire, and could grace the local beaches in almost nonexistent bikinis. There was even one beach a few blocks from here in downtown Beirut, restricted to women only, of course, where they could sunbathe topless.

At the same-time, most Muslim women still preferred more conservative dress, and you could see a range of fashion from colorful scarves over the head to full-length burkas like the one Lia was wearing now. Within Beirut, she was now effectively invisible.

Bowed slightly under the weight of camera and rifle, she made her way toward the safe house on Verdun Street, as planned. The eerie wail of a muezzin calling out the adhan sounded from the loudspeaker in a spire-topped minaret nearby, calling the faithful to prayer.

"Good job, Lia," William Rubens' voice said in her ear. It startled her. She'd not realized he was in the Art Room, or that he was watching this op. At any given moment there might be as many as three separate missions being handled through the Art Room, and a Deputy Director of the NSA could not be expected to closely watch them all.

"Thank you, sir," she murmured. "It was routine and went down as planned… thank God." Just another day at the office.

"When you get back to the safe house," Rubens told her, "call in. I need you to check something for me."

"In Beirut?" she asked. She liked Lebanon, and had been wondering if she might be able to grab some time as a tourist while she was here.

To be sure, that sort of thing was not usually a good idea and Rubens would never have sanctioned it. Standard tradecraft required operators to be pulled out of a mission area as soon as the op was over, just in case there were unexpected repercussions. But this op had been a walk in the park with no hostile contact and no complications. There was almost zero chance that she'd been spotted, or that any of her covers had been blown. According to the op plan, she would be going home on a commercial flight sometime tomorrow. That would give her the evening free, at least. And if Rubens wanted her to stay on for a while…

"Negative," Rubens told her. "Ankara. There's a company jet waiting for you at Beirut International."

So much, she thought, for a free evening in exotic Beirut.

"On my way," she told him.

Sir Charles Mayhew was a vice president of Royal Sky Line, Ltd., chief operations officer, and member of the corporate board of directors. He was also the company board member nearest to hand when Thomas Mitchell and MI5 needed a high-ranking corporate officer to give him some answers.

They gathered in a small meeting room adjoining Sir Charles' office, which was located on the tenth floor of the ultra-modern green glass tower adjoining the Atlantis Queen's passenger terminal. The tower also housed a hotel and a ground-floor gallery of shops and travel agencies, but the penthouse had been reserved for Royal Sky bigwigs, most of whom weren't available at the moment.

Typical, Mitchell thought. But unimportant. Sir Charles would do just fine. Mayhew was an obese man, heavy-faced but with nervous, active eyes. He was scared, Mitchell thought, scared that his company was about to be dealt a financial body blow.

That fear could be useful.

Also present were the ship's captain, Phillips, his second in command, Staff Captain Vandergrift, a solicitor for Royal Sky Line named James Alcock, and David Llewellyn, the chief of security on board the Atlantis Queen.

"I take it," Mitchell said, placing a photograph on the table before them, "that none of you have ever seen this man before." It was a color shot of Nayim Erbakan, an eight-by-ten blow-up of the wallet-sized photo found on Chester Darrow's body.

"Sure," Llewellyn said, grinning. "A little while ago, when they arrested him. Caught him with his pants down, as it were, in the backscatter scanner."

"I know," Mitchell said dryly. "I was there, too, remember? But how about any of you? Captain?"

"Never seen him before," Captain Phillips said. "Should we have?"

"Not really… but you have to admit that there are some puzzling facts about this case." Mitchell glanced at his notebook. "A Turkish national, caught smuggling one half kilogram of cocaine onto a luxury cruise ship… bound from England to the eastern Mediterranean. That's not one of the usual smuggling routes, you" know. Erbakan has a legitimate ticket for a mid-priced stateroom, booked by a travel agency in Le Havre five days ago.

"An hour or so after Erbakan is taken into custody, your fourth officer is murdered on the dock by persons unknown," Mitchell continued. "Three shots to the chest from a handgun at point-blank range. No one hears the shots, though there are plenty of dockworkers in the area, including just inside the ship's cargo hold forty or fifty feet away. That suggests Darrow was killed by a silenced weapon, a professional hit.

"On Darrow's body, we find a small version of this photo. And in the Dumpster next to the body, right on top of the garbage as though it had just been tossed in, we find a briefcase containing thirty thousand euros. Coincidental^, that is the approximate street value of one half kilogram of cocaine… which is also, coincidentally, the amount of cocaine Erbakan was carrying. Anyone here want to connect the dots for me?"

None of the others replied. Sir Charles shifted uncomfortably in his seat, which creaked as he moved. The solicitor, Alcock, wrote something down in a small notebook. Mitchell shrugged and continued.

"I'll tell you how / see it. Erbakan was a small-time operator. Neither MI5 or Interpol has much on him. He doesn't appear to have had any organized crime connections, but he does have travel visas for half a dozen European countries, including Great Britain. I think Darrow had contacted Erbakan and arranged to buy half a kilo of coke. Erbakan gets picked up at the terminal security station. Darrow doesn't know this, and meets someone else, maybe someone pretending to be Erbakan, maybe someone claiming to work for Erbakan. Darrow takes the money for the exchange and hides it in the Dumpster before the other guy shows up… and then the other guy shows up and puts three bullets into him."

"It sounds like you have the puzzle pretty well put together, Mr. Mitchell," Sir Charles said. He tried to sound casual, and failed. "Exactly how does this affect Royal Sky Line?"

"It all fits together very neatly," Mitchell agreed. "Maybe a trifle too neatly, one might think."

"Did Erbakan tell you anything?" Llewellyn asked.

"A little. He seems to want to cooperate, but we're not sure he's telling us everything. He claims a man named Darrow met him a week ago in Le Havre, and arranged for him to smuggle the coke on board today."

"Well, then, it all rather seems open-and-shut, doesn't it?" James Alcock said. He was a sour, precise little man who worked in Royal Sky's legal department.

"Almost," Mitchell replied. "As I said, it's neat… but there are a couple of loose ends dangling, and they just don't make sense. Why did Erbakan try to board the ship when he could have simply met Darrow on the pier and not risked going through the security check? If he did get on board as a passenger, why not meet Darrow when the ship was at sea?

"And, most important, who killed Darrow?"

"The Mafia, perhaps?" Vandergrift suggested. "Or one of the other crime syndicates? They could have seen this… this transaction as competition."

"Yes. That's what we thought at first," Mitchell acknowledged. "But it's not really their style, you know. A half-kilo deal is nothing for the big guys. Chump change. They might've demanded a percentage, or broken Darrow's kneecaps as a warning, or even killed Erbakan and told Darrow he needed to buy from them in the future… but they wouldn't have just killed the guy like that. Not unless they thought Darrow was working for someone else!'

"Sir!" Phillips said, angry. "Are you suggesting that we're operating some sort of drug ring off of my ship?"

"The thought did cross our minds," Mitchell admitted. "Especially when we looked at the records of some of your passengers."

"What?" Sir Charles snapped, startled. "Since when does MI5 have the right — "

"Please, Sir Charles," Mitchell said. "There's nothing new in any of this. We have access to police records both here and abroad, and we use them. It's our job… and if you have an issue with that, take it up with Parliament the next time they pass intrusive legislation. Or the Americans with their Patriot Act.

"In any case, one of the passengers on the Atlantis Queen is a Ms. Gillian Harper. American. She's been in trouble half a dozen times. Two years ago she got a suspended sentence and a rehab order when she tested positive for cocaine.

"And there's a stock trader… Adrian Bollinger. Another American. He did three years for possession back in the eighties. And there's — "

"Just what is the point of this inquisition?" Alcock demanded. "That some of the people on the Queen's passenger list use drugs? Or have in the past?"

"Mr. Alcock — "

Captain Phillips interrupted, his anger barely contained now. "I think the latest statistics say that somewhere between one and three percent of the adult population either use or have used cocaine. Out of three thousand people on my ship, that's at least thirty! So what are you going to do.. question every person on board? Treat them all like criminals?"

"Mr. Mitchell," Sir Charles said. His heavy face had gone florid, and he was perspiring freely. "Are you seriously considering delaying the Queen's departure? Do you have any idea how much revenue is involved here?"

"No, Sir Charles. I don't."

"Hundreds of thousands of pounds! Most of the passengers on that ship are on time-sensitive schedules! If there is a serious delay in sailing, they will… make other arrangements. Royal Sky will have to refund a fortune in moneys already paid. It could ruin this company!"

"Don't worry, Sir Charles," Alcock said. "He won't delay the sailing."

"And why won't I. do that, Mr. Alcock?" Mitchell asked.

"Because to do so legally you will need to show cause, then get an injunction from the courts. And we will file to block that injunction. The ship is due to sail at nine tomorrow morning. I don't believe you could get the legal mills turning in time, sir."

"In the case of a capital crime, Mr. Alcock, there are ways to expedite matters."

"And there is also the unsavory possibility of a lawsuit against the government. And some very bad publicity both for MI5, and for you, personally. I assure you that if you try to harm this company, your name and the name of MI5 will be prominently displayed on page one of every newspaper in the country, from the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Times, all the way down to the Sun\ After that debacle over the files your bureau holds on ordinary, law-abiding citizens… is that really something you wish to call down upon yourself?"

Mitchell chuckled. "I'm terrified. Fortunately, I'm not suggesting that we delay the departure."

"Then what are you suggesting, sir?" Captain Phillips asked icily.

"That you take on board two additional passengers, myself and one other. There's no way we could question two thousand people, and no way we could legally hold them long enough to do so. Besides, I assure you, the government has no wish to put you out of business. But if I and an assistant could circulate among the crew and passengers for the next fortnight, we could ask our questions, carry out our investigation, and the entire matter could be kept more or less quiet."

"That seems.. most reasonable," Sir Charles said. "What do you think, Alcock?"

"I think that the government could still find itself on the receiving end of a major lawsuit if their agents spread slanderous accusations about drug use on one of our cruise ships. I promise you, Mr. Mitchell, that any bad publicity whatsoever concerning this line or its employees could be actionable!"

"Mr. Alcock… a man is dead." Mitchell's face was stony. "Drugs are involved. Rattle all the lawsuit threats you want at me. I promise we will be discreet, but we will do our job."

They argued for another ten minutes, but in the end Mitchell got exactly what he'd wanted all along.

There were people on board the Atlantis Queen who knew more about Darrow's murder than had emerged from the investigation so far.

And Thomas Mitchell intended to find them.