“I don’t…I don’t know what to do. Shouldn’t you tell the police?”
“Your husband’s testimony has already ruined the careers of several prominent people in business and the government. There are even more powerful people who would like nothing more than for your husband to be silenced.”
Juan could see he was being too circumspect. Kara Isphording was already at the end of her mental and emotional rope and couldn’t grasp what he was saying. He couldn’t blame her. A year ago she was married to a successful lawyer and enjoying the genteel life of a Swiss hausfrau. Today she was bombarded with reporters and dosed daily with stories about her husband’s criminal activities.
“What I am trying to tell you is the police won’t prevent an attack on your husband.”
“But that’s just not right!” she cried indignantly. “We pay taxes.”
Cabrillo almost smiled at her naïveté. “As the Americans would say, your husband has stirred up a hornets’ nest. I am here to make sure he isn’t the last one stung.”
She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue that looked like it had been in her pocket for as long as she’d owned the robe. She tried to square her shoulders. “I don’t know what to do. What do I tell Rudy? What is your plan?”
“You don’t have to do anything, Frau Isphording.” Juan turned his head and called into the dining room. “Ludmilla.”
Julia stepped into the light cast from the fixture atop the stairs. Kara gasped at seeing her twin and jammed her knuckles against her mouth. For a moment Juan was afraid she’d faint, but she gathered enough composure to get to her feet. She crossed to where Julia stood and studied her doppelganger.
“This is my associate, Ludmilla Demonova. She will go to Regensdorf in your place tomorrow. I do not mean to insult you, but it is safer operationally for her to pretend to be you than it is for us explain the details of our plan. Had we had more time, you could have gone to your husband yourself, but…” Juan’s voice trailed off, letting the woman draw whatever conclusions she wanted. “Are you allowed to give your husband anything?”
Kara Isphording continued to stare at Julia, forcing Juan to repeat the question.
“No, not really, but I pass him little notes. The guards haven’t made me stop.”
“Okay, that is good. I need you to write to your husband. Tell him that we haven’t harmed you and that he is to listen carefully to what Ludmilla tells him. Can you do this for me?”
“Ja, yes, I can.” She was regaining her senses and seemed to accept that Juan and Julia were there to help her. “What happens afterward?”
“You mean once we free your husband? I do not know. I am only to take him to a safe house. After that”—Juan shrugged like a soldier just doing his job—“it is up to your husband and my boss. I’m sure they will send for you, and the two of you can retire to the south of France or the Costa del Sol.”
She gave him a wan smile as if she knew that the rest of her life would never be so idyllic.
Julia left for the prison the following morning a little past nine. Juan chafed at having to wait around, but there was always the risk that Kara Isphording would lose her nerve and phone the police. After giving the maid the day off, the two of them sat in the dining room over a cold coffee service. Juan continued in his role of a Russian gangster so there was little conversation, and for that he was grateful. Only three days remained until they would snatch the lawyer, and he felt every minute tick by. The modifications to the truck weren’t complete, although they’d done run-throughs in rental cars and had the timing down. What worried him most was the work they had to get done over the weekend at the construction site. Fortunately, the company overseeing the building didn’t post night watchmen, so that wasn’t a problem. However, they had ten tons of cement to get into position tonight if they were to make their deadline.
By eleven Juan’s wrist was sore from checking his watch. He’d spoken with Linc and found they’d finished with the semi at the warehouse and were now loading the fifty-pound sacks of cement.
The sound of the automatic garage door opening launched Juan out of his seat. He was at the door to meet Julia when she stepped from the Isphordings’ 740 BMW.
“Well?”
“Piece of cake.” Julia smiled. “It actually took him a few seconds to see through the disguise, and none of the guards even looked twice.”
“Great job. Is he all set?”
“More than all set. He’s eager. I guess he really was hooked up with the PLO. As soon as I mentioned they were gunning for him, he agreed to everything.”
“And you laid out the whole plan?”
“He knows where and when we’re making the grab. He’ll tell the prison administrator that he needs to meet with his attorney early on Monday morning. That’ll put his convoy at the construction site before the work crew shows up.”
“Did he give up any information?”
“About the Maus? No. And I didn’t press. But when I told him the Russians sent me, he asked if I worked for Anton Savich. I played dumb and agreed. Isphording seemed relieved. Savich must be his principal contact.”
“Savich?” Cabrillo said the name aloud as if tasting it, trying to draw out a memory. He shook his head. “New one to me. I’ll contact Murph and have him do a search. Are you all set to watch the real Kara Isphording?”
“Got everything I need.” Julia patted her shoulder bag. Inside was a syringe that she’d administer Sunday night after Kara went to bed. She’d be out for twenty-four hours, long after Juan and Julia were headed back to the Oregon.
16
NO matter how often Doc Huxley admonished him, Max Hanley refused to give up his pipe or dessert. He figured that by his age he’d earned the right to know what was best for him. The thickening around his middle added only ten or fifteen pounds, and while he couldn’t run a mile in under ten minutes, his job rarely required him to run a mile. So what was the big deal?
His cholesterol was just about normal, he wasn’t showing any signs of diabetes, and his blood pressure was actually on the low side.
He swirled his fork through the raspberry drizzle pooled on his plate and made sure he got the last few crumbs of the chocolate cake. The fork was spotless when he returned it to his plate and pushed back from the mess hall table with a satisfied groan.
“All finished?” the white-jacketed mess steward asked.
“Only because I’d need a microscope to find the few remaining cake molecules. Thanks, Maurice.”
Max had dined alone this evening but nodded to the personnel at the other tables before leaving the mahogany-paneled mess. His sturdy brogans sank into the almost inch-thick rug. A squall had kicked up from the north over the past several hours, so he decided to take his pipe in his cabin. He’d just settled into an easy chair with a week’s worth of the International Tribune that had been choppered back to the Oregon when his intercom rang. He let his cheater glasses dangle around his neck and set his pipe into an ashtray.
“Sorry to bother you on your day off.” It was Linda Ross from the operations center.
“That’s okay. What’s the trouble?”
“No trouble, but you wanted to know if we got anything from Eddie. It appears he’s left Fouzou and might be headed back to Shanghai.”
Max digested the report. “Makes sense from the snakehead’s perspective. Shanghai is one of the busiest ports in the world. Much easier to slip a bunch of illegals onto an outbound freighter amid the confusion than at a smaller harbor like Fouzou.”
“That’s what Murph and Eric Stone think, too. Do you want me to call the chairman?”
“No. Last I spoke to him he has enough to worry about. If we get any better intel, I’ll have you pass it along. What’s our position, and how’s our wallowing friend?”
“They’ve picked up a current so they’re now making six knots. That’ll put us about a hundred miles due east of Ho Chi Minh City in another five hours.”
The name always caught Max off guard.
Vietnam’s largest city would always be Saigon to him. But that was from another time and another war. Every so often when a chopper approached the Oregon, a flood of memories would leave Hanley shaken for days.
Actually, the memories were never that far from the surface. It wasn’t the sound of the Vietcong’s RPGs exploding or the chatter of their AK-47s that stuck with him. And the screams as his patrol boat was raked from stem to stern were just a background noise. What remained sharpest in his mind was the sound of the Huey’s blades pulsating over the black jungle, homing on the stream of flares Max launched into the night with one hand as he used his other to keep his newbie bow gunner’s intestines inside his body. God, the blood was hot, even in that stinking hell. The Huey’s door-mounted minigun sounded like a buzz saw, and the jungle flanking the estuary peeled back under its three-thousand-round-per-minute onslaught. And when that RPG arced up at the Huey—
Max yanked himself from the past he’d never stop reliving. The newspaper was balled in his fist. “Ah, any course change?” he finally asked.
“No, she’s still on one hundred and eighty-five. Projected either she’s headed for Singapore, which isn’t likely since they’ve got the most incorruptible harbor workers in this region, or she’ll turn due south soon and make for Indonesia.”
“Seems a better bet,” Max agreed. With several thousand islands to patrol, the Indonesian Coast Guard was stretched thin. The pirates would have an easy time eluding them and finding a secluded spot to unload the ship they’d hijacked off Japan. The ship-wide betting pool had been evenly split between the Philippines and Indonesia as a final destination since before they’d reached Taiwan.
“Okay, then,” Max said, “call me if the Maus turns or you get anything from Eddie or Juan.”
“Roger.”
Max straightened out the rumpled pages of his newspaper and set them aside. He relit his pipe and let smoke dribble past his lips until his cabin was perfumed with the aromatic blend. As yet he couldn’t figure out why the pirates hadn’t found a quiet spot of ocean to disgorge their stolen ship. They’d had enough time to give her a new name and make enough cosmetic changes that no one would recognize her, especially if they ran her in different waters, say, off the coast of South America. So why risk keeping her in the drydock this long? Unless they had a specific destination in mind. Someplace close to shore where they felt safe. Max hoped the Maus was leading them to the pirates’ lair, but it couldn’t be that easy.
There was another level to this operation, another peel to the onion they hadn’t seen. He knew he wouldn’t find it by merely shadowing the Maus, but he was confident that either the chairman or Eddie Seng would. Confidentially, he was betting on Eddie finding the key. There was no real reason, just a strong feeling of confidence in the tough, independent ex-CIA operator.
Had Eddie Seng known at that moment that Max was placing a mental wager on him, he would have told the Corporation’s president to put his money on Cabrillo and his team in Switzerland.
During his training for the CIA, Eddie had undergone a grueling program to teach agents how to deal with imprisonment and torture. It had been run by army specialists at a corner of Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Before he left for Bragg, his training instructor at the Farm had given him a random code word: aardvark. It was his job to keep it a secret and the soldiers’ to get it out of him.
For a month they owned Eddie body and soul. They used hoses to beat him on a regular basis, confined him in an iron box in the sun for hours without water, and often poisoned his meager food rations so he couldn’t keep them down. They tried to break his will by keeping him awake for six straight days and screaming every racial slur they could come up with. They once dumped him naked onto a fire ant nest, and one night they poured half a bottle of Scotch down his throat and questioned him for an hour before he passed out. They pulled out all the stops in their interrogation, but Eddie never gave up his code word. He was able to keep a small part of his mind focused that no matter what they did to him, it was only an exercise, and he wouldn’t die.
Eddie held no such illusions now, and as the truck lurched, the throng of illegals packed in with him swayed so that those closest to the rear doors were almost crushed. He whispered, “Aardvark.”
Six days in the hands of the snakeheads made that month at Fort Bragg feel like a Club Med vacation.
There were about a hundred men packed into the sweltering box truck. They hadn’t been fed or been given water in at least two days, and the only reason many were still on their feet was that there was no room for them to fall. The stench of sweat and body waste was overwhelming, a cloying film that coated Eddie’s mouth and seared his lungs.
It had been like this since Yan Luo had turned him over in Fouzou. The next link in the smuggling ring were members of a triad, China’s version of a Mafia crew. Once they’d taken his picture for forged travel documents, he’d been locked in a cell under a cement factory with sixty others. There were no bathroom facilities. They stayed there for two days, and each night guards came down to select a couple of the more attractive women. The girls would return hours later, bleeding and shamed.
On the morning of the third day a group of South Asians arrived. They spoke to the snakeheads in accented Chinese, so Eddie couldn’t tell where they were from. They could have been Indonesian, Malay, or even Filipino. But he was sure their presence was a deviation from the normal channels for getting immigrants out of China and suspected they were connected to the pirate ring.
The immigrants were brought out of their cell in groups of ten and paraded in front of the Asians. The Asians made his group strip naked and then subjected them to a humiliating scrutiny. Eddie felt like he was a slave on the auction block. They checked his teeth for decay and his genitals for obvious venereal disease. He and the others had to prove they could lift a pair of cinder blocks suspended from a bamboo pole. The Asians singled out three of the men from Eddie’s group, himself included. They were the biggest of the lot, the strongest. The others were sent back to the cell.
Of the original sixty from the cell, ten were loaded into a truck. The Asian guards had to use wooden planks like bulldozer blades to pack them into the already overcrowded vehicle. The bodies were so tight there wasn’t enough room to take a deep breath.
Before closing the rear door a fire hose was turned on the crowd. In the frenzy to slake their thirst, several people were hurt. Eddie managed a mouthful and was close enough to the side of the truck to lick a little more water from the hot metal. Then the door slammed shut, and the immigrants were left in total darkness.
What got Eddie, what made this so difficult, was the silence as the vehicle began its journey. No one cried or complained, no one demanded to be released. They were willing to put up with any privation if it meant they could get out of China. To them anything was worth the chance for freedom.
They drove for what felt like days but couldn’t have been more than twenty hours. By the continuous swaying and jostling Eddie was sure the snakeheads kept to back roads. To compound their misery, many of the men became motion sick, adding the acrid smell of vomit to the already overwhelming stench inside the truck.
The truck squealed to a halt after a particularly smooth stretch of road. No one came to open the doors. Eddie thought he heard the sound of jet aircraft, but the noise was muffled and indistinct. It could have been thunder. They were left packed and sweating in the truck for at least another hour before someone outside unlocked the rear door.
It swung open, and glaring white light blinded the immigrants. Eddie’s eyes filled with tears, but the pain was worth the first breath of fresh air he’d had in a day. They were inside some kind of huge, modern warehouse, not at all the seedy dockside facility he thought the snakeheads would use. Had Eddie not been so disoriented, he would have noticed there were no support columns for the metal building’s arching roof, a clue as to his real location.
The men were allowed to jump from the truck. Many were so wea
k they fell to the polished concrete floor and had to crawl away to make room for the next. Eddie was proud that he managed to keep his feet. He took a few shuffling steps away from the truck and tried to squat to ease his aching knees.
There were four guards inside the warehouse. Eddie was pretty sure they were Indonesians. They wore cheap cotton pants and T-shirts, and plastic sandals on their feet. All carried the Chinese version of the AK-47. Out of habit he burned their faces into his memory.
As his sinuses cleared he became aware of another smell, not the tangy saltiness of the sea but a recognizable chemical taint. Casually, so as not to arouse the guards, he crossed back around the truck. On the far side he saw towering doors that reached nearly to the ceiling. But what gripped his attention and sent a jolt of fear to his very marrow was the functional shape of a commercial airliner. It had four engines mounted on its tail, an old Russian-built Ilyushin Il-62.
They weren’t taking this group out of China on a cargo ship. They were going to fly them out. Eddie realized he was in more trouble than he’d anticipated. These people weren’t connected to the pirates at all. This really was a legitimate, albeit illegal, smuggling operation. His whole trip to China was a dead end, only he had no way of contacting the Oregon. The jetliner’s door was opened, and the guards were forming the men into a line to board. The hangar doors were still securely closed, so there’d be no escape that way.
The truck that had brought them here was quiet, its engine was off, but Eddie thought that maybe the keys were still in the ignition. The last of the immigrants were out of the cargo box and shuffling toward the Ilyushin. Eddie joined the end of the line. The truck’s cab was only ten yards away to his right. He could cover that in seconds, swing himself into the seat, and try to ram his way out of the hangar.
He braced himself for the attempt, planting one shaky foot, and was about to start running when he saw that the driver was still in the cab. For another fraction of a second he thought about trying for it anyway, even though he would lose time subduing the man. One of the guards saw he’d paused and barked something that was plain to understand in any language. Eddie released a long breath, allowed his body to relax, and adopted a posture of defeat.