Death Wave (27 page)

Well, there would be time to ply him later, and there might be some places she could check here on the island. Something, she thought, just wasn’t adding up. If Petro-Technologique and Saudi Aramco were involved in a project on La Palma, it
must
involve drilling, possibly exploratory drilling, and on a fairly large scale. Lia knew about petroleum geology, but somehow a volcanic island didn’t seem like the best place to prospect for oil. You found petroleum reserves beneath sedimentary rock—sandstone, limestone, and shale—not beneath a mountain of volcanic basalt.

What the hell were these people playing at?

Yet something was tugging at Lia’s memory about La Palma … and she couldn’t quite pull it out into the light.

CIA OPERATIONS
KARACHI, PAKISTAN
FRIDAY, 1721 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“You,” Station Chief Charles Lloyd told Dean, “are a sneaky, underhanded bastard. I
like
that.”

“I take it our friend is talking?”

“We can’t get him to
stop
talking. Anything to keep us from turning him over to the big bad nasties of the Mossad.”

“Well, we got lucky. We wouldn’t have had time to break him by conventional means.”

Lloyd was leading Dean through the twists and turns of some back passageways, ending in a darkened room where two more CIA officers sat with recording equipment, watching the interrogation through a soundproofed glass window. In the brightly lit room there, Koch sat at a small table, his interrogator opposite with a pen and an open notebook. Koch no doubt guessed that the mirror was a oneway window; it didn’t matter. He seemed to be only too eager to cooperate.

“Yeah,” Lloyd said, nodding. “Ever since Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, we have to be
nice
when we interrogate the bastards. Read them their rights. Ask them ‘pretty please.’ Takes forever, and the tough ones just laugh at us.”

Dean looked at him sharply. “You sound like you’re longing for the bad old days of waterboarding and electric shock.”

“Maybe I am. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the idea of torture any more than you do. It … it contaminates every organization, every person, who uses it. But how the hell do we break a man who might know where a bomb is planted, a bomb that might kill a dozen school kids … or a suitcase nuke that could incinerate the center of a fair-sized American city?”

“Torture doesn’t deliver reliable information,” Dean told him. “You know that. A prisoner will say anything,
anything
, to make the pain stop. That’s how the Inquisition ‘proved’ that Europe was overrun with witches who blighted crops, ate babies, and had sex with the devil. You need to use psychology, not torture.”

“Yeah, yeah. And with what for leverage? The bad guys
know
we’re not allowed to rough them up.”

“We seem to have done okay with Koch.”

“Sure … with you and the Russian guy pretending to be Mossad, and hinting that you didn’t have to follow the rules. He was practically begging to talk to us after that!”

The man on the other side of the one-way glass certainly seemed willing to talk freely. He’d been given a cigarette and appeared relaxed as he answered the interrogator’s questions.

“And when did you get your payoff, Lieutenant?” the interrogator was asking, the voices coming through over a speaker in the ceiling.

“It was in two payments,” Koch replied. “Half when I agreed to do this thing, half at Qurghonteppa, when I met the truck with the helicopter.”

“And how much were you paid?”

“Half a million euros. Half when I agreed, half when I made the pickup.”

“Why didn’t you take the money, fly back to Kabul, and turn in the shipment?”

“There was a man with me, a Pakistani. Don’t know his name. He flew with me all the way to Karachi. He was supposed to be my liaison here. They never said, but I knew he was also a … how do you say? A watchdog. To make sure I carried out my part of the deal.”

“Isn’t it true you were supposed to be paid even more money once you were in Karachi?”

Koch seemed to hesitate. “Well …”

“The Mossad has been tracking all of the financial trails in this case.”

“It is true. I was supposed to see a man at Jinnah this evening.”

“His name?”

As the questioning continued, Lloyd filled Dean in on what they’d learned already. “Koch was deserting from the German Air Force anyway. Seems he’s a member of a German Muslim group promoting jihad in Europe.
Der Volk auf Gott
.”

“He doesn’t quite look the Muslim type.”

“The VaG is radically anti-Semitic, though they’re careful about the invective for obvious reasons. It’s popular with the more radical flavor of Islamic immigrants in Germany, and is apparently picking up converts among the good, pure Aryan types as well. Especially in the teenaged population. Koch joined eight years ago, while he was in college in Berlin.”

Germany, Dean had heard, possessed the fastest-growing Muslim population in Europe, and at least some of that explosive growth was linked with lingering anti-Semitic prejudices submerged since the Nazi
Götterdämmerung
of 1945.

“So Koch is a Muslim convert?”

“At least in name. The VaG started off as a radical skinhead group in the eighties. More into social protest and riots than worshipping God. In any case, Koch was also planning on deserting from the air force. Apparently a Muslim buddy in Kabul knew that, and got him in touch with the Army of Mohammad in Afghanistan. We’re getting a lot of leads there. We’ll be following them up for a long time to come.”

“So he wasn’t planning on flying back to Kabul.”

“Nope.”

“What was he going to do with that helicopter?”

“Abandon it at Jinnah. The Luftwaffe will be treating it as theft of government property on top of desertion.”

“So they’ll be taking an interest in our friend there.”

“Oh, yes. Big-time. They have people flying into Karachi tomorrow to take him back to Germany for court-martial.”

“Does he know that yet?”

Lloyd shrugged. “I don’t know. We promised not to turn him over to the Mossad, and that’s all he’s been concerned about so far. He hates Jews and is terrified of the Israeli intelligence service. Almost paranoid.”

Dean nodded. Rubens had sent him a file on Koch before sending him to find the man. Apparently, Koch’s anti-Semitism and his pre-military membership in the skinhead gang had been well known back in Germany. There’d even been an entry describing his conviction that Mossad agents had infiltrated the German Luftwaffe.

It had been Dean who’d suggested using the Mossad ploy to pick him up, and perhaps convince him to cooperate. With the black hair and olive skin dye from the Tajikistan deployment, he could easily pass as a Sabra, a native-born Israeli. Mossad had a rep worldwide for being thorough, professional, and as ruthless as they needed to be when it came to preserving their tiny nation wedged in between the sea and nations still determined, after more than sixty years, to exterminate them.

“Are you sure you never knew what was in those containers?” the interrogator was demanding.

“They never told me, I never asked,” Koch replied.

“Weren’t you curious?”

A shrug. “It was my ticket out of the Luftwaffe, that’s all. They were paying me to make a delivery.”

“Three-quarters of a million euros is an expensive delivery.”

“It wasn’t my business to know. I just wanted out of fucking Afghanistan.”

On the other side of the glass, Dean asked Lloyd, “Have you asked him about the shipment, about where it went?”

Lloyd nodded. “Several times. He says it was being taken to a ship at the waterfront. He didn’t know which one.”

“That squares with the intelligence we got from you people.”

“The
Yakutsk
, yes,” Lloyd said, nodding. “She left yesterday. Is the Navy going to intercept her?”

“That,” Dean told him, “depends on the political winds back home. They’d damned well better.”

Where
, Dean wondered,
do you draw the line? Ships at sea belonging to one nation should never be summarily boarded and searched by the military forces of another;
that
was a principle the United States had signed for in blood
. But what if you had good information that the ship carried stolen nuclear weapons, weapons that would be used against you or your allies, weapons that could kill millions?

Was
torture
ever justified?

Hard questions, and Dean knew he didn’t have the answers. He knew if Lloyd had tried to torture Koch, he would have stopped it if he could, and reported him back home.

Yet if the man knew where those nukes were …

“Okay,” Dean said. “Just so a full report gets back to my people.”

Rubens could deal with the ethics of information gathering.

No wonder, he thought, the various U.S. intelligence agencies preferred spy satellites over HUMINT, intelligence drawn from human contacts.

Satellites were
so
much more antiseptic.

HOTEL SOL
PUERTO NAOS
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
FRIDAY, 1543 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia DeFrancesca walked into the hotel lobby, a vast and brilliantly lit space of pillars, skylights, tropical plants, and marble floors. She’d checked into her room and unpacked an hour before and was ready for the next phase of her new assignment.

“Buenos tardes,”
she told the young man at the desk. Her Spanish was rusty but passable.

“
Sí
, Señorita Lau,” the man replied. “How can I help you?”

“You have, I believe, a guest here? A Señor Carlylse?”

“Yes, miss,” the man said, having checked his computer screen. The shift to English was effortless. “Is there a message?”

“Yes. Please tell him a Miss Diane Lau wishes to speak with him on a matter of
extreme
importance.” She thought a moment, then added, “Tell him it is about his book, and about his partner.”

That
ought to get a response from him
, she thought.

“I happen to know that Señor Carlylse is out of the hotel at the moment,” the man said, typing at his keyboard, “but I shall certainly see that he gets the message when he returns.”

“Mil gracias,”
she told him and handed him a five-euro tip.

She left the lobby by ascending a broad set of spiral steps, following a blaze of tropical light filtering down through the skylights. At the end of a long hallway, she walked through a set of glass doors and onto a pool deck.

Beyond the pool, a placid semicircle of aquamarine, she looked out over the far deeper and wilder blue of the ocean.

The west coast of La Palma faced the raw, powerful Atlantic. There were no beaches with tame, knee-high rollers surging up a golden sand shelf. The Hotel Sol was perched atop a cliff extending out over the ocean; from here, Lia looked down the black and rugged face of sheer basalt, a drop at least sixty feet high, directly into the surge and thunder of the ocean surf.

The waves breaking on the rocks below the hotel were easily fifteen and twenty feet high, and the thunder as they crashed into cascades of white spray physically assaulted her senses. Looking up, she stared into the western horizon, knowing that there was nothing but open ocean between La Palma and the coast of Florida, fully thirty-seven hundred miles distant.

North of the Hotel Sol, the town of Puerto Naos lay snuggled up to the ocean beyond a broad beach of black volcanic sand curving away from the rocky point. To the south, the land seemed to rise explosively from the water in sheer vertical cliffs of black rock. The land continued to rise steeply inland, culminating in the green-clad ruggedness of the island’s central spine, the Cumbre Vieja.

Those mountains running down the middle of the island loomed massive against the sky. They were oppressive, Lia thought, heavy, threatening to come sliding toward her, sweeping the sprawling hotel into the sea. The land looked alien, otherworldly, and raw, as if the entire island had only recently thrust itself above the seething surface of the ocean.

“Okay,” she said, leaning on the safety rail. “Carlylse isn’t here, you heard?”

“We heard, Lia,” Marie Telach told her.

“If you have a position for him, I can try to find him.”

“Our best guess is that al-Wawi hasn’t found him yet either,” Telach said. “No message intercepts to that effect, at any rate. We suggest that you stick with the original plan, and make contact when he returns to the hotel.”

“Any ideas on how al-Wawi is going to try to get to him?”