Deep Ice (22 page)
Sarah was still a little sceptical, but all this did was increase his certainty. “I told you before that if I ever saw them again I’d know them. I remember specifically the big one’s moustache.”
Enrique listened with great interest, then told them he’d been alerted to watch for suspicious types hanging around the hotel. Then, to Henry and Sarah’s surprise, he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out two small automatic pistols. He handed them back to Henry through the window.
“These are for you, Sir Henry, Miss Sarah. Do you know how to use them? Be very careful to keep the red dot showing on the safety switch.”
Dumbfounded, Sarah looked at her gun for a moment before putting it in her bag. “A souvenir of our romantic trip to Chile. How nice.”
“Well, shit,” said Henry, “I was going to ask you how I could get a gun.”
“
No problema
,” said Enrique with a broad grin.
As the limo cruised aimlessly along the boulevard, Henry and Sarah sat wordlessly watching the passing shops and businesses. Henry slipped the little gun into his inside jacket pocket after double-checking the safety. “Now we’re at war again.”
“I guess it was just a matter of time,” said Sarah. “I still think the odds are that whoever it was who shot you is thousands of miles away.”
Enrique, listening, was overly aware that he hadn’t been altogether straightforward about his role. As an intelligence officer with the Chilean military, he’d been trained to keep a low profile at all times. It was necessary to maintain security.
“I believe I told you I was trained to protect you, Sir Henry,” he interrupted. “As President Frei’s driver, I am prepared to protect my passengers with my life. I am also part of Chile’s military intelligence. Like your CIA, you might say.”
Henry nodded. “Makes sense, I guess. Silly me. I was feeling like a typical tourist for a while there.”
Sarah didn’t comment. She stared out the window, obviously in deep thought.
Enrique broke the silence again. “Tell me about these men you saw, Sir Henry.”
“Gee, Enrique, it was only for a split second. I didn’t really have time to study them. Maybe it was the guy’s red moustache that tipped me off – but it was the other guy, the slick one, who spooked me.”
“ ‘
Slick
’?” said Enrique.
“Yeah,” answered Henry. “You know, slick – smooth. Like he was, I don’t know, the man in charge or something.”
“I think I understand,” said Enrique, picking up the phone. “I must report this.”
#
That evening Hayes got a call from President Frei’s chief of security, who suggested he record the call.
Hayes listened as the man played an audio tape of Henry and Enrique’s conversation in the limo. When it was finished, the man on the line made no comment other than to say that he was just passing the information along.
Hayes thanked him and hung up. He stared at the wall map and considered the possibility that Grimes had been right all along. Yet the general also agreed with what he’d heard Sarah say – that the odds were astronomically against their running into Suarez like that. He didn’t want to cause an unnecessary scramble of military security around the lovebirds.
He called Grimes to his office and played back the call. Grimes smiled as he listened to the conversation in the limousine, but said nothing.
When it was done the general just puffed on his cigar and waited for Grimes to comment. Finally Hayes said, “Come on, Kai, there’s no reason to keep a tight lip. What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing much, sir. I was just thinking that our hero is starting to get an education. I was hoping he’d nab the guy somehow – without getting himself killed, preferably.”
“You’re over my head there, Kai. But I won’t ask for an explanation. I’m not sure I want to hear it anyway, although I do wonder sometimes what the hell’s going on in that mercenary head of yours.”
Grimes sat down and took out a pack of cigarettes. “I wouldn’t trouble myself about that, sir. Nothing up there but a smile of frustration and a lot of suspicions.”
“Suspicions?”
“Oh, not about Gibbs. About our man Suarez being closer than we think.”
“I’ve been checking the records at the local institutions with regards to the Suarez fortune,” said Hayes. “You know, to see if we could target any transactions that might have links to terrorism, atomic materials, or even drilling equipment. On the last one we found plenty, but it could all be explained innocently. The man’s family is knee-deep in wine and in oil development. Nothing overtly suspicious about finding purchases of equipment for drilling.”
Hayes sucked on his cigar thoughtful y before continuing.
“We’ve been looking into the loss of a helicopter off Tierra Del Fuego, but it seems like a typical accident – nothing to pin it to Antarctica.”
“At least we know Suarez
could
be involved. That’s something.”
“Not much of a something,” replied Hayes. “I did some checking with the help of the Chilean intelligence community to see if Suarez could be located and if he’d done any business in Santiago within the last few days.”
“And?”
“Nothing. We think he’s in Chile, but that’s all we’ve got.”
#
Rudolfo Suarez had enough power and money to assume several identities. Except among his men he was in Santiago as Daoud Fasad, a wealthy investment broker from Cairo. At the airport and to customs officials he was Giantonio Frazetti, a manufacturer of mining and drilling equipment.
Today, Fasad and Frazetti were both doing business at the Moneda, setting into motion his convoluted plan to begin the dissemination of five billion US dollars in ransom. He’d arranged for the money to be rolled over into stock, sold again as commodities, and ultimately turned into interest in Kimberly gold shares. When the money came, it would be diluted into the fabric of world finance so quickly that only Suarez and his personal computer could ever find it again.
The money was to be given by the government first to private corporations, and then shunted to institutions instructed to rol the wealth over. Each piece of the million-pieced puzzle would then be scattergunned on to yet other institutions. There it would become cash or bearer bonds or even diamonds or gold bullion. A series of three further exchanges with the same physical- mathematical shifts would finally have the effect of dissolving the money into thin air.
Suarez and his men would be the ultimate benefactors, of course, and the world would still be given a new coastline. After all, no use leaving heaps of plutonium sitting around with fingerprints all over it. Suarez knew that materials experts these days could trace anything to anyone.
Much as he hated to think that some of his favourite haunts in coastal cities would be flooded, things wouldn’t be all that bad. After all, the human herd would be cul ed a bit. Everyone agreed that would be a good thing – the world was, after all, grossly overpopulated.
Most important of all, while people were feeling sorry for themselves, Suarez could quietly become the richest real-estate investor in human history.
Eight
Despite their surveillance efforts near the Modena, they failed to spot Rudolfo Suarez. No one under that name had done any recent business in Chile, let along Santiago. Hayes had alerted the troops, and they had combed the area for the suspect. He felt satisfied that, even if they had nothing to show for the exercise, it had been a good exercise nonetheless.
The fact that the Naval Intelligence operatives had been looking in the wrong direction when Gibbs and French had left the hotel bothered him, but it wouldn’t happen again. He’d reamed each of them a new asshole – at least as well as he could from a desk over 150 miles away. It didn’t matter. Even if there was a danger, in a few days he’d have the lovebirds back aboard the
Big E
, safe and sound. Gibbs could identify Suarez just as well from a digital surveillance photo taken by professionals. Best to keep him out of harm’s way, so he’d be sure to be on hand and ready to do his single task – finger Suarez.
The general’s ear hurt. He’d been on the phone the whole day. His stomach grumbled ominously. He looked at his watch.
It was seven in the evening, and he had agreed to have a bite with Captain Halsey in the latter’s office. As a favour to the captain, one of the cooks had mastered the art of Thai cooking. They were going to have some pork satay, done the way Halsey loved it – extra spicy.
Hayes closed the book of documents on his desk, picked up the phone again and called Grimes. If they were going to talk logistics, he’d better have someone on hand who could think like a terrorist, even though dining with Grimes often cost him his appetite. The SEAL had some gruesome tales he enjoyed telling after a few too many beers.
The weather had turned sour and the sea was proving to be a test for even the
Enterprise
. She was an all-weather animal, capable of launching her aircraft under most conditions, but this storm was churning up forty-foot waves; too risky for the most hardened duty.
No need to go beyond acceptable risk when you’re just practising. There are times when even the toughest fighters have to keep their heads down.
The
Enterprise
was holding anchor and facing into the wind. Hayes could feel the waves rolling under the ship as he walked the corridors. A group of sailors, soaked to the skin, came bouncing down a circular stairway. As they brushed past him one of them said “Sorry sir” even as his wet gear wiped against the general’s shirt.
Hayes could feel the chill of the outside swirl around him.
“Cold topside, sailor?”
“It’s a bitch, sir,” said the man. “Grab your slicker if you’re headed up there.”
“Not kicking and screaming,” muttered the general as he tried to picture what it must be like on a flat top in a gale. With nothing to stop the wind and nothing to stop a body from flying off the deck, it must be suicide up there. But he remembered Halsey saying they operated in all weather. Obviously those men hadn’t been on deck playing vol eyball.
“Jesus,” he said. “Glad I’m Army.”
He could smell the Thai food even before he opened the captain’s stateroom door, and as he stepped into the cabin the waft of shrimp and spices nearly floored him. Frank Chi, the
Big E
’s master chef, was standing at the captain’s desk, stirring shrimp in a wok with one hand while tending to skewered pieces of pork on an electric hibachi with the other. Halsey was standing next to him, inspecting every move Chi made.
As Hayes shut the door, Halsey looked up and waved a hand. “Check this out, General. I love this shit. Go ahead. Smell that pot of sauce – peanut butter, ginger. Ahhhh!”
“I’ve been smelling the stuff all the way from my office.” Hayes removed his cap and hung it on a rack.
“Aren’t you worried about your staff invading this place and stealing all the food?”
“Not in this weather,” said Halsey with a hearty laugh. “Besides, that would be mutiny. I’d have ’em strung up on the yardarms.”
Grimes was seated in a chair watching the process. He hailed Hayes with a casual salute, then eyed the captain. “You don’t have a yardarm on this tub, sir. I’d suggest blasting ’em out of a few CM tubes.”
The captain laughed again. “And, I guess, with a cruise missile up their ass as well ?”
Without waiting for an answer, he pointed at Grimes.
“I like this war dog of yours, Tony. The man is mean. Plain
mean
.”
“That right?” said Hayes as he went to the desk and peered into the wok. “Dangerous, I’d say, but never mean. When do we eat?”
“You’re right on time, sir,” said the chef. “Grab a bowl and help yourself to the rice.”
Gradually formalities were put aside. The group acted as if they were at a Thai restaurant, military behaviour taking a back seat to plain old cronyism. But no one had forgotten why they were here. They ate heartily, then finished the meal with fortune cookies and a bottle of sake that Chi had scared up from somewhere. Strangely, the mere act of reading the fortunes brought a sombre mood to the room. The SEAL smashed the cookie in his fist and picked up the slip of paper. “You will die a slow and painful death.”
He laughed as everyone in the room said, “
What?
”
“Just my little joke.”
The fortune-cookie ritual ended and the mood deepened as everyone thought about the situation.
Grimes looked around. “It couldn’t have been
that
bad a joke. Lighten up, fer Chrissake!”
Halsey poured himself another cup of tea and looked at Hayes. “There’s coffee, too, Tony.”
“That’d be great, Brad.” He offered Halsey one of his Cuban Especials.
The captain lit it greedily.
Grimes refused the cigar with his patented sloppy salute. “Got my own, thanks. So, General, what’s the word from Santiago?”
“Well, Gibbs
thinks
he might have seen the man Suarez.”
“Heard that,” retorted Grimes. “What’s new?”
“Nothing from our MP. And nothing from Frei’s boys. In a word. . .”
“Nada,” said the SEAL.
Halsey commented that he really didn’t know Gibbs and, as far as he could tell, no one else did either. But Hayes saw where the captain’s suspicions were going and shook his head. “The man is a loner, but he lost his wife, kids – all the family – in a boating accident. The poor guy lost
everything
. Shit, even the family dog went down with the ship.”
“Christ,” said Halsey. “I didn’t know that.”
“We checked him out while he was flat in a hospital bed. And I’ve spent some time with him. He’s clean as a. . .”
“. . . hero,” said Grimes.
The captain thought for a moment, considering Henry’s plight. “I think I’d be a loner too, if that had happened to me.” He shook his head. “That being the case, I’m not so jealous of his vacation in Santiago. I’d say he more than deserves it.” He changed the subject.
“Tell me about the nukes. How many bombs do you think the terrorists planted?”
“Their manifesto alluded to at least two, but we think there might be three,” said Hayes. “I doubt they could get enough fissionable plutonium for more.”
“Golly, what a relief that is, General,” Grimes remarked.
Hayes ignored the man’s sarcasm and forged on with his impromptu assessment.
“We got a trace on at least two more. But apparently the terrorists knew we could detect the stuff from orbit, so they did a zigzag path across the ice shelf leaving small nuclear tracers everywhere. Not enough to be a biohazard, you understand, but enough to provide the same trace as a shielded nuke buried five hundred feet beneath.”
“Smart,” said Grimes, belting down another small cup of tea.
The general stared for a moment at the SEAL without expression. “This has been a real headache for NASA. The DOD satellites that check for nukes don’t fly polar orbits. We had to redirect one, and it’s taking time. We’re just now starting to plot the targets, and NASA is readying a launch accordingly.”
“Why bother if you already have one?” asked Halsey.
“Because the one that’s up there isn’t sensitive enough to tell the real thing from the decoys.”
“Is it
possible
to do that?” said Grimes, finally getting interested in the discussion.
“Sure it is, Kai. It just takes a dedicated system. And the one they’re sending up will have a high-definition radar mapper attached to it. We should be able to correlate the positions of the bombs with the radioactive traces and separate out the decoys.”
“Interesting,” commented Halsey.
“How about another sake?” said Grimes. “A salute to the boys at NASA for sorting that one out.”
“So that’s what you’ve been drinking,” said Hayes with a laugh. “Sure you haven’t had enough, Kai?”
“You thought I was drinking
tea
?” said Grimes.
Halsey went to the intercom and asked his first mate in the conning tower for a weather report. Grimes and Hayes knew the party was over.
#
Before the storm had hit the coast, Enrique had taken Henry and Sarah to a military area outside Santiago so they could try out their weapons. After some discussion Henry admitted he hadn’t fired a handgun in years; the last time had been when his father-in-law had shown off his war trophy from World War II, a Beretta he’d taken from an Italian officer.
In the limousine driving back to the hotel, Henry’s mood became strangely ominous. As he and Sarah had stood side-by-side and shot at bottles, he had felt like he was back in the embrace of the military. They’d used up nearly a whole box of 9mm ammunition before they’d quit, and Sarah was clearly a better shot than he was. He wondered if it was her superiority with the pistol that had him in such a dark mood. But, looking at the sky over Santiago, he realized that the culprit was the weather. Still, he knew that everything had changed since he’d seen that man in the street.
He put an arm around Sarah. “How’re you doing?”
“Kinda down,” she said. “I think we’re in for a storm.”
When they got to the hotel it was raining. In spite of this, a sizeable group of bellhops rushed to open the door of the limo and stood in the downpour holding the door while Enrique handed Henry a package. “To clean the weapon, Sir Henry,” he said. “And some extra clips of ammunition.”
Sarah took the package and stuffed it into her bag, next to the laptop. Reminded of her computer, Henry waited until they’d got to their room and then asked her to bring up the picture of Suarez she’d filed on its hard drive.
When she had it on-screen, she slid the computer over to him, walked to the window and looked out at the rain. “Let’s eat at the hotel tonight.”
He stared at the face on the screen. It was a corporate portrait. Suarez had been groomed for the photo and, no doubt, the image had been retouched. Henry tried to connect the face to the person he’d seen on the ice and glimpsed on the street. Finally he just hung his head in frustration and let out a massive sigh.
Sarah glanced back at him. “Is that the guy you saw?”
“I’d have to look into his eyes. That’s the only way I can make him.”
“But
could
it be him?” She sat down next to Henry.
He didn’t answer, simply stared at the screen, shaking his head.
Sarah unwrapped the brown paper package Enrique had given them. She found a gun-cleaning kit and instructions for disassembling and cleaning the guns.
“This should be a new experience,” she said. “Come on, Henry – let’s play soldiers.”
A half-hour later the room reeked of solvent. The two of them sat at the table appreciating their weapons, all shiny and clean.
Sarah picked up one of the guns and fumbled with a clip full of bullets.
“Careful, darling,” said Henry. “Just slide the thing in ’til it clicks. Then – pointing it away from either of us – pul back the slider on the top of the gun. Make sure the safety’s on. . .”
“Henry! I know what the hell I’m doing here, okay?”
He was still wearing a leather jacket he’d bought that morning when the weather had turned colder. He picked up the gun, which he now ostentatiously called his “piece”, and slipped it neatly into an inside pocket. Then he stood up, patted his chest and looked in a mirror.
“Not even a lump. Not bad.”
After loading her gun and setting the safety, Sarah put it back on the table and looked at him. “It must be a guy thing.”
“What?”
“You’re really enjoying that gun, aren’t you?”
Henry didn’t know exactly how to respond. The plain truth was that having the weapon in his pocket
did
appeal to him. It made him feel safer to be armed, but he had to admit it also gave him a slight thrill. He remembered the Red Ryder BB gun of his boyhood, and the fast-draw pellet gun he’d owned when he was sixteen. He remembered practising the fast-draw, and his satisfaction when he’d managed to get his speed down to a quarter-second. That was fast. As fast as anybody he’d heard of, including Hugh O’Brien, TV’s Wyatt Earp, who was rumoured to be the fastest gun in Hollywood.
“I never owned a real gun,” he said, almost defensively. “But, no, I’m not enjoying it.”
“Yes you are. And it
is
a guy thing.”
He wasn’t in the mood to argue. He’d put his interest in guns to bed long ago, when he’d realized that the fast draw was about as useless a skill as could be imagined, but he couldn’t hope to convince Sarah of that.
“You say you want to try the hotel food?” he said.
“Sounds good to me.”
She smiled. “You know, Henry, I
like
the fact that you’re a guy.”
He walked over to where she sat on the sofa and knelt before her. “You do, do you? I know what else you like, too.”
“And what might that be?”
He slowly lifted her long skirt above her knees, then slid it up to her hips. A moment later Sarah’s soft screams of delight echoed through the suite.
#
The restaurant was festooned with plants, most of them in flower, and the twinkling lights that dotted the black ceiling made it seem as if they were on a patio under the stars. For the two of them it was one of those evenings that they knew, as they lived it, would always be a cherished memory. Their time together had been long enough for each of them to tell they’d found that special person, that mythic someone, who was their perfect match.
