Joshua`s Hammer (52 page)

M/V Margo West of Isla San Martin

"This is unit two standing by on schedule. This is unit two standing by on schedule, over." Green was on the radio telephone, obviously waiting for a reply. The crewman normally on the bridge with him had gone below to fetch more coffee. Green had spilled his on the deck. Captain Panagiotopolous had been on deck checking the helicopter. When he came back inside he spotted the crewman and asked why he wasn't on the bridge. He stood now in the shadows of the chartroom just aft of the bridge, watching and listening.

"Unit one, this is unit two standing by on schedule, over."

Green was not getting the reply he wanted, and he was becoming frustrated. Something made him turn around and he spotted the captain, his face falling almost comically.

"How long have you been standing there, sir?"

Panagiotopolous came out into the light. "Long enough to want to know what the hell you're up to. What's this unit one and unit two stuff?"

"It's a company code. I was trying to contact my father."

Panagiotopolous glanced at the SSB radio attached to the overhead. It wasn't set to any of the company's frequencies. "You're lying, Green. Now I want to know what's going on here!"

"It's your off-watch," Green snarled. "You should have stayed in your quarters instead of coming here." He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a pistol.

Panagiotopolous, surprisingly light on his feet, was across the bridge in two steps and he batted the gun out of Green's hand. "You little shit. Pulling a gun on me."

Green stepped back and tried to hit Panagiotopolous in the head with the radio telephone handset. But the captain had been in his share of barroom brawls during his long service as a merchant mariner, and he knew all the tricks. He ducked like a boxer, slipped the blow and shoved Green hard enough against the radar console that the breath was knocked out of the first officer. Nevertheless Green tried to fight back, but he was outweighed by at least seventy-five pounds. Panagiotopolous slammed him against the console again, this time knocking the fight out of him.

The portside door swung open and Schumatz came in. He looked from Green to the captain in surprise. "Do you need some help, Captain?"

"Green pulled a gun on me."

Green tried to say something, but Schumatz was across the bridge in a few strides and he knocked the first officer to the floor. "I told you that I didn't trust the sonofabitch." He looked up. "What was the little pissant trying to do, sabotage the helicopter?"

"No. He was up here trying to call someone on the SSB."

"My father," Green croaked from where he was crouched on the floor still clutching the phone.

"That'll be easy enough to check," the captain said. "I'll call the company."

"It's the middle of the night over there," Schumatz pointed out. "Maybe we should wait until morning."

Panagiotopolous turned back to Green. "Why did you pull a gun on me?"

Green looked away defiantly. The captain snatched the telephone from him.

"Unit one, this is unit two, go ahead." There was nothing but the soft hiss of a dead frequency. He hung up the phone. "Put him somewhere secure. I don't want him sneaking up on me tonight and slitting my throat."

"I'll put him in the dry storage locker in the galley," Schumatz said. "He won't be bothering anyone. I'll get his gun."

"Just get him out of here, I'll take care of the gun," Panagiotopolous said.

"Do you want me to send Rudi up?" Rudi Gunn was the second officer.

"He's scheduled to come on at midnight. I'll stay until then," Panagiotopolous said. He looked at Green. "See if you can get anything out of him, Lazlo. Something is going on around here that I can't quite put my finger on."

CIA Headquarters

"I don't think so, Liz," McGarvey said.

"I'm sorry, Dad, but I'm not leaving until you see my point," his daughter said. It was seven and they were alone in his office. He'd known that she was bringing trouble by the look in her eyes and the set of her shoulders. Girding herself for a battle.

Yet what she wanted to do went way beyond the pale of her duties as a CIA case officer, even in this instance in which she had so much personally at stake. Elizabeth had almost lost her life on the golf course. It was just luck that McGarvey had gotten there in time to spot the van heading out onto the fairway and recognize it for what it was. Just blind luck that he was there to break up what would have been a good hit. Both shooters had been heavily armed and both were well motivated. Since Elizabeth had been cut off from her weapon, she'd done the only thing left open to her, and that was to run. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do. The terrorists had herded her and her mother into a killing ground and would have finished the job if Liz hadn't gotten to her father's gun.

Now she wanted to step up to the plate again; deliberately put herself into harm's way. He was proud of her and angry with her at the same time. And vexed too. Goddamnit, nothing was ever simple. But she had a point and he knew it.

"I'm going to your mother's," he told her. "I need something to eat and a few hours' sleep. You can ride down with me to my car."

"Good, maybe Dick can talk to you--"

"This has nothing to do with my driver," McGarvey said. "You're an intelligence officer, not a Secret Service bodyguard."

"But I know her, Dad," Elizabeth said.

McGarvey stopped. He tried to work out where she could possibly have met the President's daughter. It was impossible, he told himself. They came from two different worlds.

"What are you talking about, Liz?" he asked her.

"I've been doing my homework on her and Sarah bin Laden," she replied. She looked away for a moment and shook her head. "We're all cut out of the same cloth, you know."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"It does! We're about the same age, our fathers are, for better or worse, important men and we all have handicaps. Sarah couldn't have any kind of a normal life because there was a price on her father's head and they were stuck in the mountains. Deborah has Down syndrome. And I--" Her lower lip quivered.

"And you what, Liz?"

She looked up into his face, searching, as if she was looking for an answer. "I want to be just like you, Dad. I want to follow in your footsteps, but I can't. I can't."

"There's nothing wrong with that, sweetheart."

"But I wanted it all my life," she said. "And now I'm falling in love with Todd, and he wants me to get out of the Company. My mother and father want me to quit. Somebody is trying to kill me. And I'm scared." She was appealing to her father for help that he could not give her. "But Sarah was scared too, and so would the President's daughter be If she knew what was going on. It's why I have to be with her until we stop the bastard."

"I can't."

"You have to, Dad. It's what we do for a living."

"The Secret Service is watching her. Twenty-four hours a day. She can't make a move without them seeing it."

"That's the difference. They're watching her. I want to go out there and be with her. She deserves at least that much from us, don't you think?"

McGarvey nodded after a long time, and he never suspected how much pain such a simple gesture could bring nun. "Take Todd with you, okay?"

"Okay."

New York City

"His name is Gordon Guthrie," Cheryl Cook said in the main saloon of Papa's Fancy. She was distraught. "But I don't know where he came from. England, maybe."

Jim Lane, NYPD gold shield detective, looked up from his notebook with interest. "Why do you think that it was this guy and not one of the crew, or maybe a burglar caught in the act?"

Cheryl had come down to New York to be with Captain Walker for a few days. They had been having an affair over the past six months, and although she knew that it would never come to anything, she did love him in a way. They were supposed to meet at the Plaza, but when he didn't show up she came over to see what was going on. She still couldn't believe what she had walked into. She looked over to where she had found his body. She could still smell the foul odor of his death lingering on the air.

"The captain got along real well with the crew, but Mr. Guthrie showing up all of a sudden was creepy."

"Creepy how?"

"We were in the middle of our annual haul-out when Mr. Richter, the owner, ordered us to drop everything and get up to Washington to meet him."

"What's so creepy about that?" Lane's partner, Nicole Nickles, asked.

Cheryl shivered. "Just the way he came aboard, smiling all the time. But there was something wrong with his eyes. Like he had X-ray vision, or something. Whenever he was around I felt like I wasn't wearing any clothes."

"Where'd he go?" Lane asked. The young woman had made the initial 911 call, and until the ME had taken a look at the body and found the probable cause of death, she'd been a chief suspect.

"The day after we got back from Bermuda he told us that he was done with the yacht for a couple of weeks. He packed up everything except the aluminum case and left."

"You already told us about that. But the case isn't on the boat now. Could he have come back and got it?"

"Anything's possible," she admitted. "But if you find him, you'll have the captain's murderer. I'd bet anything on it." She lowered her head and began to cry. "Damn."

Nicole put a hand on the girl's shoulder. "We'll find him.

Guaranteed," she said. "But we're going to need your help. Is that okay?"

Cheryl looked up and nodded.

"We're going to need a better description of him. You can work with a police artist to come up with a drawing of his face. And then you can look at some photographs. Are you up for that tonight?"

"Whatever it takes to catch him."

"Okay, just hang in there. We have a few things to take care of here, and then we'll drive you downtown."

The yacht was filled with evidence technicians who were going over everything with a fine-toothed comb. So far they hadn't come up with much except that the man identified as Guthrie had fine, light brown hair, which they found on the pillows in his cabin.

Lane turned back to the girl. "By the way, why did Captain Walker pick last night to check on the yacht?"

"I think Mr. Richter asked him to do it."

"Any idea why? I mean was this something that normally happened when the crew was away for a while?"

"Not often, but sometimes. Especially if there was a storm, or something like that."

Lane pocketed his notebook. This case wasn't going to be as open and shut as some of the ones they got. In fact he had a gut feeling that it wouldn't even be theirs for very long. He'd shared his feeling with Nicole and she agreed with him. A federally documented yacht just returned from a long trip outside the U.S. A suspect who might not be an American. An absentee owner. No apparent motive. And worst of all the lack of fingerprints. Ed Bowser, their chief evidence technician, said that they were finding only one set of fingerprints throughout the boat, plus a second set that was probably the young woman's confined to a few spots in the main saloon.

"If you want my best guess, I'd say that someone who knew what they were doing wiped down the entire boat. The prints we're finding will turn out to be the captain's."

"He came back to check on the empty boat, so what exactly did he check?" Lane asked.

"That's the best part Besides here in the saloon and up on the bridge, the only other area that we're finding prints are in the guest stateroom. And they're all over the place in there. Looks like the good captain came in, checked something on the bridge and then tossed the one cabin."

Looking for an aluminum case, Lane thought. He took Nicole aside. "Let's get a dog over here to sniff out what we might be missing."

"Drugs?"

"Could be," Lane said. "In the meantime I'm going to put what we have so far on the wire, see if Guthrie's name turns up anyplace else. And we'll get it over to the feds. Who knows, we might even catch a break."

Nicole chuckled. "Yeah, right."

CIA Headquarters

Rencke left his office a little before midnight and walked down the corridor to the bathroom surprised that everything was so quiet. When he was working he sometimes forgot about time. All that mattered was the job at hand. And so far he was coming up empty-handed and it puzzled him.

He had a half-dozen computer search programs going simultaneously, searching the Net and every database he could think of for a number of basic bits of information: bin Laden's whereabouts and movements, Ali Bahmad's whereabouts and movements and the bomb's whereabouts and movements, plus anomalies in the entire investigation. The bits and pieces that didn't seem to fit into any pattern; the stray telephone conversation, the odd satellite shot, the interrogation of a prisoner somewhere that turned up something that seemed out of place.

Anything. Anything at all.

Back in his office he telephoned Lieutenant Ritter at NSA. "Hiya, kiddo, anything new?"

"Nothing from the Rome exchange," she answered. "We're checking across the board with the vorep upgrades. If bin Laden talks to anybody by phone or radio we'll know about it."

"He's still holed up in Khartoum, or at least we think he is, so you can concentrate there," Rencke said, dismally. "What about the programs I gave you to use?" "Otto, if I'd gotten them from anybody but you, I'd have to say that they're worthless." She sounded just as frustrated as he did. "Whoever knows anything about the bomb, they're keeping quiet about it."

"Nothing out of Afghanistan, maybe Iran or Yemen, or even Saudi Arabia?"

"Zippo."

Rencke ran a hand across his eyes. "Anyway, thanks, Johanna. Keep on truckin'."

"One of them is bound to make a mistake somewhere. We'll catch up with them."

"Yeah," Rencke said, and he hung up. He sat back and closed his eyes, not even interested in having a Twinkie at the moment. Maybe he was losing his touch. Maybe he could no longer see the colors. Maybe he'd used up his edge. It happened to everybody sooner or later, even to McGarvey, or so the DO's gossip mill was saying.