Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (28 page)

“I never doubted you. And never again call me on this number.” Matthews hung up and looked for his adversary. Hecker, too, had tired of the shouting match and huddled with his own people as well as some local cops.

Seeing he was outnumbered, Matthews decided to withdraw and return to the battle once Washington suspended Hecker. As he had recorded their fiery exchange, all he’d have to do was upload the voice file and count down the hours remaining in pathetic Samuel Hecker’s DEA career.

*  *  *  *  *

Joanie wasn’t certain why the MSS had moved her to Guangzhou yesterday, but she presumed it had something to do with Bob. At least they had fetched her bag from Auntie Por Har’s home, though the poor woman must be frantic with worry given that Joanie was whisked away at night and never heard from again. With no phone access, contacting Auntie to say she was all right wasn’t possible.

The new detention center wasn’t much worse than Mei Ling’s or Bert’s first-year college dorms, truth be told. The single bed sagged, the skinny pillow made her neck ache and the lighting was dim. But China could provide far worse accommodations for a prisoner. The modest upgrade in housing signaled what she’d suspected all along. No one was after her; this was about Bob. Not everything was rosy, however. The imbecile who picked up her clothes hadn’t bothered to visit the toilet. All her expensive skin care items and cosmetics were still gracing Auntie Por Har’s bathroom vanity. Nevertheless, she had on clean clothes for the first time in two days. The shower had a little water pressure so she removed the remaining fingerprint ink from her hands.

With no TV and a solitary James Patterson novel, Joanie had plenty of time to think. Since Monday, when they told her to check her email, she had kept the presence of mind to steer clear of the secured Safe-mail account. There was no doubt the MSS had filched her password. Her iPhone battery had also run out. She was incommunicado, quite an unusual sensation.

One of her principal disappointments lay in not receiving daily chat messages and emails from the children. Her number two regret was the inability to check up on Juanilla’s latest folly, or for that matter, Bob’s. He had fallen off the virtuous path at least once before, and she was damned if she would suffer the whispers and humiliation a second time.

Her husband’s Monday email had told her to stay calm and he’d work something out, but not to expect a visit until at least next week. There were a couple of code words in that message, too, but damned if she could remember what they meant.
Vacation
was good, so something positive was going to happen. What, she wasn’t sure.

Surprisingly, no one seemed interested in questioning her further. She’d seen her interrogators once when she was eating in the cafeteria under escort, which meant she was now in a Ministry of State Security building rather than with the police.

The experience was bearable, aside from being locked up by China’s espionage agency, cut off from her children and mother, and lacking her toiletries and helper. It gave her lots of time for silent contemplation. One of her prime questions was, why was she still with Bob after he’d cheated on her? It might have been almost two and a half years ago, but “once a cheater, always a cheater” was her motto. She’d managed to stop hating him, but was always on the lookout for a sign, a scent or a scrap of paper. Any proof he was being unfaithful, and he’d be out for good.

She’d kept slim, spent a lot of time on looking good and was better preserved than her European and American menopausal counterparts. If her husband had strayed, it certainly wasn’t because of any deficiency on her part. However, Bob had started out like that, screwing that Watermen woman even when Joanie was pregnant with Mei Ling. At least Bob had had the decency to marry her, although that turned out to be slim consolation given all the overseas travel. The State Department was full of divorced people, drunks and womanizers. She’d met them all and wondered if any of Bob’s colleagues pitied her or laughed behind her back as they did with so many other spouses.

Bob wasn’t a bad husband or father. Lord knew she had plenty of friends and acquaintances whose husbands were serial adulterers. Of course, their husbands tended to be either much wealthier or more handsome. Her mother often observed that those who married for money had to work to earn it. Bob was in no way, shape or form someone who got a free pass to cheat because he was rich, although he was still moderately attractive despite being over fifty.

The other big surprise in her quarter-century with Robert was that, for the first seventeen years of their union, she thought she was married to a US Foreign Service IT professional. Only in 2006 did she find out that his real job involved codebreaking and malicious software development. That Bob was a senior spy intrigued her and contributed to her decision to stay with him after her original divorce target date, Bert’s departure for college almost a year and a half ago.

After that woman Prentice so-and-so’s hideous death in 2012, Bob needed her support to survive the gossip spread by his putative friends in the embassy. And oh, did he worry about having enough to send the two children to college, graduate school and still have sufficient savings for them to retire on. The CIA pension was certainly a good one, worth at least US$140,000 per annum to start and inflation-indexed. But to collect it, you had to make it to retirement: fifty-five with thirty years’ service in Bob’s case.

But now? The murdered IT woman might have been dead over a year and a half, but the Bob Nolan-Lam Shao Yin union had been on life support for most of the previous three. Maybe it was time to restore conjugal relations to their lives. Bob treated her well both in public and at home, and seemed to adhere to his promise of fidelity. Of late, she couldn’t fault him for much at all.

*  *  *  *  *

Nolan logged onto his Agency email to drop his heart rate back under one hundred thirty beats per minute. Ee Ling kindly sent two maps, one in Chinese and one in English, marking police and military installations near to the Lam family’s ancestral duck farm. Nolan printed both and wondered how long it would take for copies to wend their way to Constantine.

He booked an overnight flight to Tokyo on Thursday under his Larson alias. If he used the Agency travel service, they’d want to know whom he was seeing. And since he wasn’t going to make an appointment to see Burns—that would surely have immediate repercussions in Singapore, starting with Constantine—he was better off going direct to preserve the element of surprise.

It was 4:30 p.m. and he was tired. He also needed to do several important things that shouldn’t be logged, videotaped or recorded in the embassy. “Millie, I’m exhausted. It will be a long night with the DOE nuclear crew working the port and the Spec Ops team on alert. I’m leaving here to grab a few hours of sleep before seeing what else needs to be done.”

“I need to know where we stand,” Millie said in a voice that carried at least three cubicles in all directions. The sound of typing ceased.

“I’m beat and I’m headed home. Let’s talk tomorrow.” He gathered his laptop and spare papers, pocketed the still unsigned passport and planted a chaste kiss on her forehead. Millie’s look was by turns disbelieving and betrayed. Nolan could take no more and walked toward the public elevators, waiting for the imprecations to follow. He used his key to call the elevator down. As the doors closed behind him, he realized the baggage of this short affair was gaining weight by the hour.

The elevator doors opened in the lobby, where citizens and visa seekers mingled with embassy staff and an out-of-breath Millie. “I’m serious! I want to talk this out tonight. I know you’re married, but you already said you and your wife aren’t sleeping together.” The Marine duty guard standing behind bulletproof glass pretended he hadn’t heard her comments through the microphone, but Nolan knew otherwise. The leatherneck held her in his peripheral vision and barely shook his head side to side, a gesture Nolan well understood.

“We have more important things to do right now. You need to get a handle on the rendition patterns and providers, and I—”

“I’m going to come see you when I have all there is to know about rendition flights in South Asia. Don’t you leave me standing in the street.” Millie was so upset he thought she might burst into tears.

Nolan wanted to hide as they drew more curious looks. “Email me first, then call or text to make certain I saw it. We both have to return to work. Goodbye.” By some miracle, she did not call after or follow as he left the building.

The taxi line was so long he ended up taking the bus, which took thirty minutes. He used the time to take photos of Ee Ling’s Guangdong police station printouts and email them to Mei Ling’s encrypted Safe-mail account. From what he could tell, no one followed him.

When he finally arrived at Watten Drive, he told Juanilla not to answer the door or the phone. He said he was taking a nap and later wanted to eat dinner up in the home office. A long shower washed away much of the tension. There were too many jobs outstanding for him to contemplate sleeping, with the Sri Lanka files commanding his immediate attention.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

GLOWING PORTRAYALS

TUESDAY MARCH 11, RANGOON, SINGAPORE

“Special Agent Ryder,” called out Sheldon Howard, one of the borrowed Department of Energy Fukushima inspectors.

“Yes, what is it?” Ryder was distracted, more interested in tracking the progress toward Hogwarts of the two
SS Bandana
crew members who had tried to flee custody. He assigned the Delta Force staff sergeants to guard them, authorizing them to shoot anyone who impeded their progress. Gonzalez’s calls had set his heart racing. Tony Johnson was one sick sonofabitch, but the man was good in a gunfight. Ryder could just imagine Johnson’s kicking the plywood shutters out of that second-story window, bringing the M-4 up and cutting loose before Teller’s gunmen knew what hit them. Damn!

“We’ve found a highly radioactive container on the
SS Bandana.
It’s buried, but we can dig it out in maybe an hour or so. What do you want us to do?” Howard felt exposed in nineteen different ways: being in Burma without a work visa, on a container ship with a hostile crew, surrounded by
Soldier of Fortune
–type armed men ostensibly guarding him—and to top it all, they were looking for U-235 in unknown quantities, protected by a suit designed for exposure to 2,000 rad over ten minutes versus God-knew-what was in that forty-foot container. He couldn’t do much about the first items on the list, but he wasn’t dying of stupidity by walking into a metal coffin with uranium sitting in a cardboard box.

Ryder adopted his boss voice. “Evacuate everyone from that ship, unload the other containers and drop the hot one down at the end of the dock away from everything else. Knock the seals off and tell us what’s in there.”

“But if the radiation is strong enough, these suits won’t protect us.”

“If you don’t want to go in there, I’ll put on a suit and do it myself.”

“Thank you! That’s what I was going to suggest. I’ll let you know when the contaminated container is on the dock.”

“Fuck.”

Sheldon Howard was 5’11” and weighed one hundred forty pounds soaking wet, his body type tending toward pear-shaped. His decontamination suit fit him like a glove. Ryder was three inches shorter, twenty pounds heavier and had a body shape most frequently found on wrestlers and cheese wedges. The suit barely zipped up. Ryder figured as long as he could see through the visor and read the Geiger counter then he was good.

“Cut off the lock. I’m ready.” Two Rangers stood on either side, primed for al Qaeda suicide bombers to come storming out.

Will Tanner, a retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant of legendary strength, knelt and clipped that hardened alloy shackle like he was pinching off a hangnail. Lock discarded, Tanner lifted the locking rod on the container door and stepped back, bringing up over his head the sawed-off 12-gauge that had been sitting in a scabbard hanging between his shoulder blades.

They waited a minute, then another. Ryder was satisfied and silently waved them off with his Glock. It took another twenty seconds for the Spec Ops crew to cat foot it behind the invisible safety barrier set by the DOE technicians sixty yards down the dock.

Ryder swung the container door open three feet, shining a light while leveling his Glock as he followed the beam. Near the door was a large forklift, and behind it were sandbags stacked head-high across the width of the container. It looked like the top of a six-foot-tall packing crate was poking over the bags. The rest of the container was a mystery, but no one was inside and a quick look with the light didn’t reveal any tripwires.

Ryder stepped back and consulted the nuclear detection gizmo lent to him by Howard. A chorus of clicks that sounded like the maracas from Hell’s own rhythm section emanated from it. His light showed the needle bouncing around the three o’clock mark on the dial. “It’s 3,400 rad!” he shouted down the dock.

“3,400? Close the door! Get out of there!” Howard, sans suit, was sprinting down the dock. “Run! Run!”

Ryder leaned against the heavy steel door, eased it closed and ran faster than he thought possible. He passed Howard and arrived at the other end in record time for a man with no knee cartilage. Howard trailed him, shooing everyone else even farther away.

“Am I a dead man?” Ryder gasped.

“Maybe,” came Howard’s reply. “Let’s see the rad count, and we need to take you to a hospital, but first we have to clean your suit so you don’t contaminate the rest of us.”

“
Hospital?
I hate needles. Keep me away from hospitals.” Ryder felt weak and sat down. “Do the cleanup now. I’ve got to get out of this suit: I can’t feel my nuts.”

*  *  *  *  *

Nolan split his time in the home office between two tasks: the final doctoring of Watermen’s Fourth Policy files—the special FSB edition—and prepping for the Sri Lanka trip. For breaks he checked the Safe-mail account every half hour for family updates.