The Dark Hour (3 page)

She was not, however, the sort to accept charity, hence the anonymous gift, and before she was even finished, he was back at his desk, adjusting the volume on his scanner, listening to the officers at the scene of Senator Grogan’s murder. They’d made an arrest, and were now directing the CSIs on what they wanted cordoned off, then processed.

Griffin expected the FBI would be looking into the investigation, due to the top secret clearance Grogan had involving national security. And sure enough, about five minutes later, as Marlene knocked on his open door, he heard one of the officers asking for the FBI’s ETA. She crossed the room to his desk, carrying a packet of papers. If she’d seen the envelope, she gave no sign. “The security plans for the upcoming global summit haven’t come in, but I made you three sets of your briefing on the stolen AUV for your meeting this morning.” She handed Griffin the packet, then tapped his phone. “And you might want to turn your ringer back on. There’s a call holding for you on line one from Amsterdam.”

As he reached over to switch off the scanner, she leaned down and kissed him on his cheek.

“Thanks,” she told him. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, trying not to notice the shimmer in her eyes. He picked up the phone, saying, “Griffin.”

“Zachary Griffin?”

He didn’t recognize the woman’s voice. “Yes.”

“My name is Petra Meijer. I think you know my uncle, Faas Meijer.”

It took a few seconds for the name to sink in. Faas Meijer was an old informant, one he’d not heard from for quite some time.

Two years, in fact.

His gaze flicked over to a framed photo on his bookcase, one of Griffin and his late wife, Becca, skiing in Gstaad six months before she’d left him. A year later she’d been killed in an operation she and Griffin had worked together. It was Faas who’d provided the needed intel to Becca that had sent the two of them on that fateful mission.

“How is he?” Griffin asked carefully, wondering not only why Faas would be using his niece as a go-between, but why the man would even be trying to contact him.

“He’s fine, thank you,” Petra replied. “He asked me to inform you that he recently received something you’d be interested in. His expertise is in small antiques at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.”

“I remember.”

“His feeling was that this would be . . . something you’d want to see in person, something he felt you had been looking for the last couple of years. It might answer the who and why.”

Griffin stilled. Several seconds passed by, his grip on the phone so tight it was a wonder the thing didn’t snap. Then again, what if he’d heard wrong? It had been two years . . .

“Are you there?” the woman asked.

He shook himself. “Yes. Did he say anything else?”

“Just that you’d know what he meant. Oh, and that he was worried about other buyers finding it, and so wanted to meet as soon as possible.”

“I can be there tomorrow.”

“He won’t be able to meet you until after six when the museum closes.”

“That’ll be fine.”

She gave him her contact number, then disconnected. He dropped the phone into the cradle, sat there, replayed the conversation in his mind, going over each detail, trying to ascertain what wasn’t spoken, as well as what was. Two years. He’d been waiting for this information for two years . . .

“Zach?”

He drew his gaze from his late wife’s photo and saw Marlene watching him from the doorway. “Yes?”

“The stolen AUV? Your meeting’s about to start.”

He glanced up at the clock, unaware until that moment how much time had passed. His boss was expecting the report on MI5’s investigation of the
Amphitrite
, an autonomous underwater vehicle used for scientific expeditions that had been stolen from a British port. ATLAS had been called in due to the potential threat should the robotically controlled underwater vehicle fall into terrorist hands, and this report on the AUV was the first lead they’d had since it went missing a month ago. Not much to go on, he thought, taking it with him. He paused outside the partially closed door of McNiel’s office, checking to make sure he had the number of copies he needed. It was then he chanced to hear his name.

“Griffin’s not going to be happy if he figures out why you’re doing this.” The voice belonged to his partner, James “Tex” Dalton.

“Griffin doesn’t run this division. I do,” said their boss, Ron McNiel III, as the phone rang.

Not sure what had prompted the conversation—never mind that in this business, there was always something going on that wouldn’t make him happy—he knocked on the door.

McNiel answered the phone as he walked in. Tex was sitting in a chair opposite their boss, and with him was Marc di Luca, an agent they’d worked closely with in Italy a few weeks ago. Normally he wouldn’t think twice about Tex being holed up in McNiel’s office, if not for the oddly guilty look on Tex’s face and the bit of conversation he’d overheard.

McNiel thanked his caller, then hung up the phone. “They’ve confirmed the arrest on Senator Grogan’s shooter. That’s all we know. No clue if his murder is related to anything we’re working on, but the early reports indicate it to be an isolated event.”

“Isolated?” Tex said. “Ten bucks says that early reports are wrong.”

“We’ll let the investigation determine otherwise,” McNiel replied, always the voice of reason. He looked over at Griffin. “You have the report from MI5?”

Griffin handed each of them a copy, then took a seat. “Nothing definitive, because on the surface it appears that we’re dealing with ordinary pirates.”

“How so?”

“They’re basing their analysis on a tentative connection to a freighter that went missing a couple weeks before the
Amphitrite
was stolen. That and some pirate activity off the coast of Jamaica. We received a naval report about a couple of college students on an oceanic field trip who mentioned seeing a cargo ship in the area that matched the freighter’s description just before the students’ boat exploded. At first they thought it accidental, until they saw a motorized raft being driven by men with long guns coming from the direction of the freighter.”

“What’s the theory?” McNiel asked. “Using the freighter to transport the AUV to search for gold?”

Tex tossed his copy of the report on the table. “You don’t steal a long-haul freighter, sail it for two weeks to some godforsaken coast to look for sunken treasure. There’s enough of it at the bottom of the English Channel where the AUV was stolen from. What they were looking for was right there where those students were shot, and they sure as hell didn’t want witnesses.”

“I have to agree,” Griffin said. “The ocean floor drops off pretty deep out there. Which means we can’t rule out the use of the
Amphitrite
.”

McNiel pinned his gaze on di Luca. “We need to investigate this further. I want you in Jamaica, heading the dive team. Find out what the hell was going on out there.”

“Lucky me,” Marc said.

McNiel leaned back in his chair, a look of frustration on his face, one that was no doubt shared by every intelligence head in the alliance of nations that worked closely with ATLAS and the other U.S. intelligence agencies. The hypotheses from the various think tanks as to what might be achieved by someone who had possession of the AUV ran the gamut from piracy to spying on naval fleets to planting underwater explosives in order to take out entire ports. What the hell someone might need an AUV for in deep water channels, other than scientific exploring, had them stumped. “Let’s get moving on this.”

“I’ll check for satellite images,” Griffin said, then stood to leave.

“No,” McNiel said. “You won’t be assigned to that part of this investigation. I’d like you to accompany di Luca to Jamaica.”

Griffin stopped in his tracks, turned, eyed Tex, who once again refused to meet his gaze. Even Marc looked distinctly uncomfortable. “To Jamaica?” Griffin asked. “I thought you wanted me to head the global summit security team.”

“That was before Grogan’s murder,” McNiel replied.

“You just told us that his murder appears to be an isolated incident.”

“I said early reports seemed to indicate such. What I didn’t mention was a secondary MI5 report on the assassination attempt on a member of Parliament, who was also sitting on a committee to tighten port security. In fact, he used the growing threat of pirates as his impetus to increase funding for maritime security. Once Grogan heard that, he approached the Senate committee to reopen the LockeStarr investigation before the global summit started, intending to bring it up there to tighten security in international ports and shipping lanes, too. Rumor has it that was what his speech was about today, or would have been, had he finished it.”

Reopen
the LockeStarr investigation . . . “What was MI5’s analysis?”

“They believe the Black Network may have been behind the attempt.”

The Black Network was set up as a conduit for terrorism funding, arms trafficking, drug money laundering, sale of nuclear technology, and the bribery of public officials in order to infiltrate governments. They also specialized in the takeover of corporations that would further their goals. LockeStarr, a mega corporation with one of its many holdings involved in shipping port management, was believed to be one of the Network’s conglomerates, though no tangible link had ever been proven.

Griffin needed no proof.

Publicly, everyone believed that the LockeStarr investigation was merely about it being controlled by foreign investors, which was not the ideal solution for running U.S. ports. ATLAS and the CIA, however, knew different. Griffin’s wife had learned from her informant, Faas, that someone in the U.S. had tapped into and passed on the information containing every security measure and flaw of every U.S. port to the very company trying to take it over. She was killed following up a lead on LockeStarr.

That LockeStarr was the recipient of the stolen port data, Griffin had no doubt. The question the various intelligence agencies had never been able to settle on was why? If, as they suspected, LockeStarr was really a front company for the Black Network, it was for one of two scenarios, both favored by the Network: A false flag operation in which some Network terrorist activity on home soil was blamed on foreign terrorists. Or it was the sale of the information to the highest bidder, one who might be interested in knowing the weaknesses in port security that could be exploited for arms and drug running.

In either scenario, the Network had the same goal. To show that the various intel agencies and top governmental officials in the U.S. were incapable of dealing with the threats posed by other entities. Similar false flag operations run by the Network had allowed them to move their own people into positions of power when they’d come up with solutions to the problem or pointed the finger at those who allegedly had allowed such disasters to happen.

Unfortunately, after the death of Griffin’s wife, the port data had never been recovered, and the investigation quietly closed when no other evidence had been found linking LockeStarr to the theft or to the Network.

No wonder McNiel wanted him out of the way.

It also explained the guilty look Tex gave him earlier, and he glanced at the report on the missing AUV, his thoughts spinning. Senator Grogan’s murder, the phone call from Faas’s niece, and now this. “Has anyone tied in the
Amphitrite
with LockeStarr?”

“Obviously that’s one of the things you’ll be checking into on the Jamaica mission with di Luca. Tex will be heading the LockeStarr team from here.”

Normally Griffin would’ve been heading the team. His wife’s history with LockeStarr precluded that, and the conversation he’d overheard was suddenly very much in context. “I’ll get back to work, then,” he said, and left the room, ignoring the relieved look on McNiel’s face as he shut the door.

Work was the last thing on his mind. Back in his office, he sat at his desk, went over flight schedules on the computer, even as he wondered if the information from Faas’s niece was legitimate. The caller, Petra, had intimated that their meeting was time sensitive, whether because the source would disappear, or someone was watching Faas, Griffin didn’t know. If the latter, it also meant someone could be monitoring the Netherlands airports, and he decided that he’d take a red-eye into Brussels, then a train into Amsterdam. He wasn’t about to allow this lead to slip through his fingers should it be legit, and he most definitely wasn’t about to take chances should it be a setup.

Tex knocked at his door as Griffin was verifying his flight and train schedule. “Look, Griff. I would’ve said something earlier, but McNiel was worried about—well, the emotional toll.”

Griffin stared at his computer, mentally going over everything he needed to take care of before he left. Two years . . . He’d been looking for—

“Griff?”

It took him a moment to gather his thoughts, realize that Tex was talking to him. “Sorry. You were saying?”

Tex narrowed his gaze. “We were talking about LockeStarr.”

“I’m sure you’ll do an admirable job tying them into the Black Network without me.”

“You didn’t think that two years ago when McNiel pulled you from the case.”

“I have something else to occupy my time.”

“Bullshit. The only thing that would—” Tex suddenly turned, swung the door closed, then crossed the room, his look one of accusation. “There
is
nothing else. What have you heard?”

Griffin contemplated not saying a thing. But he knew he’d need someone on his side, and when it came to allies, there was none better than Tex. “Faas’s niece called.”

“I didn’t even know Faas had a niece.”

“Apparently he does.”

“Or someone wants you to think he does.”

“Trust me. I’ve thought of that. Bottom line is, Faas has some information for me.”

“The only reason this information would come out now is to lure you into the open. LockeStarr’s suddenly on our radar, and out of the blue, a sleeper agent contacts you? Hell. Not even a sleeper agent. His damned niece.”