The Elizabethan Secret (Lang Reilly Series Book 9) (5 page)

10.

Office of Naval Intelligence

Suitland Federal Center

4251 Suitland Road

Suitland Maryland

At The Same Time

(5:20 Local)

              The Office of Naval Intelligence, founded in 1882, is the oldest of the seventeen members of the so-called intelligence community. Unlike its cousin, the CIA, it does not have a massive campus but a modest (by government standards) building in a center shared by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency), the US Census Bureau and the National Records Center. Similar to its larger and better known co agency, it is organized into administrative, intelligence gathering and operations divisions. It was originally charged with “collecting and recording such naval information as may be useful to the Department (of the Navy) in time of war as well as peace. . .” Like all government agencies, bureaus and administrations, it has long since expanded its role.

              Which was the cause, if not the reason, Cincom (Commander in Chief) Admiral Adrene Puller was frowning over the decoded and translated version of an intercepted communication from the historic Imperial Russian Admiralty building in St. Petersburg now serving as headquarters for the present Russian navy. The message had been sent in
Fialk (m-125)
, a rotor code, a twenty-first century version of the German’s World War II
Enigma
machine.

              Happily for Admiral Puller, a Russian defector had swapped one of the machines for American sanctuary from prosecution for “corruption,” the usual crime of those deemed political enemies of the current Moscow regime. A day or so of tinkering and the Navy’s most talented hackers had retrofitted the device to receive messages with intended destinations such as the Russian Pacific, Baltic, Black Sea, or Atlantic Fleets. There had been speculation the man was a plant, the machine a device for dissemination of disinformation. But satellites had, so far, shown intercepted positioning orders had been followed to the predicted letter.

              Once in a while the blind hog really did find an acorn.

              But what Admiral Puller had in front of her wasn’t a positioning order. It was hardly a military communication at all. It was directed to the London embassy’s branch of Foreign Intelligence Service for the Russian Federation, one of the two agencies that had been the KGB.

              Nothing odd about that. The Russian Admiralty frequently communicated with the intelligence services.

              But this, if correctly decoded and translated, directed someone to attend an auction and buy “lot 228.”

              Admiral Puller was well aware that corruption and cronyism was rampant in Russian government, but to openly send someone to the world’s foremost auction house to buy an antique or a painting with government funds?

              Surely not.             

              There was knock at the door and a yeoman, the Admiral’s secretary, stuck his head in. “Commander Swift here to see you, mam.”

              “Show him in.” 

              Swift strode in, standing at attention before the admiral’s desk. Since cover was not worn indoors in most situations and the Navy saluted only when under cover, his hands remained at his sides.

              At thirty-six, Commander Straton Swift was the youngest head of ONI’s Ops division in memory. In any intelligence organization, successes in operations don’t go unnoticed but they do go unheralded. Only the President of the United States, Admiral Puller, and perhaps half a dozen others knew that it had been Swift who put together the intel resulting in the Panamanian government seizing a North Korean ship carrying Cuban weapons concealed under produce in January of this year. This was just one more of his accomplishments.

              Scuttlebutt had it the commander had a dark side, a habit of claiming credit belonging to others and a ruthlessness where advancement was concerned. Truth or jealousness of the Navy’s youngest commander?

              Or both?

              Puller could care less. If Swift could get the job done, his personal shortcomings were none of her concern.                     

              “At ease, Commander,” she said, pointing to a captain’s chair at the edge of her desk. “Give the deck a rest.”

              Puller was not one for banalities. She really wasn’t interested in the state of Swift’s health or that of his family. Besides, as only ONI’s second female cincom, she did not feel comfortable discussing her subordinates’ personal lives.

              She handed the intercept to Swift without further conversation. “What do you make of this?”

              Swift read the communication without expression or comment. Then he read it again.

              “
Fialk?
”

              She nodded.

              “It’s one of their top codes. Maybe ‘lot 228’ means something other than an item to be auctioned, perhaps a pre-planned action of some sort.”

              “That or simple disinformation.”

              He shook his head. “I don’t see how believing the Ivans are buying something at Christie’s does us any harm. Might be a test, though. If we start snooping round Christie’s, they know we have one of their machines.”

              “Christie’s is closed for the day, or, I should say night over there. One of our friends at MI6 will be on the doorstep when they open tomorrow to find out what lot 228 might be and who bought it.”

              “Let’s hope the Russian’s don’t have a plant who will let them know someone’s interested. If so, our
Fialk
rotor machine becomes so much junk.”

             
Was the commander implying she should
not
have made the inquiry?

             
If anything got the admiral’s temper up, it was some testosterone-juiced male with a superiority complex. She hadn’t spent the last twenty years of her life kissing men’s asses while busting her own climbing the chain of command to have some W
underkind
nearly young enough to be her son question her judgment.

              There was ice in her tone as she asked, “Perhaps, Commander, you have a different idea as to how to find out about the mysterious lot 228?”

              She intentionally asked about “different” rather than “better.”

              Among his many talents, Swift could detect the way the wind was blowing faster than any weather vane. “None whatsoever. May I inquire as to why the admiral’s interest in this, this lot, whatever it may be and why Ops is more suited than Intel to carry out the Admiral’s wishes to identify it?”

              “Because, Commander, this object has attracted the attention of the Russian navy’s higher ups. Ergo, we are interested. Depending on just what the item may be, I intend to be prepared to obtain it. That would be your job.”

11.

Outside Club Gascon

London

              A knife at her throat and an arm around her chest, Gurt was being forced backward.

              “Move and she dies,” snarled the man with the metallic dentures.

              The three new arrivals froze. Even had they been armed, Gurt would have provided a shield for the two thugs.

              She gave a nod, an almost imperceptible movement of the head that had meaning only for Lang.

              With Steel Tooth’s next step backward two things happened in concert:               Gurt went completely limp, forcing her captor to take a step forward to maintain his grip around her chest. An instant before his front foot touched the pavement, she lunged. His reflex was to react by snatching her backward. In the split second before he could regain complete equilibrium, Gurt used the shift in his weight to hook the toe of her shoe behind his ankle, sending him stumbling backward, his arms flailing the air for balance.

              In a single step, Lang gripped the hand holding the knife in both of his and a foot planted behind the man’s knees. Snatching violently down on the wrist sent the man into an involuntary back flip and the knife spinning across the puddle of light generated by street lights like a comet across the sky.
              Gurt was on her former assailant just as he thudded onto the unforgiving sidewalk, gasping for the breath the impact had taken away in a whoosh. A well-aimed kick to the groin doubled him into the fetal position and terminated any further interest in the affair he might have for the immediate future.

              Scar Face was not idle.

              In the instant his confederate went down, he took a step forward and, using his momentum, aimed a fist at Lang’s head. Had it landed, it would have sent the American sprawling at best if not to the nearest hospital.

              But it didn’t.

              Lang used his left arm to deflect the blow, leaving his opponent open for the roundhouse right to smash the man’s nose with the sound of a ripe squash hitting pavement. The pain sent Scar Face’s hands involuntarily flying to his face, making him completely vulnerable to the head butt to his solar plexus that doubled the big man over.

              Hands clasped, Lang brought them down on the back of the exposed neck like a headsman’s ax.

              Scar Face went to his knees just in time to receive a kick to the jaw that left him spitting blood laced with what had been teeth.

              He staggered to one knee, raised a hand as though to plead for mercy and soundlessly toppled over face down to join his companion on the sidewalk.

              From the moment of Gurt’s first move, less than five seconds had elapsed

              Lang was rubbing the knuckles of his right hand as he made sure neither antagonist presented an immediate threat. Looking up, he saw the disbelief on the faces on the trio from the restaurant. The woman’s mouth was open in a near perfect “O.”

              “You going to just stare or lock them up?” he asked. “I mean, you saw it: an attempted robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, battery etcetera, etcetera.”

              The woman looked from Lang to Gurt and back again as though faced with a pair of very angry cobras. “You,” she stuttered, “you could have killed them!”

              Gurt shook her head solemnly and said mater-of-factly, “No. Had we wanted to kill them, they would be dead.”

              A groan from Steel Tooth as he began to try to get up drew their attention.

              “No, that won’t be necessary,” the woman cop, Patricia Lundy, said hurriedly, extending a hand, stop. Gurt had put a foot on the man’s neck, mashing him to the ground.

              Lundy produced double Flex Cuffs and leaned over, cuffing Steel Tooth’s wrists behind his back. “Get the other lad, would you?” she asked one of the men. To the other, she said, “And call a pair of ambulances. I have a feeling these two sods are going to need medical attention.”

              Turning to face Lang, she said, “As for you two, I’ll need statements. You’ll need to come down to . . .”

              “What if we don’t choose to prosecute ?” Lang asked.

              “Not prosecute? You can’t do that. They not only tried to rob you . . .”

              “Look, officer: We’re Americans. We can’t stay here until these men come to trial. Besides, you saw what happened. You don’t need us as witnesses.” 

              Lundy nodded to her two male cohorts to take over for a moment while she stepped away and took her Motorola MTP6750 handset from a pocket. The device could have been mistaken for a cell phone but included a number of functions most cells did not have such as non-alterable, date marked photo capability. 

              “Patch me through to Inspector Patel. No, I don’t care what time it is or where he may be.”

              Seconds later, Patel’s voice came through. “Trouble, Inspector?”

              She told him what had happened, finishing with, “And I understand why you want this American, Reilly, under surveillance. Had we not been here, there would be two corpses. And the woman is as deadly as he is.”

              A brief chuckle. “As is often the case, Inspector. I’ll arrange to keep an eye on them until they are no longer London’s problem.”

              Lundy made no effort to hide her relief. She had apprehended robbers, even a couple of murderers, but being around these two was having kittens.

12.

63.746 Latitude

-68.516 Longitude

(What Is Now Known as Frobisher Bay)

July 2, 1578

              Martin Frobisher was as gloomy as the fog banks surrounding him on three sides as he pulled the shawl tighter around his shoulders.  He had lost the one hundred tonne barque
Dennis,
a victim of unpredictable winds and icebergs that appeared out of the mist like malevolent spirits. Most of her crew had been dragged from the frigid waters, but her cargo of gold-bearing soil had gone to the bottom. Fortunately, the remaining fourteen ships were safe and fully loaded.

              He was standing on the deck of the A
yde
, the largest in the flotilla that Good Queen Bess and a number of other investors had given him for a triple mission: Find the northwest passage that would allow British ships access to the treasures of the Orient, the same plan the Italian, Columbus, had when he stumbled upon the New World. Normal land trade routes had been blocked by the Ottomans since Constantinople’s fall over century ago. Establish a hundred-man colony to deny that passage to those who were competing for those treasures such as the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese and bring home as many chaldron of the gold-bearing soil back to England as his ships could carry.

              Once experiencing what passed for summer weather here, the proposed colonists had lost whatever enthusiasm they had for permanent residency; and, as freemen, rather than prisoners, there was no way to force them to remain short of putting them ashore to fend for themselves. Such action was neither in his royal commission nor in the subscription from private investors.

              On this, his third trip in as many years, he was facing an even greater disappointment. This body of water was actually a bay between two peninsulas, not a passage. The previous year, it had been blocked by solid ice, the reason Frobisher had sailed as late as June. Although cluttered with chunks of ice of sufficient size to cause serious peril, as the
Dennis
had discovered, navigation was possible, if hazardous, to the very end of the bay.

              If there was a Northwest Passage, this was not it.

              Evidence of danger lay in the caraque the
Gabrie
l
had discovered yesterday, its bones littering the shore along with the mummified remains of her crew. Apparently, the unfortunate French ship had become stuck in the ice, her timbers gradually crushed as the winter pack grew while her stranded crew starved or froze on desolate plains of snow covered ice. Frobisher had seen signs of cannibalism at similar sites. 

              He pulled the shawl of Scottish wool even tighter across his shoulders to ward off a chill not entirely due to the weather.

              A month into the voyage and the victuals were holding up. Weevils had already gotten into the biscuit. But then, the addition of the extra meat should be welcome since the boiled beef was turning green in the barrels of brine and would go off shortly. In his previous voyage, his three ships had carried live animals, beef and sheep, to slaughter for fresh meat but the cost to so provision fifteen vessels was more than his sponsors, royal and civilian, were willing to bear. And fish. It was a rare net dropped overboard that did not come back filled with slivering, squirming silver. Each ship already had enough fish salted away to last beyond the anticipated length of the voyage. 

              The daily ale ration, the most carefully planned store, should last, a gallon a man per day. The men might cheerfully fill their bellies on weevil-infested biscuit and slimy boiled beef but interrupt the ale ration and the crew would turn surly indeed.

              Not discovering the Northwest Passage on this voyage might be a disappointment but the gold-laden soil should assuage the anguish. That, plus the device the Queen’s messenger had personally handed him the day before all fifteen ships slipped their moorings at Plymouth and beat down the English Channel to the open Atlantic. The thing actually worked, made navigation possible when these northern latitudes sent the compass swinging wildly.

              He reached beneath the shawl and wool doublet into his shirt to pull out the round, gold case he wore on a cord around his neck. He smiled for the first time today. This, his queen’s gift to him, was more valuable than all the gold the chemists might find in the dirt he was taking back to England. Without it, his bones and those of his crew might be the ones scattered across the ice flow.