Cloak, page 38
“Our unofficial status on this didn’t exactly impress him,” Delgado said. “Anyway, Ross watched Angie for a month, keeping track of her computer usage and also getting to know her. He already had that Charles Sullivan identity from—well, you know—and used it to blur the paper trail in case someone tried tracking him down.”
“Such as officers of the San Jose Police Department?” Garcia asked pointedly.
“Yes, sir,” Delgado said, wincing. “At any rate, Ross concluded that Angie wasn’t the one we were looking for. We’d given Dr. Chandler the good news, and were gearing up for a more official investigation elsewhere when he and his colleagues were murdered.”
For a moment the word hung in the air like a black curtain. “Go on,” Lyman prompted.
“Detective Delgado called me and we went to the scene of the crime,” Talbot said. “The murders didn’t make sense to either of us—industrial thieves never go in for violence, especially not murder. Clearly, there was something else going on. The techs told us Angie had dropped by the lab that evening, and when I heard that she’d apparently taken off early that morning I wondered if Ross might have miscalled it. I was still tied up at the lab, so I called to see if he could intercept her at the bank.”
“And if she did show,” Ross added, “I was to take another stab at figuring out whether she was innocent or just a very good actress.”
“At which point the whole thing stops making even partial sense,” Lyman said. “Once the shooting started and you knew she was in the clear, why didn’t you bring her in?”
Ross made a face. “Because the mall shooting didn’t prove anything of the sort,” he said. “They might have been trying to kill her; but if she was working with them they might have been trying to shoot me off her back. I decided my best play was to act the brave maverick hero and see if she would try to lose me or buy me off.”
“Hence, giving her a few hours of alone time in a hotel room,” Talbot said.
“Right,” Ross said. “With a recorder going to see what she did with those hours.”
“Meanwhile, we know what the killers used the time for,” Lyman said sourly. “Gathering for round two.”
“Having conveniently gotten his tag from that damn sticky-note impression,” Garcia muttered, feeling his face warming. An incredibly boneheaded mistake, and that one had been all his.
To his annoyed surprise, Ross came to his rescue. “If it makes you feel any better, sir, that wasn’t how they found us. In fact, it turns out that stealing that note was an incredibly risky bit of uselessness. There was no way the gang could have canvassed the whole Bay Area that quickly, which implies they already knew where we were. Probably tailed us from Greenleaf Center.” He gestured at Lyman. “Though you’re right, they did need some time to pull their attack together. The point is that Angie didn’t call anyone while she was alone, which again strongly implied that that she was in the clear.”
“What if she’d simply walked out on you?” Lyman asked.
“For the first two hours after I left the room, I’d have followed her,” Ross said. “For the three hours after that, while I was out wardrobe shopping, Special Agent Talbot was watching from a room he’d rented down the hall from ours. Unfortunately, he’d already left by the time the attack came.”
“And when the dust settled you decided to go on a road trip?” Lyman asked.
“Angie said they’d been in Tahoe a few weeks earlier,” Ross said. “I thought Dr. Chandler might have left something behind. Detective Delgado used one of the department’s undercover cabs to help us get to the new vehicle I’d rented and we headed out.”
“I assume you didn’t find anything?” Lyman asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” Ross said. “At that point, having already watched the hotel recording, I decided it was time to tell Angie who I was and bring her back here.” He made a face. “Unfortunately, somewhere along the line she picked up that there was something wrong and spiked my dinner.”
“He called me the next day after he woke up,” Talbot said. “I got him another car, and he came back here to help us look for her.”
“And you know the rest,” Ross said.
“Why didn’t you come in right when you got back?” Garcia asked. “We could have put the manpower we were wasting looking for you into looking for her.”
“Maybe I should have,” Ross conceded. “But I assumed that anyone looking for me would also be looking for her, so that wouldn’t change things that much.” He hunched his shoulders. “Besides, I was the one who’d lost her. It was my job to fix that.”
“No, your job was to stay the hell out of the way,” Lyman growled. “Which you’re going to start doing as of right now.”
Ross looked sideways at Talbot. “Actually, I don’t think I can do that quite yet.”
“Oh?” Lyman asked, something very unpleasant lurking beneath the word. “Why not?”
“Because frankly, sir, you still need me,” Ross said evenly.
“Do I, now,” Lyman said darkly. “The way I see it, between lying to us and working behind our backs you’ve managed to waste four days of our lives. And with nothing to show for it.”
“That’s not entirely fair, sir,” Talbot said, a bit reproachfully. “For one thing, we have one of the Cloaks back. We also know that the group is small, a dozen people at the most.”
“How do you figure that?” Garcia asked.
“Because the man I ran into in the Lee house was alone,” Ross explained. “Logically, he should have gone straight back to his stakeout after he left me tied up and put someone else in charge of tracking me after I got loose. Instead, he never got back before my bomb threat locked down the neighborhood. Also, the ease with which I lost them after my escape implies he was probably the only one on me.”
“Which seems odd, given their interest in Mrs. Chandler,” Talbot said. “If they had so few to spare for such an important job, it follows that the rest of the group was off on some other job.”
“Hence, your call to the Secret Service,” Lyman said, nodding. “Don’t look so surprised—of course they called to check up on you. I gather from what they said that you didn’t specifically mention the Cloaks?”
Talbot shook his head. “I was afraid any perceived crazy-talk would cloud my credibility. I stayed with vague references to hidden gunmen and camouflaged bombs.”
“Someone should lay out the full story for them now,” Garcia said. “Whitcomb’s going to be here in two days.”
“I know,” Lyman said heavily. “At least now we can give them a demo of what they’re up against.”
“Thanks to Ross,” Talbot murmured.
Lyman glared at him, then shifted the glare to Ross. “How exactly do you think you’re going to be of use to us?”
“For one thing, I’ve got a feel for the gang,” Ross said. “How they think, and how they operate. For another, I’ve made direct contact with them.”
“You think they’re going to listen to you after your Houdini trick?”
“I wasn’t talking about negotiation,” he said calmly. “I was talking about bait.”
For a moment the room was silent. “We’ll see,” Lyman said. “Before we go down that road, we still have to figure out which of the techs is working with them.”
Talbot cleared his throat. “Actually, sir,” he said, “I already have.”
~
Carefully, Sergeant Osgood eased the Rigid Inflatable Boat around the rocks surrounding the unpronounceable river flowing down out of the hills into the East China Sea, swearing almost equally unpronounceable Japanese curses under his breath. He would far and away have preferred to hit the river at slack tide, when the bar would have been safer to cross. But the Pentagon had said now, and when the brass got this kind of burr up their butts there was no shutting them up until you did what they wanted.
So up the river it was going to be. With or without the proverbial paddle.
“Rocks ahead, starboard,” Pvt. Chillsworth announced from his spotter’s position in the bow.
“So what else is new?” Osgood grumbled, turning the tiller a fraction to avoid them. They could at least have given him a decent boat—if a damn forty-meter sailboat could get in here, a Marine LCPL landing craft sure as hell could, too. But no, some desk-warming paper-pushing alleged expert said the water wasn’t deep enough for a real boat, so his team was stuck sailing through the Pacific in this damn thirty-foot motorized life raft.
A sudden scraping on the RIB’s underside startled him out of his private grousefest. “Chilly, you mallet-head,” he barked. “You’re supposed to be watching for those damn rocks.”
“I am,” Chillsworth retorted. “What, you need me to warn you about the bottom, too?”
Osgood frowned, peering ahead. The bottom? What the hell was the bottom doing this far out? “What’s our depth?”
“Shallow enough to see the sand,” the other called back. “You want numbers?”
“Never mind,” Osgood grunted, easing back the throttle a bit.
It was worse than he’d expected, but better than it could have been. He got them across the bar and headed up the river, which was pretty damn near as shallow as the approach had been. Way too damn shallow for a forty-meter yacht to negotiate.
One of the other Marines was clearly thinking the same thing. “There’s no way that frigin’ boat got in here,” he muttered to Osgood. “Not unless they brought their own water.”
“And one hell of a squirt gun to lay it down with,” Osgood agreed tightly. Ahead, the river curved slightly to the right. According to the reconnaissance photos, the Eureka should be just around that curve. “Let’s get ready, Marines.”
There was a brief shuffling of cloth and muffled metallic clinking as the squad shifted from Alert Mode to what the major liked to refer to as Damn-Sure Alert Mode. Reaching to his hip, Osgood undid the safety strap on his holster and got a grip on his sidearm. They negotiated the curve and swung around the trees.
It was there, all right, right where the reconnaissance guys had said, as big and fat and sassy as you could want. A complete forty-meter yacht, its mast waving gently in the breeze
There was only one small problem. It wasn’t a boat. It was a balloon. A huge, contoured, inflatable raft, bobbing like a big rubber cork along the side of the river.
“I’ll be damned,” Chillsworth said, sounding awed. “Look at that. They’ve got a bigger tubby toy than we do.”
“Cork it,” Osgood growled. “We’re going in for a look. Stay sharp—they might have left a reception committee.”
He didn’t know what all this froth was about, who they were chasing or why they were searching freighters and islands and fishing boats.
But one thing he was sure of. Whatever was going on, whoever was on the other team had just scored a point.
Steering them cautiously toward the huge float toy, he reached down to the radio beside his left foot. The Pentagon was going to love this one.
THE SEVENTH DAY
25
“A balloon,” Cohn growled, sounding as disgusted as McPherson had ever heard him. “A damn rubber balloon. Why the hell didn’t someone catch this earlier?”
“Because the damn rubber balloon looks just like a forty-meter yacht from the air and no one bothered to go in for a closer look,” McPherson growled back. He wasn’t any happier about this than Cohn, but flailing around looking for a scapegoat was just going to waste more time. “This isn’t exactly our first clue that this gang knows what they’re doing.”
“Fine,” Cohn said, tossing the report onto the duty desk and looking around the satellite room and the weary CIA analysts. “We’re still going to be the laughingstock of the intelligence community. Assuming this doesn’t trigger World War III and no one’s laughing at anything anymore. Your people still sifting through West Coast photos?”
McPherson nodded. “Whitcomb gave the Harrier search priority.”
“How convenient for somebody,” Cohn said darkly. “Right now, I’m ready to give odds they ditched the Harriers in the ocean, and that all they ever wanted was to siphon off our people into a snipe hunt.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past them,” McPherson had to concede. “Still, there is a bright side to this. The fact that they went to all the trouble to create a fake ship for us to watch implies they haven’t transferred the nuke anywhere else since it left the Rabah Jamila. That means it’s still aboard their gimmicked racing cat.”
“A ship we know has already had at least two configurations,” Cohn reminded him. “What makes you think it doesn’t have a third, a fourth, and a fifth?”
“I’m sure it does,” McPherson agreed. “On the other hand, there’s a limit to what you can do to a hundred and twenty feet worth of ship. You can’t turn it into a rowboat or six-hundred-foot tanker, for instance. We know its basic size and shape, and there can be only so many ships in the Pacific that fit that description. All we have to do is find it.”
Cohn grunted. “That assumes they haven’t anticipated we would follow this line of reasoning. In that case, they might still have transferred the nuke to another vessel, sunk the cat in deep water, and left the blow-up toy to make us think we’re still looking for the cat. In which case, it could be on a rowboat or six-hundred-foot tanker.”
“Director McPherson?” one of the senior CIA men—McPherson couldn’t remember his name—appeared at his elbow holding a sheaf of papers. “Email printout for you.”
“Thank you,” McPherson said, taking the papers.
“What is it?” Cohn asked.
“The lab report on the Rabah Jamila containers,” McPherson said, skimming down the first page and flipping to the next one. “We were right about all the North Korean stuff in there. Looks like it was all the genuine article—”
He broke off as something completely unexpected caught his eye. “What?” Cohn demanded, craning his neck to see.
“Swenson was right—they’ve implicated another country,” McPherson murmured, pointing to the spot on the page. “China, North Korea, Pakistan, Vietnam, Iran; and now—”
“Israel?” Cohn breathed, almost hissing out the word.
“Why not?” McPherson said, flipping to the details. “Some of the clothing they wore during the pirate attack was still in the containers, complete with powder residue from the rounds they fired. Impurities confirm the rounds were Israeli manufacture.”
“Israelis usually use Uzis,” Cohn pointed out. “The Pakistanis all agreed that they carried MP5s.”
“They also said one of them had a long sniper rifle,” McPherson reminded him. “Unfortunately, no one got a good look at it.”
“Maybe we can do an end run,” Cohn said, stepping around the side of the desk and snagging the phone. “Let’s have someone take another look at the bodies they fished out of the Taiwan Strait.”
He got a connection and started delivering orders. McPherson moved a few steps away, his eyes drifting to the world map dominating one wall. The Israelis had their own tactical nukes. Why would they want an Indian one? To embarrass New Delhi? Unlikely. Israel had no particular quarrel with India at the moment, certainly no more than they had with anyone else. This Third Temple flap had Moslems up in arms all over the world, but a mostly Hindu nation like India shouldn’t care all that much.
Abruptly, his thoughts froze in place.
“They’re going to check,” Cohn said, coming up beside him. “Probably won’t be much residue left after that long an immersion, but you never know. They’re still working on backtracking the shrapnel from the grenade.”
“We need to get the radiation experts back in,” McPherson told him, his eyes still on the map, his voice sounding distant in his ears. “Find out if they can figure out how long the nuke was inside the container.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning maybe they started by sending the bomb east, but now they’re taking it back west.”
There was a short silence. “You know where it’s going?”
“I don’t know anything,” McPherson said. “But if the Israeli connection isn’t just another red herring . . . what do you think would happen if someone set off a tactical nuke beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem?”
“My God,” Cohn muttered. “With all the fault lines under there? You’d take out every piece of architecture bigger than a storage shed.”
“Including the Dome of the Rock,” McPherson said. “Conveniently opening the way for Rabbi Salomon and his Third Temple.”
“And putting a match to the whole Islamic world in the process,” Cohn said. “Hell.”
“Certainly a damn good approximation of it,” McPherson said. “That would also explain why they took a tactical instead of something bigger.”
“They want to demolish the mosques, not vaporize the mountain.” Cohn hissed between his teeth. “When is Salomon due to give his UN speech?”
“Opening ceremonies are this Friday at seven p.m.,” McPherson said. “I don’t know if any of the invited speakers will be doing anything that night or whether the first ones are on tap for Saturday.”
“Salomon may not even show up until Saturday after sunset,” Cohn pointed out. “I don’t know what the Orthodox position is on non-religious meetings on the Sabbath.”
“Someone had better find out,” McPherson said. “On the other hand, he may figure that announcing the way has been cleared for the Third Temple might sanctify the meeting as a religious session.”
“Maybe,” Cohn agreed reluctantly. “Let’s be careful not to go off half-cocked. This Israeli connection could be just as much sand as all the others have been.”
“Agreed,” McPherson said. “Regardless, you’d better alert the analysts not to limit their focus to the Pacific.”
“I’ll do that,” Cohn promised. “And I think I’ll have someone do another check on that Chinese CitationJet. See if maybe it’s decided to turn around and head west.”
