Marie looked up. “So, it went well.”
He blew by her into his own office and tossed the envelope containing the Odessa report, Arlene’s report, and the photographs on the desk. It skidded across the surface until it hit his in basket, which was filled with six other reports of potential threats in the Far East, none of which were being taken anywhere near as seriously as Hugh knew they should be.
Hugh’s problem was that the Far East just wasn’t fashionable. No one seemed to take North Korea seriously, or not as seriously as they did Pickacountry, Middle East. Indonesia, maybe a little more so because of its large Muslim population, but there the terrorists were mostly blowing up Australians, and they’d taken as big a hit from the Christmas tsunami as everyone else so they weren’t exactly at the top of their form. In Pattaya Beach, the casualties had been so evenly divided between East and West that the bull’s-eye effect hadn’t really registered with any one nation. India and Pakistan were sitting down like the lion with the lamb and actually talking to one another for the first time since World War II, in fact all the Indian Ocean nations were, another effect of the tsunami.
No, his nation’s security and defense forces were focusing almost exclusively on the Middle East, and the hell of it was he couldn’t say they were wrong. But, like Arlene Harte, he was uneasy. If she was right about the two Koreans setting the bomb in Pattaya Beach, they hadn’t taken credit for it. Why not? By definition a terrorist’s mission was to draw attention to his cause. Why, then, would these two men just walk away without so much as a phone call claiming credit for so many deaths, so much destruction, for the successful terrorizing of a heretofore peaceful resort, dedicated to the innocent pleasures of the leisure classes of many nations?
The only rational answer Hugh could find to that question was that these particular terrorists were practicing, warming up for the big event. He thought of the photographs taken at the scene of the bombing, of the lists of the dead, of the descriptions of the wounds of those who had survived. He thought of the soccer ball, which, from what the investigators could discover, had been drop-kicked onto the dance floor with some brand-new timing device they were still piecing together. The prospect of what the people who had thought up the soccer ball were dreaming up next gave him nightmares.
He hoped the director was right and that there was no need to panic. He hoped it, but he didn’t believe it.
He rubbed his eyes and the first thing he focused on when he dropped his hands was the soapstone bear, a smooth, greenish brown image of a sitting bear playing with his own toes. He and Sara had gone out to the Alaska Native hospital in Anchorage that year, looking for gifts for their mothers. An old Yupik man was there with a cardboard box full of soapstone carvings. Hugh had fallen in love with this one on sight, and Sara had bought it for him behind his back and had given it to him that Christmas. It had sat on whatever desk was his from Harvard to Langley and all points in between.
He looked at the bear and he saw Sara, dark blond hair forever bundled into a ponytail, laughing blue eyes, tall enough to kiss without leaning over. They’d been born the same year in the same village, fought all the way through grade school, and fallen in love in high school, never to fall out of it again.
Or so it had seemed then. He wondered if there was anything that he had given her that she had turned into a talisman. He tried to remember the gifts he had given her over the years, and couldn’t.
He could smell her on the clothes he’d been wearing in Anchorage two nights before. The clothes she had nearly ripped off him in that overheated little hotel room. Their meeting had been a gift of fate, her testifying in a court case, his delivering an intelligence briefing to Kyle’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Fate, and Kyle’s propensity for matchmaking.
It gave him some small comfort that no matter how far apart they were geographically, or how many months it had been since they’d seen each other, or how far their marriage had drifted into harm’s way, she had missed him every bit as much as he had missed her.
He heard Kyle’s voice again, frighteningly matter-of-fact. You’ll always have me. Question is, will you always have Sara?
He shook his head almost angrily and turned to his computer. He scanned in the photo of Fang, Noortman, and the two Koreans and sent it attached to e-mails to Bob Dunno in Odessa, as well as agents in the field in Switzerland, Brazil, and Bermuda to show to Pyotr Volk, alias Peter Wolf, if he ever surfaced, and ask him if these were his two customers. Since they were also two of the more likely suspects to have blown up his building, Hugh thought there was at least a fifty-fifty chance Peter might be willing to identify them.
After that he picked up the phone. When it was answered on the other end, he said, “Arlene? Hugh. How well do you know Hong Kong?”
OCTOBER 22,
ON BOARD THE USCG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH
I SAY WE USE him to troll for orcas.“ ”That’s a little harsh, Petty Officer, don’t you think?“ Sara said, trying not to laugh.
“Already tasked anyway,” Chief Mark Edelen said from the conn.
“Tasked how?” PO Barnette said, raising one skeptical eyebrow. Or so Sara assumed, as it was 11:00 p.m. of a Bering Sea winter’s night and there was nothing blacker this side of hell. The bridge had red filters taped over the navigation and radar and fathometer screens, dimming their readouts and allowing everyone’s eyes to adjust to see out the windows. Except for Orion looming large on their starboard bow, there wasn’t a lot to see, and wouldn’t have been much beyond an endless green ocean even if it were daylight.
But even in the dark Barnette sounded skeptical, and also thwarted. Seaman Rosenberg, an eighteen-year-old typically twirpish adolescent fresh out of boot camp, had managed in only fifteen days underway to step all over the senior crewman’s toes.
There was a smile in the chief’s voice when he replied. “They duct-taped his bunk shut, poked a hole in it, and sprayed it full of Right Guard.”
“Ouch,” Sara said. “Why?”
“Because he hasn’t had a shower since he got on board,” PO Barnette said, “and when you’re sleeping forty-two to a room it can get kind of rank. Plus he’s been puking his guts up ever since we left the dock. You can smell him coming a deck away.” A brief pause. “Ma’am.”
The smile in the chief’s voice was wider this time. “They also stuffed all his clothes into his duffle and filled it with Scrubbing Bubbles Basin Tub and Tile Cleaner.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Well, you know.”
“No. What?”
“It’s a disinfectant.”
Sara couldn’t help it, she let loose of the laugh that had been building inside for the last five minutes. She pulled herself together and cleared her throat. “I mean, this must stop, immediately.”
They knew her, and they laughed. PO Barnette’s ire was soothed, even if his hand had not been the one to mete out justice, and he returned to his brace at the conn, feet flat against the deck as if they’d been spot-welded there, hands clasped at the small of his back, leaning forward into the pitch of the ship. Salty, that was PO Barnette, eighteen years in. He never lost his balance, not even in the heaviest seas, as opposed to Sara, who had long ago perfected a complicated polka slash tango with the ship on any seas over three feet. It was effective; it had been years since the sudden lurch of a hull had tossed her into a bulkhead, but still she envied PO Barnette’s tranquil stolidity.
The bosun’s mate, Thomasina Penn, went back to the plot table to continue work on their route, but it was perfunctory as they were running box ops, hiding from a hurricane-force low in the lee of St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. Running box ops meant steering a course confined within a box drawn on the radar screen that out of sheer boredom on occasion resembled the initials of the officer on watch. The S for Sara was fun, the L in Lange less so.