Clark shrugged. “Just a bit. Used to have a forty-foot diesel cruiser back in Chesapeake Bay. Did a little sailing on leave in the Navy.”
The men looked at one another knowingly. He knew he’d not impressed them.
Another man, this one with a British accent, said, “You had yourself a rust bucket, did you?”
Clark laughed good-naturedly. He knew all these men identified him as a “renter,” a man who comes down to the islands once or twice a year to rent a boat and, as far as they were concerned, not a real captain. In fact, these guys probably thought him something of a menace.
“How about another round?” he asked, and their looks softened.
“How ’bout yes?” said the tall, thin Jamaican captain.
After he returned with six more rums Clark leaned closer to the American sitting next to him. The others had started chatting with one another, blocking Clark out of the conversation. He asked the man about where he had been recently, and the captain explained he’d been going to at least two or three different islands and marinas a day all week.
Clark nodded, then said, “Big catamaran. Fast and expensive. Half-dozen men on board, maybe more. Seen anything like that?”
The man turned to Clark. “Uh… Why?”
“Let’s just say I’m looking for a guy.” Clark wiggled his right hand on the table. There was a fifty-dollar bill in it.
The captain looked down at it, then up at Clark. “What kind of cat?”
“I don’t have a clue. Would have just started showing up this week. The boat itself might not be new to the area, but I’m sure the crew is. My guess is they don’t all look like the sailing type.”
The man slowly reached out for the money, but Clark flipped it away. “Give me something, I give you something.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the dumbass offering you a hundred bucks to answer an easy question.”
Another fifty appeared in Clark’s hand.
The American captain nodded slowly. “I know a guy who mentioned to me he ran into exactly who you are looking for. Seriously. Exactly.”
“I need to talk to that man.”
The captain said, “A hundred-dollar finder’s fee and I’ll take you to him. He’ll want a hundred as well.”
Clark said, “If the info pans out, I’ll give him another hundred.”
The captain snatched the hundred dollars, gave a wide smile, then looked across the table. “Diego?”
A tan man in dreadlocks who’d said he was from Uruguay looked up.
The American captain said, “That sixty-eight-foot gunboat you passed the other day. Where did you say you saw her?”
The man on the end said, “Last night I was at the south tip of Guana. It was in a little cove just west of Monkey Point.”
Clark cocked his head. “A gunboat?”
The American captain laughed and said, “It didn’t have a cannon or anything. It’s a type of racing boat. Fucking beautiful. It looks like a cross between a catamaran and a spaceship.”
Clark’s eyebrows rose. He sure as hell hadn’t seen anything like that sailing around here in the BVIs.
Clark asked Diego, “What color was it?”
“Cobalt gray. It’s called Spinnaker II.”
Clark hadn’t even considered asking for the name of the boat. He had no idea he’d be getting this much information. He pressed his luck. “Did you see who was on board?”
“Bunch of guys. White guys, black guys. Didn’t look like racers. They are renters, that’s for sure.”
Clark was confused. “How do you know they were renting?”
“The dumbass had the thing moored in the wrong place. Boat like that, you want people to see it. It was anchored like they were trying to hide out or something.”
Clark nodded, then asked, “A catamaran like that? How fast could it go?”
“Thirty-five knots, easy. Fast as hell.” Diego returned to his conversation with the other men.
Clark nodded again, making a show of his interest in the boat as a sailing vessel, not as a potential target.
The American whispered to Clark, “I’ll take Diego’s hundred. Make sure he gets it.”
Clark felt like telling the man to go screw himself, but he didn’t need animosity from the locals. For all he knew he’d see this guy again. He fanned him the money. “You be sure to pass that on, okay?”
“I’ll do that. Hey, does that sound like the boat you are looking for?”
Clark had a feeling it was indeed the right boat. But he shook his head. “Don’t think so. Still, I’d love to pass it someday. Sounds nice.”
52
Jack Ryan, Jr., sat at his desk facing three large monitors full of information. His eyes scanned back and forth, and then he lowered his head into his hands and rubbed his eyes.
It had been a long and completely fruitless day, yet it had begun with so much promise. He’d been given good-looking intelligence from many different sources, but so far nothing had panned out.
The video feed of the cameras on Tarpon Island had led him nowhere. These two obviously white, obviously tall people who’d kidnapped the Walkers knew how to simply and effectively obscure their faces. They both wore hats and sunglasses, probably because they knew some asshole was going to sit at his desk, pore over every frame searching for clues, and push images through the best facial-recognition suites in the world.
Jack was that asshole and he’d come up with nothing.
As Jack watched them conduct their brazen act, he was struck by just how calm and nonchalant they appeared to be. The woman followed her would-be victims into the home with a big smile. Then the man, her co-conspirator, appeared up the walkway from the beach, strolling into the big villa like he owned the place.
This couple weren’t newcomers to this sort of work. They appeared to be in their element during the kidnapping.
This gave Jack the idea to investigate other unsolved kidnappings around the world using intel from Interpol and SIPRNet. He watched surveillance videos of sixty crimes, read the reports on a hundred more, but he saw no other kidnappings that matched the MO of this one.
He’d skipped lunch to keep searching for information about the Walkers’ kidnappers, but he attained nothing other than a lot of doubt. His supposition that this couple were experienced kidnappers was contradicted by the fact no kidnappings he could find anywhere involved suspects matching their description.
Still, Jack knew, they were experienced in something that gave them a hell of a lot of confidence while snatching a kid and his mom out of their home.
After spending the morning working on the kidnappers, he spent the afternoon working on Andrei Limonov, spending hours trying to track the man’s aircraft before it arrived in Luxembourg, to see where else he might have gone and who else he might have spoken with. This too had been a fruitless hunt. The Bombardier owned by Limonov’s shell had spent most of the previous month, from what Ryan could tell, sitting in a fixed-base operator at Biggin Hill, an executive airport twenty minutes southeast of London.
The plane flew nowhere, which probably meant Limonov was in London during that time, but that didn’t tell Ryan anything of value.
Another failure.
He’d also made several calls to Christine von Langer throughout the day. Ysabel had been taken out of her medically induced coma and upgraded to good condition, and this was obviously great news, but she would remain in the hospital for at least another two weeks.
Christine had remained by Ysabel’s side, even though the two did not know each other. The American millionaire widow had slept on a tiny vinyl couch and eaten hospital food, which admittedly was better in Luxembourg than it was in the United States, but still was a far cry from what she was accustomed to.