“Fine by me. Provided you stop being so damned cheeky.”
Dugan smiled. “But that’s my most endearing quality.”
She shook her head and moved to the kitchen to brew coffee. When she returned, they settled down to discuss strategy.
“This is going to be harder than I thought,” Dugan said. “I must admit Alex is behaving strangely. Like he’s going out of his way to minimize my office time. We arrive late every day, then he has me out the door at the dot of five. Totally out of character for him; the guy’s a workaholic. Braun must be coercing him somehow, maybe through threats to Cassie.”
Anna looked skeptical. “I’ve seen Kairouz’s file. He isn’t someone easily intimidated. After his entire family was killed in the Lebanese civil war, he came to London as a penniless teen with no prospects and managed to build a major shipping company from scratch. Now he’s wealthy and connected. If he’s being threatened, why wouldn’t he turn to the authorities?”
“I don’t know. But Alex Kairouz is no terrorist.”
Anna sighed. “Let’s start with what we do know. This Farley arrived on the scene right after Braun’s employment. We can assume he’s a player, and the computer guy is in on it for sure. Word among the clerical staff is that Braun dismissed the IT people and brought Sutton on right after he joined the company. I suspect Hell will freeze over before we get any sort of reliable computer access.”
“The biggest problem,” Dugan said, “is how to snoop without raising suspicion if we’re caught. If Braun’s somehow squeezing Alex, he’s pretty damn smart. We don’t want to put his guard up.”
Anna smiled. “We just need a believable motive. You have one made-to-order.”
Dugan looked confused.
“Think about it,” Anna said. “You and Braun are rivals. We style our snooping as an attempt to uncover some incompetence or malfeasance on Braun’s part, so you can undermine him with Alex. Even if we’re caught, it will look like corporate politics.”
Dugan nodded, impressed. “Pretty sharp.”
Anna smiled at the compliment and spent the next half hour briefing Dugan on how they would develop their cover relationship. At midnight, she let him out.
“Must keep up appearances,” she whispered at the doorway, sending him off with a smoldering kiss.
Braun slumped in the driver’s seat. He’d just decided the Yank was making a night of it when Dugan exited the building and turned up the walk. I overestimated him, thought Braun. When he’s gone, I’m sure the bitch will enjoy having a real man.
Chapter Eight
The chief mate tensed at the console, focused on the rising level in the last cargo tank.
“Stop,” he barked into his radio, commanding the terminal to stop pumping. The load was complete, and at a nod from the chief mate, Medina left to check the drafts.
It was a relieved Medina that rushed down the gangway. They’d taken minimal ballast for the short transit to the refinery; water hadn’t even risen to his plugs. The ballast tanks were empty now, and the plugs had held as powerful fans pushed inert gas into the empty cargo tanks, displacing oxygen-rich air before gasoline surged into the tanks.
He’d been terrified that the gas pressure — slight though it was — would unseat the shredded bits of Styrofoam cup he’d packed into the tiny holes. He’d paced the deck, alert to telltale whiffs from ballast-tank vents or the loud keening of gas whistling through an unplugged hole.
But they all held, praise be to Allah, high on the bulkheads, submerged now under a foot of gasoline on the cargo-tank side. It wouldn’t take long for the cargo to dissolve them.
But it would be long enough.
Braun smiled. Sutton had hacked backdoor access to several porn sites, making tracking his communications like looking for a needle in several thousand haystacks. Only the logic of the method had convinced Motaki to disregard his revulsion at accessing the sites. Braun’s smile widened. Perhaps this might expand the Iranian’s horizons a bit.
He opened an encrypted file. Motaki had done well. The Chechens looked European, and below each picture was age, height, weight, and hair and eye color. Braun printed the pictures and erased the file before typing the Web address of the Baltic Maritime Job Exchange, to begin his search for unemployed ex-Eastern Bloc mariners resembling the Chechens.
Joel Sutton, dressed in a British Telcom uniform and with toolbox in hand, rang Anna Walsh’s doorbell. Showing his face was a risk, but he’d confirmed Dugan and the bitch were at work, and no one else would know him. When no one answered, he picked the lock and went to work.
He hid transmitters in the phones and throughout the small apartment and a tiny receiver on a high closet shelf, tapped into a spare circuit in the existing phone wiring. Satisfied, he left things as he’d found them and rode the elevator to the lobby, leaving his toolbox there as he went to the van. He returned with a heavy shopping bag, its handles biting into his hand, to collect his toolbox and ride the elevator to the basement.
The telephone box was well marked and he set to work, stepping back twenty minutes later to survey the results. Concealed under a stack of boxes and connected to the panel by a hidden wire sat a lead-lined wooden box with a near-invisible antenna wire run to a high window. The box was soundproof, with a speaker inside echoing any sound from the apartment. Inches away was a cell phone, voice activated to dial at any sound. There was no connection between the devices but sound waves, eliminating a trace. The outgoing cell signal was detectable, but isolating it would be difficult. Difficult became impossible as the audio was relayed through two identical boxes, both hidden far away in high-cell-traffic areas.
All the phones were untraceable, purchased for cash, and modified with long-life batteries. Each box held enough plastic explosive and white phosphorus to destroy the contents and anyone opening them without first calling the phone inside and entering a disarming code.
Sutton dialed Anna Walsh’s number on another throwaway phone and let her voice mail greeting play without responding. In the basement of the Iranian embassy, another cell phone disconnected after Anna’s words were recorded, and a technician phoned his superior. His superior walked to a window of his second-floor office and smoothed his hair with his right hand in full view of another man standing across the street pretending to read a newspaper. The man walked to a public phone and dialed a number from memory.
“Hello,” Sutton said.
“I’m sorry. I was ringing George McGregor. I misdialed,” the man said and hung up.
Sutton disconnected and reached for his toolbox. Surveillance was established for whoever the hell was running it. He left the building to ditch the van.
Dugan cursed as his monitor went black for the third time. He checked his watch. Might as well pack it in. Ever since he and Anna had begun their “affair,” they’d stayed late every night to establish a pattern of being in the office after hours. They left together every evening, and twice Dugan slept on her sofa, arriving the next morning in the same clothes — a fact noted by office gossips. What Dugan had failed to anticipate was the impact of his relationship with Anna on his other relationships.
Mrs. Coutts registered disapproval in every icy glance, addressing him with cold formality, while Anna was somehow transformed in Mrs. Coutts’s view into a poor innocent led astray by her lustful boss, a sexual predator. It got worse. Daniel, the driver, shared the gossip with Mrs. Hogan, the cook, who, certain he was wrong, passed it on to Mrs. Farnsworth. After admonishing Mrs. Hogan on the evils of gossip, Mrs. Farnsworth phoned Mrs. Coutts so that she might find the source of the malicious rumor and squash it, only to learn the rumor was true.