The NEST team leader crawled into the forward compartment in the boat and searched the ceiling beams there for the documentation number. He found the requisite three-inch Arabic numbers on a beam running crosswise at the aft end of the cabin.
As soon as he finished his confidential report to Washington on the encrypted high frequency sat-phone, the team leader called the Vessel Documentation Office in Falling Water, West Virginia. An official there came on the line immediately.
“This is Commander William Jameson responding to your code-word-THOR call. To whom am I speaking, please?”
“This is Robert Rhymes, team leader for a National Department of Energy Nuclear Security Administration Nuclear Emergency Support Team presently located in Rockland, Maine.”
“That’s quite a mouthful of a title,” the Coast Guard officer responded. “But a very impressive mouthful. What can I do for you?”
“I need to find the owner of a boat, a sailboat, immediately. It is without question a matter of great national security and I ask that you devote your entire resources to this. Can I have your agreement to do so, sir?”
“Sure thing, buddy,” the officer responded. “No problem. But this won’t take anybody’s entire resources. Give me the documentation number and I’ll punch it right into my computer here. You could have done this from any computer on the Internet, you know. It’s no big secret. What’s the number?”
“The number carved into the boat’s main beam is 1129082.”
“Fine, hold on one second,” the officer replied. “Okay, here it is. The boat is owned by one William Appleton of Seal Harbor, Maine. That’s just down the road from where you are in Rockland. Served up there myself. Breathtaking scenery, though cold as… cold as, well, you know what, in the winter.”
The team leader wrote down that information, along with the telephone number for William Appleton listed in the Coast Guard records. He thanked the officer and hung up, then dialed Appleton’s number on his cell. His fingers were crossed.
“Appleton residence,” the voice answering the phone on the second ring said. “Abigail Appleton speaking.”
“Ms. Appleton,” the team leader said. He was instantly interrupted.
“It is Mrs. Appleton, please.”
“Mrs. Appleton, my name is Robert Rhymes. I am with—well, I am with a very important government agency and we are having something of an emergency. It is of the utmost importance that I speak with your husband. Is he available, please?” His tone of voice could not be more deferential.
He heard the woman choke for a moment. It was several seconds before she replied.
“I’m afraid that is not possible,” she said. “You see, my husband passed away, two weeks ago. Two weeks tomorrow, actually. I can refer you to my attorney, who is handling all of my husband’s matters. He is in Boston. If you’ll hold on for a moment, I’ll get his phone number.”
“Wait, Mrs. Appleton. Look, I’m so sorry about your loss, but I don’t think your lawyer will be able to help. Maybe you can. I’m calling about your husband’s boat, his sailboat. It’s named Swift. Can you tell me who has been using the boat recently?”
“Well, that I can help you with, young man,” she replied. “Our son, William, he’s actually William Junior, had been living on that boat for more than a year, doing that instead of working if you really want to know. He sailed it all over, across the ocean to England and around France and Italy and all. Then he met up with some woman. He said we’d love her and he loved her and all that trash and he couldn’t wait for us to meet her.
“He’d finally agreed to come home, to sail the boat home and settle down, when all of a sudden we got a phone call from him that he was in some hospital in Athens with this woman. She’d been bitten by a poisonous fish or something and almost died. So he’d left the boat on some Greek island and flown with this woman to a hospital.
“A week later he called and said the boat had been stolen. He flew home right after that, with that tramp he’d met. They’re married now. We don’t speak often. His father owned that boat for twenty years. He was heartbroken at its loss. I told my son the loss of that boat undoubtedly contributed to his father’s heart attack. He was completely unapologetic.”
Rhymes was shocked to hear the boat was so close to the Middle East.
“Did he mention the name of the island?” he asked.
“Yes, he did, and I wrote it down so I could look on the National Geographic world map we have and find where he had been. I circled it on the map. It was the tiniest dot… I have the map in a cabinet in the next room. William and I always mark our travels on it, or we used to do so. Wait one moment.”
The woman came back on the telephone.
“The island is called Xanthos. That is X-A-N-T-H-O-S. Have you heard of it?”
“No, ma’am, I haven’t,” Rhymes responded. “But I expect I will learn quite a bit about it shortly. Thank you. You’ve been extremely helpful.”
“Wait,” she commanded in the same tone of voice she probably used with her servants. “The Greek police have been most boorish about their efforts to recover the boat. We don’t believe in paying good money for insurance, my husband and I. Insurance promotes poor seamanship, he used to say. I demand that the government find my husband’s boat. It has immense sentimental value.”
“I will be absolutely certain that gets done, ma’am,” Rhymes said before hanging up.
Rhymes consulted his notebook, then dialed another telephone number.
“CIA, how may I direct your call?” the answering voice said.
“This is a THOR call. I need to speak to the director,” Rhymes said flatly.
“Yes sir.”
A moment later a voice came on the phone.
“This is the deputy director. The director is unavailable. To whom am I speaking?”
Rhymes identified himself and briefly explained the situation. The voice on the phone was just as abrupt.
“Thank you, Rhymes,” he said. “I’m on it. I’ll have our man in Athens get to that island immediately. Who gets the information?”
“For right now, I’m in charge at the scene,” Rhymes said. “But I expect to be replaced as the person in charge. You’ll know who to call. This is big and I expect you folks will be brought in soon. And, Deputy Director, I’ve been in this business for twelve years. This is for real—very real. I feel that in my bones and I’m scared shitless.”
Even though it was three in the morning in Athens, the agent in charge answered his phone on the second ring. At first light a seaplane took off from nearby Piraeus Harbor with the agent on board. The aircraft became the second plane to land in the harbor on Xanthos. The agent quickly found his way to the small building on the quay where the port police office was located. He held a photograph of the Swift emailed to him overnight.
“I’m trying to find this boat,” he told the corporal. “You’ve seen it before.”
“Oh yes, the American boat,” he replied. “What a beautiful boat. What a tragedy happened to it. I could not believe it myself. My own trust and good judgment had been so wrong about that man. What a shock. People are still talking about it.”
“The man, what man?” the agent asked. “Who are you talking about?”
“The man who stole that beautiful American boat,” the corporal said. “He just got on the boat and sailed away, gone, over the horizon and gone.”
“What man? Who was he?”
“The man from the Israeli Navy. The Jew; that’s who took the boat. Don’t know his name. We just called him the Jew.”