He startled when he felt Cabrillo standing over him. He stripped off his headphones and massaged his ears.
“How’s it coming?” Juan asked. Moments after checking in on Dr. Huxley and Kyle Hanley when he’d returned to the Oregon, Juan had asked Hali to monitor the bug he’d placed in Gil Martell’s office.
“Reminds me of that urban legend about hearing voices in the white noise of a television tuned to a station that’s off the air.” He handed the headphones to Juan.
They were warm and a little damp when he slipped them on. Kasim hit a button on his computer. Static filled Juan’s ears, but in it he could hear something. To call them words would be an overstatement. They were more like low tones underlying the crackle of electronics.
He pulled off the headphones. “Have you tried scrubbing the tape?”
“This is scrubbed. Twice.”
“Put it on speaker and play it from the beginning,” Juan told him.
A few keystrokes later, the recording began. Because the bug was sound activated, it had remained dormant until someone entered the office.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no. This can’t be happening.” The voice, Gil Martell’s, was panicked, but managed to retain its California charm. Then came the sound of drawers opening and closing, presumably Martell checking to see if he’d been robbed. A chair creaked as he sat. “Okay, Gil, get ahold of yourself. What time is it in California? What does it matter?” A telephone handset rattled, and, after a long pause, Martell began to speak. “Thom, it’s Gil Martell.”
Juan knew that Thom would be Thomas Severance, who headed the Responsivist movement with his wife, Heidi.
“Someone broke into the compound about fifteen minutes ago. It looks like a rescue operation. One of our members was abducted from his room . . . What? Ah, Kyle Hanley . . . No, no, not yet. He’d only been here a short time. . . My security guys tell me there were a dozen of them. They were all armed.
They’re chasing them now in jeeps so there’s a chance we’ll get the kid back, but I wanted you to know.” There was a long pause while Martell listened to his superior. “That’ll be my next call. We’ve thrown enough money around to the local authorities so they won’t dig too deep. They can claim the local cops stopped arms traffickers or al-Qaeda or something . . . Could you repeat that? The connection’s terrible . . . Oh yeah. They first broke into my office and then went . . . Hold it!” Martell’s voice rose defensively. “You don’t need to send Zelimir Kovac. We can take care of this ourselves. . .
Bugs? This whole country’s crawling with them. Oh, electronic bugs. Damnit! Sorry.”
Cabrillo heard the sound of drawers opening and closing again as Martell looked for something, and then came the blast of static. Martell had turned on an electronic jammer to defeat any listening devices that might have been left behind.
Hali killed the recording. “I can keep working at it, but I don’t know how much good it will do.”
“Whatever you can find in all that static will be worth the effort.” Cabrillo rubbed his tired eyes.
“You ought to get some sleep,” Hali suggested needlessly. Juan was dead on his feet.
“Do you have someone looking into this Zelimir Kovac?”
“I Googled him, but there wasn’t anything there. When Eric comes back on duty, he’s going to try to find out about him.”
“Where’s Eric now?”
“Wooing our young charge down in medical. He’s bringing her breakfast, and taking advantage of Mark being asleep in his cabin.”
Juan had forgotten all about Jannike Dahl. He knew she had no immediate family, but there had to be some people back home, believing she had been lost with all the others aboard the Golden Dawn.
Unfortunately, they would have to suffer awhile longer. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to delay announcing her rescue, but the sixth sense that had served him so well over the years was telling him to keep her survival a secret.
The people responsible for the attack on the cruise ship believed they had succeeded in killing everyone.
There was an advantage in knowing something they did not, even if Juan didn’t yet recognize what it could be. For the time being, Janni was safe with them aboard the Oregon.
He turned away from Kasim. “Helm, what’s our ETA in Iraklion?”
“We’ll be there around five o’clock this afternoon.”
They were diverting to the capital of Crete, where Chuck Gunderson would be waiting with their Gulfstream to take Max, Eddie, and Kyle to their rendezvous in Rome. Juan had until then to reconsider keeping the young woman aboard. He went to his workstation and typed out some instructions to Kevin Nixon down in the Magic Shop to prepare a passport for her, just in case. He also made a mental note to consult with Julia Huxley before making his final decision. By keeping Janni on the ship, there was a chance Hux could discover something about her physiognomy that had helped the young woman survive the toxin, if Mark and Eric were wrong about acute food poisoning.
Ten minutes later, Cabrillo was sprawled across his bed, sleeping so soundly that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t need the mouth guard to keep him from grinding his teeth.
CHAPTER 16
ZELIMIR KOVAC ENJOYED KILLING.
He hadn’t discovered this particular interest until civil war erupted in his native Yugoslavia and he had been drafted into the military. Prior to going into the army, Kovac had been a construction worker and amateur heavyweight boxer. But it was in the military that he found his true vocation. For five glorious years, he and his unit of like-minded men had torn a swath through the country, killing Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovars by the hundreds.
By the time of NATO’s intervention in 1999, Kovac, who had been born with a different name, heard rumblings about trials for people who had committed crimes against humanity. He was certain he would head the list of those sought by the authorities, so he deserted, fleeing first to Bulgaria, eventually to Greece.
Standing at six feet eight inches, with the build of a wrestler, it hadn’t taken him long to find a niche in the Athens underworld as an enforcer. His street cunning and ruthlessness were rewarded with promotions within the organized-crime world, and he cemented his reputation by killing an entire gang of Albanian drug dealers trying to horn in on the heroin trade.
During his first few years in Athens, he began reading books in English to learn the language. The material itself was unimportant to him, and he read biographies of people he’d never heard of, histories of places he had no interest in, and novels whose plots he didn’t care about. The fact that the books were in English was all that was important.
That is, until he found a dog-eared book in a secondhand shop. The title intrigued him: We’re Breeding Ourselves to Death, by Dr. Lydell Cooper. He mistakenly thought it was a book about sex and bought it.
Between the covers was a rational explanation for everything he had believed since the war. There were too many people on the planet, and, unless something was done about it, our world was doomed. Of course, Dr. Cooper didn’t single out any ethnic groups in his treatise, but Kovac read the book with his own racist perspective and was certain Cooper meant the inferior races, like the ones Kovac had slaughtered for so long.
With no natural predators, there are no limits to our burgeoningpopulation, and the hardwiring in our DNA to procreate means we will not stop ourselves. Only the lowly virus stands in our way, and each day we draw closer to eradicating this threat as well.
He took this to mean that mankind needed predators to cull the weak so that the healthy could thrive.