“So, Fausto, you’re with the police?” Andrew said. He wanted it to sound like a casual observation, but was unable to suppress the wonder in his voice.
“Retired. Twenty-five years on the Questura,” he replied, referring to the detective squad, adding “Twenty-five years of collecting IOUs.”
“The customs agent — that wasn’t a professional courtesy?” Andrew asked, surprised.
Fausto smiled cagily, and shook no. “He cheats on his wife. He got — how you say? — busted in a raid on a sex club. I decided he might be useful and kept his name out of the reports.” Fausto chuckled, savoring the memory of it. “He’s been eternally grateful,” he went on, adding philosophically, “Of course, human nature being what it is, gratitude has always been the seed of resentment.” He pulled back his jacket, letting Andrew glimpse the 9mm Baretta that rode on his hip.
The exit door opened automatically.
Fausto led Andrew toward a Maserati quatroporto. The black sedan was parked directly in front of the terminal, in a restricted area, beneath an overhang that protected them from the rain.
The Maserati pulled away from the terminal, water spitting from its grooved radials.
Andrew settled back into the soft Italian leather, and stretched out his lanky frame — his body telling him it was night; the brightness, despite the rain, insisting it was day.
Fausto wheeled the big car onto a road that led to the autostrada, and pushed a button on the walnut-paneled console. The electric door locks engaged.
The precise click triggered the memory of a thriller Andrew had once seen. The opening sequence raced through his mind: An airport, a chauffeur with a sign, a businessman, a limousine speeding into the night, fingers pushing buttons. And then, in a frenetic visual barrage — electric door locks activating, the window between passenger and chauffeur ascending, deadly gas filling the rear compartment, the man’s eyes widening with terror, fingers clawing at the glass, body falling back onto the seat unconscious!
At the time, Andrew thought it was a damn clever abduction. Now, he thought about McKendrick’s warning, “Watch your ass son. Russians, professionals.”
Andrew realized he had no proof of anything Fausto had said. He resembled his father’s chauffeur; but that was a year ago, and the memory was vague. Anyone could get a police shield and phony ID, especially a pro. Why hadn’t he been more alert, more vigilant?! Why hadn’t he walked right past Fausto, and taken a taxi? Why hadn’t he watched his ass? He hadn’t been in Italy a half hour and already he had screwed up in a way that, at least in the movies, had proved costly. Andrew studied his reflection in the glass that separated him from Fausto, and listened for the hiss of deadly gas.
The Maserati cut through the sheets of rain, turned onto the autostrada, and accelerated smoothly on the glistening concrete ribbon.
Approximately two hundred meters back, Gorodin and Kovlek sat behind the chattering wipers of an aging Fiat, its engine straining to keep up with the high performance vehicle it was tailing.
Chapter Twenty-two
At approximately the same time that Gorodin and Kovlek were following their target, First Lieutenant Jon Lowell was searching for his.
The time in Tampa, Florida, was 8:17 A.M.
The moment he completed his midnight to eight ASW tour, Lowell had gone directly to K building.
Now, he was hunched over a computer console in a SOSUS research lab set up for use by ASW personnel. The electronics-packed facility was adjacent to the main control room where military technicians, on a rotating twenty-four-hour watch, sat at consoles monitoring satellite and underwater cable transmissions. All pertinent data was sent over a land-based communications net to analysts at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, then forwarded to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.
After shifting his focus to the mystery vessel he had spotted on the satellite photographs, Lowell pulled copies of the twelve hydrotapes that covered the one-hour-forty-eight-minute SOSUS window he’d established. With assistance of Navy Electronics Technician Lew Scofield, Lowell had been searching the tapes for the recording of the ship’s acoustic signature. Once located, it would be computer-compared with all others on file in the sonar library. With any luck, it would match one that had already been identified. Lowell and Scofield had searched ten tapes without finding it.
When Lowell arrived that morning, Sconfield was threading the next to last hydrotape across the sound heads of the big Ampex reel-to-reel machine. He balanced a slowly growing ash on the tip of a cigarette that never left his mouth. Lowell had been working on and off with the lanky midwesterner for over a week, and had never once seen the ever-present ash fall before the technician could tap it into an ashtray.
“Data up, sir,” Scofield announced when he had finished. “We’re looking at fifty-fifty today.”
“Yeah, odds are getting better. Has to be a set of twin screws on one of these.”
“Unless you’re off on the tonnage, sir, and the sig we’re after’s a one banger.”
“No way,” Lowell replied as he settled in at the console. “Ship scales out somewhere between a hundred forty and a hundred fifty thousand tons. That means we’re looking at a tanker or containerized carrier. And either way, something that big has to be pushing twins,” he went on, referring to the propulsion arrangement which gave the big vessels otherwise unattainable maneuverability.
Lowell donned a set of experimental headphones he had been testing. They received their signal by infrared light beam rather than by wire, giving him freedom of movement in the lab. And he had been pleased to discover they were more than able to reproduce a broad range of pure frequencies. He flipped on the tape console that was linked to the big Cray X-MP supercomputers used to process and analyze intelligence data, and began scrutinizing the hydrotape.
His ears filled with the overlapping frequencies of moving ships, sea-life, and the surging Caribbean.
A little over a half hour had passed. Lowell had gotten up from his chair, and was pacing thoughtfully as he listened. Suddenly, he paused in mid-stride, and pressed the earphone to his head.
Scofield was bringing his Zippo to a fresh Marlboro when he saw Lowell’s reaction.
“Low frequency rumble,” Lowell said. He listened for a few more seconds, then nodded emphatically, and sat down at the console. “Yeah, yeah we’re talking power here. Real big plant. Ship’s gotta be in the tonnage range we’re looking for.”
The target was in his sights now. He could feel the competitive intensity building; just as it did in the Viking whenever the hours of tedious searching paid off in the blip of an enemy submarine pinging across his monitor.
“Patch it through the frequency digitizer,” he said to Scofield sharply.
“The what, sir?” Scofield asked uneasily. He was fully conscious of Lowell’s intensity and embarrassed he couldn’t respond.
Lowell flicked him a sideways glance, and smiled. He knew Scofield was relatively new to the job and welcomed the chance to broaden his knowledge. The digitizer was a piece of equipment Lowell had adapted from submarine surveillance technology. He was an outstanding sonar technician until he decided he’d rather hunt than be hunted, and applied to ASW.
“It’s a bunch of chips about that big,” Lowell said, indicating Scofield’s Zippo. “It reduces the sound waves to digitized pulses, cuts negative feedback to zero, and separates them into a dozen frequency ranges. We can listen to each range by itself.”
“Kind of like the graphic equalizer on a stereo.”