“Please escort your guest to the quarterdeck, commander. I need you to round up the entire staff for a briefing. It’s going to be a long night.”
The captain turned and departed.
“Rain check?” Olivia asked.
“Sure,” Sanders said, “but from the looks of it, it’s going to be storming for a while.”
The next evening, Olivia arrived ten minutes late to an evening lecture Farah Ghaffari was giving on self-esteem, poverty, and youth.
The subject material complemented her course curriculum, and students from her daytime sections filled the front of the auditorium. Olivia counted three dozen other attendees from faculty, staff, and other interests. A handful of young adults scribbling and sharing notes were clustered together, probably making an appearance from a local community college.
Olivia slid into a center seat ten rows from the podium and opened a notepad into which she feigned interest. She switched on her psychological radar, listening, seeing, feeling, and dissecting the speaker.
Ghaffari scrunched forward with white knuckles grasping a wooden podium and a makeshift dowager’s hump pushing her head into a microphone. Olivia sensed an inner tension constricting a normally erect posture into a coil of discomfort.
Ghaffari’s mouth was tight as she spoke, and her pupils were dark abysses surrounded by the intense radiance of brown irises. When she blinked, crow’s feet formed by her eyes and her brow furrowed.
Olivia glanced around the room to see if any other listener reacted to the anger and pain she felt from the Iranian professor, but everyone else in the auditorium showed bland interest out of perceived duty or worked to understand the content of the lesson. She was alone in being in tune with Ghaffari’s suffering.
The concepts she explored in discourse included reserved judgments on the reasons why leaders create poverty, why people accept it, and how people can compel themselves to rise above it. Other than noting the austerity of the content, Olivia found it dry.
She heard the professor rattle off concepts in words that were neutral. Her voice droned with the clarity and cadence of rehearsed repetition. Her face was plasticized, but Olivia caught the bulging veins of her neck throbbing. Ghaffari held back an emotional force, and Olivia waited for it to reveal itself through a crack.
Finally, it surfaced in a brief, involuntary snarl when Ghaffari mentioned the word “mankind”. Her eyebrows furrowed, her head drooped, and her lips tightened. It happened so fast that Olivia second guessed herself in having seen it. She shifted her weight and intensified her attention on the facial expressions.
She saw it again on the word “manpower”, and she recognized the anger. Then she saw subtler, quicker expressions each time Ghaffari mentioned the word “man”, “men”, or any male-centric term.
She folded her notepad and left the auditorium.
Back at her office the next day, she called Rickets.
“She’s angry at men,” she said. “And it goes deep. There’s something powerful and unresolved inside her.”
Olivia waited and could hear Rickets trying to detach his mind from whatever he had been pondering.
“The Iranian psychologist?” he asked.
“Yes. The one engaged to the commanding officer of the Bainbridge,” she said.
“Right,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“I want surveillance on her communications.”
“Why?”
“She’s been husband hunting destroyer sailors with no rational motive. She’s got a teaching visa that’s good for years, enough prestige to earn invitations to teach in other wealthy countries, and all the money she needs. She doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body, and I can’t see her seeking or holding a serious relationship with another human being without tons of therapy. Her only motive, conscious or unconscious, is the expression of anger.”
“At whom?”
“Men.”
“All men?”
“Any men, or any man,” she said.
“She may intend harm to her fiancé?”
“Possibly.”
“You learned this from reading her dossier?”
Olivia reflected upon how quickly she had arrived at her conclusions. Intuition, training, and having been a rape victim facilitated her transfer into Ghaffari’s mind.
“Her dossier and a visit to one of her lectures.”
“You met her?”
“No, just saw her. It was all I needed.”
“How sure are you?”
“About eighty percent.”
“Good enough. You’ve got your surveillance, but this raises the sensitivity bar. I can keep this hidden, but we’re approaching that fine line between the bounds of national security and harassing a senior naval officer’s fiancée. You find anything, you bring it right to me.”
“Thanks, Gerry.”
“Sure.”
“One more thing,” she said. “Playing matchmaker with Commander Sanders. If you ever pull a stunt like that again, I’ll kick you in the balls.”
That evening, Olivia began pouring through emails and text messages between Ghaffari and her fiancé, Commander Richard Pastor. She discovered that the professor was taking a subservient role to a man with a tone so arrogant that a first year psychology student could see his childlike insecurities. That Ghaffari acquiesced to him riveted Olivia with the realization that she was playing a manipulative game.
Solving the nature of that game would have to wait. Olivia needed a mental break, and she drove home.
That night, alone in her bed, she guided her mind to thoughts distant from Ghaffari. She remembered sweet times with Jake — a ski trip to the Swiss Alps, a dinner atop the Eiffel Tower, and a motorcycle ride that had come a year later than promised but which had taken her to breathtaking remote sites in Europe.
The memories slipped into a mire of colors as her feelings for Jake drifted toward indifference. She felt a new sensation rising within her and an image forming in her mind. She shut her eyes tight against it to no avail.
She felt giddy as she pictured Commander Sanders smiling at her in his dress white uniform.
CHAPTER 13
Renard had hardly slept during his first night as captain of the Mercer.
The thrill of returning to sea on a high-performance vessel had energized him through a day and a half of testing the Mercer at high speed, deep depth, and under the strain of every angle and acceleration he could squeeze from its propulsion and controls surfaces. The ship obeyed his will like a steel-shelled symbiotic mate.
Surfaced and heading toward Toulon, he stood atop the Mercer’s conning tower sail. A tug approached, took station beside the submarine, and threw lines to Henri and hired hands on the deck.
A brow flopped from the tug onto the submarine, and the shipyard workers walked across it with test data and reports stuffed in waterproof packs on their backs. A hand on the tug flipped the brow back, and the tug was gone.
Renard lifted a microphone to his lips and ordered the Mercer to turn around and head back to sea. As the ship heeled over, he heard Jake calling him from below.
“Pierre!”
“Yes!”
“We have news from Rickets.”
“I’ll secure the bridge and be right down.”
At the bottom of a ladder, Jake greeted him with an earnest stare.
“The bridge is secure,” Renard said.
“I’ll make sure Henri knows and gets us ready to dive when he gets back,” Jake said. “Can we decrypt this now?”
“Of course,” Renard said.
Jake handed him a flash drive, and Renard took it to the privacy of his stateroom. He typed his password into his laptop and watched words form on his screen.