"I don't know what you're talking about," Phillips replied.
As if on cue, then, a long, low, grinding rumble sounded, transmitted through the steel deck of the bridge. The ship itself gave a lurching shudder.
"That noise," Khalid growled. "Will you tell me what it is, or shall I put several of your passengers overboard?"
The threat seemed to batter down Phillips' defenses. "The sea is getting rougher," he said. "The two ships, this one and the Sandpiper, are of different lengths, and different drafts, so they ride the waves differently from one another."
Khalid walked to the port bridge wing and looked aft. It was dark and raining, but in the haze of glowing mist illuminated by the Pacific Sandpiper's deck lights, he could see the smaller ship grinding unevenly against the Adantis Queen's side.
"Are we in danger?"
"I don't know. It's hard to tell. If the sea gets any rougher, the Sandpiper could stove us in, I suppose."
"What can we do about it?"
Phillips gave a halfhearted shrug. "You could bring both ships about into the wind," he said. "Cut our speed until we're just barely making way, and ride out the storm."
"We do not need the delay," Khalid said. "We have a schedule to keep." He gestured toward the officer. "Take him back to his quarters."
As Phillips was led away, Khalid called the radio watch. "Sadeeq! Raise the Pacific Sandpiper"
"Yes, sir."
"Tell them we are going to separate the ships. Our time together is over."
The two would proceed to their respective targets separately from here on out.
Chapter 23
"Who do you work for?" Jerry Esterhausen asked. "SAS? The American Delta Force? I know! The CIA!"
"Believe it or not, I'm a relatively low-level clerk," Carolyn Howorth told him. If he wanted to jump to the conclusion that she was CIA, that was fine with her. "I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Or the right place, right time," he said with feeling. They were seated at the desk in Esterhausen's stateroom. Late last night, he'd brought her down here, and she'd slept here. Only slept; Esterhausen had gallantly let her have the queen-sized bed while he took the double-wide love-seat sofa. It was, Howorth was forced to admit, infinitely better than blankets and life jackets in a lifeboat outside.
She'd been up early, however, sending more reports back to GCHQ and NSA Headquarters and also trying to raise Mohamed Ghailiani.
He was alive. She was fairly certain of that, now. According to GCHQ, which was closely monitoring every transmission in and out of the Atlantis Queen, another JPEG photo of Ghailiani's wife and daughter had been transmitted to his e-mail account on Tuesday, again on Wednesday, and then yet again that morning. The images weren't piling up in his in-box, either, but were being opened each morning. With Ghailiani's e-mail account password, she could check that. If he had been killed, there would have been no reason to keep Nouzha and Zahra Ghailiani alive, no need to keep e-mailing photographs of them with a fresh copy of the Guardian each morning. Both women would have been dead within hours of Mohamed Ghailiani's death.
The question was whether or not she could develop the guy as an agent-in-place. He'd been co-opted by the terrorists through threats to his family; perhaps he could be turned if those threats could be eliminated. However, he'd been so terrified the other day, so broken, that she wasn't sure he would be of any use even if she could elicit his cooperation.
Early that morning, she'd finished typing out an exploratory e-mail, addressed it to Ghailiani's account, and clicked send. The slow packet transmission rate meant that it would take a while to get there, and she had no idea when he would again be checking his shipboard account.
But right now she had nothing but time. Her fingers clattered over the keyboard and, suddenly, a mail icon popped up. She clicked on it.
Who are you?
She stared at the three words for a long moment. The e should be from Ghailiani himself, but there was always the possibility that someone else, one of the terrorists, was reading his e-mail for him. It was possible that they didn't trust him to access his e-mail without someone reading over his shoulder. So Who are you? might be from Ghailiani, or it might be from a tango.
A friend, she typed back. You know me. I can help you. She pressed send.
It would take a while for Jerry's computer to send the message at its deliberate electronic snail's pace. She waited.
They'd been watching them all day.
MI5 had found the flat two days before, on Tuesday afternoon. A policeman had called in the black sedan with its license registration of Y9WE83K, parked on Waterhouse Lane in front of a line of two-story brown-stone row houses in an aging section of town. The neighborhood was just three miles across town from the Ghailiani residence, an easy drive out the A3057.
MI5 agents had questioned neighbors, learning from them that two men, foreign-looking and secretive, had moved into the vacant flat only two weeks earlier. The two apparently kept to themselves — and that of itself was enough to attract attention and elicit comment in a clannish and close-knit community such as Millbrook.
MI5 had talked to the people living next door, a newly married Indian couple named Rajeesh. The two had been temporarily evicted on Tuesday, moved to a hotel in Southampton for the duration, and with the promise that the government would take care of any damages. MI5 had moved in, entering the flat from the rear two at a time in order to try to avoid alerting the residents at Number 1240 next door. Lia DeFrancesca and Ilya Akulinin had arrived on Wednesday, setting up a satellite radio link with both MI5 and GCHQ.
Early on Thursday morning, while it was still dark in the hours before dawn, the SAS had arrived as well. The takedown, code-named Imperial, was a go.
The upstairs of the Rajeesh apartment had been transformed into a military command post, the furniture moved downstairs, the carpets rolled up, and folding chairs and tables brought in for the banks of computers and monitors being used by the HRT personnel. Two technicians had used silenced electrical saws to cut through the south wall, which, according to architectural plans from the local planning-board office, should back up against the north wall of the suspect's bedroom. Working with extreme and methodical care in absolute silence, they brought down a seven-foot-high, nine-foot-wide section of lath and plaster wall, exposing the back side of the suspect's wall and the nine-inch gap between the two.
A hand drill was used to very, very slowly bore into this final barrier, a sheet of aging lath and plaster half an inch thick. The resultant hole was scarcely wider than a finishing nail, but it accepted the stiff end of a horoscope probe, connected by a fiber-optic cable to a TV monitor on a folding table several feet away.
The horoscope's fish-eye lens revealed nearly all of the room next door, and it provided the final proof that MI5 had found the right place. Two women could be seen tied on the bed. Two and sometimes three men came and went. Sensitive microphones placed against the wall's interior side let the HRT team hear everything that happened, every word that was spoken. A couple of Arabic-speaking translators were brought in, who sat and listened to everything as the recorders rolled.
But Imperial couldn't go in immediately. Clearance needed to be won from higher levels of the bureaucracy, and unless the two victims were in immediate danger, an entry warrant needed to be approved by the local magistrate. The watchers at first couldn't see either of the women's faces, and there was at least a small chance that MI5 was peeking in on a kinky sex scene rather than an actual kidnapping.