Charon's Landing (35 page)

He dropped the note into the bowl, finished what his body demanded, and left the stall. As he washed his hands, one of the guards watched him from under heavy brows, a German-made H&K MP-5 cradled nonchalantly in his arms. Patroni could feel the terrorist’s eyes burning the back of his neck. Yet he showed nothing of the thoughts swimming in his head.

They were required to wait in the restroom until the last man had finished, and only then were they led back to the mess hall. The terrorist who’d been watching Patroni gave him a sharp jab to the kidneys that propelled the engineer across the hallway and into the mess. He just managed to remain on his feet by clutching a seat back.

Patroni whirled around, his fists coming up as he settled into a defensive crouch. Then a hand reached out and pressed against his hip. It was the ship’s electrician, whose chair he’d stumbled into. “It’s what he wants,” the electrician whispered so softly that his lips didn’t move.

Patroni relaxed, straightening his body and lowering his beefy fists. He ambled back to his customary seat, a secret smile on his face. Somehow he would find a way to help Hauser.

HAUSER was too old for this and knew it. His heart pounded against his ribs like some wild animal trying to escape its cage, and sweat poured into his eyes, reducing them to painful slits. The air in the crawl space above the mess hall was so fouled with cigarette smoke that it felt as if he was drawing battery acid into his lungs. To think he used to smoke voluntarily. He clung to a thick steel conduit line running through the crawl space, his legs slung over the piping, his hands gripping so tightly his fingers ached. His shoulders were afire with the strain of holding himself in position. If he lost his grip, he’d fall through the acoustical tile ceiling below him. His labored movements kicked up dust that threatened to bring about a sneezing fit at any moment.

Captain Hauser began to haul himself back out of the space, inching along like a caterpillar. The air whooshing through a twelve-inch ventilator trunk line nearby was loud enough to cover the sounds of his ragged breathing. Once he was above the kitchen, he lowered himself to a more comfortable position — the ceiling was hardened to make it flame-proof and could support his weight. His chest pumped like a bellows, and long minutes passed before his hands stopped quivering.

“Too damned old by half,” he muttered quietly.

It took another hour of crawling, worming, and squeezing through the tanker’s numerous mechanicals spaces for him to reach a ventilator shaft and outside hatch. The cool sea breeze drawn in by the air conditioners blew across his face. It was a welcome relief to the smoke, dust, and heat he’d just endured, but the trip had been well worth it. He knew that Patroni would find a way to disable the bridge indicators when he launched the raft and make sure that no one was blamed. That was the key. Make sure the terrorists didn’t suspect that anyone had escaped.

Although his contribution to the Vietnam War had been running oil and cargo to Southeast Asia, Hauser had met enough soldiers to know that anyone with a gun in his hand suspected everything and everyone. Anything out of the ordinary meant trouble, and the only logical reaction was to open up with automatic fire. If the terrorists became suspicious, Hauser knew that some of his crew were going to die.

Easing the ventilator grid from its clamps, Hauser slid from the shaft and dropped lightly to the deck. He was near the tanker’s fantail, no more than fifteen feet from the life raft on its launching rail. As he’d hoped, he was alone. There were too few terrorists and too much ship for them to patrol effectively.

He allowed himself the luxury of watching the sea hiss past the vessel for a moment before undogging the waterproof hatch of the fiberglass lifeboat and jumping inside the claustrophobic craft. While the tanker carried a crew of thirty, as a safety precaution, each of her three life rafts could hold twenty men. Each boat carried emergency locator beacons and a two-way marine transceiver. A stay in one was never meant to last more than a day or two, especially in the busy shipping lanes that tankers ply, but they carried enough food and water to last a week.

Sitting on one of the plastic bench seats, Hauser checked that the few Plexiglas portholes were covered with blankets taken from the boat’s stores before allowing himself to relax. In a few hours, Patroni would cover for him while he launched the boat. He would motor away until some other vessel or shore-based radio picked up his broadcast. Until then, he had to wait, painfully watching the hours tick away. He turned to the question that had plagued him since he’d overheard two terrorists talking while he hung in a crawl space above a cabin.

Seattle. What was Riggs planning to do in Seattle?

Thoughts and ideas rumbled through his head, but nothing solidified enough to give him an answer. Even as he drew together every scrap of information he’d learned about the ship and the terrorists, nothing made Washington State’s port city seem important. He tried to remember which system Patroni had said was so crucial to Riggs. Tank control, that was it. She wanted to be able to shift the tanker’s cargo from hold to hold. The system was normally used to keep the vessel trimmed in rough seas or if she unloaded part of her cargo and then moved to another port to discharge the remainder. Maintaining equilibrium was significant for normal ship’s operation, but it should not be such a high priority.

It didn’t make any sense.

The continental United States’ northernmost port and the ability to shift oil within the monstrous hull… what was the connection? Suddenly Hauser knew. And fear and horror almost made him gag.

“Oh, dear God, they wouldn’t do it. No one would.”

T
here are two options for London’s weather in the midfall: warm and rainy with a heavy overcast, or cold and rainy with an even darker overcast. In the few moments it took him to duck from a limousine to the lobby of a discreet Belgravia hotel, Khalid Khuddari was chilled almost to the bone, the heavy rain forming camouflage splashes on his Burberry overcoat. He shivered in the marble and gilt lobby for a second, wringing water from his thick hair with one flattened hand. The doorman watched him gravely, taking Khalid’s rush into the lobby as a personal affront, for the umbrella in his hand could shield a family of four.

A concierge led Khalid to the registration counter, actually an eighteenth-century ormolu and teak desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl along its delicate recurved legs and bordering its broad, glossy top. An exact replica of the table shimmered up from the white Carrara marble floor. The receptionist’s smile was almost warm enough to make Khalid forget the miserable weather. “Good afternoon, Minister Khuddari. I apologize about the weather. The telly said it should have cleared by now.”

Khalid wasn’t surprised that she knew his name; hotels such as this knew everything about a guest. “I’ll be sure to take it up with the management.” He grinned boyishly. “I specifically requested no rain for my entire stay.”

“I’ll pass on your request to the BBC weather bureau and see what can be done about it.” She mirrored his smile.

Like the older and more discriminating banks of Switzerland, which looked nothing like a place of business from the outside, the St. James Belgravia didn’t look like a hotel at all. It more resembled a large well-kept private home. Georgian in style with leaded casement windows and stone walls thick enough to turn away cannon fire, it even lacked a sign at the front advertising its presence. The lobby felt more like a grand entrance hall, with the desk and three oxblood wing chairs around a low cherry table. A sideboard hugging one wall under a giltwood mirror held crystal decanters, matching glassware, and the distinctive green neck of a Dom Perignon bottle in a sterling ice bucket.

One had to have money to even know that such hotels existed and even more to actually stay.

Khalid smiled tightly, knowing that Siri had not only booked the first-class flight from the UAE but also arranged for the hotel and the limo from the airport. It was her way of teasing him and demonstrating her affection, of which he was not unaware.

“Minister, I normally wouldn’t ask this of you,” the receptionist said almost apologetically. “However, you have never stayed with us before. I must see your passport for just a moment.”

He slid the document from his breast pocket, laying it open for her. She copied what she needed onto a guest card and handed back the diplomatic passport with another smile. “Thank you very much, Minister. The bellman will have brought your luggage to your room by now and will see to it that it’s unpacked if that is what you wish. You’re in room number seven. Alfred will take you.”

In his suite, Khalid dismissed the two bellmen without letting them unpack his bags. He noted that they didn’t wait for a tip, and he smiled again. Hotels like this never bothered their guests with such plebeian tasks as paying gratuities, but he was certain that having the men lead him to his room probably cost more than his grandfather made during his entire life. After a quick shower and shave to rid himself of the flight from the Gulf, he was back out of his room. The limo was waiting for him, as he had instructed earlier.

“The Savoy,” he told the West Indian driver as he eased into the plush leather of the black stretch Daimler.

Remarkably for such a big car, they managed to bull through the snarled city traffic in record time and were soon edging down the alley that led to perhaps the most famous hotel in the world.

Given his natural good looks and the fact that he could recite ten thousand lines of romantic poetry, it was little surprise that Trevor James-Price was talking to the most attractive woman in the Savoy’s American Bar. James-Price and the woman sat at the long bar angled toward each other with the intimate and exclusionary attitude of illicit lovers. Even as he approached, Khalid heard the woman’s laughter, sweet and clear with a hint of sexual throatiness.

“Ah, there you are, Trevor. The other warders have been looking for you all over town when we discovered you’d left the asylum without your medication.” With Trevor, Khalid could let his long-suppressed schoolboy humor flow.

James-Price looked up quickly, the sandy cowlick hanging over his forehead lifting and falling like a bird’s wing. His eyes sparkled with pleasure. They shook hands warmly.

“Khalid, please meet Millicent Gray. Millie, this is the Thief of Baghdad, Khalid Khuddari.” Trevor paused for a beat while Khalid shook the woman’s hand. “Now, if you will excuse us, I’ve got to talk him out of blowing up Parliament. I’ll meet you at Les Ambassadeurs at nine.”

She brushed her hand along Trevor’s as she stood, then smiled at Khuddari and sauntered through the room. At least half a dozen heads turned to watch her go.

“Les A, huh? I thought you were broke,” Khalid teased.

“What can I say? She invited me.” Trevor knocked off the last of a club soda and nodded for the barman to bring two more. “Glad you could make it to your first OPEC meeting as a Petroleum Minister.”

“I almost didn’t come,” Khalid said darkly.

“So I gather. You want to talk about it?”

“Not really. I think I may be jumping at shadows or I could be facing real darkness.” Khalid shook his head.

Trevor was quiet for a moment. “Well, you might be facing the Abyss after all. I found out about Rufti’s commiserations with the Iraqis and Iranians. If they pull it off, that hundred-thousand-dollar check you said you wrote won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.”

Before Khalid could react, Trevor continued, “I finally got someone to open up to me, a Saudi prince who says he’s being blackmailed by Rufti and wants to see the fat bastard taken down. Seems the royal personage is tired of being extorted because of his exotic tastes in pleasure.

“Last year, Rufti met with a former KGB agent named Ivan Kerikov in Istanbul aboard this prince’s yacht. I’ve found that this Kerikov has also met with the Iraqis and Iranians on separate occasions since then. I guessed that all of them are involved with something unsavory, so I bribed a waiter at the restaurant where Rufti and his cohorts met last night. He secreted a tape recorder under their table.”

“And?” Khalid prompted when Trevor paused for dramatic effect.

“Because of the economic pressure of the American decree, the Iraqis and Iranians have agreed to put aside their religious differences for the greater good, namely their Swiss bank accounts. With the help of the UAE, they’re trying nothing less than to take over the entire Gulf. As you know, Iran, with a little help from the Emirates, can choke off the Strait of Hormuz to all seaborne traffic, tankers and warships alike. Then, with a combined army of ten million men and chemical and biological weapons that the UN inspectors never even suspected, Iraq and Iran will swallow Kuwait and a good chunk of Saudi Arabia long before anyone knows what’s happened.”

“That’s ridiculous. The Americans would respond immediately, with NATO backing them. It would be a replay of the Gulf War.”

“Would it?” Trevor arched a pale eyebrow. “When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he made only one miscalculation. He never imagined that U.S. soldiers would be allowed to use Saudi Arabia as a base for retaliatory attacks. And if you recall, it was by only a narrow margin that the Saudis agreed to let foreign troops on the Arabian Peninsula. You wogs are real touchy about who gets to walk on sacred sand and all that rot.

“Saddam never would have paused at the Saudi border had he realized America would be given those bases. This time, you can bet the tanks won’t stop rolling until they’re parked in downtown Riyadh.

“Furthermore, despite President Bush’s assurances to the contrary, the Gulf War was fought over oil and nothing else. The Americans didn’t care about the plight of the Kuwaiti people. Until the war, most Americans probably thought Kuwait was a type of fruit. No higher principles, no moral calling, just good, sound economic policy. Well, in ten years, nine now, America won’t give a goddamn about oil. They’re going to turn off the valve and let the Middle East collapse. If a combined front of Iraqis and Iranians try again, Congress is going to say the hell with it.” Trevor slipped into a mocking American accent. “ ‘Let the fig-eating sand niggers kill each other all they want. It no longer concerns us,’ some Southern senator will say. They won’t commit combat troops to a cause that doesn’t affect American wallets. Period.