Liberty (33 page)

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Authors: Stephen Coonts

BOOK: Liberty
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“Well, go dig a hole.”
“That was my first thought, sir. Then I had another. If it is a nuke, whoever put it there may be watching it—by satellite if nothing else.”
“We can put a tent up,” Alt shot back, “a big one, biggest we can find. The following evening we'll bring in a couple of big backhoes and some trucks to haul out the dirt. Work at night and keep the site completely shielded with the tent. Use armed guards to keep spectators as far away as possible.”
“All the golf course personnel will know that something is up,” Jake objected. “If this thing is what we think it is, someone is watching. We go digging around, the wrong people are going to hear about it before long. I'd rather go to a little trouble and do it in such a way that a direct observer can't tell what we are doing.”
“You know, Grafton, I never really appreciated what a sneaky bastard you are.”
“That's my second compliment this morning, sir. Clean living and prayer are paying off.”
Alt sighed audibly. “Okay. Do it any way you want.”
“I'm going to need your aides to help me grease this through the system.”
“Of course,” Alt said.
Toad Tarkington and Gil Pascal came into the room after Jake cradled the secure telephone. Captain Pascal said, “We've put together a patrol program here in Washington for our one Corrigan unit, Admiral,” and handed Jake the document.
The admiral flipped through it—ten pages, he noted—and pushed it back across the desk.
“Not yet,” he said. He eyed Toad. “You and Sonny and Harley Bennett take the van to New York. Drive up and down beside the rivers, drive the major boulevards of Manhattan and Brooklyn and annotate a map, establish a baseline.”
“Why the rivers, sir?”
“If I were going to attack America with a nuclear weapon, I'd bring it in in a ship or boat. Wouldn't even have to dock it. Detonate the bomb in the harbor.”
“Do you think one is already here?”
“I don't know what to think,” Jake Grafton confessed, and toyed with Pascal's plan. “That golf course hot spot has me worried. That was unexpected.”
“When do you want us to leave, sir?” Toad asked.
“As fast as you can get to the parking lot. Buy a toothbrush and clean underwear in New York. Keep me informed.”
“I'm on my way,” Toad said, and walked out of the room.
“NIMA can't find
Olympic Voyager,
” Pascal said as he handed Jake a memo to that effect. “They don't think she's in the Med.”
“Oh, she's probably there, all right,” Jake said carelessly. “On the bottom.”
Later that morning he spent a half hour with FBI agent Harry Estep and two of his colleagues. There was no official record of
Olympic Voyager
docking or anchoring in the harbor at Port Said, but several informants were sure
that she had been there. If cargo was off-loaded or transshipped, there was no written evidence of it.
“Thousands of containers … make that tens of thousands of containers,” Estep said, “go across those docks every week. We're chasing down the ships that have gone through that port this past week, but I don't know that we have them all. The port authorities
seem
cooperative, going through the motions, checking records …” He ran out of steam.
“Any possibility of bribery?” Jake asked softly.
“That's the third world. Every civil servant has his hand out—all of them!”
“So what if the weapons were transshipped?”
“You know the answer as well as I. They could be sent anywhere, be redirected from port to port, from ship to ship, until finally they arrive wherever the people juggling the shipping documents want them to go.”
“Assume they are destined to come here. How do we intercept them?”
“Search every ship, every container. That's the only way.”
“Is that possible?”
“No. Too many ships, too many containers.”
“What about intercepting every ship at sea, boarding and searching it with Geiger counters?”
“That might work,” Harry Estep admitted. “If we use every boat and ship the coast guard and navy can get to sea and every airplane that will fly—assuming we're willing to pay the costs and tolerate the delays—what the hell, it might be possible.”
Jake shooed them out. He stood in front of the map that covered the wall opposite his desk and used his fingers to roughly measure distances.
“Here are the daily FBI reports on those Florida cells,” Zelda said. She didn't do the “sir” thing. Jake Grafton didn't care. She placed the file on the desk.
“Please. Close the door and sit.” Jake's regular telephone had a long cord so he could walk around the office while he talked, and as often happened, the cord was twisted into a knot. He had the receiver off the hook and was busy untwisting the thing as Zelda seated herself. She had more files in her arms and rested them on her lap. He glanced up at her, finished the cord, then placed the receiver back on the hook.
He took his time perusing the reports. “What do you think?” he asked her when he finished.
“If these are terrorist cells, they are waiting for something to happen. I don't know what. They aren't really doing anything.”
“I think you're right.”
He handed the file to her and nodded at the folders on her lap. “What else have you come up with?”
“A lot of nothing,” she said, and placed five files in front of him. The top one was Arch Foster. Inside were telephone records, bank statements, credit card records for a year, even copies of the power company's records on his house. His car payments—he was never late. Subscribed to three magazines, belonged to a service club … made a complaint to the police six months ago about a loud party down the street.
Norv Lalouette's file was even thicker. He was a heavy user of the Internet—liked to visit porn sites, apparently. Ordered books from
Amazon.com
, dabbled in on-line investments—nothing huge, just occasional hundred-share lots. The investment account was worth $27,745.
The other three were Butch Lanham, Coke Twilley, and Sonny Tran, the three people who knew that Janos Ilin said the missing Richard Doyle was a spy and flunked the recognition portion of their lie detector tests. Jake flipped through the files … nothing leaped out.
“I'll need to study these,” he said. “Is there any way you can put names and addresses to the telephone calls these people made and received?”
“Yes. I have a staffer on that now.”
“So tell me what you think. Using the tools we have, how can we find out more about these people?”
“It would help if I knew why I was looking and what I was looking for.”
Her hair was shampooed and brushed, she was dressed in a nice outfit, her color looked good. She seemed more relaxed than Jake remembered seeing her. Yet still sour.
“How are you and Zip getting along?”
She shrugged.
“Carmellini says Zip's in love with you.”
“I don't think that's any of your business. Or Carmellini's.”
“I suppose not,” Jake acknowledged.
“You act like a man trying to work himself up to something. Why don't you just spit it out and we'll deal with it?”
Jake nodded. “Here's how it is. I don't trust you to do the right thing, yet I need your help.”
“Your problem.”
He arranged the files on his desk in a stack and checked that the backs were straight. “We're looking for four nuclear weapons.” He went into detail, explained what he knew. She asked no questions, just listened. “We need a fresh approach. I want you to think outside the box. If those weapons are coming to America, there will be people here to meet them, perhaps these cells the joint task force is tracking. Perhaps cells they don't know about. In any event, the people importing these weapons have plans. They are making telephone calls, spending money, talking to confederates, traveling. Your job is to find them. Not all of them—one will do. Some one person. Give me a hint, a trail, some little bit of the string. I don't care about arrests or prosecutions—that is for the FBI and Justice. I want the bombs.”
“Arch and Norv? Were they part of this?”
“They might have been. It's possible.” She had been told of Carmellini's weekend adventure but knew nothing of the blackmail angle, a detail Jake had no intention of
sharing. “I think they wanted Carmellini to tell them what is going on in this office. There are other possibilities, by the way. One of them is that they were involved in a Russian spy ring. It's probable someone killed Richard Doyle; they are the likely candidates. The FBI has a forensic team going over their airplane.”
“Lanham, Twilley, and Tran?”
“They knew Ilin fingered Doyle.”
“I need to think about this,” she murmured.
“Think hard. If a nuke pops in Washington, you're dead. If it pops anywhere in the U.S., this nation will be irrevocably changed. Before it's over we may all wish we were dead.”
“No one will be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” she said flippantly. “I got it, Admiral.” She stood. “Anything else?”
“Well …”Jake hesitated, played again with the files. Then he made up his mind and looked up at her, meeting her eyes. “Corrigan Engineering invented a nifty new radiation detector just in time for us to start chasing terrorists with nukes.”
She snorted. “Ain't it grand the way American industry comes through in the nick of time, just when we need'em? We needed telephones and there was Bell. Cars, and Henry Ford showed up. Airplanes, and the Wright brothers delivered in time for World War One. We could talk all day about Bill Gates, or Saint Bill, as he likes to be called. Are we lucky or what?”
“Check out Corrigan.”
“You're a suspicious bastard, aren't you?”
Jake brightened. “Wow, three compliments this week. Go get'em, Zelda.”
“My name is Sarah Houston,” she growled, and marched from the office.
So the feds knew about the bombs
. Nguyen Duc Tran thought about that fact as he piloted his big eighteen-wheel
rig south on the interstate. He didn't turn on the radio—most of the stations played country music and Nguyen Duc Tran hated it. Country was too schmaltzy, too sweet, too stupid … too American. Nor did he want to listen to the smart people on NPR talk to the people who thought they were smart. He had some classical and jazz CDs in the box, but today he wasn't in the mood. He kept the tractor at sixty-five and let the hum of the engine and the unwinding endless highway smooth him over and chill him down.
And the feds had Sonny looking for the damned things!
If that wasn't a hoot!
Nguyen Duc Tran hated America. He had lived here since he was five years old and spoke only English, but he hated the place and the people and their decadent, rotten values.
He and his brother grew up in Texas. His parents were professional people with standing in Vietnam—his father a career army officer—but after they escaped from Saigon before the fall in 1975, they wound up in Texas. The only work his father could find was as a janitor. His mother cleaned houses. Sonny and Nguyen grew up as Vietnamese niggers, loathed and endlessly teased about being Viet Cong. Communists. Cong Tran they called him in school.
“You South Viets lost the fucking war, Cong, let those fucking Ho Chi Minh-ers kick your asses. Even the U.S. Army couldn't save your sorry butts. So you came over here and took jobs away from good Americans when you couldn't hold on to your own shitty little country. Why don't you go back there, huh, raise the IQ of Texas
and
Vietnam?” He had gotten a lot of that growing up, back when he was too small to fight back.
Sonny was smart, a great student, and he won scholarships to California colleges. Nguyen was only mediocre in school. He dropped out of junior college after a year and became a commercial truck driver. When he could find work. “Think you're big enough to drive this fucking
truck, boy? Hell, you don't weigh 140 pounds. All that fucking rice and fish heads.”
He had learned enough karate, finally, to take care of the worst of the big-bellied bastards. It didn't take much. A punch in the throat, an elbow in the pot gut, or a well-aimed kick in the groin would usually put them down. Then they flopped around like whales on the beach.
Sonny hated them, too. Oh, he had played the game all his life, but he hated them as much as Nguyen did. Maybe more. Hated these people and their money and their cultural superiority and the mindless way they interfered with the lives of people all over the globe, because Americans knew best. Knew what was right for everyone.

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