Liberty (40 page)

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Authors: Stephen Coonts

BOOK: Liberty
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“We're businessmen,” Nguyen said lightly, exhaling smoke. “You and I have done business before and probably will again. My associates know the arrangements.” He shrugged. “People have tried to fuck with us before. Hey, man, you know how it is—gotta protect your business or you won't have one.”
Nguyen thought it a safe bet that Red would sell him out the minute he thought he could profit by doing so and get away with it. He wanted to ensure that thought never crossed the man's mind.
“I never fucked over anybody,” Red declared fiercely, and sipped his beer. “That's why I'm still alive. This is a goddamn tough place down here, don't you forget it.”
“There's a gym bag on the floor. The money's in it.”
“Okay.”
“Pick up the bag, take it to the men's and count it. I
want you happy as a pig in shit when I walk out of here.”
Red took a long pull on his beer, then picked up the gym bag and headed down the hallway. Four minutes passed before he returned. He was smiling. He tossed the gym bag back on the floor and took another healthy swig of beer, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “It's all there,” he said, and grinned.
“Lot of money,” Nguyen said, his face deadpan. “Tell me how things are going down there at the port.”
Red Citrix crossed his arms on the table and began. “Feds crawlin' all over, and that's a fact. They're using Geiger counters, waving them friggin' wands everywhere. They even search ships at random before they enter the bay. Every ship is searched in the harbor before it can come into the piers. Customs and Coast Guard everywhere.” He continued for five minutes, talking personalities and numbers, what was searched and what ignored. Nguyen let him talk.
When the man ran down, Nguyen put one arm on the table and said, “I thought Geiger counters were for finding uranium and stuff?”
“Yeah. They're looking for bombs, we figger. Won't admit a damn thing, but with those Geiger counters, it's sorta gotta be that. They ain't looking for dope—don't even have dope-sniffing dogs—I know all those dogs by sight. These are new dogs, bomb-sniffers I think. Unless you guys advertise or something you'll not have any trouble.”
“Pray that I don't,” Nguyen Duc Tran said very distinctly. “You and I got a deal. This is business.”
“Don't get all sweaty,” Red said, squinting through the cigarette smoke at the man across the table. “Like I said, the port is crawling with feds—Customs, FBI, Coast Guard, even army guys—all looking for bombs and weapons and such-like. This is a bad time. They may pop your box. I got zero control of that. They do, it's down the shitter and that's that. They can't touch me and they can't touch you. We're clean. Life goes on. Tomorrow's a new
day. You can't live with that, keep your fuckin' dough.”
“Don't cross me, Red.”
“Hey, I'm honest. That's why people do business with me. I've been helping guys get stuff into the country for damn near ten years now. Occasionally Customs pops a box—that's your risk, not mine. I do what you pay me for. I'm going to be right here six months from now, next year, the year after. I ain't goin' no place'cause I got no place else to go.”
Nguyen produced an envelope from a pocket and pushed it across the table. In it was a sheet of paper with the container number, the shipper, consignee, and the address to which he wanted it shipped. He had cut the numbers and words from a newspaper and taped them to the paper. He had worn gloves when he did it.
Red Citrix opened the envelope, took out the paper, and glanced at it. “What's in the box?”
“Office furniture.”
“For Corrigan Engineering?”
“Right.”
“Okay,” Red said, and pocketed the paper. He pushed the envelope across to Nguyen, who pocketed it.
“We need to talk about this love thing,” Tommy Carmellini said to Anna Modin as they walked hand in hand upon a deserted beach in the rain. A raw wind whipped at their legs and windbreakers, not too chilly, as gray clouds scudded swiftly overhead on their way out to sea. Even the seabirds were struggling today; when they weren't probing the wet sand for food, they stood with their heads pointed into the wind.
The couple had found the windbreakers on sale this morning in a beachwear store, and were now trying them out. She adjusted the hood of hers so that she could see him yet still keep the stinging raindrops from her face. A strand of dark wet hair was visible on her cheek. “The spy thing is bothering you, isn't it?”
“Ah, that's no big deal,” he scoffed. After a glance at her expression, he admitted, “Yes, it's bothering me a little.”
“I thought it might be. You are thinking, She said she didn't work for the SVR, but was she telling the truth or lying? And there is no way to know. To really know. Is there?”
“No,” he admitted.
“It's one of those things you must take on faith. If it matters to you.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, it matters.”
“Why?”
“It just does.”
“Can you articulate the reason?”
He thought as he walked. “Love's one of the important things in life, and there are others. I'm an American. It isn't cool to say it, but I love my country. I haven't always obeyed every jot and comma in the statute books, but I care about these people. White, black, brown, yellow, it doesn't matter, they're my people. We're all in this American thing together. That sounds sorta cornball, but that's the way it is.”
“So there are things in your life more important than love?”
“As important,” he admitted. “I suppose that's a fair statement. If you were a spy stealing secrets or servicing a network or corrupting folks, yeah, it would matter.”
She wrapped her arm around his waist and matched her steps with his. “I feel the same way,” she said. “I am a Russian woman. I do not work for the SVR. I never have. I work with—and for—a man who is fighting evil. There is a lot of it in this world to fight. You already know his name, which is a precious secret—Janos Ilin.
“Ilin is indeed an officer in the SVR, a very high one as a matter of fact, but he does not serve that organization, which is a criminal conspiracy, by the way, that under its old name functioned primarily to keep the Communist Party in power. The bureaucracy lives on today in Russia
with many of the same people, and it continues as it always has to function as the strong right arm of the ruling oligarchy. The aristocrats have foresworn communist ideology, they say. No more garbage about labor heroes or the new socialist man. Little else has changed. Kings and dictators and small oligarchies have ruled Russia as far back as we have written records. Always there have been secret police to control the masses, to manipulate them, to confound and destroy organized opposition, to maintain the social and power structure.
“Ilin has no budget, no gadgets, no bosses, no one to answer to except his own conscience, and I am his army. Me—Anna Modin. There are probably others—I do not know about them nor do I wish to. A fact or name I do not know I can never betray, even inadvertently. I have met only one of Ilin's soldiers, Nooreem Habib, and I saw the men who killed her. She gave her life in the fight against evil. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you would. That is one reason I love you. You are the first man I have ever gotten to know who would understand. Most men want a woman's body for sex and her social standing to boost theirs. They want her to applaud as they wield power and thereby acquire money. That is the way it is in Russia and Europe and Egypt. Is it like that here?”
“A lot of women think so,” he admitted.
She nodded. “Although you have stolen, money is not the god you serve.”
“I suppose not,” Tommy Carmellini muttered. “I certainly don't have much of it.”
“Nor power.”
He shook his head, even though she was looking at the sand and couldn't see the response.
“You enjoy sex, yet almost any woman could provide that, and you don't seem to have a harem.”
Carmellini cleared his throat. In the service of truth, perhaps he should admit that getting laid once or twice a
week was pretty darn high on his priority list. He had had his share of bedmates and girlfriends through the years; he enjoyed feminine companionship. The truth of the matter was that he liked women, liked everything about them, including their bodies. He started to tell her that but she had motored on.
“You seem to have a good sense of who you are,” she continued. “You aren't dogmatic or a braggart; you listen—many men don't—and you are genuinely interested in other people. I like you a lot, Tommy Carmellini. And I love you. There is a difference, you know.”
He didn't want to go there. After a few more steps he stopped and turned to face her. “Was all that intended to inform me why you won't marry me?”
“I was hoping you wouldn't ask, then I wouldn't have to say no.”
She had tears leaking from her eyes. That was when he realized that he knew the truth—she wasn't a spy.
He kissed her gently on the lips, both eyes, and the tip of her nose, then wrapped an arm around her shoulder and led her on as the rain pelted their bare legs and feet. Their feet left little impression on the hard sand.
Star Transport Corporation's
Evening Star
was intercepted fifty miles off the coast of Florida by a Coast Guard helicopter. She was a large, modern container ship displacing sixty thousand tons. As the helo hovered, a team of four inspectors went down one by one on the winch. When they were safely on deck the crewman lowered their gear to them, then the helo flew back to the coast for refueling while the team went to work.
Carrying Geiger counters on straps over their shoulders, team members walked beside, over, and around every stack of containers on the ship. They went down into the holds, the engine rooms and machinery spaces, crew compartments, galley, the heads, the ship's office, the fantail—they inspected the entire ship from stem to stern. The ship's crew and officers assisted, opening and closing hatches, turning lights on and off, producing manifests and ship's papers, answering questions. The team leader stayed in contact with Coast Guard headquarters and the pilot of the helicopter, when it was in range, using a handheld radio and satellite telephone.
Not a single Geiger counter registered anything more than normal background radiation during this preliminary inspection. The team had not opened any container and some were buried too deep in the stack to get near, but
every container would be wanded individually as it was off-loaded at Port Everglades.
Two hours after they boarded, the team members were winched back aboard the helo, which flew them on to another ship barely making steerageway five miles away.
Evening Star
worked back up to fifteen knots and continued toward Port Everglades.
The sun had slipped below the horizon when
Evening Star
anchored near the entrance to the harbor. The following morning she was boarded by another team of inspectors. Twenty-four hours later she moved against a pier and the process of off-loading her cargo of containers with giant cranes began. More inspectors were on hand, and this time they wanded every container as it was readied for lifting to the pier.
The containers were sorted and moved to giant stacks to await Customs inspection. It was then that Red Citrix first saw the container carrying the numbers that Nguyen Duc Tran had given him. In his stack of paperwork was a multicopy manifest he had prepared showing the shipper, cargo in the box, the consignee, and its final destination. The manifest looked like every other computer-generated document in his stack.
As a soldier in army fatigues walked a bomb-sniffing dog by the box and another walked around it one more time with a Geiger counter, a Customs officer looked at the manifest, scanned the numbers on the box, then wrote on the form, “No duty owed.”
“Okay,” he said, taking one copy of the form for his records and handing the other copies back to Red.
It was that easy.
Although Red didn't know it, the container held one of the four bombs that General Petrov sold to Frouq al-Zuair. The original manifest, which Red had trashed, would have caused the container to be delivered to the food shipment
warehouse where Mohammed Mohammed and his friends worked.
The warriors of the Sword of Islam had not anticipated that one of their weapons would be stolen, but they had thought it likely that the Americans might inspect one or more of the containers and find the bombs, so they took the precaution of sending the four containers to four different consignees, through four different ports.
All the bombs were now on American soil.
Red Citrix was not the only person at Port Everglades to take note of the container of office furniture from
Evening
Star
. Mahfuz Saleh was a data entry clerk who spent his days keeping track of containers on the computer database. He had been waiting for this container for weeks, so when he saw the number, he removed a piece of paper from his wallet and checked it against the number on the paper digit by digit.
Suddenly his palms were sweaty. He looked around guiltily to see if anyone was watching. Apparently not. He took a head break.
He didn't know what was in the container or why it was special, but he knew it was. He had speculated endlessly about what might be in it and had concluded that it probably contained weapons—rines and ammo and perhaps plastique explosive.
Mahfuz Saleh had no desire to be a martyr. He enjoyed life and even America—he was earning good money and sending much of it home, money the family desperately needed—but the ties of blood and religion were strong within him. A man at his mosque had approached him a year ago and asked for his help. He had agreed, and was given money to purchase a computer and encryption software, the RSP software that the American government had tried to suppress for years. It lost the battle, of course, so this powerful encryption tool was made available to narcocriminals,
terrorists, and Third World dictators in the name of privacy.
From time to time Saleh received encrypted messages. He normally used public telephones to pass the messages on to the parties to whom they were addressed. One such message several weeks ago gave him the number of the container and a telephone number to call when it arrived.
“Memorize the container number and the telephone number, then delete this message. When the container comes, call the telephone number from a public telephone. Then wipe your fingerprints from the telephone, so no one can prove you used it.”
Mahfuz Saleh had not followed directions precisely. He had not destroyed the paper containing the telephone number and the number of the container—he knew all too well that he might forget them and shame himself before Allah and the holy warriors.
Nor did he intend to use a public telephone. Last week the telephone company removed the nearest public telephone, the one at the filling station a block from Saleh's office. So many people used cell phones now that the revenues from the pay phone didn't justify its maintenance.
As he walked the hallway toward the men's room Mahfuz Saleh nervously fingered the cell phone in his pocket. The rest room was empty. He went into the stall and removed the paper from his pocket. He turned on the cell phone and waited for it to log onto the net. When the symbol in the little window indicated the device was ready, he carefully dialed the number, checking it digit by digit before he pushed each button.
Finally he pushed the send button and held the small phone to his ear.
One ring, two, three, four—what if no one answered?—five, six …
“Yes.” The word in Arabic.
“It's here,” Mahfuz Saleh said.
“
Allah Akbar!
” the voice proclaimed in his ear, and the connection broke.
Mohammed Mohammed stood with his cell phone in hand, momentarily overcome by the moment. It was here! The great moment was approaching!
He put the phone in his pocket and went looking for Ali and Yousef. After Naguib's death, Yousef had applied for the empty warehouse job and gotten it, which was fortunate.
Patsy Smoot had asked them where the big man had gone, and Mohammed told her he had gone to live with other friends.
No policeman had ever interviewed Mohammed, Ali, or Yousef about Naguib's death. Mohammed didn't even know if the authorities had found the body. He had been very nervous for days after the killing, but it had to be done and all three of them knew it. Even, he told himself, Naguib.
Yousef said that Allah was protecting them from the authorities. Mohammed felt Allah's power and might and knew it to be true.
There were three hours left in the shift; Mohammed felt it was too dangerous to leave early. He watched the clock as he stacked boxes, thinking of what must be done.
The telephone call from Mahfuz Saleh to Mohammed Mohammed should have been intercepted by the FBI, which had indeed applied for and received court authorization to tap Mohammed's cell phone number. Unfortunately the agents monitoring cell phones and hard-wired telephones for the joint task force were so overwhelmed with work that they had yet to enter Mohammed's number into the system.
Yet things were happening at the task force. Some of the suspected seventeen cells were showing signs of activity. Cryptic telephone calls to two of them had been intercepted. Both these cells had checked out of the rooming
houses where they resided and set forth upon the highway.
A call from Baltimore sent another cell driving north up the interstate in a two-year-old flower-delivery van. After the initial calls, two of the cells called members of other cells. Before long nine of the suspected seventeen cells were in motion.
Hob Tulik called FBI director Myron Emerick in Washington and told him what was happening. Both men sensed that the waiting period was over.
“Three calls,” Emerick mused.
“From Baltimore, Boston, and Savannah,” Tulik repeated.
“Nothing from Florida?”
“Not yet.”
“And not a peep from Customs,” Emerick gloated. “After Corrigan units and Geiger counters and mobilizing the army and navy, they still didn't find those damned bombs!”
“Apparently not, sir.”
“Stay on these guys with a full-court press, Hob. This is it! Use as many assets as necessary. Everything else in the country can wait. These people are going to lead us to those things.”
“Yes, sir,” Tulik replied.
“Remember what we talked about. When the on-scene commander is sure the weapon is present, move in fast. Shoot anyone that doesn't surrender quick enough. Under no circumstance are those people to be given a chance to detonate one of those things.”
“I've briefed every office on the East Coast,” Hob Tulik assured his boss, then said good-bye.
He stood staring at the telephone for several seconds, tugging at his lip, troubled by the fact that there had been only three initial telephone calls. If there were four bombs, why not four calls? Were there cells the FBI didn't know about? Or had one of the bombs gone elsewhere? Europe, perhaps, or Los Angeles. Maybe San Francisco.
Oh, well, he thought, worrying about the West Coast and Europe and undetected cells was Emerick's job, not his. He picked up the phone and called FBI offices in other cities to tell them what was happening and what assets he needed.
Tulik was quickly inundated with requests for manpower. It was then that he made a serious mistake. Since eight of the suspected cells had received no telephone calls and seemed to be continuing with their normal routine, he called off the agents who were following or monitoring them and gave them other assignments. After all, no one had ever suggested that all seventeen of these groups were terrorists. Had he thought about it he would have probably left an agent to watch Cell Eleven, the members of which were suspected of killing one of their own, but he was thinking about nuclear weapons and extremely busy, and he forgot.
Neither Tulik nor Emerick called Jake Grafton. The FBI could handle it, thank you very much.
After their shift in the citrus packing house was over at midnight, Mohammed Mohammed and his two colleagues drove to a personal storage facility that Mohammed had rented under another name. There they retrieved three 9-mm submachine guns, two thousand rounds of ammunition, binoculars, and night-vision goggles. There was another submachine gun in the storage unit—Naguib's—but they left it there.
They then drove to the Port Everglades shipping terminal and parked along the fence. They sat in the car looking at the thousands of containers stacked within and, above the tops of the buildings, the superstructures and cranes of container ships.
It was an awesome sight. The river of world trade flowed through Port Everglades. In those containers were riches beyond the wildest dreams of the American Indians
and Spanish explorers who walked this land just a few centuries ago.
The three Arabs were unimpressed. They were interested in people. Was the container with the weapon being watched? Had American Customs or the FBI learned what it contained?
Naturally Mohammed didn't know which container was his, so he scanned everything in sight, the entire scene, with his binoculars. He knew that surveillance would be sophisticated, but assumed that if it were there, he would see something. A plane overhead, perhaps, or a van with antennas. He looked in vain for vans, even opened his car door and scanned the sky with the binoculars. He saw a passenger jet that quickly flew beyond his range of vision.
He could see no one atop the buildings, no one walking around with nothing to do.
“No guards in sight,” he said aloud, then passed the binoculars to Ali.
If the FBI indeed had the container that held the weapon under surveillance, it was lost to Mohammed Mohammed, and he well knew it. He also knew that under American law, until he approached the container there was no way for the prosecutors to link him to it.
He had thought about this moment for many a night this past six weeks, lying on the floor or the bed at Smoot's Motel. He needed to get to a point where he could see the containers as they left the shipping depot. If the FBI knew about his container, he would probably see agents. If so, he could drive back to Smoot's Motel and await the arrival of another bomb in three months, or six, or a year. Whatever.

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