Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (42 page)

While he’d been on the phone, Nolan had texted. Hecker’s return call didn’t connect. What on earth was Nolan on about? Having to flee trumped-up charges? Clearing his name? Taking Teller
alive
? Hecker could still hear Gunny Tanner’s admonition. Cut the head off the snake. If they put Teller in handcuffs, the zealots who worked for him would try to free their master irrespective of the mayhem.

His cell rang and he answered.

“Damien here. Have you heard? Constantine has a global Agency BOLO on Nolan, and the Singapore Police have a warrant out. The Agency is bringing in the Bureau, and the Singaporeans alerted Interpol. Any thoughts?”

“Nolan sent a text saying he’s been framed. He’s on the run to buy time to clear his name.”

“Do you believe him?”

“There’s a lot of double-talk here and Nolan’s the only straight shooter I know in this mess. So yes, I believe him, at least for now. Even so, it won’t help us to be caught aiding him. Nolan was itching for the transcripts of the off-the-books interrogations from a couple of days ago. That can’t happen now that there’s an international arrest warrant out.”

“I agree, be careful. Just now, I ran into Flynn, the station security chief, at the coffee machine in the cafeteria. They’re giving someone named Millie a polygraph now. She claimed Nolan’s a traitor and has a copy of the Watermen NSA files. Before Nolan bolted he dissolved two drives in acid. Doesn’t sound like an innocent man.”

“Look, I know Nolan. Certainly he’s the only one who doesn’t have his head in the sand regarding MH370. I don’t know about the other things. Do me a favor. Work with our Agency friends elsewhere and run a check on John or Jack Nishimoto. Probably a US citizen. Pilot. Born around 1945. See if there are any Indochina, Air America or CIA connections from the late 1960s until now.”

“Does this have to do with Nolan?”

“The less you know right now, the better. You are doing it only for me. I need answers before breakfast.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“I have a thousand things on my plate. There are two Delta Unit operators in the next room waiting to pull the trigger on Teller if we can locate him. My police contact said none of his informants—even his own brother-in-law—is willing to talk or enquire about Jay Toffer.”

“I don’t think I can help you there.”

“I’m not asking for help. I’m just venting. In the last hour, I’ve been emailed NRO satellite photos showing a radioactive hotspot in the Andaman Sea midway between Rangoon and Penang. That’s where the
SS Bandana
dumped a U-235 purification centrifuge. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to tell anyone about this, or what happens next if I do.”

Barling whistled. “That’s well beyond our brief.”

“Agreed, except Lloyd Matthews is working twenty-four-seven to get me fired, and that motherfucker’s been sheltering Teller. So the Company in Burma, and maybe the rest of Asia, is neither particularly trusting nor trustworthy right now. I’m at a loss.

“Gonzalez is locked up in Bangkok. The Thais found his weapon in his checked luggage. I’ve put embassy people on it; we’ll have him back here Thursday sometime. Since almost all of Travis’s friends left a few hours back, Hogwarts is exposed. Two Deltas might not be enough if the Army decides to come at us. Right now, I’m just hoping they don’t know where we are.”

“Sounds like
Assault on Precinct 13
if it all goes to hell.”

“At least that one had a happy ending. I was thinking
They Died With Their Boots On
. I’ll call you if anything breaks. See what you can find out about Nishimoto’s background. I will keep looking for Teller. Detaining him is the key to understanding MH370’s disappearance and maybe clearing Nolan.”

“Good luck, big guy.”

*  *  *  *  *

Less than thirty seconds after he sent his plea to Hecker, they were airborne. Nolan knew the Gulfstream was at least three hours from being out of fighter range—more if they passed over an aircraft carrier in the Bay of Bengal. In that case, they could be intercepted almost until the wheels hit the asphalt unless the Sri Lankans put up their own fighters, a doubtful scenario. The real fun would start if they made it safely to the ground.

He looked for Kaili, but she wasn’t in her seat. He craned his neck and saw her busy with food. Swiftly, he extracted the two fishing lures from his pocket and used the Swiss Army knife’s fine tweezers to pull the microSD cards out of their slots. He put the first card in a hollowed-out Singapore dollar, with the second secreted into a slit in the tongue of his belt. The lures went under his seat.

A minute later, she sidled next to him with an array of Mediterranean starters, cold cuts and French bread with brown mustard on the side. He chugged his miniature Evian bottle in one go, so she passed hers across and brought back three more.

“How will you prove my family is out of custody and beyond the MSS’s reach before I destroy those files?”

“That wasn’t what we agreed. You destroy all the copies, and only then will the Ministry release your wife and daughter, not before. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t overpower you now and take the memory cards?”

“No, but someone might get hurt. And Mark Watermen would be disappointed.”

“And what is Watermen to you?”

“My godson.”

“You still view him as that? After he betrayed you to the Russians?”

*  *  *  *  *

Chumakov’s chest was so tight he felt on the verge of a heart attack. As a Tartar, he endured discrimination first in the KGB and then its FSB successor. The thinking among his colleagues was that, as Stalin had uprooted 240,000 Tartars with a fifty-percent fatality rate, Chumakov would bear a grudge. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel the injustice, but more that his overriding interest was personal advancement rather than righting a historical wrong. He had worked hard to win the scholarship that allowed him to escape from Uzbekistan. At Moscow University he changed his first name from Arslan to Anatoly, and tried hard to live like an affluent Muscovite rather than an impoverished Central Asian Muslim. In reality, he didn’t even have the money to marry a high-born girl from back home, much less a Moscow socialite. More affluent and lighter-complexioned men climbed past him even though he had better English than any of them. He was forty-six years old, urbane, without savings, and a big boss at last, even if it was the low-prestige Surveillance Directorate.

His fortunes changed when Mark Watermen ended up under his watch last July. The top brass now knew his name, nodding and making small talk when they crossed paths. He cultivated anyone who might be able to give him a leg up, including Foreign Minister Greyg. Just three weeks ago, Chumakov pushed past colleagues in a rush to congratulate Greyg after a lackluster speech, an ingratiating gesture that came in handy yesterday when Greyg took his call.

The slightly larger salary that accompanied his promotion was insufficient to support Chumakov’s lifestyle, certainly not in Putin’s Russia. One night out with aspiring oligarchs was enough to have him subsisting on cup noodles and vodka for the next two weeks. So he’d agreed to lease surplus Surveillance Directorate server capacity to a Lebanese hacker go-between whose client was willing to pay $100,000 for seventy-two hours of a distributed denial of service attack aimed at an unnamed Gulf State. There was certainly precedent for the FSB’s off-the-books servers to be rented to those who sought to harm Western interests. Chumakov had trimmed the FSB stipend to $80,000 and pocketed a $20,000 commission: not a large sum, but sufficient to get him imprisoned or shot if the DDOS blew up. The size of the planned DDOS attack and the anonymity of the target were troubling. The FSB was accustomed to a dozen or two of its two hundred cloaked servers providing the firepower for a DDOS, but this setup was another order of magnitude with one hundred servers initially requested.

Two weeks ago, the truth dawned on him. No hacker group could organize, much less finance, such an attack. And no nation-state actor other than the US intelligence services or military would have defenses formidable enough to justify deploying over one hundred servers. His moonlighting foray had landed the FSB—and Anatoly Chumakov—in the middle of a budding cyberwar.

Under intense questioning, the intermediary finally revealed that the end customer was a young hacker operating out of Beirut calling himself Mormoroth. Chumakov’s surreptitious checks revealed the real client was the government of Iran. He further learned that Mormoroth had spearheaded the hack and destruction of Saudi Aramco’s computer networks eighteen months ago. Whatever Mormoroth did next, it wouldn’t be small potatoes. Chumakov lost his nerve and tried to cancel the server sublet. However, the filthy Lebanese fixer threatened to expose Chumakov’s corruption unless he continued to cooperate.

Chumakov finally found a way out of this mess. Foreign Minister Greyg liked his idea of gifting the traitor Watermen and his accomplice Nolan to the US in return for NATO granting Russia a free hand in Crimea and Ukraine. Greyg wanted to obtain the files for the FSB to study, booby traps and all. The trove was likely to provide valuable information if only in the negative. Just now, Chumakov had received an email confirming that the Americans and Greyg had reached an agreement in principle. If he could snatch Nolan and then hand Watermen and him to the Americans, he was certain his masters would overlook a $20,000 discrepancy regarding the server sublet. He fondled the knotted silk tie at his throat. The collar felt tight.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

THE TAKING OF MH370

WEDNESDAY NIGHT, MARCH 12, SHAN STATE, BURMA; SINGAPORE

“Rob?”

“Yes,
Colonel.
”

“What happens if . . . what happens if neither of us makes it back?”

“Then we’re both fucking dead. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m three-quarters of the way.”

Mullen was no doctor, but he knew a sick man. Robin Teller had aged twenty-five years in five days. He now looked sixty-seven, with hollow eyes and gray-green folds of skin hanging off his face. Teller grasped both arms of the chair as the cough shook his upper body. He paused, spat into a handkerchief and took a couple of wheezy breaths. “Didn’t the doctor give you antibiotics?” Mullen asked.

“Yeah. They weren’t worth a damn so I threw ’em out.” Teller coughed hard, hocked and then stared. “Don’t worry. Coulter knows the deal. One million for the mission and another mil if you’re KIA or captured, as long as you stay mum. Nothing if you talk. Coulter collects the cash once he lands in Australia. He’s inbound now. Don’t you fuckin’ say a word, or your wife and addled daughter don’t get a cent.”

Teller gave him a maniacal grin
.
“We’re both worth more dead than alive. I called our air taxi and we’re flying out tomorrow. We’ll probably end up in Bangkok, though we might have to drive thirteen-plus hours from Mae Hong Son.”

Mullen sighed. His backside throbbed from their recently completed journey. “Vince Griggs did a heckuva job from start to finish. He’s worth more than two million, in my humble opinion.”

“Two million was what was agreed. A lot of people have to get paid. I’m not making a dime here!” Teller slammed the armrest with an open palm, triggering another fit. “Yet I took all the risk selling the Wa product and flying it off that unfinished airfield. Do you appreciate that I had to give away fifty percent of the gross profits for those flights, even though the buyers were small-timers previously not worth the generals’ time? Instead of one big load, before MH370 I had to hang my ass in the breeze
six
different times feeding those mice. I had to organize and fund security, transportation and storage, and take the fall if it all went south.” Teller turned red, missed a breath and expelled yet more bloody mucus. The wet handkerchief was now on the floor. He spat at it, missed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Now I have to reimburse Coulter—he fronted the airfield rental costs and sundry expenses—pay out Griggs’s wife and you, plus three charters—a C130, a G550 and a Citation—and that Chinese joker who was in the cockpit. Twenty million doesn’t go very far.” Teller’s sentence ended with a wet gargling cough as a huge clump of mottled expectorant landed on the floor. Mullen put his feet back into his flip-flops and tucked his legs under his chair.

Mullen’s dismay showed, but he pressed on. “Maybe if I told you more about how we handled the entire situation, you’d appreciate Vince’s role. I know he was hoping you could top him up. Maybe just another $250,000?”

“You’re free to allocate some of
your
share, Colonel. But as I have to stay up another half hour before I can take the next handful of horse pills that quack gave me, fill me in. How did you and Captain America take over Flight 370 and baffle the world with the disappearing act?”

Ignoring the sarcasm, Mullen warmed to his tale. “It started with the lax security at the Kuala Lumpur airport . . . .”

*  *  *  *  *

Rikki whipped the yellow Bimmer to the curb and cut the engine in front of her Kings Drive corner terrace home. Since dropping Bob off near Seletar Airport, she’d driven the back roads at speed and then meandered home, sticking to the posted limits. Anyone piecing together traffic surveillance footage would have trouble connecting the dots.

Her cell buzzed. “Hello?”

“Rikki Lam Shao Me?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“Inspector Richard Lum, Internal Security Department.” The voice was smug. “Would this be a convenient time to speak?”

“What is this about?”

“Robert Nolan is a fugitive wanted by the United States and the Republic of Singapore. We are assisting the FBI in their queries locally. Have you seen Robert recently?”

“No, not in a while. I usually see Bob at family gatherings with my sister, but she’s in China now—”

 “Yes, we’re aware of that trip. So you’ve not seen Nolan in how long?”

“At least three weeks. Maybe a month.”

“You realize there are severe penalties for lying to a police officer, particularly an inspector?”