The Delta Solution (47 page)

The former Bart Meinhoff, fifty-five and living on the outskirts of Washington under the name of Bart Merritt, was the agent investigating the US end of the Somali pirate operation. And as he had with every aspect of his duties in East Germany, he was consumed by a single fact. In this case, the new Monte Carlo phone number of Constantine Livanos, which no one in America knew except for Jerry Jackson, Athena’s president, and his chief of operations, Peter Kilimo. Someone had given it to the villains of Haradheere.

Bart Merritt was as certain as he had ever been that Kilimo was the man tipping off the pirate organization to the exact position of certain ships. He was unsure of how illegal this was and he certainly could not have the shipping exec gunned down. Not here in the US. But he was going to nail him. That was for certain.

Bart’s line of attack was through the banks, all of which were prepared to jump to it when the CIA came calling. He reasoned that if Kilimo was transmitting intricate details of the voyages of big tankers in the Indian Ocean, someone must be paying him.

He would have trouble finding access to Kilimo’s account since Athena’s head of operations had not been found guilty of any wrongdoing. But the money must have been sent to him somehow, and since the capture of the
Global Mustang
had been extremely recent, the cash must have either just arrived or be on its way.

Bart doubted whether any bank in Mogadishu was capable of such sophistication.
So he searched for the nearest point of contact in a neighboring country, the obvious one being Kenya. He checked with MI6 in London whether there were obvious links between Kenya and Somalia, and to his surprise the Brits came up with a good one.

They described an unusual suburb east of Nairobi, a bustling former slum called Eastleigh, which for the past couple of years had been burgeoning with new high-rise apartment blocks that were springing up all over the place. The area had a strange atmosphere of prosperity: new vehicles, lavishly decorated homes, even some expensive bars and restaurants.

But there was nothing that resembled town planning. Buildings were springing up in a haphazard and often garish way, and, according to the Brits, the local Kenyans did not like it. The exceptions were the Nairobi builders who were constructing wildly overpriced real estate with somebody else’s money.

And it was not just expensive homes. There were at least two major shopping malls going up in Eastleigh. This was more than a real estate bubble. This was heavily backed development with no signs of a slowdown.

The MI6 guys had taken a closer look and discovered that the place was known as “Little Mogadishu” because the cash being used was unquestionably pirate money from that benighted land north of the Kenyan border. It had to be. There was no other money worth talking about in the whole of Somalia.

This rapid development was being bankrolled by some very heavy hitters. No one knew precisely who. What everyone did know, however, was that Swahili had ceased to be spoken in this affluent suburb. The native language of Eastleigh was Somali. And somewhere beyond the new high-rise walls there must have been a clue to the identity of the main backers, but the Brits had yet to find it.

Mohammed Salat was very careful about that sort of thing. But his Swiss bank account was no longer adequate for the enormous sums of money that he and his chief executives were earning. The funds needed to be invested somewhere outside of Somalia. The far more urbane capital of Kenya was ideal: not too far away, with a stable, Westernized banking system, and very few questions asked.

Not surprisingly, the frenzy of economic activity attracted new branches of established banks. Barclays had so far refrained but the East
African National was there. And so was the Mercantile Bank of South Africa. The Chinese-owned Africa and Shanghai Banking Corporation was on its way.

Bart Merritt would be able to summon up substantial help, if necessary, from US banking institutions, acting as he was in the national interest on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. Armed with his new knowledge, he went in search of important-looking wire transfers from the Dark Continent to New York.

A week ago, the search would have been broad, Africa wide. But now it could be narrowed down to East Africa. Better still it could almost certainly be narrowed down to a transfer from Kenya, though Switzerland was still a possibility.

But Bart had a hunch, honed from an instinct forged in the brutal communist regime. He believed that the money, if it existed, must have been wired not just from Nairobi but from the suburb of Eastleigh, Little Mogadishu. And there were only two international banks there: the East African National and the Mercantile Bank of South Africa.

Bart put four of his agents on the case. They were to search for a sum of money between $5,000 and $50,000 wired from one of those banks to an account either in New York City or in the suburb of Bronxville, where he knew that Peter Kilimo lived.

Initially they found nothing. In fact there had been just one dollar transfer to anywhere beyond the regular trading corporations that dealt with coffee, tea, horticultural products, and cotton garments. The previous day there had been a $20,000 cash transfer from the East African National in Eastleigh directly to an account in Westchester County, not Bronxville. No one, but no one, was going to provide the name of that particular client, not without some powerful political clout behind the request.

The contact being used by the CIA agents had, however, ascertained the name of the account from which the payment had come: Haradheere Ocean Enterprises, c/o East African National Bank, Eastleigh, Nairobi. Fat lot of good that did anyone, except the word
Haradheere
. Pirate Central, Somalia.

Bart Merritt sent an e-mail to Bob Birmingham informing him that he was well on the way to locating the spy in Athena shipping who was tipping off the Somali Marines. He requested the name on the bank account
in Westchester County that had accepted $20,000 in cash the previous day from a source in Nairobi, Kenya.

It took ninety minutes. Birmingham never even acknowledged the e-mail. But an unsigned reply landed in Bart’s laptop: Mrs. Marlene Kilimo, PO Box 4833, Bronxville, New York.

At precisely 6:30 p.m. that evening, Peter Kilimo was arrested at his home by two officers from the Bronxville Police Department. He was immediately charged with conspiracy, actively assisting known criminal gangs in acts of robbery on the high seas, and warned that he could be implicated in the murder of engineering officer Sam McLean of Brockton, Massachusetts, who had been shot dead on the US-owned LNG tanker
Global Mustang
.

Wearing handcuffs, Peter Kilimo was led to a police cruiser, blue lights flashing, and driven to the local police precinct, where he was transferred to an unmarked car and driven on to Manhattan. His last stop was the FBI’s New York headquarters at the gigantic Federal Plaza Building, adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge.

They entered by a side door and went immediately to the twenty-sixth floor, where two officers from the NYPD were waiting with three FBI special agents and two field officers from the CIA, including Bart Merritt.

This was no ordinary arrest; the case of Peter Kilimo would have the most severe ramifications, not to mention overtones of counterterrorism and counterintelligence. One of the FBI men was a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The CIA was leading the investigation and had requested partnership with the FBI in the event that anyone was arrested for involvement with the Somali Marines.

Peter Kilimo had never been this afraid in his entire life. His wife, Marlene, was left sobbing at the door as they marched her husband away. With considerable presence of mind, she had called Jerry Jackson at his home and tried to explain what had happened. She had no idea where Peter had been taken and left it to Jerry to trace him.

This was a two-minute exercise since he had the cell phone number of Bart Merritt, who had conducted the original inquiries at the Athena offices. For the record, Jerry did not believe that Peter Kilimo could possibly have done anything wrong, and he told Bart that he would be sending the Athena corporate lawyer to FBI headquarters immediately.

The lawyer, who lived on the Upper East Side, took a half hour to get there, and they held the questioning in abeyance until he arrived. But as soon as he had been briefed, they threw the book at Peter Kilimo, demanding answers, demanding confessions, and above all demanding to know the name of his contact in the pirates’ lair.

For an amateur, Peter Kilimo found his nerve very quickly. He pointed out that he was a Somali by birth, like his father before him. And that although he had become a US citizen, he had close family ties to the old country. There were ancient real-estate deals that had been concluded and he was owed a share of the money. He had not informed the IRS of the transactions and for that he was sorry.

But that did not make him an accessory to murder or a member of a notorious network of international pirates. And no, he was not a mole in the Athena offices supplying information to men who went out and held oceangoing ships for ransom.

Bart Merritt did not believe him. He could not remove from his mind the new phone number for Livanos. Someone who knew it had passed it on to the pirates. And that someone was the same person who had blown the information about the tanker
Queen Beatrix
.

Bart was certain that given time he could punch holes straight through Kilimo’s story. But right now it was two o’clock in the morning, and there was not much punching left for him to do. The FBI guys were, in any event, wary of the potential charges. Even if Kilimo was guilty as hell, what had he really done? He’d offered the precise whereabouts of a few, massive oceangoing ships to someone who apparently valued the information.

Was this a criminal offense? Well, it might have been but the FBI team thought a good lawyer could blast the case apart. The position and direction of long-distance freighters and tankers on the world’s oceans was surely knowledge anyone could have. And whatever had happened most definitely took place in international waters.

Everyone wanted to go home to bed. Bart Merritt was becoming the most unpopular man in the vast Manhattan building. Only he, brooding at the interrogation table, was looking to the future. He glared at Kilimo, wondering what the hell the Athena “mole” was planning next.

Merritt had asked him a dozen times if he had offered any further information to the Somalis regarding the sailing of major freighters and tankers. But Kilimo had merely shaken his head and conferred with his
lawyer, who insisted there was no evidence that his client had ever given anyone any information about anything, never mind pirates.

In the lawyer’s opinion, it was nothing short of bullying to continue holding Mr. Kilimo. The questioning so far had not uncovered anything. The lawyer formally asked that Mr. Merritt desist.

Bart was uncertain who was actually winning the contest but knew it was not him. With immense reluctance, he agreed that the questioning should be postponed for the night, and that the NYPD would proceed with further investigation the next day.

Before he left, the CIA agent warned everyone: “These pirate operations are becoming extremely dangerous, and they are being masterminded by a very shrewd operator. The pirate leadership has access to information. And that information is coming from New York as well as Washington. I just hope the time does not come when we all look very stupid—when the next assault occurs and people get killed.

“I recommend that we undertake a very careful investigation of the main ships sailing under the auspices of Athena Shipping. Because I think Mr. Kilimo may very well have supplied the data for yet another pirate attack. Time alone will show whether I am right or wrong.”

The gathering broke up in an atmosphere of latent suspicion, unproven facts, and overwhelming speculation. Peter Kilimo was driven home in a police cruiser. But there was nothing definite against his name. Yet.

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, Mohammed Salat called in his senior marine commanders, Wolde, Ahmed, and Hassan. He outlined the new intelligence he had received and pulled up an ocean chart on his desktop computer, pointing to the layout of the Maldives and in particular the wide and turbulent waters of the One and a Half Degree Channel.

Captain Hassan offered an explanation for the roughness of the waters—citing the flow of the Indian Ocean currents that surged across the central reaches but then swirled, collided, and split into riptides when the main flow of the water hit the long, uneven group of mid-ocean atolls.

They were really just vast sandbank mountains rising from the ocean floor. “But it can be very rough in there,” he added. “Not ideal for boarding a ship moving at 12 knots.”

Admiral Wolde was concentrating more on the size of the
Ocean
Princess
, staring at the stern deck, which looked high and somewhat old-fashioned. There was, however, an obvious pair of private decks directly below, under cover, and Captain Hassan thought these might be exclusive to a couple of the very expensive royal suites.