True Honor (11 page)

Darcy held up a cassette tape. “Even better, a care package Amy sent caught up with me. Tapes of the hometown radio station, only a week old in its news and weather reports.” It was nice to hear a voice with a Western accent. Darcy had returned the favor last week with a new pair of night-vision binoculars, another large thermos, and a collection of gourmet coffees.

Amy didn’t have to deal directly with the open border with Canada, but major highway routes through the state came through her territory. They were still considered the front lines for finding unwanted items brought across the border. Darcy would join Amy as a deputy when she was next invited if only to give her a helping hand. This war had definitely moved to the home front.

“I want to go paint my fence.” She didn’t care if she had to shovel out snow to get to it.

“When this is over, I’ll slap some paint around for you.”

She unwrapped a sucker that had come in the care package. “Promise?”

“You think the Agency is going to want me around after I spend them into bankruptcy?”

Darcy smiled at him, knowing he was already on the short list to be the next deputy director of intelligence for the Agency. He might have pegged her as a rising star early on and helped along her career, but Gabriel had long ago become one of those stars. “We have hired just about every private eye we can find in Yemen and Turkey, not to mention a multitude in Europe,” she agreed.

“Eyes and ears walking around the streets are wonderful things. You want to locate a skunk, ask the neighbors.” Gabe pushed back his seat rest. “I’ll give this guy six months at the outside, then we’ll be drawing a line through his name.”

“It’s kind of nice being the spotters for a very big stick. The British and Australian Special Forces are as good as some of ours.” She glanced around to see who was near, then smiled. “Almost.” There wasn’t much difference in training or execution, but there was in motivation. America had been hit, and it showed in the focused intensity of the U.S. military to win this war.

Where was Sam now? He’d deployed less than ten days after the September 11 attacks, and she had heard only rumors. SEALs were on the front lines of this fight, not only on land, but also at sea. She’d helped sort through numerous documents, notebooks, scraps of paper, and other items recovered from missions deemed too classified to even name. She didn’t have to be told what they were doing; she could see the results. The number of names and faces on the terrorist most-wanted list was dropping fast. As long as her days were now, at least they were relatively safe. Sam’s were not.

Eight

* * *

JANUARY 15

Tuesday, 9:23 p.m.

Lebanon

A bug crawled under the back collar of Sam’s uniform as he lay stretched out on rocky ground in Lebanon. He had no choice but to ignore it. The audio mike had to be kept directly on target at this distance or the conversation streaming to tape would be interrupted. A hand rested on his collar and firmly pushed, squishing the creature. Sam rolled his eyes at his partner Wolf in thanks.

He’d had easier assignments during his years in the SEALs. Lebanon was not a friendly place to attract attention. They had spent the last six hours inserting to this position: moving from the sea to the beach, creeping into a town bombed by decades of war to watch two men meet on a strip of land near a destroyed school. The meeting broke up, and Sam followed the taller of the two men with the directional mike as he walked back to his car. Battihi was a smart man. The Egyptian explosives expert didn’t use phones. He conveyed instructions face-to-face. So they came to listen to him. The cars with the principals and their security details pulled out. Sam watched until they were out of sight.
Next time, gentlemen . . .

Sam nodded to Wolf. They began the slow process of inching their way back into the rubble. Next time he came to Lebanon, Sam hoped it would be with orders to put a laser dot on Battihi’s car and guide a five-hundred-pound bomb down onto it. Walking away from a terrorist under indictment for six bombings and a train derailment in Europe was the pits even if it was necessary. They needed to know what was coming, and that meant listening in on Battihi a few more times before they moved in to take him. The Brits had taken down a cell in Algeria based on the last such taped conversation.

“I’m getting to know this guy better than my own brother,” Wolf whispered. “I hate that feeling.”

“You don’t have a brother,” Sam whispered back. “And what I find pretty annoying is how I can’t understand a word he’s saying. I hope we’ve got a decent translator waiting for this tape.”

“The other man sounded European.”

“Battihi actually sounded respectful. First time I’ve heard that,” Sam said. It was time to get out of here. They continued to creep back.

Sam followed Wolf through bombed-out buildings, their path parallel to the road as they made their way back to the sea. They reached the secure site they had set up and Wolf moved concrete debris to retrieve their hidden cache of gear. They had slipped off their wet suits and gone in wearing desert camouflage to allow them to blend in with the concrete and dirt rubble, risking the time to strip off gear for the safety of being able to merge into the landscape. Sam secured the communication equipment for transport underwater. He pulled on his wet suit and picked up scuba gear and his air tanks. The beach was in sight.

Sam nodded to Wolf and they sprinted across the sand. They lost the cover of darkness for that short distance to the sand, and then they were back in the welcoming arms of the sea. They touched water, waded in, and dropped below the surface. Out there in the blackness was their pickup team of three SEALs and a submersed SDV, a motorized underwater SEAL Delivery Vehicle that would take them another two miles to the very big, black, and bad USS
Dallas.
The nuclear submarine had become this war’s black ops flagship for assaults that sprung from the sea.

The swim was not a safe one. A few floating mines still hid along this coastline. The silence beneath the water was complete. Sam swam hard, relieved to be near the end of a successful mission. The tape would be worth this. That fact allowed him to push aside the reality that he was cold, hurting, and looking at another three hours before he’d be dry and warm again.

What was Darcy doing right now? He thought about her every time he went underwater, wondering if she’d changed her mind and learned to swim. It wasn’t easy to get in touch with her. He’d managed to call the number she had given him and left a message on her machine twice over the last months, but he hadn’t been in a place where she could call him back. He couldn’t just call the CIA and ask for a supposedly dead person, and he wasn’t sure mail would reach her. He missed her . . . intensely. He felt like he was fighting this war for her, for he knew that opening attack against agents on September 9 had probably been part of this mess, and she’d been one of the first hit.

Wolf touched his arm. He pointed to the beacon of the waiting team members. Sam nodded and they changed directions to intercept.

JANUARY 15

Tuesday, 8:35 p.m.

Madrid, Spain

Darcy had a secure office down the hall from Gabe’s in one of the military planning buildings NATO had built in the eighties and never fully occupied. It was a mix of both very high-tech equipment and cast-off furniture. The place was cramped, had no windows, and was probably going to be hot during the summer, for it was icy during the winter so that her toes froze when she walked around the office without shoes. She’d stuffed in three computer terminals and a reel-to-reel tape deck. She even squeezed in a couch. As a home away from home it wasn’t bad; if truth be told she loved the place. Tucked as it was at the dead end of a hallway, interruptions were minimized.

A secure Internet physically separated from the public network let her connect to classified Web pages at agencies around the world. She started with the U.S. Treasury Department to see how the hunt for Luther’s accounts was progressing.

The Treasury Department had spent years developing the software that could sort through millions of transactions and generate a graphic picture of the money flow. The money in Luther’s brokerage accounts had been routed out of the first accounts within hours, and it had been done in a systematic way. Only with the review of four months of history was the plan he had used apparent.

Luther believed in diversification. Within two days he had spread his bounty into a hundred different piles of about fifty thousand dollars in size. Then over a two-week period the majority of those accounts had shrunk to smaller amounts. What cash they had been able to trace had ended up in bank safe-deposit boxes and assets like diamonds and cars that could be quickly resold. Luther had done most of it by bank wire transfers. They had recaptured only about thirty-two million of what was known to be in excess of 550 million dollars.

Luther had taken a chunk of cash off the top and probably stuffed it in his mattress. He laundered a huge amount more, and the rest he moved around accounts between banks like a shell game, slowly hiding it behind walls. He probably rightly assumed he wouldn’t need to touch one of those accounts for at least a decade. Darcy looked at numbers that were blood money and she wanted him.

She focused on the items they knew had been purchased. She was willing to bet one of the diamonds was going to turn up as a gift to Renee. An expensive stone—likely having its characteristics recorded in the international registry of gems—prestigious, possibly named, and sold to a private collector. Word would get out. She’d know what she was looking at when she saw it.

“The love of money is the root of all evil . . .”
The Scripture fragment came to mind and was personalized by the data she looked at. Luther was the embodiment of the pursuit of wealth destroying conscience.

“Darcy?”

“It’s open.” She’d stuck a piece of cardboard in the doorjamb to prevent the lock from closing.

Gabriel joined her, carrying dinner. “Eat.”

She moved aside papers to make room for the china plate. “I could get used to being back in Europe; meals are rarely fast food.” She pointed with her fork to the chair beside her. “Sit. I want to run something past you. Luther’s third man, Peter Dansky, what are his habits?”

Gabe had been working with the Russians to get a profile figured out. “It’s an educated guess: gambling, Russian vodka, and fast cars.”

“Does he strike you as a careful man?”

Gabe thought about that. “Yes and no. He plays with explosives; he’s the operations man in the threesome. Luther wouldn’t have hired him if he was careless or wasn’t extremely good. Dansky believes in planning and security, but he’s also the ultimate kind of risk taker. He thinks he’s invincible.”

Darcy nodded. “I’m thinking it would be worth digging into European luxury car dealers for about the time Dansky showed up on the radar screen. A really expensive custom car bought with cash sometime between September 11 and December 31. A show-off piece. It won’t be in Dansky’s name, probably not even traceable money back to one of these accounts, but how many new car owners do you think we would have to covertly photograph and check out? A couple hundred?”

“We don’t know if he’s in Europe,” Gabe pointed out.

“Luther’s money is primarily in Europe, his wife is French, his second in command is Russian. Dansky is probably from Belgium. They are going to hide where they’re comfortable. I’m betting the Caribbean if they do leave Europe.”

“I’d put my money on Canada,” Gabe suggested. “We’re still turning up safe houses the Russians set up during the cold war. Luther came through the same KGB school Sergey did. We lost Sergey more times than I can count when he’d slip away from the UN in New York, drive up to Canada, and disappear.”

“The Siberian express. Skirt around Alaska and you’re in Russia,” Darcy remembered with fondness.

“Luther’s a planner like Dansky. You can bet he already had every place he and Renee would live and visit for the next couple years arranged before September 11 ever went down. He’d have stayed with things and places he trusted.” Gabe got to his feet. “I’ll get people looking into cars. It’s a good idea for Dansky. Got plans for tonight?”

“I’m going to catch up on my reading.”

“Stick around and grab a catnap on the couch. Defense has a lead on the Egyptian Battihi. He may have been spotted in Lebanon last night. A transmission will be coming through in a few hours. They’d like us on the translation feed to see if we can help with IDs.”

Darcy looked over, intrigued. “Number eight on our terrorist list? He’s trying to move those explosives we’ve been hearing about?”

“We’ll find out. It would make a great evening if we could take him out.”

“Come get me when the transmission comes through.”

JANUARY 16

Wednesday, 1:20 a.m.

Lebanon

Distances in the ocean at night were deceptive. The SEAL delivery vehicle began to slow. Sam strained to see ahead. In the murky darkness forty feet below the surface of the water came the realization the blackness ahead was not water but metal. Lethal, powerful, with technology far in advance of what had sent men to the moon, the submarine rested motionless in the sea, waiting for them. In port it looked huge, but seen underwater it became the biggest thing in the sea, so massive Sam couldn’t see to the diving sail at the sub midpoint.

Riding on the back of the submarine was a dry deck shelter, about forty feet long and nine feet in diameter, stuck atop the submarine like a long metal canister. It was loaded with special SEAL gear, and it allowed them to deploy men and equipment while the submarine remained submerged.

Two SEALs in scuba gear came from the hangar to meet them. Working by hand signals and lighted wands, the SDV was guided onto the track running atop the sub and rolled inside the shelter. It had three interlocking compartments inside that could be independently pressurized. The forward compartment sphere became a hyperbaric chamber to treat injured divers. In the middle was a transfer trunk allowing entry and egress to the USS
Dallas.
The third compartment hangar stored the SEAL delivery vehicle or when it was out, up to twenty SEALs in full gear. Sam moved into the middle sphere with Wolf and Bear. They were sealed inside, it was pressurized, and the water began to pump out. Sam removed his scuba gear and gratefully took a normal breath.