Buried At Sea (24 page)

"You seem to be connected to a lot of dead people." "I didn't go looking for this."

"I know how that feels," Jim said. "Neither did I." But suddenly he believed Will's story. The whole weird tale. What tipped it, he thought, was Will's offhand remark about not being able to call Sentinel Watchman. He seemed genuinely annoyed with Sony for taking the name for their mini TVs.

And then, before he could stop himself, he asked a question that he knew he shouldn't. Not if he truly wanted to get home to Shannon safe and sound and to manage a health club for her father.

"So where's the prototype?"

REFLECTING OFF THE sails, the harsh morning sun painted Will Spark's haggard face Kabuki white. But when he looked up from the wheel, his deep-set, dark eyes were lively with a speculative gleam. "Do you know how much they want Sentinel?"

"A key to a new kind of medicine? A lot. Where is it?"

"They want it so much that they drained every drop of Andrew Nickels's blood to scan it with electron microscopes."

"It wasn't inside the hypochondriac's brain?" Jim's heart was pounding. He wasn't fully sure why. But to own a piece of something so valuable was generating pure excitement and boundless dreams of possibility.

"When they got done sifting Andrew Nickels's blood, they dissected his brain, cell by cell. I'm told they prepared a thousand slides."

"No prototypes?"

"No."

"So where are they?"

Will smiled. "In a safe place."

His smile was ghastly. Only his lips moved, twisting parallel on a face worn by trauma, starvation, and dehydration.

Jim said, "You're asking me to sail to Buenos Aires instead of home. You're not telling me why:'

"I just told you."

"You don't trust me."

"I don't trust anybody, Jim. I made a deal with the McVays on faith—look where it got me."

"Then it's no deal," Jim said firmly. "Don't forget, you tried to rip them off." Again, the speculative gleam revived Will's eyes. "What do you want? A piece of it?"

"Well, what if I did?"

"Your shot at the big time?" Will asked mockingly. "Why not? Like you said, everyone else has gotten rich. Why shouldn't I?"

"It's a pig in a poke," Will cautioned him. "Cashing in could get pretty dicey."

"How far is Buenos Aires?"

Will studied him carefully for a moment. Then he said, "Why don't we look it up?" Jim got Ocean Passages. From their position off Cape Palmas on the southeastern tip of Liberia, the distance to the Argentine city situated at the thirty-fourth parallel south on Rio de la Plata looked the better part of four thousand miles. A thousand more miles than Florida—not to mention that in Buenos Aires Jim would still be six thousand miles from home.

The GPS confirmed it when Will punched in Buenos Aires: 3,848 miles. He predicted that Hustle would average 150 miles a day. A thousand miles a week. A month if they were lucky and could maintain the pace. "Figure more like six weeks," said Will. "Seven, to be on the safe side."

"Do you think that you can last seven weeks?" Jim asked.

"I don't know," Will answered simply. "I certainly hope so."

"So where is the prototype?"

"Well, let me put it this way: where do you think I got the idea to spook the hypochondriac?"

Jim felt his face go loose and suddenly understood the meaning behind the word gape. He got what Will was saying

right away, but he couldn't quite believe it. Then he laughed out loud, delighted. "You. They're in your head?"

Will returned a weak smile. "Better make sure I don't fall overboard." Jim laughed again. "I'm going to tie you to the mast—wait a minute, Will. Is it safe?

What about the cell phone call? Will you get a stroke?"

"No, no, no. It's safe. I made that up about the cell phone."

"How do you get them out?"

"A lab procedure."

"Where's the lab?"

"There was one in Rio, but Rio's out. I have another place I can go to in Argentina." Jim studied him closely, peering at his bony skull and trying to focus his perception to extreme miniature so as to visualize the microscopic instruments flowing through the narrow capillaries that fed the brain. "What's it like?"

"What do you mean?"

"Having these things floating around in your head."

Will gave another of his good-shoulder shrugs. "We've all got things floating around in our heads."

Jim imagined them tumbling like a Star Trek version of meteors in space. Yet flowing freely, neither blocking the channels nor disturbing their fragile walls.

"Unbelievable," he said. "The perfect hiding place." "It was."

"What do you mean, 'was'?"

"I'm afraid that Mr. Nickels and the McVays have figured it out, by now. They've guessed what's in my brain. That's why young nephew Nickels sent that little girl to cut my head off. Nickels, by the way, starred in that torture video. He operated the electricity and seemed to really enjoy himself."

In Kansas, in a cell in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Serge Rudolph lay awake listening to his fellow prisoners cough

and wondering when he was going to truly believe that this was the rest of his life. How the mighty "Golden Ears" had fallen—or, in his case, with all due modesty, the " Handmaiden of the Mighty"—from ingenious electronic spying for the National Security Agency to eavesdropping on cops, which had been a lucrative sideline until he got caught.

He felt the grinding vibrations of a heavy roller gate opening. Boot steps and leaping shadows announced guards marching down the corridor. It was late for them to stir from the bubble. They stopped outside his cell. Serge sat up fearfully.

"Rudolph!"

Above him in the dark he felt his cellie sag back in relief. Blindly, heart hammering, he reached down for his shoes.

His stomach clenched with the anticipation of violence as they led him through the roller gate, down a long, long corridor, through another roller, past the inch-thick windows of the prison library, and past a classroom painted yellow and blue like his kid's public school, with bright posters warning about AIDS and drugs.

They led him through four sets of gates and around two checkpoints where the correction officers had their heads down watching the security screens. This was looking worse and worse. They were taking him to a place where no one could say they'd seen him go or see what they did to him. They took him through a COs' locker room and past another ducked-heads checkpoint and out a solid door into a parking lot lit as bright as day. One of them spoke into a radio. The lights went out. A Humvee, as wide and flat as a suburban deck, clattered out of the dark.

"Get in."

There were three shaved-head special operations military types inside: a silent black and white pair in front, with the black guy driving, and one in back, who repeated, "In," as if he didn't want to have to say it again.

The COs shoved him hard.

It wasn't his first ride in a Humvee. His Mafia boss had

tooled around his upstate farm in a luxury version. This one was pretty basic. But unlike the Mafia boss's, this one had tags that got it through the prison gates like it was the warden's limo. He waited a long time, until they were on the Interstate, before he asked, "Where are you taking me?"

"To a shower."

Fair enough. Anyone with the power to spring him from a federal penitentiary wouldn't go for the stink of the hellhole. Maybe things were looking up. Maybe someone needed his services, someone who could afford the best electronic surveillance on the planet. Had to be Feds, had to be the government. He had only one question and he would wait to ask the right person: how could he turn a temporary release into a permanent one?

But after a fast shave and shower in a HoJo's, where he changed into a gray jumpsuit with smart red piping that made him look like a bellman, a private jet flight to somewhere—which looked, in the only glance he got, like it could be Miami but could just as easily have been Phoenix or any other big, flat place speckled with streetlights and neon—and another Humvee ride, blindfolded, from the jet's stairs to a big house, he got a nasty awakening.

It was still dark, but Rudolph thought he smelled water on the steady breeze. This was the kind of house that had expensive views. But they walked him past the nightblackened windows into a windowless cellar that was set up like a war room. Rows of computer towers made the air stuffy.

A Sarnoff jumbo flat-panel showed a big nautical chart, but what riveted his immediate attention was the high-resolution display itself. When the Feds had locked him up, multiganged, magnified, diode-backlit LCD screens served by multiple-image processors were still on the drawing board. It was hard to imagine such a piece of hardware in private hands. Two pieces, he realized, as the image altered. This one was a repeater, networked to a master that was feeding it data from somewhere else—next door or across the country.

But the guy in gold chains and pointy croc boots who was staring at the chart was definitely not a public servant. Not a Fed, although judging by the build on him he had trained in Special Forces. Given the choice, Serge Rudolph thought grimly—which he most assuredly had not been—he would prefer Leavenworth. This was private. And if you made a mistake, there was no Constitution that said you couldn't be stomped to death.

The guy gave Serge a smile and thrust out his hand. A strangler's hand and a smile no sane man would trust. "I'm Andy. And you're Golden Ears—until you got caught. Wha'd you learn in jail, Golden Ears?"

"Don't get caught."

Andy roared with laughter. "You hear that,' he shouted to the others. "Don't get caught." Serge was liking this less and less. Andy laughed like a guy who'd been doing coke. Andy's people laughed like guys who wished they were elsewhere. Something big going down here had gone very wrong.

"Come here, Serge!"

Serge Rudolph followed him to the Sarnoff display. Andy pointed to a red X flashing off the bulge of Africa. "That's a sailboat. They have SSB and VHF radios, Inmarsat C satellite phone, and e-mail through the SSB and the sat phone. I want them to think that a boat sinking nearby needs their help."

"A bogus distress call!' Rudolph nodded. Simple enough. Modem marine radios usually received on the distress channel even when off. Don't even think about the poor bastards who fall for the ruse.

"I don't want anybody else but them to hear that distress call." Rudolph nodded a little less certainly. Doable.

"And I don't want anybody to hear their reply to the distress call." Rudolph asked, "Can you platform communications nearby? Say within two hundred miles?"

"It's on its way."

Rudolph nodded. "In theory I can transmit a lower power

distress call only they will hear. In theory I can suppress their long-range transmissions. But their sat phone could be a problem. I can't necessarily suppress it like the radios."

"I'll have their satellite phone account terminated?'

Rudolph was impressed. That was not easy.

"I don't like this 'in theory' talk," Andy said.

It was time, Serge feared, to try to explain the limitations of the real world. "There are variables I can't control: atmospherics, the quality of their equipment, the skill of their operator, and how close you position the communications platform. These variables mean I can't guarantee."

"But you must," said Andy.

Rudolph pretended to study the chart. The sailboat's known course was indicated by a red line. He traced it back to Nigeria. Ahead of the blinking X, several dotted lines continued, angling into the North and South Atlantic Oceans and out toward Florida, the Caribbean, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, the Cape Verde Islands, Spain, and the Azores. Very long—very hopeful—dotted lines. But some things never changed. NSA, FBI, Mafia, these guys: the bosses operated on assumptions not so easily made on the ground.

"What is the communications platform?

"One of your old SIGINT trawlers."

Rudolph's eyes widened. A Signal Intelligence ship—its superstructure forested with high-gain antennas, radomes, and microwave dishes, its hull pocked with every sonar and extremely low frequency device known to science—was a floating electronic-warfare fortress.

He decided not to ask where Andy had acquired a ship packed with highly sensitive listening gear, top secret radar, and immensely powerful jammers. Though you had to wonder who he was working for.

Andy volunteered the information anyway, probably to indicate that Serge would have top-notch support, so any screwup would be his own fault. "She's steaming from Angola. The oil companies are drilling exploration wells in the deep-water blocks. We had her upgraded to monitor their progress:'

Why not, thought Rudolph, who in his youth had once spent a year bobbing around the northern Pacific spying on Soviet rocket tests. If you could eavesdrop on the drilling, the geologists' underwater explosions, ship-to-ship traffic and reports back to headquarters, you'd know who'd struck oil early enough to make money out of it.

"A SIGINT ship," he admitted, "should improve the odds."

"So no more 'theory."

"But first you'll have to get within two hundred miles." Which meant, though he wouldn't be the one to say it, figuring out which of those dotted lines the boat would follow.

"We're working on that."

It's now or never, thought Serge, and he took the plunge. "I got to ask: what do I get out of this?"

Andy raised a big hand and someone gave him a sheaf of paper. He showed Rudolph the top sheet. Under its own letterhead, the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that Serge Rudolph had died of a stroke while being transported to New York to testify in federal court; enclosed were hospital statements, autopsy report, and the death certificate.

"If the sailboat takes the bait, Leavenworth gets this and you get a new identity anywhere you want."

Rudolph was astonished. "That is more," he admitted, "than I had hoped for."

"Make sure it isn't more than you deserve: either way, Leavenworth gets the paperwork."

"What's that roaring sound?' the man on the phone asked Shannon. His name was Charlie Post. He was recently out of prison. And she would not be talking to him if Jim hadn't floored her with a totally unexpected e-mail that he had changed course for Argentina in exchange for a piece of Will Spark's latest big deal.