Sea of Terror (6 page)

The NCTC had spent half a billion dollars to upgrade the foundering system through a project called Railhead, and things rapidly had gone from bad to disastrous. At the moment, the system was nearly useless, and a lot of data collected through enormous cost and effort had gone missing.

The Counterterrorism Center had been trying to address the issues for several years, but things looked little better than they had when a Congressional oversight committee had flagged the project in 2008.

Rubens had come up to his office from the Art Room to run the name Nayim Erbakan through the sieve. It seemed strange that the man was smuggling what appeared to be a kilo or so of drugs--heroin, most likely--from England back to the eastern Med, and on a cruise ship no less. Maybe the guy just hoped to sell his wares to the rich tourists, but after a while intelligence officers developed a hyper-paranoid sixth sense about anything out of the ordinary, and Rubens was curious about this one.

But as soon as he'd tried to run the search through the TIDE database, the Center's network, one of several connecting various government agencies, had crashed.

"Mr. Lowell on the secure line, sir."

He picked up the handset. "Lowell? Rubens."

"The system's down," Lowell said. "I know. We're working on it."

"You've been working on it for six years. When is it going to work?"

"You've seen the schedule. The upgrades are supposed to be complete by 2012."

"If they come in on time. Can you put someone on a special search for me?"

Lowell sighed. "No promises. What is it?"

"A name. Nayim Erbakan." He spelled it out, waiting as Lowell jotted down the letters and repeated them back. At least the Turkish used the Western alphabet. One of the serious problems with the TIDE database was the problem in transliterating Arabic names. Was it "Mohammed," "Muhammad," or "Mohamed"? The answer, often, was yes, and cross-referencing numerous alternate spellings as well as aliases all for the same terrorist was part of the reason the database project wasn't fulfilling expectations.

"Got it," Lowell told him. "Any background?"

"He was just detained by MI5 in Southampton," Rubens told Lowell. "He was carrying five concealed plastic bags that might be drugs. I'd like to know if he's working with one of the major drug cartels over there ... or if he has terrorist connections." Numerous terrorist operations financed their operations with drugs, especially lately, since the United States had begun aggressively freezing the bank accounts of organizations connected with al-Qaeda.

"I'll see what I can do, Rubens," Lowell replied. "But I can't keep taking my assets off important projects just to do your homework for you."

"You're there so we can do our homework," Rubens growled. "And right now you're the dog that's eating it!" He hung up the phone, scowling. Usually he was more diplomatic than that, but Lowell's bureaucratic pettiness had provoked him.

Sometimes, Rubens thought, it was a toss-up as to who your worst enemies were in this game--the terrorists or the turf-guarding bureaucrats right here at home. TIDE's effectiveness depended on each of the U. S. agencies tasked with counterterrorism to feed data into the TIDE database, but those agencies shared a long history of mistrust and miserly secretiveness with regard to one another . . . and with good reason. An intelligence agency's funding depended, at least in part, on its success as perceived by Congress. If your operatives gathered a key piece of intelligence, handing it over to a competing agency might mean that they got a bigger slice of the budgetary pie, possibly at your expense.

There wasn't supposed to be any competition. The FBI was responsible for domestic threats, the CIA for gathering intelligence overseas, the DIA for military intelligence, the NSA for electronic eavesdropping worldwide, and so on, but with terrorists ignoring international boundaries, responsibilities inevitably overlapped.

It is, Rubens thought, a hell of a way to run a railroad, or a war

Turning back to his computer monitor, he backed out of the screen showing the NCTC system's baleful error message and connected with the network serving the NSA's Deep Black program.

At any given time, Desk Three might have six or eight operations going worldwide. He tried to keep up with them all, of course, but some were decidedly low priority. They had a field team in Lebanon now, and he called up a status report. Maybe they could be diverted to Ankara for a look at Turkey^s police records.

The team had been assigned to Operation Stargazer, a routine and low-risk op being conducted in conjunction with the CIA, designed to slip an electronic Trojan horse into Syrian intelligence.

Here they were. Howard Taggart and Lia DeFrancesca. Good

Security gate Atlantis Queen dock Southampton, England Thursday, 1412 hours GMT

"You are sure this will bypass the main gate?"

"Yes, sir. It's an access for heavy equipment, but it's rarely used." Ghailiani was sweating heavily, squeezed into the cab of the six-ton lorry between Khalid and the driver as they made the final turn off Herbert Walker Avenue and into an alley between two enormous warehouses. The terminal was a hundred meters to the left, the gate just ahead.

"Pray you are right, Mohamed." The truck squeaked to a stop, the way ahead blocked by a padlocked chain-link gate. "I need to get out."

Khalid opened the passenger door and stepped down into the alley. Ghailiani followed. He fished inside the pocket of his slacks for the key he'd taken from the terminal security office forty minutes ago.

He'd been hoping to find the gate guarded. Security around the Royal Sky Line dock in Southampton had been tight, lately, and it was possible that an armed guard would have been posted, if only to foil would-be smugglers from reaching the dock and the Atlantis Queen's hold.

But there was no one here. He unlocked the heavy padlock, pulled the chain from the fence, and swung the gate open. Khalid waved the truck through.

The truck turned left and kept going as Ghailiani closed the gate.

Ghailiani and Khalid would follow the truck on foot.

Atlantis Queen passenger terminal

Southampton, England Thursday, 1418 hours GMT

"Everybody stay together!" Donald Myers fluttered his hands, trying to get the group's attention. "Please stay together! We still need to go through the security gate!"

He was, Myers thought, getting too damned old for this nonsense. A docent of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, he'd been guide and nanny for more tour groups now than he really cared to think about. Lately, it seemed, his job had been less about lecturing on eastern Mediterranean culture than it had been about herding rich little old ladies from one point to another and trying to keep them all together, a process uncannily like attempting to herd cats.

This time around, he was responsible for a group of eighteen, fourteen of them women, four of them men, and all of them over sixty. They'd signed up for the Atlantis Queen tour to Greece and the Near East, and he was there to give lectures on a variety of topics, from art in ancient Greece, to the Bible as history, to the writings of Homer; but sometimes he felt that he was little more than a poorly paid babysitter.

Leading the way, he stepped through the metal detector, then turned and waited for the rest. Ms. Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Galsworthy stepped through okay, but the alarm sounded as Ms. Dunne, waved through by an impatient security guard, set off the metal detector with her walker.

"Oh, dear," Ms. Dunne said, looking about. "Did I do that?"

"Over here, please, ma'am," the guard said. He began using a wand to check Ms. Dunne from head to toe, to make sure that it had been her walker that had triggered the device and not, Myers thought with wry amusement, a bomb hidden beneath her knit cardigan.

The others followed, one by one.

"Mr. Myers?" one elderly woman said after she'd stepped through.

"Yes, Ms. Caruthers?"

She pointed. "What does that sign mean?"

Just beyond the metal detector they were faced now by a somewhat ominous white tunnel and several blue-uniformed security guards. A sign on a metal pole to one side read:

Please form single line for x-ray security screening.

Procedure is safe and unobtrusive.

Passengers may request hand search in lieu of X-ray scan.

The procedure is for your safety.

Royal Sky Line regrets the inconvenience, and hopes you have a wonderful cruise. thank you.

"Just another security precaution," Myers told her. "Like it says. It's 'for your safety.'"

"X-rays can be harmful," Caruthers told him. "My doctor told me so."

"Ms. Caruthers, I'm very sure they wouldn't do it to people if there was any chance of harm."

"It's just like in that movie, Elsie," Ms. Jordan said, placing a reassuring hand on Caruthers' arm. "The Terminator, I think it was. The one with Arnie Schwarzenegger, before he became governor of California? The security people could see him on a big screen as a moving skeleton, remember?"

"That wasn't Terminator, Anne," Caruthers snapped back. "It was Total Recall And that's beside the point."

"But they could see he was carrying a gun!"

"Well, I'm not carrying a gun," Caruthers said with a defiant upward lift of her chin. "And I'll keep my skeleton to myself, thank you!"

Myers sighed. He didn't like Ms. Caruthers, and she didn't like him. The woman had once had the effrontery to correct him in the middle of a lecture he'd been giving back at the Walters, part of a Western arts lecture series presented by the museum foundation. She'd actually interrupted to correct him on some fine point about Doric and Ionic columns in front of the rest of the class.

The fact that, when he'd looked it up, he'd found she'd been correct only made it more irritating.

"You have to go through, Ms. Caruthers," Myers told her. "Either that, or let the guards frisk you. It's for your safety."

"Young man, I don't have to do anything! They want to frisk me like I was some kind of criminal? I won't stand for this!"

"Well, if you wish to leave the group--," Myers began, but she cut him off.

"As tour guide you can make special arrangements," Caruthers told him. "People like us shouldn't have to go through these machines like we were riffraff! And you should have known that, and made those arrangements in advance!"

"What seems to be the problem here, folks?" a security guard asked, joining them. The tour group was piling up now in front of the X-ray machine as they came through the metal detector, bringing progress to a halt.

"I'm sorry, Officer," Myers told the man. "Ms. Caruthers, here, has some concerns about the safety of this X-ray scan."

"It's perfectly safe, ma'am," the guard said. "You'll get more X-ray radiation walking outdoors on a bright, sunny day."

"My sunblock," Caruthers told him with an acid touch to her voice, "is over there, in my carry-on luggage, which you people seem to think is hiding bombs or drugs or something!"

"Ma'am--"

"On my flight from Baltimore, they confiscated my knitting and a plastic bottle of water, and then they made me take off my shoes so they could see if I had explosives hidden inside them!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but--"

"Young man, I am sixty-nine years old and I'm not a threat to anybody! Except, perhaps, to certain overzealous civil servants and incompetent tour guides!"

"Please, Ms. Caruthers!" Myers said. "If you make a scene--"

"So now I'm making a scene, am I? Good! I refuse to be frisked like a common criminal, and I refuse to be zapped by X-rays! What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to ask you to step outside the line, ma'am," the guard said, "so we can allow the other passengers to continue boarding."

"What's the matter, Elsie?" Nancy Haynes asked, grinning. "Don't want your picture took?"

"I don't know about this," Mabel Polmar said, looking worried. "Elsie's right about X-rays. My doctor told me when I had my hip surgery last winter that I couldn't have too many X-rays, or else I'd--"

"It's safe, Ms. Polmar," Myers said. He turned to the guard. "Look, is there anything else we can do?"

"Company rules, sir. Everyone goes through the scanner, or they allow themselves to be searched."

"I'd better discuss this with your supervisor, then."

"Very well, sir. But can we get the rest of these people moving? They're holding up the line."

"Okay. Let me go through and show them it's okay."

He walked into the white smooth-surfaced tunnel, turned, and held out his arms. "See, everyone? Nothing to it!"

One by one, the members of Myers' tour group followed him through the tunnel, some hesitantly, some with dogged determination, some fearfully, some with good-natured banter. Judy Dunne hobbled through step-by-step with her walker. Myers hoped that the security personnel were getting a good look at all of their skeletons, or whatever it was that they were looking at. A more unlikely terrorist group he couldn't imagine... though Ms. Caruthers did come close. She was, in his opinion and at the very least, a royal pain in the ass.

A few--Caruthers, Polmar, Jones, the Kleins, Kathy Morton--chose to follow the security guard off to the side and were engaged in a spirited discussion with him.

The Elderly Ladies' Home Terrorist and Sewing Circle, Myers thought. With a grimace, he turned and walked back to join the discussion.

This really was going to be his last time as a tour group guide.

Atlantis Queen pier side Southampton, England Thursday, 1420 hours GMT

The gray morning's overcast was breaking at last, giving way to bright sunlight. Several hundred feet aft from the Atlantis Queen's boarding gangway, the garage-sized doors to her main cargo hold on A Deck had been slid open and another lorry filled with crates of provisions drove up alongside.

Chester Darrow picked up his electronic clipboard and walked down the loading ramp to meet with the driver. "Good afternoon!" he called cheerfully. "What do you have for us?"

"More food," the driver said with a disinterested shrug. "Where do you want it?"