“Not often, but sometimes. Especially if there was a storm, or something like that.”
Lane pocketed his notebook. This case wasn’t going to be as open and shut as some of the ones they got. In fact he had a gut feeling that it wouldn’t even be theirs for very long. He’d shared his feeling with Nicole and she agreed with him. A federally documented yacht just returned from a long trip outside the U.S. A suspect who might not be an American. An absentee owner. No apparent motive. And worst of all the lack of fingerprints. Ed Bowser, their chief evidence technician, said that they were finding only one set of fingerprints throughout the boat, plus a second set that was probably the young woman’s confined to a few spots in the main saloon.
“If you want my best guess, I’d say that someone who knew what they were doing wiped down the entire boat. The prints we’re finding will turn out to be the captain’s.”
“He came back to check on the empty boat, so what exactly did he check?” Lane asked.
“That’s the best part Besides here in the saloon and up on the bridge, the only other area that we’re finding prints are in the guest stateroom. And they’re all over the place in there. Looks like the good captain came in, checked something on the bridge and then tossed the one cabin.”
Looking for an aluminum case, Lane thought. He took Nicole aside. “Let’s get a dog over here to sniff out what we might be missing.”
“Drugs?”
“Could be,” Lane said. “In the meantime I’m going to put what we have so far on the wire, see if Guthrie’s name turns up anyplace else. And we’ll get it over to the feds. Who knows, we might even catch a break.”
Nicole chuckled. “Yeah, right.”
Rencke left his office a little before midnight and walked down the corridor to the bathroom surprised that everything was so quiet. When he was working he sometimes forgot about time. All that mattered was the job at hand. And so far he was coming up empty-handed and it puzzled him.
He had a halfdozen computer search programs going simultaneously, searching the Net and every database he could think of for a number of basic bits of information: bin Laden’s whereabouts and movements, Ali Bahmad’s whereabouts and movements and the bomb’s whereabouts and movements, plus anomalies in the entire investigation. The bits and pieces that didn’t seem to fit into any pattern; the stray telephone conversation, the odd satellite shot, the interrogation of a prisoner somewhere that turned up something that seemed out of place.
Anything. Anything at all.
Back in his office he telephoned Lieutenant Ritter at NSA. “Hiya, kiddo, anything new?”
“Nothing from the Rome exchange,” she answered. “We’re checking across the board with the vorep upgrades. If bin Laden talks to anybody by phone or radio we’ll know about it.”
“He’s still holed up in Khartoum, or at least we think he is, so you can concentrate there,” Rencke said, dismally. “What about the programs I gave you to use?” “Otto, if I’d gotten them from anybody but you, I’d have to say that they’re worthless.” She sounded just as frustrated as he did. “Whoever knows anything about the bomb, they’re keeping quiet about it.”
“Nothing out of Afghanistan, maybe Iran or Yemen, or even Saudi Arabia?”
“Zippo.”
Rencke ran a hand across his eyes. “Anyway, thanks, Johanna. Keep on truckin’.”
“One of them is bound to make a mistake somewhere. We’ll catch up with them.”
“Yeah,” Rencke said, and he hung up. He sat back and closed his eyes, not even interested in having a Twinkie at the moment. Maybe he was losing his touch. Maybe he could no longer see the colors. Maybe he’d used up his edge. It happened to everybody sooner or later, even to McGarvey, or so the DO’s gossip mill was saying.
Fifteen years ago when he was trying to work out an exceedingly complex CIA computer program system that involved multidimensional bubble memories and intricate mathematics, he hit on the notion of thinking of systems as colors. A shade of lavender, for example, brought into his head the LaPlace transformations. Red was for curl, blue for spin, and more involved melding of colors were for tensor calculus matricies, quantum mechanical statements, chaos equations and a couple of new fields that an Indian mother of three had come up with that only a handful of people in the world understood or had even heard about.
The color this time was orange. He opened his eyes and looked at his monitors, all of them presenting steady streams of data, diagrams and pictures. The information was useless, less than useless without the one piece that would start tying the bits together. Even the universe had been created one pair of particles at a time after the Big Bang. For a minute or two he thought about going home to get some sleep. But he didn’t want to leave because he would have to admit that he had failed. He picked up the phone and called Louise Horn next door in the NRO. “Tell me yes, and make me the happiest man on the planet,” Rencke said, trying to keep it light.
“I’d love to, Otto,” she said. “But nothing’s changed. They’re all bedded down over there.”
A faint spark stirred in Rencke’s gut. “It’s only seven in the evening in Khartoum. Nothing’s stirring right now? Not even a mouse? All day, maybe?”
“What are you getting at?” Louise said, but then she stopped herself. “Oh, I see,” she said. “No one has been in or out of the compound in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Not so much as a delivery van?”
“Nothing,” Louise said. “What’s going on?”
“They’re hunkering. Means the battle is going to start any second,” Rencke explained excitedly. “If anything moves in or around the place, and I do mean anything, I want to know about it right then.”
“Will do—”
“Gotta go,” Rencke told her. He broke the connection and called Johanna Ritter again. “I think whatever’s going to happen is going down any minute. Within a few hours maybe, but certainly before the end of the weekend. Have there been any calls whatsoever to the compound?”
“I don’t know. We’ve just been looking out for bin Laden or Bahmad.”
“I want you to start monitoring every single call, in or out of there, and get them over to me immediately.”
“Okay, I’m sending the heads-up right now,” Johanna said.
One of his computer programs began to chirp. The screen went pale orange. Rencke broke the connection and slid over to the monitor. The screen was split. On the left was a FBI advisory and APB from its New York office. Gordon Guthrie, a Caucasian male, early to mid-forties, five-eight, a hundred fifty pounds, thinning light brown hair, brown eyes, no distinguishing marks, possibly a British citizen, was wanted for questioning in a homicide aboard the yacht Papa’s Fancy docked at the Hudson River boatyard, New York City. No fingerprints. Police artist drawing to follow.
On the right was the reason his search engine had picked out the bulletin and went orange. Papa’s Fancy had been docked at the Corinthian Yacht Club here in Washington, and had cleared customs for departure to Bermuda the day after the Chevy Chase attack.
Rencke pulled up the artist’s sketch and grinned like a kid at Christmas. “Oh, boy,” he said. “Ali Bahmad. Gotcha!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
There she is,” Captain Fernandez shouted over the terrific noise. A very strong radar return was showing up on the twenty-mile ring. “How do you know that it’s the right ship?” Bahmad demanded. It was getting too late to make stupid mistakes.
“She’s heading in the right direction, she’s going at the right speed, she’s the right size and she’s the only fucking ship out here, amigo,” the captain replied tightly. He wasn’t used to being questioned.
They were alone on the Aprhodite’s open bridge; the captain at the wheel, Bahmad seated next to him and the radar screen between them. It was midnight, and the other two crewmen, Antonio Morales and Hernando Mendoza, were below. They’d been drinking beer for the past four hours since they’d left Rosario, but the captain assured Bahmad that when the time came they would function with their cojones intact. The seas were fairly calm,
