“Nada,” the other agent replied. He nodded toward the vast empty open space around them. “You sure this is the right address, Steve?”
“Yeah.” Sanchez slowly scuffed at the concrete floor with the toe of his boot, adjusting to the new situation he and his team faced. It was a frustrating end to a very long night. The EMPTY QUIVER alert passed to the Houston field office from D.C. had caught him at his son’s soccer game.
Rounding up the other agents assigned to the field office had taken time. Rousting enough port officials to confirm that the Caraco Savannah had offloaded cargo in Galveston had consumed several more hours. By the time his people had tracked the generators, or jet engines, or whatever they were, to this address on Meridian Street, it was well past midnight. Organizing this raid and securing the necessary warrants had pushed the clock forward to near dawn. To now.
And for what? Whatever had been stored in this warehouse was long gone.
Frowning, Sanchez turned to one of his subordinates. “Get the Caraco operations manager in here — right now!”
Frank Wilson, Caraco’s Galveston port operations manager, was a big man — nearly a head taller than Sanchez. He was fighting both hair loss and a growing potbelly. Right now he was also fighting sleep. FBI agents had come hammering at his door at four in the morning.
Sanchez swung toward the disheveled Caraco executive.
“Well, Mr. Wilson? Would you care to explain what was going on in here?”
Wilson blinked, staring at the empty warehouse around him.
He turned innocent eyes on the FBI agent. “Explain what, Agent Sanchez?”
He shrugged. “As I tried telling your people earlier this morning, I’ve never set foot in this building in my life.”
“Now how is that possible?” Sanchez asked sarcastically. “You are the top dog for your company in Galveston, right?”
Wilson nodded. “That’s right. But Caraco’s a big corporation, Agent Sanchez. Very big. We’ve got more than half a dozen subsidiaries here in the States alone — and more overseas. I run the port operations for the company. We mostly handle shipments of refinery and pipeline equipment for our energy division.”
He shrugged and continued. “But this warehouse was leased by Caraco Transport. That’s a separate outfit entirely.”
“How separate?”
“Different personnel. Different chain of command. Different procedures. Hell, different pay scales, for all I know!” Wilson said.
“That’s the way the higher-ups like it, Agent Sanchez. It’s part of the whole new wave in corporate management — less topdown direction, more bottom-up innovation.”
Sounds more like a recipe for potential chaos and ducked responsibility, Sanchez thought cynically. He was a Bureau man through and through, and good or bad the FBI ran on procedure and centralized control. He tried again. “Did you ever meet any of the people working at this facility, Mr. Wilson?”
The Caraco executive shook his balding head ponderously.
“Nope. But then I never had any reason to. Like I said, we’re separate outfits — and I’ve had a ton of work on my plate these past few weeks. We’ve got a big contract to build a pipeline in Central Asia coming up.”
“What about any of your other employees, sir? Did any of them have any contact with the people running this warehouse?”
“You’d have to ask them that question, Agent Sanchez. I sure don’t know.” The big man shrugged again. “I suppose some of my guys might have run across these folks in the bars after work, but I don’t make it my business to pry.”
“I can see that.”
“Look, Agent Sanchez,” Wilson said kindly. “If you want to know more about this operation, why don’t you contact Caraco Transport’s headquarters directly? I’m sure they’d be happy to answer your questions.”
“I’ll do that, Mr. Wilson,” the FBI agent replied. “Any idea where exactly that might be?”
“Sure. They’re based in Cairo.”
“In Egypt?” Sanchez heard himself ask.
Wilson chuckled. “Like I said, we’re a big company.”
Already imagining the tangle of official forms, mounting phone bills, and foreign language translators he was about to wade into, Sanchez signaled one of his subordinates to take the Caraco executive away and get a written statement from him.
He turned back to face the warehouse. Caraco employees or not, he knew the characters who’d leased this place weren’t just model tenants when they’d stripped this place down to the bare floor. They’d systematically tried to destroy any trace of their presence. Nobody did that without a damned good reason — like hiding illegal activity.
The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was: What kind of illegal activity? An FBI addendum added to the EMPTY QUIVER alert questioned J.S.O.C’s HUMINT source — implying the goods being smuggled were far more likely to be some kind of illegal drugs than nuclear weapons.
Well, Sanchez sure hoped the higher-ups in the Hoover Building were right, and the Army was wrong. Missing a big shipment of coke, heroin, or pot was bad. Missing a smuggled nuke … He waved his section leaders over and started issuing orders.
“Okay, let’s start tearing this place apart. Check the Dumpsters.
See when the trash was last collected. Calder, you start interviewing the businesses nearby. Find out what they’ve seen. I want every license number of every car or truck that’s ever been parked within a hundred yards of this place. And get the physical evidence teams in here ASAP?
An agent speaking into a cell-phone caught his eye. “Do you want NEST?” she asked.
The highly trained specialists of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team were standing by on high alert.
If the FBI raid had turned up any evidence at all of illicit nuclear material, NEST would have come swooping in to find the stuff and remove it safely.
Sanchez shook his head. “Tell NEST there’s nothing for them to do here.”
He didn’t know whether that would make the DOE folks happy or unhappy.
Sanchez moved outside — away from the fresh-paint stink and the maddeningly empty building. For now, he suspected they’d run into a dead-end. The Caraco Savannah herself was halfway across the Atlantic, bound for Germany again. It would be days before her crew could be questioned.
Whoeever these people were, he thought, they’re pros. But nobody could vanish into thin air. They’d made the job of tracking them harden-but not impossible. If he had to, he’d interview everyone in Galveston until they found somebody who could give them a name or a description.
Hell, if need be, he and his agents would scrape that goddamned paint off the walls a square inch at a time.
Sanchez narrowed his eyes. Somewhere, somehow, they’d find something.
It might take days, maybe even weeks, but he and his fellow FBI agents would find the trail. He pushed the thought that it might already be too late far to the back of his mind.
Prince Ibrahim al Saud’s habit after morning prayers was to check his e-mail, listen to the BBC news, and get caught up on the night’s developments in his various business enterprises. He never forgot that the world kept moving while he slept.
The private study in his Middleburg home was actually a suite, with an office for his personal secretary, a meeting room wired for satellite teleconferencing, and his own palatial inner sanctum.
Ibrahim’s desk faced a wide picture window that overlooked the lush, green Virginia countryside. Bulletproof glass ensured his personal security. Double panes and vacuum sealing offered protection for his personal secrets — thwarting any attempted hightech eavesdropping.
Like the rest of the house, the study reflected his heritage, position, and wealth. Priceless handwoven Hamadan rugs covered the floor — matched by other rugs on the walls. Dozens of precise, colorful geometric
