The Blind Spy

Bosphorus and into the Mediterranean.”

“Who’s watching her on the ground?” Burt asked.

“The British.”

That explained the presence of Adrian, then.

“We have two Special Boat Service teams tracking the ship,” Adrian said in a clipped voice. “Round the clock, out of radar range.”

“What makes you think the Yekaterinburg is carrying ordinary radar?” Burt asked. “Or that anyone interested in her like we are—like your boys in their rubber boats—isn’t also being tracked but on someone else’s satellite? If she’s so important, if that’s what this is all about, the Russians will know just where you are.”

“They keep below range,” Adrian replied. “Small boats only, but I grant you there’s nothing we can do if the ship and the area around it are being tracked from space by their side. Whoever their side is,” he added.

“Dashing around the high seas in little rubber boats,” Burt said with great enthusiasm. “Great stuff, Adrian.” But in his mind he was satisfied that there was no one better for the job than the British special forces. They liked a fight.

“So. What then?” he said.

Theo moved another chart and satellite map over the first one on the table. Archie flicked a switch on a console and projected a new electronic map onto the wall that now showed the eastern Mediterranean.

“First stop after Istanbul is Alexandria—Egypt,” Theo said, again pedantically to Burt’s ears.

“I didn’t imagine it was Alexandria, Virginia, Theo.”

“Detail’s important,” the CIA chief said. “No slipups, no misunderstandings. Step-by-step.”

Not this sort of detail, Burt thought. This was just flannel, stuffing, something to fill out reports with.

“Pick up a new cargo in Alexandria, did she?” he enquired, concealing his impatience with a trademark smile.

“Yes, she was loaded when she left. Down to the Plimsoll line. But we don’t know what with. Or we didn’t.”

“So?”

“She chugs off up the coast of the southern sector of the Med. We have our Sixth Fleet now supporting the British in the area. Refuelling and so on. Rotating crews from the SBS, Britain’s Special Boat Service, sent out from the UK. She then docks in Algiers, three days later. Unloads a cargo of scrap metal, as it turns out. That’s what she picked up in Alexandria.”

This was taking an awfully long time. So a Russian merchant vessel left the port of Novorossiysk just like hundreds of others did every year. “What about it?” he said mildly, now barely concealing a growing testiness beneath his same trademark grin.

“This is where it gets interesting,” Theo said. “Adrian?”

Adrian shuffled the two or three inches available to him in order to get closer to the charts and the satellite pictures on the table. There she was again on the maps and in the photographs, the Yekaterinburg, but now she was heading west along the southern littoral from Egypt. The line of light on the wall indicated her progress. It was an entertainment, Burt thought. And then he remembered that it was the Walt Disney Corporation that had designed the CIA’s Threat Matrix centre.

“She disappears,” Adrian said. “That’s what happens.”

“Disappears?” Burt queried and raised a mocking eyebrow. “You don’t mean into thin air, presumably.”

“Put it this way, Burt. Our teams are watching her. We have a four-man team on shore in Algiers and others out at sea. Supported by your Sixth Fleet, as Theo says. Our shore team can’t get into the actual port area, but they have a view, shall we say. They overlook it.”

“Well done, Adrian,” Burt said, and Adrian tried and failed to pinpoint an unmistakable tone of mockery in his voice.

“On the morning of the fifteenth of April,” Adrian continued, “she’s no longer alongside the dock in Algiers. She’s vanished. That’s what I mean.”

“But your teams picked up what vessels left port during the night,” Burt said.

“Yes. Five ships left overnight. Between nine P.M. and nine A.M. We think the Yekaterinburg was one of them. In fact, she must have been, and we can show it.”

“That would make excellent sense,” Burt said. “If she wasn’t there anymore she must have either left or sunk. What’s the proposition?”

“Two SBS teams at sea tracked all five ships until they finally reduced the search to one. If it’s the Yekaterinburg—and we’re certain it is—she was reregistered overnight under the flag of Tuvalu, and renamed the Pride of Corsica. Paint job, new numbers, a few little differences to the outer appearance, but the superstructure’s the same. My watchers are experts.”

“I’m sure they are,” Burt agreed. “So she starts off as the Forburg in January, turns into the Yekaterinburg in April, and then swiftly becomes the Pride of Corsica. Sounds rather overelaborate, don’t you think?”

“That depends on how elaborate they think it needs to be,” Theo said. “Evidently concealment is of the utmost importance.”

“What then?” Burt said, and found he was now warming to the idea of a chameleon ship.

Theo now walked away from the table as if for some oratorical effect. Then he turned. “So the boat we’re sure is the Forburg/Yekaterinburg still heads west. But now she’s under a new flag and named the Pride of Corsica. This time she’s going to Libya.”

“And this time we see she has bodyguards onboard,” Adrian said.

“Armed guards,” Burt murmured as a statement rather than a question, and as if in some way suddenly approving of the operation. “What provenance?”

“We don’t know. But they’re crawling all over the deck. They must have boarded in Algiers, or just possibly under the cover of darkness out at sea. They looked like they were preparing for something.”

“But not a tea party.” Burt looked at Adrian. “What sort of preparations?”

“A great deal of ordnance. Heavy stuff. Antiaircraft, antisubmarine, you name it. Plus an arsenal of small arms that could bring down a small country.”

Theo now brought up satellite pictures of the deck of the ship with a clear view of about a dozen men, Burt thought, armed to the teeth with Kriss Super Five submachine guns, and wearing balaclavas and combat gear. He now saw there was a stern-mounted antiaircraft emplacement, plus one in the bow. He thought he detected what Adrian had called antisubmarine devices, too.

“And who’s she registered to now?” Burt asked.

“She was originally registered—when she left Novorossiysk—to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. We traced the account numbers of this company’s bank to the BVI and then beyond. We think we have a match to a brass plate company in Omsk, Russia. Now, however, she’s registered to another company in the BVI that we’ve traced to another brass plate company, this time in Cyprus.”

“Who are the beneficiaries?”

“We’re pretty certain they’re also Russian,” Archie chipped in for the first time—as if they were nearing the kill. It filled the dramatic pause Theo had left while gearing himself up to reply and the CIA chief looked momentarily peeved. “It would certainly make sense,” Archie added.

“Ah. Yes, Archie, it would certainly make sense,” Burt said.

“The name of the new, Cyprus company is Fennerman International,” Theo said. “Telephone number, box office address. Nothing there. But behind this shadow company in Cyprus there’s yet another company, in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and behind that company there’s a further company in Cyprus.”

“The mother ship,” Burt says. “So who’s behind that?”

“Work in progress,” Archie said eagerly.

“But you’re satisfied that this company in Cyprus—the second one—is the end of the line?” Burt asked.

“Most likely. Ultimate beneficiary is, again, a company registered in Omsk, Russia.”

“Same one as before, or different?” Burt said.

“Different, but at the same address in a run-down warehouse building on the edge of town. We’ve had people