‘‘Together as in: Whatever I have, you have and
‘‘As in,’’ Boldt confirmed, his attention still drifting.
‘‘This surveillance that was reported,’’ she said, waking him up some. ‘‘What are your chances of making this bust?’’
‘‘Until they reported it, our chances were pretty good, I think.’’
‘‘And now?’’
‘‘Not so good,’’ he answered.
‘‘There’s something going down,’’ she stated. ‘‘A container shipment?’’
His mind sprang fully awake. Where had she gotten that? ‘‘It’s possible,’’ he admitted. ‘‘We don’t know exactly when, although any time around the new moon makes strategic sense for them.’’ He added, ‘‘We thought the drop was going to be at a naval yard—that is, until things leaked this morning. That hurt us. Now, quite honestly, we’re not so sure.’’
‘‘Your plan?’’
His mind briefly prevented him from discussing it—
responsible, but quite possibly Ms. Chow as well.’’
‘‘And now that it has leaked?’’ she inquired.
‘‘One step forward, two steps back. We’re still watching our location, but I’m guessing we’ve been sandbagged by the leak.’’
‘‘So you’re tracking all arriving freighters,’’ she stated. Reporters and cops thought the same way.
‘‘Freighters, tankers, trawlers.’’ He hesitated. ‘‘Any ship making port in the next thirty-six hours. Of special interest are any that made port in Hong Kong. I’ll be down at Port Authority. We’ll be tracking every ship closely,’’ he confirmed, though his jaw was tight and his voice sounded foreign even to him. ‘‘Three in particular, due in later tonight, all made port in Kowloon. That matches with the
‘‘So do I, and my hunch is you’re about to be sandbagged again,’’ she warned. She explained what she had found out about Channel Seven’s SkyCam crew.
Boldt remained silent trying to clear his thoughts, suddenly a tangle of confusion and outright anger. The press no longer reported cases, they intervened and destroyed them.
‘‘We haven’t much time,’’ she warned.
‘‘I’m listening.’’ His throat dry and scratchy, his temper flaring.
‘‘No one—not you, not the mayor—can stop a news crew from reporting.’’
‘‘Believe me, I’m aware of that,’’ he said.
‘‘Competition is a wonderful thing. The infrared technology has its limits: It doesn’t like light. If we—my team, I’m talking about—were to aim enough light toward that infrared camera, we’d blind the equipment. We’d piss them off, sure—but we wouldn’t be breaking any laws, just one news crew out to scoop the other. You see how this works?’’
‘‘You’re going to sabotage a live news feed?’’
The open line hissed with static. ‘‘I’m going to improve Melissa’s chances,’’ she said. ‘‘They expose this freighter, and who knows what
happens? When people panic, they make poor choices.’’
‘‘Agreed.’’
‘‘If you’re going to be at Port Authority, then that helps. I need you to provide me the exact locations of these three freighters,’’ she suggested. ‘‘Maybe we can mislead Seven’s chopper.’’
Boldt paused, his mind whirring.
She asked, ‘‘You’ve got to trust me on this.’’
A week earlier he might not have, but they were two pieces of the same puzzle now. Boldt said, ‘‘Let me have your number again. I’ll call you from Port Authority.’’
CHAPTER 65
aMoia pulled up to a red light. A dozen ways existed that he might have made the connection between Coughlie and the purpose behind the man’s stop at City Hall. He might have used a detective’s cunning or logic or some complex strategy born of his years of experience. Instead it was simply that red light. The Camaro idled alongside a high-rise construction site. LaMoia, ever on the lookout for a nice set of legs or a chest to fix his eyes upon, noticed a construction crane in the process of hoisting a pallet of steel beams. The light changed. He pulled to the side of the street, set his flashers to blinking and thought it through. What if they were right about Coughlie being involved? What if the man suspected the reported police surveillance was on his drop point, the naval yard? With only hours to go before the arrival of the container ships, a new container of illegals, with crane rentals being carefully watched by SPD—information to which Coughlie was privy—how would he select a backup location? The answer was now obvious to him: Look for a waterfront construction site that had a permit to operate a crane, and therefore, a crane on-site. He popped open his cellphone and dialed: They could have surveillance in place on any such sites in a matter of minutes.
CHAPTER 66
ight rain struck the traffic helicopter’s plastic bubble sounding like pebbles on tin, heard even over the ferocious roar of the chopper’s blades. Stevie McNeal could not get used to the empty space of the clear plastic beneath her feet. She floated high above the white chop of the water and the wickedly fast gray wisps of cloud that raced past underfoot, half nauseous, half adrenaline rush.
Boldt stood over the Port Authority radar, its circular black scope fully refreshed every seventeen seconds, returning images of any vessel with a deck taller than six feet above the waterline or carrying a radar reflector, as most pleasure craft did. Radar installations rimmed Puget Sound’s coastline, all feeding data into this one facility, two miles south of downtown. There were four such scopes in all, covering every shipping lane from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Elliott Bay waterfront. The six men and women in this darkened room tracked the movement of commercial ships into the Port of Seattle ‘‘twenty-four, seven.’’ Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
‘‘As they enter the system,’’ the man with the military haircut explained to Boldt, ‘‘they identify themselves and we tag them, much the same way air-traffic control would with an aircraft. The only difference here—these ships move a lot slower,’’ he said, trying but failing to evoke a response from the lieutenant. ‘‘But being as they’re tens of thousands of tons set in motion, tens of thousands of tons that take anywhere from one to three miles to come to a complete stop, they bear our attention. Most, if not all, have contracts with tugs to be picked up and moved into port. We track where and when that is to happen to remove any possibility of collision or bottle-necking. On top of the commercial shipping lanes we have over two dozen commercial ferries on regular schedules through these waters, an impossible number of cruise ships, military craft, Coast Guard and tens of thousands of registered pleasure craft. It keeps us busy.’’
‘‘The SS
