Jean Luc held the phone silently to his ear, seized at once by a kind of morbid humor. In a few minutes he would have to get dressed and ready for his meetings — discussions meant to reassure his partners that their illegal oil shipments were being successfully covered up despite a glorified bookkeeper’s aborted attempt at snitching them out. But not until he’d started his day with some brief words about double murder.
“No, sir, it isn’t.”
“It’s a quote from the Christian scriptures I memorized a long time ago,” Jean Luc said. And shrugged a little in the stillness of the room. “Go ahead, Toll. Do whatever’s necessary. Keep us among the quick. Because if I’m going to be judged at all, I’d rather it be that way than the other.”
It was a quarter to ten when Vince Scull called back. Nimec had hung around the villa’s pool all morning, watching Annie take some laps and admiring how graceful and relaxed she looked. He’d learned to swim in the military as part of his combat survival training and, even so many years later, found that being in the water made him revert to the tight discipline the training had instilled.
“Okay, Petey, what am I interrupting?” Scull said.
Nimec shrugged with the satphone to his ear.
“Me getting a kick out of Annie enjoying herself,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Scull said. “Don’t suppose I should want to go there.”
Nimec frowned. At least Vince sounded wide awake now — maybe even excited, the way he did when his juices got flowing.
“Your noggins find out anything?” he said.
“Haven’t talked to a single one of them who’s heard of combo tanker-freighters. but they’re on it,” Scull said. “Meanwhile, Bow — I mentioned him, didn’t I? Cal Bowman?”
“Yeah, Vince. You did.”
“Bow helped me with some groundwork, basic shit just might interest you.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“You told me the feeder ships you saw were maybe three-hundred-footers, right?”
“Be my guess,” Nimec said.
“Give or take, it puts them in line with the size of industrial oil barges,” Scull said. “They’d be anywhere between two forty and two eighty feet long and carry loads of crude, refined, gasoline, home fuel, asphalt, or all the above and then some. The number of tanks in a barge’s hold depends on how many types of product they’ve got aboard. Might be one, two, four… there’d need to be different tank linings for different grades of petroleum.”
“And different ways of filling the tanks,” Nimec said. “I figure if the feeders were taking oil, it would have to be a lighter type. Put crude in the hoses I saw and it would gum them up like thick molasses.”
“Bow said about the same,” Scull answered, and then paused for a long while.
“Vince? You still with me?”
“Don’t get your bathing trunks in a knot, I need to look at my notes.” An audible shuffling of papers over the phone. “Okay, here we go… It’s twenty-four thousand.”
Nimec’s forehead creased.
“Must’ve missed something,” he said, sure he hadn’t. “What’s twenty-four thousand—”
“Barrels, Petey. It’s the typical load on one of those barges. Talking equivalents, that comes to one million gallons. You want another example, imagine a convoy of a hundred twenty tanker trucks, because that’s how much rolling stock it’d take to move it by ground.”
Nimec let that settle in for a minute. He was wearing a short-sleeved Polo shirt and the morning sun was already hot on his bare arms. He reached for the icy glass of Coke on a table beside his lounger, sipped, watched Annie from under the bill of his Seattle Mariners cap. Stroking to the deep end of the pool, she dove like a seal, then executed a kind of acrobatic loop-de-loop that left her long, toned legs briefly sticking straight up out of the water before they submerged with the rest of her. He’d promised they would go snorkeling together that afternoon. A boat would take them out over the coral reef beds for a couple of hours, and there would be exotic fish, and maybe dolphins and sea turtles. Then Annie was hoping they could hit another restaurant on the beach — it had a steel drum calypso band performing at dinner. After dark he’d leave her alone in the villa, head over to the harbor again, do a little undercover work like a character from a spy movie. That was the main thing on his mind right now and he felt lousy about it, but not lousy enough to bump it down on his list of priorities.
“Got anything else for me?” he said into the phone.
“You sound testy all of a sudden, Petey,” Scull said.
“I’m not,” Nimec said. “Anything else?”
“Maybe,” Scull said. “Remember what I told you about those disguised tankers in the Big One?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, here’s some history I found in our computers that’s a lot more recent — don’t know why it wasn’t right in my head, because it should’ve been,” Scull said. “A few years ago, around the time Uncle Saddam had his ass kicked out of Baghdad, two thousand troops from the Thirteenth MEU were assigned to a Brit naval operation to choke off oil smuggling on the Iraqi coast. There’s that city there, Umm Qasr, you might’ve heard of it. The country’s biggest port. What the smugglers did was tap crude from the Rumeila pipelines, run it down the al-Faw Peninsula in tanker trucks, then pass it off onto barges at Umm Qasr. Our troops pulled in dozens of non-Iraqi flagged ships moving about five hundred thousand gallons of oil out to sea every night — and, guess what, some of them were converted freighters.”
Nimec sat quietly for a moment. Oil. According to his company travel and intelligence briefs the area certainly had a rich supply — it’d accounted for most of Trinidad’s export economy for decades. In fact, they had those tar pits in the south where a British outfit built the first well rigs in the Americas, maybe in the world… a plantation owner had leased them drilling rights to a pitch lake on his land after his father, or grandfather, or somebody like that, had made a fortune marketing kerosene that had been distilled from it. Nimec believed the family still owned some processing plants, but would have to glance over the briefs again to be sure. In any case, it was oil that had indirectly brought UpLink here through its wiring deal with Sedco. There were the onshore fields and refineries, and some new deepwater patches. Lots and lots of oil. But oil
Probably much slighter than the odds that he was starting to let his imagination carry him away, Nimec admitted to himself. Still, he’d seen
“Thanks for getting on this for me, Vince,” he said. “Keep in touch, okay? Something turns up, I want to know ASAP.”
“Got you,” Scull said. “And be sure to send my regards to the missus… that’s if you wind up seeing her before I do.”
Nimec blinked his eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.
“Figure it out, honeymooner,” Scull said, and terminated their connection.
Nimec let the phone sink from his ear and exhaled, staring at Annie in the pool.
Figure out what Scull meant? It would have been too easy.
The rough part was that he already damned well knew.
The Modesto offices of Golden Triangle Computer Services occupied the entire top floor of a four-year-old medium-rise office building overlooking the downtown arch at 9th and I Streets. Behind the receptionist’s and security stations were large double doors with a sky blue satin-finish metal skin and the name of the concern plated across them in liquidy gray- and blue-toned prismatic lettering. This reproduced the decor of Golden Triangle’s original headquarters hundreds of miles to the south outside La Jolla, where Enrique Quiros had once run his narco
