celebrities and millionaires — who brought their own Porsche or Mercedes or Rolls along for joyrides at various ports of call, but those generally were carried in the A Deck forward hold.
In any case, this was the first time he could remember seeing a truck down here.
And it seemed odd that the deck personnel were here, rather than at the cargo loading doors fifty feet away. Several other crew members were gathered there as well, staring out into the sunlight.
Barnes pushed past these last and jogged down the ramp onto the pier. Three police cars had pulled up alongside the Queen, and an ambulance was backed up next to a green Dumpster alongside the warehouse opposite the ship. Yellow police line tape had already been strung around the area, and nervous-looking policemen in black-and-white checkered caps and several soldiers in camouflaged uniforms and red berets were patrolling the area.
A policeman stopped Barnes as he approached the tape barrier. 'Sorry, sir. You can't go through here.'
'I'm the ship's doctor,' Barnes said. He hefted his first-aid kit, as if it provided proof of his identity. 'Has someone been hurt?'
'He won't be needing that' the officer told Barnes, nodding at the kit.
'Who's that, Constable?' another man asked. He was tall and lean, and unlike most of those at the site, he wore civilian clothing.
'Ship's surgeon, sir.
'I'm Dr. Barnes,' he added. 'Can I be of help?'
'I don't know,' the civilian said. He reached inside his sports coat, pulled out an ID case, and flipped it open. 'Mitchell,' he said. He flipped the ID card away quickly, but not before Barnes saw that the man was MI5. 'Did you know a man named…' He stopped and consulted a small notebook in his other hand. 'Chester Darrow?'
'Darrow? Yes. He's the ship's fourth officer.'
'You know him well?'
'No, can't say that I did. He only came on board… let's see… would've been maybe last month. Quiet guy. Kept to himself. Seemed to know his stuff.'
'And what was his 'stuff'?' Mitchell asked.
'He supervised the hotel staff on board. Cargo and provisions. Worked with the Security Department and the Purser's Office screening cargo. That sort of thing.'
'You said you're the ship's doctor?'
'Senior doctor, yes. There are three of us, and a medical staff.'
'Tell me something, Doctor. Is there a drug problem on board this ship?'
'Drugs? No, sir! Every person in the crew is screened regularly! It's part of the employment contract!'
'Okay. Thank you very much.' Mitchell made a final entry in his notebook. 'We'll get back to you if we have any more questions.'
A couple of attendants brought an olive-drab body bag out from behind the Dumpster and slid it onto a gurney. From there it was a short trundle across the concrete pier to the back of the waiting ambulance.
Chester Darrow dead? And the MI5 officer's questions seemed to suggest a drug connection. That was not good. The Royal Sky Line board of directors was going to have a collective cow over this bit of news. A very mad cow.
Dr. Barnes wondered if they were going to cancel this cruise.
Chapter 5
'Right,' Lia DeFrancesca said, her eye against the eyepiece of her camera's viewfinder. 'Aquarius One. I have Sagittarius in sight.'
She knelt on the rooftop of a five-story office building in Beirut's Hamra District, not far from the Paradise Residence hotel, on Cairo Street. To the west, late-afternoon sunlight flashed from the azure waters of the Mediterranean. North, hundreds of pleasure craft, sailboats, and yachts bobbed and shifted in the St. George Marina. Nearby, the clatter and rattle of heavy construction continued, incessant and pounding. Beirut was busy rebuilding itself from the devastation of its civil war twenty years earlier.
'Aquarius Two,' Taggart's voice sounded in her ear. 'Sagittarius acquired.'
Lia shifted, following the target. She appeared an unlikely field intelligence operator at the moment. She'd hiked the skirt of her conservative business suit up around her waist so she could kneel and crouch more easily behind the wall, and her fashionable heels were on the roof beside her, her feet bare. She'd gained access to this building by looking the part of a Western-dressed businesswoman.
Resting on the wall in front of her, mounted on a small tripod, was the Sony camera, equipped with a powerful telephoto lens. Though it was impossible to tell through a casual inspection, the camera had been extensively rebuilt. While it could still take digital photographs, the image on the viewfinder was simultaneously appearing on computer monitors back in the United States, both in Desk Three's Art Room beneath NSA Headquarters at Fort Meade and in the Operations Center at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Leaning against the concrete wall beside her was a Mark 11 Mod Spec rifle, a weapon one observer had called an M16 on steroids. The weapon had been left for her, concealed in one of the building's rooftop ventilation ducts.
Howard Taggart — Aquarius Two — was across the street on top of the new Holiday Inn, farther up the street and only three floors up. Both Lia and Taggart were linked into the field satellite communications network through their com implants.
Through the powerful lens, Lia saw Michael Haddid from above and behind as he walked along Cairo Street toward the Paradise hotel. She raised the instrument slightly, sighting ahead along Haddid's path, and saw a man with sunglasses and a heavy mustache seated at a sidewalk table in front of a cafe.
'Aquarius One,' Lia said. 'Target acquired. I have Scorpio in sight.' As she watched, the man dropped some coins on the table, stood, glanced around, and then began walking toward Haddid. 'Scorpio is now moving. He's approaching Sagittarius.' She estimated they were a hundred feet apart, now, walking briskly toward each other through the heavy late-afternoon foot traffic on the sidewalk.
'Aquarius, Crystal Ball,' Debra Collins' voice said in Lia's ear. 'Any sign of the opposition's overwatch?'
'None visible,' Lia replied. 'But they're out there. Count on it.'
Lia and Taggart had been in Lebanon for the past month, setting up this meet, which had been dubbed Operation Stargazer. Technically, this wasn't an op for Desk Three or the NSA at all. The CIA was running Stargazer; Debra Collins was the Agency's Deputy Director of Operations, and the rumor was that Stargazer was her baby. Desk Three had been brought in to the op, however, because the NSA's highly specialized technical skills had been needed, especially as they applied to electronic intelligence.
It was not a comfortable alliance. Collins felt — and perhaps with some justification, Lia admitted to herself — that the NSA's Deep Black operations department, Desk Three, should properly answer to the CIA's Directorate of Operations. There were some at Desk Three who wondered if Stargazer might not be an attempt to wrest control of Desk Three away from the National Security Agency.
'Sagittarius, Crystal Ball,' Collins' voice said over the net. 'Scorpio is right in front of you, another thirty feet.'
'Copy that, Crystal Ball,' Haddid replied. Haddid didn't have the implants of the NSA operators, but he was wired, with a radio receiver that appeared to be a tiny hearing aid.
Damn it, Lia thought. The bitch is micromanaging. Shut up and let the man do his job.
Haddid was a CIA officer, and cupped in his right hand as he walked along the busy Beirut sidewalk below was a 40-gigabyte thumb drive, a device actually half the size of a man's thumb that could plug into any computer USB port.
Scorpio was the target of the operation — Colonel Assef Suleiman, a high-ranking officer of the Idarat al- Mukhabarat al-Jawiyya (IMJ), Syria's air force intelligence service.
