since 1995.
PNTL had completed almost two hundred shipments during those fourteen years, with not a single accident, not a single release of radioactivity, not a single hijacking or act of piracy, not a single problem of any type.
But Greenpeace and the others still had to put their tuppence in.
Ishikari was through the channel entrance now, and the Pacific Sandpiper, slowly gathering speed, followed in her wake. Rawlston watched the lines of civilian craft milling about to either side, continuing the honking and tooting of horns, the wail of sirens, the clang of bells. He could hear voices now, chanting, though the distance was too great for him to make out the words.
But the way was open as Pacific Sandpiper nosed through the channel entrance and into the chop of the Irish Sea. The wind was brisker here, kicking up whitecaps beneath the gray scud of the sky.
'At least,' he told Smithers, 'that's the worst part of the voyage behind us!'
Some eighty yards aft of Rawlings and Smithers, the main deckhouse superstructure of the Pacific Sandpiper bulked huge and white above the main deck. On an open wing of the superstructure, high above the main deck, two other men leaned against the railing and watched the demonstrators falling astern.
'Jikan desu yo,' one said.
'Hai!'
Both men were Japanese and, so far as anyone else on board the ship was concerned, were representatives of the Japanese utilities company that owned 25 percent of PNTL. They certainly had the requisite papers and ID, though the real Ichiro Wanibuchi and Kiyoshi Kitagawa were now dead, their bodies hidden in two separate Dumpsters on the outskirts of Sellafield, twenty-five miles north of Barrow.
The second man pulled an encrypted satellite phone from his windbreaker, punched a code into its keyboard, and began speaking rapidly into the mouthpiece.
Chapter 1
'My god, Mitchell!' charlie Dean said, shaking his head. 'You have got to be freaking kidding!'
'You know better than that, Mr. Dean,' Thomas Mitchell said. 'MI5 never kids.'
Dean was sitting with the three security people at a console at the center of a large room, hanging one floor above the security checkpoint leading from the Royal Sky cruise ship terminal out to the dock. In front of them was a giant flat-screen TV monitor, on which the black-and-white image of a naked man could be seen walking through a broad, white tunnel. To one side, a much smaller security monitor showed the same man, this time from a high angle near the ceiling and in color, wearing dark trousers, a yellow shirt, and a white nylon jacket.
'Yeah,' Dean agreed cautiously. 'When it comes to a sense of humor, you're worse than the FBI and CIA put together. But since when did you guys turn into pornographic voyeurs?'
'Believe me, Mr. Dean,' the woman sitting next to him at the console said. Her name badge bore the name 'Lockwood,' and she was, Dean knew, a technical specialist with X-Star Security, the company that manufactured the equipment. 'There is nothing whatsoever pornographic about this!' She sounded prim and somewhat affronted.
'That's right,' David Llewellyn added, grinning. 'After the first couple of hundred naked bodies, you don't even notice!'
Thomas Mitchell was an operative with MI5, Great Britain's government bureau handling counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and internal security in general, while David Llewellyn was the head of the Security Department on board the cruise ship Atlantis Queen. Dean had met Mitchell in Washington a week earlier, and knew him to be a dour and somewhat unimaginative British civil servant; he'd met Llewellyn and Lockwood only that morning, when Mitchell had escorted him into the Royal Sky Line's Southampton security section.
'That hardly matters, does it?' Dean said. 'It's their privacy at stake, not how many naked people you've seen in your career.'
Interesting, Mitchell thought. Llewellyn was seeing bodies. Dean was seeing people.
'I needn't remind you, Mr. Dean,' Mitchell said, 'that conventional metal detectors simply cannot pick up plastic bottles containing explosives or petrol, hard-nylon knives, or anything else made of plastic. Richard Reid walked through metal detectors several times before he boarded Flight Sixty-three.'
Richard Reid had been the infamous 'shoe bomber' who'd been subdued by passengers on board an American Airlines Boeing 767 in December of 2001. He'd been trying to light a fuse in one of his shoes, which had been packed with PETN plastic explosives and a triacetone triperoxide detonator. Ever since, airline passengers in the United States had been required to remove their shoes at airport terminal security checkpoints.
Charlie Dean had considerable experience with anti-terrorist security technologies of all types. A senior field officer of the U. S. National Security Agency's top-secret Desk Three, he'd circumvented quite a few of them while on covert missions overseas, and he'd gone through more than his fair share at secure installations back home. In fact, he'd read about this technology some years ago, though he'd never seen it in operation. It was called backscatter X-ray scanning, and it was the latest twist in high-tech security screening… as well as the most controversial.
'I seem to remember seeing this sort of thing in a movie, once,' Dean said. 'Slapstick stuff.'
'Airport,' Lockwood said, rolling her eyes. 'Yes, we've been told. Numerous times.'
The man on the screen was somewhat pixelated by the digital imaging process, but every detail stood out with startling clarity, from the frames of his glasses to the zipper of his open jacket — every detail except his clothing, which had been rendered invisible. His face seemed a little blank; Dean could see his eyeballs and eyelids easily enough, but the iris and pupil were almost impossible to distinguish.
But the rest! The guy was heavy, his belly bulging strangely over an invisible belt. His belt buckle appeared to ride tucked in beneath the bulge just below his navel, and he was wearing a small, bright crucifix on a chain around his neck. His pubic hair, the trail of hair up his belly to his navel, and the thicket on his chest and back all had a crisp, wiry, almost metallic look to it. Dean could just make out the zipper in the trousers at the man's crotch, and it was clear, as an older generation of men's tailors would have put it, that he 'dressed to the left.'
'I thought,' Dean said, 'that there was supposed to be a software algorithm that blurred faces and… other body parts.'
'Oh, sure, some places still do that,' Llewellyn replied. 'But that rather defeats the purpose, doesn't it? People have tried smuggling guns or drugs hidden at their crotch or between their butt cheeks, where they think a pat- down wouldn't find them.' He made a face. 'You Americans are so squeamish about this sort of thing.'
Lockwood typed a command into the keyboard in front of her, and on the big screen the man's computer- processed image seemed to freeze, then revolved in space for a moment, showing his body from all possible angles. At the right of the screen, a column of data appeared as it was forwarded off a security card the man was carrying — his name, passport number, cell and home phone numbers, Social Security number.
'Show us level two,' Mitchell told her.
Lockwood typed in another command, triggering a small flood of data. James Gullabry, it seemed, was American, was visiting England on business, and was a sales rep for Del Rey Computers. He lived in Westchester, just outside of Boston; he had a wife, Anne, and two children… and was on medication for depression and for type 2 diabetes. Apparently, he was taking the long way home, by way of a Mediterranean cruise. That, Dean thought, was unusual.
'What… you don't have his credit history?'
'We can call that up for you, if you want,' Mitchell said.
And Dean knew the man wasn't joking.
It's not that Americans are squeamish about nudity, Dean thought, watching the image on the screen, though that was of course a factor. The whole privacy issue had become a hot button on both sides of the Atlantic in the paranoid years since 9/11. MI5 itself had been called on the carpet back in 2006, he recalled, when a member of Parliament had disclosed that the security agency maintained extremely detailed and highly secret files on 272,000 British subjects — the equivalent of 1 in every 160 adults.
