transmission later.”
Holding the counter like a wand, he passed it over the body in front of him. There was little reaction over the man’s face and shoulders, but his hands, both of them, elicited a sharp clattering static from the device.
“Interesting,” Akulinin said. He stepped over to the other table, passed the counter over the body, and got the same response.
“What does it mean?” Masha asked.
“That these two guys were handling a leaking crate not too long ago.”
“A crate of what?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“These two are Organizasiya, you know.
He looked at her, surprised.
She touched one blood-smeared arm. “The tattoos.” Reaching across, she swiftly unbuttoned the man’s shirt and tugged it open. His chest, as well as his upper arms, was a solid mass of intricate tattoos. He could see a rose on the body’s chest, a skull, a dagger or sword, delicately interwoven floral designs …
“They often start off as prison tats,” she told him, “but they also get them to mark advancement within the gang, special achievements, punishments, anything like that. It’s a part of the whole culture of the
The second body had tattoos as well.
He frowned. “I’d like to check the third body, too.”
“Give me a hand here,” Masha said. She was already unzipping the body bag.
Awkwardly, Akulinin helped her, peeling the body bag open and sliding it down. He looked at the man’s head and blinked in surprise. “Shit!”
“What’s the matter?”
“What the hell is a Chinese doing
Rubens glanced at his wristwatch, confirming what he already knew. “Damn,” he said. “I have to go.
“Give our love to the NSC,” Marie told him. “I’ll call you when we regain signal.”
“Do that. I’ll be out of touch while I’m in the meeting, but leave me messages and keep trying.”
“Of course, sir.”
He didn’t like leaving now. He was strongly tempted to delegate the NSC meeting to Gene Lenard, his operations director.
Gene was a good man, well able to be Rubens’ representative — but the position of deputy director of the NSA was, unfortunately, as much political as it was practical. If Rubens
If he left
“While I’m gone, I want a full workup on Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev. I want to know where his office is, including architectural plans, blueprints, whatever you can find. Does he have a safe in his office? A computer? Find out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I should be back around two, two thirty,” he told her.
Rubens checked out through several security desks, picked up his car in the VIP parking area, and threaded his way out of the maze of lots and gates surrounding the towering central buildings of the NSA’s Fort Meade complex, long known to insiders as the Puzzle Palace. Canine Road swung him right onto 32 West, and he took the almost immediate cloverleaf onto 295 South, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Traffic was light and he hit the pedal, accelerating swiftly past the slower vehicles. Any touch by police radar would trigger a transponder in the car, one that flagged him as having special clearance.
Charlie Dean and Ilya Akulinin would be okay Ruebens mused. Dean was a longtime veteran of the agency, a former Marine sniper who simply never got flustered, who was always in the game. Rubens ranked him as Desk Three’s best operator. Akulinin was younger and less experienced. He’d come on board with Desk Three just a year and a half ago, during that Russian
He was more concerned about Lia DeFrancesca. She, too, was a damned good, experienced operator, and her team in Berlin, her on-site backup, was first rate. But the China Ocean Shipping Company was big and it was dirty, an immense commercial giant that was an arm of the Chinese Navy and the Beijing government. Lia wasn’t simply up against Feng Jiu Zhu in Berlin. She was squaring off against the government of the People’s Republic of China.
COSCO had been involved in illegal gunrunning before.
On March 18, 1996, undercover agents with the U.S. Customs Department and the BATF had accepted delivery of a trial shipment of two thousand fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles from Chinese representatives as a part of a sting operation tagged Operation Dragon Fire. Those weapons had been smuggled into Oakland, California, on board the COSCO container vessel
In the history of U.S. law enforcement, there had never been a bigger seizure of fully automatic weapons. The Chinese said that the weapons were for the California street gang market, and that other military-grade weapons were readily available as well, from grenade launchers to Red Parakeet shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems.
What the Crips and the Bloods would have done with weapons like
More recently, the NSA had tracked a COSCO freighter from Shanghai to Karachi, in Pakistan, with a cargo of weapons-related goods. The cargo included specialty metals and electronics used in the production of Chinese- designed Baktar Shikan antitank missiles.
There were plenty of other cases, too.
The NSA had been watching Mr. Feng for almost two years now, turning up a great deal of rather scandalous information about his private life but only hints and whispers about his professional connections. The CIA thought he was clean, though he
Contacts within Israel’s Mossad were concerned about a Palestinian operation known as Nar-min-Sama, variously translated as Fire of Heaven or, possibly, as Fire
Heaven. There was a code name associated with this operation — al-Wawi, the Jackal. Not even the Mossad yet knew who the Jackal was, but believed that he was orchestrating some sort of strike against both Israel and unnamed targets in the West.
There was also the matter of Lebed’s suitcase nukes to consider, as well as concerns about nuclear weapons from Iran or North Korea reaching any of a number of Islamic extremist groups.
Feng had recently traveled to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, an unlikely, landlocked destination for a high-ranking executive of a maritime shipping company. From there he’d flown to Cairo, where he’d met with several men believed to be associated with Hamas, before going on to Berlin. The NSA had monitored numerous cell
