Death Wave

concerned about so far. He hates Jews and is terrified of the Israeli intelligence service. Almost paranoid.”

Dean nodded. Rubens had sent him a file on Koch before sending him to find the man. Apparently, Koch’s anti-Semitism and his pre-military membership in the skinhead gang had been well known back in Germany. There’d even been an entry describing his conviction that Mossad agents had infiltrated the German Luftwaffe.

It had been Dean who’d suggested using the Mossad ploy to pick him up, and perhaps convince him to cooperate. With the black hair and olive skin dye from the Tajikistan deployment, he could easily pass as a Sabra, a native-born Israeli. Mossad had a rep worldwide for being thorough, professional, and as ruthless as they needed to be when it came to preserving their tiny nation wedged in between the sea and nations still determined, after more than sixty years, to exterminate them.

“Are you sure you never knew what was in those containers?” the interrogator was demanding.

“They never told me, I never asked,” Koch replied.

“Weren’t you curious?”

A shrug. “It was my ticket out of the Luftwaffe, that’s all. They were paying me to make a delivery.”

“Three-quarters of a million euros is an expensive delivery.”

“It wasn’t my business to know. I just wanted out of fucking Afghanistan.”

On the other side of the glass, Dean asked Lloyd, “Have you asked him about the shipment, about where it went?”

Lloyd nodded. “Several times. He says it was being taken to a ship at the waterfront. He didn’t know which one.”

“That squares with the intelligence we got from you people.”

“The Yakutsk, yes,” Lloyd said, nodding. “She left yesterday. Is the Navy going to intercept her?”

“That,” Dean told him, “depends on the political winds back home. They’d damned well better.”

Where, Dean wondered, do you draw the line? Ships at sea belonging to one nation should never be summarily boarded and searched by the military forces of another; that was a principle the United States had signed for in blood. But what if you had good information that the ship carried stolen nuclear weapons, weapons that would be used against you or your allies, weapons that could kill millions?

Was torture ever justified?

Hard questions, and Dean knew he didn’t have the answers. He knew if Lloyd had tried to torture Koch, he would have stopped it if he could, and reported him back home.

Yet if the man knew where those nukes were …

“Okay,” Dean said. “Just so a full report gets back to my people.”

Rubens could deal with the ethics of information gathering.

No wonder, he thought, the various U.S. intelligence agencies preferred spy satellites over HUMINT, intelligence drawn from human contacts.

Satellites were so much more antiseptic.

HOTEL SOL

PUERTO NAOS

LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS

FRIDAY, 1543 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia DeFrancesca walked into the hotel lobby, a vast and brilliantly lit space of pillars, skylights, tropical plants, and marble floors. She’d checked into her room and unpacked an hour before and was ready for the next phase of her new assignment.

“Buenos tardes,” she told the young man at the desk. Her Spanish was rusty but passable.

“Si, Senorita Lau,” the man replied. “How can I help you?”

“You have, I believe, a guest here? A Senor Carlylse?”

“Yes, miss,” the man said, having checked his computer screen. The shift to English was effortless. “Is there a message?”

“Yes. Please tell him a Miss Diane Lau wishes to speak with him on a matter of extreme importance.” She thought a moment, then added, “Tell him it is about his book, and about his partner.”

That ought to get a response from him, she thought.

“I happen to know that Senor Carlylse is out of the hotel at the moment,” the man said, typing at his keyboard, “but I shall certainly see that he gets the message when he returns.”

“Mil gracias,” she told him and handed him a five-euro tip.

She left the lobby by ascending a broad set of spiral steps, following a blaze of tropical light filtering down through the skylights. At the end of a long hallway, she walked through a set of glass doors and onto a pool deck.

Beyond the pool, a placid semicircle of aquamarine, she looked out over the far deeper and wilder blue of the ocean.

The west coast of La Palma faced the raw, powerful Atlantic. There were no beaches with tame, knee-high rollers surging up a golden sand shelf. The Hotel Sol was perched atop a cliff extending out over the ocean; from here, Lia looked down the black and rugged face of sheer basalt, a drop at least sixty feet high, directly into the surge and thunder of the ocean surf.

The waves breaking on the rocks below the hotel were easily fifteen and twenty feet high, and the thunder as they crashed into cascades of white spray physically assaulted her senses. Looking up, she stared into the western horizon, knowing that there was nothing but open ocean between La Palma and the coast of Florida, fully thirty- seven hundred miles distant.

North of the Hotel Sol, the town of Puerto Naos lay snuggled up to the ocean beyond a broad beach of black volcanic sand curving away from the rocky point. To the south, the land seemed to rise explosively from the water in sheer vertical cliffs of black rock. The land continued to rise steeply inland, culminating in the green-clad ruggedness of the island’s central spine, the Cumbre Vieja.

Those mountains running down the middle of the island loomed massive against the sky. They were oppressive, Lia thought, heavy, threatening to come sliding toward her, sweeping the sprawling hotel into the sea. The land looked alien, otherworldly, and raw, as if the entire island had only recently thrust itself above the seething surface of the ocean.

“Okay,” she said, leaning on the safety rail. “Carlylse isn’t here, you heard?”

“We heard, Lia,” Marie Telach told her.

“If you have a position for him, I can try to find him.”

“Our best guess is that al-Wawi hasn’t found him yet either,” Telach said. “No message intercepts to that effect, at any rate. We suggest that you stick with the original plan, and make contact when he returns to the hotel.”

“Any ideas on how al-Wawi is going to try to get to him?”

“Unless he already has a tail on him, the hotel is the likeliest venue. They’ll find a way to gain access to his room, and kill him there, out of the public eye. They may try to make it look like suicide. That’s how they took out Pender.”

“Then my best bet will be to hang around the lobby, try to hook up with him when he gets back,” Lia decided.

“So where’s your new boyfriend?”

Lia made a face, though she knew Marie couldn’t see it. “In his room, getting ready to go check on his project later this afternoon. At least he didn’t try to share a room with me like Feng did.”

“I don’t know, Lia. This one sounds kind of cute.”

“Marie, you can have him.”

“Missing Charlie?”

Was she that transparent? Her relationship with Charlie Dean was less than deep-serious … but it was more than casual, certainly, and right now she did find herself missing him.

“How is he?” she asked. Marie wouldn’t be allowed to say anything about Charlie’s mission, but … “How’s he