Dark Watch

quarry. That Singh had agreed to buy a vessel without clear title was reason enough to have the man arrested, but more importantly it told Juan that the scent he’d picked up from Rudy Isphording was running true. Abhay Singh and his father were in this up to their necks. Juan’s job now was to make them expose just enough for him to track down Anton Savich and then hang them all.

After his shower and smacking his cheeks with bay rum, he dressed in a pair of charcoal trousers, a crisp white cotton shirt, and soft dark moccasins. He called down to the galley to have some food brought to the boardroom, then called all the ship’s senior staff to a meeting.

The boardroom was on the starboard side of the ship aft of the superstructure and large enough to hold forty people, although the table only accommodated a dozen. When there was no need for stealth, large rectangular portholes were opened to bathe the room in natural light. Juan was the first to arrive, and he settled himself in the high-backed leather chair at the head of the cherry finished table. Maurice, the Corporation’s chief steward, appeared with a steaming dish of samosas and a pitcher of his famous sun tea. He poured a glass for Juan and handed him a plate.

“Welcome back, Chairman.”

Because the dossier on the Singh family had been e-mailed to Juan during his flight from Europe, and George Adams had met his flight in Jakarta with the Jeb Smith disguise, this was his first time on the Oregon since leaving for Tokyo with Tory Ballinger almost two weeks ago.

“Good to be back. What’s the latest?” Maurice was an incurable gossip.

“Rumor has it that Eric Stone is currently involved with a woman in Spain over the Internet. I hear their little chat sessions are rather torrid.”

Eric was a first-rate helmsman and had a mastery of the ship’s systems that rivaled Juan’s and Max Hanley’s, but when it came to the opposite sex, he was absolutely hopeless. In a bar in London following the Sacred Stone affair, Eric had gotten so flustered over a woman’s brazen approach that he’d rushed outside to be sick.

“You wouldn’t be using my override to check the ship’s computer logs, would you, Maurice?” Juan chided mildly.

“I didn’t even know there was such a thing, Mr. Cabrillo. I merely overheard him discussing it with Mark Murphy.”

That fit. Juan chuckled to himself. Murph, Eric’s partner in crime, had even less luck with women than Stone, if one overlooked the occasional Goth girl he hooked up with. But a girl with more piercings than a pincushion and who was impressed with a guy who could catch air on a skateboard half-pipe wasn’t much of a catch in Cabrillo’s mind.

“Well, you know what they say, Maurice, any love is good love.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell, Mr. Cabrillo.”

The steward bowed out as Max, Linda Ross, and Julia Huxley entered the room. They helped themselves to tea and plates loaded with the spicy samosas. A few seconds later Hali Kasim came in with Franklin Lincoln. Linc normally wouldn’t have been in on the meeting, but he was taking the place of the absent Eddie Seng. Eric and Murph arrived last, arguing about some obscure line from an old Monty Python movie.

“First things first,” Juan said after everyone had taken their seat. “Any word from Eddie?”

“Still nothing,” Hali replied.

Juan cocked an eyebrow at Doc Huxley.

She answered immediately. “The subcutaneous transmitter I surgically implanted in the muscles of Eddie’s thigh checked out perfectly before you and he took off for Tokyo. In fact, that one’s only been in there three months.”

A few key members of the Corporation had special burst locaters implanted under their skin, Juan included. The electronic devices were the size of postage stamps and drew power from the body’s own nervous system. Every twelve hours they were supposed to send a signal to a commercial satellite that was then relayed back to the Oregon. It was a covert way of keeping tabs on operatives in the field without having them carry bugs that could be discovered and confiscated.

The technology was new and far from perfected, which is why Juan didn’t necessarily trust the devices; however, in Eddie’s case, there had been no other alternatives.

Hali added, “The last transmission we received from him showed he was on the outskirts of Shanghai, someplace close to the new airport.”

Juan digested the information. “Any chance they planned on flying him out?”

Max Hanley tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth. “We considered that option, but it doesn’t jibe with what we know of the smugglers. Eddie’s following the trail of the illegals we found in the container. By rights he should be following the same route.”

“But if they were losing too many people to the pirates, wouldn’t they change their tactics?” Eric Stone asked from behind the laptop he’d set on the table.

“We don’t know how many the pirates have taken,” Hali replied. “The ones we found on the Kra could have been the first batch that were intercepted.”

“Or the last straw,” Eric countered, “and now the snakeheads have switched to airplanes.”

“If they already had seaborne resources, it would be cost prohibitive to switch to aircraft. They would need all new infrastructure.”

Juan let the debate circle the table but knew there were no answers. Until they received something from Eddie’s transmitter, they were just jawing in a vacuum. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said to end the futile debate. “Hali, broaden the number of satellites you’ve been checking. It’s possible that somebody else’s bird is getting Eddie’s signal. Think outside the box on this one. Check anything capable of relaying an electronic burst transmission.”

The Oregon’s communications expert bristled. “I’ve checked the logs. My people have looked at every satellite that comes within a thousand miles of Shanghai.”