Syndication Rites td-122 Page 5

  Justifiably proud of his own accomplishment, the tiny Korean reached out a long, sharpened fingernail. When the CD started, Chiun's face became a mask of utter contentment as he allowed the music to wash over him.

  Chapter 5

  Commander Darrell Irwin was standing above the radar station aboard the USS Walker, a nuclear-powered cruiser patrolling the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba, when he noticed the errant blip.

  "What's that?" Irwin asked the seaman seated at the screen. He pointed at the phosphorescent dot. "We thought it was a fishing boat, sir," the young man replied earnestly. His eyes were wide and bright.

  Irwin frowned at the eagerness in the sailor's voice.

  The kid was practically an infant. His dirty blond hair was shaved to his pink scalp. His eyes tracked the moving boat with eager interest. He was about the same age as Irwin's own son back home in Florida. He still had baby fat, for crying out loud.

  There was no doubt about it. The enlisted men these days were joining up straight out of grammar school. That was the only explanation. There was no other way they could look so much younger than Commander Irwin.

  "So is it a fishing boat or not?" Irwin demanded.

  "Too big, sir," the seaman said. "We're thinking it's one of those big cabin cruisers."

  "Heading for land?"

  "East of Guantanamo if she holds course."

  "Smack dab into Guantanamo if she holds course," Irwin corrected. He noted the blip with a frown.

  "It'll be in visual range in ten minutes, sir."

  "Let's keep an eye on her."

  The boat came close enough for visual inspection in just over seven minutes. When it passed by the nose of the Walker, Commander Irwin went out on deck to see it.

  Irwin and the two lieutenants who accompanied him had brought binoculars to view the boat. They proved to be unnecessary.

  It was a cabin cruiser. Cuban registry. The luxury boat was eighty feet long and traveling at a good sixty knots as it buzzed the prow of the much bigger naval vessel.

  "Are they nuts?" one of the lieutenants yelled, gripping the rail in amazement.

  The boat came so close it nearly rammed the Walker. It slipped off toward land, trailing a wake of angry white foam.

  Irwin whipped up his binoculars.

  Frantic men ran along the deck. Even more crammed the bridge, screaming and pounding on equipment. When Commander Irwin lowered his glasses, his face was grave.

  "She's out of control," he intoned ominously. As the calm sea churned white in the wake of the runaway luxury cruiser, Commander Darrell Irwin raced to the bridge of the Walker. He had to warn Guantanamo.

  THE BIG CABIN CRUISER did not veer east at Guantanamo. It continued on, straight through the outer defenses of the island's United States naval base.

  By this point, most of the men on the luxury boat had gone out on the deck. Arms raised above their heads, they waved in desperate fear as the ship plowed ahead.

  The Navy brass on the Cuban base were unsure what to do.

  According to every report, the boat was heading straight into the heart of the Guantanamo base. But if the looks on the faces of the men aboard were any indication, they weren't some kind of suicidal terrorists. Somehow, their boat had gone out of control.

  There would be hell to pay if the United States Navy torpedoed a civilian Cuban ship from a base that Cuba had for years wanted off the island.

  For the military, it was the most tense moment on the small Caribbean island since October of 1962. The Navy's paralysis ate up enough time for the situation to resolve itself. With Cuban nationals screaming and leaping from the deck, the cruiser plowed into the broad side of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, which had been docked at Guantanamo after being towed from the Mideast six months before.

  Running full out at the moment of impact, the cabin cruiser's nose was pulverized back to midship. Wood and metal ruptured and splintered, skipping and splashing across the water of the bay.

  The men who had remained aboard were thrown forward off the deck, slamming like meat-filled bags against the gunmetal-gray side of the massive aircraft carrier.

  Only then did the Navy snap into action. Smaller ships circled in, fishing battered survivors from the water. Crewmen were quickly deployed to the half-submerged Cuban boat. Medics prepped the bleeding crew of the crippled ship for air transport to medical facilities at Guantanamo.

  And as helicopters swooped in from shore to land on the broad flight deck of the nearby carrier, the first square bag floated to the surface.

  At first, no one noticed the plastic-wrapped package.

  It was quickly joined by another. Then another. Eventually, a sharp-eyed sailor spotted the yellow bags bobbing gently in the bay waters.

  The first helicopter was lifting off for its short hop to land as one of the bags was being fished from the drink. Using a Swiss army knife, a sailor sliced the bundle open. A white crystalline powder dumped through the slit onto the sailor's shoes. The young man looked up in amazement.

  As officers and enlisted men exchanged dark glances, bag after bag slowly bobbed like corks to the once more calm blue surface of Guantanamo Bay.

  Chapter 6

  "Just keep your head down and your mouth shut," the CIA director ordered Mark Howard on the ride over from Virginia. When he spoke, he didn't even glance at the man who shared the back seat of his government sedan.

  It was painfully obvious that the CIA director wasn't the one who had requested Howard's presence at this high-level intelligence meeting. He had been hostile to Howard from the moment the younger man got in the car at Langley.

  In tense silence, they drove through the earlymorning streets of Washington, D.C.

  It had snowed the night before. Just an inch was enough to paralyze the nation's capital, which in many ways still considered itself a small Southern town. Luckily, it had just been a dusting. Not that it would have mattered in this of all weeks. With Inauguration Day at week's end, city government was reacting to everything-crime, emergencies, weather-with shocking efficiency. In a month, when the parties were over and the balloons and confetti had all been swept away, the local government would revert to its regular incompetence. Though it was only a little after 7:00 a.m., the commuter traffic was heavy. It was bumper to bumper all the way to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. When the White House came into view, Mark Howard felt the flutter of butterflies in his gut. The Washington Monument rose high to the south as the CIA director's car crossed over to the Fifteenth Street entrance of the most famous address on Earth. A Marine guard stood at attention as they passed through the wrought-iron gates. Driving onto the grounds, they parked near the West Wing in the shadows of twisted hundred-year-old trees. Only when the engine was silent did the CIA director at last look directly at Mark. His gaze was harsh. "Remember," he warned. "Mouth shut."

  He popped the door and headed up the short flight of stairs to the big stone archway.

  Mark nodded to himself. "I guarantee it," he grumbled, still not positive why he was even here. Although he had an inkling.

  Plastering on a professional face, the young analyst hurried from the car and trotted up the stairs to the Executive Wing of the White House.

  MARK HOWARD COULD only assume that this strange turn of events had something to do with the mysterious, unexplained background check. It had all been very thorough, very detailed. More meticulous even than when he had joined the CIA fresh out of college.

  Howard assumed it was somehow related to "Black Boris," a deep-cover mole alleged to have been squirreled away at Langley for years. Mark had always suspected that Boris was a myth-the Loch Ness Monster of the spy game.

  Since the background check came not long after the well-publicized incidents of Chinese spying at Los Alamos, Mark assumed this was just some new attempt to flush out someone who probably didn't even exist. Until, that is, he learned that he alone was being investigated.

  He found out the truth after dropping a ca
sual comment to a fellow analyst at lunch in the cafeteria. Afterward, a few more discreet inquiries confirmed the fact that no one else was being scrutinized like Mark Howard.

  The knowledge that he was being singled out for some reason made for a few tense weeks.

  Then one day, as abruptly as the investigation had started, it stopped.

  Most people would have let the matter drop. Indeed, Mark would have. Gladly. If not for the "feeling."

  That was what he had learned to call his special gift. The feeling. It was a strange sense, an intuition he'd had since childhood. Back then, when a ball was lost in the woods, Mark would know precisely where it was, even if he hadn't been playing the game. The other kids would come and find him and bang, there it was.

  It worked with animals, too. He'd found lost dogs, cats, even a rabbit that had gotten out of Mr. Grautskeeb's hutch. The saddest day of his childhood back in Iowa was that time when he was six when he'd found Ronnie Marin's missing collie in the weeds out behind the tool shed. She'd been there for two days. No one had bothered to look for her there. No one but little Mark Howard.

  As he grew older, he realized that this ability of his could be applied in other ways. At the CIA, it allowed him to draw together meager, disparate facts and assemble them into a whole with remarkable accuracy.

  While Mark didn't consider the feeling a psychic thing, he had to admit his brain worked differently than other people's. It was more an ability to intuit on a level greater than the average man on the street. Which was probably why he found himself holding the rewritable CD on that day not long after the unexplained background check ended.

  Mark didn't know why he'd fished the silver disc from the back of his drawer. Sitting in his drab little cubicle in the bowels of CIA headquarters in Virginia, he studied the disc. Fluorescent light reflected off its gleaming surface.

  He'd made the disc more than six months before. On a day that would prove to be one of the strangest of his young career, a man who identified himself as General Smith had called looking for an analyst.

  Mark had been given the urgent task of locating a ship at sea. A geosynchronous spy satellite over the Atlantic was turned over to him for the task. After Mark had located the ship, General Smith had briefly commandeered Howard's computer to confirm his findings. It should have been impossible, but the lemon-voiced man on the phone was able to access Mark's computer with ease.

  When he was through, Smith had thanked Howard for his assistance and had receded into cyberspace, never to be heard from again. All Mark had to show for that weird afternoon was a single CDROM of satellite images. And the feeling.

  Instinct had compelled him to dig deeper.

  Rather than let the matter drop, Mark kept track of the general's ship through surreptitious means. Howard was stunned when, mere hours after it arrived in the Mideast, a previously unknown type of nuclear weapon was detonated in Israel. Chaos had descended on the entire region for several frightening days.

  When the situation finally stabilized a week later, Mark learned that the men suspected of deploying the device had been found dead in an oasis in Jordan. The cause of death was listed as "unknown."

  Mark didn't know why, but after reading that short report, something clicked. It grew worse a few months later.

  The Mideast had largely recovered when a new crisis developed, this time in East Africa. The defense minister of that country had hatched a crazed scheme to turn his country into the crime capital of the world. But although everything seemed to be in place for him to succeed, his plot had somehow miraculously imploded.

  It was then Mark knew for certain he was looking at another piece of a larger puzzle. Sifting through the East Africa data, he found one report overlooked by everyone else at the CIA. It mentioned a young white and an elderly Asian who were somehow involved with the native Luzu tribe at the time of the crisis. And in the moment he read that report, it all became clear.

  General Smith-who probably wasn't a general at all-was the leader of some secret force. The white and the Asian were his operatives. Mark didn't know for certain how he knew this to be so. He just knew it was true.

  Later, when he went back to look at the computer report, he found that all references to the two men on the ground in East Africa had been expunged. Someone had covered their tracks. And that someone was computer literate and could access the CIA's files.

  Smith.

  The ramifications were huge. When he found the files deleted, Mark had immediately retrieved the CD-ROM from his desk. Deleting its contents, he used a borrowed cigarette lighter to melt the disc into unusability. Once it was warped out of shape, he snapped it into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

  Woodenly, he returned to his desk.

  For Mark, this was the most exciting, frightening moment of realization he'd ever experienced.

  The events in the Mideast and Africa had been big. They had each in their own way threatened to destabilize the world as America perceived it. And yet they had not.

  There was something big lurking beyond the known fringes of American government. Alone in his cubicle that amazing day, Mark understood with blinding clarity that the clearance it was given pointed like a neon arrow to only one place.

  THE OVAL OFFICE WAS bigger than Mark expected. In the rooms beyond came sounds of packing. Through the door that opened on the office of the President's personal secretary, boxes were stacked high.

  A person unseen could be heard gently sobbing. Mark assumed it was someone who didn't want to relinquish the reins of government at the end of the week.

  The men in the Oval sat on the two long sofas near the fireplace. In addition to the CIA, there were agents from the FBI, NSC and the Justice Department present. Mark sat quietly off to one side of the senior government officials.

  The President came shuffling in ten minutes late. America's departing chief executive looked as if he'd slept in his clothes. He wore a heavy wool bathrobe, open wide. The belt dangled, lopsided, and dragged on the floor behind him. His green sweatpants were stained, and his ample belly threatened the seams of his ratty Global Movieland T-shirt. His unlaced sneakers scuffed morosely on the carpet as he made his way to his desk.

  On one of his last days in office, the leader of the free world had given barely any attention to his omnipresent makeup. A few thick smears of orangetinted rouge had been glopped haphazardly on both cheeks. The tiny broken veins in his big nose faded into the wide rosacea blotches that marred his otherwise pasty face.

  He didn't acknowledge the chorus of "Good morning, Mr. President" that trailed him to his tidy desk.

  There was no sign in the Oval of the move that would take place this weekend. The President had refused to allow anyone-either government or political employees-to touch so much as a single scrap of paper in his office. In this way, he hoped to put off all reminders of the few fleeting hours that remained for him at the White House.

  No one said another word as the President took his seat and swiveled away from his guests. He sat quietly for a moment, his bleary eyes trained on the Washington Monument. When at last he spoke, his hoarse voice was faraway.

  "Cure," he muttered, the bitter word directed at the bleak January sky.

  The men behind him frowned in confusion. No one spoke.

  "Cure, my ass," the President grumbled as he looked out the window. His words were directed at the monument, at the sky. At something far, far beyond that famous room. "They didn't cure nothin' for me. Two lousy terms. Wouldn't even help with a third. FDR got four, for chrissakes. Four. Instead, I get some rigmarole about some Twenty-second Amendment that I never even heard of until I got into office in the first place. That and some lemon-voice technocrat lecturing me on 'operational parameters.'" His tone grew mocking. "'We do not exist to indulge your political whims,'" he growled quietly. "Sanctimonious bastard."

  His mumbled words were met with baffled silence. That was, by all but one man.

  Alone in his corner, Mark
Howard's eyes betrayed intrigue. Although muttered, the President's "lemon-voiced technocrat" comment hadn't gotten past the young analyst. His thoughts flew to the mysterious General Smith.

  When the silence in the room at last became intolerable, the NSC man spoke up. "Mr. President, are you all right?" he asked, leaning forward.

  After an interminable pause, the President finally spun slowly to face the men in the room. His puffy eyes were flat. "Let's just get on with this," he said gruffly, rubbing the sleep from his face. "What's going on in Cuba?"

  They all knew the situation to which he referred. Since the previous day, the runaway boat that had found its way into Guantanamo Bay had become a minicrisis.

  "Castro is furious," the CIA director said efficiently. "He claims the boat's Cuban property, that it had medical supplies aboard and that it was seized illegally."

  "Blah-blah-blah," the President snapped. He waved away the man's words with a soft white hand that had never seen a single day's work. "What do you think about this, Mark?"

  Mark Howard assumed he hadn't heard correctly. He had a stack of papers on his lap. When he looked up from them, he found all eyes in the room had turned to him.

  The Oval Office had grown deathly quiet. The only sound was the person crying in the next room. For the first time, it sounded like a man.

  "Um," Mark Howard said slowly. "Me?"

  "Yeah, you," the President said, annoyed. "Didn't you write some memo or something about this?"

  Howard was surprised anyone had read it, least of all the President of the United States.

  Mark had detected a pattern in organized crime that had been evolving over the past month. Even before the previous week's botched DEA raid in an old New Jersey airplane hangar, Mark had linked the emerging pattern to a company called Raffair. He didn't know why. The feeling again. It hit him while he was going through the NYSE listings in the newspaper. His finger was tapping "Raffair" even before he realized it.

  The fact that audiotapes collected from the abandoned DEA van had mentioned prominently the name Raffair merely clinched it for Howard. He had filed a report yesterday.