Plague Ship (22 page)

“Lawyer,” Max said absently. “And she did it all on her own.”

“If you don’t feel you can take responsibility for her success, then you have no right to take responsibility for Kyle’s failings.”

Max let the statement hang, before finally asking, “How old are you?”

Stone seemed embarrassed by the question. “Twenty-seven.” “Son, you are wise beyond your years. Thank you.”

Eric grinned.

Juan mouthed the words
Well done
to Stone and resumed the meeting. “Is there any way to check Eddie’s theory?”

“We can hack into the Responsivists’ computer system,” Mark offered. “Something might turn up, but I doubt they’re going to break down their membership into lists of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.”

“Try it anyway,” Juan ordered. “Cross-reference the passenger manifest with everything they have going on. Some factor singled these particular people out. If they weren’t about to leave the cult, it has to be something else.” He turned to Linda. “I want to know why so many of them were in the Philippines at the same time. The answer to that question might be our only solid clue.”

Juan stood to indicate the meeting was adjourned. “We hit the Suez Canal at oh-five-hundred tomorrow morning. Remind your staffs that we’ll have a pilot on board until we clear Port Said, so we’re running on full-disguise mode. Max, make sure the tanks to the smudge engine that sends smoke out our funnel are topped off, and that the decks are double-checked for anything that can give us away. Once we’re in the Med, we have twenty-four hours to finalize our plans with Linc, another twelve to put everything in place, and then we extract Kyle Hanley. Forty-eight hours from now, he’ll be in Rome with the deprogrammer and we’ll be on our way to the Riviera on that eavesdropping job.”

There was no way for Cabrillo to know how far from simple things were going to be.

CHAPTER 12

JUAN SETTLED THE EARBUD OF HIS RADIO A LITTLE deeper and tapped the throat mike to let the others know he was in position. Below him lay the Responsivist compound, a collection of rambling buildings surrounded by a whitewashed cement-block wall. Behind the compound was a rocky beach with a single wooden jetty running a hundred feet into the Gulf of Corinth. With the tide just coming back in, he could smell the water on the soft breeze.

The buildings were low-slung, as if clinging to the ground, reminding Cabrillo of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The shallow roofs were covered in barrel tile that looked black through his third-generation night vision goggles, but he knew from their prelaunch briefing the titles were red clay. The lawns within the compound were burned brown from a drought, and the leaves on the few gnarled olive trees were dried husks. It was three-thirty in the morning, and the only lights showing were affixed to strategically placed poles.

He turned his attention to the wall. It stood ten feet high and was a double layer of thick cement blocks, running for nearly eight hundred feet on a side. As was the custom in this part of the world, upright glass shards had been embedded in the top of the wall to deter intruders. Earlier in the day, he and Linda had gone to the only security company in the nearby town of Corinth, posing as an American couple who’d just purchased an ocean-side house and wanted to install an alarm system. The store’s owner boasted he’d done extensive work for the Responsivists, pointing to an autographed eight-by-ten glossy of Donna Sky as if it were proof.

The trip wire running atop the wall was one of the first things Juan observed when he got into position. Next came the cameras, and, by the time his team had finished counting, they had spotted thirteen on the exterior of the buildings alone. They could only assume there were more inside.

There was a single rolling gate bisecting the stone driveway, and another, smaller gate at the back of the facility in line with the jetty. A pair of chain-link fences jutted from the compound walls and out into the sea to prevent people walking along the shore from trespassing on Responsivist property.

Although the security measures weren’t particularly overt, it did give the complex a forbidding aura—but not from the outside, Juan reflected. It didn’t look as though the place was designed to keep people out but rather to keep them in.

He scoped the grounds between the buildings once again. Three jeeps were parked in front of the main building. A thermal scan showed their engines were cold. There were no guards patrolling the paths crisscrossing the compound, no roving dogs, and the cameras mounted under eaves and on the light poles remained stationary. It was likely that there was a manned security station inside one of the buildings with a guard staring at a bank of monitors, which was why Cabrillo had the advance team keep watch from the moment they could be choppered from the
Oregon
to Athens.

Linc and Eddie had needed only two hours, sitting across the coast road in an olive grove overlooking the facility, to map out the cameras’ blind spots and transmit that information back to the ship. They had estimated that there were currently about forty-five Responsivists inside, although there were enough buildings to house twice that number in relative comfort.

With their strategy worked out ahead of time and final tactics honed, the crew had spent the day putting everything into place, securing rental cars, scouting escape routes, and finding a suitable place nearby for George Adams to land the Robinson and transfer Kyle to the general aviation apron at Athens’s Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport. Chuck Gunderson already had the Corporation’s Gulfstream executive jet prepped for the quick flight to Rome. All the paperwork had been filed, and a limousine was waiting for them at the other end.

And if things didn’t go as smoothly as planned, they had alternatives ready to go at an instant’s notice. The details were so meticulous that Eric Stone, aboard the
Oregon
, who’d been studying the tidal charts, had determined the precise moment they should commence their covert assault.

Although Cabrillo was taking a role in the snatch and grab, Eddie Seng, as chief of shore operations, would lead the four-person attack, and it was his responsibility to make sure everyone involved was ready.

“One minute from my mark,” Juan heard him whisper over the radio. “Mark.”

Juan tapped his TRANSMIT button in acknowledgment. He tested the pair of quick-draw holsters hanging from his hips, making certain the pair of compact Glock 19s came out easily. Though he favored the new Fabrique Nationale Five-seveN automatic as his personal sidearm, because the small 5.7mm bullets could defeat nearly any flak jackets, this mission wasn’t about killing. The crew in the ship’s armory had soft-loaded the Glocks’ 9mm rounds with half their normal charge and had topped them not with lead bullets but ballistic plastic. At close range, the bullets could be deadly, but at anything beyond fifteen feet the nonlethal shells would take the fight out of the average person with a single hit.

The seconds trickled by, and, as if a sign from above, clouds slid over the quarter moon, turning the night inky. Faintly, Juan could hear the throb of the Robinson R44 as Gomez Adams got into position.

“You ready?” he asked Mark Murphy, who was hunkered down next to him in the same roadside ditch.

“Two missions in three days,” Mark breathed. His face was streaked with camo paint, and his long hair was tucked into a black bandanna. “I think you’ve got it in for me.”

“Consider yourself our resident combat hacker.”

Cabrillo glanced at his sleeve. Embedded in the fabric was a tiny flexible computer screen. The e-paper’s resolution was crystal clear, and the image it showed was the Responsivist’s compound from an altitude of a thousand feet. Linda Ross was in a van down the road at the controls of their UAV. With the camera zoomed in, Juan had an unobstructed view of the facility, but, more important, he would know the location of anyone walking the grounds. The experimental view screen was giving off too much light, so he turned down the gain until it was a muted glow. The rig’s batteries and computer were sewn into the back of his combat vest.

“Let’s go,” Juan heard Eddie say. He tapped Murph on the shoulder, and they ran across the road together, their soft-soled boots making no sound on the macadam.

When they reached the cement-block wall, Cabrillo turned so that his back was toward it and cupped his hands. Mark stepped up onto Juan’s palms, and then, with a boost, onto his shoulders.

Mark almost made the mistake of grasping the top of the wall to steady himself but stopped just before he shredded his hands on the glass. He paused for a moment, to let the Chairman find his center of balance. Had Mark not known it was there, the monofilament security trip wire was nearly impossible to see. It ran along the perimeter of the wall, less than half an inch from the edge, supported by dozens of tiny insulators. If he were to guess, he’d say that less than ten pounds of pressure would cut the wire and trigger the alarm. He pulled a voltmeter from a pouch at his hip to test the current flowing through the delicate wire. He selected an appropriate pair of alligator clamps and attached them to the wire, letting three feet of line dangle over the far side of the wall. With his bypass in place, he snipped the wire, wincing unconsciously in case he’d gotten it wrong. There were no raised cries, no Klaxons, and no lights snapped on in any of the buildings.

From another pouch, he unfurled a role of carbon-fiber cloth and settled it over the top of the wall. Mark heaved himself atop the wall, and, even with his full weight bearing down on the razor-sharp glass, it couldn’t cut through the high-tech material. He dropped down to the ground and moved slightly to his left. A moment later, he heard Juan scramble up and over the wall. He fell lightly at Mark’s side.

“When we’re back on the ship, you’re going on a diet,” Juan said, but showed no ill effects of holding Murph aloft. He keyed his throat mike. “We’re in.”

On the opposite side of the compound, where there was another gap in the video camera coverage, Eddie and Franklin Lincoln were making their covert entrance. Though Linc was the best the Corporation had at security bypasses, it had been Eddie who cut the wire for the simple reason that all the martial arts training in the world couldn’t give him the strength to hold Linc’s two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame.

“So are we. Standing by.”

Keeping flat, Cabrillo led Murph away from the wall, snaking across the grounds in a seemingly random pattern, but the route had been carefully mapped out so they avoided the numerous cameras. At one end of the main building, the roof sported several satellite dishes and a spindly radio transmission tower. This was their destination, and it took seven minutes of crawling to reach it.

Juan removed his goggles, and, cupping his hands around his eyes, pressed his face to a window. There was a dim smear of light near the back wall, the glow of a computer on standby mode. The preraid reconnaissance had confirmed that this was the camp director’s office.

He noted an alarm pod attached to the window sash that would trip if the window was opened. He pulled a device from his combat vest, and, when he aimed it at the alarm, an indicator glowed red. Next, he swept the device along the glass to determine if wires had been embedded between the two panes, but the device remained dark. If this was the level of security provided by Corinth’s finest company, he considered making a career change, to Greek cat burglar.

He attached two small suction cups to the glass and then scored the window with a cutter, moving slowly so the sound of the pane being sliced never rose above a rough hiss. He heard an audible sigh when the vacuum between the two pieces of insulated glass were released. He handed the cutter to Mark and carefully pulled the pane free of the frame with the suction cups. He repeated the process with the inner piece of glass and set it on the floor inside the office when he was finished.

Juan legged over the sill and ducked into the building. When Mark had scrambled through the window, Cabrillo drew down the shade. “We’re in the office.”

“Roger,” Eddie replied.

Juan gestured to the computer. “It’s up to you.”

Murph cracked his knuckles and took a seat behind the desk, turning down the screen before waking the system. From a fanny pack, he removed a battered piece of electronics covered in decals and wads of dried gum. He jacked it into the computer’s USB port. A moment later, a laughing skull appeared on the monitor. When it disappeared, Mark began to pound the keyboard with one ambidextrous hand while the other rolled the mouse like a child would a toy truck.

Juan left him to his work, and examined the office using a tiny penlight, making certain he stayed away from the window in case there was a gap around the shade. They had learned from the Responsivists’ website that the facility’s director was another Californian named Gil Martell. A little digging showed that Martell had sold luxury automobiles in Beverly Hills prior to his joining the group, and that his name had come up several times in an investigation of a car-theft ring. Although he was charged, several key witnesses vanished back to Mexico before the trial, and the indictment was dropped.

The room’s furniture was what Cabrillo expected—desk, credenza, a couple of chairs, a sofa along one wall with a coffee table. He recognized it was all expensive. The Oriental rug under the coffee table was a flat-weave antique kilim that would fetch a considerable price at auction. Framed photographs adorned the walls, Martell’s shrine to himself. Juan didn’t know some of the people smiling into the camera with Martell, while others were easily recognizable. He spotted several with Donna Sky. Even in these candid shots, the movie star’s beauty was undeniable. With her dark hair, almond eyes, and the sharpest cheekbones in the business, she was the epitome of Hollywood royalty.

Cabrillo wondered idly what part of her life was so miserable that she would allow a cult to take it over.