Lincoln Rhyme: The Kill Room Part 55

And what would she do post-NYPD? Become a freelance consultant, like him? But that wasn't Sachs's way. She was a brilliant crime scene searcher, with her natural empathy and dogged nature. But she had to be a cop in the field, not lab-bound, like he was. And forensics wasn't her only specialty, of course; if she couldn't speed to a hostage taking or robbery in progress to engage the perp, she'd wither.

"Will you talk to her, Lincoln?"

Finally he said, "I'll talk to her."

"Thank you. It's for her own good, you know. We really do want the best. It'll be a three-sixty for everybody."

The captain shook his hand and departed.

Rhyme stared at the table where Sachs had recently been sitting to work the Moreno case. He believed he could smell some of the gardenia soap she favored though possibly that was just a fragrance memory.

I'll talk to her...

Then he turned his wheelchair and motored back to the whiteboards, examining them closely. Taking, as always, comfort in the elegance and intrigue of evidence.

CHAPTER 94.

THE 110-FOOT GENERAL CARGO VESSEL, chugging under diesel power, plowed through the Caribbean Sea, a ma.s.sive stretch of turquoise water once home to pirates and n.o.ble men-of-war and now the highway of tourists and the playground of the One Percent.

The s.h.i.+p was under a Dominican flag and was thirty years old. A Detroit 16-149 powered her through the water at a respectable thirteen knots, via a single screw. Her draft was fifteen feet but she rode high today, thanks to her light cargo.

A tall mast, forward, dominated the superstructure and the bridge was s.p.a.cious but cluttered, filled with secondhand navigation equipment bolted, glued or tied down. The wheel was an old-fas.h.i.+oned wooden ring with spokes.

Pirates...

At the helm was squat, fifty-two-year-old Enrico Cruz. This was his real name, though most people knew him by his pseudonym, Henry Cross, a New Yorker who ran several nonprofit organizations, the largest and most prominent of which was Cla.s.srooms for the Americas.

Cruz was alone on the deck today because the man who was to have accompanied him today had been murdered by the U.S. government in suite 1200 of the South Cove Inn in the Bahamas. A single shot to the chest had guaranteed that Roberto Moreno would not make this voyage with his friend.

Cruz and Moreno had known each other for decades, ever since Moreno's best friend, Cruz's brother, Jose, had been murdered too-yes, that was the right word-by a U.S. helicopter guns.h.i.+p in Panama during the invasion in 1989.

Since that time the two men had worked together to wage a war on the nation that had descended blithely into Panama, his country, and decided that, oh, sorry, the dictator we've been supporting all these years is a bad man after all.

In their campaign against the United States these men differed only in approach. Moreno was outspoken and publicly anti-American, while Cruz remained anonymous, which allowed him to set up the attacks and get the weapons and money where they would do the most good. But together Cruz and Moreno were the backbone of the unnamed movement.

They had engineered the deaths of close to three hundred U.S. citizens and foreigners who kowtowed to Western values: businessmen, professors, politicians, drug enforcement officials, diplomats and their families.

These attacks had been isolated and small, so authorities wouldn't make any connections among them. But what was planned today was just the opposite: a ma.s.sive strike against the political, social and corporate heart of America. Moreno had prepared for months-renouncing his citizens.h.i.+p, severing all ties to the United States, moving his money from the States to the Cayman Islands, buying a house in the wilderness of Venezuela-all in antic.i.p.ation of what was about to happen.

And the weapon at the heart of the attack? The s.h.i.+p that now was plowing through the waves.

Cruz, as a native of Panama, had been steeped in the s.h.i.+pping trade for much of his early life; he knew how to drive vessels this size. Besides, nowadays one didn't really need to be more than functional at the helm. A competent crew in the engine room, GPS and autopilot on the bridge were all you needed. That was about it. The computer was doing the donkey's work of getting her to the destination. They were plodding north-by-northwest through the three-foot seas. The day was brilliantly blue, the wind persistent, the spray kaleidoscopic.

The vessel had no name, or did no longer, having been purchased through a series of real but obscure corporations, and was known only by her registration number. There had once been a file on her in a computer in the Dominican Republic, along with a corresponding entry into a registration book, regarding her vital statistics, but they had been, respectively, digitally erased and physically excised.

She was anonymous.

Cruz had thought about informally christening her before they set sail from Na.s.sau-Roberta, after his friend, suitably feminized. But then decided it was better to refer to her simply as the s.h.i.+p. She was faded black and gray and streaked with rust. But to him, beautiful.

He now gazed at their destination, the black dot some kilometers away. The GPS tweaked the navigation system to compensate for the wind; new directions went automatically to the rudder. He felt the s.h.i.+p respond. He enjoyed the sensation of such a large creature obeying commands.

The door opened and a man joined him. He had black skin, a bullet-shaped head, shaved s.h.i.+ny, a lean body. Bobby Cheval wore jeans, a denim s.h.i.+rt with sleeves cut off so that it resembled a vest. He was barefoot. He glanced to the horizon. He said, "Too bad, don't you think? He won't see it happen. That is sad."

Cheval had been Robert Moreno's main contact in the Bahamas.

"Maybe he will," Cruz said. He didn't believe this but he said it to rea.s.sure Cheval, who wore a horsehair cross around his neck. Cruz didn't accept the afterlife and knew his dear friend Robert Moreno was as dead as the heart of the government that had killed him.

Cheval, who would lead the Local Empowerment Movement in the Bahamas once it was up and running, had been instrumental in putting together today's plan.

"Any s.h.i.+ps? Signs of surveillance?" Cruz asked.

"No, no. Nothing."

Cruz was sure no one suspected what was going to happen. They had been so very careful. His only moment of concern had been earlier in the week when that s.e.xy redheaded policewoman had shown up in the Chambers Street office of Cla.s.srooms for the Americas to ask about Roberto's visit on May 1. He'd been surprised at first but Cruz had dealt with some truly despicable people-al-Qaeda operatives, for instance, and s.h.i.+ning Path rebels-and didn't get rattled easily. He'd distracted Detective Sachs with the true story of the "white guy" who'd tailed Roberto, from NIOS undoubtedly. And distracted her further with some fiction about a mysterious private jet.

A red herring about a blue plane, he thought to himself now and smiled. Roberto would have liked that.

"Is the skiff ready?" Cruz asked Cheval.

"Yes, it is. How close will we get? Before we abandon, I mean."

"Two kilometers will be fine."

At that point the five crewmen would climb into a high-speed cigarette boat and head in the opposite direction. They'd follow the s.h.i.+p's progress on the computer. They could steer remotely if the GPS and autopilot broke down; there was a webcam mounted on the bridge of the vessel and they'd be able to watch the s.h.i.+p approach its destination.

At which the men now gazed.

The Miami Rover was American Petroleum Drilling and Refining's only oil rig in the area, located about thirty miles off the coast of Miami. (And named rather ironically; it didn't rove anywhere anymore and its journey here had been straight from Texas, at the meandering rate of four knots.) Months ago Moreno and Cruz had decided that the oil company would be the target for their biggest "message" to date; American Petroleum had stolen huge tracts of land in South America and displaced thousands of people, offering them a pathetic settlement in return for their signatures on deeds of transfer that most of them couldn't read. Moreno had organized a series of protests in the United States and elsewhere over the past month or so. The protests had served two purposes. First, they'd brought to light the crimes of AmPet. But, second, they lent credence to the proposition that Moreno was all talk. Once the authorities saw that mere protesting was what he had in mind they largely lost interest in him.

And so n.o.body followed up on leads that might have exposed what was going to happen today: ramming the s.h.i.+p into the Miami Rover. Once it hit, the fifty-five-gallon drums containing a poignant mixture of diesel fuel, fertilizer and nitromethane would detonate, destroying the rig.

But that in itself, while a blow for the cause, wasn't enough, Moreno and Cruz had decided. Killing sixty or so workers, ruining the biggest oil rig in the Southeast? That was like that pathetic fellow who suicide-crashed his private plane into the building housing the IRS in Austin, Texas. He killed a few people. Caused some damage, snarled traffic.

And soon, back to business as usual in the Lone Star State's capital.

What would happen today was considerably worse.

After the initial explosion destroyed the rig, the s.h.i.+p would sink fast. In the stern was a second bomb that would descend to the seafloor near the wellhead. A depth-gauge detonator would set off another explosion, which would destroy both the well's ram and annular blowout preventers. Without any BOPs to stop the flow, oil would gush into the ocean at the rate of 120,000 barrels a day, more than twice what escaped in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf.

The surface currents and wind would speed the oil slick on its mission to destroy much of the eastern coast of Florida and Georgia. And might even spread to the Carolinas. Ports would close, s.h.i.+pping and tourism would stop indefinitely, millions of people would take a huge economic hit.

Roberto had said, "Americans want oil for their cars and their air-conditioning and their capitalist companies. Well, I'll give it to them. They can drown in all the oil we'll deliver!"

Forty minutes later the s.h.i.+p was three kilometers away from the Miami Rover.

Enrico Cruz checked the GPS one last time and he and Cheval left the bridge. Cruz said, "Everybody in the speedboat."

Cruz hurried to the gamy forward hold, in which slimy water sloshed, and checked the main bomb. Everything fine. He armed it. He did the same with the second, the device that would destroy the blowout preventer.

Then he hurried back to the rocking deck. A glance over the bow. Yes, she was making right for the rig. He scanned the ma.s.sive deck of the structure-easily a hundred feet above the surface. No workers were visible. This was typical. n.o.body on oil rigs wasted time lounging on the fiercely hot iron superstructure, taking in the non-view. They were hard at work in the interior of the unit, mostly in the drill house, or asleep, waiting for the next s.h.i.+ft.

Cruz hurried to the side of the vessel and climbed down the rope ladder and dropped into the speedboat with Cheval and the others of the crew.

The motor started.

But before they pulled away, Cruz opened his palm and kissed the pads of his fingers. He then touched it to a rusty patch of hull and whispered, "This is for you, Roberto."

CHAPTER 95.

THE Cl.u.s.tER OF Pa.s.sENGERS ON the cruise s.h.i.+p's forward deck was being photographed by Jim from New Jersey, as opposed to Jim from Cleveland or Jim from London (all right, the Brit preferred "James" but since he was on holiday, he was happy to play along with the others).

The group had become friendly in the days since the ocean liner left Hamilton, in Bermuda, and had spent the first tipsy c.o.c.ktail hour noting coincidences of career and number of children...and given names.

Four Jims, two Sallys.

Jim from California was below, neither the patch nor Dramamine working well, and so he would not be included in the picture.

Jim from New Jersey lined everyone up against what he said was a gunwale, though n.o.body knew exactly what that was-he didn't either-but it seemed very nautical and fun to say.

"n.o.body sing the t.i.tanic song."

There'd been a lot of that, especially as the bars remained open late into the night, but the truth was that very few people, men or women, could bring off the treacly song like Celine Dion.

"Is that Florida?" somebody asked. One of the Sallys, Jim from New Jersey believed.

He saw a dim line on the horizon but that was probably just a layer of clouds.

"Not yet, I don't think."

"But what's that? It's a building."

"Oh, that's the oil rig. The first one in this part of the Atlantic. Didn't you see the news? A year ago or so. They found some oil between Na.s.sau and Florida."

"They? Who's they? Everybody always says 'they.' Are you going to take the picture? My margarita's melting."

"U.S. Petroleum. American Petroleum Drilling. I don't remember."

"I hate those things," Sally from Chicago muttered. "Did you see the birds in the Gulf? All covered with oil. It was terrible. I cried."

"And we couldn't get good shrimp for months."

The photog marshaled his subjects into line against the gunwale and tapped down on the Canon shutter.

Click, click, click, click, click...

Enough to make sure that there'd be no blinks.

The proof of vacation burned into a silicon chip, the tourists turned to gaze at the sea and conversation meandered to dinner and shopping in Miami and the Fontainebleau hotel and was Versace's mansion still open to the public?

"I heard he had an eight-person shower," said Jim from London.

Claire disputed that.

"Holy s.h.i.+t," Jim from New Jersey gasped.

"Honey!" chided his wife.

But the camera was up once more and by the time the sound of the explosion reached them, everyone had turned and was focused on the ma.s.sive mushroom cloud rising perhaps a thousand feet in the air.

"Oh, Jesus. It's the oil rig!"

"No, no!"

"Oh, my G.o.d. Somebody call somebody."

Click, click, click, click...

CHAPTER 96.

W HAT'S THE DAMAGE a.s.sESSMENT?"

Shreve Metzger, in blue jeans and a long-sleeved white s.h.i.+rt that was partly untucked amids.h.i.+ps, was leaning over a computer monitor, staring, staring at the smoke and haze hovering over the Caribbean Sea, a thousand miles away.

"Gone completely," said a NIOS communications specialist at a control panel beside him, a young woman with hair pulled back in a bun that looked painfully tight. The comspec's voice was unemotional.

The scene on the monitor revealed clearly that, no, there was nothing left, other than an oil slick, some debris.

And smoke. A lot of smoke.

Gone completely...