Blown Circuit (18 page)

Kate reached into her purse and pulled out an iPhone. It was sheathed in a blue waterproof polyurethane skin. I looked at the phone skeptically.
 

“It’s not a test, Michael. It’s a deal. Help us find the Device and we’ll give you your father. Nobody will die and you’ll get what you want. The Dragons don’t even want to use the thing, they just don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. Your conscience will be clear.”

The sun disappeared beneath the horizon, the sky an explosion of magenta and orange hues. It was an interesting offer. A tempting offer even. But I didn’t think it was a real offer. Because I didn’t trust Kate. I didn’t trust her one little bit. She handed me the phone.

“Go ahead,” Kate said. “Call whomever you need to call. Report what I’ve offered you here. I think a part of you knows that I’m telling the truth.”

I took the phone from Kate. I wouldn’t have been surprised if merely touching the screen would transfer a lethal poison through my fingertips. But I didn’t let that deter me, after all, I’d already eaten the steak. The person I wanted to call was Mobi Stearn with the CIA tech team in Virginia. We’d never met, but given that he was such a big part of my success on the China Op, I figured that if anybody could parse through facts of what the Tesla Device was capable of, he could. But I couldn’t have a technical conversation on a compromised line so I did the next best thing and called Crust at his nonsecure number. The one he knew we needed to maintain cover on.

“I’ve got a proposition here,” I said.

I watched Kate’s face. She simply smiled brightly. Then, I heard Crust say, “Yes,” and the waiter sloshed through the waves and offered us dessert.

Chapter 32

I
KEPT
IT
brief for Crust. I told him that I’d run into an old friend, a friend we’d taken some time to get to know. I told him that friend wanted my help. Crust listened while I talked. He knew who I was talking about. He confirmed Kate’s identity with me, and then he said one thing. That was it. I didn’t tell him the part about being offered my father’s freedom in trade for the Device, just as I didn’t tell him I was sipping good wine on the beach. It didn’t seem relevant.
 

Then I handed the phone back to Kate and finished my dessert, a chocolate mousse in a lemon-infused crumb crust. The first stars were visible in the twilight and I wondered briefly what we were waiting for. Coffee, probably, coffee and for me to confirm to Kate that I would agree to help her.
 

“What did he say?” Kate asked.

“He was very encouraging,” I said.

Kate smiled. “Good, I’m glad we’ve got that over with.”

“Not so fast,” I replied, pointing to the brightest point of light in the sky.

“You see that star there?”

“I do.”

“It’s not a star. It’s Venus. Sister planet to Earth. Brightest point in the sky. Named for the Roman goddess of love and beauty. Venus is rocky like Earth. Has nearly the same mass as Earth. Almost the same diameter as Earth.”

“Are you going somewhere with this?” Kate asked.

“It’s the second planet from the sun. Earth is the third. From a distance, Venus and Earth look like two peas in a pod.”

“So what’s your point, Michael?”

“They’re not two peas in a pod. Venus has a daytime surface temperature of 860 degrees Fahrenheit. Its night’s dip down to minus 428 degrees.”

“Again, Michael. Your point?”

“My point, Kate, is that Venus is a bitch who runs hot and cold just like you.”
 

Kate’s jaw fell, but only slightly.
 

“You and your Dragon friends can go pound sand,” I said. “I’m not helping.”

N
OW
I
SHOULD
say that, as rule, I’m not a mean person. I try to be nice, fair, do unto others, the whole thing, because I believe in karma. I believe that what goes around comes around. But I also believe that a tiger doesn’t change her stripes. And though I felt a little bad saying the whole Venus thing, I also felt that it was one hundred percent necessary because it did two things. A—it told Kate that I wasn’t going to take any shit, and B—perhaps more importantly, it gave me a chance to gauge her response.
 

And for what it was worth, that slight drop of the jaw told me something. It told me that I was getting through to her, that there was a real person beneath the veneer. But it also reinforced something that I already knew—that Kate had remarkable self-control. I’d have to be very careful because whatever Kate was doing out there with me on those Cleopatra sands, she was doing for keeps. When she finally opened her mouth, she sounded hurt, quiet.

“I may run hot and cold, Michael, but I’m no bitch. Hopefully, with time, I can prove that to you.”

I have to admit, I felt almost bad when she said that. And without another word, Kate rose and set off through the waves toward the launch.

T
HE
SHORT
TRIP
back to the yacht was uneventful. Kate had a way about her, I gave her that. This was the person who had handed my father over to the Green Dragons, the person who had handed me over to those same people to die, and here I was, feeling sorry for calling her a bitch? Wow. The woman was good at what she did.
 

Kate tied us up to the rear deck of the yacht. It was there that I could read the ship’s name for the first time. She was the Turquoise Fox, and I thought the appellation utterly apt. She was alluring, yet not to be trusted. There was a soldier there, standing guard with his assault rifle. Kate nodded almost imperceptibly to him, and he pointed me up the stairs. The soldier motioned to me with his gun, but Kate raised a finger stopping him.

“It doesn’t have to be like this, Michael. As I told you, I’m authorized to make a deal. Help us find the Device and we’ll give you your father.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Think about it,” Kate said. “That’s all I ask.”

Kate nodded to the soldier a second time and he prodded me up the stairs with the barrel of his gun.

Chapter 33

H
ELP
US
FIND
the Device and we’ll give you your father.

 
Kate’s words were tempting to believe. No, they were more than tempting. It was why I’d gotten into espionage in the first place. And the fact was, I’d lied to her point blank. Kate was right. Crust was a pragmatist. He’d recognized the value of the situation immediately. He’d told me to play along with the Dragons. Of course, it went without saying that although I should seem to help them, I had to be absolutely certain that they didn’t get the Device.
 

I understood this and I understood Crust’s position. Innocent lives were at stake, millions upon millions of them. I had a weapon to contain and I was to use whatever means were at my disposal to do so. There was, however, a complicating factor to which Crust wasn’t privy, namely, Meryem. Not only was I beginning to trust Meryem, but my gut told me that she might hold the key to unlocking the puzzle of the Device’s whereabouts. Kate could wait. It would seem only natural if I took some time to come into the fold. It was Meryem that I needed to crack. This was a woman who was being treated like the enemy by both Kate and the Turkish Army. I needed to know whose side she was really on.

But to do that, I needed to find her, which, given the fact that I had a gun in my back, might be easier said than done. The soldier led me up a second flight of external stairs to the main deck and into the grand salon. We made our way sternward through the teak-lined corridor. There were cabin doors on either side of me, but relatively few people about. I had seen one steward in the salon, but no one since. The bridge would be a deck above, but instead of ushering me up a set of stairs, the guard directed me back down a second stairwell.

By the time I got to the bottom of two sets of stairs, I knew that I was level with the waterline again. The yacht was a big boat, designed by Westport Shipyards according to the plaque in the corridor wall, and it seemed as if she had been refitted recently. The teak was polished, the thick carpets were new, and even the halogen pot lights had gathered only nominal dust. After about forty feet, the soldier indicated that I should stop. He opened a cabin door and ushered me in.
 

I went with it. He was a single guard and his hands were occupied with both the door and his weapon, so I knew I held the advantage if I chose to press it, but I didn’t. There was too much to be learned on this boat to go AWOL just yet. Inside the door, I found a modestly laid out stateroom, complete with a nicely made double bed and a painting of a sailing ship on the wall. There was a single porthole and two smaller doors. A dead bolt clicked as the cabin door was locked behind me.
 

The first thing I did was try the other two doors. The first was a closet, nothing special there. I closed it and opened the second door. Inside was a small bathroom with a shower, toilet, sink, and vanity. I swung open the mirror on the vanity to see that it contained a toothbrush and toothpaste. The toothbrush was embossed in gold script with the name of the yacht. Fancy.

The bathroom had a second porthole in it, the same size as the one in the stateroom. I didn’t think that I’d be able to squeeze myself through either of them. I could, however, ensure my privacy. I picked up the toothpaste and dabbed a little of it on my finger. Then I went to work.
 

I was concerned about cameras. I didn’t want them watching me. First I spread a bit of toothpaste on the lone smoke detector on the ceiling. I wiped toothpaste on the sensor hole and the test button. Then I moved on to the locks on the doors and did the same thing. I covered the little hole in the faceplates above all three door handles. After that, it was time for the painting of the ship. It looked like a Turner, a real one for all I knew, and I smeared the crack between the canvas and frame.

Then I grabbed a towel to protect my fingers and unscrewed the halogen bulbs in the ceiling one by one. There were four in the cabin, plus the one in the bathroom. When I was done, it was dark in the cabin, bright moonlight filtering through the porthole. I hadn’t swept for bugs, but because I wasn’t speaking, it wouldn’t much matter. At that point, I lay on the bed and waited.

I figured that if Kate and crew were angry that they couldn’t observe me, they’d be down soon enough. And if they weren’t, that meant I had some time to figure my situation out. Except, things went in a different direction entirely. It started with a squeak. It began intermittently but grew more persistent. At first I thought it was a mouse, or more likely a rat, but it wasn’t. No critter showed its eyes. There was no scurry of little feet. What there was, was a gradual but perceptible movement in the closet’s rear wallboard. I watched as the textured wall expanded outward in one spot, bubbling out farther and farther until it burst, the rotating head of a bolt appearing.

The bolt head stopped twisting and hung there a moment, before falling to the bottom of the closet. Then the squeaking started again, another bolt, making its way through the wallboard. At that point I saw no reason not to help. I retrieved the toothbrush from the bathroom and used it as a straight edge against the head of the hex bolt to crank it around. Within a few minutes, all four bolts were off and a metal panel tore through the layer of texturing on the wall. A second after that and I was staring through a jumble of wires at Meryem.

“You took very long to help,” she whispered.

I put a finger to my lips. If the rooms were bugged, I didn’t want to tip our captors off. It was a tight squeeze, but I followed Meryem past the jumble of wires and through the access panel into her cabin. Once in her cabin, I saw that she had gone in through a disused junction box which gave her access to the panel below it.
 

I figured if we were being observed, we’d already have been busted, but you never knew. I signaled Meryem to wait and pulled the toothpaste trick again, just in case they were watching. Then I set my sights on Meryem’s porthole. Unlike the one in my cabin, it was rectangular, consisting of a pane of tempered glass cantilevered out on two long stainless-steel hinges. A rubber gasket around the opening in the hull where the window was seated ensured it would be near waterproof in bad weather. It was a good setup to keep water out. Hopefully not so good at keeping people in.

I reached outside and hung my weight off the glass. It was surprisingly solid. I felt some movement, but didn’t gain more than a fraction of an inch in vertical play. I noticed an unintended consequence, though. I did gain lateral play. The hinges were still solidly preventing the window from bending down, but they had separated somewhat from the wall. Still, I had nothing but a toothbrush for a tool. I needed something else.

“What?” Meryem mouthed.

I raised a finger indicating that she should wait.

I wouldn’t have been shocked if the door had broken open and armed men had put an end to our little escapade right there, but they didn’t, so I scoured the room. It was the same as mine. Same closet, same tiny bathroom, same non-marine toilet. Smaller yachts tended to carry a marine toilet with a pump and valve regulating shore and offshore use. This one didn’t. It was simply a regular toilet bowl with regular plumbing, which got me thinking. I removed the porcelain toilet tank lid. Sure enough, there was a plastic float in there. A float on a steel rod with a flattened end where it connected to the flushing mechanism. Interesting. I thought it might do. I unscrewed the ten-inch rod. With the black float on the end it looked like a maraca, but it had the potential to give me the leverage I needed.

I took off the float and inserted the toilet rod under the loosened hinge, prying upward. It gave me the mechanical advantage I wanted. Two sharp, upward strokes and I was able to jimmy both hinges off their mounts. Then I removed the window and gave Meryem a boost. She slipped headfirst through the tight space, landing with the tiniest of splashes. I followed, putting my arms through the window and pushing off the hull, diving deeply into the cool black water below.