The Tears of Dark Water (20 page)

He heard the door open behind him. “Paul,” said Captain Masters, “Brent Frazier is on the line again. You can take it out here if you like.”

The Captain pointed at a handset below the railing. Derrick picked it up. “Hi, Boss. I gather you’re aware of the situation.”

Frazier laughed dryly. “For once I’m ahead of you. Ibrahim just called Vanessa on the satellite phone. He made a ransom demand. Five million dollars by Monday at 17:00 local time. Either he’s stalling, or he’s playing the family against us. We don’t know which.”

Derrick was stunned. In his decade as a negotiator, he had never been blindsided by a hostage taker. It was a remarkably uncomfortable feeling.

“As you can imagine,” Frazier said, “a lot of people are unhappy over here. MOTR scheduled a call for midnight your time. It’ll be Admiral Prince, Amanda Wolff from State, Gordon Tully, the National Security Advisor, Erika Watson, his deputy, Redman, Masters, you and me. The White House is looking for an oracle. They want somebody to tell them what the hell they’re supposed to do.”

Join the club
, Derrick thought.
Then he had an idea. “Amanda Wolff, she’s the piracy maven, the one who vouched for me at the beginning, right?”

“Yeah. The way it’s looking, you can forget the Christmas card.”

“Give me her number,” Derrick said.

Frazier knew enough not to ask why. He passed along the D.C. exchange. “Best of luck. You have until the clock strikes twelve to read the tea leaves.”

“Do I get to keep the slipper?” Derrick quipped, but Frazier had already hung up.

Derrick entered the bridge and approached Masters with his request. Two minutes later, he was on the bridge wing again, listening to the ringtone. It was only eight o’clock in the morning in Washington, but Derrick guessed the counter-piracy director was already at her desk. He was right.

“Amanda Wolff,” she said, answering on the first ring.

He kept his overture short. “It’s Paul Derrick on the
Gettysburg
. Do you have a minute?”

“Of course.”

Derrick asked the question foremost in his mind: “Have you ever seen Somali pirates negotiate a ransom at sea? I was under the impression that negotiations take place on land.”

“It’s unprecedented,” she replied. “There are only two explanations. Either Ibrahim is using this as a diversion, or he’s gone completely off the reservation.”

“Spin that out for me. How would he go rogue?”

“It’s simple. Pirate organizations have two tiers. The top tier consists of the commanders and investors—almost always old men with means. The bottom tier consists of the young men they send out on missions. The mission commander is given clear orders: bring back a ship or don’t bother coming back. When the kids show up with a prize, the old men sit around chewing
qat
and talking about how much money they think they can make off of it. They pay someone to negotiate with the shipping company or the family. They drag the negotiation out until they get close to where they want to end up. Then they play bait and switch. They bring in a new negotiator for the final squeeze. Only then do they arrange a drop. If Ibrahim is serious, he and his crew are acting
ultra vires
—beyond sanction. There’s no way they can go back now.”

Derrick absorbed this. “I need some time to think.”

“That’s what I figured,” Wolff said. “I was the one who bought you six hours.”

He smiled. “That’s kind of you.”

“Anytime. And Derrick? Don’t let the White House apparatchiks or the Special Warfare boys talk down to you. They like to throw their weight around, but they need your wisdom more than you need their approval. If this goes down wrong, it’s their ass on the line, not yours or mine.”

Wolff was nothing if not blunt. When she hung up, Derrick put the phone back in its cradle and found Ensign O’Brien on the bridge. “Can you take me someplace quiet? I need to concentrate.”

The young sailor nodded. “The fantail. I’ll show you the way.”

She led him aft from the bridge wing and down a series of ladders to a weather deck where one of the
Gettysburg
’s RHIBs hung suspended in netting. They skirted the boat, being careful not to hit their heads, and then descended another ladder to the main deck. They followed a passageway along the outside of the ship to the missile deck—a gray checkerboard housing half of the cruiser’s Tomahawk missiles—and then down a final ladder to the fantail.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll find my way back.”

Ensign O’Brien gave him a handheld radio. “We’ll call you if something comes up.”

Derrick went to the stern railing and looked out over the
Gettysburg
’s wake, watching the water foam and sparkle in the light of the setting sun. The sky was cornflower blue and speckled with clumps of cloud. He inhaled the moist air and remembered his first negotiation class at the FBI Academy, which Brent Frazier had taught.
There’s always leverage
, Frazier had said over and over again until Derrick found himself dreaming the words in his sleep.
To find it, you have to get into the heart of the subject. What’s driving him to do what he’s doing? What does he want out of it? Once you know those things, you can guide him toward a resolution you both can live with. Negotiation isn’t about us versus them. It’s about us collaborating with them to create a scenario in which everybody gets something. That’s as true in a hostage crisis as it is in a boardroom. Dignify the subject, even if he’s a psychopath. You’ll never get anywhere without his help.

With Ibrahim, there was leverage. Derrick could sense it. He wasn’t an illiterate desperado or a soulless mercenary doing the dirty work for his Somali paymasters. There was something beneath the surface, something compelling him to risk his life to steal someone else’s treasure. If Derrick had the luxury of time, he knew he could answer the riddle. But Ibrahim had changed the game. In approaching the Parker family, he had made an end run around the Navy, turning billions of dollars of military hardware into a sideshow. This was precisely the place where leverage evaporated—when a negotiator lost contact with the subject, or the subject escaped the barricade. With one phone call, Ibrahim had made huge strides toward accomplishing both. Or had he? Was it possible that he had gone rogue? If he meant to take the money and run, why hadn’t he changed the sailboat’s course? It made no sense to sail right back into the arms of his commanders. Then again, he was still days away from the coast. He had time to make a course correction. Perhaps he was waiting for something.

Derrick wrestled with the question, gnashed his teeth on it, until he could articulate what his gut told him in words that would influence the heavyweights in Washington. There were those in the government who wouldn’t like what he had to say, but he didn’t care. Amanda Wolff was right. The politicos needed cover, and he could offer them that. He wasn’t a fortune teller, but he knew people. And Ibrahim, despite the inhumanity of his crimes, was still a member of the human race.

After dinner in the officers’ wardroom, Derrick spent the evening in meetings, debating the merits of deferring to the Parker family in the negotiation, for the time being at least. He found it easy to convince Rodriguez—he was Derrick’s protégé, after all—and Masters seemed open to his point of view. But Redman took passionate exception to his proposal.

Derrick wasn’t surprised. There was a point in almost every hostage crisis at which the tactical commander and the lead negotiator came to loggerheads about next steps. The conflict was usually provoked by the hostage taker’s intransigence and the desire of the tactical team to “do something” to resolve the crisis. It was a dangerous moment for the hostages, for tactical action dramatically increased the chance that the good guys would get hurt.

Derrick hammered this point home in his discussions with the SEAL commander, citing cases from the CNU’s database in which impatience led to bloodshed. Redman listened but didn’t bend. “Goddammit!” he exclaimed at one point. “We can’t allow a bunch of pirates to define the parameters of our mission.” Derrick tried to persuade him that innovation wasn’t the same as capitulation, but the dispute persisted until midnight, when they met in the Admiral’s cabin for the MOTR call.

Derrick and the Navy captains sat at the table in the center of the room, and Rodriguez, Ali Sharif, and Lieutenant Commander Cardwell took seats around the periphery. Derrick studied the two flat-screen monitors while an ensign completed a system check. One of the screens displayed a GPS map of the Indian Ocean with position, course, and speed data for the
Renaissance
and the trio of Navy ships. The other screen showed five people sitting in a conference room in front of hanging photos of the President and Vice President.
Probably in the bowels of the White House
, Derrick inferred. Frazier was there, alongside a hawk-eyed man in uniform—Admiral Prince—and a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit—Amanda Wolff. Derrick recognized Gordon Tully, the National Security Advisor, at the head of the table and guessed that the woman next to him was his deputy—Erika Watson.

“My apologies for the lateness of the hour over there,” Tully said in opening. He made summary introductions and then got down to business. “Admiral Prince has just briefed us on the tactical options, and to be frank, they’re all bad. We’re still in the dark about the number of pirates. Your snipers say they counted six shadows behind the curtains, but they couldn’t be sure. Your attack team could make a subsurface approach, but the pirates are keeping the hatches closed, which means you can’t flush them out with tear gas. You could try to disable the propeller, but we don’t know how the pirates would react if they figured out the damage was deliberate. The last thing we need is a bloodbath when we still have time for a peaceful resolution.”

Tully checked off something on the notepad in front of him. “That brings me to the question of Ibrahim’s intent. Agent Derrick, you’ve talked to him and spent time with dozens of others like him over the years. Is he serious about negotiating with the family?”

Derrick leaned forward in his chair, conscious of the displeasure on Redman’s face. “Mr. Tully, my interactions with Ibrahim have been limited, so all I can give you is my instinct. I believe he was genuine in approaching the Parkers. Hostage takers who play fast and loose with their words set artificial deadlines and then break them. Ibrahim has made a lot of threats, but the only deadline he’s given us is the one for the ransom drop. I can’t tell you why he’s taken matters into his own hands. But I think he’s made that decision.”

Erika Watson spoke up. “The Admiral tells us you had a conversation with him about religion.”

Derrick nodded. “We run monologues sometimes to get a subject to engage. My linguist gave me some suggestions, and I improvised. Ibrahim was interested in my knowledge of the Quran. I wouldn’t say the conversation was about religion,
per se
. It was about the origins of evil.”

Watson wrote something down, and then looked back at the camera. “And what impressions did you draw from that exchange?”

Derrick took a breath. “I got the sense that he’s keenly aware of the moral implications of his actions. If I’m right, then he’s rationalizing it somehow. It’s human nature. No one deliberately subverts his conscience. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that this is about more than just money to him.”

Watson raised her eyebrows. “Are you saying he’s motivated by ideology?”

Derrick danced around the trip wire. “I doubt it. Ideologues wear their beliefs like a badge. I’m shooting in the dark here, but I’d bet his justification is personal.”

Watson didn’t disguise her skepticism. “What sort of
personal
justification would satisfy a man like him, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Derrick didn’t miss a beat. “The most powerful motivators are love, loyalty, hatred, and vengeance. Any combination of those would do.”

“You make him sound like a romantic,” interjected Admiral Prince. “A Somali Jack Sparrow. In the real world, pirates are
hostis humani generis
—enemies of all mankind.”

“He may be an enemy,” Derrick replied. “But that doesn’t make him less of a human being.”

Redman gritted his teeth. “I agree with Admiral Prince. I think Agent Derrick is giving Ibrahim far too much credit. The man is a pirate. He held a gun to Captain Parker’s head and shot holes in the sailboat. He’s threatened to kill an eighteen-year-old kid if his family doesn’t cough up five million dollars. I don’t believe a word he says, and neither should you.”

“Captain Redman,” said Gordon Tully, “I appreciate your candor. I doubt any of us would dispute your assessment of Ibrahim’s character. But what would you have us do?”

Redman’s response was direct. “Sir, I’d like permission to disable the sailboat. We can do it under the cover of darkness and make it look like the propeller got tangled in debris. As soon as Ibrahim knows he can’t get away, he’ll show his true colors.”

Tully’s eyes bored through the screen. “Has it ever occurred to you that his true colors might include shooting one of the hostages?”

When the SEAL commander hesitated, Derrick jumped in. “This morning I would have agreed with Captain Redman. Negotiation requires time, and disabling the sailboat was the least confrontational option. But Ibrahim has given us an opening. If I’m right about his motives, we could get where we want to go without any tactical action.”