A tong? Then it occurred to Renton what The Russian was saying. A bomb.
Renton needed to act. He swung his foot over the rail and pulled himself onto the deck. The Russian paid no attention to him. He was beginning to wonder why the assassin stayed behind the wheel, oblivious to Renton’s presence. He acted as if he was still going to outrun the police. Renton could see a helicopter approaching, nose down, spotlight lighting up the choppy bay water.
Renton scrambled to his feet and pulled out his gun. The Russian had his back to him yelling at the police, one hand on the wheel. Renton entered the cabin with his gun out. The police spotlights illuminated the cabin and he could see the man was handcuffed to the wheel. He seemed to sense Renton and turned to face him. The man was older than he’d suspected. Maybe sixty-five. He wore a Hawaiian tee shirt, jeans and sandals.
“Stay still,” Renton ordered.
A policeman hopped onto the port deck and entered the cabin with his rifle out front and looked Renton over.
“FBI,” Renton exclaimed, pulling out his shield for the man to examine.
The officer nodded.
Once Renton put away his shield, he reached for the throttle. That’s when the man handcuffed to the wheel screamed, “No!”
Renton froze. “What’s the matter?”
“You don’t understand,” the man said exasperated. “There’s a bomb on board. It will explode if this boat goes under twenty knots. We have to keep up our speed.”
“Why do you say that?” Renton said.
“That’s what the man told me.”
“What man?”
“The man who blew up Sylvio’s.”
Renton looked around the cabin. “Where is he?”
“He’s long gone,” the man’s voice now urgent, lifting his handcuffed hand. “Can you please release me? We need to get out of here.”
Renton looked the man over. He had a southern accent. He wasn’t The Russian, that was for sure.
“Is this your yacht?” Renton asked.
“Yes.”
“How long was he on the boat?”
“Maybe an hour before he blew up the place.”
Renton put his gun away. “Where’s this bomb?”
The man pointed to a plastic container below the front windshield, just out of his reach. There were no wires coming from the container.
He looked at the man. “How long did he work on attaching the bomb?”
“A couple of minutes,” the man said, his eyes darting from Renton then to the bomb.
The police officer said, “Let’s get out of here and call the bomb squad.”
Renton looked at the man’s face, scarred from fear. Renton knew a little about boats; however, he knew a lot more about bombs. He pulled the plastic container from the wall. It was attached with double adhesive tape.
The man yelled, “No, don’t!”
Renton yanked open the small container. As he suspected, it was empty. He showed it to the old man.
“You’ve been watching too many movies,” Renton said.
“But …” the man seemed incredulous. It was no act. The assassin had him completely convinced. Especially after firing an RPG at Sylvio’s. The man was simply a decoy to give him time to escape.
Renton looked back toward the shore. The flames from the restaurant were down to embers. He could see four or five Coast Guard vessels speeding toward them, while a helicopter hovered overhead. Suddenly it dawned on him. The pieces fit together perfectly. The Russian saw Renton watching the yacht. He used a remote to detonate the car bomb in the parking lot to draw attention away from him. He must’ve leapt off the boat immediately after the restaurant explosion.
Renton knew they were going to scour the shoreline for hours and he also knew they weren’t going to find a thing. The Russian had a thirty minute head start. He was long gone.
Chapter 12
President Merrick was reading “Goodnight Moon” to his daughter Emily when her bedroom door opened and his wife’s face came into view. Her blank expression told him everything. Whenever she didn’t have her patented smile, something was wrong. She approached the bed and took the book from Merrick. The smile made a forced return.
“I’d like to finish reading this if I could,” his wife said to Emily.
“Aw.” Emily pouted as her dad lifted himself from the edge of her bed and gave her a gentle kiss on the forehead.
“But Daddy never gets to read to me anymore,” the young girl cried.
“Now, Sweetie,” Merrick said. “I’ll be reading that same book to you tomorrow night. I promise.”
Merrick closed the bedroom door and found a male aide anxiously waiting for him, holding out a cell phone.
“There’s been an explosion, sir,” the aide said.
Merrick put the phone to his ear.
“We need to talk,” Samuel Fisk said.
The FBI’s Baltimore field office held the most extensive antiterrorist war room in the nation. It was fifty feet below the building and required an iris scan and an elevator to get there. The room was lined with slim computer monitors ranging from forty to ninety inches long. Each screen displayed a satellite image from different parts of the globe and was monitored twenty-four hours a day by thirty-five information technicians. These technicians sat behind a long, narrow tabletop which extended continuously throughout the entire perimeter of the rectangle room. Each technician had their own laptop computer and moved around the room constantly searching for answers to data received from different field agents.
These technicians worked long hours and sometimes got so lost in their assignments, they would lose track of time and even become disoriented. That’s why the war room was designed to emulate the outdoors. The ceiling displayed a real time image of the sky, piped in from a camera on the roof. When it was raining, the employees saw the rain coming down, when it was sunny out, it was sunny inside the war room. Now it was nighttime and there were stars up above, with a few scattered clouds.
In the center of the room was a round mahogany table with over twenty leather chairs available. Right now the tension in the room had escalated to a new level. Sitting around the table were FBI Director Louis Dutton, CIA Director Kenneth Morris, Defense Secretary Martin Riggs, Secretary of State Samuel Fisk and ASAC Lynn Harding.
Lynn Harding had just finished her brief on the bombing of Sylvio’s. Most people around the table had been in the war room since breakfast so the conversations were becoming more spirited as fatigue set in and patience wore down.
“So tell me what you know about The Russian?” FBI Director Louis Dutton asked the ASAC.
Harding crossed her legs, her pant suit was solemn black and her demeanor even darker. She fished through some notes she’d scribbled down while getting briefed from a European colleague with the MI-6 in London.
“His name is Anton Kalinikov,” she said, scanning her chicken-scratch shorthand. “He’s ex-KGB. Tall. Left-handed.” She looked up. “He’s very capable. No one has ever taken a surveillance image of him while he operated. His last known photo was taken almost twenty years ago.”
“That’s it?” Defense Secretary Martin Riggs asked. “That’s all you have on the guy?”
Harding understood Riggs’s frustration. He was an ex-marine and saw most things as black and white. She looked down at her notepad. “That’s all we know for sure. Everything else is conjecture.”
Harding looked over at CIA Director Ken Morris. The FBI dealt mostly with domestic terrorism while the CIA handled much of the collection of global information. Morris pulled down on his tie and unbuttoned his first shirt button.
“Shit,” Morris said. “I’m still not sure how we came up with The Russian for this stuff. My sources tell me he’s still in the Ukraine.”
Morris looked back to Harding, lobbing the question of shared information into Harding’s lap.