His understanding of what gave him no comfort because the question of how still loomed. He was certain Biddle wasn’t the leak. It couldn’t be Biddle’s wife because the skinny beast had been utterly shocked when they burst into her home and dragged her away from her martini and cigarettes. It might have been Wofford, the man he’d killed.
He looked down at the woman. “How did you learn of us?” he demanded.
“It was easy,” she said.
Abu Sayeed struck her harder this time then knelt on her back and ripped off her black tee shirt to expose the bullet proof vest beneath. The stenciled initials “FBI” confirmed what he’d already guessed. He left her and went back to the stern where he stood in the open and tried to gauge the weather. The wind continued to strengthen, and the bay now boiled with whitecaps. When he looked ahead, he could see that the storm was almost on them, blackening the sky and cutting off any sight of Long Island Sound.
A shudder ran though him. He hated the ocean, and this dense, suffocating weather caused an almost unbearable claustrophobia. Even so, he knew that Allah had sent this storm to confuse his enemies.
He went back into the salon and jerked the woman to her feet. He pushed her up the steps to the bridge, wondering again how to make her talk in the shortest time. He slapped her again, hard, knocking her to her knees, and then he threw her against the bulwark while he rechecked the navigation instruments. There was still nothing unusual on the radar, no large boat bearing toward them.
The woman appeared semiconscious. He grabbed the back of her vest and dragged her from the bridge onto the flybridge. No helicopters hovering low, no searchlights on the water. The temperature was dropping, the wind-blown rain cold and stinging. In only seconds they would plunge into the swirling fog, becoming invisible, one more anonymous blip on radar.
His heart lightened for a moment because his enemies were confused, and he was about to elude them. Allah’s blessings could be as massive as an earthquake, or subtle as fog over a harbor. Either way, they were great. “Allah Akbar,” Abu Sayeed whispered, giving thanks for his delivery.
Finally, he looked down at the woman. She blinked as the rain started to revive her, and he reached down and turned her head toward the two crates that sat under canvas tarps. “There,” he said, reaching with one hand to yank back one of the tarps and reveal a large metal crate. “Is this what you hoped to prevent us from using?” He smiled. “You are too late, but if you want to live, you will tell me what I want to know.”
The woman’s lip was split along the side of her mouth, and when she tried to talk her teeth were stained with blood. “Brent’s going to kill you,” she said.
With a cry of rage, Abu Sayeed struck her with his fist, knocking her to the deck where she lay unmoving. He returned to the bridge. “Anneliës!” he shouted down into the salon. “Take this piece of excrement below!”
SIXTY-ONE
OYSTER BAY, NY, JULY 2
BRENT HEARD A RAPID POP-POP-POP-POP, followed by a rain of heavy slaps and thumps on the dock, the pilings, the water, before one caught him in the arm. As if a horse had kicked him, it spun him around and off his feet.
When he sat up again his right arm was numb, with a tingling like a limb that had gone to sleep. He felt above the elbow, his fingers finding warm blood and then the indentation where a chunk of muscle as big around as his thumb had been blown out. When he flexed his elbow the pain began.
He climbed to his feet, fighting off the sudden nausea, and squinted at the dark shape of the yacht already becoming indistinct in the storm. A single thought drove him—Maggie! From the opening in the hedge, he’d seen them dragging her up the gangplank. His first instinct was to call the police or FBI, but to what point? Even if they believed him, the storm already covered Long Island Sound. Boats or helicopters would never arrive in time.
He cast a desperate look toward the floating section of dock to his right. There were several skiffs and jet skis but also a decent sized Boston Whaler. He ran around to its berth, fighting the pain in his arm and holding out a wild hope that the keys were in the ignition. They weren’t.
He remembered the small octagonal building on the shore beside the dock—it had to be where Biddle kept the boat keys. His arm pulsed red waves of agony as he ran to the building, circled to the door, and stopped.
One of Biddle’s security guards lay sprawled inside, face-up, a bullet hole in his forehead. The sight redoubled his fears for Maggie, and he forced his eyes to a pegboard where several keys hung on floating key chains. He grabbed one labeled “Whaler” and raced back along the dock. On the way, he stooped over to snatch the water gun he dropped when he’d been hit.
A second later, behind the Whaler’s wheel, he looked over controls that were roughly the same as Harry’s boat. He shoved the key in the ignition, found the tilt button, and lowered the engines into the water then pulled out the choke and engaged the starter. The engines didn’t catch. He cursed. Nothing ever worked in boats! He tried again, but then he remembered the gas lines. He stumbled into the stern, found them, and squeezed the two balls that fed gas to the engines.
When he turned the key again, the engines caught. He let them run hot for several seconds as he untied the lines, and then he pushed in the choke, backed away from the dock, and roared into the darkness. His eyes watered in the wind, and the black wall of the storm lay straight ahead in the west. With the throttle jammed all the way forward, he prayed he had enough gas in the tanks.
He sped along with whitecaps pounding the hull and just enough ambient light from the shoreline to avoid moored boats. Away from shore the air grew misty and cold, the rain slashed, and he began to shiver. He had no plan and wondered what the hell he was going to do when he caught the yacht, assuming he could find it in the fog. He strained his eyes into the thickening storm knowing that in only a few hundred yards, he’d be running absolutely blind.
He looked down at the control panel, searching for the radio, but found only some screw holes and an empty space. “Shit!” he screamed. It had been pulled out, no doubt for repairs. Two boxy instruments sat atop the console, and he tore off the plastic covers. It was nearly impossible with the slamming waves, but he managed to find the switches. A moment later, he had radar and also a GPS showing his direction and location. The radar indicated a thick cluster of moored boats directly ahead, and he swung well clear of them but kept his heading toward the Sound.
He hit the fog with the engines wide open. He was going insanely fast for the conditions, but if he went slower, he’d never find Maggie. After several tries he located the button that controlled the radar’s viewing area, and he widened it until he spotted an image heading west out of Oyster Bay. It was the nearest thing moving on the water, and he assumed it had to be the yacht. A few minutes later, as he reached the mouth of the bay, he guessed he was about five hundred yards behind.
Given the power of the twin outboards, he’d hoped to catch the yacht quickly, but as he turned into the Sound three- and four-foot swells were rolling hard from the northwest, causing the boat to pitch wildly. Unable to brace himself with his wounded arm, he backed off the throttle. He stared at the radar screen, monitoring the yacht’s heading as the gap refused to narrow.
What were the terrorists planning? Were the missiles on board? In his guts he knew that they were, that somehow this was all part of their plan. Maggie had guessed it would be an assassination attempt on the President, but that no longer seemed possible. Now, with the Coast Guard and FBI alerted, Biddle’s boat would be an easy target in New York Harbor. But then he thought—maybe the terrorists were simply planning to launch their dirty weapons in the dark then try to escape. Maybe that’s why they’d taken Maggie hostage.