“Sounds reasonable,” Max agreed. “We’ll play tortoise to their snail and see where this chase takes us.”
“I’m handing the phone over to Eddie. He has a list of things he’s going to need for his insertion into China. You can send someone to act as courier when you pass through the Korea Strait. The Robinson has more than enough range to make it to Pusan. From there, the courier can take a commercial flight to Singapore and meet up with Eddie at the airport.”
“Hold on, let me get a pen. And some paper. And my reading glasses.”
Five hundred miles north of where the Oregonsteamed near the Maus, another drydock, her sister ship in fact, was just clearing the La Perouse Strait separating the northern tip of Japan from the Sakhalin Islands and entering the frigid waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. She, being towed by more powerful tugs than the Maus, was making six knots despite the fact that the ship hidden inside her hold was considerably larger than the tanker Linda had seen.
The seas were building around the vessels, high, rolling waves that alternately tightened and slackened the long towlines so one moment they were submerged and the next they were as taut as steel bars, bursting with water wrung out by tension. The tugs turned into the seas, shouldering aside the waves as they plowed northward, meeting the ocean as a ship should, nimble and responsive to her vagaries. The drydock played no such game. She took the waves square into her bow so explosions of white froth were flung almost to her top deck. Then she would throw off the water, slowly, ponderously, as though the sea was merely a distraction.
Like the Maus, the drydock’s holds were covered over, but in this vessel’s case, metal sheets had been laid over a steel framework and all the seams welded. The hold would have been virtually airtight except for several industrial ventilators mounted at the stern. These powerful machines drew in thousands of cubic feet of air per minute to circulate within the drydock’s hold. The outgoing air was fed through banks of chemical filters to disguise the raw stench emanating from belowdecks, a smell that hadn’t been found on the high seas for almost two hundred years.
Cabrillo was stuck in Tokyo until Mark Murphy came up with a lead, so he spent three days basically playing tourist in a city he’d never particularly enjoyed. He longed for the fresh air on an open sea, a horizon that seemed unreachable, and the peace that comes from standing on the fantail watching the wake curve into the distance. Instead he dealt with an impenetrable language, crowds that defied imagination, and constant staring by people who should be used to Westerners but acted as though they’d never seen one.
His feeling of impotence was further compounded by Eddie Seng’s mission. Eddie had left days earlier, rendezvoused with the courier in Singapore, and had already gone on into China itself. He’d phoned the Oregonupon his arrival in Shanghai but then ditched the phone. While cell phones were ubiquitous in the cities, he was going deep into the countryside. Not only would there be no cellular service, but if he were caught with a phone, it would likely arouse suspicion. He would be completely on his own in a country that had already issued his death sentence until he’d learned the circumstances behind the villagers being aboard the Kra.
Cabrillo felt his phone vibrate in his jacket pocket. He slid it free and opened the line as he continued strolling the park surrounding the Imperial Palace, the only quiet location in the sprawling megalopolis. “Cabrillo.”
“Juan, it’s Max. Are you ready to put an end to your vacation?”
“Murph found something?” Cabrillo didn’t bother to mask the delight in his voice.
“You got it. I’m putting him through, but I’m staying on.”
Juan found a deserted bench so he could give the conversation his full attention. He had a small pad and a Montblanc pen ready in case he needed to take notes.
“Hey, boss, how’s it going?”
“Max tells me you have some information,” Cabrillo said, anxious to find a direction in which to hunt.
“It took a while, and I had to consult with Mike Halbert on quite a bit of it.” Halbert was a sometimes consultant to the Corporation and also acted as their investment broker. He’d gone on a couple of missions aboard the Oregon, though usually he worked out of his New York apartment, a fiftieth-floor corner unit overlooking Central Park. Halbert was a whiz at the more arcane aspects of international finance, the shadowy world of front companies, tax havens, and derivatives, though right now, with the current sad state of the Corporation’s financial situation, Halbert wasn’t one of Juan’s favorite people.
“So what do you have?” Cabrillo prompted.
“This might get a bit confusing, so bear with me.” Murph paused to study the notes on his computer screen. “Okay, first what I had to do was find out who was behind all those dummy companies I told you owned the Maus. You remember, D Commercial Advisors, Equity Partners International, and all the rest. First off, it appears these companies were created strictly to buy the drydock. They don’t have any other assets.”
“That’s not uncommon,” Juan said. “If there was ever an insurance claim against the vessel’s owners, their only asset is the drydock itself.”
“That’s what Halbert told me. None of these companies are based in the same place. One is Panamanian, another is headquartered in Nigeria, another is out of Dubai. I tried contacting D Commercial Advisors directly. They don’t even have a phone number, so it’s likely the headquarters are nothing more than a PO box with automatic forwarding to another address.”
“Is there any way to find out where their mail is sent on to?”
“Not without breaking into some Third World post office and having a look at their files.”
“We’ll keep that option open,” Cabrillo said in all seriousness. “Keep going.”
“Next, we checked the corporate structure of each company. These are public records and fortunately kept on a database. My hope was we would find the same names on the boards of each company.”
“You didn’t think it was going to be that easy?” Juan chided.
“Well, I’d hoped. As you can imagine, no such luck. There was one common element, though. Of the seven companies that own the Mausand the forty people listed as directors of those companies, every one of them is Russian.”
“Russian? I thought they would be Chinese.”
“Nope, Russkies to a man. Which ties in with Linda’s suspicion about the men guarding the Mausbeing from the land of the tsars. I have a search under way through Interpol right now. So far, I’ve already gotten hits on a few of these guys. They’re members of the Russian mafia. No one highly placed, but they’re definitely connected.”
“So this whole thing is a Russian enterprise,” Juan said, thinking aloud. “I can see how they’d benefit from the hijackings, but what about the human trafficking? The snakeheads are well organized and entrenched in China. I can’t see them allowing competition from the Russian mob.”
“I had an idea about that,” Max interjected. “What if the snakeheads have a contract with the Russians? Could be they use Russian ships or allow the Chinese to use Russia as a conduit to get the illegals into western Europe.”