“What’s it take to sign up on one of these sites?” This from Hendley.
“The free ones… an e-mail address, and those are a dime a dozen. Hell, there are places on the Internet that’ll give you an address that self-destructs after fifteen minutes.”
“Talk about anonymity,” Rick Bell said. “Listen, I can buy all this. It makes sense, but what do we do with it?”
The conference door opened, and Chavez walked in. “There’s something you’re going to want to see.” He grabbed the television remote, powered up the LCD flat screen, and switched to CNN. The anchor was in mid-sentence.
“… Once again, this is a live television feed from Record News helicopter in Brazil. The conflagration started just after eight p.m. local time…”
Jack leaned forward in his chair. “Christ almighty.”
The helicopter appeared to be filming from a distance of five miles or more, but still two-thirds of the screen was filled with roiling flames and thick, black smoke. Through the smoke there were glimpses of some kind of vertical structures and crisscrossing pipes, and round storage tanks.
“That’s a refinery,” said John Clark.
The anchor was talking again: “According to Record News, the location of the fire is a refinery run by Petrobras, known as the Paulinia REPLAN. Paulinia is a town of sixty thousand people and is located some eighty miles north of São Paulo.”
Hendley turned to Jack. “Can you-”
Jack already had his laptop open. “Working on it.”
“… The Paulinia REPLAN is the largest refinery in Brazil, covering almost eighteen hundred acres and with an output of almost four hundred thousand barrels a day…”
“Accident?” Rick Bell suggested.
“Don’t think so,” Clark replied. “Eighteen hundred acres is almost three and a half square miles. The complex is almost totally engulfed. Look, back when I was still getting wet for a living, we war-gamed this stuff all the time. Refineries are juicy targets, but just about anything short of half a dozen Paveways wouldn’t be enough to light up a whole complex. Hell, our refineries here are almost thirty-five years old and you can count on one hand how many accidents there’ve been. Too many backup emergency systems.”
Typing at his laptop, Jack said, “Paulinia’s pretty new. Less than ten years old.”
“How many employees?”
“Could be as many as a thousand. Maybe twelve hundred. It’s the night shift, so less staff on duty, but we’re probably talking about at least four hundred people in there.”
“There,” Clark said. “Right there…” He stepped up to the television and tapped an area inside the refinery complex. “Those flames are moving; that’s liquid, and a lot of it.”
As they watched, the Record News helicopter moved closer to the blaze, swinging around the refinery until the north side came into view.
Jack said, “Okay, got it: Paulinia’s also a terminal for an ethanol pipeline. Comes in from the north.”
“Yeah, I see it,” said Rick Bell. He walked to the television and pointed to a spot along the complex’s northern perimeter. Just short of the fence, the pipeline was ripped open, emitting a geyser of flaming ethanol.
“Yeah,” Clark said. “They would have had to knock out some shutdown valves…” He traced his finger north along the pipeline until he reached an isolated pocket of flame. “That’s one.”
“And three more back down the line,” Granger added. “How much pipeline is that?”
“Half-mile, give or take,” Clark replied.
“About ten thousand gallons,” Jack said, looking up from his laptop.
“What?” said Chavez.
“That pipeline puts through over three billion gallons a year. Break down the math and that section probably contained about ten thousand gallons-call it enough to fill a tanker truck. Some of it’ll get soaked up by the soil, but you gotta figure seven, maybe eight thousand gallons were dumped into the complex.”
“The whole thing’ll go,” Clark said. “The blending and storage tanks… the towers. They’ll start to cook off.”
Even as Clark said the words, the helicopter’s camera caught a trio of explosions, each one sending a mushroom cloud of flames and black smoke a mile into the sky.
“They’re going to have to evacuate the whole damned region,” Sam Granger said. “So we’re agreed: This is no accident.”
Clark said, “No chance. A lot of planning went into this. A lot of groundwork and intelligence.”
“URC,” Chavez speculated.
“Why Brazil?” Hendley asked.
“I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Brazil,” Jack said. “That’s meant for us. Kealty just signed a deal with Petrobras. Sub-OPEC-priced oil from Brazil. They’ve got it coming out of their ears-the Lara and Tupi block fields alone could put Brazil’s reserves at around twenty-five billion barrels. That’s part of the equation. The other part is how far behind Petrobras is in building refineries. Paulinia was their workhorse. The new complex up in Maranhão will run at six hundred thousand barrels, but it’s not coming online for another year.”
“So Brazil’s got the oil but no way to process it,” Hendley said. “Which means our deal is down the tubes.”
“For a year at least. Maybe two.”
Jack’s e-mail chimed. He scanned the message. “Biery got facial-recognition hits on a couple of Sinaga’s passport photos. Two are Indonesians that came into Norfolk two weeks ago-Citra and Purnoma Salim.”
“Citra’s a female name,” Rick Bell said. “Husband and wife?”
“Brother and sister. Nineteen and twenty years old, respectively. According to their ICE forms, they’re here on vacation. The third is none other than our mystery courier: Shasif Hadi. He’s traveling as Yaseen Qudus. Two days after we lost him on the way to Vegas, Hadi caught a United flight from San Francisco to São Paulo.”
“Hell of a coincidence,” Sam Granger said.
“Don’t believe in them,” Hendley replied. “Mr. Chavez, how do you feel about a trip down there?”
“Fine by me.”
“You okay with taking Dom?”
Chavez thought about this. He’d seen plenty of men in Dominic’s condition: stunned, guilty, playing the “What could I have done differently?” game… Feeling guilty that the other guy’s dead, and guilty for being glad you’re still alive… It was a shitty place to be, but Chavez had looked into the former FBI man’s eyes: Dominic was wound up and looking for payback but still under control.
“Sure,” Chavez said. “If he’s up for it, I am. One question, though: What do we do when we get down there? It’s a big country, and Hadi and whoever he’s with probably already went to ground.”
“Or slipped out of the country,” Clark added.
“Let’s assume they’re still there,” Hendley replied. “Jack, let’s get back to Rick’s question: Assuming you’re onto something with this online file-storage stuff. What do we do with it?”
“We do an end run,” Jack replied. “Right now, Hadi’s the biggest URC player we’ve got a bead on, correct?”
“Yep,” Chavez said.
“And we know he went from Vegas to San Francisco before heading to São Paulo, probably to get his Qudus passport from Agong Nayoan, which means they were probably in direct contact-at the very least, so Nayoan could tell him to pick it up.”
“Go on,” Hendley said.
“Nayoan’s lazy. When we tossed his place, we found he never cleaned out his Web browser history.” Jack turned his laptop around so everyone could see it. The screen displayed a text file with hundreds of lines of website addresses. “While we’ve been talking, I’ve been sifting through these. Since the URC went radio-silent, Nayoan visited an online storage site every day, three times a day, and he rotated to a different site every second day.”