“Any military ships berthed there? Chemicals, fuel depot?”
“Nothing,” Clark said. “Already checked. Mostly box ships with dry cargo. We’ve been on them since this morning. Aside from the pool and the terminal, they haven’t gone anywhere, and no one’s come up to their room.”
“If they’re scoping out targets,” Granger said, “this could go on for weeks. We’re not really set up for extended stakeouts. I say we tip the FBI and let them have it.”
“Give us another day,” Clark said. “If nothing pans out, we’ll pull the plug and come home.”
At the Claridge Inn in Saint George, Utah, Frank Weaver was showering off a day’s worth of grime and looking forward to a Law & Order mini-marathon on TNT when he heard a knock on his door. He wrapped himself in a towel and padded across the room. “Who is it?”
“Front desk, Mr. Weaver. We have a problem with your credit card.”
Weaver unlatched the door and opened it a crack. The door flew open and banged against the wall. Two men stepped inside, one shutting the door, the other taking two quick strides at Weaver, who began backpedaling across the room but not fast enough. He felt something hard pressed against his solar plexus, then felt a hammer blow, then another. He felt himself falling backward. He bounced once on the edge of the bed, then rolled to the floor on his back. He lifted his head and looked down at his chest. Just below his sternum, two pencil eraser-sized holes were bubbling blood. The man who shot him walked forward and stood over him, one leg on either side of his chest. Frank Weaver saw the gun’s muzzle lowering toward his face, and he shut his eyes.
83
THE SALIM SIBLINGS left the hotel at nine p.m., and almost immediately Jack and Clark realized they were retracing their earlier route to the Newport News Marine Terminal. In Portsmouth they turned off the highway and drove to a U-Haul Storage on Butler Street. Clark kept going past the entrance, turned onto Conrad, shut off the headlights, then did a U-turn and pulled to a stop ten feet short of the intersection.
Down the block, the Intrepid had pulled into the parking lot and stopped beside the first row of storage units. Citra Salim climbed out and trotted up to a unit, which she opened with a key.
“Don’t like this,” Jack said. “What do two kids on vacation need with a storage unit?”
“No good reason,” Clark replied.
Citra was back out. She closed and locked the unit, then returned to the Intrepid. She was carrying two small canvas backpacks.
Within minutes they were back on the highway and headed into the bay tunnel. Once through to the other side, the Intrepid continued to retrace the afternoon route, ending up once more at King Lincoln Park. They didn’t pull into the parking lot, however, but drove past it, then turned right onto Jefferson and headed back in the same direction.
“Think they made us?” Jack asked.
“No. They’re just careful. We’re okay.”
They were in an industrial-park area: trucking companies, gravel suppliers, scrap yards, and boat repair shops. The Intrepid took another right.
“Twelfth Street,” Jack said. “Heading east again.”
Clark let them get a little farther ahead, then shut off his headlights, made the turn, and pulled to the curb. Three hundred yards down the road, the Intrepid was turning left into an apartment complex.
“Visiting new friends?” Jack wondered.
“Let’s find out.”
Clark turned on the headlights and pulled out again. As they drew even with the apartments, two figures walked out of the parking lot and started down the sidewalk. The Salims. With their backpacks. Clark passed them and looked in the rearview mirror. They were heading back toward Jefferson. Clark turned the next corner, stopped again, headlights off.
“See them?” Clark asked.
“Yep, got ’em.”
At Jefferson, the Salims crossed the street and disappeared down a grassy median behind a trucking company.
“Time to move,” Clark said.
Lights still off, he did a U-turn and rolled down Twelfth to Jefferson. As they reached the intersection, they saw the Salims turn left and disappear behind the trucking company’s fence.
“They’re running out of room,” Jack said. The trucking company backed up to 664, a raised, four-lane highway.
“Let’s hoof it,” Clark said.
They parked, got out, and trotted across the street to the grass median. At the rear of the trucking company, they found a marshy creek bordered by thick brush and a narrow trail. They were halfway down it when Clark realized where they were. “It’s the Six sixty-four canal. Remember to the right, as we came out of the tunnel?” They’d seen dozens of motor yachts and speed-boats berthed in the canal.
Down the trail, an engine gurgled to life. Clark and Jack sprinted forward. Fifty yards away at the end of a dock, the Salims were sitting in a speedboat. The boy sat down in the driver’s seat and eased the throttle forward. The boat pulled away from the dock and headed into the canal.
Jack and Clark were back to their car a minute later. They pulled onto Jefferson and headed south. After a few blocks, the canal came into view through the passenger window. They could see the Salims’ boat motoring toward the mouth of the canal.
“They’re going for the terminal,” Clark said.
“What about the harbor patrol?”
“Jack, once they get around the jetty, they’re a quarter-mile from the first berth. We’ve got five minutes, if that.”
Clark did a U-turn and headed in the other direction.
They crossed under the 664, turned south onto Terminal. At the bottom of the ramp the road forked at a tank farm. Clark veered right and followed the winding dirt road. Halfway down the tank farm, Clark braked to a stop. A hundred yards away was a lighted guard shack. A swinging gate blocked the road.
“Shit.”
“Marshal’s badge get us through?” Jack asked.
“Once inside, yeah, but main gates switched to TWIC in January-Transportation Worker Identification Credential. You don’t have one, you don’t get in.”
“How do you know that?”
“Rainbow had an E-Six devoted to keeping up with ID protocols,” Clark replied. “Bad guys are all about going where they don’t belong. Figure out what they’re trying to counterfeit, you’re halfway to figuring out what they’re targeting.”
Clark backed down the road, arm draped over the seat as he steered through the back window, until they reached the fork. He veered left and pulled into a gravel turnaround beside the tank farm’s fence.
“Back on foot,” Clark said.
To their left, on the other side of the tank farm, they could hear the traffic rushing by on the 664. To their right, across the dirt road, was a dirt berm overgrown with underbrush. They jogged over and up the embankment, then pushed through the foliage, then down the opposite slope. They found themselves in a scrub field about the size of a football field. At the far end, they could see the guard shack they’d spotted earlier. They sprinted across the field, up another slope, and through some brush, and ended up on a dirt road. To the left lay a dirt parking lot with rows upon rows of boxcar-sized shipping containers and two Quonset huts. Clark and Jack were down the road and among the containers thirty seconds later. They stopped to catch their breath, then kept going.
They picked their way through the rows of containers to the edge of the parking lot. Two hundred feet away were the docks, three of them extending into the harbor, with a ship berthed on each side, for a total of six.