“And he will be there?”
“He’ll be there. Will our team be there in time?”
She mentally checked where the aircraft would be by now. It was circling the coast of Cinque Terra. It wouldn’t take them long to get clearance to land at La Spezia. If Sam could reach them, she would make sure they were in there to greet him. “Yes. They will be there.”
“Good. Don’t screw it up this time.”
The secretary of defense bit back at his insolence. He was a good friend of Sam Reilly’s, and was understandably agitated. She didn’t try to reprimand him for it. “One more thing, Tom.”
“What?”
“Is he armed?”
Tom thought about that seriously. He sighed. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Good. I wouldn’t like to think of him inadvertently killing one of his own.”
“No. But then again, I don’t like to consider what would happen if one of the others reach him first.”
“How could they?” The Secretary asked. “Nobody knows where he is.”
“All right, Genevieve and I will head into town, just to keep a look out while he gets out.”
The Secretary frowned. “Is that really a good idea?”
“Probably not. But I’m not taking chances this time round.”
“Okay. Good luck.”
The Secretary ended the call.
Craig Martin, the director of the CIA, a heavyset man with a surly disposition, approached her. He wore an expression of mulish obstinacy. “Any news, Madam Secretary?”
She nodded. “He’s staying at an ex-girlfriend’s house in Vernazza.”
The lines in his face deepened. “Do we know who the girl is?”
“Yes. It’s Dr. Catarina Marcello.”
“Good God! That can’t be a coincidence.”
“It would be highly unlikely.”
Martin grimaced. “So he knows the truth then?”
“I don’t think so. He just contacted Tom Bower. Said he’d found the contact details online. He’s got no memory and he’s terrified of who he might be.”
“The question is, what are we going to do about it? If he’s gotten this far already it won’t take him long to put the rest of it together.”
She exhaled a deep breath between pursed lips. “I agree. The window’s narrowing. How much time have we got?”
Craig Martin glanced at his wristwatch. “Fifty-six hours.”
She swallowed. “It will be close.”
“What have you done about it?”
The Secretary said, “We’ve dispatched a SEAL team to retrieve him.”
The director frowned. “Won’t our involvement get traced back to us?”
“No. This is a wet team. They’re designed to be separate. A cut off switch so no one can trace them back to us.”
“All right. Let’s just hope they reach him in time.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Andre finished drying himself with a towel.
A rapidly growing team of police detectives shot him questions in rapid fire succession about the ghost ship and specifically, how the police chief was abducted. After all, it wasn’t every day that a dilapidated shipwreck kidnaps the chief of police, before coming alive and racing off at the speed of a jetboat.
The lead detective asked, “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Andre raised his eyebrows. “The ghost ship?”
“Yeah. A ship that looks like a wreck only to be equipped with high powered hydrojet engines, capable of coming alive at a moment’s notice.”
Andre thought about it, not sure how much he was willing to disclose. He made a suppressed smile. Nodded. “They’re called ghost ships. Interpol is constantly searching for them. They look like rust buckets, soon to be shipwrecks, but have powerful engines and high-tech satellite connection.”
“For what purpose?”
“They travel around the world, setting up untraceable, illegal, and highly dangerous marketplaces on the dark web.”
“You’re talking about the part of the internet that isn’t indexed, making it impossible to find on any search engine?”
“No. That’s the deep web. There’s nothing illegal about the deep web and plenty of mainstream websites exist in the deep web. The content of the deep web is hidden behind HTTP encryptions and passwords, and includes many very common uses such as web mail, online banking, and services that users must pay for, and which are protected by paywalls, such as video on demand and some online magazines and newspapers.”
“And the dark web?” the detective asked.
“That’s different. The internet, you see, is split into three different levels. At the top you have the surface web, a place accessible by anyone with a web browser and a search engine. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Below it is the deep web, which is estimated to contain up to ninety percent of the world’s internet data. This is where banking, legal documents, scientific reports, universities, and even social media exist. And way down, below all of that, is the dark web.”
“Where criminals sell their wares in plain sight.”
“Exactly. The dark web is a collection of websites that exist on an encrypted network and cannot be found by using traditional search engines or visited by using traditional browsers. Almost all sites on the so-called Dark Web hide their identity using the Tor encryption tool. It exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access.The darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friend, peer-to-peer networks, as well as large, popular networks like Tor, Freenet, I2P, and Riffle operated by public organizations and individuals.”
“What about the ghost ship?”
“The ghost ship is used to access and maintain specific, most likely highly illegal marketplaces, on the dark web.” Andre took a breath. “The data stored inside here might be worth a fortune to Interpol. It’s a positive goldmine of criminal information. Crime syndicates are willing to spend a fortune to protect information like this. That’s why they use ghost ships. The idea is, if their connection is somehow breached, or their physical location identified, they merely pull the plug, and send the ship straight to the bottom.”
The detective closed his notebook. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Dufort. I’m sure my people will be in touch with your people shortly. We’ll let you know if we locate the ghost ship and, likewise, expect you to share any information you receive.”
Andre shook the detective’s hand. “You have my word.”
He headed back to the apartment that he’d rented.
Inside he took out a secure satellite phone and dialed a number from memory.
A man answered on the first ring. “Yes?”
“It’s done. The man’s dead. But… there’s something else you’re not going to like.”
“What?”
“Sam Reilly wasn’t the only person to come off the Ghost Ship.”
The man on the other end of the line replied, “He wasn’t?”
“No. There was a dead girl in the rowboat with him.”
“Strange.”
“It gets worse. I knew the woman. She was my other target. I killed her three days ago.”
The line went silent for a few seconds, as the man on the other end mulled it over. He said, “But that was nowhere near here. Hell, it wasn’t even on the same damned continent!”
Andre nodded. “I know, I know…”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
Andre swallowed hard. “It means someone else knew about the contract, and they’re leaving me a dangerous message.”
“Yeah?” The man on the other end of the line said. “Well I’ve got a message for you. Sam Reilly’s best friend, Tom Bower, just called the Secretary of Defense. It appears your dead man’s still walking. What’s more, the Secretary of Defense has agreed to send a team in to retrieve him as we speak.”