“Yes,” Donaldson answered. “Feels thin.”
The suit on his left agreed.
“Which part?” Crocker asked, trying to keep his composure. “The evidence linking Zaman to the Syrena, or the trail of Malie Tingvoll?”
“Both, Crocker. Both.”
“I don’t disagree. But what does it cost us to go after the Syrena?”
“Potentially a great deal.”
Anders popped open a briefcase and handed his boss a sheet of paper. The senior officer propped a pair of gold-framed reading glasses on his long nose. “First of all, what do you know about this ship?”
“Nothing, really. The port facility security officer told us it was some kind of freighter. Medium capacity.”
Donaldson glanced at the printout. “Turns out that it’s registered in Yemen.”
Crocker knew that was bad.
“The Yemenis don’t like us much,” Donaldson continued. “We touch a ship of theirs and they’re going to scream bloody murder.”
The guy on Donaldson’s left agreed. “They’ll use it as an opportunity to create an incident. Get the White House involved, the UN. We don’t want that.”
Donaldson clasped his hands together. “So we can expect zero cooperation from the Yemenis.”
“Understood.”
“Number two, the Syrena’s next scheduled port of call is Salalah, in Oman,” the CIA officer continued. “Arrives there tomorrow morning.”
Crocker sat forward on the edge of his chair. “Which means that if we’re going to board it in Salalah, we have to move quickly.”
Donaldson took a long swig of the Coca-Cola Davis had brought from the minibar under the desk on the opposite wall, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“The Omanis are reasonable people,” he explained, “who happen to be our friends. But they’re also extremely proud. Which means whatever kind of operation is launched on their soil they’re going to want to do themselves.”
Crocker spent a moment considering how to negotiate the obstacles that had just been put in his way.
“Can we ask the Omanis to monitor the ship when it docks, to see who gets off?” he asked.
Donaldson looked at Anders, who frowned.
“I don’t know how seriously they’ll take our request, but we can try.”
“How about a couple of us go there ourselves to watch what comes off the ship?” Crocker inquired.
“I expected you to ask that.”
“Nothing official. We act like tourists. Witnesses. If we see anything, we alert the Omanis.”
“Unwise.”
“Completely undercover.”
“And what happens if no one debarks in Salalah?”
“We proceed to the next port of call and do the same thing,” Crocker answered.
“That seems unnecessary.”
“Why?”
“We’ve got local assets who can do that.”
“You know as well as I do that we can’t rely on people who aren’t ours.”
“I said no.”
“Some of them sympathize with the fundamentalists. They don’t have as much at stake.”
“Dammit, Crocker. You think this is the only operation we’re running here? Let it fucking go!”
Crocker bit his bottom lip and started to tremble with an anger he had to use all his self-control to contain. Shifting his gaze from the glass table between them to Donaldson’s knotted-up face, he said, “All of us on the team feel badly that Zaman got away. We don’t want to give up on him or this girl from Norway. We all have families. It was sickening to see what they did to those kidnapped girls. There must be something we can do.” Crocker immediately scolded himself for pleading. For sounding weak.
Donaldson looked at Davis and Mancini, who were leaning on the wall behind their leader, and smiled. “It’s my job to look at the bigger picture. To look at the totality of all the things we have going on. You might think this is important, but I’m telling you that in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t. You and your men have done enough.”
“We don’t feel that way,” Crocker snapped.
“I appreciate your commitment and understand your frustration,” Donaldson said as Anders shut his briefcase. “We have experts back at Langley working on the laptop you fished out of the pond. They’re not convinced that the e-mails Rafiq received even originated with Zaman.”
“I disagree.” Crocker sensed what was coming next.
“We brought your team in for a specific mission, which unfortunately went wrong. It’s time to send you and your men home.”
No!
Donaldson rose; his bookends followed. “I’m sure you gentlemen miss your families. I’m sure they miss you, too,” he said with all the sincerity of a Hallmark greeting card.
Crocker resisted the impulse to reach out and grab Donaldson by the throat. Struggling to keep his cool, he watched the tall man in the tan suit turn and saunter out, with the two suits following. One of them cracked a joke he couldn’t hear. Their laughter was muffled by the closing door.
Crocker’s heart pounded so hard he thought it was going to jump out of his chest. His fists and teeth were clenched. All the hatred of authority he’d accumulated since he was in grade school rushed to the surface.
He looked up to see the defeat on Davis’s face. It was like a dagger pushed into his throat.
The three men were quietly packing their gear when Akil arrived from the port, looking pleased with himself. Sweat had formed two large Us under the arms of his pale blue shirt.
“What have you got?” Crocker asked.
In his big hand Akil clutched a quarter-inch sheaf of papers he said contained the lists of crew members and passengers who had passed through the Karachi port in the past eight days.
The four men abandoned their packing and tore through the lists, but found no Malie Tingvoll or Abu Rasul Zaman. Not that they had expected to see either name.
The dozen people listed as the crew of the Syrena were all men, mostly of what seemed to be Somali and Lebanese descent.
Davis did notice something-the ship was described as a tanker, not a cargo ship.
“What kind of tanker?” Crocker asked.
“I wasn’t able to find that out,” Akil answered.
“Hmm…”
“You want me to go back?”
Crocker stood looking down at the top of the table he had punched and cracked earlier, wondering how much it was going to cost to replace, when Ritchie walked in pulling a suitcase on wheels. Behind him followed a very tired-looking Mikael Klausen, wearing a beige raincoat, a sky blue shirt that matched his eyes, jeans, and brown loafers, his straight blond hair sticking up.
In his cloud of frustration and regret, Crocker had forgotten about him.
Now the Norwegian stood before him, asking what they’d learned so far. It surprised Crocker how hard he found it to answer.
Klausen knitted his pale brow and listened carefully. His hand rubbed his jaw like he was hoping a genie would pop out.
“And your government turned down your request to proceed to Salalah? Is that correct?”
“Yes. Their main interest is Zaman, and they believe that the evidence linking the ship to him isn’t strong enough to justify the problems it could cause with the Omanis. Our contact, Mr. Donaldson, said he would pursue the matter with the government of Oman. I don’t know how strongly he’ll do that.”
Klausen folded his short arms across his chest. “Give me an hour or so to make some calls. I’m checked into a room down the hall.”
Minutes after Klausen left, Crocker was in the bedroom talking to his wife. He was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Davis, reporting that Lou Donaldson wanted him to attend a meeting at the U.S. consulate in half an hour.
“Why?”
Davis handed the phone over. According to Anders, who was still on the line, the meeting concerned Abu Rasul Zaman.
“I’ll have a car waiting for you downstairs in ten minutes,” Anders said.