“Half the boats in the Mediterranean are running drugs,” Ahmet said to the table full of his visitors. “The other half are running guns. People in suits in offices are getting rich. Men who have yachts and seven mistresses. So why shouldn’t we get some crumbs from the rich guys’ table?”
So they agreed.
Two nights later they were aboard the ship. It had been cleared of local crew. The brothers were asked to go into the bursar’s office with an array of tools and take out one of the panels on the wall. They did so. Behind it was a hollow area, about a meter wide and half a meter deep. It was perfect for storage. They left the new hole in the wall open and reported back to Abdul.
Abdul came in and inspected their work. He was pleased. The panel lay on the floor with the bolts that had held it. There wasn’t much of a mess and nothing had been damaged. The brothers had done good work.
“Next, we were told to go below decks until summoned back,” Ahmet said. “When we came back down below, the atmosphere on the ship had changed. The crew was gone, almost all of it. In their place, there were some Middle Eastern guys. They had the scarves. Dark glasses. They looked like Egyptians, and they looked like they wanted trouble. They all had Uzi’s. They didn’t bother us, but they knew we were welders.”
“We understood that this was when a delivery was made,” Ahmet said. “They didn’t want us seeing whoever got on and off.”
“We sat in the ship’s kitchen, my brother, Hassan, and me,” Ahmet said. “We opened a bottle of wine and smoked cigarettes. It must have been less than an hour. One of the gunman came for us. He spoke to us in Arabic and told us we could go back upstairs and finish our work. He asked us if we had more cigarettes, so we gave him a pack. We wanted him to be our friend, you know?”
He searched the table nervously and looked for some interaction from his audience. None was forthcoming.
“We went back upstairs and Abdul was standing there. He was looking into our secret compartment. There was a bag in it. A sack. Rough material, like burlap. The type of thing tools are kept in. He motioned with his head at the hiding place. ‘Close it up now!’ he said to us. So we did. We put the steel plating back in place and used an automatic drill to put the bolts back. He didn’t let us look in the bag. We had no idea.”
He drew a breath. Alex interrupted him.
“Ahmet,” she said. “What was the exact date that we’re talking about?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Try harder than that, if you will.”
After some consultation he claimed it was June the twenty-first of this year. Or thereabouts. He wasn’t certain.
“Why is the exact date important?” Federov asked.
“Dates are always important,” Alex said.
She thanked the Arab and he continued.
“Abdul paid us in cash. So we had some fun with the money in port. Liquor. Women.”
“Well, that’s not a strict Muslim lifestyle now, is it?” Rizzo chipped in.
Ahmet hung his head a little. He had no idea who Rizzo was and didn’t know whether to spit or salute. He did neither. “No,” he said. “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble if we’d been strict,” he said, “but we weren’t.”
Federov made a motion with his hand that suggested Ahmet should move the story along. He did. He said they sailed in two days as scheduled, and everything was fine on board. Then after two days at sea, his brother came to him. Hassan had purchased this little electronic tracking device, he said. It had only cost twenty euros. But Hassan had this bold idea. He was going to go into the compartment and slip it into whatever was in the bag. Then they could follow the bag to its ultimate destination.
“For what purpose?” Alex asked. “To steal it back or to blackmail the recipient?”
“I didn’t want to go along with this,” Ahmet said. “It was my brother’s idea. Hassan’s. Completely.”
“That’s nice, but it’s not what I asked,” she said.
“Blackmail,” he said.
“It turned out that he and his brother were stealing from my cargo too,” Federov said with bitterness, staring at his prisoner. “They’d break into shipping containers and skim merchandise. They’d smuggle it off the ships and fence it, then the insurance companies would come back to me. Prosecutors in Italy brought charges of fraud against two of my companies two years ago.”
“As for these brothers creating problems for me…,” Federov continued, “we’re going to discuss it later in the evening.”
“My brother’s idea,” Ahmet said again. “It wasn’t me. It was my brother,” Ahmet said. “We have an expression in Sicily,” he said. “A cani tintu catina curta. For a bad dog, a short leash. Hassan should have been on a very short leash.”
“But you went along with all of it,” said Alex, first in English and then in Italian. “Doesn’t that make you equally guilty? And apparently you had been doing this sort of thing for years.”
“Exactly,” Federov said.
Ahmet looked very ill at ease with the notion, and Federov looked vindicated. Rizzo glanced at his watch. Not that he was going anywhere. But fatigue was starting to take a toll on all of them. “Let’s get on with it,” he said.
“We waited until we had access to the purser’s office,” Ahmet said. “We went in one night. We had a shipmate give him too much to drink.” He paused, looked at Alex as if he couldn’t decide whether to elaborate, then decided to go with it. “There were some women on the ship. Women who worked the freighters in the area. There was a Dutch girl. We made sure she kept him busy one night. We had a whole warning system. She was to signal us if Abdul left his suite.”
“Wasn’t his office locked at night?” Alex asked. “I would think it would have been.”
Ahmet managed a rare laugh. “That was the beauty of it,” he said. “The Dutch girl helped us steal the keys too. You know, when he had his pants off. And just overnight so we could get in and out. It worked perfectly.”
“Brilliant,” said Alex, watching him sweat and noting where his brilliance had landed him.
From there, according to Ahmet’s recollection, it was all smooth sailing. Ahmet did the work on the compartment, and Hassam helped with the tools and watched the door. They were both shocked when they got to the burlap bag and opened it.
“We thought it was drugs. Heroin or cocaine. It was a white substance in individual bricks. But both of us had worked light construction and demolition in Sicily. So when we examined it, we knew it was explosives.”
“What?” Alex murmured, looking up from her notes.
“Top of the line stuff. The type the Americans use in Iraq. The type they’re always using and then getting used against them. Chemicals,” he said. He made an expansive gesture with his large dirty hands. “Boom!” he said.
If it was an attempt to add levity to the evening and win new friends, it failed miserably.
Alex put down her pen and leaned back. She took a minute to re-track Ahmet’s testimony so far and summarize everything in English for Peter. There had been a whole skein of loose logic that had been hanging together with a few strings. And now the strings were being pulled into place and the logic was emerging.
Ahmet sat on the hot seat and continued to dab at his cheek. He was obviously in considerable pain. Alex guessed that Federov’s first punch had fractured the Arab’s cheekbone and the second punch had redesigned it.
“I did some further checking on things this afternoon before I left Rome,” Rizzo then announced slowly. He spoke English so as to conveniently include everyone except Ahmet. “This man has a long police record in Italy. So did his brother. I ran background computer checks on both of them, then cross-referenced his activities with other investigations involving the national police in Italy. One detail that came immediately to the surface was where Ahmet had worked recently. Aboard El Fuguero. This was a ship that was on our list as a possible conduit for some explosives that were stolen from an Iraqi military supply depot after the American invasion. Our intelligence tells us the cache was broken up several times and shipped to the West. Through Cyprus and Sardinia. That’s consistent with this ship.”