Her suspicions were confirmed when she opened a PDF with the personnel roster for both Disney facitilities and found that both had suddenly left their jobs the day after each break-in. She reasoned that their getaways were clean because no one had suspected an immigrant janitor of a high-tech robbery. She packed up her laptop and left.
Her next stop was to U.S. Immigration and its French counterpart. It took half a day to find out that, although their passports claimed Nigerian citizenship, in each case the port of departure prior to entry to the United States was Sudan. Pirates.
Her next call was to the African desk at the CIA. It took some sweet talk, but she managed to get a small investigation going into any connection between these two Nigerians, whatever their real names were, and the outlaw regime of Theodore Roosevelt Maguambi. Named after the U.S. president, and using his half-brother’s United Nations clout to wrangle funds, Maguambi went on to bribe and murder his way into power. Now he had unleashed on an indifferent world the second coming of the Barbary pirates. But unlike the 1801 solution ordered by Thomas Jefferson, “Find them and hang them,” which solved the problem once and for all, today’s more civilized approach was to pay off the pirates and hope they went away. They didn’t — and the ransoms enlarged their war chests and created more acts of high seas piracy.
The cop in Brooke knew she needed to connect the robberies at Disney to the pirates and then maybe to the attack on the Vera Cruz and the Nebraska. Mush. That was it, today’s Mush moment, as she had started to call them — times when her mind wandered to Mush and she got all — mushy. These episodes made her doubt she had matured at all. Silly schoolgirl crushes were supposed to have been drummed out of her at Harvard Law, and if not, surely in basic training, JAG School, and then Quantico on her way to becoming number one in the Bureau’s New York office. Now she worked at the White House. If they only knew that late at night, when it was just her and the moon shadows on the wall, she was just a teenage girl with insecurities intact. Somehow they always evaporated with the morning light. The real issue she dealt with whenever she met men, certain men, was that as soon as they found out she was an agent, they viewed her as “butch” and crossed her off their list of potential love interests; but not Mush. The fact that she worked in a man’s world never affected the way he looked at her. I wonder where, and under what ocean, he is now?
Joey Palumbo hadn’t been on a carrier since he visited the Intrepid Museum back in New York. The USS Ronald Reagan was massive, twice the length of the old Fighting “I,” and a city unto itself. Eight minutes after getting an escort to lead him down to the CIC, he was finally face to face with the man he had come seven thousand miles out to sea to meet. He had traveled the last four hundred of those miles in the backseat of an EC3 Hawkeye, which hit the carrier deck at one hundred miles an hour and was jolted to an arresting-wire stop just forty feet later. He was still rubbing the welts the four-point seat belt had made in his chest as his body kept moving at one hundred while the plane lurched to a stop.
“Hi, Brick.”
“Palumbo! This has got to be real important to get you out of San Francisco.”
“Is there someplace we can talk alone?”
Sensing that the issue was really serious, he extended his hand and they left the Combat Information Center and found a small stateroom in officer country a few feet down the hall. Two LTs were about to bunk in it. When they saw him they snapped to attention.
“At ease, men. Give us the room for a minute.”
Joey waited for them to pile out and then shut the door. “I ain’t in SF anymore, Brick. I’m now at the White House. I am here on a very urgent and sensitive matter.”
“White House, huh; so that’s how you get the frequent flyer mileage to fly out to the Mediterranean tail-hook class.”
“I can’t give you any details, but I need you to tell me everything you know about Commander Russ Klaven.”
“Clay? Is that why you are here? Joey I served with him…”
“Yeah I know, ten years ago. It took forty hours of computer time to match databases with someone I knew who also worked with Klaven. Your name came out of that hat.”
“You know he was Naval Intelligence, right?”
“I pulled his service jacket. What I want, is to know about him, the man?”
“I need more than that.”
“I told you I can’t discuss the details.” Joey started to feel concerned; he hadn’t come all this way to make some kind of deal.
“No, I mean, I need to see some contravening orders to my oath of secrecy before I put myself in Leavenworth.”
“Fair enough.” Joey opened his portfolio and took out an order from the White House, endorsed by the Secretary of the Navy. He slid it under Brick’s nose. “Will this do?”
“The president? Yeah, I’d say so. All the same, I’m keeping this just in case,” Brick said as he folded the “get-out-of-the-brig-free-card” and slid it into his day-uniform shirt pocket.
“I understand. Now, about Klaven.”
“Man, he was the brains of the outfit.”
For the next hour Joey learned all about the man who had confronted Hiccock in the rest room of Mimmo’s.
Outside the club, Raffey took out his ticket stub for the valet; Hanna stuffed it back in his pocket. “My place is just on the corner. You can pick up your car in the morning.”
Raffey liked the sound of that, especially the “in the morning” part.
As they walked off down the street arm in arm, Abrim emerged from the club and watched.
In the hallway of the flophouse hotel, Hanna fumbled with the key as Raffey started kissing her neck. She laughed and shook him off to better focus on the lock and key. Once inside she went straight to the cabinet and pulled down a bottle of vodka. “The bathroom is through there. I’ll fix us a drink.”
“That’s okay; I don’t need to use the bathroom.” He plopped down on the couch and started to unbutton his shirt. Because her back was to him he didn’t see the slight mask of frustration wash across her face. He grabbed the remote for the TV and turned it on. Behind him a man emerged from the bathroom with a rolled towel between his two fists. As Raffey yawned, the man brought the towel down across Raffey’s mouth. Startled, the young man started to scream, but the towel heavily muffled it. Hanna was tapping the air out of a syringe when the doorbell rang.
She and her accomplice were stunned. “Hold him.” She put down the syringe and went to the door. “Who is it?”
“It is Abrim. I have a message from the Prince.”
“Scheisse. It’s the goon from the club,” she said in a whisper to the man who was trying to stop Raffey from making any noise.
“Get rid of him.” He whispered loudly.
“Go away — I am not interested,” she yelled to the door.
“The Prince has asked me to tell you he will pay fifty thousand dollars if you’ll just agree to have dinner with him tomorrow night.”
“Fine, I will. I will be at the club tomorrow at eight. You can pick me up there. Now go away.”
Abrim didn’t know whether to believe her or not. But he didn’t really care. He had done his “pimping” for the night. He could report back that he had made the offer and she accepted. If she didn’t show up, it would only make the Prince more smitten and he’d up the sum to one hundred thousand. He turned to walk off.