Chapter 45
Marshall had given him something to help him sleep, and Joe had slept the clock round. He had a pounding headache, but he still felt stronger than the day before. He dragged himself to the bathroom, washed, and changed into clean clothes. He had to get to work. He had to find Vivian.
When Marshall brought him a plate of eggs and toast with a pitcher of orange juice, Joe engulfed them like a starving man. They stayed down. He was ready for anything now.
First things first. Joe called Fred on his satellite phone and filled him in. “What do you think, Fred?”
“The pictures you sent last night helped. I’ve moved it up the food chain.”
Joe wasn’t interested in Fred’s food chain. “The people on the sub have Vivian. What’s the Navy going to do?”
“By your own admission, she was a civilian operating in international waters and trespassed on a yacht flying a foreign flag. It’s not viewed as a naval matter.”
Joe ground his teeth. He couldn’t blow up in front of Fred. Fred was his only ally. “But?”
“But the pictures got their attention. They think she’s a Swedish Gotland-class sub.”
“I told you that.” A while ago.
“With no explicit verification. Now we have verification. I don’t know what they’re doing up there. They’ll never tell me, or you either, but I think they’ve probably sent a vessel to check her out. A rogue sub with those capabilities is no joke.”
“I know.”
“But she’s a very able vessel. She won’t be easy to track.”
He wished Fred didn’t keep calling the sub she. It was hard not to confuse it with Vivian. “You know where the sub was and the exact time. Doesn’t that help?”
“She could be a lot of places by now.” Fred rustled something next to the phone receiver. It sounded like a candy wrapper. “But I bet they’re looking.”
“How can I help?” Joe said.
“Seems like you’ve helped enough.”
“What if I can find out the sub’s next target?”
“They’d be interested, probably send someone to check that out.”
That was what he had to do.
Knuckles slammed his door.
“It’s open,” he called. He should have brought a first aid kit. He’d chewed through the ship’s aspirin already.
Marshall stepped into the stateroom. “Captain Glascoe says you might have a course for us, sir.”
“No course correction.” Glascoe was following the sub’s last heading because it was the only thing they could do. They’d cut their speed, hoping for a ping from Vivian’s transponder, but so far it had remained silent.
Marshall left without another word.
Joe closed his eyes and saw pictures of Vivian. Vivian helping him onto the boat. Vivian standing in his bedroom demanding to come along. Vivian knocking out the drone with a tray. Vivian scared inside his sub. Vivian joking with him about showing Prince Timgad that women could participate in submarine races. Vivian standing in his billiard room with a smile and a sandwich. She was his friend, maybe his best friend, and he’d let her down. Her mother wouldn’t even get a body to bury.
Edison nudged his knee, then looked at the computer.
“You’re right, boy. The answer’s in there. The answer is always in there.” He would finish what he’d started here. He owed Vivian that. That and so much more.
Edison wagged his tail and jumped up on his bed. He lay with his back touching Joe’s leg.
“No dogs on the bed,” Joe whispered.
Edison closed his eyes and pretended not to hear. That was good enough for Joe.
He stroked the dog’s head once, then picked up his laptop. He had to push down his grief. Vivian would never give in to grief in this situation, and he do what she would have wanted.
He had to get to work.
He’d start with what he knew. At this point, he was pretty certain the sub was under the control of the women who’d been in the plane that supposedly had crashed. The yacht belonged to the aunt of the woman who’d been engaged to Prince Timgad — Laila Dakkar.
She was an unlikely sub commander. She’d majored in film studies at King’s College London. Not much else about her on the Internet. A few essays about films, her face in the background of pictures on Facebook, usually next to her now-deceased twin sister. They’d seemed happy and at ease. The loss of a beloved sister and the thought of a lifetime as the wife of her murderer could drive anyone to extreme lengths.
What was her end goal? She’d killed the bodyguard and had probably intended to kill the prince, but there were easier ways to kill him. She could have sent an assassin after him, like someone had after Joe. She’d blown up an oil tanker, but that hadn’t been a particularly high-value target, and it hadn’t had any oil in it. With the submarine, she could have taken out a military target, or an oil rig, or laid mines to destroy a harbor. Even sinking the sub and walking away would cost her government millions, assuming they had paid for it.
She had to be after a target worth more than all that.
A few hours later, he was no closer to an answer. He’d investigated every woman on the plane. They’d all probably known one other for years. Most were related — cousins or second cousins or some kind of far-flung relatives that Joe couldn’t name. They showed up in each other’s childhood pictures, usually taken abroad. They’d attended private schools together, received college degrees from Western institutions together. Some had been married, most hadn’t. None had living children. As Vivian had said, these were not women who would want to settle down to a life of subservience behind a veil, but that was exactly what they had faced.
They disappeared after the plane crash. They could have gone off into the world and pursued their own destinies. But they hadn’t. Instead, they’d boarded a submarine they could barely have known how to control and set off across the sea to sink the prince’s sub, to torpedo the tanker, and then?
He used the head and ate a handful of crackers with ginger ale, glad his stomach was finally settled. He had to figure this out soon. Edison wandered off, probably to eat or to use his toilet mat on the back deck (the poop deck, Vivian had called it), and came back. The ship plowed on, maybe getting farther from her with each moment.
He hadn’t learned anything from the women’s online profiles. They’d been discreet and careful, as if they’d always been preparing to sink into obscurity. That left their men.
Laila’s former brother-in-law and fiancé. Laila’s brother and father. The retiring king. The potential male heirs.
He’d trawled through tons of websites before he finally caught a break.
The king’s son, Mishaal, had just posted a picture of himself on Facebook. He was standing next to a railing with a blonde with seriously augmented breasts. Behind him was a dark ocean and a starry sky. A quick run through translation software elicited a tag line of “Partying with the bitches” which didn’t help. The picture wasn’t tagged by location, although Mishaal usually tagged his pictures.
Joe opened an app that could determine a location based on the position of the stars in a photograph. It took work to clean up the photo enough to run it through the app. Worth every second.
“Edison!” he yelled.
The dog jumped. He’d been sound asleep.
“Sorry, buddy.” He stroked his back. “Fetch Captain Glascoe!”
Edison jumped off the bed and sprinted out the door like his tail was on fire. God, he loved that dog.
Less than a minute later, he came back with Glascoe in tow.
“The dog says you needed me?” Glascoe strode into the room.