Текст книги "Mirage"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Jack Brul
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“Ho-hum,” Max said. “What did you expect? Ali Baba’s treasure room?”

Juan started at how accurate his friend had been. “Never hurts to hope.”

Cabrillo wrestled one of the bales from the stack and slit open the plastic with the knife he always carried. Fresh pain erupted from his shoulder, reminding him that he would need to take it easy for a few days. He opened the tear enough to pull out some money, a four-inch-thick chunk of hundred-dollar bills.

“I read someplace that a stack of one thousand American dollar bills is a little over four inches thick. These are hundreds, so I’ve got a hundred grand here.” They both looked at the enormity of the cache and had a better understanding than just about anyone on the planet of exactly what a billion dollars really was.

He wedged the money back into place, and this time let Max put the bale back into the container. They closed the door, the locking arm coming down with a finality that ended an eight-year operation. Ironically, their fee would most likely come from this very stack of money once it made its way into a black budget account.

Hours later, after the dead Iraqis had been buried at sea and the prisoners and cash transferred over to the USS Boxer, the Chairman hosted a dinner for the crew in the dining room and, to rounds of raucous applause, detailed the money each member of the Corporation should expect for the successful recovery of The Container.

As fate would have it – and, in their business, fate dealt more hands than most – Juan had just poured his second glass of Veuve Clicquot when he felt his phone vibrate.

It was the duty officer in the op center. “Sorry to ruin the party, Chairman. There’s a call on your private line.”

“L’Enfant,” Juan breathed. It had to be, and that could only mean the information broker had found Pytor Kenin. After this untimely but lucrative distraction, it was time to get back on the trail of Yuri Borodin’s murderer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Considering their destination, it made sense that Eddie Seng would accompany Juan for the scouting mission. L’Enfant had only provided an address. Mark and Eric had done their usual excellent research on the location, but nothing beat eyes on the ground. They flew commercial from Jakarta to Shanghai.

Neither man was particularly comfortable in Eddie’s native land. Seng didn’t like it because he’d spent much of his CIA career here, recruiting agents to spy for him, and he’d had more than his fair share of scrapes with the various security arms of the People’s government. He suspected the dossier on him ran about a thousand pages. He looked nothing like he did in those days, the very best plastic surgeons the CIA’s money could buy had seen to that, but, nevertheless, every time he’d returned here he felt that he was being watched.

Cabrillo was also a person of interest to the Ministry of State Security since he had once blown up a Chinese Navy destroyer called the Chengdo. Technically, Dirk Pitt had blown it out of the water, but he’d done so while aboard the Oregon. That wasn’t what weighed on the Chairman. It was the fact that that particular battle had cost him a leg. He spent little time dwelling on the loss, which he’d more than made up for in so many ways, yet there were times when he felt it acutely.

Home to twenty-five million people, Shanghai was arguably the largest city in the world. As they rocketed through suburbs and sprawling acres of apartment blocks festooned with drying laundry aboard the Maglev train from the airport, Juan didn’t doubt it. Eddie had been here on many occasions, this was the Chairman’s first. Hitting speeds in excess of two hundred and fifty miles per hour, the ultrasleek train riding on a cushion of air took just minutes to reach the city’s Pudong District. A cab would have taken hours to cover the eighteen miles.

Just a few years ago, Pudong, on the eastern side of the Huangpu River, had been sparsely populated, unlike the western bank, which contained the old sections of the city and masses of bland skyscrapers left over from the 1970s expansion. Now Pudong was the face of the city, with its iconic skyline of oddly shaped buildings, most notably the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, with its two strange globes stacked on top of each other, and the beautiful Shanghai World Financial Center. The streets had the hustle and noise of New York City.

They cabbed over to their hotel but checked in separately, since two men staying in one room would arouse suspicion. As luck would have it, neither room faced the right direction, so Juan had to play the ugly American and demand a different room. The second one was perfect.

The address L’Enfant provided was one of the newer skyscrapers in Pudong, a gleaming rectangle of black reflective glass that topped out at over four hundred feet. It wasn’t the tallest building in the district, not by a large margin, but it was still impressive.

Eddie met Cabrillo in his new room with a view of their target tower. The hotel wasn’t as tall as the building, but for now their view was fine. Eddie had entered China as a medical devices salesman so he could pack in some unusual electronics. Customs had gone over it, of course, but had seen nothing amiss.

He took one of the devices to the window, which opened a crack, and stuck a probe outside and aimed it at the nearby building. He watched a digital display as he aimed the probe at each individual floor, starting at the ground and working his way up. When he was aiming the probe at the second-to-top floor, he grunted at the display. The top floor showed him similar information.

“Well?” Juan asked.

The device was a laser that could read the vibrations on a windowpane. With the right software, those vibrations could be turned into the spoken words of anyone on the other side of the glass. They hadn’t bothered bringing a computer to interpret the vibrations. They were only interested if anyone in the target building was trying to counter the use of such a laser detector.

“Top two floors have random-flux generators,” Eddie replied, putting the device back in its case. “The panes are dancing like dervishes. Impossible for a laser to get a read on what’s being said inside.”

Juan nodded thoughtfully. This didn’t necessarily mean L’Enfant was correct, but it boded well that whoever occupied the top two floors was so security conscious. “Okay, this is looking good. We’ll split up now and find out all we can about the occupants of those floors.”

Eddie was already wearing his first disguise, a package-delivery boy. Later, he would change into a suit so he could try to talk his way into the building as a prospective tenant.

Juan was dressed as a tourist, complete with fanny pack, baseball cap, and a windbreaker with a panda logo. Thanks to an online photo-mapping service, they already knew the building had an extensive rooftop garden, and he had determined the best place to look down into it.

Four blocks from the black tower, Cabrillo entered the ornate lobby of another building, one so new it still smelled faintly of paint. There was an express elevator to the observation deck. A group of schoolgirls in matching skirts and sweaters talked and giggled and played elaborate hand-slapping games while they waited for the elevator. The two teachers chatted with a representative from the building’s staff.

The elevator car finally arrived and the group entered. Juan gave the two teachers a goofy grin and they soon ignored him. They exited seven hundred eighty feet above the street onto an open deck surrounded by a chest-high glass barrier. The vista was stunning. Far below, they could see ships in the Huangpu River and the famous Bund Promenade on the opposite side. To the north was the mighty Yangtze. And if one looked east, over the sprawl, there were the placid waters of the East China Sea.

The children oohed and aahed at the amazing views. For his part, Cabrillo was suitably impressed, but he had come here for one particular vista. He took a moment to check to see if anyone on the observation deck looked out of place. There was one security guard, who made a slow circuit of the deck like a shark patrolling one of those enormous aquarium tanks. The rest were tourists like himself or young couples playing a little hooky during the workweek. He approached the best spot for looking down on the rooftop garden but gave it no more than a glance before turning to look at the central structure that housed this tower’s elevator machinery. He saw the security camera immediately, the only one on the observation deck. It was trained on the spot Cabrillo had seen was the best to study the target building. Someone wanted to know if they were being watched.

Juan hadn’t reacted when he’d spotted the camera. He was too professional for that. He was also curious. He moved out of its range, strolling along like any typical tourist. He spent another twenty minutes looking at the view. The schoolgirls were gone, replaced by a group of German tourists on a package holiday. He estimated enough time had passed that no one would connect him to what he was about to do. He had already removed his baseball cap and reversed his jacket. It had been light blue with a logo. Now it was dark green and unadorned.

He moved under the camera and, when no one was looking, reached up to change its angle ever so slightly. He moved away to wait. It took ten minutes. The guy who arrived wore a suit, not the uniform of a typical maintenance man. He went straight for the camera and returned it to its original position. The man had a Bluetooth headset strapped over one ear, and upon instructions of whoever was monitoring the camera feed, he tweaked the angle of the camera another few degrees.

Cabrillo had already taken the first available elevator as soon as the man had made his move. Now he loitered on the sidewalk outside the building. He had to wait only a few minutes. Mr. Fix It didn’t work at this building. He hit the streets with a long stride. Juan knew where he was headed, so he took off down a parallel street. He was just in time to see the man enter the black tower where L’Enfant said Kenin was holed up.

Yes indeed, the occupant of the top floors was very security conscious. “Must be paranoid,” the Chairman muttered under his breath.

They hadn’t really considered the observation deck as a suitable place to watch the black tower for the simple reason that it was closed at night. He had merely gone there to test his enemy’s resolve. Juan returned to the building and spoke with a woman who managed leasings. Through a dummy front, the Corporation had already rented space on the sixtieth floor that gave them a perfect vantage. He was given keys to the suite of rooms but declined her offer to show him the space. Juan rode the elevator up.

There were three rooms, the first of which was an outer reception, with a secretary’s desk and a seating area with a couch and matching chairs. A pair of doors led to the offices themselves. The offices were identically furnished – standard desks, credenzas, and chairs. There was even generic artwork on the walls. Cabrillo ignored it all. He removed a pair of compact but surprisingly powerful binoculars from his fanny pack and glassed the rooftop terrace four blocks away and two hundred feet down.

His view was unrestricted. Like this building, the target rooftop was surrounded by a glass railing, only this one was at least eight feet tall, and he suspected it was bulletproof. Entry to the terrace was from an elevator located in a pavilion on the building’s southern corner. There was a long, shimmering pool surrounded by a teak deck. One end of the pool was piled high with rocks with water tumbling over them in an artful, natural display. Near it, and also set in rocks so it looked like a natural spring, was a hot tub with traces of steam rising off its surface. There were hundreds of plantings, and paths winding through the trees and shrubbery. The terrace looked like something Disney would create for one of their resorts, and Juan had to admit he was charmed by the effect.

Later, they would lug over their gear from the hotel. Juan’s cover was photojournalist, and he had lenses many times more powerful than the binoculars he carried. To enter China, Eddie and he had had to list a hotel where they were staying, but from now on this suite would be their home.

Hours later, they were eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in one of the offices, discussing what they had learned. Cabrillo had just finished his report and used a piece of extra crispy to prod Eddie into telling his tale. They would have liked to have Max and some of the others listen in, but cell signals were too easily intercepted, and if the encryption was too tough for the government to crack, the police would be on them in minutes.

“There are two guards in the lobby,” Eddie told him. “And unless you have a building-issued ID or an appointment, they won’t let you loiter. All deliveries to the building go in through a back door. The packages are signed for, and internal security makes the delivery to the proper office. I talked to a couple delivery boys. No exceptions.

“I got myself an appointment with an import/export firm on the twentieth floor. The elevators go up to the thirty-eighth and are unrestricted, but on each of them there’s a key slot to go up one more level.”

“But the top twofloors have acoustical security,” Juan said.

Seng nodded. “Here’s the kicker. I physically counted the floors from the outside. The building has forty-one stories. The key-access-only floor is a buffer between the two-story penthouse and the rest of the tower. From thirty-nine, you switch elevators to go to the top.”

“Are the elevators in the center of the building?”

Eddie simply nodded.

“Then access to the penthouse is from the southern corner. At least there’s an elevator there that goes to the rooftop.”

“We need to find someone with one of those keys,” Seng said.

“Won’t do us any good. First off, I bet three of the key slots are dummies, and the access key works in just one elevator. And you can be sure security is going to be tight up there. Someone not authorized stepping off that car is going to raise the alarm. The elevator to the top two floors and the roof goes into lockdown, police are called or the guards handle the problem themselves.”

“Disguise?”

“Considering it,” Juan said. “But that means figuring out who exactly has the authority to go up to thirty-nine and then up to the penthouse levels.”

Eddie shook his head. “Only way to do that is to ride that elevator all day long.”

“And did it look to you like security is going to allow that?”

“No,” Eddie said miserably. “Stairwells?”

“Will be blocked off at thirty-eight. We could pick the lock, but there will be cameras watching it. And before you suggest killing the power to the building, we both know they’ll have battery backup and a generator.”

“We’re talking as though this place is impregnable?”

“So far, it appears to be. Even if we can get into that one elevator shaft, it still puts us one floor below Kenin’s.” This high level of security told Juan that he had indeed found the rogue admiral and he was the kind of man who planned his security thoroughly. “I bet the ventilation system stops at thirty-nine and the penthouse levels have their own heating and cooling.”

“What about the structural chases for water and sewerage pipes?” Eddie asked.

“Too tight, and I would have a motion sensor installed on thirty-nine.”

“Well, we know he won’t be leaving anytime soon.” Kenin would be undergoing cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance. The doctor would live and work inside the safe house. He might be allowed to leave on errands but would always be escorted. Kenin would rejoin society only when he was healed and looked nothing like his former self.

“Let’s just keep our eye on the place for a few days and see what presents itself.”

At dawn the following morning, they saw the first stirrings of activity on the roof. The building’s black glass walls remained as opaque as ever. A three-man security detail appeared on the open terrace. Juan watched them through a telephoto lens mounted on a tripod. One man remained by the elevator while the other two, guns drawn, checked every inch of the rooftop garden. They looked under bushes and around the waterfall. The pool lining was bright blue, so they could see it was clear. The hot tub lining, on the other hand, was dark, and one of the guards plunged its depth with a pool skimmer. They checked everything and missed nothing. And Juan could tell they kept in communication with one another at all times.

Solidly professional and deeply depressing. He had been thinking of somehow getting onto the roof and assaulting downward into the penthouse rather than coming up from below. These guys foiled that idea. As soon as contact was lost with one of the guards, the one by the elevator would go back to the penthouse and lock it down. By the time an attacking force breached the apartment, Kenin would be long gone.

He laid out that scenario to Eddie.

“So we flush him out and guard all exits, ready to snatch him off the streets,” Seng summed up.

Juan immediately saw the flaw… two flaws. Kenin could hole up in an office on a lower floor and wait out the attack. And, two, the police would be called as soon as the breach was discovered. Kenin had needed local help to establish his safe house, local help with serious pull.

The streets would be swarming with cops by the time he reached the ground floor. It would be impossible to follow him let alone stage a kidnapping.

For several hours, nothing happened. Eddie was studying the roof while Juan paced the outer office trying to come up with a plan. The same three-man security detail emerged again from the elevator and performed another scan, checking that nothing had changed on their isolated mesa of steel and glass. Eddie called in the Chairman so he could watch through his binoculars.

After the sweep, two of the guards went below while the guard posted at the elevator stayed where he was. Moments later, a woman wearing a plain white robe appeared. She looked Chinese and maybe a day past her eighteenth birthday. Apparently, Kenin liked them young but legal. When she reached the deck around the pool, she set down a wicker bag that she’d been carrying and shrugged out of her robe. Expecting a revealing bikini, Juan and Eddie were surprised she wore a sleek unitard swimsuit favored by Olympic swimmers.

She settled goggles over her eyes, dove in, and began swimming laps.

Cabrillo ignored her and watched the guard. He rarely glanced in her direction. Instead, he studied the surrounding buildings and the sky, looking for threats. Juan had to admit the guy was good. He never became fixated on any one spot, not even when a helicopter passed less than a half mile from the black tower. He watched it, yes, but it never became a distraction.

The girl swam for thirty minutes without taking a break.

It was nearing noon. A new guard came to spell the man at the elevator, and two others searched the rooftop terrace as if it had never been inspected before. One guard carried a sniper rifle with an enormous scope over his shoulder while the other cradled a Chinese Type 95 assault rifle. The bullpup design was the latest weapon in the People’s Army. The fact these two were armed with more than just pistols was a new development. It was an elevation in threat protection that told Cabrillo to expect Kenin to make an appearance.

Next, a waiter arrived, pushing the kind of food trolley one sees in a hotel. He set out lunch at a table under an umbrella next to the pool. When all was ready, wine in a silver bucket opened and a last polish to the silverware performed, he stood back at a respectful distance. The girl pulled herself from the water with the easy grace of a river otter and toweled off.

A new figure emerged from the pavilion.

Juan felt his pulse quicken. He recognized Pytor Kenin immediately. He wore only swim trunks and rubber sandals so they could see the thick pelt of silvery hair that covered his bearish torso. He had typical Slavic features – a round head, firm chin, and deep-set eyes – and he moved with the vigor of a man twenty years younger. The girl offered her cheek and he gave her a quick peck. The little intimacy was almost believable. He must be paying her very well.

Juan noticed that one of Kenin’s ears was bandaged and the other was red and swollen. The Russian was beginning plastic surgery to change his appearance and, as with everything else, he was being extremely cautious. Ears were as individual as fingerprints or DNA, and new sophisticated facial recognition software, coupled with the profusion of CCTV cameras in all the world’s major cities, made it necessary to modify more than just the jaw, nose, and brow. Juan knew of more than one terror suspect caught just by the shape of his ear. Kenin was sharp.

He ate leisurely, like a man without a care in the world. Retirement certainly suited him.

After the meal, Kenin busied himself with a laptop computer. Juan hoped he was using a Wi-Fi they could hijack, but the computer was hooked into an outlet by a thick, doubtlessly shielded cord. At one point, Kenin called over the waiter. The man vanished for a few moments, then reappeared with a humidor. The admiral selected a cigar and ritualistically snipped off the end with a gold cutter and lit it with a gold lighter.

They remained on the deck until around three. The girl had swum some, and for a time Kenin had lumbered about in the pool like a water buffalo, mindful not to douse his inflamed ears.

After the pair vanished back inside, the waiter tidied up, but it was the security detail that was the last to leave. They performed a thorough sweep, the fourth that day.

Eddie had taken pictures of all the guards’ faces and uploaded them to his phone. He left Juan in the office to watch the deserted rooftop while he hustled outside. He found a good spot to watch the black tower’s service entrance from under a parked car. If the driver returned, he’d have more than enough time to shuffle to the next in the string of automobiles lining the street. As each building employee left, Eddie checked his or her face against his database. He was forced to switch cars a couple of times, and by ten that night few vehicles remained on the street and he had to abandon his observation.

By then, no one had left the building for quite some time. None of the people he’d observed leaving the building had been among the guard staff. Like Kenin, they were locked in the building for the duration.

He returned to their rented office. Cabrillo was peering through the big telephoto lens at the darkened terrace. “Any luck?” he asked without turning.

“Nada. I’ll try watching the front doors in the morning, but I think they’re holed up like their boss. You?”

“Zip,” Juan said sourly. “Looks like they check the terrace each morning and again when someone’s about to use it.”

Eddie and he ended up staying a week. The routines varied only slightly. Kenin would sometimes eat dinner out by the pool or stroll along the garden paths. The girl was replaced on the sixth day with another that looked little different apart from hair length. It would take a huge team to have been ready to follow her, a group so large that they would give themselves away.

They made other observations as well. Martial music played in most of Shanghai’s public spaces, and patriotic posters were appearing all over the city. Soldiers were a common sight, and most had the people flocking around them to shake their hands. And in the skies over the city, fighter planes put on what seemed to be impromptu air shows.

In a country as tightly controlled as China, everything was done for a reason. The increased display of militarism was to get the people riled over the ongoing dispute with Japan about the ownership of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. What had started as diplomatic brinksmanship was quickly escalating. Since the discovery of the gas and oil fields in the waters around the islands, the saber rattling in Beijing and Tokyo was growing louder. Ships had been dispatched, and planes had engaged in games of chicken, pilots from both sides flying so close to one another that an accident was inevitable. The fallout from such an event was incalculable but certainly dangerous.

The two men wiled away the boring hours discussing, and ultimately rejecting, idea after idea of how to get to Kenin. A chopper assault was out. The rotor sounds would alert the guards, and Kenin would lock himself inside. They talked about climbing the side of the building, but that would attract too much attention from people on the street. They considered a night HALO parachute drop. It had potential, but with the guards in constant communication, a sudden silence when the men were subdued would again alert the force still inside the building. Also, Chinese airspace was tightly controlled by the government, and an unauthorized flight would most likely be met by a couple of fighter jets long before they reached the Pudong District.

In the end, Eddie and Juan came to the same conclusion. Pytor Kenin had locked himself in the modern equivalent of an impenetrable castle and was more than prepared for a siege.

It was only when they got back to the Oregonand discussed their pessimistic assessment with the rest of the crew that new ideas were thrown at the project. In a burst of inspiration, it was Juan himself who finally made the breakthrough. He needed only Max’s mechanical savvy to pull it off. Hanley considered the challenge for a few seconds before agreeing. “It’s your neck, bucko.”

“It’ll be a lot more than my neck.” The two grinned like schoolboys conspiring to commit mischief.