Dana Stabenow - Prepared For Rage

"No, sir, he wasn't. The way she tells it, he's looking to continue the, er, relationship on patrol."

"What does he say?"

"Denies everything except the first incident. Which he says was consensual."

"I am tired of this punk screwing around on my ship," Cal said. "Get rid of him for me, XO."

"I'll break out the keelhaul, sir," Taffy said cheerfully. "Just say the word."

"I wish." Cal brooded. "Okay, call shore and have the investigators meet us at the dock. In the meantime, ask Reese if she can last another ten days on the same ship as that asshole."

"And him?"

Cal fixed Taffy with a fierce eye. "Tell him he might like to keep out of the captain's way until then. I don't suppose I could restrict him to quarters?"

"Alas, sir," Taffy said, getting to his feet, "he is by law innocent until proven guilty."

"You're the only guy I know who can use 'alas' in a sentence without sounding like a pansy."

Taffy grinned. "Why, thank you, Captain," he said, and fluttered his eyelashes.

Cal turned serious. "However it turns out, XO, I've had about enough of this selfish, self-involved little brat. Time for the Coast Guard to make his services available elsewhere."

"Understood, sir. He's a presenter at some kind of workshop somewhere when we get in. Always assuming the investigators are done with him by the time he's supposed to leave. So at least you won't have to suffer his presence in port, or not for the short term. Afterward, perhaps I can, uh, divert his return to the ship. We'll see."

The door closed behind the XO.

Cal, inexplicably, felt better. On a ship with 150 mixed-gender crew members, situations like this were inevitable, although on taking command of Munro he had worked tirelessly to ensure they wouldn't happen with any frequency, if at all. Well, he had failed, but dealing with the fallout from something like this was a lot easier on the psyche than fishing dead bodies out of the water.

He went down to the mess deck to make sure his boarding team members were eating right.

WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST 2007

"Damn it!"

Chisum rarely swore, and then only mildly, but it was enough to make his personal assistant raise her eyebrows. "Bad news?"

He looked up from the report and said with feeling, "Sometimes probable cause really gets in the way."

"Yes, it does, and I thought that was why the previous administration did away with it in these cases. Also habeas corpus and-"

"Thank you, Melanie, that will be all."

"Certainly, sir." Melanie swept out, and he couldn't help it, he had to watch. Women nowadays had forgotten how to walk, or maybe they just didn't care, striding along like they were in a race, all trace of what had once been an inviting softness to a man's hand long since worked ruthlessly off at the gym and leaving something perilously close to the stringy haunch of a greyhound behind.

Melanie was a throwback. A pocket Venus of a blonde in her midthirties, she wore heels and pencil skirts topped by a variety of soft sweaters in even softer colors, and every day he sent up a prayer of thanks to whoever had assigned her to him when Birdy had left. A forty-year veteran with an institutional memory that went back to the agency's roots in the OSS, Birdy was irreplaceable, but even Birdy was subject to the march of time. When she retired in October, Melanie had replaced her, and Patrick had suffered so instant and overwhelming an attraction that he had hidden it behind a curt, distant manner.

Even if every fiber of his being urged him to throw her down on his desk each time she walked in his door. "Whoa there, down, boy," he said beneath his breath. She was too good at what she did to treat with anything less than respect, so he locked his fantasies into a steel vault with a fail-safe lock and doggedly returned to the report.

Isa or someone bearing a striking resemblance to him had been spotted in Auckland, of all places. The source reported he had it on good authority that Isa was recruiting from among the Maoris for the purposes of launching a terrorist attack from down under.

Which was about as reliable as any humint his agents were fielding nowadays, he thought glumly. Everyone was hedging their bets, scarred from too many years of being slapped down for intelligence the previous administration either disbelieved or suppressed in pursuit of their almighty crusade. Except they didn't call it a crusade. They'd learned that much.

There were times when he thought he ought to finally register to vote.

There were others when he looked at the people in office and the ones running to replace them, and was overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness and impending doom.

Still, he could not afford to overlook any lead, and while the hard intel was grinding to a temporary halt the rumor mill was hitting high gear. Along with the sighting in York, he had reports of additional sightings in London, Darfur (from a recently evacuated aid worker who did some freelance work for the agency on the side, and whose product had never been all that reliable), Baghdad (at the site of an IED resulting in three killed and which he knew was nonsense because Isa would never have been so careless as to flaunt himself at the scene of one of his own attacks), Toronto (which frightened him; he'd sent a rocket back to the agent who had submitted it, requesting an immediate re-interview and a more thorough canvas of other possible witnesses), Bern (which he almost believed, given how well funded the al Qaeda cells were and how scrupulously they looked after their money), Moscow, and the list went on and on. Isa had been sighted fifty-three times in the last six months, three times in three different cities on three different continents on the same day.

Boeing was good, but they weren't that good.

The phone rang. "The director on line one," Melanie said, sounding fiuttery Patrick had noticed most women did around Kallendorf. Guy looked like a bull elephant and had about as much finesse but he had to beat the women off with a stick. Chisum smoothed back his thinning hairline, sucked in his potbelly, and picked up the phone. "Chisum here."

"I have your report in front of me," Kallendorf said without preamble. "Anything to add?"

Chisum thought swiftly, and then decided there was no margin for defense. It was what it was. "No, sir."

"When did we last talk about this Isa?"

By now he knew that the director remembered exactly when Chisum had briefed him on the terrorist, the day, the hour, probably down to the color of Chisum's tie. "At the annual JTTF briefing, sir."

"That's almost a year ago, Patrick. What have you done for me lately?"

"It's not like he's posting his schedule on the Internet, sir."

"No, it's not," Kallendorf agreed, a little too easily. "Maybe he's retired."

Patrick found himself on his feet without knowing how he got there. He forced himself to speak calmly. "Fanatical terrorists don't retire, sir. Usually they are killed. Rarely they are captured. They don't retire."

"Then he's been killed or captured. I think it's time to reallocate some of our intelligence-gathering capabilities to more worthy targets. Convince me otherwise."

Chisum took a deep breath. "Sir, Isa was Zarqawi's right-hand man and his closest confidant. He is widely believed to have pioneered Zarqawi's use of the Internet for banking, communications, and recruiting. I can definitely place him in Diisseldorf in June."

"Sez who?"

"I-acquired the information through a third party," Chisum said carefully.

"You trust this source?"

"Absolutely, sir."

Kallendorf grunted. "Which means we paid for it. I don't like buying intelligence, Patrick."

"I don't think anyone's going to give it to us for love, sir," Chisum said before he could stop himself.