Клайв Касслер - Typhoon Fury

They sidled over to the pillar and leaned against it so that only a small portion of them was visible from the main floor below. While Beth was focused on the man downstairs, Raven kept checking the people approaching them from either side. She felt so exposed that the back of her neck itched.

Beth patted her on the shoulder and urgently pointed at the man. He had shifted in his seat, and now a metal case was exposed behind his legs.

“He’s got the same case Tagaan had in Bangkok,” Beth said, barely able to contain her excitement. “The eagle finial from the Gardner Museum must be inside. That explains why we’re not getting a signal right now.”

“Maybe” was all Raven said.

A minute later, the man picked up the case and opened it for a brief moment. Beth checked her phone and said, “I’ve got the signal. The finial is still in there. What do we do now?”

“We wait to see what he does.”

“If he leaves, we have to follow him. He might not open the case again, once he goes, and then we’ll lose our lead.”

Beth was right about that, but Raven knew following him was a big risk. If they were spotted, Raven would have to work fast to get away. And Beth would just slow her down. Not to mention Beth’s scarlet hair, which would make tailing the man undetected even more difficult.

“If he leaves, I’ll follow him on my own,” Raven said.

“Oh no you’re not,” Beth protested. “I’m not letting him out of my sight.”

“You’re not trained for this. I am. No offense, but you’ll be a liability.”

“Offense taken.”

Raven gestured at the people passing them. “You might have noticed there aren’t a lot of tall redheads in this country. He’d make you about ten seconds after we started after him. Then they could set an ambush without us even realizing it.”

“But I—”

“Let me do my job. Like you said, it’s just reconnaissance.”

Beth opened her mouth, then closed it again in a huff.

“I think you meant to say, ‘You’re right, Raven.’”

“Whatever,” Beth said with a smirk. “Hey, who’s that?”

A second man, this one dressed in a casual shirt and jeans, approached the man in the suit, who stood and shook hands with him. They both sat down, and the man who’d been waiting opened the case.

He withdrew the finial that Raven had seen in Bangkok, its gilt finish flashing in the lights. Beth held her breath when the second man took it and began an examination, turning it over in his hands and checking every surface.

He turned it over and looked intently into the base, where Beth had placed the tracker chip. Beth grabbed Raven’s arm.

“He’s going to find it!”

Beth’s fear came true when the man reached his fingers into the hole and drew something out that he held between his thumb and forefinger. It was too small to see from this distance, but it had to be the tracker.

The man stood and raged at the other man, jabbing the tiny object toward his face. The two of them argued so loudly that some of the other patrons began staring at the scene. After a few moments, the two of them suddenly stopped fighting and looked around the atrium as if they were about to be surrounded by unseen forces.

The man in the casual shirt flicked the tracker away like a used cigarette, jammed the finial into the suited man’s gut, and took off, sprinting for the main entrance. The man in the suit put the finial back in the case and walked quickly in the opposite direction.

“Stay by your phone,” Raven said, getting ready to make a break for the stairs, when Beth pulled on her arm.

“Oh, no,” Beth said. “He’s throwing it away!”

Sure enough, the man in the suit strode right to a trash can and stuffed the case inside as if he feared that there was another tracker somewhere in the case and didn’t want to risk being followed. He walked away without looking back.

Before Raven could stop her, Beth ran for the escalators. Raven called behind her to wait, but Beth had a head start, and with a runner’s physique and long legs, she was able to maintain a distance between them. Nobody else seemed to be running after them.

When they reached the main floor, Beth got to the trash receptacle a few steps before Raven.

“No, don’t!” Raven yelled. She couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this was wrong.

Despite her plea, Beth opened the case anyway, eager to make sure the finial was still intact. Raven couldn’t see what was inside, but when she saw the horrified expression on Beth’s face, she knew the whole thing had been a setup.

Beth turned the open case toward her, and Raven could now see a display that read ARMED and a small block of C-4 explosive next to the finial. There was also a small radio inside.

It crackled to life, and a voice said, “Do exactly what I say or the case will explode. If either of you tries to run away, you’ll die before you get two steps from it. Look toward the entrance.”

Beth looked past Raven’s shoulder, and her face went so white that Raven was afraid she might pass out, holding a bomb in her hands. Raven turned slowly, angry with herself about being duped but already running through ideas about how they were going to get out of this situation.

She already knew who she’d see, but she still felt a deep chill when she spotted him standing by the main entrance with a wicked grin on his face. Flanked by four of his imposing soldiers, and crooking a finger for them to come toward him, was Salvador Locsin.

28

MANILA

Finding an isolated location in the bustle of the city would have been difficult, so Gerhard Brekker rented a yacht big enough for his team and docked it away from the main marina so that Alastair Lynch’s periodic screams for more Typhoon would go unheard. The 60-foot power cruiser with sleeping quarters for ten passengers reminded Brekker of the fishing charter his father owned in his home city of Cape Town.

After getting Lynch squared away on the boat, he and Van Der Waal had spent the day casing the Baylon Fire factory and warehouse, where Lynch claimed the smuggling operation was based. Lynch had divulged how the drugs were packed into fire trucks for shipment, and he knew one was supposed to be loaded by this evening and shipped out the next day. Brekker’s target was Locsin himself. It was easy enough to find the rebel leader’s photo on websites advertising the bounty put on his head by the Filipino government.

The facility was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped by razor wire, and access was controlled by a gate with two guards, posted twenty-four hours a day. Getting in unseen wouldn’t pose much of a problem. Brekker had planted minuscule cameras on light poles, with views of the plant from six different angles, including the guard gate, to allow remote observation. They relayed the images via a phone hidden under what looked like a discarded box on the side of the road. The setup would give them twenty-four hours of surveillance before the batteries died.

The plan was to sneak into the warehouse in the middle of the night and steal the fire truck filled with the smuggled methamphetamine. Then he would have a powerful bargaining chip for reeling in Locsin.

While he waited for Greg Polten and his colleague, Charles Davis, to arrive, Brekker munched on a sandwich and watched feed from the cameras on three monitors set up in the cruiser’s luxurious main dining area. Van Der Waal sat on the other side and drew the curtains before cleaning and oiling his trusty Vektor SP1 pistol, the standard sidearm for South Africa’s Defence Force. Lynch was in a cabin below with one of Brekker’s men watching him while the others got some shut-eye in the bedrooms. Equipment bags were piled on the marble floor along with several fifty-pound kettlebell weights to keep the mercenaries fit during extended ops, though they often proved handy for other purposes as well.