Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

There was only one small problem with this setup: Bailey’s Hole had no Internet connection.

Which meant that Smith had to get himself and his laptop computer to a place that did have an Internet connection in order to send and receive messages. That place, they had decided, would be the town of Cutler, a dozen miles down the coast. A motel in Cutler called Goderre’s Downeaster offered free Wi-Fi. This is where Smith would go.

The Moneyball carried a launch that doubled as a life raft. It was an almost new Zodiac inflatable, nine feet, six inches, with a 9.8 Tohatsu four-stroke. In a calm sea with one person, the boat could plane along at a good twenty knots. But the seas between Bailey’s Hole and Cutler were anything but calm, and twelve knots was about the max a man could make without being beaten to hell by the chop, and then only in good weather. In stormy weather — forget it.

They had to be careful. The coming and going of a small Zodiac in a harbor wouldn’t merit a second glance, but seeing one tooling along the coast in open water would be noted — especially by fishermen who would think it pure insanity to be driving a small boat in late fall, on a rugged coastline known for its epic storms, currents, and tides. If they saw him, they’d want to know who the hell the crazy bastard was. Fishermen, Filipov knew well, were infamous gossips.

For all these reasons, Smith would have to come and go from Cutler at night, greatly increasing the danger of an accident. But there was no other way.

Despite taking painstaking care to set up a secure email system, Filipov knew it was more than likely that cell phones would be needed, too. It was entirely possible, for example, that Smith might at some point need to speak with Dalca in New York. And he knew enough about feds to expect them to insist, sooner or later, on communication by voice.

He had this covered, as well. On board the Moneyball were a couple of dozen GSM cell phones, prepaid minutes included, purchased with cash from a variety of foreign countries — very useful for conducting his kind of business. Filipov gave two to Dalca and four to Smith, with explicit instructions for Smith in particular: when speaking to the FBI, use a different phone for each call and keep the conversation short: a phone’s cell ID could be triangulated in as little as thirty seconds. Smith, not the FBI, would be the one to initiate the calls. After completing a call, the battery would be taken out and the phone disabled so that it could not send “heartbeat” messages back to the cell network.

Filipov inhaled the pine-scented air again. Smith had left that night for Cutler, his laptop computer and burner phones securely wrapped in multiple layers of plastic against the salt spray of the ocean. Smith was not the mariner one might wish for a dangerous sea journey at night, and Filipov had briefed him carefully: he would hug the coast, keeping close to shore but well out of the surf zone. He would need a powerful spotlight, which he would turn off before entering the harbor.

Filipov had watched him go, heard the tinny engine as it faded into the darkness. It was a risk but, again, a necessary one. The plan had been put into action and there was no going back. They would hear nothing for three days, maybe four at most.

But it was a good plan. He had gone over it in his head a hundred times, and the crew had discussed it ad nauseam. Smith would check into Goderre’s under the pretext of being a Mormon missionary. He was just young looking enough to pull it off. Not only that, but he — and indeed all of them — had brought along conservative suits: a crisp, expensive suit was an invaluable accessory in certain drug smuggling situations. Best of all, Smith was a Mormon, or had been until a gigantic lapsus, and he had in fact put in his year of missionary work. He knew how to talk the lingo.

Three days of silence. While in Cutler, Smith could not, of course, communicate with them. But Filipov had given him precise instructions on how to respond to a large variety of possibilities in his negotiations with the FBI. He was to stick to a basic message: if Arsenault wasn’t in Venezuela in a week, the FBI agent would die. Simple.

In negotiations like this, Filipov knew, SOP was for the authorities to push for more time and ask for small things, gradually piling up requirements and requests, dragging things on and establishing dominance over the hostage takers. He wasn’t going to fall into that trap. One week. If they hadn’t heard from Arsenault via Skype, standing in front of the Simón Bolívar statue in Plaza Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela — a venue that could never be faked — then they would take this fed son of a bitch out to sea, dump him, and leave the country. Of course, if they did hear from Arsenault they’d dump him anyway.

Filipov knew that bluffing the FBI did not work. He had to make up his own mind: to be determined, up front, without question, to follow through and do what he said he would, no matter what. The FBI negotiators were experts and would see through a bluff. If he showed the slightest weakness, the tiniest hesitation, the slightest accommodation to one of their demands, it would all be over.

Again, Smith had been carefully briefed on all this. He had strict orders. Filipov had confidence in him. It was perhaps an advantage that Smith could not communicate with them while in touch with the FBI: he had no choice but to stick to his guns. Meanwhile, it was important to keep Pendergast alive and healthy for the next seven days, in case the FBI demanded proof of life before releasing Arsenault.

As Filipov stood there, in morning light, with the sound of the wind sighing through the spruce branches over the boat, mingling with the regular cadence of the sea brushing the rocks, he decided there was no reason to tell the man below anything about what they were doing, what was going on. He would be dead in a week either way.

Filipov had one final annoyance. Two of the crew, DeJesus and Miller, had a special hatred of the FBI due to bad history. Neither one had truly gotten with the program. In the meeting, both had argued for tossing the FBI agent into the sea right away. They had voted against the plan of exchange and had gone off angry. That night, Filipov had caught both of them down in the hold, shitfaced, pissing on Pendergast to much raucous laughter, after having roughed him up pretty bad. Filipov had been annoyed, but there wasn’t much he could do to punish them, beyond locking up the liquor. Fact was, he had to admit part of him was glad to see the arrogant bastard get taken down a notch. And quite a notch it was: they had left him unconscious. The captain needed to keep the peace, keep everyone together, for seven more days.

Filipov had been disturbed at the breakdown in discipline. But something else had troubled him even more: the look in the FBI agent’s eyes as those two drunken idiots, cursing and laughing, had been draining their hosepipes all over him, just before DeJesus clocked him with a mooring hook. What Filipov had seen in those eyes was damned frightening.

Special Agent in Charge Rudy Spann ran a hand through his whiffle cut and stared at the evidence bag on his desk, inside of which gleamed a worn gold ring and a bizarre, partly melted medallion, along with a letter and envelope. He had mixed feelings about this case that had suddenly, and with such big noise, arrived on the doorstep of the New York Field Office of the FBI. An agent had been kidnapped. It wasn’t just any agent, either, but A. X. L. Pendergast. Spann, who had only recently become SAC of the New York FO, did not know Pendergast well. But he had certainly heard the rumors. This Pendergast had a kind of special dispensation; he was a sort of agent-at-large, who picked and chose his own cases. Apparently he was enormously wealthy, accepting only a one-dollar annual stipend — a far cry from the salary normally earned by a GS-15, Step 10. Rumor had it that Pendergast was a maverick, even something of a rogue agent, who pushed the rules and was protected from above. Frankly, he was not well liked among the younger agents; they resented his freedom, his wealth, his elitist mannerisms. The old-timers in the office, on the other hand, held him in a kind of awe: a wary sort of respect. But nobody loved him; he was not a warm personality, he wasn’t the kind to go out after work for a beer or hang out at the shooting range on weekends. For those reasons Spann had little to do with him directly, beyond providing the basic support of the field office. The agent rarely showed up at Federal Plaza.