Taylor Smith - Guilt By Silence

“What happened to the crates in Madeira?”

“The photo resolution isn’t quite as clear as on the pictures from Tripoli, but the Libyan ship off-loaded some crates onto a smaller ship. They look to be the same ones. That ship subsequently set sail for Le Havre, France.”

“That’s a long, roundabout trip for tomatoes,” Tucker said, tapping a pen against his big knee. “From Le Havre, of course, it’s just a short hop to Paris or across the channel to the U.K. These guys could conceivably have supplied both the Trafalgar and the Eiffel bombers.”

“Yup,” Mariah agreed. “Except the crates weren’t on board when the ship docked at Le Havre. French Customs inspected the hold after a quiet suggestion from our station in Paris, but they found no tomatoes—nor anything else resembling the crates loaded in Madeira.”

“Were there other ports of call before Le Havre?”

“We don’t think so, but there are several thousand miles of open sea between the two points and the ship wasn’t under constant satellite surveillance. NSA was monitoring the boat’s communications, but they didn’t hear anything unusual.”

“They could have had a prearranged silent rendezvous with yet another vessel and done a quick transfer on the high seas,” Frank’s pen took up a staccato beat on his knee. “So who owns the ship out of Madeira?”

“It’s a Liberian-registered vessel belonging to Niarchos Transport.”

“The Greek outfit?”

“Ah, well—here’s where it gets interesting,” Mariah said. “Niarchos was bought out last year by a company called Triton Transport, which is in turn owned by another company called Ramsay Investments.”

“Bloody big business! Such a spiderweb of interlocking connections. Who can figure these people out?”

“I think the idea is that we’re not supposed to figure it out too easily,” Mariah said dryly. “But you know of course that Ramsay Investments is Angus Ramsay McCord of McCord Industries.”

Tucker leaned back in his chair and whistled softly. “Great! They’re going to love this upstairs—the President’s buddy, a terrorist gunrunner.” He rolled his eyes and then fixed Mariah soberly. “Not likely, kid. Give me something I can sell.”

“Are you saying you want me to suppress the evidence?”

“No, but neither do I want us leaping to conclusions on the basis of a possible shipment of so-called tomatoes on a vessel with a tenuous link to the richest man in America—a guy with a philanthropic reputation just this side of God’s.” Mariah rolled her eyes. “I know, I know,” Tucker said. “I don’t buy that crap, either. But unless you want to spend the rest of your career counting goatherders in Ulan Bator, you’ll be very careful about linking McCord to terrorists—unless, that is, we come up with a hell of a lot more evidence than this. If it’s out there,” he added, “I personally will be more than happy to act on it. But in the meantime, tread carefully, Mariah.”

The McCord Industries Learjet taxied to a halt in front of the Fargo, North Dakota, terminal and the pilot cut the engines. Dieter Pflanz checked out the terrain, scowling at the sight of the waiting crowd. He turned to his boss, sitting across from him in one of the deep upholstered armchairs that were arranged in clublike groupings throughout the cabin.

Gus McCord’s face fell as he glanced out the window and spotted the long black limousine at the head of a caravan of vehicles lined up on the tarmac. “Aw, for crying out loud,” he moaned, turning back to the four other passengers on the private aircraft. “Jerry, I told you to tell them to keep it simple. This is embarrassing.”

A young man sitting across the cabin unbuckled his seat belt and then stood and looked over McCord’s shoulder at the retinue waiting on the runway. “I know, Gus.” Jerry Siddon grimaced apologetically as he ran a hand back though his hair. “I tried.”

“Yeah, well, try a little harder next time,” McCord grumbled. “People are gonna think I’m putting on airs.”

“Come on, dear,” Nancy McCord said, patting his arm with a smile as she rose from her seat. “They all know you wouldn’t do that. People here are proud of you, that’s all, and grateful for everything you’ve done for your hometown. Let them spoil you a little.”

Her husband seemed unconvinced as he stood up, brushed his pants and buttoned his navy blue suit jacket—bought off the rack, despite the fact that Angus Ramsay McCord was a billionaire several times over. The shirt he was wearing, like every shirt he owned, was white. The tie was typical, too—conservatively striped in muted colors. At sixty-one, he was still wiry, the suit jacket covering only the tiniest paunch. He weighed one hundred thirty-eight pounds, wringing wet, and stood only five foot six (five-eight in his elevator shoes), although the aggressively erect cut of his steel gray hair added almost another inch to his height. Under lashless lids, he had small, light brown eyes that never seemed to blink. In conversation, these eyes, like tiny copper nails, could fix people with an intensity that left them feeling impaled.

The uniformed young man who served as steward on McCord’s personal aircraft came forward from the closet in the aft section carrying a black, Russian sable coat. Nancy McCord glanced at the soft, rich fur and then out the window, where sleety gusts of snow were swirling across the black asphalt, whipsawing the legs of the people in the welcoming party. She shook her head regretfully. “No, Miguel, the blue woolen one, please.”

Miguel exchanged coats and Gus McCord took the cloth coat from him, holding it up for his wife. “That’s my girl,” he said, hiking it over her shoulders while her arms slipped down the sleeves. She turned to smile at him, her clear blue eyes enveloping him in the love that had been his anchor for the past forty years.

She’d been just nineteen years old, and Gus only twenty-one, when they had married. Cynics said Angus McCord had courted Nancy Patterson to win the favor of her father, a California businessman who had made a fortune during World War II selling equipment and spare parts to the Long Beach naval shipyard. McCord had just completed his military service as midshipman on a navy destroyer when his captain had introduced him to the industrialist. There was no doubt that having Robert Patterson as a father-in-law had helped launch McCord on the way to his first million, but Gus and Nancy had been a love match from the start. Four kids and five grandchildren later, they still were.

The steward brought out the coats of the four men on the aircraft and then hurried to open the door. An icy blast of air rushed in as Gus McCord shrugged into the tan, three-quarter-length down parka that his wife held up for him.

Pflanz pulled on his own parka, suppressing a grin at the obvious discomfort of McCord’s executive assistant. Jerry Siddon shuddered as he turned up the collar of his overcoat. A Los Angeles native, Siddon was less than ecstatic, Pflanz knew, when he had to accompany the boss on these hometown swings in wintertime. But the new neonatal unit of McCord General Hospital was opening today in Fargo. It had been planned as the most advanced facility for the care of premature babies in the northern United States and had been financed almost entirely by the McCord family. The neonatal unit, in addition to the cancer wing and the heart institute, would help cement the reputation of McCord General as one of the country’s preeminent health-care facilities, putting Gus McCord’s hometown firmly on the medical map.

Dieter Pflanz headed for the open door of the aircraft. At Pflanz’s insistence, and after a foiled kidnap attempt several years back, McCord almost always traveled with two bodyguards now. But the one place Gus refused to have the burly guards present was in his hometown, and so the bodyguards had flown ahead to McCord’s next stop in Washington, D.C. Pflanz was not in the habit of doing guard duty, but he often came along for the ride to discuss business with McCord, and the imposing presence of the former covert operative would give pause to even the most determined adversary. He patted his chest, feeling the comfortable bulge of the Smith and Wesson semiautomatic holstered under his suit jacket. He expected no trouble, but it always paid to be prepared.