no secretary had stayed with Tucker for more than a few weeks until Personnel had finally had the wit to park Patricia Bonelli outside his door, a New Jersey native with a truck driver’s vocabulary who could give as good as she got when Frank Tucker got too far out of line. Someone had once told Mariah that Patty and Frank had a legendary, rip-roaring battle the first day she came on stream. But when Frank realized that Personnel had sent him the female equivalent of Genghis Khan as a secretary, he broke down and roared with laughter—much to the amazement of the trembling staff in the section, who had expected a bloodbath.
His secretary had been with him for almost twenty years now. When Mariah had appeared on the scene, Patty had recognized a kindred spirit and had explained the fundamentals of dealing with Frank Tucker. They boiled down to this, she said: never cringe, never apologize, and never—but never—screw up. Easier said than done, maybe, but it suited Mariah to a T. She had worked with Tucker, off and on, for most of her career since.
“Are you okay, Mariah? You look dead on your feet.”
She glanced up sharply. Frank Tucker could never be accused of being the most sensitive man in the world. If he thought she was looking tired, she must look god-awful.
“I’m fine. I didn’t sleep very well last night.” She hesitated, debating whether or not to raise the subject of Chaney. But they had been over this ground many times during the investigation of the accident. Mariah knew what Frank’s reaction to Chaney’s claims would be and she knew who she trusted. It wasn’t Paul Chaney. Leave it, she decided—don’t keep picking at this scab. Let it heal. “Where were we?”
“You were telling me about the Libyan connection.”
“Right. Tripoli station has an asset who says Libya may be shipping arms through the island of Madeira.”
“Have the birds picked up anything?”
Mariah nodded. “I was down with the satellite recon boys yesterday. There was a shipment out of Tripoli three weeks ago on a state-owned Libyan vessel. The birds picked up markings on the crates that said they contained tomatoes, but the Libyans don’t usually export vegetables to Madeira. And there was an awful lot of security watching over those so-called tomatoes.”
“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
