Twenty-four Days Read online

  Bonus? "What’s Krakhower do for Northrop Grumman?"

  "Their directory lists his job as 'Purchasing'."

  Rowe drummed his fingers on his leg. "I guess I need to pay him a visit. Thanks, Otto."

  Otto made a riffling sound. "Al-alah was reviewing a tour he took of the Chesapeake Bay when he got the last phone call.”

  "The Chesapeake has great rockfish."

  “These were not fishing tours. He went the length of the Bay, took pictures of the beaches, and collected depth data."

  "Thanks, Otto. Uh, how do I disconnect you," but an empty line greeted him.

  The phone rang in his hand. James.

  "Get out of there, Zeke. Some lady called the police. Said you tried to steal her dog. You know anything about that? Never mind, just leave. I’d have a hard time explaining why you're surveilling an innocent member of the Muslim community."

  "Have your guys go through Al-alah’s house. The door's unlocked, so they should be careful,” and Rowe sped off.

  By the time he got home, it was too late to call Kali. He took a beer from the refrigerator and headed through the nature preserve until he came to a small clearing and a tree stump big enough for two. He drank the beer, glancing occasionally to his left. If Kali were here, they’d talk about anthropology and how Sean was doing in school while Sandy roamed through the clearing, making those happy woofing sounds of a dog discovering hidden treasures.

  He ran everything through his brain, but too many pieces didn’t fit. He went home. The pictures in the living room were exactly as he'd left them. The office door stood open at a forty-five-degree angle and his bedroom door at twenty. Every day, he changed it.

  He showered away the sweat, first hot water and then cold, rubbing it into his face, over his shoulders, and across his chest. As he toweled off, he considered working out, but instead checked that the five-lumin flashlight by his bedside worked and dozed off.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Day Twelve, Friday morning, August 18th

  Englewood, New Jersey, Zeke Rowe's house

  Rowe woke after a fitful sleep, rushed through his morning workout, and dressed comfortably in jeans, a polo shirt, and boat shoes, not knowing what the day would bring. He had an empty text from Duck, the SEAL way of saying everything was fine, nothing to tell. He called Mr. Winters to check on Sandy. The dog had made a new friend at the park. Mr. Winters made friends with the dog's owner. Everyone seemed happy.

  Rowe ate a quick breakfast and returned to Al-alah’s house. He checked the door for booby traps before entering. The tempting herbal aroma of Al-alah’s final meal tugged at him. The rooms were clean, counters scrubbed, closets and cupboards empty, toiletries gone from the bathroom, prayer rug absent.

  He called James. "Al-alah’s handlers cleared the house out last night."

  "My guys should be there any moment with the warrant."

  Within moments, Rowe limped outside to greet James’s crew. A tall thirty-something man with spike-straight hair and a pinched face eyed Rowe suspiciously.

  "Who are you?"

  "Zeke Rowe. Bobby probably mentioned me." He stuck his hand out. After a moment, the man took it. "Agent Scorty. What are we looking for?"

  Rowe shrugged. "Anything would help. We're kinda desperate," and he left to chat with the neighbors. No one seemed suspicion of Al-alah or his visitors or knew where he worked. One old man peered at Rowe out of eyes no more than slits.

  "I saw you yesterday, din I? In Mr. Alah’s backyard? I din have my glasses on." He shuffled inside as he talked. “Mr. Alah don’ get white visitors. All Middle Eastern. Seem nice.” He donned a pair of thick glasses and gasped. “Woah! You look like one of those SEALs. The guy I saw din have so many sharp… edges.”

  “Anything suspicious go on in Mr. Al-alah’s house?”

  “Nope, and I'd know ‘cause I'm Neighborhood Watch. If you’re police, get the witch across the street to treat her dog better. She's awful to him." He closed the door, muttering.

  Rowe stopped in on Agent Scorty, hoping he had something, but he said the place was scrubbed clean. On the way to James’s office, Duck called. “They’re delayed in Dallas by thunderstorms. Sean’s still in a coma. They won’t tell me more because I’m not family." Duck sounded disgusted.

  Rowe breathed a sigh.

  "Now, what's going on with you and Kali? If she had a sister, I’d stow my Navy career behind a white picket fence and make babies."

  Rowe winced. "Sean’s been sleuthing and Kali blames my influence."

  "Let's refocus Sean, throw that satellite phone away Bobby calls you on, and fix things." He beeped at someone, suggested they have a nice day in another lane of the freeway, and continued. “Sean’s landlord calls him the best kid to ever walk through his door. Says Sean identified all sorts of problems. Thanks to the boy, he could charge more for units. He wanted to know when Sean would be back."

  "Does he know what happened to Sean?"

  "Nope. I met with that Detective you put me in touch with. He’s in charge of the case. I’ll give him the tapes from Sean’s DropBox. The CSI team took fingerprints, but it looks like the intruder wore gloves. We found hairs, darker than Sean’s. They cleared all the tenants that were home. According to the manager, Sean never had visitors, so any trace was the attacker. The police lab has a lot of the equipment you used at ONI,” Office of Navy Intelligence, “microspec—" Duck tried to fish the name out of his memory.

  "Microspectrophotometry, a polarized light microscope. High end."

  "Don't worry about us, bud. Find that sub.”

  Rowe pulled into James's building, passed through security, got two coffees from the ground floor Starbuck’s, and went up to the third floor. James met him at the elevator. His clothes were fresh, trousers creased, light blue shirt starched, but dark circles bruised the space under his eyes and a stillness about him worried Rowe.

  That reminded him where James was this morning. "How’d your Skype with the Congressional Oversight Committee go?"

  Anger sparked through the Special Agent’s eyes. "They want the SecDef to resign, called him 'incompetent,' 'uncaring' and 'incoherent'. Britain's Commander-in-Chief Fleet Admiral Trevor Baldwin, apologized for hiding the sonar shield from us, but insists no one knew which subs had it. I agree, unless they read Penbury’s unencrypted email.”

  James snorted. “Penbury is the only one who can neutralize the sonar shield and he disappeared. I’m crossing my fingers Kali can."

  As they talked, they zagged through the cubicle farm that housed a score of agents. Rowe pulled a tooth out of his pocket and dropped it onto the desk outside James’s office. A matronly fiftyish woman with tightly curled shoulder-length hair, light makeup, a classic box suit with a bow blouse, rose and hugged him.

  "How could you remember with all that's goin' on?"

  Rowe smiled. Tess's son Jason was a bright, happy, twelve-year-old interested in paleontology and had called Rowe when he discovered his mom knew the famed Columbia paleo. Rowe took him on a tour of his lab and demonstrated how to synthesize aDNA—ancient DNA—from old bones. Rowe had as much fun as Jason.

  "Tell him it’s from an 800,000-year old hippo who wandered the Dmanisi wetlands. He got a lot of use out of this tooth."

  As he turned to follow James into his office, Tess grabbed his arm. "Cheer 'm up. He acts like he’s responsible for Virginia’s disappearance. Like he has that kind of power."

  Other than a few pictures, James’s office contained only the standard desk, chair, bookshelves, phone, and six TV's, one playing a news conference.

  “The UN’s considering a sanction of the US and Britain. They contend we’ve lost control of one of the planet’s most dangerous weapons and want to know the name of the missing sub and supervise our efforts to find it. The only one likely to vote with us is Israel.” James shut the website in disgust. “Days like today, the UN is as useful as a chocolate teapot.”

  “I need some good news, Bobby. Anything from V
irginia’s Blue crew?"

  “They say the Gold crew would never freak out or mutiny. And no visitors are aboard. If there’s a traitor, he’s hidden deep."

  Tess stuck her head in. "You have a call from the head of MI-6.”

  James sighed and turned on speaker so Rowe could hear. "Thank you for returning my call, Sir. Someone reached out to us Tuesday evening from Imperial College, but left no message. Can you check for us?"

  "We’ll get back to you," and the line went dead.

  "Let's get out of here. I’m hungry."

  They went to the cafeteria, a cheery yellow brightly-lit room overflowing with the aroma of warm chocolate chip cookies. The floors were polished stone and the small round tables ceramic. Rowe selected a club sandwich, potato chips, cherry pie, coffee, and a soda. James settled for a tired looking chicken salad and coffee. Both ate most of their food without a word. Rowe had never seen his friend uneasy, let alone floundering. It left him tongue-tied.

  Finally, James leaned back, coffee on the edge of the table with both hands wrapped around it.

  "I need Kali to find a hole in that paint, Zeke. Fast. We need to find Virginia."

  "She’s close, but is thinking about Sean."

  "One of our Destroyers found Virginia’s signal buoy. We think the crew hid it in the garbage.”

  “Our boys can think on their feet.”

  James turned his phone to Rowe so he could read the message: Sub hijacked. Will try to change polarity. “If they can turn off the degaussing coils, Otto will find them.”

  "Can they do it without revealing themselves?"

  Rowe shrugged. “A light will blink on the Bridge. They’ll have a few minutes—if the hijackers even know how to fix it."

  A deep groove cut between James’s worried eyes. “Those boys will not stop until Virginia is back in American hands. We have to find it before the crew gets themselves killed.”

  A server came to refill coffee, but James said, “Let’s go. I’m expecting an email.”

  At James’s office, all eyes were glued to the TV. Greenpeace was picketing.

  The very existence of a nuclear submarine exposes world citizens to the danger of a nuclear catastrophe. Nuclear powered warships and submarines are ticking time bombs.

  Someone muttered, “They forgot those ‘ticking time bombs’ pulled the planet from the brink of nuclear war during the USSR’s heyday.”

  “Boss, you got a message.” Urgency saturated Tess’s tone.

  James rounded his desk to his computer. “We know how the hijackers boarded Virginia. It received a Comm burst from Command, right after it left port. No one admitted to sending it so we kept digging. One of the radio operators cracked, said they were going to kill his family unless Virginia helped a stranded ASDS.”

  "An Advanced SEAL Delivery System—a midget sub. It’s designed to deliver up to sixteen SEALs and supplies for covert operations. It rides piggyback on a sub's afterdeck. You get in and out through a spherical air lock. Virginia-class subs are designed for them."

  “Man’s name is Chou. They killed his daughter after raping her with a broom, threatened to do the same to his wife and son unless he sent the message. They lied and he killed himself after talking to us.”

  James plunked at his keyboard. “ONI pulled images from Virginia’s last known location, complements of our Keyhole satellite, hoping to locate the ASDS. If the water’s clear, you can see all sorts of things."

  James turned his monitor toward Rowe to show a video of a squatty, rusted out tub of a boat, floating aimlessly. They fast-forwarded through two hours until it chugged off. Rowe replayed and leaned forward as the jerky compressed time scenes slipped by.

  “What’s it doing there for so long?”

  James scrolled through an attached memo. “No record of the boat’s numbers anywhere.”

  Rowe played it a fourth time, not knowing what he was looking for but hoping to catch something, and bolted upright.

  “There.” He stabbed a finger to pause the video, rewound, played and paused again. “See the shadow to the side, just about out of range."

  "A whale maybe."

  "Or an ASDS blurred through twelve feet of water."

  Rowe stared into the distance, pencil flipping. "All they needed were seven or eight men to run the ship—maneuvering, sonar, control room, the Helmsman, a planes man, security.

  "Virginia knew about Triumph, but with the ‘authentic’ message—and the ASDS probably presented as in distress. Any nearby vessel would be required to help. Once aboard, it'd be easy to incapacitate an unsuspecting crew and threaten the Captain."

  "How'd they get ahold of an ASDS? They're not exactly sold on eBay."

  "The manufacturer is forbidden by law from selling it privately." His voice trailed off, his eyes looking inward and a piece of the puzzle slipped into place. "Last night, Al-alah emailed someone at Northrop Grumman. I bet they built the ASDS."

  James told Tess to find out who had the minisub contract while Rowe got on his phone.

  "Duck? Yeah, how's Sean? … In and out of consciousness... Concussion, brain swollen... They beat him, broke a cheekbone, fractured his jaw and clavicle, stomped on his hands, and ruptured the spleen. I thought the medical folks shut you out? … You changed their minds…."

  James pushed speaker as Duck said, "I doubt the attack is related to Sean's academic or social life. He rarely went to school and had no friends. The only change in his life is Chacone and Mohammed. No one I can find knows anything about Mohammed."

  James moved his hand in a circle saying, Get to the ASDS.

  "Duck, we have satellite footage of Virginia’s hijackers. I want to know if you see what I do."

  "Email it to me.”

  Done, Rowe and James sat in silence, broken only by the rumble of voices from the bullpen, printers churning, and phones ringing. Rowe needed to do something.

  He stood to leave just as his phone rang. Duck didn’t wait for hello.

  "An electrical fire demolished the ASDS in that video."

  James asked, "Wouldn’t Virginia know?"

  "Do you think the Navy notifies people when they destroy a half-billion-dollar piece of equipment?" Duck’s voice was tight. “I’ll call if I see anything else.”

  Rowe sat. “In property destruction cases caused by faulty equipment, Northrop Grumman gets paid nothing. An electrical fire would be pinned right on Northrop’s financial chest. Their contract required they destroy it so no top secret parts, blueprints, materials get into the wrong hands. At completion, they had to file a verification of destruction with DRMO—Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service."

  "Tess. Get proof of destruction from DRMO on the ASDS. Next, ask USSOCOM if the picture matches the ASDS that burned up. And where’s the minisub contractor contact?”

  Two minutes later, a woman handed him a fax. James craned his neck. "Where's Tess?"

  The woman smiled. "She said to tell you she’s busy.”

  "Who're you?"

  "Tess's assistant,” and left.

  "When did I authorize an assistant for Tess?" He pivoted the page toward Rowe. "Here’s our proof—bailed refuse with numbers and authorizations on it. Tess! Get in here and not a damn assistant! What dumb shit accepted this?"

  Rowe zeroed in on the signature: Norman Krakhower. “Al-alah called him before disappearing. They’re cleaning up loose ends.”

  "Someone bought a burned out tin can of an ASDS from a vetted government bidder, repaired it enough to be seaworthy, and used it to hijack Virginia. That’s clever, make the outside look legit, and get the engine and the coupler working."

  Rowe got up. "I'll chat with Krakhower, if he’s not already dead.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Day Twelve, Friday, August 18th, Midday

  Northrup Grumman Campus

  Four hours later, Rowe arrived at Northrop Grumman. He flashed his pass at the gate guard, parked in a handicap slot, and limped inside to reception. There was a time
when Rowe could charm the most tight-lipped administrator, but then he met Kali and his bon vivant charisma rusted.

  The twenty-something receptionist was on the phone, but her brown eyes danced over his face and she held a finger up. She wore a short-sleeved sweater hugging a narrow bosom, a pearl necklace around her smooth throat complimented by pearl earrings. When she turned her attention to Rowe, she had a smile as warm and honest as a country-western ballad.

  "Hi. My name is Dr. Zeke Rowe. I'm looking for Norman Krakhower."

  "Yes, Dr. Rowe. SA James called ahead. Regrettably, Mr. Krakhower went home for an emergency. I let him know you were on your way. Can I offer you coffee while you wait?"

  It was Rowe’s bad luck the receptionist was a monument to efficiency. “No problem. I’ll meet him at home, save him the return trip."

  She took her time matching his face to his ID and then passed him a note with Krakhower's address. “You’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Rowe jumped in his car, swerved through a maze of turns until he found the right street and the right house, then parked across the end of the driveway to block Krakhower.

  The purchasing agent lived in a blocky two-story dwelling built from red Lyons sandstone with the most god-awful bright green picket fence Rowe had ever seen. A boy’s bike lay abandoned on the manicured lawn and a basketball hoop drooped by the garage door. Rowe slipped the Colt into his waistband as a man came into view, arms overflowing with books, binders, and clutter. He matched the company photo on Rowe’s phone though ten pounds heavier, hair four shades darker, and face considerably more stressed than the carefree employee who promised to go out of his way to help you.

  "Mr. Krakhower?"

  Krakhower’s mouth formed an O and he hurried toward a late model Mercedes, already stuffed full with boxes, clothes, books, photos and other bits and pieces Krakhower must consider essential to a new life.