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  Sofiane smiled and closed the now-empty case. He stood up and asked the dark-haired one if he could go fill the case with ice to replenish the fishing boat for the ice used to pack the fish the others were still trying to get onboard the ship. The men in black pants were joined by two others and were already passing around an open bottle. They paid no attention to Sofiane. When he repeated his request, he was met with a quick bark and a wave of a hand telling him to go away. Sofiane obliged and took that as permission, as well. He moved to the other side of the ship and went through an open hatch on the starboard side of the superstructure.

  He moved quickly aft and down the first ladder to the ship’s dining area. He had been told before he left, exactly where to go and what to look for. He moved into the empty galley and looked around. Sink, dishes, knives, cabinets, there...freezers. Sofiane stumbled as he darted across the sterile compartment to the two large metal doors in the back of the room. He looked at the labels on the top and opened the one identified only as “No. 2.” He shuddered as a blast of cold air came into contact with his loose cotton pants and tunic soaked with sweat born out of heat and fear.

  Sofiane Belmokhtari went to the back of the freezer and moved a large side of beef on the bottom shelf of the large metal storage rack. Under the shelf was a black briefcase identical to the one he carried. He dropped to the deck and lay on his stomach. He reached as far back as he could and grabbed the briefcase handle with his fingertips. Sofiane replaced the case with the one he had brought onboard and stood up to leave. Despite the cold, Sofiane was still sweating. He wanted to get off the ship as soon as possible, and he stepped out of the freezer and shut the door. When he turned around, he stopped. He was startled this time not by the cold, but by the presence of one of the men in black clothes, standing in the doorway between the galley and the dining area. Exactly where Sofiane needed to go through. This one was wearing a black military jacket and a knit cap despite the heat outside.

  “What are you doing down here?” Viktor Egorov asked in French. He was not carrying a rifle like the other men, but instead, had his hand on a pistol resting high on his right thigh in an open holster.

  “You speak French,” Sofiane said, stating the obvious purely out of his need to buy time to come up with an answer.

  “Again. What are you doing down here?”

  “Eh, I was was looking for the toilet,” Sofiane offered.

  “What’s in the case?” Viktor asked, ignoring Sofiane’s obvious lie.

  “It is empty. I brought you vodka. The men up there have it,” Sofiane explained, motioning to the ceiling.

  Just then another man came down. Sofiane and Viktor both turned to look. The man stopped, wondering what he had just walked into. Viktor looked down at the bottle the man was holding and asked him to let him see it, in the language Sofiane did not understand. Viktor looked at the label, took a drink and asked the newcomer another question. The man in the t-shirt looked at Sofiane and nodded while he answered Viktor.

  Viktor Egorov turned to Sofiane and eyed him up and down, disapprovingly. “Get out of here,” he told Sofiane. The Algerian did not argue and quickly exited the room for the open air of the top deck.

  When he reached the outside, he leaned on the bulkhead to the left of the hatch he exited through to catch his breath. When his heart rate slowed to a less life-threatening pace, he walked around the superstructure toward the orange ladder and the fishing boat. The fishermen were setting down the final crate. One of them saw Sofiane coming around the corner and spoke to him in Arabic.

  “Let’s go Alger. We’re done here.”

  Sofiane moved straight past him and down the ladder. The men in black trousers continued to work on one of the bottles of vodka and paid no attention to the departing men. The last fisherman untied the boat and made his way down the ladder. When all were onboard, the fishing boat pulled away from the Baltic Venture and headed back to the east—and land.

  The Algerian went into the wheelhouse and squatted in a corner with the black briefcase and closed his eyes. The boat’s captain was at the helm and looked back at Sofiane. “Did you get what you came for?”

  Sofiane looked up at the captain without moving his head. He stared at him for fifteen seconds and, without replying, closed his eyes once more.

  The captain turned back to the task of steering his boat towards shore. What did he care if this man didn’t want to talk? He was getting paid to drive him and some food out to this ship. Enough money, in fact, that he did not have to go out fishing for the rest of the month if he didn’t want to. It was just as well. The Spanish boats showed up two weeks before, and the catch had been thin since then.

  The next morning, Sofiane Belmokhtari gathered his things after sunrise prayer. He shook the dirt from the bottom of his prayer rug and rolled it up, putting it into his bag. He moved over to the tin-roofed shack by the gate to the docks. He had slept the night behind the ragged building, preferring the hard earth to the motion of the fishing boat, even though the captain had offered to let him stay onboard until morning. Sofiane looked at his watch and noted the time. Ten minutes.

  While he waited, he pulled a folded photograph from the breast pocket of his tunic. He opened it up and stared at the two young, smiling faces on either side of the crease. A boy of six years holding a ball in one hand, with the other arm around the shoulders of a three year-old girl. They both had cat-like, black eyes that resembled their mother’s. Sofiane smiled. The picture was taken ten years ago. When life was simple. When he had hope. And love.

  A sporadic buzzing came from up the road. He shielded his eyes, squinting toward the sun, low in the eastern sky. The rising dust meant it was almost time. He glanced at his watch again. Early. Good. The sooner he started, the better.

  Sofiane took one more look at the photograph in his hand. His smile was gone. Replaced by a single tear that broke from his eye and ran down his cheek before disappearing in the sandy dirt at his feet. He folded the picture in half and tucked it away again in his breast pocket. He stood and waited for the vehicle to reach the docks. Finally.

  He had only one more thing to do.

  Chapter 6

  New York City

  Monday morning. Another week. Susan Williams chewed on the cap of her pen as she waited for the video to load. She thought about what her old high school friend she ran into at the Sheraton hotel bar last Friday night had said. “You mean you just get to surf the internet all day? That has to be the best job ever!” Still loading. Yeah, great job. She dropped the pen on her keyboard and buried her head in her hands. She couldn’t believe she slept with him.

  The computer beeped, signaling the download was complete. Susan put on her headphones, looked up at the monitor, and focused. A graying Lebanese man was at a public gathering in Beirut. He began speaking in a low, solemn tone, extolling the greatness of Allah and his prophets. Just like the beginning of all of these sermons, Susan thought. Wait for it...there.

  After one minute and thirty-eight seconds by Susan’s clock, the holy man shifted into a frantic tirade that make her wince and reach for the volume control. Susan noted the time on her yellow legal pad and began taking notes. For 12 minutes and 17 seconds she listened intently to Sheikh Ali bin Talib bin Rahman preach the glory of Islam, while at the same time blaming Hizballah and Hamas for the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people. If those misguided, militant organizations would focus their collective manpower and resources to working with Israel instead of trying to destroy it, he argued, the world would fall in line on the side of the Palestinians. The West would force the Israelis to stop settlements in the West Bank and put an end to the naval blockade off Gaza.

  The crowd cheered, and the Sheikh, who did not so much as grin during the entire production, gave a wave of superiority to his adoring fans. Susan looked over her notes, satisfied that her Arabic skills had progressed far enough that she did not have to watch the clip again. Though she was hired because of her ability to speak and read
the Persian language, and because she held a master’s degree in Iranian Studies from UCLA, her job, indeed the nature of geopolitics in the Middle East, necessitated that she be fluent in both Farsi and Arabic.

  Susan worked for the Intelligence Watch Group as an Iran Specialist in the Middle East/Southwest Asia cell. IWG was a private analysis and forecasting corporation whose clients included government organizations, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, academic institutions, and individual subscribers. They provided reports based on translations of international media and internet material, coupled with information provided from their own paid sources around the globe, to support foreign policy decision-makers and CEO’s in making the most informed decisions possible. The analysts at IWG, who were the heart of the company, connected the dots of current events, past histories, and government personalities to provide both long- and short-term predictions of what they believed would be developing in the worlds of politics, economics, social and military affairs.

  The Intelligence Watch Group was only ten years old, but it had already earned a reputation as a producer of valuable, accurate, actionable intelligence estimates that equaled, and in some cases surpassed, the quality and timeliness of those produced by the Central Intelligence Agency. It wasn’t the only private intelligence company in the country, but it was one of the most successful. That success was owed in large part to the work of Susan Williams and her fellow analysts. Their job was to systematically muddle through the material both readily available and that frequently overlooked, make informed conclusions, and get results.

  Susan finished typing up her notes about the Sheikh’s speech and pushed her chair back to get up and stretch. She thought a cup of coffee might do her good, too. Although her work was more interesting than any she could think of in corporate America, she still worked in a cubicle like the rest of the drones that made up the bulk of the white collar work force in the country. Occasionally IWG employees could be heard comparing their lives to the characters from the movie “Office Space.” Some even talked about re-enacting a scene from the movie and forcibly removing their cubicle walls to create a more open work environment. Susan had no such fantasies. She enjoyed the isolation. She liked conversation and friendship as much as the next person, but when it came to anticipating the next move of the government of Iran by sifting through countless open sources, discarding those that were unreliable or merely political rhetoric and focusing on the tidbits of information that had possible credence or consequence, Susan wanted total concentration. Besides, she thought most of her co-workers were idiots.

  It wasn’t that Susan thought she was better than them. On the contrary, she was prone to second-guess every conclusion she came to, on the assumption that she was probably wrong, and it was better if she determined that early rather than hear it from her boss, or worse still, directly from a client. It was just that many of the people she worked with didn’t seem to understand that working for IWG was not a right they inherited as a result of their hard work in graduate school. It was a privilege. In the current economy, just having a job was a blessing. Some of her fellow analysts acted as if they would rather be working at McDonald’s, except the work tempo would have been too hectic. Laziness in others, particularly others she often depended on to do her own job, just left a bad taste in her mouth.

  Despite her success in academics and beyond, Susan had suffered from low self-esteem for most of her life. She recognized her affliction and tried hard to overcome it, but she was cautious not to take risks if the stakes were too high. Because of that, she remained a virtual non-entity as far as the upper echelons of the Intelligence Watch Group were concerned. Her output was above average, but because she was unwilling to put herself out in the open for fear of being reprimanded should she come to the wrong conclusions, her work was quietly absorbed into the products that were generated by the group as a whole, whether in the name of IWG or her particular analysis cell. That was just fine with Susan. It was in her personal life, however, that her low opinion of herself and the incumbent fear of rejection got her into trouble.

  Susan returned to her desk after refilling her coffee mug in the break room. She came back to a white post-it note stuck to the screen of her computer monitor and a blinking light on her phone indicating she had a voice mail. The note was from her immediate supervisor, Jim Shelton. He wanted her to stop by his office as soon as possible. Susan wondered what the crisis of the moment was now. She always thought Jim took his job as supervisor way too seriously. Susan thought he was a decent guy, but it seemed to her that he believed every scrap of intelligence, every project of the day, was all that stood between nuclear holocaust and peace in our time. Sometimes she had to work late to meet an impossible deadline for something that turned out to be nothing more than interesting background fluff. But Jim still took it seriously, even though she was the one who did the analytical work and listened to screaming sheikhs and read entries in Mahmoud Ahmadinijad’s blog until her eyes bled. All Jim did was turn in the reports to the next higher-up in the company chain-of-command. Well, that’s better than me handing it in, she thought. That way Jim gets the heat from the Big Man when I get it wrong, not me.

  She picked up the phone’s handset and pushed the button to retrieve her message. Some people preferred to listen to their messages on speaker, but Susan didn’t like to let a casual passer-by in on her phone conversation, so she listened through the handset.

  “Hey Susan, it’s me. I had an incredible time Friday. I fly back to Houston tonight, but I’ve got to come to New York for a conference in two months. Maybe we could get together again. I’d like that. Ciao.”

  “Yeah, like that will ever happen,” Susan said as she angrily put the receiver back in the cradle. “Wait...did I give him my phone number?” she asked herself. I gotta lay off the liquor.

  She stared up at the fluorescent light in the ceiling above her head and rubbed her temples. “I can’t believe I slept with him, uggghh.”

  “Slept with who?” Susan looked at the opening in her cubicle. It was Phil Davis. Phil worked primarily in the Asia cell as an economics analyst.

  “What? Who? I mean, nothing, uh, no one.” So much for not letting casual passers-by in on her conversation.

  “I thought you just said you shouldn’t have...”

  “Never mind. And it’s whom, not who,” Susan quipped in a desperate attempt to block Phil’s inquisition.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You slept with whom. Not who. It’s the object, so you use whom instead.”

  “Man, and people call me a nerd.” Phil leaned on the doorless doorway of Susan’s cubicle and took a sip of coffee from the mug he carried. He was never seen without it. “Did you know the CIA has a gift shop?” he would ask when someone inquired about his black mug with a gold rendition of the official crest of the Central Intelligence Agency. Apparently Phil had a friend from college who worked there in some capacity, though Phil never said what exactly his friend did, if he in fact knew that information.

  “Hey, you know your boss is looking for you, right?” Phil asked Susan.

  “Yeah, I better go see what he wants.” Phil took another sip of coffee and moved out of Susan’s way as she left her cube. She took three steps and called back, “Hey Phil, want to grab a drink after work?” She glanced over her shoulder but kept walking.

  “Sure,” Phil replied. “Sheraton?”

  “No, let’s try somewhere else. I don’t like the Sheraton anymore.”

  “Okay. Let me know.”

  Susan waved her hand in acknowledgment and continued down the “hallway” between the cubicles toward Jim Shelton’s office. As a Regional Cell Leader, Jim actually had a bona fide office. It wasn’t very large, but it did have a door. And windows. Two, in fact.

  Susan knocked lightly on the open door and Jim motioned her in.

  “Yes, sir. No problem, sir, we’re monitoring it. Okay, bye.” Jim hung up the phone and looked up at Susan. “Have a seat.�
� He took a moment before saying anything, appraising his Iran specialist. He always liked Susan. She was a good analyst—a solid researcher. And, more importantly to Jim, she was there to work. He had seen too many people come to IWG with the attitude that they would use their employment with the company as merely a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Jim knew from first-hand experience that “bigger,” namely the CIA, NSA, or FBI, or even Homeland Security nowadays, didn’t mean “better” by any stretch of the imagination.

  Jim had worked for the National Security Agency for sixteen years before he left to join the upstart Intelligence Watch Group. NSA, to Jim, was a meat grinder where too much bureaucracy got in the way of important information getting into the hands of the people who needed it the most. At the National Security Agency, that meant key members of Congress, military leaders, and the President himself. Jim saw the work IWG tried to do as a way to provide meaningful support for the country’s defense—something which NSA had long forgotten was in their mandate.

  “You look like shit,” Jim said, breaking the silence in the room.

  Susan shifted in the chair and brushed her hands quickly through her brown, shoulder-length hair, trying to tame any frazzles that may have tipped Jim off.

  “I mean, you look like you haven’t slept in a few days. Rough weekend?”

  Susan thought about how to answer that question, fearing that the wrong answer might blacklist her for the next series of downsizing layoffs. “Well, I, um...” was all she got out.

  “Forget it. Look, I have a new project I want you to work on. This one is cross-regional, so you may need to work with some of the other cells to run this to ground.”

  “Sure,” Susan said. It wasn’t like she was prepping a briefing package on possible Iranian negotiating tactics regarding their nuclear program, or that she had spent the last two weeks developing a personality profile on Sheikh Rahman as a possible lever for the U.S. to use to keep Hamas in check while they worked to broker a final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She wasn’t busy at all. “Is that what the boss was calling about?”