Pirate: A Thriller Read online

  Pirate

  ALSO BY TED BELL

  Assassin

  Hawke

  Nick of Time

  ATRIA BOOKS

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Theodore A. Bell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Atria Books,

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-2180-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-2180-1

  ATRIA BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Page Lee Hufty

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped make this book possible, and I am happy to acknowledge their contributions. I will never forget how lucky I was to get a start, and for that I have to thank Emily Bestler. She went a considerable distance out on a very green limb and dropped a great big ladder. Also, my thanks to Judith Curr and Louise Burke, who have always been so supportive and helpful. Also at Simon & Schuster, Carolyn Reidy and Jack Romanos—thank you.

  A note of thanks to English teachers everywhere. You bear a far larger burden now than you endured with my generation and I appreciate your dedication and fervent belief in words and stories. We are all lost without you.

  A few folks helped on this book in particular. My friend Stefan Halper, former White House and State Department official, and now senior fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge. His wise counsel and deep understanding of the challenges presented by China in this century were invaluable. M. Boicos, many thanks for helping me retrace Napoleon’s footsteps in Paris and at Malmaison. Chief of Police Mike Reiter and the Palm Beach Marine Unit were very helpful in matters of harbor security. My good friend and agent, Peter Lampack, contributed, as always, enormously to this manuscript.

  To my wife, Page Lee Hufty, who has been steadfast and unwavering in her love and support of me and this book, I express my deepest gratitude.

  “It doesn’t matter if it is a black cat or a white cat.

  If it can catch mice, it’s a good cat.”

  —DENG XIAOPING, CENTRAL COMMITTEE LEADER,

  COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA, DECEMBER 1978

  “From our view, the dominance of the West since the Renaissance

  was a five-hundred-year mistake that will soon be corrected.”

  —HIGH-RANKING CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY OFFICIAL TO

  U.S. AMBASSADOR, 2005

  Pirate

  Prologue

  Marrakech

  HARRY BROCK SPENT HIS LAST HOUR OF FREEDOM IN PARADISE, sipping orange-scented tea in the loamy shade of a grove of date palms. He was reclining against the base of a palm on a tufted cushion of grass, soaking his sore feet in a sunken pool of cool water. White and yellow petals floated on the surface. Moroccans were great believers in flower petals.

  They scattered them everywhere, especially in fountains and in the various hidden pools that dotted the property. The pretty maids even sprinkled them on the pillows of his bed whenever he left his room to go down to the bar, or go for a walk in the hotel gardens like he was doing now.

  After a hard sleep, he’d awoken that morning to the sound of distant motorcycles cranking up somewhere beyond the orange groves. Vroom-vroom. At least, that’s what it sounded like when the muezzins began calling the faithful to prayer. He could hear wailing from atop slender minarets. Needles, pointing at the sky, and white domes were visible beyond the walls of his current residence.

  He’d cracked one eye at the clock. He’d been sleeping for sixteen straight hours. It took a moment to remember that he was still alive and recall exactly where he was; to realize that he was conscious again.

  It was a pretty ritzy place, his current residence, way too expensive for his current pay grade, but, hey, if he got out of this joint alive, he was going to put in for it anyway. Beluga for breakfast? Why not? Kir royales and mimosas? Hell, he was entitled after what he’d been through.

  By God, was he ever entitled.

  Brock had donned the fluffy white robe and gone straight down to the pool, swum fifty laps, then strolled among citrus groves heavy with fruit. He was careful to keep within the high ochre-colored walls of the hotel, La Mamounia. And he tried not to look over his shoulder every five seconds, though reflexive behavior was pretty standard in his line of work.

  Harry Brock was a spy. And, not to be overly dramatic about it, but he was marked for death. Big time. Nothing new and exciting about that, he imagined, not around here. Spies went for a dime a dozen in this neck of the woods. Hell, maybe even cheaper.

  The 1920s-era Art Deco hotel, smack dab in the heart of beautiful downtown Marrakech, was, itself, no stranger to spycraft or wartime military secrets. The lavish brochure up in his room proudly proclaimed the fact that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt held secret meetings here during World War II. You could just picture the two of them, huddled in a corner, speaking in hushed tones, working on a pitcher of ice-cold martinis at l’Orangerie bar. Beat the hell out of Washington or London in December.

  The hotel’s bar must have been spy heaven in those days. Yeah, back in those good old Bogart days when everything was still black and white. When the fundamental things still applied. And a kiss was just a kiss.

  There was nothing remotely heavenly about the fix Harry Brock was in. Right about now, Harry was up to his ass in secrets. Hell, he had more secrets than ten men could safely handle. He needed to un-burden himself in a hurry. The guy he now worked for in Washington, guy name of General Charlie Moore, no doubt thought Harry was dead. He needed face time with Moore, fast, before someone really did take him out. Harry was sitting on something very big and it wasn’t his butt. He had learned that America’s old pals, the European Axis of Weasels, had themselves a new silent partner.

  Namely, China. And to stop Harry from delivering this juicy tidbit to his superiors, the boys in Beijing were pulling out all the stops. Find Harry; silence Harry, before he blows his little whistle.

  Harry found the simple fact that he was still breathing to be mind-blowing. He was living proof that human beings were much harder to kill than people gave them credit for. Maybe he wasn’t long on brains, but old Harry knew how to deal, hold, and fold. Yeah, Harry Brock, creeping up on forty, could still take a licking and keep on ticking. So far, anyway.

  There was a train leaving Marrakech station for Casablanca in two hours. Somehow, if his luck held and nobody killed him, he’d be on that train. His normally puppy-dog-brown eyes were red, filigreed with strain radiating out from the irises. Harry was beat to shit, literally and figuratively speaking, and he couldn’t find a thing that didn’t hurt like hell right now except his little friend, Mr. Johnson.

  To complete his laundry list of physical complaints, he had such a cocktail of drugs pumping through his system, he was humming like a goddamn high-tension line. Some kind of meth they’d injected him with, a mix of truth serum and speed, and he couldn’t get it out of his system.

  Time to hit the pool.

  Brock had spent the preceding few nights in far humbler circumstances. He had lain on bare ground under the stars, freezing his balls off and listening to his camel fart. Having skirted the two walled towns of Tisnet and Goulemain, he’d reached a desert plateau cradled in the foothills of the snow
-capped Atlas Mountains.

  Exhausted, he tied his foul-smelling beast to a handy scrub bush and collapsed on the rocky ground. Below his mountain, he could see the hazy lights and minarets of Marrakech in the near distance and the coast of Morocco in the far. He slept hard, woke up with the sun, and started down.

  At eight the previous morning, having given his noxious camel away to the first reasonable facsimile of a decent-looking kid he saw, he’d presented himself and his remaining cash at the reception desk. The dark-eyed beauty behind the computer flashed a winning smile. He’d cleaned up a little first, in the Gents’ off the lobby, washing a couple of continents’ worth of dirt out of his long brown hair. Couldn’t do much about the beard or the clothes, but he’d flirted his way into a room with a big marble bathtub and a balcony overlooking the gardens. A bowl of rose petals by the tub: paradise, just like he said.

  He was so close, now, so close and yet so goddamn far.

  He heard a noise above him and looked skyward. A jumbo was on final, Air France, bringing in another boatload of tourists for le weekend. Down from Paris to hit ye olde Kasbah. Drop a few thousand Euros at the rug and hookah shops in the Medina. Two hours on the ground and the big Frogliner would load ’em up again and fly away home.

  Au re-fuckin’-voir, mes amis. French bastards. When General Moore’s JCS munchkins and the seventh-floor suits at Langley heard Harry’s epic tale of harrowing adventure, they would not effing believe what their erstwhile “allies” were up to now.

  Brock had a plane to catch, too, but his was an unscheduled departure at an airport short on amenities. Like runways. And, in order to catch that little crop duster, first he had to get on that train to Casablanca.

  Brock International, as he’d dubbed it, lay about thirty-five miles out in the open desert, due north of Casablanca. It was a dried-up oasis called Dasght-al Dar. This garden spot was where an underground spring used to form a wadi, nothing more than a forgotten pinprick on a few old maps; even parched-brain camel-drivers hadn’t bothered to visit the site for a century or more.

  At eighteen hundred hours today, just at dusk, a two-seater biplane with no markings would touch down and taxi across the hard sand, stop, and turn.

  The pilot would wait exactly ten minutes. If no one instantly recognizable to the pilot ran out of the clump of palms by the oasis in that time, the pilot would take off solo. Harry had one shot. One shot only. Going once.

  They had a name for CIA guys like Brock. He was a NOC. That seldom-heard acronym stood for Not on Consular. It meant if you got caught, like he had been five days ago, you were dead and gone. Forgotten. Your name did not appear on any consular lists. In fact, your name did not appear anywhere. If you ever called your actual boss, in his case, Sweet-Talking Charlie Moore, the head of the Joint Chiefs, and said, hey, somebody has a gun stuck in my ear, Charlie would say, “Harry who?” and hang up. A NOC, operating behind enemy lines, was the deepest of the deep, and the deadest of the dead should he or she be captured.

  No NOC funerals in Arlington, no-sir-ee bobtail.

  Brock had been captured all right, three fucking times. Once in Tianjin on the Gulf of Chihli, that was the second time, trying to get the hell out of the Chinese prison system. He figured he could survive the beatings and other shit maybe one more day, so he’d gone over the wall. They caught him, tried to kill him again, and he escaped again. Made it to the waterfront. An old guy, a longshoreman with a scow, was supposed to ferry him to a French freighter anchored out in the crowded harbor.

  The longshoreman geezer turned out to be a PLA, People’s Liberation Army, informant, like every other rat in that godforsaken cesspool port town, and Brock had to kill him, too, just like he’d wasted all the other rodents. He slit the bastard’s throat with his well-honed assault knife and held him under the stinking water until the thirty bloody pieces of silver lining his pockets made him sink out of sight.

  Harry then made his way through the heavy fog to the freighter, poling the scow by himself. It was not a skill they taught at Quantico or the Farm, two places where he’d attended classes on his way to becoming a case officer. Put scow-poling in heavy fog in the training manual. Yep. He’d have to drop that one in the seventh-floor suggestion box if he ever made it home.

  But he found the right boat at least, without the Chinaman’s navigational help. He held on to the anchor rode, kicked the scow away, and did a hand-over-hand up a slimy ratline. It was two in the morning. He knew by that time the captain, a rummy from Marseilles named Laurent with whom he had a passing acquaintance, would be passed out dead drunk in his bunk. Brock hauled himself over the rail and dropped silently onto the deck at the stern. He made his way un-challenged to the bridge deck and slipped into the Frenchman’s darkened cabin. Laurent had covered the single porthole with his blanket, probably hoping to sleep it off in the morning.

  Sorry, mon ami. Je m’fucking ’scuse, pal.

  It was pitch black in there.

  It stank to high heaven, too. But Brock didn’t differentiate the bad smells in the captain’s boudoir, which was his first mistake. No, he simply dumped a half-full pitcher of water from the nightstand in Laurent’s face and simultaneously put the point of his blade up under his stubbly chin. The man positively reeked of fish and sweat and gin and needed a bath anyway.

  “Who got to you?” Brock asked the captain, one hand clamped down on his shoulder, the other twisting the blade tip in the soft folds of grey skin hanging loosely around his grimy neck. “You gave me up, you sonafabitch! Why? Tell me!”

  “Piss off, mate! I’m already dead,” Laurent hissed through clenched yellowed teeth.

  “Correct,” Brock said, and made all of the captain’s well-founded assumptions come true. He had barely finished wiping the blood off his blade and sticking it in its nylon ankle holster when he realized just how badly he’d just this minute fucked up.

  “Mr. Brock?” a voice said in the darkness, and Brock figured it might be over for him, too. Game, set, and match. The head. He hadn’t checked the goddamn toilet. The door to the fricking head had been closed. It was open now. He could see a lighter shade of grey in there, and the guy standing by the toilet. Christ. Two guys.

  Harry instinctively turned sideways to present a smaller target. He had his small Browning Buck Mark already out. His handgun skills were modest, but, luckily, the Browning shot a whole lot better than he did. He raised his arm to fire. He got one round off in the general direction of the silhouetted guy’s mouth when the flat of a hand came down on his wrist and broke it. Shit. The gun clattered to the steel deck and whoever had hit him danced back into his corner. He still had his knife, of course, but he’d stowed it inconveniently in his ankle holster.

  “Pick the gun up, Mr. Brock, and put the barrel in your mouth. Then put your hands above your head.”

  Gun in his mouth? These guys were endlessly inventive.

  “If I put my gun in my mouth, I’ll use it.” He would, too, put his brains on the bulkhead. Had no intention of going back to the “Potsticker,” the guy who liked to duck Harry’s head in a pot of boiling water, or worse. He always carried an “L” pill on him, a Lethal for little emergencies just like this one, but he hated to swallow the damn thing until he saw exactly how this was all going to turn out.

  “Let me get a look at you, Trigon.”

  Trigon was his cryptonym in all the agency dossiers. Everybody in the agency had three names: the one on their birth certificates, the one on their files, and a dumb codename like Trigon. Damn. He’d been in China for six months, two of which he’d spent in prison. He was finally on his way out. And he’d been stupid enough to think he was clean. And trust a Frenchman.

  Will we never learn?

  He heard the soft click of a switch and an overhead light came on. Buzzing fluorescent. There were two of them in the cabin with him. A tall, elegant Chinese gentleman in a neatly pressed white mandarin jacket was seated in the hard wooden desk chair. His long khaki legs were encased in
old-fashioned leather boots laced up to his knees, polished to a mirrorlike finish.

  He was tall for a Chinese, something over six feet. His hair was dead straight and blue-black. A thick comma of it lay on his forehead, the skin of which was the familiar shade of flat light yellow. His eyes, a shade of pewter grey, were hooded and thickly lashed. A northern type, Brock thought. Tibetan, perhaps, or Manchurian. He’d seen this face somewhere. Yeah. He’d seen the guy’s picture in a dossier at Langley. Hell, the guy was practically famous in certain international terrorist circles.

  Say hello to General Moon. A charter member, at least as far as Harry was concerned, of the World Hall of Fame of Flaming Ass-holes.

  This would be the dashing General Sun-yat Moon, all right. He was a man Harry had managed to learn something about in the last six months. Like any good case officer, especially one assigned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Brock had done his homework. Before his insertion into China, he’d committed every line on the man’s face and every filling in his mouth to memory. Even knew his favorite movie: Bridge on the River Kwai.

  It was starting to come back to him now.

  General Moon, fifty-six years old, was born in Jilin, Manchuria. He was a widower with two grown daughters, twins, both of whom had been trained in the shadow arts since childhood. Rumor had it, they were both high-ranking Te-Wu officers. That’s secret police in Chinese. Their current whereabouts were unknown, but both were believed to be on assignment in the field.

  Moon was a seasoned battlefield commander. He’d come up through the ranks. But more important, Sun-yat Moon was deputy chief of the much-feared Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army. A vicious, hard-line Communist, known even in Beijing for his extremist ideological stands, Moon was now in operational command of more than a million Red Chinese, for want of a better description, storm troops.