The Jungle (Oregon Files 8)

Lawless smiled and thrust out his hand. “Ah’ll call Fortran and give ’em my notice.”

From down the hallway came a whoop from an unseen female crew member. It didn’t sound like Hux or Linda, so word had traveled fast about the Adonis-like newbie.

“It might take some time,” MacD continued, “and Ah’ll probably have to go back to Kabul. Ah’m sure they’re investigating my kidnapping. Plus, Ah’ll need to pick up my passport and personal kit.”

“No problem,” Juan assured him. “We need a few days to get into position for our next job. We’ll issue you one of our encrypted satellite phones and contact numbers. We’ll have to fly you out to meet us.” Juan had a sudden thought. “By the way, how are your tracking skills?”

“Ah’m a redneck at heart. Spent my summers hunting in the bayous. My dad used to boast that he had the dogs carrying the guns and me following the scent.”

6

IN THE END, THE DECISION OF WHETHER TO SEND AN ADVANCE team to Chittagong, Bangladesh’s principal port city, or wait and drive the Oregon hard around the Indian subcontinent was made easy by the simple fact that the ship had never been there and none of their contacts had a trustworthy man in the area. If they couldn’t guarantee getting the supplies and equipment they needed, there was no sense sending a group ahead to even try.

They would lose five days getting the ship into position, five days in which the trail would grow colder. While this rankled Cabrillo and the rest of the crew, the demand for a face-to-face meeting with Roland Croissard annoyed even more.

When Juan had sent his acceptance email to L’Enfant, the reply had been swift, as it always was. The financial terms had already been agreed upon, but Croissard had added the stipulation that he get to meet with Cabrillo. Juan had only agreed to meet Gunawan Bahar because the man had flown to Mumbai, where the Oregon had just off-loaded two containers of South African millet that had been lashed to the forward deck. Croissard was currently in Singapore and wanted Cabrillo to come to him.

It meant Juan had to chopper back to Karachi, get on the G-V, fly to Singapore, hold the man’s hand for an hour or two, then head off to either Chennai, formerly Madras, or Vishakhapatnam, on India’s east coast. Which city would depend on the length of the meeting and the speed the Oregon could maintain. Once there, they would need to slow the ship so Gomez Adams could chopper in to pick him up.

Any number of bureaucratic snafus could hold him up. He’d replied to L’Enfant, expressing his concerns, but was told the client was adamant.

What bothered Cabrillo was the fact that until he could somehow get the Corporation back in the good graces of the United States government, he had no choice but to accept assignments like this. Like any business, they had overhead and expenses that translated to about two hundred thousand dollars a day.

Taking out entire terrorist cells, thwarting some major attack before it happened—these were the things he’d created the Corporation for. That was why he’d joined the CIA in the first place.

And knowing that, for the time being, he had been marginalized to a degree ate at the back of his mind.

He decided to take Max with him for no other reason than to have his company during the long flights. That left Linda Ross in charge of the ship. After she’d gotten out of the Navy, Linda had captained a rig tender in the Gulf of Mexico. She could handle a ship as well as she could handle a gun.

They landed at Changi Airport, to the north of the futuristic city-state of Singapore. Its skyline was punctuated by some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, including the new Marina Bay Sands Hotel, their destination. Hanley was nearly inconsolable when Juan told him they wouldn’t have the time to hit the hotel’s casino.

As was usual when arriving on a private jet, customs was a mere formality. The uniformed agent met them at the stairs when they stepped from the plane, glanced at, then stamped, their passports, and didn’t ask to see the contents of Cabrillo’s sleek briefcase, not that they were hiding anything in it.

Though they had flown casual, both had put on suits and ties just prior to landing. Juan wore an elegantly cut charcoal, with a faint pinstripe that was picked up in the colors of his two-hundred-dollar tie. His brogues were buffed to a glossy black. Keeping shoes spit-polished was a fetish he shared with the Oregon’s steward. Max wasn’t wearing off-the-rack exactly, but he looked uncomfortable. His collar dug into the spare flesh around his neck, and there was the tiniest trace of an old stain on his left sleeve.

The air was decidedly warmer here than in Karachi, and while they couldn’t detect it over the smell of hot asphalt and jet fuel, it carried the tropi

cal humidity associated with the sea. The Equator was only eighty-five miles to their south.

Juan checked his watch, an all-black Movado that was barely thicker than a piece of paper. “We’ve got an hour. Perfect.”

Though offered a super-stretch limousine, they took a less ostentatious town car into the city. Traffic was absolute murder and yet remarkably polite. There were no blaring horns, no aggressive driving techniques. It made Juan recall that for all its wealth and sophistication, Singapore was virtually a police state. Free speech was severely limited, and spitting on a sidewalk could get you caned. This tended to create a homogenous population with a keen respect for the law, and thus no one cut you off or flipped you the bird.

Their destination rose along the water in three gracefully sloped white towers, each more than fifty stories tall. Atop them was a platform that stretched for nearly a fifth of a mile, one part of it cantilevering off the third tower a good two hundred feet. This was known as the SkyPark, and even from a distance they could see the profusion of trees and shrubbery that adorned it. The SkyPark side facing the marina was composed of three infinity edge swimming pools holding almost four hundred thousand gallons of water.

At the base of the hotel towers were three enormous domed buildings housing the casino, exclusive shops, and convention spaces. Rumor had it, the casino resort was the second most expensive on the planet.

The car pulled up to the hotel entrance, and a liveried doorman was there even before the tires had stopped turning.

“Welcome to the Marina Bay Sands,” he said in cultured English. Cabrillo suspected that had he looked Scandinavian he would have been greeted in flawless Swedish. “Do you have any baggage?”

Juan jerked a finger at where Max was heaving himself out of the car. “Just him.”

They stepped through into the hotel’s soaring lobby. It was crowded with vacationers. A group of them were assembled for some sort of tour and were receiving instructions in singsong Chinese from a female guide who couldn’t have been four and a half feet tall. The line waiting to check in snaked through a velvet-rope maze. With twenty-five hundred rooms, this was more like a small city than a single enterprise.

Juan found the concierge desk and told the attractive Malay girl that she had an envelope for him. He gave his name, and she asked for identification. Inside the envelope was a credit-card-style room key and one of Roland Croissard’s business cards. Scrawled on the back was the financier’s room number.

They needed to show the armed guard near the elevators that they had a proper room key. Juan flashed it, and they gained entry. They took the car up to the fortieth floor with a Korean couple who were arguing the entire way. Cabrillo imagined that the man had gambled away the family kimchi money.