Ghost Ship (NUMA Files 12)
“And I’m afraid it makes me too well known to get you access to a man like Acosta.”
Kurt admired El Din’s stand. “So how do I get at him? He seems to have plenty of security.”
“He has a yacht in the harbor,” El Din explained. “Its name is the Massif. Perhaps a monument to his ego. He will be hosting a party the night after tomorrow for all his prospective buyers and sellers. A slow cruise is planned up and down the coast.”
Kurt grinned. “A little sightseeing tour.”
El Din nodded. “Yes, exactly. Something tells me a man like you might find a way to slip aboard.”
Kurt returned to the Excelsior by way of the harbor. He got a good look at the Massif, taking pictures with the zoom lens on his 20-megapixel Canon DSLR.
She was too big for any of the marina slips, so she moored offshore. Her hull was dark blue, her superstructure white. Forward, she had a sharp V-shaped bow with a large slot for a heavy anchor that was currently deployed. Amidships were the usual pen decks, a high-mounted flybridge, with a helipad on the stern, upon which a sleek helicopter with a red logo sat. Forward of the helipad, waves of heat distorted the air as exhaust from the twin stacks vented. The stacks were angled like the tail fins of some hypersonic fighter plane and painted with the same logo as the helicopter.
“Smuggling business must be pretty good,” Kurt muttered to himself.
He sauntered down the waterfront, playing the tourist, taking pictures of other boats, even turning back toward Dubai and getting a few shots of the skyline. When he looked back to the Massif, a small launch was pulling up to her side. He took a dozen photos of the launch, catching Acosta boarding along with a blond woman. As she took off her sunglasses to clean one of the lenses, Kurt zoomed in and focused, snapping a clear shot. Even through the lens he couldn’t help but notice her dark, smoky eyes. As Kurt watched, Acosta took the mystery woman by the hand and walked toward the bow. Once they moved out of sight, Kurt turned his attention to the security team. Armed guards were easy to see patrolling the decks fore and aft. He saw video cameras in the upper superstructure. From there, he guessed, they could see the entire length of the upper decks and anything approaching from port or starboard. A pair of spotlights and twin radar domes sprouted from the bridge, most likely one for weather, the other for traffic.
All of which meant the ship would be damn-near impossible to approach while moving at sea. That left two options: come in from above or up from below. Kurt recalled parachuting onto a moving supertanker some years back. It had been a treacherous operation even though the vessel was the size of several football fields and moving slowly. He didn’t fancy the idea of trying the same thing on a yacht one-fifth the size and moving three times as fast.
His mind made up, Kurt left the harbor and continued back to the hotel, traveling on foot and fighting the strange sensation of being watched or followed the entire time. He changed course and stopped a few times, scanning the sea of faces around him, looking for anyone or anything suspicious. At one point, a male wearing a patterned dishdasha looked away and stepped into the crowd with haste.
Kurt stared, but the man didn’t reappear.
“Great,” he muttered.
Unhappy with the thought that his presence in Dubai might have been compromised, Kurt continued on to the hotel, occasionally checking behind him by looking in the reflections of the glass-walled stores along the boulevard. He caught glimpses of the man several times but pretended not to notice.
Finally back at the hotel, he crossed the lobby, took the elevator to the seventeenth floor, and waited around the corner.
Sure enough, the other elevator pinged moments later.
He heard the door slide open and someone walking his way. Hoping he wasn’t about to mug some tourist, Kurt waited for the man to round the corner and then lunged at him. It was the same man, in the same robe.
Kurt slammed a hand over the man’s mouth, shoved him against the wall, and then swung a fist toward the target’s solar plexus. To his surprise, the man reacted almost instantly, arching his body and twisting to the side.
Kurt caught him with only a glancing blow, his fist hammering abs that were hardened and ready to take the shot. The man knocked Kurt’s hand away and put his own hands up.
“Easy, Kurt. It’s me! Joe!”
There was a moment of incoherence as Kurt’s mind put two and two together, trying to reconcile his friend’s voice with the clothes he saw in front of him and the fact that Joe should have been at least seven thousand miles from there.
As if reading Kurt’s mind, Joe pulled off the gray-colored gutra that was covering half his face.
“What are you doing here?” Kurt asked.
“I came to help you.”
Kurt didn’t know whether to be happy or furious. He led Joe to his room and repeated the question.
“I’ve been following you,” Joe said. “You’re hard to track, you know that?”
“Not too hard, obviously. What’s with the disguise?”
“I didn’t want you to notice me.”
“In that case, your surveillance technique needs a little work,” Kurt said. “My advice: When the mark turns around and looks right at you, don’t duck out of the way.”
Joe smiled. “Duly noted.”