introduce her to his family. Perhaps she might even arrange for him to catch her tearing up, after which she would confess that she was somewhat taken aback by the “special connection” she felt with him.
As she’d known from the beginning, the tricky part would be the pitch. Her “handler”—a Russian term she had never liked—the man with the fire-scarred hands, had proposed an angle she thought was worth exploring, but it would involve exposing herself with an unbackstopped story that Steve could check into, if so inclined. Then again, if by the time she made the pitch Steve wasn’t completely under her thumb, she would back off and try another tack. Steve wasn’t stupid, but when it came to matters of the heart, men were just as irrational, if not more so, than women. Sex, for all its power, was simply a stepping-stone, and if she judged her mark correctly, she was but a few stones away from the prize.
The question that Allison didn’t let herself wonder too much about was the nature of the information her employer was seeking. Why in the world, she wondered, did they care about groundwater in the middle of a desert?
As Panamax “box ships” went, the Losan was small, a “twelve abreast” 2,700 TEU—twenty-foot equivalent units—vessel measuring 542 feet, whose capacity had long since been surpassed by Post Panamax descendants, but Tarquay Industries of Smithfield, Virginia, was less interested in modernity than it was in cutting its losses.
Of the 120 five-hundred-gallon propane tanks it had sold to the government of Senegal, forty-six had proved defective, having slipped through quality control with improperly welded lifting lugs. By itself this was not an insurmountable problem, one that Tarquay had offered to fix at no cost and on-site, but an examination by both Senegalese government inspectors and Tarquay’s lead engineer in Dakar had revealed that the welds had compromised the shell integrity; none of the tanks could have withstood the mandated 250-pounds-per-square-inch pressure capacity.
As this was Tarquay’s initial contract with Senegal and in fact its first overseas deal, a quick refund was issued, along with an official apology from the board of directors, and replacement tanks were dispatched immediately. In Dakar, the defective tanks were listed on the bill of entry with the code R3001c—“Re-exportation of quality-rejected non-petroleum products following storage warehousing”—then transported to a government customs warehouse in Port Sud and offloaded in a vacant weed-filled lot surrounded by a four-foot-high hurricane fence.
Eight months later, arrangements were made to have the defective tanks returned to Smithfield. The Losan, making its final port of call before crossing the Atlantic to the United States, had the requisite space to take the cargo.
Two days before departure, the tanks were loaded by forklift onto platform railcars, locked into place, and transported two miles down the tracks to the Losan’s berth, where the tanks were offloaded by crane into open-top “bulktainers”—four tanks to a container—then hoisted to the Losan’s deck and stacked twelve abreast.
Having been inspected upon entry, the tanks, which had been under the control of customs since their arrival, were neither weighed nor examined before being loaded aboard the Losan.
The headache and nausea had been getting progressively worse for the last ten hours, which somewhat surprised Adnan; he hadn’t expected symptoms this soon. His hands were trembling and his skin felt clammy. Clearly the stories about the vessel’s toxicity hadn’t been exaggerations. No matter, he thought, it was almost time. According to Salychev’s chart, they were only twenty kilometers from the drop-off point.
By Allah’s grace they’d found the containment drum precisely where it should have been, still resting in its bulkhead-mounted rack. It had been lighter than Adnan had anticipated, which was both a blessing and a curse. He knew the approximate weight of the core, so it was relatively easy to estimate the weight of the containment drum; it was obviously lead-shielded but not as thickly as their intelligence had suggested. This meant the vault itself had been intended as the primary shield, but that wouldn’t help them. However, the drum was still sealed and seemed to have suffered no damage during the incident those many years ago.
They’d unlatched the rack enclosure, lifted the drum up and out by its four welded D-shaped handles, then walked it out of the vault and across the flooded deck to the ladder. Here they’d moved slowly, cautiously, one step at a time, to the catwalk, then out into the main passageway. The last two major obstacles—the ladder up to the