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He ran through the whole procedure one more time in his mind, making sure he had done everything that was required, and then made his way back to the jetty. By the time the guard woke from his slumber, Carver was long gone.
Ergon Ali took a long time to die, protesting his i
They were five miles out to sea when the vibrations started. The pilot’s instincts told him to turn back, but he knew Visar would not allow it, so he picked up speed, hoping to get the trip over and done with as soon as possible.
As the helicopter accelerated, air started rushing ever faster around the vertical stabilizer, bullying it from side to side. If all four assembly bolts had been solidly in place, they would have kept the stabilizer upright and motionless. But with the top assembly bolts gone, the weakened bottom bolts became a hinge around which the stabilizer started to flap. And the more the pilot piled on the speed, the more extreme the flapping became.
When the helicopter took off, there was a clearance of about a foot between the stabilizer and the tail rotor. But with each vibration that distance decreased: ten inches… six… three… closer and closer until it collided with the spi
The sudden, total deceleration ripped the rotor blades away from the helicopter. The two remaining stabilizer bolts snapped like breadsticks and the entire tail assembly was sent plummeting down toward the waters of the Adriatic Sea, burnished to a gleaming copper by the rays of the rising sun.
The helicopter began spi
For a brief moment, calm was restored. The cabin stopped spi
A helicopter’s tail rotor is powered by a driveshaft that runs from the engine along the tail boom. But the power can’t be transferred from the shaft to the rotor without a gearbox. This box is a heavy hunk of metal and sits at one end of the boom, acting as a counterweight to the cabin and engine at the other end.
When the rotor was ripped away from the helicopter, it yanked the gearbox out of its moorings and left it dangling off the driveshaft at the open end of the shredded tail boom. It stayed there for ten, maybe fifteen seconds, pulled by gravity and pummeled by the wind. Then the co
Without its weight, the JetRanger lost any semblance of balance. One second the pilot was looking at the sky. The next he was pointing straight down at the sea, and the chopper had ceased to be a functioning aircraft, becoming instead a glass-and-metal coffin plummeting toward the churning waters, and all the pilot could hear was the manic rush of the air and the death scream of Skender Visar.
Samuel Carver was fast asleep when the people trafficker died. Hours earlier, he’d swum back to the rented motorboat he’d moored just around the headland from the bay where Visar’s villa lay.
He’d peeled away the wetsuit, dried himself off, and changed into a pair of jeans and a loose cotton shirt. He’d then returned to the tourist resort of Hvar, where he was staying, moored the boat, and had a late di
The next day Carver breakfasted on fresh rolls and sweet black coffee before he checked out, paying in cash. He boarded a ferry across the Adriatic to the Italian port of Pescara, just another anonymous foot passenger at the height of the summer season. Once he got to Italy, he bought a train ticket home – no documentation or ID required, no record kept of his journey, cash accepted without question.
Carver traveled first class. He read a book that wasn’t about bird watching. He joined in the conversation when fellow passengers felt like talking, stopped along the way for a couple of decent meals. He did everything he could not to think about what he’d just done.
TEN DAYS LATER
1
The man smiled to himself as he walked into the walnut-paneled room, relishing the cool of the air-conditioning after the blazing August heat. He pushed his sunglasses off his face, up over his thi
He only had a few minutes to himself. Soon he would be expected back outside, where the servants were laying a table for lunch under a white canvas awning that flapped in the Mediterranean breeze. He walked across the room, feeling the soft thickness of the custom-woven carpet under his bare, olive brown feet. His jeans and T-shirt were simple but very expensive. His watch was a Rolex. He took such things for granted. His entire life had been spent inside the cocoon that money provides for the children of the rich.
Yet for all its privilege, inherited wealth carries with it the stigma of being unearned. To outsiders, he was a mere playboy, a parasite feeding off his father’s achievements. He pla
“We must talk,” he said to the person on the other end of the line. “Be ready on Monday. I have important news, good news about…” he hesitated, trying to find the right words, knowing that others might be listening. “Let’s just say, our mutual friend.”
The man’s attempt at discretion was futile. His conversation was picked up by the giant radomes scattered across the bleak Yorkshire landscape at Menwith Hill, where Echelon, the global surveillance system run by America ’s National Security Agency, intercepts countless telephone and e-mail messages every day.
From there, a signal was sent via a satellite, in orbit nineteen thousand miles above the earth, to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. Cray Y-MP supercomputers, capable of almost three billion operations per second, sifted through the never-ending multilingual babble. Like a prospector pa