The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

hidden hand to his Glock. With the other, he gave the man a curt wave. The guard answered with a nod and moved off to check out the other noise.

Ben let out his breath. Some clumsy dockworker had almost gotten him caught.

Shaking his head, he released the brake and drove down an alley between containers. A sharp turn brought his forks under the bottom container in a stack of five. He shoved the lift control lever to the maximum height marker and flipped the override toggle. The image of row after row of container stacks tipping and falling like dominoes flashed in his head, but Ben knew the little forklift had nowhere near the capacity for such mayhem. Its pump motors whined to protest the impossible task of lifting the containers. Ben bailed from the cab, leaving it running. He could already smell the hydraulic fluid heating up.

A conga line of big rigs blocked the road between the cranes and the main office, ready to drive away with incoming cargo from the pier’s other berth. The gate guards had stalled the fleet, checking the lead driver’s paperwork. Ben ran straight across the yard and grabbed the rear bumper of the last truck in line, sliding underneath.

He lay on his back, listening. No footsteps. No cries of alarm. No one had seen him. Ben rolled over and low-crawled forward, willing his lungs to keep working despite the exhaust fumes.

Closer to the administrative building, he rolled out the other side and hopped up, dusting himself off. The glass door at the entrance swung open on his first pull, unlocked. And, as predicted, no guards watched the lobby. Most of the building looked dark. The staff had gone home for the day. Ben took the stairs to the sixth floor.

The corner office stood open, with loud voices coming from inside. Ben pressed his body against the wall next to the stairwell exit with one finger holding the door open and listened.

“Three hours,” a young man said—a New Yorker by the sound of it. “I want her moving in three hours. This shipment is Mr. Jupiter’s highest priority. I already told him we were on schedule.”

An older voice with a Spanish accent fired back. “That is your mistake. Not mine. We are loading as fast as possible. And the team you sent aboard to connect the tanktainers with hoses is slowing us down. What are the hoses for, anyway?”

Ben heard an exasperated sigh. “We’ve been over this. The hoses are part of a pressure system to prevent nitrogen leakage during the voyage.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Because you’re a dockmaster—not an engineer. How Sea Titan transports our goods is not your concern.” The New Yorker pounded on something. “Your job is to get it moving.”

“Fire!”

The cry, echoed by others, came from outside the building.

A young man in a slick suit and a middle-aged Spaniard in dungarees ran to the elevators. The New Yorker grumbled and groused, repeatedly punching the button. Seconds later, the two were on their way downstairs.

Ben slipped into the office. Through the big corner window, he saw smoke rising from the container alley where he’d left the forklift—an orange glow too. Nice.

A moment later, the management kid and the dockmaster ran into view and joined the others heading for the fire. They’d be busy for at least several minutes. Ben’s gaze drifted to the Behemoth. From the elevated perch of the office, he could see the activity on the cargo deck. Teams of men and women moved and climbed among the thousands of tanks in container frames—tanktainers, the dockmaster had called them. The teams joined the top center of each tank to the bottom of the one above it with a short black hose. Longer hoses chained to the deck connected each stack. From what Ben saw, the hoses made the entire load one interconnected unit.

“The bioweapon,” he said under his breath. “But where’s your protective gear?” The hose teams wore work gloves, nothing more. Did they know what they were handling? Or did they think those tanks were full of compressed nitrogen, as the tank markings said?

The dockmaster and his very good friend were at the fire, and the pier’s response team seemed to have it under control. Ben had to move faster. He checked the computer. Locked, with no time to play password roulette. He scanned the desk. A thick manila envelope with a Sea Titan logo lay beside the keyboard, secured with an old-school string-and-button seal and marked BEHEMOTH PASSAGE PLAN. Ben unraveled the seal and slid out a thick pack of papers. The cover page listed the destination as a Sea Titan dry dock facility near Cartagena, not far down the coast.

“Who loads up with cargo for a trip to the dry dock?”

Weird—or incredibly suspicious.

Ben sat in the dockmaster’s chair and thumbed through the pages. The charts mapped the short journey to the dry dock facility, backing up the cover page’s claims. But behind those were weather charts for the whole Atlantic. Why would the captain need Atlantic weather forecasts if he never planned to leave the Mediterranean? There were also notarized registration and licensing papers for a Jaspen cargo vessel called the Clementine.

Voices. Ben heard the New Yorker bawling out the dockmaster, getting louder. They were on their way back—at the road by the sound of it.

He tried to push the papers into the envelope again, but they stuck out a half inch, blocked by something inside, maybe a folded corner or a paper-clip. He tried tapping, blowing, shaking—nothing worked. Ben couldn’t abandon the envelope on the desk with documents sticking out, a dead giveaway that he’d been there. He pulled the whole stack out and turned the envelope upside down.

A thumb drive dropped out and clattered on the desktop.

“Huh.”

He stuffed the drive in his back pocket and hurriedly shoved the papers into the envelope, retying the string seal. A quick check at the window gave no sign of the two men. They must already