Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [94]
“Comfortable, yes?” the agent asked.
Badr nodded. “Fire- and theft-control systems?”
“Both. Monitored by our control center less than a mile away. In case of fire, a halon suppression system is activated. In case of unauthorized breach, the lessee is contacted for further instructions.”
“Not the police?”
“Only on the lessee’s approval.”
“What about your company? Surely you have access to—”
“No. If a lessee’s rent is found to be overdue by seven days, we make every attempt to contact them. At the fourteen-day mark, if contact still hasn’t been established, the card reader and biometric scanner are removed and the locking system dismantled—an expensive and time-consuming process which would, of course, be charged to the lessee’s account, as would any reinstallation of these systems. Similarly, all contents of their warehouse would be forfeit.”
“You won’t have that problem with us, I assure you,” Badr replied.
“I have no doubt. We do have a minimum one-year contract, with six-month increments beyond that.”
“A year should do.” A month would do, actually, he’d been told. The warehouse would sit empty after that, its purpose—whatever that was—having been served. In fact, within days of his client’s departure, the financial artifices put in place to affect the lease would be the only thing left for the authorities to find, and even those would lead only to more closed accounts and front companies. The “money trail,” which the American intelligence community was so good at following, would be ice-cold.
“We can also provide assistance in streamlining the customs process, should you have cargo to offload,” the agent said. “Export licenses would be your responsibility, however.”
“I understand,” Badr replied with a barely suppressed smile. Something told him the last thing his clients were concerned about was export licenses. He took a final look around, then turned to the agent. “How soon can you have the lease drawn up?”
Though Adnan would never know it, his counterparts were not only further along in their mission but were riding in the relative comfort of a charter boat—albeit a converted Russian landing craft.
For days Adnan and his men had been traveling up the coast road along the Kara Sea, through fishing hamlets and abandoned settlements and the whited-out desolate landscape, seeing only the occasional vehicle on the road, and none heading in their same direction—a fact that Adnan was doing his best to not take as an omen. He had trouble imagining anyone living here voluntarily. At least in the desert you could take cheer in the sunlight. Here, gray overcast skies seemed more the rule than the exception.
As he’d expected, finding shelter for their nightly stops wasn’t hard, but finding shelter that was little more than a shack was something altogether different. On the first night they’d been lucky enough to find an abandoned wall tent with a working woodstove, and while the canvas walls were pitted and had lost their waterproofing, the support poles were buried deep in the ground and the support wires were still taut, so they’d spent the night in relative comfort while outside near-gale-force winds whipped the snow and ice against the canvas like shrapnel and the waves roared against the rocks. The second night they’d been less fortunate, having to huddle together in their sleeping bags in the rear of the truck as the sieve-like canvas sides rippled in the wind. After several hours of trying to sleep, they’d given up and spent the reminder of the night drinking tea brewed on their portable camp stove and waiting for the first signs of dawn.
And now, after three days of travel, they were within a day or a day and a half of their destination—or so said the map, which Adnan consulted warily, taking care to double-check its markings and measurements against the readings on his own handheld GPS unit. Destination wasn’t quite the right word, though, was it? Stepping-stone,