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The number of crew was twenty-two.
Juan felt the hairs on his neck prickle.
“What about this one?” Juan said, pointing at the shipwreck listing.
“Santa Cruz?” Linda said. “The CIA thinks the fact that it had twenty-two crew is a coincidence. The analyst told me it’s easy to find random numerical links to anything. On the Alpha seventeen date, there was a traffic pileup in New York that involved seventeen vehicles and a snowstorm in Calgary where they received seventeen inches of snow.”
“It’s the Santa Cruz name that bugs me. Humor me.”
They went over to her terminal, where she had a remote link to a worldwide ship database. She punched in Santa Cruz.
“She was flagged Panamanian, but was owned by a Venezuelan company called Cabimas Shipping. The company’s owner is one of the richest men in Venezuela, Ricardo Leal.” She did a quick search and found thousands of mentions of his name. “Seems like Mr. Leal has political aspirations in his country. Many are expecting him to use his wealth to run for president next year.”
Juan looked at the list again and realized what the link was between them.
“Linda, check the database for all the ships that have sunk in the last three months.”
“Even though there aren’t any other ships on the CIA’s list?”
“The dates that they sunk and the dates they were reported missing could be different. Sometimes a ship isn’t considered missing for a couple of days after it misses a scheduled check-in.”
Linda brought up the list and they compared it to the numbers on the phone list. She gasped when she saw how they matched up.
The numbers weren’t a progression. The lieutenant was keeping track of how many crew members were on each ship.
Alpha 17—Cantaura, a containership lost off of Portugal with seventeen crew.
Beta 19—Tucupita, a tanker reporting missing with nineteen crew members as it was rounding Cape Horn.
Gamma 22—Santa Cruz and its twenty-two men disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic.
All of them belonged to Cabimas Shipping. The first two didn’t broadcast any kind of Mayday or indicate anything was wrong before contact was lost. They simply vanished.
“Three ships disappeared in three months?” Linda asked. “That can’t be chance.”
“I’m sure Leal’s insurer is saying the same thing. They must think he’s deliberately sinking his ships or they’ve become so ill-maintained that they’re falling apart. Either way, it would make him uninsurable. Without insurance, no one would send freight with his company ever again.”
“Do you think Ruiz is targeting his ships?”
“It’s possible. If she has political ambitions of her own, what better way to get rid of her biggest rival than to bankrupt him?”
“He must be teetering on the edge of that now,” Linda said.
“One more sinking might do it,” Juan said. “Check the crew complements on the rest of his ships to see if we get a match.”
The answer came back immediately. Only one Cabimas ship had exactly twenty-three crew: a car carrier named Ciudad Bolívar.
“Where is she now?”
> Linda queried the Marine Traffic database. “She departed Veracruz, Mexico, two days ago with a load of cars and construction equipment. Her destination is Puerto Cabello, Venezuela.”
“Which would put her a few hundred miles due south of Jamaica,” Juan said. “We just found our answer.”
“To what?”
“To the question of why someone was trying to kill us,” Juan said. “Ruiz is planning to sink the Ciudad Bolívar today and we’re the only ones capable of stopping it.”
Maria Sandoval was nearly done with her daily inspection of the Ciudad Bolívar’s vehicle decks. As the master of the ship, her responsibility was to make sure her cargo arrived safely, so she regularly checked the condition of the interior to make sure there were no leaks in the fully enclosed decks that could allow salt water to damage the shipment and to verify that everything remained in its proper place.
