Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide Read Free Page A

bench. His eyes widened as they motioned him to get up, then led him through the bulkhead to the adjacent shower room. The other prisoners watched sullenly.
    Marceau was back a few minutes later.
    ‘Where’s the prisoner?’ asked Thibault.
    ‘Still in there,’ said Marceau with a shrug, gesturing to the shower room. ‘He’s not feeling well.’
    I bet, thought Thibault, knowing how brutal Marceau could be. He was about to chastise his second-in-command when Marceau held out a little square of plastic, about the size of a credit card. ‘We found this in the lining of his back pocket.’
    Thibault inspected the card. It was a driving licence, issued three years before and due to expire in another twenty-two. The photograph in one corner was of a young man, a boy really, clean-shaven and short-haired. But the eyes looked the same. His name, according to the licence, was Amir Khan.
    Pakistani, thought Thibault. Or with Pakistani parents, perhaps, since this was a British driving licence. It gave Khan’s address as 57 Farndon Street, Birmingham.
    Thibault shook his head in wonder. What on earth was a British national doing here, attempting to hijack a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean?

Chapter 3
    It was 10.30 a.m. in Athens when the phone rang on Mitchell Berger’s desk. The call was from overseas; Berger listened to it with increasing agitation.
    ‘Are the crew all safe?’ he asked finally.
    He waited for the reply, then said, ‘When will they reach Mombasa?  . . . All right – they’ve only lost a day. I’ll alert our people there.’
    Berger put down the phone, trying to gather his thoughts, looking down from the window of his second-storey office at the street below. It was the Greek version of an English suburban High Street, full of small shops and restaurants. Even in spring the sun outside would be scorching by mid-afternoon, so the locals shopped in the morning.
    Berger liked Athens, just as he liked virtually any part of the world – so long as it wasn’t the small South Dakota town where he’d grown up, a place of such stifling dullness that he liked to pretend he’d forgotten its name. Berger had fled it at the first opportunity, enlisting in the army on the day he turned seventeen. His four-year hitch had taken him to Germany, then Korea, and given him a taste for foreign countries. He’d also discovered he wasn’t as stupid as his alcoholic parents had always made out – when he’d left the army he’d gone to college on the GI Bill, and done well enough to go on and take a Masters in International Relations at Tufts University. Credentials enough for the career that had followed in the next three decades, working in four continents and a dozen countries.
    It had been an eventful thirty years – too eventful, perhaps, since there had been more than one occasion when Berger had feared for his life. Reaching fifty, unmarried and feeling rootless, he had been on the lookout for a change – this time to a more peaceful existence, nothing too nerve-racking. He had found it; a pleasant billet as head of the Athens office of a UK-based charity called UCSO, the United Charities’ Shipping Organisation. UCSO, as its name implied, was a co-ordinating charity. Its role was to receive requests for aid from NGOs working in the field, to liaise with donors all over Europe, and to arrange for the requested aid – food, equipment, spare parts, whatever it might be – to be assembled in Athens. There Mitchell Berger and his colleagues would make up the cargoes, book the ships and despatch the aid to wherever it was needed. Much of the focus of UCSO’s efforts was on crisis areas in Africa, though it had played an important role in the immediate relief operation after the 2004 tsunami. Unlike some other charities, UCSO prided itself on its efficiency rather than its public profile, and had an unsurpassed record in getting aid to wherever it was most needed.
    UCSO had two hubs. The key administrative and