Sea of Terror Read Free Page B

down onto the terminal concourse and security area. The two guards, fully dressed in blue and white uniforms, were escorting the man away from the white tunnel toward a door marked "Private" and "No Admittance."
    The security process had been efficiently streamlined, Dean saw. A line of civilians, most of them in appropriately garish vacation clothing, stood in line waiting to go through the backscatter scanner. Each person in turn would stop beside a conveyor belt and deposit wallets, handbags, cameras, cell phones, and other devices and carry-on items into baskets for conventional X-ray scans, then walk first through an old-fashioned metal detector and then through the smoothly sculpted white tunnel of the backscatter X-ray machine. Security guards stood at strategic points to control the traffic or to administer, as with Erbakan, more detailed and personal attention. Under the guards' watchful eyes, they retrieved their personal items at the end of the conveyor, on the far side of the backscatter device. Once they were cleared through the checkpoint, they filed through glass doors leading to the dock outside and the immense white cliff of the newest addition to the Royal Sky Line's fleet of luxury cruise ships, the Atlantis Queen.
    Another young woman, looking harried and a bit impatient, stepped out of the tunnel below Dean's window, holding an infant on one arm. She turned, and held out her free hand, fingers impatiently waggling. A moment later a dark-haired girl walked out and took her hand. The girl couldn't have been more than ten.
    Disgusted, Dean turned away and watched Lockwood, Llewellyn, and Mitchell at the console but did not walk back to where he could see the screen.
    "Just how long have you been using this device?" he asked. He was trying not to think about the ten-year-old.. . or about a world gone so sick and paranoid that this kind of thing was thought necessary.
    "Do you mean here in England?" Mitchell asked. "Or Royal Sky Line? We've had them operating at Heathrow International for a couple of years now."
    "That's where I got my training," Llewellyn told him. "We started using this unit here just yesterday. The upgrades are amazing."
    "We've already screened over a thousand of the Queen's passengers," Lockwood added.
    "Really? How many opted for a hand frisk?"
    As he spoke, his right hand peeled a three-inch strip of black, sticky plastic from the back of his tie, the movement blocked from the others by the screen itself.
    "A couple of hundred," Lockwood told him. She shrugged. "Like Tom said, most people prefer this. It's less obtrusive. Less ... personal."
    "So what is the CIA's interest in our little peep show?" Llewellyn wanted to know.
    Dean had introduced himself that morning as a security analyst with the CIA, though he'd used his real name. The National Security Agency remained not only the largest and best-funded intelligence agency in the United States but also the most secretive. Its operatives rarely admitted who they really worked for. NSA employees jokingly referred to the acronym as "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything," and, even yet, few people in the general public had ever heard of the organization, or knew anything about it.
    But everyone had heard of the CIA.
    "We're interested," Dean said carefully, reciting from a memorized script, "in how new transportation security technologies might be interfaced with various international databases, passport records, and police files, so that we can track known criminals and terrorists before they can even enter the United States or Great Britain."
    Unobtrusively he pressed the tape, sticky side down, against the back of the freestanding console. The tape had a meaningless ten-digit number printed on it in white letters; if a security sweep found it later, it would look like just another serial number.
    "Royal Sky Line," Dean added as he finished, "is introducing some .. . novel concepts along those lines."
    "Ah. You mean the passenger