Page 1 of Code Name: Harbor

CHAPTER 1

Josie

The air smells of salt and old fish, pretty much the smell of every working waterfront in the Pacific Northwest. I’m thirty yards away, lying flat on my belly in wet pine scrub, photographing a boat that does not belong here.

I’ve got my long lens on, flash off, a microfiber cloth draped over the body so as not to catch a stray beam of light that might come my way.

I’m on an elevated bluff and below me is the dock. It’s a single-vessel slip, about sixty feet of weathered planking running out into the channel. According to the property records, it’s been owned by the same fishing family for ninety years, but the owners are in Arizona for the off-season. The dock has been unattended since they left, and BOB hypothesized that it had a high probability of seeing action. He flagged it late yesterday afternoon and I double-checked the data. The pattern was too clean to be coincidence and too small to be anything else.

Good ol’ BOB. He’s the artificial intelligence system created by brains smarter than me at Jameson Force Seattle and is my main partner within the company. The B-O-B doesn’t stand for anything in particular. It’s more of an easy, affectionate human name. He runs predictive analysis across whatever data points I feed him, and he’s very good at noticing things that I might not.

As the company’s lead intelligence specialist, it was a tough pill to swallow that I simply couldn’t be the smartest, but now we’re good friends. I implicitly trusted him when he told me this desolate fishing dock near Anacortes on Fidalgo Island might be a prime spot for human traffickers to off-load women smuggled in from Canada.

The FBI brought Jameson onto this case six weeks ago. They’ve been working a maritime trafficking pipeline for the better part of a year. The women—mostly Eastern European and Southeast Asian—are brought into Canada and then moved through Vancouver into the Salish Sea. From there, it’s easy enough to avoid the maritime authorities and off-load them at any number of abandoned docks like this one, where they’ll be distributed into the American economy.

Why would the FBI hire a private security consulting firm?

Mainly because we have bigger and better toys, the least of which is BOB.

I put my eye back up to the camera and snap off a flurry of photos—three men in dark jackets with knit caps on their heads for warmth. They’re illuminated by a single light attached to the top of a pole halfway out on the dock, but it’s not good enough for me to identify any distinguishing characteristics. One of them smokes a cigarette, and once in a while, the smell wafts up my way.

Then I hear it… an engine. Out of the black night, a forty-foot boat with a black hull and no running lights appears. The engine cuts and the boat drifts in slowly. Whoever’s at the helm has done this before, but in my research of maritime smuggling, I learned that these are some of the most accomplished boat captains around.

The temperature dropped after sundown and my fingers are stiff from the cold. I want to roll and stretch my back, but I don’t dare move. Surveillance is a discipline of not moving, and I’m very good at it.

The boat reaches the dock and two men come down from the small wheelhouse while one of the men on the dock ties off the bow line. Someone says something, mumbled words I can’t make out, and another man laughs.

Then they start unloading.

Even though I suspected it, and even though I hoped beyond hope I’d find some sort of evidence tonight, I truly didn’t think I’d see the women.

The first one is hauled up from below, her wrists cuffed and a man’s hand at the back of her neck. Then another one behind her. Then another. Six total, and my stomach churns with nausea.

I’ve got my gun on me. I could take them by surprise and free the women, but I’m outmanned five to one.

I snap off a few pictures and slowly ease up to my knees. I need to make it back to my vehicle so I can follow them. Yes, that’s what I’ll do, and then I’ll call our FBI liaison and they’ll swarm.

The case will be solved and I’ll be a hero.

The professional part of my brain—the part my father trained from the time I was eight years old, the part the NSA refined and then Jameson sharpened—does what it’s supposed to do.

Frame. Focus. Document.

Don’t panic.

I quietly move from my knees to a squatted position, ready to low-walk my way out of here without being seen.

For a moment, it occurs to me that I might get in trouble with our intrepid leader, Malik Fournier, over this. I was supposed to be here with one of the other agents, Reid Calder, but he got called in to support another mission and I was told to table this surveillance for later in the week. I’m directly disobeying Malik’s orders, so even if I’m successful in rescuing these women, I’ll be in trouble.

I put that out of my mind because it’s irrelevant to worry about now. The bottom line, BOB said there was a likelihood of this going down tonight, so I had to come. The next data point that lets us reconstruct this opportunity might be six months out.

That’s six months of women being trafficked and I can’t stomach that.

The plan from here is uncomplicated. I’ll pull back through the trees the way I came in, get in my SUV, and tail the van when it leaves the access road.

I put the camera to my face and click off a few more snaps of the last of the women going into the van.

That’s when the arm comes around my throat from behind, fast and hard, hooking under my jaw, and then I’m being dragged backward into a chest that feels as big as a refrigerator.