Free Wednesday's Child by Alan Zendell

tongues had been invaluable after nine-eleven.  I knew and liked Samir, but the other occupant of the cabin was a stranger who introduced herself as Mary Conlon, of late, a member of the UK’s antiterrorism strike team in Belfast, until the relative calm there convinced the cash-poor Brits to cut back on personnel.
    “Dylan,” she said.  “What is that, Irish?  Welsh?”
    “I think my mother just liked the name,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing.
    “What’s funny?” she asked in a delightful brogue.
    “Oh, you made me think about names.  I grew up in an Irish working class neighborhood and for a while I wondered if every girl in Ireland had been named Mary.”
    “You were more right than you knew,” she said, laughing with me.  She took a seat across a small work table from Samir and William. I sat beside her, facing William. 
    “How’d you get your hands on a New York police boat?”  His superiors could usually borrow anything they needed from local law enforcement, and I knew he liked to parade his connections in front of his command.
    William preened.  “You might have noticed this isn’t an ordinary police boat.”  I hadn’t, but I might have guessed as much.  “After nine-eleven, the feds offered to outfit one with high tech surveillance gear in exchange for being able to requisition it when we needed it.  We also made it virtually impervious to eavesdropping.”  William loved that stuff.
    “Those two,” he nodded toward the two uniformed men in the pilot house, “are harbor patrol.  They’re discreet, but they don’t know why we’re here and they can’t hear us.  Conlon, here, is our new communications and electronics expert, and she’s damn good at decrypting things.  Personal citation from the Prime Minister.”  Mary parodied a sitting curtsy.
    “The last few years we’ve quietly stepped up our port security.  Ports have always been soft targets, and we decided to let the terrorists think they still are.  We use intelligent software to analyze emails, especially if they’re written in Arabic or they contain certain word patterns in French and English typical of people whose first language is Arabic.  We intercept cell phone calls, too, when we have an idea what to target.  Why don’t you bring Dylan up to date, Mary?”
    We’d been cruising south into the harbor straight toward the Statue of Liberty.  William , I thought, it’s enough with the symbolism.  We get it.   We passed to the east of the Statue and out into the shipping lanes where several big freighters lay at anchor.
    Mary described the volumes of communications their screening programs identified and the months of tedious analysis they’d done.  I hadn’t been involved with that stuff for years.  I was impressed by how far things had progressed but wondered how valuable it was…
    “Until, last month, I found this.”  She handed me a printout. Excerpts from a sequence of emails, the contents of which meant nothing to me.  “Then this and this,” and she began laying sheets before me with several items circled in red.  Three times the name “Al Khalifa” was circled and my brain snapped to attention.  I’d just seen those words.  I stood and scanned the harbor through the police boat’s smoky windows.  There!  A container ship precessing about its anchor line in the outgoing tide, had “Al Khalifa” stenciled on its starboard bow.
    If William called me in, he was worried about radiological contamination.  I looked at Mary’s papers, focusing on the circled items.  Most of them seemed like gibberish, lots of unrelated symbols.  They were all watching me expectantly, so I looked again, with my brain on full alert.  Shit, I must not be processing information very well.  Just minutes ago I’d passed over a line that should have triggered alarm bells: PU238-88, CS137-30, AM241-430, CO60-5.26, SR90-28.1.  It was a list of radioactive isotopes and half-lives, all