Anastasia Borkin was looking at the report in her hand, quivering with fury and excitement. How could they be so stupid? So inept! And yet how close were they to finding the Coca-Cola Three?
The Australian police had contacted Coca-Cola Amatil in Sydney with a report of a kidnapping and suspected murder plot. They’d received a cellphone call and thought it was a hoax and so they had not assigned it any priority, but, eventually, an officer had followed it up and made some phone calls.
By sheer luck, the officer had contacted a public relations officer at Amatil named Kate Fogarty. She had put them in touch with one Harry Truman, in New Zealand.
Harry had subsequently phoned Borkin directly, and the conversation had started with, ‘Heaven help me if I am wrong, but you’re the only one I think I can trust.’
And so, by a combination of luck and circumstance, the news of Dennis’s frantic call to the Sydney police had made its way to Borkin. If it had gone elsewhere, she knew, there would have been a very different result.
She alerted the FBI, and they had made contact back with the Australian police, who, suddenly realising the extent of what they were dealing with, had mobilised a huge task force.
They had traced the cellphone that Dennis’s call had come from, and tracked its location using cell site transmitters.
That had led them to a small airfield on the outskirts of Sydney, which in turn explained the subsequent rapid cell site hopping that the phone had made. The phone was clearly in a plane that had flown up the coast of Australia.
The last cell site connection had been from Port Douglas, in North Queensland, then contact had been lost. That could only mean the plane had turned out to sea. An Air Force Hercules aircraft had already been mobilised to search the area.
Two police cutters were already there, and were about to be joined by a ship from the Coastguard. Rescue helicopters and a ready-reaction force from the Australian SAS were on stand-by.
The problem was, ‘out to sea’ covered a very big area, thousands of miles of ocean and small islands stretching into the heart of the Pacific. The plane had a good range, and could have made it all the way to the Fiji islands if it had wanted.
So they searched, and they prayed. And so did Anastasia Borkin. There was nothing more she could do from Atlanta, Georgia to help the Coca-Cola Three, nor the two brave boys, who had somehow latched on to their trail and, having failed to get any assistance from the authorities, had launched some harebrained rescue attempt of their own. There was nothing more she could do to help apprehend the kidnappers either.
That just left her with the spy. But she had plans for him.