There had been three shipments since January. All originated at the Port of Dalian, Liaoning, and were received at Honolulu Harbor, Port of Hawaii. The first had left China on January 5, 2023, and arrived in Hawaii on February 13. A second had departed August 20, 2023 and was delivered September 26. A third cargo had left on March 12 and arrived in Hawaii just the day before, on April 19.

“That’s a shitload of pipes,” Natasha commented.

Kali had turned to her. “Jinggu is the parent of Seven Winds. It has ties to the Chinese government,” she said. “The piping is used exclusively in marine cable networks. And Jinggu is CloudCable’s sole provider.”

“Seriously?”

A nod. “That came up when Carmody and I were in Morse’s office this morning,” Kali said. “But it’s no secret. There are filings. Bills of lading. Most are public record.”

Natasha had thought about that.

“Jinggu’s kinda like a spider in the middle of a big web,” she said. “All the threads lead to it. Or maybe I should say all the steel pipes.”

Kali hadn’t commented. Instead, she copied the dates to the computer’s notepad, exited the website and did a second Google search. This time she had entered the words cargo ship tracker.

Again, a column of several hyperlinks came up. And again, she had made her choice.

Which was how they got to the Global Ship Finder site they were on now. Scanning the home page, Natasha saw that the menu bar’s drop-downs read, left to right, Vessels & Cargo, Ports, Live Ship Tracking and Real-time Location Maps.

“OK, wild guess,” she said. “You want to find out what ship delivered the pipes. Or that last batch of pipes, anyway. Right?”

Kali nodded. “The ship and the shipping company.”

“Can you tell me why? Or are we still freestyling?”

Kali didn’t answer. She was back to looking at the computer screen.

“Nope, Tash, I cannot tell you because you’re being ignored,” Natasha muttered to herself.

A minute passed. Kali clicked on Vessels & Cargo to open a new page. It had several search boxes. One instructed the visitor to search for a ship’s name and owner by its nine-digit Maritime Mobile Service Identity code, or International Maritime Organization number. There were additional filtering boxes that could narrow the name search to a specific type of vessel, the flag under which it was sailing and the freight carried aboard. She could use one or any combination of the four for her search.

“Too bad there’s no date filter,” Natasha said. “Major fail.”

Kali nodded. “We’ll try another site if we have to. But first I want to see what turns up here.”

She started her search leaving the MMSI and IMO boxes empty. In the flag box, she typed People’s Republic of China. In the cargo box, she input the words marine cable piping.

Nothing came up.

She made the search more general, typed cable piping.

Nothing.