“Let him go, Mr. Capra, we want to talk,” the gunman called.
Mister? So polite. I acted like I hadn’t heard. I hurried the sailor down toward the hold floor. He didn’t struggle, moaning as he clutched his hurt hand. But two can’t move as fast as one, and as we reached the hold floor, I aimed at the lights above us. I needed the blanket of darkness. The gunman appeared at the steps and aimed. He fired as I tried to pull the sailor back behind the angle of a container while squeezing the trigger, and my shot missed the light.
I’d moved too slow. The gunman’s shot caught the sailor in the upper back and he screamed and sagged to the floor.
I glanced down at the sailor-and instead of a spread of blood on his shirt, a small metal dart protruded from between his meaty shoulder blades. Not a bullet. An anesthetic dart, like we were on a nature show, tagging tigers to trace their roaming. The dart was so I could be dragged back and put into whatever cage Howell wanted. They wanted their bait to be functioning.
I fired at the gunman, who took cover behind the edge of a container, then I turned and I ran into the maze of containers. Hard right, hard right. I needed to take out the gunman. I was trying to get behind him when he descended the stairs. I hoped his adrenaline would make him rush, make a bad decision to my profit. Dim lights illuminated the stacks.
I stopped, risked a glance around the corner. The containers were more tightly packed down here; less room to move, longer lines of sight, which meant that there was a better chance of getting caught in the open. I could hear more voices, raised, feet thundering on the steel stairs. A crowd was coming. If I shot, I’d betray my position.
I broke the seal on a container, slipped inside, left the door open less than an inch. I counted slowly in my head. At nineteen the gunman went past me moving quickly but silently. I watched him move past the door. I stepped out of the container, slamming a kick into the back of his head like he was a wall I was running up. He collapsed and I caught the back of his shirt so he wouldn’t make a noise. With my other hand I grabbed the dart gun, fired it into his back. He rag-dolled, and I eased him to the floor. I hurried to the intersection and looked down the long, unbroken gap in the containers, and saw another man in black, accompanied by a crewman. I ran along the aisle, hearing their echoing voices clang against the steel.
They would expect me to hide in the stacks. I would have to find another part of the ship to make my own. I had to keep moving, use the crew’s thermal signals as camouflage. Hide where the heat of the engines would mask my body’s signature. I had to hold out and get to Rotterdam. There I could vanish.
I stopped at another intersection, for just one single moment, getting bearings, and a sting aced my throat, hard, like a hand’s swat.
A dart. I had maybe seconds before the anesthetic worked its juice. I raised my gun at the approaching gunman. The woman in the suit now stood behind him, watching me, unafraid.
Mila. The woman from Ollie’s bar. The whisky drinker with the fondness for wolves. Blond hair pulled back severely, eyes of quartz, a hard smile. She liked Glenfiddich whisky, and my own blood felt like a bottle had been injected straight into my heart.
The steel of the gun slipped from my grip. I laughed as I fell to the deck.
21
I opened my eyes to starlight. I heard the slush of water, the soft whistle of a breeze. I lay on my back, steel for a pillow. On a container, on the deck of the ship. Above me the moon hung, ripe with light. The whistle was the wind slicing through the gaps in the container stacks. The stars lay in a diamond spill across the sky. You didn’t see the stars so clearly in a city, ever.
Mila sat next to me. Legs crossed, wearing a trench coat, cigarette in hand, watching the smoke slide into the moonlight.
I sat up. My arms and my shoulder ached but I wasn’t hurt.
A darkness of ocean lay all around. I’d been out for most of the day.
“Good evening, Sam,” Mila said.
“Howell sent you.” My God, the trouble they had gone to.
“Howell. Name does not ring bells for me.” Mila took a drag on the cigarette, crushed the embers against the steel. She looked out over the long expanse of the Atlantic. The helicopter was gone.
She opened a bag and pulled out a bottle of Glenfiddich and two small glasses.
“Well, that’s one true thing about you. You actually do like Glenfiddich,” I said.
“And my name is actually Mila,” she said. “A doctor might say it’s not good to drink after a sedation dart, so I only give you a bit.” I held my glass and she clinked it against mine. “For medicine.”
“What are we toasting?” I asked.
“Freedom,” she said. “Yours. Mine. The world’s.” Mila sipped at her whisky. I didn’t want any but I took the barest taste.
“Ollie will be missing you, his best bartender. If the wind shifts we may be able to hear his bitching.”
“Who are you?”
“Mila, I said.”
“And who is Mila?”
“I am your friend, Sam.”
“I can find my own friends.”
Mila gestured across the expanse of the ship. There was no sign of the crew, no indication anyone was watching us. “Forgive me. You have so many friends. Where’s the back of the line and I’ll wait there.” Sarcasm suited her.
But I was not in the mood for moonlight and whisky and wit.
“Who do you work for?” And who had the considerable resources to do it, I didn’t add. Teams of men, thermal imaging, a jet helicopter. It had to be Howell.
Or maybe Mila was part of the people who grabbed Lucy, who framed us. They might not want me coming to Europe. The frame against me and Lucy had been elaborate. But… I was just one man. This was a lot of trouble for anyone to go to. And if Mila was connected to the intruder, well, then I should have been dead already-taken back aboard the helicopter, shot, and dropped into the cold gray of the Atlantic.
Mila took another sip of Glenfiddich. “My employers prefer to remain anonymous.”
“Are they the same people who grabbed my wife?”
“No.”
“Are you from the Company?”
“No.” And she made a slight face. “I do have an offer to make you.”
That wasn’t hard to figure. Someone who hoped I was pissed enough at the CIA for treating me like a traitor to turn me into an actual one. “I’m not interested.”
“I’ve arranged for cabins. Let’s go down and talk.”
The night air on the open Atlantic was cold. I nodded. I followed her down to a cabin. The two crew members we passed stared at me with barely disguised hostility.
“Speaking of friends,” I said, as Mila closed the door behind us.
“Your fighting them has cost me several thousand in bribes.”
“Sorry.” There were two beds. I sat on one. “All right. I’m listening.”
“First of all, I wanted to talk to you, not hurt you. And I wasn’t going to spend weeks searching containers for you.”
“You are Company.”
Mila fingered another cigarette in her pack, but then seemed to reconsider. “Are you dense? I have said no, I am not CIA. I have been many things in my life but never that.”
“So who are you?”
“The question, Sam, is who are you going to be? The government spent a great deal of taxpayer money to train you, and it wasn’t to refill pretzel bowls and bruise gin in martinis and phone taxis for drunks.”
“So you want to make the most of that investment. You and whoever you work for.”
“Let’s discuss your wife.”
“What about her?”
“You must have your theories about what happened to her,” Mila said. “You don’t believe she betrayed you. Framed you.”