Quiet bastard, Rodriguez thought.
“More hull popping,” the sonar chief said.
“Let’s get some sustainable data.”
More silence.
“Got him!” the sonar chief said. “We hear rudder swath. And we’ve got their screws. Contact Sierra-eleven is running one five-bladed screw, making twenty RPM. We won’t know what speed that equates to until we identify ship class. Tracking on the chin array.”
“Just the chin?” Rodriguez asked. “We can’t hear anything on the other sonar arrays?”
Jones turned with alacrity that seemed impossible for his mass.
“They’re deep, sir,” Jones said. “Probably deeper than we are, and we’re hearing them from below on the chin. Also, the harmonic of their screw is at a high enough frequency to be optimized on the chin array.”
“Deeper than us?” Rodriguez said as he stood and huddled with Jones and Bartlett.
“Five blades don’t correlate to a Kilo,” he said.
Jones and Bartlett shook their heads.
“And Chinese standard operating procedure doesn’t have any of their submarines operating below six hundred feet.”
More shaking heads.
“What the hell are we tracking?”
“Sir,” the sonar chief said.
Rodriguez glanced over Jones.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“We just heard a trim pump start. Classifying now. It’s not correlating to anything Chinese. Nothing.”
Rodriguez tried to fathom the identity.
“If you had to guess?” he asked.
“Agosta class, sir,” the sonar chief said. “The new one—Agosta 90B to be exact.”
“The Taiwanese have one, and a Pakistani hull was located in a Chinese dry dock a couple days ago, sir,” Jones said. “It has to be one of the two.”
“I concur,” Rodriguez said. “But we don’t know if he’s friendly or neutral. Or worse.”
He stepped back to the elevated conn.
“Attention in the control room,” he said. “We will trail Sierra-eleven, an Agosta class submarine.”
“Trail?” Jones asked. “Beyond our patrol area, sir?”
Good question, Rodriguez thought. That’s my concern.
The features on Jones’ face sagged as he fell into a stupor. Rodriguez had developed the patience to wait for the stupor’s results. If he were doing anything stupid, Jones would figure it out during his semi-autistic analysis.
“You think it pushes the envelope on our orders?”
“We should verify when possible,” Jones said, “but I believe it’s within the spirit of our orders, sir.”
“Let’s do it then,” Rodriguez said. “But don’t forget, this Agosta may shoot first and ask questions later.”
CHAPTER 15
Olivia tipped back a café crème and inhaled the cool evening air. Her shoulders ached from riding.
She was dining at a local café hidden from tourists, and traffic on the street was sparse. On the other side of the patio railing, Jake’s black Ninja reclined against its kickstand next to her blue one. Color-coded jackets and helmets rested on the handlebars.
“Thanks for the time to prepare,” she said.
“I haven’t ridden in months myself,” Jake said. “It was a good idea to practice tight turns around here and getting on and off the autoroutes.”
“It was fun tooling around here with you for a day,” she said.
“You almost laid it down turning off the bridge.”
“I learned not to watch the scenery, no matter how pretty the Rhône is. I need to watch the road.”
Jake left euro bills on the table.
“Look,” he said, “about the racing part of this. I wasn’t serious. There’s no hurry.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “If it weren’t for me slowing you down, you’d be breaking the sound barrier.”
“Maybe, but I like it better having you with me.”
She walked to her motorcycle and slipped on her protective gear.
“I can keep up with you,” she said.
“We’ll see.”
“Eight o’clock tomorrow?” she asked.
“I would like to see if we can have lunch in Lyon. Maybe stay the day,” he said, “depending on how we feel.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Olivia turned the ignition key and heard the rocket rumble. Her bones vibrated. She released the clutch and felt her arms snap taut.
With a rekindled command of large motorcycles, she navigated the streets to her apartment, locked the bike, and worked her door open. Within minutes, she was asleep.
Olivia dreamt.
As with prior episodes of the recurring nightmare, pain swelled in her skull.
A knife scratched her throat. The slave trafficker was on her, and she felt the burning and throbbing that her subconscious forced her to relive.
She rose above herself and asked the naked CIA officer on the Parisian pimp’s couch where her pimp was. For the first time in the series of recurring dreams, the rape victim pointed.
His face bruised and blood trickling from his mouth, the Parisian pimp knelt before the trafficker’s henchmen. The pimp looked at her.
“How did this happen?” he asked.
“Jean-Claude?” she asked.
“I wish I had known your real name.”
“Olivia,” she said.
A henchman sliced the pimp’s throat open.
Olivia awoke, covered in cool sweat. Her alarm clock indicated that it was three o’clock in the morning.
“That felt too real!” she said.
Jean-Claude had been killed during her rape, but Olivia had never seen the body. She wondered if the dream was based upon a repressed memory and stepped into the shower to clear her mind. Propping the hand-held showerhead on a latch Jake had constructed for her from wire hangers, she let hot water beat down upon her.
If that was part memory, she thought, why now?
Fearing she wouldn’t get back to sleep, she slid into her riding gear and took the motorcycle into the night. Atop the bridge that spanned the Rhône, she slipped the bike out of gear and idled to the west bank and into Villeneuve.
Seeking peaceful contemplation, she left the bike parked in the gravel and stepped through tall grass. When she liked her view of the river and Avignon on its far side, she sat and thought.
In her tranquility, she explored her mind to sort memory from subconscious conjecture. When a question — one that needed answering — took center stage, she picked up her cell phone. Tommy was on watch.
“Where are you?” he asked. “I don’t like when you run off like that. I’ve been trying to call you.”
“I had my phone off. I needed time alone.”
“When are you coming back?”
“After I talk to Rickets,” she said.
“Rickets? Now?”
She wasn’t in the mood for explaining herself.
“Set it up.”
She heard the clicking of switching relays.
“You’re secure with Director Rickets,” Tommy said. “Hurry back so Robert doesn’t put my ass in a sling.”
“It’s nearly four in the morning there,” Rickets said. “What’s wrong?”
“Gerry,” she said, “I think I remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Paris. How Jean-Claude died,” she said.
“You called me on a secure line in the middle of the night to tell me how a pimp died?”
“I think I’m starting to reconstruct my memory. Maybe getting close to Slate is allowing me to unlock memories.”
“That’s a dangerous place to tread,” he said.
She had expected more enthusiasm and frowned.