“Then what are you negotiating?” Jake asked.
Renard lit another Marlboro.
“Your freedom.”
“I am free,” Jake said.
“No,” Renard said, “you are miserable. I can see that you grow weary of living in secrecy.”
“I’m a traitor on the run,” Jake said. “What can a guy in the Taiwanese Defense Ministry do about it?”
“Worse crimes than ours have been excused when extenuating circumstances permit. I want Li to broker clemency with the American Justice Department.”
The offer hit Jake like the promise of immortality.
“If I drive frontline diesel submarines back to China,” Renard said, “Taiwan will regain control of its seas, at least temporarily, and America will escape intervention in an undesirable conflict. I can create enough goodwill for both nations to offset that mess we created by leaving a Trident missile submarine on the ocean floor.”
“Wishful thinking,” Jake said, “Li has the upper hand.”
“Ah, my friend,” he said. “You have much to learn about the art of negotiation. He can threaten my family, but what I do with his submarine is ultimately my business. I’ll get what I want from that bastard before this is done.”
CHAPTER 3
Egg-carton foam coated soundproof walls. Olivia lowered her head and listened to her breathing. Since her rape, she disliked being alone.
As she fiddled with a dimmer switch to distract herself from numbing thoughts, a large black man in a gray suit entered the room and smiled.
He looked more important than she had remembered. Perhaps the demeanor came with the promotion, she thought.
“How are you doing?” Rickets asked.
“Fine,” she said.
“I’m sorry for what you went through. We all trusted him, but in the end Jean-Claude was just a pimp.”
“Talking about it’s not going to help me get it out of my mind. At least the parts I remember.”
“Your memory’s still sketchy?” he asked.
“I’m starting to reconstruct my memory through reoccurring nightmares. I’m not even sure I want to remember.”
Olivia had studied psychology at Yale but had never envisioned looking at herself as a victim through an analytical spyglass.
“I suppose you’ve discussed it enough in your therapy,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Enough for now. The rest of the healing comes with time. I’ve been meaning to thank you for spending an entire week by my bedside, by the way.”
She felt Rickets’ hand on her shoulder. The touch was weighty but gentle.
“I didn’t spend the entire week,” he said.
“Felt like it.”
“I put you in front of those animals,” he said. “It’s my fault you were hurt.”
He walked across the room and sat at a small table.
“Are you ready to get back into the field?” he asked.
She felt unsure but feigned confidence.
“Yes.”
“Your new assignment will get your mind off things,” Rickets said. “You remember the USS Colorado?”
“Of course,” Olivia said. “A Trident missile submarine scuttled at sea after a reactor meltdown.”
“This is top secret under all submarine and nuclear compartments,” Rickets said. “They’re even making up a new compartment for it. The Colorado was never scuttled.”
That caught her attention. She gazed at a plasma screen that invoked a circle surrounded by darkness.
“Slide one,” Rickets said. “The USS Miami took a still-life through its periscope of the Colorado in the Arctic Ocean, just north of the Pacific.”
She saw hatches dangling over the Colorado’s missile deck and men trotting along the superstructure. Black clouds billowed from the Colorado’s rear escape hatches.
She squinted at zigzag tiger stripes and noticed that mooring lines held a patrol craft beside the Colorado.
“That ship looks Swedish or Norwegian,” she said.
“It’s actually Taiwanese,” Rickets said, “but it’s based upon the Swedish Visby class corvette, only smaller and even more technically advanced. It’s the Tai Chiang—or at least it was until the Miami took it out. It almost made off with the Colorado’s warheads.”
Rickets clicked his remote. A headshot appeared with features she found rugged and handsome. The image wore an American naval officer’s dress whites.
“Lieutenant Jacob Slate stole the Colorado with a small team of mutineers,” Rickets said. “The Miami’s torpedo took out the Colorado, and we thought Slate was dead until we found him in Avignon last week.”
The image of Slate standing beside a shapely woman on a sandstone patio appeared.
“Doctor Marie Broyer,” Rickets said. “A Board of Trade analyst remembered seeing her with Slate in Chicago before the ‘Colorado Incident’. We trailed her, and it paid off.”
“Broyer looks older, but I could see them together.”
Rickets clicked to the next slide. A sandstone mansion sprawled through an apple orchard atop a grassy hill overlooking the Rhône River in the south of France.
“They’re not lovers,” he said. “Broyer lives here with the father of her newborn, Pierre Renard. Renard used Slate to steal the Colorado, and now I have evidence that he’s up to something with submarines again.”
“What sort of evidence?”
“Nearly one billion dollars transferred from Taipei business interests to Islamabad, and then a Pakistani-built Agosta class submarine lands in Keelung and joins the Taiwanese order of battle.”
“Sounds like an unlikely alliance,” she said. “But it’s circumstantial if you’re fishing for Renard’s involvement.”
“A frontline Agosta is a quantum leap in Taiwanese submarine hardware. They don’t have indigenous expertise, and Renard is the most qualified submarine expert on the open market with ties to both countries. He knows the players, and he knows the game.”
“So he’s a consultant? An instructor?”
“That’s what I need you to figure out.”
“Me?” Olivia asked. “Why not just bring him in?”
“We’ve been waiting for him to make a move, but someone just made one on him. His trail saw some guys in suits from East Asia kidnap his son, and then he just went underground. We’ve completely lost track of him.”
“What about Broyer? Can’t you follow her?”
“Gone. We think she was on a helicopter that took off from the Renard estate the night of the kidnapping. He’s probably got her in hiding.”
Rickets clicked his remote, and the next slide showed the stucco wall of a four-story walkup apartment.
“Slate’s apartment,” he said.
“He’s not in hiding?”
“No. The Renard child is kidnapped, with Slate risking his neck to prevent it from happening, mind you, and then Renard and Broyer disappear. But Slate goes on as if nothing happened. We trailed him to his tai kwon do studio, his gym, and his favorite bar yesterday. He doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere.”
“You think he and Renard had a falling out because of the kidnapping?”
“Not based on the way Renard acted after it,” Rickets said. “He was calm — too calm — and he was engaged in an intense conversation with Slate after the incident. It almost looked like they were planning a response to the kidnapping right after it happened. And that’s what I want you to find out. I want you to use Slate to find Renard and figure out what he’s up to.”