Not trusting his senses, Thornton rose from the deck boards for a better view.
Mallery appeared behind him, her eyes wide with wonder.
“Look out!” he shouted, but she didn’t see the incoming projectile in time.
Diving, he wrapped his arms around her, sending them both splashing onto the deck. The spearlike projectile slashed the air millimeters above them, striking the portside gunwale and lodging there. It was half of a rotor blade. Other debris splashed down aft of the fishing boat, which continued ahead at twenty knots.
Thornton found himself lying on top of Mallery, trying to regain his wind, her breath hot against his face.
“And there I was worried that all that beer had gone to waste,” she said.
Another time, he thought, he might have enjoyed the feel of her body — firm in the right places, soft in the right places — but the prospect of more flying wreckage prompted him to disentangle his limbs from hers and spring to his feet.
Deciding all was clear, he extended a hand to her. “You okay?” he asked.
“Better than them,” she said with a glance at the wrecked helicopter.
Together they watched the ribbons of smoke dissipating into the starlit sky. He felt the same nausea that he had after shooting Albert. This time, he also felt a measure of exhilaration. As a journalist, the ideal was to write an explosive story exposing bad guys — then hope their lawyers didn’t get them off. Using actual explosives, he thought, was relatively utilitarian.
“Are we safe now?” Mallery asked.
“We’re eighty or ninety miles from anywhere, and off the radar grid,” he said. “So we might have a minute or two.”
Turning to face him, she shook a wet tangle of hair back from her eyes. Getting fired on and soaked gave her an alluring wildness, he thought, especially in the prison jumpsuit. Waterlogged, it left little to the imagination.
She cupped a hand over his left shoulder. “Russ, thank you,” she said.
“Anytime.” He burned to draw her toward him, but she took a step away.
“That wasn’t right,” she said with an edge of rebuke, leaving him chastened. “What I meant was …”
She stood on her toes and kissed him on the mouth.
Only when he felt her arms circle his waist too did he consider that this was more than a thank-you gesture. After another moment, though, she pulled free.
“Probably not the best time for this,” she said.
“Right,” he said, to let her off the hook.
She didn’t move.
“I don’t know that we’ll get a better time, though,” he said, reaching for her.
They picked up where they’d left off, her pent-up emotion apparently as strong as his own, the combined sentiments flaring to the sort of ardor he’d always thought of as the stuff of fiction. His hand gravitated to her jumpsuit’s top button, which popped open. The suit fell to the deck. Making even shorter work of his clothes, they raced down to the cabin and the intact bunk. They made love at a sprint, as though both mindful that another aircraft was liable to swoop down with guns blazing at any moment.
Getting out of the taxi at Orly Airport in Paris, the charter flight passenger listed as Brett Proctor almost didn’t hear the trill of his satphone over the whine of jets. “Goodwyn.”
“How are you, Norm?” came Rapada’s voice.
“I’m guessing not quite as well as I’d thought I was prior to the phone ringing.”
“Well, the two guests at the vacation house—”
Canning grumbled. “In English, please?” In the event that the multimillion-dollar secure communications system had been breached, Rapada’s secret-speak could be cracked by schoolchildren. “Where are they?”
“All we know right now is that the helicopter experienced catastrophic failure, survivors doubtful.”
“What about the fishing boat?”
“We don’t know. What do you think about scrambling a Hornet?” Rapada meant an Israeli-made drone armed with a pair of Mini-Spike electro-optic guided missiles, each sufficient to turn a fifty-foot fishing boat to flotsam if the helicopter hadn’t already.
“How long to deploy a submersible?” Canning asked.
“Two, three hours.”
“Do that, too. Search for the fishing boat and debris near the crash site. If we don’t find anything, in the four hours that will have passed, the distance the boat will have covered”—Canning estimated eighty miles, squared it, then multiplied by 3.14—“means a search area twice the size of Maryland. A swarm of Hornets wouldn’t be able to find that.”
“We can have the fishing boat reported stolen.”
“Good. Say drug runners did it. Throw in that they murdered an honorable fisherman and his schoolteacher-daughter who was helping him out for the day, some bullshit like that, to get the local cops’ sympathies. And speaking of locals, rouse whoever you can on Trinidad and Tobago. Stands to reason that’s where our ‘guests’ will be checking in next.”
36
The fishing boat chopped toward Scarborough, the nearest island in the archipelagic Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Through the portholes, Thornton saw nothing but water and sky in gradations of black. Mallery lay asleep in his arms — or he lay in hers, depending on the perspective — with the top of her head snug in the curve of his neck. Her breasts, nestled against his sore rib cage, should have hurt him but had the opposite effect. Although this day was only sixty-two minutes old, thanks to her it was already the best day of his life. Or it should have been. After all, they would soon be at the U.S. embassy in Port-of-Spain, handing off to the FBI the raw material to avenge Catherine Peretti and Kevin O’Clair as well as Leonid Sokolov — and to make sure Sokolov’s DARPA project stayed at DARPA. In the process, Mallery stood to acquire Langlind’s Senate seat, and Thornton would report the biggest story of his career. For some reason, though, the benefits of reaching Port-of-Spain didn’t stir him. Which was odd. Just a function of his fatigue? Or was it that he had overlooked something? He had a sense of having missed a critical piece of the puzzle.
Mallery’s eyes opened. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“Just wondering how it could be any better,” he said
Evidently he failed to manufacture sufficient conviction: “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Could they have sicced satellites on us?”
“No, probably not. Even if the Joint Chiefs decided that they wanted a satellite redirect right after the helicopter went down, they still would have to wait another hour for imagery.”
“How about drones?”
“It’s possible, but even a squadron of Global Hawks couldn’t cover the square mileage we’ll have put between us and the spot where the helicopter—” Feeling as though he’d stumbled onto what had been eluding him, he stopped himself.
“The spot where the helicopter what?” she asked.
“Where it went down.” He propelled himself off the bunk. “We need to go back there. I have an idea.”
“What about the idea where we survive?”
He dug in Albert’s bag for clothes, finding himself a pair of khaki shorts. “It would be better if it appeared we didn’t — if we want to find out who’s after us, that is, and why.”
She bristled. “What do you have in mind?”
“Sinking this boat — making it look like the helicopter sank it, actually.” He tossed her a sweatshirt. “Leave the engines running, slash the fuel lines, then toss a flare onto the deck: That ought to do it.”
“And then what? We’ll be in the middle of the ocean in a life raft?”
“This boat is equipped with Zodiacs, actually, which are pretty rugged and have ten-horsepower engines. More than good enough to reach Barbados, a hundred miles or so north. That’s where the Littlebird listening post is, I think.”