Linda hit some keystrokes on the computer built into the arm of the command chair, and an aft-facing camera mounted high on the superstructure came up on a portion of the main view screen. Sure enough, there were Murph and Stoney with Soleil Croissard. She already sported a black parachute harness, and the two men were clipping her to a thin line leading off to a winch. As they watched, Soleil climbed up the transom rail with the drogue chute in her hand. She faced forward, said something to Eric and Mark with a big grin on her face, and tossed the little parachute into the Oregon’s slipstream. The main chute was yanked from the harness in a billow of ebony nylon and inflated, heaving her off her perch in a gut-wrenching ascent.
Toggling the controls, Linda tilted the camera up until they could see Soleil silhouetted against the azure sky. She must have been two hundred feet above the deck, and because of the ship’s speed she would keep going higher and higher if not for the tether.
Cabrillo wasn’t too sure he liked this. A few years back they got it into their heads that they could wake-surf, while the ship was at speed, using a line rigged from an extension pole out of the starboard boat garage. It worked fine for about ten minutes before Murph took a spill and lost his grip on the T-bar. They’d been forced to stop the ship in order to launch a Zodiac to haul his butt out of the drink.
Mark had suggested outfitting some sort of catch net aft of the garage for their next attempt. Juan nixed the whole enterprise.
But if this is what it took to draw Soleil out of her shell, then he supposed no harm was done. “I guess,” he said after watching her for a moment, “that if the UAV ever fails us, we can put a lookout up in that contraption.”
“You should try it,” Linda encouraged. “It’s a blast.”
“And while they’ve been out playing, how’s the research coming?”
“Nada,” Linda replied. “Bahar’s still off the radar, and we can’t find anything that remotely ties him to any criminal or terrorist activities. Oh, wait. One thing. The oil platform. It was part of something called the Oracle Project. Murph found that in a purged accounting file in Bahar’s corporate computer, though now he can’t access it anymore. It’s got a new firewall that he can’t break through.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“So does he. I do have some good news. Langston phoned earlier. Says he has a job for us.”
Juan was shocked and elated. They’d been left out to dry for so long, he didn’t think the CIA would ever use their services again. “What’s the mission?”
“The Chinese have built a new surveillance ship, state-of-the-art. She’s currently off the coast of Alaska. He wants us to persuade them to go home. He said you’d figure out something creative that won’t start an international incident. I told him we needed a week.”
Cabrillo’s gears were already churning when he happened to glance at the video screen again. Soleil was no longer in camera range. He reached across to adjust the camera and saw that she was being reeled back down to the deck. Mark and Eric watched anxiously, making Cabrillo wonder if anything was wrong. When she was back firmly on the Oregon, she yanked one of the chute’s toggles, spilling air from that side and collapsing the canopy. Eric helped her bundle it into a ball while the wind fought to refill it. Mark Murphy was running for the superstructure.
Juan reset the main board to show the ship’s bows cleaving the Mediterranean. When ten minutes went by and Murph hadn’t found him in the Op Center, the Chairman called him in his room.
“Everything all right?”
“I’m a little busy, Juan,” Mark said, and killed the connection.
Rather than wait for the eccentric genius, Cabrillo went down to the forward hold, a vast open space they used for storage when they were running legitimate cargoes as part of their cover or, when it was empty like now, for repacking chutes. He found Soleil alone. When he asked about Eric, she told him he followed Mark almost as soon as he could.
“Looked like quite the joyride,” he said.
“Not quite the rush I got jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but it was fun.” She had the parachute laid flat on the wooden deck and was tracing the riser lines. It was clear she knew exactly what she was doing.
“How many jumps have you made?”
“BASE or from an airplane? I’ve made dozens of the first and hundreds of the second.”
He saw the haunted look that had dimmed her eyes and sallowed her complexion was almost gone. There were still traces of it when she tried to smile, as if she felt she didn’t deserve a moment’s happiness. Cabrillo remembered those same feelings after his wife was killed. He thought he was dishonoring her memory by laughing at a joke or enjoying a movie. It was nothing more than a way of punishing himself for something that wasn’t his fault, and in time it faded.
“Ever jump the New River Gorge Bridge?” It was an 876-foot span in West Virginia and considered one of the best spots for jumping in the world.
“Of course,” she replied as if he’d asked if she breathed. “You?”
“Back when I was in training for an organization I once worked for, a bunch of us went over and did it.”
“Linda tells me you were in the CIA.” Juan nodded. “Was it exciting?”
“Most days, it’s as boring as any office job. Others, you’re so scared that no matter what you do you can’t dry your palms.”
“I think that is real danger,” she said. “What I do, it’s only pretend.”
“I don’t know. Getting shot by a border guard or having your chute fail at eleven thousand feet has pretty much the same results.”
Her eyes lit up a little. “Ah, but I have a reserve parachute.”
“You know what I mean.”
Her smile said that she did. “I guess what I am saying is that I place myself at risk for my own needs. You do it for others. I am very selfish, while you are generous.”
Juan broke eye contact and thrust his hands in his pockets. “Listen, ah,” he stammered for just a second and changed subjects. “I hate to bring this up, but we could use your help. I’m convinced that your father was targeted for a specific reason. There is something he has that Bahar wanted.”
He used the present tense when mentioning her father, though he knew in all likelihood Croissard was dead.
“We’ve snooped through his electronic files for everything he’s been working on for the past year,” he continued. “So far, nothing jumps out at us. I was wondering if you would take a look and see if anything grabs your attention.”
She caught his eye again, her beautiful face somber. “He is dead, isn’t he?”
“I can’t confirm it, but I believe so. I am sorry.”
“My helping you will punish those men?”
“That’s the plan.”
Soleil nodded slowly. “I will try, but I think I mentioned that we weren’t close and I know hardly anything about his business dealings.”
“Just do the best you can. That’s all I ask of anyone.”
CABRILLO WAS IN HIS CABIN later that night when there was a knock on the door.
“It’s me and Eric,” Mark Murphy said.
“Come on in.”
The two entered the cabin with the eagerness of puppies.
“We figured it out when Soleil was parasailing, and I think we confirmed it,” Mark said excitedly. “The computers on the oil rig were the alpha test for why Bahar needed those crystals.”
“The beta machine uses optical lasers,” Eric put in before Mark could.