“Or so you hope,” said Gideon.
Linda laughed, looked around. “Speaking of boats, this is quite the yacht you’ve got here. A Hinckley, no less.”
“We’re celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary,” said Gideon. “Chartered it out of Aruba.”
“Well, congratulations.” Linda shook out her bleached-blond hair. “Strange place to go cruising, though.”
“We wanted to get off the beaten track,” said Gideon. He noticed that the man, Hank, hadn’t spoken. But his eyes were roaming everywhere, taking in every detail. “You know these waters well?” he asked Linda.
“Oh, yes.”
This was encouraging. “Are there any…unusual landmarks along the coast worth seeing?”
“Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Interesting rock formations. Caves, maybe? That sort of thing.”
He found Cordray was now looking intently at him.
“There’s a lot of wrecks,” Linda said slowly. “You interested in wrecks?”
“Not really. More into natural formations. Rocks, caves, sea stacks.”
Another drag and another sip. Gideon noticed her nails were very long and very red. “Caves? Why caves?”
“I’m interested in caves.”
“You scuba divers?”
“Ah, not really.”
“You got a scuba setup here.”
Gideon shrugged.
There was a pause before Linda spoke again. “There are some caves in the bluffs along Punta Gallinas, about ten, fifteen miles down the coast.”
“Thanks, we’ll check them out tomorrow,” said Gideon.
The man, Hank, rose. “May I use your head?”
“I’ll show you where it is,” said Amy. The two vanished into the pilothouse.
Linda watched the two leave, then laughed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you two were smuggling drugs!”
Gideon managed to laugh along with her. “Why do you say that?”
She waved her hand at the mast. “Two supersize radars, two GPS antennas, microwave horn, VHF and ELF, satellite uplink. You’re equipped up the wazoo!”
“Came with the boat.”
“So what’s the top speed?”
“They tell me thirty-six knots.”
“Thirty-six? I bet you could do forty-five on a flat sea. Hell, you could probably outrun some of the patrol boats of the Colombian navy!”
Amy returned with Cordray. They took their seats again and Cordray drained his wine. “You folks are sure traveling in style,” he said. He had a soft, whistling sort of voice. “Nice suite of electronics. Not to mention sidescan sonar with a tow apparatus. You looking for something on the seafloor?”
“It came with the boat,” said Amy.
At this, Linda cackled: a raspy, smoke-cured sound. “Funny, that’s just what your husband said. It came with the boat!” She shook her head. “Well, we’d better get going, leave you two in peace.” She pulled a walkie-talkie out of her pocket. “Jose? Listos.”
A few moments later the launch arrived and the couple departed, motoring back to their boat, waving good-bye. Gideon waited in silence, watching as they boarded their vessel. Amy poured her untouched glass of wine over the side, then motioned Gideon into the pilothouse.
“They’re more suspicious of us than we are of them,” Gideon said.
“Using the head was just an excuse,” said Amy. “That guy didn’t miss a thing.”
“They could have stayed anchored right where they were when we first passed them, in that bay down the coast. Instead they came after us.”
Amy nodded.
“Think maybe they’re drug traffickers, pissed that we’re in their territory?”
Amy shook her head. “My guess is they’re up to something else — something no good.”
Gideon went to pour another glass of wine, only to be surprised when Amy’s hand stopped him.
“I need you to be sharp. We’re going to run an armed watch tonight. Two on, two off.”
“Why don’t we just hoist anchor and take off? We could easily outrun that tub.”
“No. Who knows how they might react? They might report us to the Colombian coast guard — and we really, really don’t want them looking for us.”
21
Gideon lounged in the stern cockpit, having taken the midnight-to-two-AM watch. The wind had picked up and was blowing hard from shore, whipping up whitecaps in the bay. Each gust brought stinging sand with it. The air smelled of smoke, and he could taste salty dust on his tongue. It was very dark, the stars now obscured by blowing dust.
Once in a while he picked up his binoculars and looked across the two hundred yards of water to the Horizonte. It showed no signs of life. All the lights were out, and the launch was safely hoisted in its davits.
He got up and made the rounds of the boat, hopping up on the deck and completing a circuit outside the pilothouse to the foredeck and back around the other side. He wasn’t sleepy and was glad to be on watch instead of tossing and turning in his stuffy stateroom.
The wind gusted again and he closed his eyes, turning away from the biting sand. He thought of the doughty Irish monks sailing this coastline in a tiny curragh or whatever sort of sailboat they had used. It was almost beyond comprehension.
The gust died down and, in the sudden lull, he thought he heard a noise. It was a strange sound, like bubbling, off the left — port — side of the boat. He rose, pulling out his pistol, and moved silently toward it. He waited just out of sight, listening. Another sound of bubbles breaking the water.
A scuba diver.
Moving slowly, pulling an unlit flashlight from his pocket, he leaned over the rail and aimed it at the spot where he could hear bubbles rising. They broke the black surface with a sparkle of phosphorescence. He steadied his gun, switched on the light.
The beam probed the murky water, revealing nothing. How deep was the diver? Was he sabotaging their boat, placing explosives? Was he trying to board? And now, of course, the diver knew he’d been spotted — having seen the light.
Gideon leaned over farther and probed into the murky water with the light. For a brief moment he thought he saw a flash of metal.
It was hopeless to fire into the water. What he had to do was wake Amy and prevent them from being boarded.
Scrambling away from the rail, he climbed onto the foredeck, above the staterooms, giving the deck two hard raps — their prearranged signal — to rouse Amy. Then he climbed onto the hardtop roof of the pilothouse, where he had a view of the entire boat. Keeping his flashlight off — which would just make him a target — he took cover behind the mast and waited.
The wind moaned about the mast, obscuring his ability to hear. His eyes strained into the darkness, looking for the telltale flash of luminescence indicating bubbles breaking the surface. But the water remained dark.
What had Glinn called this assignment? A walk in Central Park. Yeah, right.
Where the heck was Amy? Was it possible she hadn’t heard his signal?
Suddenly there was another flash of phosphorescence to his right, followed by another on his left. Two divers? He felt his heart pounding. It wasn’t a natural phenomenon, not a school of fish. He had seen a flash of metal — he knew he had.
And now he called out. “Amy! Amy!”
“Ella esta aqui,” came a deep voice from the pool of darkness below him.
He turned on his flashlight to see Amy, in her pajamas, the tattooed pirate holding a gun to her head. He was wearing nothing but a scuba tank — not even a bathing suit. In the darkness the tattoos looked like scales.