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McAllister started to crawl out of the V-berth. The guns were in the salon on the table. The main hatch suddenly slid open and the figure of a man was outlined in the opening.

No time now! He reared back and frantically undogged the Lexan hatch just over the bed. It sprung open with a crash at the same moment the man at the main hatch fired.“Watch out,” someone shouted.

McAllister levered himself out of the hatch onto the foredeck, mindless of the damage he was doing to his wounds. The night wind was suddenly terribly cold.

He started to turn when two more silenced shots were fired, the first catching him in his side, and the second slamming into his head, the impact sending him backward. The lifeline caught his legs just above the knees and he flipped over, plunging into the river, the dark swirling waters closing over him, a billion stars bursting in his eyes.

Chapter 8

The sounds of the silenced shots were clearly recognizable for what they were, even at a distance of twenty-five yards.

A moment later McAllister fell into the river with a loud splash. Stephanie Albright stepped back into the shadows behind the dockmaster’s office at the end of the quay, hardly able to believe what she had just witnessed. Watch out, the one in the cockpit had shouted, in English. These were no Russians. The two of them held a hurried conference on the boat, then one of them went below while the other moved slowly up the length of the deck, searching the water.

Stephanie had no gun. But even if she had been armed she didn’t think she would have gone in and opened fire.

The boat light went out, and the first man came up from below and closed the hatch. He joined the other man searching the water.

After a minute or so they both climbed up on the dock and began searching the water on both sides, between the other boats, along each finger pier, and even beneath the dock, getting down on their hands and knees.

They worked quickly and efficiently. Watching them, Stephanie knew that they were professionals. But from where? The Agency or the Bureau?

We don’t work this way. We don’t shoot people in cold blood. She’d seen McAllister’s hands when he’d come up through the forward hatch. He’d not been armed, yet they had shot him.

After a long time, the two men said something else to each other, then holstered their weapons and headed back up the dock without a backward glance. They passed within ten feet of where Stephanie had edged around to the opposite side of the small building, and then crossed the street and got into a dark Ford Thunderbird. She had spotted the car parked on the street when she’d come in, but she hadattached no significance to its presence. Other cars were parked nearby, and the plates were not of any government series that she knew of.

They left, making a U-turn and heading back toward the Washington highway, their job finished.

McAllister was dead. There could be little doubt of it, he’d been hit at least once in the head. She’d seen that much very clearly.

She stepped out from behind the dockmaster’s building, walked to the end of the dock and looked out across the narrow bay. The wind was biting cold, raising whitecaps on the dark water. He was dead, so what was she doing here like this? Turn around and go home, get some sleep. Forget about it.

Something is going on here that you don’t know about, something that you are not supposed to know about, something that you don’t want to know about.

Yet she had just witnessed a murder. It was her job… her duty to report what she’d seen. Telephone Kingman, tell him everything, including why she had come down here. She cursed her own stupidity, but it was happening so fast, it was so unexpected.

She looked down at how the water swirled around the dock pilings.

It was the river current, eddying here in the narrow bay. Sweeping everything out toward the Chesapeake Bay and beyond to the ocean.

Stephanie’s thoughts stopped in mid-stride. Everything would be swept down river. At least as far as the south side of the bay. Everything. Everybody.

But he was dead, she thought as she hurried back off the central dock, then over to the next pier south. The two professionals who had tracked him here and shot him had been certain enough of their work to leave after only a cursory search. They knew what they were doing. They had fired at him from a distance of less than twenty feet. Impossible to miss. Impossible to be misled into believing he was dead.

At the end of the pier, she flopped down on her stomach and hung way over the edge so that she could see along the line of pilings. The choppy water was barely two feet beneath the bottom of the dock. Even if he had somehow survived the gunshot wound to his head, he would have been knocked unconscious, and surely would have drownedby now. The water was very cold. Hypothermia would make it impossible to move his arms and legs so that he could stay afloat.

She scrambled to her feet and rushed back to the quay and out the final pier to the south. Halfway to the end she heard a soft groan under the dock. She dropped to her hands and knees and looked over the edge.

McAllister, blood streaming into his eyes from a wound in the side of the forehead just at the hairline, was clinging to one of the fat wooden pilings just behind a low-slung power boat, its big outboard motor tilted up out of the water. His mouth was opening and closing, his eyes fluttering.

“McAllister. Can you hear me?” Stephanie called softly. He reared back as if he were going to try to swim away from her voice, and he lost his grip on the piling, his head sinking beneath the water.

“Oh, God,” Stephanie cried. She scrambled down into the back of the powerboat, and was about to jump into the water when McAllister’s head surfaced a couple of feet away, pushed closer to the boat by the current.

She grabbed a handful of his sweater and hauled him closer. “No,” he mumbled. “Enough… no more… please. “It’s all right,” Stephanie said, pulling him around the motor to the boat’s swim platform just at the water level. “You’ve got to help me. I don’t think I can pull you out of the water myself.”

“No,” McAllister mumbled, trying to pull away from her. “Go away leave me alone… they’ll come back… impossible.. Stephanie managed to get him turned around, his back to the boat, and bracing her legs against the transom heaved with all of her might, getting him into a sitting position on the teak grating of the low swim platform.

“Put your arm up here,” she said, pulling his right arm up over the edge of the transom. She climbed over the back of the boat onto the swim platform with him, the water coming up over her anKles. She pulled his legs out of the freezing water, and then turned his body around so that his right side was up against the back of the boat.

“Pull yourself up,” she said, heaving his body over the edge. “Now,” she grunted with an effort. “Pull.“He did as she told him, finally, and with a sudden heave he was up over the back of the boat, and tumbled loosely into the open cockpit, blood everywhere from his wounds.

Stephanie clambered back onto the dock and hurried back to the quay, then across the street to the next block where she had parked the Toyota. So far her luck was holding. The streets were deserted at this hour. Only the local police would be out and around. Sooner or later they would be cruising past. If they spotted her, she had no idea what she would say to them.

She got the van started and drove back down to the marina, backing up to the quay, and dousing her lights, but leaving the engine running. Just a few minutes longer, she told herself jumping out. She opened the side door, then glancing both ways up the street, hurried back onto the dock.

McAllister had come around again, and by the time she reached him, he had somehow managed to pull himself up on the back of the boat, and was halfway up onto the dock.