Death Echo

63

DAY FIVE

NORTH OF DISCOVERY PASSAGE

5:32 P.M.

Emma stared in furious disbelief toward the rocky niche where they had hidden Blackbird. Nothing was there now but a tangle of freshly cut evergreen boughs, random pieces of forest, and a pile of gillnet washing idly against the rocky shore.

“Is Faroe still on the line?” she demanded.

“Can’t you hear him swearing?”

“Over you? Not likely. Tell him to send a seaplane, money, and some good binoculars to the coordinates where we met Harrow.”

“It’s a long shot,” Mac said.

“Do we have a better one?”

“The Agency lost a damn fine officer when they lost you.”

Emma was too angry to appreciate the compliment. With Blackbird gone, she and Mac had to start over.

And the clock simply didn’t have that much time left on it.

Mac was speaking quickly into the phone, watching her through narrowed, black eyes. He was no happier than she was.

“While you’re at it,” he told Faroe, “get Harrow off our butt now. If we’re being watched, we don’t want to give away the whole game. We’ve lost too much ground as it is.”

A pause, then Faroe said, “Grace is on it.”

“She has maybe three minutes before our raggedy-ass cover is completely blown.”

And it was Mac’s experience that when cover was blown, body parts quickly followed.

“Call me when you know something useful,” Faroe said.

“Like how many ways we’ve been screwed?” Mac asked.

The connection was already dead.

Now the Zodiac was less than a half-mile away, its whine of power increasing with each second.

Emma didn’t look up from the dent in the shoreline where Blackbird had been concealed. But not well enough. She hissed a word through her clenched teeth.

“Not your fault,” Mac said. “Obviously I missed a locator bug.”

“It’s a big boat.” She started working over the little nav computer as she spoke. “Without a sweeper, it would be impossible to secure. Faroe knew it. That’s why he didn’t crap all over you. St. Kilda took a calculated risk. We lost.”

“You think Faroe sees it that way?”

“Yes. He’s not running around now, trying to cover his ass. It was his call to leave the bug sweeper behind. It was the right call, as our little strip-search proved. If there’s a slap coming down, he’ll take it.”

“That would be…refreshing.”

She laughed without humor. “It surprised me, too, the first time it happened. But if he thinks you’ve been careless, God help you, because the Devil is rubbing his hands in glee.”

The sound of the Zodiac’s massive outboards swelled like an approaching aircraft.

“I should just wave them over to us and throw in the game,” she said, her voice rich with disgust.

“But you won’t.”

“No. Not while there’s still a chance, however pinche.”

Mac recognized the Southern border slang and nodded. “I feel the same way.”

Two hundred yards away, the Zodiac suddenly altered course. The craft heeled over and sped off in another direction.

“Just another whale-watching boat gone chasing a new orca spotting,” Mac said.

“Harrow doesn’t call off easily. Wonder what Grace said.”

“Yeah, I’d like to have heard it. That’s a no-assing-around kind of woman.” He smiled grimly.

“She’s a former federal judge.”

“Must have been hell on the bench,” Mac said.

But they weren’t really listening to each other. He was focused on the fading sound of the Zodiac. She was frowning over the nav computer.

The black craft roared up a different channel and vanished. The men aboard were pros. Not once did any of them look toward Mac and Emma.

“How much time before the seaplane arrives?” he asked.

“At least an hour. It will probably be flying up from Rosario or Seattle, maybe farther north if we’re lucky. The CIA has more assets to call on than St. Kilda.”

“Then we have time to take a look around.”

She shrugged. “Can’t hurt and we might even find something.”

“Elephants might fly.”

“Thought that was pigs.”

“Pigs are easy,” he said.

Any other time she would have laughed. Now she just guided the little boat closer to the place where they had left Blackbird.

“At least we know odds are good it wasn’t Harrow,” Mac said. “He was too eager to co-opt us.”

“Which leaves Demidov.”

“Or the mysterious, stupidly rich owner who was going to contact us somewhere along the way on this Inside Passage snipe hunt.”

“If he exists,” she said.

“Plenty of stupidly rich exist. Temuri might be one of them.”

“Why would he steal his own boat?”

“Good question. I’ll ask him the next time we see him.”

While Emma motored them closer to the clutter of beached and tangled debris, Mac watched through the binoculars.

The gillnet camouflage floated in the rocky niche like the empty cocoon of a giant insect. Lines that had secured the boat dangled uselessly in the water. Two of the lines were already beginning to unwind where they had been slashed through, removing their whipped ends.

“It looks like somebody just cut the net loose, peeled it back, cut the lines, and motored away,” Mac said. “Ten minutes work, at most.”

Emma’s cell phone went off. It wasn’t Faroe, which left Harrow-unless somebody else had squeezed her number out of St. Kilda. She cut power and answered.

“What,” she said curtly.

“Do you expect me to believe you’ve lost that fucking boat?” Harrow yelled.

“Believe what you want. Blackbird is gone.”

Harrow’s response told her that he had been hanging out with sailors long enough to expand his salty vocabulary.

No news there, she thought bitterly. At least half of his team are probably SEALs. Why have water specialists if you don’t use them?

“Get that goddamned boat back and do it fast,” Harrow snarled, “or I’ll hang your ass so high you’ll think you’re walking on the moon.”

“We’re working on it,” you stupid strutting bureaucrat, “which is more than you can say,” she said. “We’ll be airborne in an hour. I’m already plotting search grids. There aren’t that many places nearby where you could hide a boat as big as Blackbird. Get your satellite recon techs on it. We’ll see who finds her first.”

She ended the call.

“That was fast,” Mac said, still studying the debris.

“I don’t have to take his abuse anymore.”

“I hope Harrow alerted Border Protection in the San Juan Islands,” Mac said without looking away from the binoculars. “If they’ve already loaded the currency, or whatever the goods are, Blackbird could be running for international boundary waters right now.”

“You’re back to sweet talk again.”

“Pushed to the firewall, Blackbird can do close to thirty knots on decent water,” Mac said. “If the captain is willing to risk running at night, he could be across the international boundary and headed for Seattle by dawn.”

“Do you want to look at the crime scene or keep depressing me?”

Mac started swearing, a toneless stream of words that made Emma wince.

“What now?” she asked. “Did you find a nasty-gram in a floating bottle?”

“Oil slick ahead.”

Emma pulled the throttle back to idle. “Will it hurt the dinghy?”

“No. It’s the death cry of a blackbird.”

“Mac-”

“The bastards sank her,” Mac said bleakly. “A fuel slick is a ship’s grave marker.”

“What?”

He pointed toward the plume of the fuel spill. “See that?”

“Yes. Smell it, too.”

“Follow the slick back to its source.” And pray that I’m wrong.

She traced the slick, saw that it led toward the mangled camouflage netting, and said, “You want to get closer.”

“Yeah.” He reached past her and began making the little nav computer sit up and do tricks. “Don’t worry. The slick is no worse than what you find near a fuel dock in a commercial marina.”

“Beautiful.”

“Go slow. I want to watch the bottom. This could be just a smokescreen. If we think Blackbird is here, we won’t look for her anywhere else.”

Emma idled forward, following the rainbow sheen of fuel to its end, maybe fifty yards from where Blackbird had been concealed.

Mac watched the display. The sonar gave a garish, two-toned picture of the uneven, rocky bottom. Emma crisscrossed the area, amazed to see that only a few yards away from where they had concealed Blackbird, the bottom went from seventy feet deep to three hundred.

“Cliffs above water usually mean steep drop-offs below,” Mac said, when she commented.

“You really think Blackbird’s still here?” Emma asked, glancing over the side.

Not that she could have seen bottom, with or without the shimmer of fuel. The green water was rich, nearly opaque with plankton.

“Either that or there’s a petroleum pipeline running right under a nameless little dog hole, and while we were gone, the line just happened to pop a leak.”

“Not likely,” she said.

“No, it-wait. Go out of gear.”

She put the shifter in neutral and watched Mac. He gave her some terse directions and watched the wildly colorful screen. The dinghy doubled back on its course, then turned again, and again, painting images of the bottom on the screen with each yard of motion.

“There,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Bloody bastards. She was a good boat.”

She stared at the bright colors. It was hard for her to translate them into anything useful. But that was why people hired experts.

“You’re sure,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

“She’s sitting on her keel in one hundred and fifty-four feet of water.” He stabbed the screen with one index finger. “That’s the top of the cabin, twenty feet above the waterline-if she was floating. What I’ve had you doing is the equivalent of flying over her from bow to stern.”

“Guess we’ll need that seaplane just to get home.”

Mac grunted.

Emma started to say something, shook her head, and tried again. “Why? Why would anyone sink millions of dollars’ worth of new yacht?”

“They didn’t need her anymore.”

“If the smugglers found out that the Agency was closing in, it’s possible that they buried the evidence and ran. But…”

“But that doesn’t explain Black Swan, the missing twin.”

“Yeah,” she said unhappily.

She thought hard, fast, silently offering and rejecting explanation after explanation for the scuttling of Blackbird. None of the things that made sense gave her a smile.

“Maybe Demidov got impatient,” she said finally.

“Would we?”

She sighed. “No. Maybe they’re planning to salvage her and start again. A different way of hiding her, as it were.”

“A ship that has been on the bottom is pretty well ruined. You’re not going to just float her, pump her out, and take off.”

Emma stared at the deceptively beautiful rainbows in the slick. The most likely conclusion made her stomach clench. She looked at Mac.

He looked as grim as she felt.

“You’re thinking what I don’t want to think,” she said

“I’m not real happy about it, either.”

“It’s a crazy idea. Premature. Unsupported.”

“And it fits the facts as we know them,” he said bleakly. “You can paint over almost every color hull but black.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It comes as a surprise to a lot of people.” He shrugged. “You want to call or should I?”

“I will.”

She dug out her phone, hit speed dial, and braced herself to tell St. Kilda some really bad news.