Death Echo (34 page)

“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.

MANHATTAN

10:49 P.M.

A
lara sat in Steele’s office as she had for hours, talking on her phone, trading favors, calling in IOUs, bribing, threatening careers, and looking more exhausted with each lost minute.

Steele didn’t look any better. St. Kilda had been combing through its own mazes, searching for something—a hint, a tone of voice, a choice of words, something done or undone—anything that would indicate that someone knew more than he or she was telling.

Nothing had come his way.

“Deputy Director of Operations on line four,” Dwayne said to Steele. “Two other calls standing by, but they’re just lower-level screamers.”

Steele nodded. He paid Dwayne very well to sort out important calls; at times like this, he was worth double his salary.

“Switch Duke to my phone,” Steele said.

Alara’s black eyes narrowed as she focused on each nuance of Steele’s expression and words. The image of a dying city haunted her, slicing her soul with the knowledge that her children’s children had inherited a world gone mad.

But when was it ever sane?
she asked herself bitterly.

She had four advanced degrees in global history. She was no closer to answering the sanity question than she had been as an eager student whose mind was on fire with the beauty and complexity of the world’s cultures and history.

The complexity, at least, remained.

Even the beauty, sometimes.

Without realizing it Alara shook her head. She had lived too long knowing too much—and not nearly enough.

Steele watched her as he listened to Duke. If her eyes had been open, he would have thought she was warning him against talking to the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations. But her eyes were like her past, closed.

“Duke,” Steele said finally, “I give you my word that you have everything we have. More. You know what originally kicked this avalanche off the mountain. St. Kilda doesn’t, which places us at a real disadvantage.”

“You’re in a tough place,” Duke agreed. “We all are. This kind of investigation is difficult in the extreme. People won’t, often
can’t
by the very description of their office, say anything until there is agreement that it’s necessary to reveal highly,
highly
sensitive secrets. Decades of careful placement of agents and officers is at stake.”

“If you make Seattle’s memorial big enough, your explanations might fit on the plaque.”

“Damn it, Steele. It’s not only our people at risk. Our allies—”

“Will pass the hat for the plaque,” Steele said. “So will our enemies. When it comes to sharing real information, there’s little difference.”

“We have sat intel people working 24/7,” Duke said. “Problem is, there’s a storm moving down the northwest coast from Alaska. It’s already hammering the Queen Charlotte Islands. Northern Vancouver Island will feel it tomorrow, but the clouds are coming in right now.”

“I’m certain your satellite intelligence technicians are capable of penetrating a few clouds.”

“Whether or how much is classified,” Duke said.

Steele bit off a particularly vicious oath. It seemed that the only thing unclassified about this steaming pile of shit was the finger-pointing.

“Look,” Duke said, “I’ve given you all that I can and more than I should. Tim Harrow’s diver confirmed that
Blackbird
is on the bottom. He and the team are standing by for any hint, however unlikely, of
Black Swan.
Another team has joined them. They are highly specialized and so secret that I’m the lowest ranking officer who knows of their existence. Every sign of
Blackbird
‘s scuttling is being mopped up.”

“The environment thanks you.”

Duke swore. “If I could get away with giving you men and material, I would. But until you give me a
Swan
sighting, my hands are tied. You sure your agents haven’t really gone rogue and are playing for the other team? You know it happens.”

“Unlike you, I’m very certain of my employees.”

“Hackers, then.”

“I’ll note your suggestions for the feasible deniability file.”

“Steele, if I…” Duke’s voice died.

There was nothing to say.

Both men knew it.

NORTHERN
VANCOUVER
ISLAND

3:16 P.M.

E
mma lowered the binoculars for a moment and closed her eyes to rest them. Both she and Mac had been in the air, staring through binoculars since dawn. She had seen some breathtakingly wild places—evergreens clinging to rocky cliffs, moss in more shades of green and brown than she could name, water both fresh and salt, calm and roiled, colors of gray and silver and blue impossible to describe.

Then there were the boats. Some small freighters or tankers, cruise ships shifting locations for the winter season, fishing boats, crabbing boats, prawning boats, sailboats, tugboats, log barges, freight barges, inflatables, rowboats, skiffs, power cruisers both dainty and extravagant. She and Mac had examined everything that could float and a few that shouldn’t have.

They hadn’t seen anything that looked like
Blackbird
.

Mac hung up his cell phone and spoke through the headphone link to Emma. “Steele says Harrow has at least two planes working south, covering Seattle and the San Juan Islands. Faroe wants us to stay north of Campbell River in case
Black Swan
is still up here somewhere under wraps.”

“But—” Emma began.

“The problem is,” Mac continued, “she could appear anywhere, because she could have been hidden anywhere from Southeast Alaska to the B.C. coast above Vancouver Island.”

“Wouldn’t that cause a stir? That’s an expensive boat to be left for months at a time.”

“It’s not unusual for summer yachties to leave their boats stashed in safe ports up north for the winter, fly out to Florida or Mexico, and fly back in the spring or summer. Some people hire transit captains to bring their baby north to south and back again.”

Emma digested that as she tried to ignore the growling, low-frequency grind of the big radial engine sitting a few feet in front of her. Even with the headset to dampen the bone-deep, droning roar, she felt like she was inside a metal coffin that was being beaten with baseball bats.

She hadn’t liked small planes before she stepped aboard this one. Now she respected the sturdy DeHavilland for its ability to rise and fall with the terrain and wind, and land in hair-raising places; but she still didn’t like it.

“Give me a boat any day,” she muttered.

“What?” Mac said.

“It’s noisy in here.”

“Try the engine room of
Blackbird,
when she was running.”

“No thanks.”

“You sure?” he asked. “I have extra ear protectors.”
Or had.

“The pilot must be deaf.”

“Only in the lower ranges.”

The pilot was a man of indeterminate age and complete control of his airplane. Whatever his per-hour rate was, he earned it.

“There’s Chatham Point,” the pilot said over the intercom, pointing ahead through the windshield at a bright, white-and-red-striped lighthouse on a finger of land. “No noncommercial black, approximately forty-feet-long hulls on the water that I can see. I’ll make a lower pass to be certain.”

Mac put down his binoculars. He’d learned that the pilot’s eye was so good it was almost eerie, reflecting a combination of expertise and a sixth sense. He could tell the difference between a forty-and a fifty-foot cruiser at a thousand feet.