Death Echo

To Jan and Bill Croft

And the inimitable

Dong Shui

MANHATTAN

9:00 A.M.

Y
ou must believe me. St. Kilda Consulting is our best hope.”

Ambassador James Steele pinched the bridge of his nose and wished he had never met the woman who now sat opposite his desk. “Alara…”

“I’m no longer called that.”

Steele blew out a hard breath and wheeled his chair back from his desk. Very few people on earth could make him uncomfortable. The woman no longer called Alara was one of them.

And one of the most dangerous.

“Just as I no longer work for the government,” Steele said.

“We established that years ago.” Alara smiled almost sadly. Her silver hair gleamed, hair that once had been as black as her eyes. “In the shadow world, St. Kilda Consulting has made quite a reputation for itself. Trust is rare in any world. Even more so in the shadows.”

“You’re asking him to break that trust,” Emma Cross said, speaking up for the first time in fifteen minutes.

Steele and Alara turned sharply toward Emma, telling her what she’d already guessed—they had forgotten she was there.

All emotion faded from Alara’s expression. It was replaced by the frightening intelligence that had made her a legend within the nameless, anonymously funded government agencies whose initials changed frequently but whose purpose never changed.

“I came in soft,” Alara said coolly, “requesting, not threatening. I don’t have time for games with disillusioned children.” She looked at Steele. “According to our intelligence, America could lose a major population center in less than seven days. We need St. Kilda to prevent that. We will have what we need.”

Without looking away from Alara, Steele said, “Emma, summarize the facts as they were presented to us.”

Emma’s light green eyes watched her boss for a moment. Then she began speaking quickly, without emotion. “As given to us, no questions asked or qualifications offered. Ms. Alara’s department or departments have been following various overseas entities. One of those entities is suspected—”

“Known not suspected,” Alara cut in.

“—of stealing and reselling yachts,” Emma continued without pause. “One of the stolen yachts was specially modified to hold contraband—chemical, biological, and/or radioactive. Motives, whether the actors are state or nonstate, weren’t part of Alara’s presentation, which will make finding and stopping who or whatever is the enemy before time runs out just this side of impossible.” She looked at Alara. “No surprise the bureaucrats and politicians want to dump this steaming pile on St. Kilda’s doorstep.”

Steele almost smiled. Emma Cross had a pretty face and a bottom-line mind.

“The excuse for said dumping,” Emma continued, turning back to Steele, “is that St. Kilda has an agent who has been investigating missing yachts for an international insurer. The yacht,
Blackbird,
which I have been tracing, is a dead ringer for the stolen, refitted, and purportedly dangerous yacht pursued by Alara’s department. Or departments. The person, group, or entities responsible for theft of the nameless yacht weren’t identified. At all.”

Alara’s still-black eyebrows rose, but she said nothing about Emma’s coolly mocking summary. The older woman simply sat in her crisp business suit and pumps, looking like an employee of a middle-management team, back when women were called secretaries rather than administrative assistants.

“Satellite tracking and other intel confirm that a yacht believed to be
Blackbird
will be off-loaded from the container ship
Shinhua Lotus
at approximately fifteen hundred hours Pacific Coast time,” Emma continued. “According to St. Kilda’s investigation, an unknown transit captain will pick up the boat in Port of Seattle. We have no assurance that the yacht aboard the container ship is the same one that originally was loaded aboard the
Lotus
. We won’t have that assurance until someone finds a way to get aboard either the container ship or the yacht. I’m sure our would-be ‘client’ has the resources to covertly conduct that search.”

“Had,” Alara said. “Past tense.”

“You have a leak,” Emma said bluntly.

“Always probable,” Alara said. “St. Kilda has carefully and repeatedly distanced itself from any traceable connection with any U.S. intel agency. The targets won’t be looking for you. They sure as bloody hell are looking for us. We don’t have anyone on the ground who isn’t being followed.”

Emma kept her mouth shut because she hated agreeing with the other woman. Nothing personal. Just past experience. The officers and agents she had worked with all over the world had been decent people…at the lower levels. The further she went up the food chain, the less trustworthy the bosses became. Again, nothing personal. Just the Darwinian facts of survival in a highly politicized workplace whose rules changed with every headline.

“Do you have anything else you can tell St. Kilda?” Steele asked.

“Not at the present time,” Alara said.

Emma made a rude sound.

Steele didn’t bother.

“You aren’t required to help,” Alara pointed out.

“But it sure is hard to do business in the U.S. when everyone who works for St. Kilda is audited quarterly,” Emma said, “when St. Kilda personnel are stopped at the border, or their passports are jerked, or their driver’s license is revoked, their spouse fired, and every business that approaches St. Kilda is warned not—”

Steele held up his hand.

Emma swallowed the rest of her rant and waited. Steele knew how harassment worked. Good old Uncle’s bureaucrats could hound St. Kilda to death. Literally.

“That’s the price of living in a society you can’t fit around a campfire,” Alara said to Emma. “Cooperation is required in reality if not in law. Ambassador Steele knows this. Why don’t you?”

Emma hoped her teeth weren’t leaving skid marks on her tongue. She really wanted to unload on the older woman.

Because Alara was right. “Reality is a bitch, and she is always in heat,” Alara said. “When all else fails, you can count on that.” She glanced at her watch. “In or out?”

Steele rolled his chair to face Emma. “You’re off the hook on this one. Be prepared to brief another St. Kilda employee in less than an hour.”

“No,” Emma said. “I’m in.”

“I don’t want someone whose head isn’t in the game,” Alara said.

“No worries.” Emma’s smile was thin as a knife. “I’ve learned to use my head, not my heart. I’m in unless Steele says otherwise.”

“You’re in,” Steele said.

“Seven days, which began counting down at midnight,” Alara said, coming to her feet. “When the time is up, be prepared for panic and chaos. If we’re lucky, the deaths will be under ten thousand.” She looked at Emma with cold black eyes. “Be smarter than your mouth.”

SEATTLE

AFTERNOON

E
mma Cross gripped the round chromed bars of the pitching Zodiac’s radar bridge as it raced over the Puget Sound, twenty miles beyond Elliott Bay. St. Kilda Consulting had assured her that the boat driver was capable. But Joe Faroe hadn’t mentioned that the dude called Josh didn’t look old enough to drink.

Was I that young once?

Yeah, I must have been. Scary thought. You can make some shockingly dumb, entirely legal decisions at that age.

I sure did.

Josh must have, too. His eyes are a lot older than his body.

She had seen too many men like him while she worked as a case officer in places where local wars made headlines half a world away, innocents were blown to bloody rags, and nothing really changed.

Except her. She’d finally gotten out. Tribal wars had been burning along before she joined the
CIA
. The wars were still burning just fine without her. World without end, amen.

Until Alara had dropped into St. Kilda’s life.

She has to be wrong,
Emma told herself.
God knows it wouldn’t be the first time intel was bad.

But if she’s right…

The thought sent a chill through Emma that had nothing do with the cold water just inches away.

Seven days.

Automatically she hung on as the Zodiac bounced and skidded on the wake of a ship that was already miles behind them, headed for Elliott Bay’s muscular waterfront. She pulled her thoughts away from what she couldn’t change to what she might change.

Emma tapped the driver and shouted over the roar of the huge outboard engines. “Shut it down.”

He eased off the throttle. The boat slid down off plane and settled deeply in the steel-colored water. Like a skittish cat, the inflatable moved without warning in unexpected directions.

“You okay?” Josh asked.

“As in not wanting to hurl?”

He smiled crookedly. “Yeah.”

“I’m good.”

He gave her a slow onceover filled with obvious male appreciation and nodded. “Sure are.”

She laughed. “Thanks, darlin’, but no thanks.”

Josh looked at her eyes for a moment, nodded, and waited for his next order. No harm, no foul.

Emma wished she could say the same about her own job. Shading her eyes against the bright afternoon overcast, she looked west, toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Swells from the distant Pacific Ocean, plus choppy wind waves, batted at the twenty-foot-long Zodiac, lifting and dropping the rubber boat without warning. Some of the waves had white crests that streaked the gray water.

“We good?” she asked. “That wind’s kicking up.”

“We can take three times the blow, easy.”

Land looked real far away to her, but she’d learned to trust expert judgment. For all the pilot’s fresh-faced looks, he was utterly at home with the inflatable and Puget Sound.

“Let me know if that changes,” she said.

Even as Josh nodded, she switched her attention back to the western horizon. Ten minutes earlier, she’d spotted her target when it was only a dark blob squeezed between the shimmering gray sky and the darker gray sound.

Now the target was a huge ship plowing toward them like a falling mountain. Dark engine smoke boiled up from funnels behind the bridge deck. The deck cargo was a colorful collage of steel shipping containers stacked seven high. The boat was close enough that she could make out its white bow wave.

“That her?” Josh asked.

She lifted binoculars, spun the focus wheel, and scanned quickly. On the Zodiac’s shifting, uncertain platform, staring through unstabilized binoculars was a fast way to get seasick.

The collage of colors leaped forward and became a random checkerboard of blue and white and yellow and red and green, toy blocks for giants playing an unknown game.

“Meet the container ship
Shinhua Lotus,
” Emma said, lowering the glasses. “Standard cruising speed close to thirty knots. One hundred and eighty thousand horsepower. Her hull is steel, a thousand feet long. She’s stacked with more than fifteen thousand steel freight containers. One hundred and sixty thousand tons of international commerce at work.”

“Gotta be the most boring job in the world.”

She glanced quickly at him. “What?”

“Driving that pig between ports. Tugs do all the fun bits close in. The ship’s captain mostly just talks on the radio.”

She looked at the little boat that had carried her out to meet the
Lotus
. Twenty feet long, six feet wide and powered by two outboard engines. She touched the fabric of the Zodiac’s inflated side tube. It was only slightly thicker than the rubberized off-shore suit she wore. All that supported the boat was the breath of life, twenty pounds per square inch of air pressure.

And one of the biggest ships ever built was bearing down on them, carrying bad news in the shape of a yacht called
Blackbird
.

She lifted the binoculars again. The huge ship overwhelmed her field of view. Everything was a fast-forward slide show. Stacks of shipping containers in various company colors. The windshield of the bridge deck. The hammerhead crane next to the forward mast.

The black-hulled yacht perched in a cradle on top of stacks of steel boxes.

Hello,
Blackbird.
So you made it.

If that’s really you.

“How close can you get to the
Lotus
?” she asked.

“How close do you need?”

She pulled a camera from the waterproof bag at her feet. Unlike the binoculars, the camera had a computerized system to keep the field of view from dancing with every motion of the boat.

“I have to be able to see detail on a yacht sitting on top of the containers. A two-hundred-millimeter lens is the longest I have.”

That and intel satellite photos, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Too bad I don’t really trust Alara.

For all Emma could prove, the photos St. Kilda had been given could have been taken on the other side of the world a year ago. Or three years. Or twelve. Not that she was paranoid. It was just that she preferred facts that she’d checked out herself. Thoroughly. Recently.