Death Echo (13 page)

“They aren’t as heavy.” He lowered his eyelids to half mast. “And I can be very gentle.”

She shook her head. She’d walked right into that one.

“Emma has her cover story,” Grace said, no longer trying not to yawn. “Mac came with his intact. As for why you’re suddenly joined at the hip, I suggest going with the tried and true.”

“Sex,” Emma said, grimacing.

“Sex,” Grace agreed. “Start practicing snuggling and snogging in public.”

Mac and Emma looked at each other and said simultaneously, “Snogging?”

“Look it up,” Grace said. “It will grow on you.”

LANGLEY
,
VIRGINIA

8:05 A.M.

T
imothy Harrow ignored the inbox marked Urgent on his desk. Pragmatically speaking, it was a low designation of priority. Everything that came across his desk was urgent. The only question was of degree.

At the moment, he was frowning over an email that was a good deal more than urgent. Somebody’s ass was going to get burned. His job was to make sure it didn’t belong to the Deputy Director of Operations, his immediate boss. Hopefully he could save his boss by putting the fire out. If that didn’t work, some serious finger-pointing was going down.

And if the op blew up…

Don’t think about it. Just make sure it doesn’t happen.

At the highest levels, politics was a blood sport.

Harrow hit the intercom button. “Duke? Got a minute?”

“Make it fast. I have to brief the DO over the mess in Caracas in five and then brief his boss on the uncivil war heating up between the narcos and elected Mexican politicians. You have anything that’s going to make my life easier?”

Harrow sincerely doubted it. “You told me to keep you current on anything coming out of Rosario, Washington, state of.”

“What’s up?”

“An Indian on the rez bought it, execution style. Half his head blown off and his trailer burned down around his dead ears.”

“So?”

“Weapon was an SR-1 Vektor. Silenced, from the condition of the bullets. Less deformation that way. Either the victim or the killer—or both—had ties to the item we discussed Sunday.”

“Sometimes I wish that Berlin still had a wall,” Duke said. “I’m told this job was a hell of a lot easier back then. How good is your source?”

“
FBI
. They get called in on major rez crimes.”

“You trust an
FBI
agent?”

Cooperation between the two agencies was a minefield filled with back-stabbing, misdirection, and agent eat officer.

Politics as usual.

“The agent owed me a favor,” Harrow said. “Even if he didn’t, he’s reliable.”

“Stay on top of it,” the
DDO
said. “If it moves off the rez to Canada, somebody will stick us with the ticket.”

“Then I’m praying it doesn’t.”

“No shit.”

Neither one of them wanted to testify before the kind of political investigation committees that would be formed if the op that wasn’t quite the CIA’s went south.

ROSARIO

7:48 A.M.

S
hurik Temuri trimmed his fingernails with a very sharp Japanese folding knife. The big, wedge-shaped blade hadn’t been designed for manicures, but Temuri didn’t care. He simply wanted to flash the lethal knife as he browbeat the two stupid Americans.

Once the knife appeared, any Georgian with balls would have pulled his own knife and begun working on fingernails or other body parts. But it seemed that Lovich and Amanar had lived a soft life too long to recognize the old-country insult of an unsheathed knife.

It was the same problem with the language the cousins spoke—an outdated, corrupt form of what any proper Georgian would speak.

“So what did your informant tell you?” Temuri asked Amanar.

“Don’t call him an informant,” Amanar said unhappily. “He’s the chief of police. He briefed me along with other members of the city council, that’s all.”

“Policemen are always informants to politicians.” Temuri shaved off a piece of nail. “Unless they’re the politician as well as the policeman.”

“Look, I keep telling you that you aren’t back in the old country,” Amanar said. “This system is different.”

“What is it Americans say? Shit of the bull?” Temuri waved the knife. “Police and politics are the same everywhere. What did he say to you?”

Blank faced, Lovich looked out the window. He wanted no part in this conversation.

Amanar started to argue with Temuri, then shrugged. The Georgian simply didn’t grasp the nuances of American politics. Or maybe the other way around. Whatever.

Either way,
Blackbird
needed a captain.

“I was told that the Indian was shot twice in the back of the head,” Amanar said. “Then the murderers doused the trailer with kerosene and lit it off. Any real evidence was destroyed in the fire.”

“Murderers? More than one?” Temuri asked.

“Uh…that’s what the police chief said.”

Another crescent of nail shaving hit the carpet. “One child with balls could have executed the Indian and burned the place down.”

“Look, I’m just telling you what I was told.”

Temuri grunted.

Amanar kept talking in his out-of-date dialect. “The body was almost burned beyond recognition. The assumption is that it’s Tommy. Considering that he isn’t answering his cell phone and can’t be found, we’re going with Tommy as the corpse. Even if he’s alive and running, we can’t count on him anymore. My cousin and I are really, really unhappy with how this is turning out.”

“Yeah,” Lovich said in English. “This talk about an execution isn’t making me feel the love.”

Temuri gave him a hard look for speaking in English. Then he turned his attention back to Amanar. “Is there a problem?”

“The chief didn’t say anything about any execution,” Amanar said. “He thinks it was some kind of ongoing, uh, argument about fishing rights or something among the Indians.”

“Why, then, is your Federal Bureau of Investigation involved?” Temuri demanded, his dark eyes glittering with temper.

“They always investigate crimes of violence on reservations. That’s what the chief said, anyway.”

Temuri spit on the rug.

Amanar winced but didn’t say anything.

“Amateurs,” Temuri said.

The knife flashed so quickly Amanar couldn’t see much beyond a metallic blur. He swallowed hard and didn’t ask just who the amateurs were that Temuri spit upon.

“You are telling me a cheap murder on a tribal reserve that is mostly scrub timber and blackberry bushes is worth the attention of no fewer than fifty federal agents,” Temuri said with a deadly lack of inflection.

“Fifty? Are you sure? The chief never said anything about that many feds.” Amanar shook his head in disbelief. “How did you find that out?”

“I drove by the tribal headquarters building and counted the shiny four-door sedans parked there. That is called intelligence work. I know Chechens who can drive by a Russian barracks and tell you within five men the number of soldiers housed there. It is how we determine the number of bullets issued to our freedom fighters.”

Amanar started sweating. “I don’t like this talk about soldiers and attacks. You told us this was a simple smuggling operation, like dope or cigarettes. That’s all we signed on for. We’re Americans, not freedom fighters or terrorists.”

“Yet you smuggle the
narco
to sell to children and addicts?”

“It’s not the same,” Amanar said impatiently. “It’s just a game. Dope doesn’t hurt anybody. Guns do. My cousin and I don’t want anything to do with anyone else’s wars.”

Temuri stared at him, then tested the edge of the knife on Lovich’s wooden desk.

Lovich worked hard on ignoring him.

“What of the people of yours who disappeared at sea years ago?” Temuri asked. “Was that all part of the game that hurt no one?”

The two boat brokers traded startled glances.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Lovich said in English. “Why the hell did—”

“I didn’t tell him,” Amanar said in the same language. “Now shut up. He knows more English than he lets on.”

Sullenly, Lovich returned to staring out at the bay.

“Look, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to or what they’ve been saying,” Amanar said. “We never killed anybody. Accidents happen, especially when you’re in a small boat on big water.”

“I know precisely what happened and why,” Temuri said. He carved another groove in the desk. Wood shavings fell on the rug next to neat slices from his nails. “So would your police, if they ever decided to investigate. Yet death at sea is a federal matter, is it not? I am told death has no limitation in the United States.”

Amanar got the point: Temuri knew that the statute of limitations on murder had no end date.

“And then the monies owed—taxes, yes,” Temuri said. “Is there a limitation on them?”

Amanar and Lovich exchanged a long look before Amanar gave in, turned away, and asked the question whose answer neither cousin would like.

“What do you want?” he asked Temuri.

“A captain for my
Blackbird.
You have until tomorrow at dawn.”

Neither Lovich nor Amanar asked what would happen if they failed Temuri. They really didn’t want to know.

ROSARIO

10:45 A.M.

T
aras Demidov swallowed the last of three hamburgers, squeezed the final drops in the tenth packet of ketchup over a pile of fries, and took a sip of the surprisingly awful coffee. No amount of sugar smothered the bitterness.

But it did take the smell inside the van off his tongue.

Eating fries, Demidov listened through his ear bug while the two cousins continued arguing over possible replacements for the Indian who had been taken out of the game. Demidov didn’t bother to sort out the voices. Only the topic mattered to him.

“And I tell you, your wife’s nephew isn’t up to a boat that size.”

“Stupid shit deserves to die. He knocked up his own cousin.”

“Second cousin.”

“Still a cousin. I say we use Durand.”

“Too risky.”

“Who’d miss him? No family, no friends except maybe Tommy, not even a regular hump in town.”

“Tommy was stupid. Durand isn’t.”

“If Durand’s so smart, why ain’t he rich?”

Demidov laughed soundlessly as he stood and walked the few steps to the slops bucket. The cousins came from families that had lived in America so long they had absorbed the culture whether or not they wished to.

“Temuri wants
Blackbird
out of here by tomorrow at dawn, no later. None of the other captains we use are available right now. You want to drive that boat yourself?”

“Fine. Whatever. If no one else can take the job by this afternoon, I’ll call Durand. Temuri won’t like it. He didn’t take to Durand.”

“So let Temuri drive the boat.”

“He’d make us drive it. Better we get Durand. He doesn’t have kids.”

“You don’t know anyone’s going to die.”

“You want to bet your life on it?”

Listening to the cousins wrangle, Demidov shook off the last drops and zipped up. It was time to message his boss and make him smile.

Blackbird
wouldn’t be going anywhere today.

ROSARIO

12:35 P.M.

I
f I tie any more ropes—
lines
—to this cleat,” Emma said, wiping sweat off her forehead, “I’m going to yank it out of the dock and put it where your sun don’t shine.”

Mac hid his smile by reaching into the grocery bag and pulling out a chocolate bar. “Truce?”

“You have a sandwich to go with that?”

“And chips.”

“Truce.” She jerked the line tight, leaving two neat, secure figure-eights of line lying on the cleat. “Is it always this hot in October?”

“No,” he said. “It won’t last. You want to take a turn at the computer?”

She looked at him blankly. “Did something, um, new come in?”

“I’m talking about the other computer. You know, chart-plotting and navigation and—”

“No, thanks. Knock yourself out.”

She stretched her back muscles. Handling fat lines and big fenders—always at strange angles that increased the stress of leverage on her body—used more strength than she would have guessed.

“After lunch, then,” he said.

She looked at his expression and knew she was going to learn more about boat handling than she’d ever wanted to. At least Faroe and his magic electronic machine had been by before dawn, assuring them that
Autonomy
was still without bugs. They could talk freely, if carefully.

“Sure,” she said, concealing a sigh. “Can’t wait.”

Mac took her hand, drew her close, and nuzzled her neck. “You’ve got to learn enough so that if I’m out of commission you’ll be able to do whatever has to be done. Both our lives could depend on it.”

“I hear you.” She bit his ear. “Now feed me.”

“Tongue sandwich?”

She laughed, hugged him hard for anybody who might be watching, and was tempted to take him up on his offer.

So she did.

He tasted fine, coffee and salt air and man. A lot of man, covering her from lips to knees, settling in for a good long kiss. She told herself she wanted to pull away, then gave up lying and returned as good as she got. Everywhere she touched him he was hot, way too hot. From the feel of the erection pressing against her stomach, he felt the same way about her.

Hot.

Slowly, very slowly, they separated.

“Whew,” she said against his lips. “That should have melted anyone’s binoculars.”

“Sure set my jeans on fire.”

“I noticed.” She smiled. “I’d show you how much I appreciate it, but we’d get arrested.”

Her stomach growled.