Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (19 page)

He took a swig of beer. “Go for it.”

Mercy set down her wine glass. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not a professional by any stretch of the imagination. Less than a year ago, I was unwillingly pulled into a situation in Mexico City, where my former husband was posted to the U.S. Embassy. Without going into details, it’s what happened there that attracted Red Sands. They’ve asked me to work with them on this one case. A few months or less. That was the agreement.”

“Really.” His expression remained a blank. “Storey told me you had experience with the CIA. I assumed you worked for The Company.”

She laughed, which sounded bitter to her own ears. “Not hardly.” She didn’t count being tricked into risking her life by a con man as “working for” anyone.

Glen looked away and squinted into the distance, as though trying to dredge up a memory. Seconds later his eyes sparked with incredulity. “Not the cartel bust outside Mexico City! That was you?”

“Ummm, yeah.” She shrugged.

“Huh, you’re the woman who—” He shook his head in disbelief then took another drink. “Of course I’ve heard about you. Everyone has!”

She felt embarrassed that he might expect too much of her. “I’m just here to get information about the stolen opal ore. That’s all,” she said with due emphasis. “So update me on your part of this mission.” She massaged the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, trying to abort the launch of a headache from hell.

It was already past one in the morning, and her entire body ached from the sprint around the dockyards. The hasty shower she’d taken before Glen arrived had only temporarily revived her. She longed for a solid eight hours in bed. She had called the Red Sands emergency number. To her frustration she reached only an unidentified voicemail. And texting Margaret Storey had gotten no response, so she might as well turn her attention to what, if anything, Glen had found out about the opal shipment since he’d been on the island.

“Not much to tell you.” He tossed down the rest of his beer and clinked the bottle onto the glass coffee table. “So far I haven’t been able to set foot on Seafarer.”

“Why not? It’s a cargo ship. Won’t it be unloaded soon? Can’t you arrange to be part of that operation?”

He grimaced. “There’s a problem. The local union includes all stevedores. They were on strike the entire month of February and first two weeks of March. Unloading is still backed up. There just isn’t enough dock space or warehousing on St. Thomas to accommodate all of the ships that have recently arrived. That’s why so many are sitting on moorings in the harbor. It might be as long as another seven-to-ten days before Seafarer’s cargo comes off her. Aside from that, I’m technically not union. I can’t legitimately have anything to do with the unloading process.”

“How about illegitimately?”

“Maybe. With a few crossed palms.”

She thought she understood the reason for his concern. “Are you worried that if the opals are on board now, they won’t be by the time the container ship is officially unloaded?”

He winced at the thought. “Exactly. Customs won’t inspect her or bother comparing the manifest with the actual goods until the Seafarer pulls up to the dock.” Glen clasped his hands, forearms on bony knees, and leaned forward, his expression concerned. “The only other way to get onboard is to be on the ship’s crew. I tried to sign on. Sometimes after a long cruise, they lose men who either want to stay in port for a while or find a better job on another ship—so they break their contract. But Seafarer is taking on no one new. Security is tight as a nun’s tw—” He grimaced.

She laughed. “I get the picture.”

“All I can do is work the docks and keep an eye out to make sure nothing comes off on the sly. Although that’s hard to do from land, particularly after dark.”

Mercy shook her head emphatically. “It’s too risky to wait.”

“I agree, but I don’t see that we have a choice.”

She reclaimed her wine glass, rolled the over-sized globe between her palms, took a thoughtful sip. “We have to get onboard. The sooner the better.”

Glen huffed at her. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

She held up a hand. “Listen. I’ve already managed to take a tour of the Australian couple’s yacht. It’s a big enough boat to carry at least some of the stolen ore. Or maybe even a most of the semi-cut opals if they've already been extracted from the bedrock. But the container ship is immense and far more likely to be the transport of choice.”

“Assuming,” he said, “the stones came by way of the Panama Canal. Remember, other boats headed for Hawaii might carry the real shipment. The two ships in the Caribbean might be decoys or entirely innocent.”

“Right. But we have to trust that the intelligence is correct and that there's a good chance that the shipment is on one of these two ships, or maybe even split between the two of them.”

“Or between all four?” Glen said.

“Maybe so. The important thing is moving quickly as possible to narrow down the possibilities and locate the opals before they're moved to land. Agreed?”

“Well, yeah. That’s a no-brainer.” He raked a hand through his hair. “So you said you’ve done a walk-through of Mystic Voyager. Did you find anything to indicate the yacht might be carrying contraband of any kind?”

Mercy shook her head. “Nothing yet. The owner is a lech. His wife is sweet and loony, and I feel sorry for her. But they both seem harmless. I'm rather suspicious of their captain—he's just really strange and a bit threatening—but he may be just doing his job, protecting his boss's property. I’m hoping to get down into the engine room soon. There may even be another level below that. It's hard to tell what's below the water line. By tomorrow I’ll have the deck plans, which should help. But it still seems to me that as much rock as was stolen from the Coober-Pedy mine would be a whole lot easier to stash on a mega-ship like the Seafarer.”

“I agree,” he said.

“So-o-o-o, let's take a peek inside Seafarer. When would be the best time for us to drop by?” She grinned at him.

He didn't seem amused. “There’s no good time. I don’t even know if that would be possible.” He rubbed his hands over his face, suddenly looking as exhausted as she felt. She drank the rest of her wine while he gave it some thought. “Carnival,” he said at last.

“What about it?”

“The festival starts in two days and runs for a week. The whole island goes wild. Most of the crew probably will be given shore leave. But I’m sure armed guards will stay with the cargo, even if it’s a legitimate shipment.”

“That seems a bit overly cautious.”

“Not at all. The shipping company is responsible for the safe delivery of all goods. Word around the docks is, they’re carrying high-end electronics—computers, TVs, digital cameras. All portable and easy to fence. A couple of local guys with a power launch could make off with a small fortune in less than an hour. It wouldn’t be the first time modern pirates looted a ship.”

“All right,” she said, “so we have to do it during Carnival, and at night, when the fewest of the crew will be onboard.”

He stared at her. “You keep saying
we
. But you just told me you’re an amateur. Aside from your lack of experience, putting two of us onboard doubles the chance of our getting caught and blowing the mission.” He shook his head. “I said Carnival would be the best time. But if anyone goes onboard, it should be me. How? I have no idea. The guards will likely spot anyone approaching by water. And until the ship moves into a slip in the dockyard, that’s the only way to reach it—by boat.”

She supposed Glen intended to discourage her. It didn’t work. Mercy felt a surge of adrenalin, washing away her fatigue, urging her to action. He’d laid down a challenge, a dare, although he probably didn’t realize it at the time. And that made things suddenly far more interesting. 

                                          20

Something is different,
Talia thought as she lay in the dark. The constant numbness that had held her body and mind hostage was receding. When she reached for something, it didn't float away out of reach and away from her. Things were real, and not—she was very sure of this—
not
hallucinations.

She brushed her fingertips across the scratchy fibers tucked around her body—a blanket? When she rolled her body cautiously back and forth she could feel the pattern of hard lumps and hollows in the thin material supporting her hips and back—maybe a mattress. She enjoyed even the less pleasant sensations—the stiffness of her spine, the cold air on her shoulders. Best of all, her head was no longer spinning and she could actually think.

Granted even during the worst of her ordeal, she sometimes heard voices or sensed shadows and lights moving over and around her. But she hadn’t been able to trust her own mind and there wasn’t quite enough evidence to convince her that she was alive, or at least would remain so for very long. Now, for the first time, she thought she might survive. And yet she still had absolutely no sense of where she was or how she’d come to be here. Wherever
here
was.

Her eyes remained a little swollen and hurt when she tried to raise the lids, so she closed them again. Distant, tinny conversation drifted to her. Or maybe it was just a radio? She smelled stale food and a rancid yeastiness that might mean another person nearby―or maybe it was just the stench of her unwashed self.

Talia tested her body, trying out the smaller muscles first. Fingers, toes—all working. Right arm, left. Stiff but no real pain.

She found she couldn’t move her limbs very far before something stopped them. She cracked open one eye. Ropes looped around her wrists and ankles, securing her to the bed. She isolated her left leg—straightened it slowly, then bent her knee. Ditto for the right. All nerves and muscles seemed to function, albeit weakly, sluggishly. Still, this was good news—being alive.

Talia tried to exert enough effort to push her torso up to a sitting position. A stab of pain shot through her abdomen and up within her ribcage, exploding like a super nova out through her limbs. She blinked her eyes wide open and lay shuddering beneath a sheen of sweat. Gasping. Her strength spent. Something inside of her must be damaged, broken.

Slowly her eyesight adjusted; she became aware of figures moving at the far end of the room. Other details now: a tiny black-and-white TV screen faintly glowing, a flame licking the inside of a soot-smudged glass chimney on an oil lamp. It hurt to look at the flame.

She closed her eyes again until the throbbing went away. This time when she carefully opened them she didn’t look directly at the flame. Better.

Random memories flooded in. Following Red Cross doctors and volunteers across a field of rubble in Peru, the aftermath of an earthquake. Other natural disasters: Pakistan, Thailand, Haiti…the U.S. Gulf Coast. She had watched medical teams triage hundreds of victims, until even she could spot the obvious injuries and know who would survive, and who would die within hours, or minutes.

Her own diagnosis? She lay very still now, assessing her body, remembering how it had felt when she'd tried to sit up.
Internal bleeding, blunt-force trauma, concussion.
Without intending to, she let out a soft moan of fear and frustration.

“She awake,” a voice said in a Slavic dialect. She knew a little Russian. The similarity told her this might be Ukrainian.

Talia went motionless at the unfamiliar voice. She didn’t want whoever was there to realize how much clearer her thoughts were becoming. Her brain felt like one of those smoke-filled Plexiglas cubes in a TV infomercial. A flick of a switch and the air-purifier inside the box sucked up cigarette smoke, leaving the cube translucent, the air cleansed.

Luckily her captors hadn’t noticed her experiments with mobility. She pretended to breathe as a sleeper would—slow, shallow, rhythmically. But her heart galloped like that of a Preakness contender.

A different voice said something she translated as: “Better get the porridge ready.” Now she was pretty sure the earlier voice was a man’s, this one a woman’s. She listened to their hushed chatter, hoping to pick up more information about where she was.

“I want to finish watching this show,” the man grumbled.

“Fool. We can’t have her screaming again. It will be our skins, too.”

The longer she listened, the more she understood.

“
Da…da
,” he agreed. The sound of chair legs ground against on rough wood. But the TV stayed on.

Despite the splintering pain when light struck her pupils, Talia squinted at the two shadowy figures. They moved about the simple room in silence. She could see a rickety table and two wooden chairs, one with spokes missing from its back. A flimsy mold-blackened cupboard of the old European style, freestanding with a shallow countertop. There was no refrigerator. No stove. Nothing of recent vintage except for the TV. Nothing at all requiring electricity to run it. The TV, Talia thought, probably worked off a battery pack.

The woman was heavy boned but carried little flesh. She was plucking wilted leaves and purple-veined yellow flowers from a plant stalk. She shoved fistfuls of the plant into a stone mortar and began grinding the vegetation with a small pestle—putting a lot of muscle into it, macerating the hell out of the flowers.