Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (40 page)

Amos stepped toward her again. She shifted back onto one foot, but found herself up against a wall.

“I saw you watching me when I was in the Zodiac,” he sneered at her. “You followed me to shore. For a woman who isn’t interested in a man, you’ve been doing a lot of looking. One might even say, chasing. Now tell me—who sent you?”

To hell with subtlety. “Sea turtle. . .sea turtle!” she shouted as she dived for the door.

Amos lunged after her. She caught a glimpse of hairy arm reaching out. Felt his fingers grappling for purchase then slipping off of her shoulder. She dodged around him. Adjusting his trajectory, he lurched forward and caught hold of the shoulder strap of her suit through the cotton wrap. He yanked her down onto the floor and fell on top of her. Air whooshed out of her lungs as the full weight of his body pinned her down.

She managed to roll her head and shoulders, hoping to throw him off of her but then realized the move came too late. She saw his big fist coming at her. Impossible to duck. No place to go. The dull thwack of his knuckles against her cheekbone set her head reeling and knocked her skull into the floorboards. Pain shot through her left eye and into her ear. Stunned, nearly blinded by shrieking pain, she instinctively thrust upward with one knee. All she hit was fleshy thigh. She tried to push him away with her hands, and kicked again and again.
Useless!

Mercy’s mouth opened on a silent scream. There wasn’t enough air left inside her to make as much as a squeak.

Amos snarled at her, “Now, aren’t you sorry you didn’t play nice when you had the chance?”

“Yo-o-o-ou piece of shi-i-i-t!” a high-pitched wail broke across the salon.

Kristen?

Amos twisted around. His altered position allowed Mercy to pull one arm free. She drove her forearm as hard as she could into his windpipe. Choking and clutching his throat, he rolled off of her, his eyes saucering in agony.

Mercy scrambled away from him, panting, and jumped to her feet.

Only then did she see the ugly black pistol in Kristen’s hand. Mercy took in every detail of the scene and instantly knew how it would play out. The woman’s wild, rage-filled eyes. Her stark white face and drunkenly swaying body. The gun clenched in her trembling hand now pointed toward Mercy. Most terrifying of all, one quivering finger already rested on the trigger. 

“Kris, don’t!” Mercy shouted even as Kristen’s tear-filled eyes hitched sideways, momentarily steadying on her husband.

Amos was still rolling on the floor, gasping for breath. “Holy crap,” he rasped. “Put that d-down. We weren’t…”

“’Course you weren’t, sweetie,” Kristen hissed. “Because I interrupted your playtime. Always an explanation, isn’t there, Amos?”

Rough sex on the floor. That’s what it must have looked like to her, Mercy realized. She took a hesitant step forward. “Please, Kris, give me the gun.”

The muzzle swung up and then arced away from Mercy’s outstretched hand. “Not until I’m done with it,” she spat, “girlfriend.”

Mercy dropped to her knees behind a chair, putting the tabletop between her and the woman with the gun. It was the only place she could shelter. The only place out of the direct line of fire. But all Kristen had to do was take two steps to the right and she'd have a clear shot at her.

Mercy squeezed her eyes shut. Held her breath. There was nowhere to run, nothing she could do. She heard one loud pop, followed by silence. Before she could move, two more shots sent her heart exploding in her chest.

It took Mercy a moment to realize she was still breathing, wasn’t spilling blood all over the polished teak floor, hadn’t been hit at all. Kristen’s loud sobs broke the ominous silence. How could the woman have missed? Even as drunk as she was. At such close range. And why had she stopped shooting? Unless. . . Mercy had never been the target.

The metallic tincture of burnt gunpowder mixed with the sickly sweet smell of fresh blood. Mercy peeked from behind the chair to see Kristen standing in the middle of the room, weeping, her head thrown back in misery, the gun hanging limply from her hand. Amos lay crumpled and unmoving on the floor. Blood seeped out from beneath his body.

Mercy leaped to her feet and rushed forward, reaching for the automatic. But a big, dark hand appeared out of nowhere and snatched the gun from Kristen’s fingers.

Mercy stared up at the thundercloud of a man towering over her. “My friends know where I am, Jobson,” she said. “If you kill me they’ll—”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” he growled, sounding more annoyed than murderous. “Who are you? Mainland police? Private investigator?” He caught a sobbing Kristen around the waist and pulled her with surprising gentleness into his chest. He lowered her into a nearby armchair, where she curled up in a quivering fetal ball.

Mercy stared at the man, speechless. Was it her imagination or did he suddenly sound like a cop?

“No more games, Ms. O’Brien, or whoever you really are. I need to know why you’re here.”

She peered up at him. “First, identify yourself.”

“I don’t carry ID while undercover,” he said, keeping his voice low. “You’ll have to take my word for it that I’m a private investigator from Melbourne. Hired by the mining company. Now who the hell are you?”

Mercy slowly picked up the pieces that had once been her self-confidence. She still wasn’t thrilled that he was the one with the gun. “First I have to clear it with my people,” Mercy said. “They’ll be here any minute.”
If the mike is working.

“There are more of you?” He looked unhappy about that.

She heard the whop-whop sound of a helicopter in the distance and dredged up a smile. “A few are about to drop by.”

                                          45

The Search & Destroy team leader was known only as Morocco, although nothing about him looked Mediterranean. He was built like a Swedish tank on steroids. Muscles bulged under his wetsuit, filling it out with totally un-Cousteau bulk. What skin was visible, crawled with tattoos. His hair was brush-cut, white-blond. Dark sunglasses, she recognized as the type she’d seen demoed at the Red Sands’ camp, enabled him to view objects behind him. She could only envy him; Geddes hadn’t issued her a pair.

“You have GPS coordinates for this cave?” he asked Margaret in a voice octaves below anything Mercy thought humanly possible.

“Caves,” Margaret corrected him. “We’ve already located the most likely ones on satellite photos taken at low tide. There hasn’t been time to carry out a search.”

Before Mercy left Amos Bellamy’s yacht and returned to the fishing boat, she’d taken a few minutes to help PI Emanuel Jobson calm Kristen—with the help of sedatives he supplied—and confine her to her cabin. Remaining crew members still onboard the Mystic Voyager were also locked in their cabins, as a precaution. No one put up a fight when informed by their captain of a temporary lock down for their own protection. They were probably further encouraged by the gun he held during the brief discussion.

For her part, Mercy was sure at least a few of Amos’s staff had been in on his operation. He couldn’t have transferred the stone from the keel, into the rafts and then a cave, on his own. And, according to Glen, it was almost certain that the divers they’d seen in the area were Chameleon operatives. Sorting out the innocent from the guilty was sure to take weeks, if not longer. But with any luck those involved would name names, leading to further arrests and damage to the terrorists’ pipeline of funds.

She'd also felt compelled to answer some of Judson's questions, as well as ask him a few of her own. It seemed that the director of the Coober Pedy mine had hired his private investigation firm to do whatever was necessary to recover the stolen ore. Similarly to Red Sands’ team, Jobson’s people had narrowed down the possibilities for transporting the opals out of Australia. If the precious stone had been left raw and in bedrock, it would be too heavy for air cargo, so he'd also bet on transportation by ship.

“I checked out every marina with a working yard, within a hundred miles of the mine,” he explained. “I asked yard foremen if they had taken on recent redesign jobs, special purposing a ship for cargo and ocean travel. The first few boats checked out. New decks, rigging, electronics, or galley upgrades.” Jobson shook his head. “Nothing at all unusual.”

“But?” She raised one eyebrow.

“But then I saw the Bellamy yacht, which was having major structural modifications made to the hull before leaving Adelaide. My problem was getting around the ship’s security to get a closer look. For a privately owned vessel, the measures were extraordinary—a pair of armed guards in shifts of two, round the clock. I couldn’t get near the thing, let along get
on
it. Seemed the only way to get aboard was to sign on with the crew. We decided to take a chance that we’d got it right, and arranged for the intended captain to become suddenly indisposed. I stepped up to replace him.”

“When did you discover that the opals were in the keel?” Mercy said.

“I didn't,” Jobson admitted. “The whole trip, I kept searching. Carefully, so Bellamy wouldn’t notice. Removing a panel here or deck plate there, digging into every inch of the boat. Nothing. I’d pretty much given up. I assumed we must have been wrong.” He grinned, and his whole face lit up. “Until you showed up.”

“You figured if someone else was suspicious of Amos there might still be hope you’d missed something?”

Jobson tilted his dark head and observed her. “Something like that. Listen, I still don’t understand who you people are working for—the U.S. government or private investigators or someone else. But when your team wraps this up, I’m taking the gemstones back to Coober Pedy. The company plans to compensate the families of the murdered miners. They can afford to be more generous if the stolen opals are returned.”

Millions more generous,
Mercy mused. But successful recovery of the valuable stone wasn’t guaranteed. Hell, they hadn’t seen even one carat of any kind of opal—black, crystal, or otherwise. And now that night had fallen, everything would be more difficult. “Well, at least my presence inspired your renewed confidence, even if I never found the stones either,” she said.

He smiled. “You did at that. My partners back in Melbourne were convinced that Bellamy was transporting drugs or weapons, not even involved in the opal heist. The suits who came aboard to meet with him were known arms agents who regularly sold to Iran, Syria, Libya and other countries of questionable integrity. We just didn't know what sort of deal he was negotiating with them.”

Mercy found all of this fascinating. They’d been working on the same side all along; they just didn't know it. “How did you talk Bellamy into hiring you?”

“I have a commercial captain’s license. In my younger years, I delivered pleasure boats for owners who didn’t want to risk trans-oceanic trips themselves.”

“A lucky item on your résumé,” she said.

“Indeed.”

She'd looked across the water at that moment and had seen what appeared to be a figure in the water, pulling himself up onto the fishing boat. “I need to go. Will you be all right here with Kristen until we can catch these guys?”

“I'd rather go with your team.”

“I doubt they'll let you. Besides, Kristen can't be left alone.”

“I know.” He frowned. “I wish I'd been in time to stop her.”

“From shooting Amos?”

“Yeah. Living with what happened tonight—that's going to be hard on her.”

And so will prison, if she's convicted of murdering her husband.
She would be arrested and charged with Amos’s murder, but Mercy hoped the court would be lenient, given his involvement with international crime and terrorism, and the emotional abuse she’d suffered during their marriage.

“Since I'm not needed otherwise, do you think it would be okay for me to stay here in case Mrs. Bellamy needs me. . . I mean, needs
someone
to talk to?”

Mercy looked at him. A tough guy. But she guessed the private investigator had taken a strong personal interest in watching over Kristen.

“I don't see why not.”

Now back on the Sara Lee, Mercy looked around the cramped interior cabin, surreal in the blue-white glow of LED marine lights. Every inch of space below deck was taken up with sweaty bodies, charts, maps, electronics, and diving gear. The chopper had dropped the Red Sands commandoes on the far side of the island, so as not to tip off Chameleon agents. Hearing it wouldn’t have alerted them; tourists island hopped or went sightseeing on helicopters constantly. By now the rest of Morocco's team had rendezvoused at the fishing boat with due stealth. Margaret had sent Glen over to the yacht to monitor any radio communications that might arrive from the terrorists.

Since there wasn't room for the entire team below deck, the commandos had gathered in the cockpit, sitting low to be out of sight. Down in the cabin, Morocco studied the marine chart on which Margaret had marked the caves that might contain the stolen ore. They conferred over the most likely of four, and selected the one that satellite photos revealed to have the most easily accessed entry.

“Here are your way points.” Margaret read off the longitude/latitude from her GPS handheld. “High tide’s in forty minutes."