Seven Grams of Lead (25 page)

Albert advanced to the transom, sharpening his aim. “Tell them, Doc.”

“Russell, consider this your last wish,” the man said. “Yes, CIA.”

Albert nodded, as if his own suspicion had been confirmed.

Thornton laughed. “I guess it’s true what they say about interrogators making the worst liars.”

“What was the tell?” asked the interrogator.

“When you asked,
What was the tell?
” Thornton said.

Not bad for a guy who was a zombie five minutes ago, Mallery thought. But even at the height of his powers, to obtain the secrets of this place, Thornton would need to do the entire job of an interrogator in seconds—or less, based on Albert’s jittery glances at the other islet.

“I have a proposal for you,” Mallery said to the interrogator. “Tell us who you in fact work for and I’ll wire ten million dollars to your account, too.”

The interrogator whistled amazement. “Is that what you told Albert you’d pay him?”

“He’s already been paid one million,” she said. “He gets the other nine once we’re safely away.”

“I would love ten million dollars, Beryl. But I have to decline if only because my employer would find out and have me imprisoned before I could spend a cent.”

It was what she’d expected to hear. And it was what she wanted. “I have a better deal for you, then,” she said.

“It won’t matter if you offer me the moon and the stars.”

“The offer is nothing. Zero dollars and zero cents. Unless you accept, I will wire you ten million dollars, Dr. Wade, then good luck convincing your employer that you
weren’t
paid to stand by while we took off.”

The blood drained from his face. “Okay, okay,” he grumbled.

A light turned on in the farther of the two Quonset huts.

With Thornton in tow, Mallery launched herself down the pier, slowed because he remained intent on Wade.

“Who runs Littlebird?” he asked.

The interrogator’s response was lost beneath a gunshot. From Albert. The bullet raised bits of mud and small stones on the far side of the pier. The interrogator grabbed for his gun, whirled at Albert, and fell to the pier like a spent top. His body twitched twice; then he lay still.

The killing infuriated Mallery. “Jesus, Albert,” she groaned.

At least he had some reason this time: Lights were popping on all over the bigger islet.

Jumping to the helm, Albert turned up the throttle, bringing the engines to a roar. “Hurry!” he called to Mallery.

She and Thornton ran, managing to reach the boat in seconds.

Inexplicably, he released her hand and continued to run, passing the fishing boat.

She started after him. “What are you doing?”

“You’d be amazed what valuable information people carry around in their wallets.”

He stopped halfway down the pier, where Wade lay. He rifled through the dead man’s clothing. The knot in Mallery’s stomach tightened with each passing instant.

“Come on, come on,” Albert urged Thornton, who appeared to come up empty-handed.

With a sheepish look, he hurried back to the fishing boat, wobbling to the extent that Mallery waited for him to collapse. Sure enough, as he stepped over the stern rail, he fell face-first onto the cushioned bench and lay there, unmoving. Mallery swung herself aboard, landing beside the bench. She noted with relief the steady rise and fall of his chest.

Albert threw the throttle, blasting the bulky craft to sea, the bow knifing through fog. Mallery dropped to the deck, bracing for bullets. She heard none. The detention complex receded into dark shapes against a dingy sky, and then, gloriously, to nothing.

Keeping her jubilation in check, Mallery rose to see how Thornton was doing. He remained prone on the bench but still breathing. They had about 200 nautical miles to their destination, the Marshall Islands, in the northwestern Pacific, nine or ten hours along the route Albert favored, outside normal shipping lanes.

Rest was probably the best medicine for Thornton now, Mallery thought.

Motion behind her drew her attention. She turned to a view up the barrel of Albert’s gun. Shock knocked the wind out of her. She croaked, “What do you want?”

“
Nobody
telling tales. If the CIA or whoever finds out it was me who shot their Dr. Wade, ain’t nowhere in the world I’ll be safe.”

Mallery fought the inclination to sink into a supplicant position, fearing the movement might spur him into a precipitous use of his trigger. “I have no reason to tell anyone. You have my word on it. I’m only grateful to you.”

Impassive, he added his left hand to the grip, steadying the gun. The boat continued chugging forward.

“How about we up it to nineteen million on arrival?” she tried.

He squinted through the gun sights.

“Or …” She scrambled to think of something he might want.

Saying nothing, he tweaked his aim.

Crushed by awareness that she was going to die, Mallery closed her eyes. Gunshots cracked, the last sounds she would ever hear, she thought. Hot droplets peppered her face.

She opened her eyes to see blood erupting from Albert’s chest as bullets picked him up and flung him against the starboard gunwale. He bounced off,
landed face-first on the deck, and lay still as his life’s blood streamed from his back.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” Thornton said from the bench. His face had a green tint, matching Mallery’s queasiness. He’d rolled onto his side in order to extend his right arm and aim the gun that he must have taken from the slain interrogator. “I’m also sorry I didn’t do it sooner.”

Gratitude propelled her to him. She wanted to tell him that he no longer owed her anything, that they were square now. It was all she could do to keep from sobbing. He opened his arms and she burrowed her face into his chest, letting his warmth and closeness—something she’d previously thought of only as a measure of distance—melt her horror.

She’d drifted off, she realized. She was alone on the bench. Her eyes felt cried dry. The fog was gone. Stars glinted in an amber sky. There was nothing else in sight save an expanse of sea so vast that she could see the curvature of the earth.

Thornton stood like a statue at the helm, scrubbed clean, and seemingly rejuvenated, like he’d knocked back a pint of adrenaline. He’d changed into clean khaki shorts and a royal blue soccer jersey, no doubt belongings of the late Albert, the lone trace of whom was a purple streak on the deck leading to the gunwale between the portside davits. The only significant effect of detention Thornton exhibited was his weight
loss. It had chiseled the thick, corded muscles in his arms and legs.

Rattling against the captain’s chair beside him was a stack of empty Miller High Life cans, duct-taped together.

Mallery asked, “Did you drink all that?”

He turned around. “Good morning.”

“It doesn’t look like morning.”

“It’s a quarter past midnight, Atlantic time.

“
Atlantic
time?”

“We’re just east of the Caribbean.”

She sat up. “That’s nowhere near the Marshall Islands.”

“Albert probably wasn’t telling the truth—what are the odds?” Checking the big compass ball atop the instrument panel, he adjusted the wheel.

She interlaced her fingers, palms up, and raised her arms above her head, trying to stretch some of the soreness out of her body. To undo the past week, particularly the hour-long sessions in the box the size of a foot locker—to “help you focus,” as Dr. Wade put it—she’d figured she would need months in an ashram. But simply having survived acted as an elixir. She let her lungs fill with ocean air and asked, “So where to?”

“I was thinking Trinidad and Tobago, west of here by about a hundred nautical miles, which we can do in five hours. As soon as we land, we contact the U.S. embassy. The FBI can bring us in from the cold, or the tropical equivalent.”

“Any idea what Dr. Wade would have told us?”

“Probably another lie. Which wouldn’t have been bad because it would be one more service that we could have ruled out.”

“Who have you eliminated so far?”

“NSA, CIA, FBI, maybe the military. Which still leaves fifteen American intelligence services—that I know of—none of whom would even confess to employing a black site interrogator. Still, Wade could be a decent clue.”

“What makes you think we’re dealing with Americans?”

“They’ve been playing by our rules, or at least our unwritten rules, taking us offshore in order to use interrogation techniques that are illegal back home.”

Compassion welled in her. “What did they do to you?”

He glanced at the instruments. “Nothing worse than I’ve had at the periodontist’s.”

“What’s keeping them from trumping up charges, so that as soon as we show our faces, they can take us right back?”

“They may well try, but whoever they are, we’ll be better off with U.S. embassy officials and marines around.”

The five-hour delay troubled her. “Why not call for help right now?”

“I imagine the Torture Island team is already searching for us. Using the ship’s radio would be the same thing as transmitting our location.”

“Wouldn’t a boat like this have a transponder?”

“Yeah. First thing I did after you fell asleep was tie the thing to a life vest and set it adrift. In hindsight, my first order of business should have been radioing the FBI.”

Mallery was confused. “But if you had used the radio—?”

She stopped short when the noise she’d initially taken for wind grew into propeller chops. Starlight delineated the helicopter, swooping out of the night like a bat.

“I figured this was coming when they didn’t do anything to stop us from escaping,” Thornton said, taking up the beer cans. “So I worked up a plan.”

Despite the three
Red Bulls he’d found in the galley, exhaustion blunted Thornton’s senses. Crouched on the deck, he judged the helicopter to be 1,000 feet off the stern. Could be 500, though. Hard to gauge. Either way, too high to make out much more than the general shape, an all-purpose craft with main and tail rotors, like a Bell JetRanger 206. Maybe a 206A. Equipped with a thirty-millimeter chain gun that could turn the fishing boat to splinters at 850 rounds per minute. The good news was that such a helicopter was better for their sake than a craft with coaxial rotors—one above the other, eliminating the need for a tail rotor. Much better.

His search of the boat had netted two safety flares, each in its own disposable launcher. He held one of
the launchers away from his body now, aiming the flare at the dark patch of sky where he anticipated the helicopter would momentarily slow to a hover.

“Is that a flare?” asked Mallery from the cabin. Safer below deck, he’d thought, because the copter surely had night vision.

“Yes.”

“But if they’re not here to rescue us …?”

“This thing burns with thirty thousand candle-power. Ought to severely screw up their night vision.”

“I like it.”

“Got the beer cans ready?”

“Just about.”

“Great.” He pulled the cord at the base of the launcher. With a hiss like a just-opened Coke, the round shot into the sky but didn’t ignite.

“Dud?” Mallery asked.

“It doesn’t ignite until it reaches maximum altitude.” He clambered down the steps into the dark cabin. “I think.”

Just as he hit bottom, the bunks, tiny galley, and various compartments lit red in reflection of the flare, now a luminous ball, turning the sky around it purple. A parachute popped up, reducing the flare’s rate of descent to that of a feather.

As Thornton had hoped, Mallery was spraying the deodorant can into the dime-size hole he’d gouged in the side of the lowest of the eight cans forming the tube. The chalky aerosol fumes rose through gaps
he’d created by cutting off the lids and punching three tiny holes in the bases of all but the bottom can. Into the open mouth of the top can, he’d wedged the plastic compass ball from the control panel.

Over the splutter of spray against aluminum, Mallery said, “Miller time.” Her nonchalance belied her apprehension.

“Cheers,” Thornton said as he took the cans.

Snatching the box of matches from the galley, he lay prone against the staircase, the coarse all-weather carpeting nicking his elbows and knees. Now he just needed to light a match and stick it into the hole in the lowest can. The flame would ignite the de facto propellant gas in the tube, firing the compass ball.

The helicopter slowed to a hover at about thirty feet above the waterline and 150 feet off the starboard side, or almost exactly where Thornton had anticipated, figuring the pilot would choose to stay just outside the effective range of a handgun. The heavy
fwump-fwump-fwump
of the main rotor dwarfed all other sounds.

Thornton drew a match. The rotor blades’ wash sucked up seawater, raining it onto the stern deck and splashing the cabin. He hadn’t planned on contending with any water, and this was a deluge. Spinning away from the open cabin door, he flattened himself against the wall in an effort to keep the match dry.

Mallery was shouting something. He couldn’t make out what over the noise of the helicopter. Following
her stare through the starboard porthole, he saw the helicopter obscured by a burst of golden smoke. He couldn’t fully process the accompanying scream, like a steam whistle, until the rocket smashed into the fishing boat above deck.

The boat heaved to port, about to capsize, it seemed. Shattered glass and shrapnel rained from the wheelhouse into the cabin, cutting Thornton’s arms and neck. Mallery dropped to the floor, using a cushion to shield herself. Everything not tied down or bolted in place slid, fell, or flew sideways, including Thornton, the match that had been in his hand, and the matchbox.

Stretching like a first baseman, he snared the matchbox, then was flung back to starboard as the boat righted itself. The hull boomed back onto the waves, raising a two-story wall of water. Through the open cabin door, Thornton saw the wheelhouse roof splash down 100 yards to port. Seawater sprayed into the cabin.

All in all, he told himself, this was good. If it hadn’t been for the flare, the helicopter would have delivered more than what amounted to a glancing blow.