The Raven (A Jane Harper Horror Novel) (5 page)

A broad grin stretches across his face. “Poor old Randall Klein. He’s ex-CIA, you know. Can’t tell it from his reflexes, but he knows stuff.”

“So, what? Jakob’s putting together some kind of geriatric task force?”

His laugh becomes a wheeze and then a cough.

I smile and put my hands on my hips. “You’re not inspiring much confidence here, Ranger.”

He waves a hand at me, composes himself. “Haven’t laughed that hard in a while. To answer your question, yeah, it’s something like that. Fact is, we’re the ones who believe him. Believe
you
. And we’re here to help.”

I turn toward the sound of an approaching car. The taxi stops and Randall Klein steps out, a hand over his stomach.

The Ranger chuckles. “You sure did a number on him, din’cha?”

While Klein makes his way down the dock, I say, “Didn’t catch your name, cowboy.”

“Talbot,” he says. “Ed Talbot.” He shakes my hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Raven.”

“Call me Jane,” I say.

He looks at me with one eye squinted. “Nah, Raven suits you.” He turns away before I can complain and heads for what looks like a small tugboat. “Let’s get a move on. I’d like to get this dark business wrapped up and get back to my horses.”

I stand rigid for a moment, weighing my options for all of three seconds. I don’t want to be locked in a jail cell if the Draugar make landfall, and despite my frustration with the Olavson men, they have my loyalty. I follow him to the boat. “Talbot, your horses are about to become the least of your worries.”

I
t takes us an hour to catch up to the
Raven
. She’s moving at a steady ten knots; slow enough for us to catch up, but far enough out to sea they’d be hard to find should someone start looking. The
Raven
’s black paint job reminds me a lot of the
Sentinel
, whose captain viewed the vessel as a modern-day eco-pirate ship. Unfortunately for him and everyone under his command, the pirate mentality and a dose of lethal hubris doomed them all.

I hope the same thing isn’t happening here. I really don’t want to die. But as we get closer, my fears seem to be realized.

Three—
three
—harpoon guns are mounted at the back of the ship. One is center aft, another to port, and the last is on the starboard side. And they’re not the handheld kind of harpoon used for spear fishing or something. They’re the big-ass kind that fire 150-pound spears with titanium flukes for gripping flesh and a cast-iron tip that explodes on contact. If one of these harpoons were aimed at a human being, well, you could jar what was left as strawberry preserves and no one would see the difference. These are whale-killers, designed to punch a hole in one-hundred-plus tons of meat and stop a heart big enough for me to swim through. I may not have been the most passionate antiwhaling crusader on the planet—hell, I’ve eaten whale meat—but this ship is a whale-killing machine.

Klein, who I haven’t talked to since I apologized for the beat down and returned his gun, joins me on the deck of our twenty-foot vessel, the
SuzieQ
. She’s a simple vessel with a small hold for fish and a basic wheelhouse. Certainly seaworthy, but I’m eager to climb aboard the much larger
Raven
.

“You don’t approve?” Klein asks when he sees my dour expression.

“Actually,” I say, looking up at one of the harpoons, “they’re perfect.”

His eyebrows rise. “Really?”

“Yup.”

“Huh.”

He’s standing farther away than most people would. Probably remembers how his stomach felt when it was wrapped around my fist. Not exactly the kind of person I’d figure for CIA material, but what do I know?

“Don’t fit the profile?”

“Not at all,” he says.

“What, do you have a dossier on me?”

When he doesn’t reply, I crane my head toward him, eyes widening. “You
do
have a dossier on me!”

He raises his hands in defense. “Yes, yes! But only because I was trying to determine whether or not you and the Olavsons were trustworthy. Whether or not I should believe your story.”

“What did you find?” I ask.

“That you are a competent investigator trusted with sensitive information and able to adapt to undercover situations better than some of my colleagues. You would have made a good agent.”

“Now you’re just trying to butter me up.”

He laughs lightly. It comes out as kind of a nerdy-sounding “Heh, heh!” Then he says, “Well, that’s what I thought before I discovered your fiery—”

“Watch it,” I say. It was meant as a joke, but the man cringes a little. I’m starting to feel like a bully, which is ironic given my size and stature.

“—temper,” he finishes.

“Sorry about that,” I say. And it’s an honest apology. “I’ve been a little more fiery than usual lately.”

“Understandable,” he says. “If I’d survived what you had, I don’t think I’d be quite the same, either.”

“Thanks,” I say and extend my hand. He takes it and we shake. Friends.
See, that wasn’t so hard, Harper
, I think. I just need to repeat the process a few more times and I’ll be hunky-dory with the
Raven
’s crew in no time. That is, if they don’t mind me beating the shit out of the captain and his son first.

“So you know a lot about me,” I say. “What’s your story? All I know is that you used to be CIA and you’ve got slow reflexes.” He doesn’t smile. “That was a joke.”

“Oh, heh, right.” He pushes his thick-rimmed glasses higher on his long nose. “I was an analyst. Reviewed data. Images. My job was to look for connections. Develop leads based on numbers, troop movements, or construction. You know—spreadsheets, maps, and satellite images.”

“So I don’t have to worry about you going Jason Bourne on me?”

“Who’s Jason Bourne?”

“Don’t get out much, do you?”

“I’ve spent fifty percent of my life thus far in an office with no windows.”

That’s when I notice he hasn’t really taken his eyes off the Arctic view. This must be all very foreign and new to him. Probably terrifying, too. “Why are you here?”

“Because I did my job,” he says. “I put the pieces together and determined you were telling the truth.”

I feel a brief moment of hope—having genuine support from the CIA could change things—but then he goes and smears my lifted spirits beneath the cold, hard boot of truth.

“I believed you,” he says, “but no one believed me. Nearly lost my job arguing my case. But it’s just too crazy sounding. I had months of vacation time saved up, so I came out myself.”

I stammer out a confused, “W-why?”

“If you believed the planet was threatened by some kind of mind-altering parasite, wouldn’t you do what you could to—oh. Right. You wouldn’t. Weren’t.”

“Touché,” I say with a frown. The man has pretty much deflated any argument I had about not being here. He doesn’t know it, but he’s just spared Willem from a beat down.

Our conversation is suddenly interrupted by a voice that confuses me. “Ahoy!” Not only is the voice not familiar; it’s also feminine.

I look up at the aft deck of the
Raven
and see a six-foot-tall blond bombshell with wavy locks and full lips. My first impression is that she’s some kind of runway model, but then I notice she’s got broad shoulders and a bit of meat on her bones, mostly in the right places. I hate her, of course, but manage to give a casual wave.

She hurls a coil of rope at me. It unfurls as it crosses the distance, but I have to step to the side to avoid getting bludgeoned by the heavy cord.

“Sorry,” she says. Her accent is local. A Greenlander woman.

Fall overboard and drown
, I think. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Tie it off, will you,” she says. “We’ll tow the
Suze
from here. You can take the dinghy between the ships.”

When she steps away, I turn to Klein. “Who is that?”

“Her name is Helena,” he says. “But I haven’t spent much time with her. She seems to know her way around a ship, though. And she seems close to Jakob. And Willem.” He glances at me, a crafty look in his eyes. “That doesn’t bother you, does it?”

“Put the pieces together on that, too, huh?” I say.

He shrugs. “Wasn’t hard.”

“Don’t think I won’t slug you now that we’re BFFs.” Before he can ask, I say, “Never mind.”

I tie off the rope and give Talbot a thumbs-up. He eases back on the throttle, letting the slack out of the cable. The line goes taut so gently that I barely feel it. But the engine cuts a moment later, and Talbot steps out of the wheelhouse. He’s so bundled up in his jacket, hood, hat, scarf, and snow pants that I’d never guess a cowboy hid beneath the layers, but when he speaks it’s like looking at the Abominable John Wayne. “Less y’all are fixing to freeze to death, I suggest we git on over to the
Raven
while the sun is still shining.”

“You do realize this is the Arctic, right?” I say. “It’s going to be cold. Like, all the time.”

“Girl,” he says from the aft, where he’s lifting a small dinghy over the rail. “You best paint your butt white and run with the antelope.”

I turn to Klein.

He shakes his head. “I have no idea.”

“Coming,” I say. We pile into the dinghy, which is the last boat on the planet I’d like to be on right now. Not only is it shaky, but we’re basically a convenient bite-size package right now. I stand at the center
of the small dinghy and command the other two to sit. Happily they listen. The
Raven
is still moving—five knots now, which is faster than I can row—so I channel my fear into my arms and drag us up the side of the
SuzieQ
and then up the line stretched between the two ships.

Malik greets us at the other end, helping us onto the
Raven
one at a time. When he takes my hand, I pause and say, “Sorry about the Taser.”

He shrugs it off.

“And when I cursed at you yesterday.”

A nod.

“And what I said about your mother…and sister.”

He smiles. “Thank you.” As I step past him, he stops me with a hand on my shoulder. “The captain would like to see you. Now.”

“Did he hear about the cruise ship?” I ask.

“Cruise ship?” he says, looking confused. “I know nothing about a cruise ship. But a whale was spotted.”

“That’s right,” Klein says. “Diane Simmons with Greenpeace. She’s a friend of yours, right?”

For a moment I wonder just how detailed that dossier of mine is, but I don’t dwell on the topic. Diane
is
a friend. And if she’s spotted a whale, she might be a dead friend by the time we reach her. I push past Klein and Talbot, heading for the bridge and, shortly, battle.

I
storm into the
Raven
’s wheelhouse like I’m Jean-Luc Picard facing a fleet of Borg cubes, demanding that we throttle ahead, that we prepare for a fight, or injuries, or worse. If I hadn’t noticed everyone staring at me with humorous expressions on their faces, I might have damn well sat in the captain’s chair and shouted, “Engage!”

“Jane,” Willem says, stopping my tirade. “We’re under way.”

I pause. I can hear the rumble of the ship’s single large prop cutting through the ocean. We’re moving fast.

“We’re in contact with your Greenpeace friend,” says Helena. She’s standing by the windows at the front of the bridge, her shapely body silhouetted by the falling sun. If that weren’t bad enough, she tinges the word
Greenpeace
with a subtle trace of disdain. “They’re fine.”

“The whale is dead,” Jakob says. He’s standing behind the wheel like a good captain, but the ship is on autopilot. I think he just likes the feel of the wheel in his hands. “And we won’t reach them until morning. Even at full speed.”

Well, don’t I feel like an idiot. “Right. Good.”

Talbot and Klein enter the bridge behind me, and I make room for them to pass. Talbot sits at a chair by the radar station. Klein sits at a workstation, where an open laptop awaits him. That’s when I notice that each and every bridge station is occupied. There isn’t a place for me here.

“How did you find Diane?” I ask. “Aren’t we—you—supposed to be incognito?”

Klein answers. “I’ve been monitoring the blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds for any organization that might report whale sightings in the North Atlantic. One of the crew members aboard the, ah”—he’s grinning—“
Arctic Rainbow
”—Helena snickers—“is fairly active on Twitter. GreenpeaceNate. He sent out ten tweets in half as many minutes. I sent a direct message, and Nate was fairly forthcoming with the details. I hacked into the Greenpeace system, and we’re getting GPS updates every ten minutes.”

“Photos, maps, and charts, huh?” I say with a grin.

“Among other things,” he says, pushing his glasses up.

“But you’ve talked to Diane?” I ask. “She knows we’re coming.”

They all stare at me for a moment.

“I noticed she was registered as the
Rainbow
’s captain,” Klein admits. “She was in your dossier.”

I look Jakob square in the eyes. “I’m here now, Jakob. I’m not going anywhere. But I swear if you don’t start being straight with me, I will find a way to turn this ship around.”

A nod is all I get. It’s all I need. From Jakob anyway.

“So they don’t know we’re coming?” I ask.

“We don’t want to give away our position,” Willem says. “For obvious reasons.”

“Right,” I say. “We’re fugitives. Thanks for that, by the way.”

The outside door opens, and Malik steps inside. He’s brushing snowflakes from his shoulders. “Storm is nearly here.”

I shake my head.
Great
, I think but don’t say anything. I’ve made myself look like enough of a doofus for one day. But I do look to the window and see a haze of flakes speckling the sky. It doesn’t look bad now, but the wall of darkness on the horizon is foreboding.

“Have you told them?” Malik says to me.

“Told them what?” I ask.

“About the cruise ship.”

Urgency returns to my voice. “Right! Before Klein…came to pick me up, I saw a news report about a missing cruise liner.”

Jakob looks stunned. It’s news to him. “Cruise liner? How big?”