66 Metres (32 page)

A refreshing riposte. Under different circumstances, Lazarus thought he could grow to like this young man. He decided to accord him this one favour.

‘Alexei,' he said.

As they left the harbour and hit deeper swells, Lazarus' phone tracker program confirmed that Ben was heading in the right direction; he clearly knew where they were going, and so was somehow involved. During the trip neither of them spoke, the hissing spray drenching them every ten seconds as they crested each wave. But at one point Ben piped up, yelling over his shoulder.

‘How many bullets do you have in that toy gun of yours?'

Lazarus couldn't think of a good reason to lie. ‘Six,' he said.

‘Good,' Ben replied, then said no more.

Lazarus had often wondered if any of the people he'd killed over the past twenty years would be good company for Sasha. Most of them had been scum, the rest had pleaded for mercy like babies. This one, though…

The pain in his gut erupted, like a knife jabbing, his brow immediately slick with sweat despite the cool air. He fought hard not to puke, instead coughing into his handkerchief. Blood. Quite a lot of it. Luckily Ben was occupied with some nasty swells. The pain passed, and Lazarus breathed easier. The obvious occurred to him.

The doc had lied to him about how long he had left.

Chapter Nineteen

It was taking forever to arrive. Adamson was fed up with the boat pitching up forty-five degrees as they crested each swell, only to surf down the slope on the other side, the twin engines ramping up then descending in a soporific rhythm. He began to feel seasick.
Watch the horizon
was the age-old advice, difficult to follow when he only glimpsed it every seven seconds, and when he did all he saw an endless carpet of white-topped steel-grey waves, cold spray blasting his face like a needle-shower. Charlie and Bud, the two SEALs at the front, seemed perfectly at home. Charlie tried to light a smoke, then gave up and flicked the limp cigarette into the sea.

Adamson was wet and cold, the leather of his shoes ruined.
Forget it, just get the Rose
. His forearms and wrists ached from gripping the boat's guide-ropes to stop himself toppling out the back. At one point, Bud, the SEAL whose name he hadn't been able to remember earlier, asked if he wanted them to slow down. Adamson shook his head. Time was chasing him. He was AWOL, his family on the run to South America, the Kilanoa family getting impatient, and if things went pear-shaped, the bare islands of the Scillies offered few hiding places.

Bud stood tall as they surfed another two-metre swell, squinted into the distance, then sat down again. He'd seen something. Adamson wasn't about to attempt any such manoeuvre. It was another five waves before he spotted the orange and grey outline of another boat, more or less stationary, three people aboard. He checked his pistol. Hard to shoot in this roiling seascape. As he looked up, Bud was facing him, prepping an underwater sled. The body of it was flat like a stretcher, two long struts with black webbing between them, at the front a white fibreglass cowling with twin headlamps facing forward, an opening for a water jet angled downwards and backwards. The sled meant they could go much faster underwater. Strapped to each strut was a spear-gun and a rack of short metal spears.

Bud looked up, saw Adamson's pistol, shook his head once, and pointed to a long white box tapered at one end, strapped to the floor. Adamson smiled. A rifle. He put his pistol back in its armpit harness.

Bud moved closer, just as the boat turned into a wave, showering them with water that stung Adamson's eyes.

‘You want them dead or alive?' Bud asked.

Adamson had given it plenty of thought. In the US, assuming he ever got extradited back there, the jail sentences for treason were often longer than for murder. The less witnesses, the better. Besides, when he was tanning on the beach with Sandy and Arnie, he didn't want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his days.

‘I want it clean.'

Bud studied him a moment, then nodded. ‘Once we get the device. Until then we leave them alive, keeps our options open in case there are complications.'

Hadn't there been enough complications already? But Bud was right. Stay professional, get the job done, then clean up. No witnesses. No traces.

‘Agreed.'

‘That means you need to keep control up here while we're underwater. They're moored. You'll need to keep the engine running, one hand on the wheel, the other on the rifle. You can handle a rifle, right?'

Adamson's stomach lurched as they sank down the trough of a bigger than normal wave.

‘I grew up in Texas.'

Bud gave him one more appraising look, then returned to the front of the boat.

As soon as Bud had turned around, Adamson took a lungful of air and swallowed it down, suppressing the urge to retch. One hand on the guide-rope, he dropped onto his knees and bent forward to open the rifle case. Spray drenched his face again, but he was glad for it, it kept him sharp. The rifle was a simple, large-bore affair, waterproofed with a thin skin of rubber. It reminded him of the first gun he'd been given, at the age of seven. Growing up in Crystal River had its advantages. He'd shot his first ‘gator at the age of ten.

The boat slowed. Voices, shouts from the men on the other boat. Then Charlie bellowed back at them.

‘This is the CIA, you are in violation of an Anglo-American treaty. This is a high-security operation. Stand down!'

Adamson smiled at the ruse, designed to put them off-guard. The boat was steadier now, the engines idling. Charlie shouted again.

‘Do not use the radio, I repeat –'

Adamson had to make the situation clear to everyone. Standing up, splaying his legs for stability, he shouldered the rifle, aimed at the boat's console, and fired. Pieces of metal exploded in front of the skipper, who fell backwards into the boat.

‘Sonofabitch! You can shoot,' Bud said, grinning.

Adamson ignored him, bent his knees to keep his balance, and swung the rifle a few degrees to the right, predicting what would happen next. One of the men had caught the skipper, but the other had bent down to pick something up. Adamson blinked hard to wash spray out of his eyes, and saw a gun's muzzle in the man's hand.

It was Adamson's turn to shout. ‘Throw it in the sea, right now. Do not test me!'

The man hesitated, looked to his companion, then threw the pistol into the sea.

Bud faced Adamson. ‘Jeez, you're no fucking suit, man; you've got balls.'

Adamson's adrenaline trumped his nausea.
Arnie, I wish you could see this, see your pa in action.
The console on the other boat had caught fire, but the skipper recovered and quickly put it out with a handheld extinguisher.

Adamson stayed in command. ‘Charlie, Bud, get ready.' He traded places with Charlie at the helm, checked the levers for the two engines and the rudder control. Then he remembered something.

He shouted at the other boat again. ‘Flare gun. You must be carrying one. Toss it in the sea, too.'

The three men turned to each other, a quick discussion ensuing. Adamson fired again, above their heads.
Don't give them time to think
.

‘Do it now, or I shoot one of your air tanks. It'll blow you and your boat apart.'

A flare gun plopped into the sea. He could tell by their defeated posture that they had no more options. Amateurs. Should have stayed at home.

‘How many divers down?' he asked them.

The skipper held up two fingers.

‘Okay. No one else is going in, understood? Drop your tanks over the side.'

Again they looked at each other, uncertain. But this was how Adamson worked, how the CIA worked: get an enemy into a weak position, then weaken them a little more, step by step. If you tell them to do everything at once, they might resist, but if you do it in steps, the psychology of defeat worked in your favour. Rumour had it the CIA had actually learned it from studying the Nazis, but nobody ever wanted to admit that.

‘Do it now, or I'll take them out my way.'

The skipper said something to the other two. There were four tanks upright in an aluminium rack in the boat's centre. Slowly they unbuckled them and hoisted them over the edge. But they did something he hadn't expected. The skipper opened the valve of the first one, so that it hissed and kicked up a jet of water as he let it go.

The skipper shouted to Adamson. ‘This way they'll hear it coming; they can get out of the way so it won't kill them on the way down.'

Now Adamson had to play it their way. The unspoken deal so far was that they all might live.

Charlie, fully kitted up with a sleek matt-black rebreather backpack on, joined Adamson, and yelled across to the other boat.

‘How long have they been down there?'

‘Twenty minutes,' the skipper replied.

Charlie leaned close to Adamson. ‘You seem to have everything under control here. We'll be back in twenty. When I surface and give you the OK signal, it means we have the device, and the two divers below are dead. You'll need to shoot these three.'

Adamson gave the tiniest of nods. A thrill ran through him, like the old days. It had been a long time since he'd killed. He wasn't a psycho, but there was an undeniable buzz of anticipation, heightened senses, and a heady feeling of power.

Charlie turned around and bent over to help Bud lift the sled and lower it into the water. Then he and Bud, without signalling to each other as divers usually do, rolled over the side and disappeared beneath the surface. There were no bubbles. Rebreathers, Adamson remembered; recycling oxygen and adjusting helium and nitrogen automatically to minimise narcosis and prevent oxygen poisoning at depth. The superior option for deep diving. Nadia had blown up the trimix dive shop, presumably to prevent any other divers from diving this wreck. A bad call on her part. One that would cost the little bitch her life, her boyfriend's too.

He clunked the engines into reverse gear, edged back another few metres, kept his eyes on the other skipper. He
was
in charge; all those assholes back at the Office who whispered behind his back that he was past it and should be pulled out of the field and shoved behind a pre-retirement desk, well, they should see him now. Screw them. He wished Arnie was here, so he could show his son how to manage situations. He knew Arnie wasn't that bright, but he'd understand his father was doing this to protect him and his mom.

He remembered taking Arnie to a James Bond movie with Sandy. Arnie didn't understand all of it, but he liked the action, and loved the theme music. Adamson had confided in his son later that he, too, was a secret agent. Arnie's eyes had gone wild. ‘Really?' He'd shown his son his pistol and CIA licence to prove it. When Arnie was older, old enough to understand, he'd tell him all about this day, and make his son proud.

The seasickness banished, Adamson stood feeling more powerful than he had in years. One hand on the wheel, the other on the rifle perched on the top of the console, Adamson stared down the other men, and began to hum the James Bond theme tune.

***

Nadia swam through the slipstream of bubbles from Jake's tank, painfully aware that each breath took a chunk out of her air supply, and the deeper they descended, the bigger the chunk. They passed the Tsuba's battered bridge, its glass-less window-frames encrusted with purple and yellow flora waving slowly in the current. She could just make out the top of the helm, where she'd been three days ago. But they moved on, and the doorway to the wheelhouse slid past. Jake spun around briefly, gave her the OK signal, and upon her returning it, twisted around again and continued their descent. She equalised her ears again, too abrupt, too hard. It felt like a jab in her eardrums, made her wince. Ignoring the momentary pain, she returned her arms to their folded position in front of her face, her right hand on the stab jacket inflate button. Glancing at her left wrist, she saw they were at forty-five metres. She injected a squirt of air into her jacket to give her buoyancy for the ascent later.

They passed an open cargo hold. She swung her torch-beam across the rectangle of darkness, briefly illuminating a carpet of big-eyed orange fish sheltering within. As she swung the beam back, it caught the ship's funnel right below them, almost horizontal. Jake had already kicked hard to go around it. She imagined many divers would pause to straddle it and take photos of each other; so unusual to see a ship's chimney at such an angle. But time was ticking. She wondered if the SEALs were already on their way out to the wreck.

Jake turned again, staring at her longer when she returned the OK signal, no doubt searching her eyes for any sign of narcosis. She flicked her hand as if slapping his face, and his eyes flattened as he smiled beneath his regulator, and turned back around again. Fifty metres. There was a lot of silt in the water after the storm, small strips of grey confetti, and very few fish. At this depth most would be on the opposite side of the wreck, on the mound of reef that had first skewered the Tsuba, then served as its near-vertical resting place, like an open coffin. But the drift of silt was hypnotic. Nadia reminded herself to stay sharp, to fight the nitrogen-at-depth effects dulling her mind. Nitrogen was an
inert
gas, and that's just what it does to the brain in high doses.

She checked her air – one-seventy bar left, roughly eighty per cent, but it would go faster down here – depth fifty-two metres, time in the water five minutes. She tried to work out what actual time it was, when some light might arrive, but she couldn't. The cognitive-dampening effects of narcosis were always first to arrive, at least for her. Never mind, their mission was about perception, not mathematics.
Just find the Rose
. Once they started heading up, particularly above forty, the effects would vanish.

Jake slowed as they came level with a small structure towards the Tsuba's stern. He stopped, and she nearly overshot him; she'd forgotten to squirt more air into her jacket to achieve neutral buoyancy. Dammit, was he testing her? He veered towards the opening of what looked like a steel hut, and peered inside. What the hell was he doing? Jake glanced backwards, then… Fuck, he's going in! Has he lost it? Is
he
narked? She regained neutral buoyancy and swam after him, reached his fins sticking out from the doorway. She pulled on one of them. No reaction. She couldn't get inside with him, there was only room for one. Clearly he was doing something, his fins kicked slowly and his legs twisted every now and again. Relax. This is Jake. He's not narked. She wedged the edges of her fins against a rusted railing and waited, arms folded.