Death Echo (33 page)

“Can’t argue that,” Mac said. “Especially after summer.”

“When is it supposed to go down?” Emma asked.

“In the next few days,” Harrow said.

“Was Tommy yours?” Mac asked, his voice as unreadable as his face.

“Tommy?” Harrow looked confused.

“The dead man on the rez,” Mac said.

“Oh. He was the Bureau’s. That’s why they were unusually territorial about the case. I looked at the file. Nobody owned Tommy but the last person to put crank or a bottle in his hands.”

“Lucky for you Tommy died,” Emma said. “It gave you a ticket aboard
Blackbird
.”

Mac had been thinking the same thing.

“Maybe,” Harrow said, shrugging. He narrowed his eyes at Emma. “Tommy was whacked by someone, but it wasn’t the Agency or the Bureau. We would have been happier with him in place.”

“Huh,” Mac said, a word as neutral as his expression.

“But we’re in place now,” Emma said. “What if we don’t want to play nice with you?”

“Even if St. Kilda Consulting wiggles out by playing the rogue-agent card, you and your ex-hotshot captain become international fugitives with serious money on your heads. Award paid on proof of death.” Harrow shrugged. “Doubt if you’d last real long.”

It wasn’t a threat.

It was a fact.

“Where is
Blackbird
?” Harrow asked again.

“You don’t trust us to play nice?” she asked.

“I don’t trust anyone.”

“Especially not the man in the mirror,” Mac said very softly.

She didn’t argue.

“We need a locator and a data recorder aboard,” Harrow said, “and we’re going to get them. Cooperate or I throw you to the bounty hunters.”

“Who killed Tommy?” Mac asked flatly.

“I told you. I don’t know. Why do you care?”

“Collateral damage pisses me off.”

“Throw a fit on your own time. Are you in or out?” Mac looked at Emma.

They exchanged a long silence.

Then she turned to Harrow and said, “In.”

VANCOUVER
ISLAND

4:15 P.M.

T
aras Demidov divided his attention between his cell phone screen and Lina Fredric.

Both required watching. His two coordinates were no longer closing with one another, which was making his boss crazier than usual. He had kept making and countering his own orders, until finally Demidov quit following them. He was waiting for two like orders in a row.

As for the woman, Lina was restless, wanting to go back to her safe little life. Demidov didn’t understand the desire. The grave was safe. Life was for taking risks. Lina had become too soft for anything but death.

Demidov’s boss might be crazy, but he didn’t have a soft impulse in his body.

“Don’t worry, little bird,” Demidov said to her. “This will all be done in a day or two. You’ll be taking fat fishermen out on the water again, and I’ll be another name you’ve forgotten.”

Her expression said everything she was too frightened to voice.

“Why would I kill you?” he asked practically. “You could be of use again. A smart man plans ahead.”

“And you’re a very smart man,” she said, her voice empty.

“I live. Others died.” He shrugged. “That is smart enough, yes?”

His cell phone chimed softly.

A text message appeared on the screen:
TARGET
ON
MOVE
.
INTERCEPT
TOMORROW
.
NEW
COORDINATES
TO
FOLLOW
.

NORTH
OF
DISCOVERY
PASSAGE

5:11 P.M.

I
t took Harrow an hour to cover each bullet point that had been passed down the chain of command to him. In that time, Mac remembered all over again why he didn’t miss bureaucracies. The sheen of impatience in Emma’s eyes told him that she felt the same way.

Finally the repetition of the obvious irritated even Harrow. He waved them off and stalked back toward
Summer Solstice
.

Silently Mac untied the dinghy and stepped aboard. He was carrying a waterproof, spun-metal case that was no bigger than his palm. Inside, nested in foam, were several impressive bugs.

Harrow reluctantly had agreed that Mac could put them in place. The fact that everyone hadn’t scrambled for the Zodiac when Emma and Mac left told him that at least one of the bugs was already live. Probably all of them were.

“Firewall it,” Mac said.

Emma gunned the inflatable away from the dock. In seconds they were flying, little more than the engine’s prop in the water.

“They’ll catch up,” she said over the engine. “That Zodiac they have goes like stink.”

“Make ’em work for it.”

The meter on the chart plotter’s electronic screen quickly climbed to thirty knots.

“You’re really pissed,” Emma said, reading Mac better than either of them expected.

“I thought Harrow or one of his hires pulled the trigger on Tommy.”

“Doubt it,” Emma said. “Tommy made a better puppet than we do.”

“Yeah. Damn it.”

“This fast enough for you?” she asked.

All Mac said was, “Why didn’t you question Harrow about any Russian involvement? The SR-1 Vektor isn’t something everyone uses. Other guns are more available, cheaper, and more reliable—unless you know how to tape the safety in the off position.”

“One, Harrow wouldn’t have told us. Two, the dumber he thinks we are, the more room we’ll have to maneuver.”

“They’ll throw us away faster than a used condom.”

“You think?” she asked sarcastically.

She swerved the dinghy around some rocks, instinctively using a gentle touch at high speed.

“Did you believe Harrow?” Mac asked.

Emma thought for a moment. “He’s a gamer by nature and training. He could have told the truth, but only if he thinks we’ll believe it’s a lie.”

“I hate spooks.”

“Me included?”

“You’re an ex-spook. Hate has nothing to do with how I feel about you.”

In that moment, Emma did something she’d never been able to do in the past. She took Mac at his word.

“Same goes,” she said. “Tim is different. If he doesn’t think he has better cards than you do, he won’t play the game.”

“What about you?” Mac asked, looking over his shoulder.

The Zodiac was behind them, hauling at least three passengers at high speed.

“I like to keep paranoids like Tim comfortable,” Emma said. “That’s when he gets sloppy.”

“How did he get sloppy with you?”

“By banging one of his office staff on the side, but only after he was convinced that I trusted him completely. He forgot that I had access to his expense accounts and travel vouchers, as well as hers. The second time they spent a weekend in adjoining rooms at the same hotel, I went to confront Tim on the subject. He was busy at the time.”

“Polishing his desk.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Harrow’s an idiot to screw around on a woman like you.”

“Thanks.” She smiled widely. “In truth, he didn’t get nearly as much out of me in bed as you did. And vice versa.”

Mac ran his knuckles lightly over her cheekbone. “It was really good. Especially the vice versa.”

They skipped along through tidal races and down channels, retracing their earlier track. This time she didn’t see any other boats.

The whirlpool was gone, too.

Mac glanced over his shoulder several times. The dinghy and the Zodiac were both blazing over the water, but Harrow’s boat had more muscle. It was slowly closing in. No surprise there. The Agency could afford to play with really expensive toys, both human and machine.

“You know what bothers me most about this whole goat-roping?” Mac asked as he pulled out his cell phone.

The gods were with him. There was a satellite overhead.

“Speak,” she said.

“Everybody wants us to succeed. The
FBI
could have blown us out of the water, but only gave us a smack on the butt. Ditto for Demidov,” Mac added. “The same doubled for Harrow and his handlers.”

“No mystery there,” she said. “This is the kind of game where everybody has cheats in place except you and me.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. All we have is a hole card everyone knows about.”

“Blackbird.”

Mac pushed the button that would give Faroe a scrambled call.

Emma drove while Mac gave St. Kilda a summary of what had happened. By the time he was finishing up, she was coming off the power, picking a way through the rocks that guarded the entrance to the bay where
Blackbird
waited, concealed.

“We did a really good job,” she said. “I don’t see the boat.”

Mac’s dark eyes raked the shoreline. Then raked again. “We are so fucked.”

Blackbird
was gone.

NORTH
OF
DISCOVERY
PASSAGE

5:32 P.M.

E
mma stared in furious disbelief toward the rocky niche where they had hidden
Blackbird
. Nothing was there now but a tangle of freshly cut evergreen boughs, random pieces of forest, and a pile of gillnet washing idly against the rocky shore.

“Is Faroe still on the line?” she demanded.

“Can’t you hear him swearing?”

“Over you? Not likely. Tell him to send a seaplane, money, and some good binoculars to the coordinates where we met Harrow.”

“It’s a long shot,” Mac said.

“Do we have a better one?”

“The Agency lost a damn fine officer when they lost you.”

Emma was too angry to appreciate the compliment. With
Blackbird
gone, she and Mac had to start over.

And the clock simply didn’t have that much time left on it.

Mac was speaking quickly into the phone, watching her through narrowed, black eyes. He was no happier than she was.

“While you’re at it,” he told Faroe, “get Harrow off our butt
now
. If we’re being watched, we don’t want to give away the whole game. We’ve lost too much ground as it is.”

A pause, then Faroe said, “Grace is on it.”

“She has maybe three minutes before our raggedy-ass cover is completely blown.”

And it was Mac’s experience that when cover was blown, body parts quickly followed.

“Call me when you know something useful,” Faroe said.

“Like how many ways we’ve been screwed?” Mac asked.

The connection was already dead.

Now the Zodiac was less than a half-mile away, its whine of power increasing with each second.

Emma didn’t look up from the dent in the shoreline where
Blackbird
had been concealed. But not well enough. She hissed a word through her clenched teeth.

“Not your fault,” Mac said. “Obviously I missed a locator bug.”

“It’s a big boat.” She started working over the little nav computer as she spoke. “Without a sweeper, it would be impossible to secure. Faroe knew it. That’s why he didn’t crap all over you. St. Kilda took a calculated risk. We lost.”

“You think Faroe sees it that way?”

“Yes. He’s not running around now, trying to cover his ass. It was his call to leave the bug sweeper behind. It was the right call, as our little strip-search proved. If there’s a slap coming down, he’ll take it.”

“That would be…refreshing.”

She laughed without humor. “It surprised me, too, the first time it happened. But if he thinks you’ve been careless, God help you, because the Devil is rubbing his hands in glee.”

The sound of the Zodiac’s massive outboards swelled like an approaching aircraft.

“I should just wave them over to us and throw in the game,” she said, her voice rich with disgust.

“But you won’t.”

“No. Not while there’s still a chance, however
pinche
.”

Mac recognized the Southern border slang and nodded. “I feel the same way.”

Two hundred yards away, the Zodiac suddenly altered course. The craft heeled over and sped off in another direction.

“Just another whale-watching boat gone chasing a new orca spotting,” Mac said.

“Harrow doesn’t call off easily. Wonder what Grace said.”

“Yeah, I’d like to have heard it. That’s a no-assing-around kind of woman.” He smiled grimly.

“She’s a former federal judge.”

“Must have been hell on the bench,” Mac said.

But they weren’t really listening to each other. He was focused on the fading sound of the Zodiac. She was frowning over the nav computer.

The black craft roared up a different channel and vanished. The men aboard were pros. Not once did any of them look toward Mac and Emma.

“How much time before the seaplane arrives?” he asked.

“At least an hour. It will probably be flying up from Rosario or Seattle, maybe farther north if we’re lucky. The
CIA
has more assets to call on than St. Kilda.”

“Then we have time to take a look around.”

She shrugged. “Can’t hurt and we might even find something.”

“Elephants might fly.”

“Thought that was pigs.”

“Pigs are easy,” he said.

Any other time she would have laughed. Now she just guided the little boat closer to the place where they had left
Blackbird
.

“At least we know odds are good it wasn’t Harrow,” Mac said. “He was too eager to co-opt us.”

“Which leaves Demidov.”

“Or the mysterious, stupidly rich owner who was going to contact us somewhere along the way on this Inside Passage snipe hunt.”

“If he exists,” she said.

“Plenty of stupidly rich exist. Temuri might be one of them.”

“Why would he steal his own boat?”

“Good question. I’ll ask him the next time we see him.”

While Emma motored them closer to the clutter of beached and tangled debris, Mac watched through the binoculars.

The gillnet camouflage floated in the rocky niche like the empty cocoon of a giant insect. Lines that had secured the boat dangled uselessly in the water. Two of the lines were already beginning to unwind where they had been slashed through, removing their whipped ends.