Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (25 page)

Mom!

Tears threatened. As had happened so many times before, her mind drifted back to those dark days when the two of them had clung to each other for support and somehow survived the death of the Senator—Talia’s devoted husband and Mercy’s grander-than-life father.

Talia had enrolled ten-year-old Mercy in a Virginia boarding school. She had explained that this was necessary so that she’d know her daughter would be cared for while she traveled to do her job and support the two of them. Mercy had argued that she be allowed to accompany her mother. What child wouldn’t? But Talia had insisted that Mercy’s job was to go to a good school and learn as much as she could, not be dragged from country to country while her mother was on assignments for GeoWorld magazine.

Mercy never doubted that her mother would rather be with her. Unlike some of her friends who complained about their parents dumping them in a boarding school for ten months out of the year, just to be rid of them, Mercy had never felt neglected. When she and her mother were together, the bond was complete. She felt cocooned in a love that lingered for months during their separations. The precious days when they were in the same city, they did everything together—attended Kennedy Center concerts, bicycled through Rock Creek Park, dined in China Town, and talked about all of things that had happened in their lives while they were apart—from the least important to the most.

Such was their closeness that Mercy always felt her mother watching over her. A thousand miles between them was nothing. They chatted on the phone, scripted daily e-mails, and texted between continents. It was almost as if they were never really apart.

In Mercy’s adult years, their twice weekly phone calls still tied their lives inexorably together. Their conversations were always warm, encouraging, and frank. Talia let Mercy know that she valued her daughter’s opinions and insight as much as she hoped Mercy valued hers. And Mercy did. Her mother was her lighthouse when life’s stormy seas tossed her upon rocky shoals. Her mother’s fidelity during her marriage to the much older senator, and unembarrassed public affection for her husband, had created a model of the kind of love and marriage Mercy wanted for herself. She’d believed she had found the perfect mate in the young diplomat she married a little over two years earlier. But Peter Davis had been anything but the model husband. 

Drifting on the Kon Tiki now, Mercy patted away bitter tears with the back of one hand before Glen could see and question her. Peter was no longer the issue, no longer deserving of her concern. He'd broken her heart, but that was different from breaking
her
. And now her mother deserved all of her attention. But the silence was killing Mercy. Her inability to speak to her mother, to know if she was even alive was more than she could bear. Death, the cruel divider of souls, was indifferent to love.

“You all right?” Glen asked, giving her an elbow bump.

She grimaced. So much for private tears. “Yeah. Just thinking about my mom.”

He nodded. Mercy had told him about her bargain with Geddes. “The usual shitty company tricks aside,” Glen said, “this is beyond unfair. How can they justify using her as leverage to make you work for them?”

She shrugged. “I don’t care.”

He looked astonished. “Why not?”

“Whatever gets her home. Besides I’d rather be working, doing something useful. I was spinning my wheels back in DC. Driving myself crazy, sitting and worrying. Why not do my small part to drain the resources of terrorists?”

Recorded steel drum music clanged and tinkled from speakers suspended over the bar, masking their conversation from other customers sitting nearby.

“How patriotic.” Glen took a swallow of his beer. “Personally, I’m here purely for the money.”

She cast him a sideways look. “Like I believe that.”

He attempted a careless shrug, winced. “Damn shoulder.” He sighed. “Maybe I’m two-percent patriot. Who knows? Has your mother always been a photographer?”

“As far back as I can remember. She loves her art, and I guess that love rubbed off on me.”

“Margaret says you’re a fair painter.”

Mercy smiled. If fair, in monetary terms, meant that her landscapes were now selling for a cool five figures, that was a reasonable evaluation. She’d even had a one-woman show at the Corcoran.

“So,” Glen continued, “after your dad died, your mother kept on traveling and snagged herself a Pulitzer for her photo exposés?”

Mercy beamed. “She did. Twice. I’m so proud of her.”

“But the Senator left you and his widow with plenty of money. She didn’t have to work, did she?”

“I guess we could have lived comfortably enough off of my father’s estate,” Mercy admitted, “at least for a while. But I don’t think it was about money. Back then, my mother was running from her grief as much as following her muse. And her photographs showed that. Her eye became sharper. ‘Merciless,’ was the word one critic used.” She shook her head, remembering how, at first, the ten-year-old Mercy thought a certain pejorative newspaper article about her mother was praising her. Wasn’t her own name a close relation to that word? How could it mean anything bad? “She saw heartbreak, poverty, injustice, and beauty everywhere she traveled. She captured all of it with the lens of her camera, for the world to see.”

In spite of her few strident critics, Talia became the most sought after photojournalist in her profession, for many years working for the Washington Post before jumping ship to the New York Times. Finally, yearning for the ultimate freedom, she went freelance, although GeoWorld with its classic glossy photo-spreads of exotic lands and people became her most frequent client—urging her toward more and more controversial, and possibly dangerous, assignments.

The last of which might well have cost your life, Mom.

Mercy looked up out of her desperation to see that the Kon Tiki had stopped at a little cove to pick up more passengers.

Enough, she thought as they floated away again toward yet another stop. Worrying would get them nowhere. But their next steps were unclear. It was obvious that they weren’t going to get into the cargo ship’s containers until they had been off loaded. And she’d hit a dead end with the Mystic Voyager.

She looked away, across the blindingly sunlit water. Smooth today, no whitecaps in sight. Gorgeous tropical weather. A shame to waste it on work, an opinion apparently shared by the locals who worked at the bar. To say the service was slow would be an understatement. Island time crawled, and so did the people.

She said, “I’m thinking we need to find a way to get a look at the shippers’ tracking info. See who’s supposed to take possession at this end. I’ll try to get into the dock master’s office.”

She’d nearly eliminated the Bellamys from her suspect short-list. Their crew, particularly the captain, was another matter. She was convinced that the arrogant Jobson was hiding something. If it wasn’t the opals, what the hell was it?

Glen kept his voice low beneath a popular calypso tune—Man Smart (Woman Smarter)—a personal favorite of hers.  “I figure, the most time we have is another week. By then the Seafarer will have been moved to the dock for unloading. If the opals are in one of those containers, whoever picks them up will waste no time making them disappear.”

“Right. And that means we not only lose the shipment itself, we lose the opportunity to track it to the terrorists. To Chameleon.”

“Fucking catastrophe. Ouch! Damn.” Glen winced when he forgot about his shoulder and tried to reach for his glass with the wrong hand.

The Kon Tiki’s bell chimed its arrival at Cruz Bay. Mercy made no move to disembark. They’d stay on the party boat for the complete loop through the nearby islands, a convenient way to keep an eye on local water activity as well as meet without attracting attention.

Two new couples and a man traveling on his own stepped aboard. Mercy checked them out while pretending to be absorbed in her cutesy umbrella drink. Her weeks at Red Sands’ camp had ingrained in her a habit constant vigilance. She sensed Glen doing the same—memorizing faces, searching for any detail or action that set off mental sirens.

The younger of the two couples were clearly honeymooners. They literally glowed passion through their sunburns, and couldn’t keep their hands off of each other. The other couple, spry seniors, chatted with deck hands, took photos of everything with their phones, and ordered for iced tea.

The loner was tanned, tall, dressed in tropical whites. Mercy caught a flash of stylish two-day dark beard but couldn’t see much more of his face. He wore a straw Panama-style hat. He kept his head tilted down as if to avoid the sun’s glare, the wide brim hiding the upper half of his face.

Mercy instinctively tensed.

She knew him! Didn’t she?

No, she decided. But there was something disturbingly familiar about the man’s confident stride as he crossed to a table as far away from the other passengers as possible. No doubt he reminded her of other men who believed they were masters of their world; Washington, DC crawled with them. So what? He had an ego—and he was aloof, maybe anti-social, or just bent on protecting his privacy.

But none of these normally negative traits decreased her interest in him. Something about him actually appealed to her. She felt an almost erotic zing and sipped hard on her straw, trying to fathom her odd reaction to the stranger. The remainder of her icy drink slid down her throat in one long gulp that sent a jolt of brain freeze across her temple.

“Oh,” she said and rubbed her forehead.

“Something wrong?” Glen asked.

“No. Just someone I thought I knew, but don’t.”

Glen slid a surreptitious glance over the lid of his beer can as he drank. “The big guy?”

She blinked a yes.

“A security guard from Seafarer?”

“Don’t think so,” she whispered. What was wrong with her? She felt edgy, alert, but strangely wistful all at the same time. “He reminds me of—never mind.”

She stabbed the tiny umbrella’s stick at the ice cubes in the bottom of her glass. The Kon Tiki pulled away from dock and bobbed over the wake of a racing speedboat before settling into a more stable, slow cruise across turquoise water.

“There’s something I want you to see,” Glen said after another minute. “When we get around to the other side of this island.”

She wondered fleetingly what he was talking about, but her attention stayed glued to Panama Man who was studying his menu with the concentration of a biblical scholar. Between the obstructive hat, his dark sunglasses, and the way he positioned his body—always away from her—she still hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. Something told her that she needed to do just that, the sooner the better.

                                          28

Half an hour later the buoyant little bar floated lackadaisically through a narrow ocean channel between the islands of St. Thomas and St. John. The wind had freshened, and waves chopped at the starboard side of the barge, causing passengers to grip their drinks and hold onto the edge of their tables—wisely bolted to the deck—to keep from falling off their stools.

Glen leaned in. “There,” he said, “see them?”

See what? Then Mercy noticed the three small powerboats anchored in an azure cove ringed by a pristine beach and multitude of graceful palms and wild brush. Remarkably, the cove had escaped the notice of all but these few tourists. Red-and-white dive flags bobbed on buoys in the water between the boats.

Mercy shrugged. “Rented dive boats. They’re all over the place. Tourists charter them for snorkeling or SCUBA expeditions to the coral reefs. The brochures at the hotel claim the variety of sea life is amazing.”

Glen screwed up his face. “I don’t know.” He unlooped binoculars from around his neck and peered through them. “I saw one of those boats return to the harbor for fuel yesterday. I got the name of the rental agency off its hull and, since their office was just off the fuel dock, I went inside and asked if they had room that afternoon for another customer. He said a private party had chartered all three of his dive boats for the entire month. They’d even supplied their own captains and equipment.”

She shrugged. “So they’re fanatics about diving.”

“Look at them.” Glen passed her the binoculars. “Those guys don’t look like your everyday tourists to me.”

She slid a glance toward his injury. “Maybe the charter guy decided that someone with an arm in a sling shouldn’t be diving. He didn’t want to risk a law suit.”

Glen scowled. “Maybe.” She handed the binoculars back to him. “I want to take a look at the marine charts. See what they’re up to down there,” he said.

“Probably exploring a shipwreck,” a voice said.

Mercy snapped around. Panama Man stood close behind her. She looked up over her shoulder into his face, shadowed from the fierce sun by his hat brim, eyes invisible behind dark lenses. The beard wasn’t at all familiar, but the voice most definitely was.

What the hell are you doing here? In disguise no less. But she said nothing as she squinted up at him. Even if Sebastian’s blue-black eyes hadn’t been visible to flash a warning, she knew not to break his cover.

Mercy felt Glen staring at her, as if he were unsure what to do about the man neither of them had noticed moving in on them.