Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (37 page)

Margaret slid over to the seat Glen had quit. “What did you expect? We didn’t know where you’d gone. It was three days before Geddes tracked you down through Interpol.”

Mercy bowed her head. “I’m sorry. I owe you both an apology.”

“More than that,” Margaret said. “Without you, without our insider on the Australian’s yacht, the mission went belly up. I tried to get the guy’s wife to talk to me, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”

Mercy winced. She set down the menu she’d been pretending to study, stood up and walked the walk of the condemned over to Glen’s table. She didn’t ask if she could sit with him, knowing his answer. Fuck-off vibrations wafted off the man like poisonous fumes. She slid a hip onto the tall bamboo stool next to his and repeated her apology.

“You trashed the mish-shun,” he mumbled. He stared sullenly into what looked like a Scotch, obviously not his first of the day. “Why’d you bother coming back?”

“Shut up, Glen. Not here.” Margaret had followed Mercy across the dock, apparently worried there might be a scene. She cast a wary look around, standing close behind her inebriated associate. “Glen here has been working real hard at washing away his disappointment since you left.”

“I’m sorry,” Mercy repeated.

“Sorry duthn’t cut it.” He drained his glass, thumped it down on the table and signaled the bartender for another.

Margaret waved off the approaching server and shot Mercy a look. “We better get him out of here and have a real conversation. You take port; I’ll take starboard. Come on, baby,” she said in Glen’s ear, “we’re taking you home for a little nap.”

“Fuck off!” he growled, bloodshot eyes hot with fury when they reached for his arms. But he was too polluted to put up much of a struggle. The two women muscled him away from the bar with its gay lanterns and happily boozing clientele, who seemed not to notice the kidnapping. . . or at least not to care.

“Where to?” Mercy asked.

Margaret nodded toward the end of the dock. “I have a boat.”

The Chris-Craft was dwarfed by everything else at dock. Outfitted for fishing, with a flybridge and large open cockpit with bait-locker, the 31-footer was conspicuously over-powered with two immense 225-HP, V6 Evinrudes.

Mercy checked out the name stenciled on the stern:
Sara Lee
. “Sounds more like a coffee cake than a boat.”

Margaret cast her an “oh-please” look.

They dragged Glen into the cabin below, dumping him onto one of the two berths that ran along the interior of the hull. His face mashed into the pillow, and he immediately began to snore.

“He can’t suffocate like that, can he?” Mercy asked.

“I doubt it.” Margaret gave him an annoyed look. “Oh hell.” She repositioned his head to one side.

Mercy smiled. “Now he looks like big-mouth bass.” She turned to Margaret, who wasn’t even close to smiling. “Listen, I know I let Red Sands down. More than that, I let the two of you down. But I had to choose between—”

“I know what happened. Geddes informed us. I’m glad you found your mother. I hope she’ll recover from her ordeal. It sounded dreadful.” Margaret climbed the three steps back up into the boat’s cockpit and sat down heavily in the vinyl captain’s chair. Dark circles underscored her eyes. She reached up and rubbed the back of her neck with both hands, her exhaustion hard to miss.

Mercy stared out into the dusk that was turning to full-on night. She sat on the teak ledge running around the cockpit. “I really am sorry. I truly had no choice.”

Margaret shrugged. “I don’t blame you. If it had been someone in my family—” She shook her head. The warm breeze off the water fluffed her short brown curls. “As soon as Glen realized you’d gone, he let me know and I notified headquarters. I guess it didn’t take them long to figure out where you were headed. Geddes sent word to our guy in Kiev to intercept you at the airport.” She smiled. “I take it you slipped in through a less obvious route?”

Mercy nodded. “The thing is, I assumed you’d call in reinforcements and the mission would continue without me.”

“We talked about it. But I decided, with Geddes’ blessing, that Glen and I would do just as well on our own until we located the opals. Of course that was over a week ago, and we never did find them.”

“Really? Maybe they just aren’t here. Do you think the Australian couple could be a red herring? It makes sense that one or more decoys might be sent out to throw the authorities off the trail. You’ve found nothing anywhere in the Virgin Islands?”

Margaret shrugged. “We’ve had people searching virtually every island—St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix, the British VI’s too—and we’ve patrolled by boat. All we came up with were SCUBA-diving parties, tourist excursions in some kind of mini-sub to view the reefs, and lots of chartered yachts coming and going. Nothing unusual or suspicious.”

“What about the Australian container ship?”

“The Seafarer? We enlisted the help of local police, unofficially. I made an anonymous call, tipping them off to a massive drug shipment. U.S.V.I. narcotics cops stood by while Customs inspected every crate, drum, and pallet onboard the ship.”

“Nothing?”

“Nada.” Margaret sighed. “They were looking for drugs of course. But if they’d come across the opal ore they would have seized it as contraband since it wasn’t on the ship’s manifest.”

Mercy bit down on her bottom lip and considered their next move. Was there one? Or had they run out of options? “Maybe I missed something on the yacht. Do you think it’s worth reconsidering?”

“I tried to get on board.” Margaret popped open a cooler packed with ice and reached in for a cold soda. Mercy accepted a diet cola from her. “When I couldn’t make friends with Kristen Bellamy, I tarted up for her husband. Amos picked me up in Tickles one night. I gather that’s routine for him, cheating on his wife.”

Mercy winced.
Yeah.
She remembered how fast he’d come onto her when they first met. “Amos took you back to his boat?”

“No. I tried to get him to, but he said his wife was getting suspicious.” Margaret laughed and shook her head. “The creep.”

“So what happened?” Mercy asked.

“I let him cop a feel while I asked him enough questions to satisfy J. Edgar Hoover. I really don’t think Amos Bellamy has anything to do with terrorists or stolen gems. He’s a fat, horny, rich guy is all. We agreed to meet in a room at the Blue Pelican Hotel. I stood him up.”

“Poor baby.” Mercy smiled at the thought. “Ready for action and nowhere to put his thingy.” She took a long swallow of her cola, letting the icy caramel bubbles smooth their way down her throat. “So does this mean the opals must have taken the alternate route? They’re somewhere in the Pacific?”

“I suppose, although Geddes says that our people have been no more successful out there. Either we’ve been given bad information from the start, or the thieves got word we were on to them and they dumped their load when we weren’t looking, to avoid being caught with it.”

“But that seems unlikely, don’t you think? I mean, throwing away gemstones worth millions? They need the cash to pay for weapons and their day-to-day operations—that's what Geddes said.”

“I agree.” Margaret groaned in frustration. “Crap! I don’t know where they are.”

Mercy tipped her head in thought. Only the narrowest pink band edged the western horizon, marking the place where the sun had disappeared. Nature was capable of hiding something as big as the sun from view. Could thieves make a half ton of rock disappear as easily? She looked back at the horizon—no more pink. She could feel the air already cooling.

Air. Earth. Water. That was the entire substance of their world. She refused to believe that Chameleon could make opals evaporate into thin air. And every inch of land that seemed even remotely possible as a hiding place had been searched. That left only one other possibility, although it was admittedly a vast one.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I think we should go diving.”

Margaret’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”

“Before I left, Glen was watching a group of three charter boats. They’d dropped anchor and set up diving markers in a cove on the west side of St. John’s island.”

“I remember.”

“They told the rental agent they were exploring shipwrecks. But while we were on the Kon Tiki, floating from island to island, I noticed caves along that same coastline, at water level. Wouldn’t a cave be the perfect place to hide stuff? A natural warehouse. I mean, that’s what pirates did centuries ago, used caves to store their loot.”

"Hmmmm," Margaret said. Her pretty eyes looked unconvinced but interested. “I’ve studied charts and maps up the kazoo. Most of the caves throughout these islands aren’t accessible, except during extremely low tide.”

“All the better for someone who wants to hide something.” Mercy felt renewed excitement. “Whenever the entrance is flooded it won’t be visible, and no one can get inside without diving gear. That limits the risk of their treasure being found. But within the cave may be areas that remain high and dry.”

“So how would they get the opals into these caves?”

“During low tide, that wouldn’t be a problem. Float them in on rowboats or rafts, a few hundred pounds at a time.” Mercy looked down through the companionway toward their sleeping beauty. “How’s his dislocated shoulder?”

“Pretty much back to normal—or so he says. Why?”

“Can he swim with it?”

“I guess.” Margaret shrugged. “If we can get him sobered up.”

                                          42

“Where are the goddamn dive boats?” Glen stared across the turquoise water of the cove. Palm trees and lush tropical foliage outlined the long, low curve of white-sand beach. But the only boat in the cove that day was their own.

“Let’s just hope they haven’t already left the area,” Mercy said.

They’d motored the Sara Lee out of Charlotte Amalie before dawn, in the company of a dozen other fishing craft. As soon as they were beyond the harbor, they left the cover of the fleet and went their own way. Now Mercy scanned the coastline of St. John with binoculars. Centuries of powerful ocean waves beating at the coral outcroppings and volcanic basalt had carved out gullies, crevices, and caverns in the rocky shoreline. Most were hidden by spiky yucca and stone pine growing out from cracks in the rock.

Glen dry-scrubbed his unshaven face with both palms. He looked decidedly rough around the edges, still climbing out of his hangover. “This is useless. I’ve followed these idiots for days. They go into the water in full SCUBA gear. Carry nothing with them. They come up later, sometimes bringing up a few lobsters or a conch for lunch. Nothing suspicious ever happens.”

The low rumble of a diesel engine announced the arrival of another boat in the cove. Mercy turned to see a shiny white hull poke its bow around the point of land. Not another small fisher. A yacht. A really, really big one.

A moment later she was able to identify it: The Mystic Voyager. Amos Bellamy’s baby.

Mercy frowned, watching it approach with a sinking feeling in her stomach and a dark dread closing in around her. When Margaret Storey had mentioned trying to get onboard their boat, Mercy hadn’t remembered that Kristen told her they would soon head north—but that had been nearly two weeks ago. And here the couple was again, in the same cove where the divers had been, where she suspected the opal ore might be stashed. Exactly where or how, she still had no idea. But she didn’t believe in coincidences.

She turned to Glen. “Since I’ve been gone, has the Australian yacht been here at the same time as the dive boats?”

“Sometimes. But so have other boats.”

Margaret must have caught her meaning. “I didn’t notice any interaction between the divers and Bellamy or his crew.”

“Right,” Glen agreed. “Amos diddles around in his dinghy. Sometimes rows it to the beach and back. But he doesn’t go anywhere near the caves or the dive site.”

Mercy shook her head. Something was wrong with this picture. Very wrong. She felt edgy. The same way she’d felt as a little kid when her dad had bought her an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box. The jangly music played as he encouraged her to turn crank. Even though he’d told her that the lid would spring open to reveal a surprise, she had jumped then burst into tears when the scary clown popped out. But later she'd pretended to like the toy, even though if terrified her, because her dad had given it to her. To this day, she hated clowns.

She turned her attention to Bellamy’s yacht now, to
his toy
. Maybe that wasn’t all it was to him. What if the boat, like the jack-in-the-box, had a secret hidden inside? A secret she’d somehow missed, that would suddenly appear and buy the tools of terror meant to cause misery to countless innocents?

Mercy slanted a look at Margaret. “I want to get back on that yacht and look around one more time.”

“Then you’re going wired,” Glen said, slapping his hands down loudly on the rail then wincing as if he wished he hadn’t. “If Amos is involved, he’ll be suspicious when you suddenly turn up again.” He looked at Margaret. “You can hook her up?”

“Sure.” She reached out to sweep Mercy’s blond hair back from her face. “But an ear bud’s too obvious. So you’ll be in send-mode only.”