Sabotage (25 page)

Victoria cast a quick glance in their direction.

“Now he's muttering something to Vasya,” she said. “They don't look happy.”

“Bad sign.”

“They're still talking about us. I can see them.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“That night, remember what Vasya told us would happen if we followed him?”

Austin felt a momentary relief as the bells of the tower began to toll, now certain they could not be heard. “Not the sort of thing one forgets.”

“This means we're on his target list. The moment we get up and leave, he'll tail us. Luckily, he doesn't know where we're staying. We're probably safe as long as we can leave the tavern without him following.”

“Not exactly,” Austin said. “Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. Fast.”

“Okay. Closed.”

“Without opening, what color is the chair you're sitting on? Don't peek.”

“This isn't a good time for games, Austin.”

“Just go along with it. Keep those eyes closed. What color is the chair?”

She thought a moment, then ventured, “Brown.”

“Good guess. Is there a small bouquet of flowers on the table?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“How about a salt or pepper shaker?”

She shrugged. “Probably.”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Now open.”

Victoria surveyed the tabletop, shocked by the degree of her inaccuracy. “A red chair, no flowers on the table, and I got lucky with the salt and pepper.” She looked annoyed. “What's your point?”

“It's a little game my parents used to play with me. You'd be amazed how basic elements of your environment slip your mind if you don't pay attention. They simply don't register to the untrained observer. Take a better look around for a few seconds, and let's try again.”

Victoria reexamined the table, the tavern, and the marketplace, taking mental snapshots and storing them. She took in the entire restaurant with a full pan of her head, noticing everything from the tessellated patterns on the floor to the number of chandeliers to the color of the bartender's facial hair. She closed her eyes. “Shoot.”

“What color is the overhead awning?”

“Green,” she said with confidence.

“What's on the wall opposite you?”

“An oil painting of a young peasant boy.”

“Good,” Austin said. “Last question. Ready?”

“Yes.”

His voice fell to a faint whisper as the bells stopped pealing. “Who are the men at the table to your left, and why do they keep listening to us?”

Victoria's eyelids fluttered; she could no longer force them to stay closed. She casually peeked to the side and observed two surly-looking hoodlums swigging ale. They set their drinks on the table and stared indiscreetly at Austin and Victoria, not caring to avert their attention despite having locked eyes.

Austin let the realization sink in before adding, “Two more at the bar, far side of the tavern. They've been watching us and every other patron since we arrived.”

“Probably Deeb's goons,” Victoria surmised, watching foam trickle over the lips of the men's steins. “They look like real tough customers.”

“I'll say.”

“You think they're on to us?”

“Undoubtedly. Two minutes ago I saw them signaling to each other and shooting glances at their boss, who's looked this way more than once. You said we're safe as long as we can leave the tavern without any tails. Losing these guys may be a different ball game.”

Victoria thought fast. “I have an idea.”

She caught the waiter's attention and flagged him down. He smiled and sped to their tableside with his notepad. “Decided you'd like a bite to eat after all?”

“Nothing to eat,” Victoria replied. “But we could use your help.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Please speak quietly. The gentlemen behind you, and several others, are listening.”

His elbow jerked back. “Why? Who? Are you sure?”

“One hundred percent,” Victoria said. “We don't appreciate the attention. We're ready to pay and leave, and we don't want them following us out.”

“What can I do?” the waiter asked.

“Bring out a tray or platter from the kitchen. Fill it with silverware and dishes. Act like you're in a hurry, then trip over a leg of their chair and drop the tray. Make lots of noise.”

“I'll be reprimanded!”

“Shhh. Softly, please.”

“Have you thought about calling the police?”

“They haven't committed any crimes.”

The waiter shook his head. “I can't do this.”

Victoria slipped him one of the hundred-euro bills she'd acquired at the train station's exchange booth. Bribes had been effective thus far.

“We can't get out of here without your help,” she said.

The waiter looked torn, but he accepted the bill and groaned. “If I'm fired for this, a hundred euros won't make a difference.”

“We'll explain the situation to your manager later. We think these men are dangerous.”

The waiter vanished into the kitchen and returned with a tray of forks, spoons, knives, and stacked ceramic plates. He also carried several full glasses of water. At a brisk pace, he headed straight for Deeb's men and snagged his foot on a stool. The tray went down with a raucous clatter. Heaps of utensils went flying, rattling and clinking against shattered ceramic. Kitchenware spilled over the table, and the glasses drenched the patrons in water. The waiter went sprawling onto the floor.

“Watch where you're going, hammerhead!” one of Deeb's bodyguards snarled.

Farzad Deeb shoved his chair aside and stood straight as a ramrod, jarred by the disturbance. The tourists kept chattering. Briefcase still pinched between his legs, Vasya surveyed the fallen waiter and the trail of broken dishware. The waiter clambered to his feet, uttering a stream of apologies as he collected shards from the ground. One of the tourists lent a hand.

Vasya gritted his teeth. Deeb cast a scornful look at his men, who shrugged back at him as he motioned to the set of empty chairs that had been occupied by Austin and Victoria.

 

TWENTY-THREE

Rove still remembered his first plunge into that murky oblivion. He'd been fifteen. Since watching police divers scour the bottom of that lake for his father's body, he'd been petrified of all things aquatic, but was forced to confront his fear after relocating to Texas. He'd been asked to help at his uncle's scuba shop and take lessons in preparation for becoming an assistant scuba instructor. His first night dive had been a terrifying encounter with the dark. Little could be as eerie as feeling one's body suspended in a void, he'd thought, or wondering what predators lurked outside the light beam. His mind had built a fragile fort, looped a soundtrack of rational mantras—
I'm okay, there's nothing to be afraid of, it'll be over soon
. But every sound or ripple or brush of seaweed had crumbled the fort, turning the mantras into wails. Only time and experience had pacified his nerves and reined in the frightful images that would unreel on the backs of his closed eyelids. He'd later come to thrive on the exhilaration of viewing the nocturnal world, where corals bloomed and reefs came alive with a different cast of characters.

Years in the Coast Guard and Air Force had further worked to dispel his phobia. There had always been distractions—namely the mission at hand—to stand in the way of his apprehension. He would simply put the regulator in his mouth and dive.

He was lugging the severed fire hose onto the balcony of his suite. Standing at the ledge, he tied one end to a firm, steel beam and let go of the spool. The coil spun downward and splashed into the water stories below.

He unzipped his equipment bag and stripped off his clothes. The yellow toucan on Rove's deltoid smiled in the mirror, an unsettling reminder of his last experience behind enemy lines. In the late nineties, his squadron had begun establishing a series of clandestine weather observation networks throughout Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. The networks were leveraged in operations to suppress violence originating in Cali and Medellín, where rival drug cartels had earned the enmity of the Colombian and U.S. government by gunning down high-ranking police officers and ministers of justice. As a combat weatherman, Rove had been attached to Navy SEAL Team Four. He was to collect environmental intelligence from forward deployed locations.

He had been shot and captured during a route-forecasting mission in the Andes jungle. Mercenaries had taken their prisoner to the inner chambers of an underground production plant, where he had been drugged, bound, gagged, beaten, and tortured for hours. They had fractured his legs and inflicted lacerations, cauterizing the wounds with a blowtorch. He still wore scars on his chest and legs, along with the tattoo they had given him. It was the smiling toucan, two inches square, emblazoned in red and yellow on his shoulder.

“You're a quiet man,” his tormenter had said. “Don't say much. But the toucan craves attention. He will give you color in death. The devil will find you and know you died in Colombia—more toucans than any country on his earth. The bird will be your pet in hell.”

He'd been battered into unconsciousness by the time the SEALs had infiltrated the plant and rescued him. He was rushed to the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras for emergency care. Fractures healing in his left tibia had left him limping for years.

Rove donned his wetsuit, covering the bird. He was not about to be captured again. He fastened the jacket of his buoyancy compensator after affixing a tank he'd refilled at the last port, and he slipped a rubber mask and snorkel around his neck. He considered bringing a speargun—ship security had given him a hard time over it, and still he hadn't used it—but he couldn't foresee needing the weapon. Instead he strapped a knife to his ankle. Clasping his fins against his chest, he grabbed hold of the fire hose and began a slow descent, struggling to counterbalance the weight of his air tank without banging too loudly against the hull. At such heights, letting go of the hose prematurely would mean death, given the heavy gear attached to his body. He trusted the canvas wouldn't tear. He also knew descending was only the half of it. Later he'd have to climb up, though he intended to lose the cumbersome tank beforehand.

His biceps burned in protest with every inch of the climb, and as the feeling spread to his shoulders, he realized how glad he was to have stayed true to his fitness routine. With the full force of the wind astern of him, he held fast.

A cool wave washed over his aching muscles when he entered the water. These waters were meant for a dry suit, not a wetsuit; he would soon become hypothermic. He purged his regulator a few seconds, then began to breathe through the mouthpiece, his lungs taking in a full load of air. He placed the mask over his forehead and strapped the fins to his feet. Before he submerged, the last he saw of the world above was the silhouette of the
Pearl Enchantress
hiding the stars.

He cracked a glow stick, illuminating a tight radius, and descended toward the ship's keel.

Every few seconds he'd glimpse a darting fish. A conger eel slinked its body past him, exposing a row of snaggle-teeth, its beady eyes measuring him for a meal. A pattern of leafy green and black would disguise its skin in any reef. Rove held its glance. Finding nothing worthy, the eel slithered away.

Keeping an eye on his pressure gauge, Rove released a gradual stream of bubbles from his BC and descended another ten feet. He fluttered his fins, propelling himself horizontally at constant depth.

A phrase in the Viking's letter played in his head.
We will not threaten your lives individually.
Rove puzzled over the sentence. What did it mean? No individual would be singled out, but passengers as a whole would be threatened? There was one conceivable way the hijackers could imperil thousands at once, and Rove needed answers. He glided along the ship's hull, the glow stick casting a ghostly penumbra against the steel plates, and he steepened his angle once more to leave the shallow depths. With every exhale, a swarm of bubbles engulfed him. He hoped none of the hijackers stood guard on any weather decks, lest they spy the bubbles at the surface. He took shorter, less frequent breaths.

A Portuguese dogfish sauntered within his stick's scope, followed by a fanged, fork-tailed creature with luminescent organs. A cod fluttered by. Visibility didn't compare to Cayman waters in this unfamiliar dominion; darkness covered all. With poor range, he could hardly tell up from down, nor did he have the usual tug of gravity to orient him. After a while, water began seeping into his mask. He tilted his head back and lifted the mask slightly, blowing a steady stream from his nostrils to expel the leakage.

He coasted clockwise around the ship. Minutes passed like hours without turning up anything anomalous. The hull had no hidden crevices; he'd assumed the hunt would be easy, but his confidence began to wane, and he worried he'd wasted an air tank looking for something that wasn't there.

A current swept his knees sideways. Something thumped against the hull. The sound had been quick and dull, like a grunt. He whirled around, waving the glow stick, his left hand gravitating toward the knife at his ankle. He didn't unclasp it, but he was ready to. He swam on with more determined vigilance, wishing he'd brought the speargun.

Hovering along the hull of the
Pearl Enchantress
made him feel like he was gliding over a barren seafloor, no carnival of marine life to admire, just a smooth, gray surface and endless stretch of wall. He plunged deeper yet, level with the upper keel, and drifted between two propeller blades. Over eighteen feet in diameter, the propellers had once whipped a force that could move megatons. Now they lay dormant.

Thoroughly he searched every blade. Nothing there. He checked his air gauge and figured he had twenty minutes to spare. He hadn't descended below thirty feet and wouldn't need much time to decompress. With an extra cylinder in tow, he had a few good breaths before he would be forced to surface. He ascended on the port side and resumed his examination of the hull, his light guiding the way. Occasional gold shimmers floated by his mask, reflections of plankton, debris, and other particles.