Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (35 page)

Chapter Forty-three

By morning the levanter
had stilled. The new wind, from the southwest, was dry and sweet and the weather clear.

Ty was surprised to find breakfast being served, as usual, outside on bridge deck, although he observed that even there they remained under a discreet yet heavy guard. Six men, including the breacher, had disembarked with Philip from the chopper the night before. Ty identified four of them, hiding in nearby shadows.

“I'm sorry for that misunderstanding last night,” Philip said over a single poached egg.

“What misunderstanding?” Isabella asked.

“Actually, I was speaking to Ty,” Philip said. “One of the security men entered his room without knocking and caught him—”

“Buck naked,” Ty interrupted.

“I hope you didn't get him too excited,” Isabella teased.

“No chance of that,” Philip sniffed. “They're not that sort.”

“Well, I hope he didn't have a camera,” Isabella continued. “People post pictures of naked movie stars on the Internet, you know. Or so I've been told.”

“They do more than that,” Ty said. “They'll attach your face to entirely different bodies.”

“What an elegant subject of conversation,” Philip said. “It's too bad I have to run.”

“Before you go, would you mind putting us in the picture a little bit more?” Isabella asked resolutely. “How long is our leash?”

Philip stopped in his tracks, hesitated, gave a thin smile, and said, “You are not on a leash, darling. You're free to go anywhere and do anything you like. The men are here for your safety. In my judgment it would be imprudent to expose yourself to unnecessary danger, certainly before we leave port. Perhaps your own assumption is correct and there's none lurking. But it would be rash to discount the possibility that there is. If Ian
was
murdered, then as I said last night, there is at least one murderer on the loose.”

“Do the men know all this?”

“Yes,” Philip snapped, but at once recovered himself. “Isabella, please, I beg you, I love you, please indulge my paranoia for one more day.”

She gave a solitary laugh. “As long as you realize that's what it is,” she replied.

“I do, and that's all I ask. Ty's free to go, if that's what he really wants to do.”

“I wouldn't dream of abandoning Isabella,” Ty shot back immediately, “at least until things here are on their way back to normal. She needs someone around, if only to make the time go by.”

Isabella smiled.

“You're too good to be true, Ty Hunter,” Philip said, barely concealing his sarcasm.

As the EC130 prepared to lift off, Isabella turned toward Ty and asked, “Why didn't you go?”

“It was a bluff.”

“Are you certain?”

“Certain enough not to have risked it,” Ty told her. “If I'd forced him to play his hand, he would have done so. It would have been six armed men plus Jean-François and whomever else he's co-opted against a single unarmed one, very likely with you as a hostage.”

“He said he'd told the men—”

“I heard that. If it's true, why do they look so ready to use their weapons should we get out of line?”

Isabella frowned. “I'm going to test one of them.”

“Don't! That's the last thing you want to do. Right now let's go back to the deck just as we would after breakfast on any other day. I meant what I said seriously. I'm going to bore you senseless with my stories and want you to do the same to me until—”

“Until . . . ?”

“Until I've figured out who is where,” Ty said, “and how to eliminate them.”

“You're full of surprises,” she told him.

“Try not to show your fear.”

“That shouldn't be difficult. I'm so frightened I'm numb.”

“Never mind,” he told her as the chopper rose and its shield of noise slowly dissolved into the deceptively innocuous quiet of a high summer morning.

After an hour Ty thought he had a good idea of the four guards' mission and routine, which was clearly to corral the couple on bridge deck even as they appeared to keep their distance.

“I think I'll go for a walk,” he said.

“You'll have followers,” Isabella whispered.

“Care to join me?”

“In fact, I think I would,” she replied, without conviction. “A walk sounds nice.”

“Let's keep to the starboard deck,” Ty said, slowing his speech and focusing on Isabella just enough to emphasize that this was an essential part of his plan.

They had advanced only a short distance when they spied one of the Slavs at the entrance to the wheelhouse, feigning nonchalance but nonetheless, Ty noticed, poised to spring into whatever action might be required.

Stopping amidships, Ty quickly put his arm around Isabella, resting his left palm on her bare shoulder, turning her toward shore as if in the distance, perhaps hidden in a valley of the Atlas Mountains, there was something that demanded her attention. “I'm going to kiss you,” he said.

“Do I have a choice?”

“You could fight me off, but after what happened in Marbella, Ty Hunter breaking up in public is a stale story. Don't you want me to kiss you?”

She didn't reply immediately. “What woman wouldn't? Is that what you're thinking?”

Ty drew her toward him, lowered his hands to the center of her back and, feeling the fullness of her breasts against his chest, brushed her lips with his. “Now, once more with feeling,” he said, then kissed her deeply. It was his best screen kiss and had about it the air of something he'd done many times before, which bothered Isabella.

“Very nice,” she said, as though she were his director.

Ty permitted himself a grin, but before he could respond saw Jean-François approach with the Slav who had been stationed by the wheelhouse door. “I'm sorry to disturb you,” said Jean-François, making no effort to disguise the disapproval in his voice, “but we've had word—”

“Word?” Isabella demanded. “About what, from whom?”

“Our sources,” Jean-François explained, with a twinkle in his eye that suggested this was as far as he was willing to go. “Until we can be absolutely certain that there is no threat to you, it would be better if you remained belowdecks.”

“Thank you for your opinion,” Isabella said, “but it's a sunny day and I would prefer not to spend it inside.”

“It would be better if you did, Miss Cavill,” Jean-François insisted, glancing at the Slav, whose right hand had by now settled into the side pocket of his tight black trousers.

“Philip made it clear that I was free to do as I wished.”

“Mr. Frost may have been operating under a different, now false, set of assumptions,” Jean-François replied.

“Last time I checked, the lines of authority around here ran from me to the captain to you, not the other way around.”

“These are special circumstances,” Jean-François declared, shaking his head in disgust, as though the embrace he'd happened upon had not only confirmed his expectations but provided him serendipitous leverage.

“Get out of our way,” Ty demanded.

But Jean-François stood his ground.

“If there
is
danger, call the police,” Ty insisted.

“We are better equipped to face down whatever threat exists than they are. Police are the same, all over the world. They do their job only after the fact. Now, for your own good, please follow my friend.”

“We're not going anywhere,” Ty said.

“Only to your staterooms,” pressed Jean-François, “for your own safety.”

“No,” Isabella said flatly, as adamant in her refusal as Ty.

Jean-François's use of the plural had at once rung in both their ears. Clearly his intention was to separate them, hold each incommunicado for however long it took Philip to execute his plan. Later, Ty supposed, Philip could make a show of blaming Jean-François, perhaps encourage Isabella to discharge him, but by then it would be too late. The warheads would have been transferred. They knew that their strength, probably their only hope, lay in remaining together.

Again Jean-François gestured to the compact Slav, then showed them a smile ripe with confidence.

“Are you going to shoot us?” Ty inquired.

Jean-François made no reply.

“Right here, in front of so many paparazzi?” Ty continued.

Jean-François smirked. It was his most natural expression, Ty thought. “I don't see any paparazzi,” Jean-François said.

“That's because they're doing their job. They're good at it. You have to give them that much credit. They lurk. They wait. Only when they've snapped their shutters do you sometimes see the telephoto lenses.”

“It is a very nice bluff,” Jean François countered, “but I have my instructions.”

“Yes, I forgot. You're to keep us safe.”

“That's right, if possible.”

“Suppose we jump.”

“There's a man in the water to assist you.”

“He's not bothered by the sharks?”

“There are no sharks in these waters.”

“You're not handing us that old canard,” Isabella said, “about sharks being functionally extinct in the Med? What if a stray bull's lost his way from the Atlantic?”

Jean-François considered the question as the Slav drew closer.

Ty moved farther away from Jean-François and his enforcer. “Man overboard!” he called out suddenly.

Reflexively, Jean-François turned. He had no sooner begun to turn back than Ty was coming at him. Ty delivered a thrusting front kick to the steward's stomach, knocking him onto the deck. “Grab his gun,” Ty ordered Isabella before the Slav could reach it. But for an instant, shocked by the abrupt violence, she froze. Then, trembling, remaining as far back as she could from Jean-François, she bent to collect the weapon. It was centimeters from her fingertips when she felt the pressure of the Slav's coarse hand on the back of her neck.

“Drop it,” he commanded. His voice was guttural, his English uncertain.

Isabella hesitated, then slowly stood in compliance. The Slav motioned her toward the stern. His SIG Sauer withdrawn and unlocked but held out of view, he stepped with caution around Jean-François, then marched them in single file, with Ty in front and his own pistol in Isabella's back.

In the distance, along the cabin wall, Isabella espied one of the chrome emergency buttons that were spaced at crucial intervals about
Surpass.
This morning's brilliant sunlight danced upon its surface, which was etched with a stylized silhouette of a human figure adrift upon the sea. As the Slav forced their retreat at a steady, cautious pace, Isabella prayed her abductor had not spotted it as well. Only a few steps more, she told herself, edging closer to the cabin wall. As she came alongside the button, she let her right ankle twist suddenly, then broke her fall with her hand, allowing her an instant to depress the
OVERBOARD
button. At once a siren wailed and was quickly followed by the dash of several members of the crew toward the starboard side of bridge deck. Behind them three Slavs kept watch.

The sudden alarm and frantic maneuvers disoriented their captor, as did the approach of small boat traffic. But his hand retained a firm grip on his pistol. To stall for time, Isabella drew a deep, exaggerated breath as she recovered herself, then struggled to stand. Perhaps Ty had been right about the paparazzi lurking over the horizon, she thought. He was used to them. She wasn't. Regardless, theirs were not the only craft now closing in on
Surpass.
The enlarging flotilla included pleasure boats of curiosity seekers, local fishing rigs and a few commercial transports, all lured by the enticing siren with its intimation of trouble aboard the magical yacht that for days had dominated the harbor and transfixed them. In the distance a shriller siren intensified. Soon Ty could make out a police boat racing toward them.

The Slav was growing frantic, Ty thought, as he helped Isabella resume her stride and then, with lightning speed, pressed her against the cabin wall and turned to face the Slav directly. He quickly assumed the
juchum seogi,
the Horse Riding Stance he had learned from tae kwon do
,
drew in his feet and bottom, let his knees drift sideways until they were over his toes, and tightened his core muscles. In the next instant he raised his hands, crossing them before his face. Then, as the Slav raised his pistol, Ty delivered a percussive hand strike to the man's wrist, dislodging his weapon. Before the Slav could retrieve it, Ty managed a dynamic front kick, a
mae geri,
to the man's groin, followed by a
harai goshi,
a sweeping hip throw, that landed the Slav squarely on the deck. After the Slav rebounded but before he was fully upright, Ty seized his upper arms and managed a
morote seoi nage,
a two-arm shoulder throw that landed him, with a splash, in the Mediterranean.

“As I said, you're a man of surprises,” Isabella told Ty as he gathered her to him.

“Let's go,” he said.

“Go where?”

“Ashore.”

“Follow me,” Isabella said, leading him urgently up the stairs to the owner's deck before the conquered Slav's comrades could reach them.

Crispin was there, standing to starboard and looking, with a mystified expression, toward the sea. “What's going on?” he asked. “How many men are overboard?”

“Only one,” Ty answered, revealing the silenced SIG Sauer he had appropriated from the Slav.

“How did it happen? He couldn't have slipped and gone over the guardrail.”

“I threw him,” Ty said.

Crispin did not immediately reply. Instead he regarded the pistol in Ty's right hand. Eventually, in a soft, wary voice, he said, “There'll be no need for that.”

“That's good, because I like you,” Ty told him, after a few seconds allowing himself the hint of a smile.