Angel of Destruction

by Christopher Nicole

  Jerry got his head back from over the rail. ‘Anna,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve puked all over the deck down there.’

  ‘It’ll wash off. How do you feel?’

  ‘A little better. I . . . oh, Jesus Christ!’ His head was back over the rail.

  She realized that he was one of those people for whom seasickness was no joke, but a potentially serious medical condition. She reduced speed and engaged the autopilot. ‘You have to lie down. Come along, and I’ll help you down the ladder.’

  ‘Anna! I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Forget it. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I feel such a no-no.’

  ‘I said, it’s not your fault. It’s probably something to do with your inner ear, your sense of balance, which gets thrown off by the motion. But how come they let you into the Navy? In fact, how come you survived?’

  ‘I was always sick as a dog the first couple of days. But so was that English guy, Nelson. And he won a couple of battles, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. Now, we’re going down together. All I want you to do is grit your teeth and hang on to the rail. Come along.’

  She went first, facing the rungs and also gripping the rail on both sides, waited for him to start, his back against her front. She supposed they would look like a pair of vaudeville comedians to any casual onlooker. But a few moments later they were on the deck, by when she felt quite exhausted.

  She supported him through the doorway into the saloon and stretched him on one of the settee berths. ‘Just lie here.’

  ‘Anna . . .’

  ‘I know.’ She went into the galley, found a bowl and a packet of salt biscuits. These she placed in his arms. ‘Try nibbling; it may help.’ She went below and fetched a blanket. It was a warm afternoon, but she knew that severe seasickness could act like a shock and lower the body temperature dramatically. Carefully she spread the blanket over him.

  ‘Anna! What are you going to do?’

  ‘What needs to be done.’

  INCIDENT AT SEA

  Anna checked his revolver to make sure it was loaded; there was a cartridge in each of the six chambers. She tucked it into her waistband, then picked up her Walther and the spare magazine and carried them all up to the bridge, laying them on the facia beside the instruments. The fishing boat had now gained a couple of miles, but she seated herself, switched off the autopilot, made sure her bandanna was firmly on her head, and opened up to her maximum fifteen knots, sending the boat creaming through the low swell, the white wake spreading behind her.

  Soon she could make out the fishing boat clearly with the naked eye, although at this distance there was no telling what was happening on board her, whether, in fact, they had even noticed they were being followed. Her advantage was that they could not possibly know who it was behind them. Her disadvantage was that without Jerry, and with no knowledge as to their intentions, she was going to have to play this entirely by ear. But she had had to do that often enough in the past.

  Four miles, she estimated. She switched on the autopilot and went down the ladder. Jerry’s eyes were closed, and he was breathing stertorously, the bowl clutched in his arms; he had been sick again, at least once. She reckoned he might not recover until they regained the dock.

  She picked up the loud hailer, and returned to the bridge. Three miles, she reckoned. And they had noticed her! Through the glasses she could make out someone standing in the stern; from the amount of black hair flowing in the wind she guessed it was the woman. But the fishing boat was continuing towards the cay, now less than twenty miles off. That was still far enough to make it impossible for anyone over there to work out what was happening out here, and now, realizing that she had to be overtaken, the fishing boat was slowing.

  Anna closed up to within fifty yards. ‘Do you need assistance?’ she asked through the trumpet.

  ‘Why should we need assistance?’ the woman called back.

  It was time to stir the pot. Anna untied her bandanna, and let it drop to the bridge deck; her hair tumbled down her back and immediately streamed in the wind. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, ‘I am Anna Fehrbach, Countess von Widerstand. Were you looking for me?’

  The woman stared at her, then shouted, ‘Paolo! It’s her! It’s the bitch! And she’s alone! We can do it now!’

  The fishing boat’s engine slipped into neutral, and the man emerged from the wheelhouse, carrying a shotgun. The woman had also produced a pistol, but Anna had already levelled the revolver. She had never fired anything quite this heavy before, so she held it in both hands, but even so her first shot missed, a very unusual experience for her.

  Her second shot found its target, and the woman uttered a shriek and fell. The man had fired, but Fair Girl was still moving forward, and only a couple of the buckshot hit the hull. Anna emptied the remaining chambers and he went down in a welter of blood.

  Fair Girl was now in front of the stopped fisherman, moving slowly through the water. Anna put her into neutral, thrust the Walther into her pants pocket and slid down the ladder. Jerry was on his feet, hanging on to the cabin doorway. ‘Anna!’

  ‘Go back to bed,’ she recommended. ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘But . . .’

  She ignored him, selected a coil of rope and carried it forward to make fast to her anchor winch, then surveyed the fishing boat. There was no movement, but with both her engines and that of the fisherman muted she could hear a cry. ‘Paolo! For God’s sake help me. I’m hit! I’m dying!’

  ‘Just coming,’ Anna called, moving up and down the side deck to drape fenders over the rail. Jerry was still watching her, unable to move, it appeared.

  ‘Those people,’ he panted.

  ‘I don’t think they were friendly.’ Satisfied, she climbed back up to the bridge, engaged gear, and turned the boat, carefully manoeuvring it alongside the fisherman. When the two vessels were bumping together, she returned to neutral, slid down the ladder, ran forward to pick up the end of the warp, and scrambled across the two rails, drawing her pistol as she did so, the rope held in her left hand.

  But there was no opposition. The woman lay against the engine cowling, still breathing, but bleeding profusely from the wound in her chest; her male companion was lying dead in the wheelhouse doorway, both he and the woodwork shattered by the point four-five bullets fired at such close range. Anna pocketed the pistol, made the warp fast so that the two boats could not drift apart, then stooped beside the woman, nose wrinkling at the stench of fish that pervaded everywhere.

  The woman opened her eyes and blinked at her; blood bubbled from her mouth.

  ‘Who sent you?’ Anna asked.

  Her lip curled.

  ‘I could make dying easier,’ Anna suggested.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she said, and the bubbling ceased.

  Anna regarded her for several seconds, then sighed and stood up. She did not think there would be any point in searching the body, as she was still wearing stretch pants and a loose shirt there was not a lot of room to conceal anything. She stepped over the dead man into the wheelhouse; there was no cabin. But she quickly saw what she wanted, a carryall lying against the bulkhead. This she opened. There was a purse, with a couple of hundred dollars in it, an open return ticket to Miami, and a latch key.

  In the bottom of the bag there was a passport. Anna opened it. The name was Lorna Strezzi, and it had been issued in Chicago. Which could be interesting, she thought. But it could also be meaningless; she possessed four passports, a German one in the name of Anna Fehrbach, Countess von Widerstand, which actually was out of date, a valid British one in the name of Anna Fitzjohn, a valid Irish one in the name of Anna O’Brien, and a valid American one in the name of Anna O’Donovan!

  But beneath the passport, there was a photograph. It depicted a beautiful twenty-year-old girl with long blonde hair fluttering out from beneath her fur hat and down the back of her fur coat. Oh, to be twenty again, she thought. But . . . apart from the fact that she was wearing fur
, she was standing in front of St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square. The day she and Birgit and Marlene Gehrig had been taken to visit Lenin’s tomb! Suddenly her memory came flooding back. The man had said, ‘Excuse me, comrade,’ and she had turned without thinking, to gaze into the lens of the camera. At the time she had thought nothing of it; she knew the effect her striking looks could have on men, and if one happened to have a camera . . .

  But for it to turn up here, in a bag belonging to an apparently American assassin . . . and it had obviously been around; the edges were dog-eared and even torn in a couple of places. But at least she could form some idea as to where this woman had been coming from. What she needed to find out, urgently, was how Moscow had located her. She replaced it and the passport in the carryall and took it outside.

  ‘Anna!’ Jerry was seated on one of the deck lockers. He still looked awful, but he would have to do something.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘get up on to the bridge, use the binoculars, and sweep the horizon. I need to know if there is any other boat out there.’

  ‘Right.’ Slowly, uncertainly, he climbed the ladder, while she wondered if he was going to fall back to the deck and lay himself out completely. But he made it, sat on the steering bench, and levelled the glasses. ‘Take your time,’ she told him.

  She had already determined that there were only two ways to handle this, in view of the fact that both the bodies had bullet holes. The preferred way was to have them, and their boat, disappear without trace, which would set their employers back a few days while they tried to find out what had happened. But if there was any other boat in the vicinity, there would have to be a fire, which she would have sighted and gone to see if she could help, unavailingly. But if there were to be any witnesses, even at a distance – she had to allow for the possibility that a fire might be spotted by someone on one of the cays – she would have to report it, and while she knew they were in several hundred fathoms of water out here and thus it was very unlikely that the wreckage would ever be located, there would inevitably be interviews, and publicity, and even her picture in the Guardian, all of which she did not want to happen.

  ‘There’s nothing in sight,’ Jerry said. ‘Save for those islands over there.’

  ‘They’re ten miles off,’ Anna said. ‘I doubt that anyone over there can even see two small boats out here, unless their attention is drawn to them. Thank you, Jerry.’

  ‘What are you going to do about those stiffs?’

  ‘Bury them.’

  *

  Leaving Jerry gaping at her, Anna returned to the wheelhouse and switched off the engine. Then she moved Lorna Strezzi’s body, and lifted the lid of the engine box. It was extremely mucky in there, and she grimaced; she had intended to use the heavy Colt cartridges to blow a hole in the bottom of the boat, but having emptied the revolver that was no longer an option. But she could not afford to have anything suspicious about her clothes. ‘Come to the rail, Jerry,’ she commanded. ‘And take these.’

  ‘Eh?’ He arrived on the afterdeck in time to receive her shirt and slacks, then her shoes, and lastly her knickers, staring at her in a mixture of admiration and apprehension, as he clearly had no idea what she intended to do next. She also handed him the carryall.

  ‘Put that in a safe place. Now pass me the bandanna,’ she commanded, ‘and if you will look in the starboard seat locker, you will find a hatchet. I need that as well.’

  He found the little axe and handed it across the rails. She laid it down and tied up her hair, returned to the wheelhouse, and dragged the man’s body inside. Then she dragged the woman away from the engine box before laying her beside her companion and closing and locking the door. She could not chance a couple of bullet-ridden bodies floating about and being found before the sharks got to them.

  Jerry watched her open-mouthed. The sight of a naked Anna at work seemed to have entirely cured his seasickness; she wondered if there was something in that for medical science to use.

  Satisfied with the situation on deck, she carefully climbed into the box. Several parts of the engine were still hot, and there were sharp edges which also had to be avoided, although the principal hazard, as she had seen, was the amount of oil and grease and sheer filth that coated every surface.

  She felt her way beneath the engine mounting, into the bilge, which was even more noisome than the rest of the space, and was covered with a film of evil-smelling water. She knew there had to be a seacock somewhere, but finding it might take time, and she wanted to get rid of the evidence of what had happened as rapidly as possible.

  There was no room to swing the hatchet properly, so she knelt in the water and delivered a series of short blows on the hull, aiming always at the same place, scattering oily water to either side and over herself. As she had expected from the general appearance of the boat, the wood was fairly soft, but it still took her twelve blows to open a seam. Once she was through, however, two more blows had water gushing in. In seconds she was up to her thighs.

  She climbed back on to the already sloping deck, handed Jerry the axe while he regarded her as if she were a sea monster. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’m a filthy mess.’

  She hurried forward, untied the warp, pulled the two boats together, and scrambled over the rail, plucking the forward boathook from its rack. ‘There’s another hook aft,’ she called. ‘Push us away.’

  He obeyed, and they opened a gap of several feet from the slowly sinking fishing boat. Anna had never seen a boat sink before – when she had been torpedoed in the Baltic in 1944, it had been too dark to see properly what was happening – and she watched in fascinated horror as its decks slowly became awash, and then suddenly it went down with a whoosh, leaving behind only a seethe of disturbed water in which the Chris-Craft bobbed violently. As affected as ever by the many other traumatic events of her life, she replaced the boathook and went aft. Jerry had again sunk on to one of the seat lockers. Anna stowed the axe. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘A little better. But Anna . . . those two guys—’

  ‘Had come to kill me. And you, even if they didn’t yet know you were on board.’

  ‘The way you do things, so unemotionally, so methodically . . .’

  Unemotionally, she thought; if you only knew. ‘I’ve had a lot of practice.’

  ‘At killing people, and sinking boats?’

  ‘At staying alive.’

  She used a rag to wipe the oil and grease from her hands and feet, then went below and stood in her shower. The bandanna hadn’t been very efficient at protecting her hair, so she washed that as well. Getting herself clean took half an hour; when she finally emerged, he was sitting on the bunk watching her. ‘What do we do now?’

  Anna looked at her watch. ‘Ten past one. Feel like lunch? There’s food in the fridge.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Anna. I couldn’t eat a thing.’

  ‘Hm.’ But she wasn’t all that hungry herself. She opened the fridge, took out a cold beer, and went on deck. The fishing boat had entirely disappeared. There were a few scraps of flotsam which could probably be identified, but would only add to the mystery of what had happened to her. ‘Well, then, we’d better go back to Nassau.’

  He had followed her on deck. ‘But what do we tell people?’

  ‘We don’t tell people anything. You wanted to see what my boat was like, so I took you for a spin. You felt seasick, so we packed it in. We did not see any other boats. Remember that.’

  ‘But that black chap you spoke to as we left . . .’

  ‘He works for me.’

  ‘And he’ll believe what you tell him?’

  Anna returned to the cabin and got dressed. ‘He will believe that I took you off to some secluded bay for a quiet fuck.’

  She climbed on to the bridge and sat at the controls. Jerry joined her. ‘You staying in Nassau?’

  ‘No. I’m returning to the cay immediately.’

  ‘Hell, I was looking forward to, well, spending some time together. We didn�
�t have much time in Brazil.’

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ she agreed. ‘But maybe things will work out later on. What I want you to do right now is get back to Joe as quickly as possible. You’ll take the passport and the photo; I want this woman identified, I need to know who she works for, and I need to know how she or they got hold of the photo. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ he agreed, somewhat gloomily.

  ‘Then, in four days’ time, I want someone to come and live on the cay.’ Clive had been here three days, and he had come for a week; once he left, she wanted to get the Argentina job over as rapidly as possible.

  ‘With you? Right.’ Enthusiasm flooded back. ‘It’ll be me.’

  ‘I think I’ll need more than just you.’

  ‘Hey, wait a minute. Just because I got seasick?’

  ‘No, Jerry. Because I think what I need is round-the-clock protection.’

  ‘You need round-the-clock protection? There’s a laugh. You reckon this woman’s employers may come looking for her? Will they know where to look?’

  ‘Yes. They must have sent her to the Bahamas in the first place.’

  ‘Yeah, but will they know where to look in the Bahamas?’

  ‘Jerry, I would say that she’s a professional. She started asking questions two days ago, and decided to act on her info today. I would say that also was on instructions from the top. That almost certainly means that she contacted her boss, probably yesterday, and received instructions from him to check the cay out. That means he now knows the name of the cay.’

  ‘And thought she could take you and the cay with just one back-up? He’s gotta be a nut.’

  ‘She wasn’t there to take me out. All she was supposed to do was reconnoitre the cay. But when they saw me, close up and apparently alone on my boat, they decided the opportunity was too good to miss. They said so.’

  ‘Well, I guess everybody makes mistakes. So how’s her boss gonna find out what happened to her?’