"She stumbled over a trip wire, huh?"
"Big time. There's only one person in the chain of command higher than her boss's boss."
"Jesus, Finn. Are you telling me — "
"Don't even say it out loud. But yes. So the fix is in that high up."
"Does that mean the person we're not mentioning is part of this?"
"Maybe, but not necessarily. It could be that someone conned him into quashing the request without telling him why. These are politicians, remember?"
"Yeah, but…" Mary sat there, frowning and shaking her head.
"Enough about that for now. We need to figure out what to do about the tracker on Island Girl. We can't use her if they're tracking her and keeping her under surveillance."
"Okay, but there are two things that come before that. I hate this place. We need to get out of here. If we can't use the boat, let's find somewhere else."
"All right. That's one thing. What's the other?"
"I've missed you," she said, swinging her legs over mine and wrapping her arms around my neck. "I've got the room for another couple of hours. May as well use it. Seize the moment, as the saying goes. Who knows when we'll get another chance?"
23
Mary Beth and I were staying in a tourist hotel in Cane Garden Bay. It wasn't fancy, but it was a lot nicer than the Fiddler's Green in St. Thomas. I didn't want to leave her there, but I figured I should put in an appearance at Island Girl for the benefit of Kelley's surveillance team. Since Kelley was looking for Mary, we figured it would be best if I went alone.
The snorkel excursion boat I left on earlier in the day returned to Soper's Hole over an hour ago. The poster at the boat's ticket booth advertised two shore-side stops — one for lunch, and another for sundowners at a beach bar near Nanny Cay. The poster said the trip back from Nanny Cay was optional, and I didn't pay for that, just in case somebody was asking questions about me.
It was early evening when I ambled down the dock in Soper's Hole, pretending to be a little drunk. My bag of snorkel gear was slung over my shoulder, so if Kelley's people were watching, they'd figure I stayed behind at the beach bar in Nanny Cay for dinner. That assumed they noticed I didn't come back with the snorkel boat. I might have been giving them more credit than they deserved.
Island Girl was as I left her. I didn't fix the broken lock, but nobody went aboard in my absence. I left a piece of thread on the companionway sliding hatch cover's track. It was undisturbed.
I was anxious about my laptop computer. Reluctantly, I left it aboard when I went snorkeling. I didn't want to snorkel with a dry bag big enough to hold the computer; that would have been too noticeable. The computer's hard drive was encrypted, but there was stuff on it that wouldn't be easy to replace. I left it under the cushions in the V-berth — not a great hiding place, but better than the drawer at the chart table where I usually kept it. It was a relief to find it nestled under those cushions.
There was nothing else aboard that I would miss, except my stash of passports and cash. Those were in a steel box on top of the ballast casting in the keel. The box and the laptop were the reasons I came back.
The box was concealed under a half-inch-thick layer of fiberglass in the bilge. No one would find it if they didn't know it was there. Access required using a power saw to cut the bottom out of the bilge sump.
That made too much noise for me to do it in the marina. I planned to spend the night aboard and sail around to the anchorage off Fort Recovery in the morning. There was plenty of privacy there.
I would retrieve what I needed from the stash and repair the fiberglass. Once I finished, I would bring Island Girl back here and arrange for the marina to keep an eye on her. I would tell them I was going to be away on business for an indefinite period.
Once Island Girl was tucked in, I would use the dollar buses to work my way to Cane Garden Bay and Mary. I would make two trips to avoid carrying too much luggage. I didn't want to tip Kelley's people off that I was leaving.
They would figure it out eventually, but I wanted as much of a head-start as I could get. I expected to be settled in our room at Cane Garden Bay the next evening in time for dinner with Mary.
After Mary and I renewed our acquaintance earlier this afternoon, she spent a few minutes rinsing the green dye from her hair. I watched as she became an auburn-haired beauty. She looked good, but I still liked her normal, honey-blonde look best. At least, her hair was honey blond when I met her. Who knew, for sure?
She tied a scarf around her still-damp hair before we left the Fiddler's Green in case we passed anybody who was expecting her to have the green locks. The scarf was almost the same shade of green as her former dye job.
"I'll take the scarf off when we're on the ferry," she said. "Then I'll look normal when we pass through customs and immigration."
We left the Fiddler's Green and took a ferry from Red Hook, St. Thomas, to Road Harbour, Tortola. Given that we were disguised and using passports that Kelley didn't know about, we made the trip together. In Cane Garden Bay, we checked into the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. John Fincastle. If the clerk noticed that Mary's passport was in the name of Mary Margaret Jordan, she didn't comment on it. I guess married couples with different last names were common enough nowadays.
Mary cautioned me while we were en route to Tortola that she was traveling with a new name. I was training myself to think of her as just plain Mary. When I asked where she got the passport, she told me that when she first started her current line of work, she spent several months creating false identities.
"It was such a pain in the neck I figured I might as well do several at the same time," she said. "It didn't take any longer to do them all than it would have taken to do one."
I should have guessed. She was Mary Elizabeth O'Brien when we first met. That identity fell by the wayside in Bequia, when Frankie Dailey's minions trailed us there and tried to kidnap her. We escaped, and I arranged a new identity for her on the fly. Her Mary Elizabeth O'Brien passport was in my stash in the bilge.
At the time, she marveled at how quickly I got the new passport. She was worried that it was a forgery, because she spent months becoming Mary Elizabeth O'Brien. Building an identity from scratch that was solid enough to get a real U.S. passport wasn't trivial.
I knew ways to shorten the process, though, and I assured her that her new passport was real. She became Mary Helen Maloney then, with bank accounts and credit cards to match.
That was when she started to suspect I was connected to the government. It didn't occur to me then that she established more than one solid false identity on her own. But I didn't know as much about her then.
As I got to know her better, the subject didn't come up. We were too busy with other things. After she confessed earlier this afternoon to having an assortment of passports, I asked where she kept them.
"I always have one extra with me," she said. "In case I get in a bind, like when I went on the run from Ste. Anne. But the rest are stashed in lockboxes in major East Coast cities."
What a girl; she was just my type.
We checked into the hotel and went out for a nice meal at the best restaurant in Cane Garden Bay. After dinner, I walked her back to the hotel and kissed her goodnight.
We spent several hours together from the time we met at the airport until our goodnight kiss. During our afternoon and evening together, we discussed what to do about Island Girl and her tracking device. I suggested finding and removing it.
"What would we do with it?" she asked.
"I could break it."
"But then they'll know you found it," Mary said. "Or at least suspect you did."
"I could put it on another boat and let some unsuspecting people lead them on a wild goose chase."
She smiled. "Fun thought. But if you're right and they have somebody watching Island Girl, that won't do us much good."
"We could stay in hotels," I said.
"The nice thing about a boat is the flexibility it gives us. Yo
u chartered that one in St. Martin. There must be thousands of charter boats here. I read on the plane that the BVI is the charter capital of North America. Plus, they all look alike."
"There is that," I said. "But the charter companies have all kinds of funny rules. Some of them don't want you taking their boats to certain places, or sailing at night. Besides, there's a paper trail, and they're geared up for charters that last a week or two. If we keep the boat much longer than that, it'll attract notice."
"Then let's buy one," Mary said.
We kicked that around and decided that while I retrieved what we needed from Island Girl tomorrow, Mary would shop for a boat. The charter companies sold them, usually after they were five years old. That seemed like a great option to both of us.
A used charter boat looked exactly like the ones still in the charter fleets. They were made up of generic, white fiberglass boats with blue canvas trim, with no distinguishing features.
Mary would start with the charter operations here in Tortola. Perhaps we could buy a boat and keep it registered in the BVI or the U.K. That would provide a little more insulation if Kelley and company came looking.
The thought of Kelley brought Nora's plight to mind. It was my query about Kelley that got her in trouble. Mary asked me earlier about Nora's incentive to keep going on her own. That was a fair question.
My first reaction was based on Nora's comment that her suspension was for appearances' sake, covering her boss's ass. Mary seemed to accept my comment about Nora's track record with me. Once I was alone with my thoughts, I wondered what Nora was up to. There was a disconnect in her story.
My role with Nora was eliminating people who were threats to our country. We didn't do investigations; we assassinated people. So what was Nora's agenda these days?
Did she have a mandate to eliminate the people who were implicated in O'Hanlon's criminal enterprise? I doubted that. But if so, where did the authority come from? It was contrary to our whole system of jurisprudence.
At my core, I'm a soldier. When I was commissioned as an officer in the Army, I took an oath to uphold the constitution. I killed many people, but I never betrayed that oath.
When I accepted a target, I knew I was acting within the scope of the government's authority in defense of my country. I made a few exceptions, but only when exercising my innate right to defend myself.
When Nora told me about her boss's boss getting chewed out over Nora's questions about Kelley, I got queasy. Unless I was missing something, that meant the president — or one of his close confidants — was protecting Kelley.
Kelley was a crook; I didn't have much doubt about that. That didn't mean I thought he should be executed without due process. Our system of laws was meant to deal with situations like Kelley's, and the process didn't involve people like me and Nora.
The president might be crooked too, or he might have been duped by one of his trusted advisors. That didn't make them targets for assassination. Again, there were established, constitutionally mandated ways to deal with that kind of situation.
So what am I into, here? And how do I square my beliefs with what Mary does? I know I'm in love, and that's irrational to begin with. Still, Mary's not an evil person.
She's not operating in a gray area; she only kills people who would kill her without blinking an eye. Same as me. It's like my innate right to defend myself, except sometimes she strikes preemptively.
Now that I think about it, all my targets have been cold-blooded killers, and beyond the reach of normal jurisprudence. Most times, I didn't give them a chance to kill me, but if I made one little mistake, they would have. Every one of them. Not much different from Mary.
Okay, Finn, maybe all that's a little bit gray. A very little bit, though. Mary's living in a world where a different set of rules applies — maybe. I need to talk with her about that, find out where she draws the line. My gut says it's somewhere I can live with, but what if it's not? Don't try to deal with everything now. One step at a time.
Mary was one thing. Nora, though, was a different kind of animal. Mary and I were both living in a kill-or-be-killed environment. As best I knew, Nora was never even close to that.
She was a link in the chain of command, passing orders to me from a duly constituted authority. In the past, there were plenty of ways for me to be sure of that. I wondered if she was still a “link in the chain of command.”
How can I know? Do I stop trusting her because she was honest enough to tell me the chain of command is broken? That's not right. But I'm not willing to accept her as the sole person making decisions about who gets to live and who has to die. She doesn't have that authority any more than I do. So how's this going to work?
I would have plenty of time to think about those problems the next day, while I was working on Island Girl. I was exhausted from a long, exciting day. I fell asleep as soon as I closed my eyes.
24
The next evening, Mary told me how she spent her time while I was working on Island Girl earlier. We were waiting for our dinner in another upscale restaurant in Cane Garden Bay.
"I saw two decent boats for sale at one of the charter companies," she said. "Want to look them over tomorrow?"
"Sure," I said.
"And we can just keep the registration 'as is,' at least for a while," she said. "They're anxious to sell both boats. There's language they said they could put in the contract that would give us an extended trial period, maybe up to 60 days. So technically, we wouldn't own the boat until after that. It stays registered to the charter company for the trial period. But if we don't keep it after the trial, we'd forfeit a good bit of the purchase price."
"I'm not worried about the financial side of this. Hiding our ownership's way more important."
"That's what I thought. That's my day," Mary said. "Tell me about yours. I saw you dumped your stuff in the room before I got back from the charter company. How did you manage that?"
"I didn't want Kelley's surveillance people to see me leaving Island Girl with a lot of luggage. I left her anchored off Fort Recovery and took the dinghy ashore. There's a main road not too far from the shoreline; I flagged down a bus to Road Harbour, then got a taxi to bring me back here."
"Then you took the boat back to the marina?"
"Yes. After I messed around out there for a while. I was giving the new fiberglass in the bilge time to cure. Then I flooded the bilge to float all the gunk up from the bottom of the sump and let it settle over the repair. Once there was a layer of sludge over the new fiberglass, I drained it again. But I was careful not to disturb the sludge. Then I took her back to the marina."
"When Kelley's people notice you're not hanging out on the boat, they'll ask the people in the office about it. How much time do you figure you bought us?"
"Hard to say. I told the people in the office I was going to do some serious hiking around the BVI. I asked them about trails on all the larger islands, and ferries to get around. They'll remember that. And the name they have is Jerome Finnegan. That's the only name Kelley has for me, so they won't be looking for Mr. and Mrs. Fincastle. Or Mary Jordan."
"What about the vessel documentation?" she asked. Mary didn't miss much.
"Finnegan."
"I thought that was the name on the Carib Princess document."
"Yes. I have a collection of several documents for the Island Girl name to match my different identities. One has Finnegan as the owner, another's for a Delaware corporation. I left the Finnegan one on the chart table with the ship's papers, since that's the name Kelley has."
"We're in good shape, then," she said.
I nodded. "Pretty good. I take it you're interested in hanging out in the islands for a while. That right?"
"Because of wanting a boat?"
"Uh-huh. What's your plan? You still working your way through those files?"
"You said Nora told you I'd been busy. Did she give you any details?"
"Yes. She didn't share any names, but she said O'Hanlo
n's rumored associates were being methodically wiped out. Said the FBI thinks there's a mob war going on over his turf."
Mary laughed.
"What's funny?"
"Mob war. Nobody ever called me a mob war before."
"Is it over?" I asked.
"The mob war?" She grinned. "Those things never end. Sometimes they wind down for a while."
"Why did this one wind down?"
"There's nobody left on my shit list except a bunch of crooked politicians, and I don't want the heat that goes with that kind of thing. Besides, their street soldiers are all dead, so the politicians are no threat, at least for now."
That's good to hear. Goes a long way toward answering my questions about that gray area.
"You said you wanted my help."
"I do."
"Why, if you're standing down?"
"Personal reasons," she said, giving me a look that made my pulse race. "And to watch my back."
"Sounds good. I like watching your back."
"But what about your friend Nora?"
"I told you, there's nothing personal between us." I felt my face flush.
Mary giggled. "Sorry. I couldn't resist teasing you a little. But seriously, what does she want from us?"
"I've been wondering that myself. We'll have to ask her, but my best guess is that it has something to do with those politicians you mentioned."
"Really? I figured they'd be off limits to people like you and Nora. You think that's why she wants me on board?"
That gave me pause. I rubbed my chin, buying a second or two. "I didn't think of that. But you're right. They're seriously off limits for me and Nora; there are non-lethal ways to deal with crooked politicians."
"Just for the record, Finn," Mary started, but I interrupted.
"There's no record here. Not between you and me."
She smiled. "I know that. But between you and me, I'm not interested in doing the government's dirty work. Not if it comes to people who are no threat to me. I've never killed anybody who wouldn't have done the same to me, given the chance. And I'm not about to start now."
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