The Trade

by Chris Thrall

  Watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest, Hans experienced a sense of closeness to this beautiful woman, one he hadn’t expected to feel again, not since losing Kerry. Penny came into their lives when he and Jessica still didn’t know which way was up, not expecting anything in return and bringing her ever-caring and effervescent persona. He would get Jessica back for all of their sakes or die trying.

  Needing something stronger, Hans went to the kitchen and fetched the half-empty bottle of rum. When he returned, Penny stirred.

  “Hans, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, but the Fulani is dead.”

  “No!”

  Hans got another glass and filled Penny in on the details, including the bloody message and the mysterious Mercedes.

  “Why would someone kill her, and who would be following you?”

  “I’m not sure. Something doesn’t figure, but . . .”

  “Did you get the license plate?”

  “I’m hoping I got better than that.” Hans took out his cell phone and downloaded the video he had captured to his notebook computer.

  “Here goes nothing.” He double-clicked the file icon.

  The result wasn’t what he’d hoped, the car flashing past in the blink of an eye.

  “Damn!”

  Hans replayed the video in a series of pauses, but even reduced to its original frame size, the image was grainy at best, the registration number blurred by the car’s speed and its license plate light. The driver remained shielded from view by the car’s tinted windows.

  “No good?” Penny frowned.

  “Not brilliant. The car’s an E-Class Mercedes – a popular choice for the movers and shakers on the island . . .” Hans’ words trailed off, and he stared into nothing.

  “What is it, hon?”

  “I’ve seen this car before. I just can’t think where.” Hans stroked his stubbled chin. “And can you see on top of the license plate there’s a logo of some kind?”

  Penny fixated on the small yellow blur. “Could it be territorial, like where the car’s registered?”

  “I don’t think so. We have that at home – you know, like this plate’s from Alaska or such and such. But I haven’t seen it here.”

  “Guess we’ll have to keep our eyes open and see if we can spot this type of plate.” Penny shrugged.

  “We could try Google Images.” Hans opened a web browser, but a search turned up nothing of interest. “We’ll have to make some inquiries with the police and whoever produces the license plates around here,” he concluded.

  “And the name Djenabou wrote? Are you sure it was for you?”

  “Who else could it be for?”

  “Right, and you think Alvarez killed her.”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  Hans downloaded the image file from his cell phone and brought the haunting message up on the notebook’s screen.

  “What is that, Hans? Lo . . . gan, Logan?”

  “I think so.”

  “But what about this clawlike thing?” Penny studied the bloody symbol.

  “Hell if I know. I’ll email it to Jonah. See what he can come up with.”

  Penny’s cell phone rang – Baba on late shift at the marina. “Miss Penny, the fishing boat is sailing.”

  “We’ll be right there!”

  Hans grabbed the keys to the jeep and they rushed to the elevator, arriving at the marina’s office fifteen minutes later to find Baba, the huge Senegalese, with binoculars in hand.

  “What’s happening?” the American asked, panting.

  “She put to sea a moment ago. Here.” Baba passed the glasses.

  “How many aboard?” Hans asked as he watched the Rosa Negra rounding the port’s protective wall with her running lights off. “Did they have a child with them?”

  “I didn’t see.” Baba held up his pink palms. “I only heard her engine start up and saw a couple of guys throwing off the mooring lines.”

  “Do you think Jessie could be with them, Hans?” Penny cast her eye over the pile of the Holly Davenport “missing” leaflets the marina’s staff had been handing out to yacht crews.

  “There’s a slim possibility, or Alvarez could just be making a discreet getaway.”

  “Where would he be going?”

  “One of the other islands.” Hans looked to Baba. “Or possibly the North African coast.”

  Baba nodded. “It’s only three hundred miles. He’ll have more than enough fuel on board.”

  “Hans, he’s the only link we have to Jessie.” Penny clutched his arm.

  “I know. Baba, can we request the coastguard intercepts him with their patrol craft?”

  “We can, Hans, but they only operate a standby crew. By the time they put to sea, the Rosa Negra will be one of many blots on the radar screen.”

  “In that case I need to borrow your launch.”

  The marina owned a small speedboat, mostly used to rescue inexperienced skippers who drifted too near to the shore and couldn’t start their motors.

  “It’s yours.” Baba pulled the launch’s engine cutout key from a peg and gave it to Hans.

  “And get on the radio and request other boats keep watch for the trawler.”

  Baba was already on it.

  “Penny, you drive. I need you to get me alongside.”

  The two of them rushed along the pontoon and untied the launch. Penny inserted the cutout key into its socket on the launch’s console and clipped the end of the leash to a belt loop on her shorts. In seconds they roared out of the marina, the city’s lights reflecting off the Rosa Negra’s superstructure, giving away her position in the pitch-black night.

  Outside of the harbor’s protective lee, the swell kicked up, drenching them in spray. The little craft pitched violently, launching off breakers and slamming down on the shimmering ocean, threatening to somersault. Penny eased back the throttle.

  “No!” Hans shouted above the noise of the outboard engine, redistributing his weight to keep the bow up. “Give her all she’s got!”

  Penny thrust the throttle forward, the two of them instinctively bending their knees each time the launch went airborne off a crest. Just as it seemed they’d catch up with the Rosa Negra, she picked up speed, her huge bulk indifferent to the challenging conditions.

  “He’s seen us!” Hans yelled, spotting Alvarez’s silhouette in the pilothouse’s rear-facing window.

  “She’s no match, Hans,” Penny screamed back as they entered the larger boat’s wake, intuition telling her they would outrun the trawler.

  Hans cocked and reholstered the pistol and shifted across the launch. “Okay, I’m gonna board her—”

  The Rosa Negra exploded into a million burning pieces.

  Hans slammed back against Penny, knocking her into the sea, a huge fireball engulfing them as shrapnel from the trawler’s hull began raining down.

  Fortunately, the cutout key did its job, and the launch slowed to a stop. As Hans dragged Penny back aboard, his thoughts turned to Jessica. He prayed she hadn’t been on the doomed vessel.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, holding up the flap of his jacket to shield them from the heat.

  “I’m fine.” Penny spat out seawater and restarted the outboard.

  Without another word, she twisted the throttle and chugged through the debris field toward the site of the explosion.

  Two dead crew members floated faceup side by side amongst the flotsam, giving the impression the dead men were holding hands.

  Hans reached down into the oily scum and grabbed the body of a third, rolling it over to reveal Alvarez, with half the flesh stripped from his skull, resulting in a hideous death grin. He thrust the corpse away in disgust, knowing the captain had the easy way out.

  There were no other human remains, so Penny spun the launch around and headed back to the marina.

  - 31 -

  Back at the hotel, while Penny took a shower Hans powered up his notebook and began typing out a timeline of events, adding in
brackets the unanswered questions each incident threw up. He knew his liaison with the island’s police force was long overdue, and he wanted to have the upper hand when they met.

  Penny emerged from the bedroom in jogging bottoms, a T-shirt and flip-flops, toweling her damp locks.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking someone – possibly this Logan character in Djenabou’s message – is trying to cover up any links to Jessica’s kidnapping now that he knows I’m after him.”

  “But why not just take you out?”

  “He could easily have done that as I drove down the coast road to meet Djenabou tonight. Instead he used me to get to her, to eradicate her, and to spook Alvarez into doing a runner before blowing him to kingdom come.”

  “I-I—”

  “I’m confused too. We can assume that whoever it is knew Djenabou had been making inquiries and was gonna spill the beans but didn’t know where she lived, hence the tail.”

  “But you said you’d lost them.” Penny slumped on the couch beside him.

  “I thought I had, but somehow they managed to stay one step ahead.” Hans poured Penny a shot of rum. “And they were watching our movements tonight,” he continued.

  “How do you know that?”

  “The explosives planted on the Rosa Negra must have been radio-controlled – as opposed to a timer – or the boat might have blown up in the harbor. And they detonated them before we could reach her, saving us from going up in smoke and causing an international incident.”

  “So someone was watching the boat leave the harbor tonight.” Penny downed her rum and poured two more shots.

  “I just can’t figure who.”

  “Are we in danger? Here at the hotel?”

  “No, what with all the media interest around Future’s sinking and me returning to the island, they would draw attention to themselves by going after us.”

  Penny yawned and checked her watch. “Hans, it’s almost three. We should get some sleep.”

  - 32 -

  Hans threw back the covers on the huge bed and answered his cell phone.

  “Odysseus, what you got for me?”

  “Orion, check your email, dude.”

  Hans nudged Penny, then flashed up his notebook in the living room and hit a message titled “Bingo!” Jonah had prepared a full PDF report on Logan, with details procured from various sources.

  “I’m reading.”

  Eddy Logan was a low-level British criminal from South-East London. He owned a bar in Praia called Chico’s, bought following a four-year jail term in the UK for money laundering. Logan had served in the British Army, seeing action in Iraq, but received a dishonorable discharge for “conduct unbecoming of a soldier.”

  Hans scrutinized a paragraph detailing how Logan got off a charge for child abduction two years previous.

  “Odysseus, this is gold.”

  “Orion, that claw thing in the woman’s message – look at the guy’s Facebook profile.”

  Hans scrolled to the end of the report to see a shot of Logan, a bald musclehead with a goatee beard, fists clenched doing a bodybuilding pose for the camera. Creeping above the neckline of his T-shirt were the claws of a full-torso dragon tattoo.

  “Odysseus, you’re ace.”

  “I know.”

  “Listen, get me everything you can on this guy – phone records, bank statements, emails. I need a picture of his movements, particularly the last two months.”

  He ended the call.

  “Hans, what’s happening?” Penny joined him in the living room.

  “Jonah’s found our man. Here.”

  As Penny read the file, everything fell into place – the name and claw symbol drawn in blood, Logan’s military and criminal record, and the child abduction.

  “What do we do?”

  “If this guy’s based in Praia, then I need to be on Santiago.”

  “You?” Penny threw a sideways look.

  “Hon, you have to leave Cape Verde. Four people are dead, and there’s no telling what Logan will do next.”

  “Then I suggest you find a place on Santiago where he can’t find us, because I’m staying.”

  Hans knew there was no point arguing.

  - 33 -

  Jessica endured the same routine for weeks, waking up afraid in the dimly lit chamber, not knowing whether it was day or night, forced to repeat the name Maria Dennis and her assigned birthday. The only way to tell the approximate time was by the meals Mouthwash Man brought her, and although she was afraid of him, eating was the only thing she had to look forward to. Breakfast would be fresh buttered bread with ham, cheese or jam, initially with a mug of bitter black coffee, but as she couldn’t stomach it, the man brought orange juice instead. Lunch was always a bowl of potato and kale soup with chunks of chorizo floating in it. Dinner would be meat, fish or poultry, with vegetables, her favorite being salted cod baked with pumpkin, onions, tomatoes and olives.

  Every day Jessica tried to hide the horrible pill under her tongue and spit it out after the angry man left. She wasn’t sure what the medication was for but remembered her father and Penny discussing something written in a travel guide about not leaving drinks unattended in bars because bad men could put pills in them and make you ill, and then steal all your belongings or make you do stuff against your will. She thought it must be to do with this and made sure to act woozy on the days she avoided swallowing it.

  “Daily routine, runner bean!” was another of her father’s aphorisms. Hans began each day by jumping out of bed at 6:00 a.m. and waking the household up with a bloodcurdling Tarzan bellow, drinking a pint of water and then going for a ten-mile run along the coast. “Structure holds your life together when things are bad,” he would say, so Jessica stuck to this approach now, and, following breakfast and before going to sleep at night, she did push-ups like she did with her papa and then ran around the tiny cell twenty times, increasing to fifty as the days went by.

  After the morning exercise she occupied her mind with singing songs, telling jokes to Bear as if he were there with her, reciting riddles and repeating the names of the kids in her class at school. Other times she ran through the preparations for a scuba dive – strapping the air cylinder to the buoyancy jacket, connecting the hoses, loading her mask, fins, wetsuit and diving knife into a kitbag and stowing it in her papa’s truck for the trip down to the beach. Then kitting up and going through the prechecks – buoyancy vest, weights, quick releases and air – before wading into the water, putting on her fins and doing a final check. She loved diving with her father and could recall the details of all thirty recorded in her logbook, such as time, depth, temperature, leftover air and the marine life she saw.

  “Jab, jab, hook, straight, uppercut!”

  Jessica danced around the cell shadowboxing an imaginary opponent, in this instance her friend Stevie Worth from the Little Dragons Muay Thai School in Portland.

  “Front kick, straight, jab, jab!” she puffed, then – “Ooph-ooph!” – took a couple of shots to the head.

  “Is that all you got?” she mocked Stevie, although her pa would not have been happy if she ever said that in the ring.

  The more Jessica visualized the sparring session, the realer it got, to the point where she could see and feel the gymnasium, the boxing ring and equipment, even picturing the orange shorts Stevie wore and the bright-red padding protecting him from her punches and kicks.

  She was proud of her own shorts, electric-blue silk embroidered with Thai script down the right leg, ones JJ gave her as a Christmas present.

  “Jab, jab, uppercut, elbow smash, push kick . . . spinning back kick!” Jessica polished off little Stevie and turned to face three more contenders. “If you wan’ it, come an’ get it!”

  - 34 -

  Penny ordered a breakfast of bagels with smoked salmon and scrambled egg, which they ate while packing. Afterwards, Hans flicked through the channels on the suite’s widescreen television to find a local news repo
rt. A shot of the quayside cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape and packed with emergency vehicles filled the screen. In the background the coastguard patrol vessel and a police diving unit circled the scene of the explosion.

  “What are they saying?” Hans asked.

  Penny dumped her rucksack on the couch and listened as a female reporter spoke in rapid-fire Portuguese to the camera.

  “She says a fishing boat caught fire and sank as it left harbor last night. The three crew members are in hospital with burns and that this should serve as a reminder to local fishermen to pay attention to maintenance issues and safety equipment.”

  “Well, they’ve played that down,” Hans mused.

  “Do you think Logan has friends in high places?”

  “It’s possible, or it might be the media has been told to keep a lid on it for the sake of tourism.”

  “Will the police have spoken to Baba?” Penny felt uneasy at the thought of them interrogating their kind friend.

  “I’m sure they’ll get around to it.”

  “And you told him it was okay to tell them about us?”

  “I had to. The explosion woke up every crew in the marina, and they’re bound to have seen us out there in the launch.”

  “Do you think the police will want to speak to us?”

  “Depends on whether they buy Baba’s story that we borrowed the launch for a spot of night fishing.” He shrugged and turned his palms up. “I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  Hans called Karen’s cell phone en route to the airport. “We’re shifting to Praia and need somewhere to stay that’s quiet.”

  “Come to the embassy. I’ve got just the place.”

  A little before 7:00 a.m. Hans and Penny returned the jeep’s keys to the Hertz desk, but as they were about to leave the office, Hans grabbed Penny’s arm.

  “I knew I’d seen it somewhere!”

  “Seen what?” She followed his gaze to see a poster of an E-Class Mercedes, the rental agency’s executive model.