by Blake Banner
“What do you want?”
She gave a small frown, like she hadn’t really thought about it till then. She gave her head a little shake. “You have made such a mess of things. The lawyers can’t hold off the cops much longer, and nobody is prepared to send us a cleanup team. What do I want? I want out of this nightmare you have created.”
“And you think you’ll achieve that by killing me here on the boat?”
She shook her head. “No, I’d just rather you didn’t kill me.”
“There’s no crew on the boat?” She hesitated a moment too long and I smiled. “You know how she works?”
“I could take her out of port, I couldn’t sail her to New York, or even Istanbul.” She frowned. “Why?”
“How sophisticated are the communication systems on this boat?”
She shrugged. “As sophisticated as they can get.”
“Can you bank from onboard?”
“Of course, but like everything onboard it requires biometrics.”
“Come.” I crooked my hand at her and she followed me to the bedroom door, where I pointed at him lying in the bed. “He’s crazy about you. Did you know that? He’s been like this since he drank my coffee and ate my breakfast, fantasizing about you. Now I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We are going to take this baby out a few miles into the Black Sea. On the way you’re going to get his computer, and the same way you manipulated me last night, you are going to manipulate him into making a substantial transfer of funds. He is out of his mind right now, so it should not be too difficult. Then we are going to ditch this baby, take the launch and head for the coast of Turkey. From there we make our way to…” I spread my hands. “Belize? Brazil?”
“And what guarantee have I that you will not ditch me and leave with all the money?”
I slipped my arms around her waist and kissed her neck. “Have you looked at yourself recently? Besides, I’m assuming you have an offshore account. One transfer for you, one for me, and then we sink the boat.”
“With him onboard?”
“Will you miss him?”
She smiled. “Not a lot.”
She disengaged herself and she led me, by way of the elevator, across the open deck and up the stairs to the bridge. There she powered up the ship’s computers and punched in a set of coordinates. After a moment the engines engaged and we started to move.
“Autopilot is engaged. This will now take us one hundred miles off Trabazon, on the coast of Turkey. It should take three hours. Trabazon has an international airport. We can fly out of there and be anywhere you like in a few hours.”
“Sounds good to me. After that,” I shrugged, “we can hang together for a while, or you can go your way and I go mine, whatever you like. You were never my target.”
“Gabriel was?”
“That’s for me to know, best if you don’t. Let’s go deal with Yushbaev.”
We retraced our steps to the Emperor Suite and I stood in the doorway looking at Yushbaev while she went to the study and emerged a few moments later with a laptop, which she opened and placed on the bed. Then she started caressing Yushbaev’s face and hair, and kissing him on the corner of his mouth. He opened his eyes and reached up, trying to grab her, but she pulled away, laughing.
“Darling, I want so much to be with you, but we have a little bit of work to do first.”
“Work?”
“Work, my love, here, now press your finger on the pad…voila! So easy, my love. Now Harry is going to help us a little. Harry thinks you are wonderful, don’t you, Harry?”
I took the laptop and tried not to let my eyes bulge at the numbers I was seeing. I made a few transfers, the biggest to Cobra, then to my account in Belize and another to my account in Panama. I used his fingerprint and eye-scan to execute the operations, then handed the laptop to Marianne.
“All yours.” I stood. “Send me down to the lower decks. I need to prepare to scupper the boat. Meanwhile you can clean out the rest of his account.”
She accompanied me to the elevator and as the door slid open I placed my foot in it to stop it closing and drove a straight right into the tip of her chin, just hard enough to put out her lights. I took the twenty-two from her jacket and laid her across the door, so it would stay open. Then I returned to Yushbaev and put two slugs in his head. Like she’d said, a twenty-two can sometimes do a lot more damage than a 9mm. A 9mm can go through and through, and on rare occasions you can survive the shot. But a twenty-two gets trapped in the skull, without the force to make an exit wound, and ricochets around, tearing up the brain.
I returned to the elevator, dragged Marianne to her feet and used her fingers to take us down to the main deck. There I used kitchen twine to tie her hands behind her back and her ankles and laid her on a sofa in the lounge.
I took her cell from her bag, showed it her face and dialed the brigadier. It rang a couple of times, then there was silence. He didn’t recognize the number.
“It’s me, Harry. I’m borrowing a phone from the girl who tried to kill me on Koufonisi.”
“Progress?”
“Yushbaev is dead. Cobra is substantially richer. Yushbaev’s operation is broken and as we speak I should think the Russian cops are swarming all over his so-called palace. I am on his yacht. It’s on autopilot and headed for Trabzon, in Turkey. We are about twenty minutes out of Gelendzhik, and in the next twenty minutes I am going to blow the ship to hell and escape, with my prisoner, in a launch. Can you extract me?”
“I had anticipated your request. In fact, to be perfectly honest, Araminta had anticipated it. We have a plane on standby that should be with you in an hour or so. We’ll track this number on GPS. What about the colonel?”
“She wasn’t here. She didn’t return to him.” He didn’t answer. So I asked, “Did you track down Bull?”
“Yes, he wasn’t a Hell’s Angel, Harry. He was just a biker, didn’t belong to any club. A bit of a waster, but certainly had no record beyond a couple of speeding tickets and a couple of brawls.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Not personally. He remembered Jane, said they’d had a brief relationship twenty years ago. She was just sixteen. One day she had stopped seeing him and that was all he could tell us.”
After that I had a sense of déjà vu. I carried my bag down to the engine room and the storerooms, and found the section where the propane tanks were stored. I had ten pounds of C4 left. I wedged one pound against the tanks, and the remaining nine against the hull. I set the detonators for twenty minutes, then returned to Marianne. She was awake and as mad as an alley cat with a hornet up its ass.
“I’m going to untie you, but there is something you need to understand. I have set explosives on this boat that will blow it sky high in a little over fifteen minutes. I am going to untie you, and that will give us about ten minutes to get in the launch and as far from the Bucephalus as we can before it blows.”
“You bastard!”
“No time for that. I can take you with me or I can leave you here.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“You’re wasting time.”
“OK! Untie me! I will behave!”
I untied her and we ran to the boarding deck, scrambled onto the launch, turned and sped away, putting a half mile between us and the vast, beautiful yacht. After twelve minutes it seemed to jump and expand. Then there was a huge shower of sparkling glass in the air before the entire yacht was engulfed in a fireball, after which it gradually subsided to the portside and was consumed by the Black Sea.
Marianne sat in silence as she watched the whole process. I didn’t say anything to her. I had nothing to say to her. I had no understanding of her feelings, and she didn’t care about anybody else’s.
Half an hour later a DHC-6 Twin Otter appeared out of the south, circled us a couple of times, then came down onto the sea and taxied toward us. I took the boat up to his floats and the pilot leaned out.
“You Harry?”
“Yeah!
Buddy send you?”
“Buddy” was Brigadier Alex “Buddy” Byrd. He gave me the thumbs up.
“Climb aboard!”
When we scrambled inside, I wasn’t surprised to find Araminta there. Marianne glared at me. “Who is this?”
Araminta smiled at her. “Marianne Barbet?”
“Who are you?”
I slammed the door and we sat. The engines roared and we started to accelerate across the water with great walls of foam and spray rising up beside us.
Araminta pulled out her badge and showed it to Marianne. “Araminta Browne, Central Intelligence Agency. I am here to arrest you. I’ll read you your rights when we get to Ankara.”
“Under arrest what for? I have done nothing!”
“Oh, we have a long list. See, we picked up Ben Macleod in Yushbaev’s office in Istanbul, and when we explained the situation to him, he had a lot to tell us. I am pretty sure you and I are going to have a lot to talk about too, Marianne.”
Marianne closed her eyes and flopped back in her seat. I looked at Araminta for a while.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
She patted my knee. “You too.”
Epilogue
Three days later I was in Gilroy, California, sitting in my rental car on the corner of Second Street and Princeville Street. It was a pretty, affluent neighborhood with lots of lawns and lots of leafy trees.
On one of those lawns a woman was tending to her roses. She was blonde, slim, in her mid-fifties. She was dressed in Levis, with an expensive white cardigan, the cuffs pushed up from her wrists. I climbed out of the car and crossed the blacktop, then the sidewalk and crossed the lawn to where she was hunkered down pruning dead branches.
“Mrs. Harris?”
She jumped, startled, and turned to look at me. I smiled and she laughed, one hand over her heart.
“Do forgive me!” She stood. “You startled me.”
“Then I should apologize. Are you Mrs. Harris?”
“Yes, but,” I saw the glint of her daughter’s strength in her eyes, “who are you?”
“My name is Harry, Harry Bauer. I am a friend of your daughter’s.”
“I’m sorry, I am afraid…”
I interrupted her. “I know she is here, Mrs. Harris. I would not have intruded otherwise. I don’t want to cause any distress. I have very good news for her, and it is really very important that she sees me and speaks to me.”
She hesitated. The front door of the house stood open and it crossed my mind that I could simply walk in, but I dismissed the idea as a young girl stepped out and stood frowning at me with crossed arms.
“What is it, Mom?”
“Somebody asking for your sister, Helen.”
Helen held my eye. “She’s not here. We haven’t heard from her for a long while.”
I gave her a big, friendly smile. “Then who was that I saw bringing in the groceries half an hour ago?”
“You should leave.”
I looked back at Mrs. Harris. “I know you have been through a lot of stress and anxiety these past couple of weeks. I know all about it. But you need to go and tell Jane that it is all over. You tell her this: Harry is outside on the lawn, Yushbaev is dead, the Bucephalus is at the bottom of the Black Sea, the palace is destroyed and Marianne is in jail. Even Colonel James Armitage is crying out for her to go back to work.”
A shadow appeared at Helen’s shoulder. Helen gave a small gasp and turned. Mrs. Harris said, “Oh, no…”
I approached. The colonel, Jane, was looking down at me with tears in her eyes.
“Is it true, or are you lying?”
“Not to you, Jane. Never to you.”
“You’d better come inside.”
We went in and Mrs. Harris closed the door. Helen asked, “Who is this man?”
Jane sat and gestured me to the sofa. She said, “He is a very good friend, and one of the few people I can really trust.”
There were tears in her eyes and her nose was red. As I sat I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and handed it to her. Mrs. Harris sat beside me but Helen remained standing, beside Jane.
“You should have told us, Jane.”
“I know. But the Air Force back then was strict about that kind of stuff. And with time, I guess I figured it was nobody’s business but mine.”
“In Istanbul. You should have told me in Istanbul.”
She shook her head. “It was too risky. And you are such a brute.” She laughed a tearful laugh and I smiled. “I knew you’d start blowing things up and shooting people and the risk of things going wrong was too high. I am so sorry I hurt you—”
“When?”
“Oh, come on!”
“I was going to apologize for falling asleep on you.”
She laughed and sobbed a little more, then said, “It was too late to go back to Yushbaev. I had to come back here, to my mother and,” she hesitated a moment, “to my daughter. I had to protect them.”
I nodded. “It was hard to buy your story.” I smiled. “I’m not saying you’re not badass in your own way, but a biker chick?” I shook my head. “And when Buddy said he had traced Bull and he was basically a nice if irresponsible biker dude, who said that you just disappeared one day, it kind of clicked into place. I had seen Yushbaev’s palace. I saw what he had there, and I realized what he had threatened you with.”
She nodded. “And it was all to get to you. They were desperate, Cavendish and Yushbaev. They were desperate to know who you were and who you worked for.”
I glanced at Helen and Mrs. Harris. “How much have you told your mother and your daughter?”
“Practically nothing, and they don’t want to know.” She looked up at her daughter and took her hand. “I was sixteen, just seventeen when Helen was born. I refused to give her up for adoption, but Mom insisted that I should pursue a career. Dad was very ill. He was dying, and his dying wish was that, that I go to college and make something of myself. Mom was young and she said we would raise Helen between us.”
Mrs. Harris broke in, “And she has done her father proud.”
Jane smiled at her. “It’s been our secret over the years. Until now.”
“Buddy wants to know if you’ll be coming back. So does Colonel Armitage.”
She glanced up at her daughter, then across at her mother. They both nodded. She sighed.
“Perhaps, Harry. But we will have to make adjustments. I can’t put my family at risk anymore.”
I nodded and looked at her with meaning. “I know what you mean.”
I stood and took a couple of steps to the door. “I’ll be in San Francisco for a few days. Can I call Buddy and tell him you’ll think about it?”
“Yes.”
“And if you feel like a quiet dinner in a pizza joint, or a biker bar, just let me know.”
She laughed. “You got it, dude.”
I shrugged. “And maybe I could drive you back to New York, if you decide to go.”
“Let’s take it one step at a time.”
I nodded. “OK, one step at a time.”
Let Me Help
As I mentioned before, I love writing. Because of this, I end up writing new books at a much faster rate than most other authors—typically one a month (sometimes more).
Some call me crazy, and though I definitely agree, it's not because of my ability to write quickly. To that, I credit hard freaking work.
However, this rapid release schedule has one major drawback, and that's with staying up to date. I can't tell you how many times I get emails that go something like this.
Hey, I didn't know (insert new book title here) was out already?! What the heck!
I know, a travesty. But, thankfully for you I've come up with a solution (and it's quite revolutionary). It's this magical new thing called a “mailing list.” Through it I am able to send you emails whenever I have a new book available for reading. You don't even have to do anything! I just send you the links. I know, what a guy, right? ;)
If that's something you'd be interested in, then simply click here and I promise you'll always be the first know whenever I have a new book available.
Also, spam drives me nuts, so I make it my priority that you will never get any. Guaranteed. Just new books. Nothing else. If you don't like it, you can always unsubscribe. It's like 1 or 2 clicks, and I promise to only get a little bit offended.
Here's the link one more time.
Thanks!
What'd You Think?
Nothing is more annoying than someone asking for a review, but unfortunately they “matter” or something. I don't know why, but the vast majority of readers won't buy something unless they see that other's already have, and had a good experience.
Therefore, if you happened to have a good experience at any point during this read, then I would be exceptionally grateful if you would consider taking a moment to leave behind a quick review. Honestly, it can be super short (or super long...if that's your thing), but even a couple words and a good star rating can go miles for a self-published author like myself.
Without you all, I wouldn't be able to do this. I'd have to go out and work in the real world...and that's simply not as fun. I much prefer killing people, err—I mean writing about killing people... (yikes!)
Anyways, if leaving a review is something you'd be willing to do, that'd be incredible. But even if you don't, I want you to know just how thankful I am that you even gave my work a chance and made it this far. Seriously, you are da bomb.
To make things easier, here are links that'll take you directly to the review pages.
Feel free to use them (or skip them) at your leisure.