by Sandra Moore
“That’s it for them,” Nikki said. “Diviner next.”
She was about to throttle up when she sensed Johnny’s protective instincts kicking in, coupled with deep affection and something else she couldn’t quite name. It was for her, all of it, a bouquet of emotion unadorned by ribbons or elaborate vases but clutched in a willing and eager hand. Not quite raw but not practiced, either. Pure cinnamon.
Moved, Nikki captured his face in her hands for a swift, hard kiss.
“For luck,” she said gruffly.
“Do we still need it?” he asked, and she discovered she honestly couldn’t say.
Chapter 21
S ingapore, a country made up of a couple of dozen inhabited islands, had ample places for a clever man in a boat to hide.
Nikki knew where he was—it was getting to him through the maze of islands that was the problem. Especially in the wee hours of the morning with no moon to speak of.
Why couldn’t she have stolen a boat with a working radar?
The GPS system aboard the fishing boat showed her three islands marching south, well off the main Singapore island. If she had to guess, her nose would say that Diviner was headed directly toward the middle island.
But why weren’t these islands lit up like the others? With as tight as the real estate was in this region, Nikki was surprised that three relatively decent-size islands hadn’t been built up or on.
Ahead, the first island’s outline warned her to slow. She throttled back a bit and checked the depth finder. She aimed the boat farther to the right, away from the sandy spit that might lurk off the island’s western tip.
“Would you take the helm?”
Johnny moved into position. “What are we aiming for?”
“Due south on the compass. Maintain this speed. Keep an eye on the depth finder. The propellers will hit bottom first.”
“Right.”
Nikki pulled Delphi’s cell phone from her pocket. “It’ll be a minor miracle if this thing works.”
“I saw the jump.” Johnny’s throat worked for a couple of seconds. “I bet the phone’s trashed.”
She found it safer not to reply. Her nerves stretched, taut and ragged, ready to let go in a moment of weakness she couldn’t afford. Save the crying jag for later.
The cell’s battery housing had cracked at some impact and separated from the phone. The battery itself looked okay, given what little Nikki could see in the steady dimness of the instrument panel. She slid the battery panel onto the phone’s back. It snapped into place and the status bar lit up.
Bingo.
Nikki hit the speed dial for Delphi. In the distance, lights from a shipping vessel pricked the dark.
“Yes,” the computer-altered voice said.
“We’re almost on Diviner,” Nikki reported as she scanned the darkness for an out-of-place light that might signal Diviner’s boat. “What do you want me to do with him when we have him in custody?”
“A team is on its way. They’ll meet you in the Strait of Malacca for the handoff.” Delphi gave her lat-long coordinates for the rendezvous. “Will you need help getting out of Singapore?”
Nikki looked at the phone. Built-in GPS tracking? she wondered. She put it back to her ear. “Probably. We stole a boat and half the Pasir Panjang terminal blew up because Diviner had some kind of self-destruct sequence on his container.”
“Are you okay?”
The darkness pressed in on her, deep and unfathomable. Nikki swallowed hard to keep her voice from shaking. “Yeah, we’re fine.”
“I need you to bring him in alive. And retrieve his electronic gear, anything that will help us find Arachne.”
“Right.”
“If Arachne gets her hands on Diviner…” Delphi didn’t have to say more.
“She won’t.”
For a long moment Delphi said nothing, and Nikki thought perhaps the connection had faded. A breeze kicked up, bringing with it salt and cool water and the distant promise of more rain. Finally, Delphi said, “Good work.”
“For Athena,” Nikki said.
“For Athena.”
Nikki shut the phone. “My boss has given us a rendezvous point in the Strait of Malacca. Assuming we can get to Diviner before the Sun Yee On shows up with reinforcements.”
“We should be prepared.” Johnny steered the boat a touch closer to the looming hulk of a pitch-black island off to starboard. “This guy might be meeting someone.”
“Or he might just be running from the gangs trying to catch him,” Nikki pointed out. “All evidence points to him being pursued by these two women, The Spider Woman and the giant who hired the Wo Shing Wo.”
“But if the giant knew about Diviner, why didn’t she just have them take him while he was aboard the Wo vessel?”
“Maybe she didn’t know Diviner was valuable. She could have hired them after something came to light.” Nikki studied the shoreline, how the jagged trees stabbed themselves into night-darkened sky. “I mean, some guy traveling around in a shipping container kitted out like an apartment might just be eccentric, not somebody important.”
Johnny gripped the wheel with both hands as a rogue wave chopped at the fishing boat, shoving it sideways. “And these women discovered what made him valuable when…what? When he gave information to the Wo second-in-command about his enemy in exchange for a ride from Florida to Hong Kong?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. If the Spider Woman is interested in information, it means she has a lot of contacts. She either knows people or can buy them. Maybe she wants more than that.” Like Nikki herself, for mad scientist experiments in secluded and terrifying laboratories.
Nikki laid a hand on Johnny’s forearm. “Wait. Throttle back.”
“What is it?” He put the boat’s engines in Neutral.
“I can see the tops of those trees.”
“Village lights on the other side.”
“We stopped seeing villages when we got out of the channel an hour ago.” She reached out, scented the wind. It was Diviner, just on the other side of the island they were slowly approaching. “He’s here.”
“On land or water?”
She concentrated. “On land.”
The faint glow behind the trees faded.
Nikki pressed the engine stop buttons mounted on the helm. The sudden quiet made her realize Diviner would certainly have heard their approach. A clearly resourceful man, he could have booby-trapped the island during the time it had taken her and Johnny to find him.
On the other hand, he hadn’t expected to be forcibly hatched from his container in the middle of a firefight, had he?
Maybe he was as in the dark, quite literally, as they were.
The fishing boat drifted closer to the island and the furry outlines of trees began to take on solid shape. Here, in the island’s lee, the waves had smoothed to a gentle roll, and each shoulder shrug of water washed the fishing boat a few feet toward the shore. The only sounds were the slap of waves against the fiberglass hull and the shifting trees.
“Let’s anchor and go ashore,” Nikki whispered.
“I can’t swim.”
“It’s okay. I’ll drop the anchor off the bow and let the stern drift in. It’ll only be about three feet deep.”
Nikki slid down the flybridge ladder to the cockpit, then made her way to the bowsprit. The anchor was a manual job, so there was no noisy electric winch to broadcast their intentions. Johnny helped her release the heavy anchor from its housing and dropped it quietly into the water. Nikki measured the anchor rode with her arms as she lowered it, counted ten feet.
“Let’s give it a minute to settle in,” she whispered. “The wind will blow the stern closer to shore.”
“Good.”
“Come on.”
Nikki led the way back to the cockpit. The boat rocked hard in the waves, canting over toward the shoreline. She slipped her holster off and lowered herself down the stern-mounted swim ladder. The cool seeped into her skin as she toed fo
r the bottom. Just a few feet down, about chest-high for her. She still had to hold her gun and holster up over her head.
“It’s not deep,” she whispered.
It was odd, she thought as Johnny slipped into the water after her and they started to walk toward the island. No sound coming from the land at all. No crickets, no birds, no rustlings of small animals.
Nikki took two steps and dropped in over her head. She immediately kicked, to regain the surface, and kept her gun high.
“Wait,” she whispered to Johnny, who’d stopped short. “There’s a hole or something.”
She frogged backward toward him, then used her booted toes to feel the hole’s edges. A broad circle, easily ten feet wide, etched the sloping bottom. Nikki waved Johnny around to follow, which he did, with seemingly infinite patience. Nikki crept forward more slowly after that, slipping once and nearly going under, but managing to do a one-armed tread out of the hole.
What could possibly be making these craters? she wondered. The only thing she could think of was…Shit.
She grabbed Johnny’s sleeve and pulled him close. “This is a firing range. The holes are from shell strikes. That’s why there’s no village. No lights.”
Johnny exhaled a warm breath on her neck, then said, “We need that luck now.”
“It’s standard military ops to sweep the area before the shooting starts. We weren’t challenged, so maybe our luck is holding.”
“Maybe. They might not have seen us.”
“Any armed forces would’ve spotted us on radar. I think we’re good.”
They were soon slipping silently through waist-deep, then knee-deep water, grappling along the rocks protruding from the sandy bottom. Nikki cautiously raised her body from the lapping waves, hoping the incoming waves would mask her movement. Johnny caught her ankle. She looked down. He motioned to her right. She nodded. He’d go that way, she’d go the other. They’d put Diviner between them.
She knelt on the rocky beach to buckle up the holster and check her gun. The darkness was dense enough that the fishing boat, though so close, seemed more like a shadow than an object. She tuned out Diviner’s nervousness enough to check her immediate, physical surroundings: old cordite, scrub trees and damp underbrush, a gathering thunderstorm to the south.
More phosphorous. What was Diviner getting ready to blow up now? Would he take himself out to avoid capture?
Nikki slinked into the lush, leafy underbrush, following the phosphorous scent. To her own ears, she sounded like a small herd of rhinos. Mosquitoes buzzed her face and neck. Every couple of steps, she paused to listen and sniff.
Rustling trees several yards away could be Diviner. Her nose said it wasn’t. Maybe he’d set up some sort of diversion to send them off-track. She ignored the noise and continued more to her left, following the bitter coffee seeping through the leaves.
A boat’s engines—gas and powerful from the rumble—roared in the distance. Nikki dropped to her knees and waited. The rumble gained volume. A spotlight swept over the water to pause on the beach, then aim up, in her direction.
Was it the Singapore armed forces who’d just discovered the trespassers’ presence on the live firing range or was it Arachne’s Sun Yee On soldiers out to kidnap Diviner? Or kidnap her?
No time to hang around, she thought. Johnny should have circled the small island by now and be on its south side. The boat approaching the island’s north shore throttled down behind her. Its hull ground against rock and sand—the sound of the boat being beached, hard. Loud voices and splashes followed almost immediately.
The spotlight’s beam cast her shadow toward the southern trees. Within seconds, bullets pitted and splintered the trees around her.
Forgoing silence, Nikki sprang from her hiding place and headed for Diviner’s scent. She stumbled into a shallow shell crater filled with rank water, caught herself, scrambled up the other side. Behind her, men shouted at each other. The cascade of bullets tapered off. They’d apparently figured out they were more likely to kill their prey than capture it with their tactics.
She rounded a tree and paused to locate Diviner. His scent remained strong. He hadn’t moved. Maybe she could flush him out and directly into Johnny’s path.
She heard footsteps coming from the water, heavy-sounding steps that pulverized sticks and kicked aside rocks. Definitely not Johnny, and Diviner had appeared to be a skinny guy. This triad didn’t think he needed to hide. And he smelled rank—of stale sweat.
Nikki stepped out from behind the tree to face his looming form silhouetted against the dim light cast from the boat’s spotlight. He spotted her and started a lumbering sprint, then splashed headlong into the crater.
Don’t think about it, she ordered herself. Don’t think about what you have to do. She held the 9 mm steady, arms straight, her weight balanced. Maybe twenty yards away.
She let him clamber up to the crater’s lip. He paused to catch his breath. She fired. The bullet struck home, low in his thigh. He yelped. Arms pin-wheeling, he fell backward into the crater.
Too late, she smelled piercing, overconfident lemons. A fist caught her cheek. The blow spun her and she went down, right eye stinging. She turned the spin into a sweep, took the triad’s feet from under him. His back had barely landed and angry copper spouted from his pores when she popped his solar plexus with the handgun’s butt. Air whooshed from his lungs. He rolled away from her to get his breath. Still on her knees, she angled a swift strike at his neck’s base, knocking him out.
Now, how many triads had been on that boat? she wondered as she levered herself to her feet. Plenty, from the pounding and crashing coming up from the beach.
“Nikki!”
Johnny’s voice sounded desperate and several yards away, but she sensed nothing from him amid the rich humus and dead leaves of the island’s groundcover and the salty sea. Heart pounding, she ignored the triads behind her. If Johnny had been wounded again…A few dozen steps forward brought her to the narrow island’s southern shoreline that tipped delicately into the water. She reached out with her senses…
And was smothered in Diviner’s coffee fear.
Instinct made her duck. A square, silver object whiffled over her head. She threw a waist-high back-kick, caught something soft, vulnerable. The man half grunted, half howled, and dropped the bludgeon onto the rocks. The clean rain of Johnny’s humor wafted through the trees.
Gunfire—from two guns in the same area—exploded through the trees lining the shore. Beneath the cordite and Diviner’s fear-sweat, she found Johnny’s natural spice and the acrid smell of his burnt flesh. She glanced up to find the twin flashes marking the muzzles of Johnny’s guns. The shouting triads crashed backward through the forest, apparently in retreat.
“Get him up!” Johnny urged.
While he provided cover, she grappled for the man she’d downed and who still lay groaning in the sand.
Diviner.
She knelt and gripped his thin shoulder. “If you want to live, you stick with us. Do you understand me?”
Diviner nodded weakly. In the pale light of false dawn, she could make out his razor-thin mustache and beard, black against his nearly white skin. His flesh hung flaccid on his frame, but he probably didn’t care to spend much container living space on a treadmill. Such a peanut of a guy to be so much trouble and wanted by so many people.
Then Johnny stood over them both, guns held at ten and two o’clock. “How’re we doing?”
“We gotta get back to the boat.” Nikki gave Diviner a little shake. “Where’s your gear? Did you blow it all up?”
He nodded.
“Except for that.” Johnny jerked his head to Nikki’s left.
The silver, mud-smeared laptop teetered on the rocks, inches from the lapping waves.
Shit. That’s what he’d tried to hit her with? Nerves ratcheted long past overstretched, Nikki snatched up the lightweight computer. She crammed it under her arm and clamped on to Diviner’s thick wrist with her free h
and.
“Got a plan?” she asked Johnny.
He shrugged, keeping his eyes on the forest, where men scuttled and thrashed like beetles in straw. “How many did you subdue?”
“Two.”
“Then we might get back to the fishing boat. I’ll draw them to the east.”
Johnny took off noisily before Nikki could protest, and the triads began crashing after him in the forest darkness. Almost immediately, shots shattered the air, but whether they came from Johnny’s gun or a triad’s, Nikki couldn’t say.
She forgot her frustration about Johnny’s abandonment when Diviner asked in a surprisingly deep and calm voice, “Where will you take me?”
Nikki breathed deep. He was still scared—the coffee bore that out—but the strong cilantro said he was also angling for something that he thought he’d get. Sly dog.
“You’re going someplace where gangland heroes won’t chop your bits off for fun,” Nikki retorted.
“What do you want? Money? I can divert millions to an account for you.”
“You’re starting to sound desperate. Move.” She jerked his arm and sent him stumbling in front of her along the shoreline. For good measure, she nosed her gun’s muzzle against his kidney.
His hands shot into the air above his head.
“Not money? All right then. Information. What do you need to know about your enemies? I can ruin them in seconds.”
“You’ve been hanging out with the wrong kind of people. I don’t have personal enemies.”
“What about this?” He waved a hand at the gunshots now cracking east of them.
“That’s business. Keep walking.”
He kept silent while they plodded through the wet sand and jungle fringe, and they soon arrived at the northern shore.
“There.” She pointed with the gun at the fishing boat nodding peacefully at anchor. “Keep your hands on your head. Go. And forget about swimming away. I’m the least of three evils you’re dealing with.”
Diviner turned to regard her evenly before nodding.
Nikki followed him through the deepening water, guiding him around the holes. She kept the gun aimed at his back while he climbed into the cockpit. Cracks and an occasional shout broke the island’s stillness. The impulse to abandon Diviner and go after Johnny itched her legs and prodded at her gut, but she managed to ignore it. Duty first.