Death Echo

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Wait here. You’re out of practice.”

  She went stiff, then relaxed. When it came to slithering through the woods, he was better than she was. A lot better. She’d been trained for city work, recruiting rather than recon.

  She signaled for him to go. Then she got as close to the pungent forest floor as she could and still peer through the undergrowth into the clearing.

  Mac set off at an angle to a place where there was a group of rez types talking and gesturing. They were so engrossed by the grisly scene that Mac could have walked right up to them.

  He didn’t. He just got close enough to eavesdrop.

  “…was always looking for trouble.”

  “Sure found it.” The man spat on the churned ground.

  Mac saw the glint of a badge at the man’s belt and recognized him as a tribal cop.

  “Arson. Damn.” The smaller man almost danced in place with excitement. “Wonder who did it?”

  “Half the rez hated Tommy’s ass.” The cop spat again, as though the taste of the air was getting to him. “Besides, he might be out on a boat. Might be someone else was sleeping in his trailer.”

  Mac hoped the cop was right but doubted it. Tommy hadn’t had any other place to go while he waited for Blackbird.

  And he’d been scared.

  Floodlights from two fire engines played back and forth over the lumpy, twisted rubble like stiff white fingers combing the wreckage.

  “There,” called one of the firemen.

  The floodlights paused, then converged on a corner of the ruins. The wind swirled, increasing the unmistakable odor of barbeque gone wrong.

  Ugly memories drenched Mac, men burning, dying, dead. Long ago, far away, and as fresh as the bile rising up his throat. He’d hoped never to smell that particular kind of death again.

  “Jesus Christ,” the fireman said. “Half his skull is gone. I mean, just flat gone. What the—”

  “Knock it off!” said a woman’s voice. “This is a crime scene.”

  Mac understood the words that the woman was too well-trained to say: Civilians around. Shut up.

  The woman who spoke wasn’t from the rez, but people gave way to her just the same.

  Silence descended as she strode into the harsh light of the clearing.

  She was on the downhill side of forty-five and didn’t give a damn. Her blond-gray hair wasn’t dyed and she wore no makeup. She was dressed in a pale windbreaker and dark slacks. As she walked up to the firemen, the floodlights caught three large block letters on the back of her jacket.

  FBI.

  Hold your ankles and brace yourselves, boys and girls, Mac thought bitterly. This just became an official Mongolian goat-fuck.

  He eased back into thicker cover and silently, quickly made his way to Emma. A curt signal had her wriggling backward. When he was certain her retreat hadn’t attracted any attention, he followed.

  Once they were well back into the forest, hidden by the night and the restless wind, he signaled for her to stand. Silently he led the way deeper into the trees. Neither of them spoke until they were in the Jeep and had driven down the road, out of sight of the cluster of vehicles. He flipped on the headlights.

  “You okay?” Mac asked.

  “Swallowing hard,” Emma said tightly.

  “Tell me if you need to pull over.”

  “Tough guy, huh? The smell didn’t get to you.”

  “You learn not to throw up. Too much noise will get you dead real quick.” His hands flexed on the wheel, as hard as his voice. “FBI was on the fire scene.”

  Emma’s head hit the back of the seat. “This just gets better and better.”

  “Let’s go wake up Faroe. I’m signing on.”

  20

  DAY THREE

  ROSARIO

  3:15 A.M.

  Mac, Emma, and Grace Silva-Faroe sat at a small dinette table in the motel suite Faroe had rented. Nobody spoke while Mac read and signed the papers that would make him a contract agent for St. Kilda Consulting, assigned to missing yachts in general and one called Blackbird in particular.

  From a nearby bedroom came the pealing laughter of Annalise Faroe as her daddy took her for a shoulder-high tour of the suite. His “Shhhh, sweetie, let the civilians sleep” was ignored by Annalise.

  Grace watched out the window toward the Blue Water Marine Group. People were still crawling over Blackbird. But not as many. Empty boxes went up the ramp much more often now than full boxes went down.

  She had been as relieved as Faroe when Mac turned up at their door in the middle of the night. With a silent sigh, she stacked papers Mac had signed and handed him a St. Kilda sat/cell phone.

  “You’ll continue working with Emma,” Grace said. “She’ll be the senior partner.”

  “Except if we’re on a boat,” Mac said. “I know more about the water than she does.”

  Grace looked at Emma.

  “No problem,” Emma said. “If it floats, I’m junior partner.”

  Grace stashed the papers in her briefcase and looked at Mac. “What do you know about Bob Lovich and Stan Amanar?”

  “They’re descended from a long line of hardworking fishermen and part-time smugglers.”

  “Arrests?”

  Mac shook his head. “You have to understand how it is in Rosario. There are three major factions. One is the Eastern European immigrants and their descendants who still speak the mother language. Or languages. They’re a hard-headed, suspicious clan. Damn few marry out, especially if you’re talking about the smugglers.”

  “Common enough for immigrant communities,” Grace said. “Particularly those who make a living outside the law.”

  “Like the Sicilians,” Emma said.

  Grace nodded. “Or the Asian tongs.”

  “The second faction is the white businessmen who have been here long enough to own the mayor and city council,” Mac continued. “They have a lot of the official, legal power, but they don’t mess with the immigrants and their ways. The white power structure ignores nearly all the smuggling, gambling, prostitution, after-hours bottle clubs, and the like.”

  “What about the police?” Emma asked.

  “Anyone who tries to do real cop work finds himself out of a job pretty quick.” Mac shrugged. “Basically, the police keep the streets clean for the businessmen and yachties.”

  “Again, pretty standard,” Grace said.

  “Except for the murder rate,” Mac said. “This sweet little town holds the lowest U.S. record for unsolved murders per capita.”

  Grace lifted her dark eyebrows. “Like the one on the rez tonight?”

  “Most aren’t that obvious. Just people who go missing when there’s a shift in the immigrant power structure. Low-level smugglers, usually.”

  “You were one of them, weren’t you?” Emma guessed.

  “I ran away when I was seventeen,” Mac said. “Hated the ever-stinking guts of this place. One of my best friends died in a ‘fishing accident’ after I left. The body was never found. He was moving cigarettes north and weed south in a small, hell-fast boat. Tommy was, too, but he survived. Until last night.”

  “The rez is the third faction?” Grace asked.

  “Yeah. There’s some pushing and shoving at the smuggling trough between the rez and the clan, but nothing like between the Sicilians or the Asian tongs or the Russian mafiyas in our big cities.”

  “Where do the Mexicans come in?” Grace asked. “I’ve seen more than a few since we got here.”

  “The ones who are illegal keep their head down,” Mac said. “The legal ones invest in Mexican food joints, the mayor, and the city council.”

  “In other words, the Mexicans are pretty much ignored, except to be milked,” Grace said.

  “They came too late to the Pacific Northwest to have much traction in local crime,” Mac pointed out.

  “Unlike the southern border states,” Grace said wearily. “Nice to know that the Pacific Northwest is holding up its end of the twenty per
cent of world Gross Domestic Product that is the result of crime.”

  “Also known as the shadow economy,” Emma said. “Does anything ever change?”

  “I can’t fix the world,” Grace said. “But I can fix what I trip over.” Or what is shoved down my throat.

  Faroe passed the dinette, stroking Grace’s cheek on the way by. Annalise was blissfully slack in his arms. Laughing one minute, sleeping deep the next. A look passed between man and wife. He shook his head in answer to the unspoken question and vanished into Annalise’s room.

  Grace looked at Mac. “You’ve given me a general picture. What about Bob Lovich and Stan Amanar in particular?”

  “First cousins,” Mac said. “Closer than most brothers. When their ancestors emigrated, it was from the part of Russia we call Georgia, with a lot of Ukrainian cousins thrown in. Close cousins.”

  “No love for Russia,” Grace said.

  “Not as tsarist Russia, the U.S.S.R., or the new Russia,” Mac agreed. “Don’t get me wrong. Rosario’s immigrant community isn’t awash in old-country nationalists. They wear the ancestral costumes and cook the food and speak a dialect of the home languages, but all they really care about is the clan here and now in America.”

  “So they don’t have much contact with the Old World?” Emma asked him.

  “They’re still bringing over cousins and cousins of cousins, especially after the Wall fell, but if there are dodgy business contacts in the Old World, I don’t know about them.”

  At the back of her mind Grace listened to the soft sound of the door to the other room closing. When Faroe’s big hands settled on her shoulders and began to work on knots, she sighed in relief. She hadn’t realized how tight she’d become.

  But nothing showed on her face when she said to Mac, “Tommy was Blackbird’s transit captain. What are your chances of being tapped as his replacement?”

  “Pretty good,” Mac said. “I do a lot of work for Blue Water Marine. So do a few other captains. I don’t know who’s in port now.”

  “If they go with someone else, are you ready to follow Blackbird right now?” Faroe asked quietly.

  Mac went through a mental checklist in his head. “Blackbird is fast for her size. If they run above fourteen knots, I’ll have to make it up at night.”

  “If it comes to that, we’ll rent you a faster boat,” Grace said.

  “Fuel tanks are full on my boat,” Mac continued. “Water tank is full. Engine is good. Oil is good. Electrical is solid. So is the generator. Rations are adequate for a week. I was going out if no new job turned up.”

  “Adequate for two?” Emma asked.

  “It won’t be fancy,” he said, looking at her.

  “And here I was dreaming of fresh prawns and champagne.”

  Grace smiled tiredly. “Emma will check out of her room immediately and move aboard. Joe will organize our watch times.”

  Faroe stroked his hand over Grace’s head and said, “I’ll take it until six. You haven’t slept well since you met Alara.”

  “Who could?” Grace asked under her breath.

  Faroe looked at Mac. “You’ve signed on, so we can tell you why we’re after Blackbird. You can access Emma’s computer for facts, guesses, estimates, and updates about this whole nasty cluster, so I’ll give you the short form.”

  Mac measured Faroe’s grim expression and braced himself.

  “Blackbird is a dead ringer for Black Swan,” Faroe said. “That yacht went missing somewhere between Vladivostok and Portland a year ago. Yet Blackbird was built from the hull up in Singapore after that and shipped safely to Elliott Bay.”

  Mac waited.

  Faroe almost smiled. The more he was around Mac, the better he liked him.

  “A woman who is no longer known as Alara,” Faroe said, “came to St. Kilda and requested in the most forceful possible way that we assist Uncle Sam in following Blackbird and finding out whether her hidden or intended cargo is biological, chemical, or fissionable.”

  Mac closed his eyes as his breath hissed out in a savage curse. “So this Alara woman has a network full of leaks and a stinking rose she wants pinned somewhere else. She pass along any other helpful little hints?”

  Grace smiled. “Ambassador Steele was right. You have a top quality, bottom line mind. She gave us seven days. This is day three.”

  “And after seven?”

  “We risk losing a major city,” Emma said.

  Mac didn’t ask which one. No matter where this dirty deal went down, civilians would die. A lot of them. The fact that they were innocent wouldn’t make them any less dead.

  Seven days? Christ. Seven months wouldn’t be enough.

  But Mac didn’t say anything aloud. Complaining about the huge serving of shit on your plate just wasted time. All you could do was grab a spoon and start eating.

  Fast.

  “I’m going to be spending a lot of time with your computer,” Mac said to Emma.

  “While you do,” Faroe said, “she can work on learning how to handle boat lines, fenders, and other matey stuff.”

  Emma made a startled sound.

  With a dark-eyed smile, Grace said, “If I can learn how to be a first mate to my snarling Captain Joe, you can learn from sweet, gentle Captain Mac.”

  “Sweet? Gentle?” Emma glanced sideways at Mac.

  He tried to look sweet and gentle. Given the information he’d just received, it wasn’t possible.

  “Tell me lines aren’t as heavy as fuel hoses,” Emma said.

  “They aren’t as heavy.” He lowered his eyelids to half mast. “And I can be very gentle.”

  She shook her head. She’d walked right into that one.

  “Emma has her cover story,” Grace said, no longer trying not to yawn. “Mac came with his intact. As for why you’re suddenly joined at the hip, I suggest going with the tried and true.”

  “Sex,” Emma said, grimacing.

  “Sex,” Grace agreed. “Start practicing snuggling and snogging in public.”

  Mac and Emma looked at each other and said simultaneously, “Snogging?”

  “Look it up,” Grace said. “It will grow on you.”

  21

  DAY THREE

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  8:05 A.M.

  Timothy Harrow ignored the inbox marked Urgent on his desk. Pragmatically speaking, it was a low designation of priority. Everything that came across his desk was urgent. The only question was of degree.

  At the moment, he was frowning over an email that was a good deal more than urgent. Somebody’s ass was going to get burned. His job was to make sure it didn’t belong to the Deputy Director of Operations, his immediate boss. Hopefully he could save his boss by putting the fire out. If that didn’t work, some serious finger-pointing was going down.

  And if the op blew up…

  Don’t think about it. Just make sure it doesn’t happen.

  At the highest levels, politics was a blood sport.

  Harrow hit the intercom button. “Duke? Got a minute?”

  “Make it fast. I have to brief the DO over the mess in Caracas in five and then brief his boss on the uncivil war heating up between the narcos and elected Mexican politicians. You have anything that’s going to make my life easier?”

  Harrow sincerely doubted it. “You told me to keep you current on anything coming out of Rosario, Washington, state of.”

  “What’s up?”

  “An Indian on the rez bought it, execution style. Half his head blown off and his trailer burned down around his dead ears.”

  “So?”

  “Weapon was an SR-1 Vektor. Silenced, from the condition of the bullets. Less deformation that way. Either the victim or the killer—or both—had ties to the item we discussed Sunday.”

  “Sometimes I wish that Berlin still had a wall,” Duke said. “I’m told this job was a hell of a lot easier back then. How good is your source?”

  “FBI. They get called in on major rez crimes.”

  �
��You trust an FBI agent?”

  Cooperation between the two agencies was a minefield filled with back-stabbing, misdirection, and agent eat officer.

  Politics as usual.

  “The agent owed me a favor,” Harrow said. “Even if he didn’t, he’s reliable.”

  “Stay on top of it,” the DDO said. “If it moves off the rez to Canada, somebody will stick us with the ticket.”

  “Then I’m praying it doesn’t.”

  “No shit.”

  Neither one of them wanted to testify before the kind of political investigation committees that would be formed if the op that wasn’t quite the CIA’s went south.

  22

  DAY THREE

  ROSARIO

  7:48 A.M.

  Shurik Temuri trimmed his fingernails with a very sharp Japanese folding knife. The big, wedge-shaped blade hadn’t been designed for manicures, but Temuri didn’t care. He simply wanted to flash the lethal knife as he browbeat the two stupid Americans.

  Once the knife appeared, any Georgian with balls would have pulled his own knife and begun working on fingernails or other body parts. But it seemed that Lovich and Amanar had lived a soft life too long to recognize the old-country insult of an unsheathed knife.

  It was the same problem with the language the cousins spoke—an outdated, corrupt form of what any proper Georgian would speak.

  “So what did your informant tell you?” Temuri asked Amanar.

  “Don’t call him an informant,” Amanar said unhappily. “He’s the chief of police. He briefed me along with other members of the city council, that’s all.”

  “Policemen are always informants to politicians.” Temuri shaved off a piece of nail. “Unless they’re the politician as well as the policeman.”

  “Look, I keep telling you that you aren’t back in the old country,” Amanar said. “This system is different.”

  “What is it Americans say? Shit of the bull?” Temuri waved the knife. “Police and politics are the same everywhere. What did he say to you?”

  Blank faced, Lovich looked out the window. He wanted no part in this conversation.

  Amanar started to argue with Temuri, then shrugged. The Georgian simply didn’t grasp the nuances of American politics. Or maybe the other way around. Whatever.