Eden's Gate

by David Hagberg

  He came in a couple of minutes after noon and the stewards began serving the first soup course. “I thought you should all know that we’ll be in Havana tomorrow about this time.”

  “Well, that’s a bit of good news,” Speyer said. “And nobody is breathing down our necks hunting for us.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Helmut.”

  Speyer smiled patiently. It had been a nearly constant theme of the captain’s over the past few days, ever since they had passed south of Bermuda. “Unless you’re carrying something you shouldn’t be, which you assure me that you are not, there was no reason for the customs authorities in Hamburg to give your papers more than a casual once-over.”

  “It was too easy.”

  “If the BKA was on to us because of Neubrandenburg it would not make sense for them to let us simply sail away, would it?”

  Zimmer spread his hands in frustration. “That might depend upon what you brought aboard in that precious metal box of yours.”

  “It’s nothing that they would bother themselves with.”

  “They might be waiting to find out where you’re taking it,” Zimmer said. He was becoming agitated.

  “They can’t touch us once we reach Cuba. So what’s your point?” Speyer turned to Lane. “What’s he trying to tell me, John?”

  Lane looked up from his excellent vichyssoise. He had an idea what Zimmer was getting at, but he feigned indifference. “The good captain might be worried that once someone notices that we’re not heading for Miami as it states in our papers, but instead trying to make a run for Cuba, the U.S. Coast Guard might want to ask us a few questions.”

  “Something like that,” Zimmer said.

  “This is not a U.S.-registered ship, we’re in international waters, and we’re doing nothing illegal under U.S. law, so where’s the problem?” Speyer asked.

  “The problem is whatever’s in that box.”

  Speyer put down his soup spoon. “We have come a long way together, Horst, as business associates and friends. Nothing is any different this time to change that. Believe me. There’ll be other assignments for you. Lucrative assignments.”

  The captain poured some wine. “That’s just it, Helmut. This trip is different.”

  “I fail to see how—”

  “Having you aboard, for starts. You’re a wanted man in Germany.” Zimmer’s gaze slid to Lane. “And this one. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t think you do either.” He glanced at Gloria, who was seated between him and her husband, but he said nothing. For some reason she’d cleaned up her act on the voyage, cutting out almost all alcohol and cigarettes, eating tiny portions at meals, and spending almost all of her waking hours in the exercise spa that Captain Zimmer had set up across from the ship’s chart room. The physical changes were dramatic, though she maintained a distant, disdainful attitude toward everyone, especially her husband.

  She gave the captain a supremely indifferent glance, and held out her wine glass. “Since we’re so close, why not celebrate a little?”

  Zimmer poured her wine. He smiled at her, his intentions completely obvious.

  “Do you know what I hate worst?” she asked.

  “No, what?” Zimmer said. He was captivated by her performance.

  “Cowards.” She arched her left eyebrow. “Are you a coward after all, Captain Zimmer?”

  Zimmer reared back as if he had been slapped. “Bitch.”

  “Yes, I am. But we were discussing your qualities just then, not mine.” She tried her wine, but made a face, put it down and got to her feet. “Just get us to Havana and leave the thinking to my husband. You’ll get your money and you can sail off to wherever it is people like you sail off to, until we need you again.”

  Zimmer started to rise, but the look on Speyer’s face stopped him cold.

  “It’s good advice,” Lane said. He wiped his lips and put his napkin down. “I’m getting paid off in Havana, and then getting out. I’ve had my fill of excitement for the time being. I suggest that you do the same.”

  “It’s easy for you to say. Nothing’s holding you back. But I have a ship to run.”

  “Change careers or get on with it,” Lane advised. “But don’t get greedy. You might lose everything.”

  “Don’t threaten me on my own ship, you son of a bitch.”

  Lane shook his head. “You guys are all alike. Nothing ever changes.” Gloria had already left. He looked at the others around the table, including the Greek first officer Spiro Metaxas, and shook his head again. “Do you see what you’ve done?” he asked. “You’ve ruined my appetite.” He got up and left.

  “Everything’s going to be fine, Horst, I promise you,” Speyer said. He got up, too, and followed Lane out.

  Gloria had gone directly up to the exercise room. Lane went up after her and lounged against the door frame. She took off the light cotton print dress she’d worn at the lunch table. She was wearing spandex exercise shorts and a sports bra underneath. She sat down and exchanged her sandals for low white socks and jogging shoes then started on the exercise bike.

  “You pushed the good captain pretty hard down there. Why?” Lane asked. In less than two weeks she’d gotten her muscle tone back, and she was looking very good.

  “The man’s a pig.”

  “He’s a friend of your husband’s.”

  She laughed as she looked at his reflection in the floor-length mirrors on the wall in front of her. “How very perceptive of you.”

  “He also has a crew of sixteen men and officers, but there’s only four of us. Maybe you should think about cutting him a little slack. At least until we’re ashore in Havana.”

  “He wouldn’t dare try anything.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Very sure,” she said, without breaking stride. “We have a lot of friends in the most interesting places, and he knows it.”

  “There’s no reason to provoke him,” Lane cautioned. She had changed not only physically in the past ten days, but her entire spirit had changed as well. In the States and again in Germany she had been a lush, soft and unfocused around the edges. Now she was as hard as nails. It was almost as if she was playing a part, he caught himself thinking.

  “John is right,” Speyer said from the corridor. Lane moved aside for him. “There’re less than twenty-four hours to go, why don’t you leave the poor man alone.”

  “Because it amuses me thinking about what he would like to do.”

  “Maybe I’ll let him do whatever he wants. Perhaps that will amuse me.”

  Gloria laughed again. “You may be capable of many things, Helmut, but that is not one of them.” She glanced at Lane. “My husband is very protective of his possessions.”

  Lane took Speyer back out into the corridor. There were no crewmen up here at the moment. “Where’s Ernst?”

  “Downstairs finishing his lunch. What is it?”

  “I think that until we reach Havana one of us should stick close to your wife at all times.”

  Speyer gave Gloria a glance. “Do you think he’ll try something?”

  “He’s your friend. You tell me. But I wouldn’t take odds on him keeping his hands off her. Or at least trying to make a move.”

  Speyer thought about it for a moment. “There’s no use in asking for trouble this close.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. But once we get to Havana, then what?”

  “That’s up to you. But you’ve been telling everybody that you want to get paid and then you’re leaving.”

  “Yes, but that’s going to take time. Selling the diamonds, I mean.”

  Speyer shook his head. “That part’s already been arranged. We can pay your share into any bank account that you want, worldwide. Twenty-four hours tops.”

  “Won’t you have to get the money from the German government first?”

  “Like I said, all that’s been taken care of. I hand over the diamonds to the Cubans and we get paid.”

  “Three hundred mill
ion?”

  “At least,” Speyer assured him, grinning. “You’re going to be a rich man.”

  “How about you?” Lane asked. “Have you already got a place set up in Havana?”

  “Outside the city, actually.”

  “What about your Montana operation?”

  Speyer gave Lane a hard look, his eyes narrowed. “I don’t care for these questions.”

  Lane shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get bored and want another assignment. I’d have to know where to find you.”

  “You found me the first time. I don’t doubt that you could find me again if you used your imagination,” Speyer said. “But I don’t think it’d be wise of you to return to Kalispell. Not unless you change your appearance.”

  “If you’re not going to be there, why bother.”

  “Well, I’m not going to be there, but the people who will be wouldn’t take kindly to someone like you barging in unannounced.”

  Lane looked in at Gloria, who was in her own world, a blank expression on her face in the mirror. “She had trouble in Montana. I’d be surprised if she lasted a year in Havana.”

  “A lot of money can perform wonders.”

  Lane turned back to him. “I meant socially.”

  “So did I.”

  Baumann came around the corner. He looked surprised when he saw Speyer and Lane together.

  “What’d the good captain say after we left?” Lane asked him.

  Baumann exchanged a quick look with his boss, then shook his head. “Nothing much. He’s pissed off, but he won’t give us any trouble.”

  “John thinks that you’re wrong,” Speyer said. “He thinks that we should take turns keeping an eye on my wife.”

  Again they exchanged a look. “If you think that it’s necessary, Herr Kapitän.”

  “It can’t hurt. Maybe Horst has finally gone off the deep end.”

  Baumann laughed nervously. “I see what you mean,” he said. “He would like to see you on the bridge sometime this afternoon.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Something about clearances to enter Cuban waters.”

  “I’ll go talk to him now. In the meantime you can stay with my wife until Horst and I are finished discussing our business.”

  “If anyone cares I’m going back to my stateroom to pack,” Lane told them. “Then maybe I’ll go for a turn on the deck. I could use the fresh air. If you want some help baby-sitting just ask.”

  The screws holding the small ventilator grille were exactly as Lane had positioned them. No one had found his hiding spot. He reached inside and pulled down the compact Russian-made PSM semiautomatic pistol. It was only a 5.45mm, and he had no spare ammunition, but it was better than nothing. On the way out Speyer had made him turn over the Beretta, but he’d kept the PSM which he’d picked up as insurance on their last morning at the chalet. Now he was glad that he had, because something was rotten in Denmark, as his father used to say. Whatever deal Speyer had with the Cubans did not involve three hundred million dollars U.S. There wasn’t that much hard currency available on the entire island. He stuffed the gun in his pocket, replaced the grille, then went out on the deck into the warm, sultry afternoon to wait.

  Speyer left Gloria and Sergeant Baumann together in the spa and went directly to the bridge. The second officer and a helmsman were the only crew on duty. They ignored him. The afternoon was hazy, the horizon indistinct, and there were very little wind or waves, which was to his liking. It was ten minutes before Zimmer showed up, and he looked angry. “We have to talk.”

  “You’re damned right we do,” Speyer agreed. “Let’s go to your cabin.”

  They went across to the captain’s neat, very well furnished quarters, where Zimmer poured them each a schnapps. “Your boy is starting to get suspicious. Why the hell haven’t you killed him? What are you waiting for?”

  “In the first place, your crew would ask questions if something happened to him.”

  “You let me worry about my crew. I’ve got just as much at stake in this project as you do. In the meantime he could cause us no end of trouble.”

  “We have the only guns on the ship.”

  “That’s right, so let’s use them.” Zimmer checked his watch. “In a little more than twelve hours this ship will be on the bottom in five hundred fathoms of water. There’ll be no survivors. No mayday will be sent. No one will suspect a thing until we’re reported overdue in Miami. By then we’ll be long gone. I don’t want anything screwing up my share of this operation.”

  “Mr. Browne is going down with the ship.”

  “I don’t have any argument with that, Helmut.”

  “When the ship sinks he’s going to be very much alive. Locked in his cabin. Knowing that there’s not a thing he can do to prevent his own death, with plenty of time to think about how he got himself into such a deadly predicament.”

  Zimmer gave him an evil grin. “You’re a sadistic bastard, I’ll give you that much. What’d he do to you?”

  “He interfered in places he should not have interfered.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “He went to bed with my wife.”

  Zimmer started to say something, but then thought better of it, and just shook his head.

  “Are we on schedule for our rendezvous?”

  “We’ll be there at two this morning, which means we have our work cut out for us starting at one.”

  “We’ll meet back here then,” Speyer said. He tossed off his schnapps and left.

  The first officer, Spiro Metaxas, listening on the ship’s phone which Zimmer had left on, came in. He looked nervous. “Crossing that bastard is a risky business,” he said. He was short, gnarled and misshapen like an olive tree, and just as dark and tough.

  “You worry too much. That’s my concern,” Zimmer told him. “We’re going to come out of this in good shape. Once we get the diamonds up to Washington and the organization pays us off we’ll be on easy street.”

  Metaxas, who was a hard-headed Greek and had seen just about everything, wasn’t convinced. “Killing the crew isn’t going to be so simple either.”

  “One of the main charges will go off right below the crew’s mess deck. All you have to do is get them there, just like we planned. Make some excuse to get the hell out, and … boom.”

  “Then what?” Metaxas asked sourly. “After Washington, I mean.”

  “Then I never want to see your ugly face again.” Zimmer laughed. He poured a schnapps for his first mate and another for himself. “Relax, Spiro. When this is over you’ll be a millionaire. You can go anywhere and do anything that you want. You’ll be a free man. You can buy your Greek island and be king.”

  They had their dinner at 8:00 P.M., the tension in the dining room so thick that it could be cut with a knife. Afterward Lane went back out onto the quarterdeck to be alone and to smoke a cigarette. He was getting the feeling that they were never going to make it to Havana. It was the way Zimmer and Speyer kept exchanging glances, making offhand comments like schoolyard bullies trying to keep a secret about who they were going to pound next. Something was going to happen in the middle of the night, maybe a mutiny or something.

  Once the ship had settled down for the evening, he was going up to the radio room to find a ship-to-shore phone. Florida was just over the horizon to the northwest, and sometime between now and the dawn he figured he was going to be needing help a lot more than he needed answers.

  “What are your plans once you’re no longer impecunious?” Gloria asked, coming up behind him.

  She wore another sundress, her shoulders bare, the neckline very low. The lights from the ship’s superstructure and from the stars were perfect for her. She looked fifteen years younger than she was.

  “I thought that I would throw a big party. Copacabana, maybe.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” she said, smiling wistfully. “I’m getting tired of Montana.”

  “You’ll have Havana, if that’s any consolation.”

/>   She pursed her lips seductively and inclined her head. “I lied to the captain when I told him that the thing I hated most was a coward. What really gets to me is boredom.”

  “Then change your life.”

  “I’m trying to, John, but it’s never that easy.”

  “I’m sure that your husband’s lifestyle provides plenty of excitement. Germany and now this, wherever it’s leading you.”

  The captain came out on deck and didn’t see them standing at the stern rail. He got what looked like a grappling hook and a coil of line from a locker, and when he straightened up he spotted them.

  “Good evening,” Lane said.

  “Excuse me,” Zimmer replied. He nodded and ducked back inside.

  “Strange—” Gloria said.

  “Gotta run,” Lane told her. “Ta-ta.” He followed the captain inside in time to see the hatch leading down to the catwalk between the double hull close.

  Captain Zimmer stopped in the darkness to listen. He’d thought that he’d heard the hatch above closing and then footfalls on the stairs, but all was quiet now except for the ship’s noises, and he wasn’t sure what he’d heard. It was rotten luck that Browne had spotted him, but the bitch would keep him occupied. And none of them would matter when the rest of his plan was put in place.

  He hurried the rest of the way down into the bowels of the ship, opened the bottom hatch, and ducked inside the passageway between the hulls. The stench was nearly overpowering; he kept reminding himself of the millions he was going to make.

  He pulled up the grate at the turn of the hulls and then dropped the grappling hook into the stinking bilge, paying out the line with his fingertips.

  He snagged one of the handles on the third try and, putting his back into it, pulled the box up out of the bilge. It was a damned heavy thing. He had to wrestle with it to get it up on the catwalk and remove the grappling hook.

  He hunched down on his knee and rubbed some of the slime away from the lid. There was no lock or hinges. A bead of solder ran around the top edge, completely sealing whatever was inside from the air. Funny, he thought. Diamonds were supposed to be indestructible. But then the old Nazis had done some crazy shit, especially near the end of the war.