The Keeper

by George C. Chesbro

  Now the guard recognized her, and his single eye filmed with both humiliation and rage. “You!”

  “You’re damn lucky I need you, you son-of-a-bitch,” Jade said evenly. “You’re going to be my ticket out of here.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, whore. You don’t think people heard those shots?”

  “I don’t give a fuck what they heard,” Jade said as she slammed the briefcase into the man’s belly. “Here. Make yourself useful and hang onto this. Drop it, and I drop you.”

  The guard reflexively dropped his arms and wrapped them around the briefcase. Jade pressed the bore of the gun to his neck, and then grabbed the back of his collar with her other hand and turned him around before moving the bore to the base of his skull. She glanced behind her to where Henry Bolo lay beneath the pile of blood-soaked bedding he had dragged with him as he’d bounced off the bed. Jade fired another round into the pile, watched as more blood oozed up around the bullet hole, and then pushed the redheaded man out into the suite’s sitting room and toward the door.

  “Give it up, whore. How the hell far do you think you’re going to get? You won’t even make it off the floor.”

  “Shut up, shithead. I’ve got three rounds left, but I think one will do, even with your thick skull. You have a very serious vested interest in getting me out of here. If I do get out, the death sentence I passed on you before is commuted, and you live. If it looks like I’m not going to make it, you die. Guaranteed. Now open the door. Take one step out into the hallway and stop. I hope those directions aren’t too complicated, because you get a bullet in the brain if you don’t follow them. Now do it.”

  The man did as he was told, opening the door and taking one step out into the corridor. Jade, still holding his collar and with the revolver pressed to the base of his skull, peered around the doorframe. To her right, the guard who had been posted in the stairwell had come through the exit door and was standing in the middle of the corridor, feet apart and using both hands to aim an automatic pistol at her head. To her left a knot of men, all dressed in dark business suits, were gathered in the corridor. Standing just in front of them was a burly man with white hair and very pale, icy eyes, a man she had last seen sweating as he sat above her on a dais in Saudi Arabia. Now Jade realized that his was the mysterious voice on the tape, a voice she had heard only once before, when he had brusquely asked if she was a lesbian.

  “Give it up, Gemstone,” the pale-eyed man said in an almost soothing tone. “You can’t leave here alive unless we let you go, which we might be inclined to do under certain circumstances. We never wanted any trouble with you, and a lot of money was given to your fisherman friend to make that point. Take the gun away from the man’s head, and we’ll discuss the situation calmly.”

  “Christ,” Jade said, stripping off her wig and dropping it to the floor. “I should have guessed from the beginning that this was a Company operation. No wonder these jokers manage to get away with so much. You spooks from Langley just can’t stay out of trouble, can you?”

  “I’m not the one in trouble, Gemstone.”

  “Tell your flunkies to back off, mister. The guard to my right lays down his gun and goes over to join the rest of you. Do as I say, and nobody else gets hurt.”

  The C.I.A. operative waved his thick, right hand in a gesture of dismissal. “I thought we had an arrangement, Gemstone. You got what you wanted, money for the fisherman to replace his boat. Why are we having this unpleasantness? You had nothing to gain by going up against us, and you were certainly aware of what you risked losing if you did so. We didn’t expect to hear from you again.”

  “If you didn’t want to hear from me again, you should have put my old buddy Henry Bolo on a shorter leash. He came after me and my children with a goddamn grenade launcher.”

  There was a short pause. The pale-eyed man blinked slowly, then said, “That was unauthorized.”

  “You’re full of shit. You, of all people, should have known that Bolo would never stop coming after me once he knew where I lived. You probably counted on it.”

  “You’re wrong. I didn’t even know until very recently that Sergeant Bolo worked for this enterprise. You know what I do, so you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m not exactly involved in the day-to-day management of the enterprise. If there’s a problem, I’ll take care of it.”

  “That’s very sweet of you, but the offer comes a little late. I’ve already taken care of it.”

  “Put down the gun, Gemstone. You can go, and we’ll clean up any little mess you’ve left behind. You really don’t want to try to fuck with us any more than you already have, and the fact remains that we don’t want to fuck with you any more than we already have. You got our attention, and you’ve made your point. I tell you again that the attack on you by Sergeant Bolo was unauthorized; I arranged for the payment to the fisherman, and I ordered that you be left alone. I suggest we reinstate the truce I thought was in place.”

  “It’s too late. Everything that’s gone on here over the weekend has been taped and broadcast on a satellite feed to friends of mine in Washington.”

  “You don’t have any friends in Washington, Gemstone,” the burly man said in a mild tone. “What you have is one accomplice who’s now in possession of some potentially embarrassing tape recordings. Detective Mannes may have left the hotel by now, but he’ll never get out of Miami.”

  “Back off. If you eliminate me, the only thing you’ll get is a murder rap tied to treason charges.”

  “Kill her,” the pale-eyed man said in the same mild tone as he abruptly turned away and started to push through the knot of men standing behind him.

  And so she was going to die here, Jade thought—but she still had three rounds left in the revolver, and Henry Bolo would not be the only one to accompany her to the grave. She would take out the one-eyed redhead, and she would fire her remaining two bullets into the back of the C.I.A. operative.

  She was about to fire a bullet into the guard’s skull when the metal door to her right at the end of the corridor suddenly crashed open and Roy, a large canvas bag filled with their electronic equipment slung over his shoulder, burst through. The startled gunman standing in the middle of the corridor started to turn at the same time as Roy swung the canvas bag at his head. The bag caught the man full in the face and he fell backward, his gun firing into the ceiling.

  Jade hit the man in front of her hard in the kidneys with the barrel of the revolver at the same time as she reached around him and grabbed the briefcase in his hands. Then she sprinted toward the door Roy was holding open for her. Suddenly the air was filled with the sound of gunfire. Bullets whined around her head and smacked into the canvas bag Roy was holding out as a shield. She rolled under the bag, came up on her feet and darted out the door. She ran down the steel steps of the stairwell, with Roy close behind her.

  “Fuck,” Roy gasped as they reached the landing midway between the second and ground floors, swung around on the railing and headed down toward a door marked Exit. “If those bastards smashed any of this equipment, I’m in deep shit with the people I borrowed it from. I promised them my first born if anything happened to it.”

  “You’ve got a great set of priorities, sweetie!” Jade shouted over her shoulder, ducking as more shots were fired from the landing above them. Bullets whined, ricocheted off the steps and walls around them. “Besides, you don’t have any children to give them!”

  “In that case, they said they’d cut off my balls!”

  “That is serious! Thanks for doing such a stupid thing, Roy! You really are my hero!”

  When they reached the landing on the ground floor, Jade kicked open the Exit door and they rushed out of the hotel into the night. They were immediately met by a blast of wind and driving rain that knocked them back against the building. Linking arms and shielding their faces with their forearms, they struggled through the maelstrom of the tropical storm, out of the hotel’s parking lot and onto a side street.

 
; “Which way?!” Roy shouted, putting his mouth close to Jade’s ear so that he could be heard over the screaming of the wind.

  “Straight ahead! The marina!”

  “Now we can go to the cops!”

  “Not in this town, Roy!”

  “We’ve got tapes, pictures, and a briefcase full of incriminating documents! The cops have to listen to us!”

  “There’s more than enough juice back in that hotel to make the tapes, photographs and briefcase disappear, along with us!”

  “Why are we going to the marina?!”

  “Because that’s where they keep boats!”

  “Boats?!”

  “You know how to sail?!”

  “Sail?! I don’t even know how to fucking swim!”

  “Then this will be a wonderful learning experience!”

  Roy wasted no more energy shouting. He moved slightly ahead of Jade and held the canvas bag up in front of them with both hands to shield their eyes from the wind and stinging rain. They kept struggling forward, leaning into the gale, down the middle of the street that led from the hotel to one of the many marinas on the shore of the bay a few hundred yards ahead.

  After a few minutes of staggering blind in the wet, shrieking darkness, Roy stumbled into a chain link fence. Together, they moved along the fence until they came to a padlocked gate. Jade used two of the bullets left in the revolver to shoot the lock off the gate, and they entered the marina. They staggered through a parking lot, went down a walkway and turned left. In front of them a sea of masts rose like a ghostly forest out of the whipping wind and spray. They reached a gangplank and went down it to a floating dock flanked on both sides by sail and power boats of various sizes that were bucking in their slips, their rigging and mooring lines groaning as the ships rode up and down the wind-whipped waves.

  “What are you looking for?!” Roy shouted as he staggered along beside Jade, who was now leaning sideways into the gale, making her way toward the end of the dock and shielding her eyes with both hands as she inspected the boats on either side of her.

  “Something I can single-hand but that’s still big enough to ride out this storm!”

  “Power boat?!”

  “No! Sail!”

  “Why not just some big fucking yacht?!”

  “Believe it or not, we have a better chance of getting out of here and where we want to go on a sailboat!”

  “I have a choice?! Where are we going?!”

  “As far away from here as we can get, like New York! Come on! We’re taking this one!”

  Roy followed Jade up a short, raked gangplank onto the deck of a sailboat that looked to be almost sixty feet long. Jade used her last bullet to shoot off the lock of the door leading to the cabin, and then tossed the revolver overboard. She yanked open the door, and Roy followed her inside. He tossed the canvas bag onto a bunk, and then closed the door behind him and watched as Jade rummaged around in a series of built-in lockers until she found an orange, oilskin slicker, which she wrapped around the briefcase she had been carrying. Next she took some line from the locker, wrapped that around the slicker-covered briefcase, and then tied it off.

  “What can I do?” Roy asked. He was already starting to feel sick to his stomach as the boat bucked and heaved under him.

  “Look for life jackets,” Jade replied tersely as she pulled a small tool chest from a drawer under the sink in the galley. “If you’re going to be sick, and the fact that you now look like a not-so-jolly green giant makes me think you will be, go up on deck. Try not to throw up into the wind.”

  Roy did as he was told, gripping wooden hand rails on the sides of the cabin for support as he searched through drawers and storage lockers until he found one filled with eight large, bright orange life jackets. He slipped into one of them, and then brought another to Jade, who had removed the top panel from the control console and was working inside with a screwdriver. She paused long enough to let him help her put on her jacket.

  “Are you all right, Roy? Don’t want to throw up yet?”

  Roy smiled grimly. “I haven’t had time to throw up; I’ll get to it later. Besides, I’m having the time of my life, and I’m afraid I might miss something if I go up on deck.”

  Jade laughed. “I’ll make sure you don’t miss anything. Would you go up and untie the dock lines? They’ll be fore and aft; front and back.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Roy said, snapping off a salute before turning and starting up the short ladder to the main deck.

  As Roy came through the cabin door he was almost blown off his feet by the wind. Crawling on his hands and knees and gripping the lifelines strung along the deck, he made his way to the stern, where he found a thick hawser wrapped around a steel cleat. He untied the line, threw the end away into the darkness. On his way to the bow he felt rather than heard the boat’s engine rumble to life. He untied and cast off the bow line. When he returned to the stern he found Jade, dressed in a hooded, orange slicker, standing with her feet spread apart as she firmly gripped the large helm of the boat. The boat was laboriously moving away from the dock at a forty five degree angle, heading out into the sheltered harbor. Waves crashed over the sides, soaking them both.

  “Go below and get dry, Roy!” Jade shouted. “There’s nothing else for you to do up here!”

  “No way!” Roy shouted back, moving up behind Jade and wrapping his arms around her waist. “I wouldn’t want to miss any part of my first sailing lesson!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  i

  Roy abruptly got up from where he was sprawled on the deck and, holding tight to the lifeline, leaned over the railing at the stern of the wildly pitching boat and vomited into the rainy and windswept darkness. His retching produced nothing but dry heaves, for he had emptied the contents of his stomach hours before, but the spasms continued until his stomach muscles ached and he felt as if he were being pulled apart at his middle. When he thought he could breathe without retching, he sank back down to the deck, legs splayed out to his sides, and resumed his death grip on the railing. He concentrated on breathing deeply and regularly, this exercise his only defense against the terror that clawed at his soul like some giant black leopard.

  In fact, although he hoped he had been successful in hiding it, he had been terrified from the moment he had set foot on the boat, even before he had tossed off the mooring lines and the engine had kicked to life and they had begun their torturous passage out of the harbor past a stone breakwater to their present position, where they had been for hours, a few hundred yards past the breakwater in the open ocean, carried on a wild roller coaster ride up the faces of thirty foot waves, down the lee side into a trough, and then up the face of the next wave. Each time they had shot down the back side of a wave, he had been certain they would be swamped by the next wave towering over them, but they were still afloat—miraculously, in his opinion.

  Roy assumed they had been out on the water only three or four hours, but it felt like a lifetime. Except when his persistent nausea had goaded him to his feet, he had lain like this on the deck as if paralyzed, staring transfixed at the figure of the woman looming above him in the darkness, her hands steady on the helm as she kept the bow of the boat pointed into the wind. Not knowing what to do, seemingly unable to move except to lean over the railing and retch, he had done nothing but brace himself and look on from the time Jade had locked the wheel, thrown a tiny, balloon-shaped device on a line behind them, raised a tiny, triangular sail at the bow, and then returned to the helm, where she had been ever since.

  Now Roy knew it was necessary for him to do more than throw up and be terrified.

  He had almost gotten used to the movements of the boat, which had a kind of rhythm in their violence. He waited until the boat had careered down the back side of a wave and begun its relatively slow climb up the face of the next, then willed himself to roll over and get up on his hands and knees. Instantly another wave of nausea rippled through his stomach, but he fought it off by opening his mouth wide an
d breathing deeply. He crawled across the deck, grabbed hold of the steering post and pulled himself to his feet next to Jade.

  “This is a hell of a first sailing lesson,” Roy croaked. “Don’t you think it’s time we turned off the wind machine and-?”

  He abruptly stopped speaking when he looked into Jade’s face, which was ashen, the color of smudged ivory. Her eyes were sunken in their sockets, and when he touched the hands that gripped the wheel they felt cold as ice. Now that he was standing close to Jade, he could see that she was shaking with cold and exhaustion, and her teeth were chattering. He quickly stepped behind her, thrust his arms under hers and gripped the helm as he put his mouth close to her ear. “It’s time for you to take a break, Jade,” he continued. “Go below, dry off and get some rest. You’ve got to get out of the wind. Just tell me what to do.”

  Jade shuddered as she shook her head. “You can’t,” she said in a hollow voice that was barely audible above the shrieking wind. “I can’t … just tell you. It’s too hard. You don’t know how, and you’re sick.”

  “Show me,” Roy insisted, putting his strong hands over hers and prying her gelid fingers from the wheel before gripping it with his own. “I’m a quick learner, and I just got unsick. If you don’t go below and get out of this wind, you’re going to pass out. If that happens before you show me how to handle this thing, we’ll die. I’d hate to miss my next lesson.”

  Jade hesitated, then dropped her arms and ducked under Roy’s. Roy immediately stepped into her place, bracing his legs and gripping the wheel tightly as they shot down into another trough between waves. Jade moved behind him, and he felt her arms wrap around his waist, heard her voice as she shouted into his ear.

  “What we’re doing is called heaving to! No matter what happens, you must keep the bow pointed at this angle into the wind and waves! If you make one mistake, lose your concentration for even a moment, we could broach—turn sideways—and it’s all over! Got it?!”