"Help, I can use," said Remo. "But an angry relative with no authority or diplomatic standing who starts raising hell with foreigners on their own soil doesn't qualify as help. You'd be a problem, and I've got enough of those already."
"And how do you propose to stop me, Mr. Remo Rubble?"
"Well, for openers, I think I'd call your father on the Hill and tell him that you're interfering with official business, jeopardizing any chance we have of tracking down the men who killed your brother. I don't think he'd take that very well, do you?"
Stacy went pale, and then her cheeks flushed brilliant crimson, anger leaping from a simmer to an instant, rolling boil. "You wouldn't dare!"
"There was a pay phone in the hospital lobby," Remo said. "I'll have it done in the next three minutes."
The angry color faded back a shade or two, her shoulders slumped, and for the second time in twenty minutes Remo found himself about to watch a woman cry.
"I have to do something," she said between clenched teeth. "I can't take any more of this infernal waiting, sitting on my hands while someone else goes out and sniffs around, then comes back saying that he can't do anything."
"You haven't heard me say that," Remo told her.
"Not yet."
"And you won't, I promise you," he said, all the while wondering why he was being sympathetic instead of trying to shake the woman loose. "I'm on this job until it's done. I can't think of a single reason why you should trust me, after what you've been through, but you can."
"I don't want them in jail, you understand? I want them dead."
His shrug was casual, but at that moment Stacy Armitage caught a glint of something in the face of the man who called himself Remo Rubble. It was the slightest muscular change along the corners of his mouth, like the start of an ironic smile that never came into being. She noticed his eyes then.
She had heard men described as having cruel eyes and harsh eyes, and that was always considered romantic. Rugged. The eyes of the man who called himself Remo were at once sardonic, and maybe a little friendly, and very, very dead.
Stacy Armitage was afraid for a fraction of a second when she knew that her remark had hit home with this man. She had said she wanted the perpetrators dead. This man had committed himself, before he even knew her, to accomplishing just that deed. This man was a killer. And if he was on the case, if he was working for the U.S. government, that meant he was a hired assassin.
Stacy Armitage was pretty sure that was against the rules. But at that moment she couldn't have been more pleased.
The man with the ridiculously false name of Remo asked, "Can I drop you somewhere?"
"No," she said. "I'm going back inside to spend time with Kelly."
"She's asleep."
"Maybe I'll wait," said Stacy Armitage, and Remo knew she was not referring to her visit at the hospital.
"That would be best," he agreed.
"But only for a little while."
"Let's hope," he said, "that's all it takes."
He left her standing on the sidewalk, and was pleased to find that his boring little Nissan rental car had attracted no hordes of angry civilian or military law-enforcement personnel. The shiny red Italian sports car he had rented in New York, he decided, was a lot like the handmade Italian shoes he wore-they were good for about a day's use before you got rid of them.
When he glanced in the Nissan's rearview mirror, Stacy Armitage had disappeared inside the hospital once more. Grimly he hoped that she was a problem solved.
All he needed was an emotionally involved relative-slash-friend mucking things up while he went hunting pirates.
Chapter 5
"You wanna check the damn chart again?"
"I checked the damn chart a dozen times already," Jon Fitzgivens answered. "It doesn't tell me anything. You want to check the damn compass?"
"Smart-ass."
Tommy Gilpin wasn't absolutely frantic yet, but Fitzgivens could tell that he was getting there. Beneath the deep suntan his cheeks were flushed an angry pink, verging on salmon, and he gripped the Salome's wheel with one big hand-the same one that had served him so well hurling footballs downfield for the Princeton Tigers before he had moved on to Harvard Law School. He had a kind of "sue the bastards" look about him now, but even after three years of the paper chase, he couldn't think of anyone to blame for getting lost at sea through his own negligence. Not yet, at least.
"Still lost there, Tom-Tom?" Barry Ward was annoyingly cheerful as he emerged from the Salome's companionway, leading to the staterooms belowdecks. The reason for good humor was close behind him, still adjusting her bikini top and patting at her cheeks to help disguise the flush of sex. As if they all wouldn't know she and Ward had just been doing the nasty belowdecks-if for no other reason than she never wore her bikini top except for an hour or so after getting laid.
"Looking good, Meg," Jon Fitzgivens told her with a rakish smile.
"We are not lost," Tommy said, glaring out to sea as if he were expecting helpful signposts to appear above the waves. "I know exactly where we are."
"Then share, by all means." Barry was goading him and enjoying the game, but took the precaution of remaining outside their self-appointed captain's reach.
"We're west of Saint Lucia, roughly southbound."
"Roughly?" Barry said. "Is that one of those nautical terms they taught you at yachting school, little buddy?"
"Listen, Bare, old chum, if you think you can handle this, by all means, step right up. I'm sure we'd all enjoy the show."
"I wouldn't dream of it, Tom-Tom," said Barry. "Not when we've all come to trust your navigating skills so much."
"Leave him alone for Christ's sake, Bare." Felicia Docherty was glaring back at Barry from her place on the forward deck, where her long brown body lay almost fully exposed to the Caribbean sun, her small bikini top untied, the thong between her buttocks looking more like a sensuous bookmark than swimwear.
Barry was considering a comeback when his own squeeze, Megan Richards, caught him with a graceful elbow to the ribs and shook her head in warning. Barry grinned at her and shrugged, leaned in to kiss her lightly on the lips, apparently deciding that he could afford to let it go-at least until they sighted land again. If Tommy lost his head and pitched somebody overboard out here, God knew how many miles from anywhere, there could be hell to pay before the others tossed down a life preserver. And how would they explain a missing person to their parents, much less to the staid authorities in West Palm Beach?
It should be easy, Jon considered, though he kept the observation to himself. If they were really west of Saint Lucia, all they had to do was turn the Salome due east, or thereabouts, and hold a steady course until they struck landfall. Even if Tommy's calculations fell short of precision-which was more or less a given, when you thought about it-they could still raise someone on the radio.
But the radio wasn't working too often. They'd get it going for a while, then nothing. That was a minor inconvenience, Fitzgivens thought, compared to the navigation computer, which was totally fried. It had started acting up their first day out of port, but Tommy wasn't having any of that crap about returning to the source for a replacement, wasting time on the vacation all of them had planned and waited for throughout a grim semester in the halls of academia. No way. So what if it was telling them they were in the Arctic Circle? Tommy could navigate them the old-fashioned way. Or so he'd claimed.
Christ, Fitzgivens thought, he didn't even have his mobile phone. He had accidentally on purpose left it behind. He didn't need his damn mother checking up on him every damn night. But it had a GPS in it and at least he would have known where they were.
So they were lost at sea, and everybody knew it, although Tommy Gilpin had yet to admit that anything was wrong. He seemed to think determination was enough to see them through, and Jon Fitzgivens prayed to nameless gods that he was right. Because if they were lost, and they had to be rescued, and his mother found out about it-death would be better than the years
of harassment that would result.
"The sun's great, isn't it?"
Reclining near Felicia on the foredeck, Robin Chatsworth flashed a dazzling smile at Jon, then puckered up and offered him a cute long-distance kiss. It warmed him in a way entirely different from the tropic sunshine, thinking what those lips could do when they were given half a chance, and he was glad that Robin had agreed to come along on this vacation cruise. If they were going to be lost at sea, perhaps cast up on some deserted isle like Gilligan and the rest, at least Jon knew that he wouldn't be bored. If they were stranded long enough, in fact, that they ran out of pills and condoms, Robin could console him with that special talent he had taught her in the front seat of his BMW, directing her and coaching her with tender loving care until she got it just exactly right.
God bless slow learners, Jon Fitzgivens thought. He had begun to stiffen, threatening to make an exhibition in his own tight swimming trunks, and started looking for another topic to distract him. Something grim, like being lost at sea. Oh, yeah. That did the trick just fine.
It was the fourth day of a cruise that was supposed to last two weeks, courtesy of their respective wealthy parents, but now Jon caught himself wondering if they would all be around when the sea voyage came to an end. He pictured the Salome adrift, crewless, like one of the ghost ships you heard so much about in these waters.
Goddamn Bermuda Triangle, for Christ's sake! It had titillated Jon when he was ten or twelve years old, reading sensational paperbacks and watching old reruns of Leonard Nimoy In Search Of the answer, but age, experience and advancing cynicism had taught him that most disasters-the "mysterious" included-could be traced to human frailty: negligence, malfeasance, some deliberate act or oversight. Why else was he investing all this time and sweat at Harvard Law, if no one was responsible for anything? Whom would he sue, on behalf of wealthy clients, if the world was run by Fate or some such drivel, guiding fingers from beyond the stars?
No, thank you very much. If there was any order in the world, if he had any kind of choice at all, Jon would prefer to sue the bastards. Litigation made the world go around.
"Is that another boat?"
The question came from Megan, standing to the port side of the wheelhouse, one knee raised invitingly to brace her foot against the railing, buttocks taut and round beneath the pastel fabric of her swimsuit bottom. Jon was wishing she had worn a thong to match Felicia's, feeling his tumescence coming back, when he glanced forward, following her index finger, and picked out a speck on the horizon. "Where?" asked Tommy, still not seeing it.
"At one o'clock," Jon told him, also pointing now.
"I don't-oh, right. Looks like a boat."
"I'd say it was a safe bet," Barry added from the sidelines.
"Or perhaps we've found a sea serpent." Megan glanced back at him and winked, suggesting that he had the only serpent that intrigued her for the moment, anyway. They had been dating, off and on, for something like a year, but in the "off" times, she was not adverse to sampling other men-including Tommy Gilpin, if the campus scuttlebutt was accurate.
"It is a boat!" said Robin. "Maybe they can tell us where we are."
Their captain glared at her for that, but Robin missed it, and Felicia cast a look at Tommy that reminded him he shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth-at least not if he expected to come within hailing distance of any bodily orifice not his own for the remainder of the cruise.
"We'll check it out," he muttered, barely audible, and cranked the wheel enough to turn the Salome head-on toward that alluring speck.
"I HAVE A VESSEL EAST, sou'east," the lookout called back from the bow pulpit of the sailboat Ravager. The vessel's name had once been something else, but that was long ago, and cunning hands had helped her true name to emerge across the stern, in crimson letters.
Billy Teach left his first mate to man the cockpit, moving forward to the lookout's side. "Show me," he said.
The lookout pointed, handing him the glass and guiding it until a sleek yacht filled the eyepiece. There were two half-naked women lying on the foredeck-lookers, both of them-and three or four more bodies clustered aft. Teach wasn't sure exactly, and he knew there might be more below, but he wasn't concerned about the numbers. Cunning, skill, determination, firepower. He had it all.
"Looks sweet," the lookout said, his unsolicited opinion grating briefly on the captain's nerves, but Billy let it go. The man was right, in any case.
"Good work," he said. And then, to no one in particular, "Let's take 'em!"
With a ragged cheer, his men scrambled nimbly to their assigned positions, trimming the sails and tacking the Ravager toward their new target, still barely a flyspeck in the distance for those without spyglasses.
"Remember how we do it, lads!" Teach bellowed at them from the rail, no fear his voice would carry to the target vessel yet. "We can't lose this plum, when she's so rich and ripe for plucking!"
Several of his men were grinning broadly, laughing as they grappled with the lines, but none would miss the dark side of his warning. Any man who botched the mission, now that they had juicy prey in view, would damn well wish that he was dead before his time arrived. Most of the crew had witnessed punishment before, and those who hadn't seen it for themselves had at least heard the stories, grim enough to keep them on their toes and minding their respective tasks.
The Ravager had diesel engines down below, but Billy Teach preferred to travel with the wind whenever possible. It was the way things ought to be, out on the open water, with no throbbing racket down below, no stench from the exhaust pipes. He could lose himself at sea-or find himself, to be more accurate. He could step out of time and live according to his own desires, the way some men had always done, without regard for man-made rules and regulations.
If their prey attempted to outrun them, Billy was prepared to use the diesels in a heartbeat, rather than allow the sweet prize to escape. But it would be a disappointment, all the same-less pure, somehow, than if the wind alone conveyed them to their destination, saw them through their conquest of the unsuspecting pleasure craft and took them safely home again.
As for the weapons, now, that was a different thing entirely. Billy Teach would have enjoyed the use of cutlasses and dirks, subduing rowdy prisoners with a belaying pin, but times had changed, and you could never tell what kind of hardware tourists would be packing in this day and age. Between shark fishermen, drug runners, oil prospectors and the nervous Nellies who imagined they were still back in Miami or New York, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that any given pleasure craft was armed.
"Bring up the sixty and my twelve," Teach told his second mate.
"Aye, sir."
The whip-thin redhead scrambled to obey. Brief moments later, he was back, handing Teach the black Benelli M-1 Super 90 semiautomatic shotgun they had looted from a Haitian fishing boat some two years back. As for himself, the mate cradled a modified M-60 machine gun, its barrel shortened and fitted with a forward pistol grip, the ammo belt neatly folded into a side-mounted box on the left. Cosmetic modifications aside, it would still spew 7.62 mm rounds at a cyclic rate of some 600 rounds per minute, fast and deadly enough to sweep the deck of any target vessel Billy Teach was likely to select.
The other members of his crew were armed, as well, with knives and handguns of their choice, but they were under standing orders not to fire unless their captain gave the word. Teach didn't mind a bit of bloodshed on his raids-it was traditional, in fact-but in the ideal situation, he decided who should live and who should die. Unless they were embroiled in mortal combat with a well-armed foe, he would not leave that choice to lowly deckhands and the like.
"Remember to stay out of sight with that until I give the word," Teach told his mate. It was unnecessary-might even have been insulting to a man with sharper wits-but he was answered with a brisk "Aye, Captain" and a nod for emphasis.
The Ravager was running with the wind now, and Billy Teach lingered at the toe rail, enjoying the bree
ze and salt spray in his face. He held the shotgun down against his leg. There was no need for a bracing hand against the toe rail. Billy Teach had grown up on the ocean, or in such proximity that he could hear and smell it in his sleep. He had developed sea legs long before most boys his age had learned to run a football down the field for no damn reason he could ever understand. What kind of sport was that, when you could spend your best days on the water, hunting other men?
And women, aye. Best not forget the women he had glimpsed aboard their target. From what Billy Teach had seen, this lot would more than make up for the one who got away.
There had been some concern about the female prisoner's escape, initially, but Teach had managed to convince himself that she was dead. A city girl and landlubber like that, what chance did she have on the open water, miles and miles from anywhere, without provisions or a hint of how to navigate?
No chance at all.
The sharks and 'cuda would have done for her by now, if she had not been caught up in a squall and simply drowned, or died from thirst and hunger in the open boat she stole. There had been talk of going after her, but it had seemed too risky in the long run. Better to let nature take its course, and if by some bizarre fluke she was found alive-what of it? How could she direct the law to a location she had only seen but briefly, in the early-morning light, as she was fleeing for her life, without a chart or any instruments to guide her?
The wind was brisk behind them, and they had already closed the distance to their target by half. When Teach raised the spyglass again, he saw that their intended prey had sighted them, as well. The two young women on the foredeck had their tops on now, both sitting up and staring back at him, an eerie sense that they could somehow see him, read his mind.
Well, let them. Even witchy magic wouldn't save them now.
There was a third young woman, equally attractive, standing near the wheelhouse, where three men were clustered, one piloting the yacht, his two companions arguing. Not with each other, it appeared, but with the tall man at the wheel. Teach had no skill at reading lips and couldn't tell what they were saying, but he wondered if they were alarmed at the appearance of another vessel here and now. He hoped they wouldn't run for it, but if they did...
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