The Ocean Dark: A Novel

by Jack Rogan

  Josh blinked, his vision clearing.

  Gabe Rio had a world-weary wisdom and a relaxed air that made him an easy man to work for, and to respect—or would have, if he hadn’t been a smuggler of guns and drugs. Tonight all of that amiable nature had been stripped away.

  The captain aimed the pistol from five feet away, smart enough to know that a pistol was a ranged weapon, that if he got too close it could be used against him. The dark hole in the barrel seemed to wink at Josh, as though imminent death were some kind of joke.

  On the floor by the door, Hank Boggs moaned, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. The puddle of vomit in front of him had already begun to reek. His eyes were closed and he breathed through his clenched teeth.

  “That was stupid,” Gabe said.

  Josh leaned his head against the wall, still disoriented, and wondered how badly he was bleeding. “I had two choices. Try to avoid a beating, or just sit and take it. I’ve never been good with sitting and taking it.”

  Gabe sighed, raised the barrel of the gun a few inches, steadied his aim. “You ever study the Spanish Inquisition?”

  Frowning painfully at the weird segue, Josh gave a small shrug. “Not in depth.”

  “The Inquisitors would get it into their heads that someone was a witch and they would torture them for a confession. If they confessed, they were executed as witches. Only if they died without confessing did the Inquisitors believe they were not witches, and by then it didn’t matter anymore.”

  With the knock to the head he’d just gotten, the pain in his face, and the blood dribbling down his cheek, Josh didn’t feel like being a smart-ass anymore. Still, he almost thanked the captain for the history lesson. He wanted to pretend he didn’t know where Gabe was headed with this line of thought, but that would have been a lie.

  “You’re going to tell us where the beacon is,” the captain went on. “You don’t want to tell us, we hurt you. If you keep pretending there isn’t some kind of tracking device on board my ship, we hurt you. Deny it exists, and the only way I’m going to believe you is if you die without telling me where it is. By which point, you being here won’t be an issue anymore.”

  The gun barrel did not waver. Nor did Gabe Rio’s furious gaze. Josh had some doubts that the man would actually kill an FBI agent aboard his ship, knowing that capture might be imminent. But he didn’t want to test those doubts.

  Boggs started to climb wretchedly to his feet. His chest rose and fell as he continued to catch his breath, and he focused watery, raging eyes on Josh.

  Gabe Rio might not kill him, but Hank Boggs would do it just for fun. Death ranked number one on his list of Things to Avoid, followed closely by torture.

  Josh opened his hands in surrender. “It’s attached to the back of the stove down in the galley.”

  Gabe didn’t smile. “Was that so hard?”

  A dozen retorts crossed Josh’s mind and he rejected them all. His mouth had gotten him in trouble in the past, but those lessons had been valuable. He might piss people off with a sharp tongue, but he wasn’t about to taunt the man with the gun in his hand.

  “You don’t want to mess with it, though,” Josh said. “If you try to shut it down or detach it from the back of the stove, you’ll automatically send a distress signal, and the cavalry will come running.”

  “Bullshit,” Boggs sniffed.

  But the captain didn’t look so sure. “You’re lying.” Josh shrugged.

  “Better for me if you don’t believe me.”

  “Captain,” Boggs began.

  Gabe turned to the chief and nodded. “I want to check it out. Make sure he’s telling the truth. If you want to have a little payback while I’m gone, I wouldn’t blame you. But try not to break him, Hank. I may need him later.”

  Boggs didn’t even look up at the captain. Instead he stared at Josh with bloodshot eyes and nodded slowly.

  “Yes, sir. He can bleed, though?”

  “Oh, hell yeah. Make him bleed.”

  The captain slid the pistol into the rear waistband of his pants and went out the door. Someone moved outside, one of the men guarding the room. Then the door closed, and the pain began.

  It couldn’t have been called an interrogation. Boggs never asked any questions.

  –24– –

  Rachael Voss had been against her partner going undercover on a Viscaya ship from the outset. The case had been simmering for a long time and it killed her to think Turcotte would move in with his Counter-Terrorism group and snatch the thing out of her squad’s hands, but she’d warned Josh again and again that it was too dangerous.

  In private. They’d whispered a lot before and after meetings and spent a lot of time alone together—so much that Chauncey had gotten up the guts to ask if they were sleeping together. Against the rules and all that. Voss shouldn’t have been surprised. She was single and Josh’s marriage had fallen apart the way so many agents’ relationships did. If they had ended up in bed together, no one would have blamed them. No one but Chauncey, who was such a stickler for the rules.

  But as close as Voss had gotten to Josh Hart in the time they’d been partners, and as much as they sometimes bickered, their intimacy had never extended to the bedroom. Still, Josh meant more to her than any of her boyfriends ever had.

  The drug lord’s impounded yacht couldn’t go fast enough to suit her.

  Voss couldn’t stay below, but she didn’t want to be in the wheelhouse, either. She’d been out on the foredeck for a while, but even with her sweatshirt on, the wind had snaked chill fingers down her spine, and she’d grown frustrated with staring out across the dark water in search of some sign of the Antoinette. The weight of expectation she felt was irrational; they were still a long way from the point of origin of Josh’s satellite phone call, and even when they reached those coordinates, the Antoinette wouldn’t be there, unless it was just sitting around in the water waiting for them to arrive.

  No. They were waiting for the beacon.

  And Voss hated to wait.

  Now she sat on the aft deck in a white simulated-leather bucket chair that was one of a quartet attached directly to the deck. They were meant for fishing, complete with belts to strap herself down in case she got a bite from a swordfish or whatever. Voss didn’t fish, and she doubted Rojas, the drug lord who’d owned this boat before the FBI took it away from him, had done much fishing, either. The chairs were glorified bar stools. Voss obliged by drinking a piña colada that Pavarotti had whipped up in the tiny galley, albeit without the rum. She felt fourteen again, but deprived of sleep and wired with adrenaline. Neither alcohol nor coffee would help her do her job tonight.

  The cold drink made her shiver even more than the wind off the sea, but the flavors of pineapple and coconut were wonderful, and kept her body distracted. Though too tense to eat, she could manage the piña colada just fine.

  “You should get some sleep.”

  Voss jumped a little, then turned to see Pavarotti standing beside her. With the wind blowing, she hadn’t heard him approach, and now she was embarrassed. She forced herself not to let it show.

  “You’re stealthy for such a big bastard.”

  Pavarotti smiled to let her know he didn’t mind the teasing. Voss made sure her expression told him she didn’t care if he minded or not.

  “Seriously. I know you’re worried about Josh—”

  “Special Agent Hart,” she corrected.

  Pavarotti actually laughed. “He’d choke on his coffee if I called him that, and you know it. I get it, you hate being called Rachael. This is your squad, Agent Voss, and that’s fine by me. But Josh isn’t going to drink with anyone who calls him Special Agent Hart.”

  Voss wanted to argue, but she forced herself to exhale. Uncoil.

  “You’re right. I’m a little tightly wound right now.”

  “I don’t blame you. But none of us is going to be any good when this goes down if we don’t get at least a little sleep, and that includes you. The doctor pres
cribes rest.”

  “How am I supposed to rest down there with all of you guys playing cards and watching movies?” Voss asked.

  Pavarotti put a hand on the back of her chair. “Nadeau and Mac are in the wheelhouse, keeping us on course and waiting for the signal, dealing with incoming communications. I’m on watch. Everyone else is asleep. It’s nearly three a.m.”

  Shit, Voss thought. She hadn’t realized she had been out here so long.

  “Incoming communications?” she asked.

  The agent glanced toward the wheelhouse. “Nothing except what we expect. Immigration and Customs has a couple of boats in the water, and we’ve got three Coast Guard ships on course to rendezvous with us at those same coordinates. We’ll be there just after sunrise, but they’re a few hours behind us. And then we wait.”

  “I’m so sick of waiting.”

  “Me, too,” Pavarotti said. “We’re sure this beacon is gonna work, right? We can track it wherever they go?”

  Voss had been over that very subject dozens of times with Chauncey and with Josh. The satellite phone would only be good if Josh could call them on it, and keep up the call. They had needed something that could act as a continuous tracking signal. The FBI’s own tech guys had shrugged off the query, claiming they didn’t have anything that could be easily hidden on the Antoinette, somewhere Josh would be able to get to it. What they offered was a tracking device the size of a land mine.

  Then Voss had talked to a friend who worked as an outfitter in Alaska and spent most of his time in isolated, inhospitable areas with no cell phone signal, and he’d told her about the personal locator beacon, which operated like a reverse-GPS, sending an emergency signal that could be picked up and followed, whether in the outback or on the ocean. The idea that the FBI’s techs would be ignorant about the existence of PLBs made her nuts. The things were available to the general public, but the FBI didn’t know about them? It made her wonder what else they didn’t know about that might save her life someday.

  “It’ll work,” she told Pavarotti.

  She didn’t see any reason to go into the one thing that really scared her about the PLB. Once Josh turned it on, there was the distinct possibility that the signal would interfere with the Antoinette’s instruments, which could lead them to seek out the competing signal on board.

  Once the beacon went off, they’d be in a race to reach the container ship before the Rio brothers figured out they had an agent on board. If Josh’s cover was blown, then even when the ICE and Coast Guard and FBI moved in, things were likely to get very ugly. Josh could end up a hostage, or dead.

  Voss took a sip of her piña colada. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll take watch.”

  Pavarotti stood his ground. “Not going to happen. I’ve already had a few hours’ rack time anyway. It’s your turn. I’ll wake you at dawn. You’re not doing Josh any favors if you’re—”

  “All right,” she said. “I get it. Will it shut you up if I go down and pretend to sleep?”

  “For now.”

  Voss rolled her eyes. “Fine. It’ll be worth it.” She took her piña colada with her as she left.

  Pavarotti smiled. “Night, Rachael.”

  She bristled. Chauncey had wanted to know if Voss and Josh Hart were sleeping together, and she’d taken some satisfaction in being able to say no. But he’d never asked her if she was screwing Pavarotti, and for that she was glad. She didn’t like to lie.

  For his part, Pavarotti apparently thought a single sex-filled, post-case victory celebration made him her lover, made it okay for him to use her given name. And it was okay … in bed. But on the job, things were different. Soon she would have to make absolutely certain she had disabused him of that notion. Six years earlier, her younger brother Ethan had developed cancer that spread rapidly through his body and killed him forty-seven days after its discovery. Since then, there was only one man in the world she cared for, and right now he was out in the middle of the Caribbean with people who might well kill him if they learned his identity.

  Belowdecks, she lay down on a rack and closed her eyes, knowing she would never be able to sleep.

  And yet, somehow, she did.

  –25– –

  In the morning, Tori’s quarters still smelled like the food Josh had cooked her. It wasn’t just the food, though. The room still had the slightest trace of sex in the air.

  She propped open her door and sat on her rack, drinking warm pomegranate juice and staring out at the lightening sky. Dawn came early in the islands, but she thought there must be at least an hour before sunrise. She needed it desperately. Not just daylight, but strong coffee and the heat of a Caribbean morning. Her eyes burned, her thoughts were soft and muddy, and her bones ached, but she knew the sunshine would help.

  She tried not to think about Josh, both because she didn’t want to worry about him, and because she despised the resentment that surged up inside her when she did. Tori hated the position he had put her in, hated him for making love to her, and for how wonderful he had made her feel. Awful dreams had chased her down into sleep for the scant hours she had spent with her head on the pillow, and now whenever she closed her eyes she imagined him in a bloody heap, neck twisted at an impossible angle, or floating bloated and blue-skinned on the waves. She wanted to scream at him, but she hoped Gabe and Boggs hadn’t killed him, either.

  Remnants of her dreams lingered. She’d woken with clenched fists and the feeling that she had to fight off hands that were reaching for her, trying to restrain her. Self-analysis had never been her favorite pastime, but she didn’t need a psych degree to recognize the origins of those feelings. The FBI was lurking somewhere close, just beyond their perceptions, and they didn’t even have their vital cargo. If they returned to Miami without the guns, they might all lose their jobs—though the job wasn’t really what troubled her. She might have just sailed home, but Gabe Rio wasn’t about to do that, which meant that though they were out on the open sea, they were trapped by circumstance. Tori could feel her muscles constrict at the thought.

  They needed to be swift, and lucky.

  Tori reached up to rub her itchy eyes, and when she lowered her hand, Dwyer was standing in her open doorway, silhouetted in the pre-dawn light, his red hair limned with a golden glow.

  Startled, she spilled her pomegranate juice.

  “Shit,” she whispered, setting her glass on the floor. “What’s going on?”

  Though shadow covered his face, Tori could make out a strange expression on Dwyer’s face. The young guy—she was trying to stop thinking of him as a kid—looked confused and a little antsy. She’d known addicts in her life, and they always seemed lost and desperate when they were craving. Dwyer had a bit of that in him now, though she had a feeling drugs weren’t responsible.

  “Captain wants you up top,” he said. He glanced back out the door, looking at something out on the water, in the distance. “We’re here.”

  Tori slipped on a pair of rubber-soled deck shoes, then grabbed a face cloth from a shelf in the corner of the room and wiped the juice off the back of her hand.

  “Why do you look so worried?”

  Dwyer’s soft, dark laugh took her by surprise.

  “Aside from the total clusterfuck this thing is turning out to be, y’mean?”

  “Yeah. Aside from that.”

  Instead of answering he stepped backward, out onto the deck, and once more glanced out over the water, toward something she couldn’t see. “Come and have a look. See if you don’t wanna click your heels and wake up home in bed.”

  With his face now washed in the glimmer of imminent morning, Dwyer seemed almost an apparition. The dark water behind him had a kind of haze upon it, a strange condition of the light, like the gauzy texture of the world right before a twilight summer storm.

  Tori didn’t want to go out there. Her mind started to manufacture reasons—she needed to change, needed to shower, needed to pee—but except for putting on clean clothes, she’d have to
leave her quarters for any of those things.

  “Come on,” Dwyer urged. “The captain’s waiting.”

  She nodded, feeling foolish. Snatching a thin white hooded sweater, she slipped it on. “No sign of the FBI?” she asked as she zipped it.

  “Not yet.”

  Tori stepped up to the threshold, stared into Dwyer’s blue eyes. “Show me.”

  He only pointed to a spot off the starboard bow, like the silent ghost of Christmas yet to come. Frustrated and dragging from lack of sleep, Tori stepped out onto the walkway, two levels up from the deck, and peered through the slowly dispersing darkness at a tiny island perhaps three-quarters of a mile away. Yet it wasn’t the island that made her blink and catch her breath.

  “What the hell?” she whispered, forgetting Dwyer entirely.

  She started along the walkway, picking up speed, hurrying toward the stairs. As she turned to start up, she saw Dwyer behind her. At the same moment, she realized that the Antoinette felt quiet and still, save for the gentle roll of the sea.

  “We’ve stopped. The engines are idle.”

  Dwyer tore his focus from the horizon. “You’re just noticing?”

  Tori hurried up the stairs, hands sliding on the railings. “You must’ve seen this on the radar a while ago.”

  “The island, yeah. The rest we just figured for rock formations or something,” Dwyer explained, following.

  On the third level of the accommodations block she paused on the landing for another look. This high off the water, there could be no mistaking the extent of what she saw. Still, she kept climbing, both because Captain Rio had sent Dwyer to fetch her and because she wanted to see it from up top, to make sense of it in her head. At night the view would have been eerie, and even now, as the horizon began to burn brightly with the impending dawn, it made her want to cross herself and keep sailing right on past, the way she’d always done as a little girl when her parents would drive past a cemetery with her in the backseat.