by Gayle Wilson
She listened a moment to the sound the waves made, and then she looked across the bay toward the lights. Griff’s words echoed in her head. And in her heart. “Whatever happens...”
Warning? Premonition? Or was it possible that Griff had reacted as strongly to their kiss as she? Had he been as shaken as she had been by the reality that nothing had really changed between them? Nothing except Gardner’s existence?
Somewhere in the darkness beyond those distant lights, two men were working to get a baby back. And somewhere below, the man who had devised the plan and had told them how to carry it out seemed as worried about what was about to happen as she was.
Worried about a daughter he had never known. And at this point, Claire wasn’t certain if that genuine though unspoken concern was something she should be glad about.
IT WAS MUCH LATER that she heard the sound of the inflatable returning. Its motor woke her, and then she listened to its cushioned side bumping against the hull of the yacht as the two vessels rocked together in the current. It seemed that either Hawk or Jordan had returned. To report? Or for further instructions?
Either way, the meeting was one where she knew she wouldn’t be welcome. So she lay in her bed and listened until she heard the inflatable’s engine kick into life again and then roar away, gradually fading into the deep, nighttime silence of the sea.
She lay awake even after it was gone, thinking about the kaleidoscope of events of the last four days. The images were fragmented, wheeling in her head exactly like those bits of colored glass, but refusing to make a pattern she could read. And underlying them all was the cold sense of dread that she had felt since she’d watched Hawk and Jordan leave the boat that morning.
She was asleep, however, when the cruiser itself began to move, its powerful engines making little noise as it cut a path of foaming whiteness through the obsidian waters. Heading for a rendezvous that Claire had been told nothing about.
AT LEAST HE HAD TOLD HER the truth about one thing, Griff thought. Nothing they could control would go wrong. That had been a palliative, of course, intended to relieve some of her anxiety. He had been in this business too long to think there was much that could really be controlled. Meticulously planned for, yes. Anticipated. But never really controlled.
So far, however, the sequence had played out exactly the way it had been planned. As always, Jordan’s and Hawk’s execution had been flawless. By the time Diaz and his bodyguards had arrived at Opa-Locka Airport, the private jet that awaited them had been secured. The cameras, which would faithfully record Diaz boarding the doomed plane, had been set up. And the explosives that would destroy it were in place.
“Nothing we can control will go wrong,” he had promised Claire, and nothing had. Everything about this had gone according to plan. It had almost been too easy, Griff thought. Too pat. But he was too much a professional to argue with success. He knew he should be celebrating instead of worrying.
Still, he acknowledged, the uneasiness that had been in the pit of his stomach for the last two days wouldn’t go away, despite the fact that the operation, the dicey part of it at any rate, was almost over. Almost done.
Only his job remained, he acknowledged, as he put his hand on the throttle lever and eased it forward. The jet responded like a well-trained thoroughbred feeling the whip. It rocketed down the runway through the heavy tropical darkness.
He watched the needle on the air speed indicator climb, and when it reached the takeoff point, he gently pulled back on the yoke. The nose of the Citation came up, and the jet lifted away from the ground. Then he rotated it toward the ocean, which stretched dark and wide under the starsprinkled sky.
Now it was all up to him. Up to him to keep the promise he had made. Another promise to Claire. And to a daughter he had never known.
WHEN SHE WAS JERKED out of sleep, there was no doubt in Claire’s mind what had awakened her. The only question was whether the explosion had been real or a dream. The noise had been distant, but the echoing boom had been strong enough to bring her out of the restless, nightmare-filled sleep she had finally fallen into.
An explosion, just like the one that was supposed to destroy Diaz’s plane. Tomorrow, she thought. That was tomorrow, and not...
Her gaze found the porthole and verified that it was almost light. Almost light. Almost tomorrow. “Whatever happens...” Griff had said. “Whatever happens...”
She threw the sheet off her body, the foreboding that had haunted her now so strong it was thick and vile, clogging her throat like a sickness. She opened the door to her cabin and hurried through the dark, silent salon, across the narrow galley and up the steps that led to the bridge. She could hear the soft, mindless noises of the instruments.
When she reached the top of the stairwell, she realized that Jake was at the helm, totally focused on the equipment in front of him, exactly as he had been during most of the last twenty-four hours. She wondered if he had even slept.
In the darkness the faint glow of the dials and screens that stretched before him was eerie. It gave the tense figure hunched forward in the command chair an otherworldliness—strange, supernatural, almost demonic.
“Jake,” she said softly.
He jumped visibly, startled by the sound of a human voice in his familiar world of machines.
“God, Claire, you scared the bejesus out of me,” he said, turning to look at her over his shoulder.
“Sorry,” she said. She walked across to stand behind him as she had seen Griff do a hundred times in the last two days. Depending on him. “I heard a noise.”
Before she reached him, Jake leaned forward and moved a couple of dials or switches. The pattern on the screen he had been studying changed. A radar screen, she realized, the sweep of the line around its circumference and its beeps making its function obvious.
“What are you doing up?” she asked, her eyes moving across the expensive array of gadgets.
Then, almost without her conscious volition, her gaze lifted above them to the dark gray world that stretched beyond the windows. An expanse of black sea meeting a slowly lightening sky, a void unbroken except for a distant glow.
Fire, she realized. Something was burning on the surface of the ocean. It was far enough away that it was only a smudge of light, flickering over the dark water, but near enough that there was no mistaking it for anything else.
“What’s that?” she asked, raising her hand and pointing. “Could that be what I heard?”
She turned to look down at Jake, and found that rather than following the direction of her gesture, his eyes had remained locked on her face. And suddenly she knew why.
“That’s the plane.” She barely breathed the words, soft and shocked. “That’s Diaz’s plane.”
This had been part of the plan, of course. They were planning to put explosives on Diaz’s plane. A device that would be triggered by a certain altitude, one that wouldn’t be reached until the jet was out over the ocean, well away from the city and the pleasure boats that dotted the bay. No danger to anyone on the ground and leaving no possible doubt in the minds of the kidnappers that the ransom they were demanding had been paid.
Paid in full, she thought, looking back at the fire. Now that she knew what it was, it was as ghostly as the other had been, as eerie as the light that had been bathing Jake’s figure when she entered the bridge.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the movement of Jake’s head. His attention had gone back to the screen he’d been watching when she came up. The long sweep of the needle and the soft automatic beep was monotonous. Unchanging. Finding nothing in the vast emptiness of the ocean that surrounded them.
Finding nothing. Her eyes tracked another slow circle. Still finding nothing. “Where’s Griff?” she asked.
She knew Griff Cabot too well to believe he wouldn’t be up here watching his plan unfold. Studying what was going on with the same intensity Jake had been when she’d interrupted him. Griff should have been standing at Jake’s shoul
der, just as he had during most of the last forty-eight hours.
The silence between her question and Jake’s answer was too long. Long enough for her pulse to quicken and for the cold sense of dread that had been in her stomach all day to increase sickeningly. Long enough to know something was wrong.
“I don’t know,” Jake said finally. His voice was flat, emotionless. “I wish to hell I did.”
“You don’t know?” Claire repeated. “What does that mean?”
There was another pause, again prolonged and full of something she couldn’t read. Reluctance to answer, certainly, but something else as well. Jake was keeping things from her, and if that were true... If that were true, then it meant Griff had been keeping them from her as well.
Son of a bitch, she thought, feeling anger surge through her body, almost strong enough to replace the ice of her fear. They had been keeping things from her. Griff’s precious team. And apparently everyone had been in on the conspiracy.
“Where is he, Jake?” she asked again, her voice tight. “What the hell is going on? I have a stake in this, remember. A bigger stake than the rest of you. I deserve to know what’s happening, damn it.”
He didn’t answer, but deliberately his eyes lifted from the screen, away from its meaningless, monotonous sweep to the vast ocean that lay beyond the window. Maybe even as far as the fading glow of the fire that was burning on top of the water.
THE WATER HAD BEEN much colder than Griff expected. Despite the fact that it was January, this was the tropics, and the water temperature should have been in the seventies. It certainly hadn’t felt that warm when he had plunged into it.
Now he couldn’t seem to feel his legs, dangling beneath the black-ink surface of the ocean. They seemed detached from the rest of his body, especially the right one, the leg that a burst of bullets from the terrorist’s Uzi had shattered. But considering its usual protest of any kind of physical demand he might make on it, he supposed he should be grateful for the numbing cold.
“Like taking a bath,” Hawk had said when they were planning this. Neither he nor Jordan had tried to talk Griff out of the role he had assigned himself. And neither had questioned that he would be able to carry it off. For that unspoken confidence, he had been infinitely grateful.
Griff was the only one of them who had flown a small jet before. They could have hired a pilot, but he had known he could do this. All he had to do was take the plane out over the ocean, set the automatic pilot to continue its climb, trip the time-delay on the explosives Hawk had rigged, and jump. His leg shouldn’t be a hindrance in any of that, not even the drop into the ocean.
It hadn’t been. Everything had gone as smoothly as he had anticipated. He had landed and gotten free of the chute in time to watch the plane’s disintegration. It had blown apart in a firestorm of debris that rained down, far ahead of him, for seemingly endless minutes after the echo of the boom had faded away.
Now all he had to do was wait for Jake’s equipment to pick up the radio signal from the ELT that was attached to his life vest. So in the darkness Griff floated on the surface of the water, waiting for the deep throb of the yacht’s engine and thinking about Claire.
Chapter Eight
“You’re telling me the transmitter Griff’s wearing isn’t working, and the chances of our picking him up on radar are somewhere between nil and zero.”
Jake hadn’t put it that bluntly, of course. Claire had had to pry every piece of information out of him. Like the fact that Griff had decided to take the plane up himself and trigger the explosives manually, to make sure it was far enough out when it blew. When he had, he’d bailed out, depending on an emergency transmitter to pinpoint his location.
“It’s a damn big ocean,” Jake said, his eyes on the unchanging sweep of the needle. “And the chances of the radar picking up a body—”
Obviously realizing the frightening connotations of that phrase, he broke off abruptly, and in the light from the screen, she watched his mouth tighten.
“Why isn’t the thing transmitting?” Claire asked, her eyes drawn back to the dying smear of the distant fire.
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “It just...isn’t. I checked it. Griff checked it. Hawk checked it right before he left. It was working then. It damn well should be working now.”
She could hear the frustration in Jake’s voice. And perhaps a thread of anger as well. In reaction to something in her tone? She wasn’t accusing Jake of incompetence, even if her question had sounded that way. But he was the equipment man. It was his job to prevent something like this from happening. Suddenly, Griff’s words echoed in her head. Nothing we can control...
How could a man’s life depend on something this insignificant? Of course, if that radio signal was the only way Griff could be tracked in the vastness of the ocean that lay beyond the windows of the yacht, then the emergency transmitter really hadn’t been an insignificant part of the plan at all.
And she still didn’t understand why it was Griff out there. Someone else should have been flying that plane. Anyone else. Just not Griff. Not now.
“Why isn’t there some kind of backup?” she asked.
“Because...” Jake hesitated, and then he turned in his chair to face her. “Look,” he said, “we’ve used these things a hundred times. They’re practically fail-safe. And we checked this one out, damn it. All of us did.”
The anger she thought she had heard before was certainly there now. It was obvious Jake was blaming himself, and there was no use belaboring the point that there should have been some provision made in case this happened. But no one, not even Griff, as meticulous as he was, could control everything. He had told her that himself.
“What do we do?” she asked instead.
“We start at the debris field, while we can still find it, and we move out from it in widening circles.”
He had probably already been thinking about that. And Jake was in charge, of course. She couldn’t see any flaw in his plan, especially since she didn’t have another one to offer.
“Okay,” she said.
“Your job will be lookout.”
It would have to be, given the necessity of Jake’s keeping a watch on the instruments and directing the search. Her job would be to spot the small, living speck that was Griff Cabot in the vast blackness of the ocean that surrounded them.
THE DAY WAS WARMER than yesterday had been, Claire thought, wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm And she wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. The water temperature wouldn’t rise that much, and even the winter sun here was strong enough to burn. More than strong enough to lead to dehydration, which was the real danger.
Her eyes ached from the hours she had spent focusing them beyond the gray-green roil of water that foamed at the prow. She had swept the binoculars across the surface of the ocean, moving them slowly from horizon to horizon, too many times to count.
The cruiser was far enough out that they hadn’t encountered much traffic. A Coast Guard cutter had passed them early this morning, undoubtedly heading out to check on the plane that had disappeared off Opa-Locka’s screens. They had paid the yacht no attention, obviously in a hurry to reach the scene of the crash before there was nothing left to mark the spot. Claire suspected Jake had been relieved not to have to answer their questions.
She closed her burning eyes, wondering even as she did if she could afford that small luxury. At first, her heart had thudded wildly with each piece of flotsam that drifted in front of the boat. She had followed its movement with the binoculars, eyes wide and straining, until it was close enough to identify. And none of them had been Griff.
“You need to come in and get something to drink,” Jake shouted from inside the bridge, gesturing broadly at her through the glass to make sure she understood.
Reluctantly she obeyed, wondering again if they should go back to Miami and report Griff missing. But Jake claimed that was the last thing Griff would want. His being in the water in this ar
ea would be highly suspicious. Griff wouldn’t want any of them connected with that exploding plane, Jake had argued. And besides, in her naïveté, Claire had been sure they would find Griff before now.
As she entered the bridge, she glanced at her watch. No wonder her eyes hurt, she thought. She had been at this now for almost eight hours. Jake had been, as well, and at least she had gotten some sleep the first part of last night.
“You okay?” she asked, taking the bottled water he held out.
“Am I okay?” he responded, his voice quizzical.
“How long has it been since you’ve slept?”
“I’ll sleep when this is over.”
She didn’t ask when he thought that might be. Or if he still believed they could find Griff. By now, even she had realized the odds of that. Claire wasn’t willing to give up, of course, and she suspected that Jake, like Hawk and Jordan, would endure whatever was necessary until they had located Griff—alive or dead.
“I don’t understand why we haven’t found him,” she said. “You said his chute would have come down somewhere between the wreckage and where we were anchored last night. We’ve already covered most of that.”
She took another long drink from the bottle as she waited for his answer. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was until the first sweet, cold draught bathed the dryness of her mouth and throat. She poured a little of the water over her face and then her neck, letting its coolness trickle into the scooped neckline of the cotton shell she was wearing.
“You see that?” Jake asked.
He pointed at an object bobbing gently in the water. It was a large, rectangular piece of metal that she had watched through the binoculars until it had become something more than a distant blur. Until she knew it wasn’t the man they were looking for.
“Maybe part of the plane,” she suggested, her eyes automatically following its motion away from the yacht.