The Siren's Sting

by Miranda Darling

  Henning examined it. ‘Unlikely to have been for animals’ use. Where did everyone go?’

  Stevie sniffed the air. There was a faint smell of violets . . . She struggled to place it, then it came to her in a flash. ‘Marlena’s scent. She was wearing it last night. She came here in that boat—she and Krok are mixed up in whatever this is.’

  As they made for the ladder Stevie asked, ‘Henning, did you notice there is no name on this ship, nor registration markings?’

  ‘I didn’t find any registration papers either.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s odd because she’s in perfect condition, and I’d say worth around five hundred thousand euros. You don’t just abandon a ship like this.’

  ‘She’s a ghost ship.’

  There was something floating in the sea to port. Stevie grabbed a pair of binoculars hanging from a hook and went to the porthole. ‘What is that?’

  She squinted in the direction of an indistinct shape on the horizon. It was a small, punctured inflatable, barely afloat. Stevie lowered her binoculars. ‘I’d lay money on it being the tender. There’s lettering on the sides but I can’t read it.’

  Henning took the binoculars. ‘Bel Amica. Must be the name of this ship.’

  Stevie looked at him with some amazement. ‘You have extraordinary eyesight.’

  Henning grinned at her. ‘I see everything. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Stevie, rather alarmed. They were silent for a minute. Stevie’s mind ticked. ‘What was Marlena doing here last night, and what was Krok plotting?’ she asked.

  Henning suddenly stooped and reached for a crumpled piece of paper, half torn and jammed behind some wires. As he smoothed it out his face froze.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Stevie nervously.

  He handed her the paper. It was an end user certificate, issued by South Yemen, for twelve surface-to-air missiles. ‘EN’s stingers,’ she murmured, then looked up. ‘South Yemen no longer exists.’

  Henning frowned. ‘I know.’

  ‘So where do you think she really took them?’ The stingers had gone with Marlena; it had to be. Henning led the way back to the main cabin. There was a pile of maps under some magazines on a side table. He found one of the Mediterranean and traced his finger north from the island of Sardinia.

  ‘This is roughly where we are—and with a boat like that, calculating a fuel storage capacity of around fifteen thousand litres, she has a lot of options. But . . .’ He ran his finger lightly south. ‘I’m guessing she was headed for Africa—most likely Tunisia.’ He pointed to a peninsula that jutted out into the Med. ‘Either somewhere on the Cap Bon peninsula, or further west, the Ichkeul National Park. Those would be the best places to land cargo like this, and she could make that distance quite easily.’

  ‘Tunisia,’ mused Stevie, leaning over his shoulder. ‘Who would want SAMs in Tunisia?’ She searched her mental database for rebel groups interested in shooting down helicopters or civilian aircraft— the most popular use for the covetable portable missiles. Henning turned to her, their faces suddenly very close in the cabin. ‘It’s not Tunisia,’ he whispered, his eyes on Stevie’s. ‘The weapons are bound for Libya. EN’s man is ex-Libyan secret service. I recognised his face. He was involved in a boating “accident” off Cavallo last year; two men died and his face was in the papers. It makes perfect sense.’

  ‘Didn’t the UN lift the arms embargo in 2003?’

  Henning nodded. ‘Yes. But there are any number of people and groups in Libya that they could be going to, and government forces could still be high on the list.’

  ‘So who would be chasing the shipment? The CIA?’

  ‘Likely. Or anyone working with them. I don’t think there would be many friendly governments who would want rogue SAMs floating about.’

  Stevie thought for a moment. ‘And the tip-off to the French coastguard came from Krok. Of course. He saw it as a chance to prove Al-Nassar and his client couldn’t do business without him.’

  ‘I think you might be right.’ Henning nodded. ‘The man loves to play games . . .’

  Stevie squinted at the horizon. ‘It won’t be long until the coastguard picks up the ship, not if they were alerted to its possible contents. We should get out of here.’

  ‘Yes, sticky questions and all that.’ Henning looked at her for a moment, then said, ‘Although you could stay—get taken back by them for questioning . . . it would get you off Krok’s yacht.’

  ‘I’m needed there,’ she said almost inaudibly.

  ‘By whom?’ There was a note of bitterness in Henning’s reply. He leant in, a hand on Stevie’s tiny shoulder. The pressure was strangely comforting. ‘I’m sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m worried about you on that boat. Come and stay with us on the Petrina. EN would be only too delighted to have you. You’re not safe where you are.’

  Stevie shook her head. ‘I’m fine, Henning. Anyway, we dock in Bonifacio this evening. I think I can look after myself for a few hours.’

  Henning kept his hand on her shoulder. ‘A minute is all it takes.’ Then he lifted it off. Without the pressure, Stevie almost felt like she could float away.

  ‘You have a hole in your shirt,’ he remarked. Stevie looked down. She must have torn it climbing onto the ship. ‘I could mend it for you,’ Henning offered.

  ‘You sew?’ she asked sceptically.

  ‘I learnt in the army.’

  ‘When were you in the army? Which army?’

  Henning grinned.

  ‘And,’ Stevie continued indignantly, ‘you never told me you had brothers!’

  Henning’s grin grew wider.

  ‘Why do you have so many secrets?’ Stevie insisted. Before she could resist, Henning had pulled her close and was kissing her, his lips salty from the sea spray. Stevie returned the kiss with a fervour that surprised her, her arms holding his strong shoulders close, her insides tumbling with nerves and desire.

  When she broke away, Henning made no move to stop her but merely said, ‘You know everything about me that matters— mostly, how I feel about you.’ His fingers touched the tear in Stevie’s shirt. After a moment, he said, ‘If you were mine, I would take better care of you. Excellent care, in fact.’

  Stevie’s head was spinning, her cheeks burning as she leapt aboard her jet ski and powered off.

  By the time Stevie got back to her cabin and changed into white shorts, a pale pink silk shirt and some very dark glasses, it was breakfast time for the guests aboard the Hercules. Clémence picked at a croissant; with her wig off—her hair back to blonde—and her sunglasses hiding her eyes (and most of her face actually, noted Stevie, they were so huge), she looked almost normal. Angelina never rose before noon so Stevie did not expect to see her at the table. Marlena was also missing. Having seen what she had that morning, Stevie was not surprised.

  Krok was in a good mood this morning, laughing with Skorpios, waving his cigar about as expansively as a wound-up warlord can. No wonder, thought Stevie. He had made a good deal last night, if his trial was successful: the monster inflatables would be sought after by gun and drug runners the world over.

  The morning papers were spread over the table. Stevie glanced distractedly at Il Corriere as she poured herself a cup of coffee and pulled the knob off the top of a perfect little brioche—still warm— and popped it in her mouth. There was news of a Saudi tanker, the Andromeda, that had been seized by Somali pirates six weeks earlier. The Saudi owners had taken a pragmatic view and finally negotiated a ransom payment. A small plane dropped fifteen million dollars in cash onto the deck of the tanker, using a parachute. Apparently the pirates had a machine that mechanically counted the money and that could also detect fake bank notes. Stevie wondered at the level of organisation and professionalism of the pirates, and remembered David Rice’s misgivings.

  Then her eyes hit another headline and she stopped mid-chew: SWISS BANKER ASSASSINATED. She forced herself to swallow, knowing immediately who the victim was. These sorts of things d
idn’t happen to ordinary Swiss bankers.

  Aldo Meienfeldt had been found bleeding by the side of the pool at his Sardinian villa, his body riddled with bullet holes. The carabinieri suspected a semi-automatic weapon due to the mess and number of bullets, but were at a loss to find a motive. His neighbour, Graziella Burano, described him as ‘un uomo preciso, discreto e pulito’—a clean, discreet and precise man—and could not think why anyone would want to kill him. She blamed the Russians.

  The chief of the carabinieri was a little more poetic in his assessment of Aldo, but had come to pretty much the same conclusion: ‘These stupendously wealthy men with their maleficious connections come south for the sun and trail evil in their wake. These are not crimes of the Costa, but crimes of the cities and gangsters of Europe.’ He was more correct than he knew, thought Stevie. She risked a sly glance at Krok. What did Richard III say in Shakespeare’s play? Why, I can smile and murder while I smile. There was no doubt in her mind who had been responsible for Aldo’s killing, that it had been done messily and publicly as a message to the others; and Aldo’s killer clearly felt no remorse, no compulsion to at least pretend to be distressed by the gruesome death of his partner. She would make sure to stay in the sunlight and surrounded by guests until they reached dry land.

  As the Hercules weighed anchor, the guests began to drift from the breakfast table towards the sun lounges. They were headed for Corsica that morning, only a short distance away. Stevie wandered about, trying to look aimless. In the saloon, she found Emile sitting on a sofa. He was reading a comic book about the Phantom. She went and sat down next to the small boy, who looked up at her in surprise.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Is the Phantom your favourite superhero?’

  ‘He’s not really a superhero,’ Emile said quietly after a moment.

  ‘Let’s see.’ Stevie leant in and they began to look at the drawings together, the boy explaining the story so far. Out of the corner of her eye, Stevie saw a pile of charts sitting on a table by the computers. Curiosity began to burn like fire somewhere between her eyes: she needed to see those charts. She got up and on cat-like feet made her way towards the pile. Her skin tingled with nerves—it would be so easy to get caught, and yet . . . She glanced at the top chart.

  To her surprise it mapped the waters of the Bab-el-Mandeb, off the coast of Somalia—nowhere near the Mediterranean waters they were currently in. What did they need it for? The water and parts of the coastline were marked with red dots—there would have been about twenty marks. Stevie glanced quickly over her shoulder. Emile was watching her. She looked back at the charts. Underneath were others, this time for the Bight of Benin, off Nigeria, the same dots . . . and suddenly she knew exactly what those red marks meant. She darted back to Emile and smiled, putting a finger to her lips. ‘I’m like the Phantom, you see? You must pretend you never saw me, okay?’ The little boy nodded, eyes even wider now. Stevie kissed the top of his head and slipped off to find somewhere she would not be overlooked.

  From the depths of a sun lounge, by the rooftop spa, Stevie sent a text message to Rice, cc-ing Josie, just to be sure: Aboard Hercules. Found charts of Somali/ Nigerian coastline with markers all over. Pretty sure they correspond to pirate attacks in the area. Why Krok? Is he involved? S

  Then she carefully deleted her sent message and lay back, her Panama hat shading her face.

  13

  The evening light was soft on the great limestone cliffs of Bonifacio. The Old Town appeared, innumerable stone buildings with minuscule windows clinging like barnacles to the edges of the precipices overlooking the open sea. The bottom of the cliffs had been eaten away by the booming waves of the winter storms and the houses now appeared to hang precariously over the water below, as if they might lose their grip at any minute and tumble into the sea.

  As the Hercules steamed past, Stevie looked up. The cliffs would have been close to seventy metres tall and the effect was vertiginous, even from below. She wondered what it would be like to live in one of the old stone dwellings, to sleep jutting over the jaws of the sea. Some had been there since the ninth century.

  The wind had picked up in the afternoon and, as they approached the port, several small sailing boats headed for the shelter of the bay. The town itself had been founded in AD 828 as a defence against the pirates that had terrorised the coast even then. A great rusted ring was still set into the rocks at the mouth of the port where once a chain was strung to keep out the marauders. Later, in the seventeenth century, the pirates that operated in the Mediterranean were known as the Corsairs, and although some were European, most were from the coast of North Africa: what is now Tunisia, Algiers and Morocco—the Barbary Coast. They plundered other ships and also coastal towns, regularly capturing entire populations of men, women and children and taking them back to the slave markets on the Barbary Coast. Often the slaves were condemned to the misery of rowing the pirate galleys, the wind being unreliable in the Mediterranean; the women were often sold into the harems of the rulers of the Barbary Coast. Ransoms were demanded of the families back home, and eventually the problem was so bad that families of some of the captives from England petitioned the House of Commons for help.

  Bonifacio was only a short boat ride from Sardinia but it felt a world away. Stevie had never been able to step ashore without feeling the sense of something sinister settle over her. The port town had been the biggest staging point and recruitment centre for the French Foreign Legion and perhaps something of that pervaded the walls as well. Although Stevie had to be grateful to the Legionnaires, since they had been the ones who had found her in the jeep when she was a girl . . .

  They docked in the port and arrangements were made to go ashore for dinner. Stevie was glad they would be getting off the boat; it was starting to feel very claustrophobic. As the sun began to sink in the sky, the guests of the Hercules set out to make the lung-busting climb up to the haute ville. The road was wildly steep and paved in cobbles. All the women were sensibly shod in flat shoes—most of them had been to Bonifacio before. Only Angelina had begun the climb in heels, though she soon discarded them by the side of the road, saying she felt like Sophia Loren walking barefoot on the cobblestones. By now, the wind had picked up and a veritable gale was blowing out to sea. The narrow stone streets acted as wind tunnels: sheltered from the wind one moment, you would turn a corner only to be almost knocked off your feet by a gust of cold sea wind.

  Their destination was a dark cave, or cellar, in the Old Town, and the party was glad to duck in through the low wooden door and out of the buffeting wind. Stevie blinked and looked about: the medieval stone walls were limestone like the cliffs, the ceiling low and crisscrossed with dark beams. The only light came from candles and oil lamps set about the cellar and along the length of a large wooden table that occupied the centre of the room. Fishing nets and old cudgels hung on the walls, but not for effect—these were obviously relics with a family history of toil on the sea, and pirate attacks. At one end of the room was a great open fire where the chef—a huge man in a charcoal-stained T-shirt—roasted and mixed and stoked the flames like some Dantean devil. The rustic room flickered and danced with shadows, the flames picking out, here and there, a dash of emerald or a blaze of diamond, the rich shine of silk as the incongruously elegant guests sat around the table.

  A huge bouillabaisse had been ordered and now arrived in a steaming cauldron in the middle of the table. Bowlfuls of mussels and octopus tentacles and fish were ladled out; bread was toasted on the open fire and rubbed with garlic. Stevie tasted the scalding soup—magnificent. Bouillabaisse was done differently in every seaside town; in Corsica it was called aziminu, and it was delicious.

  ‘So where will we cruise to next, Clémence?’ Ludi-Brigitte asked. Dressed in yellow silk Capri pants, she was struggling with a mussel; she burst out laughing as it flew from her fork and landed in her sister’s bowl with a clang.

  ‘I don’t know,’ mused their hostess. ‘I’m getting rath
er bored of quaint little sea ports. I fancy some action . . .’

  ‘Vaughan has organised a shooting competition,’ said Loli, dipping her bread in the soup, ‘with a big prize.’

  ‘What a good idea, darling,’ Stevie heard Clémence say. She supposed Clémence was rather good at feigning enthusiasm where her husband was concerned.

  Krok grunted and drank the rest of his soup straight from the bowl. ‘Winner gets the new Riva,’ he said between gulps. Stevie thought that was a competition she might quite like to win . . .

  ‘What about Venice, darling, the Biennale?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ chorused the princesses. ‘Divine idea.’

  ‘Lord Sacheverel is having a party—his palazzo has some wonderfully creepy frescoes.’ Stéphane was warming to the idea of Venice.

  Angelina, dressed in her customary black, announced that Sacheverel had asked her to sing. ‘I might even do it . . . La Serenissima is so inspirational.’

  ‘The perfect excuse, then—not that we need one,’ said Stéphane. ‘I’ll phone Sacheverel.’ He turned to the young man at the end of the table, wreathed in cigarette smoke and his own thoughts. ‘Aristo, will Marlena come?’

  ‘I don’t want you there with that woman,’ broke in Aristo’s father, laying his hand heavily on the table and making Angelina’s glass jump.

  His son’s eyes glittered dangerously in the dim light of the cellar. After a moment he asked, ‘What is it about her that you object to so much, Papu?’

  ‘I know her,’ Skorpios sneered. ‘I know her past, her secrets, her sins—I don’t want her anywhere near you.’

  ‘Because you, of course, are blameless,’ shot back his son, voice full of bitter sarcasm.

  ‘She has you by your anatomy, dear Aristo. It is nothing that a good fuck won’t cure.’

  Stevie almost expected the boy to launch himself at his father from across the table, but Aristo did not move. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, but there was no mistaking the fury behind it. ‘You should watch what you say, Papu. Marlena might become my wife one day. And you can hardly expect me to listen to advice from you, of all people. I despise you.’