The Vanishing Angle

by Linda Ladd

  By the time they reached the hospital, the Naloxone they’d administered had done its job. Irina was resting well and breathing normally. The doctor told them if they had gotten to her half an hour later, she might have ended up dead.

  She was in a private room. Stepan Sokolov was sitting close to the bed, holding his daughter’s hand. Novak stood back, watching them, pretty sure that the kid would survive, and maybe even end up living a decent life. After a moment, he walked out into the corridor where Lori was sitting, her Dell laptop open on her lap.

  “Thanks for arranging this, Lori. I don’t think I’d have that much clout.”

  “My new job does have some pretty cool perks. My one star is popular with his colleagues, which is most handy, I have to agree.”

  “You able to pick up Blackwood’s GPS signal?”

  “Yep, they’re right across from here at Hilton Head. I’ve found a house on that beach with a deed under Charles Blackwood’s name. Looks to me like they’re staying put there, at least for the time being. Probably meeting with couriers like they did on Fripp. Maybe they’re over there waiting for the news to break about someone finding poor Irina overdosed on the beach.”

  “How far is that from here?”

  “Not far, if we go by boat. Driving will take a little longer.”

  “Okay, let’s go. Sokolov says he’s staying with Irina until she’s out of the woods.”

  Lori looked around, and lowered her voice. “You think he can keep his mouth shut about his less than American past profession?”

  “He’s got more sense than that. Nobody here is going to question him, not with a one star General backing his right to be here. Do you think Petrov will come finish the job?”

  “No, they probably think she’s dead. They were thinking her body would wash out to sea. If they figure out she’s alive, then they’ll come looking for her. She should be out of here by then.”

  “Good thing Sokolov knows how Petrov operates. He’ll be on alert. He said he’s going to find a safe place for her as soon as she’s released, which will be soon.”

  “Let’s go. I want to take these guys down.”

  “It’s not going to be quick or easy.”

  “Is anything we do ever quick and easy?”

  “Nope.”

  It took some time to get back to Sweet Sarah and head for Hilton Head Island. Daylight had dawned by the time they arrived off the beach, so they anchored a good distance off Blackwood’s beach house, but close enough to watch his movements. This place was bigger and fancier than the one on Fripp Island. It was built with multiple levels, about as elaborate as any designer could make it. It had a big rectangular pool and a boardwalk that led out to a beautiful white sand-beach called Coligny. The place had two wings that probably housed bedrooms. In Blackwood’s case, those guests would all be his henchmen.

  Lucky for Novak, there were only a few palm trees blocking his view. The major difference that Novak could see was that more guards seemed to be patrolling, though they were all dressed in tropical garb, their cool linen shirts hanging open to hide their weapons. That told Novak this could very well be a major hub in his operation. Nothing much happened at the house until early afternoon. That’s when the visiting family appeared, all with dark skin and hair. Maybe they lived on the island or somewhere nearby.

  “He’s upped his manpower in there considerably. It’ll be difficult to get close to him here. More traffic, more tourists, more hotels.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Lori answered. “There’s one hotel close by that would give us a good vantage point. Let’s grab a room that overlooks his place so we can video their movements. That will give us irrefutable evidence. We’ve got to get that at every stop along the pipeline, as well as some clear photos of the couriers. If we can do that, I can start digging up everything online about the players.”

  “It looks like the set-up is pretty much the same everywhere they go. Blackwood owns the property. The couriers show up and get their marching orders. Sokolov thinks Petrov’s recruited people like they used to do for Russian sleeper cells. He also thinks these kids might be a part of a human trafficking ring working in concordance with the drug smuggling. I hope he’s wrong, but it does make sense. Who would know? Maybe that’s how Blackwood gets his new playthings.”

  “Oh God, I can’t even bear to think about him with Irina or any other child.” Lori’s face reflected utter abhorrence.

  “I don’t want to dock the Sweet Sarah at a public marina. They’re sheltered, but would be hard to get out of in a hurry. Once they find out Irina’s alive, they’ll be looking for whoever got her to safety. We’ll be safer anchored out here offshore.”

  “They could notice us out here, too. They might already suspect it’s us. They would’ve investigated you by now. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. They know I’m an investigator, so they’ll look for me under every rock. They could find out about this boat. Just get pictures of the family that’s inside right now. We need to follow the couriers to wherever they go next. If we can nail down their home addresses, it’ll be easier to round them up. Won’t be that easy, though. I’m still hoping that Irina can tell us more once she feels better, but that’s not going to be any time soon. I’m going on the assumption that they transfer the drugs out here on the water. Otherwise, why use all these beach properties? It would be safer for them to meet in some nondescript house in a quiet neighborhood.”

  “They must have access to a boat, but this house doesn’t have a dock. I say they launch somewhere else nearby or rent a different one every time at some public marina. We need to get on shore to that hotel and follow the family. You said they came to Blackwood’s house several days on Fripp Island, right? They’ll be the ones who lead us to the actual drop site.”

  “Pack a bag and we’ll lie low for a while and see what happens around that house. It’s still early. We’ll anchor the boat off the hotel shore and take the Zodiac in. We can grab a room and watch from there until we figure out who’s doing what. I’ll take watch so you can get some rest.”

  Lori refused to sleep until they got to the hotel. They called for a reservation in a giant Westin that was busy and swarming with happy tourists. Families and couples milled around everywhere, especially at the pool and on the beach. There were blue cabanas set up within yards of Blackwood’s house, which they could use without being noticed. He made sure the room Lori booked had a corner balcony with an ocean view and a good vantage point over Blackwood’s driveway. He wanted to see when the couriers arrived each day and get pictures of their vehicles. He’d have to get closer to photograph the license plates and place the GPS trackers.

  They took the Zodiac to shore around noon and pulled the rubber boat up under the shady cluster of giant palm trees on the hotel’s property. After that, they checked in, posing as a married couple under the false name of Gloria and Henry Milton, and paid the doorman to keep an eye on the Zodiac. They paid cash for the luxury corner suite on the top floor facing Blackwood’s house. Once inside, Lori wasted no time collapsing on the silky sheets of the king-size bed. She was asleep in minutes, and didn’t move for three hours. No doubt the painkillers she’d swallowed right before she disembarked from Sweet Sarah had something to do with that. Novak ordered up sandwiches, a fruit platter, and a large pot of coffee. He drank most of it during his first hour on watch. He’d have to hit the rack soon, too. He could make it fine on a couple of hours’ sleep, a knack he’d been forced to cultivate in the military, but this time he hadn’t slept at all for going on eighteen hours. He had to crash soon.

  Nothing of interest was going on at the beach house. Blackwood’s men were congregated around the pool, behaving like college frat boys on Spring Break. All of them had on swim trunks and sunshades. Some of them sat around on the multilevel decks. They were the ones on duty. Some were out front on the sand or wading in the surf. Their carefree be
havior probably meant Petrov and Blackwood were gone somewhere or they wouldn’t be goofing off that openly. That theory disintegrated when his two main targets strolled out onto the upper deck of the wing nearest the hotel. Blackwood held a martini glass. Petrov was drinking from a beer can. Novak focused his binoculars on their faces, and tried to read their lips. Sometimes he could do that fairly well if he was close enough, or at least get a feel for the conversation. Not this time. One thing was for certain—they didn’t look like two men mourning the overdose death of Blackwood’s adopted child.

  He continued to watch for the rest of the day. Lori woke up, stumbled in to see what was going on, and went back to bed. Although she denied it, she was not fully recuperated; handling the boat alone had been harder on her than she wanted to admit. She finally woke up around dusk, showered, and ordered dinner from room service. They sat down and ate together on the balcony, then Lori took over watch while Novak hit the bedroom. He slept four good hours before he woke, and that was enough.

  The next day the same courier family showed up. They drove into Blackwood’s driveway in a fire-engine-red Volvo. They were not afraid of being seen. Novak watched them get out of the car. The same four people got out. The man and woman, and two children, the boy looking about eighteen, the girl about six or seven. Once they disappeared into the back of the house, Novak and Lori headed downstairs and called for a rental to be brought to the front entrance. It took fifteen minutes for an employee to show up driving a white Corolla. They drove it out to a parking lot at the back of the hotel, in a spot that lined up with Blackwood’s driveway, from where they could see a good distance down the beach road.

  It took almost an hour before the family emerged and backed the Volvo up, turned around, and headed down the road toward them. Novak and Lori slid low in their seats as the family drove past their position. Novak started the car, expecting them to head inland away from the ocean. That didn’t happen. Instead, the driver stayed on the beach road. They followed them a mile past the beach houses and hotels until they reached a big marina.

  “Bingo,” Novak said. “They’re renting a boat. Get ready. They’re going to make a drop.”

  “They’re taking their kids along. These people are awful excuses for human beings.”

  “The children have to be there to alleviate suspicion. Let’s see where they take the boat. We’ll have to rent one, too. They’re inside the office now. Call in and have a boat waiting for us, or we’ll lose them. Tell them we want a fast one.”

  The Volvo was parked in a spot a few yards down from the front office. The entire family got out and headed inside. Novak eased his car into a space next to the Volvo. He got a tracker out of his backpack and got out of the car. A moment later he was back with the GPS tracker secure in the Volvo’s wheel well. Then they waited. Ten minutes later, the family came back outside and trailed a uniformed employee down the length of the first floating dock. At the last slip, they stood and chatted a moment before the man stepped down into a sleek red-and-white motorboat. Mom and the kids followed him and started strapping on life preservers. The man had evidently boated before, seeing how he expertly backed the boat out of the slip and headed slowly toward the channel that led out to open ocean.

  “They do make the drops at sea. You were right,” Lori said. “We’ve got to hurry or we’ll lose them. Boats are zipping around everywhere out there.”

  A quarter of an hour later, they were aboard their own speedboat, one with a bigger motor and more horsepower. They also rented a bunch of fishing gear as cover, just like the couriers had. It took them a while to locate their prey with binoculars, but Lori picked them out where they were floating about a mile offshore. Other boats were using the area for swimming, and some were fishing. Novak kept going right past them, while Lori kept her binoculars trained on the father of the group.

  “Both kids are in the water now. So is the woman. The man’s scanning the horizon with binoculars, but he’s not looking at us. He’s watching the south horizon for somebody, mark my words. We’re going to see the meet.”

  A hundred yards past the red-and-white boat, Novak steered the prow seaward in a wide arc and pushed down the throttle. The boat jumped, then flew toward the horizon. Once they were far enough out to waylay suspicion, he turned off the motor, and the craft settled gently back to bobbing on gentle waves. “You see anybody yet?”

  “They’re putting out lunch. A couple of big buckets of KFC. More than they can eat.”

  “Keep watching. They didn’t come this far out here for nothing. Somebody is going to show up.”

  “You can count on it.”

  It took over an hour of watching and waiting before a big white cabin cruiser showed up just south of them. It was traveling in their direction at a moderate speed. There was nothing out of the ordinary at all, but Novak’s gut told him that boat would soon make contact with the family. He focused on the man at the helm. He was big with a dark tan, and looked perfectly normal for a man out boating. He had on black swim trunks, a New York Yankees cap, and mirrored sunglasses hanging around his neck on a white cord. A woman and two children were sitting in the stern, their dark hair blowing wildly in the wind. For all intents and purposes, they were just a normal American family out on the water, enjoying the salt air on a sunny afternoon. It was good cover, he would give them that.

  Novak examined the big cabin cruiser for its name. He found it lettered on the stern in big black letters: Family Time, Savannah, Georgia. Nothing appeared suspicious about her. A few other craft were anchored farther in toward the beach, and a few more sped about here and there. On Family Time’s stern, an American flag flapped in the wind, but Novak focused his glasses on the small pennant fluttering beneath it. It was triangular and black with a white trident, just like the one under the flag on the red-and-white boat. It wasn’t a nautical flag, because Novak knew them. It was a signal. If those two boats hooked up, Novak was certain that was how they recognized each other.

  “Lori, look at that pennant the cabin cruiser’s flying. Have you seen it before?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “Take a look at the pennant the couriers put up. It’s one and the same.”

  Lori trained her glasses on the small boat. She smiled. “Yeah, I see that. It tells them who to meet. I bet they never know who is coming or which boat. So they can’t identify the other couriers if they get caught. But it sure as hell will give us a way to nail them to the wall.”

  “The Coast Guard cutters can pick them out anywhere once they know their signal flags.”

  “Exactly. They’ll hook up any minute now. Mark my words.”

  Novak moved over to the stern bench where Lori was on her knees, her binoculars resting on the back of the seat. He got down beside her. The cabin cruiser was slowing now. Moments later, the man at the helm steered the boat into a nice tight turn that put them up close against the smaller one. While the two men lashed the boats together, everybody else waved, laughing and calling out, as if they were two families who were meeting for a picnic at sea.

  “Well, it’s clever, that’s for sure,” Lori murmured softly. “Two big, happy, drug-dealing families having a finger-licking good time. Who would think they’ve got illegal drugs aboard? Nobody would ever guess.”

  “Problem is, we’ve got to prove it. They’re probably celebrating the money they’re getting paid for this drop. And it’s plenty, let me tell you.”

  Lori sat back on her heels. “Do you think those little kids belong to those parents? I can’t imagine real parents subjecting their own children to this kind of danger.”

  “If they’re based on those old sleeper cells, and Sokolov thinks they are, then most likely they are theirs. If they’re not, the worst case scenario is those kids are for sale, too. Petrov and Blackwood are the kind of men who’d traffic them.”

  “I hope you’re wrong. But if you aren’t, I hope t
hey all get the death penalty.”

  “I think it goes deeper than that. Blackwood has a personal interest in child trafficking, and we’ll be able to prove it before this is over. I won’t stop until I get him on that charge. He’s also the safety net if anybody else gets caught. He wields a lot of power and can pull strings to get them out on reduced charges, at the very least. Most of these couriers are probably addicts. We’ve got to get an idea on how deep this thing goes and where they get their product. Are you getting close-ups of these guys?”

  “Yeah, and videos. We might be able to put names with faces using our facial recognition software at the Pentagon. I think we should contact the DEA right now, Novak, before this goes any further. Give them everything we suspect and let them take the reins. I have contacts in Washington that I trust implicitly with this kind of information. My general would help me line things out.”

  Novak shook his head. “Not yet. Eventually, maybe. We don’t have enough proof. I want to get every stopping place, every contact, north to south, east to west. We’ll keep following them until we can nail down points of connection and the names of the boats. I’m guessing they use assumed names when they do it. That’s smart, too, but most marinas will have names and dates and hopefully security cameras that can ID them.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Keep documenting everything they do. If we get authorities involved right now, things could go bad fast. Law enforcement would have trouble coordinating and staying out of sight. Besides, Blackwood had the whole sheriff’s office in his pocket up in that town in Virginia. Stands to reason, they’ve bought off dirty police and judges.”

  “I still think we should hand it over. We’re not equipped to pull off this big of an operation.”

  Novak kept his eyes on the two boats. He was not going to convince her, so he wasn’t going to try. “I want Petrov myself. He overdosed that kid and left her to die out on that cold beach by herself. He murdered Justin and would’ve killed both of us inside that Jeep if I hadn’t been armed. I want to take him out myself.”