Blown Circuit Page 16

  “So have I,” I replied. “That’s what made me hungry.”

  “I feel I owe you an explanation,” she said.

  “Let’s be clear. We don’t owe each other anything, Kate. You don’t owe me and I don’t owe you. Not a damn thing!”

  “There’s something I haven’t been telling you, Michael.”

  I laughed. “Is that supposed to surprise me?”

  “There’s something I haven’t been telling you about your father.”

  I stared her down. I wasn’t in the mood for more games.

  “Stop playing me, Kate.”

  “We had an affair,” she said.

  “What are you going on about?” I said.

  “Your father and I,” Kate said. “We had an affair.”

  I had heard her correctly, so there was no point in asking her to repeat herself. I had also completely lost my appetite.

  Chapter 39

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for my sandwich to arrive. A second soldier carried it over from the corridor behind me. Lightly toasted sesame bread with grilled-chicken, lettuce and tomato, cut into four triangles, each speared with a fancy toothpick and topped with a pickle. There was a coffee too, with cream and sugar on the side. But I had no desire to eat or drink anymore. Not after what I had heard.

  “It started not long after we met, on the job, in China,” Kate said. “At first it was casual. Just two people who worked closely together letting off stress. Enjoying the moment. But it grew. We…shared something. But I didn’t want to be a home wrecker, Michael. I knew your father was happily married. So I ended it.”

  I thought about what Kate had said. Thought about my dad. Thought about my time with her.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  Kate smiled. “Your father is an attractive man, Michael. He’s fit, experienced, smart. Is it so hard to believe that he’d be attractive to a younger woman?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then what is it you don’t believe?”

  “You,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “The timing. It’s convenient isn’t it, Kate? To tell me about this now. To tell me when you want something from me.”

  “It’s the truth, Michael.”

  “Really?”

  “He called me his Camden Star.”

  I felt my stomach knot up a little, but betrayed no emotion. At least I tried not to.

  “When I asked him why, he said it was something about the time he’d spent in Camden Town. In London. It’s where I was born you know. I don’t know what he meant by it exactly.”

  I didn’t now what he meant by it either. I took a bite of my sandwich. The chicken was flavorful. Slightly spicy. I liked it. I liked it almost as much as I hated the image in my mind’s eye of Kate and my dad.

  “Why did you bring me here, Kate?”

  “Why else, Michael?” She smiled. “The book.”

  Kate reached between the crates and removed Tesla’s journal from the bar. It looked as worn as ever, even in the low light. The raked windows of the salon had blinds drawn over them to prevent the light in the salon from interfering with navigation. I felt some wave movement, but nothing the big yacht couldn’t handle as we droned forward into the night.

  “Come over here,” Kate said.

  I was beyond feigning indifference. I wanted to see what had caught her attention just as much as she wanted to show me. I picked myself up and took a seat beside her at the bar. Kate turned the journal to the first page.

  “I’ve been over it several times. It makes no sense.”

  “Are we going to start at the beginning?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  She opened the leather-bound journal.

  “You know what the first pages look like. The olives, the arm, the statue. Then we get down to the island, the theater, all that stuff is now clear.”

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  “Because we found, or let me rephrase that, you found what we were all looking for.”

  “Mistake,” I said.

  “That you found what we were looking for?”

  “That you assume this Bayazidi guy who hid the Device was that limited in his thinking.”

  “Occam’s razor, Michael.”

  “The simplest solution is probably the correct one? Maybe true most of the time, but not necessarily true when you’re dealing with someone who’s trying to fool you.”

  “So what are you saying? That everything you’ve discovered so far—the tower and the triggers—were simply designed to get us off the scent?”

  “I’m saying that whoever intercepted the Tesla Device and subsequently re-hid it, wasn’t necessarily leaving us bread crumbs to find it again in this diary.”

  “Then why write it at all?” Kate said.

  “Easy,” I said. “To kill us.”

  Kate looked at me quizzically, her brow briefly furrowed with concern.

  “Whoever wrote this thing is leading us into a trap,” I said. “They planted the journal as a red herring. To eliminate the threat.”

  Kate smiled.

  “You’re going to have to work harder than that to fool me, Michael.”

  I smiled back. Maybe, I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But I’d introduced the notion of doubt. The idea that we might not be on the right path. The idea that some clues in the journal might be decoys. And that was all I needed to do right then. I needed to shake Kate up enough that she wouldn’t entirely trust her next move.

  “You don’t want to help me find it, fine,” Kate said. “But the next step is in this journal. Right here.”

  Kate opened the aging pages to a map of the coast, a town depicted on it front and center, like a map of old. I didn’t know the name of the town, but I remembered the drawing. It had a huge, double-moon harbor with a pear-shaped peninsula separating either half and tiny, ink-drawn boats taking refuge in each calm bay.

  “The town of Bodrum,” she said. “We’ll make landfall by noon. Is there anything you want to tell me before we get there?”

  “Sure. Meryem says that you’re going to murder a bunch of folks. Maybe a whole city of them,” I said.

  “Blow up a city? Not without a reason, Michael. Why on earth would we do that?”

  “I don’t know. Why would you say you were going to?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t,” Kate replied.

  The way she said it, matter-of-factly like that, I almost believed her.

  “The final component of the Device is somewhere in this town. The map proves it,” Kate said.

  Kate thumbed to the next page in the journal. I saw a figure of a man. A very pained, very distraught man. But I also saw a possibility. I kept my expression neutral.

  “Now, as I said before,” Kate said. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  I thought about it.

  “If you want my help with this, I want Meryem released from that God-awful storage locker. Get her something to eat. And I want another coffee. A full pot this time. And I want some damn room to work. You give me that, we can talk.”

  “Whatever you need, Michael,” Kate said. “But know that I’m watching you.”

  I drew one of the crates near, peering at the titanium triggers inside. Kate took both hands off the journal, pushing the crate back over the bar.

  “Not so close,” she said.

  I smiled and Kate gave the guard a nod, pointing me toward the stern of the ship. No way. I shook my head and pointed outside.

  “Meryem first,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said to me. “Watch him like a hawk,” she added to the guard.

  Chapter 40

  THE SUN WAS not yet up, but the sky had begun to lighten to a deep purple behind us in the east, the Fox throwing a decent wake in the low rolling sea. I judged that we were cruising at fifteen knots, close to maximum speed for a big yacht. The launch I had taken to the island with Kate hung from the deck above on two davit cranes. There wasn’t eno
ugh wind to put a chop on the waves yet, but if the seas got any bigger, I knew that what I had planned would be impossible.

  “Worked here long?” I said to the guard behind me. It was the same guy who had hauled me out of the storage locker in the first place. The one with the chipped tooth.

  “Long enough,” he said in thickly accented English.

  “Your English is good,” I said, pausing as I turned. “What happened to your tooth?”

  “I bit an American,” he grunted.

  I hoped he was joking, though he didn’t strike me as a particularly funny guy. He prodded me down the stairs toward the rear deck. It wasn’t a great position to be in. I was five steps above the deck and he was two steps above me, the barrel of the H&K assault rifle at my back. I felt the boat roll in the waves. It was my opportunity, so I went for it. I tripped. I dived headlong down the steps, cartwheeling off my left arm to absorb some of the impact, while I rounded my shoulder and tucked into a ball, rolling once across the deck below. I could have landed in a crouch, but I didn’t. I landed flat, face down, because I needed to sell it. I needed him to think that I was knocked out.

  The guard let out a grunt and pounded down the stairs after me, the ship pitching and yawing. I took a risk then. I assumed that with the ship rolling about as much as it was that he would have to take at least one of his hands off the gun, preferably the right one, to steady himself on the wall. With that thought in mind, I sprang up from my prone position, flipping around to meet him. Either I’d be quick or I’d be dead.

  I was right. He held himself upright with his trigger hand on the stairwell. I lurched forward and grabbed his weapon by the barrel, pulling him down the last three stairs, directly over top of me. He landed on his back, his head to the stairs, his weapon across his chest. There was no time to celebrate. I needed to finish what I had started. Going directly for the weapon was one route, but I was more interested in immobilizing him than getting into a tug-of-war. So I grabbed his right arm, one hand on his wrist, the other on his elbow, and pushed down, cranking him like a Model T Ford. He flipped over on his belly immediately, the gun below him. After that, I lightened up because I pretty much had the situation under control.

  “I don’t how many people you’ve bitten, friend. But you move, you make even a squeak, and that tooth of yours will be the least of your problems,” I whispered.

  I still needed the gun, so I stepped forward levering his arm against my right leg. That left my right hand free to fish the rifle out from under him by the strap. Once I had hold of the gun, I pointed the barrel directly at the back of his head.

  “Take off your shirt,” I said.

  He struggled beneath me, removing his navy blue long-sleeved shirt. It took him a moment, but he got it.

  “Good. You like to bite things, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Bite your shirt.”

  I saw the look of confusion in his face, but he did it. He balled the shirt up and put it in his mouth.

  “Chew,” I said.

  I think he thought I was kidding, so I put a little more pressure behind the gun. He chewed it. In point of fact, I didn’t want him to eat his shirt, but I wanted him to have something to think about other than getting away from me. I held the barrel of the Heckler and Koch firmly to the back of his head.

  “Now take the keys out of your pocket. Slowly.”

  He reached into his right pocket with his good hand.

  “Let me see it.”

  The guard dangled the key.

  “Open the hatch,” I said.

  He inserted the key into the stainless-steel lock on the deck floor and lifted the hatch.

  “Now get in.”

  The guard climbed inside. I could see Meryem on the far side of the locker. She was a couple feet away from where the guard had crouched.

  “Meryem, you come with me.” I peered down into the locker. “If I hear your voice, I will shoot you,” I said to the guard. “That’s a promise.”

  Meryem pulled herself out of the storage locker and I locked the hatch behind her. We were still alone, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I was taking a risk by not killing the guard. He could start screaming and there would be nothing I could do about it. Regardless, I had decided at some point that there were two ways I could conduct a mission. Brutally or ethically. When circumstance allowed, I had decided to choose the latter. The job was difficult enough without worrying about my karma too.

  “What took you so long?” Meryem asked.

  “She made me a sandwich.” I said. “Stay here.”

  I jogged up the steps two at a time, quickly reaching the aft second-floor deck. The launch was suspended over the stern by two davit cranes positioned to drop it right behind the swim platform. Of course it was designed to do so when the yacht was stationary, but we would have to make do. There were two cables clipped to the rear stays to prevent the launch from swinging around. I unclipped each of them and eased myself into the launch, pulling the fat controller wire attached to the davit crane with me. Then I hit the green down button on the controller, feeling a jerk as the cables slowly unspooled.

  It was still dark but, looking up, I could see the enclosed tail rotor of the helicopter and its battened-down top rotor on the deck above. I could also see the guard. Unfortunately, I was fairly certain that he saw me, too.

  Chapter 41

  THE GUARD IMMEDIATELY drew his weapon. He was two decks above me at that point, but it was an easy shot, even in the dark. He seemed to reconsider what he was doing because I saw him speaking into his collar mike. Then there was some kind of response and he ran down the stairwell. I knew it wouldn’t take him long to reach the davit cranes. And if he got there, he could stop my descent. But the launch was descending quickly. I was almost in the water. One of the cables must have unspooled more quickly than the other because the stern now hung much lower than the bow.

  Meryem waited under the cover of the lowest deck. I didn’t need to say anything to encourage her. She hopped into the launch as it lowered past, climbing up and over the gunnel. Tactically, it was debatable how much further use Meryem would be. She had led me to the Arm, but whether she had any more useful information was unclear. Ethically, however, it was a no-brainer. There was no way I was going to surrender her to the Green Dragons.

  By this point, the guard had reached the deck with the cranes. He grabbed the fat swinging control wire, but not before I felt the launch’s bow hit the water, skipping and jumping sideways in the wake of the yacht. The stern, however, still hung high out of the water. We weren’t going to get away like that.

  “Michael? What kind of plan is this?”

  “The only one I’ve got. Stay where you are.”

  I scrabbled up the deck toward the long mahogany-enclosed stern of the boat, the launch skipping and shuddering below me. The cable was connected to a harness that fed through two round eyes on either side of the stern. The key was the hook on the cable that attached the harness. Detach the harness from the hook and the stern was free.

  I climbed toward the rear harness, sea mist spraying in the white water of the propeller wash. Glancing up, I saw that the guard was speaking into his collar mike. Probably awaiting instructions. I made a grab for the cable, trying to loosen the hook. No dice. There was too much tension in the line and the launch was jumping around like a frog in a frying pan. I pulled the strap of the machine gun off my shoulder and shoved the barrel into the open mouth of the hook, levering it up and away from the harness cable. Then I heard the davit cranes start up again, winding up the cable.

  “Michael!” Meryem screamed. “Shoot them!”

  Not a bad idea, but the barrel of the gun was still caught in the hook. The winches wound quickly this time. The bow of the launch jerked up first. Way up. Meryem tumbled backward and I almost went overboard, but the sudden movement gave me the slack I needed to ease the hook out from under the harness. I levered the hook right out with the barrel of the gun and the cable we
nt flying up.

  The problem was that the hook had hung up on the sight of the gun, yanking me upward with it. I let go of the gun and dropped straight back down as the stern of the launch swung around in the yacht’s wake. It was all I could do to hold on. We were now being pulled by the bow. The yacht was our tow truck and we were the broken-down car, our stern bouncing along in its wake.

  I climbed toward the bow, but the cable was still wound tighter than a Gibson guitar. There was no way I would be able to loosen it, so I did the next best thing and choked the launch’s engine. Then I turned the key. The launch roared to life and I pulled the throttle all the way back. Full reverse. Not a lot of competition between a twenty-two-foot runabout and a hundred-and-sixty-five-foot yacht. There was, however, a lot of strain on the cable. The launch’s prop bit in, pulling the slack out of the crane’s winch. The cable sung as we unspooled it backward, reversing from the mothership, blue water pouring over the stern of the boat.

  And that’s when the first bullet flew.

  It whizzed by, three feet to my right, taking a chunk out of the mahogany. Kate stood on the upper deck of the yacht beside two guards, guns drawn, but my overall plan was working. We were getting farther away from the yacht. Waves of water sloshed over the transom soaking us as we fled backward.

  Another bullet flew.

  “Keep your head down,” I shouted over the rev of the engine.

  Then we stopped. The cable from the crane had unspooled completely. We were a hundred feet from the boat. I gunned the engine backward. The big yacht kept going forward. At least two submachine guns tracked us from above. Things were not looking promising. Then we got lucky. The yacht hit a big roller head on. I knew because we had drifted far enough out into the wake for me to see the Fox’s bow. She dipped low into the big roller’s trough and, as a result, the stern went up, pulling us with it.

  “Hang on!”

  And that’s when the Fox’s stern slapped back down again. The cable slackened and we slapped down with it, but the wave kept rolling through. It swamped us, breaking right over our bow. Both Meryem and I held on to the steering wheel as the launch’s entire cockpit filled with water. Which was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because, suddenly, we weren’t a boat. We were a bucket being dragged through the sea.