Death Echo

by Elizabeth Lowell

  He was at home.

  Her phone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Mac said, reaching into her purse. “It’s Faroe.”

  “So talk to him. I’m busy.”

  Mac answered the phone. “We’re about an hour south of Campbell. Where are you?”

  “Hello to you, too,” Grace said.

  “Sorry. I was expecting your husband. Hello, how are you, how is Annalise, and why are you calling?”

  “Faroe is looking at reports from various Canadian marine weather stations on his computer. He’s making unhappy noises.”

  “We’re fine. Blackbird may be beautiful, but she’s not just a pretty face. She’s built for this part of the world.”

  “How is Emma taking to it?”

  “Fish to water,” Mac said. “Quick and smart. You may not get her back.”

  “Thinking about keeping her?” Grace asked, amused.

  “Yes.”

  “What does she think about it?”

  “No screaming yet,” Mac said.

  “Give yourself time. It doesn’t always happen for new lovers the first few rounds.”

  Mac made a choked sound. “Joe wants to know if you’re going to run through the night,” Grace continued.

  “No. Even if the water was calm and my first mate had all the appeal of moldy concrete, I wouldn’t run in the dark past all those coastal log yards unless something bigger and meaner than me was closing in fast.”

  “See any cruise ships?” Grace asked.

  “Four of them so far, but none are headed toward Campbell. You expecting trouble from a bunch of retired folks on their dream vacations?”

  “No. I just always wanted to see a cruise ship from a distance. All those lights and glamour.”

  “Only at night. Close up in daylight, at the end of a season, cruise ships look like hookers after a hard night.”

  “You and Faroe. Not happy unless you’re captain. Let us know if anything changes. We’ll do the same. Hello and good-bye to your first mate.”

  Mac closed the phone and answered the question Emma hadn’t asked. “Faroe is following the weather up here and got nervous.”

  “Is this the kind of water you call snotty?” Emma asked.

  “Getting there,” Mac said. “If I want to use the electronic charts, are you happy steering by compass for a few minutes?”

  “Better that than autopilot. It doesn’t correct fast enough for this kind of water.”

  “Told you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said without heat. “So I’m a slow learner.”

  Suddenly she felt his heat and sheer bulk along the left side of her body. The warm, slightly rough surface of his fingertips traced from her left cheekbone to her jaw, her throat, and lingered on her pulse. Her heart stopped, then beat double time. His breath brushed her ear.

  “Emma-love, you are anything but slow.”

  She plucked at her sweater and let out a long breath. “Getting hot in here, Captain.”

  Teeth closed gently on her earlobe. “If the water was calm, it’d be a whole lot hotter. But I want to be in Campbell before dark, so medium warm is as good as it gets for now. Hot comes later.”

  She cleared her throat. “You keep nibbling like that, you’re going to distract me.”

  “My hands are in my pockets,” he pointed out.

  She moved her head quickly, caught one of his fingertips, and sucked it into her mouth for a thorough tasting. She released it slowly, enjoying the flush of color high on his cheekbones.

  “My hands are on the wheel,” she said.

  He took a long breath, then another. “Point taken. Damn it.”

  She laughed softly and moved aside so that he could get to the chart plotter while she steered. “All yours, Captain.”

  “Promises promises.”

  “I keep mine,” Emma said.

  “So do I.”

  She cleared her throat. “So…good. I won’t have to date myself tonight.” She shook her head hard, trying to clear the haze of lust.

  “God, Mac. Is it something you were born with, or did you take classes?”

  “In what?”

  “Sexual heat.”

  He blinked, then smiled slowly. “I’m learning from my first mate. One hell of a teacher. Can’t wait for night school to begin.”

  She blew out her breath and ignored him. It was that or jump him, and Blackbird really did need a guiding hand. Two hands, actually. The waves were building with the wind. And the wind had teeth in it, forewarning of the cold autumn gales Mac had talked about.

  “Is this weather as bad as it looks?” she asked after a time.

  Mac didn’t even glance up from the electronic chart plotter he was putting through its paces. “Not for us. If we were in a small boat, yes, I’d already be ashore or real close to it. Out here, size matters.”

  “Not touching that.”

  “Ever?” he asked.

  “Not hearing you. La la la la. Not a single tempting word.”

  Mac laughed and quit teasing her—and himself—for the moment. He checked the boat’s position, the tide, the currents, and the time to Campbell River. It would be an interesting ride. They were right on schedule for a beating from the steep tidal currents just south of Campbell River. The wicked water would slow them down, but they should make Campbell before dark.

  Mac could hardly wait.

  But he kept at work on the chart plotter, trying out various possibilities for the next day of running. The beauty of a boat like Blackbird was that speed opened up so many choices that a six-knot boat didn’t have. The downside was that choices led to more opportunities to screw up.

  That’s how you learn, Mac reminded himself. And along the learning way, you try real hard not to make the kind of mistakes that are fatal.

  Not to mention praying that somebody else didn’t make those mistakes for you.

  49

  DAY FOUR

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  9:10 P.M.

  The front door closed behind Timothy Harrow with a weighty restraint that whispered of money. As he walked down the echoing marble foyer, he pulled off his suit coat, yanked his tie loose, looked at the muted gleam of bottles in the home bar, and sighed.

  He’d rather have a woman. Unfortunately, his wife—soon to be ex-wife—had discovered that sometimes any woman would do for him. It wasn’t anything against her, certainly nothing personal. It was just the way he was.

  He looked around the suburban home that had become a house with the divorce decree and decided all over again that his career was a relationship killer. He should have stuck with serial affairs. Or found a wife who understood the demands of his career. Marrying a beautiful, ambitious lawyer had been a head-banging mistake, one he’d be making payments on for the rest of his life. Unless the clever bitch remarried.

  And speaking of clever bitches…

  He picked his cell phone off the table and looked at his contacts, searching for the personal number of his FBI contact. Information or a hookup, either would be fine with him. Both would be better. But before he could find the number, someone knocked at the front door.

  Harrow locked and set aside the phone before he pulled out the drawer in the end table by his chair, saw that his pistol was in its usual place, and picked it up. He checked the load and flicked the safety off. Holding the weapon more or less out of sight along his right leg, he went to the security screen at the end of the foyer leading to the front door.

  The surveillance camera showed Duke standing at the front door, but far enough back to make ID easy. What everyone hoped would be the final heat wave of the year had left Duke’s expensive suit wrinkled and his bald head sweating in the porch light.

  He was alone. Even his driver-bodyguard wasn’t in sight. Suddenly the Scotch looked more likely to Harrow than a hookup. With a subdued curse, he opened the door and let his boss into the mechanically cooled air of the house.

  “You look like you could use a drink,” Harrow s
aid.

  Duke ran a palm over his head. “You alone?”

  “Yes.” Harrow put the safety on his pistol and led the way to the living room.

  “Nice place,” Duke said.

  “It will be Pam’s in a few weeks.” The end table drawer shut with emphasis.

  Duke grunted. “Yeah, she’s a shark.”

  “And a bitch. You want some bourbon?”

  “No time.”

  “What’s up?” Meaning: What’s too hot to talk about over the phone?

  “I don’t know.”

  Harrow didn’t ask any more. Whether Duke didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t share wasn’t the point. The point was that something had sent a jolt through intelligence networks, a shot hot enough to burn some very important butts.

  “How can I help?” Harrow asked.

  It was the question that had taken him very near the top of the pyramid at an age when most people were still wondering what they would do when they grew up.

  “One of Shurik Temuri’s aliases entered Canada through Blaine,” Duke said. “That’s on the northern border of Washington State.”

  Harrow made a sound that said he was paying attention.

  “By the time we got someone on Temuri, he’d ditched the rental. We’re going through the records of nearby car rentals as fast as we can get to them, but it will take time. We don’t have time.”

  The Scotch looked more like nectar with every word Harrow’s boss spoke.

  “Is there anything I’ve missed in Temuri’s file?” Harrow asked carefully.

  “No.”

  “But we’re upset that he’s in Canada.”

  “Yes. He’s on our ticket, now,” Duke said.

  Says who? Harrow thought. Nobody told me about an op, especially good old Duke.

  Harrow didn’t say anything out loud, just waited, hoping his boss would say something useful.

  Duke was an old hand at the silence game.

  Harrow gave up and asked, “What’s the op?”

  “It’s an old sting that went south,” Duke said. “A few years back, a political golden-boy decided that it would be useful to catch a well-connected Russian dirty in the U.S.”

  It was a time-honored way to recruit double agents. Nothing new. Certainly nothing to send Harrow’s boss roaming wealthy D.C. suburbs when he should be home having a drink.

  “What was the contraband?” Harrow asked.

  “A hundred million in counterfeit cash.”

  Harrow didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “That’s a lot of dirty to set someone up with. A million would have been more than enough.”

  Duke shrugged. “It wasn’t my op. It was political from the get-go. Politicians don’t notice a million here or there. Not anymore. To make a splash in the headlines you need a splashy amount of money, plus the threat of levering a corner of the U.S. economy off the rails, which would yank the rest of the economy down into the train wreck, one financial sector at a time. People are still goosey about 2008.”

  “Old news.”

  “Not to the politicians who were voted out and went back to mowing lawns for a living,” Duke said. “They won’t forget until they die. Neither will their children. Hell, the last thing my grandpa said to me was ‘Don’t trust banks or the stock market. Don’t forget the Great Depression.’ Turns out he had wads of cash buried in the rose garden.”

  Harrow’s interest in Scotch turned into the stabbing of a migraine beginning behind his right eye.

  “Anyway,” Duke said, “Temuri somehow made off with the really good-looking bad cash our side had used to set up the sting. Temuri is getting ready to run it into the U.S.”

  This just gets better and better, Harrow thought unhappily, heading toward a grade-A cluster.

  He rubbed his right eyelid and asked bluntly, “Is Emma Cross a willing or unwilling participant in all this?”

  “Unknown. Personally, I suspect she’s former Agency with an ax to grind. Think how bad we’ll look if it’s revealed that we helped a foreign national get hold of a hundred million in good-looking fake cash.”

  “I thought this was a political ploy, not one of our ops.”

  Duke gave him a disgusted look. “It’s all politics, boy. Thought you’d figured that out by now.”

  Harrow grimaced. “So do you want the bad money or Temuri or Emma Cross?”

  “All three would be gravy.”

  “What’s the meat?”

  “Get that money any way you can,” Duke said. “Destroy it. No money, no headlines. No headlines, everyone goes back to playing in their own national sandbox.”

  “Where’s the cash?”

  “Hidden aboard a yacht called Blackbird, which is somewhere in British Columbia. Campbell River is what we were told. Somebody up the line has a locator on the boat and is keeping a watch.”

  “How soon can you get me there with a good, quiet team?” Harrow asked.

  “The team is already in place. As soon as the storm along Vancouver’s east coast dies down, we’ll fly you on recon. Once you ID the boat, you get the team and find a way to take the boat. Then you find the money, destroy it, and everybody goes home. Questions?”

  “Are you worried about witnesses?”

  “Go in soft,” Harrow said. “No need to worry. And if you go in hard…”

  Shoot, shovel, shut up. Everybody’s favorite fallback solution when money and threats don’t work.

  Harrow’s right eyeball felt like it was being gouged out of its socket. “Does Canada know?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Am I using my own name?”

  “She’s going to recognize you anyway, right?” Duke asked.

  The headache shot through Harrow’s right eye socket and along the back of his skull. It didn’t take a bureaucratic genius to see that he’d been nominated the sacrificial goat in this game of tin gods.

  “The team I got you is really good,” Duke said. “They won’t talk no matter what goes down.”

  Harrow just looked at him.

  “Shit.” Duke sighed. “I’m sorry. I tried to take it myself. They said no and then switched my bodyguard. I’m locked down.” He looked at his watch. “In two minutes my new ‘bodyguards’ will drag my ass out of here. I’ll do everything I can to help you. I’m sorry, Tim. Really sorry.”

  So was Harrow.

  50

  DAY FOUR

  CAMPBELL RIVER

  8:15 P.M.

  The thirty-five-knot wind ripping through Campbell River’s Discovery Harbor made Blackbird flinch and her fenders rub against the dock. The water in even the most protected fairways sported small whitecaps. All through the marina, loose stays rang against masts, keeping an odd sort of time with the wail of rushing air. The docks were filled to capacity, a man-made forest of metal masts and small boats leaning away from the wind.

  Emma felt the seat give as Mac slid in next to her on the couch behind the dining table.

  “Anything new on the weather?” she asked, glancing up from her computer.

  “General consensus is that the wind should die down around dawn.”

  “If it doesn’t?”

  “We go out against the floodtide,” he said. “That way the wind and the water will both be moving the same way.”

  “Which means less wind chop?” she asked.

  “And more fuel expenditure. Fortunately, we can afford it.”

  Emma made a sound. “I’m still in shock over what it cost to fill this baby up. Both tanks.”

  “They’re cross-connected, so that you end up drawing down both.” The leather banquette seat creaked as he moved closer. “The generator runs off the starboard tank.”

  She felt his body heat and automatically moved to give him more room. When he took that, and more, she smiled. And stayed put.

  “You get through to Faroe?” Mac asked, glancing at her cell phone.

  “By way of Grace, who had to pry a cooing Annalise from her daddy’s arms.”

  Mac grinn
ed. “Gotta admit, watching him with that little charmer makes me smile. A really unlikely combination.”

  “You and smiling?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  He leaned close enough to nip her ear. “Someone as deadly as Faroe with a drooling, cooing, cracker-smeared toddler in his arms.”

  She gave him a nip right back. “Grace and Faroe both agreed that Demidov could have been lying.”

  “From hello to good-bye and most spots in between,” Mac agreed, watching her lips.

  “He probably was telling the truth about his government’s relationship with the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia,” she said. “They’ve been at one another’s balls since the Berlin Wall came down.”

  “And the U.S. has been playing ‘Let’s you and him fight’ for just as long,” Mac said. “What doesn’t make sense is that Georgia would sponsor an attack of any sort inside the borders of its most powerful ally, the U.S.A. That moves straight down from stupid to suicidal.”

  “You know that because you’re intelligent and you follow international news from time to time. I know the truth about the Republic of Georgia for reasons that national security prevents me from listing.”

  Mac stole the last sip of coffee from her cup.

  She ignored him and kept talking. “But how much would the average transit captain/dope smuggler and his arm candy know? Demidov made an educated guess that we’re as self-centered and internationally ill informed as the average American. For Jack and Jill Average, the Caucasus Mountains are a long way from anything meaningful, like finding a parking place or paying the bills.”

  Mac wished he could disagree, but he couldn’t. Too many citizens were happily uninformed about the larger world.

  For a moment, Emma looked wistful. “I wanted to be Jill Average. That’s why I quit the Agency.”

  “And I hoped to be Jack.”

  Mac put his hand on top of hers on the varnished teak table. She wove their fingers together.

  “I guess that makes us stupid,” she said, sighing.