Death Echo

by Elizabeth Lowell

  They hadn’t seen anything that looked like Blackbird.

  Mac hung up his cell phone and spoke through the headphone link to Emma. “Steele says Harrow has at least two planes working south, covering Seattle and the San Juan Islands. Faroe wants us to stay north of Campbell River in case Black Swan is still up here somewhere under wraps.”

  “But—” Emma began.

  “The problem is,” Mac continued, “she could appear anywhere, because she could have been hidden anywhere from Southeast Alaska to the B.C. coast above Vancouver Island.”

  “Wouldn’t that cause a stir? That’s an expensive boat to be left for months at a time.”

  “It’s not unusual for summer yachties to leave their boats stashed in safe ports up north for the winter, fly out to Florida or Mexico, and fly back in the spring or summer. Some people hire transit captains to bring their baby north to south and back again.”

  Emma digested that as she tried to ignore the growling, low-frequency grind of the big radial engine sitting a few feet in front of her. Even with the headset to dampen the bone-deep, droning roar, she felt like she was inside a metal coffin that was being beaten with baseball bats.

  She hadn’t liked small planes before she stepped aboard this one. Now she respected the sturdy DeHavilland for its ability to rise and fall with the terrain and wind, and land in hair-raising places; but she still didn’t like it.

  “Give me a boat any day,” she muttered.

  “What?” Mac said.

  “It’s noisy in here.”

  “Try the engine room of Blackbird, when she was running.”

  “No thanks.”

  “You sure?” he asked. “I have extra ear protectors.” Or had.

  “The pilot must be deaf.”

  “Only in the lower ranges.”

  The pilot was a man of indeterminate age and complete control of his airplane. Whatever his per-hour rate was, he earned it.

  “There’s Chatham Point,” the pilot said over the intercom, pointing ahead through the windshield at a bright, white-and-red-striped lighthouse on a finger of land. “No noncommercial black, approximately forty-feet-long hulls on the water that I can see. I’ll make a lower pass to be certain.”

  Mac put down his binoculars. He’d learned that the pilot’s eye was so good it was almost eerie, reflecting a combination of expertise and a sixth sense. He could tell the difference between a forty-and a fifty-foot cruiser at a thousand feet.

  The plane banked, drifted lower, and circled as though looking for a place to land.

  Emma scanned the water through her glasses.

  “Anything?” Mac asked.

  “Nothing we want.” She sighed and lowered the glasses. “The Inside Passage is an extraordinary, beautiful maze. And maddening. Did I mention that? You could lose an armada down there.”

  The radio crackled.

  “We’ll need to refuel soon,” the pilot said. “You want me to do it at Campbell River or Port Hardy?”

  “Port Hardy,” Mac said. “We’re going to give the far northern stretch another look.”

  “Roger Port Hardy.”

  Emma listened, put the binoculars back to her eyes. She refused to let despair creep over her as she watched the countless, intricate waterways of the Inside Passage and listened to the clock ticking relentlessly in her head.

  We’ll find Blackbird’s twin.

  We have to.

  66

  DAY SIX

  PORT HARDY

  4:35 P.M.

  The seaplane splashed down fifty yards off the breakwater that protected the boat basin at Port Hardy. In choppy water, the plane taxied to the aviation section of the fuel docks. The pilot went to work filling the plane’s tank and cleaning the windshield just like a ground-based gas jockey.

  Emma called Faroe as soon as her hearing returned to normal.

  “We’re refueling in Port Hardy,” she said quietly, relieved to be free of the hammering engine sounds. “No joy so far.”

  “Frack,” Faroe muttered savagely.

  “Frack?”

  “I’m holding Annalise. No F-bombs allowed.”

  Emma smiled, reaching for the sane and normal. “Someday soon, she’s going to ask her mommy what ‘F-bomb’ means.”

  “Yeah, and by then her big brother will probably have taught her ten other nasty words, right, sweetie?”

  Annalise cooed.

  “She’s the only joy on my end,” Faroe said. “If Harrow’s searchers have had any more luck than St. Kilda has, he’s sitting on it.”

  “I hope he gets hemorrhoids. Mac says we’ve covered all the back ways up to the Queen Charlotte Sound and back down to twenty miles below Campbell River.”

  Mac reached for the phone.

  Emma gave it to him.

  “Mac, here,” he said. “I gather you’ve come up as empty as we have.”

  “Double handful of F-bombs.”

  Mac shook his head. “As far as we can tell, no Blackbird twin has turned off through the Thurlows or gone sneaking around the back side of Quadra. Do you have any contacts other than Harrow and Alara?”

  “Steele knows Harrow’s boss.”

  “Twist his nuts,” Mac said.

  “Already done. No go. Until everyone at the top of the feeding chain is dead-solid certain that Harrow can’t get the job done before the bad news sails into Seattle, we’re stuck up north sucking the Devil’s, uh, thumb.”

  Annalise burbled in the background.

  Mac smiled despite the anger, fear, and sheer frustration raging beneath his calm surface.

  “If the Agency lets it all hang out in public,” Emma said impatiently, reclaiming the phone, “everyone’s lifetime of experience, decades of effort, overt and covert contacts, and international knowledge in general is in the sewer or dead by execution. If the top of the food chain keeps a lid on Blackbird, they might survive, and with them whatever ops and covert sources they have running outside this one particular op. For them, it’s not just careers at stake. It’s actual human lives overseas. Until they’re certain there’s no other way out, they’ll zip it and keep it zipped. This can’t be news to anyone with the IQ of a pile worm.”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Faroe shot back.

  “Did somebody ask you to?”

  Faroe said something Annalise wasn’t supposed to hear. Then, “You sound like Grace.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was the rush of Faroe releasing a long breath. “Sorry. Last few hours, my AQ is off the charts.”

  “AQ?”

  “Asshole Quotient.”

  He disconnected.

  Emma looked at the phone with a bemused expression.

  “What?” Mac asked.

  “My boss just apologized. To me.”

  “Savor it,” he said absently.

  She followed his glance. He was watching the fuel dock where boats orbited like moths waiting for their chance in the flames.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Having a ‘duh’ moment,” he said.

  “Speak.”

  “Assume Swan came off a compliant containership somewhere between Southeast Alaska and the northern tip of Vancouver Island.”

  “Where we are now.”

  Mac nodded. “When I picked up Blackbird, she had about enough fuel to make Rosario, if I trusted the sight gauges.”

  Emma cocked her head and listened.

  “But I know better than to trust anything coming right off a containership,” Mac said, “so I got some reliable fuel aboard before I ran to Rosario.”

  “That’s where I met you. At the fuel dock.”

  He turned and smiled. “Sometimes a man gets lucky. Real lucky.”

  “So does a woman. Which leaves us with a probably thirsty Swan somewhere between way north and here.”

  “Port Hardy is a magnet.”

  “Why?” she asked, looking around at the unassuming little harbor.

  “First reliable fuel—�
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  “You keep mentioning ‘reliable,’” she interrupted.

  “Some places don’t sell enough fuel to keep their storage tanks clean.”

  She started to ask another question but didn’t. The intricacies of good diesel fuel weren’t her problem. Yet.

  “North coast of B.C. has some of the first reliable fuel after crossing Queen Charlotte Sound from Alaska,” Mac said.

  “Or being off-loaded from a container ship at sea. Is that possible, by the way?” she asked. “Off-loading at sea?”

  “Depends. If the weather is decent, and the container ship’s deck crane operator is mostly sober, you can off-load a boat like Blackbird pretty much where you want to. Takes maybe half an hour.”

  “What about all the outfitting that was done in Rosario?” she asked.

  “They’ve had a year to work on Swan. They could have done it in pieces without making any waves at all.”

  “But no matter what,” she said, “if Swan was off-loaded north of here, she would likely make a call at Port Hardy?”

  Mac nodded. “I’m going to talk to the fuel jockey.”

  She fell in step beside him. “If Port Hardy is such a magnet, what makes you think anyone would remember a single boat?”

  “The opposition made a mistake when they stole a beautiful, black-hulled ship. She’s memorable.”

  “And can’t be painted over.”

  “Nearly impossible. Besides”—he shrugged—“despite being a magnet, the amount of traffic Port Hardy sees isn’t spit compared to Port of Vancouver or Elliott Bay. The farther north you go, the smaller civilization becomes, until a handful is a crowd.”

  “We’re grabbing at straws, aren’t we?”

  “Depends.”

  She sighed. “Next to what we have, straws look like logs.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Mac and Emma closed in on the lean woman who was giving orders while a younger man pumped fuel into boats as fast as the fat, heavy hoses allowed. Emma let Mac engage the woman—the owner, as she quickly pointed out to him—in talk about grades and purity of fuel, virtues of gas versus diesel, various filters, taxes, taxes on taxes, licensing fees, environmental fees and restrictions, fishing restrictions, the silliness of sailboats in a place when the wind was rarely constant, and the weather. In between words, the owner was directing her dockhand.

  By the time Mac and the owner got around to yachts coming and going, Emma was having a hard time swallowing all her yawns.

  “…and a black hull. Seen anything like that?” Mac asked.

  Emma snapped into focus and mentally reviewed the past few sentences. Mac had been describing Blackbird.

  The owner removed a grubby fishing cap, scratched through an explosion of silver hair, and said, “Matter of fact, the cousin you’re asking about came through here around dawn today. Made such a fuss, I opened the fuel dock early.”

  “Yeah?” Mac said idly, but his eyes were like black ice. “He have his wife with him?”

  “Didn’t see her. There was another man, though. Maybe it was a different boat.”

  Mac shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Sounds like my dear old cuz. He takes buddies fishing a lot. Leaves the wife behind. Pisses her off, I’ll tell you.”

  The owner laughed. “That explains it. He spent a lot of time on his phone. Didn’t look like he enjoyed it. In fact, he was heading home real quick, taking the shortest way.”

  Emma sensed Mac’s sudden intensity, but nothing showed on his surface.

  “You mean he’s going down the outside?” Mac asked, shaking his head. “Damn fool. Weather is tricky this time of year.”

  “I said something about that. He just kept on buying charts from the Brooks Peninsula all the way to Bamfield. I didn’t have any for farther south. One of the men, the taller one, was screaming about not piloting the whole west side without charts, and the other guy said they’d pick up the rest in Tofino, since they were going to have to fuel there anyway.”

  Mac was too busy clamping down on his control to make a polite and casual reply.

  Son of a bitch!

  Nobody had expected anyone to take on the Pacific Ocean in autumn in a Blackbird twin designed for the very different waters of the Inside Passage.

  The owner shrugged. “Man’s captain of his own boat. I just put fuel on board and rang up the sale.”

  “He never was real good at listening,” Mac said.

  “He’s got a sound boat underneath him, for a yacht.” The owner stepped away for a moment to flip on a fuel pump. “They figured to run close to twenty knots, be home in eighteen hours. I looked at the numbers on a big chart and it came to seven hundred kilometers, give or take.”

  “He’s shooting for Seattle?” Mac asked. “All at once?”

  The owner laughed. “Yeah, his wife must have put fire up his butt. He wasn’t entirely stupid, though. He listened when I told him to head two-hundred-seventy degrees for twenty minutes, long enough to miss the big reef out there, before he headed south.”

  Mac remembered the reef. Just one of the many treacherous features of the beautiful, wild stretch of ocean that thundered along the west side of Vancouver Island.

  “I saw him make the turn a little later,” the owner said, tugging her cap down with an automatic gesture. “He was throwing a bow wave like a customs cutter on a hot run. Made my kidneys ache to look at it.” She sighed. “That’s why I got out of the crabbing business in Alaska. Didn’t have the kidneys for it.”

  “Seattle in eighteen hours. Wow,” Emma said. It will take an airplane to catch them.

  “Big storm coming, too,” the owner added absently, looking around the fuel dock. “Guess he plans to beat it to Seattle. Hope he makes it.”

  Mac and Emma looked at each other, wondering the same thing.

  Would it be good or bad if Blackbird’s twin sinks?

  Suddenly the owner loped off to help an old yacht that was making hard work of landing at the fuel dock. Apparently the captain was single-handing the boat.

  Mac took Emma’s arm and urged her back to the seaplane. She hurried along beside him.

  “Did I understand that correctly?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Lovich and Amanar are taking the outside route. Stupid bastards.”

  “Why? It fooled us.”

  “Blackbird wasn’t built for ocean storms,” Mac said simply. “She can take swells in decent weather, even lousy weather, but without a stabilizer, the crew will get hammered real good. A big enough wave over the beam could blow out all her side windows and sink her.”

  “God.” Emma swallowed. “Is that likely?”

  “She’s well built. Lovich and Amanar may be greedy, but they’re good captains on the water. Their spines will hate them, and their stomachs will be slamming against their brains, but without bad luck they’ll get through.”

  “What is Tofino?” she asked.

  “A port about three-quarters of the way down the west side of Vancouver Island.”

  “Reliable fuel?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Mac said.

  “Can our plane reach Tofino before Lovich and Amanar refuel?”

  “That’s the easy part.”

  Emma didn’t ask about the hard part. She already knew.

  67

  DAY SIX

  WEST SIDE OF VANCOUVER ISLAND

  5:12 P.M.

  Emma searched the Pacific Ocean beneath her through binoculars. The slanting light and broken clouds—and her weary eyes—made shadows that looked like black-hulled ships.

  At her side, Mac searched between the plane and the ragged black line of shore. Waves that surged rather than broke against cliffs flashed white against the darkening land.

  She saw a shadowy black hull, lifted the glasses enough to rub her eyes, and focused again. The hull was still there.

  Then it wasn’t.

  With fingers that wanted to tremble, she refined the focus. The silhouette of a ship settled into the clear viewi
ng field of her binoculars. She wanted to use the computerized zoom feature, but was afraid to lose contact with the shadow in any way.

  “Mac.”

  The huskiness of her voice brought every nerve alive in him. “Here.”

  “About two-thirty. Out to sea. When you find it, zoom in.”

  He found the ship quickly, zoomed in. “Hello, Blackbird. Or Black Swan. Aren’t you a beauty.”

  “ID positive?” she asked.

  “Unless someone built a triplet, that’s our baby.”

  The certainty in his voice was as unmistakable as the elegant silhouette sliding down the side of a wave.

  “Want me to circle?” the pilot asked.

  “No,” Emma and Mac said as one.

  “Just keep on like you’re flying in to one of the remote resorts on the west side,” Mac said.

  “When we’re out of sight of the boat, go straight to Tofino,” Emma added.

  “Roger.”

  The plane kept on a course that angled slowly away from the boat. Before it was out of sight, Emma was on her special phone.

  Grace answered immediately. “Anything?”

  “We found a ship identical to Blackbird going down the west side of Vancouver Island,” Emma said.

  “Thank you, God,” Grace breathed. “Above or below Tofino?”

  “Above.”

  Grace sighed more thanks into the phone. Then her voice became precise, efficient. “I have permission for you to repossess a ship of Black Swan’s description.”

  “Repo? As in steal?”

  “Stealing is illegal. Repossessing is part of a legal process.”

  “Um, right,” Emma said, feeling an absurd kind of laughter tickling her throat. “So we go to the local cops and—”

  “We’d rather you didn’t,” Grace cut in. “The insurance company paid off Black Swan, which means that they legally own the ship if and when it is found. However, it would be a much smoother ownership transition if you simply hijack the bitch and run for the border.”

  “Possession being nine-tenths of the law.”