Coco stared at the transformation in her employer. She had the look of a woman who had just acquired a very good, very personal sex toy, and his name was Archer. Ian wasn’t going to like hearing about this.
But she sure was going to enjoy telling him.
Chang and Flynn sat in a private room off the Blessing Crane’s small public dining room. None of Chang’s anger at finding out that Hannah McGarry had finally taken a lover showed on his face. The least important part of his anger was personal and male. The majority of his ire was professional. The Chang family was counting on him to discover the secret of producing rainbow pearls. With that, they could increase their importance to mainland China. With more importance would come more contracts, better contracts, and a strengthening of guanxi, the all-important connections that were the basis of power in China.
Despite his darting thoughts, Chang’s face was impassive as he ate, wielding chopsticks or knife and fork with speedy precision, depending on the dish in front of him. Flynn did the same. Cigarettes smoldered in the ashtray between the men, adding to the stale smell of the room. The fact that the food was second rate didn’t matter to either man. If they wanted really good food, they abandoned Broome for Darwin or Kowloon or even Perth.
Both men were silent. They had nothing useful to say to one another. McGarry’s death was old news. The missing rainbow pearls were old news. The fact that each man’s government was pressuring him to come up with the pearl prize was taken for granted, as was the fact that Flynn and Chang were in competition.
They hadn’t come to the restaurant to socialize. They were here because a third player in the pearl game had “requested” it. Until the third representative arrived, there was nothing to do but smoke and eat and drink lukewarm beer.
The door to the private room opened. Without a word of greeting, a third man walked in, sat down, and picked up a plate to help himself from the varied dishes at the center of the dark table. Whatever Maxmillian Barton thought of the food, he kept it to himself. He had been raised on Tex-Mex cuisine and had graduated to coconut milk and nuclear Thai curries while doing several duty tours for the U.S. State Department. No matter how hot the spice or how cold the company, Barton ate and listened, both eyes wide-open for the main chance.
“Is Archer Donovan working for the U.S. on this?” Chang asked Barton without preamble.
“Not so far as I can tell.”
“How far is that?” Flynn asked.
“Far enough to know that he has no official ties with the U.S. government.”
Chang picked up a tree ear with his chopsticks, chewed the nutty fungus, and swallowed. “What about unofficial ties?”
“He’s not ours off the books, if that’s what you mean.”
Chang grunted. McGarry had been an off-the-books agent for the United States. Sometimes. Most of the time he had worked for himself. Chang wondered if anyone else at the table knew.
“Archer Donovan’s a Yank through and through,” Flynn said. “He’ll help out his government.”
Barton shrugged. “Maybe. He’s turned ’em down flat in the past.”
Flynn’s blond eyebrows rose. “You let him get away with yanking your chain like that?”
“It’s a free country,” Barton said blandly.
“Balls.”
“Len was a Yank, too,” Chang pointed out to Flynn. “He didn’t help anybody but himself, no matter who happened to be employing him.”
Flynn made a disgusted sound. If there was anything that made a government crazy, it was foreign or domestic agents who wouldn’t stay bought. But it was a hazard of the business. “I still say Donovan somehow got McGarry killed.”
“If he did,” Barton said, avoiding an opaque clot of tofu in favor of anonymous animal protein, “you better pray he never wants your pecker in his collection. We looked, and we looked hard, and we couldn’t find one single goddamn piece of evidence that Donovan had a hand in McGarry’s death.”
Flynn started to object.
Barton looked up, still chewing. His black eyes reminded the other men that he once had been a contract assassin. “We would love—just flat fucking love—to have a twist on Archer Donovan. He was about the shrewdest damn analyst we ever had, as well as one effective son of a bitch in the field. Having that kind of talent running around without a handler makes us nervous. So if you’re thinking we didn’t look hard enough, think again.”
The palm of Flynn’s big hand came down on the table with enough force to make silverware jump. “Then who in Jesus and Mary’s name killed Len McGarry?”
Barton smiled thinly. Beneath his thinning gray hair his scalp gleamed. So did his teeth. “We have two pools going. The first is betting on the Chinese triads, compliments of one of the Overseas Chinese’s foremost trading families.”
Chang speared tofu, chewed once, and swallowed as though he didn’t understand that Barton was accusing his family.
“The second pool,” Barton said, watching Flynn idly, “is on the Aussies doing the dirty. Specifically the marginally bright, no-longer-young Turk who needs a gold star in his file to go up in rank.”
“Bugger yourself,” Flynn said without heat. “If I killed the wanker, you’ll never prove it.”
Chuckling, using the chopsticks as deftly as Chang, Barton flicked a lump of noodles from his plate to his mouth. “What are you going to do about Donovan?”
Flynn didn’t say a word.
Neither did Chang.
Barton sighed. “Listen up, boys. For the moment, the U.S. wants Archer Donovan alive and kicking ass.”
Chang glanced up and mentally began revising his phone summary for Sam Chang. “Why?”
“Yours not to reason why,” Barton retorted. “Just make bloody sure that if Donovan goes tits up, you don’t have any part in it. If your Daddy doesn’t like the good word, tell him to call my boss. She’ll tell him just what I’m telling you. Lay off Donovan until you hear otherwise.” Black eyes glanced at Flynn. “Same goes.”
Flynn shrugged. “I don’t take my orders from a Yank.”
“Your country takes loans, lots of them, in U.S. dollars. Would you like to be the one to explain to your finance minister that you personally fucked up some multibillion-dollar development loans because McGarry’s widow liked Donovan’s cock better than yours?”
Flynn’s head snapped up. “So Donovan is working for you.”
Barton’s laugh was as cold as his eyes. “Not yet, but we’re giving him rope and lighting candles in hell. The instant he screws up, we’ll be there. And he’ll be ours.”
“What about Hannah McGarry?” Chang asked.
“What about her?” Barton retorted.
“Is she off limits, too?”
“Nothing was said about her.”
Chang flicked a prawn into his mouth, eating it in the Chinese manner—head, shell, and all. He chewed thoughtfully, savoring the intense flavor of the shell and the succulence of the flesh. “Ms. McGarry is the owner of record of a very special, very valuable piece of the pearl trade.”
“Too bad Donovan showed up,” Barton said cheerfully. “She isn’t likely to make an alliance with either of you now.”
Neither Chang nor Flynn looked at each other, but each was thinking the same thing: Barton didn’t know that Donovan was half owner of Pearl Cove.
And Hannah McGarry had just been thrown to the wolves.
Barton stood up, tossed some Australian money on the table, and walked out. Every step of the way he cursed April Joy for her latest intricate game. It wasn’t the first time he had cursed her. It wouldn’t be the last.
The hell of it was, she was right. Getting a handle on talent like Archer Donovan was worth bending a few rules.
Red dirt flew by on either side of the road, which was also red dirt. Low, ramshackle buildings circled Broome and crouched rather drunkenly along the waterfront. Many of the buildings were remodeled pearling sheds. New buildings stuck out like castles in a shantytown. These were the small ho
tels and restaurants, stores and bars that had been built recently with the tropical tourist in mind—potted palms, French doors, bamboo or rattan furniture, breezy rooms, lots of shade, and a cross between rustic frontier and clean-lined Asian decor.
The airport wasn’t one of the castles.
Like the World War II Quonset hut that served as a terminal, the airport parking lot was unadorned and unshaded. It sucked in heat and held it, returning it redoubled to anyone unlucky enough to stand on the sun-softened surface. Even through the mercury-colored heat haze, sunlight was a staggering burden over land and man alike.
While Archer locked the car, Hannah looked around the parking lot. Though Archer said nothing, he was feeling every bit of the temperature difference between Seattle and Broome. Sweat gleamed on his face, his arms, his legs. His tank top and shorts were a wet second skin. He couldn’t have dripped more if he had just walked out of the shower.
“Is this where you tell me why we’re in Broome?” Hannah asked.
“No.”
She lifted her eyebrows, shifted the airy straw hat that shaded her head, and waited.
He held out his hand, silently apologizing for his curt answer. “A flight just came in.”
“So?”
“So what passes for a taxi service should be waiting out front for passengers.”
Hannah looked at the car they had just gotten out of. She looked at Archer. He didn’t say a word. She took his hand and headed for the ragged jitney that would ferry them to town.
When the van left the airport, there were only six people sitting on the cracked, sticky seats. The other four passengers were two couples who had nothing in common but the slammed feeling of having been on a jet for too many hours, through too many time zones, and then walking out of stale air-conditioning into the tropical sauna of Broome air in late November. Overdressed for the time and place, they watched the world outside the jitney windows with the glazed eyes of people who would remember nothing of their surroundings until they slept for eight hours.
When Hannah would have spoken, Archer swiftly bent and kissed her. Then he murmured against her ear, “Look exhausted, sweetheart.”
She gave him a sideways look and settled her head against his sweaty shoulder to punish him. Exhausted women slept, didn’t they? A little thing like 99 percent humidity and a temperature to match wouldn’t stop a really tired woman from curling up against her man.
Archer stroked Hannah’s hair and caressed her cheek with his fingertips. He watched the passengers and the view outside without seeming to do either. The other couples talked in fragments, too tired to finish sentences. Neither he nor Hannah spoke until the jitney left them off in the heart of Broome.
“Now what?” she asked, turning away from the jitney’s ripe black exhaust.
“We kill some time.”
“Why?”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” Archer said.
“That will make it hard to meet him,” Hannah said dryly. “Or her.”
“I don’t know that, either.” He glanced at his watch. If April Joy was on the job, someone was cruising the airport lot right now, looking for a white rental car with a broken left taillight. “We won’t be meeting this person in the flesh, but our car will.”
Hannah blinked, tilted her head, and stared up into his gray-green eyes. “Want to run that by again?”
“It won’t make any more sense the second time.”
She sighed.
He smiled. The speckled sunlight and shade from her straw hat made her look like she had white-hot freckles sprinkled across her face.
Before she could ask another question, a trio of men dressed in the Outback uniform staggered toward them. Two of the men were drinking beer. The third was knee-walking drunk. They were staring at Hannah like she had a For Rent sign tied to her butt.
“Time to go sightseeing,” Archer muttered. The last thing he wanted was to call attention to himself by brawling with three randy drunks.
Broome’s Chinatown was a cluster of whitewashed corrugated roofs, red grates and trellises, and palm trees that had weathered any cyclones. The Asian cemetery, where so many pearl divers were buried, had the weary dignity and ageless power of a place where too many hopes had died.
Hand in hand, silent, Archer and Hannah walked slowly through the cemetery. The hot, wet breeze felt heavy with the secrets of men long dead. Under other circumstances, he would have walked quietly through the cemetery, reading the markers he could and appreciating the mystery of the ones he couldn’t. How people chose to meet the darkness that came at the end of the lightning stroke of life had always fascinated Archer, but even if he had been able to read Chinese, the messages engraved on headstones would have remained a mystery. The complex ideographs had been worn to shadows across the faces of the slowly, slowly dissolving stones. Canted every which way, poignant, elegant, the headstones gleamed redly above their rough, untended graves.
“Will Len be buried in Broome?” Archer asked quietly.
“No. He wanted his ashes scattered at sea.” Hannah closed her eyes and let the sultry air flow over her face. “He didn’t want any kind of ritual or ceremony. Said he wouldn’t need it.”
“But the living do need it.”
Something burned behind her eyes, something she refused to recognize as tears. She was finished with crying. It accomplished nothing. The past was beyond redemption and the dead were beyond tears.
“Tell me about him,” Archer said quietly. “Tell me about the good times.”
“It was . . . a long, long time ago.”
“Have you forgotten?”
Hannah’s silence grew and grew until Archer accepted that she wasn’t going to say anything about Len. Then she sighed, laced her fingers more tightly with his, and began talking about the man they had both loved before they understood that he could neither accept nor give love.
“Len was mad for lemonade.” She laughed oddly. “I don’t know why that pleased me, but it did. He would hover around like a big kid while I squeezed lemons, then he would drink so hard and deep he would have a sticky mustache and drops of lemonade on his chin. I’d watch his pleasure and dream of having a little girl or boy who would hug my knees and dance with impatience while I fixed lemonade.”
Archer thought of the pregnancy that had ended in sorrow and agony for Hannah. His throat ached with all that he couldn’t say, couldn’t do, couldn’t change.
“Len taught me to dance,” she continued after a few moments. “He had a penny whistle and an ancient Asian flute. When he was pleased with a project, he would play jigs on the whistle and we would dance until we were breathless, laughing . . . . He had a wonderful laugh, big and free.” Her breath squeezed. It had been years since she had heard Len laugh, really laugh. “When he played the Asian flute, I knew that he was almost sad.”
“Almost?”
“Melancholy, but not really depressed. More like . . . gently haunted. As though he was thinking about things that he had never seen or done and never would, but it was all right. He accepted it. And he played so beautifully, conjuring dreams with just breath, wood, and fingertips.”
“Yes,” Archer said, smiling and sad. “The first time I heard Len play, I thought of Lawe and Kyle. Lawe especially. Put a harmonica or a flute in his hands and he’ll make you laugh and weep and yearn for everything that doesn’t have a name.”
“That was Len.” Hannah made a soft, aching sound and looked around the cemetery that was both empty and full. After Len was paralyzed, he had never played again. He had never laughed again, not his real laugh. He had never touched her again.
But Archer had asked her to remember the good times, and that was right. Thinking about the bad times didn’t solve anything. Remember the good, accept the bad, and walk on, because there wasn’t another damn thing she could do except hate herself for not being what Len had needed.
“He could dance me into
the ground,” she said huskily, “wipe the sweat off his forehead, and start all over again, laughing out loud, loving just being alive. That’s when I loved him the most, when I could all but touch the life pouring through him. He was . . . incandescent.”
“I saw Len like that, but it wasn’t dancing. It was hell’s own bar brawl in Kowloon. Len and I fought back to back against a roomful of strangers. I fought because it was the only way to get out of the place in one piece. Len fought because he simply, fiercely, enjoyed the physical contest of man against man.”
Hannah nodded. “That was Len. He really loved a good fight. He’d come home grinning with a shiner the size of a pie plate and his arm around the bruiser who had given it to him.” She smiled slightly. “Are you sure Len didn’t start that bar riot?”
Archer smiled even as he realized that Len undoubtedly had done just that. “I’ll bet he did it as a way to test his newly discovered half brother.”
She looked at Archer curiously. Her eyes were a blue so dark it made him think of twilight sliding into night.
“I didn’t let him goad me into a fight with him, one on one,” he explained calmly. “He called me a coward. I just laughed at him and said I didn’t fight with family that way, no holds barred. I think the bar brawl was his way of finding out what I was made of.”
“Did he try to get you to fight him after that?”
“No.” Though Archer didn’t say any more, he was remembering the few times Len, without trying, had come real close to getting a brawl. All of those times had involved Hannah.
“Guess he figured out real quick that you weren’t a coward,” she said. Despite the sadness that clung to her memories like cold to ice, she smiled.
“Guess so.”
“You don’t hold it against him?”
Archer shook his head. “It would be like holding thunder against lightning. Len was what he was. Strong. Tough. Reckless.”
“You sound like you admired him.”
“Some of Len was worth admiring, worth remembering.” The rest wasn’t, but Hannah knew that even better than Archer did.
Pearl Cove Page 17
