Heron's Cove

by Carla Neggers

  * * *

  Emma entered Colin’s small Craftsman-style house through the back, using the key he had given her before his abrupt departure a month ago. He didn’t pop out of the shadows, and he wasn’t in his kitchen, drinking one of the bottles of Smithwick’s he had left in the stainless-steel refrigerator.

  The house was quiet and cold, masculine with its dark woods and neutral colors.

  His refuge, she thought, heading to the front room.

  He wasn’t there, either, sitting by the fireplace in the dark with a glass of Bracken’s finest.

  Not that she had expected him to be. Technically they worked on the same team. She would know if he were back in Maine.

  As she went up the stairs, she noticed a light, undisturbed film of dust on the wood rail, a tangible reminder of his absence.

  She made her way down a short hall to the back bedroom he had chosen for himself.

  No Colin Donovan there, either.

  Emma turned on a lamp on the nightstand. She remembered him sweeping her into his arms a few short weeks ago, as if she were a fairy princess. He’d carried her upstairs and laid her on the soft duvet atop his bed.

  They had fallen for each other so fast, so hard.

  Madness, really.

  And perfect.

  She stood at his oak dresser and ran her fingertips over the stack of books, sports watch and a few coins that Colin had left. She caught her reflection in the mirror and stared at herself, as if somehow it would help her see answers that so far had eluded her. She had moved to Boston in March to join a small, specialized team. Her area of expertise was art crimes and their intersection with other major crimes. In early June, she had discovered that Vladimir Bulgov, a wealthy Russian citizen and the kingpin of a transnational network of illegal arms traffickers, had a passion—a perfectly legal passion—for Picasso and would be in Los Angeles for an auction.

  At the time, Emma had suspected a deep-cover operative was chasing Bulgov but had no idea who it was. When she met Colin in Maine in September, she thought he was a lobsterman.

  Well, for a minute, anyway.

  She had learned that his friend and former contact agent was Matt Yankowski, the same senior agent who had encouraged her to join the FBI as a young novice and then handpicked her for his new Boston-based team.

  Colin had done the hard, dangerous, often solitary work to investigate and build the case against Vladimir Bulgov. The Los Angeles auction was a way to lure Bulgov onto U.S. soil and arrest him.

  Emma had no illusions that Matt Yankowski—Yank—had recruited her solely because of her expertise in art and art crimes. She was also a Sharpe. Her grandfather was Wendell Sharpe, a renowned art detective who had started Sharpe Fine Art Recovery out of his home in Heron’s Cove. He had six decades of experience working with the FBI, Interpol, Scotland Yard and countless other law enforcement agencies, as well as embassies, insurance companies and individuals—celebrities, princes, heiresses, CEOs, new money, old money. Fifteen years ago, he had opened an office in his native Dublin and had worked there ever since. Now in his early eighties, he was semi-retired and Emma’s older brother, Lucas, was running the family business.

  Yank had known from the moment he met her at the Sisters of the Joyful Heart convent and decided he wanted her in the FBI that as a Sharpe, she had her own sources, her own contacts.

  Emma noticed her cheeks were pink from the wind and cold. As Finian Bracken had wished her a simple good-night, continuing on his way to St. Patrick’s rectory, she had felt his deep concern for his friend. She understood. She was worried about Colin, too.

  She turned from the mirror and sat on the edge of the bed, tugged off her boots, her wool socks. She had come up to Rock Point several times during Colin’s absence but never stayed overnight at his house. She had always gone back to her apartment in Boston or the Sharpe house in Heron’s Cove.

  She flopped back onto the soft duvet and gazed up at the ceiling, knowing it wasn’t just the whiskey that was keeping her in Rock Point. It was being here, in Colin’s house. In his bed.

  “Colin, Colin. Where are you?”

  Her whisper sounded hollow, even bewildered. She sat up straight, shivered in the chilly room. The sheets would be cold. And no Colin there to help warm them.

  Her cell phone rang and she realized she still had on her raincoat and dug her phone out of the outer pocket.

  A private number.

  She answered without giving her name. “Hello, who is this?”

  “Hello, Emma Sharpe. It’s good to hear your voice.”

  Her breath caught in her throat at the Russian-accented voice of the man on the other end. He would never identify himself over the phone, and she would never ask, or guess, or say who she thought—knew—he was.

  “And yours,” she said.

  A half beat’s pause. “Your man is in danger.”

  Colin.

  Emma stood up from the bed, the floor cold on her bare feet. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave her an address in Fort Lauderdale, and disconnected before she could thank him or ask any questions.

  Another ghost, she thought, and dialed Matt Yankowski.

  2

  THE TWO RUSSIANS wanted to kill him now. Pete Horner, the American, wanted to wait. Then kill him if he didn’t produce the weapons they wanted. In their shoes, Colin Donovan would have sided with the Russians. Time to cut their losses. Too many risks doing business with a turncoat FBI agent.

  They were out by the pool behind the pale yellow stucco house that Horner had rented on a finger of the intricate web of canals that had given Fort Lauderdale its nickname as the Venice of America. It was a hot, humid night, even for South Florida in late October.

  A cabin cruiser was tied to a private dock in the dark, quiet Intracoastal water. Colin had the feeling the boat was in his immediate future. He was already sore from a few warning blows back at the marina where he had tried to persuade his new friends to let him be the one to take them to the weapons they wanted, but they weren’t doing this his way. They were doing it their way.

  Horner and the two Russians were armed. Colin wasn’t.

  “Watch this guy,” Yuri, the older of the two Russians, said. He had short, thinning gray hair and a scar under his left eye, his English excellent but heavily accented. “He’s like cat. He has nine lives. Maybe more. First he’s alive, then he’s dead. Now he’s alive again.”

  The younger Russian, Boris, who was especially eager to kill Colin now, stood at the edge of the pool, the water turquoise in the light from the house. Boris was good-looking, with wavy brown hair, pale brown eyes and no visible scars. Colin didn’t know their last names and doubted their first names were Yuri and Boris. The American, however, really was Pete Horner, a private pilot in his mid-forties who had flown one of Vladimir Bulgov’s arms-smuggling cargo planes.

  A good thing for Colin, Horner was the leader of the armed trio and still held out hope that their FBI agent could help them. “We give him this one chance to deliver,” Horner said. “If he does, he gets to live. That’s the deal.”

  That clearly wasn’t the deal but Colin wasn’t offended at being lied to by a sandy-haired, blue-eyed, amoral thug who wanted to procure illegal weapons and then sell them to anyone who would give him his price—drug cartels, warlords, guerrilla groups, terrorist cells, paramilitary organizations, mass murderers. Horner didn’t care provided he got paid, and he would get paid more selling weapons—picking up the pieces of Vladimir Bulgov’s network—than he ever had flying planes.

  The house behind them was an expensive furnished rental walled off from its upscale neighborhood of currently absent snowbirds. Horner lived above his means, and the lure of easy money was obviously too much for him to resist.

  “I’ll take you to the arms,” Colin said. “I stashed them myself.”

  “When?” Horner asked.

  “I told you. Two days after Bulgov’s arrest in June. My
buyer got cold feet and bolted. I had to disappear for a while and let the dust settle.”

  Yuri narrowed his gaze on Colin. “Does FBI think you are dead?”

  Colin shook his head. “I couldn’t fake my death with them. I’m an undercover agent. Turning up dead would have drawn too much attention to me. You boys might keep that in mind. The FBI thinks I’m on their side. If you kill me, they won’t rest until they catch you.”

  Boris smirked. “Or FBI thanks us for killing a traitor.”

  “The weapons he promises are a fiction,” Yuri said.

  “They’re not a fiction,” Horner said. “He bought them with FBI money for a fake buyer but he was running his own game. He had his own buyer waiting in the wings. A real buyer.”

  “I like how you talk about me as if I’m not standing here,” Colin said. “We’ve been through this. I put the weapons in a safe place and told the FBI that Bulgov had them. Then I let everyone in Bulgov’s world think I was dead and bided my time until I could find another buyer. That would be you three budding arms merchants.”

  The younger Russian looked disdainful. “He double-crossed the FBI.”

  Honor among thugs, Colin thought. “I don’t want a career doing this,” he said. “I want to unload my stash and disappear. I’ll take you to enough weapons to prove I’m legitimate. Then we do business. My price is a third of what your buyer is willing to pay. You’ll make a tidy profit. It’s a risk worth taking.”

  Horner gave him a cool look. “I didn’t say we had a buyer.”

  Colin didn’t argue but he knew they had a buyer.

  Yuri jumped into the aft deck of the boat. “I still say we kill him now. We can find other weapons.”

  “We don’t have time,” Horner said.

  Colin rubbed a bruise on his forearm where he had blocked Boris’s first hit. “Your buyer’s impatient.”

  “Everyone is impatient,” Boris said with a short, disgusted laugh.

  Horner shrugged. “You and Yuri have a point but your way, we know we get nothing. My way, we have a chance.”

  From the boat, Yuri pointed a thick finger at Colin. “And if our deep-cover agent here leads us straight to the FBI instead of to weapons? What chance do we have then?”

  Horner didn’t answer. He motioned with his gun for Colin to climb into the boat. “Let’s go.”

  As Colin got in the boat, pretending to be in more pain than he was, he noticed the light from the patio catch Horner’s face, and he knew. The Russians had finally persuaded him that the risk of walking into an FBI trap was too great. The promise of fast, easy weapons was a mirage. They would have to find another source.

  Kill the FBI agent now. Move on.

  Only Horner wouldn’t kill Colin here by his pool. He would get out to the ocean first, then kill him and throw his body overboard.

  Colin had expected that resurfacing as his undercover alter ego would be tricky, suspicious, but sometimes it just wasn’t any fun to be right.

  Faking a limp, he sat in a corner of the aft deck. Horner and his two Russian thugs had no respect for a turncoat FBI agent; even one they had hoped would lead them to an easy cache of orphaned illicit arms and their start as arms merchants. They knew Colin was an undercover federal agent because he had told them so, just before they shoved him into the back of Horner’s Mercedes and drove to Horner’s rented Fort Lauderdale house. Colin had offered them a reasonable explanation for what he had been up to the past few months and what he wanted now, and he had set conditions for his continued cooperation.

  He hadn’t bought himself as much time as he’d hoped but he wasn’t dead yet, either.

  Yuri and Boris went inside, up to the helm to pilot the boat.

  Colin breathed in the thick, stifling air. He didn’t like hot weather, but he was a former Maine lobsterman and Maine state marine patrol officer and knew his way around boats and the water.

  It was something his captors didn’t know about him.

  The boat cruised up the narrow canal toward the main Intracoastal Waterway. Horner was watching a party aboard a luxury yacht, lit up against the black night. Boris and Yuri were navigating the turn out of the canal into the main Intracoastal.

  Without a second thought, Colin eased himself over the side and dropped into the dark water.

  He didn’t make a sound.

  The water was warm, certainly by Maine standards, but he figured it had snakes. Maybe an alligator. It’d be a hell of a thing to escape armed thugs only to be bitten by a poisonous snake or eaten by an alligator.

  He liked Florida well enough but really wasn’t one for the subtropics.

  He swam back to the rented house and climbed up onto the dock, then ducked onto the patio, the pool still glistening in the light through the French doors. Once Horner and his Russian friends realized he was gone, they would come straight back and kill him on the spot. No waiting this time.

  Colin planned to be gone by then.

  Then he would find them, and he would find their buyer.

  “Scary bastards,” he said under his breath.

  The warm canal water dripped off him. His head pounded. His bruises ached. Dehydration blurred his vision.

  He wanted to be back on the rocky coast of Maine.

  Back with Emma.

  He noticed a movement by the far corner of the pool.

  He saw two black-clad figures by some tropical shrub.

  Not the bad guys. Not this time. Colin grinned, and he felt the tension ease out of him.

  The cavalry was here.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Matt Yankowski was frowning at a large painting of black, red and white splotches on a stark white wall of the rented house. He had on a medium gray suit that looked crisp despite the South Florida heat. Colin watched the senior FBI agent from his position on a soft, white leather couch. He had changed into fresh clothes from his pack, still in the back of Horner’s Mercedes. The tactical team had almost finished going through the car, the house, the three-car garage, the yard and patio.

  So far, they hadn’t found the name of Pete Horner’s buyer or a little note saying where he, Boris and Yuri would be if the FBI swarmed the house.

  Yank moved to another painting, almost identical to the first one. “I don’t like them,” he said. “Emma knows art. Do you think she’d like them?”

  Colin hid his impatience. “I don’t know, Yank. I’m not thinking about art right now.”

  “If I ever buy a house down here, I’d want flamingos on the walls. Not splotches. Looks like somebody got shot.” Yank turned and took in the large, airy room. “This place is sterile. More like a hotel than a home. How long were you here?”

  “Minutes. I was staying at a fleabag hotel a few blocks off the beach. Horner, Boris and Yuri met me at a marina where I had a boat rented. The plan was for me to take them to weapons. Instead they tossed me in the Mercedes at gunpoint and drove here. We parked, walked through the house out to the pool, got in the boat and left. I waited until they were distracted and went overboard. For all I know, they still don’t miss me.”

  “Unlikely.”

  Colin agreed. “Any sign of them?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How did you find me?” Then he saw Yank’s grimace and knew. “Emma.”

  “She got a tip and gave us this address. I alerted the team and flew straight down here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Heron’s Cove. She went up there to bake pies and drink whiskey with Father Bracken and your brothers.”

  “My family?”

  “She’ll get them word you’re safe.”

  “No more lying to them, Yank.”

  He nodded. “They’ve guessed what you do, anyway. I should have known telling them you worked in D.C. wouldn’t fly.”

  Colin looked out through the tall windows at the patio and the canal, quiet in the morning haze. He volunteered for his first undercover mission four years ago. Matt Yankowski had ventured up to the Maine coast
to talk to him about the mission and being his contact agent. As of a month ago, Colin was technically the newest member of Yank’s Boston-based team and Yank was his contact agent on this mission.

  “I had to go dark,” Colin said. “It still didn’t work. I don’t have Horner’s buyer. I don’t know who’s bankrolling him. He and Boris and Yuri are in the wind. This stinks, Yank.”

  “You got a toehold with them. It’s a start.” Yank sat on another white leather couch opposite Colin. “Are you sure you don’t need a hospital?”

  “I have three brothers. I can take a punch.”

  The senior agent’s dark eyes were steady, serious. He had been a legendary field agent, but he had never strayed too far from the book. He had never gone deep undercover to chase a transnational threat like Vladimir Bulgov and his complex arms pipeline.

  “You do like to go it alone,” Yank said heavily.

  “I didn’t have much choice this time.”

  “Well, you’re no good to us dead.”

  “That’s why I decided to jump off that boat, Yank. So I could be an FBI asset.”

  “You know what I meant.” Yank drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Your luck saved you this time.”

  “Not luck. Skill.”

  Yank didn’t crack a smile.

  Colin worked a tight muscle in his jaw. He thought he would be sleepy by now, but he wasn’t. He was wide-awake, thinking about how Yank had found him. “What Russians does Emma know?”

  “Between her and her family, I imagine she knows quite a few.”

  “Vladimir Bulgov’s Russian. Horner flew planes for him. His pals Boris and Yuri are Russian.”

  “Emma’s contacts are one of the reasons she’s on my team,” Yank said, his tone cool, measured.

  Colin leaned forward. “What else?”

  “Nothing else. She’s every bit the asset I thought she’d be when I recruited her. That hasn’t changed in the past month.”

  Colin watched a small boat cruise past the house on the picturesque waterway. “Any reason to think whoever tipped off Emma knows my real name?”