by Matt Rees
“Special Agent Verrazzano, I congratulate you.” Wyatt’s face, brown from the sun off the sea, showed calculation like the fast darkness of a shoal of fish racing under the surface. “You’re my next generation, son.”
Verrazzano had wondered if Wyatt would still exert his old power over him. But now he spoke with absolute certainty. “It’s over, Wyatt.”
“What’re you going to do? Kill me?”
“First things first.” Verrazzano pulled Feng’s head back and put two bullets through the tattoos on his scalp. The slugs ripped into the computer code and smashed Feng’s brain.
“Goddamn it, son.” Wyatt punched Verrazzano hard. He aimed for his jaw. Verrazzano dodged enough to take it on his cheek. The bone exploded at the contact from Wyatt’s heavy fist. Verrazzano knew it would only be a fracture and it wouldn’t render him unconscious as a jaw shot would have done. He tumbled onto the bench along the side of the cabin. Jahn came to him, training her weapon on the colonel.
Wyatt scrabbled his fingers over Feng’s wrecked scalp. The dead man flopped across the chair. Wyatt pulled at the scraps of flesh, trying to piece together the code. He hammered his hand down on the dead man’s shoulders in frustration. “Son, you have messed it all up again.”
Jahn grabbed for the detonator. Wyatt closed his fist and backhanded her. She went down in front of the forward door.
A series of fast steps came from the direction of the prow, and the Krokodil entered. The door struck Jahn’s head as he opened it. She rolled away groaning. The Krokodil held a Belgian submachine gun and pointed it at Verrazzano. The P90 had its action and magazine behind the trigger where the stock would usually be. That made it no wider than a man’s body and easy to maneuver in the cramped space of the cabin. Over his shoulder, the Swedish woman gasped and covered her eyes at the sight of the dead man. Then she took her hands away and Verrazzano noticed something turn in her face. He had seen it before, innocents robbed of everything they thought was true and left with an explosive hatred. Sometimes it stayed with them forever. Others could resolve it with one desperate act.
Wyatt waved for the Krokodil to hold back. He slapped the chubby cheek of the Chinese man, angrily. “Goddamn it. I was going to turn this bastard and make him work for us.”
“You mean, work for you,” Verrazzano said.
“You’re smarter than that, son. Jesus H. Christ, stop listening to Tom Frisch and trust yourself.” He came close and rested his hand, bloody from the man’s smashed skull, on Verrazzano’s shoulder. “Everything you ever did for me was done on the orders of Washington. Everything I did was for Washington. Including this here operation.”
Something in Wyatt’s anger rang true. Verrazzano pictured the traces of the colonel’s operation, mapping them toward Washington instead of Beijing. “You’re not working for the Chinese?”
“Sure, I was. Double-crossing them. The Chinese called it all off, boy. My man back in DC wants this crash thing to go down anyhow. He wants the White House to finally accept that diplomacy won’t work with China. China needs to be dealt with by force.”
“Who’s your man?”
Wyatt grinned. “You think I’m scary, son? My guy is the devil himself. I’m not going to give you his name. I care enough about you to want you to never even think of going after him.”
The Krokodil’s boots shuffled on the varnished floorboards. The Swedish woman brought herself very close behind him. “Shane, we have to go now. This isn’t right. You have to get away. Come with me.” He shrugged her off.
“Who is it?” Verrazzano said to Wyatt. “Who’s behind this?”
“It’s a black op, for Christ’s sake,” Wyatt said. “There is no proof. It’s completely deniable.”
The Swedish woman spoke, her voice louder than it needed to be, pushing her words out despite her nerves. “You must help Shane, Colonel Wyatt.”
Jahn crawled toward the door that led to the prow. Groggy from the blow to her head, she muttered, “The detonator. Dom, the detonator.”
“Who ordered the operation?” Verrazzano said. “I want a name.”
“You must get him help for his addiction,” Maj said. “This was your promise. You must pay for his treatment. Or he will die.”
“Your boy has a job to do, sweetheart.” Wyatt turned briefly to Maj. “When that’s done, he’ll be taken care of.”
The Swedish woman shook her head. “Shane, he’s going to make you keep doing these things until you’re dead.”
“Maj, leave it alone.” The Krokodil’s voice was hesitant. He moved the barrel of the P90 away from Verrazzano toward Wyatt. The ICE agent prepared to jump him.
Maj touched her lover’s raddled face. “I’ll take you away from him and cure you.”
Wyatt chuckled. “There’s no cure for what he’s got, honey. I don’t mean the drugs and the gnarly skin. Your sweet little boy there is a killer, and it’s all he’s ever going to be good at. Take that away from him, and he’d be nothing but scabs and scars, inside and out.”
Verrazzano leapt at the Krokodil. He snapped the submachine gun out of his grasp and head-butted him on the bridge of the nose. He twisted as they landed on the floor of the cabin and held the Krokodil in a half nelson. Maj screamed and pounded his shoulders. Verrazzano took out his handcuffs, hooked the chain behind the leg of the heavy bench, and snapped the cuffs on the Krokodil’s wrists.
Jahn got to her knees and caught Maj around the neck, dragging her away.
“Help him.” Maj raised her hands toward Wyatt, pleading. “How can you let this man do this to him? You were like a father to Shane.” She delivered a sharp backward head-butt that caught Jahn on the nose and sent her back to the floor.
The Krokodil glared at Wyatt, lips tight, wrists jerking against the handcuffs. Verrazzano went toward the colonel. “I’m taking you with me too.”
Wyatt laughed softly. Then he frowned. Verrazzano followed his glance.
Maj held a Beretta subcompact. Her eyes were teary, but her arm was steady, and the gun was aimed at Wyatt. Verrazzano cursed. The pistol must have been in the Krokodil’s vest.
Verrazzano stepped toward the Swedish woman. In the instant that Maj’s finger strained against the pressure of the trigger, Wyatt threw Verrazzano to the floor, out of the line of fire. Verrazzano went down. Two bullets struck Wyatt in the chest. He collapsed against the expensive paneling of the cabin.
Verrazzano grabbed the gun from Maj. Jahn scrambled across the floor. She peeled back Wyatt’s fingers and lifted the detonator away. Blood gushed onto Wyatt’s shirt and ran with the camber of the deck toward starboard. He made a tiny motion of his head, signaling Verrazzano to come close. “I did that for you,” he whispered. “Now get me revenge. I told the truth. About the dark op.”
“Then who is it? Who’s behind this?” Verrazzano knelt at his side.
“That one knows.”
Verrazzano followed Wyatt’s glance. The Krokodil stared at his dying master. Profound loss crossed the man’s face. Then it receded, as if the scabs and infection smothered it. Maj wrapped her arms around his shoulders and kissed his brow.
Wyatt’s face froze, and the blood stopped pumping out of his smashed carotid. “Dinner at Odin’s table, old man,” Verrazzano whispered. He took the detonator from Jahn. With a flick of his finger, he deactivated it. “Go find your husband.” She went through the bulkhead toward the prow.
Verrazzano took the Swedish woman by the arm. He pulled her to the stern. Maj struggled against Verrazzano’s grip. “I won’t leave him. Shane is good. I can save him.”
“I’m the only one who can do that.”
The Krokodil closed his eyes briefly, a signal to Maj that he accepted his fate.
At the swim deck, Verrazzano put Maj in the dinghy. He heard a big launch coming after them from the marina. The Spanish police had finally mastered their panic, or Kinsella and Todd had commandeered a boat. The engine was less than one hundred yards away, but the dinghy was shielded from view
by the yacht. Verrazzano yanked the cord on the outboard and set Maj’s hands on the wheel. She sobbed and wavered. But the wheel gave her something to hold onto. He untied the line. She swung the dinghy away from the yacht and headed into the half-light toward Punta de Sant Carles.
The voice of Comisario Cruz came over the loud-hailer from the police launch. “People on the boat, come out and show yourselves.”
Verrazzano went back below decks. Through an open cabin door, he saw Jahn embracing a man who was weeping hard. Back in the owner’s quarters, he unlatched the handcuffs and guided the Krokodil up to the bridge and around to the bow rail.
“If Maj hadn’t killed him, I’d have done it,” the Krokodil said. “He went too far.”
Verrazzano waved to the police launch. At the bow, Kinsella’s shoulders dropped in relief when she spotted him. The launch came around. Todd went up and down the deck to be sure the panicked Spanish cops didn’t open fire.
“I’m going to jail for a year,” the Krokodil said. “Then I’m going to die.”
Verrazzano glanced toward the point where the Swedish woman’s dinghy had disappeared. He read the last traces of her wake, white against the morning sun on the water. He had thought he was tracking Wyatt, to confront him about the car crash conspiracy, to do what a law enforcement officer did, to put a stop to something and tie it up. Instead he discovered that the filth was really everywhere, deeper and more complex and unforgiving than he had ever imagined. That was Wyatt’s message to him in the end. It had all been a long training for this moment. A Washington power broker wanted war with China, and he would surely find another way of getting what he wanted now that Wyatt was gone. Verrazzano sensed in himself something tougher and darker than he had known before, something tenacious and unforgiving enough to stop the man who wanted war. The Krokodil shuddered because he saw it too, on Verrazzano’s face—saw how far he would go.
Jahn emerged from the wheelhouse. At her side, a thin man with pale skin and a long beard came squinting into the sunlight, his face still wet with tears. Her husband held her hand in both of his. She smiled at Verrazzano, and there was a question too on her face. He shook his head. She was clear.
The police launch bumped against the gunwales of the yacht. The Krokodil stumbled with the impact. Verrazzano caught his upper arm to steady him. He pulled him close. “You’re not going to jail to die, and you’re not going to die of your addiction. You’re going to lead me to the Washington guy who set up Wyatt’s dark op.”
“How in hell would I know who that is? You think Wyatt told me?”
Verrazzano opened his mouth to speak. Then he halted. He ran it through his memory again, the moment when Wyatt had demanded revenge for the betrayal of his black op and glared across the cabin at the Krokodil and said, “That one knows.” Special Ops had trained him to challenge every step in his logic, to identify the lazy thinking that could cost his life. He traced the angle of Wyatt’s eyes. Something wasn’t right. Then he caught it. The old man had been looking just to the side of the Krokodil. At the Swedish woman.
Verrazzano shaded his eyes to stare at the boathouses on the Punta de Sant Carles. Maj’s dinghy drifted empty by the quay.
The Spanish comisario wailed over the loud-hailer, begging for information so loudly that Maj could probably hear him as she disappeared into the city. Kinsella and Todd leapt onto the yacht. The bell in the cathedral tolled for early Mass. Traffic noise drifted over the waves.
“Dom,” Kinsella called out, “what the hell happened here?”
Verrazzano went to the rail. The water was just catching the southern light that turned it from nighttime gray to azure. The dinghy was a quarter mile distant. He kicked off his boots, tied the laces together, and strung them over his shoulders.
He plunged into the sea. Under the surface, the space around him was as silent and cool as his soul. He came back up. On the deck of the yacht, Jahn watched him with her husband at her side. The Krokodil gave Verrazzano a small nod of understanding.
Verrazzano struck out for the shore.
