Concrete Evidence

by Rachel Grant

  If she’d taken the job at Starbucks and never met Lee, JT, Joe, or Sam, the artifacts would have been there. And Starbucks would have given her better health insurance.

  Every action she’d taken, every choice she’d made, had been a mistake.

  Probably including this one.

  She tucked her car up against a run-down fishing shack located a half mile up the road from the Menanichoch marina. It was two thirty in the morning. She needed to search the Andvari to find what Jake had pulled from the Atlantic near Norfolk. She opened the hatchback and pulled out her dive gear; she would approach the boat from the water.

  Her stomach knotted. Would Marco be on the boat?

  After donning her dive gear, she entered the Chesapeake, her breath catching as she sank into the dark, cold water. On a clear day at noon, she’d only be able to see five feet in front of her, but now her flashlight illuminated only two feet. The full moon would be up for hours, so she surfaced several times to check the shoreline until she reached the marina entrance. There she spotted Jake’s boat tied to the end of the longest dock and took a compass reading. Until she reached the boat, she would stay underwater, using her flashlight and compass to navigate.

  She surfaced in the shadows of the Andvari’s dive platform. Holding the ladder rail, she listened for several minutes to determine if anyone was aboard. Sick with fear, she placed her foot on the first rung. Her wet, gloved hands slipped, and she gripped the bar tighter. Her whole body shook as she boarded the vessel. Ironically, it was just one week shy of a year since she’d escaped this boat by jumping from this very platform.

  She pulled her mask down around her neck and left the heavy air tank and fins on the platform. She would confirm Jake had Iraqi artifacts, get the hell off the boat, then call the FBI.

  She entered the below deck area through a rear hatch and listened for movement, hearing only water lapping against the hull, and her pounding heart, which beat so loud she feared the sound would give her away.

  She paused outside Jake’s cabin. Any valuables on the boat would be inside this room. With her ear to the door, she listened for several seconds, then took a deep breath and turned the knob. She used her flashlight to scan the room. Shock and surprise rippled through her. Dozens of bright blue waterproof dive bags filled the cabin.

  She reached for the closest bag and opened it. Holy shit.

  Inside were neatly stacked bundles of crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bills. She hesitated, then decided her dive gloves made it safe for her to touch the money. She lifted a bundle and fanned the bills. The money looked real, the numbers sequential. How much money was here?

  One hundred bills in a bundle meant each bundle was worth ten thousand dollars. Ten bundles would equal a hundred thousand. The money was arranged in four rows by five rows: twenty bundles visible on the top layer. She was looking at two hundred thousand dollars per layer.

  She ran her hand down the side of the bag, trying to estimate how many layers of bundles were stacked. Her hands shook, and she lost count. Better just guess. Each bundle was a little more than an inch thick; the contents of the bag were stacked about two feet high. Twenty layers? Two hundred thousand times twenty—

  She dropped her flashlight, then held her breath, wondering if anyone was around to hear the soft thunk that echoed in her ears.

  She looked at the other bags in the room and tried to count them, but she couldn’t focus, adrenaline surged through her. The one bag she’d opened contained approximately four million dollars. And at least twenty bags were stacked on Jake’s bed and floor.

  She wasn’t looking at the proceeds from artifact smuggling. This was so much bigger, so much worse than that. Jake was now smuggling cold, hard cash.

  Where had the money come from?

  All she knew was she had to get off this boat. Now.

  She was back on deck, closing the hatch when she heard a voice from the dock. “They’ll be here soon,” Jake said. She wondered who he was talking to.

  She couldn’t get to the dive platform without crossing open space. She waited. Jake entered the hull from the sliding door on the side, but his companion remained outside.

  She ducked behind a storage bench on the port side, hoping she’d have a chance to make a run for the dive platform.

  Seconds later, she heard a yell, and Jake raced onto the deck. “Someone’s been here. There’s water in the hall and in my cabin.”

  “Feds?”

  “Feds wouldn’t drip everywhere. My money’s on Erica. She was asking about the boat tonight.”

  “You should have killed her. But you were too fucking horny for the bitch.” Erica recognized Marco’s voice. Oh God. She should never have come here.

  “We couldn’t kill her, and you know it. If she turned up missing, we’d have been asked too many questions by the wrong people.”

  Marco called out from the stern, “She’s still here. Stupid bitch left her dive gear.”

  She heard a splash over the sound of her frantic pulse.

  “She won’t be able to get away without her tank,” Marco said. “We’re in deep shit. She probably called the cops. Get in the Zodiac.”

  The boat rocked—Marco jumping into the smaller vessel? Please let them leave.

  “Get the stern line,” Jake said.

  Suddenly, light washed over the deck. Spotlights, coming from the dock.

  “Fuck!” Marco yelled.

  “Jake Novak, this is the FBI—” The rest was drowned out by the sound of an outboard motor revving. The small Zodiac sped out into the Chesapeake.

  Erica heard cursing from the dock. The spotlight shifted from the Andvari and found the fleeing boat.

  Shit. What should she do? Stay and answer questions? She had a history with Jake, a reputation for stealing artifacts, worked for Talon & Drake, and someone who worked for the company was involved with smuggling.

  By stepping on board the Andvari tonight, she’d cast herself as scapegoat.

  Footsteps sounded on the dock. She had one chance to get away. She hoped the FBI agents were too focused on the fleeing boat to notice her. She ran for the dive platform, took a deep breath, and dove straight down.

  She kicked downward and pulled on her mask, using precious air to clear it. She estimated she’d descended about twenty feet and hoped the light from her flashlight wouldn’t be visible at the surface. When she reached the murky bottom, she read her depth gauge: thirty-five feet. In a drop that deep, the current could have shifted her scuba tank several feet in any direction. She could see only two feet in front of her.

  She felt the sea floor frantically. Her lungs ached. She wasn’t wearing a weight belt and had to kick in a frenetic rhythm to keep from rising, fighting both buoyancy and her desperate need for air.

  She couldn’t panic.

  She’d spent hundreds of hours underwater and was trained to search methodically. She tried not to think of what was happening on the boat above her and swam in a circle, widening the radius with each pass.

  The burning in her lungs became unbearable.

  LEE HAD BEEN AT HIS POST on a neighboring boat for half an hour when he saw a dark form climb onto the dive platform of the Andvari. Even in a wet suit, her body was recognizable. He probably knew her shape better than his own and felt a jolt of disbelief and pain slice all the way to his core.

  Erica is still working for Novak.

  No. He didn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it.

  The agent with him quietly radioed the other agents stationed on vessels throughout the marina. Lee and the agent were probably the only ones who’d seen her, as the other agents faced the boat from different angles.

  “You know the woman? Does she work for Talon & Drake?” the agent asked Lee.

  He didn’t hesitate. “I can’t be sure; the mask and hood hid too much.”

  Erica’s water entry onto the scene caused a flurry of conversation as the agents decided what to do. They agreed to wait. The woman was the first conspirator
to arrive.

  At nearly three in the morning, Erica appeared on deck just as Novak arrived with someone else. A minute later, the unidentified man dropped her tank into the water.

  The radio crackled. “A suspect is untying the Zodiac at the end of the dock.”

  The agent in charge came over the radio. “Shit. They’re gonna flee. Move in!”

  “You stay here,” the agent said to Lee and left.

  Alone, he watched the scene play out. She dove into the water while the Feds raced to the end of the dock, intent on the fleeing boat. He needed to tell the agents. Instead, he held his breath, wondering what she’d do without her scuba tank.

  He watched, reminding himself she was a diver and an archaeologist. If anyone could find a tank in the murky Chesapeake, it was Erica.

  The agents argued over whether there were two or three people on the fleeing Zodiac. Another boat left in pursuit.

  He found it impossible to hold air in his lungs any longer and took a great gasping breath.

  Time to tell the FBI the scuba diver had gotten away.

  He hoped he’d given her enough time to escape.

  ERICA HAD TO SURFACE. She needed air.

  She planted a foot on the bottom to push off for a fast ascent. Pain shot up her leg.

  Her ankle had hit something. Something metal.

  Her scuba tank. A frantic second later, she had the regulator in her mouth and took a slow, deep breath. She fumbled with the straps as she forced herself to take even breaths.

  She checked her compass, found her bearings, and hoped she had enough oxygen to swim back to her car.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ERICA WAS SOUND ASLEEP on a pile of blankets and towels when there was a loud banging on her apartment door. She glanced at the clock: six a.m. She’d slept for an hour. She didn’t have to fake bleary-eyed confusion when she opened the door for the two FBI agents.

  They questioned her for hours, asking about Novak, the Andvari, and her whereabouts at three a.m. She claimed to have been sleeping from one on but was truthful about everything else. She gave them the camera disk and the prints that proved the Aztec artifacts had come from the shipwreck, and as she’d expected, they told her the photos alone proved nothing. They had no artifacts to compare them to. She told them about the DNA test she’d sent off and her hopes that the envelope contained Sam Riversong’s DNA. The agents, one male, one female, rolled their eyes and told her the envelope was useless without proof of where it came from.

  They asked to see her scuba equipment. When she’d arrived home, she’d rinsed her wet suit and dried it in the dryer. She would have dumped the suit in the garbage on the way home, but the cleaning crew might have seen the suit, so she had to produce the items for the FBI. She showed them her tank and pointed out a hole in the regulator hose, damage she claimed came from Jake when he’d trashed her apartment. She didn’t think they believed her, but she wasn’t arrested, which was an improvement over the last time she’d fled Jake’s boat in the middle of the night.

  Finally, they left. She locked the door and leaned against it. Then she began to shake. She staggered to her bedroom, lay down on the pile of blankets, and rolled into a fetal position.

  She wanted to be held.

  Hell. She wanted Lee to hold her. He’d said he loved her. Had his words been just another manipulation? She wanted one person to care about what happened to her.

  Somewhere along the line, she’d fallen desperately, hopelessly in love with him and realized she could forgive him for everything if he stood by her now. She picked up her cell phone and started to dial his number, then stopped.

  He was the senator’s stepson, and she was embroiled in a scandal. If he loved her, if he truly cared, he’d contact her. But if he didn’t, he’d avoid her at all costs.

  She snapped the phone closed and set it down as the tremors became convulsive spasms. Hugging a tattered blanket to her chest, she tried to stop the quaking, all while wishing, praying, hoping her phone would ring. The endless shaking loosened the block of ice she’d clung to since her mother betrayed her, and pent-up tears from that disaster began to fall like snowmelt, forming first a stream, then a river. She cried until she was empty, then drifted into an exhausted slumber.

  She woke up in the early evening and forced herself to eat a few bites of dry cereal, but the meager meal threatened to come back up. She paced her empty living room, fighting nausea.

  She had no TV, no radio, no idea of what was going on in the world. She didn’t know if Novak had been caught or even if the press had learned of the raid at the marina.

  All day she’d clung to memories of whispered words and intimate kisses, touches that made her feel beautiful…worshiped…loved. The sun had risen and set without a phone call, confirming those declarations of love had been made by a man whose every word was a lie.

  She doubled over, broken with pain.

  Her deepest darkest shame slipped through the cracks in her heart: there was something so terribly wrong with her, even her own mother had hated her. Lee hadn’t called because she was nothing more to him than a means to an end.

  LEE STOPPED PACING AND STARED at the television, which had been tuned to the news all day to catch updates on the investigation at the Menanichoch marina. “I’m going to call her.”

  JT grabbed Lee’s cell phone from the coffee table. “You know you can’t. Face facts, Lee, she’s been in on it from the start.”

  In spite of the evidence he’d seen with his own eyes the night before, he couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe Erica was guilty. “No.” He held out his hand. “Don’t make me beat the crap out of you, JT. I’d like to beat on someone right now, and you’ll do.”

  JT swore and handed him the phone.

  The words “Breaking News” flashed across the screen, and an anchorman oozing gravitas faced the camera. “We’ve received confirmation from an unnamed source that the FBI recovered over one hundred million dollars from the boat that was raided at the Menanichoch Tribal Marina last night. For those of you just joining us, we will again explain the connection between the boat, owned by treasure hunter Jake Novak, and Maryland Senator Joseph Talon, who announced last night his candidacy for president at a gala event that took place only a half a mile away from the marina where the money was found…”

  The anchor went on to trace the connections Jake had to Talon & Drake, starting with the recent project proposal and ending with Erica, his former employee, who was rumored to be an artifact thief. They showed the same footage they’d aired all day long: Erica emerging with Lee’s help from the limousine after JT and Alexandra; pictures of Erica and him on the red carpet—she glowed with radiance while he looked down at her with proprietary lust; both of them standing near the senator as he made his speech.

  The fact Lee was nuts about her was plain on his face in every single frame, and the press made much of the senator’s stepson’s involvement with a “person of interest” in the smuggling.

  “It appears,” the anchor said, “based on the serial numbers of the bills recovered from Mr. Novak’s boat, the money is a portion of the twelve billion dollars of American money shipped to Iraq in 2004 and then lost in the war zone. We have confirmation the FBI is investigating Talon & Drake employees working in Iraq, who may have found a large portion of the missing money and then smuggled the bills back to the states. An FBI spokesperson has released a statement saying: ‘We have yet to determine how this money got into Mr. Novak’s possession, but we have a theory, which we are investigating.’”

  Lee knew exactly how those bags of money ended up on Novak’s boat. They had been tossed with the last regular garbage dump from the aircraft carrier on Thursday afternoon. The dump had occurred within fifty miles of shore, which was closer than naval regulations allowed, and Lee suspected the seamen doing the drop had been paid-off. The seamen would have used a GPS device to record the location of each bag as it was dropped, then, after the carrier was in port and the men released f
rom the vessel, one would have given the coordinates to someone at Talon & Drake—Lee suspected Ed Drake—who then transmitted the information to Jake in a series of text messages.

  Lee wouldn’t be surprised to learn each bag contained a sonar beacon, making it even easier for Novak’s divers to find the money. On Friday afternoon, Novak and his crew took the Andvari out on what was probably the easiest, most fruitful treasure hunting trip ever recorded. One hundred million dollars for a day’s work. The number floored Lee. It made the artifacts they thought Novak had been smuggling seem paltry in comparison.

  Jake Novak’s picture filled the TV screen. “Mr. Novak and two unknown accomplices are still at large.”

  Every time he thought about the fact Novak had escaped, he wanted to break something. After a thirty-minute chase, the Zodiac had been recovered, empty of passengers. Novak and his accomplice had jumped from the boat and presumably swam to shore.

  “I hope the bastard was eaten by sharks,” Lee spat.

  “And I hope he’s alive and kicking,” JT said. “He needs to be caught and take the blame, or Talon & Drake will suffer. I never thought I’d see the day when Talon & Drake would make Halliburton look good.”

  One hundred million dollars. He remembered the news stories about the money, embarrassing at a time when Iraq teetered on the edge of civil war. Twelve billion US dollars, imported to Iraq by the American government, had been lost in that country and had probably funded the insurgency that killed so many American troops and Iraqi civilians.

  Twelve billion dollars which could have been put to good use at home or abroad, but now it had come back to the U.S. as contraband, ready to line the pockets of greedy men like Jake Novak and power-hungry men like Edward Drake. But the worst was the possibility the money had been destined for laundering through the Menanichoch casino by Sam Riversong. Had Sam intended to use the money for Joe’s campaign?