by Sharp, Zoe
“Hey, I was told to be thorough,” said the man named Sullivan, his voice leaning towards whiny. “He should make up his goddamn mind.”
“You want to tell him that yourself?” asked the second man.
There was a short pause while Sullivan tried to work out exactly how sorely tempted he might be, considering the undoubted payback. Then he turned, shoving his way out without a word.
The second man made a harrumph of sound as he started to close the cabin door. Then he stopped, as if he too had sensed me watching in the shadows.
Hell, he only had to look down to notice a disconnected pair of legs behind the hanging clothing.
But he didn’t notice. A moment later he’d yanked the cabin door shut behind him and I was left listening to the thump of their combined bootsteps fading along the deck outside.
I slumped back against the bulkhead, the adrenaline hangover hitting hard and fast. It scared me how close I’d come to killing him. How disappointed I was to be denied.
No! That isn’t true.
I told myself I was disappointed only to be robbed of the chance to interrogate one of the other side and extract vital intel from him—numbers, aims, and their line of retreat once they’d done whatever it was they’d hijacked the Miss Francis to achieve.
Right now, I was back to guessing.
I straightened gradually, no sudden moves or I was likely to keel over. And that, I was sure, would bring Sullivan and his mate running.
Instead, I waited until my system had climbed down from screaming high alert to just your everyday normal hijacked-riverboat kind of levels.
I pushed through the unknown crew member’s clothing and reached for the door handle myself. I confess that I opened it with extreme caution, skylining my head as little as possible past the aperture.
But of Sullivan and his cheery friend, I saw no sign.
Thirty-seven
I don’t know what Sean told Blake Dyer about leaving before the impending threat. I could only guess he must have phrased it as an order rather than a request. By the time I arrived on the casino deck, identified my principal and hurried across, they were involved in a quiet but vehement argument.
Now, I considered, was not the bloody time for either man to get stubborn.
It didn’t help that he was only a few metres from Tom O’Day himself, who watched the exchange with undisguised curiosity, even if they were keeping their voices down. The body language spoke volumes.
“Sir,” I cut in as soon as I reached them. “We need to leave. Right now.”
“So Sean here has been informing me,” Dyer said with a certain coldness. He indicated the crowded room with a flick of his hand. “And what about everybody else?”
“They have their own protection,” I dismissed. I stepped in close. “Sir, if you don’t walk with us, right now, then if I have to I will punch your lights out and carry you out of here.”
His head reared back in shock, checking between our grim faces as if—after all that had happened so far—he still thought we might possibly be joking. I saw him waver as he realised there was a distinct chance we were not.
Then Sean made a guttural noise of impatience in the back of his throat and took hold of Blake Dyer’s arm.
Mistake.
Dyer twisted out from under his grasp, face closing down. He turned towards Tom O’Day, who was now staring with frank fascination at the unfolding scene.
“Tom,” he said, loudly enough to be awkward, “they’re telling me your guys have apparently lost control of this old tub to some kind of river pirates—is that so?”
Shit!
My turn to grab Dyer. I did so with both hands—one at the back of his wrist and the other pinching in hard to pressure points just behind his elbow. He went rigid but allowed me to turn him. Unless he wanted it to really hurt, he didn’t have much of a choice.
Tom O’Day moved forwards as if to intervene. Or maybe he couldn’t quite believe the question Blake Dyer had just asked. “Now, wait just one moment—”
I ignored him and began to hustle our principal towards the nearest exit. “We don’t have time for this.”
Tom O’Day came after us. Of his own bodyguard, Hobson, there was no sign—and that worried me. It worried me a lot.
I glanced around, took a mental snapshot of the casino as it stood at that second. I’d been half expecting Morton to be among the missing, too, but there he was near one of the blackjack tables, staring over at the commotion we were causing. There was something akin to amusement on his features.
Jimmy O’Day, on the other hand, was goggling at us in horror. I made a mental note to ask him some tough questions about the reason for it—when all this was over. It was as if he knew something bad was about to happen, if it wasn’t doing so already. The look he threw Morton contained total panic. He received no obvious reassurance by way of response.
Even Gabe Baptiste showed the beginnings of concern, but after a supposed mugging and a missile attack on the helicopter he was riding in, I guessed he had every right to a little paranoia. Interestingly, though, the person he edged nearer to was not his replacement bodyguard, but Ysabeau van Zant. As though she had got him into this mess and he was relying on her to get him out of it.
Sean and I almost had Blake Dyer as far as the service entrance when the double doors leading out of the casino were rammed open so hard they bounced back from the frame on both sides.
Armed men poured in through the gap, a mix of MP5Ks and M16s pulled up hard into their shoulders. I swung Dyer round behind me, almost onto my back, to keep my body in front of him. I half expected Sean to step up, step in, but realised in shock that he’d let go of the pair of us and was already moving away.
I could only watch as he shifted sideways. I took a look at his face and knew he was not in escape-and-evade mode—he was on the attack.
For a second my mind faltered as the prospect of Sean killing himself at the hands of our attackers burst into it, overwhelming any logical thought processes taking place there.
But as I watched—still shuffling backwards towards our exit and dragging Blake Dyer with me—I saw Sean casually reach out and pluck a couple of the heavy champagne bottles from the table where they’d been stacked up.
He threw the first of them overhand towards the nearest attacker. The bottle flashed outwards, tumbling in flight like a circus performer’s flying dagger, catching one black-dressed figure full in the face and dropping him like a stringless marionette.
Sean wielded the second like a club, smashing it down into another man just at the juncture between his neck and the front of his shoulder. There was too much noise to hear the crack, but I saw his arm suddenly droop, letting the stubby machine pistol dangle from its strap, and knew Sean’s blow had smashed his collarbone.
“Get Dyer out of here,” he yelled at me over his shoulder, then waded in with another bottle.
I didn’t hesitate—couldn’t allow myself to hesitate. I piled Blake Dyer back towards the doorway. We almost knocked Tom O’Day flying in the process. He stumbled. Dyer grabbed him and, as the casino deck erupted into panic and confusion, the three of us half crashed, half staggered out of the door into the stairwell beyond.
The last thing I saw before the doors punched shut behind us was Sean going down amid a flurry of black-clad figures with fists and boots swinging wildly.
Thirty-eight
I took them back to the crewman’s cabin on the upper deck where I’d so nearly had my run-in with the man called Sullivan.
The logic of that decision was simple. They’d already searched the cabin and found it empty. There were plenty of nooks and crannies aboard the Miss Francis left still unexamined. Why would our attackers go back over ground they’d already covered until there was nowhere else left to look?
The two of them followed my lead in compliant silence—for once. Blake Dyer must have been only too aware that his own stupid stubbornness had just cost Sean dearly. If he’d done as he w
as bloody well told at first time of asking, he and Sean would have slipped quietly away before the trouble even started. Now, they knew to look for us.
As for Tom O’Day, I suspected he might well be in shock. His face was bagged with disbelief, eyes dazed in denial. But more than that I sensed a bitter, overwhelming disillusionment. I thought back to his speech earlier. This was something he’d fought for with a passion, more than just a project or a hobby. This had been a crusade. And now his dream lay in tatters around him.
It was hard not to feel sorry for the man.
When we reached the tiny cabin I shoved them inside and took a moment with the door ajar, listening for signs of pursuit. None came. I closed the bolt as quietly as I could and twisted the Venetian blinds so they were almost closed, slanting upwards so I could see the legs of anyone passing but they could not easily see in.
All the time I was aware of the sweat sticking my shirt to my back but also of a terrible anger fizzing coldly at the base of my brain. I had come so close to losing Sean at the beginning of the year, in more ways than one. We’d had a breakdown in communication that had nearly damaged our relationship beyond repair. And just when I thought things were all over for us, that we’d never come back from that precipice, Sean had been shot. The whole edge of my world had collapsed underneath me. I’d been falling ever since.
I pushed it aside, locked it away, keening, into a dark recess of my mind. If Sean had sacrificed his life for our principal, at least he’d done it willingly this time—knowingly . . .
“Charlie, I am so sorry,” Blake Dyer said at last, his voice shaky. “You have to believe me—I had no idea there was any real danger—”
“You were supposed to be paying us to have those kinds of ideas,” I said roughly, then bit down on it. If I’d let the rest of it spill out I might never be able to stop.
I turned away, keyed the mic on my comms unit, two clicks.
There was no response from Sean.
Tom O’Day had slumped onto the crewman’s narrow bunk and was sitting with his hands dangling slackly in his lap. I didn’t like the vacantly inward look in his eye.
“Where’s Hobson?” I demanded.
O’Day barely seemed to register. “Hmm?”
Give me strength!
“Hobson—your bodyguard,” I repeated with more patience than I thought I possessed. “Where the hell is he?”
Tom O’Day made a concentrated effort to pull himself together. “He, um . . . went out. Got a message. Some guy came with a message for him. He said the skipper needed him to handle some kinda problem or something topside.” He thought for a moment, nodded with slow sadness. “I guess they . . . got him, huh? No way would he have willingly let this happen to us.”
Unless he’s on the payroll. No way could they have done this without an inside man.
I said nothing. I didn’t see any point in making Tom O’Day feel worse. I pulled out my cellphone and checked it again. Still no service. Whatever jammer they were using, it was damned effective.
Blake Dyer was pacing restlessly. Not easy in a cabin that wasn’t big enough to pace even if he’d been on his own.
“So, what do we do now?”
“Do?” I queried. “We’re already doing it. Get away, find a place of safety, lie low until rescue.”
Blake Dyer stopped pacing and stared at me incredulously. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I said firmly, and just when his face began to twist in disgust I added, “It’s textbook procedure for close protection—keep the principal out of danger. And, if that fails, get him away from danger as fast as possible and then keep him as far away from it as possible. That’s my remit and I’ve followed it to the letter.” And if my voice was harsher than it should have been, maybe there was a healthy understanding of his incredulity mixed in with it.
Tom O’Day looked up, caught the hunch of his old friend’s shoulders. “She’s right, Blake,” he said, aiming for reasonable but actually coming out weary to his bones. “Don’t give the lady a hard time. She’s just doing her job.”
“Yeah, and a lousy job it must be at a time like this,” Dyer said. He shook his head. “You’re playing God with people’s lives, Charlie. I don’t envy you those kinds of choices.”
Did you have to remind me?
I would have said the words out loud, but I knew if I did there would be a shake in my voice that I couldn’t disguise. I would not show that weakness. Instead, I aimed for a calm stare, said: “I knew what I was signing on for.”
“What about all those other poor people—including Sean?” Blake Dyer persisted. “Are you really going to leave him to the mercies of those thugs?”
I tried not to remind myself of the last mental snapshot I had of Sean, going down before a beating, outnumbered and definitely outgunned. That he would undoubtedly have taken a few of them with him was suddenly of little consolation.
“He knew what he signed on for, too,” I said, stony.
“Yes, but—” Dyer broke off, took a breath. “I thought you and he were . . . connected on more than merely a professional level.”
We were. We are, dammit!
“Look, I can’t . . . think about what might be happening to Sean.” I took a breath of my own, deep and shaken. “I cannot allow myself to be concerned about his safety when my first duty is to ensure the safety of my principal—you.”
Dyer fell silent. It was left to Tom O’Day to say quietly, “The young lady I brought on board with me, Autumn, is still down there, Charlie. And my son. I will not hide under a bunk like a coward while they’re suffering God knows what at the hands of those goddamn pirates.”
“I sympathise,” I said. “Believe me, I do, but my hands are tied. There’s nothing I can do.”
Blake Dyer straightened suddenly. “No, but there’s something I can do,” he said. He looked me straight in the face and gave me a tight little smile. “Sorry, Charlie but . . . you’re fired.”
Thirty-nine
I leaned my hip against the small table at one side of the cabin, glad of its support, and folded my arms.
“Are you seriously trying to tell me that you want to dispense with my services? Right now?” I said with remarkable calm. “I have to say, sir, your timing stinks.”
Blake Dyer shot a cuff, straightened the sterling silver link that fastened it. “On the contrary,” he said, sounding irritatingly cheerful. “I very much doubt that my timing has ever been better.”
“How do you work that one out?”
The smile appeared again, brief and grim. “Because you make a damn fine bodyguard, Charlie, as I’ve cause to know on more than one occasion now. But the way you dealt with Sean this morning showed me your skills are not confined to defence. You’re a pretty formidable offensive tackle, too. I’d back you to make any play.”
I shrugged, expelled a long breath and tried to let my anger go with it. “With all due respect, sir,” I said, “this is not a bloody game.”
“Damn right it’s not,” Blake Dyer agreed. “Doesn’t stop me wanting to win, though. In fact, it makes it a whole heck of a lot more important that we do.”
I noticed the “we” and was not reassured by it.
“We’re on a boat in the middle of the Mississippi River, at night, in fog, with no means of communication with the outside world, an unknown number of armed men on board, and no weapons between us except what we can scavenge, improvise, or steal,” I said. “What exactly are you proposing that we do?”
“We do what we in this country have always done best when the odds are stacked against us, ma’am,” Tom O’Day said, breaking his silence. His voice sounded slow and rusty, as if it cost him to use it. “We fight.” He nodded as if to himself, as if to confirm that his train of thought was logical and valid.
Then he looked up, and the old man of a few minutes ago had been replaced by the mogul he’d made of himself. “I had the honour to serve my country in Korea,” he said, “and while that may be many year
s ago the experiences I had there are not something I simply put aside and forgot afterward. It kinda lingers.” He pushed down on his thighs and stood up, the action emphatic. “So, either you’re with us, Charlie, or I would advise you to stay the heck out of our way.”
“Wait a moment,” I said. “There’s no way I’m going to let you go gallivanting off on some kind of”—the word “geriatric” so nearly popped out but I managed to suppress it in time—“of crusade. Besides anything else, nobody should go into any kind of fight without a plan. You have one?”
The two men exchanged glances as if each hoped the other had already thought of that. Neither of them, it seemed, had done so.
