DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (24 page)

“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.”

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 years 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.

“Well, I kinda thought trying to regain control of the ship might be a good place to start,” Tom O’Day said cautiously.

I shook my head. “I’ve already been up to take a look at the bridge,” I said. “The skipper’s tied to his chair and they have a guy with a gun to the helmsman’s head. Without a weapon there’s no way you’re going to get a foot inside the door before somebody gets killed—probably one of us.”

Damn. I meant to say “you”. Not “us”—“you”. . .

I saw by the glint in Tom O’Day’s eye that the slip had not gone unnoticed.

“So, ma’am, what do you suggest?” he asked.

I shook my head again. “Oh, no,” I said. “You’re not putting me in charge. I was never an officer back in the army and I don’t intend to become one now.”

“Would you settle for a non-commissioned rank?” Tom O’Day asked. “I seem to recall a Marine Gunnery Sergeant who had your kind of attitude. He was pretty good at not letting a certain wet-behind-the-ears young lieutenant trip over his own bootlaces too often.”

He was good, I’d give him that. But then he’d made a fortune in business by recognising when to push, when to plead, and when to downright flatter someone into getting what he wanted. I just didn’t like being manipulated in any direction.

But how could I leave them to their own devices? Two men who might be in good shape but were still not in the first flush of youth. And both who’d had things go their own way for far longer than was good for them.

This is a bad idea, Fox. Quite possibly the worst you’ve had in a long time. But still . . .

After all, what else was
I
going to do? Hide behind someone else’s skirts in the corner of a cabin while two old men went out and fought my battles for me?

No way.

Was I going to go my own path, try to find out what had happened to Sean, to the others, and possibly have those same two old men get in my way while I was doing so?

Again, not happening.

I exhaled, long and slow.

“Are you happy to accept that this is an extremely risky enterprise, however you go about it?” I demanded.

“Yes ma’am,” Tom O’Day said.

“Of course,” Blake Dyer said at the same time.

“Good. In that case you won’t mind putting it in writing for me. I reached for the pad of paper on the tabletop, and the pen I’d picked up previously to use as a weapon against Sullivan, offered it to Blake Dyer.

He took it slightly dumbly. “What do you want me to write?”

“For a start you can make my dismissal as your bodyguard official,” I said.
Just in case you don’t make it.
I didn’t say the words out loud but from the hollow look on Dyer’s face I didn’t need to.

He wrote in a beautifully legible hand, a few quick sentences that were brief and to the point. He even added that my dismissal was nothing to do with my competence and that professionally he held me in the highest esteem. It was more like a eulogy than a legal document. He ended it with a note that I was in no way responsible for anything that might happen to him, then signed and dated it with a flourish.

Tom O’Day had been reading over his shoulder as he wrote. He took the pad from Blake Dyer when he was done and added his own signature, then handed it back to me.

“What now?” he asked.

I read through the note, folded it carefully into an inside pocket.

“We arm ourselves,” I said, “and then we go and see how much trouble two old geezers and a girl can cause these bastards.”

At first I thought the clicking through my comms earpiece was random static—maybe some kind of interference from the jamming signal that still rendered my cellphone a useless lump of pretty plastic. It took a moment before I realised there was a rhythm to the fast-and-slow staccato beat that I recognised.

Morse code.

Sean!

I jerked upright, startling the two men.

“Charlie, what—?”

“Shush.” I cocked my head, concentrating. It was a short repeating pattern, and gradually I was able to make out two letters, over and over:

— · — ·   — — · —

C.Q.

Not a message as such, nor a military call sign, but two letters sent out over the airwaves by amateur radio enthusiasts around the world, a question expressed in the most economical terms.

It meant not simply the letters C and Q, but phonetically
Seek You.

I seek you.

I keyed my own mic. “Sean? Can you hear me?”

Y.E.S.

“He’s OK?” Blake Dyer demanded. I silenced him again with a quick hand swipe, then turned it into a “maybe/maybe not” gesture.

I thought furiously for a moment. During the time we’d been working for Parker Armstrong, we had developed plenty of code-words and test phrases. Words to check the presence of threat, of stress or duress. Besides anything else, Sean and I had once had no problem communicating without words. He’d always seemed to have very little difficulty reading my mind.

Before.

The problem was that I had no idea which—if any—Sean would remember. And without knowing who we could trust, I couldn’t ask him questions about before—about our time in the army together—and expect an answer that would tell me anything one way or another.

Supposing Vic Morton was the inside man? Supposing he was standing over Sean right now, with a gun to his head, to get him to talk us into an ambush? If I asked him the name of our commanding officer back then, for example, Morton would know if Sean tried to twist the truth. And anything that had happened since—since we got back together four years after my court martial—was hit-and-miss hazy in his mind.

Shit! Have to be much more recent then.