DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (25 page)

“Sean. You came to my room last night,” I said, ignoring the way Tom O’Day’s bushy eyebrows shot up, crinkling his forehead. “What did we do?”

There was a long pause. I tried not to hold my breath, felt the beat of my own pulse in my ears.

D.R.A.N.K. W.H.I.S.K.Y.
came the reply, slow enough for me to translate it even with my rusty Morse.

Clever, too. He could have added an “e” into whisky without arousing suspicion from an American eavesdropper. The very fact that he did not suggested he was a free agent—for the moment anyway.

“Wait one,” I murmured into the mic, and closed the channel. “Sean at least is alive,” I told the two men, trying to keep my voice calm and matter-of-fact but unable to keep the relief out of it entirely.

“That’s good news, Charlie,” Blake Dyer said, putting a hand on my shoulder. The smile I gave him in return was more weary than I’d intended.

“Is he OK?” Tom O’Day wanted to know, galloping on before I could answer. “And what about the others?”

I relayed the questions, to which I received the answers
Y.E.S.
and
O.K.

“Thank the Lord,” Tom O’Day said when I told them, and somehow I knew he was thinking of Autumn rather than his son. “Can he get them out of there?”

That was one question I didn’t need to pass on. “If it was possible, he would have done it by now,” I said. “You’ll just have to settle for him being our eyes and ears on the inside.”

Tom O’Day nodded, then started frowning. “‘Eyes and ears . . .?’ I thought Hobson said everyone had agreed not to come aboard wired?” He glanced at his old friend. “You were planning on cheating me at the casino tables, huh?”

“Whatever Charlie and Sean were planning, I wasn’t in on it,” he said, rather more quickly than I would have liked.

“There was nothing sinister, I assure you,” I said with a touch of bite. “We held onto our comms because we’re trained to plan for every eventuality—like a hijacking for instance.”

“You make a fine point,” Blake Dyer agreed at last.

“So, let’s use it to our best advantage,” I said, and keyed my mic again. “Sean, have these people said what they want? Is it ransom? Or robbery?”

I got two clicks to the second suggestion. The jewellery alone must have amounted to a decent haul. Still something didn’t gel for me. Was it really worth all this effort?

“How many attackers do you see?”

He came back with an answer of four.

With machine pistols against an unarmed crowd. I swore under my breath. Plus the man holding the skipper hostage and a couple of roving two-man patrols that made nine or ten minimum. A lot—especially when the only troops we could muster against them were contained in this very small cabin, without a weapon between us. If you didn’t count the pen I had slipped into my pocket.

“Have they kept everyone together or split you up?” I asked. Again Tom O’Day made an anxious gesture.

S.P.L.I.T.
came the response from Sean.

Damn
. “Split how?”

B.G. C.I.V.

OK, I could work out that one. The hijackers had split the group up into bodyguards and their civilian principals. On the face of it, not a bad idea to cut the possible troublemakers out from the herd so they could be watched more closely.

In reality it was both a sensible move and a bad one. Putting a group of highly trained professionals into a tight knot might have made them easier to cover, but it also gave them a chance to plan, to subtly shift into positions of maximum effectiveness. Four men covering the whole room was cutting it fine. At least one had to be watching the guests, which left only three on the bodyguards.

If they had any sense the hijackers would mostly stay at a distance to give themselves the greatest response time to any threat. That also meant they’d miss minor communications, plans being formed, signs of readiness. Most of these guys were ex-military. They all thought along the same lines.

It was almost a certainty that, sooner or later the captive close-protection personnel were going to try something. They had to—their reputations were at stake.

But if they did, this was going to turn into a bloodbath.

Communication by Morse code when neither party has used it for real since the army does not make for free-flowing conversation. I knew Sean wasn’t trying to be cryptic, just as I wasn’t trying to be slow on the uptake.

“Is Morton in with them?” I asked him.

N.O.
came the immediate reply.

I frowned. “They must have had an inside man or they would never have managed to get aboard in the first place,” I pointed out. “Somebody had to nobble—or turn—the outriders in the Z-boats.”

H.O.B.S.O.N. G.O.N.E.

I pondered on that one for a moment—“gone” as in “not here”? Or “gone” as in “dead”?

Not dead
, I realised,
or Sean would have said so—same number of letters.
So, “gone” simply meant not among the hostages, nor among the hostage-takers either. Hobson was simply not there.

“Well,” I muttered, “
that
would make sense, I suppose.”

“What would?” Tom O’Day wanted to know.

“Hobson’s disappeared,” I said. “If he was their inside man, either he’s taken his money and run, or he’s making sure nobody sees him colluding with the bad guys.”

Tom O’Day shook his head firmly. “Rick Hobson’s been with me for ten years,” he said. “I can’t believe he’d . . . do something like this.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Nobody ever expected someone they trusted to betray them. That had always been our advantage, coming in as outsiders. We didn’t trust anybody.

“Sean, when—?”

W.A.I.T. 1.

The interruption was messy, sharp. I could hear the tension in his fingers on the mic key.

“What—what is it?”

Nothing.

I swore quietly under my breath. Not quietly enough if the raised eyebrow Tom O’Day gave me was anything to go by. The guy had the most expressive eyebrows I’ve seen in a long time.

“How clever is your equipment, Charlie?” Tom O’Day demanded.

“State-of-the-art,” I said shortly, still trying to listen for the faintest click of Sean’s mic through my earpiece. “Good enough to escape your guy’s scanner anyway.”

He looked only slightly pained at that. “And where’s the mic?”

There was something focused enough about the question to be more than idle curiosity. I flipped down my shirt collar to reveal the mic on a thin neck loop underneath. With a little more work they could have disguised it as a piece of jewellery, although considering ninety per cent of the users were male, it probably wasn’t worth the company’s effort.

“It’s all wireless,” I said. “The mic’s either voice-operated or works from a pocket key—it looks like a key ring.” I fished my wallet out of my back pocket and opened it up. The main transmitter was the thickness of two credit cards and sat neatly inside.

Blake Dyer glanced at his old friend. “And here was me thinking your specialty was cryptography—codes and such,” he said.

Tom O’Day smiled. “Still had to know how to get a hold of the intel before we could set about decoding it,” he said. He peered at the device. “Things have come on a pace since my day,” he admitted, “but I would guess that thing has some kind of volume or sensitivity setting, if Sean can wind his mic up full you should be able to hear what’s going on at his end, save him having to translate everything for us.”

“If we leave the channel open, there’s more chance of it being picked up,” I argued. “And it will whack through the battery. You get about eight hours of talk time, but up to a hundred-and-fifty on standby.” I gave a twitch of my shoulders, tried to work out why I was being awkward and added grudgingly, “Still, I don’t expect these guys are in for the long haul.”

Tom O’Day nodded, accepting my acquiescence. “He only has to open the mic when there’s something you need to hear,” he pointed out reasonably. “At which moment in time I’d guess those people will have other things on their mind.”

My turn to nod. I forwarded the information to Sean, aware that he’d already caused the men holding him trouble. If they had any sense, they would have bound his hands, but they had not—or if they had, they’d done so in such a position he could still reach his mic key. Getting his wallet out of his pocket to fiddle with the sensitivity settings on the transmitter, however, was a whole different ball game. One that was likely to get him shot.

Maybe it was a good thing the hijackers were likely to be standing well back after all.

G.O.T. I.T.
he sent back when I was done.
W.A.I.T.

There was silence for a few long, agonising minutes, then suddenly Sean keyed his mic and held it open. Everything that was happening inside the
Miss Francis
’s casino came flooding through my earpiece and directly into my head.

“—Leave him alone, you bastards. Leave him alone!”

The voice that came buzzing through my earpiece had a Brit accent and, to my utter surprise, I recognised it as belonging to Vic Morton. I’d never heard him so intense.

Who the hell was he talking about?

The shouts were quickly followed by the thud of blows landing, someone hitting the deck hard. Then more scuffling terminated with groans and muttered swearing.

“There’s no point in fighting them, Vic, mate,”
came Sean’s voice with a taut calm, but so loud it was distorted from being closest to the mic.
“Trust me, cowards like this lot never play fair.”

“You can shut up, too. What is it about you fucking limeys—you just love to hear the sound of your own voices, huh?”
A new voice, American, from somewhere like New Jersey if my ear for the accent was correct.

“Yeah, it must be a real novelty for you to hear someone not talking out their arse,”
Sean shot back.

I sucked in a breath. Sean was letting his temper get the better of him. Not his usual reaction—whatever that was now. Either way it was unwise.

“You don’t shut up, you can take his place next time,”
warned the man from New Jersey. And louder, to someone else off in a slightly different direction, he added,
“Get him out of here.”

Did he mean Sean? I held my breath, listening to sounds of a renewed scuffle. Then Sean said,
“What’s the matter? You don’t have the guts to kill him in front of witnesses? He’s the kid’s bodyguard—he’s just doing his job.”

Was Morton really getting himself worked over for Jimmy?

“Unless you want to join him, can it.”
The threatening voice suddenly grew louder, lowered to a growl. Was that what Sean was doing—tempting the guy in close for the kill?

I held my breath again. With three other armed men in the room it was suicide to try anything solo. I was amazed they hadn’t slotted Morton as soon as he’d kicked off. Slimy little sod always did have Teflon-coated shoulders for sliding out of trouble.

But where were they taking him—and Jimmy?

More to the point—
why
?

Inside my head I could picture the layout, the large deck area with the gaming tables dotted around the place. If they’d any sense, they would have all the hostages sitting on the floor. Easier to keep an eye on them, and harder for anybody to launch any kind of surprise attack.

Sean had said there were four of them holding a roomful of people. Any of the bodyguards would earn themselves a massive bonus if they managed to disarm one of the attackers.

More, no doubt, if they managed to kill any of them. Or all of them.

It all made isolating and separating out any possible troublemakers even more important for the hostage-takers. Whoever got brave would almost certainly also get very dead. But once someone took a chance and led the initial charge, the rest would be quick to take advantage of the situation. A few wouldn’t make it, but with their military background they were used to the concept of acceptable losses.

“You’re wasting your time,”
came another voice that was both shaken and shaking. I heard fear there, and pain, all being manfully hidden. His voice was quite distant. It wasn’t hard to identify the new speaker as Jimmy O’Day.
“I hate to disappoint you, but there’s no way my father is ever going to make any sweeping sacrifices on my account,”
Jimmy said.
“You can take that to the bank.”

I found my eyes straying to Tom O’Day as his son’s words came into my ear. O’Day senior certainly didn’t strike me as filled with paternal pride.

“Well, let’s hope you’re wrong about your old man, because otherwise things are gonna get very nasty for you, Jimmy boy,”
said the man from New Jersey with a certain grim relish to his tone.
“Very nasty indeed.”