Seven Grams of Lead (26 page)

He plucked a fresh match from the box, threw himself up the stairs, aligned the mouth of the beer-can tube with the helicopter, and lit the match. Cupping his free hand to shield the flame, he dipped it into the hole in the side of the lowest can. The gas in the tube sizzled, igniting. With a bang and a streak of
fire, the compass ball shot toward the tail of the helicopter before disappearing into darkness.

The target was the helicopter’s tail rotor, which combatted the twisting force produced by the main rotor. With a malfunctioning tail rotor, forward speed could keep a helicopter flying straight. A helicopter with a malfunctioning tail rotor would lose control in a hover, however. And if the fragile tail rotor, which spun at 2,000 revolutions per minute—or about 400 miles per hour at the tips—were impacted by a ball traveling 100-plus miles per hour, the results could be catastrophic.

“Please,” Thornton said to no one in particular.

He heard no impact and saw no further evidence of the compass ball.

Then the helicopter pitched forward, somersaulted, and plummeted into the waves, all in about three seconds, before transforming into a yellow fireball, parts flying every which way.

Not trusting his senses, Thornton rose from the deck boards for a better view.

Mallery appeared behind him, her eyes wide with wonder.

“Look out!” he shouted, but she didn’t see the incoming projectile in time.

Diving, he wrapped his arms around her, sending them both splashing onto the deck. The spearlike projectile slashed the air millimeters above them, striking the portside gunwale and lodging there. It
was half of a rotor blade. Other debris splashed down aft of the fishing boat, which continued ahead at twenty knots.

Thornton found himself lying on top of Mallery, trying to regain his wind, her breath hot against his face.

“And there I was worried that all that beer had gone to waste,” she said.

Another time, he thought, he might have enjoyed the feel of her body—firm in the right places, soft in the right places—but the prospect of more flying wreckage prompted him to disentangle his limbs from hers and spring to his feet.

Deciding all was clear, he extended a hand to her. “You okay?” he asked.

“Better than them,” she said with a glance at the wrecked helicopter.

Together they watched the ribbons of smoke dissipating into the starlit sky. He felt the same nausea that he had after shooting Albert. This time, he also felt a measure of exhilaration. As a journalist, the ideal was to write an explosive story exposing bad guys—then hope their lawyers didn’t get them off. Using actual explosives, he thought, was relatively utilitarian.

“Are we safe now?” Mallery asked.

“We’re eighty or ninety miles from anywhere, and off the radar grid,” he said. “So we might have a minute or two.”

Turning to face him, she shook a wet tangle of hair
back from her eyes. Getting fired on and soaked gave her an alluring wildness, he thought, especially in the prison jumpsuit. Waterlogged, it left little to the imagination.

She cupped a hand over his left shoulder. “Russ, thank you,” she said.

“Anytime.” He burned to draw her toward him, but she took a step away.

“That wasn’t right,” she said with an edge of rebuke, leaving him chastened. “What I meant was …”

She stood on her toes and kissed him on the mouth.

Only when he felt her arms circle his waist too did he consider that this was more than a thank-you gesture. After another moment, though, she pulled free.

“Probably not the best time for this,” she said.

“Right,” he said, to let her off the hook.

She didn’t move.

“I don’t know that we’ll get a better time, though,” he said, reaching for her.

They picked up where they’d left off, her pent-up emotion apparently as strong as his own, the combined sentiments flaring to the sort of ardor he’d always thought of as the stuff of fiction. His hand gravitated to her jumpsuit’s top button, which popped open. The suit fell to the deck. Making even shorter work of his clothes, they raced down to the cabin and the intact bunk. They made love at a sprint, as though both mindful that another aircraft was liable to swoop down with guns blazing at any moment.

• • •

Getting out of the taxi at Orly Airport in Paris, the charter flight passenger listed as Brett Proctor almost didn’t hear the trill of his satphone over the whine of jets. “Goodwyn.”

“How are you, Norm?” came Rapada’s voice.

“I’m guessing not quite as well as I’d thought I was prior to the phone ringing.”

“Well, the two guests at the vacation house—”

Canning grumbled. “In English, please?” In the event that the multimillion-dollar secure communications system had been breached, Rapada’s secret-speak could be cracked by schoolchildren. “Where are they?”

“All we know right now is that the helicopter experienced catastrophic failure, survivors doubtful.”

“What about the fishing boat?”

“We don’t know. What do you think about scrambling a Hornet?” Rapada meant an Israeli-made drone armed with a pair of Mini-Spike electro-optic guided missiles, each sufficient to turn a fifty-foot fishing boat to flotsam if the helicopter hadn’t already.

“How long to deploy a submersible?” Canning asked.

“Two, three hours.”

“Do that, too. Search for the fishing boat and debris near the crash site. If we don’t find anything, in the
four
hours that will have passed, the distance the boat will have covered”—Canning estimated eighty
miles, squared it, then multiplied by 3.14—“means a search area twice the size of Maryland. A swarm of Hornets wouldn’t be able to find that.”

“We can have the fishing boat reported stolen.”

“Good. Say drug runners did it. Throw in that they murdered an honorable fisherman and his schoolteacher-daughter who was helping him out for the day, some bullshit like that, to get the local cops’ sympathies. And speaking of locals, rouse whoever you can on Trinidad and Tobago. Stands to reason that’s where our ‘guests’ will be checking in next.”

The fishing boat
chopped toward Scarborough, the nearest island in the archipelagic Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Through the portholes, Thornton saw nothing but water and sky in gradations of black. Mallery lay asleep in his arms—or he lay in hers, depending on the perspective—with the top of her head snug in the curve of his neck. Her breasts, nestled against his sore rib cage, should have hurt him but had the opposite effect. Although this day was only sixty-two minutes old, thanks to her it was already the best day of his life. Or it should have been. After all, they would soon be at the U.S. embassy in Port-of-Spain, handing off to the FBI the raw material to avenge Catherine Peretti and Kevin O’Clair as well as Leonid Sokolov—and to make sure Sokolov’s
DARPA project stayed at DARPA. In the process, Mallery stood to acquire Langlind’s Senate seat, and Thornton would report the biggest story of his career. For some reason, though, the benefits of reaching Port-of-Spain didn’t stir him. Which was odd. Just a function of his fatigue? Or was it that he had overlooked something? He had a sense of having missed a critical piece of the puzzle.

Mallery’s eyes opened. “Everything okay?” she asked.

“Just wondering how it could be any better,” he said

Evidently he failed to manufacture sufficient conviction: “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Could they have sicced satellites on us?”

“No, probably not. Even if the Joint Chiefs decided that they wanted a satellite redirect right after the helicopter went down, they still would have to wait another hour for imagery.”

“How about drones?”

“It’s possible, but even a squadron of Global Hawks couldn’t cover the square mileage we’ll have put between us and the spot where the helicopter—” Feeling as though he’d stumbled onto what had been eluding him, he stopped himself.

“The spot where the helicopter
what
?” she asked.

“Where it went down.” He propelled himself off the bunk. “We need to go back there. I have an idea.”

“What about the idea where we survive?”

He dug in Albert’s bag for clothes, finding himself a pair of khaki shorts. “It would be better if it appeared we didn’t—if we want to find out who’s after us, that is, and why.”

She bristled. “What do you have in mind?”

“Sinking this boat—making it look like the helicopter sank it, actually.” He tossed her a sweatshirt. “Leave the engines running, slash the fuel lines, then toss a flare onto the deck: That ought to do it.”

“And then what? We’ll be in the middle of the ocean in a life raft?”

“This boat is equipped with Zodiacs, actually, which are pretty rugged and have ten-horsepower engines. More than good enough to reach Barbados, a hundred miles or so north. That’s where the Littlebird listening post is, I think.”

Pulling on the sweatshirt, she grinned. “Because it says
Barbados
on the back of this boat?”

“Among other reasons.”

Pointedly, she raised an eyebrow. “Would people from a secret operation paint their secret location in big letters on the back of their boat?”

“If they needed the boat to blend in, sure. By the way, I don’t think they planned on either of us seeing the letters on the back of the boat, or at least living to tell anyone about it. But even if we did, what more would we make of it than there’s a black site near Barbados and a local fishing boat used for prisoner transport?”

“So then why have we made more of it than that?”

He pulled a T-shirt over his head. “If you’re going to run an offshore business and hide in plain sight, Barbados is your island. It’s a haven for human trafficking. Offshore banks—which, as you know, aren’t the sort where Grandma keeps her Christmas club account—have been going up on Barbados as fast as the plaster can dry. Also, Andy Nolend told me he’d heard of an American black op with a listening post there. The key is the island has virtually no electronic eavesdropping regulations, creating a loophole for American intelligence operators who are prohibited by law from wiretapping Americans: They can transmit the audio directly to people on Barbados, who send back written transcripts. If the Littlebird operators believe we’re in Davy Jones’s locker, they won’t be expecting us in Barbados. If we can get a place for you to lay low, I might be able to find Littlebird Central.”

“How would you do it?” she asked. “Barbados isn’t exactly a one-horse island.”

He put on a baseball cap embroidered with an anchor. “All of the towns there are one-horse compared to Bridgetown, the capital. I’m thinking Littlebird Central would have a lot of computer hardware, power usage, maybe a mess of antennas. Outside the city, people would sure as hell notice that. In the city, probably not. Maybe I can access utility-company data, or land a source at the utility company and find
out who has the highest power bills. On account of the computers, Littlebird Central’s bill should be up there.”

“Wouldn’t nosing around like that raise red flags?”

“Good question. If it’s shaping up that way, Bridgetown’s still small enough that I could canvas it on foot in half a day. Instead of a storefront, they’re probably using an office that’s on an upper floor or tucked away, with an innocuous name designed to dissuade people, like Acme Sewage Consultants.”

“But even if they’re fronted by a candy store that you can waltz right into, their systems will have electronic security, right? You would at least need pass codes and, probably, an electronic evidence retrieval team.”

“That was my thinking in going to Trinidad and Tobago. I figured we would turn over what we’d come up with to the FBI, let them hit Barbados and bag the evidence. In retrospect, the problem with that plan is the gauntlet of red tape between an electronic evidence retrieval team and Littlebird Central. On top of that, the Bureau is almost certainly searching for us now for the wrong reasons, so we’d need to take a leap of faith that our contacts there could keep our reappearance on the QT. Also, to take action on Barbados, they would need internal approval, then have to bring in the CIA—probably State, too. By the time an electronic evidence retrieval team made it to Barbados, Littlebird Central will have been long since cleaned
out. But if we play dead, the Littlebird operators will think they’re in the clear.”

Mallery gazed through a porthole. “Suppose I could get you an electronic evidence retrieval team?” she asked.

Even with her extraordinary wherewithal, this didn’t sound possible. “How?” he asked.

“Take me with you.”

“Goodwyn.”

“Sorry if I woke you, Norm.”

On a jet that appeared to be racing the sun across the Atlantic, Canning sighed. “If only you had.” That would mean he’d been able to sleep on the flight; Thornton and Mallery’s continued existence jeopardized his entire operation.

Rapada said, “The latest is the fishing boat’s lying on her side on the bottom of the sea, about a quarter mile from the wreck of the helicopter.”

“But there’s no sign of the lifeboat.”

“How did you know?”

“Murphy’s twenty-fourth codicil:
When a slice of toast falls on your white carpet, the probability it will land jam side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
But this isn’t bad news.”

“Why not?”

“In a lifeboat, they’ll be easy prey for a drone.”

The fourteen-foot Zodiac lifeboat sliced through waves at twelve knots, or about fourteen miles per hour. Sitting by the tiller, Thornton saw no other crafts of any sort, just the still-dark sea and the tip of the sun spraying violet into a cold gray eastern horizon. For the eighth time in the four hours since scuttling the fishing boat, he took up his crude astrolabe—he’d made it by cutting a paper plate in half, adhering one end of a shoelace to the half plate’s center point, and weighting the other end of the lace with a hexagonal nut. As he aimed the flat edge of the half plate at the fading North Star, the shoelace fell on a line between the seventy-five- and eighty-degree notches on the round edge of the plate, slightly closer to seventy-five, meaning the North Star was seventy-seven degrees above the horizon. Accordingly, the Zodiac was traveling along a latitude of thirteen degrees north, or right on course for Barbados. Thank you, Cub Scouts.