Storm Surge (31 page)

“Excuse me,”
Sharon said. “Are you Senator Buchan?”

The man turned
on her, irritated. Everything about him looked expensive and perfectly cut,
from his stiff brush of gray hair to the shiny black shoes that were getting
marred by the mud in which the man was standing.

“Of course
not,” the man snapped. “I’m Robert
Dawkes
. The
Senator’s chief of staff.”

“Well, Mr.
Dawkes
,” Sharon said. “I don’t think there’s much of
anything left in that house. We saw a tornado hit it.”

“A tor…” he
stopped, turned back to the commander. “I still need to examine the safe.” The
dismissal was obvious.

“Well, fuck
you, too,” Glory muttered.

“Glory,”
Sharon said reprovingly. She was really going to have to start cracking down on
the use of that word.

Sharon
wondered how
Dawkes
would react when he saw that the
safe had been opened. She wondered what he would do when he or the other
rescuers found bodies inside. Then she realized that Kyle Mercer’s was probably
one of those bodies and her throat closed with grief. Her vision went blurry
with tears and she fought the impulse to begin sobbing.
Not in front of all
these strangers
, she thought.
Later.
When I’m safe.

She was
distracted by a flash of color at the corner of her eye. She looked over, and
her eyes widened in amazement.

Captain Jack
the cat was pacing up and down the dock, in front of the door of the paint
shed. He stopped, looked at it, and mewed. Sharon walked over, glancing behind
her. Everyone was still busy arguing. She scooped the cat up into her arms.
Glory, delighted, reached out to stroke the cat’s ears. “Hey, you,” Sharon
whispered to it. “How many lives did you go through last night, hmmm?” The cat
began to struggle, eyes still fixed on the door of the shed. “What’s in there?”
Glory crooned. She walked over, opened the door, and gasped.

 Kyle
Mercer sat cross legged on top of a work table that was covered by a paint
stained tarp. He looked up at them and put a finger to his lips. The cat leaped
out of Sharon’s arms and up onto the table, purring. Mercer scratched it behind
the ears.

“How did you…”
Sharon whispered, unbelieving.

Mercer smiled.
“God laughs,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

Glory looked
nervously out the door. “You need to get out of here,” she said.

“I will.”

“How?”

Mercer
shrugged. He was still smiling. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Will I see
you again?” Sharon blurted the words before she could stop herself.

“Yeah,” Mercer
said. “You will. As soon as I find out what’s in this.” He held up a black
notebook.

“I think the
guy who knows,” Sharon said, “is right outside. His name’s
Dawkes
.”

“Can’t exactly
ask him now,” Mercer said. “And you need to get back out there before someone
comes in here and sees me. I think Deputy
Bohler
, and
probably some other people, would still like to take me in.”

“Okay,” Sharon
said. “You’re right.” But instead of moving toward the door, she ran toward
him. He slid off the table and came to her, wrapping her in his arms and
holding her against him. “I was sure you were dead,” she whispered.

“I got kind of
worried about that a few times myself,” he said.

“Promise me
you’ll...” she stopped, pulled away,
wiped
her eyes.
“What am I saying? I’ll see you again. You said I would.”

“And I never
go back on my word,” he said. “Now go. And take this damn cat with you before
he gives me away.”

They came out
of the paint shed to find
Bohler
walking up the dock
toward them. They walked quickly, trying to meet him as far away from the paint
shed as possible. Sharon held up the cat. “Look what we found,” Glory said
brightly.

“We need to
go,”
Bohler
said. “There are a couple of FBI agents
who want to debrief us about Kyle Mercer.”

Sharon
resisted the temptation to look back. “Kyle’s dead, Deputy.”

***

They carried
Phillips in his stretcher down the gangplank of the cutter,
Bohler
following behind. An ambulance waited at dockside. An
EMT
stood by the open rear door, next to a tall bald man in a dark suit. The man in
the suit beckoned them over.

“Agent Parker,
FBI,” the man flashed a badge at
Bohler
. “I’ll take
him from here.”

“This man’s my
prisoner,”
Bohler
insisted. “I want to come along.”

“Sorry,
Deputy,” Parker said. “You don’t have the clearance. This man is wanted for
questioning in conjunction with a number of terrorist actions.”

“Terrorism?”
Phillips rose partway off the
stretcher in his agitation.
“Bloody hell.
I want a
lawyer.”

Parker smiled
nastily at him. “Where you’re going,” he said, “there aren’t any lawyers.”

Phillips
turned to
Bohler
. His eyes were panicked. “You can’t
let him take me,” he pleaded. ”I have rights.”

“We’ll be in
touch,” Parker said to
Bohler
. “In the meantime, we
need to ask you to say nothing about what you saw on the island until you’ve
been properly debriefed. I can’t emphasize to you how important that is to our
national security.”

“What did you
say your name was again?”
Bohler
said. “Can I see
that…
”
But Parker had turned away and was climbing
into the back of the ambulance. They loaded the still-protesting Phillips into
the ambulance. The
EMT
got in behind him. The doors
slammed shut and the ambulance roared away, leaving
Bohler
standing frustrated on the dock.

When they were
on the highway, Phillips looked over at the man in the suit. “It’s a fair cop,”
he said in an exaggerated Cockney accent.

Storch
grinned and took off his shades.
“Welcome back,” he said.

“What a
clusterfuck
,” Phillips said. He nodded at the
EMT
. “Who’s he?”

“A friend,”
Storch
said. “Don’t worry.”

“That Deputy
is going to be trouble,” Phillips said.

Storch
nodded. “We’ll take care of it.”

“And
what about me?”
Phillips said.

“What about
you?”
Storch
said blandly.

“You knew
about Moon,” Phillips said. “You had to. So are you taking over his job?
Eliminating all the witnesses?”

Storch
grinned. “I have a better idea,” he
said.

“I’m
listening.”

The “
EMT
” spoke up. “Information is power, Mr. Phillips.”

Phillips
nodded.
And?”

“And I work
for a third party. Someone who’d like to know the information you and your
friend possess about what happened on Pass Island.”

Phillips
chuckled. “A white knight, eh?”

The “
EMT
” smiled. “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

“I’m sorry,
sir,”
Dawkes
said into the cell phone. He held it
away from his ear, wincing. When the storm of invective died down on the other
end, he put the phone to his ear again. “I understand, Senator. But the FBI is
insisting on treating the house as a crime scene. It seems…” he braced himself.
“It seems that the safe inside had been breached.” He waited, but there was
only silence on the other end of the line.
Then a terse
instruction.

“Yes sir,”
Dawkes
said. I’ll be right here.”

He shut the
phone and shook his head. He knew Hart Currant was getting desperate, but to
try and steal the documents back under cover of a hurricane…

“He must
really be tired of being led around by the short hairs,”
Dawkes
said out loud. He smiled to himself and poured a scotch into a hotel tumbler.
He looked around the room. The place was a shithole, not up to his usual
standard at all, but with so many people displaced and using hotels for
temporary shelter, not to mention the influx of workers flowing in from
everywhere to make a quick buck on the reconstruction, he was lucky to get
anything.

There was a
knock at the door.

Dawkes
’ brow furrowed. “Who is it?” he
called out.

The voice that
came through the door was muffled, indistinct. “I have a package here from
Washington for Mr.
Dawkes
?”

“I don’t know
about any package.”

“It’s marked
urgent. It’s from a Mr., ah, Boo-
kan
?”

“It’s Buchan.”
Dawkes
opened the door. The man standing in the
doorway hit him, once, a hard right straight to his nose. It was the first time
Dawkes
had been hit with a fist since grade school,
and it hurt worse than anything he had ever felt. Tears streamed from his eyes
and he staggered back, falling hard on his rump, his hands over his face to
contain the awful pain.

When he looked
up, the man standing over him was pointing a gun at his face.

“Oh, my god,”
Dawkes
said. “Please…don’t hurt me.”

“I’d say that
depends on you, Mr.
Dawkes
.”

“Who are you?
What do you want?”

The man with
the gun smiled. “Just call me John Doe.”

Dawkes
shoved himself backwards across the
rug with his feet, fetching up against desk chair with faded upholstery. “My god…you’re…you’re
Mercer, aren’t you?”

“That
name’ll
do as good as any.”

“You’re
supposed to be dead!”

Mercer
shrugged. “Lot of things
are
supposed to happen that
don’t.”

Dakwkes
, having put a name to his enemy, was
recovering some of his composure. He got himself up into the chair. “You’re not
going to get away with this.”

“
Y’know
,” Mercer said, “People tell me that a lot. But yet…”
he spread his arms in a “what are you
gonna
do”
gesture, “here I am.”

“This is
different. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

“Well, Mr.
Dawkes
, I see you’re a man who cuts right to the center of
the problem. That’s exactly my problem. I don’t know who I’m dealing with. So…”
he reached behind with his free hand and pulled to a slim black notebook that
had been tucked in his waistband. He threw it on the bed.
Dawkes
’
eyes followed it in fascination, as if Mercer had thrown a poisonous snake on
the bedspread.

“Why don’t you
enlighten me?” Mercer said.

When
Dawkes
hesitated Mercer shook his head. “Come on now,
Mister
Dawkes
. We both know you’re not a brave man.
Unlike Senator Buchan the famous war hero, you got out of the draft. Let me
see…spastic colon, I think it was?”

“Bleeding
ulcer,”
Dawkes
whispered.

“Right.
See, I get a little confused
sometimes. I grew up following a different kind of politics. So, why don’t you
fill me in on what I’ve
missed.
Fill me in on why a
U.S. Senator, or someone like that, had to hire a gang of murdering thugs to
take this little black notebook.
in
a hurricane, no
less. I’m all ears.”

“I can’t,”
Dawkes
said. “I
can’t
.”

“Yeah, you
can,” Mercer said, almost gently. “It’s just a question of when.”

He only had to
break one finger before
Dawkes
told him.

“Hart
Currant,”
Dawkes
whimpered.

“And who’s
that?” Mercer said. “And stop crying. You’re getting snot on your nice shirt.”

“You honestly
don’t know who he is?”

Mercer shook
his head. “I told you. I don’t follow your kind of politics. But I guess it’s
time I start.”

“Senator
from Alabama.
They
think he might be a potential Presidential nominee.”

Mercer nodded
slowly. “And those people in the photos with him?”

“Let’s just
say they’re people Currant doesn’t need to be seen with.”

“And the
figures in the ledger at the back of the book would be…
don’t
tell me, let me guess.
Payoffs.”