The Last Family (50 page)

“Woody Poole was my insurance policy. I never thought he’d show here before he met Eve. I was way off.”

“Woody’s another dark angel.”

Paul nodded. “I think so. Someone from one of the other agencies, most likely CIA, wanted him included. He was pushed on me. I was only sure the team that’s in Miami could take him. I didn’t look far enough ahead.”

Thorne grew silent for a minute as he assimilated the new information.

“We don’t have anything to trade him? Maybe we could turn his friend Steiner with the right offer.” Thorne said.

“No negotiating,” Paul said. “We’re going to kill them.” He turned to the two policemen. “You know who the friendlies are on board?”

Nods from the SWAT-team members.

“Get a clean shot on
anyone
else, take it and make sure they don’t get up again. We’ll take the pilot out first, and silently as possible. That’ll leave either Martin or his accomplice below.”

Paul checked his gear and secured the forty-five he’d carried throughout his professional career. The cane stayed loaded. Walking without it would be difficult, but he had to refrain from using it on the deck and alerting the men inside.

The navigator turned around. “The Mae Wests—each is fitted with a beacon on it that we’ll pick up. They inflate as soon as they’re immersed or by pulling the strings. We’ll be on the sailboat’s stern in ten minutes. You’ll need to get out on the bow. We’ll hold it as steady as we can.” Paul nodded and selected four of the inflatable Mae Wests.

He opened the rough sketch of the
Shadowfax
Thorne had drawn. He studied it. Going in would probably be suicide. Two detonators, a split second to trigger them. Martin would do it, would die himself, before he’d risk failing. Would the other man? Probably.

Five minutes later the four were wearing assault-style hoods. Paul turned to the pilot, whose face was demonically lit by the orange glare of the dials.

“I’ve got solo body-heat silhouette on the stern. Either the boy or someone seated,” the navigator said as he inspected the red-orange form on the deck. The sailboat was a light-blue outline against a darker blue.

Paul thought about it for a second.
Reb? Martin’s friend Steiner, watching for us?

“Get us in close. When we get my family overboard, I don’t want them wet good before they’re in this boat. We’re your second priority, but stay well back from the boat after you drop us. Do not approach the vessel under any circumstances once the family is aboard. No closer to the
Shadowfax
than two hundred meters until I have the bomb disarmed and Martin neutralized.”

The pilot nodded. The four men went out the forward hatch and stood at the railing. There was a platform at the front that could be raised several feet to allow occupants of the
Cheetah
to board a larger vessel. The men wore Kevlar vests and goggles to protect their eyes from the rain—the speed of the boat drove the rain against them like BBs.

“Good luck,” Paul said.

“Later,” Thorne said. He smiled at Paul, and in that second Paul was swept with a feeling of loss and remorse. They would not all see dry land again. Maybe none of them would.

“If Reid is alive … if you get to Reid, and I don’t, find out who sent him,” Paul said. “And make sure people know.”

Thorne nodded.

The
Cheetah
swung in from the east and pulled behind the sailboat. Ted held the figure on the deck in his binoculars as they swung in while Brooks kept his MP-5 trained on it. If it was Steiner or Martin, they would be full of holes before they knew what hit them. The cockpit was empty, which meant the vessel was on autopilot. The sound of the sailboat’s diesel and the wind was far louder than the pursuit boat. Paul could make out the figure on the stern now. It was Woody. The agent was naked, leaning against the aft mast with his legs splayed on the roof of the aft cabin. His head was lolling, his chin against his chest. He looked unconscious, his head rocking with the movement of the boat.

As the boats fell into speed and directional sync, the
four men moved across the gangplank. They stepped quickly aboard the
Shadowfax
, their guns in hand. Ted led the group, with Thorne bringing up the rear. The
Cheetah
dropped back and veered away behind the veil of rain, then followed like a hungry shark on a blood trail.

55

K
URT
S
TEINER CAME IN FROM CHECKING THE COCKPIT, SHED HIS WET
coat, and joined Martin, who was almost finished stitching his jaw where it had been opened. Kurt looked at the instrumentation on the galley wall, which included a compass with their present bearing displayed. Martin was seated at the counter before a small mirror as he used a curved needle from the boat’s first-aid kit to pull a length of suture through and through, sealing the open wound in his cheek. He finished three, clipped off the extra nylon string, and wiped the oozing blood from his cheek carefully with a damp cloth. “That’ll have to do,” he announced. The white sutures reminded Kurt of the stitching on a baseball. The way Martin ignored pain never failed to amaze Kurt. It was as though he refused to acknowledge its existence and in doing so robbed it of any power it might have over him.

“What about them?” Kurt asked, pitching his head in the direction of the cabin door.

“Why, you want a little sport?”

“No,” Kurt said. “There’s no honor in—”

Martin’s hand moved like lightning, and he seized Kurt’s wet face between his fingers, the palm covering his mouth. “What the fuck do
you
know about honor? A bunch of claptrap you heard from a drooling old man who ran to South America with his tail tucked?”

“No, I mean …”

Martin’s eyes flashed, and the teeth, between his tightened lips, were like white tiles set in a grout of blood. Blood flowed anew. Martin wiped at it, angrily or impatiently. “That little
mother
in there knows more about loyalty than either of us could ever understand.” His face twitched and his eyes cleared. He released his grip and patted Kurt playfully on the shoulder. “Real loyalty, true devotion, springs from perfect love. Loyalty for men like us is a function of self-interest.” The rose circles where Martin’s fingertips had gripped Kurt’s cheeks stood out as though painted on with rouge. Martin turned back to the counter, opened three of the white capsules, poured the powder into his mouth, and took a swallow of wine. He waved his hand in the air over the counter to dismiss the past few seconds as nothing significant.

Kurt hadn’t moved a muscle. His expression did not betray the pain he felt at the rebuff or the fire of anger that was burning inside him. “I am loyal to you. I will die for you.”

“So I am a cause worth dying for? I am an object for your perfect loyalty? Interesting.” He searched Kurt’s eyes with his own for an answer. “Hereditary anomaly, no doubt.”

“My grandfather was loyal. To his leader.”

“Yes, I’m sure he was. Even though his leader was a loser on a global level. I didn’t mean to knock the old buzzard off his ragged pedestal.
Sieg heil
and all that shit.”

“He was a great commander. He served in Russia. Lost two fingers and the toes on his left foot to frostbite,” Kurt murmured.

“No fun tonight,” Martin said absently. “We’ll need
all of our energy for Paul. Maybe I’ll draw it out for a long time so he’ll have something special to remember. Think he’d deflower his own daughter to save the family? That is an interesting thought. That would be something for him to remember.” Martin laughed out loud. “Oh, that’s good! What a test of love and loyalty versus ingrained Christian morality.”

Kurt frowned. “Let’s just get it over with and get the hell out of here.”

Martin looked at the man for a second, and then he backhanded him, sending him sprawling onto the floor.
“I’m
in charge here.
I
make the plans,
I
set the rules of engagement. The important thing
isn’t
getting away. We’ll get away if we deserve to. The important thing is teaching these fucking assholes about the limits of pain. If you want to go, get the fuck out now—take the tanks, I don’t need them. If you’re afraid to die … get the fuck out. Tell you what, you can have
all
the Lallo money. Live like a king in your country, marry some blond-haired, German-mix spick and bounce your own grandsons on your arthritic knees singing the praises of the Fatherland.”

Kurt stood and pulled himself up into full attention. His face was twisted, red where he had been struck, and his lips pursed tightly together. “I’m not afraid, Martin. I
will
die if I need to—or if you order me to. My oath is my loyalty, my life. My life is yours to command.”

Martin put his arms around the younger man, looked him in the eyes, and hugged him. “Then we’ll live or die together. If we fail alive or dead, it’s all the same. Without honor, what is there?” He took the detonator from his pocket and placed it on the counter. “I give you the honor of detonating the package when the time comes. Is the scuba equipment ready? There’s a ten-minute delay. Enough time to get away,” he lied. The delay after the button was released was thirty seconds. Martin had reset it.

Martin patted Kurt’s cheeks softly, almost lovingly. “Let’s go back and rig everything nice for our soon-to-arrive guests. And put a smile on that face.”

56

T
HE FOUR INTERLOPERS CROUCHED AT THE
S
HADOWFAX’S
STERN
and stared at the sight Martin had constructed. Woody’s mouth was covered with duct tape. His forearms were duct-taped together from the elbows to the wrists. His fingers looked like twisted oak limbs with the bark removed in places where broken bones showed through the skin. When he rolled his head up, Paul thought his eyes had been gouged out but realized that someone had packed the sockets as well as the ear canals with caulk.

“Dear God,” Paul whispered. Woody was living in a dark, silent world where there was only pain for stimulation.

Ted crossed himself and pulled a knife out of a boot holster to cut the ropes that held the young baby-sitter to the mast.

Paul grabbed his wrist, stopping him as he started the first cut. Then he circled around behind Woody and
saw what he had expected. A small, all but invisible trip wire led from Woody’s waist to a coil of cotton rope. He looked into the coil and saw a fragmentary grenade wired to a chrome stanchion. The trip wire had been wrapped around the pin, and the pin had been pulled out so that only a small bit of the tip was still providing purchase and holding the device’s spoon in place. Just to make sure it would come out easily, there was grease on the pin to kill any friction.
Hell of an alarm system!
He pointed it out to the others and pushed the pin back so that it was fully locking the detonator, then bent the metal slightly, using Ted’s knife, so that it would take a hard tug to pull it out. Then he took the cop’s knife and cut the trip wire. They lifted Woody and laid him on the deck. He was alive but mercifully unconscious.

Paul took one of the extra Mae Wests from its carry pouch and secured it around him. Then, with the help of the others, they dropped Woody into the sailboat’s wake. He bobbed there, his head and shoulders out of the water, then disappeared into the wall of rain in their wake.

They began moving slowly and silently up the side of the boat. Thorne stopped to cover the aft cabin door; Ted knelt with his back to Thorne’s and kept his gun trained on the cockpit door. From his position Ted could cover the cockpit and the door to the galley. He would see whoever was coming up before they could see him. Paul and Brooks moved slowly and quietly the length of the boat to the cabin in the bow.

Paul removed the snap buckle from the hatch’s hasp, tossed it into the lake, and eased the door open. The music from Erin’s radio escaped, and the first thing he saw was Reb’s upturned face, filled with surprise. Paul put his finger to his lips for silence as he held out his other hand.

Laura looked up and beamed. “Paul!” she whispered. “Okay!” She grabbed Reb by the waist and held him up to his father like an offering. Paul pulled him free and into the rain, then reached in for Laura.

Brooks laid his machine gun on the deck and put a Mae West on the shivering child.

Paul pulled Laura up and into his arms. She kissed him hard on the lips. The policeman handed her a Mae West, and she started to put it on.

“Erin?” she whispered.

“At the yacht club. Fine. You two go on over the side. Brooks will stay with you. There’s a boat behind us that’ll pick you up in a minute or so.”

“Where’s Wolf?” Reb asked.

“With Erin. Safe.”

“Biscuit!” Reb said. “Biscuit’s in there!”

“It’s just a bird, Reb,” Laura said.

“He’s not just a bird! Daddy, he trusts me and they’ll kill him. I know they will.”

“Where is he?” Paul asked.

“Down there by the bed. Please let me go get him.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” the policeman said.

“No, I’ll get him,” Paul said. “You just do what I say.”

The young policeman put the machine pistol’s strap on his shoulder, grabbed Reb in his arms, and stepped to the railing. “Come quickly, ma’am,” he said.

“Biscuit?” Reb said, fighting to get loose from the policeman’s grip.

“Reb, trust me.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Cross your heart?”

“Promise. You take care of your mother till I get there. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Ready?” Brooks asked.

Reb nodded and pinched his nose closed as the cop tightened his grip on the child’s waist. Then, as Laura’s and Reb’s eyes stayed locked, the cop took Laura’s hand, and they all three went over the rail and out of Paul’s sight.

“Good-bye,” he whispered. “May God keep you safe.” He moved to where Thorne and Ted were.

“Okay,” he said. “I want you two over the side, too.”