Thriller (25 page)

Keep going, Special Agent Jacobs.”

“Rousseau wanted Fletcher captured alive and brought back

to Louisiana. That was the condition of the reward. The bounty

hunters and people working for Rousseau, they wanted us to disappear. Everyone would assume you were responsible because

you have a track record of making federal agents disappear. That

way, it would keep the heat off Rousseau.”

“I’m afraid Jacobs is telling the truth about the bounty

hunters,” Fletcher said. “I’ve been following Lee for the past

week. Naturally, I wanted to see what he was up to, so I took the

liberty of tapping into his phone conversations—the FBI’s encryption technology is woefully out of date. After Lee and Jacobs

left your hotel, I followed them back to the house they’ve been

using as a base of operations. You can imagine my surprise when,

two hours later, five rather disturbing-looking men emerged

from the back doors and carried three oversize coolers to the fishing boat Lee used to transport all his surveillance equipment. I

recognized one of these gentlemen from a previous entanglement—a professional tracker, or bounty hunter, who works for

Daddy Rousseau. Now tell Marlena about what you had planned

for her.”

Jacobs didn’t answer.

Fletcher whispered something in Jacobs’s ear. He looked terrified.

“After you planted the transmitter, the bounty hunters were

to move in and take care of Fletcher,” Jacobs said, his voice quivering. “They wanted me to take you out on the boat under the

guise of meeting up with Lee at the operations house. You were

supposed to disappear, out here in the water. The sharks were

going to take care of you. No bodies, no evidence, no case.”

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“And where were you going?” Fletcher said.

“Costa Rica.”

“With how much money?”

A pause, then Jacobs said, “Seven million.”

“It seems the price on my head has gone up,” Fletcher said,

grinning. “Jacobs neglected to mention the part where I slipped

out of the utility closet and caught him in the act of feeling you

up. I think he was preparing to share a special moment with you

before dumping you overboard. It’s not every day he has an opportunity to be intimate with such a beautiful woman. Did you

tell Marlena about your colorful tenure in Boston?”

“I worked as a handler for informants.”

“He’s being modest,” Fletcher said. “Special Agent Jacobs was the

handler for two
very
powerful figureheads inside the Irish mafia. In

exchange for lucrative payoffs, Jacobs ran interference so these two

men could continue committing extortion, money laundering and

murder. When his superiors got wind of what was going on, these

two men suddenly disappeared. Any idea what happened to them?”

“I was cleared on those charges,” Jacobs said.

“You were never indicted because the president stepped in and

invoked executive privilege in order to protect a member of his

high-ranking staff—a member who once worked as your boss in

Boston. The corruption went well beyond Jacobs, and the president wanted it kept quiet. How many people died to protect your

secrets,
Special
Agent Jacobs? How many people did you kill?”

Jacobs didn’t answer.

“It doesn’t matter. I think we’ve heard enough.” Fletcher taped

Jacobs’s mouth shut.

Then Marlena watched as Fletcher dragged Jacobs, kicking

and screaming, to the back part of the boat. The idea flashed

through her mind: Jacobs alone in the water, screaming out in

pain and horror as the sharks ripped him apart. No part of her

rose up in protest or tried to push the thought away.

Jacobs was pinned against the stern, screaming behind the

duct tape as he stared, wide-eyed and terrified, at the water.

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“Do you want me to cut him loose before I toss him overboard?” Fletcher asked her.

Marlena didn’t answer, aware of the intense feeling building

inside her, the one she had when holding things like the postcards and the sweater.

“What would your mother want you to do?” Fletcher asked.

Marlena thought of her mother alone in that terrible moment,

a woman who worked as a janitor and wanted nothing more out

of life than to be a good mother to her two children, now forced

to make a decision between jumping to her death and being

burned alive.

She spotted a bright light on the horizon. The light belonged

to a boat.

“That would be my ride,” Fletcher said. “What’s your answer?”

She
wanted
Jacobs to suffer. But giving the order to do it was

something else entirely.

“I want to bring him in,” Marlena said.

“At the moment, you have no direct proof of his involvement

with the bounty hunters. Jean Paul Rousseau is not a stupid

man. And despite his rather apish appearance, I’m willing to bet

Jacobs covered his tracks just as well. It will be your word against

his. I don’t have to remind you how those cases turn out, especially since Jacobs has connections in very high places.”

“I’ll work the evidence.”

“I doubt you’ll find any.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Your choice.” Fletcher released Jacobs. “Turn around, Marlena, and I’ll untie your hands.”

The boat that pulled alongside them was a cigarette boat, a bullet-shaped race boat designed for incredible speed. Standing behind the wheel was a pale man with a shaved head and an

odd-looking nose—Jonathan Prince.

“Malcolm,” Prince said. “We need to get moving.”

She recognized the voice as the one she had spoken to earlier

on the cell phone.

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“You had this whole thing planned out,” Marlena said, more

to herself.

“I needed to move you to safety, and the only way to do it was

to get you on the boat, away from the club.” Marlena felt

Fletcher’s breath against her ear. “Those postcards and whatever

other items you’ve bought since your mother’s death? I suggest

you bury them.”

Her hands were cut free.

“I’ll leave Jacobs tied up, in case you change your mind. Good

luck, Marlena.”

The cigarette boat roared away. She got to work untying the

rope around her ankles. She didn’t rush. She knew there was no

way she could catch up to Fletcher.

During the commotion, Jacobs had managed to rub off part

of the duct tape from the corner of his mouth. “I have an account

set up here on the island,” he mumbled. “I’ll transfer the money

to you. All I need is a laptop. You let me go, and I’ll disappear.

You’ll never see me again.”

Marlena didn’t answer.

“Seven million,” Jacobs said. “That kind of money can buy you

a lot of things.”

But it can’t buy me what I need
, Marlena thought, and went to

start the boat.

“Wait, let’s talk about this,” Jacobs said. “We can come to

some sort of agreement.”

Marlena drove toward the bright lights of the island. She heard

Jacobs screaming over the roar of the engines and wind, pleading with her to make a deal. Marlena drove faster and thought

of her mother falling through the sky and tried hard not to dwell

on the limitations of justice.

Both a literary and suspense novelist, Dennis Lynds is credited with bringing the detective novel into the modern age

then, twenty years later—in the 1980s—introducing literary

techniques that propelled the genre into its current dynamic

form. An award winner, Lynds wrote under several pseudonyms, publishing some eighty novels and two hundred short

stories. His most famous pen name was Michael Collins.

Under that label he created fiction’s longest-running detective series, starring the indelible private eye Dan Fortune. The

New York Times
consistently named Lynds’s mysteries among

the nation’s top ten. One year, it listed two of his titles, each

written under a different pseudonym, without realizing he was

the author of both. His awards include both the Edgar and

the Marlowe Lifetime Achievement.

Lynds also published literary novels and short stories. Five

were honored in
Best American Short Stories
. Then, in the late

1980s and into the 1990s, he pioneered the detective form

again, writing books in both third and first person and lacing them with short stories, techniques which today’s writers employ regularly.

“Powerful and memorable, [these works] indicate Collins

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has embarked on a new course after some 60 books,” wrote

critic Richard C. Carpenter in
Twentieth Century Crime and

Mystery Writers
. “Truly, he is a writer to be reckoned with.”

Of his most recent short story collection,
Fortune’s World,
the

Los Angeles Times
commented, “To spin tales as intriguing and

thought provoking as these for three decades is a remarkable

enough achievement. Even more remarkable is the sustained

quality…. It takes style to bring that off. Bravery, too, of

course.”

Iconoclastic, witty and generous, sadly Lynds died

August 19, 2005, at the age of eighty-one. Several of his

short stories will be published posthumously, including the

one here,
Success of a Mission.
This story was first published

in 1968. Since then, it has been nominated for several

awards and anthologized. The story is still relevant today in

both its triumph and its tragedy.

The minister of defense stood with his back to the room. He

faced a large map on the wall of his office.

“They will attack,” the minister said. “If we do not know the

locations of their ammunition dumps, supply depots and fuel

stores, we cannot stop them.”

The minister turned. He was a small man with a round face

that would have been kindly except for the hard gray surface of

his eyes. These hard gray eyes studied the faces of the other two

people in the room the way a scientist would study a specimen

on a microscope slide.

“That data would only be at army headquarters in their capital, Minister,” the tall infantry captain said.

The minister nodded. “Yes. Our man at their headquarters

knows that much, has already located exactly where they are in

the building.”

“He cannot get the data for us, Minister?” the woman asked.

“No. He cannot get into the building. It would be quite impossible in his disguise, and in any case we need him to remain

in his present position. His contacts are too low level, and we

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have no other reliable agents with the necessary experience at

their headquarters for a job of this degree of difficulty, sensitivity and importance. There is no time to place an undercover man

in the headquarters now. It will have to be a single swift operation from outside army headquarters. Get in, get the data, bring

it back without them being aware that we have it.”

The woman paled under her olive complexion. There and

gone, the quick fear, but it had been there. She was little more

than a girl, despite her officer’s uniform. Her face was oval, with

a small nose, wide and full lips and soft brown eyes. She had been

in the army three years, and had killed four men with a knife in

the dead of night, but she paled as the minister described what

would have to be done at the headquarters of the enemy’s army

in the heart of enemy country.

The tall man only nodded. “When do we leave?”

His voice, when he said this, was low, and had a faint trace of an

accent different from that of the woman and the minister. There

was a long scar on his lean, tanned face. The middle finger of his

left hand was missing. His almost-black eyes showed no expression.

“In ten minutes, Captain. All your papers are ready,” the minister said. “You, Captain Hareet, will be an American automobile salesman on a long-planned combined vacation and business

trip that could not be canceled despite the crisis. We have picked

you for this job because of your experience, your colloquial

American English and your command of Arabic. With some

darkening of the skin, your features will also pass as Arab, if that

becomes necessary. You know their army and their city.”

Captain Hareet nodded. “Yes, sir. I know both only too well

to lose a war to them.”

The minister faced the girl. “Lieutenant Frank, you will be his

wife. Your home is in Santa Barbara, California. You have lived

there, and no special regional accent is required for an educated

Californian. Standard American will do. Your Arabic will pass in

an emergency, but we hope there will be no need. It is hard for

a woman to infiltrate in Arab countries.”

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“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Frank said. The shiver in her voice was

so faint no one but a man as trained as the minister, or Captain

Hareet, would have caught it, and it disappeared as quickly as it

had come. The two men looked at each other, nodded, and then

smiled at the woman.

“You are lovers?” the minister asked.

The captain was silent. Lieutenant Frank hesitated for a moment. Then she nodded. “Yes, sir. Paul and I have lived together

for over a year. We were lovers before that. We planned to marry

soon, but that will have to wait now until after the crisis has