The bullet severed the handle from the rest of the tiller. Charlie rolled toward the stern, snatched the handle, and swung it, batting the Glock away from Bream. The gun took an odd bounce off the stern and splashed into the bay.
Propelling himself away from the raft despite obvious pain, Bream plunged into a dark wave and, somehow, fished out the weapon.
Charlie dove for the far end of the raft.
Bream wrestled the tide to put Charlie in his gunsights.
The tinny sputter of a motorboat grew louder, capturing their attention.
The bow sliced apart the fog, showing Charlie a washed-out image of Alice at the helm. She was squinting down the barrel of her pistol, pointed at him. The sight was more painful than the bullet would be. All he could do was brace himself as she refined her aim and fired.
The air shook with the report. The bullet drilled through the haze, missing him by a wide margin.
Bream gasped. A wave swept aside a large lock of his hair, revealing a purple cavity in the side of his head. Another wave clubbed him, driving him to the bottom of the bay.
Charlie wondered if, in reality, Alice had shot him-or if Bream had shot him-and he was now spending his last throes in reverie.
A moment later, the motorboat was close enough that he could clearly see Alice’s face. She was smiling.
“Need a lift?” she asked.
He glanced at his raft, all but underwater. “Where are you going?”
Setting down her gun, she gathered up her bowline and tossed him the end. He caught the rope with both hands, then held on tight while she pulled the remains of the Zodiac toward her. When he stepped off, grabbing the motorboat’s bow, the raft disappeared altogether beneath the waves.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said as she helped him aboard.
“What’s that?”
“I love you.”
“Same.” She stood on her toes and kissed him.
20
Charlie liked to say that the best thing in life was to win money at the track. And the second best thing was to lose money at the track. In the three months after Mobile, he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, not counting his bourbon tab, which wasn’t far behind.
At least the losses came at Keeneland, the historic Kentucky racecourse famous for the Blue Grass Stakes as well as for its tonic effect on horseplayers. Sitting in the august grandstand, breathing in the horses and hay and fresh-mown bluegrass, Charlie often felt as if he were drifting back in time. He sometimes turned toward the thunder of hooves half expecting to find Seabiscuit in the lead.
During the final week of Spring Race Meet, Charlie was joined in the grandstand by his father. Drummond’s heart had healed entirely in Martinique and, after nine weeks in Geneva, his mental condition had begun to show improvement. In Kentucky, he was happy just to be in his son’s company.
On their third day together, a few minutes before the final race, Charlie said, “I’m going to make a run downstairs. Need another cup of burgoo?” The robust meat stew was a Keeneland specialty, and a favorite of Drummond’s.
Drummond smiled. “That would be nice, thank you.”
Charlie headed to the aisle, then turned back to Drummond. “This is your sixth cup of burgoo, and you’ve yet to impart an interesting piece of information about it.”
Drummond lifted his shoulders. “I don’t have one.”
“With a name like burgoo, we ought to be able to find one.”
Leaving him to soak in the sunshine, Charlie went to watch the post parade, in particular Queen of the Sands, a stocky dark brown mare with a white star between intelligent eyes. Her illustrious ancestry included two Derby winners. Her owner, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, seemed to have a golden touch of late, although rumors swirled that his gold was in fact a new detection-defying anti-inflammatory drug that could mask pain, allowing horses to run faster.
Charlie was known to bin Zayed less as a horseplayer than as the son of Drummond Clark, the retired spy who had recently purchased a chateau in Switzerland with the proceeds from the illegal sale of a Russian atomic demolition munition. Rumor was, Drummond had another ADM.
Bin Zayed, the chief benefactor of an international terrorist network, suspected that Charlie had learned the location of the second bomb from his father and might be persuaded to give it up to pay off his gambling debts.
The CIA had fed this information to bin Zayed through cutouts in Saudi Arabia.
In truth, Charlie’s betting and bourbon were just cover. Alice, waiting in Paris, understood. His real reason for being in Kentucky was to sell a washing machine.
