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
Kurt Steiner 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
The four interlopers crouched at the Shadowfax’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.
