Death Echo

in the water.

“They’ll catch up,” she said over the engine. “That Zodiac they have goes like stink.”

“Make ’em work for it.”

The meter on the chart plotter’s electronic screen quickly climbed to thirty knots.

“You’re really pissed,” Emma said, reading Mac better than either of them expected.

“I thought Harrow or one of his hires pulled the trigger on Tommy.”

“Doubt it,” Emma said. “Tommy made a better puppet than we do.”

“Yeah. Damn it.”

“This fast enough for you?” she asked.

All Mac said was, “Why didn’t you question Harrow about any Russian involvement? The SR-1 Vektor isn’t something everyone uses. Other guns are more available, cheaper, and more reliable-unless you know how to tape the safety in the off position.”

“One, Harrow wouldn’t have told us. Two, the dumber he thinks we are, the more room we’ll have to maneuver.”

“They’ll throw us away faster than a used condom.”

“You think?” she asked sarcastically.

She swerved the dinghy around some rocks, instinctively using a gentle touch at high speed.

“Did you believe Harrow?” Mac asked.

Emma thought for a moment. “He’s a gamer by nature and training. He could have told the truth, but only if he thinks we’ll believe it’s a lie.”

“I hate spooks.”

“Me included?”

“You’re an ex-spook. Hate has nothing to do with how I feel about you.”

In that moment, Emma did something she’d never been able to do in the past. She took Mac at his word.

“Same goes,” she said. “Tim is different. If he doesn’t think he has better cards than you do, he won’t play the game.”

“What about you?” Mac asked, looking over his shoulder.

The Zodiac was behind them, hauling at least three passengers at high speed.

“I like to keep paranoids like Tim comfortable,” Emma said. “That’s when he gets sloppy.”

“How did he get sloppy with you?”

“By banging one of his office staff on the side, but only after he was convinced that I trusted him completely. He forgot that I had access to his expense accounts and travel vouchers, as well as hers. The second time they spent a weekend in adjoining rooms at the same hotel, I went to confront Tim on the subject. He was busy at the time.”

“Polishing his desk.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Harrow’s an idiot to screw around on a woman like you.”

“Thanks.” She smiled widely. “In truth, he didn’t get nearly as much out of me in bed as you did. And vice versa.”

Mac ran his knuckles lightly over her cheekbone. “It was really good. Especially the vice versa.”

They skipped along through tidal races and down channels, retracing their earlier track. This time she didn’t see any other boats.

The whirlpool was gone, too.

Mac glanced over his shoulder several times. The dinghy and the Zodiac were both blazing over the water, but Harrow’s boat had more muscle. It was slowly closing in. No surprise there. The Agency could afford to play with really expensive toys, both human and machine.

“You know what bothers me most about this whole goat-roping?” Mac asked as he pulled out his cell phone.

The gods were with him. There was a satellite overhead.

“Speak,” she said.

“Everybody wants us to succeed. The FBI could have blown us out of the water, but only gave us a smack on the butt. Ditto for Demidov,” Mac added. “The same doubled for Harrow and his handlers.”

“No mystery there,” she said. “This is the kind of game where everybody has cheats in place except you and me.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. All we have is a hole card everyone knows about.”

“Blackbird.”

Mac pushed the button that would give Faroe a scrambled call.

Emma drove while Mac gave St. Kilda a summary of what had happened. By the time he was finishing up, she was coming off the power, picking a way through the rocks that guarded the entrance to the bay where Blackbird waited, concealed.

“We did a really good job,” she said. “I don’t see the boat.”

Mac’s dark eyes raked the shoreline. Then raked again. “We are so fucked.”

Blackbird was gone.

63

DAY FIVE

NORTH OF DISCOVERY PASSAGE

5:32 P.M.

Emma stared in furious disbelief toward the rocky niche where they had hidden Blackbird. Nothing was there now but a tangle of freshly cut evergreen boughs, random pieces of forest, and a pile of gillnet washing idly against the rocky shore.

“Is Faroe still on the line?” she demanded.

“Can’t you hear him swearing?”

“Over you? Not likely. Tell him to send a seaplane, money, and some good binoculars to the coordinates where we met Harrow.”

“It’s a long shot,” Mac said.

“Do we have a better one?”

“The Agency lost a damn fine officer when they lost you.”

Emma was too angry to appreciate the compliment. With Blackbird gone, she and Mac had to start over.

And the clock simply didn’t have that much time left on it.

Mac was speaking quickly into the phone, watching her through narrowed, black eyes. He was no happier than she was.

“While you’re at it,” he told Faroe, “get Harrow off our butt now. If we’re being watched, we don’t want to give away the whole game. We’ve lost too much ground as it is.”

A pause, then Faroe said, “Grace is on it.”

“She has maybe three minutes before our raggedy-ass cover is completely blown.”

And it was Mac’s experience that when cover was blown, body parts quickly followed.

“Call me when you know something useful,” Faroe said.

“Like how many ways we’ve been screwed?” Mac asked.

The connection was already dead.

Now the Zodiac was less than a half-mile away, its whine of power increasing with each second.

Emma didn’t look up from the dent in the shoreline where Blackbird had been concealed. But not well enough. She hissed a word through her clenched teeth.

“Not your fault,” Mac said. “Obviously I missed a locator bug.”