LITMIR.BIZ

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a steady pace.

      Daniel tapped Sal on the shoulder and asked him to step outside. Sal rose, took another look at the screen, then shrugged and left. Daniel shut the door behind him.

      ‘Anne,’ he said. ‘I think you should stay ashore for this one.’

      His eyes showed her nothing. A depthless smile.

      ‘What? You’re having a premonition? This computer thing?’

      ‘Just do me this favor, one time. Okay?’

      ‘We don’t need to hit it at all,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing special about this one. Something doesn’t feel right, let’s bail.’

      Daniel came over to her and put his hands on her shoulders.

      ‘You won’t do this for me? Just this once. Stay home.’

      ‘What’s going on? You’re phasing me out? I’m supposed to start training to be the happy homemaker?’

      He drew his hands away as if they’d been stung. She hadn’t meant to lash out like that. But she couldn’t bring herself to apologize. He had a different look. Unsure, lost. It unnerved her, seeing him like that. The ground beneath her growing unsteady.

      He swept both hands back through his glossy hair and turned his eyes to a window in the cabin.

      ‘If I died,’ he said, ‘or we got separated, what would you do, Anne?’

      ‘You’re not going to die.’

      He turned to her then, his eyes as harsh as she’d ever seen them.

      ‘I asked you what you’d do.’

      ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’d probably go home.’

      ‘Back to Key Largo.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Back to your brother and your boyfriend?’

      His blue eyes were full of twisting light.

      ‘You asked me a question, Daniel, I’m trying to be honest. I’d go home, try to resume my life. There is no boyfriend. And I have no desire to see Vic.’

      ‘Key Largo,’ he said. ‘Okay, that’s good. Something ever happens, I’ll find you there. That’s where I’ll come.’

      ‘Daniel? What’s wrong? What’s going on?’

      He stared at her for several moments, then said, ‘I’m sorry, Anne. I’m tensed up, that’s all. I’m sorry I bullied you. Forgive me.’

      ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

      But when he came to her and held her, for the first time since they’d met, the fusion of their bodies, that disappearance of their separate selves she’d come to expect and depend on, did not occur.

      On that steamy April afternoon, the Rainmaker passed through the Pedro Miguel Locks, Gatun Lake, and finally the Gatun Locks, then out of the Panama Canal and into the Caribbean Sea, where she went north on her last leg, following the busiest of several shipping lanes that would take her through the Yucatán Straits, up into the Gulf, then into the Mississippi, headed to the Marathon Oil refinery in Garyville, Louisiana, which was midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. She carried a crew of fourteen.

      Using two of the fishing boats from the Gray Ghost Lodge, Daniel and Anne and their crew shoved off three hours after the Rainmaker passed through the last lock of the Panama Canal. Earlier in the day, Marty Messina had set up the rendezvous with two small tankers based in Barranquilla, providing them a GPS location out in the Colombian Basin where they would converge near dawn tomorrow to off-load the crude before scuttling the ship.

      Their crew was a mixed lot. Five former Sandinista guerrillas, well-armed, quiet men who doubled as Gray Ghost fishing guides in the winter. And there were Pedro and Manuel Cruz, two Cuban brothers from Miami who’d assisted Daniel with various rip-offs at the Port of Miami before he strayed from the family business. Two others had peeled off from Vincent Salbone’s Miami crew: Sal Gardino, the young computer guy, and Marty Messina.

      Two hours after departing the Gray Ghost, they spotted the oil tanker a mile to the east, and for the next hour Daniel in the lead boat and Anne Bonny following with Sal Gardino and three of the Nicaraguans shadowed the Rainmaker as it moved north a hundred miles off the Central American coast. At that distance in their high-powered craft, they could seize the ship, tie up the crew, take her to the designated meeting spot, off-load the crude, and still be back in the maze of estuaries of the Barra de Colorado by the day after tomorrow. Long enough for a watchful owner to become alarmed at losing touch with one of his vessels, but too quick to send help.

      When the sea was clear in every direction, Daniel signaled, and the boats came along opposite sides of the Rainmaker. Hull to hull with the tanker, the men readied the grappling hooks. That part hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, same four-pronged steel hooks. Only difference was that theirs were coated with a rubberized layer to soften the clang when they caught the rail.

      In recent years, as piracy had boomed, shipping companies had begun to install laser devices that sensed boarders climbing over the side. Alarms sounded, decks were flooded with light, and usually the pirates fled. If they didn’t, the tanker’s crew was usually ready with powered-up fire hoses to blow them back over the side.

      But Sal Gardino had researched the Rainmaker’s specs and her recent maintenance history and was certain she wasn’t equipped with alarms. Once aboard, Sal would only have to locate and disable the FROM system and the ship would simply vanish from computer screens.

      At Daniel’s signal, the hooks were heaved and they caught to the rails of the big ship and the rope ladders uncoiled beneath them. The Rainmaker was a midsize tanker, just under a thousand feet long and 166 feet wide. At that hour of night, with most sailors customarily spending their free time in quarters and only a skeleton crew working the bridge, it was highly unlikely a boarder would encounter one of the tanker’s crewmen when coming over the side.

      But this night was different from any before.

      Anne Bonny was halfway up the ladder, Pedro, one of the Nicaraguans, and Sal Gardino ahead of her, when she heard the first sharp pops. Her breath seized in her lungs and her hands fumbled for a grip.

      She’d practiced with the Mac-10 at the Gray Ghost Lodge target range and recognized the quick burst. And those first few shots were answered by a duller noise, the suppressed puffs of what surely were silenced weapons.

      At the railing, Pedro hesitated, gripping the rope with one hand while he struggled to unsling the AK-40 from his back. Then there was another round of firing, this one longer. Panicked shouts from the deck, and the metallic chime of slugs flattening against the ship’s iron sides. She heard Daniel’s voice, strangely calm, commanding Marty Messina to take cover.

      ‘Move!’ Anne shouted. ‘They’re in trouble. Move, goddamn it!’

      Raising up, Pedro lifted one foot to the lowest rail, and a half-second later the small man was kicked backward by a burst of fire. He shrieked and somersaulted, the heel of his boot clipping Anne Bonny on the shoulder as he pitched into the sea. For a half-second she lost her grip, burned her hand on the rope as she fought to regain her hold, and scrambled up the rope ladder and wrestled past Sal Gardino, who was paralyzed and gibbering to himself. A techno geek, rendered useless by the first sounds of a gunfight.

      On the top rung of the rope ladder, Anne Bonny paused and found her breath. Head down, crouched below the gunwale, she gripped her Mac-10, formed a quick image of her next move, then sprang up and tumbled over the rail, ducking a shoulder, slamming into the rough pebbled deck, and rolling once, twice, a third time until she came to rest against an iron wall.

      She was dizzy and nauseous and for a moment thought she’d been hit by one of the slugs strafing the deck. She closed her eyes and scanned her body but sensed no numbness, no hot prickling. Just a throb in her shoulder where she’d

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