Off the Chart

‘Oh, come on,’ Anne said. ‘This is safer than waitressing. Restaurant work, there’s a truly perilous career. Never know what dangerous characters you’re going to run across.’

Sal Gardino stood up, nodded his approval, and left.

‘One more year,’ Daniel said when Sal was gone. ‘Six months if we’re lucky. Then we call it a day.’

‘You’re worried about something?’

‘Not worried, no. It’s just that my perspective on risk and danger has changed lately. Having someone I care about.’

‘If you’re really worried, we could stop now.’

‘Do you want that, Anne?’

‘What do you want?’

He looked at her for a moment, then turned back to the stack of papers.

‘Six more months, we’ll never have to dirty our hands again.’

‘And then?’

‘And then we can retire to this lovely spot.’

‘Live in the jungle.’

‘Build your dream house, a tropical bungalow, whatever you want. It’s perfect here. Wild parrots, fantastic fishing. Like the Keys, only more pristine. Not to mention excellent tax advantages.’

‘Live here and do what?’

‘You know what.’

‘I want to hear you say it.’

‘All right,’ Daniel said. ‘Raise our children in the Garden of Eden, start over, get it right.’

‘Keep them isolated? No cartoons, no computer games.’

‘We’d be great parents,’ he said.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because we love each other.’

‘That’s all it takes?’

‘It’s a damn good start,’ he said.

For the next ten days, they followed the ship’s progress on the laptop.

After taking on 840,000 barrels of North Slope crude, the Rainmaker departed from Berth 5 of the Alyeska Marine Terminal across the bay from Valdez, Alaska, on a blustery afternoon. All eleven of the Rainmaker’s tanks were full and she rode low and slow in the heavy seas of the northern Pacific. The ship was owned by TransOcean Shipping Lines, an American corporation based in San Francisco, although for tax purposes the Rainmaker was registered in Panama and flew the Panamanian flag of convenience. For the first few hundred miles the ship was battered by gales. She took eight days to steam down the coast of California and around the Baja Peninsula and across the eastern Pacific to the Panama Canal. For their purposes, the canal was an ideal choke point, funneling a huge percentage of the hemisphere’s traffic through a narrow band of sea.

When the tanker passed through the Miraflores Lock on the Pacific side at four-thirty in the afternoon, the ship’s image was captured by a Web camera and a few seconds later the image was broadcast on the Internet Web site operated by the Panama Canal Authority. The Web camera was updated every few seconds and showed the constant stream of ships through the first Pacific lock. Sal monitored the Web site to double-check the data coming from the FROM system.

‘Headed our way,’ Sal said. ‘Right on schedule.’

With Anne looking over his shoulder, Sal sat at their tiny desk and tapped out the code to slip into the FROM. From this point on, they’d camp inside the Web site for the moment-by-moment updates on the ship’s position.

‘Shit,’ Sal said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

Daniel set aside the Mac-10 he was cleaning and came over.

‘What?’

‘There’s a lag,’ Sal said. ‘Look.’

Anne and Daniel leaned close to the computer. The stream of data that had always flowed smoothly across the screen, updated every two or three seconds, had slowed to a crawl.

‘What is that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sal said. ‘But it’s not right.’

‘Have they fingered us? They know we’re inside?’

‘Could be the satellite. Some kind of weather interference. But it’s never been this slow.’

As they watched, the screen blinked as if the laptop were losing power; then the stream of numbers and coded letters resumed its normal flow.

Daniel stepped back.

‘A hiccup in the transmission,’ Daniel said. ‘Nothing to worry about. A thunderstorm over the Pacific. Lightning in Guam. No big deal.’

‘Yeah,’ Sal said. ‘Could be.’

Anne said, ‘They could do that, know we’re watching? Figure our location?’

‘If they had reason to be suspicious, yeah, top security people might be able to discover we’ve hacked the site,’ Sal said. ‘But track us back here? Not unless they’ve got the Pentagon in on it, a supercomputer doing the work. Not some piddling corporate security system. Or it could be the mercs.’

Daniel shook his head at Sal, but Anne said, ‘Mercs? What’s that?’

Turning away from her, Daniel said, ‘Mercenaries. Hired guns.’

‘First I’ve heard of that,’ she said.

‘There’ve been a couple of cases,’ said Daniel. ‘Both times in the China Sea. A gang of ex-soldiers hired by the shipping companies.’

‘And what? They arrested some pirates?’

‘Took them out is more like it,’ Sal said.

‘Took them out? Murdered them?’

Daniel flashed a look at Sal and said to Anne, ‘The details are sketchy.’

‘But they’re out there,’ Anne said. ‘And that’s who this is?’

‘It’s the weather,’ Sal said. ‘Just some damn lightning storm.’

They watched for a while longer as the data scrolled at 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 slammed the steel deck.

She sat up, pressed her back flat against the wall, and was fumbling with the Mac-10, trying to find the right grip, when she made out the shadow of a man moving to the rail. Then saw the bright flashes as he unleashed on Sal and the rest of her crew following her up the ladder.

The man got off a dozen rounds before Anne Bonny could raise her weapon. Sal screamed and one of the Nicaraguans cursed in Spanish and went silent. Anne Bonny aimed at the center of the body armor sheathing the man’s back and curled her finger against the cool metal and the tall man bucked forward and tumbled over the side.

She blew out a breath, but before she could move again, dozens of spotlights bathed the deck in staggering brightness and in the same instant the whup and blare of a helicopter sounded from the north.

‘Stay down, Anne. Stay down!’

All around her, automatic weapons erupted, the raw thuds and clangs of bullets slamming the ship’s tough hide.

Daniel’s voice had come from her right, roughly fifty feet away. She rose from her crouch and craned around the edge of the wall, which she could see in the blue-white glare was not a wall at all but a yellow cargo container emblazoned with the logo of the Maersk shipping line.

‘Anne, flat on the deck! Stay down.’

A staccato chain of blasts cut him off. Louder ones answered back and a dozen more of the muffled shots replied. Then it was silent. To the north she saw the helicopter searchlight prowling the dark waters on the starboard side of the ship. Again and again, a large-caliber machine gun unloaded on men in the water. One of their speedboats exploded, the fireball blooming against the black sky.

Facedown, she wormed to the edge of the yellow container and peered toward the spot where she’d last heard Daniel’s voice.

Two men in camouflage pants and black T-shirts were standing over Daniel’s body. They gripped silenced weapons. The taller of the two men said something to the other and the man unloaded his weapon at Daniel’s body. She thought she saw Daniel twist aside in time to avoid the gunfire; then both men scrambled out of view.

A wail broke from Anne’s throat, but before she could rise to fire, she was staring at a pair of black boots not more than a yard from her nose.

‘Fuckin’ move and you’re dead.’ His growl was all New York, the nasal bray of a street punk. ‘Shove it out slow, that fucking gun. You hear me, cunt? Twitch and you’re dead.’

A year before, she would have obeyed instantly, raising her hands in relief that this long and terrifying dream was done. But that was before Daniel. Before he led her to the edge of the precipice, took her hand in his, and looked past the surface of her eyes into regions of her self she had barely sensed were there and the two of them leaped over the brink, dropping and dropping in one long ecstatic rush, only to land in the black heart of this moment.

Anne Bonny Joy nudged the Mac-10 forward along the deck, inch by inch until it was fully exposed; then without a flicker of hesitation she slid her hand down the stock and squeezed off a half-dozen rounds at the toes of the black boots and watched them jerk and dance for a half-second; then she spun to the right, came to her feet and sprinted to the rail, and dived into the bottomless dark.

In the choppy sea she stripped a life jacket from one of the Nicaraguans. She ducked away from the spotlights, stroking slowly and steadily beyond the perimeter of their search zone. Through the night, she paddled and drifted in a swoon of dehydration, rage, and despair. She was carried by the current mile after mile northward until an hour after sunrise she was spotted by a Panamanian fishing boat and plucked from the sea.

They put her ashore on a beach at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and she used some of the American dollars she was carrying to work her way south by bus down the Mosquito Coast. Campesinos on the bus turned to stare at her. As Anne slumped in her seat, an old woman nudged her shoulder, checking for life. At Punta Castillo Anne chartered a skiff to the Barra de Colorado. In a deadened haze, she left the boat behind and trekked through fifteen miles of rain forest and made it to the lodge late in the afternoon four full days after the disaster on the Rainmaker.

Taking cover in a gully on the outskirts of the camp, she spent an hour listening to the shrieks of parrots and howler monkeys. She sniffed the air but detected neither foreign aromas nor the charred ruin of the camp. Until dusk she waited; then finally she rose and entered the camp.

In the gathering darkness she inched along the shadowy edges of the buildings, a pocketknife her only weapon. The sour stench of the staff latrine, a can of garbage overturned and raided by jungle creatures. The cigarette reek of the bunkhouse where the Sandinistas slept, and at every step there were the vaporous echoes of voices.

She slipped into the main cabin that she and Daniel had shared the last weeks. Their bed was neatly made. She stared at his comb lying on the dresser and her brush, which lay beside it. She wiped her eyes clear and stepped over to the bathroom mirror and took it down from its hook. She calmed the jitter in her fingers and dialed the numbers and swung open the steel door. For a moment in the gloom she thought all was well, then she reached out and ran her hands across the bare shelves and a low groan rose from her chest. Someone had beaten her back to the camp and looted the reserves.

The journey back to Florida took two weeks. Riding Greyhounds through the long nights, exiting at dawn, eyes down, speaking to no one. Staying in cheap motels along the coast, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. Blinds shut tight against the daylight, drinking herself to oblivion while she spent the impossibly long days staring at the pitted walls and the blank screens of televisions. Paranoid, grieving, so twitchy she couldn’t sleep. Not even in those desperate weeks after her parents’ deaths had she felt so hopeless.

Somewhere east of Pensacola she woke from a drowse, jerked upright in her bus seat, and startled the teenage kid in a cowboy hat beside her.

‘You okay, ma’am?’ The kid had taken his Stetson off and set it in his lap. ‘Bad dream?’

Anne looked at the boy for a moment, then turned her eyes to her window, at the palm trees and scrub brush flashing past.

‘I wish it were,’ she said. ‘I wish to hell it were.’

5

Oh, come on, Thorn. Even a guy like you could find a use for two million bucks.’

‘Not really, Marty.’

Marty Messina shook his head and groaned. He was a big man with a blocky head and coarse black hair that he wore in a military flattop. An inch of hair across the front was greased into a small curl like a perfect wave rolling off the black ocean of his skull. He was several inches above six feet. In the years since Thorn had seen him last, Marty had chunked up, and now dangerous muscles flared in his shoulders and arms. His neck was so thick, he probably had to custom-order his flowered shirts. He wore white high-top tennis shoes with a complicated lacing system, and skintight blue jeans and a black rayon shirt printed with yellow hibiscus blooms. The shirt was opened to the sternum, showing off a pad of black hair that rose to his throat. Five, six years ago when he’d been sent away to prison, Marty had been fond of heavy gold jewelry, but they must’ve had a fashion class up there, because now he wore only a single diamond stud pinned to the top of his right ear.

Marty shook his head and made a show of sighing and marching over to the wood stairway of Thorn’s stilt house and planting his butt on the fourth step with such resolve, it appeared he meant to stay as long as it took for Thorn to cave in.

Resetting his grip on the pine slat, Thorn pressed it against the sawhorse, then drew the handsaw back and forth through the last inch of softwood. When the excess piece dropped in the grass, he smoothed away a couple of brittle ends on the slat and stepped over to the shade of a tamarind tree and set it on the bench that was three-quarters complete. He brushed the sawdust from his hands and wrists and looked out at Lawton Collins, who was napping in a hammock strung between two coconut palms a few yards from the rocky shore of Blackwater Sound.

It was about four o’clock on that May afternoon, and Blackwater Sound shivered with sharp blue light. A brown pelican coasted a few feet above the still water, carried along by a warm draft from the west. An Everglades breeze full of mold spores and mosquitoes and the first ozone whiffs of a spring thunderstorm. It had been a brutally dry year. During the winter only a couple of cold fronts had plowed all the way down the state, and those brought no rain. And so far, the summer monsoon season still hadn’t kicked in.

His grass was charred and crispy underfoot, but the bougainvillea seemed ecstatic about the drought, and their great clouds of purple and pink and white cascaded over trees and lesser shrubs all around the perimeter of his five acres. The wild lantana and the penta were doing fine as well. For generations those indigenous plants had thrived in the inch of sandy soil dusting the limestone rubble that passed for land in the Florida Keys. Regularly flooded by the salty sea or scraped back to nubs by hurricanes, those native plants seemed to bloom with even greater flourish after each new trial.

The year of relentless heat had been nearly ruinous for Thorn’s fly-tying business. Out on the flats the bonefish and reds were lethargic in the overheated water. A warmer-than-average winter in the Northeast and a series of airline crashes had cut the tourist flow by half, so the fishing guides who worked the flats hadn’t snapped up Thorn’s custom flies in the numbers they had in the years before. And though Thorn had almost exhausted his savings and was starting to make uneasy calculations whenever he looked into the pantry, he wasn’t about to confess any of that to Marty Messina.

Back when Marty Messina had been a bush-league dope peddler around the upper Keys, word was Marty was connected to a Miami crime family. Whether it was true or not Thorn didn’t know, but the guy certainly had acted the part. As a sideline, he’d laundered some of his profits through Tarpon’s, a waterfront restaurant he operated in nearby Rock Harbor. Probably through dumb luck, Marty signed on a young chef who’d discovered some creative uses for cinnamon and bananas and exotic Caribbean fruits in his fish dishes. Nobody had ever cooked that way in Key Largo before, and the restaurant became a trendy hit with locals. Even Thorn had gone there once or twice for special occasions.

Marty kept the prices low, routinely buying rounds of drinks for the whole bar to celebrate his great good fortune. But then a trawler Marty was piloting was boarded by the DEA just off Islamorada. Nearly a ton of Mexican grass was aboard at the time. Within a few weeks Marty was sent away to perfect his croquet skills in a minimum-security prison somewhere in north Florida, a place that housed corrupt politicos, white-collar embezzlers, and other well-lawyered crooks. In his absence, the restaurant changed hands, the chef moved on, and finally the place became just another tourist joint, pumping out fish sandwiches and limp fries.