Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2013
Copyright © Penguin Books Ltd, UK 2013
Cover illustration: Larry Rostant
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
ISBN: 978-0-718-15966-5
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Part Three
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.
Plato, Timaeus
They were in waters off the coast of Uruguay when the sound of the klaxon dashed whatever meagre hopes Kapitän von Franz had allowed himself. They were under attack.
The submarine rang to the sound of men thundering to their stations. Von Franz passed them, tumbling out of bunks, pulling on boots, as he shouldered his way along narrow, grey passageways. They were just a skeleton crew but etched into each of their faces was something he’d seen before. Shell shock. The look of men scarred by battle.
And yet, how could they be shell shocked? They had not seen battle. He had found himself gazing into their hollow eyes, wanting to see some sign. But there was nothing. Just an awful blankness. And von Oswald, the archaeologist, not among the dead. Von Oswald was missing, in other words.
‘Do you remember?’ he’d said to First Watch Officer Hansen.
The man had reared back.
‘Remember what, Herr Kapitän?’
And for a moment von Franz had considered saying what it was he had seen … the people, the things, the message. But no. And it was funny, because he was an intelligent man, rational, not a man given to flights of fancy, and yet not for one moment did he doubt what he’d witnessed. Never did he consider that hallucinations or madness were what fuelled his experiences. Somehow he knew the message – peace – was real, that it was important, and that it had been meant for him to share with the world.
It was all that mattered. He clattered into the control room, the strangely empty control room, where through the periscope he caught the name HMS Wildflower. A British cruiser, executing a slow turn. It would soon be bearing down upon them, trying to ram them.
No, he thought. To come all this way, to have seen what he’d seen, then to meet their end this way. No. He wouldn’t let it happen.
‘Dive!’ he screamed. ‘Dive.’
Valve handles in the control room spun and time seemed to slow as von Franz watched the prow of the Wildflower carve the sea towards them. The tanks filled and the periscope was submerged as the U-boat slipped slowly – agonizingly slowly – back beneath the waves. Just in time to avoid impact.
But he knew better than to relax. On the surface the Wildflower would be throwing its engines into reverse, and von Franz imagined the scenes above: specialists on deck rushing to the K-guns and priming the depth charges; the screw stopping, engines silent for a moment as they powered down and idled; men in the sonar room crowding around an ASDIC operator with headphones pressed to his ears, listening to the ping of the equipment. Then instructions relayed: depths and distances, commands given, handles turned, turrets rotated. And at a command from the bridge the K-guns fired, their fizz and thump followed by the roar of eight simultaneous splashes as the gargantuan barrels – ‘ash cans’ the sailors called them – crashed into the sea and sank. Eight barrels of plunging death.
As if on cue he heard, ‘Depth charges deployed, Herr Kapitän.’
They would be Mark VII, and the British navy would have doubled their sink velocity to over fifteen feet per second by adding weights; they’d be distributed in a diamond pattern to increase the certainty of catching the German sub in the blast radius; and they were equipped with a charge powerful enough to rupture a submarine hull at up to twenty feet.
But they were still just depth charges.
Not the Hedgehogs, which were more powerful and exploded on impact. Or the Squids, the anti-submarine mortars that were automatically fired by sonar range recorders. No, the depth charges relied on human operators, judgement and guesswork.
That was what von Franz told himself as he braced his back against the hull, which groaned as the water pressure built and the U-boat continued diving.
Two hundred feet, Herr Kapitän. Two hundred and fifty feet, Herr Kapitän.
He imagined the barrels of the depth charges sinking, trails of bubbles in their wake. He saw the wild eyes of the men in the control room. All, like him, unshaven. All, like him, stinking: of fear and body odour. Neither of those things in short supply on a U-boat.
He closed his eyes and prayed for deliverance. He told himself that they’d survived hundreds of depth charge attacks. Hundreds. And not only that but this sub, this particular sub, could dive deeper than any other sub on the planet. Past the reach of any other vessel, past the reach of depth charges.
On the other hand.
On the other hand they couldn’t dive faster than sinking depth charges. They were already damaged from before. Already he could hear the complaint of tormented, twisting metal – so strong but so, so damaged. He saw grey flakes of paint flutter almost prettily to the steel floor. Watched straining rivets. All their comms were out, of course. Their last message had been sent – when? – over two months ago. So much had changed in the meantime. Then, he had captained a vessel of war, loyal to the Führer. But now, he was on a mission of peace, intending to take it to the Allies.
If only they could somehow know that, those men in the cruiser above. All he could hope was that God smiled on them all. Because, after all, the British had just one chance. When the charges went off the blasts would disrupt the Wildflower’s sonar and the U-boat could slip away while it recalibrated. If they could just survive the depth charges …
Whump.
The dull, terrifyingly familiar sound of charges detonating.
One … two … three …
They sounded near.
The men in the control room braced themselves as they were buffeted by primary shock waves. They knew the first set was bad, but it was the second set that really damaged the hull.
Four … five … six …
They were flung about.
Seven … eight …
Still the U-boat heaved and rocked and groaned and shook, and the already tortured metal wailed in protest.
Until, at last, it stopped.
There was silence. Kapitän zur See Wilhelm von Franz realized that he had been holding his breath and he let it out at the same time as the men around him, a combined gasp of relief breaking out inside the room. Their prayers had been answered. Perhaps God was looking kindly upon them.
Then, the sub lurched. There was a great cracking noise followed by the sound of water.
And for the final time the klaxon began to sound.
All shoes are silent on the carpet of the West Wing. It is, given that it stands at the centre of the free world, a strangely quiet place; it seems to hum. Which is why, though he stalked back and forth across the carpet of the outer office of the Oval Office, Senator Timms did it quietly. Timms, in his late sixties, had salt and pepper hair. He wore a black suit and overcoat that he hadn’t bothered to remove, that swished as he turned to pace from one end of the office to the other. Behind thick-rimmed glasses his eyes twinkled, dancing with excitement or nerves or possibly both. Why, it was impossible to tell. He spoke constantly into his cellphone but his voice, though harsh, was low, and even though he was here at the heart of the White House, he held one hand in front of his mouth as though to deter lip-readers. Habit, perhaps.
Behind a desk sat the President’s personal secretaries, wearing headsets and fielding calls. An aide stood by the set of double doors leading to the rose garden, one half of his grey suit bathed in the pale yellow light that streamed through the glass and flooded the cream carpet. He watched as Timms spoke into his phone while he paced, his voice remaining harsh and low. The aide and the secretaries exchanged worried, covert glances. Something to do with the urgency of Timms’ voice, how he felt the need to keep his voice down.
And then, abruptly, Timms’ pacing stopped. His phone snapped shut and he brushed back his overcoat and jacket to plant one hand on his hip, the other kneading his chin as he stood for a moment, lost in thought.
The aide watched.
The secretaries watched as Timms seemed to reach a decision.
‘I need to see the President now,’ he barked at the aide. He was already moving forward, pausing for just the briefest moment to peer through the spyhole in the Oval Office door and then, before anybody could stop him, going straight in.
‘Mr President, sir,’ they heard, ‘we have a situation. Agency 08 are tracking a level one Fast Mover in the mid-Atlantic rift—’
The door slammed behind him.
Silence reigned once more.
A smell of coffee, of aftershave. Screens on every wall, from desktops to the soundproofed ceiling tiles.
Stiff-backed operators sat at consoles. They wore headsets, barking voice-recognition commands as their hands moved at dizzying speeds over keyboards and touch screens. They reached for coffee cups and drank without taking their eyes from the screen in front of them, watching like hawks as satellite images formed, were scanned then dismissed, replaced by the next, images moving at a dizzying speed as coordinates were analysed and logged, data dribbling down screens like on neon-lit windowpanes. Grids within grids, scans of scans. Facial recognition software filtered crowds and scanned knots of people; the pictures were being screened, tagged and filled. On other screens operators monitored psychedelic blogs of thermal imaging; some sat monitoring security networks, feeding conversations into lightning-fast keyword recognition software. Individually these people were unsurpassed in their intelligence capabilities, but as a team – as a team whose job it was to retrieve and process information – they were the best in the world.
Behind them were three senior agents, two in black suits, one in dark fatigues, with arms folded across their chests, hands thrust into pockets. The two men in suits looked nervous. They swallowed. Light flickered on drawn, pensive faces and droplets of sweat glittered on their temples, despite the air conditioning.
The combat fatigues guy, on the other hand, was more relaxed. Neither an operator nor a suit, his role here was – for the time being, at least – an uninvolved observer. Screens, data, read-outs. Not really his thing. Hurting people, that was his thing. And since there was nobody in the room he was currently authorized to hurt, he simply watched the action unfold. Watching the operators – the two nervous, perspiring agents.
And Crowley.
The boss of Agency 08 – the CO – Crowley was too agitated to stand; instead, Crowley paced, painted by the phosphorescent glare of the screens as he passed back and forth in front of them.
‘Patch it front,’ he commanded to one of the men in suits by his side.
The order was relayed. Fingers danced and a satellite image on a main screen was made redundant and replaced with a fresh image, different altogether. Transmitted from a mid-ocean underwater beacon, it showed a vague shape underwater. Impossible to make out exactly what it was – submersible, human, animal, something else – but it appeared to be travelling fast, very fast, towards the surveillance beacon, a cloak of ripples disrupting the water in its wake.
‘Is everything in place?’ demanded Crowley. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, ‘The President has given authorization to initiate the operation. You will do as I say. To the letter. This is my operation.’
Yes, his operation. He’d even named it, with a somewhat uncharacteristic lack of flair: Operation Entrapment.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied one of the agents. Like his colleagues, his gaze was torn between the action on the centre screen and Crowley. Behind the CO’s back the agents exchanged nervous glances. ‘We’ve had confirmation that the target has passed the SOSUS relay, at speed and with a straight trajectory. It’s definitely not Russian – way too fast. The beacon’s data shows that the vessel left the rift at well over fifty knots and accelerated. We have live satellite feed now in ninety seconds …’
‘Good,’ said Crowley. ‘Remember, we want them alive.’
‘But, sir, these are terrorists.’
He smiled to himself. ‘Is that what you think?’
More nervous glances.
‘Sir, they’ve killed—’
‘No one, so far,’ interrupted Crowley, silencing the agent with one look.
All eyes returned to the feed as the objects moved closer and closer.
On either side of the secluded inlet, jetties protruded into the water like crooked teeth. Tethered to them were long-forgotten rowing boats that rocked gently on the current, rotting in the relentless Haitian heat. Sunlight danced on calm waters, clouds of insects bobbed and dived, and the silence was broken only by the faint hum of activity from nearby Labadee Beach. It should have been a tiny bit of paradise. It would have been – if not for the body floating in the water.
Three fishermen peered at it in silence. They were accustomed to wasting their days dangling fishing poles from one of the jetties, keeping thirst at bay with a brew or two, but for now they’d put aside their poles and for several minutes had watched the body float, face down, bobbing around near the support struts of the jetty with arms and legs waving loosely in the water.
They frowned sadly as they studied it. Most likely washed in from the open sea, the body was that of a white person, and young by the look of … him? Or her? It was tough to tell: the corpse was dressed in jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt. The hair was long and floated in the water like a dark halo.
One of the men lowered a retriever hook and poked at the body, which rolled languidly in the water until it was facing upwards. It was a boy, they saw now. A teenager – seventeen or eighteen or so. And though the manner of his death had surely been distressing, his eyes were closed and he looked at peace.
And then his eyes opened, and he looked at the three fishermen, who gasped and jerked back, the man holding the pole stumbling with such force that he fell on to the jetty. They stared at each other, eyes wide, and though not a word was said they were all thinking the same thing: that it was not possible, that the boy was surely … dead. Because hadn’t they watched him floating face down in the water? Nobody could hold their breath for that long.
Then one of them cottoned on, put his hands to his hips and burst out laughing at the stupidity of it all. They’d been fooled, he announced, guffawing. The boy had played a practical joke on them. Whether he was wearing an aqualung or using a snorkel, it didn’t matter, he’d made fools of them all right.
They peered over the edge of the jetty to share the joke, calling that it was okay and congratulating him on his prank, but the boy was nowhere to be seen – he was either hiding or had gone off to play his tricks elsewhere – and they laughed to think of the carefree ways of youth.
They laughed so hard that they barely noticed the small speedboat as it came purring into the inlet, a girl at the wheel.
Her name was Marta Angeles. She saw the fishermen and couldn’t help but envy them, because although at seventeen she was certainly young, she was not at all carefree. Not today, anyway. Today she was as nervous as hell.
Nobody would have known it to look at her. She was an expert at hiding her emotions. But she knew it. She knew because of the sick feeling in her stomach, the way her hands slipped on the wheel of the boat, and because she had to fight the urge to chew her lip, which was something she only ever did when she was nervous.
As she eased back on the throttle she thought she saw something beneath one of the jetties. A boy treading water and looking towards the fishermen. What caught her attention was the fact that he was a white boy. A white boy with long hair and – even from this distance – piercing eyes that shone in the shadows. But when she looked again, he was gone.
And next, she was concentrating on bringing the Consuela to dock while Ren jumped out with the bowline in hand. As he secured the boat her thoughts returned to what lay ahead.
She tried not to think about the chainsaw.
The fishermen had been wrong about the boy beneath the jetty. He had no aqualung and no snorkel – nor was he playing a prank – and though, like Marta, he was undoubtedly young, he too was a long way from carefree. He too had worries of his own.
For a start, his head hurt: pain radiated from a tender bump at the back of his skull where a scab had started to form. But it was just a dull ache and would soon be gone, nothing to worry about. No, the problem was, the real problem – and he was sure to be laughing about this in a minute, because it was so completely random and absurd – but he couldn’t actually remember anything. Nothing before waking in the water. He knew things: like over there was a boat with a cute girl getting out of it; the salt water would help cleanse the wound at the back of his head; and the final shot of the American Civil War was fired on 22 June 1865. Just nothing involving himself, that was all. It was as though he could see the picture, bright and clear, but he wasn’t in it; as though in his head was an empty space – no, a locked room – a locked room that no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t open.
But it would come to him, wouldn’t it? After all, this was amnesia, a common side effect of a blow to the head, and usually temporary. He just had to be patient, not panic, and wait for something to jog his memory. That’s what he decided.
In the meantime, he watched the girl. She wore frayed denim cut-off shorts, a loose white shirt, and she tied her hair back before she stepped out of the boat. With her was an older guy whose dark hair fell across his eyes; he wore jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing tattoos. And though their motions were casual, and they even smiled at one another, the boy in the water could tell there was something worrying them – both of them. As the girl’s gaze swept the inlet he ducked into the dark water around the supports but continued to watch. Yes. There it was. A worry that darkened her face. She was chewing her lip too.
With the boat secure, they left the jetty and disappeared into undergrowth by the edge of the inlet. The boy trod water some more and listened to the chatter of the fishermen, who by the sounds of things had decided to retire for refreshments. It seemed like an age but when, at last, they’d gone he swam to a pier where he pulled himself out of the water, on to the warm and flaking wood. He stood for a moment or so, taking note of himself and his surroundings. He was wearing sneakers, jeans and a white T-shirt a bit too small for him.
And feeling … odd. Short of breath. Dizzy. And then suddenly so faint that he had to drop to one knee, pushing his knuckles into the jetty as he struggled with the sensation, gasping for air.
It passed. He stood with a slightly sick feeling in his stomach, clutching at his head and massaging his temples. He saw his palm for the first time, with three small inscriptions on it: ΛΥΤΡΩΣΗ ΔΙΑΦΩΤΙΣΗ ΣΩΤΗΡΙΑ.
It was Greek. He knew that. Just did. And wondering how he knew that, he stared at his palm for some moments hoping it would jog his memory. But no. Nothing.
He knew Greek, but he couldn’t even remember his own name. He almost smiled at the irony of it all.
Because he knew what irony was too.
Oh, come on, Marta had told herself earlier, as she and Ren were weaving their way across the marketplace in search of a cab. All that talk about the chainsaw was just that – talk. A bit of badman myth-making. Haiti’s most dangerous man or not, it was more likely that Marcon had a photograph of his mother hanging on the wall behind him and, like every other crime lord in the Caribbean, left his dirty work to hired hands.
A terrified cab driver had dropped them off – and if a cab could scurry away, then that one had. They’d walked up the long path to a faded white house surrounded by swaying cane fields and announced themselves to an old woman who sat chewing on the porch, an automatic rifle on her lap. She had directed them through to a large front office.
And there, behind a vast desk, sat Marcon. His hair was short and neat. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a crisp white shirt, his eyes were unwavering, and hanging on the wall behind his head was a chainsaw.
‘Marta and Lorenzo Angeles,’ he said, voice deep, the accent a mix of French and Creole. ‘It is a pleasure to meet you again.’
It was the second time that Marta and Ren stood before him. The first time had been at their father’s funeral, when it seemed as though hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people had turned out – entire villages – not to mention the region’s traffickers, rivals who had eyed each other across the cemetery.
‘It’s good to meet you too, Mr Marcon,’ said Ren.
He was speaking differently, Marta noticed, bemused despite herself. There was a bit of badman myth-making going on there as well.
‘Father told us a lot about you,’ added Ren.
Marcon’s eyelids drooped. Contained in that droop was the acknowledgement that Jorge Angeles had been a great man, now much missed, but that time had passed since his death. And things had moved on.
And then, after a quiet moment in which these silent understandings settled in the room, his eyes opened. Once again he was regarding them with his flat, cold stare, like a shark, and finally he said what Marta had been dreading.
‘I have a proposition for you.’
She was dreading the question because last night she and Ren had sat on the veranda, at home in Baracoa, and Marta had thought about her plans. She wanted to finish her education then start a career, a proper career – one that didn’t involve being boarded by customs, arrested by border cops or shot by rival smugglers – in medicine, nursing, maybe even as a doctor. Leave Cuba. Learn. Then bring all that knowledge back home and use it. They’d known, of course, that Marcon wanted to make them an offer. That’s what men like him did. But she’d taken Ren’s hand and asked him to swear that, whatever the offer was, he would say no. They were leaving the game, going legitimate.
For years their father had ferried antiquities across the Gulf of Mexico, but when his wife, their mother, had died of tuberculosis – a death that could have been avoided, could so easily have been avoided, if only Cuba had the medicine – well, their father had changed course. Instead of antiquities he smuggled medicine into Cuba, a man on a mission to prevent similar deaths.
After his death, Ren and Marta had continued making his runs, always conscious of rival smugglers moving in, bigger, more ruthless smugglers – men like Victor Marcon, whose priorities lay not in helping the people of Cuba but in lining their own pockets. And doing it by any means necessary. These men had been more than eyeing each other up that day at the cemetery; they’d been eyeing up Jorge’s routes, and much of the two years since their father’s death had been spent fending off ‘friendly offers’ of help, inevitably made ‘out of respect’ for Jorge. He had a name in the region – a reputation as someone who had helped the people – so the usual strategy of simply taking the routes was out of the question. The region’s smugglers relied on the clandestine support of the villages; jeopardizing that support was not a good idea. Ren and Marta, they enjoyed a special kind of protection.
For a while, at least. But time had passed
‘He’ll ask us to ship drugs and take migrants,’ she’d said. ‘Human traffic, Ren. Do you really want to do that?’
‘Of course not,’ he’d replied.
‘That’s what Marcon will want. He’ll want us to do everything Pop hated. That’s why we’re getting out.’
‘Not a good idea to piss him off, Marta.’
‘Oh, come on,’ she’d scoffed. ‘You don’t believe all that stuff about chainsaws, do you?’
Now Marcon was asking how they might feel about ‘expanding their remit’. And as her eyes flitted from him to the chainsaw (and that was rust on the blade, right, not blood?) she could almost see the indecision pouring off Ren. She felt his dilemma: he was a good-hearted man, her brother, but there were ways of fooling yourself that people-trafficking was an okay thing to do – that you were helping others find a better life – and that they could, of course, continue bringing medicine to the island.
Maybe Ren had been having those conversations with himself. Maybe he was thinking of the money he could make, enough to trade a riverside shack in Baracoa for a big-ass house in Havana. Maybe he was thinking that it was one thing for Marta to leave the life and finish her education – she could get an exit visa – but another for him. Because the Cuban government didn’t hand out exit visas to convicted criminals.
The clanking of an overhead fan was the only sound in the room as Ren tried to form words. Until, at last, some appeared.
‘Thank you very much, Mr Marcon,’ he began, ‘it would be—’
He’s going to say yes.
Marta panicked.
‘No, thank you, Mr Marcon,’ she blurted.
They were her first proper words since walking in, and all eyes went to her. She sensed Ren’s glare but didn’t look at him; instead, she felt colour coming to her cheeks as the two guards tensed.
‘No’ was an unfamiliar word in this room.
Marcon put his elbows to the table, touched his fingertips together and said, ‘No, you say?’
‘Well, not no, Mr Marcon,’ she said, ‘I mean … What I mean is …’ and she was trying not to look at the chainsaw without making it obvious that she was trying not to look at the chainsaw, ‘It’s just that Father made us swear we would never take human cargo.’
He never actually had. But come on, he hadn’t needed to. Even so, she felt like there was a big neon sign over her head, flashing: Lie! This is a Big Fat Lie!
‘He made me and Ren swear on our mother’s grave.’
He hadn’t.
Lie! Big Fat Lie!
Marcon looked from Marta to Ren. ‘Is this your decision?’
The fan clanked its little song as she held her breath, waiting for her brother’s answer.
‘It is, Mr Marcon, yes,’ said Ren.
A freeze seemed to settle on the two guards at the other side of the room. Marcon was unreadable.
‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘Nevertheless, you still intend to work the routes? Taking …’ he said the word with just enough of a sneer to let them know how he really felt about their low-volume, low-profit venture, ‘medicine.’
And this time it was Ren who jumped in. ‘Yes, Mr Marcon, just as my father did.’
She tensed. Oh, Ren, no. Not what they’d agreed. She gave him a sideways glance and it was returned with a defiant glare of his own. Fine, she thought. Fine. But you’re on your own. And she shot him back a look she hoped was filthy.
Marcon watched them, waving a finger between them as he said, ‘Something tells me the partnership is dissolving, huh?’
‘I think you might be right, Mr Marcon,’ replied Ren tightly.
‘Then it’s to you I need to speak,’ said Marcon to Ren. ‘I have something else, something valuable that I would like you to take care of …’
Marta felt her chest tighten. They’d been played, she realized. What Marcon had just done was divide and conquer.
He indicated and one of the guards went to a rusting filing cabinet, dragged open a drawer and removed a small knitted rucksack that he tossed to Ren, who caught it. There was something bulky inside and Marta’s stomach lurched. He couldn’t just let them leave, she thought. A man like Marcon, once he’d got his claws into you, he never let go. She found she was shaking her head and had even opened her mouth to say thank you very much, Mr Marcon, but they’d prefer to wait for the cash as agreed with their father, when—
‘Take it to the Outfit in Miami,’ instructed Marcon, ‘and collect from him no less than seventy thousand …’ here he paused for effect, ‘that you may keep, as your fee.’
Marta caught her breath.
It had all gone wrong. The operators knew it. The two nervous agents in suits knew it. The more relaxed agent in fatigues knew it.
Most of all, though, Crowley knew it: Operation Entrapment was going wrong. Horribly wrong.
That vague shape they’d been watching in the centre screen had, for a few precious moments, been within Crowley’s grasp. It had first shown up when a SOSUS underwater monitoring beacon had triggered the alert early that morning. Vectors and coordinates were processed: a fast-moving unidentified vessel was apparently emerging at speed from the midpoint of the Atlantic rift roughly on a parallel with the Caribbean.
The alert had triggered the full contingency response from the Agency. Crowley’s beloved Operation Entrapment commenced, the shape in the sea appeared, and he had it. He had it. Like, so close he could taste it.
And then it had disappeared.
And then – as if that wasn’t disastrous enough – the navy had got involved. Turned out the shape was moving in the direction of the USS Ingram, which was on patrol in the Atlantic, and some asshole in a white suit had panicked, assumed the unidentified object was hostile and ordered pre-emptive action. Crowley had shouted himself hoarse, calling for an abort. But as soon as they came within range the Ingram had fired a heavily modified Mark 54 torpedo from the ship’s helo.
It detonated off the coast of Puerto Rico and everything went offline. The centre screen froze, one pixellated image of nothing in particular, an indefinable shape, fixed in place, before the connection was cut and the screen filled with angry, pulsing static.
The operators bent to their work. The nervous agents chewed the insides of their lips and cast worried sidelong glances at Crowley, who merely stared at the infinite mess on the centre screen, his mouth wide in disbelief, the colour draining from his cheeks. Curses formed on his lips but were never quite delivered, as if there was no obscenity yet invented able to convey the full spectrum of his emotion.
‘Tell me the navy have footage from the torpedo nose cone,’ he said. He turned to one of the nervous agents. ‘Gilwell. Tell me that. At least tell me that.’
Gilwell was the Agency’s tech man; the operators answered to him. He moved among them now to issue orders, pleased to escape Crowley’s orbit, if only for a moment or so.
‘We’re just confirming now, sir,’ came his reply.
A tetchy few minutes passed as one agency conferred with another, then the centre screen was clearing and they were taken back in time to a moment some fifteen minutes before, when they had visual confirmation of activity in the Atlantic – when Crowley had believed that everything would be okay and he was about to oversee the successful execution of Operation Entrapment.
There it was … the shape – or shapes – seen from a slightly different angle than before, that of a fast-approaching torpedo. The image exploded and Crowley was forced to relive the moment.
‘Run it again,’ he ordered through gritted teeth, ‘and freeze. Hold it there.’
The image hung in the room.
‘What are we seeing, Phibbs?’ he asked the second of the sweaty agents.
Phibbs, the Agency’s specialist in marine biology, cleared his throat.
‘Difficult to say, sir.’
Crowley shot him a withering look. ‘How about you try? How about you start by telling me whether or not it’s anything you recognize, huh?’
Phibbs squinted at it.
‘Well?’ prompted Crowley. ‘Does it look human? Aquatic?’
‘No, and it doesn’t look military.’
‘Not Earth military,’ corrected Crowley. ‘Human military.’
‘It certainly looks like a vessel of some sort.’
‘Gilwell, can you enhance it?’
‘Negative, sir. Not unless you want a screen full of pixels.’
‘Okay, Gilwell, let’s try it again. Can you enhance that image?’
‘You want a screen full of pixels, sir?’
‘I want you to do it like they do it on CSI.’
‘No can do, sir. What you’re seeing is as good as footage from the nose cone of our modified Mark 54 Lightweight Hybrid Torpedo moving at close on a hundred knots gets.’
Crowley shot the tech guy a filthy look.
‘That … vessel, then. Where is it now?’
‘The SOSUS beacons are offline from the blast, sir,’ replied Gilwell. ‘At the moment it looks like it disappeared.’
Crowley frowned. ‘Well, you’d better find it again. Send a team now, and scan the area, scan the whole fucking ocean if you have to. Find it.’
Leaving the jetties behind, the boy had come upon the marketplace where the noise, colours and smells sent him reeling. Exquisite food, lewd T-shirts, leather goods and key rings – everything the tourist heart could desire was for sale on stalls set out in higgledy-piggledy rows, shielded from the sun by bright umbrellas and colourful linen fluttering in the breeze. Tourists wandered among locals, with loud and persistent street sellers snapping at their feet; women with bags on their arms hurried among the sightseers; traders struggled with baskets; and three men sat playing drums, adding a beat to the clamour of buy-and-sell, to the whine of moped engines and the blare of car horns.
The boy stopped on the outskirts and watched the crowds ebb and flow. Still he remembered nothing. Still he knocked on that locked door calling for his memory to come out to play. And when it came, would it return in dribs and drabs, in tantalizing glimpses? Or would it land in one big info-dump, like snow falling off a roof? He’d half expected the market to feel familiar, or for someone to materialize from within the shoppers: ‘There you are!’
But no such luck.
He searched for faces, wondered, should he find a cop? He had nothing on him – no wallet, ID, phone, money, nothing – so maybe he’d been robbed, and that was how he’d got the bump on his head. Or perhaps he’d fallen from a boat and should find a tour operator, a lifeguard? What did missing people do, he wondered, when they wanted to be found?
Not panic. It would come to him. In no time at all he’d be laughing about this. He’d be able to congratulate himself on keeping a cool head. In the meantime, he had to keep looking. For what? He’d know when he found it.
He began to move through the market when he suddenly became aware of a kid with an armful of belts jogging along beside him.
‘Hello, boss,’ shouted the kid above the beat of the drums. Eight or nine years old, he was grinning widely. ‘You speak English? French? Creole?’
The boy stopped, noticing that he instinctively clenched his hand, wanting to hide the markings in his palm. He looked at the kid and opened his mouth to speak when he realized that he didn’t know what language he spoke, even what his own voice sounded like.
The kid gave him a prompting look. ‘Boss?’
‘I speak …’ The drums stopped. ‘English.’
‘Oh. You American, huh?’
‘I … I don’t know. Maybe. I sound American, right?’
The kid nodded his head vigorously. ‘Sure. You American. Where you from, boss?’
Good question. ‘I don’t know.’
The kid was taken aback but kept on grinning. ‘You don’t know?’
‘I was in the sea, and …’
‘You were swimming? You come from boat?’
Perhaps that was it. As if in response to the thought, the back of his head began to throb.
‘I’m not sure. Do you know if there have been any, um … boat accidents?’
The kid looked blank. ‘Any boat sink?’ he tried. ‘Anyone lost off boat?’
The grin returned. ‘You fall off boat!’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘Then you need belt. Lifebelt!’ The kid roared with laugher.
This was getting him nowhere.
‘Thank you, but I’ve got a belt … thanks,’ he said.
The kid looked pointedly at his waist, where there was no belt, shook his head and scampered off in search of fresh quarry.
Alone again, the boy continued through the teeming market, further along towards the clothes and leather goods. On a stall overflowing with baseball caps he saw a mirror and for the first time took a look at himself. He had more tattoos, he saw. Two sets of markings, dark and shaped like the flights of an arrow, that ran from the nape of his neck to the collarbone. When his fingers went to them he realized they were unnaturally tender, as though they’d been bruised by whatever accident had caused the bump on his head. But it was just local bruising.
As he was looking at himself in the mirror, feeling alone even though the market swirled noisily around him, the stallholder plopped a cap on his head.
‘You an LA Dodgers fan? Very nice,’ she said.
Who knows? he thought. Maybe I am an LA Dodgers fan.
Then he saw her again – the girl from the boat. She was pretty, he realized, feeling a pang of what he knew to be jealousy when he saw the older man who was with her. And somehow, not because of her looks – not just because of her looks, anyway – he felt a connection there.
Perhaps he should talk to her.
Still with her brother, Marta was standing at a stall admiring fabric, when Ren tapped her on the shoulder.
‘What?’
‘We got to go, Marta.’
‘Don’t glower at me, Ren.’
‘Don’t “glower”? That’s a good word, “glower”. You get that from a book?’
Uh-oh, she thought. He was still sore about what had happened at Marcon’s house.
‘Ren, we were supposed to get out of the game,’ she said. ‘It’s what we wanted.’
‘What you wanted.’
‘We shouldn’t be dealing with people like Marcon, Ren,’ she said. ‘That way is jail. Death.’
He jerked a thumb at the rucksack. ‘And what’s that?’
‘One last job. Enough to set ourselves up.’
‘Oh yeah? You know what it is?’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Do you?’
‘I sneaked a look in the car, sis. It’s gold-plated.’
‘Well? Gold-plated what?’
‘Statue.’
‘What, like an Oscar or something?’
‘No, Marta, it ain’t no Oscar.’
‘Then how come it’s worth so much?’
‘Probably some kind of antique.’
And then she saw the boy.
It was him, from the water. He was wearing a T-shirt that was a little on the small side so the hem didn’t quite meet the waistband of his jeans, and he was looking her way, staring right at her. And despite the fact that his T-shirt was too small and he had an LA Dodgers cap perched on his head, he was …
Madre mía! He was beautiful. A scruffy angel.
Marta tore her gaze away from the scruffy angel just as a street seller came skidding up to Ren, a young kid with dozens of belts looped around his arm.
‘You need a belt, boss?’ he said.
Ren’s belt – or, more specifically, his Iron Maiden belt buckle – was his pride and joy, and he needed no invitation to show it off.
‘Nice belt, boss,’ said the kid. And then, with an extravagant wink, he added, ‘Shame you got no belt like the cowboy over there,’ and with that he jerked his thumb behind him. ‘He got a police badge.’
Police badge.
It took perhaps a second for the words to sink in, and their eyes went to where a figure in a white cowboy hat was quickly retreating behind a suit stand. Next, either instinct or a working knowledge of law enforcement made Marta twist round to see a second man suddenly feign interest in a display of key rings and ripper wallets.
Oh, nuts.
‘Ren,’ she said, ‘we gotta go.’
‘I’m with you on that, sis,’ said Ren, and he took her arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
They were too late. Two men had stepped out, the white cowboy hat in front of them and a younger man in a dark polo shirt behind them. Marta spun round and looked from one agent to the other, assessing their chances.
‘Hold it,’ said the cop in the hat.
Actually, she realized, he wasn’t a cop – he was a customs agent. She recognized him. They’d had dealings before, the kind that made her want to leave the life, that entailed long hours spent cuffed to plastic chairs, the smell of stale coffee, the stares and sneers of passing agents. This one, his name was Knight, and he was less scary and sneery than most. Older was why. Couple of times he’d said to her, ‘Get out of it, Marta. Get out while you still can.’
Hey, she could say she’d taken his advice – if they weren’t currently packing Victor Marcon’s statue.
‘Keep your hands where I can see them,’ he was saying as he flashed his gun and cuffs quickly, trying to be discreet.
A woman holding a basket of fruit stopped, sensed something was happening and hurried on. Another, oblivious, walked in front of the agent, forcing him to step to one side.
‘Gonna take you in, Lorenzo,’ he called. ‘Marta too.’
Lorenzo scoffed. ‘Take us in, Knight? You don’t have the jurisdiction.’
‘Sure I do. Got an international warrant. I got suspicion of felonies committed in the United States and on her waters. I got all the jurisdiction I need, Lorenzo.’
He took a step forward, closing in on them. Marta sensed the second agent do the same behind them.
Not far away Marta saw the boy trying on a cap at one of the stalls. He was still staring, and that caught the younger agent’s attention, who snapped at him, ‘Hey, you know these two, kid? These friends of yours?’
The kid seemed dazed and shook his head, no. A look of apprehension crossed his face as the agent flashed his piece and added, ‘Then beat it before we arrest you too.’
With a final look at Marta, the kid began to move off, except he’d forgotten to give back the LA Dodgers cap, which was still sitting on his head. The stallholder turned from where she’d been busy selling a sun visor to a wrinkled old lady, and what she saw was a kid trying to make off with one of her LA Dodgers caps.
Go!
In the next moment all three were a tangled blur, with Ren twisting beneath their bodies even as the younger agent yanked one arm behind his back to cuff him. His other hand appeared, clutching the rucksack which he threw with a desperate effort to land at Marta’s feet, imploring her with his eyes just as the agent wrenched back his free hand and he was cuffed.
Knight rose, saw Marta pick up the bag and shouted, ‘Hey, freeze!’
‘Run, sis, run,’ yelled Ren, and with a burst of strength writhed, sending Knight sprawling, his hat flying off as Marta grabbed the bag and did as Ren said.
She ran.