3 Lies (7 page)

He pulled back an eyelid. With a palm-sized flashlight, he shined it directly into her eye. No recognition flickered within the ginger-brown bead.

Unlike his usual assessments, he kept no charts, took no notes. Colleagues did not exist in this particular ward. There were no peers to consult if he encountered any problems.

He spent a few minutes with the girl before he moved on to the next cot. The doctor performed the same tests on each of the hostages—checking heart rates and respiration. He looked for signs of ill effects from the meperidine injections.

He put away his instruments. “Each of the subjects is in good order. They will wake up in turn, depending on the time of the last dosage.” He turned to Salif. “Who was in charge of the young girl?”

Amir stepped forward. “I was. Why?”

The doctor rubbed his ear lobe. “I’m curious. Have you had any medical training?”

“First aid, survival training, combat triage, and what was necessary for this mission. Why?”

“Any pediatric training?”

“No. Why?”

“How did you know her dosage for the drug?”

“I guessed. I was going to give her half a dose, twenty-five milliliters. When I squirted out the extra, four milliliters remained, so I gave it to her. It knocked her out, and she didn’t die.”

The doctor nodded. “Thank you. I was merely curious.” He held his bag with both hands. “If you’d given her twenty-five milliliters, she’d be dead.”

A smile slid across Amir’s face. “I guess I am just lucky.”

The doctor nodded to both men. “I’m leaving town. I won’t be seeing either of you again.” He walked to the back of the boat, climbed in the dinghy, and departed for shore.

Amir and Salif returned to their guests in the salon. Amir donned a green ski mask; and Salif, a red. They muscled the heaviest man down to the cabin deck. At nearly three-hundred pounds, he was their biggest load.

The cabin for the female guests was in the prow of the boat. Mid-ship, the men’s cabin occupied portside, and a bunk for the crew sat starboard. A crawl space ran from the bunkroom to the aft engine room. Each of the guest cabins had an attached head, so they had no excuse to roam. In the aft, the hosts occupied a second, larger cabin with direct access to the engine room. A small control room housed some of their equipment.

From the guest cabins, the only path topside was through the hallway. Binard guarded the hallway with a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. The weapon bore a Navy trigger, a silencer, and a thirty-round magazine.

Salif unlocked the door to the men’s cabin, then resumed hauling his end of the large man with Amir’s help. Binard came in behind them and blocked the doorway. They deposited the man on the large bed.

“What do you want from us?” A doughy man stood up at the back of the cabin. His face flecked with anger and fear.

The man next to him mirrored the sentiment.

Amir glared at them. “Only your silence.”

Binard, in his black-ski mask, turned his weapon toward the older man. The old man slinked back to his seat.

Jaman arrived with plates of microwaved pizza and bags of potato chips. It constituted their first meal since their abduction. They eyed the food but did not touch it in their captor’s presence.

Amir and Salif went topside to bring down the other unconscious man. They deposited him in the cabin. By this time, the other captives were eating. The two new men brought the total number of male guests to five. The room began to look crowded.

The last load, the girl and the extra-large woman, brought the total number of females on board to four. Amir and Salif shared the weight of the woman, who weighed nearly as much as did the man. They plopped her on the bed, and the other two women descended upon her with care. Amir re-entered with the small girl draped over his arms. The two women gasped.

Jaman stood at the doorway in his blue ski mask and gestured to the beautiful woman with long, golden hair. “Give it to her.”

The young woman’s face lost no attractiveness under her scowl.

“She’s a girl. Not an ‘it’.”

“And now, she is yours.” Amir plopped the young girl on Golden Hair’s lap. “Make sure that her needs are met.”

Another time. Another place, Golden Hair. A woman with a backbone always enticed him.

Golden Hair swept the child’s hair from her face. The small body hung limp. Golden Hair touched the tiny cheek with her hand and felt along the slim neck for a pulse.

Like a lamb on a spit, everyone kept checking to see if she was done.

“The child is alive,” Amir said.

“No thanks to you.”

Her fern green eyes reminded him of a white Persian cat he possessed as a child. That female hissed at him too though it was not nearly as alluring.

When Jaman reappeared with dinner trays, he broke her stare. She tracked the trays’ movement until they landed on the table. She cradled the child in her lap.

Amir left the room and joined Salif in the hallway. Monitors hung at intervals along the walls. Salif smoked a hand-rolled cigarette and passed the ingredients to Amir. Amir pulled a paper from the pack and piled the tobacco down a line in the middle of the paper, tucking the stray bits down as he rolled the cylinder. He licked the edge and smoothed the wet part over until it fused into a cigarette. Salif took a long drag. Fire chased the edges of the paper. “Do you know who the girl is?”

“No.” Amir struck a match. “The golden-haired woman will find out when the child awakens. She will want to know its name.”

“We need to find out if she is worth keeping.”

“She will be awake within a couple of hours.” Smoke rings left Amir’s lips.

“We do not have the authority to return her. We have direct orders to purge any distractions.” Salif stubbed out his spent cigarette. “If she has no value, she must die.”

Clint’s boat,
No Moor
, occupied the last slip of the dock with an unfiltered view of the open sea. The prevailing offshore breeze kept her pinned inside the slip even completely unfettered. When the winds shifted to the east, as today, she barely needed a sail to find her way out to the blue.

Clint waited on the bow as Merlin ambled up the dock trailed by a red and white cooler. Louie trotted over to accompany him to the boat. A sturdy deep-sea fishing rod nestled in the nape of Merlin’s tanned neck. He looked like a man at rest against the winds of life. Like Opie out fishing with Pa.

“Cheerio, lad.” His buttery baritone floated in the wind.

As far as Clint knew, Merlin had no real job, no possessions, and no family. Somewhere in his fifties, prospects weren’t improving. Yet in the three months since Clint met him, he couldn’t recall a single time that he wasn’t of good cheer. It was downright unnatural.

Clint pricked with jealousy. The disappointments of his day bore down with the weight of a press. His fishing plans with Beth replaced with an old man too foolish to know he was miserable.

And Paige. He’d briefly forgotten about her little time bomb.

A sharp snort left his head bobbing. Moody vapors formed a dark cloud of discontent.

Merlin showed no recognition of Clint’s deflated disposition. The intensity of Merlin’s smile only increased as he neared Clint. Clint mustered an upturning of his lips. The effort loosened the chokehold on his good humor.

He reached down to take the cooler from Merlin. “Welcome aboard.”

“It’s a glorious day for a sail.” Merlin climbed the aft ladder. “Looks like she’s ready. What can I do?”

“Cast off. Let’s get out of here.”

Merlin released the mooring line, shoved off, and the boat glided out under a slack sail.

The glassy water inside Clement Marina swept past the hull without a sound. Gulls circled and searched, occasionally squawking for a handout. The waves outside the jetty, dampened by the wind shift, broke low and early. The weather showed only promise.

Clint sailed toward the horizon. The crisp air gently blew the muddle from his thoughts. With each change in tack from a port beat to starboard, his worries left him alone. Off the lee side, a pair of dolphin swam parallel to their vessel for half a mile before they plunged in search of another adventure. While he captained the boat in silence, Merlin kept company with the sea.

He turned toward the coast. They passed several other vessels traversing the expanse, heading to sea or inland. A large Hatteras, well over fifty foot, lay at anchor with an open-bowed Grady White in attendance.

“Nice ship that Hatteras.” Merlin nodded toward the vessel.

“Such a beautiful day. You’d think someone would be on deck to enjoy it.”

“It does seem a pity. Even the Grady looks empty.”

An hour later, they reached Sea Ridge Island about a quarter mile from the shore. Schoolie fish congregated in the churning water bound between the island and the coast. They hoped to find large striper bass chasing the smaller ones amid the roiling water. Clint dropped anchor and doused the sails.

Merlin stood slowly to keep his balance. “This looks fine,” he called to Clint.

The ketch’s rocking subsided into a more predictable rhythm. Louie lay on his side and stiffened all four legs into a frozen stretch. With a yawning growl, his limbs went limp in the warming sun.

Clint stepped over his dog with tackle box and rod in hand. “Louie you may be the smartest one here.” He sat on the upper deck and spoke to Merlin. “I’m going with minnows on double lures. What’ve you got?”

“A fly on a sinking tip line. It’s still early enough in the season that they might like something else to snack. They get fussy during the summer and lose all their imagination.”

The boat moaned and pitched when Merlin sat down on the teak planking. He nestled a soft coil of rope behind his back and braced his feet against the ankle-high railing that circled the deck, tossing his rig into the surf.

“This is a fine boat you have here. Mine’s as sound but not nearly so grand. This is your first I take it?”

Clint’s concentration never left the clinch knot he was tying. “How did you know?”

“I spit salt water, my boy. Grew up in Pompey—Portsmouth, that is. The men in my family have been seafaring for over five hundred years.” He winked. “The women have been wailing over it even longer.” He shifted his bones to a more comfortable position. “Hesitation. I can see you thinking about a thing before you do it. A man that’s owned more than one boat, he doesn’t hesitate. Hesitation can get a man in trouble.”

Clint dropped his line onto the deck. He counted the stripes in the planking. “Or killed.”

“The ocean is a severe master. You pretend you’re in charge at your own peril.”

An engine chopped in the distant sky, barely audible above the splashing water.

“Sounds like a helicopter.” Merlin said.

“No.” Clint concentrated on the sound. “It’s a Merlin.”

“I’m a what?”

“Not you. The engine design. It’s called a Merlin. Used in airplanes during WW II. Probably a P-51.”

“P-51, do you say?” Merlin furrowed a single brow at him then craned toward the sky to see for himself. “I’ll be. And so it is.” A few years vanished from his face. “My uncle says we wouldn’t have won the war without that bird.” The solemn schoolboy in him reminisced. “He flew a Spitfire during the Battle of Britain.”

Clint scooped a large minnow from the bait bucket and threaded it on the hook. “So what kind of seafarers graced your family? Any pirates?”

“I suspect we have. Though no one in the long, proud line would ever admit it.” Merlin reeled his rig back in. No fish. “Today’s thugs. Tomorrow’s royalty.” He threw the rig overboard.

Clint baited the other hook and sent the pair out into the foam. “Here in the States, we don’t bother with titles. We count cash.” He settled back on the rope pillow. “Naturally, the biggest pile wins.”

“At least you Yanks base it on something tangible. We Brits cling to the boughs of chivalry and honor from men that have long stopped walking.”

“But you aspire to nobility not mere gain.”

He jerked back to take in all of Clint. “I never figured you for an Anglophile. Noblesse oblige.” Disgust peppered his voice. “What rot. Living your own life is trick enough without wearing someone else’s version of it.”

Clint bent over his tackle box. “Then again, you did knight Mick Jagger. I guess it must be rot.”

Merlin tsk-tsked. “A right tosser. What was Her Majesty thinking?”

“Maybe she’s got the hots for him. I hear she’s partial to younger blokes.”

“An Anglophile and a bloody gossip. I’m beginning to think you’re a bad influence Mr. Masters. By the by, Sir Mick surely doesn’t look younger. Is he even still—”

A tug on Merlin’s line bought his attention. He hauled the tip of his rod up high and reeled it in slowly, steadily. A swell rose under the churn and then disappeared. Merlin lowered the tip and reeled in more of the line, pulling the pole straight back to his chest. “It’s a keeper, I’ll say.”

“Don’t you catch and release?”

“Oh, most certainly.” He pulled harder. “Once I catch it, I’ll release it into my oven.”

He spoke with a spike of what Clint could only interpret as regret. Maybe not lately, but Clint suspected that there was a time when Merlin involuntarily missed more than a few meals. The thought made him sad. He reeled his line in and put the rod into a holder deck-side. He took a long, sturdy net and went to Merlin’s aid.

Merlin positioned his body at an angle to the side of the boat, his left foot out front, and a heel joined to the floor. His neck strained under the cords of sinew and muscle. He pulled with the determination of a man accustomed to struggle.

“He’s a big one, eh? Nearly four feet. Get the net in the water.” He reeled in more of the line.

Clint saw only a thrashing beneath the waterline. He thrust the net into the action. The mix of foam and fury kept the fish out of his reach.

Merlin bellied up to the rail. “I’ve got him on the rise. He’ll be yours, right soon.”

Clint blindly stuck the net out once again. The fish flipped, flailed, and then flopped into Clint’s sweeping net.

“Got him.” Clint gripped the net with both hands and beamed at Merlin.