Circle of Bones (6 page)

The woman had disappeared into her cabin and she didn’t respond. In her absence, he checked out her boat. He didn’t know much about
sailing
, but he knew boats well enough. She kept a tidy ship. A handheld VHF radio sat in a bracket within reach of the helm, she had jack lines for securing her safety harness, and a pod of navigational instruments surrounded the helm. Up on the foredeck, a canister containing an inflatable life raft was bolted to the deck. From the water, as her boat approached, he had noticed the radar, wind generator, and the insignia on the mainsail: a large letter
C
with the number forty.

She reappeared in the companionway with a first aid kit and was about to hand him the box when she paused, set the box down and took out the bandages and a tube of antibiotic cream. She tossed them to him
.

“For your hands and feet,” she said. 

“Thanks.” He knew what she was thinking. She didn’t want to give him the box because it contained sharp implements.  She was very savvy for a civilian. Surely, they wouldn’t have thought ahead and sent a woman? No, they were good, but not that good. Besides, his instinct told him she was not one of
them
.

When he rested his ankle across his knee, he saw the sole of his foot was criss-crossed with white, puckered lacerations. Most of the bleeding had stopped, but his feet still left faint pink footprints on her white decks. It stung like hell when he massaged the cream into the cuts. He began to wrap his foot with the white gauze bandage. Walking was going to be a bitch for a while.

She was standing on the companionway ladder, her elbows resting on either side of the hatch, watching him.

“What kind of boat is this?”

“A Caliber 40.”

“That’s a lot of boat for one person to handle.”

“Yeah.”

“Must be nice just sailing around the Caribbean without a care in the world.”

“Yeah, must be.”

She turned to look across the water toward the point they were approaching. She crossed to the far side of the cockpit and began pulling on one rope and easing out another. The sail at the front of the boat unrolled like a window shade, and the boat leaned over a little. They picked up speed.

“Sailboats don’t go very fast, do they?”

“Nope.”

“Four hours, you said?”

“Yup.”

“Guess you’d never outrun anybody on a boat like this.”

She turned and looked him straight on, no blinking, no fear. “You don’t like the speed we’re making,” she said, “you could swim instead. I’d be happy to drop you off right here.” 

“Seems you really don’t want to talk to me, do you?”

“Nope.”

He woke with a start. He had not intended to fall asleep, but when he stretched out on the foredeck with the sun warming his face and the trade wind breeze riffling his hair, he had started again trying to figure out where he had gone wrong in his calculations. He thought he had deciphered the text correctly, but if so, he should have found the wreck by now. Something wasn’t right, he’d thought. And that was the last thing he remembered. 

He sat up and looked past the bow. He massaged the muscles at the back of his neck and rotated his head around in a circle.  

The tall buildings of the capital city of Guadeloupe lay a few miles ahead, spread out against the backdrop of the lush green highlands of Basse Terre on one side, the rambling cane fields of Grande Terre on the other. If one looked at the chart of this island, its shape resembled a butterfly, and Pointe-à-Pitre, a combination of bustling commercial port structures and crumbling colonial architecture, lay on the body where the wings joined. He had thought the place was a dingy, dirty backwater at first, but in the months he and his mate Theo had spent around the island, he’d grown to like the city with its combination of French and Creole cultures. Off to the east stood the pink and white hotels and condos on the beach at Le Gosier, the resort the European tourists flocked to by the thousands. Few Americans visited the island of Guadeloupe at all, and Cole had decided that was one of the place’s principal charms.

When he glanced aft, he saw the woman, Riley, was sitting behind the wheel holding the binoculars in front of her face. Her short-cropped auburn hair accentuated her long, graceful neck, and the white T-shirt she wore fit tight enough to show the swell of her breasts above the flat belly. Her hips were slender, almost boyish, and the skin of her upper arms was carved around her taut biceps.  As the boat rolled and a shaft of sunlight struck her hair, he noticed fiery streaks of gold. She was a fine-looking woman to be out here all alone. After watching the way she handled herself and her boat, though, he suspected she was pretty damn good at protecting herself. 

In the shadow of the binoculars, he saw her lips moving. She was talking to herself, and he decided he liked that. Maybe she wasn’t quite the hard-ass she was pretending to be.

Off in the distance, behind her, he saw a large white sportfisherman pushing a big wave and churning toward them at nearly twenty knots. The man who stood on the side deck looked familiar, even at this distance. He hoped he was wrong, but there weren’t many people as funny-looking as this dude. Cole hobbled back to the cockpit on his bandaged feet and slid onto one of the cockpit cushions. He picked up the binoculars from the seat where she had just set them down, and he focused on the big fishing boat. It
was
him. Things were starting to make sense. Did they know he was aboard the woman’s boat? No way. Damn!

CHAPTER EIGHT

The harbor at Pointe-à-Pitre

  March 25, 2008

  3:35 p.m.

Riley did not like having this stranger down alone inside her boat, but after they had been motoring for over four hours, when he’d asked to use the head, she couldn’t refuse him. 

Bonefish
was passing the entrance buoy at the start of the long channel leading into the harbor off the capital city when a big Bertram sportfishing boat with gleaming stainless steel rails and the name
Fish n’ Chicks
in gold letters on her transom cruised past at twenty knots throwing a monstrous wake. She’d wondered at first if it had been the same boat she’d seen anchored that morning, but the Yank fish boats all looked pretty much the same. The man on the bridge deck had long hair under a baseball cap pulled low on his head. She figured him for a mechanic taking the owner’s boat out for a sea trial. Another weird character with a white Afro and dressed all in white stood on the side deck holding tight to a railing, looking like a seasick ghost. 

Riley gripped the steering wheel as their wake rocked her little boat, but the ghost didn’t even turn to look at them.

She wondered if Bob was still in the head getting rolled right off the toilet.

The sun was angling in under the Bimini top that shaded her cockpit. She slid her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose, trying to make out the channel ahead. Between the binoculars, the GPS, and the paper chart spread out on the cockpit seat, she was still having a time making out the ship channel markers. 

She was glad she had moved the dive knife on her last trip below.  And she’d slid her rigging knife into her pocket. He seemed harmless enough, but she was not about to drop her guard.

During the last few hours, he had tried several times to start a conversation. Each time, she’d answered him with curt, one-word replies, hoping he’d get the message. Eventually, he’d given up on conversation and walked to the bow where he stretched out on top of the cabin and seemed to fall asleep.

Until fifteen minutes ago when he’d sat up, moved aft, looked all around with her binoculars, and then asked to go below. She wished she knew what his story was. Was he on the lam or was he some kind of freak down there trying on her underwear?

Riley glanced away from her chart and tried to focus on the dimly lit cabin. It was too strange having another person on the boat, again. She’d left DC in October with her best friend, Hazel, as crew. They had a fine trip going down the Chesapeake to Norfolk and through the Intracoastal Waterway to Beaufort, North Carolina. Though the two of them could not be more different, both were State Department brats, and Hazel was the closest thing to a sister Riley had. 

So, on the trip south, she’d talked to Hazel about Lima. About her affair at the embassy with the man who was so right, yet so wrong for her in so many ways, and then about the bomb. She told her about how she’d seen Mr. Wrong for the last time on the day of the bombing, and he had just walked away into the smoke. About how later, through the endless interviews and debriefings, she waited to hear from him. Total silence. Compared to that pain, the burns were nothing.

Afterwards, she left the Corps, using her father’s illness as an excuse, and swore off men for good. 

It felt good to talk about it after years of holding it inside. But looking back now, it bothered her that it had been so easy to leave out parts of what happened. Was she lying to her best friend by not telling her everything? But then, not even Riley knew the
whole
truth. She hoped to find that out here in Guadeloupe, tomorrow. 

In Beaufort, Hazel said her tearful good-bye, and Riley took off for a straight shot to Puerto Rico. Ten days later, she’d pulled into Boqueron, pleased with her first solo ocean passage, and she’d been alone ever since. She liked solo sailing, she told herself, so why, when Mr. Wrong emailed her out of the blue, as though years of silence were nothing, had she agreed to meet him in Pointe-à-Pitre?

She was thinking about Lima and leaning over the side, out from under her Bimini, to look up at the bridge of a passing freighter when a loud voice spoke right next to her ear.

“Nice boat you’ve got here, Maggie Magee!” 

Her body jerked. She banged her head on the stainless tubes of the Bimini frame, and she nearly knocked Bob off his feet.

She rubbed her hand on the back of her head. “Stop calling me that.”

“Little jumpy, aren’t we?”

She didn’t say anything, and she hoped he didn’t notice her discomfort. Her other hand had brushed against the sarong she’d given him, and she was trying very hard not to think about what she’d felt beneath it.

“Pretty comfortable down below — for a sailboat.”

She continued to ignore him which was difficult since he’d picked up her binoculars –
again
– and trained them on the Bertram. She squinted at the boat in the distance wondering what his interest in it was all about.

He lowered the glasses and looked up at her. “I see you’re reading one of those books.”

Okay, it seemed like a safe topic. She’d bite. “What books?”

“All that about the Knights Templar and the Illuminati?” He sighed. “You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”

“It’s fiction. Just a fun read.”

“Dead right. They’re not the ones we’ve got to worry about. But the Bilderburgers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations? You know, the whole Skull and Bones crew?”

She flicked a quick glance at him. “I’ve heard of them.” So he was one of those, she thought.  Conspiracy nut jobs generally weren’t dangerous.

“They’re the ones really in charge now,” he continued. “They’re running the shadow government. They’ve completely screwed up our country, spying on us with satellites, tapping phones, stealing elections, false flag attacks, getting us into this friggin’ war and torturing people. These billionaires and their banking buddies have made ass wipe out of the Constitution, and they intend to keep it that way. But the closer we get to this election, the more frantic they get. That’s what those guys should be writing about.”

She looked at his face to see if he was kidding. He had a strong chin and the muscles of his jaw were set. “And I suppose you believe in the second gunman on the grassy knoll and that MI-6 killed Diana?”

His green eyes looked at her without blinking and one eyebrow lifted just a fraction. “Don’t you?” 

She turned her head aside and rolled her eyes. “I’ll believe in conspiracy theories when you can show me more than two people who can keep a secret.”

“What about Project MK-Ultra?”

She sighed and turned back to look at him. “And what was that?”

He smiled and pointed his index finger an inch from her nose. “My point, exactly,” he said.

She somehow managed to stop herself from reaching over and breaking his finger.

“Okay,” he said. “In the fifties and sixties, the CIA was doing mind control research by giving all kinds of drugs — including LSD — to unwitting citizens. It didn’t come out until the mid-seventies.”

She’d heard about that, but she didn’t know enough to venture an opinion. What was she doing arguing with this nut case anyway? “Okay, so there may be stuff that goes on behind closed doors in government, but there’s not a whole lot we can do about it besides voting.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. “On an electronic voting machine made by a subsidiary of Haliburton?”

She rubbed the sweat from her eyes. “But you and I aren’t going to change that.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong, Magee. If we don’t do it, who will?”

She had once said nearly identical words when she enlisted in the Marine Corps. She’d been so angry after her brother’s death, and she wanted to reveal all the secrets, right all the wrongs in the world. When had she grown so cynical? 

Riley knew the answer to that one. After Lima.

She ventured a quick glance at him. His eyes reminded her of the ocean — of that glowing shade of grayish green when the first sunlight breaks through after a thunderstorm. He looked up and caught her staring. She turned her head away, as though she had heard something behind them. 

She knew better than to argue with a conspiracy nut. When she faced forward again, she said, “Listen, Bob, we’re about to enter the anchorage, so I’d appreciate it if you’d sit still and keep quiet until the anchor’s down.”

She had given him a tropical print sarong along with an old, extra-large military-issue T-shirt. His fingers rubbed at the cloth of the olive drab shirt. “You military?”