Circle of Bones (7 page)

She kept her eyes trained on the channel ahead. “Marine Corps.”

He nodded as though that somehow explained something. “Never met a woman Marine before.”

She drew in a deep breath. “
Former
Marine. And I told you to sit down and be quiet.”  

Riley was trying to decide if he looked adorable or ridiculous in her knee-length sarong when he pivoted around, leaned his back against the side of the cabin and put his feet up on the cockpit seat, his legs bent at the knee. She looked away. Peering ahead, out through the windows of the dodger, she could feel his eyes on her. On top of that, after his hours in the sun, he smelled of male sweat and testosterone. From the corner of her eye she could see he hadn’t moved, and she stared straight ahead, determined not to smile.

Behind the freighter, a wide, high-speed catamaran ferryboat was also trying to crowd her out of the channel. These French didn’t seem to have very good manners. Like her passenger. He was still grinning at her. 

“What do you find so amusing?” she asked without looking his way.

“You.”

Her eyes flicked for a second in his direction, then away. He still hadn’t changed his position. She said nothing.

“Don’t you ever smile, Magee?” he asked.

“I told you to be quiet. And stop calling me that.” 

He made a big show of pantomiming zipping his lips closed and throwing away the key.

She looked at him, not letting her line of vision stray lower than his chin. “While you’re at it,” she said, and though it took some effort to keep a straight face, she managed.  “When you’re wearing a skirt, you might want to keep your legs closed, too.”

CHAPTER NINE

Washington, DC

March 18, 2008 

4:47 p.m.

Diggory Priest stood at the center of the star on the floor of the Capitol Crypt and checked his watch for the second time. Most of the tour groups had finished for the day. There were a couple of stragglers on the far side of the large room, teenagers, giggling in front of a glass case that held a model of an earlier design for the Capitol. The Crypt was located on the first floor of the United States Capitol building, directly under the Rotunda. Though the room over Priest’s head had sometimes hosted the lying in state of dead presidents and other luminaries, he’d been told the Crypt, in spite of its name, had never been used for funerary purposes. Now, the large columned space only housed artwork and exhibits about the history and architecture of the building. Diggory thought the man he was meeting had quite a sense of humor to have chosen this location. He checked his watch again. He had not ever known him to be late to a meeting, but given the vagaries of political emergencies, he would give him five more minutes.

It was only after the gigglers had disappeared that Diggory heard the tapping of leather shoes crossing the polished stone floor. The man who approached him was wearing an elegant charcoal suit, white shirt, and red tie. The suit looked good on his lean frame, and he carried a buttery soft and worn Italian leather attaché case. He extended a hand as he approached Diggory.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long?”

“Not a problem, sir. It’s always a pleasure to see you,” Diggory said. He was uncertain of the protocol for names in this particular situation — much depended on the nature of his assignment. Traditionally, members called one another by the names they had taken on the night of their initiation, but this man was so well known from newspapers and television, it was difficult to call him by anything other than his title. Diggory’s Bones name was one formerly used by Averell Harriman and Dean Witter, Jr., among others. God of Thunder. 

The man standing before him was Beelzebub.

“I haven’t got much time, Thor, so let me get straight to the point.”

At the sound of that name, Diggory relaxed. “I’m listening, sir.”

“We have a sub rosa exigency.”

Diggory nodded. They all did it. It was their way of talking down to him by trying to talk over him. Sub rosa. Secret. As if he didn’t know. As if he hadn’t made it his fucking specialty.

“It’s down in the islands. Your neck of the Caribbean.” The Agency had sent him on assignments from Barbados to Haiti to Latin America. Places that oozed with poverty and hordes of dark-skinned people. Now, men like Beelzebub saw him as their trouble-shooter in the region.

“I’m asking you to handle this for us with the kind of discretion that has become your trademark.”

“I’d be happy to.”

“Something may surface — bringing up a top secret past operation. One we thought was long buried and gone. This cannot come to light. Not now, not ever.”

“Understood.”

 “As I’m sure you are aware, these are tenuous times for us. If this information were to go public at this point, with the election barely six months off and the fucking economy imploding — impossible to contemplate the damage. They’d use it against us. Hell, both sides would. Anyway, we’ve had a man on the scene down there for several weeks, a senior agent, but I’m not satisfied with his results. I asked the circle to name the top man for this sort of thing, and they named you.”

“I can be on the first plane out.” Top man, perhaps, he thought, but what they were really looking for was their top janitor — still taking orders. Cleaning up their sub rosa exigencies in dirty little corners of the third world.

“Excellent. You’ll be going to Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Your contact is Caliban. He will fill you in on the necessary details.”

“Yes sir.” He shook Beelzebub’s hand.

“Thor.” The older man tightened his grip and locked his eyes on Dig’s. “You’ve never had a more important assignment. Our very existence is at stake.” 

Diggory slipped out the north entrance of the Capitol Building and headed up New Jersey Avenue to the Hyatt where he had checked in the night before. As he navigated his way across intersections and up the street, he raised the collar of his coat and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. 

Blasted cold. Thankfully, he was now headed south. But this was more than merely looking for a more hospitable climate. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He had always known one day they would ask him to clean up a mess so big he would be able to use it to his advantage.  

The time had come for him to take what was rightfully his. What had Beelzebub said? 
Impossible to contemplate the damage.
Or the power that would be his if instead of making it all disappear, Dig made it his own. 

In spite of the cold, he smiled.

And the timing could not be more perfect. The stars were aligning for him. It so happened he also had a bit of unfinished business down in the Caribbean. Business with someone who, last he’d heard, was in Antigua on her boat and headed south. She was key to the whole operation. All things come to he who waits. He had waited long enough.

CHAPTER TEN

Pointe-à-Pitre

March 25, 2008

3:45 p.m.

Once the anchor was down and she’d made certain it was set, Riley hurried to lower the dinghy.

“You sure you won’t let me give you a hand?” he asked.

“No, I’ve got it.” 

He stuck his lower lip out in a pretend pout and this time there was no getting around it. He did look adorable. It would have been easy to accept his help, but for her own reasons, she needed to do it alone. It wasn’t that she had anything to prove. It was simply part of the discipline. Once she started accepting help, it would be easy to start
expecting
it. Next thing you know, they’d be involved. A couple. That’s what had happened down in Lima and look how that had turned out. No, she’d stick to doing things herself.

She went below to her cabin, closed the door and pulled off her T-shirt and changed into a clean white polo shirt for her trip to Customs and Immigration. In the main salon she slid on some boat shoes, then stopped at the navigation station to collect her paperwork.

When she raised the hinged tabletop and looked inside, it was obvious that her papers, charts and instruments had been disturbed. On a small boat, everything had to have its place, which suited her. 

Son of a bitch,
she thought, then she wondered if it counted as cursing if you only thought the words.  What had he been looking for? She’d known something was not right about Bob from the first. His injured hand, his shredded feet. The conspiracy gibberish. She didn’t like strangers, especially paranoid, crazy ones, rummaging through her chart table. If she accused him, he’d deny it. Better not to let on that she knew. 

She stuffed the ship’s papers into her canvas briefcase. Dimples or no dimples, she was not going to leave this guy alone with access to her boat. She grabbed the boat’s padlock on her way topsides.

“Look. I’ll go in to Immigration and talk to them. Then, once I’ve cleared, I’ll come get you. I’m going to lock the boat up, but you’ve got water and shade here. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

“Take me ashore with you, and I’ll just take off,” he said. “The French will never know. I already cleared in here.”

Yeah, she thought. Right. “And if somebody has already seen you on my boat and reports it to the authorities? No thanks. They could impound my boat for trying something like that. You’re not on my crew list.”

His eyes widened as he looked around the waterfront that fringed the harbor. “You really reckon they’re watching us?”

“I’m not going to assume they aren’t.”

“I thought for sure I’d lost them back there.” 

“Lost who?” Now, she wasn’t at all certain whom he meant by
them
. 

“The aliens.” He grinned. “A couple of guys from Uranus.”

The sooner she could get rid of him, the better. He really was one of the tin hat whack jobs. She shook her head. “I’m not going to risk getting charged with doing something illegal. You sit tight and I’ll have you ashore in an hour.” Sooner if she could manage it.

He cocked his head and watched her as she closed the companionway doors and secured the hatch with the combination padlock. 

“You don’t trust me alone on your boat, do you, Miss Maggie Magee?”

She sniffed and raised one eyebrow. “Would you?”

“He was right here,” she said. She was standing in the cockpit of
Bonefish
. 

“
Oui, Mademoiselle
. So you told us, but where is he now?” The French Immigration Officer, Monsieur Beaulieu, stood on her stern boarding platform in his leather shoes. He was looking down his long nose at the stainless rungs on the ladder that led up to the cockpit.

“I can’t believe this.” Riley sat down hard on the cockpit cushion.

“As I told you,
Mademoiselle
, we have no record of a
Robert Surcouf
clearing through immigration.” 

She looked at the Frenchman standing on the stern, his upper lip curled in disgust. His nose was worthy of a leading role in a production of Cyrano. She could see long black hairs curling up and out both sides of his nostrils. 

“You are sure you got the name right,
Mademoiselle
?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

She should have seen this coming. Was the craziness just an act or a cover? She was supposed to be the security expert and he’d played her.
Bob.
Yeah, right. Bet he either swam ashore or hitched a ride with a passing dinghy. The fact that she’d been distracted by her “date” tomorrow was no excuse. She thought about the clothes she’d given him. She’d miss that old shirt. Glancing around the cockpit one last time, she realized the handheld VHF radio was gone, too. Damn him. 

“So,
Mademoiselle
,” he said. “We go?”

Monsieur Beaulieu sat on a pontoon in the bow of the dinghy talking into his cell phone and waving his free hand through the air as she ran him back to the inner harbor her chart referred to as La Darse. The brightly-painted hulls of local fishing boats were tied along the eastern wall, so she continued to the head of the harbor in front of the Place de la Victoire and the still bustling fish market. White plastic buckets filled with ice and red squirrel fish were lined up behind the men who displayed the larger kingfish and grouper on their tables. Creole ladies with headscarves and huge shopping baskets were haggling for better prices. Riley smiled at their waving arms and shrill voices, not so different from the man in her dinghy.

Since she and Beaulieu had been speaking in English, he apparently did not realize she spoke fluent French. He was discussing what to charge her with. He snapped the tiny phone closed and sniffed as she turned the boat to come alongside the seawall. 

Once Beaulieu had his feet on terra firma, he brushed his hands together as though he had dirtied himself by getting ferried ashore.

“You are certain your mysterious passenger was American?”

Riley stood in her dinghy looking up at him, one hand on the seawall steadying the boat. “Yes, no doubt about it. And he assured me he had already cleared into your country. Why do you ask?”

“The name he gave you.
Surcouf
. It is French and I am surprised he would use it.”

“Why?”

“There was a very famous French submarine with this name.
Surcouf
. Named after a pirate. She disappeared in the Caribbean in
la seconde guerre mondiale
. Over one hundred and thirty men died when she was lost in 1942.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“
Exactement.
You are an American.” He snorted air through his massive nose. “You know so little about
l’histoire
of the rest of the world.”

Great. A fake name, and a French one, no less. God only knows what he was into. And the jerk stole her only handheld VHF radio.

Beaulieu waved his hand toward the immigration building on the waterfront. “You are coming.”

It wasn’t a question.