Amber Beach (5 page)

Remember Kyle,
Jake told himself savagely.
You liked him, too. And he screwed you but good.

At least getting screwed by Honor would be a lot more fun.

“I assume your brother kept a log?” Jake asked impatiently.

“Yes. Could you hand me my purse? I’ve been looking through the log, hoping to find where he… uh, fished.”

Jake looked over his shoulder, where she was pointing. A dinette table stuck out between two more bench seats just across from the galley. The resulting booth could seat four, if they were friends. It made into a bed that would sleep two, if
they were very, very good friends. Or planned on getting
that way.

“This is a purse?” he asked, lifting the black leather backpack on the table.

“It works for me.”

He held the backpack with one hand. “Find any?”

“What?”

“Good fishing holes.”

“Er, no.”

“So you decided to hire a fishing guide?”

“Er, yes.”

Jake decided that Honor needed a lot more practice lying. Unless she really was a world-class actress pretending to be the innocent sister of a larcenous brother….

Impatiently Jake told himself that it didn’t matter. Either way, the lady with the cat eyes and quick mind was definitely trouble in oversized sweats.

“Why are you looking so skeptical?” Honor asked. “Surely you’ve seen a woman’s purse before.”

“All sizes and shapes. I once saw a woman pull a live rooster and two chickens out of her purse. Of course, she was on the way to the market, so it wasn’t all that surprising.”

“Any fresh eggs?”

“Does scrambled count?”

“Nope.”

“Then there weren’t any eggs.”

A smile changed the taut lines of Honor’s face. The smile was brief and all the more beautiful for it.

“Ah, well”, she said. “Maybe next time. Where was this market?”

Telling her that it was in Kaliningrad would raise the kind of questions Jake had no intention of answering.

“In the country”, he said. “Is that the log?”

“Yes, but there’s nothing interesting in it. Just rows of
dates and gas consumption and maintenance records and that sort of thing.”

Adrenaline pulsed through Jake. He had hoped that Kyle was the kind of captain who kept decent records. That, plus the chart plotter and computer, could tell a lot about where the boat had been recently.

Jake took the log from Honor. For a minute or two he flipped through it, frowning like a man working hard. Then he looked up at her.

“I can’t say for sure that the boat is ready to go out until I look over this log more closely”, he said. “Why don’t I read it while you go into town and get boat shoes and a fishing license? If you hurry, we can still make the tide change.”

She hesitated. “Okay, I guess.”

“I’ll meet you back here in ninety minutes”, he said, sliding out from the helm seat.

“Wait! What do I do with the boat until then?”

He gave her an odd look. “What do you mean?”

“It’s running”, she pointed out.

Jake turned off the ignition key, pulled it out, and dropped it in Honor’s lap.

“It’s just an engine”, he said with exaggerated patience. “It won’t
attack
you. Treat it like a car.”

All that kept Honor from saying
Bite me, big boy!
was
the fact that he probably would.

Jake turned his battered four-wheel-drive truck into the muddy tracks that led to his cabin. Surrounded by dark, wind-sculpted fir trees, the small house crouched on a cliff above Puget Sound. This was his getaway from company headquarters in Seattle, the place where he caught up on work, his home away from home, the one place whose address and telephone number no one had.

That was why he swore when he saw a Ford utility vehicle sitting in what passed for his driveway. When a woman in a smart red blazer and black skirt climbed out and waved at him, he knew that the day had just gone from sugar to shoe polish.

Ellen Lazarus was old news from a time in his life when he believed in saving the world from itself. These days his goal was less grandiose: all he wanted was not to be at ground zero when that great outhouse in the sky unloaded.

He turned off the truck, climbed out, leaned against the door, and waited to find out how much crap was headed straight for his head.

“What, not even a smile or a wave of welcome?” Ellen said, walking up to him.

Jake watched her move with a cross between cynicism and male appreciation. She didn’t have to work to add an extra swing and jiggle to her ass. She had been born with that special locomotion, the same way she had been born with wide blue eyes, black hair, and a brainy pragmatism that made Machiavelli look like a choirboy. Not surprisingly, once she got over wanting to play cloak-and-dagger games in the field she became an exceptional intelligence analyst.

“I won’t ask how you found me”, Jake said. “The folks you hang with could find anything.
Why
did you find me?”

“My, we’re in a bad mood, aren’t we? And it’s such a beautiful day, too.” She waved an elegant hand at the sun-dappled forest. “I’d heard that it always rains in the Pacific Northwest.”

He grunted.

“Does this mean you don’t want to talk about the good old days?” she asked.

His scarred eyebrow lifted in a sardonic arc. “The good old days? That should take about three seconds. Bye, Ellen. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Your three seconds are up.”

Her cheerful smile vanished, leaving behind the restless, consuming personality that would never be satisfied with one of anything, including men.

“Hey, C’mon, Jake”, she said softly. “It was good and you know it.”

“Since when do you spend time looking over your shoulder at the ashes?”

“You’re determined to do this the hard way, aren’t you?”

“First thing a boy learns is it’s gotta be hard to be good.” She made an impatient gesture. “Have it your way.”

“I plan to. Good-bye. Don’t give my regards to Uncle Sam.”

Jake started to walk around Ellen to get to his cabin. She stepped out in front of him and looked up with eyes as blue and clear as a porcelain angel’s.

“Would you be more cooperative if we sent someone
else?” she
asked.

“No.”

“You don’t even know what we want.”

“I like it that way.”

The wind gusted, rippling the black silk collar of Ellen’s blouse. Absently she patted the collar back in place and examined her remaining options. It didn’t take long. She wasn’t a slow or timid thinker.

“I told them the old lover bit wouldn’t work”, she said calmly. “You haven’t made any attempt to get in touch with me for years. In fact, you never did. When you say good-bye, you mean it.”

Jake waited, knowing he wasn’t going to get rid of her easily. What he was afraid of was that he wouldn’t get rid of her at all. U.S. government intelligence types – no matter what part of the alphabet soup of agencies they might work for – didn’t bother honest citizens unless the professionals were up to their lips in shit and the devil was coming by in a
speedboat.

“I could appeal to your patriotism”, Ellen said.

He smiled.

“Mother”, she muttered. “Reformed idealists are the worst. Once the fairy dust gets out of their eyes, they don’t want to play anymore.”

“We’ve had this conversation before.”

She tapped a manicured nail against her little leather purse and looked at the unfenced woods beyond Jake’s truck. A bald eagle soared overhead, its pure white head turning as it looked for prey. Though the bird’s shadow whipped over her face, Ellen didn’t look up.

“All right”, she said, deciding. “You want to find Kyle Donovan. So do we. We can help each other.”

Jake’s impassive expression didn’t change. He had been
expecting something like this since he had seen Ellen get out of her car.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why what?”

“Why are you after Kyle?”

“You know why. He stole a million bucks in amber.”

Jake knew the amber was worth only half that. But if that’s what the Donovan family was claiming on the insurance, no one would listen to him anyway. The Donovans had wealth and friends in high places – same thing, really.

“So Kyle stole some amber”, Jake said. “So what? People steal ten times a million bucks and our dear Uncle doesn’t break a sweat unless taxes aren’t paid.”

“Kyle stole this money from a foreign country.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Wrong.”

“Get real. This is me you’re talking to, not some freshman politician hoping to get in your pants. You’ll have to come up with a better reason for chasing Kyle. A lot better.”

Ellen considered her remaining options. Option, really. The truth. The only question was how little she could get by with – and how to shade it to the best
advantage.
But not too shady. Jake could be an abrupt bastard.

“Kyle was involved with Lithuanian separatists”, she said. “We’re
afraid
he took the amber to them to finance some grassroots terrorism.”

Jake hoped she was wrong, but he doubted it. Even so, it still didn’t explain why Uncle Sam
cared.

“Still not good enough”, he said. “When it comes to geopolitics, Lithuania is very small beer. So where’s the
damage
to Uncle?”

She didn’t want to answer but she knew she was going to. “I told them you would get to the bottom line.”

Jake waited.

“Kyle’s driver added something to the shipment before he was killed”, Ellen said.

“What was it?”

“No answer.”

“Don’t know or won’t tell?”

“Same difference. No answer.”

Jake tried another direction. “I don’t buy it. Kyle wasn’t stupid enough to get involved with nukes.”

“If it was nukes, we wouldn’t be asking for anyone’s help. We’d be demanding it.”

He didn’t disagree. “So it’s more than raw amber and less than nukes, but still enough to bring Uncle running. Must be damned valuable. I don’t think Kyle is that stupid.”

“Idealism, fairy dust, and a piece of ass”, Ellen said succinctly. “Makes ‘em stupid every time.”

“Are you talking about Marju?” Jake asked.

Ellen nodded. “She’s the granddaughter of a hard case left over from World War Two. He fought the Germans. He fought the Russians. He fought the Soviets. He fought his own countrymen when they wanted peace.”

Jake bit back some searing words of disgust. He knew full well how a woman could lower a man’s IQ. “I told Kyle that Marju was more trouble than she was worth, but no, he was in love. He was going to be her bold knight in bright armor.”

“I don’t know about bright, but he’s a bold son of a bitch. He killed the Lithuanian driver, got in the truck with the amber and headed off into the night.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Tell me what you know and I won’t bore you with repetition”, Ellen shot back.

“Where did you lose Kyle?”

“We never had him to lose. He wasn’t ours.”

Jake wondered whether to believe her, then decided it didn’t matter. “I managed to track him out of Kaliningrad and
through Lithuania. I lost him when he crossed over into Russia.”

“That’s where we lost him”, she agreed.

“And if I said I’d tracked him to Tallinn…?” Jake asked sarcastically.

“I’d be on the phone right now. We’re being chewed up one side and down the other to get results. Did you?”

“Track him to Estonia? No. He went east, not north. I lost him about three hundred kilometers inside the Russian border. Before I could find him
again,
I started running into bureaucratic walls and some nonbureaucratic types with nasty guns. Officially, I was invited to leave the country and not come back.”

“And unofficially?”

“I was offered permanent residence in a three-by-six-foot slice of Mother Russia.”

She shook her head. “Whatever happened to Byzantine subtlety?”

“Same thing that happened to Byzantium. It lost.”

“So about ten days ago you came back here to lick your wounds. And maybe to have a late-night look around Kyle’s cottage?” Ellen asked.

Jake shrugged and said nothing. It was close enough to the truth to be uncomfortable.

“Then you noticed one of those cards tacked up all over Anacortes asking for a fishing guide and signed by H. Donovan”, Ellen continued.

He waited, watching her.

“And then you turned on that Jake Mallory slow grin and got hired”, she concluded.