Buried At Sea (33 page)

Villa Miseria

JIM SLEPT IN the cockpit, waking hourly to shorten sail. At dawn it was blowing thirty knots. The seas were streaked with foam and salt crusted his hair. He was flying a scrap of jib and had taken two reefs in the main and Hustle's knot meter was still jumping between eight and nine. Screaming, Will would call it. A vote of confidence from the weather: go home.

He cooked some breakfast and wrote to Shannon again.

Dear Shannon,

I've been thinking about Will. With all his delusions and illusions, this was probably the right way to go—dying at sea. Out here, he was no con man. When sailing the boat, he was a champion—always sure of himself, always focused, always in "the zone." I'll write more later. I know we have lots to talk about. I hope to be back in seven or eight weeks. I wanted an adventure and I got one. I love you,

Jim

He sent it by the SSB radio and found two e-mails waiting. One was titled "MAILERDAEMON: Returned mail, Host unknown." The other was from Shannon: "SEE YOU

SOON!"

The MAILER-DAEMON read, "Name server: FACEPLANTRILEYSPA.COM: host not found." Of all the damned times for a computer screwup. It was the letter he had written right after Will died. He opened "SEE YOU SOON!" wondering what she meant. A quick glance stopped him cold.

Dear Jim.

People have been asking questions about you—on the phone—and they're insinuating that you're involved in some kind of criminal activity. I'm sure that your friend Will is behind it—he must have tangled your name into one of his scams. Whatever, Daddy is really pissed—really pissed—and he's saying what kind of a guy is this to be joining the business. (If I were talking to him at the moment, which obviously I'm not. I would remind him that just because we've been e-mailing often doesn't mean that we're getting married or that you would even want to work for him if we did.) I would like to kill him. He's actually *ordered* me to stop writing you until you come home and explain yourself. F him and the horse.... Which is why wire not talking. And Mom says that he says he'll fire me if I disobey him. (Do you detect Mom's hand in this? I do.) Fire me?

We'd be out of business in a week.

Jim doubted that. Shannon's mother didn't want to work for RileySpa anymore, but if she had to step back in she was a brilliant manager and RileySpa would forge on without a'

hiccup. At which point Shannon would have to look for work in the real world. With a real-world salary, real-world benefits, and real-world inconvenience. But when I heard that I was like. It's every woman for herself. So I wrote myself a tenthousand-dollar check on the company credit card and bought a ticket to Buenos Aires.

"No!"

I'll be waiting for you at the Plaza Hotel on the Plaza San Martin. which sounds really cool—and unbelievably expensive, so I withdrew another five thousand on Daddy's card. They said

anyone can tell you how to get there—ifs right in the middle of the city. (Ifs a Marriott. so I'm sure they speak some English.) I reserved my plane ticket with my own card so Daddy can't find me. Ditto the hotel. If only I had time to sell his house out from under him!!! And his big fat SUV. I'm leaving tomorrow morning. You must be pretty close to Buenos Aires by now, so with any luck I will see you in just a few days. So until then, ol e—or whatever they say in Argentina. And by the way, don't tell Will. God knows what he's gotten you into, or the kind of people he'll know in Buenos Aires. So just lump ship" and meet me at the Plaza Hotel.

PS: I closed both my e-mail accounts in case my mother pulls a full-court-press snoop in the computer.

I hope you're not mad I'm coming. At first, I thought we would wait until you gat home to sort things out. but the situation is different now. thanks to Will. I feel I got you into this mess and I want to help get you out.

Jim pushed from his mind an image of Shannon struggling down a mile-long airport corridor. They'd have wheelchairs. And she was very resourceful. And people liked her, so they would help her. Still, he had trouble breathing. Who the hell was asking questions?

Was it someone investigating one of Will's scams? Or the McVays? Nickels? Shannon might be right, but if she wasn't . . . And if they were asking questions at the club, then they already knew about Shannon and him. What would happen when she left Westport?

Would they follow her?

The broad reach on which Jim had been sailing home—booming along on a strong breeze from behind—become a close-hauled battle when he turned the boat around. Hustle seemed to go faster, with the wind whipping over the deck and salt spray in his face, but she wasn't. Worse, he had to tack, approaching Rio de la Plata obliquely, angling to the south, then to the north, and back again and again and again—angle, angle, angle, with his bow never pointed directly at Buenos Aires.

A GUY IN a baseball jacket and backward cap was following her. She had first noticed his beat-up Toyota when she left her mother and father's the night before. The Toyota stood out like a sore thumb in their neighborhood. It might have been driven by somebody's maid, but not by a guy in a baseball jacket and backward cap. This morning, he and the old car fit right in across the street from her low-rent condo, and she wouldn't have paid him much mind if she hadn't seen him the night before—and if she wasn't a little jumpy about getting to the airport without her parents' finding out until she was safely off the plane in Buenos Aires.

So now she was letting this guy think she didn't know he was following her. A private detective, she guessed, working for one of Will Spark's victims. Maybe an undercover cop looking for Will. Whatever, there was no way she would let him follow her to Kennedy Airport. She decided to make him bored. Then make him nervous. Then make him crazy.

She headed toward the club. The regular route would lull him, make him feel as if he knew where she was going. It was early, but traffic was getting heavy on 1-95. It would be hard to see her low-slung 740 among the big trucks and the boxy SUVs. She sped up and swung into the passing lane. That would make him nervous. The Toyota followed, pulling up close to keep her in sight. Shannon shifted to the middle lane, passed a Lincoln Navigator in the passing lane, and tucked in front of the bulky SUV, leaving no room for the Toyota. The guy actually pulled alongside of her, pretending not to glance over. When he did, she gave him a little wave. That would make him very nervous. She smiled. Let him think she was just waving because she thought he was cute. Ahead was a median crossover. The guy locked his eyes on it. That made her a little uncomfortable.

He'd been following her for weeks, she realized. You saw me pull that one-eighty with Daddy in the car. He was bracing to shove between her and the Navigator. Okaaaay. She passed the crossover and the guy practically smiled with relief. She squeezed the brake lever with her left hand. The Navigator's tires screamed and it would have hit her if she hadn't swung onto the shoulder and across forty feet of grass. She hit the southbound passing lane right in front of a Lexus and swiveled her twist-grip accelerator as hard as she could. Horns shrilled. People screamed at their windshields. Like anybody could hear them at seventy miles an hour.

Buenos Aires, here I come. Except first, when she got to the airport, she had to find a parking space close enough to drag herself and her bags to the shuttle bus. It would get better, once she checked in. They'd have wheelchairs.

" 'She's not going anywhere,' " Val McVay mimicked Andy Nickels.

"She pulled a cute one."

" 'She's a cripple.' "

"We'll find her."

"She's handicapped. Our best link to Will Spark cannot walk and you let her disappear."

"She's a great driver."

"I can't believe you've done this."

"Nor can I," said Lloyd McVay.

"This is a temporary setback," Andy replied coolly.

"Damage control is in gear. I've got people fanning out over Buenos Aires—Will Spark's destination—"

"Assumed:' Val McVay reminded him. "Assumed destination."

"A city of twelve million people, for the love of God," said her father.

"They are on course for the River Plate?'

"Assumed:' Val repeated. "The fact is, Dr. Angela Hein-man Ruiz was last seen in Rio de Janeiro."

"We're watching her apartment in Buenos Aires." "We do not know that Will Spark is headed there." "He and the doctor exchanged long e-mails." Val went on as if Andy had not spoken. "As we have not been able to decipher what Will Spark has written to Dr. Ruiz. For all we know, he's arranging to alter his features with plastic surgery so he'll be even harder to find. She is a plastic surgeon."

"She's also a micrasurgeon. Which is exactly the kind of doctor that Spark would go to to get those goddamned things out of his head."

"Look at the data, for goodness' sake. She published her last paper on microsurgery ten years ago. As for Shannon, we know only that Shannon canceled her 'public' RileySpa email account, but we don't know whether she and Jim Leighton are communicating under other screen names. Do we?"

Nickels turned to Lloyd McVay and played his trump card. "I put the ex-resident on the payroll."

Lloyd McVay banged a big hand on his bony knee. "Well done, Andy! A-plus!"

"The 'ex-resident'?" demanded Val. She felt the ground suddenly slipping out from under her. "What does that mean?"

Nickels explained that the former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Buenos Aires—for many years the United States' chief spy in Latin America—had been hired to enlist the city's famously corruptible policia federal to watch the airports and tourist hotels for an American girl in a wheelchair.

"But by now—if she even went there—she has already passed through the airport."

"She has to sleep somewhere. Plus, we've put the word out on the streets."

"What word?"

"We've put a bounty on them."

"Alive!" warned Lloyd.

"Of course, sir."

Val McVay was not impressed. "If they're there, they're not on the streets. They're on a boat. BA is a sailing town. There are a hundred marinas on the Rio de la Plata, fifty yacht clubs, and thousands of private moorings."

"The second they make contact with the girl, we've got them." Val typed in a macro that locked her computer tighter than Will Spark's onetime code and stood up. "I'm going down there."

"That is not necessary," said Andy.

"Oh, really?"

Andy turned to her father. "Mr. McVay. This is not a scene for the generals. This is down and dirty. BA is one tough town. I'm dealing with scum. The bosses should stay home." Lloyd McVay shook his head no emphatically. "You're forgetting your Shakespeare, Andy. We'll be pulling many strings in Buenos Aires, calling in a lot of favors.

"The presence of a king engenders love Among his subjects and his loyal friends."

"But sir, either she'll screw things up for me—" "Something you've managed quite well on your own," said Val.

"—or she'll get hurt?'

Lloyd McVay's face hardened. "The bard also wrote,

"I see no reason why a king of years Should be protected like a child."

"Go! Both of you. Retrieve Sentinel from that thieving son of a bitch!" THE RIO DE La Plata sluiced the muddy runoff of half a continent into the South Atlantic Ocean, and when Jim saw the blue water under Hustle's speeding hull turn graygreen, he was still 120 miles from Buenos Aires. It was the closest he had been to Shannon in three months and he practically wanted to climb the mast for an early look at her.

Concerned that the McVays were the ones who'd been asking questions, and terrified that they might have followed her, he wished she were safely home in Connecticut. But he was deeply touched that she would come all this way to help him out of "this mess." Touched, and hopeful. Had she changed her mind? Was she reconsidering marrying him?

Or was it just her sense of duty? And what, he wondered, would she make of him?

Would she notice a "new Jim," changed by all that had happened and all he had learned to do? The big answers to these big questions lay only 120 miles away. Though at sea he would be just one day away from seeing her, entering "the Plate" posed any number of difficulties that could drag it out to three.

The Sailing Directions warned bluntly of sudden lethal changes in the weather, particularly the ferocious squalls that thundered off Argentina's pampa, an immense, flat plain

that spread hundreds of miles inland. He watched for the distant roll of dark cumulonimbus clouds that might herald a pamper —though the books warned that the killer squalls could strike without warning from clear skies, too. Conditions were ripe for one, with a warm humid wind blowing from the north and the barometer indicating a gradual drop in pressure.

While the estuary was as broad as an inland sea, more than 60 miles wide and 120 long, much of it was shallow. With traffic funneled into the dredged channels, Jim soon found himself in busy waters, with many ships around him.

Will had warned him about the difficult transition from the relative simplicity of bluewater navigation to inshore piloting. He had likened offshore navigation to the first shot in pool—bang the rack with the cue ball, hope for the best, and repair the damage later. Piloting inshore was like calling pockets for each and every ball. You had to know where you were at every moment, which demanded skills Jim didn't possess. He had never come close to mastering Will's sextant and hadn't done much better with the math required to use the almanac.

Thank God for Will's "push here, stupid" electronics. The GPS, the knot meter, the depth finder, and the radar showed him where he was on the chart, how fast Hustle was moving, whether there was enough water under her keel, and warned when he was about to run into something. He was good to go, as long as none of those instruments stopped working.

"They forgot to lock the gates of heaven."

"Are you talking to me?"

"An angel escaped."

"I said," Shannon repeated, "Are you talking to me?" This was what the guidebooks called piropo, the Argentine male's poetic pickup line. He had come over from a nearby table, where he had been drinking mate—the local tea they drank from a gourd—with another young guy and an older, silver-haired man in a blue blazer.