Castro Directive (40 page)

He heard a scratching noise. It didn't fit, didn't make sense. He tried to blot it out.

He heard it again, louder this time.

What was it?

He rubbed his eyes, blinked, looked around. He was still inside the hot room with the others. Nothing had changed.

"I thought I heard something." It was Carver's voice, but it sounded as if it were inside his head.

Pierce stood up as he heard the sound again. It was like sandpaper being rubbed against a wall. Where was it coming from?

He vaulted up the stairs to the door. He started to grasp the handle and realized he still was holding the amulet. He jammed it back in his pocket, grasped the handle, closed his eyes, squeezed it. Prayed it would open, muttered his mantra:
Open, escape.

The scratching noise abraded his nerves. He turned the knob. It didn't move.

He let it go, opened his eyes, and stared at his watch. Twelve minutes. Almost halfway through hell.

He heard a sound, but now it was like a rattle. Was he delirious, imagining it? He looked at the doorknob. Concentrated on it.
Open. Escape.

It was moving, vibrating. He was sure of it.
Open. Escape. Open. Damn it.

He grabbed it, squeezed. This time he felt it move in his hand. Move on its own.
Open. Escape.
It moved again, and his heart leaped. He heard a click. Slowly he turned the knob. It kept turning. He sucked in his breath, then pulled with all his strength.

The door swung inward; a body toppled forward into his arms and he nearly tumbled down the stairs. Carver moved to his side and together they pushed the man onto the deck. Pierce's hand came away bloody.

"Oh, Christ," Elise said from behind him, and Pierce realized it was Simms. He emitted low, broken groans; he was saying something. His groans became words: "Raff, raff, raff."

Marisol moved out onto the deck. "What's he saying?" Pierce motioned for her to be quiet.

"Raff," Simms gasped.

"Raff. . . Raft! He said raft!" Carver exclaimed. Pierce leaned forward. "Where is it?"

Simms was sitting up with the help of Pierce on one side and Carver on the other. He pointed toward the bow. Pierce glanced at Elise. " Find it. Hurry!"

Her eyes were hard, unforgiving, as she stared at the man who was once her husband. "Leave him, Nick. We can't do anything for him."

She swept past them; Marisol hugged her heels. Their footfalls echoed along the deck. Pierce looked at Carver. "He opened the door."

"And he's going to be my number one witness if he lives," Carver said.

They lugged him forward. He was badly hurt, but he was still moving his legs; somehow he was walking. The warm night swam around Pierce, and he drew in deep lungsful of air as he moved across the deck. Then his foot struck something and he crashed to the deck under Steve's weight.

He looked around and saw he'd tripped on another body. He looked into the man's eyes. They were glassy, vacuous. He saw two more bodies. "Christ, they killed the crew."

The popping sounds were gunfire. Simms shot the crew for Andrews, Pierce guessed, then K.J. shot Simms. And he knew why. Simms was too defiant, a potential threat to Andrews.

"Nick, help us. There's no time." It was Elise.

Simms was on his hands and knees, crawling over bodies toward the raft. A bib of blood spread over the back of his shirt.

"Go on," Carver said. "I'll get him."

Pierce hurried to the bow, where Elise and Marisol were struggling to get the self-inflating raft over a low rail. He lifted and shoved, and it skidded over the side.

"Jump! There's no time!" Elise screamed.

The raft landed upright and bobbed in the sea. Marisol leaped, landed in the raft on her hands and knees. Elise followed her, hitting the water next to the raft. Pierce was about to hurl himself over the railing when he saw Simms's bloody hand on it. Carver was trying to get him over the side, and Pierce ran over to help.

They lifted him by the shoulders to the top of the rail, grabbed his legs, and pushed. The burly man plunged headfirst toward the water and the raft. He smacked against the edge of it, landing just inches from Elise. The raft stood on end, flipping Marisol into the water.

Pierce vaulted the railing. As he fell, he glimpsed the moon low on the horizon, its milky illumination shattering against the choppy seas. He was like the moon, hanging in midair. Then there was only the dark, the sting of the salt water, and his body plunging. He popped to the surface, treaded water, turning in circles.

He saw Carver swimming frantically toward the raft, which looked like a whale painted in moonlight, and Marisol crawled aboard it. But he didn't spot Elise or Simms. Pierce kicked his screaming legs and propelled his weary arms, shooting toward the raft. As he grabbed the side, the raft suddenly tilted as Carver hoisted himself aboard.

"Where's Simms?" Carver bellowed, hanging over the side.

Where the hell was Elise? Pierce shouted for her, listened, waited, shouted again. Nothing.

"Paddle," Carver hollered. "Hurry. It's going to blow!"

The cop grabbed one of the paddles and thrust it into the water as Marisol clutched the other. Pierce shouted for Elise again, desperately searching the dark waters for a glimpse of her. They couldn't paddle away and just leave her here, they couldn't.

The yacht suddenly blew, lighting up the sky. A wave of heat and water flipped the raft and tossed them into the black sea like a handful of pennies.

He tumbled over and over, the turbulence of the explosion tossing him about until he couldn't tell which way was up. He swallowed mouthfuls of salt water. The stuff swirled up his nostrils.

I'm not going to die, not going to die, not going to—

His head broke the surface amid flaming patches of sinking wreckage. He gasped for air. Not going to die. He saw flames nearby, and oil-stained water all around him. He sucked air, dived, and swam until his lungs were fairly bursting.

He didn't know if the fire was above him, but now he desperately needed air. He shot to the surface, filled his lungs. Something bobbed in front of him. It was a cushion, and he seized it, clutched it, hugged it. It was life itself. He gazed over the burning water around him. There was no sign of the raft. No sign of the others. No sign of Elise. He called her name, thought he heard a distant cry. A woman's voice. Elise? Marisol?

Then he heard Carver, closer. He kept shouting for Elise, but didn't hear any more answering calls. Maybe he'd imagined the woman's voice. Maybe it had only been the wind, the water, a trick of the sea. The fire on the oil slick was dying when he spotted Carver, clutching another floating object. He called to him, but his voice was lost in the blast of a ship's horn.

A light in the distance. Was it moving toward him? Yeah . . . yeah it was. He was sure of it. He thought he heard the voice again, a woman's voice, it had to be. He swam toward the light. The voice was inside it, speaking to him, tugging at him. And then the light was on top of him and hands were pulling him out of the water and he clearly heard his name called. But it wasn't a woman's voice.

"Pierce, for chrissakes, about time you got here."

He looked up, blinked, and saw Redington smiling broadly. Two Coast Guardsmen lifted Pierce onto the deck, and carried him away into a cabin. Then he saw her; she was wrapped in a blanket sitting on a cot. Her hair wet and sticking to her face.

"Nick, Nick. I knew you'd make it."

South Beach, August 17

I
t was 7 a.m. and the sun had just risen out of the cerulean Atlantic waters. Nicholas Pierce had never seen the beach crowded at this hour and neither had the handful of
 
determined sandpipers that scooted to the edge of the water, picking for their breakfast amid the bare feet of revelers celebrating the Harmonic Convergence. Gulls shrieked overhead and pin-wheeled through the clear blue sky above the throng as musicians strummed guitars and beat steel drums with mallets.

Broken waves eddied over the warm sand, rising to Pierce's ankles and receding again as he and Elise walked away from the crowd. Like the tide, his thoughts rushed, fled, rose again, both reluctant and anxious to dwell on recent events.

Raymond Andrews had obviously planned all along to disappear once he had the skulls; the world would presume that he had perished with the others on the yacht. He hadn't counted on anyone surviving to tell the story, or that Redington would alert the Coast Guard when he discovered the Argo-II missing from its slip.

"I know that look." Elise reached for his hand as they walked along the beach. "You're thinking about him again, aren't you?"

Pierce bent down, picked up an oval-shaped shell and examined its swirling lines, which spiraled inward to a central point. Like his life, spiraling inward, avoiding the world outside his immediate surroundings. "He's hard to forget."

"He's gone now," she said, but he knew she wasn't any more convinced than he was that they'd heard the last of Andrews. After all, they'd betrayed him, and Andrews did not tolerate betrayal.

"Yeah, gone." He tossed the shell into the water, watched it disappear, knowing it would again wash up on the shore. "But they should've caught him by now."

"It takes time, Nick. He's got a lot of money and a lot of connections. Look at the tough time they have catching the big drug smugglers in the Medellin cartel. They're wanted in this country, just like Andrews. But they live like kings, and most of them have avoided getting caught for years now."

Pierce smiled as he thought about the telephone conversation he'd had recently with Morris Carver. If all those 'big-time cops' who were after Andrews came home empty-handed, he was going after the 'mofo himself.' He had a lot of vacation time saved up, and no one could stop him from doing what he wanted with it.

Pierce believed he'd do it, too. He was tenacious as hell. "Who knows. Maybe he's hiding out on Miami Beach right now," Elise said when he didn't reply.

"I doubt it. My guess is he's hiding somewhere in the Pyrenees on the border of France and Spain. Basque territory."

"Could be."

"It's no secret that the Medellin cartel has connections with the Basque Separatists, and for a price they'd probably hide Andrews."

Wealth and connections, Pierce thought, could enable Andrews not only to find a secure residence, but would allow him to easily create a new identity. With plastic surgery, he could move about at will without concern about being identified. Transformed.

But where was the New Enlightenment portended by the reunion of the skulls? He asked Elise about it.

"I'm not sure it's something that happens in a flash, but don't belittle the predictions of the Mayan calendar. Don't be surprised if the Harmonic Convergence brings great change in the world."

"Like what?"

"I've heard some interesting predictions."

Like what?"

"Oh, everything from the crash of the stock market to the crash of the entire Eastern Block of communist governments. The end of the Cold War. Russia becoming a democracy. Gorbachev building a free-market economy in the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall falling."

"Yeah. Sounds like a pipe dream."

She laughed. "I can't really say it's going to happen. But it's possible."

"Sounds like a lot of chaos, at least at first, especially if the stock market collapsed."

"Look at how the reunion was achieved. I'd say we can expect more big changes, but with a heavy dose of darkness. And I wouldn't be surprised if Andrews somehow emerges out of the chaos as some sort of New Enlightenment prophet, preaching peace and stability."

Pierce paused, opened the flap of his canvas camera case and lifted out his Nikon
 
 
F-3 with its 300 mm lens. "I'd like to believe there's no way in hell that he's ever going to do anything public again."

He aimed the camera at a flock of pelicans gliding in a line down the coast. "Look at that." He snapped several shots and as the lead pelican dove down and skimmed the water, the others followed in an undulating movement. "Well, look at that," he said, lowering the camera.

"What, you've never seen pelican flying along the coast?"

"Not quite like that." He set the camera back into the case, closed the flap, and took Elise's hand. "I heard that we might see a plumed serpent in the sky this morning, a sign of the times. And you know what, I think we just did. They looked very serpentine in their flight."

"I like that," she said and squeezed his hand.

They walked in silence away from the beach, away from the crowd. Everyhour they were together seemed like a miracle to him. Until he'd been lifted aboard the Coast Guard cutter that had spotted the fiery explosion, he'd thought he'd lost Elise. She'd been trapped beneath the raft after Simms's falling body had knocked her off. But, as Carver and Marisol had started paddling, she'd grasped a guide rope on one side and managed to get a breath of air before the explosion. She'd never let go of the raft and had been the first found.