A Five Year Plan

Chapter Twenty-three

‘Would you mind telling me exactly what the fuck is going on here? Did the ship hit an iceberg? Are we the only survivors? I hope so, because I’ve got this thing about people driving my boat, which is partly to do with the small fact that it cost the best part of a million bucks. But mostly it’s to do with the fact that to handle not one, not two, but three — three Man diesel engines, each delivering 2,300 revs, and three Arneson surface drives, you generally have to know precisely what the fuck you’re doing.’

Kate turned around in the cockpit chair and seeing a red-eyed Calgary Stanford standing there, smiled her most disarming smile.

Coolly she said, ‘Nice boat, guy.’ Then checking back at the controls, she glanced at the rev counter and saw that they were doing over twenty revs as it was. The movie actor’s boat was virtually in flight.

Sitting next to her at the helm position, Jack Jellicoe nodded his nervous agreement. Smiling thinly as the boat surged forward, he said, ‘Yes, she’s a real thoroughbred. I should think this boat is capable of near competition speeds. Am I right?’

Stanford dropped heavily down in the second co-pilot seat and said, ‘Knock it off and just give me the story to date.’

Kate started to tell him about the Britannia being used to smuggle cocaine and how she and her FBI colleagues had been working undercover.

‘Cut to the chase, will you?’ insisted the actor.

‘This is it, guy,’ Kate told him. ‘The FBI has requisitioned your boat and we’re now in hot pursuit of the bad guys.’

‘No shit. The real cops n’robbers thing?’

‘The real thing.’

‘So where the hell are they?’

Jellicoe, scanning the horizon with his battered binoculars, said, ‘There’s no sign of them yet, but we’re pretty sure they’re on this general bearing.’

Stanford gave Kate an up and down look of appraisal. ‘I’ll say one thing for you, Mrs J. Edgar Hoover. You sure know how to handle a boat.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Mind if we have some sounds?’

‘Your boat. Your rules,’ said Kate.

Stanford flicked a switch on the control panel that turned on the CD player. He grinned and said, ‘Rock music for a boat chase, don’t you think?’ The next second a pair of giant speakers behind the helm position kicked in with a Guns n’ Roses track.

‘They’ll probably hear us before we can see them,’ winced Jellicoe.

‘Yeah. Sorry it’s not Wagner. If you know what I mean Captain Willard.’

‘Not really,’ admitted Jellicoe. ‘And the name’s Jellicoe actually.’

‘Film reference,’ drawled Stanford, shaking his head. ‘Scares the hell out of the gooks, n’ shit like that.’

‘Still not with you, I’m afraid.’

‘Forget it, Captain Willard.’ Stanford looked at Kate. ‘You know, I was kind of blasted last night. I have a vague recollection of a nocturnal visit by someone carrying heat? Was that you guys, or was I outta my mind?’

‘That was one of the bad guys,’ said Kate. ‘They visited all the boats and took away the radio handsets to prevent anyone from calling the Navy.’

‘Which disposes of my next question,’ said Stanford. He looked back at Jellicoe and asked, ‘How’s it comin’ there, Willard? Any sign of Mister Christian and those other mutineers?’

‘No.’

‘Like the music?’

‘Music?’ Jellicoe snorted.

‘Guns n’ Roses. How do you like them?’

‘Not much.’

‘On the subject of guns,’ said Stanford. ‘Am I going to need to be packin’ a piece, or what?’

‘Do you mean to tell me you’ve got a gun?’ asked Kate.

‘Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,’ said Stanford. ‘The Hollywood community is full of nervous people and prey to others who make them that way. Being a movie star has some significant bio-hazards. Stalkers. Shit like that. My own life has been threatened on any number of occasions. So yes ma’am, I am licenced to carry firearms. Fact is, there’s a gunsafe on this boat. If you’re short of a weapon I can probably fix you both up. Highway Patrolman. Glock. Smith & Wesson Sigma. All chambered for cartridges with gravitas. You dig? Easy Andy, I’m not. But when you’re on my boat, mi arma de fuego, su arma de fuego.’

Kate nodded enthusiastically. She said, ‘A gun would be nice.’

‘How about you, Captain Willard?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Please yourself,’ said Stanford getting up carefully from the co-pilot’s seat. The speed of the boat made the deck difficult to stand on. But clearly Stanford was used to it.

Jellicoe said nothing as the actor went below to fetch the handguns. He was still sweeping the bright blue horizon for some sign of the Britannia. From time to time he would glance down at the open-scan radar screen. It was a similar system to the ARPA on board the Duke, except that the screen had two displays: the radar image of the general vicinity, and the adjacent chart display — instant confirmation of their position and any hazards that might be in the area. Something on the small screen caught his experienced eye and he touched the instrument’s zoom button to take a closer look.

‘There,’ he said excitedly. ‘On the screen. Something to the north-west of us. Less than five miles away.’

Al came out of the head feeling like shit. He had a headache and a bad case of diarrhea and he felt as tired as if he’d missed a whole night’s sleep. So tired that it took him a couple of minutes to remember that he really had lost a whole night’s sleep. They’d been up all night taking down the score. Then there was the medication. And the alcohol. Tearing the two Scopoderm plasters off his arm he threw them irritably onto the stateroom floor and then sat down on the edge of the bed, paying no more attention to the two dead bodies next to him than he had to the guy in the bath while he’d been taking a crap. They didn’t bother him. Dead was dead. He never connected bodies with people who had lived and breathed. But he did wish that he had paid more attention to what Dave had told him about mixing alcohol with the seasickness medication. Not that he had drunk all that much. No more than a few mouthfuls of vodka. A couple of beers. That was just refreshment. But it did seem to have taken its toll on his state of being.

Trying to get his shit together, Al took a deep breath through his nose. He’d killed lots of people before. People he knew well, too. Fact was, it was nearly always people he knew well. The nature of the business he was in demanded it. You came on to a guy you’d done business with, like he was your best friend, and then blew his fucking brains out. Only usually Al had a little more enthusiasm for the job, on account of how he normally felt more like he had some adrenalin coursing through his system. Adrenalin was good for wet work. It kept you sharp and on your toes. Right now, he felt as blunt as a door handle in a padded cell. Gray and sweaty, like it was him who was heading for a Viking funeral, instead of the younger guy up on deck.

Al looked around for inspiration and saw a jade block and a razor blade on the dead girl’s bedside table. It had been quite a few years since he’d had a blow of snow. Enjoyable, but expensive, and Madonna was too money oriented to let him turn lots of cash into a handful of dust for snorting up his nose. Besides, Naked Tony wouldn’t have liked it. He distrusted people who used dope regularly. But as a now and then thing it was OK. And right now it looked just what he needed to be on top of the hit parade. To give it his best shot. One hit to make another. That was politics.

He leaned across the girl’s body, casually inspecting her nakedness, and stroking her titties as he reached for her bedside drawer. Leaving aside the hole in her head and the blood all over her face, she was a nice-looking girl. Still warm too. But for his lethal agenda he might have been tempted to fuck her before she cooled off for good.

The drawer was a regular dessert service tray: shotgun spoons, gold-capped safety razors, gold straws — all the paraphernalia of the regular user, like it was premier cru Bordeaux. Even the glass storage bottle containing her supply of coke was wearing a little gold jacket.

‘Damn right, babe,’ Al told her as he tapped a generous measure onto her jade chopping block. ‘It’s a luxury, not a lifestyle.’

When Al had finished chopping the coke, he separated the powder into two neat mounds, took the gold straw and snorted one of the piles into his flaring nostrils. His head jerked up from the rush and a big grin spread on his face.

‘Now that’s what I call vitamin C,’ he chuckled and swept the second mound of coke off the jade block with the razor, and into the dead girl’s navel. Taking the gold straw, he pressed his face close to her belly and snorted out her navel, licking it clean for good measure. Already he felt invigorated. He said, ‘This is good leaf.’

Ever since Dave had found the stash, Al had been wondering if there was a way of getting it out of there and loading the stuff onto the Ercolano at the same time as they transferred all the money. Tony might like a windfall like that. It seemed a hell of a waste just to sink the boat with all that dope on board. If it was anything like the stuff tingling through his nose, deep-sixing the motherlode would be nothing short of a fucking tragedy. Al licked the dead girl’s belly again, and feeling the boat begin to slow, he stepped out of the main stateroom and shouted up the stairwell.

‘We there?’

‘I reckon this is about the spot,’ shouted Dave.

Snorting happily, Al scratched his nose and went up to the galley where he had left his weapons on the counter. He took the .45 automatic and unscrewed the laser aiming module. He wouldn’t need it. Not at the range he was contemplating. The silencer he had already dumped when firing at what he had assumed was the nosey parker. Noise was good when you were trying to persuade someone to stay the fuck out of your way. Ejecting the magazine, he thumbed a few more rounds inside until it was full again and then smacked it back up the handgrip. One round would be all he would need, but Al was too much of a pro to leave anything to chance. Any opportunity you got to reload, you took it. You could never tell what might happen when you had to grease someone. The unexpected. It was always a factor. Especially when it was a guy you knew well. A guy you quite liked, even. Drugs had helped Al to change his mind about blowing Dave away without a word. That no longer seemed such a good idea. He was going to have to talk to Dave. Apologize. Tell him that it was nothing personal. That it was just Naked Tony’s fucking paranoia, and what could he, Al, do about it? Except do what the fuck he was told, or end up in a similarly terminated condition. After all he and Dave had been through together, apologizing seemed to be the least he could do for the guy. That and a quick and painless headshot. Back of the cranium probably — SS style. Whatever you thought about their lack of personal morality, those Nazis had known how to off people with a pistol. German efficiency. The ultimate killing machine. BMW with bullets.

The Britannia’s original owner had been a keen diver, and the boat was fitted with an Apelco fishfinder. As well as giving the screen viewer the best possible picture of where fish were to be found, the Apelco was also equipped with a dual-frequency transducer, which, scanning forward and downward, could give advance warning of shoals, holes in the seabed or even wrecks to be explored. From the pilot’s chair on the bridge, Dave kept one eye on the Apelco and one eye on Al through the skylight window of the galley. There could be only one reason for Al reloading his gun. He meant to use it. On him. This was the moment Dave had been half expecting. Now that Dave had served his useful purpose, it was time for Al’s double-cross.

Dave throttled right back so that the engines were just ticking over, picked up the Mossberg shotgun from the control console, and positioned himself immediately over the stairwell that led up from the galley to the bridge.

Al came creeping up the stairs, gun at the ready, and called out, ‘Can you see the ship yet?’

Dave pumped a cartridge into the barrel by way of reply and took aim. He said, ‘Just the back of your head, Al.’

Recognizing the distinctive sound of a shotgun being readied for business, Al became as still as the boat itself.

‘Throw the gun out of there, as far as you can. And better make sure it hits the sea, or I’ll get upset.’

‘What the fuck is this about?’ said Al.

‘You tell me.’

‘You gone nuts?’

‘The gun, Al, or I’ll part your hair with buckshot. I’ve killed two people today already. I don’t suppose one more’ll make much difference to my immortal soul. But it sure as hell will to yours.’

‘Okay, okay. I don’t need it any more anyway.’

‘You said it.’

Al threw the gun. It sailed through the air and plopped into the ocean behind the boat with a scarcely audible splash.

‘Come upstairs, real slow, hands on your head,’ Dave told him, and backed up to the pilot’s chair.

Al did what he was told. But at the very next minute, just as he reached the top of the stairs, the boat began to rock violently, as if the sea had been stirred by some sudden typhoon, or maelstrom. Dave collapsed back into the chair and, glancing down at Apelco, saw the outline of something large on the screen. He knew by the speed of its ascent that this was no shoal of fish or some marine leviathan. He recognized the electronic signature of a submarine when he saw one. But by then the sub was already surfacing, less than fifty yards from the Britannia’s bows. And Al was scrambling across the deck toward him, knife at the ready, a murderous expression swiped across his big ugly face.

Dave turned toward Al, the shotgun pointed squarely at his barrel-like body. He could have shot him. Could have blown his head clean off. Al knew that, but he was gambling on Dave’s lack of guts, as he saw it, for any more killing. He hardly expected that at the last second Dave would take hold of the gun barrel and swing the Mossberg round like a baseball bat against his head. The stock struck Al’s skull with a loud thwack, like someone knocking once and loudly on a wooden door, and Al collapsed onto the deck at Dave’s feet.

Most men would have been knocked insensible. Al merely lay there groaning for a minute, time enough for Dave to snatch away his knife and throw it over the side, backing further away as Al sat slowly up. He rubbed his head furiously, focusing on the shotgun and then on the conning tower now looming over them.

‘Well, there’s no need to take this so personally. Get us out of here for Chrissakes,’ he complained. ‘Whoever they are, they don’t mean to ask for directions. We can still make a run for it.’

‘Where do you suggest we go?’

‘Anywhere but here.’

Dave turned off the engines.

‘What are you, nuts?’ demanded Al. ‘This little misunderstanding you and I just had. It don’t mean that we have to go jail for it. Come on, will ya? They can’t chase a motor yacht like this.’

Dave shook his head and said, ‘You can’t outrun a submarine, Al. Quite apart from the two-inch gun on the conning tower, they have these things called torpedoes. We’d be a sitting duck.’

A figure now appeared on the submarine’s conning tower and, speaking English in a thick foreign accent, addressed them through a loud-hailer.

‘Britannia. Prepare to be boarded. Prepare to be boarded.’

Other figures appeared on the hull and, within a minute, an inflatable carrying several sailors was bobbing its way across the short stretch of water that separated the boat from the sub. Dave threw the shotgun into the sea, just in case Al was tempted to grab it and try something stupid.

It was then that he saw another boat racing toward them. Checking through the binoculars, he saw that it was a some kind of performance yacht. Right away he guessed it must have come from the Duke.

‘Kate,’ he said wearily. ‘That’s all I need.’

‘Now we’ve got him,’ she crowed.

‘It looks like Ross must have got into the radio room after all,’ yelled Jellicoe.

Kate said, ‘Either that, or the French decided to go after them on their own account.’

Calgary Stanford turned down the volume of the boat’s CD, and said, ‘I did a movie about a sub once. I was the intuitive sonarman, following a hunch. Course I was just a bit player back then.’

‘Or maybe they tried to radio us themselves and, when they got no answer, they figured something was wrong,’ Kate continued.

Stanford wasn’t listening. ‘And it wasn’t a real sub at all,’ he said. ‘Just something they mocked up on the lot at Paramount.’

‘The silent service, eh?’ remarked Jellicoe. ‘Never fancied being in subs, myself. Banged up for all that length of time. A bit like being in prison, I’d have thought.’

‘That’s exactly where those two shit-heads are headed,’ said Kate, and throttled back the Predator’s engines. ‘A sub will seem like the Plaza Hotel by comparison with where they’re going. With twenty million dollars’ worth of coke on board, they’ll be lucky to get away with twenty years. A million bucks a year.’

Jellicoe and Stanford exchanged a what-a-bitch kind of glance.

‘Don’t fuck with the FBI,’ whistled Stanford. ‘I’ll try and remember that, ma’am.’

‘Absolutely fucking right,’ snarled Kate. But even as she said it, she knew she was trying hard to convince herself that she wanted to see Dave locked away for the better part of his adult life. Whatever he had done she loved him and, what was more, she wanted to believe that he loved her. But all that was too late now. There was nothing she could do, except her duty. With Captain Jellicoe on the scene, not to mention the French Navy, she could hardly walk away from this. Her feelings in the matter were of little account here. Dave was going back to prison, and that was where her duty lay. Even so, she half hoped that the captain of the French boat, whose men were already boarding the Britannia, would dispute her jurisdiction and lock Dave and Al in his submarine’s brig — or whatever it was they called their lock-up. More work for the DA’s office when it came to getting them extradited, but a lot easier for her.

Kate steered Stanford’s boat alongside the Britannia and Jellicoe threw a line to one of the sub’s sailors, while Stanford put out fenders to protect his paintwork. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Dave standing beside Al on the aft deck watching her, but she did not look back at him.

‘You guys wait here,’ she told Jellicoe and Stanford, and trying not to look triumphant, she climbed aboard the Britannia, curtly declining the helping hand that was offered to her by one of the sailors.

Dave and Al were covered by a sailor with a machine pistol and, in the absence of her FBI identity card and badge, Kate had brought Stanford’s Glock automatic to help establish her authority. From what she had heard of Frenchmen they were notoriously sexist. She figured it would be a lot harder for them to patronize a woman with a gun in her hand. She looked around for someone who seemed like he was in charge. Then, in her halting French, and still avoiding Dave’s twinkling eye, she identified herself and requested to speak to the officer in charge.

To her surprise and annoyance, one of the sailors laughed. A swarthy, handsome man, with a thick mustache, and wearing a blue boilersuit, he said, ‘Please, there is no need for you to try to speak French. I speak excellent English. Agent Furey, did you say you were called?’

Kate nodded and tried to control her irritation. The French. Even when you tried to speak their language they treated you with contempt. It made you wonder why people bothered to learn it in the first place.

‘I lived in New York for many years,’ explained the man with the flourishing mustache. ‘A dirty city, but also interesting.’

‘And you are, sir?’

‘I am Captain Lieutenant Eugene Luzhin, the executive officer on board,’ he said smoothly, and took a packet of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his boilersuit. ‘Do you mind if I smoke? Only it is forbidden when we’re on board the missile boat, and most of us are now desperate to get some fresh nicotine into our lungs. It’s been a week or two since we last surfaced.’

He did not wait for an answer, and nodded to his men, who took out their own cigarettes and began to light up. Even the man with the machine pistol. Luzhin did not offer Kate a cigarette, for which she was glad. Diplomacy might have meant she would have had to take it, and French cigarettes were too strong for her. These were as pungent as any she had ever encountered. It was small wonder that Frenchmen sounded so gravelly and sexy.

‘Captain Luzhin,’ she said.

‘Captain Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘The captain is still on the missile boat.’

‘Captain Lieutenant,’ she said, acknowledging his grinning correction. Was he still amused by her attempt to speak French? ‘I’m sorry sir, but is there something funny here? Something I’m missing?’

He exhaled a cloud of smoke as blue as a car exhaust and shrugged in that Gallic way they had.

‘Is that a yes or a no?’ she asked.

‘It’s just that I am not accustomed to a beautiful woman pointing a gun at me,’ said the captain lieutenant.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Kate, glancing awkwardly at the Glock, and wondering where to put it.

‘That’s all right. As a matter of fact I was rather enjoying it.’ Puffing stylishly, with one eye closed against his smoke, he added, ‘It is like Humphrey Bogart in the film Casablanca, when this beautiful woman—’ He snapped his fingers as he tried to remember the name of the actress who had played Use.

It was Dave who supplied the answer.

‘Ingrid Bergman,’ he said. Catching Kate’s eye at last, he added, in a good imitation of Bogart, ‘Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.’

Kate blushed with anger and pushed the Glock under the waistband of her shorts.

‘Now then,’ she said brusquely, addressing herself to the captain lieutenant. ‘These two men are wanted in the United States for piracy and drug smuggling. Hidden on this boat are 100 kilos of cocaine with a street value of twenty million dollars.’

The captain lieutenant whistled.

Even as she was making her explanation, Kate was wondering what could be in all the bulky black sports bags that were piled inside the boat. ‘But before we do anything else, I think we have to resolve the question of jurisdiction.’

‘A difficult matter,’ admitted the captain lieutenant. ‘I believe the Grand Duke is a British-registered ship. And this boat we are standing on. The Britannia. It is registered in the British Virgin Islands. At least that is what is painted on her stern.’

‘That’s true,’ said Kate. ‘But both these men are American citizens, and as such they should be tried for their crimes by an American court.’

Dave said, ‘You send me back to the States, and I’ll be facing a long prison sentence. Like I said before, go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.’

‘Is this another joke?’ she asked him angrily.

‘No, it’s no joke.’

‘Then why in hell are you grinning?’

Dave shrugged and looked for his missing watch.

‘We’re a long way from American jurisdiction,’ said the captain lieutenant. ‘May I remind you that these are international waters.’

Kate hardly wanted the two men as her prisoners. But there was something in Luzhin’s manner that made her want to win this particular argument. She said, ‘Nevertheless I insist that these two men be handed over to my custody. They’ll be held on board the Duke until we arrive in Mallorca, whereupon they’ll be immediately extradited back to the United States.’

‘Immediately?’ The captain lieutenant laughed again. ‘I hardly think so. These things take time.’

Dave said, ‘You’d really do that to me, Kate? After all that happened between us?’

‘Nothing happened between us. And just keep your mouth shut, unless you want to spend the rest of the voyage in handcuffs.’

‘Kate. Be fair. I can hardly stay silent about it, now can I? After all, it’s my ass that’s maybe going back to jail.’

‘You should have thought of that before you pulled this little stunt.’

‘And that’s your last word on the subject?’

‘Last word. Period.’ She added below her breath, but just loud enough for Dave to hear, ‘How I could have ever fallen for a crummy narcotics thief, I’ll never know.’

‘This was never about narcotics,’ Dave told her, still smiling, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

‘S’right,’ said Al. ‘We was after cash money on them other boats.’

‘You keep out of this,’ snapped Kate.

Once again Dave looked for his missing watch. Then he leaned toward the captain lieutenant and coolly lifting the executive officer’s forearm read the time on his watch. Like they were old buddies. Not that the Frenchman seemed to mind at all. Then Dave said something to Luzhin that Kate didn’t quite hear. Or perhaps didn’t understand.

‘I regret, I cannot accede to your request,’ Luzhin told Kate. ‘But I tell you what.’ He nodded at Al. ‘You can have him, the ugly one. And we’ll take the other one with us. That’s fair, isn’t it? Like the judgment of Solomon, yes? Half each, as it were.’ He nodded at one of his sailors. Straightaway the man threw away his cigarette, stepped into the cockpit and restarted the Britannia’s engines.

‘That’s the craziest idea I ever heard,’ said Kate. ‘If this is the way the French Navy does things—’

This time she caught the look that passed between Dave and the captain lieutenant and thought she could smell a rat. As if Dave had cut some private deal of his own. Maybe even bribed the guy.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘What’s going on here? You French—’

‘Who said anything about the French?’ shrugged the captain lieutenant, and flicked his cigarette across Kate’s shoulder into the water. ‘Not me.’

‘Well, if you’re not the French Navy, then whose damn Navy are you, Mister?’

Instinctively she started to reach for the Glock under her waistband. But the captain lieutenant smiled and caught her wrist in his own strong hand. Still smiling politely, he said, ‘Pazhalsta,’ and took her gun away.