Mistakes took a while to show up on Torea, but once they happened, events unfolded quickly. She was not a particularly easy vessel to sail if one was not accustomed to her fickle ways, but this guy was, as they said down under, right-as.
“You must spend a good deal of time on the water,” the first officer said, relaxing a notch.
The man tossed a casual glance over his shoulder. “A bit,” he said. “Though rarely on anything this small.”
Winterflood strode up a moment later, a ceramic mug of what was presumably tea in one hand and a Bacardi and Coke in the other. He gave the tumbler to his friend. “Best give us back the helm before young Jaret has a stroke.” The skipper punched a code into the instrument panel to the left of the wheel, engaging the autopilot.
“Jaret,” Winterflood said. “I’d like you to meet Admiral Peter Li of the United States Navy. We sailed together as part of the Joint Antipiracy Task Force 150 off the Somali coast… too many years ago.”
“Admiral,” the first officer said, stepping forward to shake the offered hand.
“Retired,” Li said. “In the private sector now. Please call me Peter.”
Jaret gave a nervous chuckle. “That’s not going to happen… Admiral.”
Li took a sip of his Bacardi and Coke, smelling the sea over the top of his glass. Rum, he thought, was best when consumed near salt water. It put him in mind of sea captains of old, sampling the wares of the rum trade.
Winterflood handed the mug to his first officer. “This is for you.” He turned to Li. “Speaking of your private-sector job, there’s a saucy brunette at the bar who wants to meet you. Says she’s from some online rag I can’t recall. Fiona something. Dundee or Dunford, something like that. I only spoke with her for a moment, but she’s quite engaging. Been around the world so many times, she’s got more culture than a month-old mango. She must have written books, because she’s wearing a silk frock that probably costs more than I make in a month. All the reporters I ever met looked like they got their clothes from the rubbish bin behind a thrift shop.”
Li chuckled. He’d always enjoyed listening to Winterflood’s Aussie accent and colorful turns of phrase.
“I’m not interested in meeting women,” Li said. “Or talking about my work.”
“Too late, mate,” Winterflood said, glancing toward the port-side door to the main saloon.
The skipper had been right. Saucy might have been a sexist term, but it was a good descriptor of this woman. She slinked as much as she walked, giving the impression to anyone looking that she was dancing her way to wherever she happened to be going. The yellow silk sundress clung alluringly to the dips and swells of her body, falling off her right shoulder to expose exquisitely tanned collarbones. The sea breeze had freshened significantly, making the dress not quite enough to keep her warm. Li imagined that would be no problem. Not for long, anyway. Some poor schmuck would offer her a coat. She was the kind of woman that oozed sexuality from every curvaceous pore, the kind who gave the impression she was naked even when fully clothed — the kind who made wives angry.
Her face brightened when she caught Li’s eye.
“Out warning him I’m on the hunt, are you?” she said to Winterflood, the r’s lost in her New Zealand accent. The clingy silk dress left little to the imagination, forcing both men to focus on her eyes or risk getting caught looking somewhere else.
“Not at all, ma’am,” the captain said. “We were, in fact, just talking about you.”
“Yes,” she said, sounding more like yis. She stuck out her hand. There was a gold ring on the thumb, and an AppleWatch with a white leather strap, but no other jewelry that Li could see. “Fiona Dunfee,” she said. “Auckland Mirror. Did the captain tell you what I wanted?”
“We hadn’t gotten there yet,” Li said.
“Might we sit down?” Ms. Dunfee lifted the hem of her dress more than she needed to, drawing his attention to her calves. The white leather of her sandals stood out in stark contrast to bronze legs and bright red toenails. “I wore the wrong shoes for this. My feet are killing me.”
Li motioned toward a large round sun lounge between the wheel and the saloon. A canvas cover blocked the view from party guests who milled on the other side of the windows, but the front was open to the helm.
“I don’t want to whinge,” Ms. Dunfee said. “But I was thinking out of the wind. Maybe someplace more private… where you’d feel free to talk.”
“And just what is it you want to talk about?”
“You, Dr. Li,” she said, as if it were obvious. He didn’t follow, so she gave up going inside and sat on the lounge, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She looked up at him, batting her eyes. “The work you’re doing. Sources tell me it’s cutting-edge communications tech. The so-called Internet of Things — you know, the future of mankind. That kind of stuff. I don’t want you to talk about anything top-secret, of course — unless you want to, which I’d be fine with — but anything you could give me that could be open-source.” She patted the cushion beside her, beckoning him to sit down.
He remained standing. “A lot of top-secret stuff is open-source, if you know where to look.”
“True.” She made like she was pulling up the shoulder of her dress, but ended up toying with it for a moment and leaving it where it was, low, cutting a diagonal line from the bottom of her deltoid across the swell of her breast. “My source says your team has developed some remarkable communications systems between Wi-Fi-compatible devices.”
“If that is true,” Li said, “your source is telling you a lot more than I ever would. Who is it you’re talking to, exactly?”
“Nice try, Dr. Li,” Ms. Dunfee said, eyes sparkling in the sunlight as she looked him up and down. A stray lock of dark hair blew across her face. She left it there, as if she’d planned it that way all along. Her lips blossomed into a pout, which, in her case, was even more alluring than the smile. “How about you give me something on background so I can corroborate the things I already know?”
“Afraid not,” Li said, hackles up. She could very well be a journalist in search of a scoop, but she could also be working for the endless list of foreign intelligence services pecking away at the United States — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran… Hell, even Israel wouldn’t let a little thing like friendship get in the way of spying to learn what Li knew.
“Come on…” the woman whined — whinging, she called it — then suddenly brightened as if a novel idea had just popped into her head. “I can make it worth your while.”
Li laughed out loud at the audacity of that. “Are you actually offering me money?”
“I can pay,” Ms. Dunfee said. She was leaning back now, on both arms, knees swaying under the thin silk. “But it doesn’t have to be money.”
“Let me ask you something,” Li said.
“Yay, dialogue.” She clapped her hands. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Go ahead. Ask me anything.”
“Does this ever work?”
Dunfee raised a wary brow. “Does what work?”
“The Betty Boop shtick,” Li said. “I mean, I’m as red-blooded as the next guy, but I’m also smart enough to know I’m a little old for you.”
Dunfee shrugged, sticking out her bottom lip and tilting her head to look at him for a long moment. At length, she said, “You know what they say, sixty percent of the time, it works every time.”