SEVEN
Can you hear me?”
His eyes were shut but he could feel his body moving up and down. He could smell coffee, tobacco, and the sea.
“You need to wake up.”
He moved his fingers; they touched cloth. He moved his feet; they were in boots.
“It’s time.”
Will opened his eyes. His vision blurred at first but then he saw a man, the older person he’d seen light tobacco before walking onto the jetty. He was in his fifties, was thick-set and looked very strong, had a beard and sandy-colored hair with streaks of gray, wore a turtleneck sweater and oilskin waders, and had a cigar fixed in one corner of his mouth. His muscular hand was outstretched toward Will. Will grabbed it, pulling his body up until he was seated. Looking around, he saw he was on a bed in a tiny cabin containing four other beds. Two windows were on one side of the cabin, beyond which sea pounded their glass. He was on the trawler, and to judge by its rolling movement they were far out at sea.
The Norwegian captain spoke in a deep, thick accent. “You’ve been asleep for twelve hours. That’s more than enough rest for any man, even though you were in danger of getting hypothermia. My wife’s been looking after you.”
Will released the Norwegian’s hand, looked down and saw that he had been dressed in a sweater, jeans, and boots. He frowned. “Twelve hours?”
The captain shrugged. “Seems you needed the rest. Plus, my sons and I didn’t need your help to get this far. But we’re about to exit Norwegian waters, and I need you awake in case we spot a coastal patrol heading toward us and”—he smiled—“we need you to jump overboard before they search the boat.”
Will stood gingerly, worried that his legs might buckle. But they were strong and steady. He had needed the sleep. He also knew the real reason why the captain needed him to be awake before they entered international waters.
The captain needed every person on the boat to be on hand to throw stuff into the sea if they saw a naval or customs vessel approaching them.
The captain was a smuggler — mostly precious metals, counterfeit money, stolen goods, though Will wasn’t blind to the fact that the man sometimes smuggled nastier stuff like drugs and weapons. Four years ago, he’d learned about his activities by reading files belonging to the MI6 division that targeted international organized crime. He’d had no interest in the ongoing efforts to monitor and one day thwart the activities of criminals, because that task was in the safe hands of other officers, but he was most certainly interested in the people in the files: criminals he could approach without MI6 knowing and whom he could help if one day they’d do the same for him. The trade was simple — I tip you off if I think the net’s closing in on you; you get me out of your country if I need you to do so. Over the years, he’d handpicked and recruited dozens of men like the Norwegian captain, spread out across the globe; people who could get him stuff, who traveled off the radar, who had overriding reasons not to tell a soul about their secret pact with Cochrane.
No doubt it was a morally ambiguous thing for Will to do, but Will had long ago given up attempting to grapple with the ambiguities of his line of work.
Right now, all that mattered was going west, and the captain’s smuggling route was going to do that for him. “Thank you.”
The captain waved a hand while puffing smoke from his cigar. “I don’t need gratitude.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Come on, make yourself useful on deck. Providing the weather holds, two days until we reach Greenland.”
EIGHT
Ellie Hallowes pulled up the collar of her overcoat, thrust her hands into her pockets so that they were dry and one of them could grip the metal box, and hunched her shoulders, because rain was pouring out of the sky and it was cold and dark. Hunching her shoulders did nothing to stop the wet and chill, but it made Ellie feel at least a bit like the many people around her who’d been caught in the sudden downpour in Washington, D.C.’s small Chinatown.
All of them were tourists who should have been tucked up in bed in their hotel rooms. Adults and kids jostled for space to move onward while gawping at the primary-colored glow from the twenty restaurants and their window displays of Peking ducks on rotisseries and neon signs in Cantonese, and inhaling the rich aromas of soy and oyster and hoisin sauces, aniseed, Szechuan pepper, cinnamon, ginger, garlic, and cloves.
Ellie liked Chinese cuisine. But tonight, the pungent smells from the restaurants seemed out of place, because they reminded her of her safe places — the havens where she could shut her door at night, not fear the moment when she might inadvertently say something that compromised her undercover work, kick off her shoes and watch TV, and eat stir-fry noodles out of a cardboard carton.
Right now, she wasn’t in one of her safe places.
She wondered if she was doing the right thing by finally laying the tiny metal box to rest. Twenty-two years ago, her father had placed it gently in her hand while they were watching ballet at the Kennedy Center. She was thirteen, and was wearing a ball gown that her father had bought from a second-hand store and had arranged to be altered by a seamstress who refused payment for the job because her daughter was at the same school as Ellie and she knew Ellie’s father had it tough. He was wearing a bow tie and old tuxedo, one that would have looked good on him when he was younger but now was shiny with wear. She remembered smiling at him and noticing a few flecks of dandruff on the black shoulders of his jacket. Poor Dad; he’d made such an effort to look smart for her, but had forgotten to brush down his suit. Her mother would never have let him go out like that. But she had died the year before and they were here to commemorate the anniversary of her death by attending her favorite ballet, Giselle.
Inside the box was a plain nine-carat necklace with a heart pendant. As she’d held it with her fingers, he’d leaned toward her and said, “Your Mum told me that I had to be smarter than usual when you got to the teen years, that I wasn’t to get all awkward just ’cause you were becoming a woman, and that I needed to buy you pretty things.”
He’d sat back in his chair, pretending to watch the performance, but Ellie could see that he was tense. No doubt he’d rehearsed what he’d said to her, and was now wondering whether he’d used the right words. Ellie had placed the necklace around her throat and kissed her dad on his cheek. His rigidity vanished, replaced with a big grin and look of utter relief.
He’d died when she was in college, and it was sometime then that she’d lost the necklace. The guilt over losing it made her hang on to the necklace’s box, as if doing so made everything okay. Over the years it had sat on mantelpieces or in the corners of drawers. But all the time, she’d known that the box had meant nothing to her father. He’d wanted her to feel pretty; boxes don’t do that.
So tonight, while rummaging through her hotel room in D.C., looking for a suitable container for the job, her eyes had settled on the box and she’d made a decision. It was time for the box to go.
Odd, though, that she wasn’t just throwing it away; instead, she was giving it to another man. Did that mean she wasn’t really letting go?
She walked out of Chinatown, south along Seventh Street NW, staying close to buildings to avoid the spray from passing vehicles. Less than a mile to her right was the White House. Twelve years ago, she’d stood in front of the building with a letter of employment from the Central Intelligence Agency inside her jacket, marveling at the center of power and feeling pride that she was being brought into its inner circle of trust. Like all college graduates about to embark on life in the real world, she’d been naive back then. Doubly naive in her case, because upon completion of her Agency training, Ellie was told that she had to resign and set up her own Agency-funded consultancy so that she could be a deniable undercover operative. One without the name Ellie Hallowes, because the real her would be kept at arm’s length from the inner circle.