“Where are you?” a voice said, but the light didn’t come back on.
Afraid to leave the light on, Marquez thought. Looking for me and surprised I wasn’t where they left me. The light scanned again, this time the beam reaching closer. He heard the air tanks clank against the rock again, the rip of Velcro, the man reposition-ing himself, and briefly the light was on again. When it clicked off Marquez got ready. The next pass would reach him. He brought his knees up, thought he’d try to kick out, drive his legs into the man’s chest.
Then without warning, the sound masked by rough water at the cave entrance, there was a boat motor and a searchlight played along the walls. Marquez slid forward as the boat turned around. He heard a hard splash and the boat swept into the cave, its lights raking across him.
“Identify yourself.”
“Marquez,” he shouted. “Watch out! There’s someone in the water under you! Don’t let the diver get away, stay with his light!” But either they couldn’t hear him or didn’t understand. And then there were arms grabbing him and they struggled to get him aboard.
“Do we have her?” Marquez asked. “Do we have her?”
“No.”
“Stay with the light, there was a diver,” and a blanket was wrapped around him, a woman telling him they couldn’t do any-thing about the cuffs yet as they tried to pick up the light outside the cave, and a search began along the beach.
“We’ll find him,” he heard the boat’s pilot say, but he knew they wouldn’t. He’d lost the money and they had nothing. He leaned over the side looking down into the dark water. Who was the diver? Was it Kline?
36
“You’re a stand-up guy,” Douglas said outside Mar-quez’s house, and Marquez waited for the reason Douglas had driven up here. His heart had jumped when Douglas pulled into the driveway, afraid Douglas was here to deliver bad news in per-son. Marquez hadn’t gotten home until dawn and this was where the FBI insisted he be, as though Kline would contact them again. “You probably came pretty close to buying it last night. Good thing you got on that ledge.”
“What about the Irishman’s comment she was on a boat?”
“Do you believe him?”
“I want to believe she’s alive. How much money was in those bags?”
“$200,000. A lot of one dollar bills.”
That brought a rush of anger in Marquez. He squinted against the sunlight, his eyes tired, his mind veering off from how Kline would react to the short money.
“Tell me. You shorted him, so what was your plan?”
“To be there, John, and I think you know that. He didn’t bring Petersen; he wasn’t ever planning to make a trade, which probably means he doesn’t have one to make.”
It was Alvarez who’d figured out that the man on the Zodiac had gone off the side wearing dive gear and swum to shore. The Zodiac steering had been locked and it had run out to sea drawing all but the vehicle surveillance with it. The FBI theory was that he’d floated the money ashore with him and met his ride.
“There was a last image on the Web site before it went down,” Douglas said. “You’ll see it soon enough. Her head was tipped back and she had a knife at her throat. The facial contusions were deeper, more colored. I’m told they took at least forty-eight hours to develop the color they had. It means that not all the images were shot the same day, but whether that’s good or bad we don’t know. I don’t want her husband to hear any of this. He doesn’t know about it now and doesn’t need to.”
“I won’t be the one to tell him.”
“How computer literate are you?”
“Not as literate as my fifteen-year-old stepdaughter.”
“I hear you on that. The site is down, but he may come back up, and if he does and keeps the same sequencing going, it may not be a very happy ending.”
“You’re talking around the edges of whatever you have to say.”
“What I’m getting to is, it’s our opinion there’s nothing more that can effectively be done. We need to let him make the next move, because we don’t have one.”
“I think the Irish bastard was telling at least part of the truth; she’s alive on a boat somewhere. We can check every boat over sixty feet in California.”
“And if you get close you may cause him to kill her. Better for your team to sit tight, hard as that is, and we’re all over the boats anyway.”
“I’m not going to have my team stand down.”
“Then, if you find a boat, don’t do anything except call me.”
“We’re going to come up with a list of boats.”
“And we’ll work together. Here, I brought you another one of these.” Douglas fished a telelocator out of his pocket. “Don’t lose this one.”
He watched Douglas drive away and then turned to Katherine. She’d been here when he’d gotten home and he figured the FBI must have called her, must have alerted her though he hadn’t asked. Now he talked to her about his fears for Petersen, his sense of loss and responsibility, the terribleness of having her taken this way. She touched his face, her fingers cool and smooth. She said he ought to get some rest, but what he did after she left was lay out how the team was going to check all vessels over sixty feet. Had to be at least that big, he thought, or at least they’d work from that point. He’d have to get Baird to lend wardens. He took a call from Stuart Petersen, and the conversation was very hard, Stuart saying repeatedly that they had to try to contact the kidnappers, go out to the media in a new way, that the FBI was stonewalling. Marquez could feel Stuart’s hope dying. After he hung up he closed his eyes, thought back over each thing he could remember from last night.
Somewhere in the late afternoon he fell asleep, waking at dusk with a blanket over him and hearing Katherine and Maria talking, taking comfort from the murmur of their voices before closing his eyes again. An hour later he rose and walked into the kitchen. Maria was there alone, her mother was in the shower.
“What’s going on, Maria?”
“I’m making dinner tonight.” Maria hugged him. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
“Count me out on dinner,” he said.
“Oh, you have to eat or you’ll lose weight.”
“I lost too much weight once. I wouldn’t want to do that again.”
“Maybe there’s a message there for me.”
He smiled at her sarcasm. You were only young and self-centered a particular way once and then life showed you otherwise. But he had a lot of tolerance for that. He hadn’t been that fun to talk to as a kid, himself. “How much weight did you lose?” she asked.
“About thirty-five pounds. Some people on my undercover team were killed and I had a hard time with it. I felt guilty and unworthy, and there was suspicion thrown my way because I’d been the only one who’d made it. And I didn’t handle that very well, couldn’t handle my integrity being questioned. It made me very bitter and angry and I had to walk it off in the mountains and when I did, I didn’t eat enough.”
He told her more. He told her of a moment of change, of self-awareness that had happened to him, a dawn on San Francisco Bay, watching the sunrise from a boat. The light on the water had been particularly beautiful, like a thousand prisms reflecting that morn-ing. Hoping he wasn’t sounding too corny, he tried to tell Maria how he’d realized what he loved and what mattered and what it meant to embrace the positive.
But he could see that Maria had lost more weight. When they ate dinner an hour later, she cut a couple of small slivers off a chicken leg and counted out the string beans she put on her plate. She finished and asked to be excused.
“Mom, will you clean up since I made dinner?”
“Sure.”
“Is it okay if I do my homework with the TV on?”
“Don’t turn it on too loud.”
She turned the TV on before going down the hall toward her room and Katherine got up quickly from the table. She walked over to the edge of the kitchen wall where she could see Maria’s bathroom. When Katherine went around the corner he figured Maria was in the bathroom and knew Katherine was listening. A few minutes later, Katherine was back.