Alex Larson was not a fanatical fisherman, but he enjoyed solitary time out on his boat, and loved preparing striped bass à la Fiorentina, the way he had first tasted it in Rome. His wife did not enjoy going out into the middle of the bay, which could get quite rough and make the round-bottomed Lyman pitch and roll like a floating ninepin, especially in a beam sea at lazy trolling speed. Simon Benford had once reluctantly agreed to go out with Alex, but the plunging and yawing made him green, and he detested handling live bait, so he vowed the next time to stay ashore and drink Larson’s scotch while his friend caught dinner.
At 0600 hours on a crisp fall day, the cloudless eastern sky was going pink as the two agents of DCIA’s protective detail backed both trailers into the green water of the creek. They knew Larson would be walking down from the house in fifteen minutes with a thermos of coffee, a flask of bourbon (which they knew he hid from his security guys), and a roast-beef sandwich wrapped in foil made by his housekeeper. The agents today were Bennett and Scott, each with five years’ experience on the detail and more than ten years’ time in Special Forces. They had examined the undersides of both boats for limpet mines on the keel, checked the lockers on the Lyman, and started the Johnson outboard to let it warm up. Before the Old Man came down from the house, they snapped 30-round magazines into their M4s, charged and snapped the bolts closed, safed the weapons, and put them back into the footlocker. They both additionally carried 17-round, 9mm Glock 17s in Frontier Gunleather CC1 holsters under their sweaters and foul-weather jackets—they knew from experience that once out on the bay, it could get cold and wet in a hurry. They weren’t experienced watermen, but they knew the basics.
Once afloat, Bennett and Scott spun the RIB on a dime, and skimmed ahead along the creek to make sure it was clear, the Lyman sedately following, raising hardly a wake in the early light. No one noticed the man in the pickup truck parked on the side of Waterview Drive watching through the trees as the Lyman chugged down Pooles Gut and out onto the South River.
The RIB was infinitely faster than the Lyman, even when the antique was running with the outboard full-out, so Bennett and Scott pushed the throttles flat and bounced ahead to check for traffic downriver as it opened up onto the vast Chesapeake. One of them would always keep the Lyman in sight, and periodically check the radar display set at ten miles range to keep an eye out for the heavies: the tankers and container ships plowing up the channel to Baltimore. They would then pound back to the DCIA, take station astern in a violent turn that sent spray flying in the early sunlight, and throttle back in his wake, smelling the boss’s pipe smoke even two hundred feet astern. The process of darting ahead, then racing back was repeated as required, especially if an unknown boat—runabout, cabin cruiser, or tacking day sailer—looked as if it would pass close by.
There was only one rule: the RIB had to keep off at least one hundred yards when the DCIA began fishing. The noise of the burbling Merc outboards would scare off finicky stripers in the Gulf Stream for Christ sake, not to mention around Thomas Point Shoal at the mouth of the river, or Bloody Point Bar, five miles across the bay, off the tip of Kent Island on the Eastern Shore. These two spots were Larson’s favorites—productive and not too far from home. He tied on a Slug-Go, a five-inch bone-white plastic worm with a flattened tail that made the lure undulate irresistibly to predatory stripers. He tried the rock ledge around the historic Thomas Point lighthouse: the frivolous hexagonal house on stilts with green shutters and six gables, with the Fresnel light in a pagoda-roofed cupola, like a cherry on a sundae.
No one was home around the ledge; stripers sometimes go deep and suspend, feeding on deep baitfish schools, not unlike some members of Congress, Alex thought, retrieving his lure, setting down his rod on the aft deck, and clambering over the front-seat stanchion to sit behind the wheel, a little tricky with the Lyman’s tipsiness. He cranked up the Johnson with the electric starter, eased the throttle ahead, and waved to the guys in the RIB who, bored stiff and soporific from the rocking of the waves, actually didn’t see the Lyman settle down in the water and swing east to cut across the bay to Kent Island, until the DCIA gave them two shorts and a long on the horn. Embarrassed, they escorted the Lyman across the ship channel, watching for traffic. Larson could estimate where Bloody Point Bar was by taking bearings between the breakwater of the Kent Island Marina and the collapsed seawall off Bloody Point beach. Alex kept his eye on his bearings and about a mile offshore, killed the outboard, stood in the aft deck, balancing easily against the roll, and tried a few casts with a silver spoon. Bennett and Scott in the RIB took station 150 yards upwind of the little Lyman so they’d be drifting down to it instead of away from it.
A typical grimy oyster boat, a Chesapeake deadrise—describing the hard chine or angle of the bottom built for stability—with a plumb bow, forward doghouse, and long open stern, was working closer to the beach, dragging for oysters. The single oysterman was reeling in the sharp-toothed dredge that dislodged the oysters from their beds and scooped them into a steel mesh basket by the bushelfuls. Bennett and Scott didn’t know enough to notice that the oysterman was not emptying his dredge, but rather was just casting up and down the beach without result, about half a mile from the Lyman. Alex Larson didn’t notice either, because he had already hooked a thirty-inch striper that probably went fifteen pounds, and was intent on bringing in another one. Something else. None of them noticed what an instinctive sailor would have marked in the sky by late morning: the weather.
Heated by the sun, moisture from the Gulf of Mexico was rising over the bay into the atmosphere, where it collided with a stream of cold air, eventually spreading out to create the anvil top of a storm cell. As water built up in the thunderhead, it began to rain, and the temperature variants created wind shears of sixty knots, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Neither Alex Larson nor the agents in the RIB recognized that the thunderhead was building into a classic squall. The rest of the sky was blue, and the surface of the bay was riffled by a mild chop. The oyster boat incongruously kept up its nondredging, marginally closer to the Lyman. Then it happened. From the surface of the bay, the black lowering clouds with slanting rain bands were preceded by a sick gust of hot air, followed by the white froth of torrential rain moving across the water like a visible shock wave. The first sheet of horizontal rain and gale-force wind heeled the Lyman over as a tremendous clap of thunder tore the sky apart and a bolt of lightning lanced into the water beside the boat, the shaft surrounded by green plasma. Larson balanced precariously on the runabout, which was rolling from gunwale to gunwale, as he threw on a rain slicker from the locker. The rain stung his face like needles, and the insane wind got up inside the jacket until he could zip it. He dropped his rod on the deck, and he held on to the side rail, deafened by thunder, wondering if the Lyman would roll all the way over to turn turtle. The wind dropped for a beat, then came roaring back stronger than before, shifting ninety degrees, making the Lyman roll so far over that she shipped a bathtub’s worth of slate-gray water. Two more of those and his precious antique would sink from under him. He tried inching toward the forward stanchion to get to the wheel, to start the outboard and get her bow into the wind where she’d settle down and where her nose-up attitude would let the self-bailing bilges get the seawater out of her, but he couldn’t let go. The damn hull was still rolling, and Larson’s face was slapped by sea spray at each downward roll. He looked with amazement as a rubber glove rose out of the foaming water, then another, to grasp the side rail and pull violently down with the next roll. Larson was tilted so far forward that the gunwale banged his knees and he catapulted into the water. The salt stung his eyes—his glasses had flown off—and he felt his clothes and boots filling with water, and he knew he had to shuck off his boots, get out of his slicker, and kick to the surface. Bennett and Scott would be alongside to haul him into the RIB, bail out the Lyman, and tow her home. Instead he felt the rubber glove grasp him by the collar of his rain gear, turn him upside down, and begin pulling him deeper, where the water was colder, and where the stripers eyed the fluorescent lures dangled by men in cockleshell boats up there in the sunlight. Alex Larson did not think of Vladimir Putin as his breath gave out and he swallowed seawater.