“Your last name sounds familiar.”
“It’s usually attached to ‘disgraced CIA section chief’,” said Jonah.
“Can’t be you. You’re much too young.”
“My father.”
“Do you know my name?”
“Klea something.”
“Klea Ymeri.”
“Slovakian?”
She shook her head. “Kosovar. From what used to be Yugoslavia. By birth, anyway.”
Silence fell between them. At least she’d stopped looking at him like he was some evil, treacherous bastard that would throw her overboard at any moment.
“I’m really sorry about wrecking your dive equipment,” she finally said. “It’s my fault we’re stuck out here.”
Jonah nodded, considered the apology. It seemed heartfelt enough.
“I probably would have done the same thing,” he said. “So I’ll get over it.”
“Seriously? Just like that? You’re what, over it now?”
“Seriously. It was pretty shitty of me to come in with no intent of saving you. You saw your opportunity and took it. It wasn’t like you weren’t prepared, you certainly weren’t being vindictive. I mean, your plan to escape kinda sucked, but we made a decent go of it.”
“I spent years working it out,” she said. “I was so certain. I visualized every detail, mapped out as many outcomes as I possibly could.”
“By the look of things, you may have missed a scenario or two.”
“No need to be a dick about it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What other way could I possibly take it?”
“Let me put it this way. Fatima’s son didn’t exactly hire me. He sprung me from a prison where’d I’d spent three years. I’d spent that time trying to dream up a way to escape. Lots of ideas came to me, but no real way to carry them out.”
Klea remained silent.
“So Doc Nassiri comes along,” continued Jonah. “And he offers me a way out. A real, bona-fide release from prison in exchange for some basic diving work. Basic for me, anyway. I got the sense he probably couldn’t pay anybody else enough to do it given the proximity to Somalia. But you know what I did?”
“What did you do?’
“I came within one second of taking his gun and trying to shoot my way out of the prison. And you know why? Because I only really knew of one way out. Death. I didn’t have a life to go back to outside those walls. Family is all gone; all my friends think I’m dead or holed up in Thailand with a needle in my arm. They’d said their goodbyes years ago. It was the one certainty I could find, the one absolute I could still control. Maybe I’d take a few assholes with me, maybe not.”
Klea shook her head, refusing to look up, refusing to make eye contact.
“I’m sorry I destroyed your ship,” he said. “I truly am. I know you can relate to what I’m saying. Your elaborate plan? All that Mad Max shit? Harpoons, spears, explosives, smoke clouds? I think you wanted to put yourself in a position where the only choice the pirates had was to kill you. I think you wanted to die on the Horizon.”
She was too strong to sob, but Jonah could feel her heart breaking with every word.
“I should have died four years ago,” she finally said. “I should have died with my friends.”
“Why does the Horizon mean so much to you?”
Klea sat back in the raft, her eyes open, and her cheeks dry.
“I was born in Kosovo,” she said. “This has a point to it, I promise. I was still pretty young during the troubles, but old enough to remember hiding in the woods and the six months I spent in a refugee camp. It’s the sort of thing that college admissions officers swoon over. That was great, because I was good at school. Like, really good. Especially math, physics, anything with numbers, formulas or computer programming. My family stayed observant, we drifted apart when I lost my religion.
“And then I met Colin. He was two years ahead of me at MIT. He was brilliant, an actual certifiable genius. Always smiling, always laughing. Friends with a lot of the girls in his classes but didn’t get many dates. He was kind of awkward and a little overweight. But he was so brilliant and so kind. He showed me a world of phenomenal creativity and passion. Passion for me, a type of intense infatuation I’d never experienced before. It was so pure, so painfully earnest. Maybe other girls found it smothering. One of his exes even tried to warn me off. But I thought it was wonderful. He became my best friend. And then he became more, much more.
“The Horizon was his masterpiece, the culmination of every moment he spent at MIT. He didn’t just want to build a ship that could go around the entire world using less fuel than any other ship before it; he wanted one that was fast and beautiful as well. Every line on this ship was an expression of his brilliant mind and open heart.
“He wasn’t quite what you’d expect of a globe-trotting record-setting maritime explorer. Colin could be a little ridiculous. He wore sandals with tube socks pulled up to his knees, and khaki shorts. Squared-off glasses, even though I went out of my way to get him fitted for contacts. He wouldn’t even go outside unless he was dripping with sunscreen. But I didn’t care about any of that. If you’d met him, you’d understand why.
“So there we are, sailing in the Indian Ocean. Colin thinks he’s planned for everything. We’re more than a hundred miles off the coast of Somalia coming out of the Gulf of Aden. Colin thinks there is no possible way the pirates are going to detect a vessel as small as ours.”
“But they still came,” said Jonah.
“Yeah, they still came. We had no idea how hungry these men were. How could we? Given my childhood, I thought I was wise to the world. We even laughed about the threat, can you believe that? Colin made jokes about joining them, said it’d make for a better career choice than trying to enter a down economy as a mechanical engineering major.”
Jonah allowed himself a tiny chuckle. Klea fell silent for a few moments, but Jonah didn’t mind. She’d finish her story at her own pace.
Finally he spoke up. “You must have gotten along well. The two of you, alone on the ship for all those weeks. Not many couples can do that. Most of the divers I know spend their rotations wishing they were home with their wives and most of the time home with their wives wishing they were out on rotation.”
“Oh no,” said Klea. “It wasn’t just the two of us. Colin’s best friend came along too. Kyle. He programmed a lot of the electronics. That was his ticket onboard. I think he was really just there for the adventure. He brought his girlfriend, Molly-Anne. She was a nurse; we figured she would be really useful in case any of us got hurt or sick, especially in some of those more remote regions. She was there because Kyle was there. I don’t think she really cared for the ocean or boats or anything. Molly loved Kyle, but I don’t think she trusted him very much by himself in foreign cities. More specifically, she didn’t trust him around foreign girls.”
“Girls liked him?”
“Girls loved him,” said Klea, laughing. “Kyle was one of those friendly, handsome guys that thought the world was just a really great place because of how nice everybody was to him. Super trusting. Smart, but not smart enough to realize how uniquely he was treated. The trust fund didn’t hurt either. If Colin would have let him, we probably wouldn’t have needed a single sponsor. Kyle could have personally funded the expedition without breaking a sweat.”
Jonah smiled and watched as Klea relaxed a little, sinking deeper against the inflated side of the raft.
“Kyle drove some old muscle car,” mused Klea, almost more to herself than Jonah. “Hadn’t thought about that ridiculous thing in a long time. I adored him and Molly. They had been together for a long time. I think Kyle was under some pressure to get on with it, if you know what I mean. He would have proposed eventually, I’m certain of that. Colin and Kyle would have been the best men at each other’s weddings.