Circle of Bones (14 page)

She had suggested they go back to his room, and instead, he gave her a handful of euro notes and had her check in to the Hôtel Arawak under her name. Once in the room, she had torn off her clothes and been more willing than most to do what he asked of her. She had not needed him to touch her like so many women did, and she had been very good at squatting over him on the floor and taking him into her. He watched her as she rocked and bounced, her fingers touching the glistening flesh where she held him, her nipples erect, breasts swinging. She’d called out in German as her muscles squeezed around him, her contractions sending him over the edge, her face contorted, her damp hair stuck to her skin with sweat.

Watching them, knowing that he had the power to turn them into animals only heightened his pleasure. So long as they did not put their hands all over him.

When he could stand it no longer, he lifted the sleeping woman’s leg and climbed out of the bed. He crossed the plush carpet to the sliding glass door. After opening the panel on its silent rollers, Diggory stepped out onto the cool tiles of the balcony and left the door open behind him. The trade wind breeze that cooled his sweat-covered skin was ripe with the briny smell of low tide. On the distant horizon, white lights winked as vessels traversed the waters between Pointe-à-Pitre and the Iles des Saintes. 

Though Ulrika had been a pleasant distraction, even when he had been inside her, his thoughts had drifted to Riley. In Peru, when he had discovered the attractive Marine’s pedigree, he had been unable to resist bedding her. This secret knowledge gave a new dimension to his pleasure. But in the end, she became cloying like they all did. They’d meet for a meal at one of the trendy cafes in the El Barranco section of Miraflores, and while he was cutting his steak, she would reach across the table and touch his arm, caress his cheek. She started to talk about love and
their
future together. He’d had to end it before anyone caught on. Granted, things hadn’t played out as he’d expected, but the end result was the same. The affair ended and she had disappeared as a threat to him; yet he knew there was still unfinished business there. He’d always known she would play a part when the time came for him to seize control of the organization.

From inside the room, he heard Ulrika’s voice. She called out a name, but not the one he had given her.

“Thor? Someone is calling for Thor?” she called out in her accented English.

He slipped back into the room, and though the bed was lit only by what light passed through the gauzy curtains, he could see her sitting naked and cross-legged on the bed holding his satellite phone out to him, the small screen aglow.

“What kind of phone is this? What’s this thing stuck to it?” She was wiggling the voice encryption device that snapped on to the dataport of his sat phone.

He grabbed the instrument from her hand and stepped back out onto the balcony closing the door behind him this time.

“Yes.”

“I am surprised at you, Thor. Letting a civilian have access to your secure phone.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“You do understand the gravity of the situation.”

“I do.”

“Yes.” He paused and Diggory knew that he was saying more through his silence than he could have with words. “I understand you told them to follow some woman. I want to know what it’s about.”

So Caliban had contacted the barbarian to check up on him. He wondered if the older man was following orders or merely trying to assert his power by keeping Diggory on a short leash. The late hour led him to believe the latter. 

“It is a woman sailor who knows Thatcher. I have reason to believe she will lead them to him if they follow her.”

“I see.”

“You brought me in to do a job. Either leave me to do it or get someone else.”

“Yes. Absolutely. I understand, but you do need to keep me informed.”

“As soon as I have something concrete, I’ll be in touch. Is there anything else?”

“Thor, I know I don’t have to tell you this, but —” Caliban began.

Dig held the phone a distance from his ear, disgusted with the man’s pedantic tone. He was losing patience.

“We are headed toward this election at home, and though I cannot say any more about what exactly is at stake here, I can stress to you that this project is of the utmost importance to our future.”

“I understand,” he said. He closed the phone before the other man could answer. 

In the dark room, her body was an undistinguished lump under the sheet and comforter. Her dark brown hair splayed out across the pillow. The snoring had resumed. He sat on the side of the bed and she stirred. She murmured to him in German, “Who was that on your phone?”

He said nothing.

She rolled over to face him. “Is something wrong?”

He reached out his hand and traced his fingers along the side of her face, gently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “My phone was inside my jacket.”

“Yes, but I didn’t see anything. I just got out the phone.”

Of course she would not be so quick to say she had not seen anything unless she had. She would not have been able to miss the heft of the gun.

“You should not have answered that phone.”

 “I’m sorry.”  She ran her tongue around her lips, her intentions bare. “It’s just that you were outside, and I thought it might be important. I was a bad girl, but that’s what I like about you. You’re a bad boy and you like bad girls, don’t you?”

He looked away from her, out the window, and thought about what she did know about him. The gun. The phone. And she’d called him Thor. He looked at the open sliding door. The hour was late. He wondered how much noise she would make.

“I won’t do it again,” she said and squirmed her body to press her breasts through the sheet against his thigh.

He placed his left hand on the mattress on the far side of her body, then he pulled down the sheet to admire her long neck and the heavy breasts with large pink areolae. He leaned down close, pressing his rib cage against her naked skin and watching her eyes as his fingers traced the line of her jaw then slid up under her chin. “No,” he said. “You won’t do it again.”

She was an athletic woman and the tendons in her neck were strong. He saw it in her eyes when the pressure registered, when the last vestiges of sleep were ushered out by the arrival of terror. She began flailing at his back with her fists, trying to reach his head, but he fended off her blows by pinning her arms with his elbows. Her feet were tangled in the bed clothes and she arched her back, her eyes growing wider, her face starting to darken. She tried to kick her legs free. 

He increased the pressure on the carotid and her eyes flicked and darted around in their sockets, panic driving out all reason. But the lack of oxygen and the blood that continued to pump into her head slowed her struggles. When her eyelids drooped, he released his grip on her throat. He heard the intake of air and was pleased. He needed to see her eyes to watch for that exquisite moment. Her eyelids fluttered, and he watched as the eyes rolled and began to focus and the realization flooded back into her that he was still there.

He felt her chest expand as she made ready to scream, and her eyes locked on his with a hatred so vile he imagined he could feel the heat. Once they were resigned to what was going to happen, they always turned from terror to a venomous enmity. They wanted to let him know what they thought with their last thoughts, and he found a strength in that. With his powerful right hand he squeezed hard, cutting her scream so that she only emitted a feeble squeak before her face darkened again and her eyes began to bulge. This time he reached over with his left hand and held her eyelids open as she lost consciousness and the life drained out of her. 

He watched, wondering if there would be a moment when he would see the change in her, when she would see if there was something beyond this world or not. There were so many stories of visions, of a light, a tunnel, of people seeing the other side, and he always watched for that moment when he might learn if it was so. But like all the other times, she merely departed. One second, she was there, then came the instant when he knew that even if he released his grip, she would not breathe again. When she was gone, he moved his face close to hers and tried to find the words to explain how different the eyes looked without that inner light. Dull, glassy, inert. The eyes were now all these things, but none of those words got to the essence of what had changed. 

Heaven, Hades, angels, Lucifer — all that seemed quite preposterous if you thought about it. The only way people could possibly believe in that was to force themselves to suspend their reason and disbelief – and that he could not do. As Hegel said, “The rational alone is real.” Saints, sinners, miracles, the Bible. It was all as fantastic as something made up by Poe or Disney. Ludicrous. And if it didn’t exist, then what on earth would drive men to act except their own desires and appetites and self interest? If the whole structure that defined good and evil was based on falsehoods, then his life made perfect sense. As did her death, he thought as he flexed the fingers of his right hand, remembering the feel of her smooth, warm skin as she struggled
. 

But in the back of his mind, there was always that little niggling doubt that said,
yes, but, what if it all were true? 

He went to work with the precision of a Broadway set dresser. From another pocket of his jacket, he removed a pair of latex gloves and a small microfiber cloth. He cleaned the room, flushed the spent condom and then stood, one gloved hand on his chin and stared at the corpse. Her clothes, underwear, bra and pantyhose were draped over the armchair where she had left them. He looked up at the ceiling fan still turning over the center of the room — then back at the pantyhose, and he nodded. They’d started this back in England, and it would be amusing to repeat it. Tying the pantyhose around her neck, he gave her one last smile, even though the blank eyes showed no appreciation for his charm. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Aboard the Bonefish

March 26, 2008

10:05 a.m.

The volcano stood off to starboard, invisible beneath its cloak of snagged trade wind clouds. The lower, gentler slope of the mountain was dotted with red-roofed homes, towns, and farms. Riley hummed to herself as she sailed the Bonefish hard on the wind bound for the
Iles des Saintes
. The wind was from the east-southeast and she was sailing due south to clear
Capesterre Belle-Eau
.  In truth, the autopilot did most of the steering leaving her free to play with the lines, adjusting the trim of the sails, trying to eek out an extra half knot from each wind shift. She moved from one side of the cockpit to the other, her yellow oilskins streaming water from the waves that smashed against the small boat’s bow and the wind-blown spray that stung her cheeks.

She shook her head like a dog whipping the water off his fur. The hood of her jacket was pulled tight round her face, cinched in by the drawstring under her chin, so it was only her face that got wet. The salt water streamed into her eyes. She didn’t care. The stout little boat smashed into another wave and spray reached nearly to her mast’s first cross-trees. 

She whooped like a rodeo cowboy, ducked under the dodger and patted the boat’s closed main hatch. “Atta girl,” she said aloud. Her Caliber 40 was no racing boat, but she was making a solid seven and half knots punching through the seas, rarely slowing down. This was the kind of adrenelin-pumping sailing Riley loved, with the lee rail almost underwater and the lower edge of the genoa dripping seawater. Off her stern, the quarter wave rose up with a whoosh as the
Bonefish
slipped through the water pushing to reach beyond her own hull speed. She was a sweet boat all right, and Riley had grown to trust her, aware that the boat
was tougher than she was. This morning
Bonefish
was over-powered with full jenny in the eighteen to twenty knots of wind, but she was pounding her way through the Caribbean chop without a care. All the hatches and port lights were closed down tight, and Riley was proud of the fact that her boat never leaked a drop in bad weather. The only seawater that made its way below would be what she tracked in once she arrived. 

Riley braced herself in a corner of the cockpit and admired the view of the island she was leaving behind. She still hadn’t worked out what she was going to do about her passport situation. The night before, she lay in her bunk staring at the overhead unable to sleep, thinking about Diggory and wondering if she should sail to the Saintes with such thin evidence Bob might be there. She knew she was looking for an excuse to stick around and go find Dig in the morning. 

Finally, she got out of bed and dug into her chart table for her old scrapbook. In it were family photos, plastic sleeves filled with yellowing newspaper clippings, her discharge papers, and the various ribbons and medals she’d once worn so proudly. She opened the book to the snapshots from Lima. In one, she and Diggory were sitting at an outside cafe table, smiling for the camera, arms entwined. She looked so happy, so ignorant. Then she’d slammed the book closed, stuffed it into the bookcase behind the settee, and climbed back into her bunk.

Riley saw she had cleared the cape, and she eased off the wind a bit. The boat speed picked up by another half knot. It wasn’t even mid-morning and she was more than halfway there. Her predawn departure had paid off. She had been tempted one more time — when she’d ventured on deck in the dark and found her oars tucked inside her cockpit — to stay and find Dig. But then she remembered what Hazel said. He would never tell her the truth. If only she’d trusted her instincts instead of her libido, she never would have slept with him in the first place. Now, she would have to find the truth on her own. And to do that, she needed to get her passport back first.

Ahead, the small islands rose out of the sea like dark green gum drops. At this rate, she should be able to get the anchor down before lunch, go ashore for a fine French midday meal, and then work it off with an afternoon walking the streets — all the while keeping her eyes open for the elusive Bob.