Troubled Waters (14 page)

As he spoke, Jonas backhanded Heath in his wounded arm. Heath winced, but refused to give Jonas the satisfaction of hearing him cry out in pain. Jonas dropped his friendly tone. “How dare you override my direct orders?” he shouted. “Now I have a mess to clean up, and I don’t have much time.” He glared at Tracie. “So what’s it going to be?”

“How can you hand me over to Trevor if he’s in jail?”

“I have the power to free him. Besides, that’s not your concern. You simply have to decide—death or Trevor?”

“Death,” Tracie retorted, refusing to look at her captor. Instead, she eyed Heath with a troubled look. Was she concerned for him? Or simply wary?

Jonas glanced between Tracie and Heath. “Oh, I see how it is. You prefer Heath over Trevor? He lied to you, Tracie. Heath lied.”

“I don’t care,” Tracie snarled without looking at her captor, her eyes locked on Heath’s face. “He’s still a better man than Trevor.”

The amused sound of Jonas’ laughter caught Heath off guard. “You think so?” Jonas chuckled with an exaggerated sigh. “Heath, care to tell her the whole story? Who was the mole at the Coast Guard station—the person you were working so hard to flush out? Have you figured it out yet, Heath?”

Like a dying man whose life flashed before him, Heath replayed all the conversations he’d held with Jonas while on the Bayfield case.
Tracie’s taking me by Trevor’s house. We’re meeting Tim tomorrow at noon. They moved Sal’s transfer again
.

But Jonas had been in cahoots with Trevor all along,
which explained why the other agents had been so confused when Heath had called from the boat and told them where to pick up Trevor. Jonas had given them other orders, had kept his own men out of Trevor’s way and fed Tracie straight into their hands.

Just as Heath had blindly fed him the information he’d needed throughout the investigation. He’d given Tracie one more reason to hate him. Rather than give Jonas the satisfaction of telling her, Heath lifted his head and looked Jonas full in the face. When he spoke, his voice was full of self-loathing. “Me. I was the mole.”

T
hough she knew it probably gave Jonas no end of satisfaction to hear it, Tracie couldn’t suppress her gasp of surprise and disappointment at Heath’s confession. He hadn’t just betrayed her. He’d betrayed them all—Tim Price, Captain Sal, Gunnar, and everyone on the Bayfield Coast Guard team.

“Oh, I know,” said Jonas in a fake commiserating voice, “it’s so upsetting, isn’t it? So you see, Tracie, Heath isn’t worth dying for. I’ve made you an offer you can’t refuse.” He waved the handcuff key in her face. “Why don’t you let me unchain you? We’ll get you warmed up, find something to eat and get you back to Trevor where you belong.”

Tracie looked up at him through angry eyes. The man was cruel—repulsively so. She couldn’t stand that he’d killed her father. Worse than that, she couldn’t tolerate the idea that he would kill her as well. She doubted there was anything she or Heath could do to free themselves, but she wasn’t about to let Jonas get away with murder. As she lifted her head in defiance, she felt something sharp brush against her arm where it hung cuffed to the pipe above her. Her hairclip.

The one with the recording transmitter. If Martina’s
explanation was correct, everything she heard all evening was being recorded and sent to a computer file with the FBI. Granted, if Jonas knew about the file he could have it deleted, but Tracie doubted he realized Martina had chosen to outfit her with the transmitter clip. Trevor’s choice of jewelry removal had not been a coincidence—Jonas had probably told him exactly which pieces to take. Neither of them knew about the hairclip, she was certain. Martina had only added it at the last minute, apparently on a whim.

Tracie kept her expression neutral. All she needed to do was keep Jonas talking. The more information she could get him to spill, the more the FBI would have to use against him when it came time to lock him up. “Why do you care about what Trevor wants?”

She watched as her captor’s lips thinned to a rumbling white line. “That’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

“Do you?” Jonas forced a laugh, as though he found her statement ironic, but still felt reluctant to tell the story. “Only the time I give you.”

Tracy wouldn’t be intimidated. If the man wanted her to hook up with Trevor, he’d play along.
If
he really cared what Trevor wanted. “I don’t understand,” she baited him. “Why would such a high-ranking FBI official as yourself care what some low-life criminal wants? What does he have over you? Information?” She watched Jonas as the vein above his eye began to twitch.

She took that as affirmation that she was on the right track. “And so what if Trevor has dirt on you? Kill him.”

“I tried that!” Jonas snapped back. “I shot him twice, right outside this cave. You saw his body floating in the water. And if I’d have left him there another couple of minutes, he’d be dead.”

“So why didn’t you leave him?”

The twitching trickled down from his eyelid to his mouth. Tracie watched as the FBI official fought between telling her and remaining silent. She prodded him with words. “If you wanted Trevor dead, why didn’t you leave him? You had what you wanted.”

“No, I didn’t,” Jonas cracked. “Trevor’s father has too much on me—information that would put me away forever. If I let his son die, he’d expose me.”

“So kill Tom Price, too. Kill them both.”

“It’s not that simple. I don’t know where—” Jonas stopped mid-sentence, scowled and straightened. “Your choice is simple—Trevor or death.” As he laid out her options, Jonas waggled the key at her once again.

Tracie wasn’t satisfied. She wanted justice. If this man was going to kill her, she at least hoped to get him to spill enough of his secrets to put him away for life. She ignored his question. “How is it possible that you work for the FBI when you supposedly died on the
Requiem
twenty years ago? The FBI doesn’t hire dead men. How did you outsmart the Navy and the FBI?”

As she watched, a light came on behind Jonas’ eyes. Sinister pride glinted there, the kind of pride that couldn’t resist a chance to boast. Tracie watched as Jonas made the decision to tell her everything. His chest puffed up slightly, and he tapped the key against his chin. He smiled to himself as he began his story.

“My name really
is
Jonas Goodman. I began working for the FBI twenty-six years ago. I started out like a lot of guys, naive, eager to please, ready to catch the bad guys and see good triumph over evil.” He made a face. “That is, until I got smart. Figured out it doesn’t work that way. I watched too many good men die poor and lonely trying to work for a thankless cause, and I decided that wouldn’t be me.

“About that time, I was assigned to the coldest, loneliest
spot on the Canadian border to investigate a customs issue involving some diamonds. Now, as I’m sure you’re well aware, the border between Canada and the U.S. is friendly, but only if the personal effects a person carries are also the friendly sort. The government doesn’t look too kindly on large amounts of diamonds sneaking through undeclared.

“I thought it was a chump assignment, and I won’t pretend I wasn’t offended to get it. But when I saw what these guys had, churning out diamonds by the bucketload, when I realized what kind of profit margins they could be capable of, I saw my ticket out of poor and lonely. I made a deal with the guys, bought them out, so to speak, in exchange for covering up what they’d done and covering our tracks for what we’d go on to do.” Jonas chuckled to himself and continued.

“Of course, you can see the trouble. I bought them some time, but then what? How to shuttle that many diamonds across the border? Sure, Customs doesn’t always check your bags, but they’d only have to crack open one suitcase and our gig would be up. And we couldn’t just move our operation south—the raw materials we needed were abundant in Canada. Everything else was in place. We just needed a way to breach the border.”

He smiled to himself as he paced before her, so caught up in his self-glorifying tale he didn’t even appear to suspect that he might be digging his own grave. His gravelly voice rumbled on. “About this time, I read about these shark class subs and realized they were just the ticket. Just what I needed. I took an extended leave of absence from the FBI and joined the Navy as Jonas Vaughn. Got myself assigned to this sub. Talked to the boys assigned with me. Tom and Mark, they were smart fellows, my right-hand men. Jeff Kuhlman, he never did take very well to the idea,
needed too much encouragement, tended to get nervous about some of the things we’d done. And I can only put up with nervous folks for just so long.

“But the rest of us, we had a good run. I went back to being Jonas Goodman, went back to the FBI, took up right where I’d left off defending our nation from criminal activity, and always on the lookout for suspicious gems. As soon as some gemologist got too smart for his own good, tried to blow our cover, I had him blown first. It was a clean and tight operation. For over twenty years we kept it that way, and our blue diamonds have made us wealthy.”

Jonas Goodman paused and looked back and forth between Heath and Tracie. “But some people don’t kill too easy. They ask too many questions about things that aren’t their business. And I tell you, kids, when I have to leave my office and come down here to clean things up myself, it makes me irritable. And when I get irritable, people don’t die clean and easy. They die slow and ugly.” He seemed to tire of his story then.

“So choose already! Are you going to go to Trevor, or am I going to have to kill you?”

“If you kill me, won’t Trevor give away all your secrets?” Tracie asked. “He’s been captured—won’t he want to bargain for his freedom?”

For a second, Jonas looked like a trapped animal, but then pride filled his features again and his voice dropped to an even more threatening tone. “Fine. I’ll make your choice easier for you. You can go to Trevor, or you can watch me kill Heath. I’ll let you think about your decision a while.”

He snapped off the light and slammed the door as he left, leaving them in utter darkness, which Tracie figured was just one small piece of his plan to leave them hopeless and helpless, just as she felt certain he wouldn’t have risked
telling them his tale unless he was absolutely certain they’d soon be dead.

Tracie felt her heart plunge to her knees. She might have been willing to die rather than become part of Trevor’s criminal activities, but she couldn’t imagine watching Jonas kill Heath. She’d crack. She couldn’t see any way around it. They were both doomed.

“Tracie,” Heath’s whisper broke the silence. “Can you get your shoes off?”

His question seemed odd, but she answered, “I think so.” A moment’s foot-shuffling later, she announced. “Yes. They’re off.”

“Okay,” Heath grunted. “I’ve shifted my body as close to you as I can. Reach out with your leg. I have Trevor’s keys in my left pants pocket.”

The darkness was complete, without the slightest hint of light. Tracie inched one foot toward Heath until she could feel the tips of his shoes with her toes. She strained the tight hold of her wrists against the pipes as she slid her foot up his leg until she found the opening to his pocket. It took several more minutes of shuffling, failed attempts before she caught the ring of keys with her toes and pulled them out.

Panting, she announced, “I’ve got them.”

“Can you find the one you used earlier?”

“I’ll try.” Tracie recognized what Heath was getting at. He must have put Trevor’s keys in his pocket before they’d left the speedboat. And since Jonas and his men had been playing friendly as they’d welcomed them aboard, they’d never patted them down, and the keys had gone unnoticed.

Which left them with a slim chance that the key she’d used to open her handcuffs at Trevor’s would work on the cuffs Jonas had used on them—assuming Trevor and
Jonas had used the same brand of cuffs, and assuming that brand was one that made all its cuffs with interchangeable locks. Though many of the major brands of handcuffs used interchangeable keys, some cuffs were made with unique keys, and if Trevor or Jonas had used that kind, there would be no way the key would open their cuffs—if they could even wrangle the key into the lock before Jonas or his men returned for them.

“I think I’ve got it,” she announced, the slender key sliding between her first two toes as she flexed her foot against the cramp that had formed in her instep in protest of the unfamiliar activity.

“Can you hand it up to me?”

“I’ll try.” Grabbing hold with both hands to the bar she was cuffed to, Tracie pulled up her legs up like a monkey’s while still clutching tight to the keys with her toes. She slid her feet along the pipe toward him, holding on to the heavy key ring with all the strength her foot could muster. As the cramp in her instep began to cry out, she felt her toes brush against metal.

And she dropped the keys.

They hit the floor with a loud clang, and Tracie froze, bracing herself as she waited for Jonas or one of his men to pounce.

“Here,” Heath whispered. “I’m sliding them toward you on the floor. Try again—you were almost there.”

Diligently, Tracie retrieved the keys and attempted the difficult maneuver a second time. This time, she felt his fingertips brush her toes as he took the keys from her with one hand. She dropped her feet to the floor and listened while Heath used the keys held in one hand to free his other wrist. A clicking sound told her when Heath’s hand popped free.

“Praise God!” he declared, and a moment later she
heard a second click. Instantly his warm hands found her in the cold darkness, feeling their way up her arms to the handcuffs that held her. Two clicks later, she sagged against Heath, taking just a moment to let the blood return to her arms. Then she found his ear in the darkness and whispered quietly, “Now what?”

Heath’s lips grazed her earlobes and he held her tight against him as he spoke. “It won’t be long before Jonas comes back. I say we wait and pounce. He’s expecting us to be cuffed to the pipes. If we can catch him off guard—”

“But Jonas and his men are armed, and they also outnumber us,” she said. What she really meant to say was that she didn’t want to do any of it, but then she realized she had no choice. She shook her head. “The only way for this cup to pass is by our drinking it,” she murmured.

“That sounds like something from the Bible,” Heath murmured back.

“It is.”

“Then that’s what we’re going to do,” he announced decidedly. “I’m going to see if I can’t brace myself close to the ceiling. Then I can drop on them when they walk in.”

Tracie let out an exhausted sigh. “You can’t be serious. Heath, you don’t know how long it’s going to be before Jonas and his men return. You could be holding on for hours.” She shuddered at the thought, especially given his injuries. “Can’t we just hide in the bunks and pull the curtains shut?”

“But won’t that be the first place they look?”

“Sure, but we’ll see them coming. That gives us an advantage.”

“A small one,” Heath conceded. “Okay, but I’ll take the top bunk, you take the bottom one. Hopefully they’ll
check the middle one first. And let’s just pray they don’t come in shooting.”

The bunks were stacked three high—Tracie figured a crew of four wouldn’t need four bunks in the tightly-packed sub, since they’d rotate shifts for sleeping along with everything else. As she slid onto the soft blanket she whispered to Heath, “Let’s pray we don’t fall asleep, either. I’m so exhausted; it’s going to be difficult to keep my eyes open. But if they walk in on us while we’re asleep we’ll lose everything we’ve gained.”

“I’ll keep you awake,” he offered. “We need to discuss our strategy. I’m going to strike first. You wait for my signal.”

For several minutes, the two kept themselves awake by discussing what they’d do if Jonas came alone or with his men, how they’d disarm them, and under what circumstances they’d shoot. They both agreed not to kill the men unless they had no choice, preferring to see them face justice in court. Most importantly, they considered what to do once their captors were subdued—assuming they would be able to subdue them.