James Patterson - Gone

“That won’t be necessary,” Vida told him, still up on the flying bridge.

“No?” Scanlon said skeptically, looking up at her. “Coast Guard has drones now, sweetie. Attached to them are cameras that can see through your pants and count the dimples on your ass from five miles up. What do you imagine the Coasties are going to think if they see your buddies here, out on this fishing boat, standing around?”

“Fine,” Vida said, checking her watch. She went back to scanning the horizon with her binoculars.

“You’re sure we’re in the right place?” she said.

“As if my life depended on it,” the captain said as he showed Eduardo how to cast.

The ship came into view from the south a little over an hour later. It was huge, a Handymax-class oil tanker, its rust-streaked black hull two football fields long from stem to stern. There wasn’t anyone visible on its deck. It was flying a Guatemalan flag.

This is it , Vida thought. It has to be.

She thought the ship would stop, but it didn’t even slow as it passed, about a hundred yards from the starboard side of the fishing boat. She craned her neck up at the deck.

Shouldn’t there be someone up there? Or is this the right ship?

The ship passed on. As the fishing boat bobbed in the tanker’s swell, Vida scanned the choppy surface to see if something had been tossed from the opposite side. But there was nothing.

Scanlon was opening the cooler on the deck below when she placed the barrel of the Walther to the leathery back of his red, sun-beaten neck.

“What is this?” she said. “Where is it? You brought us to the wrong place.”

Scanlon, unfazed by the gun, cracked his can of Bud as he slowly turned around. “Why would I bring you to the wrong place?”

“To double-cross us,” Vida said. “We weren’t given the coordinates. Only you were. You bring us here, to some bullshit point, then send another boat to the correct spot to grab the shipment for yourself.”

Scanlon laughed and swigged his beer.

“Lady, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Listen, Perrine and I go way, way back. We got drunk together in Paris at a NATO thing back when I was a SEAL. Ask around. Your buddies on the ship got spooked or tipped off or something, OK? I’ve been doing this shit for twenty years. It happens all the time. We go back to shore. You call your people. You’ll be — ”

“Ahhh!” someone yelled behind him.

The men were crowded at the back of the boat, yelling at one another.

“What happened?” Vida asked, rushing up.

“Eduardo!” one of them said. “He was sitting there a second ago, and then I don’t know what happened. It seemed like something pulled him into the water!”

A moment later, Eduardo broke the surface, ten feet off the stern.

“¡Ayúdame! ¡Tiburón!” he yelled. “¡Algo está agarrando el pie!”

Help me! Shark! Something’s grabbing my foot!

“You gotta be shitting me,” Scanlon said as Eduardo went under again.

The water broke again a moment later. It wasn’t just Eduardo this time. Vida jumped back, elbowing Scanlon in his beer belly. Beside Eduardo was a man in a full black scuba-diving suit!

“Surprise!” Manuel Perrine said as he peeled off the face mask and chucked it onto the deck. “How is everyone? Vida, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Everyone stood there, blinking, trying to catch up. Vida was completely flummoxed. The call had said they were there to receive a shipment. She hadn’t thought it would be the boss himself.

“I got you, didn’t I? I can tell,” Perrine said, swimming toward the rear of the boat.

“You actually jumped off the deck of that rust bucket, didn’t you, you crazy son of a bitch,” Scanlon said as he hauled Perrine up onto the deck.

“What can I say, Scanlon?” Perrine had a twinkle in his light-blue eyes. “I still got it.”

Vida kept on staring as the rest of the men fished Eduardo out of the drink. Perrine was back in the US! What did that mean? Nothing good. How could it?

Eduardo was right , she thought.

There actually was a tiburón. A two-legged one, now on board.

Even without the aid of a rooster, I woke up on the air base bright and early the next morning.

The afternoon before had been hectic. Parker had me fill out some paperwork that officially made me a government contractor with top secret intelligence clearance. I was given temporary FBI credentials and, even better, a Glock 17. After dinner, she’d also handed me a pile of files to take back to my room. I’d pored over them until almost one in the morning.

I’d never seen a CIA report before, and I was surprised to see how similar they were to the NYPD ones I was used to. The gist of what I’d read was that, though there were a lot of leads and tips as to Perrine’s whereabouts, so far they hadn’t amounted to much.

Usually paperwork in cases drove me nuts, but I was actually pretty jazzed about the whole thing. I wasn’t exactly back at my Major Case Squad desk at One Police Plaza in Manhattan, but at least I was doing something positive, for once in the past eight months. Something constructive.

I was even psyched about giving my talk. Public speaking is usually on par with a root canal on my list of favorite things, but that morning, I was actually raring to go to give my speech about Perrine to the US troops who were after him.

But, as it turned out, my enthusiasm was short-lived. After my shower, I was in a towel, shaving in the dormitory head, when my phone rang.

“Hey, Parker,” I said, holding my phone away from my mouth to avoid covering it in Barbasol. “I’m almost done with the first draft of my speech. Think one part Gettysburg Address, one part St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth. ”

“Sounds … ambitious,” Parker said. “But you’ll actually have to put it on the back burner, Mike. Tip came in last night, late. Apparently, someone spotted Perrine over the border in Tijuana. The army scrambled Gray Fox to check it out. The rest of the gang is on standby.”

Gray Fox, as Parker had explained to me the day before, was the code name of a division of the army’s Special Ops. They were an airborne unit that worked with the CIA on covert operations. Using small, single-engine aircraft or drones, they scanned search areas with sophisticated listening equipment. They could tap as well as pinpoint the location of any and all cell-phone transmissions in a given area on the ground.

The rest of the gang she was referring to included the Delta Force and SEAL Team Six members who had been assigned to the task force to do the actual boots-on-the-ground arrest once Perrine was found.

“Well, I hope it’s credible. Where does that leave us?”

“I just got off the phone with the LAPD federal task force working the cartel murders in LA. They need bodies. I know I said it would just be a couple of days down here, Mike, but if you want, we can get on board there.”

“But what about my military speaking engagement?” I said. “I’ve been working on my Patton impression all night.”

“The troops can wait for now, General Bennett,” Parker said. “How about pretending to be a cop again for a couple more days? Last time I checked, you were pretty good at it.”

“I was, wasn’t I?” I said, finally putting the phone back down on the shelf. “When can you get here?”

“I already am,” Parker said from the open doorway of the bathroom behind me.

I spun around, blushing, as I gripped my towel, but she was already turned, laughing as she hurried away.