Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Devlin was typing on an iPad, noting the time and character of the surveillance for a later formal report, along with Lucas’s decision not to try a close tail.

Lucas was looking at an iPad-type device that showed Regio’s Lexus on one screen, and Cattaneo’s on another. “I think they’re all headed back to their apartments. We’ll pick them up at Virgil’s place in . . . two hours.”

Devlin made a note on his draft of the day’s activities.

Rae was starting to freak, pacing around the apartment. “I could do a joint for real,” she said.

Virgil was working out the various tethers for the scuba gear. He would keep the lift and cargo bags rolled and tied to his backplate until he needed them; that was simple enough. Less simple would be attaching tethers once the cargo bags were full of dope canisters, and he was towing the bags while trying to control the DPV, which would be on a different set of tethers. If he had trouble untangling things, working with flashlights in pitch blackness a hundred and fifty feet down, then he had serious trouble.

So he was carefully packing the tethers, as though he were packing a parachute, taking his time with it. To Rae, he said, “If it’d help, go for it. More authenticity for the goon squad.”

“Ah, it wouldn’t help,” she said. Then, after a minute, “What’s it like down there, in the night? When you get way down?”

Virgil sat back on his heels, the tethers still in his hands. “Way down isn’t much different than being fifteen feet down, after dark, except for getting narced,” Virgil said. “It’s like instrument flying through clouds in a plane. You have instruments, you believe them, even if your mind tells you they’re wrong. I’ll stay on the surface after I jump off the boat and navigate over to the GPS spot they give me. When I’m there, I’ll go straight down. Coming back, I’ll have to go through a decompression regime. I’ll be dragging lift bags, and moving slow, coming back up to the pickup spot at an angle, to decompress. I’ll be looking at my dive computer the whole way. It’ll tell me how deep I need to stay, each step, to decompress.”

“The thought scares the heck out of me,” Rae said. “I’ve jumped out of airplanes, but I wouldn’t do this . . .”

“It’s actually kind of restful when you get used to it. Peaceful.”

“Yeah. Like being dead.” Rae looked at her watch. “Two o’clock. You almost done there?”

“I am done. All I’m missing is the information they’ll give us on the boat.” He stood up and looked at the litter of gear on the floor. “Let’s bag it. I need that nap.”

Virgil got an hour. He got up and they dressed, Rae in a long-sleeved black cotton top, black jeans, a little loose down the legs, and Salomon trail runners. She pulled an elastic ankle support over her right ankle, and slipped a nine-millimeter Sig 938 under the elastic band and jumped up and down a few times to make sure it was secure.

“Doesn’t even feel like much,” she said. “Not gonna be a fast-draw, though.”

“Don’t bump into anything and make a clank sound,” Virgil said.

Lange and Regio showed up early, wearing head-to-toe nylon sailing pants and shirts, and helped carry the gear down to a different vehicle, a Suburban. After they’d loaded the scuba equipment, Virgil climbed into the backseat and said, “New wheels, huh? I’d like to get me one of these. Travel all over the country, you could sleep in the back, you know, at the Walmarts, never have to pay a motel bill . . .”

“You bring us enough of that stuff up, you won’t have to worry about paying for motels,” Regio said over his shoulder.

Rae: “That’s what I’m talking about. Hot showers, big TV, king-sized bed.”

Lange: “Mini-bar . . .”

“Oh, yeah.”

Lucas and Devlin watched them loading the Suburban, and Devlin said, “Man, I hope they don’t do anything tricky. Wonder why they changed cars? Christ, without the tracker . . . They could spot us if they start dragging us through the back streets.”

“Might be something simple—all that scuba gear plus four people. Maybe the Lexus is a little tight.”

Lucas got on the handset to tell the feds about the change in vehicles. The feds had tracked Cattaneo first to his condo, and then, a half hour later, to his sailboat at an Intracoastal marina south of Hollywood. He was getting ready to move it, they said. Lucas had called them in, to help track Regio and Lange. “We’ll try to get you in front of them until we figure out where they’re going,” he told them. “If they’re headed toward the boat, we’ll back way off.”

“Got it.”

The Suburban’s turn signal came on and the truck made a U-turn and headed toward Lucas and Devlin. They both ducked down and a minute later the Suburban went past, and after another hundred yards, made a left turn.

“Shit, they’re going to drag us through the neighborhoods,” Devlin said. Lucas, at the wheel, got the Pathfinder going and followed, but instead of making the left turn, looked down the street and saw the Suburban make the next right, to run parallel to Lucas and Devlin, but one street over.

“That’s what they’re doing,” Lucas said. He got on the handset. “They’re looking for a tail, gotta be careful, guys. They’re one street north of Hollywood, headed east, get out in front if you can.”

They hardly saw the Suburban over the next fifteen minutes, but it gradually became clear that they were getting closer and closer to Cattaneo’s sailboat. “Gotta be the boat,” the feds called. “Usual spots?”

“Usual spots, let’s go, don’t try to track them anymore. We gotta get there first.”

After dragging down narrow streets and through yellow lights, Virgil said, “I think we’re clean, guys.”

Regio grunted and said, “Looks like.”

He nevertheless continued a back-street route down to the Intracoastal, where they parked a couple of hundred feet from Cattaneo’s chunky white sailboat. Virgil carried the tanks and Regio and Lange carried the two gear bags down to the boat.

“Right on time,” Cattaneo said. He checked Virgil: “You ready, Willy?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Virgil said. “We got things to talk about. I need GPS numbers, coordinates, I need to know what tricky thing I’ve got to do to find the cans.”

“We got time to talk,” Cattaneo said. “Get everything down below and out of sight. I want to be the only one visible as we’re going out through the cut.”

“Got two hours before it gets dark,” Virgil said.

“Going to take a while to get there at four knots,” Cattaneo said. “We’ve got this nailed down. Don’t worry about it.”

Rae to Virgil: “You know when I said I was getting puckered up? I’ll tell you what, cracker: right now, I couldn’t poop poppy seeds.”

From across the Intracoastal, Lucas, Devlin, and the FBI team watched the boat from a condo parking lot. “They’re doing it,” Devlin said. “It’s all going down.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY

Lange stayed in the cockpit with Cattaneo as they cast off, then eased the boat into the Intracoastal and motored north toward the Port Everglades cut into the Atlantic. The boat rode slowly and smoothly with a southerly breeze not strong enough to create even a light chop on the waterway.

Virgil could talk to Cattaneo through the open hatchway and as they passed under a bridge, asked, “When do we get there?”

“Around six-thirty,” he said. “We’ve got to go through one drawbridge and then I’ll give the wheel to Matt and we’ll talk.”

“We’re going to motor the whole way?”

“Yes.”

Rae was poking around the interior of the cabin and said, “This is really neat. I’ve never been on, like, a yacht. It’s like an RV, but way better.”