Philip Kerr - The Five Year Plan (1998)

'Oh yeah, I think I know--'

'Only spelt different. More 'im' than 'pro'. Matter of fact that's really only as far as the similarity goes.' She smiled triumphantly. 'If the impeller packs up, so does your fuel pump and so does your diesel, so it's important to be able to get it out and fit a new one. Even at sea, in the dark, in a storm. Can be kind of tricky if you don't know how.' She blew some smoke across his shoulder and watched the grin spread on his face.

Dave jerked his head toward the top of the stairs.

'What were you guys talking about?'

'They'd just finished persuading me to go and take a look at the hard-core action.'

'That's where Al is,' said Dave. 'He's a real movie fan. Sees everything.'

'That's what's on show,' said Kate. 'Everything. You want to take a look?'

'Sure.'

Kate was a little disappointed. She had hoped he'd be the type to shake his head at the very idea of watching porno. Instead here he was, taking her by the elbow and steering her toward the movie theater upstairs. He could at least have pretended to disapprove, for a minute or two anyway. She was swiftly coming to the conclusion that all men were probably interested in this kind of shit.

She said, 'Beats me why more guys just don't become gynecologists.'

'Relaxation becomes harder to find when a man's hobby becomes his work,' said Dave.

'Is that an observation based on personal experience?'

'That and a lot of wishful thinking.'

'You're no gay bachelor, I'll say that much for you, Van.'

She felt his hand in the small of her back as they mounted the stairs. Near the top he stopped and took a step down again.

'Suddenly I need to visit the head,' he admitted.

'I thought that was after you'd seen the movie.'

'You go on in. I'll be there in one minute,' he said.

'One minute? In a movie like this? You could miss the whole story.'

'As long as it's got a happy end, I don't mind.'

Kate started upstairs again. 'Happy endings are what this crap's all about. Lots of them. In slippery close-up.'

Dave thought he had about ten minutes before Kate started to get suspicious. He left the Jade from her stern, climbing straight onto the Juarista and then onto the Carrera. A minute after leaving Kate at the party he was down the circular stair mat connected the Carrera's salon and dining room with the midship accommodations deck.

The master suite was the full width of the boat and featured a sitting area, a large walk-in closet, and a generous bathroom with a Jacuzzi. Dave guessed this was the cabin occupied by Kent Bowen. Lying on the floor of the closet were some garishly colored sports shirts he thought he had seen Bowen wearing. And there was no mistaking the sweet antiseptic smell of Brut aftershave that always signalled Bowen's presence. Quickly, Dave opened some of the drawers and almost immediately found what he was looking for: a medium-frame .357 Magnum in a ProPak undercover shoulder holster, and a wallet containing business cards. Dave thumbed one out and read it quickly. The embossed gold roundel in the top left-hand corner of the card was easily recognizable. It identified the Department of Justice just as surely as the printed information alongside. Kent Bowen was an Assistant Special Agent in Charge at Miami's FBI HQ on Second Avenue.

'Jesus Christ,' he exclaimed.

Dave replaced the card, closed the drawer carefully and then went next door to search Kate's stateroom. This was tidier than Bowen's. The bed was made, with cushions scattered across the silk brocade spread. Clothes were neatly hung in the closet, but there was nothing in the built-in drawers to interest Dave. Apart from some very sexy underwear.

'Just the facts, ma'am,' he muttered and, closing the drawer, he backed out of the closet.

His heel struck something hard underneath the spread. Guessing that there was probably a linen drawer under the bed just like the one in his own stateroom, Dave dropped to his knees, threw back the spread, and grabbed hold of the drawer handle. Hauling it open he found everything he would have expected to find in a linen drawer. He had to reach right to the back to put his hand on the familiar shape he'd been half expecting. The next second he was looking at a Smith & Wesson Airweight .38, holstered in a nice leather Vega, although the gun's shrouded hammer made it about perfect for a handbag. Attached to the holster's strap was an ID wallet containing an FBI badge and card identifying Kate, not as Kate Parmenter, but as Kate Furey, Special Agent. She looked younger in the photograph and her hair was different. But there was no mistaking that launch-a-thousand-ships face.

Dave nodded with bitter satisfaction. He didn't know whether to whoop or to wail.

'A Fed,' he mumbled. 'She's a goddamn lousy Fed.'

The only question was what she and Bowen and the other guy, who was probably a Fed too, were doing on the Duke. There was no way they could know about Dave's score. Unless it was the money they were onto.

'Fucking Feds.'

He dived back into the drawer in search of something that might tell him what this was all about, but found nothing. He shut the drawer and went into the head. His eyes noted the brand of her perfume for future reference, a small bottle of Murine eyedrops, some suntan lotion, and an impressive array of mouthwash, dental floss, toothpicks and plaque-disclosing tablets that helped explain Kate's Ford model smile. The drawers were empty, but in a closet under the basin he found a TEAC reel-to-reel tape machine. The kind of tape that wasn't meant to play Handel's Water Music when you were lying in the tub. Dave knew it was set up to record from some kind of listening device. But planted where? On whose boat?

Twisting a knob he rewound the tape for a couple of seconds. The least he could do in the time available was verify that the Feds weren't interested in him, or in the Russkie money.

The tape began to play.

He was listening to the voices of a man and a woman. The man was American but the woman sounded as if she was from Australia. The accent would help to narrow it down. Not that it really mattered. None of the Russian boats had any female supernumos. And these two weren't saying anything interesting. Just some shit about this and that. Dave switched the tape off and started to grin. The Feds were watching someone else's boat. Someone Dave didn't even know about. Everything was fine. His five year plan could go ahead more or less as scheduled. Submarine permitting. And seeing those FBI shields and ID cards had given him an idea.

For about ten minutes Kate was too shocked to notice Dave's prolonged absence. Her imagination was abruptly ordered somewhere else, as not the smallest aspect of human anatomy escaped the attention of the camera: every mucous tract, subcutaneous fold and sebaceous follicle. But what was most surprising to her was not the explicit intimacy of what was depicted, but that there should be any women who were still willing to have unprotected anal intercourse. Just where had these women been for the last ten virally preoccupied years? Did they imagine that just because they were doing it in a movie they would be protected by the special effects department?

Almost as fascinating to Kate as what was happening on the screen were the faces of the audience. Bowen grinning like an ape. Sam Brockman cleaning his glasses every few minutes and making a silent whistling noise from time to time. Rachel Dana watching Jellicoe and enjoying his thunderstruck demeanor. Two of the targets from the Britannia, Nicky Vallbona and Webb Garwood, laughing loudly and cracking the most tasteless jokes. Kate wondered if Bowen had even registered that they were there.

She'd heard men -- Howard was one such -- claim that porno was boring, but somehow she'd never quite believed it. Bowen looked anything but bored. Even in the half-darkness of the Jade's viewing theater, she could see a light sheen of sweat glistening on his upper lip which he wiped periodically with the back of his hand. But after a while she realized she really was bored. It wasn't so much the lack of story she found tedious as the monotonous serial continuity, as if what was being enacted was a precise ritual. The girl always sucked the man before he licked her; then, always, he penetrated her vagina as a prelude to sodomy, before finally he came all over her face as if by this final act of degradation the reality of what was happening was there revealed. To Kate this last act in the ritual pointed up the lie of porno: no man had ever come in her face, and if it ever did happen -- woe betide the guy who thought he could get away with that shit -- she would hardly have been disposed to treat his load as if it had been the choicest Beluga.