UndercoverSurrender (12 page)

She whipped around. It was Santiago.

“What are you doing in here?”

She swallowed. “I…I was looking for a hat.”

He looked around in an exaggerated fashion. “I don’t see no
hat around here.”

“I’ll just go back down and—”

She made to move past him and he caught her arm. She
remembered the painful, clammy grip from when he’d held her back during the
knife fight. She hadn’t struggled then, but she sure as hell did now. “Let go
of me.”

“Your old man tired of you already?”

He wasn’t as big as Vik, but he was wiry and, judging from
his grip, strong as well. She couldn’t break free as he used his grip to yank
her closer.

“You maybe think you going to call somebody to pick you up,
baby? That what you doing in here?”

“Let her go.”

The calm instruction was welcome, but could have had a
little more teeth in it as far as Samantha was concerned. Vik stood in the
entry to the wheel room, his arms folded across his broad chest, his legs
slightly spread in a dominant stance. But he didn’t stride in and break her
free of Santiago’s hold. Or punch the guy in the nose. Or
something
.

Santiago obligingly let her go anyway and she wrenched her
arm back, rubbing what she knew was going to be a welt.

“Brute,” she muttered.

“Your chick here was just strolling in like she was going to
make a call on the radio or something. Ain’t you watching her? Christ, who the
fuck knows who she would have called?”

“I told you she’s mine. You stay away from her.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think that counted when she was
calling the cops or whatever the fuck she was doing.”

“I wasn’t calling anybody. I just…I just…” God, she was bad
at pretending. Her mind was blank. She could not think of a single legitimate
excuse to be in here, and in addition, she was confused as to whether she was
lying to just Santiago or to Santiago and Vik both.

Vik wasn’t staring at her, though. Only at his fellow crew
member. “I told you, you touch her, you die.”

Suddenly, she didn’t need anybody punching anybody’s nose,
especially since with this group they seemed to bypass the intermediate quarrel
steps and move right to the corpse stage.

“I’m fine, Vik,” she added hastily. “Really.”

Vik had killed in the line of duty. Lots of times. He didn’t
resort to it lightly and he didn’t enjoy it. And he had never, ever done it in
blinding anger. In fact, his ability to do it so coolly was sometimes worrisome
to him. Until now. Now he thought he could fucking kill Santiago for touching
Samantha and relish every second of it—and
that
was truly worrisome.

Her cool touch on his arm held him back. He met her dark
brown eyes and read them accurately. She was terrified he was going to kill in
her honor again. He took a deep breath. Good thing somebody around here still
had some reverence for human life. He slipped his arm around her waist and
turned back to Santiago.

“Fine. I’ll let it go for now. But you lay one finger on her
again and I’ll make what happened to Gunderson look like fun.”

Santiago’s hand moved almost imperceptibly toward his knife
holster before it froze and then came back to hang limply at his side. Santiago
couldn’t beat him in a knife fight. They both knew it. He made the wise choice
of not even trying.

“I was looking for you anyway,” Vik said casually. “I think
you ought to tell me the coordinates for Visto. It’s dangerous having there be
just one on board who knows.”

Santiago no doubt knew it was even more dangerous for him to
give Vik the coordinates. “You know the rules, man. I can’t do that. I’m a dead
man if I do.”

“How’re they going to know?”

It was a reasonable question and Santiago’s immediate answer
worried him. “They’d know.”

Was it possible Santiago was in contact with Visto already?
Was that part of the key to getting in the super-secret harbor?

“Once we’re in, they’ll make the decision as to whether you
should know the location, Vik. Not me. You know that. Gunderson was clear about
that. It’s only the fact you been with us so long and done okay that Gunny even
decided to bring you along this time.”

That had never made a hell of a lot of sense to Vik. Any
seaman worth his salt would know where it was once he’d made port there. There
must be something he was missing.

“And the rest of the crew?”

“Like Gunny told you, somebody’ll board us when we’re at a
certain point and give them their share and a boat to get back to the nearest
land. Then Gunny got the okay to keep you on board while we take it in to
Visto. Some folks want to meet you. And now Gunny’s dead, they want to meet you
even more.”

The way Santiago said it gave him pause. Like Visto already
knew Gunny was dead.

Vik glanced at Samantha. He’d have the rest of this conversation
without her standing there shivering beside him.

“Jesus, it’s ninety degrees out here, Chica,” Santiago said.
“Why you look so cold?”

“None of your fucking business,” Vik responded. “Come on,”
he told her. “We’re going below now.”

As they left the wheelhouse, Santiago called, “Give her a
spanking for me, Vik. She was a bad girl for checking out the radio. You know
she was!”

Chapter Five

Vik slammed the cabin door shut behind them. “What the hell
did you think you were doing?”

“Nothing. I just—”

“Did you think because we slept together that somehow you’re
on some pleasure cruise now? Those men are criminals. Dangerous.”

“
Those
men,” she probably unwisely taunted, though
she kept her voice as quiet as he did. “Just what makes you think you’re any
better than they are? You’re a thief too, aren’t you? You’re dangerous too,
aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I
am
dangerous and right now I
should
give you a spanking.”

She let that pass. She’d never had a spanking in her life.

“Getting caught near the radio could have had disastrous
consequences if I hadn’t shown up when I did.”

“What disastrous consequences? I could’ve gotten a plea for
help out?”

“No. You could have gotten your throat slit by Santiago if
he’d caught you doing it, instead of just suspecting you were about to.” He ran
his fingers through his hair. “Did you get a message out?” he asked, almost as
if he was disinterested in the answer.

“Why? Are you afraid my brother might find out what’s
happened and send someone to rescue me and my poor father who’s probably running
out of water out there on that damn raft?”

“I’m sure your brother already knows,” he muttered under his
breath.

“What?”

“Never mind. Listen, don’t try any more theatrical moves to
rescue yourself. Just sit tight and let me protect you and probably your
rescuers are on their way right now as we speak.”

“What makes you so sure of that?”

He didn’t answer, wandering over to the sink and rinsing his
face.

“And anyway,” she murmured, “maybe I want to rescue myself
for a change instead of just waiting around for somebody else to do it.”

He patted his face dry with a towel and then flung it across
the room. “Don’t make my job any harder than you already have, Samantha.”

“Your job?”

“I’m going up top and you’re staying right here and locking
the door behind me. Got it?”

She nodded. When he’d gone and she’d locked the door, she
knelt down next to the bed. The wheelhouse room had reminded her of something
she had temporarily forgotten and since this was almost the first time Vik had
left her alone in the cabin, she had a chance to take advantage of it.

“
Theatrical
moves to rescue myself,” she muttered as
she extracted the small laptop from a hidden compartment covered by a
floorboard under the bed. Her father had confiscated her main computer and
thrown it overboard as soon as they got there. Talk about theatrical. But
Samantha had a spare one he didn’t know about, one she had planned to pull out
at some point and use to send an email to Justin. Right now, though, it could
be put to much more important use. She flicked it on and it sprang to life.

The pirates had disarmed the wireless it appeared, as she’d
seen before Santiago came in, but they didn’t reckon on having a self-taught
computer expert in their midst. She hadn’t been able to counteract the
disarming in the wheelhouse because she didn’t have the time, but she had an
idea as to how she could do it from her laptop. With the way Vik had stormed
out of here, and add to that the fact she’d said there’d be no more sex, and
she figured she had a lot of time before he came back to the cabin.

With an excited feeling similar to the power she had felt
with Vik last night, she got to work.

* * * * *

Avery Windom wiped his glasses clean and set them back on
his nose, staring at the view of the Capitol from his office window. It wasn’t
supposed to be this hard. Ever since he’d been caught in bed with that girl
he’d picked up in Bangkok—and he really did mean
girl
—he’d been more or
less blackmailed into cooperating with the people who ran the sex ring. Sure,
after a while, they’d started paying him for information, but it wasn’t as if
he could really say no to them or anything anyway. The
girl
had been
what might kindly be termed jailbait and, less kindly, little more than
pubescent. What could he say? He liked them young. And this operation had them
young all right, young and pure and available to the highest bidder. Once those
girls were used up, they were hustled away into the less glamorous whorehouses
of whatever region they found themselves in, not many of them lasting too long
as he understood it.

Oh well, everybody had a story, didn’t they?

His bosses—not the ones here at the State Department in
Washington, but the real ones, the ones who ran the sex operation—were just
lucky that he was able to get wind of this whole rescue mission right from the
outset. The daughter of the powerful Reynolds family had somehow ended up in
the hands of the slavery ring. Even worse, an Interpol Agent had gotten close
enough to the operation to be in on the heist that captured the girl.

The call from Michael Reynolds had been placed to a level
much higher up than Avery of course—the scion of such a powerful family
wouldn’t talk to a lowly undersecretary—but eventually details had to be
handled, plans implemented. Somebody had to make the call to assemble the Navy
SEAL team and get them to the Interpol ship in the South Seas in record time.

And Avery was very good with details.

He warned the ring of course, promptly, but he was a little
leery of getting in the middle of it so visibly. The Reynolds were a powerful
family and under normal circumstances he’d never get in their way. But these
weren’t normal circumstances.

The
bosses
told him right away that they wanted him
on site so that he could be behind the scenes to delay the mission. They needed
a long enough delay to get their own people on board the yacht first and to
communicate with the man on board they felt they could trust.

They were rather hard to turn down.

The intercom on his desk buzzed.

“What is it, Marge?”

“The limousine is here to take you to Dulles.”

Fine. Not a moment too soon.

* * * * *

Vik found Santiago foraging around in the galley.

“Your babe can’t cook for shit. I’m still starving.”

Vik got right to the point as Santiago popped open another
bag of corn chips. “Have you been in contact with Visto?”

The crunching of what sounded like a pound of corn chips was
his only answer for a minute. Then, swallowing audibly, Santiago said, “I know
you’re in charge now you offed Gunny and everything, but there’s bigger guys
than Gunny.”

“I know that,” Vik said impatiently.

“And there’s a, what do you call it, a
protocol
we
got to follow if we want the money for this boat and make it to Visto. You got
to stay out of that.”

Vik considered him. Then he nodded. “Okay, but if I find out
you’re screwing me—”

“Only one screwing you is that sweet little piece of ass
down in your cabin. And if I was you, man, I’d get back to it. Nothing you can
do around here. We just gonna keep heading where we’re heading.”

Somehow, Vik didn’t feel much like being one-on-one with
Samantha right now given her pronouncements this morning.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. Maybe he’d just go watch the waves
for a while.

Now this was puzzling. Samantha had managed to get the
wireless up, although it had taken her considerably longer than she had
expected, but before she could get a message out to Michael, she unearthed a
message that had already gone out from the main computer on board,
this
morning.

Samantha couldn’t read what it said as it was in some
language she didn’t understand. Taiwanese maybe? But just as she was
considering using one of the online translator sites to make sense of it, a
message came in. She took care not to register it as having been read as she
perused it, since whoever this was directed to on board would undoubtedly see
it only later when they reengaged the wireless themselves. A search of the IP
address led her on a merry chase. She’d need a lot more time to trace that
given the complicated bells and whistles built in to make it
un
traceable.

For now, though, she just concentrated on trying to read the
incoming message. She did use an online translator, but maybe what she’d always
heard about them was true. They weren’t exactly foolproof. Because the message
she ended up with was more like a riddle than a straightforward note. It
translated roughly to
Termite onboard. Expect exterminators tonight. Further
details to follow.

Exterminators? What kind of a message was that? And termite,
singular?

A knock on the door had her slipping the computer, still on,
under the bed again. “Who is it?” she asked when she had.

“Me,” Vik responded and she unlocked the door to let him in.
He locked the door behind him and handed her a lunch bag of something. “Here
you go. Dinner.”

She glanced out the porthole. A mellow orange light was
descending as the sun set. It was later than she had thought. Getting on a
computer was always like that for her. Time just slipped away.

“Oh.” She took the bag, peeking in to see a few pieces of
fruit and some sort of sandwich. “I thought I might be cooking dinner.”

He gave her a funny look. “No, the consensus was to spare
them, I mean you, that.”

She put the bag on the vanity as he went to sit on the
couch. Reaching for the remote, he flicked the television on.

She glanced to the bed. “Did you guys find any kind of bug
problem or something when you came on board?”

He guffawed. “Bug problem? Why the hell would you think
that? Don’t tell me you’ve seen something on this fancy-ass thing?”

“No. I just wondered.”

He turned the channel, navigating away from something with a
laugh track to something with jarring music. “We’re pretty clean pirates as
things go, Samantha. Are you worried we brought lice or something?”

“No. No, of course not.”

She didn’t want to admit the existence of the computer underneath
the bed, but she did need to cover her tracks somewhat so that when someone
switched the wireless on, they wouldn’t see it had been on before that.

“Aren’t you going to take a shower?”

“Why?” He didn’t look up. “You want to join me?”

She frowned. “I hope you’re not going to be petulant about
that?”

He threw the remote onto the couch without switching the
television off and grabbed his duffle bag. “I guess I will take a shower.”

When she heard the water on a minute or two later, she dove
under the bed. But as she examined the screen, she saw she was too late.
Whoever it was who had been sending messages from the ship, they’d already read
the incoming one and sent a return email.
Will be waiting.

Since the message had just been sent she supposed she might
be getting a rap on the door with an accusation soon. So she might as well go
for broke. She tapped in Michael’s email address and typed,
Yacht was
hijacked. Father set adrift on raft yesterday. Am being held prisoner, but…
She hesitated. What should she write? But
have met a really nice, hot man
who…
God!

Before she could decide what to say, a pounding came on the
cabin door that had her pushing the computer underneath the bed again and
running into the bathroom.

“Vik!” The steam was so heavy, she could barely see as he
opened the shower door.

“Come to join me?”

“There’s someone pounding on the door.” He came out
immediately, not bothering to dry himself or wrap a towel around his waist. Or
turn off the shower for that matter.

He marched, dripping wet, over to the side of the cabin
door, careful apparently not to stand square in front of it, and said in
response to the pounding, “What?”

“You guys in for the night?” It was Santiago’s voice.

“What is this? A fucking bed check?”

“The guys had some questions about the game plan. Thought
you might like to come on up and talk to them.”

“Now?”

“Forget it, man. Tomorrow’s fine.”

After a minute, Vik came back into the bathroom and shut off
the water. He grabbed a towel and began to dry himself as she scurried back into
the cabin.

“What was that all about?” she asked when he came back into
the cabin in his shorts a few moments later.

He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know.”

Acting on impulse, she fell to her knees and slid the
computer out from under the bed, bringing it to him, screen open, flicking on
one of the keys to prompt it out of hibernation.

“I know, I know,” she said in response to the thunderous
look he gave her. “But I want to show you something.”

He snatched the computer away, reading the beginning of her
email to Michael. “Christ, you don’t follow directions very well do you? I told
you to—”

“Somebody is sending messages onboard.”

“Yeah, you, it looks like.”

“No, not me. I didn’t get a chance to send that to Michael.”

“Good.” To her amazement, Vik slammed the computer, screen
open, against the sharp edge of the vanity. And then he did it again, three
more times, until it was obvious the computer was toast. Then he flung it to
the floor.

She stared at him, speechless.

“I told you to sit tight and not stir things up.”

He went over and switched the television off and though it
was barely dark out, climbed into bed.

She stared down at him. “You’re a jerk.”

“Yeah, and you’re causing me more trouble than a whole army
of enemy agents.”

Enemy agents?
She tried to stay calm. “There was a
message sent from here.”

“Oh yeah? What’d it say?”

“I don’t know. It was in Taiwanese, I guess.”

“Well, we’ll never know then.”

“Don’t you even care?”

Not especially. And he pretty much knew it anyway. It was
obvious Santiago was in contact with, if not Visto itself, somebody connected
to it.