The Vessel Read online

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Taylor Stevens

  Excerpt from The Catch copyright © 2014 by Taylor Stevens

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from The Catch by Taylor Stevens.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-41990-0

  Cover series design: Eric White

  Cover photographs: (boat) Mark Avellino/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images; (background) Glen Wexler/Gallery Stock

  v3.1

  For the Muse

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  A Conversation with Taylor Stevens

  Excerpt from The Catch

  Other Books by This Author

  CHAPTER 1

  There was always a trail to follow, always a place to start. No matter how well hidden an object, how perfectly obscured the information, or how invisible the man, there was always a way.

  Some were easier to find than others: just pick up a whiff and follow the scent. Others took hunting and patience.

  The most difficult was a target who knew she was coming, and he knew.

  Of course he knew.

  How could he not?

  When you backed a predator into a corner, when you took and destroyed all that she loved, when you made a game of ruining lives, and sadism for you was sport, when you turned the hope of death into a welcome relief, and then you failed to kill the predator, well.

  You’d better know that predator was coming back.

  This was an inviolable law.

  She wasn’t dead, and so she was coming for him.

  She would find him. Kill him.

  Simple as that.

  VANESSA MICHAEL MUNROE drained the last of the beer, knocked the empty glass to the scuffed and scarred bar top, and, with a nod to the bartender, counted out from a handful of coins and laid the money beside the glass.

  Behind her, around her, voices rose and fell in tempo with the game playing on the small television. A shout of triumph shook the room, and she turned to the screen, same as every other man in the bar, watching through cigarette smoke for the goal replay. Then she pushed off the stool and stood.

  Armchair coaching erupted two tables over, and the man at the end of the bar flung a loud retort. Bellowed laughter filled the stuffy room: immigrant voices belonging to immigrant faces, the same group of men in frayed, drab clothes, with sun-leathered skin and gnarled fingers, who’d come and gone throughout the evenings Munroe had sat on this stool, listening, learning, absorbing.

  She’d followed the same nightly pattern for nearly three weeks, and spent the daylight hours in doorways along the quarter, wine bottle in hand, head tipped against stone, or wood, or concrete, or whatever the perch du jour might be. Just another apparent drunkard surrounded by the poor and the struggling while phrases and tones and speech shifted form and made shapes inside her head, as they did now in the bar. As they had her entire life.

  Language had defined her, made her who she was. Language, the savant-like ability to find the pattern in foreign sound, was a poisonous gift that had been with her since childhood. Without the gift, there would have been no teenage years spent running guns across West and Central African borders; without the gunrunning, no nights in the equatorial jungles fighting off the worst of human predators; and without these nights, no instinct of self-preservation and the speed that kept her alive.

  Hood up and over her head, Munroe pushed through the old wooden door, out of the reek of stale beer and ripening body odor, into a late evening chill that announced the coming change of seasons, and onto a dark and quiet street where the past whistled on the wind and twisted in the swirling leaves.

  She glanced right, left. Her eyes tracked along the shadows of doorframes and windows, and the outlines of the men who claimed space on doorsteps, drowning away lives that were still only half-lived.

  Hands in her pockets, she headed for bed and the possibility of sleep.

  She walked a different route tonight than the one she’d walked the night before, and the night before that, paths that she learned during the day because they were dark and without streetlights. Several minutes from the bar, three sets of footsteps took up behind her, keeping a healthy distance but tagging after her nonetheless.

  She didn’t turn to confirm their presence, didn’t need to.

  Instinct, honed well from hunting and being hunted in the rainforest dark, had become an added sense, heightening hearing and ambient texture, providing sensory input that no light-polluted city dweller could match.

  Munroe reached an intersection and turned down an alley that led out of her way toward better streets and better light. She didn’t quicken her pace—that would only entice them the way running enticed a dog to the chase, would show weakness and fear and convince them to follow no matter what their original intent might have been.

  She led them on another block and stopped finally beneath one of the few working lamps, stood where they could clearly see her in worn leather work boots and torn jeans, with no watch, no belt, and nothing of value, nothing worth stealing but the few coins in her pockets. She searched behind them, and then up the buildings that lined the narrow street, probing shadows for potential surprises and sizing up the potency of the threat.

  The men stopped when she did. They kept four meters back, faces distorted by the relative dark, their clothes worn and tired, much like hers. That she stood here now, facing them instead of running or hiding, should have been a warning at the least, but they were young, and with youth came undue boldness and presumed invincibility.

  “Not tonight,” she said, loud enough for her voice to carry. “Whatever it is you want, you’ll get it easier somewhere else.”

  They didn’t respond or reply to Ukrainian, so she tried again in Italian, and to this they reacted with sniggering and smirks.

  “A fight will end badly for you,” she said. “Please just let me be.”

  They didn’t listen. They never listened.

  The young men moved in closer and separated, with two moving to flank her from either side. They would have done better to attack as a united front.

  She pushed her hood back and inhaled the night and the sweat of garbage and black water runoff; she watched them, measured them, and still they came closer, smirking and taunting, oblivious to the danger in her stillness, oblivious to her lack of fear.

  The smallest of the three drew a six-inch knife.

  Streetlight glinted off the metal and the present morphed into the past.

  Nights as a teenager spent in fear of the blade became the now, and the taps of adrenaline opened.

  Munro
e relaxed into the chemical surge, comforting and familiar.

  The men drew closer, tightening the intended trap.

  The inner war drum pounded, building pressure, building speed and intensity with each booming fall of the mallet.

  The man with the knife swung.

  Muscle memory dodged the first awkward slash.

  Torture had primed her for speed and for survival. Size didn’t matter much when she could move that much faster than her opponent.

  The world curved into a dark shade of gray, and focus, narrow and primal, turned this man into the man who had taught her to hate.

  Release would come through death, his or hers.

  She grabbed his wrist and forearm and pulled him into her. Enough pressure at the right point and the ulna would snap like a bird’s wing. Drove her knee between her hands and felt the break.

  His scream shattered the silence and was answered by howls from a pack of stray dogs in the distance. She followed through and forced a compound fracture. His reactions slowed, his brain trying to make sense of events that had shifted faster than he’d had time to register.

  She slammed a palm into his elbow, drove the broken arm back into his face, and twisted the knife free from the other hand.

  Whispers of air and movement reached out from behind, and she dropped, slashing through the thin material of track pants as she spun, carving a line across a tendon. Another’s arm wrapped around her throat. Cut off her air. Jerked her off her feet and dragged her back.

  She drove the knife up and over her shoulder, blade plunging down behind her head faster than he could react, into the base of his neck, that sweet spot between collarbone and shoulder blade. She yanked down hard and twisted out of his grasp, tasting the life sprayed from him, feeling his shock and fear.

  He dropped to a knee, and she rotated toward the first two attackers, blade readied, facing off against the one she’d sliced.

  He backed away, hopping on one leg out of the light, into shadow. The man with the broken arm cradled his useless limb and shook, eyes fixed on her, inaudible pleading on his lips.

  The law of retribution cried out for the kill, demanded she finish what she’d started. What they’d started. She pushed the urge away.

  Those nights were a long, long time ago.

  “Go,” she said.

  He blinked rapidly, hesitated, and then struggled to his feet, glancing over his shoulder as he took a few tentative steps, and then he bolted.

  She continued to face him until he’d gone a safe distance, and then she turned toward the kneeling man, bloodied knife in her hand, staring down at the living dead.

  She’d had nothing of value for them to take; they’d come after her for no reason other than the thrill of the fight. She couldn’t have been the first victim, wouldn’t have been the last, and, in staining her own soul, she’d done the world a favor.

  He glanced up and then pulled fingers away from his neck and gazed at the crimson gushing over them, painting his clothes and the cobblestones around him. She’d hit his carotid. He’d bleed out before he could find help—if he could even find help.

  Munroe knelt so that she could see his eyes, so that he could see her eyes, and she wiped the blade on his pants.

  Body succumbing to shock, his lids closed.

  “I asked nicely,” she said, and then she stood and walked back into the dark.

  CHAPTER 2

  One piece of information was enough to form a trailhead. It didn’t matter what that piece was, really, as long as it was accurate: an address twice removed, the name of a friend, a phone number.

  In the right hands, anything could be mined into so much more.

  She had his face, had the name of a city.

  That was more than enough.

  They’d met in the Principality of Monaco, if the encounter could be called a meeting: she with a metaphorical noose around her neck, a sniper’s rifle tracking her head; she with her former lover killed by her handlers as a means to control her, while her surrogate brother was tortured and held as collateral. She’d done as she was told as a way to save those she loved, forced to transport a prisoner she knew she’d be delivering into a nightmare like the one she herself had escaped long ago. She’d driven the living package across Europe, and, as she’d escorted the woman who’d become merchandise, bought and paid for, toward certain death, he’d walked his dog in their direction along the seawall with a smirk on his face, sizing up his prey.

  The Dog Man, they’d called him.

  He’d been the client. The buyer.

  He’d come by yacht; she’d pieced that together before the encounter.

  He was wealthy enough to afford the highest of price tags in owning his women. He was one of the few who picked his human acquisitions like clothes from a catalog, purchasing from criminal networks that thrived off poverty and misery and the value of the female body.

  She’d been a pawn, caught in the middle of a match of wits and brinkmanship as he toyed with the sellers. She’d been just one of many pieces on his chessboard while the lives of her family and friends, dangled as a sword above her head, were used to control her. She’d submitted to the game to buy time, to keep them alive. Had waited until she’d gotten close enough to see him, close enough to memorize his build, his walk, and the angles of his features, and then, believing she’d signed the death warrant for those she loved most, she’d abandoned hope and upended the game board.

  She’d set out for retribution, for justice, instead.

  The Dog Man was the loose end she’d left untied.

  Untied, but not forgotten.

  And so, in the end, she’d returned to the beginning, to the trailhead of Monaco, where he’d berthed his yacht in Port Hercules; Monaco, where she’d left one of the traffickers in an underground parking garage with his brains painting the interior of a black Passat.

  She’d returned to the beginning, where she could track the Dog Man’s scat.

  It had taken three days of little designer dresses accentuating a long, lean figure, of painted red lips and bashful glances, of twelve-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel rooms and inviting herself into private parties, of small talk and open flirtation, of feigning connections and mutual friends, to find and then maneuver into an informal introduction to the port master’s assistant.

  Chameleon charm—the ability to adapt, blend, and bluff, skills that had served her well in her working life when gathering and selling information had been what paid the bills—served her even better as a murderous vagabond.

  Drinks, name-dropping, and an exchange of favors—not that kind—had granted her access to recorded CCTV and webcam footage of the harbor. And then followed two bleary-eyed days without sleep to pinpoint her target, the Omicron II, a forty-six-meter superyacht that had arrived offshore three days before the scheduled delivery of the kidnapped girl, had left port the same morning Munroe had deviated from the plan, and hadn’t been back since.

  In leaving Port Hercules, the yacht had disappeared and, with it, the target.

  Private planes had tail numbers and flight plans; vehicles had license plates and didn’t often travel far from their countries of registration, but watercrafts—watercrafts were vessels of the world, often registered in and operating under the jurisdiction of countries on the other side of the globe. They arrived and departed at leisure, leaving no documentable trail, and the Omicron II, at the minimum length considered a superyacht, was not so ostentatiously huge that she would create a beacon among the tens of thousands of pleasure and luxury vessels plying the French Riviera, the Italian Riviera, the Ionian, Adriatic, Aegean, and the Med.

  One piece of information was enough to form a trailhead, and Munroe had left the Principality of Monaco with three: A face. The name of the yacht. And the flag state under which the ship was registered.

  CHAPTER 3

  She sat alone in the last seat at the back of the half-empty train car, shoulder to the window and face to the aisle, studying the occasional
passenger walking by: searching body language for clues and threat.

  Searching out of habit.

  This time she was the hunter, not the hunted, invisible among the masses. He might know she was coming but could never predict when or how, and he believed this was still his game, that she was still a pawn on a chessboard he controlled. Perhaps it was true, consumed as she was with finding him.

  The rocking lured her down into sleep, wheels against the tracks, wheels against nights without rest; a rhythm with a lullaby of its own, singing her slowly down into respite from life and from pain.

  Memories, disguised as dreams, jerked her awake.

  She glanced at her watch.

  She’d managed forty-five minutes.

  The insomnia, always an issue, had only gotten worse since her return to Europe. She knew the signs. This was her body pleading for relief, for a stop to the death and killing that ever followed her; was her mind and soul begging for an end to the torment of losing, one by one, those few that she loved.

  But she couldn’t stop. Not yet.

  She had to put an end to him.

  She was the only one who could.

  Soon.

  Soon this would be over. One last hunt and then she’d disappear, shut off emotion, and cease to feel at all.

  Munroe stood. Grabbed the grimy duffel bag that held what few possessions she carried, slung the strap over her shoulder, and walked the train.

  Movement, any movement, would help cleanse her head.

  Darting glances, suspicious and accusing, bored into her back.

  She avoided eye contact. Kept her head down and ticket in hand.

  Gone were the soft skin and the couture dresses, the nightlife and parties of Monaco, replaced by the posture of a man beaten down by life, who longed to be seen beyond his appearance and, knowing better than to hope, chose instead to not be seen at all. Her frayed and baggy jeans were tied off with a piece of rope, her carrying bag and worn-out boots, everything on her, had been purchased piece by piece off immigrants and the homeless, marking her as one of them.