The Vessel Page 7

  But privacy violations that were good for one could be good for all.

  In the mind-numbing hours of surveillance in Graz, Munroe had created and forged documents, attributed them to her new corporate shell, and fudged what she needed to gain access to a used model out of Germany. She’d tested the machine the night it arrived, then repackaged the box and left it with the hotel desk staff, prelabeled with an overnight DHL slip, payment, and instructions that she’d provide a forwarding address as soon as she had one.

  And so she had, from Kavala, before making the drive to Thessaloniki.

  At nearly a hundred thousand dollars, the machine had put a hefty ding in her bank account, but the IMSI catcher was insurance against having to crisscross the globe in perpetuity—a guarantee that the yacht wouldn’t weigh anchor and slip away before she’d had a chance to work.

  MUNROE LEFT THE nightclub shortly after midnight and returned by car to the marina, and to the thirty-five-foot cruiser she’d secured in place of a hotel room. Ignoring the neighbors that slept in berths on either side, she powered the boat and released the mooring lines, then crawled the cruiser out of the marina, past the buoys, and followed the coast toward her target.

  Thessaloniki was a popular yachting destination, and the bareboat charter hadn’t been difficult to come by—not even on short notice. And, though it had been a while since those years on the water running guns through the bight of Biafra, handling the cruiser, like riding a bike, was comfortably familiar.

  She dropped anchor within a hundred meters of the Omicron II and, in the rise and fall of the calm ocean swells, lay on the bed in the master cabin, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. She’d eventually find sleep, scattered among the hours, as she had on so many other days in the course of the hunt, but not tonight.

  The digital images she’d stolen from the yacht yard of Viareggio were above her, enlarged photographs layered into a blueprint composite that stretched the width of the cabin. Beside her were pages of schematic diagrams, the complicated electrical wiring system that ran everything on the yacht from control room to kitchen.

  Munroe picked up a piece of paper and held it above her head, comparing a segment of wiring to its match within the skeleton above. A chirp broke the silence, and she paused to listen as a stranger’s voice filled the cabin.

  Given the hour, calls to and from the yacht were few. This one continued the rage of a pissed-off girlfriend who’d finally clued in to being just one port of call in her boyfriend’s many, and his lies as he attempted to reassure her that her proof was the result of a wild imagination. The conversation was background noise to the diagrams, but within the insults and yelling, the excuses and explanations, were details about the crew, and previous destinations of the yacht, and possible future destinations, and finally silence.

  Munroe studied the blueprints until long after the sun had risen, then showered and changed and ate, all the while waiting for the call to the captain of the yacht that would tell her the Dog Man had altered course. By late morning the Omicron II was still at anchor, and, with no indication the yacht had prepared for departure, Munroe changed into the costume of loose linen pants and deck shoes, and returned the cruiser to the marina to pick up her disguise.

  THEY WERE THREE women and two men, all of them late teens and early twenties—two Germans, one Swede, one Italian, and one American—in Greece for the winter holidays, staying at the same hostel and, in spite of language barriers, friends for at least four days—though none of that really mattered. She’d chosen them from among many possibilities because they were all still young enough to feel entitled and believe they had life figured out, and because playing host to an already established group would shortcut the awkwardness of introducing strangers.

  They sat on the pier staring at the empty slip where the cruiser had been, wearing clothes far less nocturnal than when Munroe had seen them last. With them were a mishmash collection of bags and coolers—booze and food and music—a continuation of the bacchanal that had already gone on for days, and, when she neared, they stood, dusting off hands and pants.

  Munroe played the host, the lonely traveler with money to burn, and guided the party from dock to cockpit, offering a hand of support to the women as a gentleman would, throwing in flirtation for good measure, and joking with the English speakers until the assembly was fully on board.

  Munroe tossed out personal floatation devices, which they ignored, and the party was already in full swing, music blaring, alcohol pouring, by the time the boat cleared the buoys. By early afternoon the cockpit was a mess, the revelers wasted and full, and, because the friends from the north found the winter water of the Aegean warm and balmy, bathing suits were wet, as were the cockpit cushions.

  Two hours on the water, and the subterfuge was set.

  Munroe piloted the charter in the direction of the Omicron II and left the chair to grab something from the galley. The boat lurched in a swell, she lost her footing and took a short fall onto a sharp knife.

  CHAPTER 15

  The cut on Munroe’s thigh was a bleeder, the ghastliness made worse as the red crept out along the white linen pants, painting the wound into twice its original size and growing. Munroe stumbled back into the cockpit and, in the shock of seeing blood, the party went silent for a long-drawn-out moment, making a mockery of the deafening music.

  Then came the reactions, extreme and authentic.

  Antonio grabbed the wheel, Pria lunged for a towel, and then for Munroe’s leg in an attempt to control the bleeding. Munroe waved her off and limped for the VHF. She hailed the Omicron II, and, when the bridge responded, begged for help from the ship’s doctor.

  The request was a long shot, made to emphasize the seriousness of the injury, and failed in a stop-start of broken English because the ship had no doctor.

  Munroe followed with a plea for use of a medical kit.

  Hesitancy from the yacht filled the gaps between words.

  Unwilling to risk a no and be forced to turn the request into a form of action, Munroe called upon the captain’s duty to render aid—a moral appeal, not a legal one, based on general maritime understanding that the person in charge of a vessel had an obligation to assist those in danger, unless doing so would put his own ship or crew in harm’s way.

  She notched her voice, beseeching help so desperately that the five-person party reacted as if they’d been told no help would be forthcoming. They stood and waved, jumped and shouted at the large yacht, petitioning and pleading with body language in a way that Munroe’s words never could.

  Eventually, the midsection of the stern, between the aft ladders, lowered into a ramp, exposing the garage. A crew member, who couldn’t have been older than any one of the group in her cockpit, guided the tender into the water and piloted up against the cruiser. Munroe grabbed a backpack and the boat key and, accepting unneeded help from the others, struggled into the smaller craft.

  Physical pain was a small thing. She’d learned long ago how to block it out and suffer through, and the ability to endure had nothing to do with proving toughness or scoring points or establishing pack dominance: endurance had been the only way to stay alive.

  When they reached the garage, a second man hooked the pulley to the tender, then handed Munroe a towel to sop the blood and water dripping down her leg before she boarded. Like his crewmate, the second man spoke Polish, and Munroe shrugged off his questions with a show of nonunderstanding. Broken English became the substitute as she limped along behind him, down a passageway and up two levels to the cook with a med kit, who doubled as a doctor.

  In the galley, pant leg sliced open, wound presented for inspection, Munroe fought the urge to grab the antibiotic ointment, gauze, and tape, and handle for herself what the cook’s clumsy ministrations intended. She needed stitches, might not have the chance to get real medical help later, and the last thing she needed was an infection.

  Either way, the wound would scar, but what was one more scar on a bo
dy crisscrossed and disfigured by them? For those who saw the patchwork of slivers and asked, she sketched a story of a car accident and glass.

  Looks of pity, words of consolation, as much as she despised them, were better than inducting others into the truth. The lines and gashes, thin and thick, that decorated her torso and arms and legs like a haphazard, unpatterned version of tribal scarring, were mementos, most of them, of those teenage years when she’d been forced to fight to stay alive while the man with the knife, a man like the Dog Man, got off on the blood and pain.

  He’d taunted her with her weakness when he cut her, when he raped her; laughed when he said she’d never be strong enough or fast enough to escape him.

  She’d proved him wrong and left his body in the jungle to rot, just as she would leave the Dog Man’s body.

  The cook’s clumsy repair took less than ten minutes, and Munroe begged use of a bathroom before returning to her charter. The crewman showed her to the nearest head, and there she wedged a transponder up behind the sink, where it would likely never be found, and Gorilla-glued it into place.

  If the Omicron II wouldn’t bring AIS to her, she’d bring AIS to it.

  She’d rigged the portable device to operate off a larger battery pack, and now she secured the pack behind a supporting crossbar. The machine would transmit to a satellite until the batteries died.

  ON THE NIGHT of the scheduled transfer, the night the Dog Man should have arrived to take possession of the girl, the Omicron II left Thessaloniki without him.

  The call had come over the IMSI catcher in the early evening: a young man’s voice to the captain’s phone providing a change in plans and a new destination. The voice offered no explanation for the about-face, no details as to when the crew could next expect their boss, and the captain didn’t ask. The few words he spoke were perfunctory and conveyed a familiarity with the illogical, and with last-minute rerouting. The captain hung up, called his wife to tell her he didn’t know when he’d be home, and some forty minutes later the yacht weighed anchor. Not long after that the catcher lost contact with the cell signals on it.

  Munroe slept, rocked into oblivion by the rhythm of the water, and when she woke with five hours of sleep behind her, she packed her things, hosed down the cockpit, cleaned the last remnants of her party subterfuge out of the saloon, and returned the charter to the marina ahead of the contract expiration.

  She followed the Omicron II’s AIS from Thessaloniki to Athens and on to Izmir in Turkey, chartering private planes only after the yacht had remained stationary for more than six hours, enduring the tiresome process of lugging the equipment with her, of finding a place to stay within transmittal range, of setting up the listening station, of killing time and boredom and fighting back the memories that always intruded when life got too quiet.

  No matter the port, the patterns were the same. The yacht stayed on the hook and crew members remained on board, passing time with maintenance and whatever else they did that she couldn’t see or hear. Once a week, the tender left for shore to reprovision, returning with baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables, and this routine continued until the next phone call with a new destination, only to pick back up again in the new anchorage.

  The stay in Izmir dragged on past days and neared two weeks of self-imposed house arrest, with Munroe attached to the StingRay, unwilling to risk missing a call to the Omicron II. She depended on the small grocery next door and the restaurant within the hotel to keep her fed and watered. She knew the patterns on the ceiling in her room by heart, could recite the cracks in the bathroom tiles line by line, and, when pareidolia kicked in, could find every imaginable face among the crags and wrinkles of the curtains, until at last the voice arrived with a new destination to save her from herself.

  They were but a few words from assistant to yacht captain, but with these Munroe’s heart rate quickened and she closed her eyes and breathed down the pounding, allowing the surge of adrenaline to peak and subside.

  Igoumenitsa.

  She’d been handed an opening, the gateway to the prize.

  The ending she’d chased for over four months was finally within reach, and, in response, anger and rage and nausea and fear bubbled in a cauldron of poison that threatened to suffocate her with noxious fumes.

  Munroe stood, walked to the balcony, and drew back the curtains. Stepped out into the air and breathed in the night, pushing away the emotion one inhale at a time; all of the emotion.

  There was no room for feeling now, only focus, only the mission.

  The killing was almost over, nearly done.

  The Dog Man was coming.

  CHAPTER 16

  The ocean rose as the plane descended, white-capped blue on every side reaching out for an embrace until the tarmac appeared as the charter approached the island runway. The plane bounced, the wheels took control in place of wings and rudder, and the pilot taxied toward the low-slung buildings at the far end.

  Munroe unbuckled before he’d come to a complete stop.

  She had no need for subterfuge, only the itch to hurry, to reach the destination before the target. Time spent in transit had cut her off from the digital eyes that tracked the yacht, eyes she would have otherwise stayed put to observe until after the ship had anchored, and without which she couldn’t know if the yacht had made an unscheduled stop en route—or if it was even still en route.

  Munroe lugged the suitcase of electronics out and onto the ground, slung a backpack over her shoulder, and left the prop plane for the terminal, and for a cab that could take her to the port. A chartered flight to Corfu had been the fastest route to Igoumenitsa from Izmir, but the journey still required a two-hour ferry ride.

  In the port terminal restroom she swapped out pants and shirt to better blend with the local travelers and holiday seekers. Igoumenitsa, a tourist destination on the Ionian Sea, was a port of call for cruise ships and a ferry transit stop, a sleepy seaside town on an agricultural delta where buildings and artifacts and history from the Byzantine era were layered beneath the money and bustling activity of the foreigners who came to sightsee. Travel timetables and mechanical hiccups conspired against the rush to get there.

  Forced into unwanted pause, Munroe sat with her face toward the book she’d opened thirty times and never read, pushing back against impatience, turning pages with the timing of a languid reader while strategy, move against possible move, played out on the map inside her head, and panic seeped in, raising the possibility that she’d lost an opening because she’d moved too fast.

  Twilight had begun its creep into the sky when the ferry finally reached the mainland. Munroe disembarked near the heart of the city and followed the waterfront south, along the center of town. She found a hotel five minutes from the port, and a room ten floors up that allowed her a view over the bay and an Internet connection so that the digital footprint could confirm what her eyes had already told her.

  She had another five hours at least before the yacht reached port, before the StingRay imprisoned her again, five hours of fading light and closing businesses to secure supplies, because on such short notice the city was too small and out of the way to rely on the shadows of the digital world to give her what she wanted. History and skill and preparation would have to be enough.

  ON THE FAR north of town, where the tourists were fewer and the waterfront quieter, Munroe walked the edge of an old stone seawall that reached out into the ocean, acting as pier and wharf. She shone a flashlight, tracing the lines of the boats moored to pilings and cleats. They were wooden, most of them, traditional white Greek kaiki with bright colors painted along the tops and sides—boats that likely served their days ferrying tourists from sight to scene along the coast. Each kaiki was unique, like names and homes and fingerprints, and, for her needs, entirely useless.

  She hadn’t been able to secure a charter and, given the patterns of her target, needed something that would float and had an engine. More, she needed it in a package that wouldn’t stand out like a l
ong-lost friend to every local within a fifty-mile radius.

  From the end of the pier Munroe spotted another mooring in the distance, with boats that appeared older and dirtier. She wandered that way through a seafront alive with talk and chatter, woodsmoke and food, and found what she wanted in the form of a twenty-foot fishing vessel with a fiberglass hull, an outboard motor, and a fore cabin just large enough for a narrow bunk to hug the bow and keep clothing and perishable goods out of the elements.

  It took her half an hour to find the owner, another hour of drinking and banter to negotiate a price, and fifteen minutes beyond that to convince him she was serious when she asked to buy his clothes as part of the bargain. She met him again in the morning, before the sun rose, and, with his blessing written onto a simple slip of paper, she powered south for the bay with a marine battery and a converter to run the StingRay, and, for now, only time to kill.

  The Omicron II had come into port at three in the morning, a hulking shadow beneath the moon, and she’d been on the balcony watching the water, waiting to greet its arrival. Munroe observed the yacht now through the spotting scope, quiet and serene and already flying the Greek flag alongside that of the Cayman Islands. Whether the vessel had stopped on the way, or had done so on a prior journey, it had already cleared customs.

  In the tight cabin, Munroe re-dressed in fisherman’s clothes.

  The sun crested over the distant hills to the sound of seagulls and lapping waves and silence on the catcher. Time became the enemy; time, and the memories that brought back the rage and the urge for action.