Filipov stared. It took him a moment to process this. “Big talk coming from some shit-encrusted piece of flotsam we dragged out of the drink.”
The figure smiled with a mirthless and ghastly stretching of the lips.
“Okay.” Filipov put down the bowl. “Here’s your dinner.” He started to go, then paused. “And here’s your dessert.” He turned back and kicked the man viciously in the gut. Then he climbed out of the hold and let the grate slam down behind him.
16
19 Days Earlier
October 25
ROCKY FILIPOV STOOD at the helm of the F/V Moneyball, guiding it through a cross sea. The rising sun was just breaking through a dirty scrim of clouds on the eastern horizon, the remains of the storm that had swept through during the night. Off the port side of the vessel, the low dark shore of Crow Island slid past, and ahead Filipov could see the winking beam of the Exmouth Light, standing on a bluff with the keeper’s house beside it, touched with gold by the rising sun—a fine sight. The crew not on watch were sleeping in the cabin below. Martin DeJesus was standing next to him in the pilothouse, drinking coffee, eating a stale doughnut and playing a game on his cell phone.
Filipov was in a dark mood. They had finished delivery of product to their contact in Maine. The trip from Canada had gone without a hitch. They were now sitting on seven figures of cash, locked up in the hold. And they had a month to kill before the next pickup and delivery. It should have been a moment of triumph…except for the problem of Arsenault.
The feds had picked him up with a suitcase of money from the Canadian job a week ago—a hundred grand, enough to pique their interest. No drugs, no evidence, just a shitload of money. Now they had Arsenault in custody, and Filipov had no doubt they were working on him. He hadn’t cracked yet—otherwise they’d all have gone down. While he believed Arsenault would be a hard man to break, the guy did have a wife and two kids, and that was always a man’s weakest point. Also, he was stupid—he should have laundered his share of the money along the lines Filipov had carefully worked out, rather than be caught with it on his person.
The other problem was that the crew had voted to take the boat to Boston and dock it for the month while they enjoyed the fruits of their labor. Filipov was not happy with the plan: he did not like the idea of the crew, suddenly rich, going into the city, spending money, getting drunk, hiring prostitutes, and—possibly—talking too much. After all, look what had happened to Arsenault, who’d opted to leave the boat early. But, realistically, he had to go along with it. He couldn’t just say no after how hard they had worked on the delivery, the risks they’d taken, and how well they’d pulled it off. He simply had to trust them not to get into trouble.
For his part, he was going to spend the month quietly laundering as much of the drug money as he could through the successful antiquities gallery he owned on Newbury Street, eating out at fine restaurants with his several girlfriends, going to Bruins games, and adding a few rare bottles to his wine cellar.
“Whoa,” said Filipov suddenly, staring forward into the choppy water. “You see that?” He throttled down.
DeJesus looked up from his game. “Holy shit, it’s a floater.”
Filipov briefly slid the throttle into reverse, slowing the boat’s headway. The body was lying faceup, arms splayed, pale in death.
“Get a boat hook,” he told DeJesus.
DeJesus exited the pilothouse, grabbed a boat hook, and went forward while Filipov maneuvered the Moneyball to a standstill, bringing it alongside the body. When he saw that DeJesus had snagged it he put the vessel in neutral and exited the pilothouse as well, joining DeJesus at the port rail.
Filipov stared down at the body. It was male, about forty, pale hair plastered to the skull, black suit, pale-gray skin. A watch gleamed on the left wrist.
“Bring it aft and haul it on board,” Filipov told DeJesus.
“Are you shitting me? If we report this we’re going to get all messed up with an investigation.”
“Who said we’re going to report anything? You see that watch? Looks like a Rolex.”
DeJesus issued a low chuckle. “Rocky, you always looking for an angle.”
“Ease him around to the stern and haul him in over the stern ramp.”
Having lost its forward motion, the trawler was rolling pretty good, but DeJesus managed to pull the body aft and around the stern, then dragged it on board with the hook fixed to the floater’s belt. The body slid easily up the stern ramp, draining water. Filipov knelt and grasped the wrist, turning it over.
“Look at this. Platinum Rolex President Sant Blanc. Worth forty grand at least.” He unbuckled it and slipped it off, holding it up for DeJesus to see.
DeJesus took the watch and turned it over. “Fucking A, Cap. It’s still running.”
“Let’s see what else he’s got on him.”
Filipov made a quick search of the body. No wallet, no keys, nothing in the pockets. A strange medallion around the neck that looked worthless, and a gold signet ring with an engraved crest or symbol on it. He tried to take it off, and finally had to force it free, breaking the knuckle as he did so.
He let the hand drop, examining the ring. The value was in the gold, of course: maybe three, four hundred bucks.
“What do we do now?” DeJesus said. “Dump it back? We sure don’t want to be caught with a dead body on board.”
Filipov stared at the body. He reached back toward it and grasped the wrist again. It was not as cold as it should be. In fact, it was slightly warm. He pressed his thumb into it, trying to find a pulse, but couldn’t detect anything. He reached over to the neck and checked the carotid artery. Once again, he was startled at the warmth. As he pressed his index and middle fingers in, he picked up a faint throb. And now he could see the body was in fact breathing—very shallow, almost imperceptible breaths. He put his ear to the chest and picked up a faint gurgling wheeze, along with a slow feeble thump of the heart.
“He’s alive,” he said.
“All the more reason to dump him.”
“Absolutely not.”
Filipov found DeJesus staring at him with a blank look on his face, his bald crown surrounded by a tuft of black wiry hair, his hammy hand gripping the watch. DeJesus was a reliable man, but about as intelligent as a side of beef. “Martin, look. Here’s a guy with a forty-thousand-dollar watch. We just saved his life. Now…don’t you think there might be a money play in this situation?”
“Like what?”
“Go wake up the crew.”
DeJesus went below, shaking his head, while Filipov grabbed a heavy wool blanket from a storage locker. He glanced around to make sure there were no other boats in sight, then hauled the man farther up the stern deck, laid the blanket down, and wrapped him tightly. He had to warm the guy up fast or he’d die anyway, of hypothermia. The water temperature was about fifty-five degrees, and according to the tables Filipov knew by heart, a healthy man in water like that had about ninety minutes of consciousness, then another hour before death, assuming he didn’t drown first.
The guy wasn’t worth a shit dead, but he might be worth a lot alive.
Once he’d wrapped the guy up, Filipov thought about what to do with him. If he came to, he’d be confused. Maybe cause trouble. Best to lock him in one of the holds. The aft lazarette, the biggest hold, would be the place; it had light and some electrical outlets high up into which they could plug a space heater.
Now the crew was coming out on deck, wiping the sleep out of their faces, gathering around the unconscious man. Filipov stood up and looked around. “Martin, show them the watch.”
The watch went around to murmurs and nods.
“You can buy a Caddy for the price of that watch,” said Filipov. “This man is loaded.” He looked around. “It means giving up your Boston holiday, but there may be some serious money to be made here.”
“Money?” asked Dwayne Smith, the first mate. “Like a reward?”
“Reward? Shit. N
o reward would be anything near what we might get if we handled this in another way.”
“What other way?” Smith asked.
“Ransom.”
17
FILIPOV STOOD AT the lazarette hatch, staring down at the mystery man shackled to the cleat in the bottom of the hold. The man had been with them for ten days, but they knew as much about him now as they had when they’d hauled him on board. Which was nothing. The man appeared to be sleeping, but Filipov wasn’t sure. For the first few days after they’d fished him from the water, he’d been sunken in a kind of deep stupor. That was to be expected after almost dying of hypothermia. They had taken good care of him, keeping him warm, feeding him broth when he was able to take it, bandaging his wounds and broken knuckle, making him comfortable. Then he had run a high fever for three days—again, nothing surprising in that. But the crew began to get nervous, worrying that if they were stopped by the Coast Guard and boarded it would be all over.
To minimize that possibility, Filipov had taken the Moneyball beyond the Schoodic Peninsula, deep into the wildest coastline in the United States: Downeast Maine, with its thousands of uninhabited islands, coves, and estuaries. Filipov knew the coast well, and he also knew the habits of the Coast Guard. For days now they had been meandering from gunkhole to gunkhole, keeping well out of the cruising and shipping lanes and moving only at night. But the atmosphere aboard ship had continued to sour, especially when, after the mystery man’s fever cleared up and he seemed to be on the road to recovery, he still hadn’t spoken: not a single word. It was almost as if he were brain-damaged—which was a possibility, after being almost drowned. But in the few times he’d had a chance to look into the man’s silvery eyes, Filipov had seen an alert intelligence. He felt in his bones the guy was cognizant. So why wouldn’t he talk? What had he been doing floating in the water? And what about his wounds? It almost looked like he’d been mauled by a bear, with long tearing scratches, lacerations, and bite marks.
It was damned unnerving to everyone on board.
Now the man was lying in his usual position, eyes closed. Filipov stared at him, his hand in his pocket, toying with the man’s gold ring. He was sure the answer, or at least some answer, lay in the crest or symbol engraved in that ring. It was a strange emblem, showing a weird vertical cloud with a five-pointed star inside it, lightning bolt shooting down, striking a lidless cat’s eye inside of which was the number 9 in place of the pupil. To Filipov it looked vaguely military. Smith, his first mate and the resident computer guru, had spent hours on the Internet looking for a match, without success. The same was true of the bizarre medallion around the man’s neck, although that looked less official, almost familial or perhaps even medieval. Smith had also tried to get an Internet match on the man’s face. That had failed, as well. The problem was the man had almost died and his face was so haggard and drawn that he probably didn’t look enough like his former self for the software to find a match.
The key to this man’s identity was that ring; Filipov was sure of it.
He stared at the man, his anger growing. The son of a bitch was holding out on them. Why?
He stepped into the hold and walked up to the man. He lay there, eyes closed, shackled to the cleat, asleep. Or rather, pretending to sleep. And even as Filipov stared, those eyes slowly opened, revealing two glittering silver coins with pinpoint black pupils. He looked more like a ghost than a human being.
Filipov leaned over him. “Who are you?”
Those eyes looked into his own, with what Filipov felt was a kind of insolence. The man had started out almost dead, but now Filipov was sure he must have recovered more than he was letting on.
“I’m going to dump your ass back in the ocean. How about that?”
To his surprise, the man spoke for the first time. The voice was barely more than a whisper. “The repetition of that threat is becoming tiresome.”
Filipov was taken aback by the quiet smoothness of the voice, the southern accent, and the distinctly arrogant tone.
“So you can talk! I knew you were screwing with us. All right, now that you found your tongue: who are you?”
“The real question is, who are you? Ah, but never mind: I already know the answer.”
“Oh yeah? So who am I then, you little prick?”
“You’re the unluckiest man alive.”
With a curse, Filipov kicked him in the ribs. But even with that, the man’s expression never changed, those eyes never shifting from his own.
18
CAPTAIN FILIPOV STOOD at the chart table to the left of the helm, staring over Smith’s shoulder as the man worked his laptop computer. He was explaining his latest failed attempt to match the engraving on the mystery man’s ring with something on the Internet. “Whatever it is,” Smith was saying, “it’s not on the surface web, not on the dark net. I used the best image-matching software available. It ain’t fucking there.”
Filipov nodded, staring at the image on the screen: a photo they’d taken of the ring. The boat was lying off Bunker Cove, south of Great Spruce Island. It was a protected anchorage for a dirty night, the swell coming from the northeast, rain splattering the pilothouse windows.
“Want a beer?” Smith asked.
“Not right now.”
Smith scraped the chair back and went below; a moment later he returned, a beer in one hand. He took a long swig.
“Whoever this asshole is,” said Filipov, sitting down at the computer, “he wants to be anonymous. Why won’t he tell us his name?”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
He stared at the design. Weird cloud; lightning; cat’s eye; nine. And suddenly an idea came to him. He winced at the obviousness of it. “A cat has nine lives.”
“Yeah?”
“So this group, whatever it is, is all about survival. Nine lives.”
“Okay.” Smith took a pull from his beer.
“And this cloud. You ever see a cloud like that?”
“It’s strange. Sort of like a thunderhead.”
“Maybe it’s not a cloud at all.”
“So what is it, then?”
“A ghost.”
Smith peered at the image of the ring on the screen, squinting, and then grunted. “Maybe.”
Filipov took the real ring out of his pocket and looked at it, turning it in the dim light of the pilothouse. “Ghost. Star. Nine lives. Lightning. Okay. So the image isn’t on the web. But perhaps a description of it is.”
Filipov started Googling the words “ghost,” “star,” “nine lives,” “lightning.” And almost immediately he got a hit. It was a small article in an FBI newsletter, Hall of Honor, devoted to agents killed in the line of duty. It was dated three or four years back, and it described the funeral of a Special Agent Michael Decker, who had been killed “In the Line of Duty as the Result of an Adversarial Action.” The article described the funeral and noted some of the attendees. Filipov read through it, then stopped at one passage:
In addition to the American flag, the coffin displayed the emblem of the elite Ghost Company to which Decker belonged—a ghost on a blue field, decorated with a star, throwing a thunderbolt at a cat’s eye with the number nine as its pupil, symbolizing the nine lives that all members of the Ghost Company were alleged to have by virtue of their training, determination, and experience. The Ghost Company was a highly secret, tight-knit, specialized descendant of the army’s now-defunct “Blue Light” detachment, and was created specifically to operate in classified, highly dangerous, and at times unsanctioned theaters of engagement. The Ghost Company’s window of service was relatively brief. “Blue Light” as a whole later developed into the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta Force. Special Agent Decker was one of a small, decorated group of agents who joined the FBI after serving in the Ghost Company.
“Our mystery man below,” said Filipov, “was in the military. Special forces.”
Smith stared over his shoulder, breathing hard. “Fuck me,” he said, pointing. “Loo
k at this!”
The article sported a small photograph of a group of agents at the graveside. And there, standing with his hands folded, was a tall, pale man in a black suit. While his face was blurry and indistinct, everything about the figure matched the man in the hold—the paleness, the blond hair, the pale eyes and lean physique.
The caption named him as Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast.
“Christ,” Filipov breathed out. “He’s a fed.”
There was a silence, broken only by the pattering of rain on the windows.
“Well, that’s it,” said Smith. “We throw the motherfucker overboard.”
“You really want to kill him?” asked Filipov.
“We’re not killing him. We’re just putting him back where we found him. Nature will do the rest. Who’s gonna know? He’ll wash up somewhere weeks from now and nothing will connect him to us. We sure as hell can’t keep a fed on board.”
Still Filipov said nothing. He was sorely tempted. The prick had really gotten under his skin. He opened a small cupboard below the chart table, removed a bottle of scotch, unscrewed the cap, and took a pull. He felt the liquid make its fiery way down his throat. It felt good. He took another.
“I say we go back offshore of Crow Island,” Smith went on. “Dump him there. Not far from where he must’ve disappeared. No one’ll connect us to him.” He paused, then grasped the scotch bottle. “Mind?”
“That’s pretty strong stuff for a Mormon,” said Filipov.
“Lapsed,” said Smith with a grin, sucking down a mouthful. “We put the watch back on him. And the ring. No evidence left behind.”
As the scotch set his belly afire, Filipov could feel a remarkable clarity taking hold in his mind. He waited for Smith to talk himself out.
“Fuck the watch,” Smith went on. “We can’t take the risk. With Arsenault maybe about to talk, we can’t take any risks at all.”