Adrenaline

20




I RISKED CRACKING OPEN THE DOOR. Daylight hit my eyes, the dawn, rosy fresh. I could smell air unsullied by city, saltwater, the tinge of rust. The light stung my eyes; I blinked the pain away. My container stood near the top of a stack—another stack stood next to it. I could barely open the door and squeeze through, and I had to hold on to the side of the adjoining container. I looked down. I was roughly four stories up—if I slipped I would fall into a narrow canyon created by the containers. I pushed the door open as far as I could and pulled myself up to the top of the container wall.

Thin clouds streaked the sky. The helicopter’s whoosh faded as the rotors slowed. I inched along the top of the containers and looked down. At the ship’s stern, a jet helicopter squatted. I saw four men, armed, exiting the helicopter as the rotors slowed. One figure—a woman in a suit—stood at a distance, conferring with a group of men who appeared to be the captain and members of the crew.

The arrivals must be Howell’s people.

Jesus, how? How? Finding people who didn’t want to be found was hard; I’d hit my head against that wall a number of times. Yet no matter how carefully I hid, here came the Company. My heart trip-hammered against my chest and then I thought: six thousand containers, they can’t open and search them all. It would take weeks.

Well, if the Company was seizing the ship, they would have weeks. They could commandeer the vessel, sail it back to New York or to Boston, pay off the disgruntled shippers. They could take as long as they wanted to find me. If they’d found the intruder’s body in the apartment, they’d never give up. Howell would know I’d killed the guy and run, presumably with highly useful information.

The helicopter rose again. It hovered over the stern of the ship, then began to work its way slowly over the deck. I could see two men sitting in the copter’s open door, peering at a laptop. Hanging from each side of the helicopter was an array of lenses, shaped like a rectangle.

The helicopter passed low over the first stack of containers, keeping up its flying speed, but just barely. It wasn’t in a hurry. It was searching.

My heart sank. Infrared scanners tied to thermal imagers. My body temperature would stick out like a flame against the coolness of shipped goods like my Vermont soap and New Jersey hand wipes.

I had to find somewhere else on the ship to hide. Now.

I couldn’t go down. My body heat would stick out like a blister. I had to go up and then find rapid entry into the ship. I’d be spotted, but they were going to find me within minutes anyway. I ducked back down to my container, grabbed my gun and the ammo, and the cash. I put the cash and the ammo in a belt bag and tucked the gun in the back of my pants, then went back out the door. The containers’ surfaces were damp from the ocean breeze, and I tested my grip carefully; a slip would be fatal. I hoisted myself up high. The helicopter was about a hundred meters away. The ship had stopped and dropped anchor; the white noise of the engines had faded.

The helicopter was turned away from me, its nose pointing back to where the suit from the helicopter and the captain (I presumed) stood. I crawled out onto the top of the containers. I was five stories in the air, laying flat on the cool steel of a blue container. I could see that the container stack here stair-stepped down, then rose again. The loader had not done a neat job and it gave me ledges and walls, just like back in Vauxhall.

The helicopter began its turn. I hunkered low and ran. I eased myself over the lip of the first stack and dropped down to the next.

I made a clang when I hit. The helicopter couldn’t have heard it. But a crewman, standing near the railing toward the bow, turned, either at the sound or at the flash of color I made as I ran.

I saw him turn and point. Right at me.

I rolled and ran toward the edge again, and I heard the increasing whine of the helicopter. I slammed off the edge of one container, slowed my descent, hit the top of another and rolled to my feet. I glanced back as I ran the twenty feet to the edge and saw the helicopter bearing down on me. One of the men jumped from the copter onto the container stack, gun in hand.

I ran. Metal hit metal—a bullet pinging against the container. I had to get off the stack—the helicopter roared above me, circling, keeping me in sight as the gunman narrowed the gap between us.

I was caught between man and machine, boxed, now three stories above the deck, and I could see another thin crevasse between shoved-together stacks of multicolored containers.

I wriggled inside the gap. I had maybe thirty seconds to navigate down thirty feet to the deck before the gunman caught up to the canyon. I’d be a dead target if I wasn’t out and clear by the time he reached it. He could simply fire a bullet into the top of my head.

I bounced down, my feet catching the edges of the containers, just enough to break the descent, then dropping again. Find the line, I told myself. It was like a parkour run inside a pipeline; my shoulders bounced hard against the steel.

Twenty feet. I hit a skid, lost my balance. I slammed into the metal side, caught the edge of a container with my hands. I could hear the helicopter drumming above me like a hammer.

I focused and let go and managed to drop to the deck in a controlled roll. I spilled free from the container stack, out of the shadows, into the weak, ocean-guttered sunlight. Fifty feet ahead of me was a railing—and beyond that the uncaring gray of the sea.

I ran, staying close to the edge of the containers. I needed to get belowdecks. On a ship full of warm bodies and heating pumps and heavy engines, they’d have to do their thermal scans by hand. And hundreds more containers should be below. I could become the needle in the haystack for a while. I was going to make them work to find me, because I was sick of being stymied, of being pushed away from finding Lucy and my son.

I crashed into a crewman, a young Filipino who cried out in Tagalog for help. I showed him the gun and he froze. I pushed him away hard and ran through a doorway, started hammering down the steps.

Behind me I saw the gunman take a hard run, slide off a container, hit and roll with enough grace to hold his balance as he came off the front of the container stack.

I vanished into the depths of the ship. The crew was not likely armed; this ship wasn’t sailing past Somalia. I didn’t want to shoot an innocent person, and the sound would betray my location to the hunters. Best to be silent and vanish.

I ran down a long, narrow corridor, turning back and slowing to look for pursuit, and I slammed into a wall of a man as he bound out of a doorway. I staggered back and the man—heavyset, Asian—snarled and launched a flurry of blows at my face. He used Muay Thai: hard, sharp, brutal blows, a Thai fighting form designed to knock an opponent down and out with the smallest amount of effort. It hurts. A lot.

He landed two precise blows on my jaw and my throat before I could parry, and I fell to the ground.

Then he flicked open a switchblade. A switchblade? The eighties want their weapon back. “They pay for you,” he hissed. He sliced the air between us, smiled his hard awful smile. “You get up, slow, and—”

“That’s cheating,” I said. I thought we were sticking to fists, but whatever. I pulled my gun free and shot the knife out of his hand. At least I would play fair. He shrieked; the broken knife clattered along the deck. I glanced behind me, saw the gunman launching himself into the hallway behind us, so I cheated some more and I closed arms around the crying, bleeding sailor and made him my shield. The gunman held fire. Hurray for morals. I yanked the sobbing sailor back along the hall. We finally hit a door; it opened into the main container hold.

“Let him go, Mr. Capra, we want to talk,” the gunman called.

Mister? So polite. I acted like I hadn’t heard. I hurried the sailor down toward the hold floor. He didn’t struggle, moaning as he clutched his hurt hand. But two can’t move as fast as one, and as we reached the hold floor, I aimed at the lights above us. I needed the blanket of darkness. The gunman appeared at the steps and aimed. He fired as I tried to pull the sailor back behind the angle of a container while squeezing the trigger, and my shot missed the light.

I’d moved too slow. The gunman’s shot caught the sailor in the upper back and he screamed and sagged to the floor.

I glanced down at the sailor—and instead of a spread of blood on his shirt, a small metal dart protruded from between his meaty shoulder blades. Not a bullet. An anesthetic dart, like we were on a nature show, tagging tigers to trace their roaming. The dart was so I could be dragged back and put into whatever cage Howell wanted. They wanted their bait to be functioning.

I fired at the gunman, who took cover behind the edge of a container, then I turned and I ran into the maze of containers. Hard right, hard right. I needed to take out the gunman. I was trying to get behind him when he descended the stairs. I hoped his adrenaline would make him rush, make a bad decision to my profit. Dim lights illuminated the stacks.

I stopped, risked a glance around the corner. The containers were more tightly packed down here; less room to move, longer lines of sight, which meant that there was a better chance of getting caught in the open. I could hear more voices, raised, feet thundering on the steel stairs. A crowd was coming. If I shot, I’d betray my position.

I broke the seal on a container, slipped inside, left the door open less than an inch. I counted slowly in my head. At nineteen the gunman went past me moving quickly but silently. I watched him move past the door. I stepped out of the container, slamming a kick into the back of his head like he was a wall I was running up. He collapsed and I caught the back of his shirt so he wouldn’t make a noise. With my other hand I grabbed the dart gun, fired it into his back. He rag-dolled, and I eased him to the floor. I hurried to the intersection and looked down the long, unbroken gap in the containers, and saw another man in black, accompanied by a crewman. I ran along the aisle, hearing their echoing voices clang against the steel.

They would expect me to hide in the stacks. I would have to find another part of the ship to make my own. I had to keep moving, use the crew’s thermal signals as camouflage. Hide where the heat of the engines would mask my body’s signature. I had to hold out and get to Rotterdam. There I could vanish.

I stopped at another intersection, for just one single moment, getting bearings, and a sting aced my throat, hard, like a hand’s swat.

A dart. I had maybe seconds before the anesthetic worked its juice. I raised my gun at the approaching gunman. The woman in the suit now stood behind him, watching me, unafraid.

Mila. The woman from Ollie’s bar. The whisky drinker with the fondness for wolves. Blond hair pulled back severely, eyes of quartz, a hard smile. She liked Glenfiddich whisky, and my own blood felt like a bottle had been injected straight into my heart.

The steel of the gun slipped from my grip. I laughed as I fell to the deck.