Hot Ice (6 page)

Not yet.

The thought was more frightening than the gunfire. The shooter must be confident he was going to get close enough to make the next try successful. The theory was accurate: he could hear the footsteps behind him getting closer. There was no need to look over his shoulder. He knew who his pursuer was. Or who had sent him.

He felt the knife in his pocket. A jackknife against a gun? Absurd. But the only thing he had. If he could just reach that pile of stones, he might find a place to hide, perhaps even ambush …

The ragged sound of his own breath and the ache in his lungs required him to devote full attention to simply inhaling and exhaling. A stitch slashed at his side as painfully as any blade.

He was surprised when his hand touched rock. He climbed onto the massive formation.

He slipped behind the first boulder and squeezed through a crevice he hoped was only wide enough to accommodate his small body. Looking around for a possible hiding place, he spied a crack in the rock level with his chin. About a foot long, but deep. He couldn’t secret himself there, but the fissure would hold his discoveries. In an instant he had slid the cell phone, the stick, and the piece of metal into the crack.

Then he had an idea.

If he could scramble down the other side of the formation, maybe, just maybe, he could creep away while the other man searched for him here. No chance. Other than a scattering of boulders, the landscape was as naked as a newborn baby.

“Boris, why do you flee an old friend?” The words were in Russian.

The little man spun about to see a man holding a GSh-18 9 mm automatic pistol. The distinctly mid-Asian flat face with the flat nose, broken multiple times, was all too familiar. “Old friends do not shoot at each other, Patrivitch.”

Patrivitch glanced at the weapon in his hand. “It is my job just as it is yours to be here. Sad but true. You have been hired to find certain information; I have been paid to make sure you do not.” He extended the hand that did not hold the gun. “The cell phone. Place it at your feet.”

The man had been watching him take pictures.

Boris shrugged. “I dropped it during the chase.”

“Empty your pockets.”

Boris did so, the jackknife clattering to the stone along with a wad of Icelandic króna and the keys to the Land Rover.

Patrivitch tsk-tsked. “I would have seen the phone had you dropped it.”

“If you were looking for me to drop something, no wonder your first two shots missed.”

“I can search for it after I kill you.”

Boris shrugged. “What happens after that is of no concern to me.”

There was no warmth in Patrivitch’s smile. “You always had a smart mouth.”

He pulled the trigger.

Boris spun from the impact, a kick as though a horse’s hoof had struck his chest. His face hit the solid rock upon which they were standing, sending a jolt of pain through his entire body. Broken nose, he thought sleepily. Odd, no pain in my chest, just my nose.

Though Boris’s vision was quickly becoming dark, he recognized his assailant’s shoes level with his eyes. He sensed the man leaning over him.

The coup de grâce.

He was too drowsy to care.

Patrivitch straightened up, turning his head as though scenting the air. He had heard something… .

There it was, the bleating of a sheep.

Cautiously, he peered around the edge of a boulder facing Boris’s car. A shepherd with a dozen or so sheep. Too close not to hear the shot that would finish his victim. He mentally wavered. He could fire the fatal shot and then flee. Or he could take out the shepherd, too.

No, too risky. There might be others around. Better to report back that Boris was no longer a threat. Besides, if anyone found the phone, small chance they would look for any photographs or, if they did, have any idea as to the significance of the images they might find.

Shoving the gun into his belt, he left by the opposite side of the rock formation, keeping it between him and the shepherd. When he reached the base, he broke into a jog.

Jason didn’t hear Maria step onto the loggia, the adoring Pangloss padding at her heels. She watched Jason concentrating on the canvas on the easel before turning down the sound system, reducing the joyous can-can of Offenbach’s
Orpheus in Hades
to little more than a tinkle.

He turned, his puzzlement turning into pleasure. “Well, hello there! I thought you were still sleeping, fighting jet lag.”

“Sleep? With the whole chorus line of
Moulin Rouge
prancing through the house?”

He gave her an admiring look. Maria Bergenghetti. Dark skin, sun-streaked hair so black it had blue highlights like a crow’s wing. When she smiled, as she was doing now, she displayed a Chaucerian Wife of Bath gap between her front teeth that, if not saying she’d had it in her time, said she could have the world if she so desired. The shift she wore almost concealed a figure that women half her age would envy.

“Perhaps you’d rather hear Tchaikovsky.”

She put her hands to her ears. “Those damn cannons are worse than the dancers, and the church bells give me a headache.”

Maria preferred Kenny Rogers to Rachmaninoff, Hank Williams to Wagner. Although born Italian, she had gone to college and grad school in the United States, absorbing odd pieces of American pop culture as well as Americanized English with a Western twang. Her interest and passion, though, were volcanoes. She had returned to work for the government of her native land. After all, few volcanoes were privately owned.

Truthfully, Jason enjoyed American country music too; he simply couldn’t paint and listen at the same time. The tragedies of deserted lovers, broken trucks, runaway trains, and the other subjects the singers lamented were distracting.

And Pangloss insisted on accompanying each with the most doleful of howls.

Jason changed the subject. “So, what time is your body on now? What time is it in Hawaii?”

She shook her head. “Two days ago, a week from now. Who knows? I’m tired of being tired. Think I’ll go into town, see what’s new.”

“Nothing since the Normans left about four hundred years ago.”

“OK, so I’ll see the same old stuff. But I haven’t seen it in a month. Want to come along?”

He gave the invitation some thought. “Why not? Maybe I can find a
Herald Tribune
, see how Washington’s doing.”

“First in war, first in peace, and last in the National League East.”

He smiled at the hoary joke. The Washington baseball team had arrived from Montreal long after Jason had left the town house in Georgetown that he had shared with Laurin; but, like so many expats, following a sports team was a trace of a homeland he both missed and to which he had no intent of returning. The English-language paper also featured
Calvin and Hobbes
, a favorite comic strip long since absent from American papers.

“Suzuki or Suzuki?”

Motorcycle or car.

Upon arrival on the island, Jason had purchased a well-worn Suzuki Samurai, a small jeeplike vehicle with an underpowered engine but a clutch and four-wheel drive that were equal to the surrounding hills. Its two rear seats were almost large enough for two adults and served as carrying space for his canvasses, groceries and, when Maria was with him, Pangloss. The quality of the car had induced him to buy a used 250 cc motorcycle by the same manufacturer, a machine for which Maria did not share his enthusiasm.

“Does it matter?”

“Try wearing a skirt on the back of a bike and ask that question.”

“A zillion Italian women don’t ask it; they just do it.”

“The cause of large families.”

Robespierre appeared from nowhere and began to rub against Maria’s leg. Pangloss eyed the cat with canine caution.

“If we take the car, we can include Pangloss,” Maria said helpfully.

Jason was already wiping his brushes clean. “The car it is, then.”

The road to the causeway consisted of more potholes than pavement, each of which produced a grunt of discomfort from Pangloss in the rear. Before Maria could begin her normal complaints about the speed at which Jason insisted on driving, he initiated a conversation.

“You were so tired when you got in last night, I didn’t have a chance to ask: How was the trip?”

She related the airlines’ latest atrocities, now routine in the course of air travel. “Other than that, nothing you’d find interesting. And you?”

He gave her a nervous glance before returning to concentrate on what passed for the road. “Me?”

“I’m not talking to the dog. Gianna told me you were gone a couple of days.”

Jason cursed himself for not swearing the housekeeper to silence. “Oh, I got tired of just hanging out, decided to go over to the mainland.”

He knew there was no chance this was going to satisfy her but it did give him a second or two to think.

He could feel the heat of her blue eyes burning into him. “Jason, you remember Casanova.”

The name by which she referred to her ex-husband, a man who seemed to be as capable a liar as he claimed to be a lover. The name came up on those rare occasions Jason had reason not to tell the whole truth.

“Never met the man.”

“Jason …”

He sighed heavily. “OK, so I had a friend in Africa who needed some help …”

“This wouldn’t be same friend who nearly got us killed in the Hades thing, would it?”

Jason sighed again, the sound of a man who had just realized his alibi was sinking faster than the
Titanic
. “OK, so, yeah, it was.” He saw the storm clouds gathering. “Why not? I mean, you were gone, off watching some volcano on the other side of the world… .”

“You promised.”

Where was his logical mind now?

“I promised I’d have nothing to do with those people as long as we were together. I don’t call your being gone a month or more at a time ‘together.’ What if I asked you to stop climbing around erupting volcanoes? That’s dangerous, too, y’know.”

She let go of the hand grip she had been holding on to as the car jolted down the road and entwined her fingers in her lap, something she did when she was giving something deep thought. “Then, I suppose, I would have a choice: quit or stay with you. I would not agree to do one thing and sneak around doing the other.”

She noted the set of his jaw. “Jason, I love you. Is it too much to ask that I don’t have to worry about you getting killed? Or, for that matter, my getting shot at? I never want to be forced to actually kill someone to save your life again. I mean, you yourself say you have more money than you’ll ever spend. Can’t you live long enough to try?”

“Not if it means letting those animals who are responsible for Laurin go free,” Jason said through clinched teeth, not taking his eyes off the road. “Not if it takes the rest of my life. Can’t you understand that?”

Maria turned in her seat to face him, putting a hand over his on the steering wheel. “I understand you loved her very much, still do, and I accept that. But when you’re full of hatred, how much can you love me?”

Neither metaphysics nor rhetoric was a subject in which Delta Force trained its members. Neither had he taken either course in college. Jason regretted the omission.

He placed a hand on her leg well above the knee as he turned onto the narrow causeway that led to the main part of the island. “I tried to show you how much I love you last night… .”

She removed his hand impatiently. “I was just too tired. Besides, sex and love aren’t the same. My ex demonstrated that enough. I—”

She followed his eyes. A large cement truck had turned onto the far end of the causeway. A construction company had brought several over on a special ferry from the mainland to do some work in the town. But there were no roads on this side of the causeway that would accommodate a vehicle of that size.

And there was no building going on.

“What … ?” Maria began.

Instantly alert, Jason shushed her with a hand gesture, looking over his shoulder. He stopped and quickly shifted into reverse and began speedily backing up, to the consternation of two motor scooters, a cyclist, and a pocket-sized Fiat 500. Two pedestrians, older women, crossed themselves as they scurried to the other side of the road.

Maria turned from staring out of the open rear flap of the Samurai’s canvas top and looked at the truck approaching with increasing speed. “Is he drunk, crazy, or both?”

Jason glanced to the front too, and then backward. The end of the causeway he had just left seemed impossibly far away. “I don’t intend to stick around to find out.”

The truck, smoke snorting from its vertical exhaust like the breath of a dragon, was rapidly filling the Samurai’s windshield. The road was barely wide enough for two small cars to pass. There was no room around the oncoming behemoth. The causeway here had been originally built centuries ago across a narrow stretch of swampland that connected the two islands. Although eventually paved, there had been no reason to widen it or to add shoulders. Leaving the road meant running into a tidal bog of unknown depth, one that, under weight, could easily crumble into the sea that had been nibbling at the edges of the road since rock, pebbles, and sand had been used to steel it from the tides.

“Jason, that truck is going to hit us,” Maria said in a surprisingly calm tone.

She was right. Unless Jason could win the race to the end of the causeway behind him, there was no place to go. And it didn’t look like the contest was going in his favor.

It was becoming obvious that Jason was losing the race. He wasn’t going to get to the end of the causeway in time.

The causeway.

Shoving the lever that activated the Suzuki’s four-wheel drive, Jason drove over the lip of the pavement. Tires spun, hissing a rooster tail of mud, sand, and seawater into the air.

Then the tires caught, the sudden traction sending the diminutive car jolting forward.

“Jason,” Maria gasped, “you can’t …”

He ignored her as he began a sweeping crescent with the cement mixer at its center. The problem, he thought, was that there was no way to tell where the foundations of the causeway abruptly dropped off into the sea. At any second, the Suzuki could run off the shelf, overturn, and sink with all aboard.