White Water td-106 Page 7

  The last few yards were rocky, and the rocks scummy under his feet. Remo didn't care. He had survived. Chiun would be proud. He had survived an ordeal that might have beaten some of the greater Masters of Sinanju.

  But not Remo Williams. He was a survivor. He had survived.

  Reaching shore, Remo clambered over the rocks and found a patch of dry, cold sand. His knees felt hollow.

  There he lay down and slept until the rays of the morning sun touched his face and a voice asked, "Where the hell have you been?"

  Remo blinked, lifted his head and saw a face that wasn't at first familiar, though the Red Sox ball cap was.

  "Who are you?" he muttered weakly.

  "Ethel. Don't you remember me? I gave you a lift. We had a deal."

  "Oh, that. Sure."

  Her lined face hovered over him, filling his field of vision.

  "What kept you?" she asked.

  "I was fighting off sharks."

  "Where's the stuff?"

  "Something went wrong."

  "I kinda figured that." She stood up, eyed Remo critically and asked, "You know what?"

  "What?" said Remo, not really caring at the moment.

  "Last night I thought you were kinda cute."

  "Thanks," Remo murmured tiredly.

  "But now you look like something the cat dragged in, and I wouldn't have you on a stick."

  "That's nice," said Remo, closing his tired eyes.

  "So I guess I don't feel so bad about what I did."

  "That's nice, too," said Remo, tuning her voice out.

  Ethel stood up and called over her shoulder. "He's over here."

  "Who is?" mumbled Remo.

  "You are," Ethel replied.

  The Maine State troopers surrounded Remo with their hands on their side arms. They looked unhappy, the way men look when they've spent a cold night on a long stakeout.

  "Get up, sir," one said formally. "You are under arrest."

  "For what?"

  "Suspicion of smuggling."

  "Smuggling what?"

  "You tell us."

  Remo got up, shivered one last time energetically and cracked a weak grin. "The only thing I'm smuggling is shark meat."

  "Where is this contraband?" the second trooper demanded.

  "In my stomach."

  Nobody looked very amused.

  Because it was the easiest way to go and it meant warmth and probably dry clothes, Remo allowed himself to be taken to the local state police barracks. He was issued a hot shower and blue prisoner denims. He took them in that order.

  "We know you're a bad guy," a trooper told Remo in the interrogation room after Remo had gotten dry.

  "Wrong. I'm a good guy."

  "You're a smuggler. Ethel said so. She's well liked around here."

  "You know, I thought she had an honest face."

  "She does. Why do you think she turned you in?"

  "Good point," said Remo. "I want my one phone call."

  "We need your name and address first."

  "Sure. Remo Mako." He gave a Trenton, New Jersey, address.

  "That a house or apartment?"

  "House," said Remo. "Definitely a house."

  "Any statement you care to make at this time will be counted in your favor."

  "Thanks. My statement is I want to call my lawyer."

  A clerical head poked into the interrogation room. "You don't have to. He's already on the horn, demanding to speak to you."

  "His name Smith?" asked Remo, who was not about to fall for some trick and lose out on his lawful call.

  "Ay-yah. And you must get into a lot of this kind of trouble if he knows where you are so quick."

  REMO TOOK THE CALL in private.

  "What took you so long, Smitty?"

  "Your Remo Mako alias is not on my list of approved cover names. When it went out on lawenforcement wires, my system spit out the fact that the address you gave was that of the Trenton State Prison death house. That told me it was you being held in the Lubec barracks on suspicion of smuggling."

  "Good catch."

  "What happened, Remo?"

  Dr. Harold W. Smith was grimly silent after Remo told him what had happened.

  "You can spring me the polite way or I can spring myself," Remo told him.

  "We need to do this quietly."

  "Don't take long, or I'll take matters into my own hands," Remo warned.

  Remo knew he was on his way home when he heard the helicopter rotors beating his way.

  The chopper settled on the back lawn, where he could see it from his holding cell. It was a big orange-and-white Jayhawk rescue helicopter with the Coast Guard anchor-and-flotation-ring crest in red-and-white striping on the tail.

  Coast Guardsmen in crisp whites came running out, holding their service caps against the rotor wash.

  In less than ten minutes Remo was being processed out.

  "You might have informed us you were with the Coast Guard," the arresting officer told Remo as he searched his pockets for the handcuff key.

  Remo handed over the handcuffs, still locked tight, and said, "Lost my ID in the water. Would you have taken my word for it?"

  "No," the trooper admitted.

  "There you go," said Remo.

  The Coast Guard chopper ferried Remo to the local guard station, where Remo was transferred to a Coast Guard Falcon jet. It took off screaming, and two hours later Remo was deposited at Logan International Airport in Boston.

  He took a cab home, thinking that Chiun was either going to be very happy to see him or very angry. Possibly both. It was impossible to predict the Master of Sinanju's moods in advance.

  But either way, Remo couldn't wait to see him again. It had been as close to death as he had gotten in a long time, and it felt good to be alive and kicking.

  He hoped the Master of Sinanju would feel the same way about things. After all, a mission was just a mission, but Remo was next in line to head the House. How angry could Chiun be?

  Chapter 10

  She wanted sex. Of course she did. He could tell it from the look on her long face when he walked in the door and from the filmy negligee that would drape a busty blonde wonderfully. But clinging to her scrawny, pale skin, it looked pathetic. Like spiderwebs on a corpse.

  He avoided her kiss by striking first. A peck on the cheek, and sensing it would not be enough to avoid the tobacco breath, a second, more careful one on the brow.

  She stepped back, spreading the gauzy wings of the negligee.

  Lavender, for God's sake. Made her look like a harridan.

  "I thought you'd never get home, dear," she cooed.

  He wanted to slap her. Tell her to grow up. She was a mother, for Christ's sake. Why couldn't she settle for that? Not these pathetic attempts to rekindle the spark that was long past cooling.

  "I had a difficult day," he said guardedly, his eyes going to the closed door of the den.

  Her smiling face bobbed into view.

  "Then you'll need a long, leisurely ...what?"

  "Soak," he said quickly.

  "Soak. Yes, have a nice soak. I think I'll join you."

  There was no way out. Divorce was out of the question. Without a wife he might as well pack it in. Throw away all hope, all ambition, all thoughts of the future.

  "All right," he said, mustering up what passed for marital enthusiasm. "We'll share a soak."

  The soak was as sexy as bathing with an Irish wolfhound. With her long face, thin arms and absolute absence of a bust or bottom, she more and more reminded him of an Irish wolfhound, an abysmally hideous canine.

  When it was over, she toweled him down lovingly and led him by the hand to the bedroom, where scented candles flamed in glass jars. It was all very bewitching. All the tableau needed was a woman with some meat on her bones.

  But he hadn't married her for her flesh, but for her mind, her good breeding, her impeccable character. A respectable wife was one of the inconvenient accoutrements for a man on the move.
>
  He never stopped to think that even sex became boring if one did it often enough in the same two unimaginative positions with absolutely no props or enhancements.

  So, once again he went through the motions. Foreplay consisted of a few chaste kisses, a perfunctory back rub and then he mounted her. He wanted to strangle her. Strangling her would have made it exciting for once, and it would have ensured that he'd never have to plumb these unpleasant depths again.

  In the moment she gave before his first prodding thrust, he decided the hell with it and took her violently. It was madness, but he was desperate. It had been too long. And he was under such stress at the office, what with the latest Angus Reid polls and all.

  To his astonishment, she loved it. She shrieked wildly, then began moaning as he pumped and pumped as if driving a stake through a vampire's heart. That was how it felt. Like driving a stake through the heart of the undead thing that his marriage had become.

  Climaxing, she sank her teeth in his shoulder and shuddered uncontrollably.

  It wasn't passionate, but as least he had climaxed. For once.

  "You came!" she whispered, giving the word a slutty inflection.

  "Miracles never cease," he said dryly.

  Her smile was a dim porcelain glow in the wan light. "Admit it. It was wonderful."

  "Shattering," he said, disengaging.

  As he rolled over, she doused the bedroom light and blew the candles out. She was humming. It was some mindless Barry Manilow song he detested.

  But at least it was over.

  As he waited for sleep to come, he smelled a pungent odor. It was her. But it reminded him of something else. The sexiest smell in the entire world.

  The smell of ripped and gutted fish.

  It wouldn't let him sleep. He prayed for sleep, but the tuna smell in his nostrils was like scented cotton.

  He waited until her snoring filled the room before throwing off the bed covers and digging his feet into his slippers.

  He padded into the den and turned on the computer. The paneled walls were adorned with schooner prints. A varnished pine plaque over the monitor had a legend burned into it by a soldering iron: From Sea To Sea.

  The system went through its interminable sign-on cycles, and finally he accessed his e-mail via the service.

  There was no message from the one who haunted his thoughts. It had been nearly a month. Where was she?

  The cellular telephone in his briefcase buzzed. Snapping it open, he lifted it to his face and spoke. "Yes?"

  "Commodore."

  "Go ahead."

  "We had another inconvenient encounter."

  "Details, please."

  "A U.S. vessel in the Nose. We were conducting routine truffle operations, and the illegal spotted the Hound on his fish-finding sonar. We had to take action."

  "Vessel status?"

  "Scuttled."

  "Crew?"

  "Cat food."

  "Witnesses?"

  "None. As before."

  "That will do."

  "Aye-aye, Commodore."

  "Continue herding operations. Report any anomalies."

  "Aye, sir."

  Closing the cell phone, he laid it beside the terminal. His eyes went to the screen.

  And there, like a beacon, glowed a New Message prompt line.

  To: Commodore@net.org From: Kali@yug.net Subject: Call me instantly

  But the message area was only blank space.

  "Bitch!" he muttered.

  He had been warned never to call, never to visit, without being summoned first. No one gave a man of his stature orders, and that was part of the thrill, of course.

  He punched out the number from memory and waited with pounding heart and an uncomfortable rising sensation in his crotch.

  "If you dialed correctly, you know my name," her cool contralto voice said. "Speak."

  "Mistress."

  "Commodore."

  "Er, I have your message."

  "All is well, I trust," she said coolly.

  "As well as it can be with the current situation."

  "Still conducting tests?"

  "Er, yes. We had an accident this evening."

  "You must tell me all about it." It was not a polite invitation, but a firm command.

  "Be glad to."

  "In person."

  "I would be delighted. Shall I bring something?" Her voice dripped with contempt. "Bring your obedience, worm." And she hung up.

  He changed from his stained pajama pants into fresh trousers and sped through the sleeping city to the place he knew as the Temple.

  It was unlocked. He stepped into the anteroom and through double doors beside which danced barbaric carvings of bare-breasted females with ripe lips, lascivious hips and multiple arms poised to please. In the preparation room he removed his clothes down to the last stitch.

  His manhood was already rising. He swallowed hard, presented himself to the mirrored door of one-way glass. He saw himself. Behind the obscuring glass, she was looking at him, he knew. He could feel her blazing blue eyes upon him.

  Her cool question floated through the barrier. "Are you prepared to enter my presence?"

  "I am, Mistress."

  "Then assume the position of approach."

  Falling on hands and knees, he crept toward the door, bumping it open with his head.

  Like a scuttling crab, he entered the room.

  He kept his eyes on the polished floor because the penalty for doing otherwise was severe, and it was too early in the encounter to expect the corporal delights to be visited upon him.

  He stopped when his head bumped her stiletto boots and one lifted to press its steely pointedness into his bare back.

  "Tell me," she said flatly.

  "Anything."

  "Tell me what happened tonight that disturbs you so."

  "Another U.S. fishing vessel stumbled onto a test. It had to be disposed of for security reasons. Crew and vessel are no more."

  "Very wise."

  "No one will ever know."

  Her tone turned sarcastic. "Except you and I and everyone involved. That is how many individual persons?"

  "I imagine thirty, all told," he stuttered.

  "Thirty people in on a secret that could ruin your career, if not your life. If only one percent of them tell one person, how big a leak is that?"

  "Considerable," he admitted.

  "How big?"

  "Disastrous."

  "That's better." Her voice shed its bitter sarcasm, though it could hardly be said to soften.

  "It's a well-known axiom, Commodore, that if you tell one person a confidence, you must assume you told three. Because most people feel the urge to confide in their most trusted confidants, who in turn will confide in theirs, and so on several times over until the secret is fully out and no longer a secret but common gossip."

  "Stories distort in the telling."

  "It may be time to move to the next level."

  "Escalation?"

  "I have read your polls. They are sinking. You are sinking."

  "I am receptive to your merciless counsel, as always, Mistress."

  "Of course. How could it be otherwise?"

  She dug her heel into his back, and the bullwhip-whose leather he smelled but did not see unwound from her unseen hand to fall heavily over his head like a shiny, crinkled tentacle.

  "I can see you are in need of convincing."

  In fact, it was the contrary. But he had more urgent needs. Already the bullwhip was being gathered up into a tense, tight coil of unreleased energy.

  "Whatever you decree, Mistress."

  "I decree pain!"

  And the bullwhip cracked down on his back like a bitter, stinging kiss.

  His face was pushed into the black floor. His hardness burned, sliding to one side under the pressure of his recoiling body. Later he would discover friction burns. He loved friction burns. They were like a badge of honor.

  She was hectoring him mercilessly. "Y
ou will escalate. You will provoke and you will obey."

  "I will obey."

  "You will obey absolutely!"

  "I will obey absolutely."

  And kneeling before him, she lifted his head by the sweaty hair, thrusting her womanly face into his own. Her eyes burned like icy blue diamonds. Her golden hair was a wild cloud framing a perfect face made more perfect by the yellow silk domino mask. Her lips glistened with a bloody shine. They pulsed with her moist, confident exhalations, not an inch from his eager ear.

  "I will tell you what you must do ...."

  Chapter 11

  Tomasso Testaverde was a survivor. From his earliest days of stealing fish off the slush-laden wheelbarrows and ice buckets on the busy Kingsport, Massachusetts, wharves of his youth to the day he crewed his first dragger, he was a survivor.

  It was said of Tomasso Testaverde that he was a survivor to the day he died.

  He died on a day just like any other. All of the days of Tomasso Testaverde's life were essentially the same. That was to say, larcenous.

  Deep in his larcenous heart, though Tomasso didn't see himself that way, he was a low thief.

  When he stole fish off the docks and cooked them over fires made in the crumbling, naked chimneys of Old Dogtown, where witches used to dwell in the long-ago days before his grandfather Sirio came from Sicily, Tomasso saw himself as simply an opportunist. One who took advantage of life's little opportunities. Nothing more. And besides, he was hungry. His father was away for weeks at a time fishing cod off the Grand Banks, or sometimes seining mackerel off the Virginia coast. Tomasso's mother was, as they liked to say, a woman whose heels grew rounder the longer her husband's shoes were not tucked under her bed.

  Had he been born a fish, Tomasso Testaverde would have been a bottom feeder.

  When he grew older, it was no longer possible to hide in small places or outrun the fishermen from whom he pilfered haddock and flounder. Tomasso discovered he had acquired an unfortunate reputation. And so crewing on the trawlers and draggers of his peers, as his ancestors had done, was not in his future.

  But a resourceful boy invariably flowers into a resourceful adult. Denied the livelihood of a man, Tomasso shunned those who refused to let him crew on their boats and so found other, more creative ways to survive.

  In those days they set lobster pots in the water just off the shore, lowering the pots in the morning and hauling them up again at night. The buoys were colored, so that no one hauled up a pot that was not his, but as far as Tomasso was concerned, any untended pot he happened upon in his rickety dory was his.