On deck, the man fires a shot. It misses Carlisle by inches, makes a hole in the windscreen. Carlisle ducks onto the seat and spins round, just the top of his head visible. He sneaks a peek, then slowly raises his hands and gets up.
“Turn off the engine!” the man yells hoarsely. “Do it now!”
Carlisle complies, and then resumes his posture of surrender. “What now, old boy?”
“Why were you at Valdez’s hacienda last night? Who sent you?”
“What? Nobody sent me. I received an invitation through a business associate. Valdez throws a mean soiree, everyone says so. And, being in Malta for the weekend, I couldn’t pass up the chance, so I made a call to a friend of mine who knows Valdez’s PR man. We got on well, I thought, Manny and me. Do you mind telling me what all this is about?”
He fires another shot, again misses by inches. “Who sent you? I will not ask again.”
“Very well... Let go of the girl and I’ll tell you.”
“No. You tell me now: who is the girl, and who is she working for?”
The inscrutable Brit shifts his weight a little, adjusts his sunglasses. He throws his hands aloft when the man gets fidgety. “Take it easy,” Carlisle says. “Just try to get comfortable, old boy. The girl is Athena Katsaros, daughter of Andreas Katsaros. I assume you know the name.”
My sweaty abductor can barely stand. He wheezes every breath, coughs behind stubborn clenched teeth that chatter in my ear. And his shakes are getting worse. Maybe he caught a chill last night when he swam in the sea in order to sneak onto this boat.
“She came for revenge?”
“Are you serious? She told me all about what happened on the balcony. It was after I’d left. She said Valdez was sick as a dog, and he collapsed in front of her. But when she tried to catch his fall—to help him—someone attacked her, tried to kill her. There was some kind of scrap on the balcony. So she fled for her life, came straight to my home. I’ve never seen her that frightened. And now you’re here, after her again, blaming her for I don’t know what. It’s rotten form, old chap… absolutely rotten of you. And I don’t know what the hell you’re pointing that thing at me for! Manny and I hit it off first thing last night.”
“You keep saying that, but...but ther
e is no such thing as coincidence.” The man staggers with me still in his grip. He’s about ready to keel over. “I-I followed you both. There was no mistake. The fence, the jet ski...”
“No mistake? I’m afraid there’s been some terrible mistake.” Carlisle deftly adjusts his sunglasses again, this time tilting them so that the glare of the sun flashes in the eyes of my abductor. The man reacts, shields his eyes with his gun hand. In that brief moment of blindness, he loses his advantage. Carlisle rips the glove box open and pulls out a pistol of his own. He doesn’t wait for the stand-off. He shoots the bastard in the shoulder above his gun arm.
With a cry, the man jerks back and lets me spin out of his grasp. He slips on the smooth deck. I scramble away toward the onrushing figure of Barrett Carlisle, who pays me no notice. Instead, he tosses his sunglasses overboard and proceeds to kick the life out of the feverish assailant—vicious, vengeful kicks doled out with almost psychotic rapidity. He’s doing a lot more than just protecting us; he’s meting out punishment. The kicks never seem to end, and he doesn’t appear to want them to end.
“Barrett, that’s enough!” I tell him.
As he glances round at me, the oil fires burn with fierce abandon through his stunning blue-gray eyes. Just what is it that’s filled him with this much hate—hate enough to drive a man who has everything to a place from which there’s nowhere left to go. He can jet around the world all he likes, pretend to be whoever he wishes, but the real
Barrett Carlisle will never be able to escape this moment: a moment he goes to extraordinary lengths to recapture, to recreate, time and time again. He’s only really alive in this moment, I think. For all his talk of helping victims find justice, it’s clear to me now: he lives to get even.
If I can, and if he’ll let me, I’m going to help him find the peace he sought for me. But first things first...
“Who else knows about us?” Carlisle presses his gun to the man’s glistening forehead. “Who did you tell?”
He mumbles something I can’t decipher, and then hacks up a grave, chesty cough. It seems to excite a rumbling chuckle deep in the sick-pit of his stomach. He assaults us with a toothless, blood-stained grin.
Carlisle leans closer. “Say that name again!”
More coughs, deathly wheezes. Again the mumbled word I can’t make out. But Carlisle seems to. He sits up, looking out to sea, his mouth pursed to a thin white line.
“What did he say?” I ask.
He holds a finger up to me, as if to say, give me a minute, Athena. I need this minute.
It reminds me of...my own finger. The ring... The needle... I lost it during my struggle with this man on the balcony. What if I...pricked him before it came off? Not Valdez, him. Is that why he’s so feverish? The poison was supposed to take twelve hours to kill. It has to be about that long since the balcony fight.
“Barrett, it’s my poison. That’s why he’s sick. He’s dying because of—” Carlisle pulls the trigger before I can finish, tosses the man overboard, and restarts the engine before I can tell him what I’ve done. Perhaps he already knows, and he killed the man quickly because he doesn’t want me having murder on my conscience. But it’s too late. I’m the same as him now, a child of the shadows. Wherever we go from here, whatever happens, I’m on the same dark trajectory as him.
And we have a rendezvous to keep.
*****