Death Echo

Seattle?”
    â€œRosario. San Juan Islands.”
    That could be checked. And would be.
    â€œIs Blue Water Marine Group a broker?” she asked.
    â€œSometimes.”
    Emma throttled a flash of impatience. “Do they own this boat?” He shrugged.
    â€œDo you have their telephone number?” she pressed.
    â€œI use the VHF. That’s a radio.”
    She told herself that she didn’t see a gleam of amusement in his nearly black eyes, but she didn’t believe it. She hoped he couldn’t see the gleam of temper in hers. She felt like a dumb trout rising for pieces of indigestible metal.
    â€œI’d like to go with you to see how Blackbird rides,” she said evenly.
    â€œI don’t want to sell my boss a pig.”
    â€œI’d like to have you along.” He shrugged again. “No can do. Insurance only covers the transit captain.”
    â€œI’ll risk it.”
    â€œBlue Water Marine Group won’t.”
    Emma knew a wall when she ran flat into it. She pulled her sunglasses out of her crop top and put them on. “Is there some way I can contact you?”
    â€œI’m right here.”
    She flashed her teeth. “So am I. I won’t be for long. How do people who aren’t standing on your feet get hold of you?”
    â€œI move around a lot,” he said. “That’s the life of the transport skipper.”
    â€œBut you have a cell phone, right, one that rings almost anywhere?”
    Mac decided that baiting wasn’t going to get him anywhere with this woman. She had a temper, and she kept it to herself. So he pulled out one of the stained business cards he always carried in his jeans.
    She took it and slid it into her backpack as she walked to the swim step. “See you around, Captain.”
    Mac didn’t doubt it.
    Nor did he doubt that someone would be running his fingerprints soon. She had handled that card almost as carefully as a crime-scene tech.

5
    DAY ONE
BELLTOWN MARINA
AFTERNOON
    T aras Demidov leaned against the sturdy pipe railing that kept careless pedestrians from falling fifteen feet into the waters of Belltown Marina. Part of him was amused by the railing. It summarized the difference between Russia and America. Russia believed citizens should watch out for themselves; if they got hurt, it wasn’t the government’s fault. America’s citizens believed the state should take care of them like children. Russia accepted a world of good and evil. Americans believed only in good.
    Demidov enjoyed working with a culture that believed in God but not in the Devil. Americans were so genuinely surprised when flames burned through their flesh to the bone.
    Unfortunately, the world wasn’t made up of Americans. The so-called nations of the Former Soviet Union understood about the reality of evil. Some of them contributed to it at every opportunity.
    A movement in the marina caught his eye. He lifted his camera again, bracing the long lens on the railing. A light touch of his finger and the automatic focus homed in on the brunette who had reappeared from the cabin of Blackbird. Even though he knew that he wouldn’t be able to identify her at this distance, he took a series of quick pictures. Digital cameras were useful for fast transmission ofimages, but they just didn’t have the resolution of a good, slow film camera.
    But tourists carried digital cameras. As long as he appeared to be a tourist he could vanish among the crowds. He was pushing it by having a long lens on the digital frame, something few tourists had. He wasn’t particularly worried. People saw what they expected to see. If anyone asked him a question, he would answer it in genial American English.
    To the crowds around him, Demidov was just one more sightseer enjoying Seattle’s long summer days.
    That startling, useful naïveté about strangers hadn’t changed since Demidov had first come to the U.S. many years ago, as a young commercial attaché in the Russian Consulate in San Francisco. He had been amazed then at his freedom of movement from city to city, state to state. He was still amazed. His movements were unwatched, unmarked, anonymous. As long as he stayed away from any Russian Federation consular buildings, he didn’t have to worry about FBI counterintelligence watchers.
    All he had to do was wait for Shurik Temuri to appear and claim Blackbird . Unless the sullen old wolverine was disguised as a