Without A Trace
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Another minute of sticking close to shadows and moving silently had her sequestered near the containers still stacked aboard the ship. Above her, a crane’s giant hook hung in the air, abandoned, as if the five o’clock whistle had just blown. On the ship, the containers sat bunched together and tied down by massive cables, with little space for a smallish woman to slide between them. Still, she managed to squeeze in.
Hard-soled boots clanged on the steel deck, driving her deeper into the shadows. While she waited for the deckhand to pass by, she scanned the containers that hid her. Nothing out of the ordinary. She needed to get inside, where passengers—including Alexander Wryzynski—would be awaiting the captain’s permission to disembark.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noted a blip of black between the metal containers—someone had passed the gap where she hid. The better place to evaluate the situation would be up top, she realized, and pressing her feet and hands on opposite containers, she crept up between them, using leverage to keep herself suspended. Another blip of movement. Nikki froze. When the person disappeared, she crab-walked the rest of the way to the top.
Far enough from the ship’s deck lights to be in shadow even up here in the open, she could safely assess the situation.
The ship’s five-story bridge gleamed like a Hong Kong skyscraper. She counted six men walking purposefully past windows that were probably crew quarters. Another two, judging from their footsteps far below, paced the deck. Might as well assume another two, maybe three, in the engine room.
Were they all crew, or a security team, or what?
And where the hell was Johnny Zhao? According to her last phone call with Regina, he was supposed to meet them here.
Ten crewmen. One potential but notably absent ally. One unarmed woman.
That sounded about right.
Nikki stifled a snort and pulled her PDA from her gear bag. It fired up instantly.
“Wireless signal, come to mama,” she mouthed as she launched the signal probe.
The PDA registered two wireless signals: one from the terminal that looked like a wide area network, and one whose network name was complete gibberish. Not even random numbers and letters, but blocks, as if it used an alphabet unavailable to her PDA.
Is that you, Diviner? she wondered.
Her PDA faithfully monitored the signal without attempting to access the machine producing it. Dana had told her that Oracle believed the signal to be a sophisticated satellite hookup rather than part of a standard network. The gibberish seemed to confirm that.
The mystery signal was pretty strong, seventy-four percent. Nikki scuttled aft, toward the bridge, then paused. The signal strengthened a fraction to seventy-six.
Nikki stowed the PDA back in her gear bag. There was little chance she’d manage to get onto the bridge or into the hold unnoticed. Maybe she should try to arm herself first.
She slipped back between the containers and shimmied down to the deck. Moments of darting between big metal boxes, pausing to check for guards and sprinting across the occasional open area put her beneath the overhang of the bridge’s house and once more out of the light. She was ready to go inside, and the starboard door sat invitingly open about six feet away.
Shouts drove her to drop to her knees. A split second later, a bullet pinged off one of the containers. She lunged for the bridge door and spun around it—
And stopped short.
The guard’s eyes widened. Without thinking, Nikki swept her right arm down to block the gun hand he was raising, then snapped a front kick to his kneecap. It crunched. He went down. She snatched the firearm from his loosened grip, then threw all of her one hundred and twenty-five pounds behind a left cross to his cheek.
This guy weighs more than he looks, she thought as she dragged his unconscious body behind a mess of old tarps. She checked the weapon. A semiautomatic of undetermined make, though she suspected it might be a bootleg QSZ-92 liberated from the People’s Liberation Army. Eleven rounds out of fifteen.
The room was a storeroom from the looks of the gear thrown every which way. A single door led deeper into the bridge. She listened hard, but when she heard nothing on the other side, she opened it.
The scent hit her hard, the wet-penny smell of anger, the burnt coffee of terror. Concentrated, it nearly exploded in her nostrils, cloying and acidic.
What had happened here?
Nikki suppressed a cough and breathed through her mouth. The scent was concentrated from the small, dimly lit space, but several days old. Had it been fresh it would have put her on her ass for sure.
She’d ponder this one later, when she had time. Heart pounding from adrenaline rush, she slammed the door shut.
Outside, a man’s panicked cry was cut short.
Nikki thumbed the safety off the 9 mm and slipped back outside. It was a regular pattern: men would yell, go quiet, then guns armed with silencers would spit. Almost like they were hunting someone.
Or someone was hunting them.
The coffee smell was starting to be so strong, she thought a pot was brewing under her nose. No time to be scared, she reminded herself.
Nikki ran back to the stern and nearly tripped over a wounded crewman lying half-in, half-out of a pool of deck light. He screamed, shielding his head with his hands. Nikki quickly frisked him but found no weapon. Only a flesh wound in his thigh.
She tucked the semiautomatic in her waistband and tore a strip off the man’s untucked shirt.
He lowered his arms. “You American!”
“Do you speak English?”
The man nodded warily. “You’ve come to rob us.”
“Not exactly.” She ran the strip underneath his injured leg and cinched it tight above the wound. “What’s going on?”
“We are doing our job.”
“What job?”
“Guarding the ship.”
She knotted the strip and sat back on her heels. “Who’s shooting at you?”
“Triads.”
Nikki bit her lip. “These triad guys. Can they be identified by what they wear?”
He shook his head.
“Great. I bet there’s no secret handshake at the clubhouse, either.” At his puzzled frown, she said, “Forget it. Listen, where’s your passenger?”
The guard looked confused again. “I don’t know. We guard the ship from robbers. We’re not crew. That’s all.”
Well, hell. So much for getting information the easy way. “Stay put and don’t move.” She started to leave, but thought better of it. Instead, she leaned toward him and said softly, “I wasn’t here.”
And suddenly, lemons.
Nikki sprang back and to the side. A knife whisked out of the darkness, caught the injured guard in the throat. She pounced. She grabbed the assailant’s wrist, still outstretched from his throw, and twisted down toward his body. He bent forward, his elbow locked up. She saw him winding up for a sweep-kick. As it approached, she palm-heeled his vulnerable elbow. The snap was followed by a grunt of pain, and the kick lost its momentum. She applied more pressure to his wrist, driving him face-first to the deck.
After that, it was dealer’s choice.
She chose the choke hold. In moments he’d passed out. She liberated another sidearm and a throwing knife. This guy she left in the open. His lemony triumph, always a sign of arrogance, had given him away before she saw him.
Nikki drifted into the shadows on the starboard side again, following the sound of the screams. They grew less loud, less frequent, as she threaded between containers. By the time she reached the bow, silence.
Somebody had made mincemeat out of the triads. Or the guards. Or both.
Nikki settled into a ball on the deck, making herself small and unhumanlike in shape to the careless glance. She eased the gun from her waistband. Then she took a long and careful sniff.
Nothing.
No coppery anger or coffeeish terror. No citrus triumph. Just sea air and diesel fumes wafting over the water.
It felt really, really wrong.
She adjusted her grip on the gun, consciously relaxed each major muscle. Loose, she thought. Stay loose.
In the silence, she finally heard the distinctive scrape of metal on metal, something unscrewing.
A silencer being removed. Or attached.
It was now or never, while he was distracted.
She leaped from between the containers as he spun to face her, her arm outstretched, pistol up and pointed into the man’s impassive face. Gotcha!
Only she was looking down the barrel of his gun.
Chapter 4
They eyed each other warily. Arms straight and stiff, guns unwavering, muzzles nearly pressed to cheeks.
Nikki forced herself to look past the gleaming barrel and into the eyes of the man who held her life in his trigger finger. In the shadows and half-light, wrapped in some sort of black fighting garb, he was every inch the dark warrior. He looked exactly like the kind of man who could take out well-armed guards, instill terror in grown men and kill without mercy.
His eyes, the only part of his face not concealed by his disguise, were black, calm.
No wonder I couldn’t smell him, she thought. He’s at peace.
Of course he’s at peace, another part of her retorted. He’s got two guns.
One aimed at her face, the other at her heart.
Nikki counted breaths. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. Lungs full, her life about to end, she remembered sunlight slanting down onto Athena Academy’s grassy courtyard and the neighing of the smelly horses she hated to ride. She thought of the dry dirt and mesquite surrounding the silver mine where she first truly understood what her gift could mean, when she’d smelled burnt coffee and then heard a scared girl’s voice echoing up through the earth.
She’d come all this way just to die.
A tendril escaped from her messy ponytail and arced down onto her forehead. The heady scent of fish wafted over the ship’s bow. If she listened carefully, she could hear the distant traffic—small cars and buses darting through heavy weekend traffic. With one long, slow sniff, she knew the vehicles’ diesel and gas fumes and the rotten eggs of a spent catalytic converter.
But from her killer, nothing but a hint of ginger and something akin to warm chalk.
“Can we talk about this?” she found herself saying.
His eyes remained unchanged and he didn’t speak.
She slowly stepped to her right, out of the horse stance that was starting to burn her thighs. He pivoted with her. Their guns remained aimed, deadly. She needed to get close enough to a railing to jump. Maybe in the dark he wouldn’t be able to hit her. With either gun. Right.
She backed up a step. He followed.
He stood now in a patch of dim light slanting down from the ship’s bridge. He seemed fuzzy, in-substantial. Almost like a ghost.
Her ghost?
“Johnny?” she chanced.
“You are of the goddess?” His lips and tongue made the plain English words sound exotic, slightly thick.
“Athena sent me, yes.”
His body betrayed no sudden tensing, no anxiety. If he was nervous, annoyed, or inwardly jumping for joy, Nikki couldn’t tell. His guns stayed steady, but his gaze flicked over her formfitting training pants and top. “You are very small.”
So are you, she wanted to retort, but didn’t. True, she was a little short—it made squirming through boat holds easier—but he wasn’t that much taller. Her automatic comparison of his physique to Jet Li’s might be unimaginative, but it was also accurate.
“The goddess sent more than one emissary,” she replied, but couldn’t keep the scorn from her voice when she added, “A taller one, no doubt.”
His right eye tightened at the corner. Was he laughing at her? Angry? Confused by the English word emissary? The wind shifted slightly and she caught the scent of a classic novel she’d picked up once in the Athena library. The copy had been decades old, with yellow, mildewed pages she’d been happy to bury her nose in.
It was the scent of regret.
“My contact said you were of the dark goddess. The dog. Not Athena. Heck-a-tee.”
Nikki smiled despite herself. “Yes. Hecate.”
“Is that the dog goddess’s name?”
“Are you Johnny Zhao?” she countered.
He inclined his head in something like a formal bow, his eyes never moving from her face. Still not trusting her.
“What happened to Regina?”
He abruptly dropped his gun hands to his sides. “An ambush outside her work.”
“You were there?”
“I wasn’t alert.” Zhao flicked on the safeties of both guns and disappeared them into the folds of his fighting trousers. “I let her out of my sight.”
“I doubt that was the problem.”
“She was my responsibility.”
“She hired you. I’d say that makes things work the other way around.”
His eyes narrowed. Nikki wished he’d lose the ninja garb because she wanted to see the rest of his face, not just hear his voice emerging from black gauze. But she didn’t need to see him to know that the regret was now rolling off him in waves. He was telling her the truth. He’d felt protective of Regina, that was clear in the light pine underlying the old paper scent. And he’d failed.
Nikki realized she was still holding the semiautomatic on him. She lowered it and was immediately surprised by how strained her shoulder felt. Damn heavy gun.
“Who ambushed her?”
“I don’t know yet. It was a professional hit. No clues and no calling cards.”
“Did she give you any information I can use?”
Zhao shook his head. “She told me only to keep watch over this vessel when it came into port.”
“I can do that now.”
“With my help.”
His matter-of-fact statement struck her speechless for a moment, then she said, “Maybe.”
“Honor demands I complete the mission.”
“Do you even know what the mission is?”
The corners of his eyes crinkled. Nikki knew that underneath his makeshift ninja costume he was likely smiling. She wished suddenly she could see his lips, and not to read them for tension or intent.
“I know you will need help. I am commissioned to complete the task. I’m responsible for—”
“Don’t,” Nikki said around her tightening throat. “She’s gone. Let’s move on.”
“I’m doing that. She paid me for a mission and I will complete it.”
Nikki recognized the universal male “ain’t gonna budge” look in his stance. Growing up with seven brothers was enough to teach her when she needed to bide her time, and now was that moment. She’d deal with him later, after she had a look around the ship. And since Hero here wanted to come along—and had great stealth skills—she might as well let him.
“What’s your background?”
He hesitated and for a moment she thought he’d ignore her question, but he finally said, “Hong Kong police.”
She stared. “You’re a cop?”
He shrugged, as if his occupation was of little interest to him and should be of less to her.
“So you know this vessel belongs to SHA,” she pressed.
“SHA is a front for the Wo Shing Wo.”
“Who?”
“A triad organization.”
Nikki frowned. “A guard I talked to thought the guys attacking the ship were triads. But if he was working for them…”
Her confusion must have been written on her face in capital letters because he said, “Triad means ‘mafia.’ Different groups inside the mafia fight for control. It’s the same with the triads. Hong Kong has more than fifty different factions. Some of them are street gangs. Some are organized. Wo Shing Wo. Fourteen-K. Sun Yee On.”
“We’ve landed in the middle of a gang war. Great.”
“There’s always a gang war.”
She thought she heard fatigue in his quiet voice. She understood. For every cocaine and heroin shipment her squadron intercepted, nine more got through. Sometimes it felt as if it’d never end.
Nikki mentally shook herself. “Which one would likely be trying to hijack this vessel?”
Zhao blew out a breath, making the gauze wrapped around his mouth plume slightly. “Sun Yee On. They’ve got the upper hand on the streets these days.”
“What are they into?”
“The usual. Child slavery, prostitution, drugs. Every vice money can buy.” He paused. “They’re behind, though.”
“Behind?”
“The growth sectors are identity theft and online extortion. It’s why the Wo Shing Wo will dominate in another year or two. Markets are changing. The Wo Shing Wo are much more active online.”
“Por dinero baila el perro,” she muttered. The dog dances for money. “But what are they looking for here?”
“The scouting group was small. How many did you subdue?”
Subdue. Like she’d sung them to sleep. “Two.”
“That makes twelve in all. A local group controlling the dockyard. What we need is its red pole.”
She looked at him.
“The enforcer in charge,” he qualified. “To question him.”
“Let’s make sure the ship is secured then,” she said. “Maybe he’s hiding somewhere and I need to have a look around, anyway.”
“For what?”
“A passenger who might be the source of a satellite signal.” Nikki stuck the semiautomatic in her waistband so she could rummage through her gear bag. She pulled out the PDA and fired it up. The signal was weaker here at the bow but still in the low seventies. Diviner hadn’t moved.
“Passengers normally have cabins just below the bridge deck,” she continued. “But I don’t know how he’s getting his signal out through all that metal.”
“Let’s go look.”
She headed back through the cargo containers, slipping easily between them. Zhao followed silently. Aware of him but unable to smell or hear him, her hackles rose. She felt like a mouse being stalked. In moments they’d arrived back at the door where she’d surprised a guard.
Nothing moved inside, so her first victim was still out cold. When Zhao slipped around the corner and headed toward an inset doorway, clearly expecting her to follow, Nikki tried to shrug off her annoyance. He’d been all over this vessel before she’d even shown up; no sense in getting bent out of shape over his take-charge attitude.
A good leader uses all the resources at her disposal, she reminded herself. Even if it means following sometimes. The thought still rankled.
In moments they’d threaded through crew recreation quarters littered with porn magazines, tools and mechanical devices broken open for repair, and headed up onto the second deck. Nikki checked the PDA. The signal was dampened within the steel house. The bridge structure acted as a giant Faraday cage, creating enough radio interference that a signal couldn’t enter nor leave. It was why radio antennae were mounted outside the house.
And why it didn’t make sense that Wryzynski, or Diviner, or whoever, would be generating that satellite signal from inside.
The second-floor galley and dining area was empty but for the three subdued triads Zhao had left there. The third deck’s whitewashed hallway ought to have been lit, but only a dim stairwell light gleamed from the far end. Several closed doors lined the hall, their inset jambs creating darker shadows that marched at regular intervals down both sides. They quickly searched each cabin, but came up empty.
Zhao was nearly through the doorway to the bridge deck when she caught the burnt coffee. She tapped his arm. He stopped instantly. She waved him back into the narrow metal stairwell, surprised when he obeyed.
Someone ahead, she motioned.
His dark eyes studied her for a moment and Nikki was suddenly thrown back years, staring into her best friend’s eyes while they stood at the mouth of an abandoned silver mine near the Athena Academy’s desert campus. Nikki had just equated the scent of burnt coffee with a child’s fear, fear that emanated from the bottom of the mine shaft. The experience had left her physically ill, weak and retching. Her claim to knowing someone was lying down that shaft had sounded crazy even to Nikki at the time, but Jess had simply prepared to rappel into the shaft.
Jess had believed her experience was real; she’d trusted her to do what had to be done.
Something like that trust was reflected in Zhao’s eyes now.
Nikki motioned toward the doorway. She reached for the L-shaped handle and paused, aware that Zhao suddenly had semiautomatics in both hands. In the half dark, she could see only the outline of his head and the fabric covering the bridge of his nose. She was struck by his stillness, by how he emanated nothing—no scent, no pent-up energy, no aggression. The guardsmen she worked with exuded machismo and nervous energy in the moments before action, but Zhao seemed almost absent from her psychic space.
She’d love to know how he did that. Her own nerves whined like a dentist’s drill.
He was waiting for her to make a move.
Nikki inhaled, drawing the air deep into her diaphragm for strength. A heartbeat, then she twisted the knob and jerked the door open to expose the darkened bridge lit only by ghostly green and orange instrument lights.
A bullet winged high and pinged off the metal doorjamb. She dropped and rolled inside. Almost immediately she crashed hard against something that gave—a man’s legs. He cried out as he went down. His gun exploded in her ear and clattered on the floor. She shoved him off her prone body and sprang up to straddle his torso. He struggled like a landed fish but stopped when she pressed her pistol’s nose to his cheek.
A click and overhead fluorescents glared. Nikki’s assailant lay cowering beneath the pistol’s muzzle, hands spread wide. The dull gray coveralls spattered with grease said he worked aboard. His frenetic gaze said he was panicked.
She leaned on the gun, pressed its muzzle into his cheek. “Don’t move!” she shouted.
The man started shouting back, spittle flying from his lips. What was he saying? His arms flailed, hitting her randomly and hard. She struggled to get her knee on his elbow, then had to defend against a sudden strike toward her neck.
“Help me out here, Zhao!”
A black-booted foot pinned the man’s windmilling arm to the floor and a flood of lilting, diving words spilled from Zhao’s mouth. The man beneath her abruptly quit fighting.
Nikki, breathing hard, warily leaned back, though she kept the gun on her assailant. “What the hell did you say to him?”
“That you are a crazy American woman and I cannot control you, so he should be still before you lose your mind and kill him.”
“Great.”
“What?” he asked as he retrieved the man’s gun from the floor. “It worked.”
Nikki caught the scent of freshly cut grass. Zhao was teasing her.
She let her smile freeze into a grimace and leaned again toward the man she sat on. He turned his face away, clearly afraid now.
“You’re right,” she admitted. “What does he know?”
Zhao spoke at length with him. During the exchange, she heard Wo Shing Wo mentioned several times, then the conversation seemed to get darker. Wet pennies emanated from Zhao and the man seemed to be trying to make himself smaller, as if afraid of being struck.
“What’s going on?” she asked after Zhao stopped speaking.
He turned toward her then and she saw beneath the black gauze the hard planes of his face. “This man manages one of the Wo’s operations. He’s the Chou Hai—a liaison officer.”
“Yeah. And?”
Zhao’s tone was stiff. “He is to prepare this boat to go to Vladivostok with its cargo.”
“Of what?” And why do I have to keep prompting you? she thought. Cooperate with me.
Angry copper surrounded her, nearly stealing her breath.
“Children. For sex slaves.”
“Damn pervert,” Nikki snarled. She grabbed the front of the man’s coveralls in her fist. “Full cargo? How many children is that?” Her voice rose. “Dozens? Hundreds? How many? Tell me!” She shook him hard, then shoved him back against the floor, away from her as if he stank.