fired as I tried to pull the sailor back behind the angle of a container while squeezing the trigger, and my shot missed the light.
I’d moved too slow. The gunman’s shot caught the sailor in the upper back and he screamed and sagged to the floor.
I glanced down at the sailor—and instead of a spread of blood on his shirt, a small metal dart protruded from between his meaty shoulder blades. Not a bullet. An anesthetic dart, like we were on a nature show, tagging tigers to trace their roaming. The dart was so I could be dragged back and put into whatever cage Howell wanted. They wanted their bait to be functioning.
I fired at the gunman, who took cover behind the edge of a container, then I turned and I ran into the maze of containers. Hard right, hard right. I needed to take out the gunman. I was trying to get behind him when he descended the stairs. I hoped his adrenaline would make him rush, make a bad decision to my profit. Dim lights illuminated the stacks.
I stopped, risked a glance around the corner. The containers were more tightly packed down here; less room to move, longer lines of sight, which meant that there was a better chance of getting caught in the open. I could hear more voices, raised, feet thundering on the steel stairs. A crowd was coming. If I shot, I’d betray my position.
I broke the seal on a container, slipped inside, left the door open less than an inch. I counted slowly in my head. At nineteen the gunman went past me moving quickly but silently. I watched him move past the door. I stepped out of the container, slamming a kick into the back of his head like he was a wall I was running up. He collapsed and I caught the back of his shirt so he wouldn’t make a noise. With my other hand I grabbed the dart gun, fired it into his back. He rag-dolled, and I eased him to the floor. I hurried to the intersection and looked down the long, unbroken gap in the containers, and saw another man in black, accompanied by a crewman. I ran along the aisle, hearing their echoing voices clang against the steel.
They would expect me to hide in the stacks. I would have to find another part of the ship to make my own. I had to keep moving, use the crew’s thermal signals as camouflage. Hide where the heat of the engines would mask my body’s signature. I had to hold out and get to Rotterdam. There I could vanish.
I stopped at another intersection, for just one single moment, getting bearings, and a sting aced my throat, hard, like a hand’s swat.
A dart. I had maybe seconds before the anesthetic worked its juice. I raised my gun at the approaching gunman. The woman in the suit now stood behind him, watching me, unafraid.
Mila. The woman from Ollie’s bar. The whisky drinker with the fondness for wolves. Blond hair pulled back severely, eyes of quartz, a hard smile. She liked Glenfiddich whisky, and my own blood felt like a bottle had been injected straight into my heart.
The steel of the gun slipped from my grip. I laughed as I fell to the deck.
21
I OPENED MY EYES TO STARLIGHT. I heard the slush of water, the soft whistle of a breeze. I lay on my back, steel for a pillow. On a container, on the deck of the ship. Above me the moon hung, ripe with light. The whistle was the wind slicing through the gaps in the container stacks. The stars lay in a diamond spill across the sky. You didn’t see the stars so clearly in a city, ever.
Mila sat next to me. Legs crossed, wearing a trench coat, cigarette in hand, watching the smoke slide into the moonlight.
I sat up. My arms and my shoulder ached but I wasn’t hurt.
A darkness of ocean lay all around. I’d been out for most of the day.
“Good evening, Sam,” Mila said.
“Howell sent you.” My God, the trouble they had gone to.
“Howell. Name does not ring bells for me.” Mila took a drag on the cigarette, crushed the embers against the steel. She looked out over the long expanse of the Atlantic. The helicopter was gone.
She opened a bag and pulled out a bottle of Glenfiddich and two small glasses.
“Well, that’s one true thing about you. You actually do like Glenfiddich,” I said.
“And