Page 47 of Poison Evidence

The number on the screen was unfamiliar. Her heart pounded as she answered the call—again on speaker for Curt’s benefit, to hell with the fact that Erica and Lee could hear too.

Hope and fear had Mara in a tight, warring grip. She hoped to hell it was Ivy but was terrified it would be bad news.

Chapter Sixteen

Ivy gripped the phone as if she was afraid Dimitri would take it from her. She was so confused by him and even more confused by her feelings toward him.

She should hate him. Yet she didn’t. Couldn’t.

She wanted, more than anything, to know why he was doing this. To know what made him tick. If she had that piece, maybe she could find a way out for him.

Mara answered, and the call was brief. Curt was with her, and she gave them the rundown of events, why the transmitter had been disabled, and why there were no bodies to bring to Koror for the police to examine.

Curt launched into a series of questions, but Dimitri gave a hand signal indicating she needed to end the call. “Sorry, Curt, but we need to keep the boat moving,” she said, offering the prearranged excuse—which also happened to be true. “We need to put distance between us and the last point where CAM was transmitting, in case they have a boat and are searching for us. We’re going to spend the next thirty-six hours at sea to give the police a chance to catch up with the Syrians, if there are more, before we return to the Rock Islands. I’ll call again when I can.”

Dimitri hit the End button, and it was done. He returned the phone to the storage compartment under his seat and throttled up the engine. They headed out to deep, open sea—but not, Ivy soon learned, for a thirty-six-hour jaunt. Thirty minutes later, they turned, heading toward Palau’s southern edge.

Twenty minutes after that, Dimitri cut the engine, full stop.

“Why are we stopping?” she asked.

“Load CAM and RON in the tender. We’re abandoningLiberty. We’re sending her out to sea.”

“What? We can’t—”

“There’s a lot of oceanLibertycan cover before she runs out of gas. If she’s spotted, she might draw off the Syrians. Plus,Libertyis too big to maneuver in the waters where we need to search for the AUUV,” he said.

“AUUV?”

“Air/Underwater Unmanned Vehicle. The Russians lost their prototype. We’re going to find it.”

“I thought you weren’t going to tell me what it is?”

He shrugged. “We need to work together if we’re going to find it quickly—before everyone has a chance to regroup.”

“And you know where it is?”

“I’ve narrowed down the search to ten islands and their surrounding waters. CAM will do the rest.”

“You lied when you said we were going to spend a day and a half at sea.”

“I lie about a lot of things. Say good-bye toLiberty. We’re going camping.”

Curt glanced at the clock before answering the phone. Ten p.m. Caller ID sent dread up his spine: Rudy Fredrickson, from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He didn’t waste a moment with pleasantries. “Dominick, I just got a call from the office. We got a hit on the Veselov name. As soon as my wife gets home to stay with our son, I’m heading into the office for a full debriefing and figured you’d want to be there too.”

Curt tightened his grip on the phone. Finally, a lead. “Thanks for the tip. You going to catch shit for keeping me in the loop?”

“No more than the usual.”

Like Curt, Rudy had been bothered by the way his bosses had set up Ivy. Curt wasn’t surprised he wasn’t toeing the DIA line and locking Curt out as others had been intent on doing.

“When do you think you’ll get there?”

“The embassy event Alyssa is coordinating is supposed to end in forty-five minutes. She said she’d try to slip out, but it’s hard to say. They’ll start without me, though, even though in theory I was the lead on this one. I’m thinking my days with DIA are numbered.”

Curt was tempted to tell the man to submit his résumé to the Justice Department, but in a few short months—long before a transfer would ever come about—he planned to be out of there himself. No point in inviting the man to further screw up relations with his current bosses when Curt couldn’t make promises.