Page 2 of Steinbeck (The Minnesota Kingstons #5)

“Wow. You’re a head case. But I get it. You run into a dead end and you start circling the drain. The key is to keep trying leads, no matter how desperate.”

“I thought about trying to find her sister, but frankly, Phoenix isn’t even her real name, so...” He lifted a shoulder.

“Okay, let’s think. Where are those ships going?” Jack had opened a can of pop and now handed another to Stein, who held it against his other knee for a second before opening it.

It frothed out over his hand, and he sucked off the foam. “I don’t know. Anywhere.”

Jack sat across from him. “Probably an international port. And if it’s a Russian ship and they carry ‘illicit’ cargo”—he finger quoted the word—“they’d want a country friendly to Russian interests.”

“Like?”

“Well, Russia and Brazil are part of brICS, so...” He lifted a shoulder, took a drink. Set it down. “And on the European side, you have the Baltic states.”

Stein studied the port video. “What about Portugal?”

“Why Portugal?”

Stein pointed to the screen. “I think that cargo ship is flying a Portuguese flag.” He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before. He turned the computer toward Jack, who peered at it.

“Yeah, maybe. Not a lot of countries have the coat of arms in the middle of their banner. Spain. Albania. But Spanish flags have horizontal stripes. And Albania has the two-headed eagle. This flag has two sections, with the coat of arms in the middle. You’re right.

That’s definitely Portuguese. And Portugal has been pretty friendly with the Russians in past years. ”

“I don’t know how you know these things.” Steinbeck turned his computer back. Paused the video and searched for the IMO number.

“Maybe your hacker friend could find the ship’s log, or a bill of landing. See where it ended up.” Jack finished his sandwich.

“How long does it take to cross the ocean?”

“In a cargo ship? I don’t know. Eight, ten, twelve days? Depends on how often it stops.”

Which meant she was probably long gone into the labyrinth of the Russian gulag system.

If she was even still alive.

“What did you say her name was?” Jack got up, pulling out his cell phone to retrieve a text. He threw his pop can into the recycling bin.

“Phoenix. But again, that’s not her real name?—”

Jack looked at his phone.

“I got a ping from our King’s Inn website contact form. It has a booking request for a woman named Firebird. Except the dates are all wrong. It’s for December 14, 2005.” He turned the phone around. “Twelve, fourteen, two-zero-five. It’s missing a year digit.”

“Or not.” Steinbeck took the phone. “Maybe it’s European dating. Fourteen, twelve, two-zero-five. Which would be one, four, one, two, two, zero five. Seven digits.” He studied the screen. “The IMO number on the ship is seven digits.”

“The IMO?” Jack said.

“International Maritime Organization. They have a global shipping information system that keeps a record of all the locations of ships at sea by their number.”

“And you know this?—”

“SEALs don’t just bang down doors,” Stein said. He opened a new tab and did a search. “Found it. It’s a container ship. Registered to... bam, Portugal.” He held up a fist, his gaze still on the screen.

Jack bumped it.

“It’s a Panamax. Big ship—about nine hundred feet long, a hundred plus feet wide. Draft maybe forty feet.” He leaned back, made a wry face. “She’s about 190 feet tall above the water.”

“Hard to board a ship like that at sea, in case you’re thinking like a SEAL.”

Stein nodded. “She’s still at sea, port of call, Lisbon.” He didn’t want to think of where they’d kept Phoenix for the past month. “ETA, three days from now.” He ran a hand over his mouth. “If this message is from Phoenix, then...”

“Then you’re all done sanding, bro.”

* * *

Her prison even came with a view. And if Emberly looked long and hard enough, maybe she could even make out her apartment on the hills above the Tagus River, in the Santa Catarina neighborhood of Lisbon.

Students would be basking in the grass of the nearby Miradouro park with the Adamastor, the epic literary sea-monster statue, maybe watching as her container ship churned into port.

Over a month off the grid—Nimue would be crazy with worry.

Please let her plan work.

Sunny blue skies, a cloudless day, the distant Serra da Arrábida a sleeping hunchback in the far southern horizon.

Across the gray-blue of the water, the city of Lisbon climbed up the hillside, with ocher and whitewashed buildings, red clay roofs, streetcars motoring up the cobbled streets, the sidewalks lined with slick and shiny black basalt.

Ahead of her, the 25 de Abril Bridge spanned the river, golden sun turning the metal to blood red, now glistening on the water.

That same sunset splashed over the rebuilt limestone Tower of Belém at the seashore, a reminder of the explorers who left the shores, along with the resilience of a rebuilt city.

Maybe that’s why she’d picked Lisbon and her tucked-away two-room flat. She loved to sit on the balcony that caught the salty winds off the sea, winds that stirred into the city air the scent of lush stone pine, fragrant eucalyptus, and even hints of the cork oak that had once overrun the city.

So close, and yet so far.

Staring out the window of her bare crew-quarters cell, Emberly nearly groaned for a taste of a fried bifana or a beefy prego. Maybe a plate of crispy-rice paella with shrimp, mussels, and crab—and now she was just torturing herself.

Most likely, her captors would shove her onto a plane headed for some remote Siberian gulag. With a stopover in Moscow just so they could have another go-round of interrogation.

She’d have the same nothing to say this time around. She didn’t have the jump drive that contained the Axiom program, and in the bonus round, no, she didn’t know where the shipment of obsidite had ended up.

Didn’t know anything except that the thugs who’d taken her belonged to the Petrov Bratva. A piece of information she tucked away to tell her boss.

If she ever escaped.

Stay calm. Think .

Emberly sat back on the twin bed and drew up her bare feet—she should have scored better shoes back before...

Well, before her foolish heart had decided to defect from her brains and stick around to help a guy who’d abandoned her.

“I’ll be right behind you! I promise!”

Aw. Her stupid words.

She touched her forehead to her knees even as the boat’s horn sounded, alerting the harbor of their arrival. She couldn’t blame Steinbeck for abandoning her—he had his own life, his sister’s life, even Declan’s life to protect.

She was an afterthought, at best. So maybe she shouldn’t have put so much hope into her desperate shout for help.

If only the stupid cell phone she’d taken off one of the crew who’d delivered her dinner four days ago had had more than a wink of juice left, she might have been able to make a call to her boss when they got closer to port.

Instead, in the fading life of the battery, Emberly had connected to the Internet and taken a chance.

A drastic, reckless chance.

She’d left a message on the contact form of the King’s Inn.

Because of course she couldn’t dredge up Steinbeck’s cell number—had she even gotten it?

And the idea of connecting with Nimue and maybe having some Russian hacker trace the connection put a fist in her gut.

So yeah, she hoped Stein was still the savvy SEAL he’d once been.

Probably hoped too much. Steinbeck Kingston wasn’t going to be waiting with some magnificent plan as the Bratva dragged her off the ship and into the trunk of some old Lada.

He wasn’t going to overpower Igor and Boris, the rather grumpy men who had guarded her at the home of some Cuban official, or any of the other Ivans who’d watched over Prisoner 24601 in the crew cabin in the aft superstructure of the boat.

Steinbeck wasn’t a superhero. Just...

Well, he was her only hero. And even that might be going too far.

He had too many reasons not to rescue her, not to trust her, and if it weren’t for his response to her words I think you should kiss me.

.. Her words shifted again in her head, but really, she’d probably lived too long on and read too much into the way his mouth had curved into a smile, the way his blue eyes had roamed her face.

His sardonic words before he’d taken her up on her suggestion.

“Really? I feel like we’ve been here before.”

Oh, they had. Once, in an alleyway in the city of Krakow. Quickly in a mine tunnel on a Caribbean island. And over and over and painfully over in her head for the past three years.

But in real life, she’d ghosted him. Also over and over...

No. Steinbeck wouldn’t come for her.

Still, her entire body seemed to thrum with a sort of radar, an anticipation, when the door to her quarters opened and Boris stood there. “Poydem.”

Right. “Let’s go.”

His beefy hand gripped her upper arm, the mouth of a gun pressed to her spine as he marched her down the portside gangway.

They hit the dock, a long concrete pier that jutted into the water, and she glanced at the IMO number on the hull of the ship. Please let her have typed it right.

The sun baked her skin through the worn clothing she’d stolen from some liveaboard trawler over a month ago. Thankfully, her cabin had come with a shower, but please let her not die in a pair of salt-soaked, baggy, and ripped cargo pants and a white T-shirt that said Stay Positive .

Good life advice, maybe. Especially for a woman heading to the tundra.

She couldn’t help, however, scanning the wharf for a tallish, scruffy blond sailor, maybe in sunglasses, and perhaps pretending to be one of the dockworkers who drove forklifts and trucks or operated any of the giant cranes overhead.

The redolence of diesel fuel and the briny tang of the rusty, bleeding metal fouled the salty air and bored into her bones.

Run.