Page 4 of Code Name: Harbor

It could be more Russians called in to look for me, and because I’m an analyst, I have to admit it’s the most likely answer.

And then the engine cuts and it’s nothing but silence except for the slap of waves against my face and my own ragged breathing.

I can’t see anything in the dark out there. I don’t know if the boat is twenty feet from me or eighty. I don’t know if whoever is on it is reaching for a radio or a rifle or nothing at all.

Please be a fisherman.

Please, please be a fisherman.

CHAPTER 2

Finn

The Quartermaster is doing what she was built to do, which is run quiet on a moonless night with a hold full of contraband.

Marcus has her at five knots, engines barely a murmur so as not to draw attention. I’ve navigated the Salish Sea a million times, both in real life and in my dreams. It’s a marginal body of water between British Columbia and Washington state wherein you’ll find the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound and an intricate web of connecting channels and waterways.

It’s a smuggler’s haven.

Tonight the inky black depths are as familiar to me as my own bed and the sound of water lapping at the hull is music to my ears.

I lift the night-vision binoculars and scan the waterline, portions of which are swallowed by the night and others illuminated by dock lights. I sweep back and forth, taking in every minute detail. My diligence is why I’m not in prison.

You don’t approach a dock without doing your homework.

“Got eyes on the Brown place yet?” Marcus asks.

His voice is the same low, rich rumble it’s been since I met him in a Bremerton dive bar nine years ago. He was fresh out of the navy, looking for work, and I was two years out of my one and only stint in prison.

“Working on it,” I say, soft enough not to be heard over the water but loud enough to carry back to him.

“Tide’s against us in about twenty,” he points out.

“I know.”

“Just letting you know.”

“I know.”

I hear his coffee thermos click against the wheel mount. He’s never without it… an addiction that will eventually eat his stomach from the inside out.

The Brown place is a private dock half a mile up the channel from where we’re sitting now. It’s owned by a retired commercial fisherman named Walt, who’s taken my money for the last six years to look the other way. He’s never once asked me what I was unloading.

This evening’s cargo is a Pieter de Hooch domestic interior painting. A private collector in Bellevue bought it on the gray market for $2.3 million. It was supposedly looted by Nazis from a collector in Amsterdam in 1942 and my cut is five percent to get it through these waterways and into the purchaser’s hands. That’s $115,000 for a night’s work, which isn’t a bad way to live in my opinion.

Normally, Marcus would handle a run like this with our crew, often with Connie as his first mate, but this is a new buyer and he insisted I be the one to deliver.

Which is totally fine… new buyers get the boss.

I sweep the shore again and see the light on Walt’s porch. It’s his signal that it’s safe to dock. I shift my focus east, scanning past black water to the next slip about four hundred yards away.

I lower the binoculars. “Marcus.”

“Yeah?”

“Cut the engine.”

It quiets and The Quartermaster slows to a dead drift.