one of Vladimir Bulgov’s arms-smuggling cargo planes.
A good thing for Colin, Horner was the leader of the armed trio and still held out hope that their FBI agent could help them. “We give him this one chance to deliver,” Horner said. “If he does, he gets to live. That’s the deal.”
That clearly wasn’t the deal but Colin wasn’t offended at being lied to by a sandy-haired, blue-eyed, amoral thug who wanted to procure illegal weapons and then sell them to anyone who would give him his price—drug cartels, warlords, guerrilla groups, terrorist cells, paramilitary organizations, mass murderers. Horner didn’t care provided he got paid, and he would get paid more selling weapons—picking up the pieces of Vladimir Bulgov’s network—than he ever had flying planes.
The house behind them was an expensive furnished rental walled off from its upscale neighborhood of currently absent snowbirds. Horner lived above his means, and the lure of easy money was obviously too much for him to resist.
“I’ll take you to the arms,” Colin said. “I stashed them myself.”
“When?” Horner asked.
“I told you. Two days after Bulgov’s arrest in June. My buyer got cold feet and bolted. I had to disappear for a while and let the dust settle.”
Yuri narrowed his gaze on Colin. “Does FBI think you are dead?”
Colin shook his head. “I couldn’t fake my death with them. I’m an undercover agent. Turning up dead would have drawn too much attention to me. You boys might keep that in mind. The FBI thinks I’m on their side. If you kill me, they won’t rest until they catch you.”
Boris smirked. “Or FBI thanks us for killing a traitor.”
“The weapons he promises are a fiction,” Yuri said.
“They’re not a fiction,” Horner said. “He bought them with FBI money for a fake buyer but he was running his own game. He had his own buyer waiting in the wings. A real buyer.”
“I like how you talk about me as if I’m not standing here,” Colin said. “We’ve been through this. I put the weapons in a safe place and told the FBI that Bulgov had them. Then I let everyone in Bulgov’s world think I was dead and bided my time until I could find another buyer. That would be you three budding arms merchants.”
The younger Russian looked disdainful. “He double-crossed the FBI.”
Honor among thugs, Colin thought. “I don’t want a career doing this,” he said. “I want to unload my stash and disappear. I’ll take you to enough weapons to prove I’m legitimate. Then we do business. My price is a third of what your buyer is willing to pay. You’ll make a tidy profit. It’s a risk worth taking.”
Horner gave him a cool look. “I didn’t say we had a buyer.”
Colin didn’t argue but he knew they had a buyer.
Yuri jumped into the aft deck of the boat. “I still say we kill him now. We can find other weapons.”
“We don’t have time,” Horner said.
Colin rubbed a bruise on his forearm where he had blocked Boris’s first hit. “Your buyer’s impatient.”
“Everyone is impatient,” Boris said with a short, disgusted laugh.
Horner shrugged. “You and Yuri have a point but your way, we know we get nothing. My way, we have a chance.”
From the boat, Yuri pointed a thick finger at Colin. “And if our deep-cover agent here leads us straight to the FBI instead of to weapons? What chance do we have then?”
Horner didn’t answer. He motioned with his gun for Colin to climb into the boat. “Let’s go.”
As Colin got in the boat, pretending to be in more pain than he was, he noticed the light from the patio catch Horner’s face, and he knew. The Russians had finally persuaded him that the risk of walking into an FBI trap was too great. The promise of fast, easy weapons was a mirage. They would have to find another source.
Kill the FBI agent now. Move on.
Only Horner wouldn’t kill Colin here by his pool. He would get out to the ocean first, then kill him and throw his body overboard.
Colin had expected that resurfacing as his undercover alter ego would be tricky, suspicious, but sometimes it just wasn’t any fun to be right.
Faking a limp, he sat in a corner of the aft deck. Horner and his two Russian thugs had no respect for a turncoat FBI agent; even one they had hoped would lead them to an easy cache of orphaned illicit arms and their start as arms merchants. They knew Colin was an undercover federal agent because he had told them so, just before they shoved him into the back of Horner’s Mercedes and drove to Horner’s rented Fort Lauderdale house. Colin had offered them a reasonable explanation for what he had been up to the past few months and what he wanted now, and he had set conditions for his continued cooperation.
He hadn’t bought himself as much time as he’d hoped but he wasn’t dead yet, either.
Yuri and Boris went inside, up to the helm to pilot the boat.
Colin breathed in the thick, stifling air. He didn’t like hot weather, but he was a former Maine lobsterman and Maine state marine patrol officer and knew his way around boats and the water.
It was something his captors didn’t know about him.
The boat cruised up the narrow canal toward the main Intracoastal Waterway. Horner was watching a party aboard a luxury yacht, lit up against the black night. Boris and Yuri were navigating the turn out of the canal into the main Intracoastal.
Without a second thought, Colin eased himself over the side and dropped into the dark water.
He didn’t make a sound.
The water was warm, certainly by Maine standards, but he figured it had snakes. Maybe an alligator. It’d be a hell of a thing to escape armed thugs only to be bitten by a poisonous snake or eaten by an alligator.
He liked Florida well enough but really wasn’t one for the subtropics.
He swam back to the rented house and climbed up onto the dock, then ducked onto the patio, the pool still glistening in the light through the French doors. Once Horner and his Russian friends realized he was gone, they would come straight back and kill him on the spot. No waiting this time.
Colin planned to be gone by then.
Then he would find them, and he would find their buyer.
“Scary bastards,” he said under his breath.
The warm canal water dripped off him. His head pounded. His bruises ached. Dehydration blurred his vision.
He wanted to be back on the rocky coast of Maine.
Back with Emma.
He noticed a movement by the far corner of the pool.
He saw two black-clad figures by some tropical shrub.
Not
