As the boat bumped against the dock for the first time, Donovan felt a weight lift from his shoulders. Dry land. He wasn't sure he'd ever been so grateful to be stuck on a relatively small island as he was right now.
He really wasn't much for traveling, not before joining the FBI. He’d had enough of being dragged around. Nothing had ever felt so good as buying his own home and knowing he could stay there as long as he liked. So he'd never come to the Bahamas before. Islands didn’t appeal to him, and he still fought the concerns that came with being an FBI agent, but one no longer on American soil. They had no authority here. They were nothing but tourists.
Still, he was grateful that, in a few moments, they would all be off the tiny research vessel. They would no longer be corralled in one place. In fact, they were purposefully splitting up. He still hadn’t seen anything to confirm Eleri's comment that they were still being followed, but Donovan didn't doubt her.
The boat continued to rock slightly with the waves, but the dock was a steadying force. Donovan would have leapt from the deck right onto the wooden planks had he been able to. There were still so many things to get off of the boat. So many things to protect.
First and foremost was the duffel bag Neriah had fought to bring to them. They had been towing her small inflatable behind the Calypso. It slowed them down a little bit, but they hadn't wanted to leave it.
Though Donovan had argued they should ditch the little boat and make it look like an accident, Eleri and Hannah had argued to keep it. In his mind, it might stop whomever was following them, if it looked as though Neriah had either decided to go for a dive by herself or had fallen overboard and never come back up.
“We need the raft,” Hannah had claimed. “It makes us harder to kill. Having an entirely separate flotation device that—despite its small size—all seven of us can fit onto is something we desperately need right now. It gives us an escape route if we are attacked. And with our own stored inflatable, we have two modes of escape.”
In the end, Donovan's argument had lost. He was fully in favor of having a speedy exit, though he hoped he would never have to set foot on the tiny craft.
On the dock, workers passed by him, ignoring his presence as they carried boxes and drove small forklifts with pallets full of goods coming into the city.
The Calypso had sailed past the large dock where the cruise ships stayed, instead coming around into this tiny port that Hannah knew of. It fed them into Nassau about five blocks away from the other dock, dramatically reducing the tourist traffic. Grabbing his own bag, Donovan stepped into the stream of moving workers and was carried along a few yards before he managed to turn around.
Despite this not being the bright and shiny cruise ship dock, it was still tremendously busy, and he was assaulted by sounds and smells coming from the boats and people and even all the way across the open beach in front of him. Turning, he saw Eleri still standing on the boat, bags in her hand, stuck behind a trio as Hannah, Jason, and Neriah gingerly stepped off onto the dock. They were embraced in what appeared to be a very touching moment.
As he looked at them, Hannah caught his eye. “This is the last land we were on with Allison. We were actually on this same dock, in the same slip, the last time we were here.”
Shit, Donovan thought. He hadn't seen Hannah grieve her wife. Not yet. Maybe she'd worked through some of it before she contacted the FBI. Maybe she had a renewed purpose with Eleri and the other agents on the case. It always felt good to find justice for a lost loved one. . . or so he had believed until he’d found the paperwork on his mother. But right now, he wouldn't get in the way of the three of them having a moment they clearly needed.
A small, quick group hug passed, the only thing allowable in the traffic of workers. Hannah looked up at him and caught his eye again. “I'm furious about Allison. Livid. They took her from me. I'm mad that she suffered. And I’m mad that I don’t get to have her for the rest of my life. But right now, I’m focused on finding them. Those fucking assholes aren't going to get anyone else.”
He nodded at her. The FBI—like police officers—were trained to never promise they would solve a case. But right now, he felt like telling Hannah he would make sure it happened.
Once they moved off the dock and waded through customs, they regrouped in a little square across the street. A fountain held court in the center, and the sound of the water would help drown out their conversation for anyone listening in.
They each had a specific task to get them and their bags of evidence out of the open as quickly as possible. Donovan and Eleri handed out communication systems, while Noah booked hotel rooms. Hannah let him do it, since Noah didn't know the ones she and Allison usually went to. The agents didn’t want to follow the research crew’s normal path. Hannah and Jason procured two separate rental vans from different agencies, and within thirty minutes, the group was loading all the bags they had hauled off of the boat.
One of them contained the flask with the dried crystal substance on the bottom. Though he and Eleri were both anxious to get results from it, they knew they would have to wait for Hannah, who actually had the equipment to run the tests. The other option was to find a lab here on Nassau that could do the work, but that was risky, too.
It was all risky. Someone was after them, and for the last twenty-four hours, they’d all been in a single, thirty-foot by ten-foot space.
Donovan inhaled the warm air. The moisture hit his nose, along with a myriad of new scents. Despite not having been at the cruise ship dock, they must be close to touristy locations. He smelled what must be the local street food, but also rum cakes and a distillery nearby. Behind the fountain, the street marched up and away, a curious mix of modern pavement bracketed by older buildings.
Divided into the vans, the two groups split off from each other, carefully heading in different directions. Hannah and Noah turned left. Their van had most of the lab equipment, ready for Hannah to test what she could. The other van held Donovan, Eleri, GJ, Jason, and Neriah. Their first stop was to drop GJ and Jason at a hotel where Noah had made a reservation for the two of them.
In each case, they would stay in one room or suite. Eleri had not been willing to split them up more than that—not with Miranda Industries hot on their tails.
Jason and Hannah each now had their own armed agent for protection. Eleri and Donovan had taken Neriah, as she was the one that Miranda Industries had made the biggest gamble for already.
“Do I really need guards?” she asked while leaning forward from the middle row. She’d belted herself exactly into the center of the van, as Eleri had instructed. “I mean, I managed to evade them well enough on my own for a while.”
“No, you didn't.” Eleri tossed the comment back over her shoulder as she took the turns like a native. “We found you. And we sent you information. We also knew you were back there behind us.”
“I thought you didn’t know it was me.”
“No, we didn't,” Donovan admitted, wondering if they were playing into a lighter version of good cop/bad cop. “But we knew someone was following us. And if we decided to turn around, we would have gotten you.”
“Then why didn't Miranda get me?”
That question had Donovan turning around in his seat. He looked her in the eyes. “I get the feeling they could have grabbed you if they wanted. They killed Allison and almost made it look like a marine attack, an accident. They got two other researchers—sorry, if you count Blake, they got three—and they made those look good enough that the police are only investigating one of them. So if they didn't get you, it wasn’t because they couldn’t. So the million dollar question is: What did they get out of letting you live?”
Neriah was nodding along as she followed his ugly logic, her expression changing rapidly from confident to afraid. “Well, if I was them, and I let me live, it would be because I was going to lead them to you.”
“Exactly,” Donovan said as the van bumped forward sharply, snapping the side of his face into the headrest as the car behind them plowed directly into their rear bumper.