At the Buenos Aires airport, Robert held Lynda’s picture, studying the faces of the people walking past, coming through the automatic glass doors that separated customs from the outside world. He himself had emerged from behind those doors only an hour before, weary from a sleepless night, wondering how he would make it through the long day ahead. With one more flight to go, and a partner yet to meet, he’d begun to entertain thoughts of turning around and heading home. He tried to remind himself why he’d agreed to this assignment in the first place.
He replayed the previous morning in his head, when Gordon had phoned him awake and told him that Aeneas had turned up again. Like a bad penny, Gordon said. He told Robert to pack his bags and get to the office.
But Robert had stayed in bed, staring at the bare walls of his “no personality” apartment, as an old girlfriend once called it. She’d been right. He used to blame the lack of decoration on living his life on the road. But the truth was, as an undercover agent, Robert had assumed so many personalities over the years that he had begun to question which personality was his.
Robert’s one meager attempt at interior decorating was a laminated map of the world. He’d hung it in the kitchen, planning to use pushpins to mark every place he had visited—Amsterdam, Oslo, Osaka, Kuwait—but he abandoned the idea when he realized that most of those trips were classified.
And that morning, after he’d finally gotten out of bed and dressed, he’d wandered into the kitchen and stared at the northern reaches of the map, at the tiny islands of Svalbard, two hundred miles north of Norway, just below the polar ice cap. Places Robert had nearly succeeded in erasing from memory, until Gordon had called and mentioned Aeneas.
When Robert had entered Gordon’s perennially unlit office, Gordon was reclined in his chair, feet on the desk, keyboard on his lap. People often mistook the posture for laziness, but Robert knew it was intentional. Gordon once said the fastest way to get promoted at the Bureau was to pretend you didn’t want to get promoted. Robert wondered whether Gordon’s emerging paunch was part of the disguise, but he wasn’t about to ask. Gordon was only a few years older than Robert but looked twice that, heavyset, with a balding head framed by wisps of thin blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
Robert walked to the window and pulled open the vertical blinds to let in some light, revealing the top half of a naked tree. The night’s ice storm had left a sheen on its branches, and they hung low under the weight. A dense layer of clouds threatened more of the same. Robert normally would have welcomed the change in scenery brought about by a new assignment, but not this time. He could feel Gordon watching him but resisted the urge to turn around.
Don’t you want to know what he did? Gordon asked.
Not particularly.
I’d have thought you would relish a second shot at him.
And I’d have thought I would’ve graduated to pursuing real terrorists by now.
Oh, he’s real, Gordon said. Aeneas, too, has graduated. To negligent manslaughter.
Robert turned to see if Gordon was joking. He wasn’t. Aeneas may be good at protecting animals, Gordon said, but he’s not so good at protecting people. He let one of his crew members, a woman, die up in the North Atlantic. Details are sketchy because nobody’s talking. She was estranged from her parents, and they want it kept quiet as well. But they’ve got connections in the Bureau, which is all we need to know. And, frankly, it was just a matter of time before he gave us another reason to come after him.
Robert had looked back out the window, at the tree, at one sadly sagging branch. He felt the urge to exit the building, climb the tree, shake the ice off. Give the branch a break from the weight. A little temporary insanity might give Robert a break as well, a week off from work, an excuse. He knew he didn’t need an excuse; he could just say no. Gordon certainly owed him. Back when Gordon had been working undercover, with Robert just out of the Academy, an arms dealer in Long Beach discovered a microphone in Gordon’s briefcase—and Robert put a bullet in the man’s head just as he was about to put one in Gordon’s.
But Robert couldn’t say no. He’d been the one to open this case five years ago, and he knew he needed to be the one to close it.
Still, he wished he hadn’t been assigned a partner, that he wasn’t still waiting for her at the increasingly crowded airport terminal. He noticed a woman approaching rapidly, pulling a wheeled carry-on bag, and he stepped aside to get out of her way. But she stopped, right in front of him.
“You Robert?” she asked. She wore a Red Sox cap that covered her short blonde hair.
Robert looked again at the picture; he’d expected a brunette. The woman smiled. “That photo’s from when I was working out of Boston. I’m in the Miami office now. Gotta blend in with the locals. I’m Lynda.” She gave his hand a quick shake then started off. She was shorter than Robert expected, but she carried herself with a swagger that made up for it. “We’ve got to motor,” she called back to him. “Next flight leaves in ten minutes.”
Robert followed a step behind. She was still talking, but he couldn’t hear her over the public address system, and he got the sense that she didn’t care if he heard her anyway.
On the plane, Robert took the window seat and, as Lynda continued her friendly chatter, he watched Buenos Aires disappear beneath the clouds. Then she switched gears, brought up the case, and he started to listen.
Lynda told him that Brazilian trawlers off the coast of Fortaleza had first sighted Aeneas’s ship, the Arctic Tern. Fishermen were, by nature, a suspicious lot, and they took the boat for a competitor. She said they’d reported that the Tern was headed south. And she had a warrant for Aeneas’s arrest.
“So what’s your story with this guy?” she asked.
“I don’t have a story.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Ask Gordon.”
“I did. All he told me was that you could I.D. him. Can you?”
Robert nodded.
“Well, that’s a start. If all goes well, you’ll be pointing him out by nightfall. Gordon pulled some strings with the Argentines. There’s a naval cutter waiting for us in Puerto Madryn loaded with enough men and arms to invade Panama.”
Everything was suddenly moving quickly, too quickly. The Tern’s coordinates, the Argentine cutter. Success seemed inevitable, which would have been a good thing if they were chasing anyone else. But Aeneas in handcuffs seemed more dangerous to Robert than Aeneas on the run. The stories Aeneas could tell, once captured, to anyone within earshot. How Lynda would react if she learned the real reason Aeneas escaped under his watch five years ago. The new cases Gordon could open just as this one was being closed.
Robert began to imagine scenarios that would result in the use of lethal force. The images weren’t hard to conjure—Aeneas raising a shotgun, Aeneas playing Kamikaze with his ship—giving Robert an excuse to react with a well-placed round, extinguishing, finally, the man and his stories. Extinguishing the memories, once and for all.
“You’re not all that chatty, are you, Bobby?”
Robert turned away from the window. Lynda wore a sly smile, which pulled his mind back to the present. He forced a grin and shook his head.
“Like my husband,” she said with a shrug. “We’ll get along just fine.”
* * *
As promised, the ARA Roca, a four-story gunmetal warship, was waiting for them when their taxi arrived at Puerto Madryn harbor.
“If only the Bureau moved this fast in getting me a raise,” Lynda said as she and Robert hurried up the boarding ramp.
Robert looked up at the guns, at the men in uniform, and felt a twinge of embarrassment. He imagined what Aeneas would say at such a display of might—All this, for little old me?—and didn’t know what bothered him more, the veritable army before him or the fact that he had begun imagining what Aeneas would say.
Lynda stopped in the bridge, and Robert heard her talking to the captain in Spanish while he took up position outside on the wing deck, off the starboard side of the bridge, which gave him a panoramic view of the water below. He could still see Lynda inside, laughing at something the captain said. She was flirting with him—a short man in his forties, trim, with dark hair and the matching requisite mustache—and Robert felt his body begin to relax, knowing that she was taking care of things. It was nice, for the time being, to feel as though he were nothing but a passenger.
Within a few minutes, the boat was in open water, under a cloudless sky. When Lynda joined him at the railing, Robert hoped that the stiff headwind, which made talking difficult, might keep her silent. But Lynda had a loud voice and stood extra close.
“Captain Zamora says we’re not far,” she said. “A fisherman sighted the Tern just an hour ago, not far from here. We should call Gordon and give him an update.” She looked at Robert expectantly.
“What do you mean, we?” Robert asked.
“You’ve got the satellite phone. He’s your boss.”
“I’ll call him when we’ve got actual news. What’s the rush?”
“Look, Bobby, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to start scoring some points with upper management. I wasn’t sent down here for my health, if you know what I mean. You do know what happened in Miami, don’t you?”
“I read the report.”
“That’s the official story,” she said. “Not the entire story.” Lynda began to tell Robert about her attempt to capture Aeneas in the Port of Miami, much of it a rehash of what he’d already read. So he raised his binoculars, focusing more on the horizon than on her story.
She’d had only three agents to do a five-agent job—round-the-clock surveillance of the Arctic Tern. It would have been simple, she told him, if only she’d had the manpower: The Canadians had pulled the boat’s registration. The FBI had obtained a warrant on the captain. The Coast Guard was on high alert. All they needed was a positive I.D. of Aeneas, and they would move in and make the arrest.
And then came the bomb threats, two of them, fifteen minutes apart. Two fully loaded passenger ships—one about to depart and one just arrived—had to be evacuated. More than seven thousand people spilled out onto piers, herded by SWAT teams, bomb-sniffing canines, and TV cameras. The next day, Lynda traced the calls to a cell phone on a ship that slipped out of the harbor during all the commotion—the Arctic Tern.
“Now for the part I left out of the report,” she said. “You see, I was the only one on surveillance that afternoon. The only one. And I get this call on my cell. Franklin Bimler, he says his name is, out of Counterterrorist Operations. You know this guy?”
Robert shook his head.
“Of course not. Neither did I. Bimler tells me he’s got urgent information but he can’t tell me because he thinks people are listening in via parabolic microphone—because I’m outside at the time. So I leave my post and get into my car, and that’s when all hell breaks loose with the cruise ships.”
“So?”
“So, there was no Franklin Bimler. Not on the phone. Not anywhere. I ran a search on the guy, and there’s nobody by that name in the Bureau.”
“Franklin could have been Aeneas.”
“I considered that. I did. But how’d Aeneas get my number?”
“He’s good.”
“I don’t know. How’d he even know I was working the case?”
“You think that someone in the Bureau set you up?”
“Crazier things have happened.”
“You’re getting paranoid, Lynda. Aeneas will do that to you.”
“I suppose.”
“Why didn’t you put that in your report?”
“Because I left my damn post, that’s why. I got duped. It was bad enough I let him get away. Would you have put it in your report?”
He wouldn’t have. There were a lot of things he’d left out of his own report on Aeneas. He looked at Lynda, who was still watching him, and wondered how much she knew.
“It was Aeneas,” Robert said, turning away and raising his binoculars again. “Trust me.”
“Ballenas!” shouted one of the uniformed men standing below on the main deck. Following the man’s pointed finger, Robert scanned the horizon, then broadened his viewing arc. He zoomed out, then back in, but he did not see any ships. He lowered the binoculars and turned to Lynda.
“Whales,” she explained. “I think.”
“You think? I thought you were fluent.”
“I am. They speak a different Spanish here,” Lynda said. “The double el has a jha sound. Always throws me.”
Robert returned his eyes to the water just as the nose of a whale emerged, missile-like, off the right side of the ship. The gray marbled monster rose ten feet, twenty feet, angled, then fell sideways into the water.
“I was right!” Lynda reached into her backpack, pulling out a camera. Looking down, Robert counted five men in uniform doing the same, aiming their cell phones and pocket cameras.
“Five summers dragging my nephews through Boston Harbor,” Lynda said, “and we never saw so much as a fin. They’re not gonna believe this.”
After getting her fill of photographs, she began to flip through a travel guide. “Must be a southern right whale,” she said. “This is where they give birth and raise their young. And did you know there are penguin colonies along the shoreline? Along with elephant seals and blue-eyed shags. Maybe we can swing by there on our way back, hey, Bobby?”
“This isn’t a vacation,” he said.
She shrugged. “Might as well get something out of it besides frequent flyer miles.”
Suddenly the ship turned sharply left and coughed up a thick blast of smoke. Robert grabbed the railing to avoid losing his balance. The two officers standing next to them began talking rapidly.
“What are they saying?” Robert asked.
“Looks like we’ve got a runner.” Lynda stepped back into the bridge, Robert close behind. He could make out three small ships on the otherwise flat horizon. The one in the middle, a medium-sized fishing trawler, appeared a lighter shade, possibly painted white. It emitted clouds of smoke, evidence that it, too, was in a hurry.
As the Roca began to catch up, Robert watched the white ship expand in size until he could count the number of decks (three) and estimate the length (200 feet). Yet he did not recognize the ship itself.
“That’s it,” Lynda said. “That’s our ship.”
Robert looked again and realized that he had been searching for something much smaller, the boat he’d sailed on five years ago. The ship ahead was larger, probably a recycled commercial fishing trawler with ice-reinforced hulls. Robert thought of Aeneas using a former fishing vessel to attack fishermen, and how much Aeneas would relish the irony. He’d probably acquired the boat from the Russians or the Norwegians—the fishermen thrown out of work by declining cod stocks or some other overfished species. It’s time someone put this boat to a noble use, he would say.
The Tern ran for a few minutes more before slowing to a halt. Because Canada had pulled the Tern’s registration, it was now a ship with no country, meaning it could be boarded by any nation at any time. Not that Robert needed an excuse. They already had the warrant. Still, he realized, this was all too easy. Aeneas would not have stopped running.
The Argentine captain radioed the Tern but got no response, and he began speaking to his officers in rapid-fire Spanish. As Lynda listened in on the chatter, Robert stepped outside the bridge to call Gordon on the satellite phone.
Robert paced the deck until he got a clear signal, then wrestled with an unresponsive keypad before giving up and tossing the phone back into his backpack. If they were chasing real terrorists, Robert would have the latest-generation satphone, plus a backup. But not here. Everything down here was old and used. Second-hand. Including him.
By now, they had pulled within a football field’s distance of the Tern. The ship, painted white from mast to bow, looked like a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, with the exception of three large black letters painted on each side of the hull: CDA, for Cetacean Defense Alliance. The name R/V Arctic Tern was visible in smaller letters, the “R/V” indicating research. There was, of course, no research being done aboard the Tern, just as whaling ships claimed to be research vessels without ever publishing a single study. If the Japanese are going to play the research card, Aeneas always said, so will we. And on the side of the bridge were painted a dozen black checkmarks, one for each whaling vessel sunk or disabled by the CDA over the years. Robert had been a witness to one of those checkmarks.
Lynda and Robert stepped into a lowered Zodiac, and a crew member ferried them over the chop, followed by a dozen men in uniform. Lynda was the first up the ladder on the side of the Tern. Robert held back, watching as the uniforms pulled themselves aboard, one by one, until he was alone with the driver.
He’d tried to brace himself for this voyage into his past, for the opening of old wounds, mostly his own. But now he could feel his body tensing, his heart accelerating. What if someone up there recognized him; what if some fragment from his past did emerge? More important, he didn’t know how he would react once he came face-to-face with Aeneas after all this time, with all the history between them.
Robert heard a shout from above. Lynda, looking down at him, waved him up. He reached down and made sure his gun was holstered, safety off. Then he took a deep breath, slid on his sunglasses, and grabbed onto the ladder.
Assembled in front of him on the rear deck were about two dozen kids, dreadlocked and tattooed. A few wore white t-shirts with the CDA logo—a black silhouette of a whale fluke with the letters CDA superimposed in white. Most of the crew wore second-hand flannels and fleece, ripped jeans, flip-flops. As Robert reviewed the faces beneath the beards and piercings, he began to breathe more easily, thankful that the CDA did not pay a salary, ensuring a high rate of turnover. He did not recognize a single face, and he was growing optimistic that nobody recognized him—which was fortunate, as Lynda had apparently left the introductions to him.
“We’re with the FBI,” he said. “I’m Agent Porter and this is Agent Madigan. We’re here to execute an arrest warrant for Neil Patrick Cameron.”
“Who?” asked a gangly, unshaven man standing in front.
“Aeneas,” Robert said.
“Are you in charge of this vessel?” Lynda asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lynda said.
“I’m the chef.”
Muted laughter emanated from the crowd. For a ship that was on the run, these people appeared awfully relaxed. Perhaps they were bluffing; perhaps Aeneas was hiding somewhere below. But Robert had a feeling that he was long gone, that Aeneas again had managed to stay a few steps ahead. The only times he ever got captured were times he chose to be captured. Like in Iceland, during CDA’s first year. Aeneas sunk three whaling ships and eluded a fleet of naval and coast guard ships for six months. Then, one afternoon in October, he sailed into Reykjavík harbor and turned himself in. He’d wanted a high-profile trial. Iceland, fearful of negative publicity, stuck him on a plane to London and barred him from ever returning.
Aeneas was an expert in the game of cat and mouse, a trait Robert envied when he’d been on the side of the mouse. Now that he was the predator, he felt predictable and slow. Yet he had little choice but to continue along this preordained path, to go through the motions, search the ship, ask pointed questions, ignore the laughter.
Robert looked at Lynda. “You want to do the honors?”
“My pleasure.” She said something in Spanish as she led the way into the ship, a few of the Argentines following her, a few heading for the bridge.
“You all stay right here,” Robert told the crew on the deck. He knew that the faces staring back at him knew where Aeneas was, and he knew just as well that they would not give up their leader. As Robert paced the deck, he envisioned the uniforms below, opening doors, lockers, anything that might contain a heavyset man of just over six feet. They would, he realized, come up empty handed.
The chef stepped forward. “About how long do you expect this open house to last?”
“Until we find him.”
“I’ve got food on the cooker,” he said.
“It can wait.”
“I am quite serious,” the chef said. “We could have a fire in the galley if I don’t get down there.”
“Tell me where Aeneas is, and I’ll let you go.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“Then tell me where you dropped him off.”
“I work all the way down there. I don’t know what goes on up here.”
“Then tell me who does.”
“I do.” A tall woman in a red fleece jacket and wraparound sunglasses emerged from behind the crowd.
“Who are you?” Robert asked.
“I’m the captain,”
“Aeneas is the captain.”
“Aeneas isn’t here.”
The woman—somewhere in her thirties—had the hardened look of a triathlete, with close-cropped blond hair and dark skin blushed red from the wind and sun. Robert considered telling her to remove her sunglasses. He wanted to see her eyes, to know if she was hiding anything. But doing so would have only made him look desperate, which he wasn’t, not yet.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Lauren Davis.”
“Very well, Captain Davis, tell me why you’re headed south via Argentina instead your usual route via New Zealand?”
“You should already know that.”
“Indulge me.”
“So you can pass it along to the Japanese?”
“I don’t work for the Japanese.”
“You might as well.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“If you want to catch a fish, go where the fish are; if you want to catch a whaler, go where the whalers are.”
Robert felt blood rush to his face, not just because he recognized the line—one of Aeneas’s many adages—but because of the way she delivered it. Knowingly. He lowered his sunglasses. He wanted her to see his eyes, to see that she was mistaken, that she did not, in fact, recognize him.
“Have the whalers moved to a different location?”
“Not yet. But they will,” she said. “The Aussies are sending two naval ships to protect their waters. This will force the Japanese into the Amundsen Sea.”
“Which is where you are headed.”
“If you’ll let us.”
“All I want is Aeneas. Show me where you dropped him, and you’ll be free to continue on, save all the whales. I’m not here for the ship. I’m here for him. But if I can’t get him, I’ll settle for the ship.”
She removed her sunglasses. Her eyes, bright green in the sunlight, stared defiantly at him.
“Unlike you,” she said, “we don’t leave people behind.”
She knew. Robert could see it in her eyes. She knew who he was, and she probably knew everything. Aeneas must have told her. Maybe he told everyone.
Robert turned and walked to the rear of the deck and leaned over the railing as if checking a possible hiding spot. He looked back at the Argentine ship, anxious to return to it, angry with Gordon for sending him here, angrier with himself for coming. He dug his fingernails into the railing, as if he could bore through layers of paint, peel away the history of the ship. He should have known better than to think he’d been forgotten just because a few years had gone by. A fresh set of faces didn’t save him from the same collective memory. Now Robert had their ship, but they had—and always would have—his past.
Lynda emerged from below, followed by her Argentine escorts. When she saw Robert, she stopped and shook her head before joining him at the railing.
“You don’t look surprised,” she said.
“They dropped him off somewhere, not far from here. That’s why they didn’t run far when we chased them.”
“They tell you that?”
“No,” he said, “I just know.”
“In case you’re wrong, Sherlock, we should take the ship back to port and do another sweep. Get the dogs on here.”
Robert knew she was right but was too weary to say anything, the jet lag catching up with him, the feeling that this short mission would not be so short, after all.
“Hand me the phone,” she said. “I’ll call Gordon.”