Chapter Twenty-One

Luke held Undine on the tarmac and kissed her one more time. The Raptor jet was refueled and ready for the long flight to Palau.

She dropped back to her heels with her hands behind his neck. “Don’t underestimate him. He’s Dimitri Veselov, not Parker Reeves, and he’s not your friend.”

He nodded. “Don’t worry. I won’t make that mistake again.” He released Undine and nodded to Ian Boyd. “Let’s roll.”

Undine hugged Ian. “Watch his back,” she said. “Or I’ll kick your ass.”

Ian laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”

Luke took a step toward the jet, then stopped and faced her. Her long dark hair whipped up in the wind, and, as it always did, his heart flipped just looking at her. His fiancée. His past. His future. “I love you,” he said with feeling, not the rote words of their daily good-bye before he headed to work.

Her eyes lit, and she smiled. “Cool.”

He laughed. Her reply only pulled him in deeper. Leaving Undine for a job would never be easy; they had too much lost time to make up for.

She grabbed his shirt and kissed him one more time. “I love you too. Stay safe, both of you. And bring Ivy back.”

“Will do, Undine,” Ian said, then climbed the steps to the private jet.

With one last look at the woman who’d become his world, Luke followed Ian up the steps, then gave a low whistle as he took in the plush corporate jet. “This is quite the step up from the military flights we used when heading to a deployment.”

“Working for Raptor has its perks.”

“Did Keith give you a spiel to pass on to try to recruit me?” Luke asked as he stowed his suitcase in a storage compartment.

“Pretty much. But he also knows it’s futile.”

“Yeah. I’m out of the game. If this weren’t personal, I wouldn’t be here.”

They settled into their seats. One of the pilots sealed the door, and they were airborne just moments later—a perk of being able to use the small Port Angeles airport—no waiting as they would have at SeaTac or Boeing Field.

Definite perk. But still, Luke wasn’t interested. His life was in Washington with Undine, and he was happy working for NOAA—and thankful his bosses had approved open-ended leave at the last minute so he could embark on this mission.

It didn’t hurt that Curt Dominick personally made the request, but still, after last fall, his employers were more than happy to give him whatever he wanted, as long as he continued to wear the NOAA uniform. They wanted to move him into public relations, but he’d flat-out refused. He didn’t want to be the poster boy for the organization. He wanted to be an anonymous marine biologist. He wanted to continue his study of the effects of sonar on marine mammal navigation.

But today, the whales would have to wait.

“Here’s everything we know about Veselov,” Ian said, setting a thin stack of files on the table between them. “And here’s what we know about Jack Keaton.” He set another, even thinner stack on top. “There is a real Jack Keaton. He was in the Air Force. Right age, height, and build for Veselov to pass as him. Eighteen months ago, the real Keaton took off, crewing on sailboats to travel the world. His last known stop was Australia about six months ago. Someone fed Veselov the ID, which has the DIA worried about the real Keaton. They’re trying to trace his steps and track him down.

“Veselov showed up in Palau about five weeks after Reeves bailed from the Osprey,” Ian added.

Luke flinched. Dimitri Veselov wouldn’t have escaped if Luke hadn’t let him.

“He set up shop as a charter captain,” Ian continued. “And generally ingratiated himself with the locals and American expats very quickly. Took several officials out on multiday trips for free—to get a feel for the ports, he said. Likely he was laying the groundwork for his search. Had a reputation for being congenial. Good drinking buddy, and he knows boats and the water like no one’s business.” Ian paused. “A good spy is always everyone’s best friend. The friendship is usually genuine, or his cover might crack—it’s hard to fake it for extended periods of time. As a case officer, I always zeroed in on one trait I liked in the spies I ran and used that to work my way in.”

Luke grimaced again. He’d met congenial Parker. He hated that he’d still believed the persona, even after learning he was a spy. “Who invited him to the party?”

“The governor of Melekeok—who he’d taken on several cruises through the Rock Islands. It’s possible Veselov chose to target the party, knowing Ivy would be there and he could swoop in and save her.”

“I thought it was assumed he got lucky there? He wasn’t connected to the men who attacked the party?”

“The DIA believes there is a link between Veselov and the assault.”

“According to Ivy, he killed three men on the boat—two of whom were the same men who attempted to abduct her in the mangrove swamp.”

“Yes. The DIA believes he betrayed his partners. Probably to further win Ivy’s trust.”

“Motherfucker,” Luke said.

“It gets worse. She told Dominick that she slept with him after the assault—before he abducted her.”

“So…if he’s had any luck winning back her trust, we can assume Ivy’s drinking his Kool-Aid. She may even try to protect him.”

“Yes. Given that she willingly turned off the signal for CAM and she hasn’t reported in since the initial call when she explained why, it’s possible she’s protecting him already.”

“Everyone seems pretty certain she wasn’t involved in Hill’s treason,” Luke said. “What’s your take?” He figured no one else would have as honest an assessment, given that Ian had been the one to take down Hill in the end.

“I wondered when I first met her, but after getting to know her, no way. She doesn’t fit the profile. She’s not like the women who ally themselves with terrorist groups and arms dealers. Believe me, I know the type. She and Cressida have grown close. She feels guilty in the way that only the innocent feel, like she’s responsible for what happened because she didn’t see through Hill’s lies and couldn’t warn anyone.”

“Why did she divorce Hill?”

“She told Cressida he was banging an intern.”

Luke picked up the file that outlined Veselov’s life as Jack Keaton. He read the statements gathered by the DIA and FBI, surprised that both organizations were willing to pass on the information, but then, Ivy was a senator’s cousin and once again, the attorney general was personally involved because one of his wife’s subordinates was in danger—and it appeared the DIA had set her up for the bullshit assignment.

DIA was in full damage-control mode and were probably more than happy to have Alec Ravissant privately fund her exfiltration—as long as they did it nice and quiet like and left the DIA out of it.

After he reviewed everything twice, he tapped a name that had popped up in both Ivy’s and Veselov’s dossiers. “Ulai Umetaro lives in an apartment above his floatplane hangar in the same marina where Veselov lived aboard Liberty. They are drinking buddies, and Umetaro was Ivy’s pilot for that first week in Palau. We start with Umetaro.”

“Agreed,” Ian said. “He’s the most likely to know where Veselov has been searching for the AUUV over the last few months.”

Ivy rubbed her eyes again as she slouched in front of the computer. It was two a.m. and clear that she was fried, yet she resisted going to bed. Of course, Dimitri understood. The wall between them was impenetrable, but their sleeping arrangements remained the same. “Time to bring RON home and get some sleep,” he said firmly.

She tapped the power meter on the display. “There’s enough juice to finish the flyover of that island.”

“You’re so fried, you’re liable to crash him into a hillside.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She sighed. “Tomorrow, we need to visit the island. I need to ground-truth the data. CAM is having trouble identifying a few features and needs calibration.”

“Can we go at dusk?”

“I’d rather go earlier. I don’t have the same night vision that RON has, and the vegetation there is really thick. My luck, I’d rub up against a dozen poison trees in the dark.”

“Fine.”

She brought RON back to the cave and closed down the system, then retreated to the lower level. “You coming?” she asked when he didn’t follow.

“No,” he said. He’d give her the space she needed. “I’m going to sleep on the hilltop. Too hot in the cave.” Too hot sleeping next to Ivy, wanting her but knowing it wasn’t fair to her. The deeper they got involved, the more she’d want him to fight. The harder it would be for her to face the final outcome.

So he’d leave her alone. Done and out.

She stopped on the staircase and met his gaze, then gave a sharp nod.

He grabbed a sleeping pad and thin blanket from the supplies and climbed the hill. He set up his bed near one of the skylights. He could hear her, guard her, from here.

He stripped down to boxer briefs and lay down. Without light pollution, clouds, or moon, the stars were crystal clear. A vast universe unfolding above him.

It put him in his place, seeing the cosmos. He was but one man, insignificant amid the vastness of time and space. He’d done something good and important once, that night with Luke on the Interceptor. He’d helped save thousands of lives. But even that wouldn’t register against the hundred billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy, let alone the multiverse and all the infinite possible universes.

In an infinite number of those universes, he’d never been a spy. In at least one of those, his parents didn’t die in that car wreck, and after the Iron Curtain came down, they moved to the US, where he met Ivy in college. In that universe, he probably was a science major of some sort. Marine biology, or astrophysics if that Dimitri could handle the math. They married after graduation and had three kids. Patrick Hill was a goat who was killed in a farming accident, and the man who raped Sophia was never born.

In that universe, he wasn’t a killer.

A satellite drifted across the sky, hard to spot among the multitude of stars. It could be a US spy satellite, searching for him, here, in this universe, where he was a spy and an assassin for Team Russia with no future.

They’d better get a lead on the AUUV tomorrow. He didn’t know how much longer they’d be able to work together before he did something stupid, like start to hope for a future with Ivy in this world.