Hostage Zero

Harvey poured on more gas. He was still running full tilt when the wooden decking below his feet became only air, and he launched the best racing dive he could muster. He hit the water palms first, and when he realized that he hadn’t drilled himself into the mud and broken his neck, he scissor kicked hard and dove deep, fully expecting to be tackled from above or shot through the water, which was astonishingly cold for July.

Apparently, Fisherman’s Cove was blessed with a deepdraft marina. He never did find the bottom. Instead, he found a forest of pilings and spiderwebs of rope, which in the inky darkness felt predatory, threatening to grab him and hold him under until he drowned.

He had no idea how long he stayed underwater or how far he swam-it felt like three slips, but how could you know? — but when the urge for a new breath hit him, it hit him hard. Harvey kicked again and pulled hard with his arms. His lungs screamed for relief, and it occurred to him in his disorientation that he could just as easily be pulling himself deeper as rising to the surface.

The new rush of panic redoubled his need to breathe. Now.

He kicked and pulled again, but as he saw the surface rushing to meet him, he aborted the effort, sculling madly to slow his ascent. If he exploded out of the water, he’d surrender any advantage that this swim might have bought for him.

He slowed to an easy float, again sculling to rise as slowly as possible. Just a few inches from the surface he saw a white fiberglass hull through the murk, and he rose to meet it with his hands, then used its support to hand-walk to the surface. Of the whole ordeal, the final five inches were the worst. The pressure in his lungs and the panic in his mind screamed at him just to give up and give in. He refused.

He broke the surface vertically, crown of his head first, then his eyes, and finally his nose and mouth. He pursed his lips to keep from exhaling with a burst of noise, gulped a new lungful of air, then took in his surroundings.

He had, in fact, swum under two slips and past four ranks of moored boats-maybe a hundred feet, farther in the water than he’d been since basic training. He allowed himself a moment of pride.

But Denim was still out there somewhere, armed with a gun and a plan that Harvey wanted nothing to do with. He couldn’t see him and he couldn’t hear him, but he was definitely there.

So, what to do next? Staying right where he was appealed to him for the time being, but that was ultimately self-defeating. Silhouetted as he was against the white fiberglass, he was nowhere near as invisible as he needed to be. Sooner or later, Denim would see him, and then Harvey would have no choice but to become a victim.

Harvey needed to get to the street. He needed witnesses-a crowd that would make it impossible for Denim to hurt him. Down here on the water, isolation worked to the attacker’s benefit. Up there, the tables turned.

His mind conjured a memory of the long staircase that led to the street. Moving with excruciating care to remain silent, he pressed his hands against the hull to guide himself through the water toward the aft end of the boat-he figured it to be a twenty-eight footer, a speedboat-away from the dock, but toward the swim deck that he believed to be standard equipment on boats this size. Hey, if you can’t ski or go tubing off the back of a speedboat, what was the point of owning one?

He wasn’t disappointed. Actually, it was more of a shelf than a deck, slats of imitation wood hovering no more than eight inches from the surface. He faced the trailing edge of the deck, wrapped his fist around the closest plank, and did his first chin-up in a very long while.

As he strained to raise high enough to hook the deck with his leg, he realized for the first time that the night tasted like oil. A half-roll more and he was completely out of the water, watching the sky.

He didn’t move. He couldn’t afford to move. As long as his pulse was the only discernable sound, he’d be vulnerable to anything. He counted to sixty, and then he counted to sixty again. After two minutes, he felt in control again. At least a little.

Measuring every motion, Harvey gently rolled from his back to his stomach and pushed up to his haunches, where he froze again to reassess. Except for the slapping of the moored boats and the occasional sound of laughter from Jimmy’s up the street, all seemed silent. All seemed normal.

The way things always seemed to victims in the moments before an ambush.

Where had Denim gone? Harvey had expected to find him two slips over, peering over the side into the water, waiting for him to rise and give himself away, but now he realized that it wouldn’t make sense. Whole minutes had passed since Harvey’s headlong dive. The smart move for Denim would be to pull back to a place that allowed the best recon and allowed him to set up the ambush that Harvey had been dreading. But where?