Annie was the last diver in the water. She was sitting on the edge of the boat about to drop back when she was pulled into the water from behind.
•••
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
That had been the last thing the LC said to him before he hung up, and Dean hoped to hell he could keep his shit together. But sitting on the tarmac waiting for the flight to take off was like playing an agonizing game of trying not to lose his mind.
God, how much fucking longer were they going to be sitting here?
The police were being notified, but until Dean got there—until he saw her—he wasn’t going to be able to relax or “calm the fuck down” as the LC had so eloquently put it.
But this thing was a hell of a lot bigger than any of them had guessed.
Dean’s tip to Kate about OPF targeting large companies—largepubliccompanies—had paid off. It hadn’t been just about a failed ecoterrorist attack on the drillship. Jean Paul had murdered his two compatriots and gone after Annie not because of the environment or a protest. He’d gone after them because of money. OPF was a front for something much bigger than ecoterrorism—and a hell of a lot more profitable: shorting stock.
Basically, as the LC explained it, shorting stock was betting against the market with borrowed shares of stock. If the stock went up, you could lose your shirt, but if the stock went down, you could rake it in. It was more complicated than that, with things like margin and calls, but the basic idea was that you could win big when the stock went down and lose big if it went up.
Dean’s observation about the group targeting progressively bigger and bigger companies had led Kate to look deeper into the companies’ finances and stock. She’d found a pattern in the short interest chart. Immediately before OPF hit a target company, she’d noticed a spike in the percentage of shares of that company being shorted. It was as if someone knew what was going to happen.
Someone obviously did. OPF. The investors behind OPF shorted the stock of the company they were planning to sabotage, and then afterward when the stock price dipped, they covered the stock they’d borrowed at a higher price, pocketing the profit.
They made out like bandits—literally—every time they bombed one of these publicly traded companies. Kate estimated they’d made millions.
It was fucking brilliant—assuming the blast went off and the stock dipped.
The problem was that this time the ship hadn’t been destroyed or damaged, and the stock hadn’t dipped. It had gone up. And when the margin calls went out, those investors were going to lose a lot of money. They were the types of investors—probably an organized crime syndicate—that didn’t like losing money and would be looking for someone to pay.
Someone like Jean Paul. That had been the second alarming piece of information. It was beginning to look as though Jean Paul’s death had not been an accident, and that he might have been killed intentionally. A witness had come forward and said that the tourist’s car had sped up as she made the turn, “almost as if she’d been targeting the guy.” And not only had the woman disappeared; she’d been using a name and a passport that appeared to be fake.
If Jean Paul had been killed, it was because he’d cost lots of bad people lots of money. And if they knew about Annie, would they blame her and go after her, too? She was no one. There was no reason to think...
But Dean couldn’t take the chance. Nor could he escape the knowledge that if something happened to her, it would be his fault. By sending her back to Lewis, he might have put her right in the bastards’ hands.
Fuck.
Finally the captain’s voice sounded over the intercom. They were ready for takeoff. Dean sat back in his seat and prayed as he’d never prayed that his gut was wrong.
•••
It was the longest forty-five-minute flight of Dean’s life. He’d turned his phone on as soon as they hit the ground, and the text waiting for him made his stomach sink like a ball of lead.
Kate had connected the dots. The two guys who’d attacked them in Oban had washed up and been identified. They were part of a crime syndicate in Germany and had been on Interpol’s and the CIA’s watch list for a long time. Unfortunately no one had thought to share the information with officials in Scotland, and they’d gone through immigration without a problem. They had been photographed after clearing customs, however, with a woman. The text from the LC included a grainy airport picture of a woman of indeterminate age with long blond hair.
Police in Inverness, where Jean Paul had been taken and killed, confirmed her identity as their missing tourist. Not surprisingly, the woman Interpol knew as Greta Johansson, a Swedish national, was part of the same syndicate. With the Swiss Meier and German Richer, a Belgian, and two Frenchmen, it was a regular United Nations.
Dean couldn’t get off that plane fast enough. Fifteen minutes later he was in a cab and found out the rest in a quick phone call to the LC. Jean Paul’s cell phone number didn’t match the one that Dean had pulled from the hit man’s phone, which meant that not only was his picture still out there, but the two guys hadn’t been reporting to Jean Paul as they’d thought. It probably belonged to the woman, but she still hadn’t been located.
Neither had Annie. The police had gone to the protester camp, but apparently they hadn’t made a lot of friends after the attempted bombing and no one was talking.
Dean had the cab make a beeline for the camp, and five minutes later he was running down the dock.
It might have taken longer if he hadn’t recognized one of the guys from the table the first night he’d seen Annie and her so-called friends in the pub. Sergio had tried to slink away, but Dean intercepted him. The hand around his throatprobably convinced him that Dean wasn’t in any mood to fuck around, and Sergio told him what he wanted to know faster than he could piss himself—which he did.
Annie had gone to Harris to dive an old wreck “about an hour ago.” Dean knew it. TheStassawas the first dive he’d done when he signed on with Old MacDonald. But Dean knew his worst fears had been realized when he showed Sergio the picture of the woman and he confirmed that she was part of the group.
Figuring it could cut a good half hour off the travel time to go by boat, Dean looked around the harbor for something fast. He wished to hell he had access to one of the Special Boat Teams’ CCM Mk1 stealth speedboats, but there was a company that did speedboat rides around the harbor, and one of those would have to do. He hoped to hell it would be enough.
The kid manning the booth recognized him. “Hey, people have been looking for you.”
