Heron's Cove

A cabin cruiser was tied to a private dock in the dark, quiet Intracoastal water. Colin had the feeling the boat was in his immediate future. He was already sore from a few warning blows back at the marina where he had tried to persuade his new friends to let him be the one to take them to the weapons they wanted, but they weren’t doing this his way. They were doing it their way.

Horner and the two Russians were armed. Colin wasn’t.

“Watch this guy,” Yuri, the older of the two Russians, said. He had short, thinning gray hair and a scar under his left eye, his English excellent but heavily accented. “He’s like cat. He has nine lives. Maybe more. First he’s alive, then he’s dead. Now he’s alive again.”

The younger Russian, Boris, who was especially eager to kill Colin now, stood at the edge of the pool, the water turquoise in the light from the house. Boris was good-looking, with wavy brown hair, pale brown eyes and no visible scars. Colin didn’t know their last names and doubted their first names were Yuri and Boris. The American, however, really was Pete Horner, a private pilot in his mid-forties who had flown one of Vladimir Bulgov’s arms-smuggling cargo planes.

A good thing for Colin, Horner was the leader of the armed trio and still held out hope that their FBI agent could help them. “We give him this one chance to deliver,” Horner said. “If he does, he gets to live. That’s the deal.”

That clearly wasn’t the deal but Colin wasn’t offended at being lied to by a sandy-haired, blue-eyed, amoral thug who wanted to procure illegal weapons and then sell them to anyone who would give him his price—drug cartels, warlords, guerrilla groups, terrorist cells, paramilitary organizations, mass murderers. Horner didn’t care provided he got paid, and he would get paid more selling weapons—picking up the pieces of Vladimir Bulgov’s network—than he ever had flying planes.

The house behind them was an expensive furnished rental walled off from its upscale neighborhood of currently absent snowbirds. Horner lived above his means, and the lure of easy money was obviously too much for him to resist.

“I’ll take you to the arms,” Colin said. “I stashed them myself.”

“When?” Horner asked.

“I told you. Two days after Bulgov’s arrest in June. My buyer got cold feet and bolted. I had to disappear for a while and let the dust settle.”

Yuri narrowed his gaze on Colin. “Does FBI think you are dead?”

Colin shook his head. “I couldn’t fake my death with them. I’m an undercover agent. Turning up dead would have drawn too much attention to me. You boys might keep that in mind. The FBI thinks I’m on their side. If you kill me, they won’t rest until they catch you.”

Boris smirked. “Or FBI thanks us for killing a traitor.”

“The weapons he promises are a fiction,” Yuri said.

“They’re not a fiction,” Horner said. “He bought them with FBI money for a fake buyer but he was running his own game. He had his own buyer waiting in the wings. A real buyer.”

“I like how you talk about me as if I’m not standing here,” Colin said. “We’ve been through this. I put the weapons in a safe place and told the FBI that Bulgov had them. Then I let everyone in Bulgov’s world think I was dead and bided my time until I could find another buyer. That would be you three budding arms merchants.”

The younger Russian looked disdainful. “He double-crossed the FBI.”

Honor among thugs, Colin thought. “I don’t want a career doing this,” he said. “I want to unload my stash and disappear. I’ll take you to enough weapons to prove I’m legitimate. Then we do business. My price is a third of what your buyer is willing to pay. You’ll make a tidy profit. It’s a risk worth taking.”

Horner gave him a cool look. “I didn’t say we had a buyer.”

Colin didn’t argue but he knew they had a buyer.

Yuri jumped into the aft deck of the boat. “I still say we kill him now. We can find other weapons.”

“We don’t have time,” Horner said.

Colin rubbed a bruise on his forearm where he had blocked Boris’s first hit. “Your buyer’s impatient.”

“Everyone is impatient,” Boris said with a short, disgusted laugh.

Horner shrugged. “You and Yuri have a point but your way, we know we get nothing. My way, we have a chance.”

From the boat, Yuri pointed a thick finger at Colin. “And if our deep-cover agent here leads us straight to the FBI instead of to weapons? What chance do we have then?”

Horner didn’t answer. He motioned with his gun for Colin to climb into the boat. “Let’s go.”

As Colin got in the boat, pretending to be in more pain than he was, he noticed the light from the patio catch Horner’s face, and he knew. The Russians had finally persuaded him that the risk of walking into an FBI trap was too great. The promise of fast, easy weapons was a mirage. They would have to find another source.

Kill the FBI agent now. Move on.

Only Horner wouldn’t kill Colin here by his pool. He would get out to the ocean first, then kill him and throw his body overboard.

Colin had expected that resurfacing as his undercover alter ego would be tricky, suspicious, but sometimes it just wasn’t any fun to be right.

Faking a limp, he sat in a corner of the aft deck. Horner and his two Russian thugs had no respect for a turncoat FBI agent; even one they had hoped would lead them to an easy cache of orphaned illicit arms and their start as arms merchants. They knew Colin was an undercover federal agent because he had told them so, just before they shoved him into the back of Horner’s Mercedes and drove to Horner’s rented Fort Lauderdale house. Colin had offered them a reasonable explanation for what he had been up to the past few months and what he wanted now, and he had set conditions for his continued cooperation.

He hadn’t bought himself as much time as he’d hoped but he wasn’t dead yet, either.

Yuri and Boris went inside, up to the helm to pilot the boat.

Colin breathed in the thick, stifling air. He didn’t like hot weather, but he was a former Maine lobsterman and Maine state marine patrol officer and knew his way around boats and the water.

It was something his captors didn’t know about him.

The boat cruised up the narrow canal toward the main Intracoastal Waterway. Horner was watching a party aboard a luxury yacht, lit up against the black night. Boris and Yuri were navigating the turn out of the canal into the main Intracoastal.

Without a second thought, Colin eased himself over the side and dropped into the dark water.

He didn’t make a sound.

The water was warm, certainly by Maine standards, but he figured it had snakes. Maybe an alligator. It’d be a hell of a thing to escape armed thugs only to be bitten by a poisonous snake or eaten by an alligator.

He liked Florida well enough but really wasn’t one for the subtropics.

He swam back to the rented house and climbed up onto the dock, then ducked onto the patio, the pool still glistening in the light through the French doors. Once Horner and his Russian friends realized he was gone, they would come straight back and kill him on the spot. No waiting this time.

Colin planned to be gone by then.

Then he would find them, and he would find their buyer.

“Scary bastards,” he said under his breath.

The warm canal water dripped off him. His head pounded. His bruises ached. Dehydration blurred his vision.

He wanted to be back on the rocky coast of Maine.

Back with Emma.

He noticed a movement by the far corner of the pool.

He saw two black-clad figures by some tropical shrub.

Not the bad guys. Not this time. Colin grinned, and he felt the tension ease out of him.

The cavalry was here.

* * *

Two hours later, Matt Yankowski was frowning at a large painting of black, red and white splotches on a stark white wall of the rented house. He had on a medium gray suit that looked crisp despite the South Florida heat. Colin watched the senior FBI agent from his position on a soft, white leather couch. He had changed into fresh clothes from his pack, still in the back of Horner’s Mercedes. The tactical team had almost finished going through the car, the house, the three-car garage, the yard and patio.

So far, they hadn’t found the name of Pete Horner’s buyer or a little note saying where he, Boris and Yuri would be if the FBI swarmed the house.

Yank moved to another painting, almost identical to the first one. “I don’t like them,” he said. “Emma knows art. Do you think she’d like them?”

Colin hid his impatience. “I don’t know, Yank. I’m not thinking about art right now.”

“If I ever buy a house down here, I’d want flamingos on the walls. Not splotches. Looks like somebody got shot.” Yank turned and took in the large, airy room. “This place is sterile. More like a hotel than a home. How long were you here?”

“Minutes. I was staying at a fleabag hotel a few blocks off the beach. Horner, Boris and Yuri met me at a marina where I had a boat rented. The plan was for me to take them to weapons. Instead they tossed me in the Mercedes at gunpoint and drove here. We parked, walked through the house out to the pool, got in the boat and left. I waited until they were distracted and went overboard. For all I know, they still don’t miss me.”

“Unlikely.”

Colin agreed. “Any sign of them?”

“Not yet.”

“How did you find me?” Then he saw Yank’s grimace and knew. “Emma.”

“She got a tip and gave us this address. I alerted the team and flew straight down here.”

“Where is she?”

“Heron’s Cove. She went up there to bake pies and drink whiskey with Father Bracken and your brothers.”

“My family?”

“She’ll get them word you’re safe.”

“No more lying to them, Yank.”

He nodded. “They’ve guessed what you do, anyway. I should have known telling them you worked in D.C. wouldn’t fly.”

Colin looked out through the tall windows at the patio and the canal, quiet in the morning haze. He volunteered for his first undercover mission four years ago. Matt Yankowski had ventured up to the Maine coast to talk to him about the mission and being his contact agent. As of a month ago, Colin was technically the newest member of Yank’s Boston-based team and Yank was his contact agent on this mission.

“I had to go dark,” Colin said. “It still didn’t work. I don’t have Horner’s buyer. I don’t know who’s bankrolling him. He and Boris and Yuri are in the wind. This stinks, Yank.”

“You got a toehold with them. It’s a start.” Yank sat on another white leather couch opposite Colin. “Are you sure you don’t need a hospital?”

“I have three brothers. I can take a punch.”

The senior agent’s dark eyes were steady, serious. He had been a legendary field agent, but he had never strayed too far from the book. He had never gone deep undercover to chase a transnational threat like Vladimir Bulgov and his complex arms pipeline.

“You do like to go it alone,” Yank said heavily.

“I didn’t have much choice this time.”

“Well, you’re no good to us dead.”

“That’s why I decided to jump off that boat, Yank. So I could be an FBI asset.”

“You know what I meant.” Yank drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Your luck saved you this time.”

“Not luck. Skill.”

Yank didn’t crack a smile.

Colin worked a tight muscle in his jaw. He thought he would be sleepy by now, but he wasn’t. He was wide-awake, thinking about how Yank had found him. “What Russians does Emma know?”

“Between her and her family, I imagine she knows quite a few.”

“Vladimir Bulgov’s Russian. Horner flew planes for him. His pals Boris and Yuri are Russian.”

“Emma’s contacts are one of the reasons she’s on my team,” Yank said, his tone cool, measured.

Colin leaned forward. “What else?”

“Nothing else. She’s every bit the asset I thought she’d be when I recruited her. That hasn’t changed in the past month.”

Colin watched a small boat cruise past the house on the picturesque waterway. “Any reason to think whoever tipped off Emma knows my real name?”

“She wouldn’t do anything to compromise you.”

“Not intentionally, maybe.”

“You’ve had a rough few weeks. You need a break. We’ll find these guys.”

“Their buyer? Whoever it is won’t like a delay. Horner knows that.”

Yank didn’t look as confident but nodded. “We’ll find Horner and the Russians and stop them from procuring more weapons. We’ll find their buyer. You laid the groundwork.”

“I knew a blown cover was a possibility going into this thing, turning up alive after three months. I told Horner myself that I was a federal agent.” Colin touched a bruise on his wrist. “But having one of your people get a tip about me isn’t sitting well.”

“One of my people?” Yank raised an eyebrow. “Emma got the tip about this place while she was sleeping in your bed in Maine.”

Colin pictured her honey hair, her green eyes, and sighed. “Hell, Yank.”

He draped an arm on the back of the couch and stretched out his long legs on the white-tile floor. “You two complicate my life.”

Colin didn’t argue. His relationship with Emma complicated his life, too. He had never expected to fall for a woman like Emma Sharpe, granddaughter of a renowned art detective, ex-nun and FBI art crimes expert, but he had. Thinking about her over the past few weeks had been both a comfort as well as a potentially dangerous distraction. Any contact with her—with his family, his real life, even Yank—had become too risky given the stakes and the scrutiny he was under.

“You’re nothing if not pragmatic, Yank,” Colin said. “It’s easier not to ask tough questions if Emma got this tip from a Sharpe source.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“You know who it is, don’t you?”

The dark eyes didn’t waver. “Informants are a tricky business. We have strict rules, but they include reasonable room to maneuver. Are you going back to Maine?”

“I always go back to Maine.” Colin drank some water from a bottle one of the agents had handed him. His lips were dry, burning from his salty swim in the canal. “Are you worried Emma got in over her head to find me?”

Yank got to his feet and stood by the French doors. “I don’t know yet. Maybe.”

“You’ve been known to hold back pertinent information,” Colin said. “For instance, you didn’t mention Emma had been a nun when you asked me to keep an eye on her in September. I had no idea that this pretty FBI agent used to be Sister Brigid of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.”

“She’d just found a nun from her former convent murdered. I needed your fresh eyes on the situation. I wasn’t thinking you two would end up…you know. Together.”

Maybe so, but Colin wondered how he would have responded to Emma if he had known from the start she had once been a postulant and novice. “What are you not telling me now?”

“Her brother’s in Dublin with her grandfather.”

“Is that relevant to the tip she got on my whereabouts?”

“I don’t know.”

Colin shifted on the couch, the Florida sun burning through the haze and hitting him in the eye, as if to remind him he hadn’t had any sleep. “You’ve never met Vladimir Bulgov, have you?”

“Not in person, no.”

“He’s this likable, chain-smoking former Soviet helicopter pilot who cobbled together a small fleet of aging planes and made a fortune hauling cargo. Most of the cargo was legitimate, but he also had access to stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons, from Kalashnikov rifles to shoulder-fired missiles. He tucked them in with the legitimate cargo. No problem finding buyers.”

Yank turned from the French doors. “Your point?”

“Along the way, Bulgov developed a taste for modern art. Emma found out and we finally had him in the U.S. and arrested him. That’s the only tie I can see between him and the Sharpes. Peter Horner and his two Russian friends aren’t interested in art.” Colin noticed that Yank was all but pacing now. “If you asked Emma for her source, would she tell you?”

“I’m not asking.”

“Because you want to trust her?”

“I do trust her. She’s analytical, intelligent. She’s not a black-and-white thinker. She sees the shades of gray in a situation.”

“She’s not like anyone else on your team.”

“That’s not a negative.”

Colin stood, ignoring a twinge of pain in his lower back. A bruise had blossomed on his forearm, and when he had changed clothes, he had noticed a nick on his right temple. “What’s your best guess, Yank? Did Emma put herself in danger to find me?”

“I don’t like to guess, but I get nervous when emotion enters into a decision. You operate on instinct and experience. You’re good at reading people. Emma…”

“Emma gives people a lot of rope, and she was worried about me.”

“Your whole family was worried.” Yank seemed to give himself a mental shake. “Emma can handle herself. Come on. We have a flight to catch.”

“Where are we going?”

“Washington. The Director wants to see you.”

Colin wasn’t surprised but had no desire to board a flight to Washington. “I’m not finished, Yank.”

“Don’t start second-guessing yourself. We have more than we had a month ago. If you hadn’t gone overboard when you did, you’d be dead now.”

“No kidding.” Colin grinned. “Why do you think I braved the snakes and gators?”

Yank sighed. “What was I thinking? You never second-guess yourself.”

They crossed the bright, elegant living room and went up three steps to a wide front door. “Is Lucy in Washington?” Colin asked.

“Paris. She’s shopping with her sister.”

“You didn’t want to go?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter because I wasn’t invited.” Yank opened the door with more force than was needed. “I don’t see me in Hermès, do you?”

Colin followed him out into the South Florida heat and humidity. “What happens when Lucy and her sister get back from Paris? Is Lucy moving up to Boston with you?”

Yank’s expression was unreadable. “I’m on a need-to-know basis, and I guess I don’t need to know.”

They walked over to a black sedan idling in the driveway. Colin glanced at the lush, professionally landscaped yard, vines curling over a tall fence, a stone fountain bubbling amid colorful flowers. Suddenly he couldn’t wait to be out of there. He would go to D.C. with Yank and talk to the Director of the FBI, but he wanted to be back in Maine. He wanted to enjoy a glass of whiskey with his brothers and Finian Bracken, and he wanted Emma.

Not in that order, he realized.

Emma was first.

3

EMMA BROUGHT HER red sable brush, saturated with cerulean-blue watercolor paint, to the dampened paper she had clipped to the easel on the back porch of the Sharpe house in Heron’s Cove. She pulled the brush across the paper, right to left, practicing a simple flat wash and, out of the corner of her eye, watching the woman down on the docks. She had looked up at the house several times. She was small, with long, straight dark hair, and she wore a pumpkin-colored barn jacket that, even at a distance, was obviously too big for her.

A Sharpe Fine Art Recovery client? A sightseer who had wandered down to the waterfront and now was trying to figure out how to get back out to the street with its attractive houses, shops and restaurants?

Emma noticed her cerulean-blue was leaking down the page into her burnt-sienna. Probably should have stuck to one color. Perfecting a flat wash wasn’t as easy as it looked. In the weeks since Colin had gone after his arms traffickers, she had started taking painting lessons with Sister Cecilia, a young novice with the Sisters of the Joyful Heart. She and Emma had become friends since their encounter with a crazed killer in September. The lessons at the sisters’ shop in the village were therapeutic for both of them, and always followed by a walk, tea or just a good chat. Sister Cecilia especially loved hearing the latest about Rock Point and the Donovans.

Yank had called an hour ago. He and Colin had arrived in Boston and were on their way to Maine. Yank would drop Colin off in Rock Point. Then he was on his own.

No handing over the phone to Colin to say hello. Not Yank’s style.

Colin, Emma knew, would want to know about her source. He would have figured out the tip about the Fort Lauderdale house had come from her, or Yank would have told him outright.

She stood back from her painting, her brush in hand. Not her best effort.

A lobster boat drifted from the open ocean through the channel into the tidal river. It was late on a still, cool autumn afternoon. Several pleasure boats had passed by, heading to the marina and adjacent yacht club, but there were fewer boats now, with the colder weather and the foliage past peak. In midsummer, Heron’s Cove would be bustling with boats and people.

Colin had been a lobsterman in his teens, before joining the Maine state marine patrol. Emma didn’t know why he had decided to become an FBI agent. Boredom? Ambition? A precipitating incident? An unsolved case?

How could she have fallen for a man about whom she ultimately knew so little?

She had showered and changed in Colin’s house that morning, putting on fresh jeans and a sweater she had brought up from Boston. She’d had little sleep, dozing in his bed. When she got word that he was safe, she called Mike Donovan, then Finian Bracken, and let them know all was well and Colin would return to Rock Point later today.

She had stopped at Hurley’s for coffee and a cider doughnut and took them with her to Heron’s Cove. A run on the beach, a visit to a local apple orchard, a stop at her brother Lucas’s house to check on his cats while he was away—it had been a long day. She had known she wouldn’t hear from Colin until he was fully debriefed and back home.

The woman in the pumpkin-colored jacket had circled up to the retaining wall and was squeezing past tall hydrangeas, their white blossoms turned burgundy with autumn, into the Sharpe yard.

Emma set her brush in a jar of water on a small dresser against the back wall of the covered porch and stood at the rail. “Hi, there,” she called down to the woman. “It’s a beautiful afternoon, isn’t it?”

“It is. And it’s a beautiful place.” The woman spoke with an accent that Emma couldn’t immediately place. “You’re Emma Sharpe, yes?”

“That’s right. What’s your name?”

“Tatiana,” she said, crossing the yard to the porch. “Tatiana Pavlova.”

Emma stiffened at the Russian name, what she now realized was a Russian accent with a British undercurrent, as if Tatiana Pavlova had learned English on the streets of London. “What can I do for you, Tatiana?”

She started up the porch steps. “You mind?”

“Just keep your hands where I can see them, okay?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. You’re an FBI agent. You must worry about villains.”

Villains? “Are you a Sharpe client?” Emma asked.

Tatiana joined her on the small porch of the gray-shingled house where Wendell Sharpe had started Sharpe Fine Art Recovery in a front room. “A friend was,” she said. “I’m a jewelry designer in London. One of my clients once hired your grandfather. But that’s not important. It’s not why I’m here. Your grandfather is retired now, yes?”

“He’s semi-retired.”

“Ah. I can see that. I want to work until I can no longer lift a pencil.” Tatiana tightened her oversize jacket around her slim frame. “It’s colder here than I expected but I’m used to the cold.”

Emma leaned back against the rail. Tatiana wore black leggings and black flats more suited to London than a walk on the docks of Heron’s Cove, but no makeup or jewelry. Her nails were blunt, unpolished. Stylishly unstylish, Emma thought. “You’re Russian?” she asked.

Tatiana nodded. “But I left Russia years ago.”

“Years? You must have been a child. You’re young—”

“Twenty-five. I was twenty when I left the country for good. It’s a long story.” Her dark eyes gleamed with emotion. “Are there any short Russian stories? Some of our fables and folktales, perhaps. Do you know the fable of the cat and the nightingale?”