Balsam Sirens Read online

  And just like that, the line was dead.

  Twenty-nine

  I looked outside. The door to Number 6 Ash Grove stood open.

  I was shaking. What had I done? Where … Andrea? I had lost … Oh, Andrea!

  Leaned against the wall. Wracked by a huge sob. Gulped. Wrestled with image after horrific image.

  This was all my fault.

  But then the familiar inner voice came back to me.

  Stop this bullshit and do something! You haven’t much time! Andrea would not be impressed at all!

  Despite my shaking hands, I managed to call Mike.

  “Mark, how’s –”

  “Mike. They’ve got Andrea. Dickson’s goons are on their way to get me. They’re going to force me to help them find whatever they’re looking for. I’ll have to go with them. I need to try to find a way out of this. I’m not – okay, they’re here, Mike. Three of them.”

  I cut Mike off, pocketed my cellphone, and waited.

  They didn’t knock, just walked straight in. They knew exactly where I would be, had been ahead of me the whole way. Seeing them there made everything ten times worse. Their presence showed me the physical reality of the situation, that a nightmare too black ever to imagine was not a nightmare at all. It was the real thing. It meant that I might never see Andrea alive again. For the first time in my life, I knew deep, deep despair.

  The largest one of them, blond hair, about forty, blank expression, looked strong, came up to me. The other two stood behind and on either side of him.

  “Cellphone”, he said.

  I handed over my phone.

  “The boss called you, you know why we’re here, so let’s go.” They bound my hands behind me using a short length of rope, and then led me out to a car parked in front of Number 2. The leader stuffed my cellphone into his back pocket, then climbed in behind the wheel. I was bundled quickly into the rear seat, one of the other two on either side of me.

  We drove out of Largs, turned south on Highway 35, then turned right onto a dirt track that I knew led to about eight down-at-heel cottages. We turned off the dirt track and parked in a thick grove of cedars. Behind the cedars, next to the shore of the lake, stood a dispiriting old frame cottage, robin’s-egg-blue paint peeling off in large flaps, a place where people came to get drunk and try to convince themselves they were having a great summer break.

  “Out”, the leader said to me, as the two on either side opened their doors and stood facing me.

  They led me down to the shore, where a largish boat having a single outboard motor was tied to a decrepit dock. The leader pulled out a gun.

  “I’m going to untie you, because you’re going to direct us to where we need to be. You know better than to do anything stupid.”

  He untied my hands and they all stepped slightly away from me.

  “To the boat”, the leader said.

  I looked around at them.

  “Now!” he said, with more emphasis but no loud-voiced threat.

  We walked down toward the boat; one of the two lackeys climbed in first, moved to the bow of the boat, and drew out his pistol to make it clear that they had all the angles covered. They placed me in the middle of the boat with the third man, and the leader climbed into the driver’s seat at the rear. The third man next to me was the only one of them wearing shorts, and I noticed that he was carrying a small satchel in his right hand. So the two pistol bearers were at either end of the boat. The situation looked hopeless.

  My despair surged again, but the inner voice came back:

  Clear your mind! Don’t think of anything! Keep your eyes and ears open!

  The leader had some trouble starting the engine, and it was obvious that he was not at home in boats. After a few moments of cursing under his breath, he got the motor running, untied the rear mooring rope, and told the man in the front to do the same. These two knew little or nothing about power craft.

  Pushing the boat off from the dock took an inordinately long time, but eventually we were moving slowly out into the lake.

  “Where am I going?” the leader said to me.

  “You need to turn to star – turn right, and head for the other side, the Indian Point shore, over there”, and I pointed. “You need to –”

  The leader had held up his hand, cutting off my instructions, and pulled out his phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, we have him.”

  “We’re in the boat now, on the way.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He put his cellphone away, then gestured for me to carry on where I had left off.

  “Head for the other side”, and I pointed again. “You need to be in a position about a hundred metres from that shore”, and I gestured toward Indian Point, “but lined up with the church steeple in Largs on the mainland”, and here I pointed toward the opposite shore.

  We chugged along at a speed that I found surprisingly slow until I realized that the leader was reluctant to open the throttle.

  He’s afraid of boats, afraid of the water, the voice said to me. But this was hardly any comfort.

  It took almost twenty minutes for us to reach the area I had indicated and another five minutes to line up the boat and the church steeple. But in the end, I had to say it.

  “This is it”, I told the leader.

  He looked vaguely over the side.

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s down there”, I said. “Somewhere.”

  “What do you mean, ‘somewhere’?”

  “I mean somewhere. I don’t know exactly where it is. If I did, I would have raised it already.”

  “Oh, yeah? How do I know you haven’t already raised it?”

  I looked at the leader steadily.

  “If I had already raised it, it would be news. Everybody would know about it. It would no longer be available and we wouldn’t be here today.”

  The leader looked back at me for a second.

  “The boss said you could be something of a smartass. Doesn’t matter. You don’t hold any cards at all.”

  While this discussion was going on, the man in the middle, the one seated next to me, had begun taking off his shirt. He then pulled a diving mask and a pair of fins out of his satchel.

  The leader looked at me, then inclined his head toward the diver.

  “Tell him where to look.”

  “Pretty much right below us is a reef, a rock formation, that extends up to within six or seven feet of the surface. You’ll need to look all around that reef. It could be anywhere within about twenty-five feet of the reef. The lake bed itself is about twenty feet down, but it’s uneven.”

  “What’s he supposed to look for?”

  “Well, I think that it will be gold bars or gold coins. I’m not sure. But it likely won’t be just lying around on the bottom. I don’t know what they were in when the boat went down. It could have been in one or several leather cases. If so, the leather will have rotted away by now. And whatever they were in, it will all be covered by a layer of silt now. And it could be buried under part of the physical structure of the boat. So it won’t necessarily be easy to spot. The boat went down more than a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “What else might it have been in?” This was the diver speaking.

  “Maybe a locked wooden box.”

  “How much will it weigh?”

  “Don’t know, but it could be a hundred pounds or more.”

  The diver looked at the leader.

  “How do you know that somebody hasn’t already found it?” the leader asked.

  “I don’t.”

  The diver was now standing, and the leader stood as well. The leader scowled at my last answer, then looked at the diver.

  “Better get on with it then”, he said to the diver. “Sounds like we might be here for a while.”

  The diver nodded. But I was no longer looking at him. I was listening.

  Within a second I recognized the sound and knew that it was what I had
sensed initially. The diver and the leader had heard it now as well. It was a rising tone and it was becoming louder quite quickly.

  The diver and the leader both looked around to see whether another boat was approaching. I remained seated, but I could feel my muscles tensing.

  It roared out from behind a large and dense stand of trees that grew right out to the water on the shore of Indian Point, about a hundred and fifty metres to the north of us. The two men standing turned when it was almost too late, and the plane closed on us extraordinarily quickly, at a height of not more than twenty feet. Less than a second later, the floats passed over us, little more than ten feet up. I could hear the whoosh of the air flowing past them. I also had a better idea of what was happening because through the plane’s windows I could see Kate.

  And Mike.

  The diver lost his balance and fell overboard. The boat rocked sharply, and the leader struggled to keep his balance while reaching for his cellphone and following the plane with his gaze. The two men in the boat began firing at the plane, but Kate was already more than two hundred metres distant and banking hard for cover behind Indian Point. At that distance, and for a target like an airplane, handguns were essentially useless. The sound of their shots echoed around the lake, giving me some sense of just how desperate they were to complete their boss’ orders, apparently desperate to the extent that they had stopped thinking.

  The leader now had his cellphone out of his pocket. I stood suddenly and struck his hand causing the cellphone to fly out over the water, and I did what I hoped was a James Bond half-gainer over the back of the boat, such that the man in the front of the boat would have trouble shooting at me without hitting the leader.

  In the water, I could see the legs and torso of the diver, who had pulled himself up so that his head was over the gunwale of the boat, likely completely confused and wondering what he should be doing next. I headed underwater for the bow, grabbed the rope to which their anchor weight was tied, swam back and wrapped it tightly a couple of times around the propeller. I then began swimming underwater toward the north, the direction the bow of their boat was pointing. I hoped that they would expect me to swim directly toward the shore, and that they would also be looking south in the direction the plane had flown. I would need to come up for air in less than a minute, I would still be easily within pistol range at that point, and I wanted them to be looking anywhere but the area where I would have to surface. I surfaced as gently as I could, mouth only, took a couple of breaths and then dropped below the surface, swimming once more to the north.

  At about six feet below the surface I swam as fast as I could, but my mind was in utter turmoil. I now had a little bit of something that just a couple of minutes ago I had been absolutely without.

  Hope.

  The urge to breathe was becoming strong again, but I ignored it and ploughed on. My legs were pumping hard and my arms were carving out long powerful strokes, full-length strokes, using up oxygen at maximum rate.

  My lungs were now on fire. I let out some air to try to placate the demon that was ordering me: Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!

  I rose to the surface again, as gently as I could, only my lips breaking through, and breathed in and out, great heaving breaths, seeming to me that I was making enough noise to wake the dead.

  “There he is!” the leader cried. He tried to start the engine, it coughed once, gave a strangled sound of grinding metal, and stopped. There were three more ineffectual clicks as he tried again to start it.

  I had raised my head as far out of the water as I dared, trying to assess my situation. It was certainly not good.

  But then I heard something else. A soft fluttering sound. And I knew what it was.

  Kate’s plane appeared once more, at treetop level. She had throttled way back, had glided almost silently across Indian Point, and then was upon the boat and its crew once more.

  As soon as the plane cleared the trees, less than a hundred metres from the boat, Kate opened the throttle fully. She would cover the distance between them in not much more than two seconds. The little plane roared angrily, was attacking in a shallow, full power dive, and it must have seemed to the men in the boat that it had their number on it. The leader, now phoneless, and probably in the grip of his fear of water, tried nevertheless to focus. I saw his gun hand come up.

  Oh, shit! I thought.

  But suddenly the plane reared up, the wings practically vertical, the wing on the passenger side of the plane looking as though it was going to sweep both men off the boat. I saw the two of them cringe, now really afraid. In fascination, I watched as the door on the downward side of the plane opened wide.

  Something came out of the plane. Or rather, a number of somethings.

  Water fountained up on both sides of the boat as whatever it was that came out of the plane entered the lake at speed. There was a very loud clank as something struck the motor, and a series of rapid staccato thuds as the boat itself was hit numerous times.

  Rocks!

  Mike had dropped fifteen or twenty fist-sized rocks from the plane!

  Kate brought the plane back level, gained some height, then made a tight turn to port. Within a minute, she brought the plane down onto the surface of the lake and cruised up close to me. I swam to the plane, climbed up onto the starboard float, gripped one of the struts, and waved to Kate to taxi to the now-disabled boat. The fumes of aviation spirit flowing back at me from the engine’s exhaust smelled like nectar. The loud chugging of the engine itself was sweeter than any music I could imagine.

  As we approached, we could see that the diver had climbed over the bow back into the boat and was standing in surrender, arms raised. The other two were lying motionless in the bottom of the boat, something Mike confirmed later that he had seen as they had banked away from their bombing run.

  The boat’s motor had a very large dent, two pieces of metal were hanging from it, and it appeared no longer functional. There was a hole through the boat just behind the middle seat, and the boat itself was half full of water, stern down, but it seemed that the floatation chambers would prevent it from sinking entirely.

  Kate brought the plane alongside the boat, and I made the large step across into the boat. Nobody could hear anything above the engine noise, and not knowing what else to do, I stepped up to the diver, smiled, nodded, then struck him in the face as hard as I could.

  Now there were three men lying motionless in the boat.

  Kate kept the engine at idle while I steadied the boat and plane together and Mike opened his door and stepped down onto the float.

  “Nice shootin’, Tex”, I shouted over the engine noise.

  Without giving him a chance to reply, I shouted to Kate, asking if she could take me over to Largs. She nodded, and I climbed into the seat Mike had vacated. Once at Largs, I would collect Wilder’s boat, come back, and retrieve our catch: three flounders.

  Before closing the door, I leaned out toward Mike.

  “If any of our guests awaken from their naps, be nice to them, give them a cup of tea or something, there’s a good lad.”

  Mike gave me a twisted sneer that would have made a Stasi border guard lose all sphincter control. I closed the door, Kate revved up the engine and we were off.

  Fifteen minutes later, Mike and I had our three goons in a functioning boat headed back to Largs.

  By the time we reached Largs, Kate had the plane tied down and helped us unload our cargo. They were all awake now. The diver had a huge bruise on his left cheek and likely a couple of loose or broken teeth. The leader had been struck in the chest by one of the rocks and by his shallow breathing it looked as though he had cracked or broken ribs. There were no flecks of blood at his lips, so I was prepared to assume that neither of his lungs had been punctured. His chest probably hurt like hell.

  Tough!

  The remaining man had no visible injuries, but he was having trouble walking, and it looked as though one of the stones had struck him in the leg.

&n
bsp; We sat them all in chairs in the garden. Only their hands were bound but none of them was going anywhere.

  The pressure to focus on my own immediate survival was off now, but that left a far more oppressive problem. I began slipping into a darker, deeper pit, and anguish filled my being.

  Andrea.

  Where was Andrea?

  How could I possibly get her back now?

  I moved toward the back door leading to the kitchen, but before I had reached the steps I found that my hands were shaking almost uncontrollably.

  “Mark?” Kate asked, and when I failed to answer she followed me.

  “Are you alright?”

  I carried on into the kitchen and Kate came in right behind me. By the time I was inside and the door had closed, I was whimpering, then blubbering. Tears flowed down my cheeks.

  Kate turned me toward her.

  “Oh Kate! I’ve fucked everything up! Andrea … I let them … Andrea’s everything! And I’ve fucked it all up!”

  Kate directed a hard stare at me and shook me violently by the shoulders.

  “Stop this Mark! We need to find Andrea! Where is she?”

  “I don’t … I don’t know. Dickson … Dickson has her”, and I blubbered some more.

  Kate slapped me hard across the face.

  “Stop this Mark! Where will Dickson take her?”

  To my utter astonishment, my head had cleared.

  “I … he won’t give up easily”, I said. It felt like somebody else was talking. “He’ll probably come here. He expects I won’t run away. The prize he wants is here.”

  Mike was now standing in the doorway, looking in at us but glancing back at our catch every second or so. “His connection to the big blond bastard is lost now”, Mike said. “Neither of them can contact each other.”

  “No consolation”, I said, wiping my cheeks dry. “If he can’t get hold of his guy, he’ll know something’s wrong. But I think he would make one last attempt to get what he wants. Psychopaths have trouble admitting defeat. As a last resort, he would torture Andrea in front of me.”