Pirate: A Thriller Read online

  Looking perhaps at his own thick black hair and sharp blue eyes, she interrupted his reverie. “You are Irish, no?”

  “No. I’m a half-breed. English father, American mother.”

  She seemed to consider that briefly, but gave no reply. She did, however, adjust her black pleated skirt, giving him a glimpse of lush pale thigh and filigreed stocking tops held up by black suspenders. It was a fashion statement he’d always found profoundly appealing.

  “Staying at the Carlton, are you?” Hawke asked. He wasn’t all that accustomed to flirting (if that’s what this was), and he felt awkward. If his poor attempts at conversation with this beautiful woman sounded like so much cheap tin to his own ear, he could only imagine what they must sound to hers.

  Anyway, she managed a half smile.

  “No. I went ashore to shop. I am a guest aboard that yacht out there. We came for the film festival and stayed. The owner likes it here.”

  “Valkyrie, I believe, isn’t she?” Hawke said, gazing across the water at the astounding white sloop. He knew exactly which boat she was, but it seemed far more sporting to feign ignorance. The German yacht was famous. Just shy of three hundred feet length overall, with a forty-foot beam, she was the largest sloop-rigged private sailing yacht on earth. Built in strict secrecy in Hamburg by von Draxis’s German yard, she had three fully automated carbon fiber masts and carried twenty-six thousand square feet of sail. Hawke had heard rumors she could do well over twenty knots per hour under sail.

  “Yes, that’s Valkyrie. She belongs to our host, Baron von Draxis. How do you know him?”

  “I don’t. Someone slipped his invitation under my door.”

  “Ah. Schatzi is an old and dear friend. You seem to like his yacht. Perhaps I can arrange a tour.”

  “Tour? I’d rather sail her. I’d give my eyeteeth to sail that boat, to be honest,” Hawke said, his pale sun-bleached eyes devouring the boat from stem to stern.

  “You are a sailor, Monsieur?”

  “An old navy man,” Hawke said, hating the sound of that, and he looked quickly away. An “old navy man”? He wasn’t that old. And he wasn’t strictly a naval officer any longer. He was more of a contract advisor. How ridiculous and fatuous he sounded. Good God. He was instantly ashamed of his transparent and hollow efforts to charm this woman. The jolt of guilt deep in his gut had shocked him, as if he’d swallowed a live battery.

  For two years, Hawke had been trying to suppress a brutal memory of overwhelming loss: the murder of his beloved bride, Victoria, on the church steps within minutes of their wedding. The event itself, the graven images of blood and lace, had been bulwarked against. But the vicious specter of pain remained, lurking on the outer edge of his consciousness, lingering, grinning hungrily, breathing hotly. He had tried to run away and failed.

  He had come to call this specter his “black dog.”

  Six months after his wife’s murder, there was a brief and ill-considered rekindling of an old relationship. It was unforgivable, but it happened. The woman involved, an old and dear friend named Consuelo de los Reyes, no longer spoke to him. Would not return his calls nor acknowledge his flowers. He didn’t blame her. After a period, he gave up and retreated within his own walls.

  Fate, and its accomplice tragedy, had finally won the lifelong battle. At barely seven years of age, Alex Hawke had witnessed the horrific murder of his beloved parents on a yacht in the Caribbean. Pirates had come aboard in the middle of the night. His mother had been raped before her throat was slashed. His father was crucified upon the very door the boy was hiding behind. He had seen it all. Behind his door, he kept silent to stay alive.

  He kept silent about it now, for much the same reason.

  For nearly two years, Hawke had simply disappeared from his own life. He locked up his house in Gloucestershire and fled. He ran to escape his feelings, to repair his heart. As far as he could run. Tibet. Malaya. Burma. A tea-and-vegan lifestyle, no liquor at all. The daily yin-yang discipline of tai chi. Mountain climbing. Meditation. Fasting. A Zen retreat on the beautiful Thai island of Koh Samui. It didn’t work, none of it.

  Alone in his one-room hut by the Gulf of Martaban, when the night was dead still, he could hear the black dog. Could see him crouching there, just inside the green edge of the leafy jungle, panting, all pink gums and bared fangs. Ready to pounce. He ran home. Opened the house in Belgrave Square. Once back in London, he’d tried liquor. Mr. Gosling’s rum. Barrels of the high-proof stuff. That hadn’t worked, either, and he’d felt like hell every morning in the bargain.

  His closest friend, Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve, had told him perhaps this period of mourning was growing unhealthily long. Perhaps it was time to begin to see other women.

  Looking at Jet in his bed now, he thought that, yes, perhaps the world-famous detective had solved yet another of life’s mysteries.

  It was time. Hawke was the kind of man who needed a woman. Perhaps this one was the one he needed.

  Chapter Four

  Cap d’Antibes

  AT ONE OF THE PINK LUNCHEON TABLES SCATTERED RANDOMLY beneath a copse of whistling pine trees, Hawke gave chase. Jet was a girl, he now thought, who wanted to be caught. His grandfather, a font of enduring wisdom, had said to Alex at a tender age, “Never chase a girl who doesn’t want to be caught.” The nine-year-old boy hadn’t really understood the lesson then. He did now.

  The sun had returned to the sky, as pale as a waning moon. He was glad he’d come. He tried to be witty and charming throughout the bouillabaisse and poisson du jour and sorbet au citron.

  It wasn’t easy. He felt like a two-bit stage actor who kept flubbing his lines. Out of practice, he thought.

  After the luncheon, the two of them had strolled up a freshly washed gravel path bordered on either side by manicured gardens of alyssum, salvia, and lobelia. The wide path rose up a gentle slope and led to an exquisitely beautiful hotel sitting atop the breast of a leafy hill. The Hotel du Cap definitely lived up to its billing.

  It had been a pleasant enough afternoon. The girl was stunning. Hawke had eaten a dozen portugaises and washed the delicious oysters down with cold white wine. The black dog was nowhere to be seen.

  Popping an oyster into his mouth, he had said to Jet, “You know who’s the bravest man who ever lived?”

  “Let me guess. You.”

  “No. The first man ever to eat an oyster.”

  And, somehow, there had been more oysters and then more champagne on the return voyage to the Carlton pier and then at dinner and in Le Petite Bar downstairs and somehow the beautiful Jet had ended up here in his bed.

  “Le vent,” she said again now in the darkness of the Carlton bedroom.

  “What about it?” Hawke said, stroking back a lock of her hair, black as a crow’s wing and cut on the diagonal across the sharp planes of her cheeks.

  “C’est mal, this wind.”

  “Winds have a habit of blowing themselves out sooner or later,” Hawke said. “Like men, I suppose.”

  “Where do you live?” she asked him.

  “Oh, London and thereabouts. How about you?”

  “I have a flat in Paris. The Avenue Foch.”

  “Very posh.”

  “This is not your suite, Mr. Hawke,” Jet said, athletically disengaging her body from his, rolling over, and firing a cigarette, sucking hungrily, her dark eyes flaring in the glow of the red coal.

  “Really? Why on earth do you say that?” he asked, his own keen blue eyes laughing.

  “No toothbrush. No razor,” she said, exhaling a plume of harsh purple smoke toward the ceiling. He looked at her carefully. She had the blackest eyes. He liked to believe he could read people through their eyes. He assumed most people felt that way. He’d been trying to read Jet’s eyes all day long with no success. Inscrutable was the word.

  “Ah. Well, there’s that,” he said.

  “And the name on the card. Out in the hall by your door. You wrote it yourself. It’s not the engraved p
lacard the hotel concierge provides for guests upon arrival.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “You are a—what do you call it—a cat burglar?”

  “No, my dear Jet, I am not. I hate cats,” he said, swinging his long legs off the edge of the bed. “Besides, they’d never allow pets in this pretty palace.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out to the terrace to check something. I have an old acquaintance sailing for Shanghai on the evening tide. I have to make sure he misses the boat.”

  “Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Hawke.”

  He didn’t bother with his shirt and trousers, just shouldered into his dinner jacket and slipped out through the French doors, grabbing a pair of rubber-coated Zeiss Ikon military binoculars he’d left hanging by a strap from the doorknob. Raising the glasses to his eyes, he saw the sea whipped into a frenzy. Strange weather was, Commander Alexander Hawke knew, not at all unusual in this corner of the world.

  The entire Mediterranean Sea passes through the eye of a needle. Only fifteen miles of water separated Ceuta in North Africa from the Rock, that headless limestone sphinx crouching on the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar. The ancients called the rockpiles standing on either side of the straits the Pillars of Hercules. Beyond them lay chaos, the dark and spooky ocean they called Mare Tenebrosum.

  Spooky enough out there tonight, Alex Hawke thought. The roiling sky was a bruised color, yellowish and grey on the horizon.

  He allowed himself a thin smile. There was something in him that loved bad weather. Sunny days were a dime a dozen in the South of France and this night he was glad of a little mood and drama. Besides, foul weather might keep a few prying eyes and ears battened down and out of his way. His mission tonight was certainly straightforward enough. A simple hostage snatch demanding basic techniques that were, once learned the hard way in the Special Boat Squadron, never forgotten.

  But, as usual in the life of Alexander Hawke, the implications of failure were enormous.

  He swung the Ikons west to the harbor proper and found what he was looking for in the crowd of grand yachts, fishing boats, and a thicket of sailboat masts. An ancient rust bucket called the Star of Shanghai. She’d arrived from Casablanca and was en route from Cannes to Aden and then on to Rangoon. Aboard her, he’d learned two days ago, was an involuntary American passenger. A CIA chap, whose very life was hanging by—

  “Alex?” Her voice floated out from the darkened bedroom. She spoke both English and French with a lilting Chinese accent. The words came to him like a tinkling wind chime.

  “Sorry,” he said above the wind, scanning the horizon with the Ikons. “Just give me a moment, dear. Have some more champagne. The bucket is by the bed.”

  In his mind’s eye, he saw his old friend Ambrose Congreve smirking at that one. Caviar, champagne, fancy rooms at the Carlton. And in his bed—

  He would never have taken the wildly expensive suite (ever since his first stint in the navy, he’d loved small bedrooms with single beds and crisp white linen) had not the corner rooms offered one very specific advantage. The eighth-floor terrace of Suite 801 happened to present a panoramic view of the entire harbor. From this luxurious perch, Hawke could monitor the comings and goings of every vessel in the harbor, unseen. And so he had done for the last two days.

  His own boat, Blackhawke, lay anchored in deep water a half mile from the harbor entrance. To all appearances, she was simply another rich man’s play toy in this glittering Côte d’Azur yacht harbor, a seagoing Mecca for the extravagantly wealthy. In reality, she was more of a small warship cleverly disguised as a megayacht by the Huisman Yard in Holland.

  The yacht’s unusual name had not been chosen lightly. She was named in honor of Hawke’s notorious ancestor, the English pirate, Blackhawke. John “Black Jack” Hawke, born in Plymouth, had gone to sea as a cabin boy serving under the infamous “Calico Jack” Rackham. This worthy buccaneer was known as much for his colorful calico cotton clothes as for his beautiful pirate wife, Anne Bonny. Years later, Calico Jack was hanged for piracy in Port Royal. Young Hawke, already prized for his heroism and amazing luck, was the crew’s unanimous choice to succeed Rackham as captain.

  “To whom does the sea belong?” he would ask.

  “Blackhawke!” was the unanimous reply.

  Over the years, as his reputation grew, Black Jack Hawke would come to be known by a shorter, more memorable name: Blackhawke. He operated in the Caribbean, commissioned by colonial authorities in Jamaica, preying on Spanish possessions. His hearty band became known as “the brethren of the coast.” Tens of millions in gold and booty buried by the brethren remain hidden to this day along the rocky coast of what was then the island of Hispaniola.

  “Fortune favors the fast,” was the young pirate captain’s motto, and he made good on it. Blackhawke had light sloops called balandras specially built in his home port of Plymouth and rarely had trouble overtaking even the fastest quarry. Once he’d spied you, and his ship Revenge was bearing down, you’d do well to start making peace with your maker.

  Ferocious and merciless in battle, Blackhawke was one of the very first to fly the Jolly Roger, a hand-sewn black flag emblazoned with symbols taken from old gravestones in his native land: skulls, crossed bones, and an hourglass to warn prey how rapidly their time was running out.

  Blackhawke’s enormous success was later attributed by scholars to atypical pirate behavior. He was highly intelligent, drank only tea, never swore in front of women, and regularly observed the Sabbath. For all that, he was condemned to the gallows in the Old Bailey for striking a mutinous crewman on the head with a bucket and killing him. His corpse was hung on the banks of the Thames as a warning to all who would take up the pirate’s life.

  It was a warning his bloodline had found difficult to heed.

  Blackhawke had been steaming all day en route from Corsica. Hawke’s yacht had arrived on station according to schedule, just after nightfall. Hawke had spoken to his chief of security, Tom Quick, and ordered all unnecessary lights aboard doused. From Hawke’s luxurious perch at the hotel, her darkened silhouette resembled some hulking, uninhabited island lying just offshore.

  The Star of Shanghai had arrived in Cannes harbor the afternoon before. Hawke had observed minor comings and goings aboard her, nothing too intriguing. She was now moored along the long narrow breakwater that curved out to sea from the eastern edge of the harbor. Hawke focused on the Star, swept the glasses back and forth, stem to stern.

  From this cursory appraisal, he was surprised she was still afloat. What the hell were they loading? It looked like huge barrel-shaped sections of polished steel. According to his dossier, some kind of Renault factory assemblies. She was riding low in the water, down by the head. On the dock, more massive steel O-rings secured with bright orange tarps. Looked innocent enough but you never knew.

  She wasn’t scheduled to sail for another hour. But schedules in French ports didn’t always behave properly. Time to go, at any rate.

  Hawke lowered the glasses, noting the sudden lack of breeze on his cheeks. The wind had vanished just as capriciously as it had sprung up forty-eight hours earlier. And now, as the temperature rose perceptibly, a thick, viscous fog bank the color of charcoal was rolling in from the sea. Hawke turned and ducked back into his bedroom through the French doors, his brain ticking over rapidly now.

  “What are you doing now?” Jet said with some annoyance, sitting up in bed and vainly attempting to cover her quite beautiful breasts with a corner of bedsheet.

  “Sorry, dear girl. I’ve got a meeting,” Hawke said, stepping into his skivvies and then his black trousers. He pulled open a dresser drawer and removed the new nylon swivel holster that held his pistol. He’d spent long days down at Fort Monkton, the Royal Navy’s Field School near Portsmouth, assassinating video projections in the simulator. He could now comfortably draw and fire in no more than one-quarter of a second. It was his fondest wish to shave one-fifth off that. He had no urge to spe
nd his last moments on earth counting the bullet holes in his tummy.

  He wore the gun just behind the right hipbone, the position he’d found most suitable for the fastest draw. The gun was a lightweight Walther TPH only recently acquired and he hoped it was as effective as advertised. Tom Quick, a U.S. Army sharpshooter and weapons expert before joining Hawke’s security staff, had assured him it was good for close work. Assuming one used Quick’s own hand-loaded ammunition, which Hawke most assuredly did.

  “So. You are some kind of spy, or counterspy. Is that it?”

  “Over-the-counter spy would be more like it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “For sale without prescription,” he said, checking the heft of the fully loaded mag and sliding it with a satisfying click into the butt of the gun.

  “What?”

  “Readily available, you know, generic espionage. Mundane stuff, I’m afraid. Tedious corporate snooping and the like. A dull business, I assure you. Might as well have studied the law.”

  “And the gun?”

  “Strictly precautionary. Might encounter some archfiend of the industrial espionage world out there.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He cut his eyes toward her. The word didn’t fit the face. Women had every right to use the same language as men. He wasn’t being priggish. He just didn’t find it attractive.

  “Really? How on earth do you know that, my dear?” he said, reaching behind his back and slipping the weapon into its high-tech scabbard. Then he reached for his knife.

  It was an item acquired a few years earlier in Qatar. A long-bladed dagger called the Assassin’s Fist. He wore it strapped to the inside of his right forearm with a quick-release device his friend Stokely Jones had perfected in the Mekong Delta. The knife had seen a lot of use. He’d recently replaced the original blade with six inches of the finest Sheffield steel.

  “So. You have a meeting?” the actress pouted. “At this hour? Ridiculous.”