Page 31 of Code Name: Harbor

It’s the fact that I didn’t think about Voronin at all after that first mention, and I most certainly wasn’t thinking about it as he drove away.

And right now, the only thing I’m wondering is when he’ll kiss me again.

CHAPTER 7

Finn

The Quartermaster sits low at her slip with the tide running out underneath her. Connie has her boots on my chart table again.

“Off,” I growl, giving them an elbow.

“So grumpy,” she mutters and drops them to the floor with a thud.

“So impolite,” I shoot back.

Marcus ignores both of us, his head bent over patrol routes as he chews on the end of a pencil.

The cabin is warm from the space heater, and the windows are starting to fog at the edges. Outside, the October light is fading fast and without apology. Marcus has his thermos of coffee and a full pot he just prepared on the small galley stove.

“Three weeks from Tuesday,” Marcus says, tapping his index finger on the table. “Pick up at Steveston.”

“Is this the same broker who bought the de Hooch?” Connie asks, propping an elbow on the table and resting her chin in the palm of her hand.

“Yeah,” I say, tracing a finger from Steveston down through the islands toward Walt Brown’s dock. “He was very happy with our work.” I look to Marcus. “What’s the crossing window?”

He takes a sip of coffee from his tumbler. “Coast Guard cutter rotation gives us a gap between oh-two-fifteen and oh-four-forty on a Wednesday morning. We pick up at midnight on the Canadian side, run dark down the strait, hand off at Walt’s by oh-five hundred.”

“I can handle getting the retainer to Walt,” Connie offers and I nod at her. “What are we transporting?”

“A Cycladic figurine. It’s only about fourteen inches tall, so easy to hide.”

There are half a dozen places on the boat to tuck it into in case we were to get boarded by any type of water patrol.

“What’s a Cycladic figurine?” Connie asks with interest. Marcus doesn’t care at all about the history or the art, only the paycheck. But Connie’s always curious.

“It’s an abstract figurine from the Aegean Sea’s Cycladic Islands. Made from marble, they’re usually abstracts of the female form. About five thousand years old.”

“What’s that puppy running?” she asks, eyes twinkling at the prospect because Connie cares about the money too.

“Three point two.”

“Nice,” she drawls, exchanging a toothy grin with Marcus. My cut on this particular transport is ten percent or $320,000 for a day’s work. I’ll take sixty percent and give forty to Marcus to split with Connie, and the kicker is that this is a smaller job. We’ve smuggled in works valued at over $20 million before.

Marcus leans back and stretches his arms, tossing his head left, then right to crack his neck. “So the route we’ll take is from Steveston down through Active Pass, around the south end of Pender into US waters somewhere between Stuart Island and Roche Harbor. From there, south through Haro Strait.”

I let my eyes roam over the maps, noting the patrol routes and using my years of experience to analyze the risks. “Yeah… that’s the best route.”

It’s one of the same routes we’ve run a dozen times in the last nine years. The same route that, four nights ago, put me in proximity to Voronin at the exact wrong moment.

Or rather, it was the exact right moment because I saved Josie’s life.

Neither Marcus nor Connie have brought up that night. We’ve talked about the piece, the buyer, the cut, the timeline and the crossing window, and we’ve all very carefully not talked about the woman I pulled out of the water.

Footsteps on the deck above have all of us freezing and Connie quickly pulls the maps from the table, spins toward the head, and slips inside to close the door. She’ll be hiding them in the small cabinet on the wall.

Marcus and I look at each other for half a second and his hand goes to the small of his back where his piece is tucked into his pants. I shake my head once and he casually picks up his tumbler for another sip.

The cabin door opens without a knock and Mikhail Sokolov steps through. Whoever is with him stays above.