CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
Founded in the mid-seventeenth century by Governor Jan van Riebeeck, Cape Town was first given life as a supply station on the Dutch East India Company’s sea route to the East. Over the years the city flourished, occupied first by the British, and then returned to the Dutch in 1803. By 1806, the port was once more in British hands, and soon became the capital of the Cape of Good Hope Colony.
When the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, all administrative proceedings were moved north to Pretoria, but the coastal city continued to expand as the diamond and gold mines of the Transvaal provided enormous and lucrative quantities of raw exports. Now, as both the legislative capital and one of the largest maritime ports in the world, it was easy for Ryan Kealey to understand why Stephen Gray would choose to base his company in the thriving commercial and industrial center that marked the gateway to the African continent.
They arrived in Cape Town at three in the afternoon after traveling almost 8,000 miles, the sun sweltering overhead as Ryan drove their white Nissan X-Trail deep into the heart of the city. Naomi sat in the passenger seat, a large map spread out across her lap as she navigated the way west on the Strand toward the waterfront. Judging from the expression on her face, Ryan knew she was occupied by more than the directions she was giving.
“Come on,” he finally said. “You’re driving me crazy with that look. What are you thinking about?”
She turned in the seat, the concern obvious in her face. “I’m worried about how we’re going to handle Gray. I mean, don’t you think we’re just a bit shorthanded here?”
Ryan shrugged, his attention focused on the road ahead. “He owns one of the largest shipping companies in the country, so he’s obviously an intelligent man. We’ll try to reason with him. I highly doubt he wants to face extradition; it’s a tough sell, but I’m sure the State Department will make the request if Brenneman makes a point of it. I don’t see the South Africans trying to get in the way, do you?”
“I guess not,” she said. “What if he doesn’t listen to reason? Turn here.”
Ryan swung the jeep around a corner, swearing under his breath as he narrowly missed sideswiping a smaller vehicle. He was still adjusting to driving on the left side of the road. “I don’t think that far ahead,” he finally replied, turning to give her a small smile.
They were driving slowly down the narrow streets of the Victoria and Albert Waterfront, known to the locals simply as the V&A. As one of the Cape’s premier tourist attractions, the streets were lined with expensive stores and their patrons, sunburnt tourists trudging along the sidewalks as they struggled under a common load of cameras, daypacks, and shopping bags. The Waterfront had been restored in the late-1980s, and although many of the buildings had been mod-ernized, some still bore the remnants of Victorian industrial architecture left over from years of British rule. Overall, Naomi thought the effect was quite pleasing as the jeep crested a low hill and the sparkling waters of Table Bay came into view.
“Slow down,” Naomi said. She looked back down at her map.
“Take a right here.”
Ryan turned onto the next street. They were moving away from the bustling center of the commercial district and into the industrial area. The change was subtle at first, marked only by the diminishing number of people on the streets. It wasn’t long, though, before towering warehouses of red brick and cracked gray cement completely replaced the exclusive restaurants and boutiques of the commercial sector.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
She consulted her map once more and nodded slightly toward one of many identical structures. “That,” she said. Parked outside of the warehouse was a silver late-model E class Mercedes.
“Kind of telling, isn’t it?” Ryan said. “There can’t be too many of those around.” He looked for guards secreted in the alleys bordering each side of the warehouse, but none was visible. “Do you see anything?” he asked her.
Naomi shook her head, and Ryan accelerated down the street.
“What do you—”
“Hold on a second, I’m thinking,” he said. Although the street was well behind them now, the shapes and orientations of the buildings were held perfectly in his mind as he thought about what he would need to begin a loose surveillance . . . It was some time before he realized he still had an audience.
“Sorry, Naomi. What were you saying?”
“It’s not important,” she said. “I’m more interested in what you were just thinking.”
He sighed heavily as they moved back through the streets bordering Table Bay. “I was thinking that it can’t be that simple. For a known arms dealer, he doesn’t seem to take a lot of precautions. That’s not realistic, though; he has to have protection, and that means an unknown number of armed guards inside the warehouse, plus some kind of alarm system. The best way is to hit him in transit, but that would never fly with Harper—we’re supposed to do this without making a lot of noise.”
Naomi didn’t respond for a while, the darkening waters of the bay holding her attention as Ryan drove back into the commercial district, the well-lit storefronts passing by on the right, with an impressive view of the water on the left. She absently watched navigation lights move up and down as a number of ships bobbed on the gentle swells of the Atlantic. “Maybe it is that simple,” she said on reflection.
“What do you mean?”
“Gray beat the government at their own game—he was caught red-handed and still managed to stay out of jail. Now he’s even richer than before. He might just be arrogant enough to think that he’s beyond their reach.”
“It’s a thought,” he said. “But we have to be sure.” His eyes involuntarily moved to Naomi’s throat, and he suppressed a shudder at what might have been. “I think we’ve already taken enough chances.”
She didn’t respond as Ryan pulled their rented Nissan into the Victoria and Albert Hotel’s parking lot. They checked in and opted for a light meal on the patio overlooking the bay. Although both were exhausted, they did not refuse when the waiter brought out a wine list along with the menu.
The meal was excellent, and made all the more so by the sweeping view of the bay below. It seemed as though the water would have gone on forever were it not contained by the fiery red of the sky and the flat tableau of Mount Table held in silhouette against the fading sun.
Conversation was uneasy at first, but after a while Ryan began to overcome his initial distaste for Naomi Kharmai. He knew that it was partly her looks and partly the wine, but he found himself gradually warming to her as the night wore on. When he thought about the smirk on her face outside the Kennedy-Warren, he considered her lightning reflexes in the bar in Norfolk. When he recalled her lack of gratitude, the memory was quickly followed by an image of salt-stained cheeks and a hurried swipe at warm tears in a brightly lit hotel room. Despite the contradictions running through his mind, he couldn’t help but hold her liquid green eyes when they met his across the table.
Long after the meal was done, the waiter brought them a second bottle of Bordeaux. Naomi drank one glass very fast, then savored another. They spoke about the flight over, and their first impressions of the African continent. As the light receded over the warm stones of the patio, they found themselves talking about their early years in the Agency, although Ryan was more interested in her years in general.
“I know it’s impolite to ask,” he said with a boyish grin, “but how old are you, anyway?”
“You don’t have any cards to play,” she responded with a smile of her own. “I already know how old you are.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “You seem to know a lot.”
“That’s why I’m here instead of my little cubicle at Tyson’s Corner,” she said, her eyebrows arching wickedly. “The director thought one of us should know something.”
He laughed as he lifted the bottle to pour them both another glass.
“And how old is your fiancée?”
“Her age for yours.”
An amused expression came over her face as she set down her glass and considered. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll just have to trust you on this one. I’m twenty-nine. Your turn.”
“Twenty-nine?”
Her smile faltered. “Thirty. But, God, twenty-nine sounds so much younger, doesn’t it?”
He laughed again and held up his end of the bargain. “Katie’s twenty-four. I know that makes me sound bad, but—well, I don’t really have anything to say in my defense. She was my student, which only makes it worse, I guess.”
“You were a professor?” she asked with some surprise. “Aren’t you a bit young for that?”
“I’m only a lowly associate professor. I probably still have a job if I say all the right things and grovel a little. Why? I don’t seem the type, right?”
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “My father taught at Cambridge. He was really well known, a leader in his field. Most people wouldn’t have thought he was the type either.”
“Is that why you moved to the States, because of his teaching?”
She nodded, and Ryan watched an unhappy look come over her face as she stared down at the table. “He was offered a position at Harvard when I was eighteen. He did really well . . . wrote a few books, secured his tenure. When they offered me a full ride and I turned it down, he was so angry that he didn’t speak to me for a month.” She hesitated before speaking again. “He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, I guess. He was even more disappointed when I joined the Agency.”
“Why did you turn it down?” he asked gently. She finally looked up to meet his gaze.
“I had to earn it, you know? I didn’t want my future handed to me.
It seems stupid now, but I really felt strongly about it at the time. He could be stubborn, too, so we didn’t get along too well. It wasn’t like I wanted much. I mean, if he would have talked about me just one time the way he talked about my brothers—”
She stopped in midsentence, pushing back from the table and standing up quickly, her chair tipping back and over in the process.
Ryan rose to his feet almost as fast.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
She was shaking her head, clearly amazed and angry with herself.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing, really. God, I just prattle on sometimes. I’m sorry, forget it—”
“Naomi.” She was grabbing her coat, turning away from him.
“Naomi,” he repeated. He caught her arm as she started to walk away. “If he wasn’t proud,” Ryan said, “then he was wrong.”
She searched his eyes quickly and saw that he meant the words.
She hesitated and then moved in close, leaning up to kiss him lightly.
She pulled away only slightly afterward, her soft lips close to his like the promise of something more. Then the moment passed and she was walking away, the tap of her heels light against the rough stone as she moved past empty tables toward the hotel.
Ryan was stunned. He stood alone on the terrace, the taste of her sweet on his mouth as the darkness moved in across the bay. God, for that not to have happened. He couldn’t take it back, though, and he had to work with her for a long time yet. Only now did he think about Katie, and that just wasn’t good enough. He forced a mental image to punish himself, and when she appeared, it was on the rocky bluff overlooking Cape Elizabeth, a strong inland wind sweeping her hair back from her face as she looked out over the ocean. Even in his mind, jumbled and confused as it was, the clarity of her features was breathtaking. Then the image shattered into a thousand pieces, and he knew at once that he was responsible.
He shook his head as he walked away from the table. For that not to have happened . . .
The next morning began early for Ryan. He showered and dressed before the sun came up, stopping on his way down the hall only to slide a scribbled note underneath Naomi’s door. It said nothing about the previous evening, just a few lines to let her know that he was taking the jeep out for some supplies. She had consumed more than her fair share of wine the night before, and he didn’t see the harm in giving her a few hours to recover. He stopped at the hotel’s restaurant to pick up a cup of coffee, then at the front desk to get directions to the stores he needed to visit.
The air outside was brisk, a gentle purple-orange dawn easing the Cape into another day. He knew that it was too early for the shops on the Strand to be open, but he couldn’t take seeing Naomi again just yet. She’s a strange woman, he thought absently. So smart and stubborn, so afraid to show any weakness. He had to let her know that it wasn’t going anywhere, but he still had to be able to work with her afterward. It was a difficult situation. Would it be better, he wondered, to leave it alone? To see what she had to say? She might regret it as much as he did.
Then again, there was that long moment before she had pulled away from him . . . Ryan wondered if she had waited in her room after leaving the terrace, listening for his knock at the door, a robe slipping down low to reveal her bare shoulders. The image stuck in his mind as he drove the Nissan west toward the industrial section of the city.
The silver Mercedes was there, but in a slightly different spot.
Thinking back to Harper’s file on Gray, Ryan remembered that the businessman also owned a town house on the Buitengracht, in addition to numerous properties farther north; there was a good chance that he had spent the night at one of those locations before driving back to the warehouse in the morning. Ryan looked at his watch.
Only eight minutes past seven, and the man was already at work. He filed that fact away as he got out of the jeep and took advantage of the empty street to survey the arrangement of the buildings surrounding Gray’s renovated warehouse. The sidewalk opposite was very narrow, almost nonexistent before it rose up into the face of yet another industrial complex.
Ryan’s eyes followed the lines of the building up to the flat roof, and then on an imaginary path cutting down diagonally to the metal-framed door on the other side of the Mercedes. He walked down a litter-strewn alley, the straight cement walls towering on either side of him, and was pleased to find an aluminum fire escape hanging over a Dumpster, which was coated in flaking brown paint.
By standing on the Dumpster, he found he could reach the base of the fire escape. It pulled down easily when he tugged on the lowest rung. It was all he needed for the moment. Satisfied, Ryan returned the retractable ladder to its original place and hopped down from the container, walking back down the narrow space between the buildings toward the jeep. He still had a lot to do before nightfall.
Naomi woke just before ten, the sheets in a tangle at her feet.
Crawling out of bed, she was startled to see the sun halfway into its climb through the African sky. She could hear happy shouts of children beneath her window, and she wondered why Ryan had let her sleep for so long. Thinking his name forced her to recall the night before. Sitting on the edge of the bed, her mind scrambled to recollect the events that had transpired.
Oh God.
I can’t believe I did that, she thought. I can’t believe it. Naomi knew she felt something for Ryan, but also knew instinctively that it could never work. He was engaged, and . . . Well, that was all that was wrong, really, but it was enough. He hadn’t pulled away, though. She could remember that clearly now. She’d given him the opportunity, but he didn’t pull back. All the same, he couldn’t think too much of her after what she had said. Rambling on about her father, feeling sorry for herself. There would be no more of that, she decided. No way in hell.