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“Until Friday,” he said.
The greeting sounded more like a warning.
She left the condo and ran down to the beach. Cesar turned his head when she passed him and Lee.
“Maya,” he called after her, “are you all right?”
She just kept on running, until she reached her unit. Inside her room, she logged onto the tablet. The truck was heading for Puerto Viejo on a slow, steady course.
Chapter 8
Despite the early hour of four in the morning, the air was thick with heat and humidity. Even dressed in only a thin black cling top and pants, Maya perspired as she leaned on the back wall of the abandoned warehouse across from Mango on the jetty.
It was Friday, only five days since she’d last seen Tim and her need was growing. So was her irritability. The dreams were getting worse. Her professionalism suffered. Her hand clutching the gun wasn’t as steady as usual, damn it.
Except for the men at work—four armed guards keeping watch and another four carrying cargo—the area was deserted. From the loading dock inside the warehouse, the men offloaded the truck and lifted the weapons into a fishing trawler that floated on the interior warehouse canal. At twenty-four knots, the new generation Sabreline 36 trawler would take twenty-three days to cover the thirteen thousand nautical miles between Costa Rica and Mozambique.
Maya’s infrared scanner picked up a web of sensor detectors at the warehouse entrance. She couldn’t put down a foot without setting off an alarm, but she wasn’t concerned about going inside. Her orders had been to destroy the shipment. Taking out the guards wasn’t a requirement.
She wiped her brow and rested the gun against her thigh. Ilano was going to lose five hundred AK-47s and a hundred F1 hand grenades tonight. From what Joss had pulled up about Ilano, Tim may lose a finger or two if the weapons didn’t turn up as promised. She forced the thought from her mind. Thinking about Tim’s perfect, strong fingers wasn’t helping her mission.
She recognized two of the men keeping watch from the night she followed Tim to the pink house. They were Ilano’s cronies, Victor and Eduardo. The men worked in silence until the last of the weapons were secured on board.
“Let’s put her to sea. Tide’s turning in thirty minutes,” Victor said.
This was her cue to move. The four men who had loaded, boarded the ship. She hoped for their sakes they could swim.
Trained to move fast and quietly, she ran through the shelter of the dense jungle to the dive center. She pulled the plastic cover off the boat, pushed it from the wet sand into the water, and, once the motor was running, steered it a few miles into the sea. She wouldn’t get close enough to the trawler for them to hear her engine. In fact, for what she had in mind, she preferred to keep her distance. The map of the ocean flickered to life on her smartwatch. One dot was the trawler and the other her inflatable raft. She had to act quickly. A small vessel at this time of the night on the water would raise suspicion. The last thing she wanted was for them to spot her on their radar and question her presence.
She closed her eyes and commanded her gift until she felt nothing but the water. Like iron to a magnet, the molecules were attracted to her, as she was to them. She imagined the liquid atoms stir under her fingertips. She could manipulate them in any way she wished, using nothing but her mind.
In the distance, she imagined the swell collect and build. It would have to move at exactly ten knots per hour to collide head-on with the boat. The bank of water rose from nowhere, the ocean floor shaking from the brutal reversal of the tide. Molecules bubbled inside, a mass of weight advancing, growing, lifting. The thunderous noise was a drumroll to the inevitable crescendo. Multiple mini-collisions unfolded simultaneously as everything that lived under the water propelled away from the pending detonation. A scattering of fish shot out like an exploding star into all directions underneath the surface. The mental image of what was happening below the water was reconstructed in Maya’s mind by the indent the objects formed as it displaced the medium.
One more second.
The sea bellowed as it reached its peak. She let go, allowing gravity to do the rest of the work. The freak wave snapped. It rolled in on itself and broke, a mass of white, disorientated fury that swallowed the boat, shred it to pieces, and spat the debris out on the bottom of the ocean.
The water was a living entity, an element with a heart of its own that beat in her very chest. She stood still until the distorted noise of metal indenting under the pressure of tons of seawater sounded in her mind, and she felt the bounce of the broken vessel on the seabed vibrate in her bones. Only then did she smooth out the surface and reverse the flow before the aftershocks could reach her or flatten palm trees on the shore. The sea returned to normal. The roar was swallowed by the tide. An air bubble escaped from the sunken ship and floated up like a jellyfish. It vanished on the surface with a soft pop.
