2014
After their airplane skidded over the water and sank, their two life rafts tied together seemed so small in the vast, dark sea. Claire held her four-year-old daughter, Lexi, close to keep her warm and calm, though she was neither of those things herself. The child had gone silent, no more screams or sobs. Claire’s husband Nick’s arm around them felt like a band of iron, a moving one, since he too was shaking from the cold and shock.
Her ex-husband, Jace—Lexi’s father—was the third person in their raft. He’d been the pilot of the borrowed private plane that had nearly plunged all seven of them beneath the surface to drown. So far, only Lexi’s nanny, Nita, in the next raft had been seasick, though they were all sick at heart and scared to death. Nita was praying aloud and, no doubt, the others were doing so silently.
“Where are we, really?” Lexi asked. “Near a beach at home?”
Her teeth chattering, Claire told her, “Not quite, but off the coast of Florida.” She didn’t add they were in the wide Straits of Florida but much closer to dangerous, forbidden Cuba.
The sea, so rough at first that their little rubber islands had slid from trough to trough, seemed to be calming now. Breaks in the clouds revealed a scattering of stars that looked like they were dancing and a crooked sliver of moon like a sharp, tilted smile.
“Nobody’s gonna find us til mornin’.” Bronco, their family bodyguard, spoke up from the other raft. The big, bold man was trying to be strong, but his voice quavered too.
Nita, who had been moaning, began to cry again, though she was sheltered in the other raft between her cousin Hector, called Heck, Nick’s tech genius, and Bronco, who had his arms around her.
Heck said, “Yeah, well, we’re valuable to the FBI, so they’ll have their net out for us. Just hope someone else doesn’t, and they tampered with the plane. You-know-who has a long arm—and an army of spies.”
“That can’t be,” Nick said. “Before we took off, Jace checked the plane and Bronco guarded it. It had to be a malfunction, not sabotage.”
Bronco said, “But you know, boss, the plane was parked by that dark Key West field. I didn’t tell you, but some guy came up and asked me how much it cost. Took my eyes off the plane to get rid of him, head him back to the terminal.”
“I did all the checkups,” Jace told them, “but that was before I hit the john when all of you were still in the terminal. I still can’t believe it. And since the FBI arranged for that plane, who knows if we can trust them? Maybe you-know-who got to them too, or at least to that contact guy Patterson. I don’t trust anyone anymore—except you, Lexi,” he added and rubbed the child’s back.
“And you trust Mommy and Nick too!” she insisted.
“Listen up, all of you.” Nick took over the conversation again, like them, raising his voice to be heard over the wind and waves. “So far our adversary’s dealt in torment, not total annihilation.”
Lexi stirred against Claire. “What’s nilation?”
“Don’t worry about that, or anything,” Claire whispered to her. Nick was evidently using big words so Lexi wouldn’t catch on to the deadly mess they were in whether they were rescued from the water or were onshore.
They had fled Florida with the help of the Federal Witness Protection Program, WITSEC, to stay safe until the US government could locate and extradite Nick’s nemesis, a powerful international businessman with a long reach. The FBI wanted their hands on Clayton Ames as badly as Nick did, but Ames made a habit of living abroad and moving around. When it came to catching, extraditing and prosecuting the man who was now among the US government’s most wanted, Claire knew Nick wished he was a vigilante or hit man instead of a criminal lawyer who could only accuse and testify.
“Okay, enough about all that for now,” Nick said. “Whoever rescues us, the new identification papers I have for all of us in this waterproof pouch are what we will have to go by. Lexi, we are going to have new, pretend names for a while, but it’s a secret only the seven of us can share. I was telling you on the plane that we are going to live in a new place for a while, and we need to learn these names and the story of where we came from.”
“Is it like a game?”
“Yes, but a very serious, important game.”
“Like life,” Jace muttered. Then he said louder, “That box I had strapped to my wrist has some drinking water, some medical supplies and a few rations. Semper paratus, semper fi. Listen up, everybody. You’re with a former navy pilot who has never crashed before but has training for it. We’re going to be rescued, but meanwhile, we need to keep our heads up and work together. Like Claire said when we first made it into the rafts, we’ll be okay.”
Tears stung Claire’s eyes and not just from the saltwater spray. The only two men she’d ever loved were with her: Jace, her ex, who had claimed he still loved her when he’d helped her out of the sinking plane and into the raft; and Nick, who had taken her life and love by storm. They had been forced by his nemesis, Clayton Ames, to marry, but she had come to not only desire but love Nick. Thank God the three of them were getting along in this desperate flight. But to live all together as the WITSEC program had planned? That scared her almost as much as this shifting, sliding, endless sea.
* * *
As dawn broke, raising their hopes they would be spotted, Jace passed around the water canteen again so they could each take a drink as a chaser after a tasteless biscuit. Nick saw that Jace had put the dry jacket he had loaned him around Lexi. Jace looked like a Viking at sea, ruddy and blond compared to Nick’s dark hair dusted with silver.
The two men’s gazes met. They’d been at loggerheads over Claire, so Nick hoped they could work together to be rescued. But their hideout plans for that had been for Northern Michigan, not on a rubber raft in the middle of the Straits of Florida.
Nick looked away and hit his fist hard on his knee. He’d left his prosperous Naples, Florida, law firm of Markwood, Benton and Chase in the hands of the other partners. He’d used the cover story he was leaving immediately for Belgium to assist an important government figure with legal advice. He’d told them he was taking his family and a small support staff with him and asked them to cover his cases.
True, they were used to his going off to work on his private South Shores project, for which he advised and sometimes defended