The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4), Gregg Dunnett [books to improve english .txt] 📗

road behind and in front of her was completely empty, so she made the turn and carefully skirted around the puddles, until she came to the flood embankment at the end.

The weather was improving now, and it put Amber in an upbeat mood, which matched the thought of seeing Billy again, a mood which had grown and expanded during the long wait and journey to get here. But the moment she did see him, her mood began to decline. He looked pretty bad. He smelled pretty bad too, as did the inside of the yacht. It had only the most basic of plumbing facilities, a marine toilet which drew water from the surrounding creek and discharged it there too. There was a shower, but it ran from freshwater tanks that had long since been emptied. In a normal situation Billy would have needed to move the boat to a marina or fuel station and top them up, but that wasn’t possible.

The outside of the little yacht looked unchanged, though there was now a kayak partially concealed behind the work shed where Amber left the car. But inside the yacht things did look different. The place was a mess. Billy seemed to have dismantled most of the other computers she had seen before, and only the new one, which she had bought him, remained on the saloon table. It was running some program and the lights on the front were flashing on and off all the time. The boat’s little sink was filled with dirty dishes.

“Well?” Amber asked as she looked around. They’d only spoken so far for Billy to ask if she had brought any food. She had, two bags of groceries – she’d pretended to be buying them for her mom and sister, although she couldn’t bring herself to believe anyone was really watching that closely.

“Well what?”

“Well have you heard anything?”

“Like what?” Billy didn’t sound interested. He poked around the groceries.

“Like? Anything that’s going to help?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He shrugged in response. “I know it’s not me, but I kinda need some vegetables. I think I’m getting scurvy.”

“What’s that?” Amber asked, looking at the screen on the new computer.

“It’s this disease that sailors got on long voyages. Before they invented tinned food. They weren’t getting enough vitamin C…”

“Not scurvy. I know what that is. What’s that. What are you doing?”

He followed where she was looking. “I’m just keeping a record of which audio recordings are coming in and who’s present.”

“Well? Has anyone been there? Have they said anything about the bombings?”

“No. I don’t think they’re going to now. If they ever did. They’d be pretty stupid to tell Lily. They’d be pretty stupid to talk about it at all.”

“What?” Amber felt her frustration burn. “I thought that’s what you were hoping for?”

Billy shrugged, and found a bag of carrots. He pulled one out and inspected it. “Well. I hoped they might. But it was just an idea.”

“Maybe I could go around again?” Amber suggested. “To Lily’s house. I could say something that forces them to talk about it.” She thought fast. “I could tell her that you told me James did it. She’d confront him with it, and you’d record it!”

“Yeah.” Billy sounded downbeat. Amber didn’t understand.

“Well?”

“Well… You could. But he’s just going to deny it isn’t he? Remember they didn’t plan for me to die. They thought I’d be caught, and that I’d tell the cops they did it. They were always expecting to have to deny it. To use the false evidence they made that makes it look like they weren’t even there. They’re not going to suddenly confess.”

“But then… What’s all this for then? What’s the point? I don’t understand.”

Billy put down the carrot and pulled out a bag of cookies instead. “I like these,” he said. “They’re not very good for you, but they do taste nice.”

“Billy! What the fuck.” She rounded on him, and swiped the cookie from his hand. “You made me bug Lily’s computer, you had me break into that guy’s apartment. I’m aiding a goddamn fugitive. I could go to jail for that too. Are you telling me the whole thing was for nothing? Why?”

Billy looked at her and at the cookie on the floor. He took a deep breath. Then he sat back down behind the computer.

“Perhaps you’d better see this,” he said, as his fingers flew over the keys. She came around behind him to see the screen, and realized he was opening a video file. When it was ready to play the starting image was of Amber, sitting nearly exactly where she was now, inside the yacht’s little cabin. But it wasn’t taken now, she was wearing different clothes – the ones, in fact, that she’d worn the last time she was there. Billy pressed play, and the image of Amber on the screen started talking. Amber listened, intrigued at first, and then increasingly confused.

“I don’t remember saying that.” She said, after a minute. “I don’t remember ever saying that.”

“You didn’t,” Billy replied. But before he could explain further there was the unmistakable sensation of a person stepping onto the yacht, tipping it heavily with their weight. At almost the same time the tarpaulin covering the cockpit was ripped clear. Then a gun was pointed into the cabin.

“Freeze! FBI. DO NOT MOVE!”

Chapter Fifty-Eight

The first alarm came from the boy’s father. His financial history showed he paid for groceries at the SuperU store on the outskirts of Newlea almost every week, using a bank card. Since the supposed death of his son he either stopped buying food there – or apparently anywhere else either – or he’d started paying cash. The question was, why?

Although by now agent’s Black and West were only allowed to allocate fifty percent of their week to the case, they were able to establish roughly how much he was spending, from records of cash withdrawn at two ATMs on the island, in Silverlea and in Newlea. And they were able to compare this with two