“We’ll wait and see,” he said. “Stay ready to evac if we’ve been made.”

“And if they don’t come?” Ava asked. “If there’s never a sign that we’ve been made?”

Breece nodded. “Then the mission’s a go.”

Chapter 52: Sail Away

52

SAIL AWAY

Sunday October 28th

“No tracers,” Sam repeated, her gun to Lo Prang’s head. “Your boss is coming with me. I find a tracer, he dies. Badly.”

“No tracers,” Lo Prang echoed, calmly, agreeably.

His men nodded, kept on loading the last of the food and fuel and gear onto the stealth boat in this hidden cove. It was a smuggling craft, a low, skinny, quiet affair, with a sonar absorbent hull and a chameleonware upper shroud. If anything could get her up the coast and to the island she’d seen in that soldier’s mind – Apyar Kyun, the Blue Island – this was it.

Lo Prang’s two razor-nailed slave bitches watched her, still in their party dresses from the night before, their blades extended. Murder was in their eyes. The claw marks one of them had cut down her back ached. This was personal for them. If she crossed their paths again, they’d do their worst.

“Time to go,” Sam said. She stood, dragged Lo Prang up with her, propelled him forward towards the low cigar of a vessel, her free hand on the cuffs that bound his wrists behind his back. Now was the time of maximum danger. Transitions are points of vulnerability, Nakamura had taught her. If they were going to try to take her, it was now or never…

But she and Lo Prang made it onto the boat unharmed.

Sam pushed Lo Prang forward, away from her, towards the driver’s seat. “Drive,” she said.

An hour later they were past the island of Koh Phayam, a few hundred yards off shore, and on their way towards the Burmese border.

“You could have done this the easy way, Jade,” Lo Prang told her. “I meant what I told you. If you joined my household, you’d be happy.” He gestured with his cuffed hands towards his head. “A little tweak here and there. All this stress? All this hardship? I could have taken care of whatever problem you have. And you’d have contentment, the satisfaction of having a purpose in life, of knowing what it was, of having a master who loved you.”

Sam stared at Lo Prang and shook her head.

Lo Prang smiled. “Trust me, Jade. I’ve never had happier staff than I do now. They come to me willingly, for what I can give them, for the satisfaction, the peace and contentment. Even the whores are happy.”

Sam shuddered. “There are more important things than happiness,” she told the man. “Doing the right thing. Doing what matters.”