All Chapters of THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE : Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
12 chapters
Chapter 11: THE SHADOW OF NUMBER TWO
Monday night gave him a fog so thick the harbor lights had no edges.Zale hung in the black water beside the third piling of the old ferry slip with his forearms across a slimed crossbeam and the sea pulling at his legs. Eleven degrees again. The dive watch said 3:41. He had been in the water for twenty-six minutes, and this time he had not let his body argue with the cold. He had told it the number before he went in, and it had accepted the number.The key was in his right fist.He had carried it that way since the cliff, wrapped in a strip of black tape against the neoprene of his palm so the brass would not knock on anything. The magnetic card sat flat in a thigh pocket with the zipper pulled tight. Four days he had spent in the olive grove with both of them, turning them over, running the numbers on the sheet until they were a language he could dream in. Four days of watching the harbor from the cliff road through a long lens. Four days of waiting for Voss to change what he did.V
Chapter 12: THE GHOST OF THE QUAY
The lock rattled again, and this time a bolt slid.Zale had the screen dark before the sound finished. One keystroke closed the map. Another dropped the terminal back to the blue lock screen it had shown him when he sat down. He lifted the key and card off the steel, wiped the desk edge with his sleeve where his forearm had rested, and slid off the stool onto the outside edges of his boots.Four minutes, forty. Not enough anymore.At the far end of the building a door screamed on its hinges. Light fell in a long white blade across the floor, and with it came voices, three men talking low in the bored Montenegrin of the day shift, boots slapping concrete. A flashlight beam jerked over the girders and swung down into the central aisle.He went the other way.Not toward the exit. Toward the bunks. The lane behind the steel beds ran narrow and dark along the east wall, with a drain in the floor, and the day men would walk the center first, where the work was. He took the lane at a crouch,