Ghost Ship (NUMA Files 12)

Austin, to prod him into green-lighting some dirty trick. And it did sting. How could it not? But it wasn’t news.

“You’d be surprised what Sienna told me about Kurt Austin,” he said. “The biggest thing is that he’s a decent human being. As good as they come.”

“Well, that decent human being could destroy this company with one wrong word.”

Westgate saw fear light up in Forrester’s eyes. It was something he’d never seen before. “What are you talking about?”

Forrester was blunt. “You don’t know this but we’re teetering on the brink of financial collapse. Working on Phalanx to the detriment of all other products has put us in a desperate spot. So far, I’ve managed to hide this with a few accounting tricks I learned from my Wall Street days, and some recent cash flow that’s tiding us over.”

Westgate could guess where the money was coming from. “The yacht belonged to the company,” he said. “The fifty-four million from Lloyd’s . . . that’s what’s tiding us over. You’re worried they’ll stop the payout.”

Forrester waved as if he was way off. “That would be the least of our problems,” he said. “Sienna’s knowledge is the real threat. She designed the system. If a rumor that she’s alive and hiding out somewhere got traction . . . Can you imagine? We’d be dead in the water.”

Westgate looked away. “Dead in the water,” he whispered. “Like my wife and kids.”

“You know I didn’t mean that . . .”

Westgate nodded. “What if Austin’s right?”

Forrester narrowed his gaze, studying Westgate as if searching for something. He slid one hand into a pocket as if fishing for his keys and settled back on the couch. “We’ve talked about this before, Brian.”

Westgate felt the ringing in his head once again. “Yes . . . I guess we have talked about this . . .”

“Maybe we’d better go over it again.”

Westgate felt a migraine coming on. The pain was scalding, the room seemed too bright.

“What happened in the storm?” Forrester asked. “How did you end up on the raft?”

Westgate hesitated. He knew what to say. But the words stuck in his throat, and he took another swig of the gin to try and free up his vocal cords.

Strangely, Forrester began telling him the story. “The yacht was taking on water. You were prepping the raft. A huge wave hit and you got swept over the side.”

Westgate remembered this. He felt the cold of the sea. “I almost drowned,” he said.

“That’s right, Brian. You almost drowned.”

He looked over at Forrester. The pain in his head was now blurring his vision. Soon, Forrester was just a voice at the end of a tunnel. “You couldn’t get back to them.”

“I tried,” Westgate said. He could feel the pain in his shoulders from rowing with all his might. He could taste the salt on his lips from the sea, could feel his eyes burning. “The weather was so bad . . . In twenty minutes, I couldn’t even see the ship. I heard . . . I heard . . .”

“You heard the helicopter,” Forrester reminded him.

“But they didn’t see me.”

“And before that?” Forrester asked. “Before you went out on the deck?”

Westgate remembered something. Shouting. Chaos. It seemed to make the pain in his head flare again. Even with his eyes shut, he saw a scalding light. He recalled something about the pumps. A failed hatch. He remembered Sienna and their children huddled in their life jackets. But there was something odd about the memory. It was too still. No one was moving. No one was talking.

The voice in the fog pressed, “I need an answer, Brian. What happened on that yacht before you were swept overboard? Can you tell the story without help this time?”

Westgate fumbled for the words.

“Brian?”

The truth. For once, Westgate managed to speak it. “I wish,” he said. “I wish to God I knew.”

As Westgate said these words, the pain spiked to unbearable levels. His vision faded, his world shrank to nothing. Nothing except the sound of David Forrester’s voice.