Page 88 of Austen

He had two hundred miles to figure out how to get to the bow, open up the fender garage, access the lithium batteries, destroy them, and start a fire, exactly the plan he’d outlined for Steinbeck.He hadn’t wanted Stein to think he mightreallybe a traitor.He didn’t know why it mattered so much, but...

Okay, it was Austen that he was trying to prove himself to, although he didn’t know why.Maybe he should harbor no hope that he might fix anything between them.Maybe his best hope would be that she’d remember him with some warmth, after the truth came out.

Fact was, he probably wouldn’t live through this, so any hope beyond this felt futile.

Now the captain plugged in the coordinates Declan had given him and told Declan to sit down on the sofa.Another guard held a handgun on him.He lifted his hands in surrender.“Where am I going to go?There’s nothing but ocean around us for fifty miles.”

He said it in Russian, and Sergei looked over at him and then at his henchman, a new guy whom Declan decided to call Ivan, and nodded.

“You think we don’t remember you?”Sergei said and glanced at Declan.

“What?”

“Alosha.You’re on a dozen wanted posters.”The chair creaked as Sergei laughed.“I didn’t know you were so famous till I got to Cuba.”

Oh,that accounted for why the US official had turned on him.It wasn’t about the obsidite or even his AI program.

It was about Operation Cybernet.

Declan looked over at Sergei.“That was a long time ago.”

“We have a long memory.”

Yes, well, Declan did too.The kind that kept his Russian fluent.

Maybe because he’d feared exactly this day, his past coming back to haunt him.

“So after we find the obsidite and the refining facility, I think you will have to return to the motherland for another conversation.”

Another conversation.After which, if he wasn’t executed, he’d end up in a Siberian gulag, if they still had such things.

Alosha.A play on the name Dark Horse,loshad.

He just could not seem to outrun his mistakes or even the consequences of his decisions.His stupid words to Austen played back to him,“Whatever business problem I have, I have two choices.I can either ignore it or I can face it.Facing it helps me figure out how to fix it.”

Clearly not.It only dug him deeper.

Well, at least she was alive, and Steinbeck too.

He stared out into the night and uttered a prayer, wanting to believe that God might listen to him.Please get her safely to shore.Maybe for her sake, God would.

Although her words still dug into him, ached.

“I want the guy who stopped at nothing to find me in the middle of the ocean just because he cared about doing the right thing.”

He wasstilldoing the right thing.But helping her had also made him feel like he could step out of the choices he’d made into a new place, a new version of himself.

“Watch him,” Sergei said to Ivan, then looked over at Declan.“If he tries to touch the console, shoot him.”

Declan held up his hands and rolled his eyes.“I’m just an observer here, man.”

Sergei stepped out of the pilothouse, heading down the stairs, probably to the galley.

Ivan, maybe in his early twenties, glanced over at Declan.“What did he mean by all that?”

Declan frowned.

“When he called you Alosha.”

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