Page 3 of The Oligarch's Daughter

For just the briefest moment, Newman glanced down at Grant’s wallet, and in that instant, Grant lunged at the man, fist balled, and batted the gun out of his hand as hard as he could. The weapon went skittering and clattering across the deck and splashed into the water.

Smoothly, with scarcely a pause, Newman picked up the speargun lying at his feet and hoisted it until it was pointing at Grant’s chest. The man seemed to know what he was doing. The gun was probably five feet long, its end just a few inches from Grant’s body. “You build boats for a living,” Newman said. “You’re very good at it. You know what I do for a living. Trust that I’m good at it, too.”

Obligingly, Grant reset the wheel.

Gesturing around at the water, the wide-open vista, Newman said, “See, in my business, this is what we call a ‘clean field of action.’” He glanced at something on his wrist, maybe a GPS nav device, Grant wasn’t sure. “Bring us seven miles southwest, Paul.”

“Berzin send you?” Grant said, sounding resigned. He watched Newman remove the cotter pin from the cartridge at the end of the bang stick, the safety. So he did know what he was doing.

“You’ve only made things harder on yourself, Paul,” Newman said. “Messier. More painful. It didn’t have to be this way.”

“The currents shift a lot this time of year, you know.” Grant didn’t meet the man’s gaze but looked elsewhere. He felt the ocean waves gently rolling the deck, smelled the diesel. He moved very slowly and carefully toward Newman.

With a sudden motion, he shoved the end of the speargun up and away from his chest and pointing into the air, to point at neither of them. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.

What followed was a blur.

They grappled over the gun, Newman yanking at the weapon, trying to gain control of it, Grant trying to grab it away from him. Grant knocked Newman to the deck, the two men struggling, fighting with each other, each of them grunting. The other man was stronger than he looked. With a guttural roar, he wrenched the speargun out of Grant’s hands, and as the distal end struck the underside of Newman’s jaw, there was a deafening blast. Grant’s face was splashed with blood. His ears rang.

At once he saw what had happened. The .44 magnum round had torn a jagged hole in Frederick Newman’s throat. Blood gouted from the wound, down Newman’s chest, pooling on the lacquered wooden deck. Grant’s face was beaded with blood and sweat. He squatted next to Newman and felt an artery in his bloody neck. There was no pulse, but he knew there wouldn’t be one.

Grant’s stomach was roiling. Something oily rose in his throat. He hadn’t killed the man; the struggle over the speargun had done it. But he felt like he had just crossed some Rubicon, violated some ancient taboo, and was now on the other side of it.

Staggering to his feet, he just made it to the side of the boat and vomited.

He thought of Sarah and the little girl at her school.

Then he took the dead man’s iPhone out of his back pocket. He looked at it. The phone’s home screen was locked. But how to unlock it? Would face ID do it? He held the phone up to the dead man’s face, but the eyes were closed, so it didn’t work.

In any case, your mobile phone could be tracked, he remembered, so he had to get rid of it. Standing at the side of the boat, he dropped the phone into the ocean.

Now he was operating out of purest adrenaline. Cleaning up the puddle of blood would be easy. But what to do about the body?

The solution came to him instantly.

Returning to the wheel, he navigated over to where the sonar fish finder told him there were sharks. A whole school of them, probably tiger sharks. He throttled down to two knots.

He removed the man’s wallet from his back pocket. Opening it, he found a New York State driver’s license in the name ofNEWMANFREDERICKG. In the man’s front pocket was a set of Porsche keys. He thought a moment. Tossing the wallet and keys overboard, he dragged the body a few feet over to the side of the boat, eased it over the edge, and tipped it headfirst into the shark-infested water with a dull splash. A cloud of dark blood instantly bloomed, and the ocean began to churn, and once again he was sick.

2

Grant tied the boat to the dock and once again scrubbed down the deck with bleach. He finished with a spray of the alcohol solution. No trace of blood, as far as he could discern. Just to be sure, he hosed down the deck again and washed it again with boat soap, and then the bleach, and then the alcohol.

If there was an investigation, the alcohol and the bleach wouldn’t be suspicious, he thought. They’d be part of the close of any normal fishing excursion.

Smelling of bleach, he put away the deck chairs and locked up the pilothouse. He said hello to a fisherman on the pier he knew, then made his way to the row of parked cars. There was only one Porsche parked there, a black 911. It was a very good car, the sort of car he once used to drive but hadn’t for a long time.

He unlocked his truck. On the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, he set down a plastic bag containing the striped bass he’d caught. After his struggle with Newman, he’d forced himself to catch a fish, even though all he wanted to do was get home. But he had to be able to explain the time he’d spent on the water.

As he drove home, he noticed that the leaves had turned a spectacular array of colors, from brilliant red to blazing orange to bright yellow and deep russet. This was why leaf peepers drove from miles away to see New Hampshire’s trees. But he wasn’t enjoying the foliage. His entire body was crackling with tension.

From the truck, he called Lyle. “The guy never showed,” he said. “I waited a good long time, and he never appeared. So, hope you don’t mind, I took the boat out to catch some.”

“No problem, but . . . that’s weird,” Lyle said, sneezing, sounding congested. “He even prepaid and everything. That’s really bizarre. Well, sorry for the trouble.”

*

There was aCREAKYold joke in the boatbuilding business: How do you make a million dollars building boats? Start with two million.

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