Surviving The Evacuation (Book 3): Family Read Free Page A

that was months ago.”
    “Exactly, there’s bound to be more by now.”
    “Or none left at all. You can’t be certain anyone’s left.”
    “No more certain than you can be that they are all dead. And there’s no reason to think they would be. Those guys in Crossfields Landing had more munitions than most medium sized countries. And if they needed to retreat, then there’s the sea at their backs. As for the Vehement, exactly who’s going to threaten a nuclear powered, nuclear-armed submarine? Anyway, it’s Sophia who’s going to be waiting for me. Or she’ll send someone.”
    “How can you be certain she will?” I asked.
    “I told you. Sophia owes me. She won’t let me down.”
    “You’ve said that,” Kim said, “half a dozen times, but you’ve not said why, or why Bill and I should trust her.”
    “You trust me, don’t you?” he retorted.
    “Surprisingly, yes. But that’s not what I meant. What’s your connection with her?”
    “I thought I told you? No? OK, well for that we have to go back a few years.”
    “Can’t you just give us the short version?” she asked.
    “Why? What else have you got planned. We’ve at least another hour before we get to the next lock. As I was saying, we have to go back a few years. Her family has been fishing for years. Father to son to niece to cousin. The surname changed, but someone in that family was hauling cod out of the Atlantic since before Amerigo Vespucci’s name was first misspelt. Most recently that was Sophia. She had delusions of acting until her brother drowned, and she realised that living in increasingly smaller apartments chasing increasingly irregular work was even less appealing than spending the rest of her life knee-deep in fish guts. She returned to Puerto Rico, claimed her inheritance and discovered it consisted of a boat that leaked more than a five-cent sieve. She’d gone to Hollywood hoping to get rich and didn’t see why that should change. She needed a new boat. Ideally she needed more than one. No bank was ever going to front her that kind of cash, so she got her loan from a group of unpleasant men with deep pockets and long memories.
    “She managed to make her repayments, and all was peachy, right up until the hurricane hit. I doubt you’ll remember that particular storm, it was back in the dark ages before we had twenty four news. It blacked-out a few hundred miles of coast, destroyed some villages, devastated a few towns and flooded the port. She lost her boats. That didn’t stop her getting in a dinghy trying to rescue people stranded by the flooding. And that is how she came to my attention. There was a piece about her on the news. An election was coming up and I thought she’d look good on a stage next to my candidate. By the time I found her, she’d been told that press, fame and a civics award weren’t much use when the interest was due. I say she was ‘told’, the people she owed the money to had burnt down her office, and that was a real feat given the flooding. So I made her an offer.”
    “What? One she couldn’t refuse?” Kim asked, sarcastically.
    “Of course she could have refused. The alternative was smuggling drugs north and guns south until she was caught or killed. She knew it. I knew it. I offered to pay off her debts, buy her two new boats and make sure she wasn’t bothered again. In return...”
    “No, hang on. What do you mean by ‘make sure’?”
    “I grew up running drugs and guns for an organised crime syndicate in London,” he said. “I crossed the Atlantic on a fake passport and bribed, blackmailed and bludgeoned my way to the top. What do you think I mean? I had the cash, and was looking for a very public good deed to perform. In return she’d...”
    “No,” Kim cut in again. “I don’t buy it. There’s no way she’d swap a school of piranhas for one big shark. What exactly did you tell her, because I bet you didn’t tell her the truth?”
    “The truth was that I wanted a way