Water Memory Read online

  PRAISE FOR DANIEL PYNE

  “Deceptively explosive, Water Memory pairs the cleverness and precision timing of Daniel Pyne’s riveting storytelling with his addictive, action-packed plotting and unforgettably vivid cast of characters.”

  —Karin Slaughter, New York Times and international bestselling author

  “Water Memory blew me away. It’s the kind of rare character-driven, adrenaline-charged action-thriller readers crave and writers dare to emulate. Aubrey Sentro is an iconic, kick-ass heroine—deeply flawed, exceptionally skilled, and exceedingly motivated. Lara Craft on steroids. A brilliant page-turner.”

  —Robert Dugoni, #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of A Cold Trail

  “A deftly crafted thriller with a captivatingly complex lead character, Pyne’s action-packed novel builds with each surprise twist and will keep you up late turning the pages.”

  —Chad Zunker, Amazon Charts bestselling author of An Equal Justice

  “Mother knows best, even when her memory is short-circuiting. Water Memory has everything you want in a modern-day thriller: pirates, propulsive action, and an unforgettable female lead. Pyne’s prose is elegant, evocative, extraordinary. Best book I’ve read in ages. Addictive.”

  —K. J. Howe, international bestselling author of Skyjack

  “Water Memory moves like Die Hard but with a tragic family backstory as its heart—and with an indelible, three-dimensional action heroine, Aubrey Sentro, as the muscle and sinew. I loved it.”

  —Barry Eisler, New York Times bestselling author

  “Daniel Pyne’s Water Memory is a stylish and addictive thriller propelled by gritty action, sublime intrigue, and a brilliantly executed character twist.”

  —Steven Konkoly, Wall Street Journal bestselling author

  “A mysterious woman on a mysterious path, danger in the future and from the past—Water Memory holds a hypnotic grip on you from the very first page. This is Daniel Pyne at his very best.”

  —Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  OTHER TITLES BY DANIEL PYNE

  Catalina Eddy: A Novel in Three Decades

  Fifty Mice

  Twentynine Palms

  A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Daniel Pyne

  All rights reserved.

  “I’m an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grand)”

  Words and Music by JOHNNY MERCER

  Copyright© 1936 (Renewed) THE JOHNNY MERCER FOUNDATION

  All Rights Administered by WC MUSIC CORP.

  All Rights Reserved

  Used By Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542025027 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542025028 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542025034 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542025036 (paperback)

  Front Cover Design by Kaitlin Kall

  Back Cover Design by Ray Lundgren

  For Joan

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE:

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PART TWO:

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  PART THREE:

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)

  How fast she nears and nears!

  Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,

  Like restless gossameres?

  Are those her ribs through which the Sun

  Did peer, as through a grate?

  And is that Woman all her crew?

  Is that a DEATH? and are there two?

  Is DEATH that woman’s mate?

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  PROLOGUE

  The fifth-floor hallway was darker than reported, and there was an awkward dogleg near the stairwell that their local recon hadn’t bothered to map; it smelled of garlic, mold, and dry rot even though the hotel was billed as a Byzantine five-star. A milky Mediterranean twilight bled faint from hidden recesses along the ceiling, enough to cast a glow but not overly expose the shadow gliding through the shadows toward its target.

  A woman, unremarkable, if a little boxy, hip to shoulder. Here on business, you might think, not worth a second look. Black slacks, T-shirt and unstructured blazer, wireless earpiece, and Zero Halliburton briefcase.

  She approached a doorway with a curious surfeit of caution, stepping to one side of it while preparing to knock. But then she hesitated, stared uncertainly at the brass digits fixed to the door—six two seven—and was momentarily unable to make sense of them. A voice in her earpiece hissed, “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, forgetting that the voice couldn’t see her; she glanced across the hallway at the next doorway, momentarily paralyzed with doubt.

  “Suite number,” she murmured, with a calm she didn’t feel. “Double-check for me?”

  “Seriously?” In her earpiece, an annoyed whisper: “Shit, man, did you fucking forget it?”

  She didn’t answer him but felt her cheeks flush hot because yeah, she had.

  “Stand by.”

  She waited as papers rustled on the other end of her comm, a clock in her head ticking away precious seconds that she knew, from long experience, she’d regret losing however this went down, at which point a door across the hall but just behind her—six two six—opened to reveal the naked, pale, middle-aged Chinese American asset she’d been sent to retrieve, a towel wrapped around his waist and a frown on his face. Their eyes locked.

  There’s the plan that you make going in, and then there’s what really happens—the shitstorm. Rarely do they align.


  “Can I help you?”

  No. It was supposed to be the other way around. But on the love-tossed bed in the room behind the towel man, a pretty, naked woman was reaching to a side table and a big black Glock that surely had been stowed in its drawer for a contingency just like this one.

  The woman in the hallway felt the familiar slowing of time she often experienced at the initiation of conflict. The clarity, the narrowing of focus, her pulse in her neck, a slight dissociation, as if she were watching what was unfolding rather than actively participating in it.

  She was across the corridor and falling to the side and away from the six-two-six doorway, her arm wrapped around and pulling the towel man down with her as bullets from the naked woman’s gun splintered the jamb, slipped hot past their faces, and blistered plaster off the wall opposite. She felt them tear into the tactical vest under her T-shirt and bang off the metal briefcase she had raised as a shield. The narrow corridor came alive: voices, Turkish, other doors flung wide, a volley of panicked gunfire as red tracer dots from short-stock automatics searched the gloaming for her.

  The towel man was shrieking. She felt the warm wetness where a bullet had grazed her neck, just below her ear.

  Stress, but no panic. She whispered evenly, “Stay with me, Scott, okay?” Their Halliburton shield burst open, she lost her grip on it, and bullets tore the cash bundles inside into a flurry of pale confetti that smelled like burned rice.

  She hit the floor hard. The stun grenade that exploded next was too close to her, with a roar of blinding light she’d been unprepared for.

  The three-op backup who had rolled into position beyond her waited for sight lines to clear so they could cut the Turks down with little fanfare.

  Close your eyes. Cover your ears. With the asset in her arms, she had been unable to follow any operational protocol. A searing scree deafened her. Curled around her man, protective, blood leaking from her neck wound, she felt dizzy, head filled with glue, and sensed a lateral movement.

  The naked woman. Glock in her outstretched hand aimed point-blank down at the asset.

  His dad body wasn’t as heavy as she expected. Or maybe it was simply the adrenaline of fear. She levered him safely to one side, rotated while pulling the sidearm from her hip—took a breath—and aimed center mass before tapping the trigger twice.

  The naked woman dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  Shredded bills and bits from the broken briefcase were still wafting down on them. No more than eleven seconds had passed. It had happened so fast that the spray of the overhead sprinklers triggered by the stun grenade only now began to rain.

  Her thinking was splintered and unreliable; her eyes felt fried, the hallway even thicker with the smoke and the mist. She struggled to sit up. The naked woman lay dewy and unmoving on the threadbare carpet, ivory skin between augmented breasts ruined by the two puckered puncture wounds where the bullets had made entry.

  There was movement around her. She heard but couldn’t understand the voices, as if she were underwater, but when her hand found his shoulder, she felt the pounding of the sobbing towel man’s heart.

  “Let’s get you home,” she heard herself murmur.

  There were hands under her arms then, and she stood, finding her balance; the rank lukewarm water that ran down her upturned face felt heaven sent. The backup team got their trembling towel-clad asset to his feet and trundled both of them to the emergency stairwell and away.

  Her own pulse was steady, stubborn; she’d survived.

  PART ONE:

  GIRL WOMAN ON A BOAT

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The ocelot is a wild cat.”

  Only one of her assigned kids is still in residence, and in the big, noisy common room, she sits at a table helping the scruffy almost-nine-year-old boy named Damien struggle with his homework, reading aloud the paragraph she’s helped him research and watched him compose.

  “It hunts at night.”

  Little kids, she muses, sound more like spies than spies.

  The creepy security guy who must never go off duty greeted Aubrey Sentro with a gap-toothed leer, just as he does every night she slips through the front door of All Saints Rescue Mission to tutor homeless grade school students. She tries to imagine herself as he sees her: not really MILF material, but he doesn’t seem picky; average, then, older than she looks, not big but fit, oddly graceful, her close-cropped hair threatening to grow out, no aversion to smiling. Which she did as she breezed past him. It’s a reflex. Smiles disarm and buy time. One of the few things she’s sure she inherited from her mother, it’s proved useful from time to time, in this case to breeze safely past the guard without having to suffer another one of his humorless jokes.

  “It’s got fur like a jag—a jag—a jag-u-are—”

  “Jaguar.”

  “—and people kill them for its fur.”

  Since Dennis died, she’s struggled to fill her time. Grown kids, empty house. Hard to make close, long-term friends when you’ve been living a sort of lie. Between her business trips there lurks a yawning emptiness that scares her more than any physical threat. Doing homework with Jenny and Jeremy was once borrowed time she treasured. Despite the long absences—or maybe because of them—she’d greedily spend all her free days at home with her children. It was never enough. Cramming too much into limited windows probably smothered them—out of guilt, out of need, out of her own greedy joy—and no doubt was the reason they began to push her away as they got older. It could be maddening, the way they craved you when you weren’t there and evaded you when you were. Dennis would reassure her it was natural; they were a good team, the two of them, each filling in where the other gapped.

  “Their fur. That’s great, Damien. Keep going.”

  She had never expected to outlive her husband. She did her part, but he was the glue that held them all together. And now, if it turns out she can no longer do her work, what’s left? Friday bar crawl with Lucky and his wife? Marta’s book club? Her ears ring faintly at a pitch not on any scale. That and the tepid headache have become her constant companions.

  “I don’t understand why you won’t let me use spell-check.”

  “You need to learn to spell.”

  “But that’s why there’s spell-check.”

  “What if the spell-check is wrong?”

  “Wronger than me?”

  “Or what if there’s a power failure and you can’t get online?” She hesitates—what do they call those bombs? EMPs. Electromagnetic pulse weapons, Sentro remembers. They were all the rage for a while.

  Damien rolls his eyes, and as he makes the correction on the borrowed shelter laptop, Sentro reaches into her pocket, takes out a small pill bottle with a childproof cap. It was Jenny who suggested the tutoring, Jeremy who found her the venue. For a while she was coming here four times a week. But the impermanence wore on her. Homeless kids are at the mercy of their peripatetic parents; she’d just be getting started, and they’d vanish. Rarely to return.

  “Jagwire.”

  “Close enough.” She fumbles to open her bottle as Damien soldiers on.

  “Jagwire. Their fur. The ocelot—the ocelot can live in trees, and the ocelot will fight”—he stumbles over the word—“fer-o-shus . . .”

  Sentro shakes out a pair of capsules to wash down with Diet Pepsi, then sees the boy watching her, looking wary. “It’s just aspirin,” she says. “For a headache.” She smiles her smile. “Keep going.”

  “My sister went to jail for pills.”

  “These are legal.”

  “They make her act scary weird.”

  Sentro holds Damien’s gaze. “Don’t worry.” His mother works two jobs, trying to save enough to make first and last month’s rent to move to subsidized housing. Sentro has offered to help them, but the All Saints volunteer rules prevent it.

  “—and fight ferocious sometimes,” he resumes.

  “Ferociously.”

  “What?”

  “Never m
ind.”

  “She sorta stabbed my mom with scissors.” The little boy won’t look at her. There’s something else.

  “What.”

  “What if I’m not here when you come back?”

  Sentro wants to say the right thing. “I’ll find you,” she tells him, knowing it might be impossible. But she’d try. “Ferociously.”

  “Ocelots, us,” Damien says.

  “That’s right.”

  “’Kay.” The little boy lowers his head, makes the correction, and: “—ferociously, sometimes to the death . . . for its home and family.”

  He looks up at her. This last part he knows by heart.

  “But mostly ocelots live alone. They are an endangered species.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I’m an old cowhand . . .

  Several CT scans of a human head glow, spectral, on a wall monitor.

  . . . from the Rio Grande . . .

  Normal bone structure. Healthy tissue. No tumors. No apparent trauma.

  “Did you play contact sports when you were younger, Mrs. Troon?”

  “Sentro. Ms.”

  “Oh.” The doctor looks down at his chart with what she presumes to be a practiced, professional doubt that he could ever be mistaken. “I’m sorry. It says here—”

  “Sentro’s my maiden name; I never legally changed it. When the kids were younger, I used my husband’s name for family and medical matters because—”

  “I get it.” He makes a notation.

  Having given up trying to convince herself that the noise in her head will fade, here she is: battery of tests, awkward questions, anxious and undone. She’s determined not to tell anyone, yet. A diagnosis is what she wants. And a remedy.

  A confirmation is what she’s afraid she’ll get instead.

  MRI of a human brain. The ragged coastlines of gyri and sulci. Her head has felt heavy for days. Overcast. Migraines, mood swings, discomfiting distractions—she can’t shake loose the clouds. The riot of color assigned to scanned images is merely for reference, but part of her wants to believe that they’ve actually mapped the tangled, uninvited memory scraps that have started chasing her through fitful nights: thunderclouds piled like soft serve, tumbleweeds the size of longhorns, a wafer-thin air freshener in the shape of a rose, faded by sun, dangling from the rearview of a station wagon doing ninety on a Texas two-lane, ruler straight from horizon to horizon. A brown Sherman Cigarettello, smoke twisting up from the glow, wedged in the pink lipstick smear of her mother’s mouth, singing: