Chapter 13 - The Triage of Truth
The interior of the Coast Guard cutter Anacapa smelled of hot coffee, diesel fuel, and industrial wool blankets—the three most intoxicating aromas I had ever encountered in my entire life.
We were in the vessel’s medical triage bay. I sat on a stainless-steel examination table, stripped of my ruined silk tunic and wrapped in three layers of active-warming forced-air Bair Hugger blankets. An intravenous line in my right forearm was pumping eighty-eight-degree warmed saline directly into my bloodstream to safely raise my core body temperature from ninety-three degrees back toward normal parameters.
Across the narrow bay, Marcus lay on a secondary gurney, surrounded by two Coast Guard hospital corpsmen who were administering oxygen and monitoring his cardiac rhythm. His hypothermia had been severe; he was still shivering violently, his skin pale and mottled, but his cognitive faculties were slowly returning as the warmed fluids did their work.
The watertight door of the medical bay clicked open, and a man in the clean blue uniform of a Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander stepped inside. He had a stern, weathered face and held a stainless-steel clipboard under his arm. He walked directly to my table, stopping at the foot of the bed, his posture radiating rigid military formality.
“Mrs. Vance?” the officer asked, looking down at his clipboard, then up at my face. “I am Lieutenant Commander Vance—no relation, obviously. I’m the commanding officer of this vessel. How are you feeling?”
“Like I fought a glacier and scored a draw, Commander,” I said, my voice still slightly raspy from smoke inhalation and salt water, but steady. “What is our location?”
“We are currently making twenty knots east-southeast toward Port Angeles,” the Commander replied. “We pulled you out of the water three miles south of the Canadian maritime border. Now, Mrs. Vance, I need to ask you some preliminary questions regarding the loss of your vessel. When we intercepted your automated Mayday signal, you reported an active violent hijacking in progress. Yet when we pulled you out of the water, you were physically anchored to your husband’s brother in a lifesaving survival posture.”
He looked across the bay at Marcus, who had turned his head on the pillow to watch our conversation with hollow, bloodshot eyes.
“My radar operators also tracked a secondary small craft—a motorized inflatable—departing the coordinates of your vessel at high speed approximately fifteen minutes before our arrival,” the Commander continued, his eyes narrowing slightly. “That craft crossed into Canadian territorial waters before our interceptor could launch. Who was on that boat, Mrs. Vance?”
I looked at the Commander, then looked across the medical bay directly into Marcus’s eyes.
For the last six months, I had played the role of the quiet, accommodating civilian wife—the woman who smiled at dinners, ignored red flags, and allowed men in custom suits to dictate the parameters of her reality. That woman had drowned in fifty-two-degree water an hour ago.
I sat up slightly against the examination table pillows, letting the warming blankets fall away from my shoulders to reveal the deep, dark purple contusion on my collarbone and the split, healing cuts across my knuckles.
“Commander,” I said, my voice ringing with the crisp, unmistakable authority of a federal intelligence officer, “my name is Kathryn Vance. Former Captain, United States Marine Corps, Special Operations Training Group. What you are investigating is not a simple maritime accident or a hijacking.”
I pointed a finger across the room at Marcus.
“That man sitting on your gurney, along with his younger brother Julian Vance and a bribed commercial master named Captain Briggs, conspired to commit maritime extortion, unlawful restraint, and attempted murder on the high seas,” I declared clearly. “They lured me onto a private charter, disabled the communications grid, and attempted to force me at gunpoint and with a steel crowbar to sign over a ten-million-dollar real estate trust.”
The two hospital corpsmen working on Marcus froze, their hands hovering over his IV lines as they stared at me in stunned silence.
“When I resisted and disabled the vessel’s engines in self-defense,” I continued relentlessly, “Julian Vance and Captain Briggs stole the vessel’s only motorized tender, abandoned this man and me on a burning, sinking hull in a fog bank, and fled into Canadian jurisdiction with three hundred thousand dollars in illicit charter funds.”
The Lieutenant Commander’s face hardened into granite. He looked down at his clipboard, making a rapid, sharp notation with his pen, before turning his gaze slowly toward Marcus.
“Mr. Vance,” the Commander said coldly. “Do you dispute any of the tactical or criminal allegations Captain Vance has just entered into my official ship’s log?”
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Marcus closed his eyes, resting his head back against the white hospital pillow. A long, shuddering exhale escaped his chest—the sound of a man who realized that his money, his family name, and his corporate arrogance could no longer protect him from the crushing machinery of federal justice.
“No, Commander,” Marcus whispered softly into the quiet medical bay. “Every single word she just said is true.”
