Текст книги "Circle of Bones"

Автор книги: Christine Kling

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

CHAPTER NINE

Washington, DC

March 18, 2008 

4:47 p.m.

Diggory Priest stood at the center of the star on the floor of the Capitol Crypt and checked his watch for the second time. Most of the tour groups had finished for the day. There were a couple of stragglers on the far side of the large room, teenagers, giggling in front of a glass case that held a model of an earlier design for the Capitol. The Crypt was located on the first floor of the United States Capitol building, directly under the Rotunda. Though the room over Priest’s head had sometimes hosted the lying in state of dead presidents and other luminaries, he’d been told the Crypt, in spite of its name, had never been used for funerary purposes. Now, the large columned space only housed artwork and exhibits about the history and architecture of the building. Diggory thought the man he was meeting had quite a sense of humor to have chosen this location. He checked his watch again. He had not ever known him to be late to a meeting, but given the vagaries of political emergencies, he would give him five more minutes.

It was only after the gigglers had disappeared that Diggory heard the tapping of leather shoes crossing the polished stone floor. The man who approached him was wearing an elegant charcoal suit, white shirt, and red tie. The suit looked good on his lean frame, and he carried a buttery soft and worn Italian leather attaché case. He extended a hand as he approached Diggory.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long?”

“Not a problem, sir. It’s always a pleasure to see you,” Diggory said. He was uncertain of the protocol for names in this particular situation – much depended on the nature of his assignment. Traditionally, members called one another by the names they had taken on the night of their initiation, but this man was so well known from newspapers and television, it was difficult to call him by anything other than his title. Diggory’s Bones name was one formerly used by Averell Harriman and Dean Witter, Jr., among others. God of Thunder.

The man standing before him was Beelzebub.

“I haven’t got much time, Thor, so let me get straight to the point.”

At the sound of that name, Diggory relaxed. “I’m listening, sir.”

“We have a sub rosa exigency.”

Diggory nodded. They all did it. It was their way of talking down to him by trying to talk over him. Sub rosa. Secret. As if he didn’t know. As if he hadn’t made it his fucking specialty.

“It’s down in the islands. Your neck of the Caribbean.” The Agency had sent him on assignments from Barbados to Haiti to Latin America. Places that oozed with poverty and hordes of dark-skinned people. Now, men like Beelzebub saw him as their trouble-shooter in the region.

“I’m asking you to handle this for us with the kind of discretion that has become your trademark.”

“I’d be happy to.”

“Something may surface – bringing up a top secret past operation. One we thought was long buried and gone. This cannot come to light. Not now, not ever.”

“Understood.”

 “As I’m sure you are aware, these are tenuous times for us. If this information were to go public at this point, with the election barely six months off and the fucking economy imploding – impossible to contemplate the damage. They’d use it against us. Hell, both sides would. Anyway, we’ve had a man on the scene down there for several weeks, a senior agent, but I’m not satisfied with his results. I asked the circle to name the top man for this sort of thing, and they named you.”

“I can be on the first plane out.” Top man, perhaps, he thought, but what they were really looking for was their top janitor – still taking orders. Cleaning up their sub rosa exigencies in dirty little corners of the third world.

“Excellent. You’ll be going to Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Your contact is Caliban. He will fill you in on the necessary details.”

“Yes sir.” He shook Beelzebub’s hand.

“Thor.” The older man tightened his grip and locked his eyes on Dig’s. “You’ve never had a more important assignment. Our very existence is at stake.”

Diggory slipped out the north entrance of the Capitol Building and headed up New Jersey Avenue to the Hyatt where he had checked in the night before. As he navigated his way across intersections and up the street, he raised the collar of his coat and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

Blasted cold. Thankfully, he was now headed south. But this was more than merely looking for a more hospitable climate. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He had always known one day they would ask him to clean up a mess so big he would be able to use it to his advantage.

The time had come for him to take what was rightfully his. What had Beelzebub said?  Impossible to contemplate the damage. Or the power that would be his if instead of making it all disappear, Dig made it his own.

In spite of the cold, he smiled.

And the timing could not be more perfect. The stars were aligning for him. It so happened he also had a bit of unfinished business down in the Caribbean. Business with someone who, last he’d heard, was in Antigua on her boat and headed south. She was key to the whole operation. All things come to he who waits. He had waited long enough.

CHAPTER TEN

Pointe-à-Pitre

March 25, 2008

3:45 p.m.

Once the anchor was down and she’d made certain it was set, Riley hurried to lower the dinghy.

“You sure you won’t let me give you a hand?” he asked.

“No, I’ve got it.”

He stuck his lower lip out in a pretend pout and this time there was no getting around it. He did look adorable. It would have been easy to accept his help, but for her own reasons, she needed to do it alone. It wasn’t that she had anything to prove. It was simply part of the discipline. Once she started accepting help, it would be easy to start expecting it. Next thing you know, they’d be involved. A couple. That’s what had happened down in Lima and look how that had turned out. No, she’d stick to doing things herself.

She went below to her cabin, closed the door and pulled off her T-shirt and changed into a clean white polo shirt for her trip to Customs and Immigration. In the main salon she slid on some boat shoes, then stopped at the navigation station to collect her paperwork.

When she raised the hinged tabletop and looked inside, it was obvious that her papers, charts and instruments had been disturbed. On a small boat, everything had to have its place, which suited her.

Son of a bitch, she thought, then she wondered if it counted as cursing if you only thought the words.  What had he been looking for? She’d known something was not right about Bob from the first. His injured hand, his shredded feet. The conspiracy gibberish. She didn’t like strangers, especially paranoid, crazy ones, rummaging through her chart table. If she accused him, he’d deny it. Better not to let on that she knew.

She stuffed the ship’s papers into her canvas briefcase. Dimples or no dimples, she was not going to leave this guy alone with access to her boat. She grabbed the boat’s padlock on her way topsides.

“Look. I’ll go in to Immigration and talk to them. Then, once I’ve cleared, I’ll come get you. I’m going to lock the boat up, but you’ve got water and shade here. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

“Take me ashore with you, and I’ll just take off,” he said. “The French will never know. I already cleared in here.”

Yeah, she thought. Right. “And if somebody has already seen you on my boat and reports it to the authorities? No thanks. They could impound my boat for trying something like that. You’re not on my crew list.”

His eyes widened as he looked around the waterfront that fringed the harbor. “You really reckon they’re watching us?”

“I’m not going to assume they aren’t.”

“I thought for sure I’d lost them back there.”

“Lost who?” Now, she wasn’t at all certain whom he meant by them.

“The aliens.” He grinned. “A couple of guys from Uranus.”

The sooner she could get rid of him, the better. He really was one of the tin hat whack jobs. She shook her head. “I’m not going to risk getting charged with doing something illegal. You sit tight and I’ll have you ashore in an hour.” Sooner if she could manage it.

He cocked his head and watched her as she closed the companionway doors and secured the hatch with the combination padlock.

“You don’t trust me alone on your boat, do you, Miss Maggie Magee?”

She sniffed and raised one eyebrow. “Would you?”

“He was right here,” she said. She was standing in the cockpit of Bonefish.

“Oui, Mademoiselle. So you told us, but where is he now?” The French Immigration Officer, Monsieur Beaulieu, stood on her stern boarding platform in his leather shoes. He was looking down his long nose at the stainless rungs on the ladder that led up to the cockpit.

“I can’t believe this.” Riley sat down hard on the cockpit cushion.

“As I told you, Mademoiselle, we have no record of a Robert Surcouf clearing through immigration.”

She looked at the Frenchman standing on the stern, his upper lip curled in disgust. His nose was worthy of a leading role in a production of Cyrano. She could see long black hairs curling up and out both sides of his nostrils.

“You are sure you got the name right, Mademoiselle?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

She should have seen this coming. Was the craziness just an act or a cover? She was supposed to be the security expert and he’d played her. Bob. Yeah, right. Bet he either swam ashore or hitched a ride with a passing dinghy. The fact that she’d been distracted by her “date” tomorrow was no excuse. She thought about the clothes she’d given him. She’d miss that old shirt. Glancing around the cockpit one last time, she realized the handheld VHF radio was gone, too. Damn him.

“So, Mademoiselle,” he said. “We go?”

Monsieur Beaulieu sat on a pontoon in the bow of the dinghy talking into his cell phone and waving his free hand through the air as she ran him back to the inner harbor her chart referred to as La Darse. The brightly-painted hulls of local fishing boats were tied along the eastern wall, so she continued to the head of the harbor in front of the Place de la Victoire and the still bustling fish market. White plastic buckets filled with ice and red squirrel fish were lined up behind the men who displayed the larger kingfish and grouper on their tables. Creole ladies with headscarves and huge shopping baskets were haggling for better prices. Riley smiled at their waving arms and shrill voices, not so different from the man in her dinghy.

Since she and Beaulieu had been speaking in English, he apparently did not realize she spoke fluent French. He was discussing what to charge her with. He snapped the tiny phone closed and sniffed as she turned the boat to come alongside the seawall.

Once Beaulieu had his feet on terra firma, he brushed his hands together as though he had dirtied himself by getting ferried ashore.

“You are certain your mysterious passenger was American?”

Riley stood in her dinghy looking up at him, one hand on the seawall steadying the boat. “Yes, no doubt about it. And he assured me he had already cleared into your country. Why do you ask?”

“The name he gave you. Surcouf. It is French and I am surprised he would use it.”

“Why?”

“There was a very famous French submarine with this name. Surcouf. Named after a pirate. She disappeared in the Caribbean in la seconde guerre mondiale. Over one hundred and thirty men died when she was lost in 1942.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Exactement. You are an American.” He snorted air through his massive nose. “You know so little about l’histoire of the rest of the world.”

Great. A fake name, and a French one, no less. God only knows what he was into. And the jerk stole her only handheld VHF radio.

Beaulieu waved his hand toward the immigration building on the waterfront. “You are coming.”

It wasn’t a question.

“You’ve got my paperwork, and you know where to find me,” she said.

“That is not sufficient, Mademoiselle. This man you brought ashore, the man you insist was American, has not passed through immigration. He is an illegal, undocumented alien. You will come with me.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Marigot Bay, Guadeloupe

March 25, 2008

5:45 p.m.

The Citroen pulled to the side of the road and screeched off again almost before Cole had fully climbed out of the vehicle.

“Thanks a lot,” he said to the red taillights as they disappeared around the next curve.

He reached down to brush the dust off the tropical print sarong. What did he expect when he was out hitchhiking in a dress – and going commando, no less? The driver had made certain assumptions, and he wasn’t exactly happy when Cole turned him down.

He started down the steep dirt road leading to the narrow rocky beach at the head of the bay. He picked his way between the stones since his bandaged feet had started to hurt again during the ride. He’d plucked the cactus needles out of his hand with tweezers he found in the head on Riley’s boat, and he flexed his hand as he walked. Nearly good as new.

The last rays of sun lit the treetops high on the mountain above him, but down in the cove night was descending. A restaurant was perched on the ledge above the dark water, its colored lights illuminating the small grove of coconut palms. When he reached the bottom of the hill, Cole lifted the green T-shirt and grabbed the VHF radio he had clipped to the waist of his sarong.

“Shadow Chaser, Shadow Chaser, this is Shadow Mobile.”

A few seconds later the radio crackled to life. “Shadow Mobile, where the hell are you?”

“Switch?” he said, and the voice acknowledged. They switched to the VHF radio channel they always used. He didn’t want to broadcast his location in case they were listening. Once Cole explained how he had arrived, his first mate grudgingly agreed to pump up the spare dinghy and come ashore to pick him up.

Twenty minutes later, he heard the oars splashing as his mate struggled to row the tiny boat in through the cove’s small surf. In the deepening dusk, he could make out neither the man’s dark skin nor the black rubber dinghy against the dark water of the bay.

“Over here,” Cole said, stepping out of the shadows.

The dinghy ground onto the shore and Theo Spenser stumbled onto the beach, the rope in the bottom of the tiny inflatable dinghy wrapped around one of his long legs. When he managed to disentangle himself and straighten up, he stood almost half a foot taller than Cole.

“Quite a landing, Theo.”

“Mon, I hate this boat,” Theo said in his clipped, British-sounding English. “It scares the crap out of me.” He adjusted the wire-rimmed glasses on his face and peered down at Cole. “Is that a skirt you’re wearing?”

“I’m starting a new fashion craze.”

“The Scots beat you to it.”

“That’s me. Always a day late and a dollar short.” Cole bent over the small rubber dinghy and began to adjust the oarlocks.

“I’ve heard people call you ‘a few cards short of a full deck,’ but the day late one is a new addition to your repertoire.”

Cole stood up with the dinghy line in his hand. He smiled. “I’m always striving to upgrade.”

“What did you do with the Whaler, anyway?”

“It’s a long story.”

“As usual. And where did you get the radio?” Theo took it from Cole’s hand and held it close to his face to examine it. “It’s a rather nice one,” he said nodding. “Waterproof.”

“I’ll tell you the story when we get out to the boat.” Cole put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “And on the way out, I’ll row.”

Once off the beach, the swells were gentle rollers, so Cole took the opportunity to row facing forward and admire his boat as they approached. Shadow Chaser was sixty-four feet overall, a former shrimper he’d bought in Fernandina and then spent six months converting over to a research and salvage vessel. Her navy blue hull was barely visible against the dark foliage across the bay, but the accommodation lights in the wheelhouse reflected off the water. From her business-like raked bow the lines of her hull swept aft with a slight hollow in her sheer to the lovely rounded transom. God, she was a beauty. She still had her big A-frame crane aft and the outriggers in place, so she looked like the work boat she was, not like some Ivy League asshole’s yacht. But it was Theo who had really done magic with the money they raised.

The kid was amazing. Cole had been teaching in the Maritime Studies program at East Carolina when he met him on the docks at Ocracoke. Theo had arrived one morning as a crewman on a gleaming white motoryacht. Cole was down in the launch, trying to clean the carburetor on an old Johnson outboard when this tall, gangly black kid came over and asked if he could have a look. From Cole’s vantage point, squinting up at the young man, he couldn’t make out any features in his face. The sun behind his head made him look like he had a brilliant celestial aura, and he spoke with an Oxford accent that sounded more like it belonged on Masterpiece Theatre than on a greasy, salt-baked dock on the Outer Banks.

“You know anything about outboards?” Cole asked. “‘Cuz I’m just about ready to give up on this one.”

When the young man jumped down into the wooden tender, Cole saw his skin and hair were the brownish black of one who’d spent hours in the sun. His hair was close-cropped, his white shirt and shorts threadbare but clean and pressed, and behind his gold-rimmed glasses were dark, bright eyes full of intelligence. He shook Cole’s greasy hand and took the wrench without a word. Ten minutes later, the jets were clean, the motor reassembled and the exhaust was producing clouds of bluish smoke as the stranger gunned the engine.

 Cole shouted, “Nice work. What’s your name?”

The young man shut down the engine and wiped the sweat off his forehead with a clean handkerchief. “Theophilus Spenser. Just call me Theo.”

“Where you from, Theo?”

“Dominica. It’s an island.”

“Yeah, I know.”

The young man hopped easily up onto the concrete pier and looked down at Cole with a sigh. “Not the Dominican Republic.”

Cole laughed. “Yeah, I know. My old man spent some time down in the Caribbean. On Dominica and Guadaloupe.”

Theo inclined his head in approval. “Very good. All right. Cheerio.”

Cole watched as the fellow began to head back toward the yacht that had arrived that morning. Did people really still say that? Cheerio? “Hey Theo,” he called out. “You know diesel engines, too?”

In Okracoke, the big yacht left, but Theo stayed, and Cole had seen it as his chance to go out on his own, to say, “See ya’” to that world of academia that never would accept him anyway. Cole started Full Fathom Five Maritime Explorations, and thanks to the support of their one big, then-anonymous donor and a handful of guys who’d made a bundle in Internet start-ups, he bought his own boat, and fitted her out. Theo even designed and built their Remote Operating Vehicle or ROV that had an underwater video camera and a mechanical arm. Cole had named it Enigma. It was better than the one he’d been using at the university. Together, they had turned Shadow Chaser into a state-of-the-art vessel for the search and recovery of archeological artifacts. To their investors, that translated as a treasure hunter.

Once aboard Shadow Chaser, both men headed for the galley, and Cole filled the coffee pot while Theo walked forward to the pilot house to check the gauges on the Cummins generator he’d left running. He brought the chart back and spread it out on the Formica dinette table. Cole slipped into his cabin to change into a pair of shorts. He was about to lift the woman’s shirt off his head, but when the fabric was across his face, he stopped and inhaled. There it was, that citrus smell somewhere between orange and lime. He’d smelled it in her hair when he’d brushed close to her, and again, down in the head on her boat. He smoothed the olive-colored fabric down across his chest. No need to dirty another clean shirt just yet.

Back in the galley, he turned off the stove. When they both had steaming mugs of thick black coffee, they slid onto the red vinyl bench seats of the galley dinette and looked at the chart.

“I’m waiting,” Theo said.

“Okay. I was diving out here,” Cole said, his finger tracing a line off the southwest coast of the island.

Theo didn’t say anything.

“I had the handheld GPS and I was over the coordinates where we’d got that last reading from the magnetometer. I drew a blank, though. Didn’t see a thing.”

Theo rubbed his chin. “So, I suppose there are two possibilities, then. Either the sub broke up into pieces that are now so covered in coral you couldn’t see them – or we still haven’t broken the code right, and the magnetometer got those readings off some other kind of trash.”

“I don’t care if it’s been more than sixty years, we should be able to see something from a sub that in her time was the biggest submarine in the world. Coral wouldn’t cover it that fast.” Cole shook his head. “We haven’t got it right yet. But I know it’s here.” He wasn’t sure if he was referring to the code in the journal or the submarine itself – or both. “Anyway, after I’d exhausted a couple of tanks just chasing fish around, I took the dinghy into this little cove where there’s a spring.” He finished the story, telling Theo about the men who arrived, his escape up and off the cliff, and how he’d been picked up by the Bonefish.

“So what did she look like?”

“What?”

“Don’t bloody try to act like you didn’t notice. It’s not like we’ve had women crawling all over this vessel the last few months. Christ, man, you were butt-naked and all alone on a little sailboat with a woman. Did you do her?”

“Shut up.”

“Aw, come on, Cap’n.” Theo stood up, put his hands under his shirt and poked his fingers out to make imaginary breasts. He waggled his eyebrows up and down. “Was she hot?”

“I don’t know.” Cole rubbed his hands across the chart, smoothing out non-existent wrinkles in the paper. “I was more worried about the guys who’d been trying to kill me an hour earlier.”

“Yeah, right,” Theo said, sitting back down looking dejected. He took a long drink of his coffee. “So somebody’s after you. Again.”

Cole held up an index finger and pointed at Theo. “One of these days, my friend, you are going to have to eat those doubting words.”

Theo leaned forward, his close-cropped head hovering over the chart. “So, who do you think they were this time?”

“The Brewster brothers.”

“No, mon.” Theo leaned back, screwed his eyes closed for a second and made a face like a man who had just sucked on a lemon. “Not again. Not those two trogs?”

Cole wasn’t thrilled about it either. The Brewsters were half brothers, a couple of Outer Banks lowlifes who had once told Cole they were “from the same crackhead mama, different white daddies.”

“How’d they find us?” Theo asked. “I thought we left them back in the Carolinas.”

Cole shrugged. “Word gets around. Especially that word – gold. And Shadow Chaser’s not exactly inconspicuous. Even a moron could track down a boat that looks like her in the Caribbean.”

“I wouldn’t give Spyder that much credit.” Theo sipped from his coffee mug.

“Spyder, no. His brother, yes. Besides, I’m pretty sure I spotted them as the woman was bringing us into Pointe-à-Pitre.”

“What? Tell me they didn’t see you.”

“No, I went below to use the head.  They’ve got a Bertram sportfish now, named Fish n’ Chicks.”

Theo chuckled. “Probably stole it and renamed it. That sounds like Spyder.”

Cole nodded. “I’m almost certain they were the ones after me this morning. With those wet suit hoods, I didn’t really see their faces, but later I was looking out the port when this boat passed us. It sure looked like Pinky out on deck.”

“Him, I’d recognize anywhere.”

“You’ve got that right,” Cole said. There was a time he’d felt sorry for Pinky who suffered from a condition called vitiligo. Most of his skin was the light brown color of walnut shells, but vitiligo had caused odd patches to lose all pigmentation. The result was he sported a white Afro and his skin looked like somebody had splashed him with a bucket of bleach.

Theo walked to the galley sink and rinsed out his mug. “So, what about the Whaler?”

“Let’s head down there and look for it tonight. I can’t afford a new one. And there was all my dive gear in it, too. If we’re lucky, they left it there. Decided they’d rather leave it for us so we can find the wreck – which they intend to steal from us, later.”

“What I don’t get is, if they followed us here, why show themselves now? Why chase you? What were they after?”

“They must know, somehow, that we’re getting close.”

“But how? Do you think they know about the journals?”

“God, I hope not.”