The Last Witness

by W. E. B. Griffin

  If those poor girls aren’t dead, they probably wish they were, she thought.

  And Krystal may have just missed the same fate.

  —

  She turned down a brick-paved alleyway, then thumbed the button of the garage door opener clipped to her sun visor. Approaching the back of her three-story town house—in the last year she’d spent a small fortune renovating the hundred-year-old structure—she saw that the wooden door of the garage was almost completely open. The interior was brightly lit.

  Glancing up, she saw that there were no lights in the windows of the second and third floors.

  Krystal didn’t call back on my house phone, she thought, nosing the Land Cruiser inside the neat, orderly garage. Maybe she went to bed?

  Or she’s hiding in the dark . . . ?

  Maggie put the SUV in park and turned it off. As she opened her driver’s door, she heard a heavy thump upstairs and what sounded like glass shattering and, a moment later, the rush of air.

  Maggie jerked her head, struggling to hear as the garage door closed.

  Maybe she fell? But what was—?

  The smoke alarms suddenly went off with a steady, ear-piercing squeal.

  She got out of the vehicle and ran up the staircase. Reaching the top, she grabbed the doorknob—and instinctively yanked back her hand when she felt the heat. She tugged her thick sweater cuff over her hand, then quickly grabbed and turned the knob.

  The door opened onto the kitchen. When she pulled on it, flames flickered out of the crack. She slammed it shut.

  What’s that smell? Gas?

  She waited for a long moment, then tried again.

  This time the flames were not quite as intense—and now she could see Krystal. She was lying on the kitchen’s hardwood floor. What looked like a beer bottle with a rag tied to it lay in a pool of blood beside her head. A second one was shattered on the marble countertop. The wooden cabinetry was burning rapidly.

  The room reeked of gasoline.

  “Oh my God!” she whimpered, her green eyes tearing.

  I need to call nine-one-one!

  No—I don’t. The alarm system does that.

  She pulled her sweater over her head and ran to Krystal and knelt. Krystal’s face was coated in blood. Her eyes were glazed. Maggie touched her neck to feel for a pulse, found none, then grasped her shoulders and shook her.

  “Krystal!”

  There was no response.

  When she had shaken her, her head had moved—and Maggie now noticed a small brass object, then a second one, in the blood pool. She immediately recognized them as spent bullet casings.

  She looked back at Krystal—and now followed the trail of blood on her neck to the small round entrance wound the bullet had made behind her right earlobe.

  You poor thing . . .

  Maggie quickly looked around the kitchen, then down the hall that led to the front of the house. At the end, she could see that the front door was wide open.

  Did she not lock the door?

  Or did she let in whoever did this?

  The flames on the cabinets suddenly grew stronger and hotter.

  She ran back to the door to the garage, went through it, and slammed it shut. She slapped at the wall to the left of the door frame until her fingers found the control button that opened the garage door.

  The light on the opener in the center of the ceiling came back on. The motor hummed as the big wooden door clunked upward.

  She could hear the sound of sirens, faint but clear. They were coming from the direction of the firehouse not quite a half dozen blocks away at Sixth and South.

  Maggie ran down the steps.

  She pulled from the front passenger floorboard of the Land Cruiser a canvas sailing bag—its neat stitching read YELLOWROSE SPRING BAY RESORT & SPA, VIRGIN GORDA BVI—then took it behind the enclosed stairway. She opened the narrow door there. A single bulb above automatically came on, and she crouched as she entered the small enclosure.

  A heavy rug covered most of the concrete floor. Tugging back the far corner, she uncovered a false floor that was a three-foot square of sheet metal.

  She slid the square aside to reveal a fireproof safe that had been set in the concrete floor. Its door had a readout and a digital keypad for its combination, and she quickly punched in a string of numbers. The keypad beeped as each number was pushed.

  Suddenly there was a rapid series of three beeps. A tiny bulb beside the readout lit up red. The screen flashed ERROR.

  “Damn!” she said, breathing heavily.

  She punched the CANCEL key, then held her breath and again rapidly keyed in the combination’s string of numbers. When she finished, she hit the pound symbol key.

  Simultaneously there came a single beep, the tiny bulb glowed green, and the readout flashed OPENING. That was followed by the whirring sound of the door tumblers disengaging the insets of the door frame.

  She exhaled heavily, then swung open the fireproof safe’s heavy door.

  Maggie reached inside and pulled out a stack of folders and notebooks. She quickly stuffed them into her shoulder bag. She then reached back into the safe, found a bulging brass-zippered cloth bank pouch with the silk-screened logotype KEYSTONE FINANCIAL SERVICES, and a heavy black plastic bag imprinted in gold with LUCKY STARS CASINO & ENTERTAINMENT, and added them to the canvas bag.

  Finally, she extracted a black molded plastic clamshell case. She flipped open its silver latches and swung back the top. She looked for a long moment at its contents—a Baby Glock Model 26 9mm semiautomatic pistol with two extra fully charged ten-round magazines—then grunted and shook her head. She racked the slide back and a shiny round ejected, landing inside the safe.

  Damn it.

  She then let loose of the slide, chambering another round. She stuck the pistol and extra magazines into her bag with everything else, then dropped in the plastic case, slamming the door shut.

  —

  Maggie McCain climbed into the Land Cruiser and with effort put the now heavy canvas bag on the front passenger seat. Tires squealed as she quickly backed out of the garage.

  When she slid to a stop in the alleyway and looked up through the snow that now fell steadily, she could not believe her eyes. The entire second floor was engulfed in flames. And the flames were quickly spreading to the third floor.

  The sirens were getting louder.

  It’s all too little too late.

  Poor Krystal . . .

  Her thoughts were interrupted by her work cell phone ringing. She tugged it out of her pocket, looked down—and gasped.

  The screen read KRYSTAL G.

  That’s impossible!

  She’s . . . she’s . . .

  After a moment, the call went to voice mail, and a moment later Maggie touched the message icon that appeared on-screen.

  Over the speakerphone, a Latin male’s voice, with a siren growing in the background, growled: “I told those putas to keep their fuckin’ mouths shut. Now I’m tellin’ you, bitch—”

  Her heart raced. She dropped the cell phone as if it also were on fire.

  She put her hand over her mouth, staring at the phone on the floorboard until its screen dimmed and went dark.

  She looked out the windshield, her mind starting to spin as she watched the flames.

  That was the guy . . . Ricky?

  He’s here! And knows my number!

  He has to know about Mary’s House. . . .

  What else is on Krystal’s phone?

  Her mind flashed with the scene of the burning kitchen and the girl, lifeless on the floor in a pool of her own blood.

  The sirens screamed closer.

  She shook her head, trying to clear it.

  She jerked the gearshift into drive and floored the accelerator.

  She frantical
ly slapped at the door panel, finally finding the window switches. The right front and rear windows both went down at once. Bitter cold air blew into the SUV.

  She felt as if she were going to start shaking, from both the chill and the fear, and forced it back.

  She then reached down to the floorboard, grabbed the cell phone, and threw it. It went out the front window, disappearing into the thick snowflakes. Then she hit the switches again, putting the windows up.

  As she skidded to a stop at the end of the alleyway, an enormous red fire truck filled the windshield. Engine 11 flashed past, its siren wailing and emergency lights pulsing in the falling snow.

  Crying, she dug the Baby Glock out of the bag while watching the fire truck make a right turn onto her street.

  She then spun the steering wheel left. And again floored the accelerator.

  [TWO]

  Latitude 23 Degrees 32 Minutes 64 Seconds North

  Longitude 81 Degrees 92 Minutes 77 Seconds West

  North of the Republic of Cuba

  Sunday, November 16, 1:35 A.M.

  “Damn it, Miguel, that’s got to be them!” First Mate Raúl Alfonso announced, peering through binoculars as he stood beside the helm of the Nuevo Día. “Those Pangas are right on the GPS coordinates they sent. But why two boats? Is one a backup? Or what . . . ?”

  The sky was clear, the winds calm, the sea almost flat. The thin crescent of a new moon hung near the horizon amid a blanket of twinkling stars. The humid air was thick, its salty smell heavy.

  The New Day was a faded black, rusty steel-hulled cargo vessel 280 feet in length. In addition to a regular schedule of calling on ports around the Bahamian Islands, she and her sister ship made staggered once-a-week trips to Havana from their home port of Miami. The vessels delivered items deemed by the Communist government of Cuba to be of humanitarian value—for an outrageous import tariff paid by the Cuban exiles in the States who sent them—and thus permissible to enter the sovereign island nation.

  Months earlier, in another humanitarian shipment, handheld Motorola two-way radios and Garmin GPS units, possession of which Cuban law considered treason and would result in the bearer’s immediate imprisonment and likely torture, had been smuggled to Cuban fishermen inside fifty-pound bags of dried frijoles negros. Black beans, a Cuban staple, were in almost as great a demand as rice.

  A chunky round-faced thirty-year-old Cuban-American, Alfonso stood five-five. He wore a mussed tan uniform, the shirt untucked and his ample belly straining its buttons.

  Even with the high-powered optics and the clear weather, he could make out no more than the silhouettes of the two Pangas in the predawn darkness. The narrow, low-profile, twenty-five-foot-long fishing boats, each powered by a single outboard motor, were designed more for calmer inshore waters than for the open sea.

  “Perhaps God is with us,” Alfonso said, as he passed the binoculars to the ship’s master.

  “Don’t speak too soon, mi amigo,” Captain Miguel Treto replied.

  Treto also was Cuban-American. At thirty-three years of age, he looked like a slightly older version of Alfonso, though not nearly as chunky. His tan uniform was much neater.

  Alfonso pointed out the pilothouse window.

  “Near one o’clock,” he added helpfully, “about two hundred yards out.”

  “Got ’em, Raúl,” Captain Treto said, almost immediately after putting the rubber cups to his eyes. “But, like what happened last month, they could just be other fishermen. Or, worse, even a trap. Radio the code to confirm that’s really them.”

  —

  The previous day, the Nuevo Día had made the run from Miami to the Port of Havana. The Cuban capital was only ninety miles due south of Key West. Alfonso and the four-man crew had unloaded the cargo of forty-foot-long corrugated metal intermodal containers in just under two hours. Immediately thereafter, with paperwork complete—and none of the crew, including the captain, having been allowed ashore—lines were cast off and the ship headed back to the States.

  When south of the Gulf Stream, particularly during the ten-mile approach and departure of the island, it was standard operating procedure for the captain to keep the speed of the twin diesels at a fraction of the usual twenty-knots-an-hour cruise speed. This accomplished a number of things, beginning with better fuel consumption. But more importantly it also bought extra time for the captain to locate any rendezvous target and, during a pickup, for the ship not to draw attention when suddenly slowing or stopping.

  Since clearing the breakers at the mouth of the Port of Havana, the Nuevo Día had been making just over five knots per hour. She now, after four hours, was approximately twenty miles east, not far from Santa Cruz del Norte, the small fishing town (population thirty-two thousand) where the Río Santa Cruz emptied into the Caribbean.

  The lumbering vessel—in addition to her red, green, and white navigation lights burning—had small clear lights on either side of the bow. They illuminated the thirty-six-inch-high rust-stained white letters that spelled out NUEVO DÍA on the faded black hull.

  If they have binocs, Alfonso thought, they won’t be as good as mine.

  And if I can’t make out their details, who knows what they can—or can’t—see?

  Alfonso thumbed the handheld’s PUSH TO TALK key three times. That caused three clicks to sound on the speaker of any radio within ten or so miles that shared the frequency. They knew that it was possible that someone in the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias—Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces—could be monitoring radio traffic and would somehow interpret the clicks as being a signal. But, being a very common frequency and not maritime specific—not to mention the laxness of the Tropas Guarda Fronteras, especially at such an early hour—their experience had been that it also was equally entirely improbable.

  TGF, the Interior Ministry’s Border Guard, used aging Soviet-built patrol boats to interdict Cubans fleeing the island and anti-Castro agents infiltrating it. But, with failing assets and regular shortages of fuel, they managed to do so only sporadically.

  “Nothing!” Captain Treto said unnecessarily, as they both strained to see out into the dark distance, Treto still using the binoculars.

  Then, a long moment later, a beam from a flashlight on the closest Panga lit momentarily, then lit again, and again.

  “There!” Alfonso said.

  He keyed the radio twice more, and after another moment the light flashed twice more.

  “Good enough?” Alfonso said.

  Treto grunted.

  “Not really,” he said, putting down the binoculars. “Anything is possible.”

  “So then what do you—?”

  “Here,” Treto said, interrupting him.

  He reached under the helm and came out with a dull stainless steel Remington twelve-gauge pump shotgun. Instead of a long wooden stock, it had a compact black polymer pistol grip. And its barrel had been cut short.

  “Prepare to take them aboard, Raúl,” Treto ordered, racking the foregrip back then forward to chamber a round of double-aught buckshot. He handed the shotgun to Alfonso. “Be quick. But take no chances. If it goes to shit, we open fire, then scuttle the boats with the bodies.”

  “And if it’s just Castro’s TGF goons trying to lure us into a trap?”

  “Same as always. We say we thought that any small boats way out here had to be in distress—‘We know nothing about anyone seeking exile in the States!’—and were following the United Nations Convention that rendering aid is the ship master’s legal and moral obligation. And I’ll let them hear me call Miami on the satellite phone and repeat that. If that fails . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “If that fails—what?”

  “Then we pray, mi amigo. We pray.”

  He patted his back. “Now go, Alfonso.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  —

/>   Ten minutes later, Captain Treto had the Nuevo Día sitting dead in the water, her diesels idling. He stood just inside the open door of the pilothouse, using the steel wall to conceal himself as he covered Alfonso and the crew working almost immediately below. The butt of a stainless steel Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic carbine with a thirty-round magazine of .223 caliber hollow points and ten-power scope rested on his right hip, muzzle pointed skyward.

  The crew tied up the two battered gray Pangas alongside the ship almost at her stern, where the deck dropped closest to the water. Alfonso had the shotgun and a flashlight trained on the boats, the barrel following the beam as it bounced from stem to stern and illuminated those aboard. He and one of the men in the first Panga exchanged greetings in Spanish.

  Those boats are packed! Treto thought. But why am I surprised?

  Alfonso turned, looked up to the pilothouse, and gave Treto a thumbs-up.

  The only damn sure thing we’ve learned to expect is the unexpected.

  One guy was all they said to pick up. And now there’s got to be more than a dozen people in those boats. Must’ve paid off the TGF—or took ’em out.

  What the hell. The more the merrier.

  Sínguense un caballo, Castros!

  The long, narrow Pangas bobbed and rocked as the men and women aboard moved anxiously, making it difficult for them to transition to the twenty-foot-long ladder hanging over the side of the more stable ship.

  But slowly, one by one, they managed.

  At the gunwale, two crewmen stood on either side of the top of the ladder. They shone flashlights on the ladder rungs, helping the passengers aboard as they reached the top. Two other crewmen then led them to a bunkroom below deck.

  —

  Fifteen minutes later, Captain Treto heard the starter on the engine of the first Panga grinding, and after a moment the outboard finally fired up loudly. Two of the ship’s crew then untied the Panga’s fore and aft lines and tossed them over the side. They went to the lines of the second Panga and prepared to repeat the process as the first boat quickly pulled away and disappeared into the inky dark.