Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  She left a trail of lemon-scented cheerful weariness in her wake.

  The mailbox store would also shut down any moment now. Open late for an average mailbox center here, but they seemed to have a large business going. Lots of shorts-wearing live-aboard yacht types from Road Town harbor were meandering in and out.

  And at least one sharp-looking man in a suit. No doubt fresh off a private jet.

  That was the real moneymaker for these mailbox centers here: offshore companies. There were probably a hundred corporations living inside the small office across the street. Western companies claiming headquarters here using just a PO box.

  Westerners, oil rich sheiks. Criminals.

  Money moved around between PO boxes to different tax regimes. And ended up wherever a CEO needed it, so that companies could choose the tax rate they paid at, if at all.

  If there was an address at the bottom of a piece of Viagra spam to legally detail the company that had sent it, it was probably really just an address shared with hundreds, or thousands, of other companies: an address just like the one Roo was staring at right now.

  To be fair, there were people who didn’t have postal addresses just because they were on the move. Like Roo. Living aboard a boat, coming into shore to get mail. Or even neo-tribal homeless moving across the world with their antimicrobial tents and flat-pack composting toilets. They had their physical mail sent here, scanned and e-mailed to them. They had boxes held until they knew they’d be holding a position for more than a few days and then triggered forwarding.

  But mailboxes for people like Roo were probably more incidental than the core business of offshoring business.

  Roo sipped badly burnt coffee and grimaced as he continued watching the street. Looking for rhythms out of place. People like him. Trouble.

  Of course, the real trouble could be a tiny camera somewhere he’d never see. He could use a sniffer to look for telltales: wireless, heavily encrypted video feeds. But encrypted Wi-Fi was getting better and better at blending in with background radiation, or piggybacking other data to burrow inside and hide. It would take days to certify the area as clean.

  Roo didn’t have days.

  He sighed. Twenty minutes before closing time now. A sparrowish woman with her hair pulled back in a wavy bunch was tidying up and looking at a wall clock.

  The doors behind Roo locked shut. The cook, a thick-armed man, with his hair tied back into a hairnet when Roo’d only briefly glimpsed him in the back kitchen, squeezed past him.

  “Evening, man,” he said, nodding at Roo. Then behind, in a flirting tone, “’Night, Mary. You going out? Going wok-up on anyone special now?”

  “Man, I’m too tired for that. I’m going home.”

  “Let me come home and relax you good,” the cook said with a smile.

  “Quit vexing me and go home to you wife,” Mary shouted back at him.

  “Hurricane coming. You want someone good to keep you warm at night,” the cook tried.

  Mary laughed. “You don’t have what kind of heat I need,” she said in a rising tone.

  The cook mock-staggered back and spread his arms to Roo as if to say ‘see, I tried,’ and then turn to walk up the road. “One day, Mary.”

  Mary ignored both Roo and the cook to walk in the other direction back toward town. Roo watched them go, then turned back to the mailbox company front.

  Was he going to risk going in?

  Two questions gnawed at the back of his brain. One was: who killed Zee? And the other was: how much trouble was Roo inviting by coming here?

  He and Zee had joined the Caribbean Intelligence Group when it was just starting to roll. The CIG had initially bloomed down south, with Barbados cozying up with Trinidad and Guyana to deal with the increasing Venezuelan naval hostility. And then the CIG had become necessary when news broke about the big oil finds in the Caribbean basin.

  There were large nations out playing for blood when it came to easy natural resources. CIG formed up to give the South Caribbean information about who was up to what. At the very least they all needed protection against the last gasps of petro-corporations struggling to keep the old high-profit days going.

  Barbados, one of the few islands with a standing professional army in the southern Caribbean, albeit a small one, fielded the equipment and muscle to get CIG agents where they needed to be.

  And in a flattened world, small didn’t have to be ineffective. CIG could hire the same crack Eastern European freelance hackers the CIA constantly tried to buy off to quit breaking into sensitive high-level networks. They didn’t need to sneak an expensive military jet into hostile airspace to move around. A private jet could get someone from Grantley Adams Airport in Barbados to mainland China easily enough.

  CIG styled itself as a group of patriotic ex-bad-boys at first. Toughs working with anarchic hackers like Anonymous to release information to change the political atmosphere in the basin, or embarrassing foreign diplomats trying to buy off the Caribbean. In the past the former colonial empires divided up negotiating with each island to use their power imbalance for leverage. Suddenly those nations faced more united fronts. And even bands of islands trying to negotiate with major cities instead of larger countries. With thirteen sovereign nations serving on the UN, and with some of those island nations having populaces in the hundreds of thousands, a single Caribbean nation’s vote was cheap. CIG helped the South Caribbean work as a bloc.

  Since 1823, U.S. agents claimed the Caribbean as the backyard of America thanks to the Monroe Doctrine. CIG headquarters in Bridgetown set off a firestorm of Caribbean chatter when a picture “leaked” online of the brass plaque on the inside door of their headquarters that said FUCK MONROE.

  Most Americans hadn’t picked up on the reference, but Caribbean politicians had, and suddenly diplomats were knocking on doors and asking what the hell CIG was.

  And after that little stunt, CIG got folded within CARICOM, the larger political entity that had been creating a common Caribbean economic zone and tighter integration of the islands. Suddenly CIG members weren’t tricksters and men like Roo given a second chance to reform their lives, but clean-cut kids getting recruited from the University of the West Indies. And just as suddenly, Roo had found, he was sent off to the Arctic to keep an eye on larger world politics. Shivering his ass off between icebergs so that CARICOM had eyes on the ground.

  He hadn’t seen Zee in a long, long time. Last he’d known, Zee was head of an ad-hoc team monitoring Middle East money trying to run away from the worst of the post-oil situations to settle in Trinidad, as well as Indonesian and Chinese influence buying.

  Last he’d heard.

  Before Roo’d gotten out of it all.

  There were so many foreigners playing around in the Caribbean. All of them convinced they were part of some “exotic” game, dragging their shiny mega-yachts down into the islands to host clandestine events while anchored off pretty sandy shores.

  Any of them could have gotten Zee into a shitload of trouble that blew back on him. The upper echelons, the bankers and corporations and rulers of the world, they didn’t like pushback in what they regarded as neutral vacationland.

  Fuck.

  Fuck them all. Roo snorted and crossed the street.

  “Watch you-self!” a man in a blue suit shouted, swerving his moped to dodge Roo.

  “Sorry, sorry.” Roo hopped to the sidewalk.

  “Hi.” The woman at the desk smiled brightly. And in a precise and careful, half-imitated British BBC broadcast, half-Tortolan accent, said, “I’m sorry, if you’re here to get a box we are just about to close.…”

  “Box ninety-five three four,” Roo said, wincing as the repetition of the box number made him recall the sound of Zee’s voice.

  The desk lady froze.

  “Nine five three four?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Roo glanced around. What had he missed? Something was wrong.

  “On box nine five three four, there is an extra security feature.
It is a verbal password; we do this for our executive plans.” She had a phone in her hand. “If you don’t get it right, I promise I will call the police. Someone came in this morning and tried to get me to open the box. They tried to bribe me.”

  She sounded outraged by the thought, and she eyed Roo suspiciously.

  Someone else had been here already. Which probably meant the mailboxes were being watched. Roo had missed it.

  But never mind. He was here. No turning back.

  “The password is: ‘I’m one sad motherfucker,’” Roo said with a sad smile. Because that was a very Zee sort of password, the one he’d left on his post-death message.

  Roo glanced around, jumpy, waiting for something bad to happen. But she nodded primly and walked behind the wall of mail slots and boxes. The mailboxes hadn’t been attacked. A simple gunman would have worked, disguised as a robbery. Maybe whoever wanted in was waiting to break in. Or just waiting for the hurricane to pass.

  Roo had his back to a wall of glass. He couldn’t help trying to keep his eyes both on the windows and door while also trying to watch the desk lady.

  He slunk his back up against the wall and tried to rest casually on an elbow against the counter.

  She came back a second later, though, and handed Roo a small rubber tree frog the size of a fingernail. She set it carefully on counter, and Roo picked it up.

  It was very green.

  On the stomach it said PRESS ME. Roo had to squint to read the text.

  When he did, the frog stuck a silvery, square tab of a tongue out at him.

  “Damn, Zee,” Roo said, wiping the corner of his eye with the palm of his hand. Even from beyond the grave Zee was treating this whole thing as a joke. But it wasn’t. Whatever was on this scuffed, old tree frog drive had killed his friend. And Roo hadn’t made many of those.

  “Damn,” he said again, as the lady watched him blankly, waiting for him to leave.

  She held up a large roll of tape. “I have to get the windows ready for the storm,” she said. “I have to close up now.”

  Roo nodded. He pocketed the tree frog. “Is there a back door?”

  “No,” she said politely, even though Roo figured it was a lie. Box 9534 had been enough trouble for her today.

  Roo left, rushing out the door and abandoning all pretense of casualness. A white man with carefully gelled hair in khaki pants and a floral shirt turned the corner and started walking down the street after Roo.

  This was what happened when you didn’t use a tasking service to go do the pickup. Send some anonymous stranger with the password and watch him from a distance. Have them drop the package at the side of the road, get a series of other strangers to hand it randomly around town and back to you.

  But Roo’d been impatient, and setting that up took time. Time the oncoming hurricane had taken away.

  This is what you got when you exposed yourself. When you got impatient.

  Or when it got personal, Roo thought.

  He moved quickly, zigging through Road Town’s roads to make sure he was really being followed.

  He was.

  Roo couldn’t shake the tail. It wasn’t so much that the man was good, but just determined and not worried about being spotted. So Roo led him down to the dinghy dock and through the empty, almost graveyard-like marina. Then back out again. Roo had his phone out, flipping through events lists.

  He found what he was looking for. Smiled.

  He led his tail back out of the marina and onto the roads, sidewalks, and shops again. A fast powerwalk around the concrete curve of the harbor to a pier where tourists onboard a large pontoon boat sang along, out of tune and not caring, to a local band.

  Roo held up his phone and the two crewmen at the gangplank looked at it and nodded.

  At the top Roo turned and looked back as the crewmen held up their hands. “Sorry man, we full.”

  Roo’s tail stopped, confused for a second. “I have cash,” he muttered.

  “Nah, all the tickets sold,” they told him.

  The white man glanced up and Roo, his mouth parting slightly in surprise. Roo could see the hint of a holster under his shoulders, now that he stood still in the light. Roo tensed, wondering which way this would go. They were very much in a public place. Neutral territory.

  Usually.

  “All the tickets?” the man asked. “Because the boat only looks half full.”

  “All the tickets sold out.”

  For a moment, the man in the floral shirt looked ready to push through and up the gangplank, but he stopped himself. He pointed at Roo directly. “Who are you?” he called out across the no-skid steps.

  Roo looked to the left and right, as if not realizing the question was directed at him.

  “Who are you?” the man repeated. He unbuttoned the top of his shirt, threatening to reach for the gun. Roo held up his camera and started recording the man. The man stopped himself, and then said, “We need to talk.”

  “Sorry.” Roo shook his head. “Like that man said there: no more tickets.”

  He stepped back into the throngs of noisy partiers. They were hurricane chasers from Europe. They’d fly down right before a big one with duffel bugs of emergency rations to watch the storm from a sturdy hotel, excitedly sharing clips of them leaning into the wind or daring each other to go outside.

  The pontoon boat loosed its ropes, and the electric engine burbled away as they kicked back from the dock. The man swore, pulling a phone out of his pocket and shaking his head.

  For several minutes Roo scanned the area for other boats, or a helicopter. But the tail wasn’t being backed up at that level. If Roo had been rushing to get here, it made sense that anyone else had trouble getting resources to the ground quickly as well. And with a hurricane about to hit, most of the equipment they could rent would be tied down for the weather.

  Roo picked up his phone and listened to the message from Zee one last time. Then he called Delroy.

  “I’m on the booze cruise paddling through the middle of the harbor,” he said. “Bring the dinghy after it, come get me off this damn thing, okay?”

  He waited until he saw Delroy’s lights, his nephew gunning the engine to close in with them. Then he looked down at the phone in his hands.

  Roo dropped it overboard into the dark water.

  5

  In the quiet still of predawn, they slipped out of Road Harbour, putting the multicolored buildings dotting the brownish-green hills to Spitfire’s stern. The dinghy swung in the davits behind them, and the wake from the silent electric engines churned gently as they headed back west along Tortola’s rocky coast.

  The world was ghost-quiet, except for the crack of sails and the burbling of water against hull. Roo watched as Nanny Cay marina slid past, filled with bristling masts sticking over the breakwall.

  Early morning traffic buzzed along Francis Drake Highway, following the coastline with him.

  When the sun rose over the hills and humps of Virgin Gorda farther east, it was baleful and grim, sliding behind a wall of dark clouds.

  They sailed under an ochre light between Little Thatch and Frenchman’s Cay on the West End of Tortola, the catamaran jibing against the gentle wind as Roo turned northeast toward Jost. Roo ran the engines hard, chewing through the batteries to help keep the pace up, leaving the mainsail up for the occasional puff to help drive them along.

  As they passed out from the protection of Tortola’s West End, the swells rose again. Delroy woke up, staggering out of his cabin with loud thumping footsteps that came natural to all teenage boys. He climbed up the stairs out of the right hull and into the main cabin and blearily fumbled around the galley.

  The smell of coffee filled the air around the cockpit as it leaked out of the main cabin’s sliding door.

  When Delroy came out with an extra cup for him, Roo nodded toward the bows. “Jost up ahead. We sailing right for Great Harbour, so just watch out for lobster traps.” Most of the buoys were smaller than a soccer ball and, alt
hough brightly colored, hid in the dips and crests of waves and swells.

  If the propellers caught on one they’d get snagged. Most of the work sailing up between St. Thomas, St. John, and Tortola consisted of keeping an eye out for the things.

  A lot of them were chipped with solar-powered beacons and popped up on the navigation display. Most fishermen didn’t want to lose a pot and paid a little extra for the newer buoys. But some still used old plastic bottles filled with air to tie the lobster trap lines to, and those required old-fashioned attentive human eyeballs to spot.

  Delroy grunted, still not at the part of the morning where he was going to speak, and sat on the captain’s chair. He squinted out over the main cabin ahead and sipped his coffee.

  Roo left him to sit himself down at the chart table near the galley. The dark blue of the ocean shifted around the windows of the main cabin as he pulled up a screen and plugged the frog drive into an adaptor.

  He didn’t look up until Delroy shouted that they were in Great Harbour, and the sparkling white sands of one of Jost Van Dyke’s largest beaches was up ahead, with the colonial-era brick-and-stone buildings gleaming in the early morning sun.

  It was odd to sail into this harbor and not see it filled with ships at anchor. Jost Van Dyke was a popular sailing stop.

  * * *

  They cleared customs to officially enter the British Virgin Islands, even though Roo had done that already late in the night by sailing to Tortola. He’d conveniently arrived after customs closed, and left before it opened. The Virgin Islands, split down the middle by a border between St. John, U.S.V.I., and Tortola, B.V.I., required all the usual passports and customs hassle to travel between.

  The customs official processed their “entry” into the B.V.I., and then Roo thanked him and promptly asked for the paperwork to also leave. “I needed to help a friend for the storm,” he explained to the suspicious official.

  “Why didn’t you just take the ferry?”

  Delroy laughed. “See, I asked him that. But he won’t listen to me.”

  The official looked out the window at the lonely Spitfire II at anchor by itself in the harbor. Any other day, Roo had the feeling he’d want to search it. Or maybe hassle him more.