Until fifteen minutes ago when he’d sat up, moved aft, looked all around with her binoculars, and then asked to go below. She wished she knew what his story was. Was he on the lam or was he some kind of freak down there trying on her underwear?
Riley glanced away from her chart and tried to focus on the dimly lit cabin. It was too strange having another person on the boat, again. She’d left DC in October with her best friend, Hazel, as crew. They had a fine trip going down the Chesapeake to Norfolk and through the Intracoastal Waterway to Beaufort, North Carolina. Though the two of them could not be more different, both were State Department brats, and Hazel was the closest thing to a sister Riley had.
So, on the trip south, she’d talked to Hazel about Lima. About her affair at the embassy with the man who was so right, yet so wrong for her in so many ways, and then about the bomb. She told her about how she’d seen Mr. Wrong for the last time on the day of the bombing, and he had just walked away into the smoke. About how later, through the endless interviews and debriefings, she waited to hear from him. Total silence. Compared to that pain, the burns were nothing.
Afterwards, she left the Corps, using her father’s illness as an excuse, and swore off men for good.
It felt good to talk about it after years of holding it inside. But looking back now, it bothered her that it had been so easy to leave out parts of what happened. Was she lying to her best friend by not telling her everything? But then, not even Riley knew the whole truth. She hoped to find that out here in Guadeloupe, tomorrow.
In Beaufort, Hazel said her tearful good-bye, and Riley took off for a straight shot to Puerto Rico. Ten days later, she’d pulled into Boqueron, pleased with her first solo ocean passage, and she’d been alone ever since. She liked solo sailing, she told herself, so why, when Mr. Wrong emailed her out of the blue, as though years of silence were nothing, had she agreed to meet him in Pointe-à-Pitre?
She was thinking about Lima and leaning over the side, out from under her Bimini, to look up at the bridge of a passing freighter when a loud voice spoke right next to her ear.
“Nice boat you’ve got here, Maggie Magee!”
Her body jerked. She banged her head on the stainless tubes of the Bimini frame, and she nearly knocked Bob off his feet.
She rubbed her hand on the back of her head. “Stop calling me that.”
“Little jumpy, aren’t we?”
She didn’t say anything, and she hoped he didn’t notice her discomfort. Her other hand had brushed against the sarong she’d given him, and she was trying very hard not to think about what she’d felt beneath it.
“Pretty comfortable down below — for a sailboat.”
She continued to ignore him which was difficult since he’d picked up her binoculars – again – and trained them on the Bertram. She squinted at the boat in the distance wondering what his interest in it was all about.
He lowered the glasses and looked up at her. “I see you’re reading one of those books.”
Okay, it seemed like a safe topic. She’d bite. “What books?”
“All that about the Knights Templar and the Illuminati?” He sighed. “You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”
“It’s fiction. Just a fun read.”
“Dead right. They’re not the ones we’ve got to worry about. But the Bilderburgers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations? You know, the whole Skull and Bones crew?”
She flicked a quick glance at him. “I’ve heard of them.” So he was one of those, she thought. Conspiracy nut jobs generally weren’t dangerous.
“They’re the ones really in charge now,” he continued. “They’re running the shadow government. They’ve completely screwed up our country, spying on us with satellites, tapping phones, stealing elections, false flag attacks, getting us into this friggin’ war and torturing people. These billionaires and their banking buddies have made ass wipe out of the Constitution, and they intend to keep it that way. But the closer we get to this election, the more frantic they get. That’s what those guys should be writing about.”
She looked at his face to see if he was kidding. He had a strong chin and the muscles of his jaw were set. “And I suppose you believe in the second gunman on the grassy knoll and that MI-6 killed Diana?”
His green eyes looked at her without blinking and one eyebrow lifted just a fraction. “Don’t you?”
She turned her head aside and rolled her eyes. “I’ll believe in conspiracy theories when you can show me more than two people who can keep a secret.”
“What about Project MK-Ultra?”
She sighed and turned back to look at him. “And what was that?”
He smiled and pointed his index finger an inch from her nose. “My point, exactly,” he said.
She somehow managed to stop herself from reaching over and breaking his finger.
“Okay,” he said. “In the fifties and sixties, the CIA was doing mind control research by giving all kinds of drugs — including LSD — to unwitting citizens. It didn’t come out until the mid-seventies.”
She’d heard about that, but she didn’t know enough to venture an opinion. What was she doing arguing with this nut case anyway? “Okay, so there may be stuff that goes on behind closed doors in government, but there’s not a whole lot we can do about it besides voting.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “On an electronic voting machine made by a subsidiary of Haliburton?”
She rubbed the sweat from her eyes. “But you and I aren’t going to change that.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong, Magee. If we don’t do it, who will?”
She had once said nearly identical words when she enlisted in the Marine Corps. She’d been so angry after her brother’s death, and she wanted to reveal all the secrets, right all the wrongs in the world. When had she grown so cynical?
Riley knew the answer to that one. After Lima.
She ventured a quick glance at him. His eyes reminded her of the ocean — of that glowing shade of grayish green when the first sunlight breaks through after a thunderstorm. He looked up and caught her staring. She turned her head away, as though she had heard something behind them.
She knew better than to argue with a conspiracy nut. When she faced forward again, she said, “Listen, Bob, we’re about to enter the anchorage, so I’d appreciate it if you’d sit still and keep quiet until the anchor’s down.”
She had given him a tropical print sarong along with an old, extra-large military-issue T-shirt. His fingers rubbed at the cloth of the olive drab shirt. “You military?”
She kept her eyes trained on the channel ahead. “Marine Corps.”
He nodded as though that somehow explained something. “Never met a woman Marine before.”
She drew in a deep breath. “Former Marine. And I told you to sit down and be quiet.”
Riley was trying to decide if he looked adorable or ridiculous in her knee-length sarong when he pivoted around, leaned his back against the side of the cabin and put his feet up on the cockpit seat, his legs bent at the knee. She looked away. Peering ahead, out through the windows of the dodger, she could feel his eyes on her. On top of that, after his hours in the sun, he smelled of male sweat and testosterone. From the corner of her eye she could see he hadn’t moved, and she stared straight ahead, determined not to smile.
Behind the freighter, a wide, high-speed catamaran ferryboat was also trying to crowd her out of the channel. These French didn’t seem to have very good manners. Like her passenger. He was still grinning at her.
“What do you find so amusing?” she asked without looking his way.
“You.”
Her eyes flicked for a second in his direction, then away. He still hadn’t changed his position. She said nothing.
“Don’t you ever smile, Magee?” he asked.
“I told you to be quiet. And stop calling me that.”
He made a big show of pantomiming zipping his lips closed and throwing away the key.
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She looked at him, not letting her line of vision stray lower than his chin. “While you’re at it,” she said, and though it took some effort to keep a straight face, she managed. “When you’re wearing a skirt, you might want to keep your legs closed, too.”
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. “Yo
u 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.
Circle of Bones: a Caribbean Thriller Page 5
