There were more than six and a half billion human beings roaming this earth, most of them little better than the vermin that climbed aboard the fishing boats at this time of night. How marvelous that his Riley had crossed paths with the man he now sought. He would enjoy the opportunity to use her again and to finish, finally, the business he had started. Even Yorick would have to appreciate the symmetry of the situation. Life appeared random, that is until something like this fell into his lap. But here was another signal that his time was at hand. While he didn’t believe in God or Destiny or that any force like fate ruled men’s lives, Diggory saw this as proof that men like him, superior in intellect and breeding, often also had plain luck on their side — and the intelligence to know how to take advantage of it.
He patted the front pocket of his shirt, feeling the shape of the passport there, and he felt the hot blood rushing to his core. She was his now.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aboard the Bonefish
March 25, 2008
8:15 p.m.
Riley didn’t stop crying until she reached her boat. She hoisted the dinghy in the davits, unlocked the main hatch, and turned on her anchor light. Routine was what always saved her. In the service, it had been her job, her duty and the best way to move beyond what had happened to her brother. When you had a job to do, something you had trained for, you could lose yourself in the work. After she’d left the service, she floundered back in DC, chafing under the memories and her attempt to live with her father. She’d always lived frugally and saved during her years on the government’s payroll, so she took her life’s savings and bought and moved aboard the Bonefish. On the boat, she had maintenance, routine, things she had to do to keep herself sane and the boat safe and secure.
On this night, her routine allowed her to get back in control, but her mind wouldn’t turn off. Seeing Dig again had brought it all back. He’d called her that last morning in Lima, and she had gone to his apartment. They’d made love, and then with the sunlight streaming in the window bathing their naked bodies in golden light, he had asked her to do a favor for him. Of course, she had said. At that moment, she would have done just about anything to get to spend more time with him.
Stop it, she told herself. She reached up and turned on the overhead light in the main cabin, then slid onto the settee in front of her MacBook laptop computer. She tapped the space bar and the screen blinked on to reveal her email inbox. She still had not opened the email she’d received from Mercury that morning, but the name Hazel Kittredge was listed beneath the name of her employer and she clicked on her friend’s email instead.
Darling,
How are you and where are you? Please tell me you’re shacked up on some luscious Caribbean island with a well-endowed gorgeous man who owns a rhum distillery or some such romantic thing. You’re not still doing this all-alone-Super-Woman routine, are you? Call me!
XX,
Hazel
Riley smiled and felt for the first time in over an hour that she might be able to shake off the pall that Diggory Priest had cast over her life. She reached for her cell phone and thought a moment before dialing, wondering where and in what time zone her friend might be.
Like Riley, Hazel had grown up the daughter of a career diplomat, but Hazel’s father had never needed to work. Hazel’s grandfather had started life as a share cropper until he invented some device that improved car mufflers back in the fifties, and ever since her family had been those Kittredges of Atlanta.
She dialed Hazel’s U.S. cell on the off chance she was stateside. Hazel picked up on the second ring.
“Darling! Where are you?” Her friend’s soothing alto voice worked better than a Valium.
“Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadaloupe.” Riley turned her body on the settee, settled back into the pillows, and stretched her legs out on the velvet upholstery.
“And you’re headed down to the Saintes, I hope?”
“Yup. Tomorrow morning.”
“I envy you. They make better croissants there than in Paris. You know Daddy has a little place down in Martinique. Maybe I’ll fly down and we can catch up.”
She sighed. “Hazel, that would be so great.”
“Riley, what’s the matter? I can hear it in your voice. Something’s wrong.”
“I ran into an old acquaintance today.” She stopped, trying to remember how much she had told Hazel last fall. “Remember that guy I told you about? The one from Lima?”
“The son of a bitch who couldn’t even be bothered to call you after the fucking terrorists nearly blew you up? Oh yeah, I remember him.”
“He surprised me on the street today. We exchanged a few words, and I sort of lost it and slapped him.”
“Good for you!”
“Not really. Not good at all. I thought if I ever saw him again I’d be able to figure it all out. You know, like my old shrink used to say ‘find closure’ and all that. But instead, I smack him and then turn and run off crying like some silly female.”
“Contrary to your tough guy self-image, my friend, you are still a female and you’re not bullet-proof. But silly? Girl, you wouldn’t know how to do silly.”
“I was such an idiot.” On a shelf, behind the settee, dozens of books were held in place by a long bungee cord. She snapped the elastic absentmindedly. “I thought I was over him, over all that drama. I’d agreed to see him because I wanted to know more about what happened down there. I was prepared to be fully in control.”
“That’s my girl.”
“But I couldn’t believe how pissed off I got just seeing him.” Riley stopped. She didn’t know how to explain the feelings she’d had.
“What did you expect?”
“Hazel, I thought Lima was the end of something. It wasn’t. In fact, I think now it was just the beginning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I still don’t know what really happened down there. I haven’t told you all of it, Hazel. I can’t. I need to know the truth, but I’m afraid, too. There are things that he — that they won’t tell me. Things that don’t add up.”
“Riley, he works for the Agency? Girlfriend, you never will be able to add it up. You know how those people are. They think they fucking rule the world.”
Riley laughed. “You remind of another guy I picked up today. He was a real nut case.”
“You picked up a guy?”
“He was swimming way out at sea,” she said. Then, after pausing for effect, she smiled and added, “Buck naked.”
“You are having fun!”
“Oh yeah. He says I saved his life.”
“So that should make him your slave for life?”
“Not exactly. He disappeared on me — after I’d reported him to Immigration. So now, thanks to him the French authorities here think I’m smuggling in illegal aliens. They seized my passport.”
“Good God, girl! I can’t let you out of my sight. You might be a big strong Marine, but you aren’t doing so well on the outside away from the government tit.”
“I’m doing fine.” She didn’t want to worry her friend, so she tried to sound as though she meant it. “The wanker stole my radio, too. I’ve got to fix this whole thing on Tuesday. They’ve scheduled some kind of hearing. I’m not that worried. I still have plenty of friends at State. I’ll get it straightened out.”
“You let me know if you want me to call Daddy.”
“No. I just have to find my illegal alien. When I plucked him out of the water, he mentioned he’d been headed down to the Saintes. So, that’s where I’m going in the morning.”
“So, back to the naked guy. Was he cute? Was he a keeper or was the water too cold to tell?”
Riley laughed again and it felt so good. She’d needed this call. “The water was quite warm and, not that I noticed, but he had a body worthy of a Playgirl centerfold.”
“Darling, I want details. Dimensions! Are you going to see him again?”
“First, he was eye candy only. A bit soft i
n the head – a sort of a hard-bodied hillbilly spouting New World Order conspiracy crap. You know, the old ‘the government is out to get you’ type. But there was something about him, Hazel, something sweet, almost innocent. Like he still believes in tilting at windmills.”
“One sight of all that man flesh and you’re making him heroic.”
“Not really. It was just something he said.” Riley pictured him standing next to her in the cockpit of her boat. He was so different — not tall and elegant like Dig. Bob was broad-shouldered and built solid. But, she reminded herself, you’ve given up on men, remember?
“Hazel, I think he’s more the redneck, butt-crack-flashing type. You know, great ass but no class. Has about an eighth grade education. And yes, I’m going to see him again. I’d better. I plan to haul that sweet ass of his into this court hearing so I can get my passport back.”
“Now listen to who’s gone all snob on me.”
From anyone else, the remark might have stung. Riley came from a family of high achievers — her father had attended Yale, her mother the Sorbonne. After Michael died his freshman year at Yale, she had enlisted in the Marines — much to her parents’ chagrin — and attended no college at all.
“Hazel, you always think my life should have more drama in it.”
“Darling, you and your redneck illegal alien can have lots of little no-neck children. This sounds like a match made in Tennessee.” Only Hazel could come up with that one. They’d both been Liz Taylor fans and watched every movie they could find with her in it.
“Now look who’s being catty!” Riley said, and she heard her friend groan through the phone. “Besides, Maggie and Brick? I don’t think so. They didn’t have any kids. That was the problem, remember?”
“Ahhhh. What am I going to do with you? You and your prickly personality. You’ll drive Mr. Good Buns away. Girlfriend, you need to get laid.”
“I’ve told you — I’m done with that. I’ve joined the Semper Fi Immaculate Heart Convent for Wayward Marines. I’m going to devote my life to good works.”
“Ha! That’ll be the day. Riley, darling, I live in hope that some fellow is going to come along with an axe and chop his way through the forest of thorns you’ve built around yourself. I mean you don’t want to wind up one of those old cat ladies, do you? Tell me you haven’t got a cat.”
“No cat, Hazel.” And with a grin, she added. “Not yet.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aboard the Shadow Chaser
March 25, 2008
8:05 p.m.
The moon lit the sky from behind the volcano when they raised the anchor and motored out of Marigot Bay. Cole left Theo at the helm and slipped into his cabin. From the bottom of the hanging locker, he extracted a sheet metal box with a combination padlock on it. He set the box on his bunk, spun the combination and withdrew three worn leather journals. Inside the first two, every page was filled with his father’s neat printing. He knew because he had read them all many times. The first entry in the first journal was dated three days after Cole’s birth. Each entry started with the words, “Dear son.”
He’d still been busting his hump at East Carolina U when word came that his father had died at home in Cornwall. There were no details, which didn’t surprise him at the time. Communication with his father had always been a bit odd. Cole had been the result of a brief love affair and an even more brief marriage between an American nurse, Kara Greer, and a British business man, James Thatcher, twenty-five years her senior. Cole’s mother had told him that his father was not suited for family life, and she’d sent her husband back to England. It was not until the journals arrived in a package from Bodwin, England that he had learned his father’s side of the story.
He opened the first of the leather volumes and began to read.
Dear son,
Just received word from the states of your arrival three days past. You must take after your mother – quite punctual, that is. Any woman who could marshal that lot at her hospital could presumably have even got the Italian trains to run on time. Alas, all her attempts to tidy up my life went awry. Love does not conquer all. She’s a scientist, that one. Maybe unconquerable. She’s a queen from Amazonia, our Kara is, a warrior princess who has never needed a man for much. Could have been much more than a nurse, not to degrade her profession in any way, but she sees the world in the black and white of certainties — truth and falsehood and ne’er shall anything dwell between. That, my boy, is where I think life begins to get interesting. In the ‘tween.
-JT
Cole closed the leather cover and sighed. He wondered how it was possible he could have ended up so much like this father he never knew. He had thought when he went to school to study marine science that he was following his mother’s first love: science. But when he enrolled in graduate school to study Maritime Archeology, he had shifted over to his father’s world in the ‘tween — the world of suspicions and rumors, conspiracies and plots. The shadowy world of dreams.
And the day these journals arrived, Cole had learned how far into the ‘tween his father had gone. Theories only remain theories until someone proved them right or wrong. James Thatcher hadn’t been given the chance to do that, but he’d sent his words on to his son. And the more Cole read, the more he, too, became a believer, not only in the theory, but in the idea that it was his father’s search for the truth that had got him killed.
“Hey Cole, you want me to take her into the cove?” Theo called out from the helm.
“Hang on. I’m coming.” He slid the journals back in the box, locked it and returned it to its place in his cabin.
Little more than two miles down the coast from Marigot Bay, Cole eased the big vessel in close to shore while Theo stood out on the bow with a hand-held spotlight. The younger man panned the light down the beach but there was no sign of the Whaler.
Cole stuck his head out the wheelhouse door and asked Theo to come take the con.
After the younger man had taken the wheel, Cole went alone onto the foredeck and searched the beach with the spotlight himself. No doubt about it. The Whaler was gone. He shut off the light and sat in the darkness for several minutes, contemplating how he was going to continue diving with nothing but that rubber ducky of a dink. They had no more money. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to do when they ran out of fuel. Finally, he stowed the spotlight and returned to the wheelhouse.
Theo sat in the comfortable chair in front of the wooden ship’s wheel, his feet propped up on the console above the helm. Over his head, several screens glowed including a computer GPS chart plotter, radar, and a down-imaging sonar/depth finder, while resting on his lap was a small laptop that could convert into a tablet computer. Theo’s fingers danced on the keys with the speed of a court reporter.
“Are you paying any attention at all to the con?”
“It’s called multitasking, my good man.”
“Take us out, then, Mr. Multitasker.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Theo said without removing his eyes from the tiny screen. “Back to Marigot, then?”
Cole stood in the doorway to the galley, his eyes bouncing from Theo to the chart to the radar. The vessel was turning and he heard the RPMs increase as the bow of Shadow Chaser cleared the land. Theo had not touched the wheel or the throttle.
“What the hell?”
Theo grinned. “You like my new toy?”
“You’re controlling everything from there?” Cole pointed at the laptop. “How?”
“The magic of wireless, my dear friend. I don’t even need something this big. I could do it from a Wi-fi enabled cell phone. Back to my question. What course, Captain?”
Cole shook his head. “Damn. You’re really something. The Saintes. We’re going to Bourges des Saintes,” he said, trying to make his mouth into the right shape to say the French words, but mangling it in the end.
Theo looked up from his computer, his eyes wide behind the glasses. “Really? Why? What about the journals? Surcouf? As you
said, we’re getting close.”
“I told you — I saw the Brewsters going into Point-à-Pitre. I couldn’t take a chance that they’d see me on the streets. It’s got to be the coin they’re after. I had to hide it. I left it on her boat.”
Theo’s feet dropped to the floor. He flipped the laptop shut and slid it across the console. “You did what?”
“Don’t worry. She’ll never find it.”
“But what about us? Are we going to be able to find it?”
“No problem. We’ll find her, I’ll get aboard her boat and get it back.”
Theo threw back his head and started laughing, then he collapsed into the helmsman’s seat. He flipped open the laptop and began punching in waypoints, his shoulders still shaking.
“What?” Cole said finally.
“I got my answer. She was hot.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Pointe-à-Pitre
March 25, 2008
8:45 p.m.
“Monsieur?”
Diggory Priest heard the boy’s voice before he made out his shape at the bottom of the steps. The child scrambled up to the door of the Immigration offices dragging two aluminum oars. Diggory paid the urchin and the boy ran off into the night without another word.
From his high vantage point, Diggory leaned on the oars and considered how best to take advantage of the evening’s events. Across the Place de la Victoire, he noticed a man hurrying through the crowd, shoving people aside. He was wearing a red windbreaker over his T-shirt and frayed cut-off jeans. It was the bright color that had caught Diggory’s attention. The man rushed past an elderly couple who were coaxing a well-coifed tiny dog toward a patch of grass. The red-jacket man failed to see the dog until his leg tangled in the leash. The small ball of fur was whipped into the air and Diggory heard the high-pitched yelp from fifty yards away. The man turned, swearing in English, then kicked the dog airborne again while disentangling himself. He rushed on, leaving the elderly man shouting curses and the woman bending over the whimpering fluff.
Circle of Bones: a Caribbean Thriller Page 9
