by Ralph Zeta
Still, the struggle was taking its toll on him. He was steadily losing blood, which made the deck beneath us slick. Some of the oozing blood reached my lips, its salty, warm metallic taste making me spit. I saw Baumann smile. He swung his head forward, crashing his forehead against my temple. The gun fell out of my hands, and he quickly turned and got his arm around my neck. I felt the bone of his forearm press against my windpipe. In another second or two, he would have my throat in the crook of his arm, cutting off the blood to my brain, and I would black out. I had to do something now. Grasping above the man’s huge biceps, I felt the familiar hilt of the Ka-Bar combat knife, and with a violent jerk, I dislodged it from his chest.
Baumann let out a rasping wail, and his grip loosened just enough for me to take a breath and try to wring free of his deadly chokehold. But as soon as he felt me slipping away, the massive arm clamped down like a massive vise. Gripping the knife by the handle, I stabbed him in the armpit and slashed upward, attacking the nerves and blood flow to his right arm.
Another feral howl of pain, and this time I broke free. He struggled against the slippery floor but somehow managed to stand up again, tall and crimson with his own blood.
Rolling to my feet, I saw his left hand reach into the front of his waistband. Another gun?
I lunged and hit him low, driving my shoulder hard into his midsection, like a defensive lineman hitting an offensive tackle, and drove him back into the deckhouse wall. He hit it hard and slid over, toppling to his right and finally falling backward onto the deck.
At first it was not apparent but Baumann had managed to fall onto one of the three Danforth anchors, impaling himself under the left ribs on one of its two broad, upward facing flukes.
“Jason!” James’s voice again. I went over to the rail. “You hurt?”
I shook my head. I was exhausted, my head felt as if it had been hit with a splitting maul, and I could barely see out of my swollen left eye.
“You need to change course at once!” James barked. “You’re almost onto the shoals.”
I took a quick look at Baumann. He was still breathing, but only barely. In the moonlight, a gleam caught my eye: the gold chain dangling from his neck, most of it covered in blood. Something about it commanded my attention. I bent over and examined it. There were three keys attached to it. If they were around his neck, they had to be important. I ripped the chain from his neck and stuffed it in my pocket.
Baumann growled again, an enraged grimace distorting his battered features. He didn’t have much time left.
Ignoring him, I went to the pilothouse, switched off the autopilot, and swung the wheel hard to port, onto a new westerly course that would take us away from the shallows. High above me, over a thousand square yards of heavy canvas flapped in the wind for a moment as the booms swung around, and the sails bit hard into the new tack, the wooden hull groaning and creaking with the sudden shift of tension.
I took a moment to catch my breath. I sat heavily on the long foam-padded bench behind the wheel and set the autopilot on a course for Nassau, I then flicked on the running lights, turned on the sailboat’s radar array and collision alarm system, and left the pilothouse. It was time to find Mackenzie. At the head of the stairs down to the living quarters, I turned toward the spot where I had left Baumann. Only a pool of blood remained.
As I turned to scan the deck, something hit me hard between the shoulders.
The searing pain shot down my spine as I went sprawling onto the deck. Rolling over to face the unexpected threat, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Baumann stood above me, a long boat hook in his hand. He took an uneasy step back and brought the boat hook over his head, a sick grin on his bloody lips, eyes half open, hissing reddish spit with every breath. The man was near death. He should be flat on his back, barely conscious, and yet, here he was, ready to strike again.
I rolled up onto my feet and threw a side kick into his diaphragm. The boat hook fell noisily onto the deck behind me. This time, I didn’t want him just falling on the deck. I wanted him gone. It was time to end it. Permanently.
I grabbed one of the anchors and shoved it into Baumann’s chest. His wail was not as loud as the last one. I looped the anchor’s chain around his neck twice and knotted it and drove him back toward the rail. I shoved him as hard as I could. He went overboard, his hands clawing at the humid night air before he splashed into the dark ocean, the chain rattling noisily as it furiously scraped the top of the rail, blood soaked nylon rope rapidly snaking behind as if pulled under by a malevolent force.
I stood there, my bloody hands on the rail, watching as the rope was swallowed by the dark ocean until there was nothing but empty wake where he had gone under. That is when I realized I could no longer see out of my left eye, and my strength was ebbing fast. I slipped and fell onto something wet and slick. Baumann’s blood?
A man’s voice was calling my name. A familiar voice, though it felt more distant with every passing second.
Then came welcome silence and then the soothing darkness.
Thirty
The official investigation into the events that led to so much bloodletting that night dragged on far longer than anyone expected. There were the obligatory inquiries by the whole alphabet soup of official agencies and stiff government types, each with its welter of red tape, countless requests for official reports and bureaucracy, and all of them engaged in the usual jurisdictional pissing contests: FBI, DEA, PBSO, FBI, INS and SEC, not to mention the Coast Guard and the Royal Bahamian State Police. Even the State Department came calling once.
Even though I was not overly concerned with how much I told them, I needed to be mindful of whatever information I did share. I never mentioned Lowell Pinkus or even considered mentioning the CIA. Doing so would only open up a can of worms I didn’t want or need in my pantry. I intentionally kept James Burke’s name out of the official account. No one else but Mackenzie knew of his involvement. Although I found it hard to explain how I managed to catch up with the Carpe Diem so quickly and halfway to Eleuthera, I managed to come up with a plausible enough half-truth. I had found a seaworthy craft, hotwired it, and set off in pursuit. I had a good idea where Baumann was headed. During the fight at sea, the boat had been most likely commandeered by one of Baumann’s men, who vanished with the boat that night. The fact that no one had reported a stolen boat of the description I gave was telling in itself. Drug runners? Perhaps the boat belonged to a coyote, opportunists who profit from smuggling illegal immigrants. It wouldn’t be the only boat belonging to people who operated outside the law people who saw no benefit in reporting such a loss to the authorities. Where had I found the boat? I couldn’t be sure. A dock somewhere? I ran all over the place searching for a suitable boat that night. Everything was a blur. I had suffered a severe concussion, complete with short-term amnesia. Keeping the lies as close to the truth as possible simplified the benign deceit considerably. After all, white lies are an integral and vital part of normal human interaction. When the truth serves no good purpose, we lie to protect others and, sometimes, ourselves.
For Lowell Pinkus, things did not end all that well. It appears his time had simply run out. The autopsy later revealed that he died from congestive heart failure. He was sixty-two years old and in poor health. I wondered if the cause of death was natural or manmade, perhaps engineered by Baumann himself, tying up loose ends.
As to sweet, voluptuous, lethal Cindy from the beach bar, who had so expertly planted a drug dart in my neck that night, not surprisingly, there was no record of anyone fitting her description having visited the Bahamas during that time. It was as if she did not exist, a figment of my trauma-jangled imagination. Was she CIA, something else, or freelance? The possibilities were almost endless. Would I ever run into her again? I hoped so I owed her.
When it came to Baumann’s fate, only the truth would suffice: I had fought with him to free Mrs. Mackenzie Deschamps. He opened fire on me, and I defended myself. During the struggle,
he fell on an anchor, impaled himself, and then fell overboard. Injured as I was, there was nothing I could do to save him. End of story.
As for where Baumann had gotten the sailboat and his money, the answer was simple: from the trail of broken and swindled women he had left in his wake. One of the women, his last known wife, had died under questionable circumstances. Yes, the authorities knew about it, I was told. What really helped establish Baumann as a hard-core criminal in their eyes and took much of the official focus away from me was Amy’s subsequent identification of Baumann as the man who had beaten her and had her kidnapped from her hospital bed. I was simply her attorney, someone who had gone the extra mile to help a client in need.
Mackenzie’s story was a bit more complicated, though it worked out just the same. She was the ideal witness: articulate, thorough, and succinct in her precise account of the events. Mr. Justice had come to her door to inquire if she had ever met Mr. Robertson, they later ran into each other in Nassau, and she inadvertently got caught in the fray, and thank God Mr. Justice was able to come to the rescue.
My story, on the other hand, even though straightforward and seemingly simple, had to be repeated over and over again. I recounted the events of that night as best as I could to every agency and investigator who cared to ask. There was nothing else the authorities could do but listen intently at first, and with waning interest later, as we each repeated our story, never veering too far from the true version. In the end, the investigators concluded that our differing versions of the events of that night were basically the same story told from three different points of view, which made it all the more believable. No bodies were ever recovered, and no witnesses were ever identified. Eventually, one by one, the various federal, state, and Bahamian government agencies got tired of the process and investigated less and less, until they eventually were satisfied enough they stopped calling.
Of all of us, Amy had fared the worst: multiple concussions, broken ribs, fractured jaw, and a punctured lung. But she survived. From the hospital in Nassau, Mackenzie had arranged to have her flown via ambulance plane to a medical center in Miami, where she was expected to make a full recovery.
As for me, the experience was no walk in the park, but I had survived far worse. While it is true that I have been a civilian now for a number of years, the instincts that saw me though countless skirmishes in those dusty mountain passes never really leaves. The sum total of those experiences, the skills gained, the anticipation, the bleeding, the stalking, the quickening and the dying, although now relegated to memory, is never all that far behind and always ready to be accessed when needed. I took most of two full weeks to fully recover from my tangle with Baumann. I had a severe concussion and a hairline fracture to my occipital bone, a pair of cracked ribs, and a nasty black eye that made a few small children flee in tears.
The injuries didn’t slow me down much. A day after my release from the hospital, I was back at work. I had made promises I intended to keep.
Thirty-one
Some say secrets are made to be revealed in time. We all have at least a few of them. Some are secrets about ourselves we tend to withhold anything we believe would make us seem vulnerable or somehow diminish us in the eyes of others. Other secrets are privileged information we know about others embarrassing or incriminating tidbits that, for whatever reasons, we choose not to divulge. Often, we stumble onto such rare instances by sheer happenstance or accident of fate.
After I passed out that night at sea, James Burke tied up his boat to the Carpe Diem and came on board. He found me lying in a pool of blood, and it was only after checking me out thoroughly that he determined it wasn’t mine. After I came to, James took over piloting the sailboat while I rushed belowdecks to search for Mackenzie.
I found her tied to a berth. She was naked, her clothes tossed carelessly about the cabin. I could not tell whether Baumann had raped her or not. She seemed fast asleep. Though I fought the urge to admire her beauty, something primal prevailed and quashed my puritan qualms. Pausing for the briefest instant, I found myself in awe. She was even more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.
The second of self-indulgence passed, and I quickly checked her vital signs. Her pulse and breathing were slow but normal, and other than a nasty welt on her forehead, I saw no other injuries. After carefully cutting the plastic zip ties from her wrists and ankles, I got her dressed. I didn’t want to have her awake, wondering whether Baumann or any of his goons had had his way with her. By the time she woke an hour later, James had already left on his boat, and Mackenzie and I finished our return sail to Nassau and the waiting authorities.
Upon learning of Baumann’s fate, Mackenzie reacted as I had expected: with uncontained jubilation. She even clapped. That the heiress to a multibillion-dollar fortune had been caught up in an international murder-kidnapping plot was newsworthy enough, but the plot’s ties to master swindler and Ponzi schemer Samuel Reichmann a scandal dating all the way back to 1987 made for even bigger headlines. It even became fodder for a few late-night talk shows. Bloggers feasted on the news, with speculation quickly drifting into the realm of the improbable. To fight off the long-range telephoto lenses of the paparazzi, Mackenzie had cloistered herself in the family compound in Connecticut for some time. She also made arrangements to have Amy transported to the same countryside estate as soon as she was released from the hospital. It would be some time before Amy could look after herself. Baumann had not only taken everything from her, he had practically disfigured her, and he had almost succeeded in killing her.
Thirty-two
Almost four weeks had passed since our ordeal. I had called once more on the assistance of my friend James Burke. He seemed to have the all the right connections connections apparently well outside the long anxious reach of U.S. authorities. He had some of his contacts look into the keys I had removed from Baumann’s neck. As it turned out, two of the keys had engraved numbers on them. It was relatively easy for his contacts to trace the keys back to a pair of bank safety-deposit boxes located in the Cayman Islands and Singapore. The third key was an entirely different story. It had a tree digit number and an engraved logo. The peculiar logo was traced back to a pricey high-security storage facility in Coral Gables. The three digit number indentified the storage unit.
The large temperature controlled storage unit was filled with treasures. Not surprisingly, I finally located the tapestry left behind by Amy’s father long ago in the storage unit. It had been left leaning in a dark corner of the sizable unit like a sleeping soldier. It was neatly rolled onto its substantial brass rod and tied with thick gold rope. The elaborate gold finials at each end of the rod hinted at its value.
The storage unit was in one of those high-end climate-controlled facilities, and its contents were something of a surprise. The unit housed a treasure trove of fine art and valuable antiques. There were also several Greek and Roman sculptures, their provenance undetermined, and also a few pieces of Egyptian antiquity as well as smaller pre-Columbian artifacts, perhaps of Mayan or Olmecan origin I wasn’t sure. Hanging on the drab white walls of the unit were a few dozen framed paintings that Baumann had somehow acquired. These were mostly oils on canvas, along with a couple of serigraphs, several etchings, and an apparently authenticated Picasso drawing. This cache of art pieces alone was undoubtedly worth a fortune. I had to wonder how Baumann had come to posses them all, and whether we would ever learn who the rightful owners were, but that would be for others to determine.
Once we had removed the few valuables that we knew belonged to Amy and Elizabeth, we closed up the unit and left it pretty much as we had found it. Later, Sammy would place an anonymous call to the authorities, telling them of the warehouse location. They would see that the stolen pieces were returned to the rightful owners.
James offered, and I quickly agreed, to have some of his overseas contacts no doubt current or former MI-6 personnel, though he wouldn’t specify check the contents of the safety-deposit boxes. All he w
ould require were the keys, the laptops left behind by Baumann on the Carpe Diem and a list of his known aliases, just in case.
The Caymans box held several fake passports, IDs, and matching credit cards. It also contained a respectable amount of cash: 3.25 million dollars in various currencies, to be exact. Everything a smart operative needed to start anew at the drop of a hat.
The box in Singapore yielded more fake IDs, credit cards and passports, and also the numbers to several bank accounts in Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. All told, we recovered close to nine million dollars in cash and cash equivalents substantially more counting the value of the booty found in the storage unit. I knew then that Amy and Elizabeth would have a real shot at a fresh start.
Thirty-three
I went to see Elizabeth on one of those warm and perfect Florida fall mornings. The sun was high in the eastern sky, with not a cloud in sight. She still wore the same sad-eyed look she had when I last saw her, but now her little home was tidy and sparkling clean, and so was she. Her skin was pale but radiant.
Upon hearing the news, she collapsed on the floor in front of me. I told her I had recovered over eight million dollars in cash and after renegotiating and paying off the outstanding liens and bank loans against her family business she still had close to three million left. She now had clear title to her waterfront property and all related assets. She would be able to regain most of her former life. I told her I had taken a fee of a hundred fifty-five thousand dollars plus expenses amounting to twenty thousand dollars. She hugged and kissed me and said her first call would be to her brother. She hoped they could be a family again.
