Daunting. So I planned on being intercepted. Because I didn’t want to be arrested or shot, I also planned on lying my ass off. A believable lie, I hoped.
I would tell agents I was on my way to the annual Halloween party at the friendliest of nearby islands: Cabbage Key, a popular bar and restaurant, accessible only by water. I’d have to do some acting. Pretend to be appropriately sloshed, tell agents I’d gotten lost in the fog.
If they contacted Cabbage Key’s superb dining room, they would find my name on the guest list: Marion D. Ford, Dinkin’s Bay Marina. Reservation for one, admission paid in advance.
Establishing plausible deniability is not a subject taught in college. The famous man was right: My past includes training in subjects other than marine biology.
Nearby, I heard a heron’s reptilian growl. I was passing an oyster bar where wading birds had gathered-unusual for this time of night. Maybe they were grounded by fog. Was that possible? Or maybe feeding in the light of this full moon.
I touched my paddle to the bottom. Felt shells crunch as the canoe pivoted with the current. Once again, I listened for the patrol boat. Nothing. Could still hear the distant outboard… could hear the river-rush of tide flushing seaward… then I was surprised to hear voices. Men’s voices whispering: a few staccato fragments, words indecipherable.
Garbled by distance?
No. They were close.
I waited, using the paddle as a stake, my canoe pointing downtide like a weather vane.
Water drizzled from leaves… yowl of raccoons… creak of trees… then another muffled exchange: two men, maybe three.
The island was to my right. The voices came from my left. The men had to be in a boat. Or wading. The syllabic patterns were exotic, not English, not Spanish. That’s why it registered as garble. I didn’t hear enough to guess at the language.
Fog is romantic in a cozy sort of way, but, in primitive lobes of our brain, it also keys primitive alarms. The alarms remind us that tribal enemies use fog as cover.
During thunderstorms, people retreat in clusters, voices hushed. The same is true of the slow, silent storm that is fog. Men were out there in the gloom. Foreigners in a Florida backwater. Why?
There were plausible explanations.
I didn’t like any of them.
A million-dollar bounty had been offered for the celebrated man’s head. My guess: They were here to collect it.
The night the celebrated man appeared at my door, I’d said to him, “If you travel outside the country, no security, what happens if the bad guys take you hostage, or worse? It could get some of our people killed, maybe even start a war. To be blunt, you’d be putting the nation at risk. Is that worth a couple weeks of personal freedom?”
I’d expected indignation. Instead, he became philosophical, which is an effective cloaking technique. “History’s fickle. Small events have started wars. I suppose some minor event could also prevent war-who can predict? The only time I depend on men and nations to behave like they have any brains is when there’s no other choice. I’m speaking theoretically, of course.”
Was he?
“Who knows what I might stir up. The risks depend on where I go. And who you consider to be bad guys. It’s far more likely someone will take a shot at me in the States instead of in a country I’m not scheduled to visit.
“That’s another reason I’m eager to get on the road, Dr. Ford. Someone’s going to take that shot -soon, I think. My enemies view me as unfinished business. What they don’t suspect is, I have some unfinished business of my own.”
He used his fighter pilot’s voice-a combat vet on a mission.
“It sounds like you have a target in mind.”
“Maybe.”
“Something to do with your wife’s death?” I knew the accident was still under investigation. It had only been a few months.
“Possibly. Her plane caught fire after it landed. Seven people killed, no survivors. Do you find that suggestive?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know the details.”
“I think you know more than you realize.” The man was looking at me strangely.
“Are you suggesting something? Or am I missing something?”
“Maybe both.” I watched his jaw muscles knot. “But I think I’ll reserve the details until we come to an agreement. For now, let’s just say there are several stops I’d like to make. I’ve lived a big life. I’ve called liars liars, frauds frauds, and I’ve stood toe-to-toe with every variety of despot and egotistical ass. When enemies visit my grave, it won’t be to plant flowers.”
“You have old scores to settle.”
“You disapprove; it’s in your tone. Good. Getting even is for amateurs. I want revenge.” After a moment, he chuckled. “I’m joking. My plans aren’t that dramatic.”
It was disturbing. Witness a wounded beast stumble and most of us wince. I winced inwardly at his stumbling paranoia, his outdated bravado; his weak attempt to cover malice with humor. I was thinking Yes, he’s mentally ill.
According to my pal Tomlinson, who turns into a newspaper junkie the instant his Birkenstocks touch soil, the man dropped from public view shortly after his wife’s death. He retreated to a Franciscan monastery, then spent time with a famous Buddhist scholar on Long Island.
When he reappeared, he had changed. The man had always been dignified, under control, even when speaking his mind. In the last few months, though, his behavior had bordered on the outrageous.
“He’s doing what no one in his position has ever done,” Tomlinson told me. “If he’s asked a question, he tells the truth-his version, anyway. He’s managed to offend just about every political and religious organization in the world.”
The million-dollar bounty was an example, Tomlinson explained. It started when the man called America’s news media “cowards and fiducial incompetents” because they sidestepped reprinting an editorial cartoon from a Danish newspaper that sparked worldwide riots. The caricature depicted the prophet Muhammad with a lighted bomb fuse in his turban-mild by Western standards.
The man remained outspoken even when Islamic clerics issued an international fatwa, or religious decree, demanding his head. Literally. The reward was posted soon afterward.
“The media used to despise him,” Tomlinson told me. “Then, for a while, he was their darling. But that’s changing because he refuses to back down on the cartoon issue. ‘When did the New York Times and Wall Street Journal start deferring decisions about free speech to religious fundamentalists?’ That’s the sort of thing he’s been saying and he won’t shut up.
“Ultimately, they’ll crucify him. He knows it. He seems to be inviting it.”
Standing in my lab that night, the man sounded in full control of his facilities, even while sharing a plan I dismissed as irrational.
“The group I mentioned, the Negotiators. They operated without oversight. Their victims were seldom found so there’s very little proof they were licensed to kill. But there is proof. I have it. Ethically, I couldn’t ask a law-abiding citizen to help me… That’s why I’m asking you.”
With an edge, I replied, “Very flattering.”
“It’s not meant to be. I’m explaining why I’m here. The illegalities my trip requires won’t be a problem for someone with your expertise.”
“You’re asking me to break laws, too.”
“None you haven’t broken before.”
His inflection conveyed subtext. Was he telling me he wanted someone killed?
I said, “You don’t need me. You need a magician. The Secret Service will realize you’re missing before you make it to an airport.”
“Not the way I’ve set it up. We’ll have enough time.”
My expression read We?
“That’s the deal. You’re coming. Spring me loose, keep me alive, and get me back. Help me disappear and I’ll make your past disappear.”
He interpreted my unresponsiveness as mistrust.
“I’m not the first to of
fer, I know. But I’m the first who has the power to make it happen.”
2
I let the canoe swing free, then drifted awhile before I ruddered toward the island.
I’d studied charts and aerial photos. Ligarto consisted of about seventy acres of high ground, most of it built by Florida’s pre-Seminole inhabitants. They were a sophisticated people who constructed cities of shell. On Ligarto, they’d built courtyards, dug canals, and raised shell pyramids four stories high.
Archaeologists believe that royalty lived atop those pyramids. The equivalent of post-Columbian royalty still did: The celebrated man was staying in a cabin on the highest mound.
From the aerials, I knew the layout. I also knew that Ligarto’s Prohibition-era docks were on the western shore along a private channel. That’s why I was approaching from the east. To the east, water was seldom more than chest-deep, scarred with reefs of oyster and rock-okay for canoes, bad for powerboats. A fringe of mangrove swamp buffered the island so there was no easy place to land.
Visitors, welcome or unwelcome, would not be expected from the east.
I paddled close to the mangroves, mist smoldering out of the bushes as if the swamp was afire. I caught a branch, slid paddle beneath thwarts, and repositioned my feet as the canoe swung under limbs. It was a cheap canoe, green plastic hull, quieter than aluminum, with ridged seats. I’d been paddling for an hour. I had to pee and my feet were numb.
I sat rubbing my ankles and waited, straining to see through the mist. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to wait long.
I didn’t.
There were four men, not two. They were in an inflatable boat, all of them paddling, but the last guy, starboard aft side, also used his blade as a rudder. They came directly at me. For a moment, I thought I’d been spotted. But then the boat turned north, hugging the shore, passing within twenty feet of where I sat motionless, all senses testing, as they paddled into mist.
Water-laden air molecules transport odor as efficiently as they conduct sound. After a few seconds, the smell of men and equipment arrived on foggy tendrils: military canvas, rubber, machine oil, the stink of wet boots, the stink of stale tobacco laced with an unexpected hint of eucalyptus or clove.
Spiced tobacco. Distinctive.
An inflatable boat resembles an overinflated inner tube, pointed at the front, with rigid buoyancy chambers made of high-tech fabric. In military jargon, it’s a “rubber boat,” or an IBS (Inflatable Boat, Small). This one had an outboard engine mounted aft, but it was tilted upward and locked, so the vessel should have been difficult to control.
The four men made it look easy. Blades cut the water in synch; strokes short, efficient. This was a military unit, or paramilitary, a trained assault team: two men had already pulled on ski mask balaclavas. All four had weapons slung over their inboard shoulders, ammo clips fixed. One of the rifles had the distinguishing banana clip of a Russian AK-47 or one of that weapon’s myriad clones.
Weapons identification is something else not taught in college science labs. I maintain a working knowledge for a reason.
A Secret Service agent carrying a Russian assault rifle? No way. Nor do agents whisper in a foreign language or smoke clove tobacco-the odor reminded me of Kreteks, the cigarette of choice in Indonesia and some parts of the Middle East.
These weren’t federal agents on maneuvers. It was remotely possible they were American friendlies assigned to test the island’s security. Staging mock attacks is part of Secret Service training. In Maryland, the agency built a mock city to simulate attacks on motorcades. Agents participate in crisis scenarios known as AOPs, “Attacks on Principals.”
But war games in this fog? At this hour?
No, I’d stumbled onto a hit team. The men were assassins with a plan and they were now only minutes from their target.
The celebrated man had told me he had enemies. He’d said he expected someone to take a shot. I’d dismissed the million-dollar bounty as media sensationalism, just as I’d dismissed his fears as an outdated sense of his own importance.
He was right. I was wrong.
“It’s something you’ll get used to,” he’d told me the night I agreed to help him. I’d been pressing for details on what, exactly, he was offering me in exchange.
“Not that there’s anything in my past that I regret,” I’d added.
“Really? Then you’re one of the few rational men I’ve met who can say that. Or maybe I’ve misjudged you.”
“When I say ‘regret,’ I mean there’s nothing that warrants records being destroyed.”
“I’m not that stupid. The only thing destroyed when a man tries to erase the past is his own future. How many fools have marched off that cliff? What I can offer is clemency-in a legal sense. The same for other members of your little group… including your friend Tomlinson.”
Long ago, Tomlinson had been a suspect in the bombing of a U.S. Naval base. There are men in high places who still believe he’s guilty of murder. They want him dead.
“A pardon, you mean?”
“Yes. Retroactive.”
It strengthened my impression that the man had an obsolete sense of importance.
“It’s my understanding you lost that power when you left office. .. ten years ago?”
“Nine. It just seems longer because of all the screwups and bad luck the last two administrations have had.” He was standing in my lab at the bookcase, hands on hips. “I don’t suppose you have something on the subject?”
No, but I had Internet access. I’d moved the computer next door into my quarters because it wasted so much of my time in the lab.
I watched him put his wide farmer’s hands on the keyboard. A few minutes later, he motioned to the screen. He said, “Do you see this name?,” then went on to explain the significance.
He was right, I was wrong-if what he told me was true. That’s when he said, “Don’t feel bad. Me being right is something you’ll get used to.”
The man had also told me there were enemies who wanted to kill him.
Right again.
I watched the four men, with their masks and automatic weapons, paddle into fog and moonlight, their boat surging forward like a water spider.
I gave it a few seconds, then went after them. I used mangrove limbs to vault the canoe into open water and turned bow on to their course.
Keeping the man alive-that had seemed like the easy part.
I dug hard with the paddle, four abbreviated strokes on the left, three on the right, gathering speed. Then I stopped, thinking about it as I glided.
Fog is where mankind’s first monsters were born. What awaited me on the other side of the veil? The coincidence of arriving at the same time as the hit squad was suspicious… or was it?
Halloween is the only night when military gear can be worn as costume. It’s a night when gunshots may be dismissed as fireworks. Halloween provides natural cover for those who venture into the night with sinister intent.
Plausible deniability-that’s why I was dressed for a party, not a wet night in a canoe. The assault team had chosen Halloween for the same reasons.
The timing wasn’t coincidental. It was a professional choice.
Then why the hell was I pursuing armed professionals? It was stupid. I hadn’t brought a gun-with the possibility of being intercepted by the Secret Service? Even if I had, it was idiotic to blunder ashore and take on four guys with automatic weapons.
No. The smart thing to do was go running and hollering to security agents, tail between my legs, and hope they didn’t shoot before giving me a chance to explain. I could deal with the fallout later.
I swung the canoe around. Secret Service would have people guarding the channel on the other side of the island, so I began paddling toward Ligarto’s southern tip with the same sprinter’s rhythm: four strokes on port side, three strokes on starboard, ending with a slight rudder correction.
I wasn’t worried about making noise now. Once I’d put some distance between the hit
team and myself, I intended to start yelling, whistling, thumping my heels on the hull, calling out the alarm.
I didn’t get a chance. The canoe was still gathering speed when there was a sharp Bang. Not a big explosion; more like a dozen firecrackers with the same fuse. Even so, water conducted a mild vibration through the plastic hull. Above the tree line, a haloed incandescence flickered.
My brain was still trying to pinpoint the source of the noise when there was a second firecracker, Bam.
On the water, most explosions are caused by sparks in unventilated boats, a sickening sound because passengers are usually aboard. But these twin detonations had the sharper, metalon-metal report of military ordnance. My first impression was they were stun grenades or flash bangs, but the shock wave didn’t carry the distinctive stink of nitro aromatics. Whatever had fueled the combustion was odorless.
I stopped paddling as I considered the significance. There are a bunch of odorless explosives, but only one stuck in memory-Semtex, a Czech-made plastique preferred by terrorist types, sold on black markets worldwide. More power than TNT and undetectable to conventional security devices. A firecracker-sized glob made a grenade-sized noise.
It fit: foreigners using black market ordnance.
The explosions were on the western side of the island. The men I’d seen were on the eastern side. It meant they had accomplices… or the explosives had been planted earlier and detonated by timers, or remotes.
I reconsidered my options. A western approach was now suicide. The Secret Service would be on a war footing. They’d shoot before I had a chance to identify myself. Even if they gave me a chance to talk, I would be too late. The assault team had landed by now, or soon would.
I had to intercept the killers, I decided, before they got into position. Find a way to slow them and give the feds time to regroup.
Once again, I turned and began trailing the inflatable, retracing my path along the mangroves. As I paddled, I heard muted shouts. Expected to hear automatic weapons fire but didn’t. Not a shot fired. The silence told me there was no follow-up attack. It also told me there were no human targets visible to Secret Service. Anything that moved they would have shot.
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