"You'll attempt to duplicate the Armitage itinerary, inasmuch as possible from information we possess. Leave from Miami, make the stops at Nassau and Caicos. See about hiring a crewman or two at Puerta Plata, if the opportunity presents itself."
"Not too obvious," said Remo.
"Let's assume our targets may be something less than brilliant," Dr. Smith replied. "If nothing else, it may be safe to say they stick with a technique that works."
"Except the woman got away," said Remo.
"Yes, which brings me to your next stop." Dr. Smith paused for a moment, his blunt fingertips shuffling invisible papers around the vacant, polished desktop before he spoke again. "They've got her in a private room at Walter Reed."
"Not here?" The surprise in Remo's tone was strictly shammed.
"Unfortunately, no," said Dr. Smith. "It would have made things more convenient, I admit."
"The senator's a Navy man?"
"The next best thing. Remember that appropriations seat."
"I see."
"If you leave now, you should have ample time to catch your flight from White Plains to Bethesda."
"Marvelous."
"I trust you'll show the proper respect at Bethesda," Dr. Smith cautioned, the expression on his lemon face revealing very little trust, in fact.
"I always try to show respect for innocent victims," Remo replied. "On the other hand, if we're discussing those who abuse them for profit, financial or otherwise, well, I'd say all bets were off."
Dr. Smith seemed to take his meaning at once. He said, "Perhaps you should give Senator Armitage the benefit of the doubt."
"I already have," Remo said as he rose from his chair. Mark Howard handed him an itinerary with his flight number, which Remo wadded into his pocket.
"Please hurry," Smith said to Remo. "Miss that flight and you just might miss your opportunity to visit with the patient today."
Remo grinned at Mark Howard, who gave him a dark scowl. "I'll hurry like a bunny."
Chapter 4
Best known as a bedroom community of the nation's capital, Bethesda, Maryland-or, more properly, its Woodmont suburb-is also home to the sprawling U.S. Naval Medical Center and its equally vast alter ego, the National Institutes of Health, situated on the west side of the Rockville Pike. Between them, the two research-and-treatment facilities cover an area of several square miles, teeming with doctors, nurses, technicians, orderlies and patients.
Teeming with security, as well, from what Remo could see as he made his approach in a year-old rented Nissan. It was a nice enough car, but it was no Lamborghini Murcielago. But Remo had barely dropped off the keys and fled the car-rental desk before the small army of state troopers, traffic cops from various jurisdictions and airport security descended on the place.
"Hey you!"
"Freeze!"
"Stop right there!"
They came from all directions. They had him trapped. This guy had been witnessed flagrantly committing more traffic violations in the past forty-five minutes than most of the law-enforcement personnel on the scene could recall seeing on the worst day of their lives.
And he was going to pay. He was surrounded. There was no escape.
And yet, he had escaped. The army of badges converged on the desk and the startled car rental clerk, and found the perpetrator had vanished.
An all-points bulletin had instantly gone out up and down the East Coast for a traffic criminal whose name, according to his car rental documents, was Remo Quartermaster.
The airport search came up empty.
Arriving at the other end, Remo had decided a Nissan would be just fine and less trouble. It didn't even occur to him that the per-day rental was just a fraction of the bill for the Lambo-Genie Whatever-it-was.
The young SPs on duty at the front gate were also the type to notice a car like that. One of them examined his driver's license.
"Remo Rubble?" The guard looked at Remo as if he knew the name was a lie, just by his appearance. But he checked Remo off a list of names he carried on a shiny metal clipboard, then provided Remo with a photocopied map of the facility and traced his line of travel with a yellow highlighter pen.
The installation was laid out with the military's usual concern for detail, meaning that each intersection featured signs, and most of them directed visitors to destinations labeled with a bizarre alphabet soup of Navy acronyms. Remo imagined a group of officers penned up in a basement somewhere, being paid by the hour to concoct labels like MACVSOG and COMSINTEC. He finally decided to ignore the signs and concentrate on counting intersections, following the yellow-pen road on his map.
Somehow, he reached the hospital facility he sought. Another SP, this one young and female, waited for him in the lobby with another clipboard.
"Boy, I really feel expected," he told her as she officiously checked him off her list.
"It's our job to welcome visitors," she retorted with perfect seriousness.
"Hey, I never said welcome."
The blond SP directed Remo to a bank of elevators on the far side of the crowded lobby and instructed him to choose the seventh floor.
The Reigning Master of Sinanju and the world's most accomplished assassin did as he was told. On seven, Remo found the nurses' station located conveniently near the elevators. His clearance to visit was confirmed for the third time in fifteen minutes, another SP peering over the head nurse's shoulder as she checked her own clipboard, and a skinhead power lifter disguised as an orderly escorted Remo to a beige door labeled 725. The metal slot designed to hold a name tag was conspicuously empty. "Take it easy, 'kay?" the skinhead cautioned him. "She's been through hell."
"Sure," Remo said.
The private room contained a single bed, hospital style, with shiny rails on either side and enough peripheral attachments that it resembled the captain's chair aboard some movie space-fighter ship. A television mounted near the ceiling, in the northwest corner of the room, displayed a frantic game show with the sound turned off. The idiots on the show were bitterly banishing one of their teammates. Once upon a time, Remo recalled, game shows had been full of happier idiots who jumped up and down with hysterical joy when they correctly guessed the suggested retail price on a five-pound canister of Folgers coffee. The world, he thought, was a meaner place without Bob Barker's conspicuous presence on the boob tube.
The woman in the bed could have used some ecstatic idiocy. She could have used any sort of a pick-me-up.
He guessed that Kelly Bauer Armitage had once been beautiful, and might well be again someday. At present, though, she could have been a refugee from Iraq, the sole survivor of a tragic airline crash, perhaps a poster girl for AIDS. Her sunken cheeks revealed a model's bone structure, but she was thin and blistered from exposure to relentless tropic sunshine.
Long blond hair that had to have drawn admiring stares in better days now spread across her pillow like drab seaweed clinging to the body of a woman who has drowned. Her body, underneath the sheet, would doubtless be alluring, if and when she got herself in shape again, but at the moment she looked wasted, drained of all vitality.
"Ms. Arnutage?"
Although he tried to keep his voice down, Remo thought it came out sounding harsh, unnaturally loud inside the nearly silent room. Despite his own perception, though, the woman in the bed didn't appear to notice him or recognize her spoken name. Her green eyes-once vibrant, he imagined, but sadly faded now-were fixed on a point to the right of the silent television, seeing God knew what on the pink pastel wall.
Remo moved closer to the bed, not rushing it, making sure that he was well within the woman's range of peripheral vision. The last damn thing she needed was a strange man popping up from nowhere, at her bedside, peering down at her as if she were some kind of specimen prepared for mounting. "Kelly?"
Jumping to the point of first-name intimacy was a risk, he knew, but it appeared to break the ice. The woman turned her head to face him, frowning slightly, but at least she didn't flinc
h or scream. In fact, her eyes appeared to focus clearly for the first time since Remo had entered the room.
"I've told you everything I can remember," she declared.
There seemed to be no point in telling her that they had never met. As an alternative, he said, "I hoped that if we went through it again, just one more time, you might remember something else."
"Is that the way it works?" she asked. Her voice was small and faraway.
"Sometimes," said Remo.
"Oh." She thought about it for a moment, vision fading in and out of focus on his face, before she said, "All right. Where should I start?"
"At the beginning," Remo told her, "if you wouldn't mind."
"Okay."
She hesitated, whether marshaling her thoughts or simply losing track of them, he couldn't tell. At least a minute passed before she spoke again, but when she did, her voice was firm and clear.
"We started from Miami on a Friday," she began, and Remo wondered what the problem was, how anyone could call her incoherent. "First vacation in a year. My Richard works so hard. Not anymore, of course. He's resting now."
Tears shimmered in her eyes, prepared to spill across her blistered cheeks.
"You stopped in Nassau and at Caicos," he reminded her.
"I'm getting there," she said. "Who's telling this?"
"I'm sorry." Remo was encouraged by the flash of anger, the display of spirit.
"So, we stopped in Nassau, and at Caicos. Richard likes to gamble. He knows how to play. He's lucky. Used to be."
The first tear left a shining path across her face. If Kelly noticed it, she gave no sign. Her eyes were focused somewhere in the distance now, beyond the pale acoustic ceiling tiles.
"We had a great time, really. Nassau ...Caicos... Richard needed to relax. All by ourselves..."
"You went to Puerta Plata," Remo said.
The woman grimaced, flicking her eyes toward Remo with a reproachful glare, as if the very name left a foul taste in her mouth, but she didn't reproach him verbally.
"We went to Puerta Plata," she agreed. "And met Enrique."
"Filthy bastard!" Kelly startled Remo with her sudden vehemence. "He was a part of it, you know. Oh, yes. I didn't trust him from the first, but Richard told me everything would be all right. It wasn't. was it?"
"No," Remo agreed, "it wasn't. How'd you meet him?"
"Richard?"
"Enrique."
"Bastard!" This time, Remo wasn't sure if Kelly was addressing him directly, or referring to the missing crewman. "Richard found him. Tried to warn him, really. Didn't like the way he looked at me. He always smirked, the little shit! We never should have hired him."
"Where did you go from Puerta Plata?" Remo asked.
"East," she replied, "and south. Down through the passage."
That would be Mong Passage, Remo thought, the stretch of water separating Puerto Rico from the eastern coast of the Dominican Republic. He had learned that much from checking out a map in the in-flight magazine while airborne between White Plains and Bethesda.
"After that?" he prodded as gently as possible.
"It was supposed to be a real vacation," Kelly Bauer Armitage replied, slipping gears. "No plans, no reservations. Living on the water. It was just supposed to be the two of us, but Richard took him on, in case we hit bad weather. There was nothing in the forecast, but he worries. Used to."
Both of Kelly's sunburned cheeks were wet with tears now, but her voice was steady. One hand had worked its way out from under the crisp sheet that covered her, fingers curling around the side rail of her bed and tightening until the knuckles blanched. Remo noted that her nails were bitten or broken off down to the quick. Long scratches on the back of her hand had scabbed over, already healing, while the skin between her fingers was chapped from exposure to sun- and salt water.
Remo took a gamble, asking, "Where did the attack take place?"
"I don't know, dammit!" Fury and frustration mingled in her voice. "A day beyond the passage, was it? Maybe two. What day is this?"
He had to think about it for a moment. "Wednesday," Remo told her.
"Wednesday. No, that isn't right. It wasn't Wednesday. You're mistaken."
"When the men came-"
"Men? You call them men? Those filthy animals? You still have no idea." Her eyes were wild now; she was trembling on the edge of panic. "They killed Richard, did you know that? And they ...they..."
Her tears were flowing freely now, her shoulders jerking as she wept. Remo moved quickly, touching her gently on the neck before she could notice what he was doing. The woman relaxed into the bed like a deflating hot-air balloon. The hysteria drained out of her, but the horror still lived in her eyes.
"You said they dressed like pirates," Remo reminded her.
"They were pirates," she said, her voice like someone whose mind was far away now. "You didn't see them. You don't know."
"I'm trying to find out," he said.
"The island where they live ...it's like another world. Like nothing from this century. No lights except for fire at night. No roads. Those bastards... what they did ...you couldn't know."
"And no one mentioned a location, anything like map coordinates?"
"No, no, no, I told you no."
Remo felt grim. He couldn't help her. She was traumatized in some permanent, or at least semipermanent way. Maybe with time she would heal that part of her mind that had been locked up, but he couldn't do it for her.
All she had to tell him now was one word. "No, no, no, no," she said, her head shaking somberly back and forth. "No, no, no, no..."
Remo touched her neck again and gave her the gift of unconsciousness.
The shouting had attracted attention. The orderly was almost to the door of number 725 when Remo exited the private room. "What's going on in there?" he growled.
"She fell asleep," said Remo. "I suppose it was a waste of time."
The hulk glanced inside Kelly's room and gave Remo a glare. "I could have told you that."
"Next time I'll ask," Remo said as he strolled to the elevator, feeling a pair of eyes on his back. They weren't the eyes of the orderly. They belonged to a slim, attractive redhead he had noticed standing at the nurses' station, a prim frown on her face. He wasn't surprised when he heard her fall into step behind him and increase her pace when he hit the elevator call button. A moment later, when the door hissed open and he stepped in she was right beside him, stepping back against the other wall as he chose the button labeled L for lobby.
"Who the hell are you?" she challenged as the doors closed.
"Who's asking?"
"I'm Stacy Armitage. You were with my brother's wife, and I heard her crying, then it goes dead quiet and you make a beeline for the exit. Now, I want to know exactly who you are and what the hell is going on, or you can bet your ass you won't be getting past hospital security."
"I'm Remo, and I've been assigned to look into your brother's case."
"Remo? What kind of name is Remo?" Stacy Armitage demanded.
"Mine," he told her.
"Remo what?" the angry redhead challenged.
He thought about that for a moment. Who was he today? Oh, yeah. "Rubble."
"Remo Rubble of which agency?"
"CIS," he told her, picking the letters out of thin air.
''I never heard of it."
"That's good. You weren't supposed to."
"Cut the crap, okay? We've had the FBI in here, the Coast Guard, DEA, you name it. What are you supposed to have that they all lack?"
"A winning personality," he said.
"I must have missed it," Stacy said, sneering.
"You caught me on my coffee break."
They reached the ground floor and the elevator door slid open. Remo started for the exit, leaving Stacy Armitage behind, but she caught up to him at once, heels clicking on the shiny marble floor.
"You don't get off that easy, pal," she said.
"Oh, really? Maybe you should try
a citizen's arrest," he said. "It's worth a shot, you want to make a total ass out of yourself."
"I don't like strangers badgering my sister!"
"Sister-in-law," he corrected.
Stacy grabbed his arm, and Remo let himself be turned to face her. "Listen, damn you! We were friends before she ever met my brother. Christ, I introduced them! Now, the cops and Feds are acting like there's nothing they can do about my brother's murder or the things those bastards did to Kelly, but I don't believe it. It's not good enough, you hear me? Someone has to pay!"
He stared into her blue eyes for a moment, seeing love and hate mixed up there. He didn't take the animosity personally. She just needed somebody to vent on. "Okay," he said, "let's take a walk."
Outside, she kept pace easily with long, athletic legs. In other circumstances, Remo might have complimented Stacy Armitage on her appearance, but today, it would have felt like hitting on a widow at her husband's funeral.
"We're walking," she said at last. "Now what?"
"I want you to relax and trust me when I say that someone's working on the case. We haven't broken it, but I don't give up until I get results. You have my word."
"Your word? Trust you? For all I know, you could be someone from the tabloids. They've been sniffing after Kelly since those fishermen-"
"I'm not a newsman," Remo said.
"So, you're some kind of cloak-and-dagger character, is that the deal?"
"No cloak, no dagger," Remo told her. "But I get-"
"Results, I know. You said that. But these bastards aren't American. Suppose you find them in some pissant country where we don't have extradition treaties?"
"I'll come up with something," Remo said.
She stared at Remo for a moment, then she said, "I'll help you."
"Not a chance."
"Why not?"
"Because you're a civilian. Does that ring a bell?"
"My brother's dead! My best friend kidnapped, raped and God knows what else! So far, no one from the mighty FBI or any other federal agency has got a freaking clue about who did it, and you're telling me you don't need help?"
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