As his eyes gradually focused, Russell could see that the fires were mostly surrounded by people cooking, the shadows were tall palms waving in the breeze, the hanging bodies long garments drying on a line. The drums, though, still sounded ominous.
‘Who are the drummers?’ he asked his escort.
‘Just voodoo priests,’ the man said. He sounded bored by the idea.
There were buildings all around them, Russell realized. In fact the place didn’t look that dissimilar to the place where he lived and worked. There were several low buildings grouped in a rough square which could easily be hospital wards. Or barracks, he thought, as they emerged from under a group of palms and a tall watch-tower loomed into view against the night sky. It wore a radar dish on its roof, which made the whole structure look like one of H. G. Wells’s Martian war machines balancing a plate on its head.
But if it was a barracks, then who were these people grouped around the fires? They looked more like refugees than soldiers. And in fact most of them seemed to be not much more than children.
Russell began to feel very tired. ‘I can’t walk much farther,’ he said.
‘We are almost there,’ the man told him, gesturing towards the building directly ahead of them.
What seemed like an hour later they reached the door. Inside the furnishings were smarter than Russell had expected, and had a distinctly military feel to them. It reminded him of the Admin block back in Poole.
The next thing he knew he was coming back to life in a chair, with a new throbbing pain in his head. Since there didn’t seem much profit in anyone hitting him again, he assumed he must have collapsed.
‘Mr Russell,’ a voice addressed him. With a supreme effort he managed to refocus his eyes. The man who had spoken was sitting opposite him, behind an office desk, leaning back in his chair with hands behind his head, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. There was more American than French in his accent, but the face, though African, had a Gallic quality to it. The nose was decidedly Roman, the mouth almost thin-lipped, the hair lustrous and wavy. The eyes, though, were what drew Russell’s attention. They seemed to be straining at their sockets, as if eager to leap out and devour the world.
For the first time in an often dangerous life Russell had the sense that he was in the presence of evil.
‘Who are you?’ he asked quietly. The words seemed to boom inside his head.
The man smiled, ‘I am Toussaint Joutard. Colonel Joutard. But . . .’
‘Of the Haitian Army?’ Russell interrupted him.
Joutard didn’t seem to mind. ‘I am the leader of an organization known as the Sons of the Motherland. We work closely with the army, of course. Most of the time we share the same objectives.’
His English was perfect, Russell thought, and said so.
‘I lived in America for several years.’
Bully for you, Russell thought. The man was probably another CIA-trained fascist gone bananas in his own country. ‘Why have I been brought here?’ he asked.
Joutard smiled again, but it wasn’t the sort of smile which engendered bonhomie. ‘You could say this was a job interview . . .’
‘I already have a job.’
‘No longer. You will either take the job I am offering you, or you will be killed.’ His lips creased in response to some inner amusement. ‘Either way I shall make an excellent profit.’
The last sentence passed Russell by. ‘What have I done to you?’ he asked.
Joutard looked at him for a few seconds. ‘You don’t know?’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps you don’t. It doesn’t really matter any more.’ He slapped the desktop suddenly with the palm of his hand, and then seemed to examine the backs of his fingers. ‘You are an extremely lucky man, Mr Russell,’ he said. ‘We lose the services of one of our doctors, and, hey presto, here you are. I’m told you’re a paramedic, which I assume is a step up from being a nurse. Well, here you’ll take another step up – to doctor.’
‘I don’t have that sort of training . . .’ Russell said.
‘You will get it here. A man with your experience will have no difficulty learning the techniques required – the operations performed here are simple enough.’ He smiled yet again. ‘We’re not doing brain surgery yet.’
Russell felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. ‘What sort of operations are you talking about?’
Joutard told him.
Russell just shook his head.
‘Of course, if you refuse you will be killed and your body harvested. Being British, you might think that seems a jolly noble sort of thing to do. But you must also understand that these operations will be performed with or without you, and that the patients’ chances of survival will no doubt worsen dramatically if they are performed by people with inferior skills. So it might be more noble to stay, n’est-ce pas? And of course if you accept – not that I imagine such matters interest you – you will earn an extraordinary amount of money in a short space of time.’ He paused for effect and then looked up and said: ‘So you can either leave the sick to fend for themselves or die a useless death.’
Russell just looked at him.
‘I will give you until tomorrow morning to decide which.’ His eyes moved across to Russell’s escort by the door. ‘Take him to the late Dr Barlow’s bungalow,’ he said. ‘And tell Dr Alabri I want to see her.’
Franklin got home soon after ten, and found Sibou waiting anxiously for him.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked angrily. ‘Why didn’t you phone?’
‘I . . .’
‘Your best friend vanishes off the face of the earth, and then you take five hours over a trip to Suzie’s and expect me not to worry?’
He reached out for her hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘So I should think.’ She burrowed into his arms, and they held each other tight for a while. Eventually she disentangled herself. ‘Where have you been then?’ she asked.
He told her what he had learned at Suzie’s Bar and the Caicos Marina, and of seeing Arcilla’s sister. ‘When I got back to the marina I had another talk with the guy there. He told me Arcilla has a private helicopter, and that he heard it taking off in the middle of the night.’
‘So Nick could have been taken away by air or by boat.’
‘Yep. He could be anywhere by now – the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, you name it. And we still haven’t got a clue why he was taken.’
‘Maybe they needed another diver for this treasure business,’ Sibou suggested.
Franklin thought about it. ‘You could be right there. Though I don’t see why they couldn’t just hire one. There’s enough of them around.’
‘I suppose.’
Franklin sat down on the sofa, laid his back against it and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know what else we can do,’ he said.
She sat down next to him. ‘Put pressure on Oswald,’ she said. ‘If that doesn’t work, go to his superiors on Grand Turk.’
‘And if they can’t find him?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. It was too much to accept – that a friend could disappear in such circumstances and that nothing could be done to find him.
The late Dr Barlow’s bungalow turned out to be as comfortable as Russell’s own on Providenciales. The screening seemed to be in good repair, and the air-conditioner, though somewhat noisy, was an efficient enough cooler. There was a refrigerator in the kitchen, a working shower in the bathroom. The furniture was somewhat sparse, but did include a functioning cassette player. The doctor’s tastes had apparently been somewhat different from Russell’s – Handel rather than Hendrix.
Having concluded this brief tour, Russell sank back exhausted on to the large bed. He could still hear drumming in the distance, and see the reflected light of the fires dancing in the trees outside. It occurred to him that Colonel Joutard had not bothered to warn him against trying to escape.
From what he could remember the Ile de Tortue – or Tortuga, as the English called it – was several miles off the northe
rn coast of Haiti. In the old days it had been used as a base by French and English buccaneers for raiding the Spanish gold traffic which passed through the nearby Windward Passage. Russell had no idea who lived on the island now, or whether the writ of the Haitian Government – such as it was – extended this far. It seemed much more likely that Joutard had turned the place into a semi-private fiefdom.
Escape should be possible. Russell’s expertise as a diver was common knowledge on Providenciales, but his background in the Marines and SBS was known only to very few, and Joutard had given no indication that he was aware of this pre-medical career.
Still, as of that moment he was in no condition to walk round the bungalow, let alone make a break for the Turks and Caicos Islands. He would need to be fully recovered from the effects of the chloroform, and to know a lot more about exactly where he was, before seriously contemplating escape. One such attempt, he suspected, was all he was likely to be allowed.
And in the meantime he had Joutard’s offer of employment to consider. Not that there seemed to be much choice.
He wondered if there was anything to drink anywhere on the premises. Levering himself gingerly off the bed, he was halfway to a promising-looking cabinet when there was a rap on the outside door.
Maybe room service, he thought wryly. He tried to shout ‘come in’, but could manage little more than a loud croak.
Whoever it was seemed to hear. He heard the door open and close, and there she was standing in the doorway of the room, still wearing the white coat. She looked just as lovely as before. But then she had seemed like a ministering angel; now he knew her to be one of Joutard’s ‘doctors’. And maybe she had been sent to him as a further inducement to sign on the dotted line.
‘I thought I’d better check up on you,’ she said.
‘I’m OK.’
She walked forward and took hold of his wrist, the way he had seen Ching Ling do with patients back at the clinic.
‘You do Chinese medicine?’
She concentrated on his pulses. ‘Only a little,’ she said, taking the other wrist. ‘One of my grandmothers was Chinese.’
That explained her extraordinary face, he thought.
‘Your pulses are better,’ she said. ‘You should be back to normal in a couple of days. But you should be in bed,’ she added.
‘OK, doc,’ he said, expecting her to leave.
But instead she stood there, obviously uncertain about something.
Russell found himself wondering what Joutard had wanted with her.
As usual she seemed to read his mind. ‘The colonel wants me to persuade you to work for us,’ she said.
‘With what?’ he asked wryly.
Anger flashed in her eyes. ‘By appealing to your better nature,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Not my nose for profit?’ he replied in kind.
‘I may be mistaken in your case,’ she said slowly, ‘but nursing isn’t usually the sort of career someone enters with money in mind.’
Russell looked at her. ‘I may be mistaken in your case,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think doctors signed on for Joutard’s sort of operation with anything else in mind.’
Her whole body seemed to tense, and for a moment he thought she was going to hit him, but then she let it all out in a long sigh. ‘How would you know?’ she said, looking at the floor.
‘Explain it to me.’
She looked him in the eye, and for a moment he felt uncomfortable, as if she was seeing right through him. ‘The world doesn’t always work the way you want it to,’ she said. ‘Especially in Haiti. There are two hundred young people here who have no parents, and no matter what I do they will suffer. But I can lessen that suffering; I can see that they lead a healthy life after they leave here.’
‘Are you here willingly?’
She shrugged. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Could you walk out of this place, and take a boat across the strait, and tell the authorities in Port au Prince what is going on here?’
She sighed again. ‘You don’t understand. There are no authorities in Port au Prince who would care a damn about what’s happening here. And even if there were, do you think Joutard would throw his hands up in the air and promise not to do such things again? Of course not. He’d just find another base, another corrupt government.’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘This is the Third World in 1994, for heaven’s sake – where have you been?’
Exploring coral reefs, was the answer that came to mind. It didn’t seem the sort that would appeal to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, unexpectedly. ‘This is not your country, and you have been brought here against your will. There’s no reason why you should want to help me.’
‘There’s no reason why I should want to help Joutard. Except that he’ll kill me if I don’t.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. If there’s some sort of principle at stake here that you think is worth dying for, then there’s nothing more I can say. Except that if you do decide to live, then your skills will make a difference to the children here.’
Russell bit back the retort that was on his tongue. ‘There’s no principle,’ he said. ‘Nothing that grand. And I have no desire to die, or to be “harvested”. I’ll work for Joutard. But I’m not going to kid myself into thinking that I’m doing something that’s morally acceptable.’
She smiled for the first time, but Russell found it unsettling rather than comforting, for in it he seemed to see his own pomposity reflected.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But after you’ve been here a while you may decide that morality is just one more luxury no one can afford.’
4
The clear turquoise waters of the Caicos Bank gave way to the deep blue of the ocean trench which separated South Caicos from the Turk Islands. As usual, the eight-seater plane was full, mostly with men in suits. It was only about eighty miles from Providenciales to Grand Turk, but the three intermediate stopovers stretched the journey time to almost ninety minutes.
The pilot began his descent. Franklin looked down at the sea, wondering why he had bothered to make the trip. As far as he could tell the chances of getting any satisfaction from the commissioner were about as minimal as chances got.
But six whole days had now gone by since Nick’s disappearance, and he and Sibou had been unable to think of anything else. Making use of his SAS skills in clandestine observation, Franklin had spent several days and nights practically staking out the Arcilla villa, but had come up empty. The sister – whose name was Tamara – seemed to rise around noon, stare at the sea for most of the afternoon, and go out drinking in the evening, usually at the Club Med-Turkoise bar on Grace Bay. Once she had brought a man home with her, and perhaps had sex with him. If so, the encounter didn’t seem to have been mutually satisfactory. He had left at two in the morning, looking angry.
She was presumably in charge of the place, but the man who did what work there was to be done was a Jamaican named Freddie Bartholomew. He collected supplies, acted as a resident watchdog, and lived in one of the converted outbuildings. He did most of his drinking at home, usually with two other equally underemployed cronies. They looked like the sort of men who would be hired by someone expecting trouble. Two ferocious-looking Rottweilers only emphasized the atmosphere of potential siege.
Arcilla himself had not been seen on the island for at least a couple of weeks. Still, Franklin was convinced that the Cuban was responsible, one way or another, for Nick’s disappearance. The problem lay in finding a single shred of evidence to that effect. He had gone back to Oswald and asked him to find some pretext for searching Arcilla’s home but, not surprisingly, the policeman had refused. Franklin was told what he already knew – that there were no substantive grounds for obtaining a search warrant, and that where prominent citizens like Arcilla were concerned, Oswald was not going to act without such grounds. He was sorry about Franklin’s friend, but there was nothing more he could do. Some crimes just remained unsolved. It was t
he way of the world.
But it was not the way of his world, Franklin thought, to give up looking for a friend who had inexplicably vanished.
The police station was the taxi’s last stop. It lay behind the oldest building on the island, Guinep Lodge, which was being turned into a maritime museum. The adjoining building had not as yet been rebuilt following its torching on the last day of 1985. The unidentified arsonist’s intention had probably been the destruction of financial and other records, and the attack had spawned an official British government inquiry. Where the police were at the time had never been established. ‘Incorruptible’ was not a word which came easily to mind where the local force was concerned. At least not in those days.
Maybe things had changed, Franklin thought, as he pushed through the double doors of the police headquarters. There was no one visible, so he pressed the bell.
The commissioner himself appeared in a doorway.
‘Worrell Franklin?’ he asked.
Franklin nodded.
‘Come through,’ Missick said, lifting up the counter.
Franklin took a seat in the man’s office, which seemed unusually bare. There were no paintings, photographs or posters – just cream walls, an uncluttered desk and a bookcase full of what looked like bound reports.
‘Cigarette?’ Missick asked, pushing forward a carved wooden box full of Marlboro Lights.
‘No thanks.’
Missick lit one for himself. ‘So how can I help you?’ he asked, in a tone that suggested help was unlikely to materialize.
Franklin doggedly went through the story of Nick’s disappearance, and outlined his suspicions.
‘But there is no evidence linking Arcilla to your friend?’ Missick asked when he was finished.
‘He talked about him that evening.’
‘He probably talked about other people too. That hardly counts as evidence.’ Missick sucked in his lower lip and blew smoke down towards his desk. ‘I’m not saying you are wrong in your suspicions, but . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not only that you have no evidence. You have no motive either.’
Marine C SBS Page 4
