Bedard put a bullet between them.
28
INTERPOL
LYON, FRANCE
“You’re serious.”
“As a heart attack,” Graham said. “I told him I had already called Ambassador Sanderson and that she was on her way to the palace to see President Préval.”
“And Brigham said what?”
“He told me not to do another thing. I mean he was just sizzling, Helmut. He actually used those words, verbatim, like I was some little kid. I said, ‘All due respect, Admiral,’ and the phone went dead. He hung up on me. Ten minutes later I get a call from Senator Metcalf, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He tells me to stand down and wait for further instructions from my director. The director, Helmut! I’ve never had a conversation with the director in my life.”
“What the hell is going on down there?”
“Hey, I’ve never even heard of anything like this. You can raise hell from your side of the pond. I’m not doing another thing until I hear what the director is going to say.”
“I thought we were lucky enough to run down the missing policewoman from Poland in a week’s time. That and connect her to a ship from Haiti. What in the hell more could anyone expect?”
“I’m just saying, this Sherry Moore is a close friend of Brigham’s and Brigham is pissed.”
“What do you think he’s up to?”
“All I can say is what I’ve heard around the watercooler, that maybe Brigham keeps a hand in DEVGRU.”
“DEVGRU?”
“Navy Special Warfare, the old SEAL Team 6 that wasn’t supposed to exist.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“If what they say is true, Helmut, Brigham’s armed with the Joint Special Operations Command and four teams of alpha-grade SEALs who are autonomous from the regular military.”
SOMEWHERE OFF THE CAYMAN ISLANDS
When she dreamed, Katya saw yellow butterflies. They were Russian butterflies or, more exactly, Caucasus Mountain butterflies, and behind them she saw her parents’ home on the snowcapped peaks of Mount Elbrus.
The Caucasus region was a virtual melting pot of biology, of bison and wolves and leopards and eagles, of Muslims and Christians and Buddhists and Jews. She should have stayed there. She should have appreciated the simplicity of her life. Appreciated the sun and the moon and the wind and the rains, the true elements of existence that had forever influenced her ancestors.
But she had not. She had run away with a foreigner, an ecologist from Switzerland who came to photograph the leopards. He had pictures of exotic places and he told stories and knew many languages. He was funny and he was interesting, which was everything that her life, her parents’ life, and that of the other mountain farmers, were not.
Their relationship lasted only to the Black Sea resort of Sochi; the ecologist confessed he could not take her home with him, he had a wife, but she was smitten with adventure by now; she had seen palm trees and beautiful botanical gardens, Greek architecture and the gleaming hulls of ships on a startling blue sea. Even her severe asthma had seemed to suppress at sea level. There was no going back to the life she once knew.
She spent a few nights in a hostel with summer camp students who had come to learn tennis at the academy. She visited cathedrals and museums. She sat on sandy beaches and drank vodka with a man who promised he could get her a housekeeping job on one of the cruise lines. And when it came time to interview, she used a landlady’s iron to press her wool dress, brushed her hair a hundred times, and arrived early for her appointment. But it was not the chief cabin steward who showed up to greet her. It was a man with a handgun.
She spent that night in the hull of a freighter with girls who had been kidnapped in Taganrog and all the while more girls were loaded into the hold at the harbor at Sochi, all with stories like her own.
The air was bad from the beginning, but a fuel leak at sea would send her into asthmatic spasms. Katya, when she wasn’t fighting for air, fought to sleep, to dream in the rumbling hull of the ship. After days at sea all her questions about what had happened were reduced to one. Katya wondered if heaven had yellow butterflies.
The captain of the Anna Marie nosed his trawler beneath the hulking bow of Yelenushka, looking up at the rails where men were dropping lines and readying a battered metal life basket. His crew of four tied off against the freighter’s lines, then sat bobbing in the dark sea off Haiti while the women were being readied.
When they came down, they came two at a time. The captain had them put below in the empty ice hold. It took an hour and fifteen minutes, but all of the women survived. The Anna Marie’s crew untied lines and pushed off, letting the forty-foot trawler drift away from the hulking freighter. Ten minutes later the captain checked his radar screen, started his engines, and headed for the coast of Colombia.
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
“Helmut.”
“Hold on, Graham. I need to close the door.”
Graham cradled the phone to his ear, waiting. He had been staring blankly at his desk ever since his conversation with the director two hours before. It was one of those conversations you couldn’t quite remember afterward but you knew had monumental implications. Especially the part about straying dangerously close to violating state’s sovereignty in Haiti.
“I’m afraid to ask,” Helmut said.
“I got a call from a friend before the director came to see me. My source tells me Ambassador Sanderson is inside the palace in Port-au-Prince.”
“And?”
“President Préval was already waiting for her. He told her he had talked with Washington and that the FBI was putting together a forensics team to send to Port-au-Prince in the morning. He’s agreed to send guards with them to Bedard’s compound.”
“Just like that,” Helmut said.
“Just like that. The ambassador hardly said a word.”
“So who softened Préval up—was it Senator Metcalf?”
“Actually, my source said that President Préval told the ambassador he talked to the White House, but if you think that’s strange, listen to this. Préval put a lockdown on all of western Haiti. He ordered all police field commanders to their stations. Then he closed the airports. Nothing comes or goes from Haiti for the next twelve hours.”
Helmut didn’t know what to say. “What about Colonel Deaken?”
“Officially missing. The palace sent national security guards to his house. His housekeeper said his family hasn’t been home in a week, since about the time the explosives engineer’s body was dumped in Tiburon and your office contacted the colonel for his help.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Helmut said. “Why is Préval restricting access to Haiti and letting the FBI in?”
“He’s not letting the FBI in for twelve hours either,” Graham said. “The lockdown is universal. No one comes or goes from Haiti until noon tomorrow.”
“Why in God’s name would President Préval order that?”
“Why would the Senate Arms Committee order the CIA to stand down? Want to wager a certain retired admiral is in the middle of all this?”
CONTESTUS
HAITI
Sherry could hear men shouting above the thrum of a generator, a high-pitched whine somewhere in the catacombs of the ancient cellar.
“What do you see?”
“The walls are stone and dirt.”
“What else?”
“Bags, cloth sacks of something, men with guns. They are waiting for something.”
“What did they do with Pioche’s wife and her daughter?”
“Next to us,” Carol said, sitting on the floor, her hands wrapped over her head.
Carol’s voice was strained. Sherry knew what the woman was thinking, that her daughter had been here.
Sherry stood at the door. “How far away are the men?” she asked, trying to distract her.
Carol got slowly to her feet, looked out the viewing pane.
“Forty, fifty
feet,” Carol said, again collapsing to the floor. Sherry heard the noise rising from within the woman; she turned to hug her and Carol moaned, her mouth pressed against Sherry’s shoulder. The tears weren’t for herself, Sherry knew. Carol was thinking her daughter might have shared this very cell. And here she had spent a summer, with her mother on the other end of the island.
Sherry thought about Brigham just then and was thankful he was not here. He would have preferred it the other way around, she knew; Brigham was like that, he tried to be protective of her, and she had never made that an easy responsibility. They would only have killed him too.
Of course Brigham wouldn’t let this go away quietly. Interpol would try to capitalize on what they learned, would try to do the right thing, but Sherry knew they shared information in a secretive world. She had no doubt as to their intentions, but Sherry had struggled through countless challenges to have some purpose in this life. She wanted to be an example for others. She did not want to become a casualty in a clandestine war.
Brigham wouldn’t allow it, she was sure. He would do everything in his power, use every bit of knowledge at his disposal, including what he knew about Madame Esme’s humanitarian organization, if it helped him get to President Préval. Failing that, he would go public.
Sherry only hoped that he would succeed, that their story would be told. She wanted the world to get a glimpse of what she had seen. She wanted CNN to show what caged humans looked like. She wanted those six o’clock sound bites to provoke reflection on what it must be like looking out from within. Knowing that dreams of love, motherhood, and success were all gone, that their lives, the only lives they would ever have, had been sacrificed to amuse and profit strangers.
Car doors slammed faintly. Sherry turned and looked to where the sound was coming from. She put a hand up, found an air vent. “Can you see out there?”
“Lights outside,” Carol sobbed. “Trucks.”
Sherry heard voices. Footsteps fading into the recesses of the cellar. The whine of the drill stopped.
Sherry heard men talking. The voice of the leader, the man who had shot the old houngan, was disquieting in a way Sherry could not describe.
The man speaking to him sounded British. They were talking about electrical loads and flashovers, but the voices were too distant, and the sobbing of the women around her too loud, to hear specifics.
Then the leader’s voice was coming back toward them, speaking Creole now, moving closer to their cell.
“Open it,” he ordered someone.
Sherry heard the rattle of a metal hasp, the creak of hinges as it opened.
Hands grabbed her arms and pulled her out in the open.
She could smell rancid breath. The man measured six, perhaps seven, inches taller than she.
A hand took her hair and wound it around the fist. She could feel his eyes on her body. She could smell the odor of his skin as he leaned close. Suddenly he jerked her head back and dragged her by the arm and hair across the dirt floor and removed her wrist restraints. Then Bedard said, “Bring the mother out, bring all of them. Line them up on their knees.”
Bedard took a cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it while the women were being brought to him.
Sherry could hear them getting close, perhaps only ten feet away, before they were made to kneel facing her.
“So you are the girl’s mother.” Bedard left Sherry standing there and walked toward Carol Bishop. “The American crusader,” he said mockingly.
Carol looked up at him with disgust, muscles tightening in her legs. She looked ready to spring headfirst, but Bedard grabbed her throat and squeezed, watching her face go blue. “You will die soon enough, woman, but first I want you to see how easily a person can be broken. Your daughter was easy,” he sneered. “You should have seen her perform. She didn’t even beg.”
He pushed her away, back to her knees. Then he walked down the line, past the others, lifted Aleksandra’s hair, and let it fall over her battered face. He leaned over and took her head in his hands and jerked it to face the others, grabbed her nose and chin and pried open her empty mouth. “See this. This is my work.” He smiled. “What do you think?”
The dead man’s widow screamed and Bedard backhanded her jaw, sending blood and spittle over Carol’s face.
Bedard stepped away from the kneeling women, looked over his shoulder.
“Take off your clothes, Miss Moore,” he yelled. Sherry’s face showed no expression. She did not move.
Bedard turned to face her. “If you do not, I will take them off myself, or perhaps I will go to the child first. Would you rather I start with her?”
Sherry’s mouth tasted like metal; panic-inducing adrenaline flooded her bloodstream. Until now she had been presented with no opportunity to resist. She’d had guns pointed at her since she’d been taken from the houngan’s temple. Her wrists had been bound.
She took a deep breath from the abdomen. Wait, she coaxed herself, for God’s sake don’t panic.
Sherry was hardly defenseless, she knew martial arts well, but protecting one’s self was not about the immediacy of a response. It was also about opportunity. She knew she had to fight down what her mind and body were screaming for her to do. She could not flail out and overcome the odds, no matter how physically capable. She needed to know more about who and what was around her. She needed the perfect moment.
Sherry kicked off her shoes, unbuckled her belt, and unzipped her shorts, tugged them off her hips, and let them fall to the ground. She heard men speaking in Creole, three of them, to be certain. Two were distant, near the corridor leading to the outside, or so she gauged. The other was closer, within striking distance.
They were all enjoying this. This was something they had seen many times before, had likely participated in.
Bedard concerned her most. She could feel his eyes on her. She could sense his lust, his hatred.
She undid the buttons of her shirt and let it fall off her shoulders. She took a deep breath. This would have been a lot easier if the young girl were not here. She might have had options then. Or maybe she would have done as all the other women did here. Try to live for another moment, another day.
29
CARIBBEAN SEA
The captain of the Anna Marie stooped to crane his neck beyond the ship’s wheel. There was a light in the sky to the north. It seemed to be growing, shimmering on the wet windshield of the cabin.
He rummaged through rags and sundry tools, found binoculars in a hatch, and trained them on the light.
One of the crewmen came into the cabin behind him and shut the door.
“What is it?”
The captain shook his head.
The light continued to grow on a cloudless palette of stars. It wasn’t heavenly, he knew, nor was a second light now becoming visible on the horizon. There was another ship out there.
In twelve years of smuggling, the Anna Marie had never been boarded. The police and military were fixated on the go-fast boats, which had been highly successful outrunning them. Fishing trawlers weren’t immune from the drug interdiction cops, but the ones that were targeted had been linked through informants to cocaine. The Anna Marie smuggled bodies, not drugs, and her name had not yet come up on law enforcement radar.
Two more crewmen entered the cabin, pulling automatic rifles from the hatches. The lights were converging in front of them, bright as small moons.
The captain turned the wheel in a reflexive but futile gesture. Then they could hear the whop of a helicopter coming toward them across the open sea. The helicopter’s floodlights came on as a machine gun fired and hot orange tracer rounds rained upon the dark water off their bow.
The superstructure of the coast guard cutter was now visible in the captain’s glasses. She was a big one, he thought, eighty, ninety feet, and she would be armed with cannon and torpedoes. He put the binoculars down and barked an order to his crew as the helicopter descended over the cabin of the Anna Marie.
The crew
put down their weapons, opened the double doors over the hold full of women, quickly stepped away, raised their hands to surrender, and waited for the cutter St. Louis to come alongside. Above them the Jayhawk helicopter’s crew looked down in wonder. The open hold was packed full of women, every one of them staring up into the blinding lights.
30
CONTESTUS
HAITI
Men in black flight suits huddled over a black-and-gray satellite image, topographical features of a coastline illuminated in laser-green light. Their attention was being drawn to a mountain ridge. There was a series of small outbuildings by a cathedral, the perimeter of a security fence traced in red.
“Five-knot winds from south-southeast.” The leader met each of their eyes. “If your body begins to plane in free fall you’re going to sail off target. Every foot matters, gentlemen.”
The men nodded their understanding.
The blacked-out KC-130 Hercules was silent at 35,000 feet, releasing the five high-altitude chutists into chilled un-breathable air over western Haiti. The men dropped like shadows into the night, oxygen masks linked to personal tanks on their chests, Heckler and Koch .45-caliber pistols in black shoulder holsters and 5.56mm SCAR light combat rifles strapped across their backs. They plummeted an astonishing six and a half miles before deploying the square black plumes of their canopies. The men were virtually invisible as they floated above the spires of the ancient cathedral and dropped within the security perimeter.
Metcalf landed on his feet at the edge of the outbuildings. In less than a minute he heard the others hit dirt; all but one dropped their harnesses and used their radios, making telltale clicks over the closed frequency to signal they were okay.
The last man to land drifted northwest of his target, was still inside the perimeter but dangerously close to the fence and foundation of the cathedral. He was still trying to extricate himself from a coil of barbed wire inside the fence when one of Bedard’s guards, who just happened to be standing there, shot him.
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