by Lark Brennan
“Are you okay? Did her tail hit you?”
“I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
A sharp whistle from farther out in the cove pierced the air. An answering whistle followed.
Lex frowned and nudged him toward the shore. “Damn. The aggressive males are getting closer. Let’s get out. I’ve got binoculars in my bag.”
He followed her onto the sugar-white beach and stepped up onto the wooden planks of the deck. While she rummaged in her bag he slipped on his sunglasses and scanned the bay. “There’s something going on out there. Will the males hurt that female?”
She focused the binoculars on the churning offshore. “Normally, I’d say no. Now? I don’t know. She isn’t afraid of them, though.”
The glare of the sun reflecting off the water distorted the dolphin activity. Their whistles, squeaks, and clicks carried across the cove to the dock.
“What about the female?” he asked. “Is she okay?”
“She’s more emotionally stable than the males who attacked me. When she encountered the nasty orphic energy she felt a falling sensation and lost consciousness.”
She lowered the field glasses and studied him over her shades. “She doesn’t remember anything except a bad thing then being herded here by the aggressive males out there. Your reaction startled her. That’s why she flipped you on your ass.”
“When I touched her, I felt residue from the orphic. It hit me in the gut and I jerked away.” The queasiness had almost passed but that was the least of his concerns. “That was the first time I experienced orphic energy in an animal. Otherwise I thought she was pretty amazing.”
“She liked you too.”
He fought a grin then gave up. How cool was it that a dolphin liked him. Lex’s relationship with the cetaceans was making a hell of a lot more sense.
She opened the big dive bag and began stuffing the unused sling back into it. “At least she’s not showing signs of physiological damage resulting from the experience. Her emotions are skittish but there’s nothing wrong with her cognitive abilities.”
“So why did the males go crazy and not her?”
Lex shrugged. “I don’t know. Because she passed out maybe? I’d like to get close to the other females but not with the males out there looking for trouble. When the team gets here, I’ll try to connect with the other females and see what they know.”
“So what do we do in the mean time?” he asked.
“Pack up. Can you carry the inflated sling to the jeep?”
As he lifted the float, a bottlenose whistled from offshore. He looked up as she rose out of the water and squeaked at him, almost dancing. An invitation to join her? A farewell?
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“She wants you to come back in the water.” Lex chuckled. “The little tart is trying to seduce you.”
With a final whistle, the dolphin dove gracefully, flicking her tail in the air as she disappeared.
• • •
As soon as they got back to the house, they rinsed off the sling then themselves. Lex leaned on the long dining table, half sitting, half kneeling in the chair next to him, and squinted at the screen of his sensor. “So where are you sending your data?”
“The clouds. I have a secure account and my ComDev encrypts the data for transmission. The retrieval isn’t as seamless as using the Durand system and my sensor can’t scan continuously like the one at DT. Five-second intervals is the best it can do.”
She rearranged herself on the chair to see better. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“The system is set up to monitor the entire Caribbean and alert me of odd orphic activity, especially anything that creates a red spot.”
“So we’re just going to sit here and stare at the screen?”
“I have an idea.” With a tap of his finger, he focused in on Little Harbor and dragged the image so the bay filled the screen. By touching a tiny icon on the edge of the image, he filtered the picture to show orphic energy. The pin-points might not have been visible had he not already known what he was looking for. Zooming in, the three spots of orange grew and slowly moved on the blue-green background. “What do you know.”
“Is that possible?” she asked. “You said you never sensed orphic energy in an animal before.”
“I haven’t.”
“And orange is bad. This doesn’t make sense. Dolphins are one of the most gentle species on the planet. What’s going on?”
“Assuming the orange spots are the guys who attacked you, what do they have in common that the others don’t?”
She stared at the screen for several seconds and frowned. “Shit.”
“Shit, what?”
The grimace on her face deepened. “Those three are wearing GPS trackers. Nobody else is.”
“And the whale who disappeared had a tracking device, right?”
“Yeah.”
Damn. Marine mammal disappearances, the sudden appearance of red orphic energy and GPS trackers—there had to be something targeting the tracking devices. But what? There had to be clues in his data somewhere. Without a link to Durand, there was no way to pull up the data for time and location of the whale’s disappearance on his hand-held. He needed to access his computers on the Talos to run the analysis he wanted.
“I need to get back to Road Town,” he said.
She shook her head. “Not tonight. It’ll be dark soon. We can leave in the morning although I’d rather meet the Ariel and brief them on the situation.”
“If we leave at sunrise, you can be back way before noon.”
“What about you? Aren’t you coming back?”
Of course he was coming back. For the first time in a long while he had a tangible problem to solve. “If you get me there by nine, I can sail the Talos back here by late afternoon.”
She studied him. “I’m trusting you to keep your word.”
The veiled threat irritated him. “If I say I’ll be back, I will.” He angled the sensor screen toward himself. “I need to get back to work.”
She rose and his gaze involuntarily skimmed down her body. “I have some research to do, too,” she said, “If you need me, I’ll be in my room.”
What he needed was off limits and the last place he was going was her room. He nodded and when her door closed he let out a deep ragged breath.
• • •
An hour later Lex opened her bedroom door and paused to watch Bodie engrossed in the screen in front of him. He ran a hand over the stubble on his jaw and something in her chest fluttered.
“Hungry?” she asked.
Her question startled him out of his concentration and he blinked a couple times before his silver eyes focused on her.
“Yeah.” He stretched his back and rolled his shoulders, then rubbed the back of his neck. “Is there anything to eat or do we have to go out?”
“Let’s see.” She surveyed the contents of the kitchen. “Could be worse. How does grilled cheese and tomato sound? Or fried egg sandwich? Colin left a six pack of beer.”
The cheese turned out to be aged gouda and the bread was homemade. While she cooked, Bodie moved his electronics to one end of the dining table and set placemats and flatware at the other.
“Tell me about Joaquim Wilson,” she said.
The good humor drained from his expression. “He’s dead.”
“Then there’s no reason not to talk about him.”
He set his beer down on the table with a thud. “Why are you doing this?”
“The people who killed you, are they likely to come after you again if they find out you’re not dead?”
“Ask your brother,” he snapped.
“I’m asking you. Why did they come after you?”
“They wanted my delphic energy research. One of the guys said it was a matter of national security or some such crap.”
“Why do you believe they were government agents?”
He stared at her a moment. “That’s wha
t they said when they flashed their credentials.”
Her Protector training made her suspicious of any volunteered information. The U.S. government had always harbored covert branches, some of which researched psychic abilities, noetics, remote viewing, extraterrestrials, and other off-the-record phenomena, so she couldn’t dismiss the possibility one of these agencies had zeroed in on his research. She also knew there were plenty of other entities interested in psychic power. “So you think we should expect company.”
“Probably.”
“Then tell me who Joaquim Wilson was.”
The muscle of his jaw clenched. The guy clearly had serious issues with his past, but if their safety was in question, she needed to know about it.
“A Hispanic newscaster in Houston created the persona of Joaquim Wilson in Jack Wilson’s sophomore year at UH—University of Houston. Jack was making a show on the basketball court and the guy dug up his birth certificate.”
So Jack became Joaquim. Hearing Bodie talk about himself this way in the third person was kind of creepy. “How did you get named Joaquim?”
“My mother’s Brazilian. My father was an American merchant marine. They met in Rio and he dumped her in Miami pregnant. She gave me my first name, he gave me my last.”
“So you grew up in Miami?”
“No. In a shithole town south of Houston. My father’s mother raised me.”
“What about your mother?”
“Out of the picture.” His eyes warned her not to push the subject. “I lived with my grandmother until she died. All her money went to the church and I was homeless.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen. Basketball was my only hope for going to college and escaping redneck hell. The high school coach saw me as a ticket to a better job and took me in.” He folded his arms over his broad chest. “The University of Houston offered me a scholarship to play ball and get a college degree. Celtics drafted me and I went to Boston for a glorious eight-game career. The rest you know.”
“Laughed out of M.I.T. Right.”
After several beats of silence he fixed her with an intense stare. “Princeton.”
The grilled cheese sandwich suddenly felt like lead in her stomach. “Which is where you met my brother.” And never had a chance. “How did you meet?”
He sighed and uncrossed his arms. “A reception for some hotshot alumnus. Someone mentioned Mark had just gotten back from three months in Tibet. For some time I’d wanted to see the Himalayas to test a theory about delphic energy in the region.”
“You asked him about delphic?”
“No, just his travels. He surprised me by alluding to a high level of psychic energy at a monastery he’d visited and invited me to see some sacred objects in his flat in New York.”
“The family flat.” She could never tell him about the powerful telepathic abilities Mark had certainly used to discover Bodie’s talent. No, family secrets must be kept at all costs. “Did you go?”
“I almost didn’t. Who wouldn’t be suspicious of a rich alumnus inviting a lowly grad student to his New York penthouse for dinner?”
“Why did you go?”
“Curiosity.” A frown creased his brow. “Now I can see Durand set me up. He dropped all the right details to make it impossible to refuse. By the end of the visit I had a grant to measure and prove the nature of delphic energy.”
“What did he get?”
“Besides my soul?” He laughed bitterly. “The commercial rights to any product of the research.”
Truth with a twist. Clearly more had gone down than a business transaction.
“Did you get to see the artifacts?” she asked. The Durand penthouse covered the entire top floor of obscenely expensive real estate overlooking Central Park. A five bedroom residence and garden took up half the area, a private museum of objects having spiritual, magical, or psychic properties filled the rest. Whatever objects Bodie had seen, they’d been brought to him at the residence. Only family—and selected members of the family at that—entered the museum itself.
“Yes. They turned out to be very impressive.”
“But disconcerting?”
He held her gaze. “Some were beautiful. Others were fucking sinister.”
And he hadn’t even been a revenant back then. Nor had he understood what he was seeing.
He stood abruptly. “If you’re finished with the interrogation, princess, I’m going for a run.”
“It’s dark.”
“I’ve got a flashlight and a key to the back gate. Don’t wait up.”
She watched him disappear into his room. Running wasn’t her first choice of exercise or even her tenth. Besides, he hadn’t invited her to go along. The more she learned about him, the less she blamed him for his hostility. Mark had used him. Probably still was.
She rose and cleared the table. While she washed the dishes, Bodie’s story replayed in her head. Mark knew everything about him and he knew very little about the Durand aside from their tech empire. Something didn’t make sense. Her brother was a master of strategy who never did anything without a plan. So why had he sent her to Bodie with no more than a “this guy can help you”?
• • •
Bodie heard music from the bars along Little Harbor below the house which set his route in the direction of Great Harbor. The road was packed gravel and visible under the bright moon. And best of all there were no espectros between the cottage and Foxy’s, and no Lex.
His legs stretched and pounded on the narrow road in a familiar rhythm. He wasn’t sure which he wanted to avoid more, angry spirits or the woman. Right now? The woman.
The uphill slope burned his calves and worked the stiffness from his thighs, but it did zip for the mess bouncing around in his head. At the top of the hill, he paused to enjoy the cool breeze on his sweaty skin. He lifted his arms to let the delphic flow around him. Reggae music drifted up from the cove and the lights at Foxy’s glowed on the water. Putting rubber to the gravel he took off again, picking up his pace on flat terrain. He took a dirt track above Great Harbor. On a moonless night he would have run right past the narrow trail bisecting the main path at the crest of the hill, but moonlight glinted off something shiny in the dirt, bringing him to a sudden stop. He stared, refusing to process what he was seeing. Twenty-five years and he still knew a spell when he saw one.
At each corner of the intersection someone had placed an assortment of objects. He studied them and their placement.
His gut clenched when a familiar pattern emerged. “Shit.”
One corner held seven coins placed in a circle about ten inches in diameter. In the center of the circle a red candle had partially burned and two pieces of red chalk had been carefully positioned like spokes on either side.
The next corner contained a white bowl of dark liquid—blood, he guessed—surrounded by seven cowrie shells and seven feathers. In the third, seven large nails weighed down a round white cloth on which a trident, sun, moon, and star had been carefully drawn. In the final corner stood a wooden figure of a horned man, naked with an exaggerated aroused phallus, surrounded by seven cowrie shells.
Bodie had no idea what kind of spell was being cast or undone but he recognized the wooden figure as Exu, one of the best known deities of Yorùbá religion. He resisted the urge to destroy the patterns, to kick the dirt until none of the spell remained intact, to hurl the wooden devil far into the night. Without knowing the magic’s purpose, he might do more harm than good. The neutral feel of the place’s orphic energy led him to assume the spell was not working evil, but what did he know?
A cloud passed across the moon and unease prickled on the back of his neck. He’d lingered here too long. The spell wasn’t for him and the sooner he forgot what he’d seen, the less likely the spirit of Exu would follow him. It was a lesson his mother had taught him before he could talk.
He crossed himself although he’d never been a practicing Catholic, then added, “I am not interfering and wish to leave t
his place alone. Do not follow me. Do not remember my face.”
Taking off in the direction of the harbor, he thought he heard a voice in the wind. “Proteja sua alma, irmão.” Protect your soul, brother.
Chapter Twelve
Oxley Cowan pushed open the heavy, camouflaged steel door and stepped out of the bunker into the night. The full moon illuminated the stark white landscape and the sea beyond. By day, the tropical sun baked the surface of Sombrero Island to temperatures well over a hundred degrees. The cavern below, however, stayed a constant seventy degrees to accommodate his delicate electronics.
He breathed the fresh night air, no longer noticing the metallic tang of guano. Every day his successes grew and with them his confidence. Six months ago he’d received an untraceable email containing a piece of information that had allowed him to finally crack the code Jack Wilson used to safeguard his notes. If the fools who killed Wilson had first tortured him into turning over all his data, the Disruptor wouldn’t have taken three years to develop.
The hum of an outboard engine announced the arrival of his supplies. Three hundred yards offshore a small freighter lay anchored, lit by only a half dozen dim lights. The open provisioning boat approached without running lights, guided by the beacon of the unmanned lighthouse—not a simple feat given the steep rock face edging the island and the coral reef in the surrounding sea.
Oxley took a remote control from his pocket, keyed in a six number code and watched the glowing landing platform rise above the surface of the water. The Boss thought of everything, or almost everything, and his organization had very deep pockets.
“Right on time.” The voice so close by startled him.
He glanced at the island’s only other inhabitant, a sturdy American-educated Haitian in his mid-twenties, assigned to him as bodyguard and assistant. Henri Sardou loathed him. The feeling was mutual.
“Do you have the garbage ready for them?” Oxley snapped. “It’s beginning to stink.”
