Emma got home and went in search of a snack. While Carrow’s staff had served small appetizers, she hadn’t eaten a meal. She headed to the kitchen to check the warming drawer. She often worked late and Johnson would leave a meal for her. There was a chicken pot pie and a kiwi cheesecake. When she finished eating she made the rounds, checking the doors and windows. She found the door that connected a small mud-room to the laundry room unlocked and secured it before heading to the master bedroom to sleep.
She rose from a deep sleep to a lighter, dream state to the sweet smell of decay. She opened her eyes and saw a creature that was preparing to attack her. The dark shadow hung above her, enveloping her in icy cold. The floating figure reached for her throat with long fingers—each one dripping with seaweed. She had a vague image of a head, of long, muscled arms and clawlike feet. Its breath held the scent of decay she’d smelled. The carbon monoxide detector started to wail and the beast opened its mouth and displayed a jagged row of teeth as it howled along with the alarm.
The slowly turning bamboo ceiling fan above the bed allowed Emma to breathe despite the gas-filled room. The rotating fan sent enough air her way to keep her alive. The alarm shrieked at an ear-piercing pitch, and she tried to force her muscles to function. Her head swam and her breath came in labored gasps. She jerked to the side as the beast lowered its jaws toward her face and she kept rolling to the edge of the mattress. The draped mosquito netting covering her, she fell straight down to the jute rug below, still wrapped in the mesh. The room careened around her, whipping in a blur as vertigo took over. The dizziness was so extreme that she felt her stomach clench in preparation for the dry heaves. She turned her head and gasped.
There was another creature under the bed. It stared back at her through malevolent red eyes.
She forced herself to crawl away, fighting her way out of the gauze, dragging herself across the rug, and when that ended, across the wooden floor. The beast’s howls rose when it became tangled in the netting, and she heard a ripping sound as it clawed its way out. The room spun and her right calf twisted into a tight cramp. She groaned from the pain and pitched sideways, but her own voice sounded muffled.
She’d thrown the windows open earlier, to allow air to circulate while she slept, and now half rose and stumbled to them, plucking at the slatted wooden blinds, trying to unlock them and swing them wide to get to the outside and fresh air. She pulled the stops on the screen and shoved it open from the bottom. She smelled the decaying thing behind her, and its frigid aura hit her back as she crawled through the opening, snagging the edge of her cotton night shirt on the wooden sill and turning her body to clamber out. Dropping onto the ground, swaying and still disoriented, she crumpled to the grass and closed her eyes. While her brain told her to move, her body wanted to sleep.
Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, she told herself. The beast would be upon her. Her body, though, wouldn’t respond. It was as if she’d been drugged. She kept her eyes on the window, watching. After a few moments, when the beast didn’t appear, she felt her lids begin to lower. I’ll just rest for a moment, she thought.
Her calf muscle twisted in a sudden charlie horse that made her sit straight up and brought tears to her eyes. She punched at it in a desperate attempt to get it to ease up as her foot curled. She hammered at it again, and when it subsided, fell backward and lay there, panting.
Did carbon monoxide poisoning cause seizures? She shook her head and tried to focus as her lids lowered again.
Emma woke to the sound of a mosquito buzzing in her ear. She opened her eyes to see the insect hovering next to her right temple. It was just a shadow in the wan light of the moon, flitting in and out of her peripheral vision. She glanced at the sky but saw only inky black dotted with stars, which meant that she hadn’t been unconscious for long. The carbon monoxide detector’s piercing shriek was gone but her head still pounded, possibly from the monoxide gas. Her vision was clear, though her dizziness remained. She rose.
The back lawn was quiet. Stars twinkled overhead. Emma leaned into the window and peered at her bed. The mosquito netting was bunched on the left side. She assumed that she’d pulled it in that direction when she rolled away from the beast. The room was quiet. Peaceful.
The doors were locked, so the only way back into the villa was to crawl through the window. Emma hauled herself over the sill but left the screen ajar and the shutters open, in case she needed to make another hasty exit. She moved toward the lamp on the nightstand, keeping her back against the wall and her eyes on the bed. She staggered with both exhaustion and vertigo. The shadows dissipated when she flicked on the light.
She reached for the netting and spread it wide. It was intact. No holes where the beast had ripped through it. She took a deep breath and lowered herself to the floor. The back of her neck tingled in fear, but she ignored it and peered under the frame. Nothing hid there.
She looked up at the ceiling and scanned the corners. The room had no carbon monoxide detector. And now she remembered that the villa had no furnace. There was no need for one. Terra Cay villas needed air-conditioning, not heating. The ringing she’d heard must have been in her own ears. The beast in her mind. Her stomach twisted into a vicious knot, bending her forward with the pain.
Not carbon monoxide. Poison.
She got up and swayed to the bedroom door, heading to the kitchen, breathing in irregular gasps as she made her way down the hall. She kept her shoulder against the wall, using it as a support to stay upright. Another cramp hit her stomach and she bent forward. She felt her body heat climbing with fever. Keep moving, she told herself.
Emma stepped into the kitchen, the tile floor a shock of cold on the soles of her feet. She made it to the pantry, opened the door, and reached to the top shelf to grab a white plastic bin with a red first aid symbol on it. When she had it, she staggered backward and fell against the sink. She flipped the bin open and saw the dark brown bottle of Ipecac syrup.
Thank God, she thought, twisted off the top and swallowed a mouthful.
The heaving started within seconds. She vomited over and over into the sink, her diaphragm hammering into her spine with each convulsion. She’d never realized just how powerful her stomach muscles were until that moment.
When it was over she lowered herself to the floor and sat with her back against the cabinets. The dizziness was gone, the muscle seizures as well. She reached over her head to the edge of the sink and pulled herself upright, then managed to remove a large glass mug out of the cabinet next to the sink and fill it with water. She drank the entire glass, filled it again, and drank again.
Having thrown the remnants of the chicken pie and cheesecake into the garbage, she now pulled them back out and placed them into two plastic sandwich bags. While it was possible that the food at Carrow’s villa had been tampered with, she doubted that was the case. The more likely scenario was that her late night snack was tainted.
Done securing the samples, Emma filled a pitcher with yet more water and refilled the glass. While she was drinking she heard the woman’s low laugh. She glanced through the kitchen’s sliding glass door that led to the backyard and spotted the woman silhouetted against one of the trunks at the corner of the lawn where the tree line began. The woman’s figure began to undulate and then disappeared. Another hallucination, Emma thought. Her hands were clammy and her heart still raced with adrenaline.
She called Island Security and Randiger answered.
“I’m sorry to call so late, but I think someone broke into the villa again,” she said. She recounted the hallucination and the possibility of tainted food, and told him that she’d found the laundry room door unlocked. She heard him give a heavy sigh.
“Do you think you can make it to tomorrow? I’ve got three people who have fallen asleep and I’m dealing with their hysterical relatives.”
“Carrow’s villa again?”
“No. Three members of the staff of another villa. I’ve called the National Health Service in Nassau, Bahama
s, in the hopes that they’ll send a doctor. Honestly, this keeps up and we’re going to have to issue a travel warning. I don’t have to tell you how much trouble that would be for us.”
“I’m headed out to the blue holes tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll bring the samples to you before I leave. Perhaps you’ll have the doctor take them to a lab?”
“Will do.” He rang off.
Emma checked the doors and windows once again, went into her room, locked the wooden shutters and grabbed her pistol out of the armoire. She rearranged the mosquito netting and shoved the gun under the pillow. While the dizziness had disappeared completely, her lethargy remained. She fell asleep within minutes.
Chapter 19
Stromeyer sat in front of a computer screen and scrolled through picture after picture of known female operatives of the major intelligence agencies of three nations. The dead woman who had hung from the tree didn’t match any portfolios from America, England, or Israel. She ran another search, this time looking for known international criminals. Once again she came up empty. She rephrased the search, looking for known terrorists. Nothing.
She sat back and stared out at the evening through the screen door that divided the living area from the terrace of her rental apartment in St. Martin. It was the top unit of a three-flat located halfway up the small mountain overlooking the harbor. Boats bobbed in the water below, illuminated only by lights set on pole supports every few feet along the dock. The balmy night was quiet and lovely, but a breeze blew through the screen, and Stromeyer was content to remain inside while she worked on the case. She wore her usual jeans and a white tee shirt, her hair in a loose bun and her feet bare. She paused when she heard a knock on her door.
She rose slowly, taking care not to move the chair’s roller feet across the floor, and went to a messenger bag propped against a wall. It was teal blue on the outside, with a lime green interior, and nestled inside it was her gun. She removed it, checked the clip, took off the safety, and positioned herself next to the front door.
“Who is it?” she called.
“It’s Sumner.”
Stromeyer paused, thinking about how to proceed. While she hadn’t wanted him to know who she was at the scene of the dock shooting, it would serve no purpose to cover her face now. He still couldn’t testify that the masked woman at the dock was the same woman named Stromeyer who lived on the third floor of a walk-up overlooking the bay in St. Martin. She opened the door.
Sumner was framed in the entrance, dressed in a pair of dark jeans, a gray tee shirt, and a casual navy blazer. He wore black suede dress shoes with a square toe and his habitual serious expression. There was nothing frivolous about this man, Stromeyer knew, but she was unprepared for the full force of his intensity. It radiated off him and seemed to fill the space between them. She’d noticed his contained manner at Kemmer’s compound and the dock, but the confines of the small apartment intensified that impression. He stuck out his hand.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you . . . in person,” he said.
She shook his hand. “Likewise. How did you find me?”
“After I tracked and intercepted a suspicious flight for Banner, he asked me to report to you first.”
“Do you think anyone saw you return to the island? Whoever set that bomb for you could be back.”
“I came in from the French side and in a rented boat. From there I went straight to the police department to check on the arms seller. I rode in the back of a paddy wagon here. I don’t think anyone followed us.”
She stepped aside and waved her hand. “Come in. Let’s sit on the terrace. Can I get you a drink?” Sumner walked in and scanned the apartment while Stromeyer closed the door. The rental was small, with dark hardwood floors, a slowly turning ceiling fan, and wooden slatted blinds on the windows. Stromeyer went without air-conditioning as often as the ocean breezes would allow. Her private residence was in Washington, D.C., and she found St. Martin’s balmy, tropical air a refreshing relief from the capital’s oppressive humidity. “Are the authorities detaining the dealer?” she asked.
He nodded. “He’s in custody here on the island. They confiscated his bag, but I managed to convince them to allow me to take one of the bullets he was trying to sell. I’m going to send it to the Southern Hemisphere defense guys. Let them analyze the material.”
“Who is he?”
“He said his name was Martin Saint.”
Stromeyer rolled her eyes. “Saint Martin backward? How original of him. Did he have identification that matched?”
“Excellent identification. He carried a Bulgarian passport that looked authentic. Has to be a false one, though.”
“What would you like to drink?”
“I’d love a whiskey if you have it.” She walked toward the narrow wet bar set into the corner of a wall on the opposite side of the living room. The screen on the laptop she passed still showed a woman in an obvious mug shot. Sumner walked over to look at it and gave Stromeyer a quick glance.
“I’m trying to identify the woman from the casino,” she said by way of explanation. “The St. Martin authorities haven’t been able to find any information about her. Are there any details that you can recall that might help?” She poured him a shot of Maker’s Mark and herself a cognac and carried both to the terrace. Sumner joined her there and sat on a wicker couch that faced the view, while she sat in a matching armchair opposite him. He accepted his drink, took a sip and settled back.
“She was well spoken. At first I thought she was a high-end call girl working the casino crowd.” He sighed. “But it soon became clear that she was far too intelligent for that. Perhaps an agent working for a foreign agency?”
“I checked. Nothing.”
“And not one of Kemmer’s girls. Though I accused him of it, I didn’t really think so. Yet . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Yet?”
“I still think she was someone’s girl. Okay, maybe not a call girl, but something higher class along those lines.”
“Mistress?”
He thought for a second and nodded. “Exactly. Yes. Mistress. Not a wife.”
“Why not a wife?” Stromeyer was intrigued. She wanted to know Sumner’s view of mistresses versus wives.
“A wife wouldn’t have been in a casino alone. She would have had her husband with her. But a mistress would be there alone. Perhaps waiting for the man to get free and join her. A mistress would keep herself busy gambling until he appeared.”
“If you’re right and she’s a mistress, would that be Kemmer?”
Sumner shook his head. “Kemmer doesn’t have one. He generally picks from among his girls. Easier for him. He doesn’t have to put himself out for anyone, and the girl uses him and his money until he grows bored and picks the next one.”
“How depressing,” Stromeyer said. Sumner looked at her over the rim of his glass and his eyes held a glint of humor.
“I don’t know, maybe he has the right idea. Choose from available options.”
“Whoever said that had no romance in his soul. I hope you’re not in agreement.”
“Well, since I’m chasing an option that may or may not be available, I think we can safely say that I lean toward the less practical.” Stromeyer assumed that he was talking about Emma Caldridge. She smiled but refrained from commenting.
“So what about Mr. Saint? Can the authorities hold him? Are they interrogating him?”
“They’re in the process, but he’s not talking. A lawyer has already weighed in and is screaming bloody murder.”
“The guy’s an arms dealer caught in the act of transporting illegal weapons. What can the lawyer possibly be complaining about?”
“Jurisdiction. He says I had no authority to intercept.”
“Is that true?” Stromeyer asked. Sumner sipped again and nodded.
“It is. While we’ve been working in conjunction with St. Martin, we generally are supposed to only intercept suspicious aircraft flying in under radar. This flight di
dn’t match the intercept criteria and his lawyer is crying foul.”
“So he’ll be released?”
“I assume so.”
Stromeyer felt the soft air flow around her and the cognac warm her. Despite the calming effect of both, she felt a twinge of dread. The idea that the seller would walk free to attempt another sale of his deadly product was depressing.
“Ever feel that what we’re doing is spitting in the wind? That it’s never going to make a difference?”
Sumner inhaled slowly and exhaled just as slowly. “All the time.” He finished his drink and rose. “I’d better get moving. As soon as I get any information on the bullet, I’ll let Banner know.”
“Watch your back.”
“I’ll do my best. You, too.” He stood just as another knock came at the front door.
“I seem to be popular today,” Stromeyer said. She checked her watch. “But midnight is a bit late. Cover the left side, could you?” She put her drink down and returned to the living room, once again grabbing the gun, which rested on the nearby credenza. Sumner pulled out his own weapon and positioned himself against the wall to the left.
“Who is it?” Stromeyer called through the door.
“Police. We’d like to speak to you.” It was a male voice, inflected with an accent that Stromeyer couldn’t place. She moved carefully to the door, looked through the peephole and saw nothing. The man had placed his hand over the viewer.
“I’ll need you to place your credentials where I can see them,” she said. “That means you’d better remove your hand from the lens.”
After a moment of silence the door shivered as the man on the other side delivered a tremendous kick. The panel cracked and the dead-bolt lock ripped from its seat in the frame. Stromeyer dove to the left, where a hallway led to the bedroom.
Two masked men burst through the door. Both wore black, with bulky shirts covering what might have been Kevlar vests. In their gloved hands were guns. Stromeyer caught a glimpse of a silencer. Professional killers, she thought. Sumner crouched low and shot up at the first intruder, hitting him in the chest. The gun’s noise cracked through the small apartment. The man took the hit and staggered, but raised his own gun, confirming Stromeyer’s suspicion that they were wearing bulletproof vests. Sumner scrambled to his feet to run but his options were few in the enclosed space.
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