by Stuart Woods
“That’s what I was told to put,” Mosely said.
“Told by whom?”
Mosely looked away. “A friend advised me.”
“Well, Cracker, when Barney advised you to lie on your application, he advised you to commit a felony.”
“What?”
Holly shoved the gun application across the desk. “Look right down at the bottom there. It says, ‘I swear, under penalty of perjury, that all the statements I have made in this application are true.’ Perjury is a serious crime, Cracker; it’ll get you five years, easy. And of course, when you perjured yourself, you violated your parole. And you’ve still got, what, ten, twelve years left on your sentence?”
Mosely’s mouth was working. “I want a lawyer,” he said.
“Nah, you don’t want a lawyer, Cracker. I haven’t read you your rights yet, and you were a cop long enough to know that until I read you your rights, whatever you tell me doesn’t count.”
“What do you want?” Cracker demanded.
“Ah,” Holly said. “Now you’re getting the picture.”
CHAPTER
45
H olly sat and waited, staring at Mosely. Daisy made the noise in her throat again, as if urging him to speak. Mosely looked back and forth between Holly and Daisy.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you want to know.”
“Everything,” Holly replied.
“Everything? What do you mean, everything?”
“Tell me what you do for a living, Cracker.”
“I’m a security guard. Well, I was, until today.”
“And what did you guard?”
“Palmetto Gardens. It wasn’t a big deal. I just kept out intruders, except we didn’t really have any.”
“How long you been doing this work, Cracker?” she asked.
“Nearly a year.”
“What kind of training did you have?”
“Not much. Barney just told me what to do.”
“And what did he tell you to do?”
“To guard the place—you know, gate duty, patrol duty.”
“When you were on patrol, what did you patrol?”
“The whole place.”
“Give me a rundown on your typical day patrolling,” she said.
“Well, I’d go on shift, say the morning shift. I’d drive around to each house, go up the driveway. Sometimes I’d get out of the car and walk the property. I’d drive to the clubhouse and take a walk around, checking out things.”
“What about the special buildings?”
“What do you mean, special?”
“How about the building with all the antennas?”
“Oh, we didn’t go out there. They have their own security.”
“What are they protecting?”
“What do you mean?”
“What goes on there that they need their own security?”
“I don’t know, really. The place is called the com center, so I assume it’s for communications.”
“Communications with whom?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. They don’t tell me that stuff.”
“Who is Barney’s boss?”
“The general manager, Mr. Diego, I guess.”
“What’s his first name?”
“I don’t know. Barney just calls him Diego.”
“What does he look like?”
“About forty-five, I’d guess; five-ten, a hundred and seventy-five, black hair going gray, has a mustache. He’s Mexican or something, has a light accent.”
“I want to know his first name, Cracker.”
“Wait a minute, let me think. That’s his first name, Diego. His last name is something like…Romeo.”
“A Spanish name?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, think.”
“I’m trying. It’s Ramos, or Ramero, or something like that. Ramirez! That’s it, Ramirez.”
“Diego Ramirez—good boy, Cracker. Now who else works for Ramirez?”
“Well, everybody—the club manager, the shop managers, the people in the accounting office, the maintenance manager, the airport manager—they all report to him.”
“Where is the accounting office located?”
“It’s in the village, next door to the security station.”
“And who runs that?”
“A woman named Miriam something…uh, like Talbot.”
“Is that it, Talbot?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Description?”
“Late thirties, early forties, five-six, a hundred and forty, mousy hair, not pretty.”
“What kind of vehicles are driven by the staff?”
“Security drives white Range Rovers, maintenance drives Ford vans and pickups, all white, with the green palmetto thing on the doors.”
“Where are they serviced?”
“In town. We take them to Westover Motors when they need something.”
“Any vehicles there now?”
“I’m taking Barney’s Range Rover in when I leave here.”
“What for?”
“Regular service. We get it back tomorrow. Barney’s a stickler for regular maintenance.”
“Where do you live, Cracker?”
“I have a room in the staff quarters.”
“How many of the staff live on the place?”
“All of them.”
“What do you do for entertainment?”
“They fly us to Miami. Everybody works seven days on and four off. Palmetto Gardens owns a refurbished DC-3 for flying staff back and forth.”
“Which airport in Miami do they fly into?”
“Opa Locka.”
“Tell me the names of some of the members of Palmetto Gardens.”
Cracker looked blank. “I don’t think I know any of them.”
“How do they refer to them among the security people?”
“By addresses. I’ve never heard any names used.”
“What do these people look like?”
“Rich. All kinds of nationalities. There’s some Europeans and some Hispanics and some Americans. There’s a couple of Arabs, too, I think. It’s not like I ever have a conversation with any of them.”
“Do they have wives and children?”
“Women, most of them. I’ve only seen a few kids—that’s less common.”
“How many members?”
“There’s two hundred and eight houses; I guess a member a house.”
“How many employees, total, on the place?”
“Something over six hundred, I think. Half of them are domestics.”
“Six hundred employees are living on the place?”
“No, the domestics are local.”
“How do they get in and out of the place?”
“They drive or take the bus to the service gate; there’s a parking lot for them there. Then they walk or are driven in vans to their work.”
“How do they hire the domestics?”
“I don’t know. I guess they run ads. The pay is good, so there’s not much turnover. There’s an employment office in Orchid.”
“What sort of arms do you have at the security station?”
“We all carry nine-millimeter automatics, then there’s a supply of AR fifteens.”
“Anything heavier than that?”
“Not at the station.”
“Elsewhere?”
Mosely suddenly looked uncomfortable.
“Come on, Cracker, or I’ll be talking to your parole officer.”
“There’s some stuff scattered around the place. I don’t know exactly what.”
“You’ve got to do better than that, Cracker.”
“I’ve never been close to it, but there are some…places around the property.”
“Are they camouflaged?”
Cracker looked surprised. “How did you know that?”
“We’re talking about what you know, Cracker.”
“Yeah, they’ve got netting over them.”
>
“Who mans them?”
“There are certain employees who’re trained for that, a couple of dozen, I think. If there’s an alarm, they go to their positions.”
“What kind of an alarm?”
“There’s a siren on a pole at the security office. If we get three blasts, we’re to go to our preassigned positions.”
“What’s your position?”
“Backup at the front gate, unless I’m already on service-gate duty.”
“What are they afraid of out there, Cracker?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but I know that they don’t want anybody from the outside there, unless they’re invited and escorted.”
“What kind of aircraft land at the airfield?”
“Corporate jets, mostly, and some support airplanes that bring in stuff.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Equipment, parts, special foods, whatever’s needed. The DC-3 and a Cessna Caravan do that work.”
“Is there any special security at the airfield?”
“Yeah, there’s a couple of those camouflaged places.”
Holly couldn’t think of anything else to ask him. “Stay here a minute,” she said. “Guard, Daisy.”
“You’re leaving me with that dog?” Cracker asked, worried.
“She won’t hurt you unless you move.” Holly left the room and went next door. Harry Crisp was gone. She went back to the other room. Cracker had not moved. “Okay, Cracker, I’m going to let you go. If Barney wants to know why you were here so long, tell him I kept you waiting. If you tell him about our conversation, I’ll know, and I’ll have you back in prison before nightfall, you understand?”
“I understand,” he said. “I’m not going to jail for Barney.”
“Good, now get going.” She followed him to the squad room and watched as he walked out.
Hurd Wallace approached. “Who was that guy?”
“Just an interview,” Holly said. “Nothing important.”
CHAPTER
46
H olly went straight to Jackson’s house after work. One of the two FBI vans was parked outside. Harry Crisp was on the phone, as usual, when she walked in, and Jackson was having a beer with Bill and Joe. Harry waved and covered up the phone. “Be with you in a minute.”
Holly fed Daisy and got herself a beer, returning to the living room as Harry finished his call. “What happened to you today?” she asked. “I came in there to see if you had any more questions, but you had gone.”
“Sorry, when I heard that Cracker was driving Barney’s Range Rover I went out there to see if I could bug it, but I didn’t have the right equipment.” Harry waved at the other people. “Let’s all sit down for a minute,” he said.
Everybody gathered at the dining table.
“I just want to tell you all where we are,” Harry said. “First of all, Holly did a brilliant job of interrogating Cracker Mosely this morning. She got a hell of a lot of information that would have taken us a week to get. Thanks, Holly.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Let’s see.” Harry consulted a list. “I talked with a guy from the National Security Agency this morning. They were already aware of the transmissions coming out of Palmetto Dunes.”
“They’ve been listening in?” Holly asked.
“They did for a while, starting a couple of years ago, but they’d assigned it a lower priority for the past year.”
“Why? What was coming out of there?”
“Commodity trades.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They were dispatching sell and buy orders for futures on soybeans, wheat, pork bellies, everything you’d find at a commodities exchange, but they were doing it on a worldwide basis.”
“Well,” Holly said, “that doesn’t make any sense at all to me. I thought those things were handled through brokers.”
“What they’ve got there is a brokerage. There’s something odd about it, though.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re using a Chinese telecommunications satellite to move their information.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand that, either,” Holly said.
“Neither does the NSA. Their earlier scans were handled routinely by lower-level personnel. All they did was to listen in; they didn’t do any analysis. Now they’re going to take another look at the transmissions and see if there is any change in what’s coming out of there. They’ll also do an analysis of the information.”
“I still don’t understand it,” Holly said, “but maybe that’ll help somehow.”
“Sounds like your old man’s idea of the antiaircraft emplacements wasn’t all that far-fetched,” Harry said. “Though, for the life of me, I just can’t believe that anyone on the Florida coast would start shooting at airplanes.”
“Who would do something like that?”
“It doesn’t make any sense as a security precaution. It might make more sense if they intended to use that kind of weaponry to buy some time.”
“Time for what?” Jackson asked.
“Time to evacuate. From what Cracker had to say in his interview with Holly, it sounds like they have a plan to hold the place just long enough for some aircraft to get out of there. I mean, they can’t get into a shooting war with the outside and expect to win, can they?”
“They could sure hold off my department for a while, though,” Holly said.
“I think that’s what they’re counting on. In a pinch, they can get out of there before reinforcements arrive. Your dad’s right; they couldn’t hold out against a military assault, but cops with small arms couldn’t take the place.”
“Have you found out anything else so far?” Jackson asked.
“We’ve had a report from Miami Center on the aircraft in and out of there. They’ve had airplanes with registrations from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada, Japan and, mostly, from the United States. We ran down the U.S. tail numbers and nearly eighty percent of them were owned by a charter service out of Miami, which is owned by a Delaware corporation, which is owned by a Luxembourg company. Wheels within wheels.”
“Spooky,” Holly said.
“We checked out Diego Ramirez, the general manager of the place, too. He’s Panamanian, a former colonel in Manuel Noriega’s palace guard. He got out before the invasion and has been living quietly in Miami. No criminal record in this country, and his immigration status is okay.”
Holly spoke up. “I checked out the property ownership this afternoon, but the results were disappointing.”
“Dummy ownership, I’ll bet,” Harry said.
“Not even that. Every house is owned by the Palmetto Gardens Corporation. But, of course, that’s a Cayman Island corporation. Here’s a list of the directors.” She handed him a sheet of paper. “The only one I recognize is Ramirez. You might check out the others.”
“Good work, Holly.”
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Harry said, “about what sort of people could own and operate this place. It seems to be operated without regard for profit, which is strange, and if the members are taking up the slack, then it has got to be the most expensive club in the world to belong to. Rich people, even billionaires, didn’t get that way by flushing money down the kind of toilet that Palmetto Gardens seems to be, so that leaves just two other candidates for ownership that I can think of—governments or drug cartels. The presence of Diego Ramirez there, given the recent history of Panama, makes me lean in favor of the drug cartels, or maybe a combination of governments and the cartels.”
“That makes sense,” Jackson said. “Even if you got Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and the Sultan of Brunei together, with all their money they would expect a return on investment, or, at the very least, some kind of value for money. With only a couple of hundred houses there, the expense per house has got to be staggering.”
Harry continued. “We’re going to bug Barney Noble’s Range Rover tonight, come hell or high water,” he said. “It’s
at Westover Motors, still outside in the rear parking lot; apparently, it gets serviced first thing in the morning. Arnie is out on Jungle Trail, scanning their VHF radio frequencies, all their handheld radios, and he’ll record what he can get there. Once the frequencies are identified, which should be easy, we can jam them, if we have to go in there.”
“Don’t you need a court order to bug Barney’s car?” Holly asked.
Harry shook his head. “Between you and me, Holly, this is just to get information; we’ll never use it in court, so the hell with a warrant. It’s quick and dirty, but it’ll work. Oh, one more thing—I’m trying to get a female agent into Palmetto Gardens as a domestic worker. There’s an ad in the local paper and a hiring office on the mainland. We’re flying up a woman who’ll try to get an interview tomorrow morning.”
“That’s a great idea,” Holly said. “We really need somebody inside.”
“Well, there’s always Cracker,” Harry said. “I think you scared him shitless this morning, and I don’t think he’ll spill to Barney, do you?”
“I sure hope not. I’ve got him by the short and curlies. I didn’t lie to him about that. I know who his parole officer is.”
Bill spoke up. “I learned something this afternoon,” he said. “I don’t know how important it is.”
“Tell us,” Harry said.
“I tracked down the people who were in charge of most of the infrastructure work at Palmetto Gardens, a construction company called Jones and Jones, in Vero Beach.”
“And?”
“We went over a map of the place, while he showed me what he had done out there. The only really unusual thing was at the communications center.”
“What?”
“He put in a basement and a sub-basement, fully waterproofed and insulated.”
“A sub-basement? In Florida? It’s probably full of the Indian River by now.”
“He said it was fully waterproofed,” Bob said.
“Got any ideas what it’s for?”
“It’s all heavily reinforced, superdense concrete. I reckon it’s either a bomb shelter or a vault.”
“Now, that’s interesting,” Bob said. “Anybody else?”
Holly spoke up. “Well, I learned something from Cracker this morning that I didn’t expect to.”
“What’s that?”
