“I’m just saying everyone, whatever their occupation, is entitled to safe, hazard-free working conditions.”
Albertine’s hand slid clear of the shoulder bag. She was clasping a small object that seemed to be made mostly of feathers, black and red ones. Gripping it tightly, she began murmuring under her breath.
“Huh?” Pirate said to her. “What’s that you sayin’?”
Albertine didn’t reply, just carried on murmuring. Her eyes were closed. Her speech had a rhythm to it, somewhere between a song and a chant.
The tip of the pistol ground into the side of her head. “Shut up now, woman. I said shut up!”
Albertine’s voice rose until individual words and phrases were audible. Lex caught a mention of a name he didn’t recognise, Maman Brigitte, and another, Erzulie Dantor. Albertine was apparently asking the voodoo spirits for aid and protection.
“Stop that jabber right now, or I shoot!” Pirate yelled. “I will!”
Albertine’s eyelids parted. Her eyes had rolled up inside her head. Only the whites showed. Her whole body was shuddering, as though in the throes of some kind of seizure.
She lifted the object in her hand up high.
It was a tiny figurine, a gaudy little wooden doll festooned with feathers and brightly coloured beads, and even a couple of small bones that must once have belonged to a bird or a mouse.
Very deliberately, Albertine took hold of one of the doll’s legs.
No less deliberately, she snapped it in two.
Pirate let out a screech as his left leg collapsed backwards under him, bending like a liquorice whip. He crashed to the ground in a sitting position with his leg doubled beneath his bottom, shin folded against front of thigh, foot pressed to crotch. It was as though his knee had disintegrated—been struck by a blow from some powerful unseen hammer and utterly destroyed. He gibbered and writhed, near incoherent in his agony.
The man was incapacitated and clearly no longer a threat, but Lex nonetheless sprang over to him and snatched the gun from his grasp.
“Albie! You all right?” Wilberforce was at her side, cradling her, desperately concerned.
Albertine, emerging from her trance, nodded wanly. She looked like someone recovering from a severe hangover, brittle and delicate.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” said her cousin. “This is all my fault.”
“I’m fine, Wilberforce. Really I am. No need to worry.”
“If anything had happened to you, I’d never forgive myself. Aunt Hélène wouldn’t either. She’d kill me.”
“She’d do a whole lot worse than that, cuz. Seriously, though, I’m okay. No harm done. You can stop smothering me now.”
Wilberforce rounded on the thug. “Bastard! Holding a gun on a defenceless woman.” He lobbed a wad of spit onto Pirate’s contorted face. The man was in too much pain to notice or care.
“Defenceless?” said Lex, arching an eyebrow. “Apparently not. What did you do to him, Albertine? What is that thing?”
“This?” She held out the doll for him to examine. “What does it look like?”
“A voodoo doll.”
“The correct term is ‘wanga fetish,’” she said. “But essentially yes, it’s what you know as a voodoo doll. This one’s consecrated to Maman Brigitte, who rights wrongs, and also to bitch-devil Erzulie Dantor, who safeguards women, especially when they’re in danger from men.”
“And you just happened to be carrying it in your bag?”
“I have it with me at all times,” Albertine said. “A girl can never be too careful. Rapes and muggings aren’t unheard of on this island. I got the idea for keeping an emergency fetish on me when I was at Cornell. A couple of coeds were assaulted in Ithaca one night, not that far off-campus. The dean of the faculty advised the female students to buy personal alarms and pepper spray, just in case. I thought I could go one better.”
“So you break its leg”—Lex pointed to the fetish’s snapped wooden limb—“and his leg breaks too?”
“That’s more or less it. The fetish has to be primed with power first. You must ‘baptise’ it, giving it a name, and perform various other rituals and incantations over it. You must also offer it food and drink on a regular basis and talk to it like a friend. Otherwise the protective energies inside it will fade and it may not work when you need it to. Now and then it’s good to fumigate it with frankincense and herbs as well, keeping it sweet in more ways than one.”
“A name?” said Lex. “So what’s yours called? Psycho Barbie?”
“It has a secret name, which I can never reveal. But its public name is Woman Scorned.”
“As in ‘Hell hath no fury like...’”
“Precisely.”
Lex looked at the stricken Pirate, who was grey-faced and on the verge of passing out. He could scarcely fathom what had gone on here. Was he expected to believe that some sort of magic had just taken place? That the damage Albertine had inflicted on the fetish had somehow transferred itself onto Pirate?
He couldn’t deny the evidence of his own eyes. The man’s leg had been forced backwards at the knee without any visible physical cause. Was it possible that Pirate suffered from some underlying medical condition that would account for the knee giving way spontaneously? Some disease of the bones or joints? Extreme osteoporosis? Hyper-elastic tendons?
But even if that were so, it didn’t explain why the injury had occurred at the exact same moment that Albertine broke the doll’s pencil-thin leg, and so abruptly too. The power of suggestion, maybe. Or else an astonishing coincidence.
Lex was aware that he was clutching at straws. Unfortunately, the simplest solution here was also the one that was hardest to swallow.
Voodoo.
Voodoo existed. It was real. It worked.
That, on top of Lieutenant Buckler’s revelation of the shadowy supernatural demimonde which he and Team Thirteen operated in... It was all too much. Too many absurdities to take in at once.
This was turning into one monumental head-fuck of a day.
THIRTEEN
EXTREMELY UNCIVIL
VIRGIL JOHNSON CRINGED in his office, hunched against the wall between a filing cabinet and a steel desk bearing a vintage computer and a litter of motor parts. He couldn’t tear his eyes off Lex’s SIG, not knowing that Lex had no intention of using it on him.
“Please don’t shoot me, please don’t.” He looked beseechingly from Lex to Wilberforce to Albertine. “I didn’t want to do it. The Garfish made me.”
“Made you?” said Lex. “How? By offering you more cash than you could refuse?”
“No.” And more vehemently: “No. Never. I’m not that kind of person. But he said if Wilberforce dropped by and I didn’t let him know immediately, he’d do things to me. Awful things. And he’d torch this place, too. My whole livelihood would go up in smoke, he said, and I’d spend the rest of my days in a wheelchair, pissing through a tube. I didn’t know what else to do, man. I mean, it’s the Garfish. You don’t say no to him.”
Lex turned to Wilberforce. “What do you reckon? You believe him?”
“Can’t see why he’d be lying.” To Virgil, Wilberforce said, “I suppose you thought if I was stupid enough to get into the Garfish’s bad books, then I deserved whatever was coming to me.”
“No, no,” the mechanic whimpered. “It never crossed my mind. I was more concerned about not getting into his bad books myself. I did wrong, Wilberforce, I realise that. But it was me or you. If you’d been in my position, under the pressure I was under, you’d have done the same.”
Wilberforce pondered on this, then nodded. “Okay. Maybe so. But you know what? I reckon from now on I don’t pay to keep Puddle Jumper here any more. She stays for free. And your drinks at the rum shack are no longer on the house.”
“Yeah.” Virgil sniffed mucus back up his nose. “Sure.”
“We’re square. After what you did to me, to us, I owe you nothing.”
“I said yeah. It’s a deal.”
>
“One more thing,” said Lex. He held out a hand. “Your phone.”
Hesitantly, frowning, Virgil passed his mobile over.
Lex redialled the last number Virgil had called.
“Virgil,” said a deep, rumbling voice on the other end. “I hope this is you tellin’ me my men have Wilberforce Allen in custody an’ they’re bringin’ him to me.”
“Afraid not, Mr Finisterre,” said Lex. “This is Lex Dove telling you that three of your men are no longer among the living and the fourth requires urgent medical treatment.”
The pause that followed was surprisingly brief. “That is a pity,” Finisterre said. “For you I mean. What you don’t seem to appreciate, my friend, is that I own this island. I am Manzanilla. Everyone an’ everything on this hunk of rock belongs to me, Garfield Finisterre. The Garfish is king here, an’ if the Garfish decides he wants somebody dead—an’ he most definitely does in your case, Mr Dove—then the Garfish will get his way.”
“And if the Garfish insists on referring to himself in the third person, then the Garfish is clearly suffering from delusions of grandeur.”
The already low voice dropped a further octave, until it was almost subsonic. “I will gut you like a pig, you white spook batty-boy. I will pull your entrails out an’ eat them in front of you while you scream.”
“A charming prospect,” said Lex. “Me, I don’t make threats. It’s not really my way. I act. So you should listen to me, Mr Finisterre, and listen well. I’m advising you to leave me alone from here on. Wilberforce Allen too, and anyone who’s connected with Wilberforce. That includes Virgil Johnson. Steer well clear. Because I can come for you any time. You will never see me, you will never hear me. I repeat, I don’t make threats. I’m laying out the facts, that’s all. I will be there when you least expect it, and no matter how many gunmen you have around you or what kind of security system you have in place, it won’t be enough. I will be in your home, your bedroom, your inner sanctum, and you will have no clue as to my presence until the moment you turn round and I am behind you. It won’t be you discovering me, it’ll be me revealing myself to you. That’s how it works. And then you will die. It will be as quick or as slow a death as I care to make it. It might be instantaneous, fast as a snake strike, oblivion in a flash. It might equally be long and lingering, so excruciating that you will pray for it to be over and you will feel as though your prayer will never be answered. Hear it in my voice. I am not bluffing. I am not lying. I am simply stating how it is going to be. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you’re hammerin’ even more nails into your own coff—”
“I repeat: do you understand, Mr Finisterre? I am not just some ‘white spook batty-boy,’ as you so charmingly put it. I am the very last person on God’s earth that you want to have pissed off at you. You told me last night that you saw something dark in me, something dangerous. Here it is, speaking to you right now. Do not provoke it any further, Mr Finisterre. Do not let it out of its cage. It will be greatly to your cost if you do.”
“You think I’m just goin’ to cancel Wilberforce’s debts, or forget that three more of my boys are dead thanks to you? That’s four in total, countin’ Maurice last night. Because if you think that, mister, you’re the one with delusions, not me.”
“I am recommending that you do exactly as I say, or I shall stop being polite and start being extremely uncivil. You really do not want me being extremely uncivil to you.”
Lex ended the call.
“That ought to hold him for a while,” he said.
“You don’t reckon you’ve scared him off for good?” said Wilberforce. “Because, man, if that was me, I’d be on the next boat to Jamaica. I got chills up my spine just listening to you.”
“Someone like the Garfish isn’t easily put off. He’s too arrogant, too assured of his own power. But I’ve at least given him pause for thought. He won’t be hounding us quite so hard for the moment.”
He returned Virgil’s phone to him.
“Listen to me now,” he said to the mechanic. “There are beach houses reasonably close by, witnesses who’ll have heard gunfire. We can’t cover this up, but the last thing I want right now is more hassle with the cops. You should call the police, and also an ambulance. You have to, otherwise it’ll look suspicious. But no matter what anyone asks, we weren’t here. You were indoors all the time and didn’t see anything that went on outside. You just heard the shots, that’s all. Got it?”
The mechanic nodded, more eager to please than ever now that his life wasn’t in imminent danger.
“Give us a head start,” Lex added. “Wait until a couple of minutes after we’ve gone.”
Again, a nod.
“And we’ll be back for Puddle Jumper. Not sure how soon, but the plane needs to be fuelled and ready to fly at a moment’s notice.”
“You got it, boss,” said Virgil. “And thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” said Lex. “Just don’t fuck up.”
“He means don’t fuck up again,” Wilberforce put in.
FOURTEEN
ANGER REEF
BACK AT THE Cape Azure Hotel, Lex reported to Buckler in Buckler’s room. Transportation by seaplane had been secured for Team Thirteen.
“Any difficulties with that?” Buckler enquired. He leaned a little closer to Lex and squited, ever so briefly, as though curious.
“Nothing insurmountable,” Lex replied, slightly puzzled. The American had some odd mannerisms. “Wilberforce is glad for the excuse to be Captain Wilberforce of Wilberforce Airlines again.”
Buckler leaned back, straightening up. “What about your lady friend? Albertine. She up for helping us?”
“She seems to be.”
“But...?”
“It all depends on what capacity you want her to act in,” said Lex. “If it’s advice, technical assistance, background intel, I can’t see a problem. Anything more hands-on...” He left it implicit: not going to happen.
Buckler stroked one frond of his moustache. “This her talking, or you? You’re being kind of overprotective of her.”
“I said it before—she’s a civilian.”
“She’s also an asset. You can’t tell me Mr Shit-hot British Wetwork Guy never used civilian assets when he was out in the field doing his stuff, and I’ll bet he never gave a damn what happened to them during or afterwards. They were pawns on the chessboard, disposable. You know as well as I do, the end justifies the means. Any means.”
“My life’s different now. I’m different.”
“You’ve gone soft, is what you’re saying.”
“You’re not going to get a rise out of me that way, lieutenant.”
“Not trying to, sport. Just stating facts.”
“Tell me exactly what the mission is,” Lex demanded. “We’ve reached that point. I’m not making any further commitment, on my own behalf or anyone else’s, until I have a clearer picture of what I’m involved with. I need details.”
“Hey, simmer down.” Buckler made a placatory gesture. “I was just about to fill you in anyway. You don’t have to get all ‘Fetch my blunderbuss, Jeeves’ on me. Truth is, what you already know isn’t much more than I know myself. Shit’s gone down at a US military site not far from here. Marines are compromised, likely dead. Team Thirteen’s picking up the baton.”
“Where is this site?”
“Well, now...” Buckler opened up the magnesium alloy case housing his laptop. He typed in some commands, fingers thudding on the rubber keys. A map appeared onscreen. “The north Caribbean. There’s Hispaniola, to the right. There’s Castro’s Communist nirvana, very much to the left. And tucked between those two, the meatball in the sandwich, is the delightful sun-soaked resort destination that we call Manzanilla.” He stroked the touchpad. “And if we track two hundred or so klicks north-northeast, and zoom in, and even further in, what do we find?”
A tiny green speck grew amid the blue of the ocean, an outcrop of land shaped like a str
anded starfish.
“That, my friend, is Anger Reef,” said Buckler.
“Anger Reef?” Lex racked his brains. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised. It was a bit of the Bahamas that got broken off and left behind while the continents were drifting apart. Used to be an atoll, a ring of islets surrounding a lagoon, but the lagoon silted up and dried out, making it an island proper now. Technically it’s American soil, though it’s so pissant small we never got round to officially claiming it as such.”
Lex compared the island’s longest axis against the scale at the corner of the map. Anger Reef measured barely a kilometre across at its widest point. Pissant small indeed.
“Rumour has it that Captain Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, buried treasure there in the early seventeen-hundreds,” said Buckler. “But I’d discount that, on account of the island’s almost impossible to approach by sea. Anger Reef. Clue’s in the name. It’s surrounded by banks of coral that rise to just below the water’s surface. Those and hidden sandbars, treacherous currents and a perpetual heavy swell mean it’s not safe to make landfall there even in a rowboat. You’re going to get smashed to splinters if you try.”
“Obviously you Yanks managed it somehow.”
“Only recently. Back in the late ’fifties, it was decided to outfit Anger Reef as a listening post and early warning station.”
“Because of its proximity to Cuba.”
“Bingo. Give the man a clap.”
“What, no prize?”
“Wasn’t that big of a deductive leap, now was it?” said Buckler. “After the Batista regime fell and Castro seized power, someone somewhere in the Department of Defence realised Cuba needed keeping an eye on. The USSR’s little puppet state right in our own backyard. So Anger Reef was chosen to be our tumbler against the wall. An installation was built there in record time, the majority of it underground. All the workmen, equipment and materials were either flown in by Hueys or landed aboard hovercraft. Radar arrays were set up to track ships and planes, sonar arrays to track submarines. Radio masts tuned to all broadcasts going in and coming out. Basically, Fidel couldn’t fart in the bath without us knowing.”
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