Westfarrow Island

by Paul A. Barra

  Before Tagliabue could reply, O’Brien told her he was a friend and that they had business to discuss. She nodded and field stripped her cigarette, watching Tagliabue all the while. As she got up to go back to work, she spoke to him again. “When you’re ready to eat, sit at station five. I give good service.” Then she winked. O’Brien and Tagliabue laughed.

  “This is a wild place in the summer.”

  “Sure is, Anthony. Good thing Frances is with me.”

  Tagliabue sat where the waitress had been. “This a good place to talk?”

  Timmy looked around and nodded. They could hear a steady rattle of activity from inside the kitchen but no one was about outside. The kitchen and break area were on the town side of the Pelham Island and there was no walkway to it from the restaurant or bar. Customers would not be strolling by. The area was lit by a single hooded lamp over the back door that allowed some dark patches around the edges of the concrete pad, but Tagliabue could sense no presence anywhere. Still, he spoke softly.

  “I got your call, Timmy, and met my man. Is there something else on your mind?”

  “Well, y’know I told you about the guy who seems to be carrying, the older guy not the Indian? He was sitting with Jack Brunson and some big fella with a bandage over his nose in the back of a fancy sportfisherman that come by when I was fishing off Tillman’s Pier earlier.”

  “They see you?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know for sure. They was pretty busy talking to each other. Anyway, I was wearing a straw hat cause I’m getting too much sun and I had the boys with me, so he probly don’t recognize me if he sees me. I ain’t sure if Mr. Brunson knows who I am anyway.”

  He knows, Tagliabue thought to himself.

  “Okay, thanks, Timmy. You’ve done enough. There’s going to be some nasty stuff come down in the next day or two and I don’t want you to get involved. Don’t contact me again unless it’s something really critical, okay?”

  “I gotcha, Anthony. I’m off to work. You take care of yourself.”

  After O’Brien went in through the back door of the kitchen, Tagliabue strolled across the lawns back to the bar, thinking about this new development. Who was this other character? He showed up just as the operation is set to go down and has apparently befriended Jack Brunson. Is Brunson part of this after all? Giselle’s written warning to him was not specific about Brunson’s role in the defector op, if he had any role at all.

  There was no one he recognized in the bar until he saw Carlos enter from the far end of the dining room. He stood in the crowd finishing his drink. Carlos passed by him.

  “Nobody,” the Mexican said. “Midnight, eh?’

  “Si.”

  Carlos smiled and left the bar.

  Tagliabue spent the next two hours searching for Jack Brunson. He figured the man would be staying at The Commodore, the only luxury hotel on the island, but the clerk on duty would not confirm that Brunson was staying there, or if he was, what room he was staying in.

  “We do not give out that kind of information on our guests, sir. You are welcome to leave a message.”

  “So, he is staying here?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “Well, why would I leave a message for someone who may not be here?”

  The front desk clerk was a young man with a deep tan, probably one of the many college students who take summer night jobs in the resort community and spend their days in play on the beaches and golf courses of the island. He was polite enough but adamant, probably doing exactly as instructed, Tagliabue thought. Rather than bully the clerk, he left to have a drink in the small hotel bar, where he hoped to probe around a tad before giving up. It just seemed as if The Commodore would be Jack’s domicile of choice while on the island.

  The barroom was quiet, a four-top chatting, a couple in the far corner, and an empty bar. He stood at the bar and was sipping a pony of Cointreau when the hotel security guard walked in a few minutes later. As the uniform angled for Tagliabue, the bartender caught some signal and left for the back room. The guard stood straight backed next to Tagliabue, who leaned with his elbows on the padded bar edge. He wore a white mustache with a potbelly pushing the buttons of his blue shirt. He spoke in a quiet voice that did not carry.

  “I mighta known it was you, Anthony.”

  “Hey, Bob.”

  “The boy at the desk is nervous. Thinks you’re here to cause trouble.”

  He spoke facing Tagliabue. Neither man smiled. Tagliabue did not look at the cop. If anyone was interested enough to observe them, the two did not appear to be anything more than a hotel dick checking on a stranger.

  “I want to find out if Jack Brunson is staying here.”

  “He was. For the whole of last week. I haven’t seen him today, so he may have checked out. You need to know if he’s gone? I can probably find out later tonight.”

  “No. Tell me, though: does he usually stay here when he’s on the island?”

  “Yeah. He has a place in New York, down by Saratoga. He’s usually there when the track is open. On some kind of lake. He stays there a lot, I hear, but usually takes a room here once our season starts. Maybe a coupla weeks in July.”

  “A summer house in New York?”

  “Yeah, some sort of cabin. On a lake named like some kind of berry.”

  The two were quiet for a minute, the security guy looking hard at Tagliabue, pretending to be rousting him.

  “Anything else, Anthony?”

  “No, thanks, Bob. I just needed to know where he’s berthed for the next day or two.”

  Pushing the remains of a twenty into the tray, Tagliabue left the bar. Bob followed ten feet behind, watching until he was back in the street. The clerk nodded his appreciation and Bob went back to the kitchen and his plate of boeuf bourguignon.

  Tagliabue sat on the roof of the pilothouse on Maven until Carlos appeared as suddenly and silently as a wraith. The night had turned humid, a mist threatening. The air conditioning was thrumming away in Maven’s cabin, so the two men repaired to that space to talk.

  “You find out anything about the guy with Brunson?”

  “Nada,” Carlos answered. “He like disappeared. The man Brunson and his muscle too. You worried, Antonio, that they may be here to get in our way or something?”

  “I don’t know anything for sure, but both turning up here on Westfarrow just at this time is worrying.”

  “You worried enough to want to cancel?”

  “No. This is really our only chance. The Leonov may be transiting out for good, for all we know. We’d better stick to Plan A. I do think we should get out of port ASAP. What time is your contact blast?”

  “One fourteen.”

  “Just over an hour now. Okay. Go get your speedboat and meet me at buoy Charlie.”

  “On my way, amigo.”

  “Carlos.”

  “Si?”

  “Be extra careful. Time is getting short. If they’re going to interfere in any way, it’s got to be soon. Keep a round in the pipe and your piece in your hand. Got it?’

  “Yes. I see you at the sea buoy.”

  Then he was gone. Tagliabue killed the air and disconnected from shore power. He eased Maven away from the dock and puttered out to sea. Visibility was worsening. A dirty night could help, he thought. He and Carlos had the coordinates and could navigate by radar. Anyone out to foil their plans would have to track them. First, though, he had to find Carlos and his skiff.

  Barely keeping way on, with no lights showing, he maneuvered Maven between the green buoy to starboard and the red bell buoy to port. He had picked Charlie because there was some room to navigate on either side of it, but it was a channel marker and still inland from open water. The radar screen showed a blip that was the buoy dead ahead. There was no sign of a small craft in the area. Letting Maven drift to a stop, he searched with glasses and listened. The mist was thickening. The air felt suffocating and deadly silent. Time passed. Checking the radar again, Tagliabue figured he ha
d roughly another three minutes before he’d have to get way on or risk grounding on a sandbar to leeward. Then he saw a brief flash of white light.

  Answering with a click of his flashlight, Tagliabue ran low to the stern of his vessel. He had the Glock on his hip and an AR-15 in one hand. He crouched behind the bulkhead, listening. The Suzuki on the back of Carlos’s skiff was quiet at idle. If it was Carlos who had signaled with his spot, Tagliabue couldn’t hear him. He waited. Maven drifted slowly toward shore. The lighthouse horn sounded, indicating fog. After that, it got quiet again. A form eased into sight, close enough to Maven that it startled Tagliabue.

  “You going to have a beach party pretty quick, señor.”

  The skiff was practically alongside before Tagliabue could positively identify it. The dark hull and low profile hid it well in the darkness. It would be a good vessel for the operation, difficult for the ship to see if Carlos kept it nestled to Maven’s side.

  “You’re right, Carlos. I think I hear waves breaking. Tie off and let me get out of here.”

  He moved forward quickly, grateful that he knew the boat so well he didn’t need lights. He leaped into the conning station, noted the red blinking light on the SONAR screen indicating shoal water, and thrust the throttles forward. Maven’s screws churned up sand beneath them as they caught water and pushed the boat ahead. In seconds, they were back in the channel and heading for the sea, the skiff bumping in their wake, bow high and made fast to one of Maven’s stern cleats. He slowed to five knots just as Carlos slipped into the second seat.

  “We got plenty of time, Antonio.”

  “I know. What’s your latest ETA?”

  The other man unzipped his briefcase and extracted a radio the size of a thick iPad. He tapped buttons and read green text.

  “It’s a go. Our man is bailing at 0114 local. Expected coordi-nates are 44º49′1.45″ north and 68º12′12.8″ west. Look like a few miles outside something called Georges Bank.”

  “Aye, that’s a major fishing section just off the coast.”

  Tagliabue knew the area but he plotted the coordinates on the chart table anyway. They were making for the Great South Channel, which would take them past the fishing grounds and out to deeper water. They would be picking up a few night netters soon, and they hoped to be mistaken for one of them when their quarry came into radar range. Of course, the range on the Viktor Leonov’s systems was four times as great as the one antenna on Maven provided. Maybe the Russians were watching them already.

  “What do you know about the ship, Carlos?”

  “I know more than I want to. She is a Vishnya-class intelligence-gathering ship, three hundred feet long.” He sounded as if he were reading from a script. Tagliabue figured he had received his own brief from Giselle, different from his. She was always compartmentalizing her troops. “It can go about sixteen, er, knots. She has missiles but for airplanes, nothing we have to worry about.”

  “Guns?”

  “Big machine guns fore and aft, one cannon, three inches.”

  “Troops?”

  “She carries maybe two hundred men and at least a couple of small craft that could chase after us.”

  “But she’s a foreign warship and has to stay in international waters.”

  “Right. And Vladimir Putin is not allowed to murder political dissidents.”

  Tagliabue chuckled sardonically at Carlos’s witticism, knowing well that the sailors on the Leonov would stop at nothing to prevent a defection if they found out about it. This was a dangerous strategy, putting a slow, unarmed cargo boat in the proximity of a Russian naval vessel to extract a man, a communications expert, who wanted to live in a free country, in the hopes that the target warship would not suspect the wallowing Maven of such an activity. It was bold, maybe even workable.

  But the plan could only work at all if Tagliabue had his boat on the exact spot on a major ocean, in the dark and mist, at the exact time the defector jumped overboard. The Maven had to appear to be part of the fishing fleet on Georges Bank, to be drifting out to sea a ways in pursuit of haddock. The Russians could not know with certainty from their course out in open water just where the Grand Banks ended. Tagliabue plotted carefully, using Loran fixes and his GPS. When they made the banks, other boats were around, showing on the radar screen as points of blurred lights, seven in all. Tagliabue had then to slow even more and move sporadically, as a fisherman might in his search for schools of fish. If he drove straight through the fishing fleet, a sharp radar-man on the Russian ship would spot an anomaly and report it, no matter how slowly Maven steamed.

  Carlos manned the radar scope, calling out directions and distances to other vessels. Suddenly he straightened.

  “Antonio,” he whispered in an urgent tone. “Something is moving fast.”

  Carlos was tracking a bogey coming through the Great South Channel at speed, maybe twenty-five knots, dangerously fast in the prevailing conditions. It was too big a signal for a speedboat, too small for a ship. Tagliabue scanned the channel with his big binoculars but could see nothing in the dark mist.

  “No running lights.”

  “A big boat, I’m thinking. Maybe forty, fifty feet.”

  “We’d better plot that sucker, amigo. I don’t know what she could be doing out here this time of night.”

  Carlos nodded his agreement, both men thinking of Jack Brunson and the other two armed men in the big yacht Timmy O’Brien had seen them riding earlier in the day. Tagliabue scrubbed his face with his hand: This operation is turning out to be even more complicated than he had imagined.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  AGNES ANN

  I know Tony is embroiled in another of his secretive, and complicated, operations for that government woman Giselle. I know also that she is no competition for his affections, but I still can’t avoid a little twinge of jealousy when I think about her. She’s such a sophisticate compared to me, so worldly and knowledgeable, and compels so much of my man’s attention. Still, he goes for months at a time without any contact with her. Now, however, he is on some sort of assignment and is incommunicado with me. I understand that he must concentrate on it—it would be unfair for me to either want to discuss it with him, as most wives discuss their husbands’ work with them, or to demand his attention when he surely must concentrate it all on the task he’s been assigned—but I hate the long days of no texts or phone calls from him.

  I want to tell Tony about Francine’s progress. And about Jesse’s, for that matter. They seem a perfectly suited pair, working together on the training track as they both learn more about racing and mature into two elegant and powerful animals. Jesse is turning into a man already with the responsibilities Jacob Collier is placing on him, so much more mature than the boys I remember from high school, or college for that matter. He’s probably more responsible than Jack was in college.

  We’re going easy with the filly. She seems eager to run but is a fragile two-year-old. Burdened with memories of other youngsters who injured themselves by coming up too fast, Mr. Collier—funny I call him that and my son calls him Jake, almost as if our roles have been reversed at the racetrack—is being deliberate with her schedule. I am the final arbiter about entry decisions, since I actually am the owner, but really all I do is listen to Jake and Jesse and affirm their opinions.

  The latest of those is to run her in a Grade 3 Handicap race at Belmont in September, but we are weighing the possibility of entering her in one of the lesser races on the Travers Stakes card on the last Sunday before Saratoga closes for the year. There are a lot of races for two-year-olds at Saratoga, in fact the place is famous for that. The track features four good races before the big Travers Stakes, and one of them is the Prima Donna, for fillies. If we run Francine in that race, she won’t race again until October, so I’m kind of hoping the boys decide on that one. That way, I could go back to Westfarrow after the race and let Jake and Jesse board and train, and rest, my horse.

  After our big win in her maiden race, w
e’re not going to be sneaking up on the competition anymore. So the odds won’t be much good but the purse, for the Prima Donna is big enough to cover Francine’s expenses until the three-year-old season begins, even if we only come in third or fourth.

  If the horse herself had a say in the decision, she would opt for the race at Saratoga. She is eating well and literally feeling her oats. Jesse says she can be a handful on the Oklahoma Training Track.

  “She wants to run hard, all the time,” he says. “She’s learning to rate but it’s against her nature. She’s a powerhouse.”

  The three of us are scheduled to have a discussion after Thursday morning’s training session. I think we’ll have to make a decision then. The Prima Donna is but two weeks away and entries will close Friday at noon. We could get in later, but it costs extra.

  We meet in the tack room of Francine’s stable thirty minutes after the filly had worked a fast three furlongs, thirty-five seconds, under a hand ride. Mr. Collier seems to be making an effort to contain an emotion: his face is calm but he isn’t lounging in his chair as he usually does. He’s a man who has suffered heartbreak and many disappointments on the track in his decades of training thoroughbred racehorses, so he has learned to temper enthusiasm and to accept discouragement. I think he has lost some of the gambler’s drive that the top-line trainers possess because of the bad times he has experienced over the years, the willingness to take a chance on intuition. He has built a protective cage around his emotions, afraid to allow himself to be infected with enthusiasm.

  Collier makes a good living as a trainer, mostly for the reason I have retained his service: he is a safe and cautious trainer, putting the animal’s welfare first. He also has a secure and secluded barn on Heal Eddy, where young horses and older ones who had suffered in their racing careers can grow in strength and expertise. I think, but cannot confirm, that he dislikes running two-year-olds in races at all because of their vulnerabilities. Their leg and ankle bones, in particular, are not always ready to accept the stress of hard running with a person on board.