by Ben English
Jack Be Nimble: The Crystal Falcon
Ben English
Copyright 2011 by Ben English
Jack Be Nimble: The Crystal Falcon
By Ben English
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living, dead, undead, or wandering the streets of San Francisco, would be pretty amazing, now, wouldn’t it?
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4660-0738-3
Copyright © 2011 by Ben English
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
Published in the United States of America.
Cover art modified, original photo property of Victoria Moran Flynn. Crystal falcon, recovered near WWII-era shipwreck in sovereign Philippine waters.
Visit the author’s website: www.BenEnglishAuthor.com
The Jack Be Nimble Series
Gargoyle
Tyro
The Crystal Falcon
A Lion About to Roar
(coming Christmas 2011)
Table of Contents
Foreword
Five Ghouls and a Specter
Cayo Verad
Creative Anachronism
Hit ‘em Where They Ain’t
Second Story Work
Playing the Long Game
Microcapsule
Trajectory and Resonance
Coldest Winter of His Life
Little Black Dress
Legend
The Epicure
Odd Combinations
Reception
No Limits
Short Skirt, Long Jacket
A Cupful of Ink, the Revel, an End of Us, and Mercedes’ Idea
Burner
Send
When the Wheel Comes Round Again
Outflanked
No Epiphany Required
End Notes
This one’s for Ryan Amber English
my daughter
Who shines and shines and shines.
Foreword
Written on a playbill for a production of Cyrano de Bergerac,
in an elegant hand
Havana, Cuba
An hour before sunrise
There is no evil worse than what men can do, but there are things in this world darker than the deep, sweet night.
My name is Peter Dalton, and I’ve known Jack since he was very young. We even resemble each other a bit, though he keeps me around for the other ways in which I am most useful to the team. I have an affinity for the dark and hidden places of the earth, and I’m good at discovering secrets. Forgive me for being less than forthcoming, but after all, this is not my story, it is Jack’s.
The events of the past few days have already been described in the books Gargoyle and Tyro. If you read them, you already have an idea of the gravity of the situation. What appeared at first to be a sensational kidnapping of someone close to Jack has quickly unraveled into a conspiracy far worse. Alex Raines, the leader of an international technology firm, is making full use of all his resources to introduce grand chaos into the world, and I fear that is just the start. I fear that Raines is not insane.
Jack and the team chased the agents of Raines across the globe, from Europe to the New World. In San Francisco, I was able to meet two of the killers sent by Raines against a scientist who knew too many secrets. They did not leave my city.
I found Jack, alone, in Southern California. There is a woman there, Mercedes Adams, who possesses a few secrets of her own, and a history with Jack—the events of Gargoyle and Tyro describe this. If you are not familiar with these volumes, you should read them before attempting to navigate this tale.
At the moment, we are gathering information and clues as quickly as possible—much of the team is in Cuba, attempting to shore up security measures for the celebration marking the start of the international Goodwill Games, while Jack and Alonzo are following instinct, chasing down a lead. Why was Mercedes Adams targeted for assassination, and what is the connection between her and Alex Raines?
And why does Jack’s heartbeat quicken whenever thoughts of her cross his mind?
Are you ready? It’s getting darker. Pray you may see straight through the fog and cloud rack.
Jack Be Nimble Book 3
The Crystal Falcon
Ben English
The dance of battle is always played to the same impatient
rhythm.
What begins in a surge of violent motion is always reduced
to the perfectly still.
- Sun Tzu
“Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don't push me, and I won't push you. Dong le ma*?"
- Captain Malcolm Reynolds
*Mandarin: “You get me? / Are we clear here?”
Five Ghouls and a Specter
Havana, Cuba
5 AM
The day he discovered what happened to the children, Ian Whitaker woke up with heartburn. He’d always been an early riser, enjoyed the hunter’s ability to set his internal clock for a certain time and just plain wake up when he decided, with no need for an alarm. The problem lay in the island food. All this sweet coffee, in particular, was killing him. He decided to skip breakfast, or at least put it off as long as Nicole would let him. He showered, dressed, and was out the door and on the street before the sun lit the sky.
Taxis still plied the streets; Ian had the driver drop him off a few blocks from San Francisco Park. After going through the usual gyrations to make sure he wasn’t followed, he entered and found Pete waiting patiently, hands folded, practically reclining on a stone bench under the shadows of an old, massive banyan tree. In the soft light he looked more like Jack than ever.
“You know,” Pete said, “Castro met with his first Soviet handler here, back in ’53.”
“That a fact?”
“They used to play chess right over there.” He indicated a low stone table.
Ian liked Pete; he was a no-nonsense guy. Never talked much about himself, but always had something interesting to say. Even did a decent imitation of Jack’s easygoing carelessness, which was just fine with Ian. He also took the time to cultivate solid, deep connections to the Cuban crime scene. “I hear the old town was a sight to see back then.”
Pete smiled. “Disneyland for grown-ups. American business really took off after the war, and the money just wouldn’t stop. Neon everywhere, rummed-up tourists everywhere—a P.I. could really make a living if he knew how to market his camera to suspicious housewives ba
ck in the U.S. And the mob was into everything. Lansky ran it all—you would have loved it.”
Ian had heard the stories. “An instructor I had at Quantico, one of the old hands. He was with the Bureau down here before Castro took over. Said the old boys’ club ran an airplane courier every night to a bank in Miami with suitcase after suitcase of casino profits.”
“If Batista hadn’t been such an idiot, the mob could have held on to things. This place was bigger than Vegas. Or so I hear.”
“What about now?”
Pete nodded; they were getting to the reason for the meeting. “Weak. Espinosa is mindful of Cuba’s past, and he doesn’t want to repeat Batista’s mistakes. No more pure-greed laissez-faire economics. He sees everything in terms of an economic equation, see? Capitalism is managed carefully; lots of incentives for small- and medium-sized business. He hasn’t allowed unions or foreign ownership of any of the businesses the mob usually favors. They’ve got one or two casinos going up out past Verdado, but that’s it.”
The mob angle was a dead end. That left the cartel. “What’s your feel for the narcotics situation?”
“The drug lab out near Santiago? Supposed to be supplying the country, exporting to Miami and points north.” Pete shrugged. “It makes sense that Lopez would want to process it here and cut it before it gets to the mainland, but nothing I’ve found points to one huge processing station in Cuba. If they’re starting and finishing the process here, there’s got to be some product leaking out onto the local market. I mean, it looks like a lab, smells like a lab, sounds like a lab, but where’s the product?” He hesitated. “The drugs on the street in Havana aren’t flowing out of Santiago, for one thing. DEA says they’re coming into Cuba from Mexico, just like they always have.”
“The locals are hot to move on it. Want to invite CNN to watch them take down the lab.”
“I get it,” said Pete. “Solid PR win for the new president, boot the evil cartel out of the islands right before the world shows up for the Goodwill Games. I feel safer already.”
Ian couldn’t ignore the feeling they were exploring another blind alley. “You think the intel is wrong?”
“It’s the trail of evidence that’s wrong,” said Pete. He thought a moment. “What else is out near Santiago?”
Ian used his phone to check the database back at the crow’s nest. “Farming. Sugarcane. Semiconductor testing. PicoMorph Pharmaceuticals. Hershey’s is starting up again out there.”
“Did you say, ‘PicoMorph?’” said Pete. “There might be a connection here.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “I found something interesting on the five organ donors who went after Jack and Al in the market.”
“Oh?” Ian was due to assist Irene later that morning in the morgue. He wasn’t looking forward to it. Hadn’t cut in years.
“Local hitters, but with specialized labor skills. They entered the city on the same date, stayed in the same boarding house, and got their fake IDs from the same shop downtown. Their fake IDs all led back to recently deceased persons. These were operators, not planners.”
“So they were being run by someone else. Five ghouls and a specter, maybe a spook.” He turned that over in his head, wondering which of the foreign intelligence agencies they’d pissed off. “Wait, you said they were specialized laborers?”
“Right, hired months ago to work on the new conference center. One of them was a glazier, the others were electricians, carpenters, that kind of thing.
“Get this: Behind the fake IDs, they’re all from the same hometown, an island not far to the south called Cayo Verad.”
“And?”
“The title of ownership to Cayo Verad is held in trust by PicoMorph Pharmaceuticals.”
Ian wasn’t sure he’d heard that correctly.
“Jack emailed me the shell maze breakdown before he and Al flew out. Through his shell companies, Raines runs operations on many properties in the Caribbean. It’s a trick, but he even owns a few of the freehold islands outright.” Pete paused. There was something else.
“At the last census, there were over three hundred people living on Cayo Verad. No one’s heard from any of them in months. Something was wrong with their children, and then nothing. It’s like they all just vanished.”
Cayo Verad
Using his FBI credentials, Ian rented a decent boat and set out for Cayo Verad about an hour after sunrise. Not knowing what to expect, he took along a shotgun, a satellite phone, and several maps of the area. He also took along Irene Archer’s evidence-gathering kit—Irene just happened to be attached to it as well.
Major Griffin was just leaving her duty shift in the crow’s nest, and worked up a quick package of mission-critical intelligence about Cayo Verad. Everyone else was involved in preparations leading up to the raid on the drug lab, and she was at loose ends. Ian fully expected the three of them to return hours before the raid. He took his guns nonetheless.
The sun quickly ascended into the clouds, and by the time they were well underway the sky and water were nearly the same shade of dull gray.
“What did he mean, the children all just vanished?” asked Irene. She looked relieved to be out of the lab.
Ian was at the wheel. “Actually, he said everyone had apparently vanished.”
“I verified it this morning,” said the major—everyone was calling her Allison now; she was fast becoming part of the team. “The interisland mail coming out of Cayo Verad dwindled to nothing a few months ago. All other regular communications abruptly stopped from the island several weeks ago, according to government reports.” Irene frowned, so Allison explained further. “Reports were made by relatives living on several neighboring islands. There was also a note about some kind of medical problem affecting the children on Cayo Verad that one of the relatives related third-hand to the local Cuban authorities, but no action was taken.”
“No one visited the island to verify the reports?” asked Ian.
“There’s nothing like a local coast guard here,” she replied. “The Cuban government relies heavily on the big corporate presence to maintain the infrastructure, keep the peace, that kind of thing.”
“I’ve read about this,” Irene said. “Companies like PicoMorph have intensive research programs all through the Caribbean, Central America, the Amazon River Basin—you get the idea. They investigate local cures, looking at all the historically medicinal benefits of local plants and folklore. They’ve been publishing papers on their discoveries at forensics conferences for years.”
Ian nodded. “So in return for permission to perform research on the local flora and fauna, the big corporations give back. They play enormous roles in the lives of the little local populations. Big brother cleans up after storms, provides jobs, medical aid, education.”
“By all official accounts,” said Allison, “PicoMorph Pharmaceuticals is a benevolent landlord.”
‘“By all official accounts’?”
“Well, don’t you think it’s interesting that no one is asking any official questions about where the people of Cayo Verad went off to?”
She had a point.
Ian used an old paper sea chart for navigation. The island wasn’t registering for some reason with either the onboard GPS or the GPS built into his phone. They couldn’t even find it on Google Earth. Strange, because the island itself was fairly large for the Caribbean. Rather than being a low atoll-based island, Cayo Verad was a volcanic island, and had what might almost be called a mountain in the middle of its two or three square kilometers. It had fresh water, but no unusual natural resources and no useable natural harbor—Ian could see why such a place was off the beaten path. There was no real reason for the outside world to notice such a place.
As they approached, the first thing they noticed was the wide pier. The heavy-duty concrete construction extended nearly a quarter mile from the beach, set high to accommodate the deep draft of a full-sized cargo ship. It had been badly battered by the weather; they couldn’t guess its age.
Ian had a thought. “Major—Allison, how is your Spanish?”
“I thought it was acceptable until a few days ago.”
He knew what she meant. Vacations in Mexico and several dates with a Spanish major in college hadn’t prepared Ian for whatever passed for Havana streetspeak. He hoped the locals of Cayo Verad had a good sense of humor, or an addiction to untranslated American television.
The boat had a shallow draft, and they came right up onto the beach at the base of the village. The buildings were a curious mix of clapboard and prefabricated, sectioned pieces. There was no smoke from cooking fires, and this would have struck Ian as odd except for another curiosity: each of the houses was wired for full utilities. “Where’s the electricity come from?”
Allison pointed at the topographical map. “I’d guess geothermal. There’s a station of some kind further up near the mountain.”
Irene was the first off the boat, her evidence kit in hand. She looked back at the others, and didn’t say a word. They all felt it.
Ian gave the satellite map a final look, and joined her. Aside from the houses and shacks near the water’s edge, there were three large constructions at the very center of the community.
The air was clear and clean, even cool nearest the water. A silence hung over the small village, an air of long-abandonment. There wasn’t anything alive here, not even a damn cat.