Jack Be Nimble: The Crystal Falcon Book 3

by Ben English

  “No fishing nets,” remarked Irene. She was right. No nets, and none of the equipment needed to mend and maintain them. Aside from a few small outbuildings, no recognizable places to store fishing boats and supplies, either.

  A clothesline hung limply between two homes. Here and there a branch lay in the street; leaves and other detritus littered their path. All the buildings were in good repair, but it was obvious that no one had cleaned up after the past few storms. Everything was painted the same beige. The front doors were shut. All the curtains drawn.

  At the base of the little road leading to the pier, a child-sized bicycle lay encased in mud, trapped like a fossil in soil runoff from the last rainstorm. Under the grime, it was a new model.

  No one needed to suggest they stick together. Ian was most interested in getting to the research station, which he assumed was one of the large buildings visible on the map. Curiosity, however, led them to one of the small homes.

  The door had been padlocked from the outside. A quick glance at the other houses confirmed that they all wore identical security devices.

  Allison made as if to shoot off one of the locks, but instead kicked at the edge of the door near the handle. Rotting wood underneath the new paint gave immediately. The faint odor of rotting vegetables assailed them.

  Inside the house, they found a bit more tech than they expected. There was a microwave oven in the kitchen and a respectable-size flatscreen TV in the center room, along with a personal computer. The two children’s rooms both held docking stations for laptops, along with docks for digital music players. The home was small, but they could tell it had been expanded over time. Irene immediately put her finger on an interesting detail. “The children’s rooms were added as they were born.” Both the building material and the furnishings in the small rooms were much newer and of higher quality than the rest of the house.

  A brief line of pictures, sealed against the moisture in wooden frames, showed a young family. The parents looked barely out of their teens, and had four children in rapid succession. The oldest child was perhaps eight, Ian decided.

  Allison checked the refrigerator, and wrinkled her nose. It had been fully stocked before the electricity was cut. Pressure from the expanding rot inside had forced the door open. “How long, do you suppose?” she asked.

  Irene responded immediately. “Not longer than six weeks, by the look of things. What gets me is the lack of vermin. I haven’t seen a single mousetrap, but why wouldn’t they have been at the food?”

  The brands of food were all American.

  The whole place should have reminded Ian of the practice houses set up at Quantico, “homes” erected so the agents-in-training could practice hostage rescue situations and other exercises, but it didn’t. The homes on Cayo Verad were real, had that lived-in feeling, and he wondered, not for the first time, if they shouldn’t have come with an entire Hazardous Materials team. He eyed a coffee cup, noting the dried, dark line just inside the rim. A matching discoloration decorated the table at the base of the cup. Someone had taken a sip and set the cup down quickly, perhaps in surprise, sloshing a bit of the coffee onto the table.

  Ian didn’t touch anything. Using their phones, they all took multiple pictures of the interior of the house. On his way out, Ian wedged the door shut as best he could. Somehow it didn’t seem right to leave the home open and vulnerable.

  The two largest buildings, next to the clapboard church, bore signs of recent work. The concrete had been blasted, cleaned, patched, and painted. A heavy rainstorm, common in the islands, had done its work on the paint before it had completely dried. Ian couldn’t make out the insignia or markings that had been on the walls, but they had been enormous. Everyone in the village would have seen it whenever they came to school or church. He filed that thought away for later analysis.

  The locks on the research building were much larger and of better quality than the padlocks on the houses below. Ian loaded a breeching round into his shotgun, and found he rather enjoyed blowing that particular door open.

  They expected a lab, maybe a containment area for cataloging species of vegetation, and a greenhouse. What they found was more like a hospital. One room contained fifty modern beds, completely stripped of linen and equipment. There were three other rooms that could only be full operating theaters. In one large chamber, bolts set into the floor showed where a number of heavy machines had rested. “What could have been this big?” Ian asked.

  “An MRI machine?” offered Allison.

  The center room contained several marble-topped tables, each with built-in fixtures for gas, electricity, and wired ‘net access. “There’s a server room around here somewhere,” Irene said.

  She and Ian found the server closet, also empty, in a carpeted room labeled Admin. A square indent of dust-free carpet showed Ian where the physical filing cabinet had been. The desks and cubicles in the room were intact. Irene looked for prints, but was not optimistic.

  Ian carefully examined each desk, and was rewarded for his efforts. Whoever had cleaned out the office had been in a hurry; a single sheet of paper was folded and crushed against the back of a drawer.

  Irene took it delicately in a gloved hand.

  It struck Ian again how perfectly silent the village was. He realized he hadn’t even seen a single bird since landing on the island. Wasn’t this supposed to be a jungle?

  “Double luck,” said Irene. “Managed to lift two distinct fingerprints and three partials from the page.”

  “Good work.”

  Ian wasn’t a superstitious man. His wife was considerably more religious, but had never pushed her beliefs on him. To be honest, Ian had always enjoyed a simple, nodding relationship with the Almighty; more of a sense of himself and Another, both smiling at the same joke.

  Still.

  Ian felt a deep, insistent need to get out of that building. It was almost a physical pressure (he wondered if the barometer was falling), and he found himself looking for the exits. Hospitals in and of themselves were bad enough; even worse was the idea of spending one second longer than necessary in a hospital that had run out of patients.

  Ian left Irene to pack up her medical supplies and found the street. He met Allison as she emerged from the next building.

  “It was a school,” she reported. “Everything is stripped out, but there was considerable tech here. All the students’ desks included docking stations for laptops, like the ones we found in the home.”

  “Does this place strike you as being more than a little tech-heavy?” he asked.

  Irene was right behind him. “I was expecting something a bit more Third World,” she said.

  That left the church. A simple, single-story clapboard building, it was a lighter shade of white than the other buildings. The paint was layered oddly, and wasn’t all the same tone of white. Ian supposed it had been painted in stages by the local population, rather than a corporate labor force. No cross stood at the apex of its steeple.

  They found the first signs of violence at the entrance. The two double doors were gone, the hinges twisted and black, brittle due to some tremendous heat.

  “Alright, both of you stay back,” said Irene. “Let me get a close look at that door.”

  Ian shifted his grip on his weapon and caught Allison checking the load in her MP5. The major had broken out in a light sweat that caused her hair to paste against her forehead and neck. She watched the forest line suspiciously. Not happy to be here either, thought Ian.

  It was then he noticed the wild animal tracks. The island obviously had its share of wild boar, and a big specimen had come through recently. Probably a sow, Ian thought, looking closely at the indentations in the dried mud. By their depth and angle he judged the she-boar at between two-fifty and three hundred pounds. The animal had come to the bottom step of the church, rooted around the base of the stairs (there were score marks where her tusks brushed the wood), but had not gone in.

  Reflecting on what he knew of island boar, I
an realized there was something missing. He walked the breadth of the street, eyes on the ground, but found no other tracks or spoor.

  “What are you on about then?” asked Allison. Another sign of stress; her accent was a shade thicker.

  “No piglets,” he responded. “Given the time of year, there would have been a litter of hundred-pounders following their mother around.”

  Irene called to them from the doorway, and they mounted the stairs, weapons ready. It was a typical Roman Catholic meetinghouse, built by simple people but with great care. The floor plan lay in the traditional crucifix pattern, with the alter facing east. The wooden benches had been lifted out and propped against the tall windows on either side of the chapel, blocking the light except from the highest portion of the glass. Angled, colored beams of radiance bore down into the darkness from those high windows, but did little to dispel the gloom at ground level.

  The entrance was blackened oddly. “It looks almost like a shaped charge,” said Ian, examining the scorched doorway. The surrounding area was unburnt, which ruled out a freak fire or a grenade. The floor was concrete.

  “Well, whoever barricaded themselves in here was sure convinced that something was after them.” She pointed a gloved finger at the heavy workmen’s tools. Boards from a smaller side room—probably a confessional—had been torn out and double-layered against the entire span of the front door; now only their ends were visible where they were still nailed against the doorjamb.

  “I’ll check the other end of the chapel,” said Allison. “There’s usually another entrance there, for the vicar.”

  Irene was gathering bits of the wood from the doorframe into evidence bags. “I’ll need to test these back at the lab,” she said, “but I’ll tell you right off the bat that whatever blew these doors came from the inside of the building. See these angled scorch marks? The device was right next to the door, in fact.” She took swab samples from the floor, the walls, and the outer stoop, then let Ian step in for a closer look.

  “So let’s say I’m trying to keep something out,” he began, “I’m standing just inside the doorway. I’ve nailed two sets of boards against the door with my big five-penny nails; nothing’s getting in here without taking the whole of the front of the church with it.” He waited for her to agree. “If I’m desperate—”

  “—If you’re flat-out panicked—” she saw the marks on the floor, and could see where he was going with the explanation.

  “I’m panicked, so I’m going to stand right here and plant both hands against the door, maybe even lean against it with my whole upper body.” He mimed doing so, and they both looked at the scorch marks on the doorframe. They began at eye level and ran to the floor. The doorjamb directly over Ian’s head was burnt. He took a step back and looked directly down.

  Etched in black against the cool concrete floor were the unmistakable outlines of human feet. The sunlight through the open door showed them clearly. While the area around both feet was smooth and almost reflective, the burned section was pitted and crumbled under Irene’s knife. She worked a sample loose and stowed it away, not meeting Ian’s eyes.

  The silence outside was broken by a rogue wind, a lone gust. It rattled the glass and loose boards of each house as it caromed down the street, tossing leaves and twists of grass. Ian looked up as it passed the front of the church, half expecting to see something physical in the bluster. It coiled the dust briefly in the air of the narthex, then leaped on to the next building. Ian found himself looking at that section of the wall on the opposite building, where the cement had been reworked and painted over. He still couldn’t make out the symbol that had once rested there, looking into the church.

  He and Irene walked through the nave toward the altar. More workmen’s tools lay scattered about. It seemed nothing had been spared in the barricade efforts; every pew and kneeling bar had been taken up and nailed to the side walls over the windows. The crucifix over the altar was gone, only the outline remained. Likewise, no statues of saints looked down on them from the two man-sized recesses in the apse.

  Ian almost didn’t see Allison in her black tactical gear, kneeling on the floor in the sanctuary at the front of the chapel. Rather than receiving Eucharist, she was closely examining the contents of a smallish wooden box. There were more than two dozen of the rectangular containers on the floor of the sanctuary, each arranged neatly in line with each other, each open.

  No, not boxes. With a short, sad cry, Irene dropped her evidence case and bent over the nearest tiny coffin. On some level, Ian’s mind refused to believe what his eyes told him. Utterly refused. He forced himself to breath evenly and count each coffin, twice to make sure. There were thirty. Not all of them were the same size, but they were all unquestionably coffins.

  “Where are the bodies?” Irene demanded. They were empty, and Ian realized that what he’d taken for a tiny body inside each was a burnt, darkened outline, a silhouette of the form that had once occupied the space. Most of the wood was unburned and still light-colored. Only that portion which would be in contact with a body was blackened by heat.

  Ian’s fingers tightened convulsively on his weapon, and he fought the urge to withdraw from the building, the urge to carry the fight against whoever had done this thing.

  The coffins were lidless and empty, but they hadn’t been. Ian removed his glasses and cleaned them.

  Allison straightened and slowly pushed herself to her feet. It was impossible in the dim light for Ian to clearly see her face, but her voice was thick. “I found something in the sacristy,” she said. “I passed by this lot a few minutes ago, never gave them a second look. Didn’t occur to me.

  “But whoever laid these out hid one of the little . . . hid a coffin in the sacristy, just under the sink.” She pointed, not looking. “There’s a body inside, I’m pretty sure. Didn’t open it, but the smell—”

  “I’ll help you get it,” said Irene, steadily. Of course, for an autopsy. “Just give me a moment here.” Her hands were steady as she used a small, sterile spatula to swab out the inside of one of the boxes. Her face betrayed her emotion, but she pushed through it to get the job done. Ian found it hard to think of her as a civilian.

  “Can the two of you wait for me a moment?” he asked. “I’ll give you a hand, but there’s something I need to check out first.”

  Allison didn’t look particularly eager to remain in the church, but she was unwilling to leave the other woman alone while she collected evidence. She began taking photos with her phone.

  Ian left the building. The air outside didn’t feel any better. The sun was fully up and so was the humidity. The freak wind earlier was probably a sign of a new weather front coming in, and that probably meant a storm. Best to get back to Cuba before it hit. He had no desire to hole up on Cayo Verad during a hurricane. Wasn’t this part of the Bermuda Triangle? Felt more and more like.

  But. Whoever cleaned up the village had missed something. The person or parties responsible for taking the little, burnt bodies out of the coffins had missed one, apparently. Ian looked hard at the wall opposite the church. Thought a moment. Turned on his heel and marched back to the little house they’d entered earlier.

  Walking through the little house still felt eerie and odd, more so now that he was alone, but Ian ignored that. The line of family photographs was right where they’d left it. Ian trained his flashlight on the photos, examining nearly all of them before he found what he was looking for.

  At the baptismal celebrations of each child, pictures had been taken outside the church. In each shot, a section of a distinct corporate logo appeared on the wall that had been more recently blasted clean and patched over.

  Another photo showed the school, which bore the entire mark, in all its burnished-steel glory, next to the main entrance. Once again Ian found himself gripped with the urge to flee from the island, not away from anything but toward something; to carry the fight forward.

  The two photos revealed the now-familiar logo of the Rain
es Corporation, etched in steel into the concrete walls that overlooked the village. No one could have gone a day without seeing the stylized hunting bird and its keeper. They would have seen it every time they walked to school or church.

  Ian took the photographs from the wall. Once again, he wedged the front door shut as best he could. The faces in the pictures were happy, smiling, cared for. He was willing to bet that none of them had died of advanced age.

  Creative Anachronism

  Seattle, Washington

  The old, old man delicately repositioned his mug of hot chocolate. Elbows to himself, he took up as little space as possible at the airport bar. He lifted his feet to rest them, one by one, on top of his suitcase of product samples. There. That was better. That sort of thing would do. Anything to dull the ache from a much-abused sciatic nerve.

  Lord, but he felt his age. Couldn’t tell if the back pain was from the kidneys or his lumbar failing. At least it was a good day for the arthritis, despite the rain and sleet. Looking at the liver spots on the backs of his hands, he shivered. And that was another thing: it was too damn cold everywhere he went. Had nothing to do with the storm in Seattle. The old man eyed the crowd, wondering if it was ever going to be spring.

  Now, that was a maudlin thought. He chuckled, in spite of his black mood. Then he nearly laughed aloud at himself. Deep down, he knew he was the same as any man he’d ever met, his heart completely confident that it still beat in the chest of a seventeen year-old.

  The airport bar was attached to a quick-serve restaurant. A young woman at one of the tables rose, hefted her briefcase, and moved quickly toward the exit. Whether she was conscious of it or not, she pulled eyes toward her; she was just one of those women whom men found it difficult to look away from.

  The old man felt for his heart medication, and paid the bill.

  On the other side of the gray glass, all kinds of weather poured onto the tarmac. Nothing manmade moved.