The seascape soon became cluttered with uninhabited landmasses, none of them larger than a football field. With the sun nearing its peak, the blue of the sea matched that of the horizon so that the two appeared to be one and the Riva seemed to be floating through the heavens.
Charlie might have appreciated it if he hadn’t been on the lookout for police boats. Even the colorful birds flitting about the islands gave him pause. In the Middle East, Alice’s NSA unit had deployed remotely piloted attack aircraft that could pass for barn swallows. A macaw was nothing.
Drummond slowed the engines.
“Are we there yet?” Charlie asked.
“This particular GPS is only accurate to within a latitudinal minute, or 1.15 miles. So all I can tell you is we’re within 1.15 miles.” With a sweeping gesture, Drummond indicated the eight small islets surrounding them, distinguishable only by the placement of the trees. “It could be any of these.”
Hardly simplifying matters, each islet lacked an obvious hiding place. If Fielding had buried the washer, which made sense, he wouldn’t have left the ground looking like someone had dug an enormous hole. The odds of finding the washer before the police made the scene were best not to calculate.
“Other than whipping up an astrolabe, what can we do?” Charlie asked.
Drummond brightened. “Actually, all we would need to make an astrolabe is a thick piece of paper, something to cut notches along its end, a straw or reed, some string, and a small weight, like a ring.”
Charlie wondered if his father was fading-a fade was well overdue. “Then what? Wait for the stars to come out so we can calculate latitude?”
“Planets work too.” Drummond accelerated the runabout toward the furthest of the eight islands. “But I have a feeling that that’s it.”
“Washer Island?”
“I recognize the tree on the southern shore.” He pointed to a huge oak atop a high ridge that sloped at almost a right angle to the sea. “You’ve been here?”
“It’s where I found the treasure of San Isidro-you don’t forget a thing like that.”
Charlie felt the cold draft that usually accompanied the opening of Drummond’s chest of broken memories. “Just like you don’t forget seeing your first unicorn?”
Nosing the Riva onto a shelf of golden sand, Drummond cut the engines. “You’ll see.” He hopped over the gunwale and secured the bowline to a giant root.
Charlie slid off the bow and waded after his father. The oak’s myriad roots and tendrils fanned down the ridge like a bridal train, several disappearing into the high tide. Between the roots, where Charlie would have expected sand or soil, he saw dark apertures nearly his height. Waves tumbled into these gaps, breaking with a rich echo, indicative of an enormous subterranean cavern.
“Go on in,” Drummond said.
Charlie hesitated. “How do I know this isn’t a giant squid’s lair?”
With a laugh Drummond reached into the mouth of the cavern and patted the roof until, with a rip of Velcro, he extracted a moss-green nylon sack the size of a hardcover book. He unzipped it, drew out a pair of slender black Maglites, and tossed one over his shoulder. Charlie set aside his incredulity to make the catch.
Drummond fired his Maglite’s laserlike white beam through the roots, casting spidery shadows onto mossy rock walls, then sauntered into the cavern. Charlie stuck close behind, hunching every few steps to avoid a stalactite. The air was cold and clammy. Goose flesh rose on his arms, not attributable to the temperature alone: Although he saw no movement, he had a tingling sense that the place was teeming with slithery life forms.
“Dad, you know how I used to get on you for never taking me camping?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“I take it back.”
The cavern floor rose out of the water to a platform of red clay. Within the far wall of the platform was a tunnel large enough to allow a man to wheel in a washing machine.
31
Charlie aimed his Maglite into the tunnel, revealing an opening fifty or sixty feet down, maybe the entry to another cavern. Shifting the beam to the right, he saw a wall coated in silt and dirt. Unlike the ceiling and floor, the wall was flat, undoubtedly man-made.
“That’s the gold,” Drummond said with no more enthusiasm than if he were showing Charlie the contents of his sock drawer.
“What’s the gold?”
“That wall.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The other wall too.”
Charlie swung his beam across the tunnel. Amidst the grime, streaks of yellow metal flashed. “Walls made of gold. How would that even be possible?”
“Fielding and I used to putter around this area, using sonar to find places like this that couldn’t be picked up by eyes in the sky. The idea was, if you’re a prospective client and you’re taken to a subterranean weapons cache on a tiny deserted island fifty miles from anywhere, you more readily believe that you’re seeing an actual nuclear device.”
“I’ll buy that. What about the fifty-foot-long slabs of gold?”
Drummond ambled into the tunnel. “Oh, that, right. Long story.”
Charlie followed him. “So you didn’t just order them from Sears and Roebuck?”
“In 1797, the Venezuelans organized a conspiracy against the Spanish regime. The Spanish colonial governor in San Isidro worried that the rebels would seize the gold that the Spanish colonists had previously seized from the natives, chiefly the golden roof of the church, which was worth two million dollars.”
“In 1797,” Charlie repeated, brushing a stripe of the metal and pondering its current value.
“So the Spaniards found a sea captain whom they thought they could trust to take the roof panels to Spain. But they were wrong about him: He and his crew turned pirate. The loot’s infamy made it impossible to traffic, though. So the pirates secured it here, intending to return when things cooled down. But they died in a cannon fight with a Spanish man-o’-war before they had the chance. And although there have been hundreds of attempts, no one found the treasure.”
At the tunnel’s end, half thinking he’d imagined the gold, Charlie turned, taking it in again. “Until you did?”
“Right.”
“So why was Fielding hunting for it for the last couple of years?”
“He had his dive teams search in the wrong places, which allowed him to go about his real work. Eventually, he would have ‘happened on’ this cavern, I suppose.”
Charlie bounced his beam off the floor to better see his father’s face. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you sell the gold off yourselves? You’d still have your secret cavern.”
“For one thing, we would have had the same problem the pirates did.”
“You and Fielding? Come on. You guys trafficked nuclear weapons.”
Drummond shrugged. “I suppose we could have sold the treasure, if we had wanted to.”
Charlie, whose upbringing had been modest bordering on Spartan, couldn’t fathom his father’s indifference. “You ever even consider it?”
“We were occupied with the job that brought us here in the first place.”
“That gold is easily worth a hundred million-”
“We thwarted an actual nuclear incident in 2005,” Drummond said with finality.
“You would at least have bolstered your Marvin Lesser cover. We could have lived in a villa on the Baie de Fort-de-France, driven Lotuses …”
“Living the Lesser cover would have been too time-consuming. I needed to be either in the field or at the office.”
Drummond’s base of operations was Perriman’s musty, overheated, low-rent office in Manhattan.
“If memory serves, the washing machine is in here,” he said, rounding a corner into another, darker cave, not much larger than a van.
And, other than dirt and a spiderweb the size of a volleyball net, empty.
If memory serves resounded harshly in Charlie’s mind.
“Latex,” Drummond sai
d, batting aside the spiderweb. “Otherwise we’d get bugs.”
He leaned into the damp, rocky wall and a door opened inward, revealing a small room. Charlie shot his Maglite beam inside, illuminating a white, top-loading Perriman Pristina, bound to a wooden pallet that rested on a dolly. The washer’s housing had dings, spots of rust, and a light coating of muck. A good deal of the spongy orange insulation around the power cord appeared to have been chewed away, as if rats had mistaken it for cheese.
“Probably in all of history, this is the happiest a man has been at seeing a washing machine,” Charlie said. “Unless it is just a washing machine.”
Wrestling with the plastic strips binding the machine to the pallet, Drummond pried open the lid and peered in. He grunted his confirmation that the Pristina indeed contained a nuclear device.
Charlie felt a jubilation well up in him, like bubbles in champagne.
“Better check that the serial number’s still there,” Drummond called, interrupting Charlie’s reverie of life with Alice enhanced by the proceeds from the treasure of San Isidro.
Charlie shone his light, revealing a metal band glued to the top of the control panel. He recognized the sequence of fifteen one- and two-digit numbers as the detonation code made to look like the manufacturer’s serial number.
He waited for the reality of their accomplishment to sink in. Then he would leap up or shout or-
“Well, are you going to lend a hand?” asked Drummond, setting about getting the washer out.
“Okay.” Charlie helped push the dolly into the tunnel. He guessed his father was averse to celebration prior to the completion of a mission.
“I was a big fan of our Pristina line even before we increased the cubic footage of the wash basket,” Drummond said, batting aside a tree root. “No one’s going to argue that we have the vibration control or that we’re designed as well as some of the highfalutin brands, but you won’t find as many wash cycle options at twice the money.”
The spy had reverted to the old appliance salesman suffering from Alzheimer’s. Charlie felt shortchanged; the transformation had robbed them of the shared exultation their discovery warranted. At least the timing wasn’t terrible for once, he thought, until, displacing a vine, he saw a tall policeman standing near the beached runabout.
Drummond came to a halt.
Charlie had DeSoto’s Beretta wedged into the back of his waistband. The policeman’s gun was holstered on his right hip. His right hand was occupied with a flashlight.
Spinning toward them, the cop called out, “They’re here!”
Five other officers came galloping from the parts of the tiny island that they had evidently been searching.
Returning his attention to Drummond and Charlie, the cop said, “Luckily the owner of the Riva installed LoJack.”
32
Bream’s condominium complex consisted of about fifty luxury duplexes, amalgams of classic colonial and modern beach houses with weather-browned clapboard walls and doors trimmed in a sandy cream. A suntanned blonde out of the pages of a swimsuit issue dozed, gently swaying in an oversized rope hammock by the pool. Lying on a floating chaise lounge was a second woman, possibly the blonde’s younger and bronzer sister. She glanced up from her paperback and smiled as Stanley and Hadley got out of their new rental car.
Stanley gave a tight smile in response.
“Bonjour,” Hadley said to the women. Nudging Stanley, she said under her breath, “Don’t you want to give them a thorough once-over, make sure they’re not sentinels?”
He looked down at her and saw her grin. He liked that she never missed a beat.
He hoped like hell that the switchblade ring business was just an aberration.
She rang Bream’s buzzer. A moment later the pilot appeared in the doorway, pulling an old sweatshirt over a pair of gym shorts. He might have put on the sweatshirt before opening the door, Stanley thought, but then he wouldn’t have been able to show off his Muscle Beach abs. The pilot’s eyes were rimmed red with sleeplessness, pleasing Stanley, who didn’t like it when scumbags with that much free time for the gym slept well in their cushy island pads.
“Mr. and Mrs. Atchison, hey.” The pilot acted pleasantly surprised. “Nice of you to drop by.”
“We’re here on United States government business,” said Stanley, glad to be spared the song and dance of why the golf-obsessed CFO and his self-absorbed wife were on the pilot’s front stoop.
Bream leaned closer, as if he hadn’t heard right. “Government business?”
“We should go inside and talk about it,” Hadley said.
The pilot shrugged. “So long as you don’t mind a little mess. The maid hasn’t been here, well, to be honest, ever.”
Stanley stumbled, intentionally, as he followed Hadley across the threshold. He fell against Bream, who reflexively caught him by the shoulders.
“Excuse me,” Stanley said, clinging to the pilot’s waist to remain upright while he felt for a gun hidden in the small of the man’s back.
Bream released him. “First thing on the maid’s list will be that doorstep.”
“Much obliged.” Stanley added a pat of gratitude, feeling no holster in the vicinity of Bream’s underarm, bolstering his confidence that the pilot had no weapon on him.
Still Stanley knew he needed to keep an eye out for a knife or gun produced from a hiding spot and against which his only defense would be the surveillance team in a hotel room fifty yards away. In such situations, the old joke went, the best your backup team can do is avenge you.
The condo itself wasn’t as bad as advertised. Empty Red Stripe bottles, randomly flicked bottle caps and clothing abounded, but were lost in the grandeur of the space-ten-foot ceilings with gleaming ceramic tile crown molding, lustrous hardwood floors, and slabs of granite atop every counter.
Whisking a weight-lifting belt off the back of one of the dining room chairs, Bream ushered Stanley and Hadley into two of the other three seats at the table. “I can offer you water, or water with a tea bag in it,” he said, indicating a stout Victorian teakettle on the burner.
“How about you just join us, Mr. Bream?” Hadley tapped the glass tabletop.
“Okay, then.” Bream spun around a chair and sat so that his chest was pressed against the backrest, providing himself an extra layer of protection whether or not he consciously intended it. “So are you folks CIA or FBI or I don’t need to know?”
“You were right the first time.” Stanley leaned over the table to minimize the distance between them. “I take it you’re aware that you’ve been ferrying some fairly sought after individuals.”
“I heard about the dustup at the airport last night. You’ve gotta understand, though, I’m just a glorified courier. Those guys came to me through an American company that does lots of business here.”
“We know all about them,” Stanley said of Alice Rutherford’s NSA unit, which had operated under the cover of a Maryland-based insurance agency and obviously hadn’t placed background checks for charter pilots high on their priority list. “I want to let you in on something that the CIA has learned: John Townsend Bream is a thirty-nine-year-old resident patient at the Four Oaks mental institution in Tunica, Mississippi. Has been for nine years.”
Bream stared across the table in openmouthed wonder. “So you’re saying I’m a mental patient in Mississippi and, what, that I’m just imagining that I’m in Martinique?”
“That’s possible. It’s also possible that you assumed the identity of someone who wouldn’t be going anywhere …”
Bream scowled. “Maybe the mental patient assumed my identity-”
“If I were you, I’d deny everything too,” Stanley said.
“Don’t worry, we’re not here about that,” Hadley added.
“Not necessarily.” Stanley let a beat of silence underline the threat. “If you’ll help us locate your two passengers, J. T., your only involvement in this case will be collecting the ten-thousand-euro reward for their arrest
.” In fact, Stanley expected Bream, or whoever he was, to wind up penniless in a federal penitentiary.
“Do you have any idea where they are?” Hadley asked.
Bream sighed wistfully. “I wish I did.”
Stanley didn’t believe him. “How about your best guess?”
“The only unusual part of the deal is they’re planning on bringing back some supersize cargo. I’m supposed to find a bird with an extra-large cargo door. But that’s okay. I once had a client who bought a statue in Athens and flew it back to Palm Be-”
Hadley cut in. “Do you have a rendezvous time or place?”
“They’re gonna call me as soon as they find whatever it is they’re looking for. They’ve got me booked for the whole week.” Bream broke free of Stanley’s stare, shifting his focus to the copper teakettle.
Hadley set her BlackBerry on the table and cupped her right knee, signaling to Stanley her belief that the pilot was dissembling. Stanley twisted his wedding ring, indicating his agreement.
The BlackBerry vibrated, rattling against the table. Hadley snatched it up.
“Well, how about that?” She relayed the text message. “Lesser and Ramirez have been captured at sea by the Royal St. Lucia Police Force and are on the way to a detention center.”
Bream grinned. “Well, it’s a good thing you came to see me, isn’t it?”
33
The forty-foot Royal St. Lucia Police cutter chugged toward a remote island known as Detention III, a dismal, rocky place, apparently immune to vegetation, and so tiny that the architects had had no choice but to build up: The four-story brick prison stood at a slight incline. Painted battleship gray, it was part tenement house, part lighthouse, surrounded by two rings of twenty-foot-high electrified wire fencing and, in the event of a power outage perhaps, an outer fence topped with coils of old-school razor wire.
Drummond was handcuffed to a long bench in the police cutter’s stern. If he had a plan, he had to have dreamed it up, literally, while napping during the hour or so since their capture. Escape seemed impossible to Charlie, who was handcuffed to the other end of the bench.
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