Castro Directive

by Mertz, Stephen

  "Just twice. That's all."

  "You come by yourself?"

  "I was coming with a friend, another teacher, but she canceled out at the last minute."

  "Where'd you learn your Spanish?" he asked.

  "Jeez, you got a lot of questions. I spent a couple of summers in Guatemala and Mexico. Where'd you learn yours?"

  "I've traveled quite a bit in Latin America. In fact, I used to own a travel agency and lead tour groups."

  "Sounds interesting."

  "To a point. I'd never go on a tour myself," he grinned. "It's not my idea of what travel is about."

  She appraised him for a long moment, a slight smile on her lips. "I think most Americans are wary about traveling in Latin America."

  "Of course they are."

  She gave him a puzzled look. "So why did you lead trips there?"

  "The unknown factor, I guess. You never know what to expect, even on a guided tour. In Bogota, for instance, sometimes you check your luggage at the airport, then instead of boarding the plane you end up in a basement, and there's your luggage going around the carousel as if you'd just arrived. But you're trying to leave."

  "Why do they do that?"

  "Native customs," he said dryly. "To search for drugs."

  "I bet your clients loved that kind of treatment."

  "I tried to instill in them the idea that it was all part of the adventure. I'd warn them in advance that on this tour, they would be travelers, not tourists."

  She laughed. "I guess tonight I feel more like a traveler than a tourist."

  I bet you do, Pierce thought. A half-formed idea about Monica was slowly taking shape in the back of his mind; a sculpture being carved from stone.

  "You still lead tours?" she asked a while later, after their dinners had arrived.

  "I sold my travel agency a few years ago, started a new profession."

  While they ate, Monica asked him one question after another about his detective work. She seemed fascinated, even though he emphatically told her the work usually wasn't exciting, or even interesting.

  "I never realized that auto manufacturers hired detectives," she said. "What would you do if you found out the car company was at fault?"

  "Then my job would be to limit the damage as much as possible. You look at the claimant's driving record, find out whether he or she ever sued anyone before—anything that might bring about some doubts in the minds of the jurors."

  Monica swallowed a mouthful of spaghetti. "Isn't that kind of like working for the wrong side?"

  "Even confessed murderers deserve defense attorneys. It's sort of the same thing."

  "How did you get involved with car manufacturers?"

  "My old college roommate from Columbia University grew up to be rich and influential. He helped me out. I'm sure you've heard of him. Raymond Andrews."

  "You're kidding. The movie producer?"

  Pierce didn't think of Andrews as a movie producer, although he certainly was one. "Yeah, that among other things. He's got a lot of connections."

  She looked impressed. "Are you two good friends? I mean, can you call him up and say, 'Hey, Ray, let's do lunch,' or whatever?"

  Pierce was tempted to say Yeah, sure, he and Andrews were buddies. Instead, he told her the truth. "Not really. Especially not lately. You see, I took a consumer case against a car manufacturer. Word got around, and all the car companies dropped me. I'm sure Ray knows about it. He probably thinks I'm an idiot."

  Monica nodded. "That's too bad you lost the business. But you're not an idiot and I wouldn't worry about what Ray thinks."

  After they finished dinner, Pierce walked Monica to the Cardoza. She stopped outside the lobby and turned to him. The neon light from the hotel sign accented her high cheekbones and her long, graceful neck. Her body was angular, but feminine. Appealingly so, he thought. Her blue eyes were inquiring, but there was also a wariness about her.

  "Thanks for going to dinner with me. I hate eating alone." As she spoke, she nervously fiddled with the crystal pendant that hung from a gold chain about her neck.

  "My pleasure. Is that quartz?"

  "Rose quartz. You like it?"

  "I noticed it at dinner. It's nice."

  "You believe in crystal power, Nick?"

  He shrugged. "It seems to keep my watch running on time, but I'm still usually late."

  "Did you know that if you send out loving vibrations to a crystal, it will respond in kind, enhancing your love?" Pierce reached out, stroked the crystal, touching her hand and neck as he did. "I didn't know that."

  Monica smiled, took a step back. "I better go. Thanks again. It was nice."

  "Good night."

  Pierce watched her cross the lobby and head for the elevator. As soon as the elevator door closed behind her, he crossed to the beach side of Ocean Drive. He took in a deep breath of night air, gazed at the moonlight reflecting off the Atlantic.

  After a moment, he leaned against a palm tree, opened his camera bag. He kept his eye on the hotel as he fixed his zoom lens onto the camera body, then put it away. He lowered the bag to the ground and turned his full attention to the hotel. He didn't have to wait long. A couple of minutes later, he saw Monica retrace her steps across the lobby and leave. He wasn't surprised.

  Her story didn't ring true to him. He'd realized it when she'd slipped up and said she knew that the Chinese restaurant he'd mentioned was in the Grove. The place had been in Little Havana for years, and had reopened in the Grove only a couple of months ago. He didn't have any idea why she would lie to him, but now he was curious. He wanted to know who she was.

  She headed away from the beach, walking at a swift pace. Pierce trailed well behind her, walking on the opposite side of the street. It was still before midnight; plenty of cars and people were around to make it easy for him to remain inconspicuous. He had an idea where she would lead him, and he was right. When she neared the Jack of Clubs, she approached a white VW Cabriolet, unlocked the door, and slid behind the wheel.

  Pierce hurried ahead another hundred feet, unlatching the strap on his camera bag as he ran. He ducked inside a doorway a half a block away from the car. Dropping down on one knee, he took out his camera and pulled out the zoom lens to its full extent.

  As the car started and the lights came on, he focused on the license plate. He lowered the camera and watched the car pull away. He wouldn't have any trouble remembering what he'd read. Monica had a personalized license plate: MAYA-2.

  Chapter 6

  In the dream, the crystal skull rested in the middle of a table. He was seated on one side of it, Monica on the other. She was dressed like a gypsy and stared intently into the skull, seeking to divine something. The jaws of the skull were moving, speaking. What it said was important, but Pierce couldn't quite hear, couldn't understand.

  Suddenly Monica's hand and arm were sliding into the skull's mouth; it was devouring her. He grabbed her other arm and pulled. But the mouth kept swallowing her, and suddenly the jaws clamped onto his own hand and he was being dragged down after her.

  The peal of the phone punctured the dream; the reality hissed out of it and he rolled over, blinking hard against the light. He patted the table until he found the receiver and answered in a gravelly voice.

  "Good morning, Nicholas."

  The voice was cheery and familiar, but Pierce couldn't place it.

  "It's Ray Andrews. Hope I didn't wake you."

  He cleared his throat, sat up. "Ray, hello. No, it's okay." He rubbed his face, trying to clear the sleep from his head. A vague memory of his dream, something about the crystal skull, jumbled together with the woman he'd met, tracked across his mind.

  "You sure?"

  He looked over at the clock on his bed stand, saw it was almost eight-thirty. "It's time I got up."

  "How are you feeling? I read about what happened to you."

  "I'm okay, Ray. Just a lump on the head. Appreciate your concern."

  "I'm glad you're all right, because we
need to get together as soon as possible."

  Pierce cleared his throat again. "What's up?"

  "I'm the one who hired you."

  An hour later, Pierce was crossing the MacArthur Causeway when traffic slowed to a stop as the drawbridge rose. He knew he'd be stuck for several minutes, suspended above Biscayne Bay. He shifted into neutral and pulled up the emergency brake. He lowered the back of his seat a notch and gazed out over the aquamarine bay. He saw in the distance the vague outline of the Rickenbacker Causeway, which he would take to reach Key Biscayne, where he was to meet Andrews.

  His front pocket bulged from the roll of cash. Andrews hadn't asked about the money, but a couple of grand was nothing to him; the man was a multimillionaire. But Pierce was still going to give it back. He didn't like being indebted to anyone, especially Andrews. After all, he was hardly as naive as he'd been when he'd met the man.

  That had been the summer of his sophomore year at Columbia. He'd answered an ad in the student newspaper that had said: "Help wanted, international travel, Spanish required." The telephone number had been Andrews'. It hadn't taken Pierce long to figure out that the job involved being an accessory to an international marijuana smuggling scheme, and at first he'd wanted nothing to do with it. But Andrews had convinced him that he would act only as an intermediary, setting up the time and place of exchanges, delivering messages. For Pierce, no money and no drugs 'were involved.

  The summer job had meant four trips to Santa Marta, Colombia, and had earned him $3,200 tax free. That fall, he and Andrews had gotten an apartment together. Those days had been a time of almost childlike innocence, when drugs were new and mysteriously mind-expanding, instead of mind-destroying; when only the cops carried guns; when cocaine was only a rumor; and when those in the business lived by the countercultural motto: You go to be honest to live outside the law.

  Andrews had majored in business and philosophy and had continued operating his importation and distribution network while attending classes. He'd reaped windfall profits from his cannabis connections, and by the end of the academic year he was already starting to invest his profits in legitimate businesses, some of them small, high-risk, high-tech ventures involving the manufacture of what was then a virtually unknown product called the microchip.

  Pierce remembered Andrews as generous, but obsessed with amassing wealth. He'd once confided to Pierce that it was a mystery to him why so many of their friends seemed ambivalent about seeking their own pots of gold. Pierce knew that Andrews considered him one of them, and that Andrews would soon move on to a new circle of friends.

  Maybe it was his unstable childhood that had provoked the search for quick wealth. He remembered Andrews telling him that he was lucky to have grown up with a father who came home from work every day and a mother who stayed at home to raise the family. Andrews's memories were of a father who was in the air force and a mother who worked in a mill. His mother, he'd once told Pierce, had been obsessed with her fading youth and had started drinking after his father walked out for good. By age ten, Andrews was living in the homes of relatives and family friends, and by thirteen he was working his first job after school each day.

  The next fall, his senior year, Pierce saw less and less of his former roommate. Andrews arrived on campus driving a new Porsche he'd paid for with cash, and he no longer needed to share the rent with anyone. A couple of years after graduation, Pierce saw an article in Esquire listing Raymond Andrews as one of the top twenty-five young millionaires in America. There was little doubt at that point that his old roommate's ambitions were quickly being fulfilled, and that he was no longer relying on New York pot smokers.

  Over the years, he'd read about Andrews' success in commodities and foreign currency investments. He'd financed two blockbuster movies and others that had fared well. He had been president and major stockholder of World Cable Network before selling his interest and buying an airline which he'd taken from insolvency to prosperity in three years, renaming it Tropic Air. He owned a real estate development company, large land holdings, restaurants, a shopping mall, and God knew what else. He was a financial whiz, worth more than three hundred million . . . and counting. But he was much more than just another wealthy, successful businessman. He considered himself a man of vision, one who saw a future in which mankind emerges from conflict and chaos.

  Pierce didn't see Andrews in person for almost fifteen years. Then suddenly one day he'd received an engraved invitation to the dedication of the new headquarters of Tropic Air in Miami. He and Tina were still married, and she'd been stunned to find out that he knew Andrews, that they'd been roommates.

  He remembered Andrews speaking from a platform in front of the new building. He was in his element, and charisma emanated from him like a hypnotic scent. It was more than his handsome face, the authority in his voice, or his demeanor. Andrews was born to galvanize a crowd. He commanded your attention, made you feel as if he were talking to you and only you and that he was putting into words what you had been thinking yourself. Here was a man, you thought, who could not only put this vision of a better world into words, but who had the ability to carry it out. Even Pierce, who knew him like no one else in the crowd, had been caught up in the talk that day.

  "The course I will follow from this day on will be dedicated to building a peaceful and prosperous world, a world community. Some say why bother, enjoy your wealth. Others say, nothing can be done; the tide of the times is washing us over the edge of the world into oblivion, the end of history.

  "But I say that is the flat-world vision. And I see the world and mankind as multidimensional. With proper guidance to avoid the inevitable pitfalls, we are headed into an holistic future where mankind prospers in a vision larger than the ordinary. In science as well as society, new paradigms, or visions of reality, are emerging. Indeed, the era of the New Enlightenment is almost upon us. Of course, we may see instances of chaos as our vision shifts. But keep in mind that no system can be completely understood by the properties of its parts. I promise you that through it all, the power of the vision, the dynamics of the whole, will radiate through the darkness."

  Andrews stepped down from the podium and was immediately surrounded by a throng of reporters and admirers. On the edge of the crowd, Tina urged Pierce to approach him. "Go say hi to him, Nicky. He must want to see you."

  "He probably won't even recognize me."

  "Of course he will."

  Pierce made his way through the crowd with Tina behind him. He wasn't sure why, but he felt ambivalent about talking to Andrews. When he was within a few feet of him, he saw a hulking man who looked like a professional wrestler and realized that it was Andrews's bodyguard.

  He ignored the man's cold stare and after a moment caught Andrews's eye. "Hello, Ray."

  Andrews looked blankly at him a moment, then his face lit up, and he grinned broadly. "Nicholas Pierce. Great to see you. Hang on a minute, will you?"

  He greeted several more people, told them to help themselves to the food and drinks that were being served from long tables on the lawn. Then he excused himself, and motioned for Pierce to follow him. Pierce took Tina by the hand and noticed that the bodyguard stayed close to Andrews.

  They stopped near a tall, attractive blond woman, and Andrews introduced her as his wife, Ginger. "Hon, Nicholas is an old college friend, and I bet this is—"

  "Tina, my wife," Pierce finished.

  "Mr. Andrews, it is so wonderful to meet you. I am a great admirer, and I did not believe it when Nick received your invitation. He never told me you were friends."

  Andrews turned to Tina, looked at her as if no one else existed. His eyes glistened, his toothy smile, brilliant, affable. At close range, Andrews permeated a sense of vitality, enthusiasm, an undeniable charm. He took Tina's hand, leaned into the introduction giving her a full second of his presence. His voice was smooth as silk. "Very nice, nice to meet you. Nick always had a wonderful eye for beauty," he confided. "I see that attribute of his has only impr
oved with time. You're lovely."

  Tina was mesmerized as if Andrews were a snake charmer and she the captivated cobra. She was wide-eyed, dumbfounded. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. Finally, she blurted, "Thank you."

  He turned to Pierce as Tina exchanged a few words with Ginger. "We've been out of touch a long time. I happened to see a list of private investigators working in South Florida and saw your name. When I verified that it was you, I couldn't resist sending you an invitation."

  Unless Andrews had changed, he didn't simply invite him for the hell of it. There was a reason. "Well, I work as a P.I. only part-time right now. I own a travel agency."

  "It is the child in him," Tina interjected. "I keep telling him to stay with the travel business. But his mind wanders."

  Andrews nodded, laid a hand on Pierce's shoulder.

  "Same old Nicholas. Listen, I have to go, but I wanted to mention to you that I have a friend in the auto industry who's looking for a reliable detective to investigate insurance claims in South Florida. If you're interested, I'll recommend you."

  The bridge lowered, and traffic was moving again. In the aftermath of that conversation with his old roommate, Pierce's life had shifted from the travel industry to investigations. Within months his income had doubled, and after a year he was taking cases from several auto manufacturers. Andrews had called on occasion to ask him how it was going, and more than once Pierce had wondered if he was being primed for an assignment. But then he'd taken Gibby's case, and he hadn't heard a word from Andrews in more than a year. Not until this morning.

  Pierce crossed downtown to the Rickenbacker, where he accelerated back across the bay. He quickly passed through Virginia Key and drove onto Key Biscayne, the verdant stronghold of the wealthy. In spite of the pricey real estate, almost half of the island was dedicated to parks covered with banyans, palms, and wild growths of lush vegetation. Most of the remainder was claimed by mansions and million-dollar condominiums.

  He followed Crandon Boulevard, passing a golf course and a small shopping district. The road narrowed as he motored through quiet, tree-lined residential streets. Suddenly, ahead of him, he saw the gate to Cape Florida State Park and realized he'd missed the turn. He backtracked at fifteen miles an hour until he found Mimosa Lane. Andrews lived at the end of it, on the beach—or more precisely, above the beach. He pulled up to a guard booth at the entrance to the high rise and told its uniformed caretaker who he was visiting.