****
I pushed through revolving doors and felt a blast of alpine air that can only be created in the South Florida summer heat by industrial-size air conditioners fed by a nearby nuclear power plant. It was a welcome shock to be back in the first-world climate-control bubble. And a major bubble it was, inside the sprawling Fontainebleau complex. When had I last enjoyed such major-league air conditioning? Months ago, before the Bahamas, but I couldn’t remember when or where. Probably in the Dominican Republic, in a bank or a government office.
The lobby spread before me in many directions. Immediately inside the revolving doors was a security area, theoretically to assure our mutual safety by checking new arrivals for dangerous contraband. After passing through a metal detection portal, I was given a secondary wanding of my belt buckle by a uniformed Fontainebleau security guard. My leather valise was opened and given a cursory look at an inspection table, and only then I was admitted into the lobby proper. Art and architecture in every direction. Intricate black-and-white marble floors. Every wall, every ceiling, every surface was decorated with artwork, from museum-quality sculptures to furniture fit for royalty—or at least for movie stars and other celebrities.
I wished Victor was with me. When he wanted to, Doctor Aleman oozed European higher education and academic purpose. He had worked for NGOs, nongovernmental organizations, as a physician, so he could blend well among this crowd if he chose to. But I needed him to help guard Rebel Yell and be ready to move it with Tran’s help, if necessary. Safely moving the sixty-footer from port to port was a two-man job for anyone other than me.
Tasteful signs on easels and wall mounts directed me to the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Conference check-in tables. I scanned the lobby for other symposium attendees, found some by their badges, and angled past them for a closer look. Relief. My own bootlegged paper badges appeared to be identical to the real McCoy, but the clear plastic sleeves Sharon and Mike had scrounged up were not the same as the ones being issued here. I drifted back toward the check-in table. A stream of new arrivals kept two middle-aged women busy logging names onto a pair of computers, and then printing and handing out the newly minted badges.
On the end of the table was a basket full of empty plastic sleeves with silver spring clips at the top. I slipped two of them into a conference brochure, easy sleight-of-hand, and headed for the lobby men’s room. The bathroom was fifty feet of matched marble parquet floors and hand-painted tiles, befitting the elites who could pay the three-thousand-dollars-a-night tariff for a single bed in the Fontainebleau.
Like all good spies, I did my private tradecraft behind a closed stall door in the men’s room. Kelly had printed my two badges with an extra-wide colored border, because she couldn’t be certain of the exact dimensions of the badge holders. I had to fold the blue edges back just a bit in order to make the paper fit exactly. I held my two badges side by side: Malcolm Garret, meet Marcus Garnet. Since Garret was registered, I clipped his badge onto my lapel and put Garnet into my jacket pocket for later.
While washing up at the marble sink, I studied myself in the mirror. A little thumb-smear of scar-hiding foundation from a miniature tube, over both cheekbones for balance, and then my lens-changing glasses went back on. Richard Prechter might conceivably recognize me from our almost-meeting at the party in George Town the week before, when he had first noticed Cori. And Trevor Ridley had both seen me up close and personal and heard my voice. But with my oversize metal-framed glasses and my hair gelled and combed up and back, they would probably not make the connection as long as I didn’t get too close or do much talking around them.
I didn’t know how much of a handicap this would be, because I had not yet come up with a line of attack, a plan of action or even a half-baked scheme for this conference. And I was taking a risk even in trying to get this close to them. The risk was that I’d be recognized and they would be alerted and take off and I’d never see Cori again. Tonight after dark I’d probably be swimming up to Prechter’s property, but I couldn’t spend the day until then just waiting. I had to make things happen, like a billiard player breaking a rack of balls. At the moment of the break there’s no plan about sending exactly what ball into which pocket. You have to make your own luck, so you give that cue ball a good hard smack.
There was no need to ask for directions to the RASE Conference in the hotel’s multi-acre convention center. More posters on easels pointed the way with arrows. I walked with a crowd of new arrivals down a long, curving corridor that was an extension of the hotel lobby, up a bank of escalators, and then it was just a short walk down the next broad corridor. Busy, jolly men and women in suits and suit-dresses were entering and exiting an opening that was at least four doors wide. There were more open doors further down the corridor, for other parts of the conference. People were moving about singly, doubly and in little squads. The attendees were split about equally between genders, average age a bit under forty.
A pair of hotel security guards stood by the primary entrance to the main exhibition hall. They were wearing maroon jackets with embroidered Fontainebleau crests, any defensive hardware concealed. Nobody passing by the guards ahead of me was producing ID. This relieved a bit of my anxiety, because I had no idea if the fake Oregon driver’s license provided by Kelly would pass inspection.
One of the guards had an electronic scanner that could presumably check the bar codes on our badges, but he held it loosely down by his side. He was joking with his buddy in Spanish and only glanced at my counterfeit badge as I passed him. Not one person around me was given a hard or even a doubtful look. We conference attendees all wore freshly printed badges in shiny plastic holders, so obviously we needed no further screening. These two guards were just props, providing only false security. The hotel was putting on a minimum-wage show for the rubes while impressing not one genuine thief or terrorist.
My first destination inside the massive hall was the nearest men’s room, along the wall to the left. I ducked into my second bathroom stall since entering the Fontainebleau, and Malcolm Garret became Marcus Garnet. Thanks to Kelly Urbanzik, I was inside the target area with a ghost credential clipped to my jacket.
At a conference information kiosk I picked up a map indicating the locations of the various lecture halls, exhibit areas, meeting rooms, breakout sessions and media centers. A conference syllabus gave the schedules for each of the three days. Halfway down the first page my eyes locked on a single name. Richard H. Prechter, PhD, “Right-sizing Renewable Energy Solutions,” 11 a.m. in the Dazzle Room. All of the rooms in the convention center had shiny names like Dazzle, Sparkle, Glimmer and Glitter.
The main exhibition hall was the size of two football fields or more, with a ceiling high enough to throw the long bomb and a wall of glass overlooking the ocean at the far end. I’d been to some major trade shows and conventions. This was not as big as the national car, boat or gun shows, but what it lacked in sheer acreage it made up with a high-prestige factor for most of the exhibits. Corporate banners erected on towers enabled attendees to spot their must-sees from any part of the hall. I decided to make a circuit of the room on the outermost aisles to get the lay of the land and check all the exits.
The smaller exhibits occupied a minimum of twenty feet of table frontage on the aisles; the major corporate exhibits took up large blocks of floor space. The biggest were a hundred feet on a side. Giant television panels looped propaganda clips. Most of the major exhibits contained custom-painted prototype vehicles, boats, wind generators, solar arrays and any other gadgets related to renewable energy products. Most of the exhibits had hands-on demonstration models, where attendees could try a new tool or, by the miracle of virtual reality, see a concept put into action. The ambience of the hall was high-tech Disneyland.
Most of the sponsored exhibits were giving away gifts and knickknacks along with brochures, booklets and informative DVDs. I picked up a black canvas swag bag with a fairly innocuous logo printed on it. It was still factory-f
olded and, doubled over, slipped easily into my leather valise.
I continued scanning and found the green-and-yellow GORP banner, a Tidal Power Solutions sign not far away. For now I could see only their banners; their floor exhibits were still several aisles and rows of exhibits away.
Everyone was wearing a badge like mine, with different colors around the edges depending on whether they were attendees, vendors, exhibitors or sponsors. My attendee badge had a blue border. Exhibitors’ were green. Intermixed with the glossy corporate exhibits were some humbler booths manned by the nongovernmental organizations. I passed exhibits from groups with names like InterAction, C.U.R.E., EarthCare, Just Energy, and the World Modernizing Network. GORP and TPS were in the area of the hall that segued between other corporate sponsors and the nonprofit NGOs.
The Marine Corps was years behind me, but I was still in the surveillance and target acquisition business, cataloging faces, looking for patterns, sniffing the air-conditioned breeze. With my twenty-fifteen vision I was able to read names on badges from across an aisle. There were a high percentage of attractive young women helping to promote the corporate exhibits. Some might have been actual salaried employees of the companies, but many were bright-eyed models clearly hired for the convention to draw the attention of male visitors. At least half of the conference attendees seemed to be singletons like me, so I didn’t appear unusual in that regard.
Every twenty yards brought a complete reshuffle of the characters around me, some stationary, some walking opposite my direction of travel, some passing crossways at aisle intersections. Many organizations rejected suits and ties in favor of khakis and corporate-logo polo shirts. In general, the older crowd favored suits and the younger went casual. I had picked a happy middle, wearing khaki slacks and a blazer.
At the side of one of the larger exhibits I recognized a television documentary star, a blond female reporter well known to network audiences. She had her own area divided off with portable walls covered in mauve fabric. Some chairs, a few couches, and a podium. Framed art on the portable walls, which turned out to be photographs of her in dramatic journalistic action poses on every continent. I couldn’t recall her name offhand, but she went to lots of dangerous places where she usually had to wear either a safari jacket or a Kevlar flak vest. I walked past her and we even made eye contact above a small huddle of her fans. I remembered her name as soon as I saw it written across the ten-foot-tall cover mockup of her new book.
She was Becca Blakely, former intrepid ace reporter for one of the alphabet networks, then PBS, with Nat Geo and the Discovery Channel thrown in on the side. Those were résumé bullet points on a separate wallboard touting her bio. Up close, she looked older than I remembered. Well, perhaps it had been a while since I’d seen one of her television documentaries of politically correct derring-do. I guessed she was pushing fifty, but she was still striking. I mean, who could forget Becca Blakely? Honestly. Even on the downslope of her career, when her former cover-girl face had to be air-brushed for a book jacket.
In the hollow center of the Patagonia exhibit a couple about my age was unpacking a large plastic shipping crate. They could have been a brother and sister from Sweden, but according to the storyboard behind them they were from Colorado, USA, and they were married. They looked so similar that I thought maybe they were married and they were siblings; there weren’t many rules left regulating who could get married even before I left the States the last time. But I sure wasn’t going to ask that.
According to a display board, the handsome couple had biked, hiked and mostly kayaked around eighty percent of both of the American continents. A red line on a National Geographic map showed how much of their planned bi-continental circumnavigation had already had been completed. Their last stop had been in Newfoundland. All that remained undone was that tricky section across the top of Canada.
It seemed as if they were soliciting donations, in a roundabout way, for a foundation they had created for polar research and a few other causes. Their yellow sea kayak, a big two-seater expedition model with a rudder, was suspended from ropes behind their table. It looked pretty good for having come so far, but maybe it was a replacement. Patagonia and the other companies sponsoring the expedition probably shipped them new kayaks from time to time. Sure seemed fair to me.
I would have liked to stop for a chance to have a private chat with them, because they would have been a great source of information about some less-known ports in Central and South America. Nobody knows the harbors like sea kayakers, who have to struggle for every mile. Firsthand information sometimes leads to real nuggets and gems of information that can be found no other way. In the past we might even have crossed wakes at some point. If we had, then I might have been able play the name game with them and trade useful contacts for a future day far down the ocean highway. But they were busy trying to set up their exhibit and I left them to their work.
My path was a spiral box closing in on the GORP and TPS exhibits, using their tower-suspended banners as my pivot. My main concern was running headlong into Trevor Ridley. Just a few days before, we had been almost nose-to-nose and it was unlikely that he had forgotten the encounter. I wondered if his eyesight was as good as mine. It sometimes came down to that. My excellent vision was a great advantage in such a densely packed room teeming with persons moving in all directions at once. I could easily recognize faces at well over a hundred feet. If I didn’t want someone to get an equally good look at me, I could turn away and disappear before I came into their focal range.
I turned again at the end of a long aisle, another row closer to the big GORP sign. The aisles in the exhibit hall were a dozen feet wide and carpeted. Many conference attendees dragged along little wheeled crates to fill with handouts, catalogs, computer discs, product samples and promotional souvenirs.
I was scanning through the crowds and exhibits searching for Trevor Ridley and Richard Prechter. I knew Prechter would be there; he was giving a speech at eleven in an adjoining room. Ridley was another matter. Did he accompany Prechter ashore on these corporate gigs? Was the top of his job description personal bodyguard or boat captain? Was Ridley at this moment with Cori in the hidden girl-smuggling compartment on Topaz while I was three miles away pursuing his boss at a convention?
And what would I do when I finally saw Prechter? How close should I try to get to him? My experience advised me to keep him at the edge of my recognition distance until I analyzed the people orbiting around him. Identify the muscle, the money, the brains, the underbosses, the gofers. Then find an approachable weak link in Prechter’s circle and turn him into an unwitting go-between for a plausible approach. That was my usual way, but it took time and patience to find a weak sheep on the fringe of the target’s herd with a flaw that could be turned to my advantage. Time I didn’t have. I had to get bad-breath close to my enemies, and I had to do it today. I had to get to Cori before the worst happened to her, even if I needed to shake some trees and take some risks.
But walking up to Richard Prechter, PhD and CEO, and politely asking him to release Cori Vargas was not going to succeed, no matter my charm or conversational prowess. I have been called glib. But attempting a citizen’s arrest or any other outlandish idiocy would result in my being arrested as a lunatic within minutes. Tasered on the floor and handcuffed was not where I wanted to be. Dan Kilmer in custody would not be much help to Cori Vargas hidden aboard Topaz or anyplace else. Going to the police to tell my bizarre tale and file a complaint against a wealthy pillar of the community would be equally futile in a county where graffiti taggers were fair game for police death squads. The law enforcement approach would end with me detained instead of my nemesis, and then maybe a quick trip to the Glades or offshore to deep water. Between the alligators and the sharks, disposing of unwanted bodies was never much of a problem in South Florida.
10
At last I was on the GORP aisle. They took up about seventy feet of a hundred-foot block, their affiliate Tidal Power Systems t
he rest. The rectangular green-and-yellow GORP logo was repeated in flashing overhead signs and free glowing lapel buttons. Their space had the requisite jumbotron wide-screen televisions, invention prototypes and product demonstrators. A single look across their quarter acre of floor space was enough to convince you that GORP affiliates were doing great things for humanity on every continent.
Tucked almost out of sight behind the tables and prototypes and product displays was a private meeting room a dozen feet on a side. Most of the major corporations had similar prefab rooms inside their territories. That’s where the alpha dogs huddled together to make the big deals. Or where a mark could be taken for a financial bloodletting, out of the sight of witnesses.
Kuboka Solar Industries occupied the first fifty feet of the aisle across from GORP. Two long and narrow waist-high tables fronted their exhibit on the aisle. A gap in the middle was their sally port, allowing Kuboka reps out and selected visitors from the aisle in. On the other side of the tables a half-dozen KSI representatives stood ready to field questions from the passersby who paused to study brochures, watch televised promotions, snag freebies and gaze longingly upon solar panels as big as garage doors.
Three of the KSI reps were Asian men in identical dark suits. The other three exhibitors were American, I guessed at a glance. A blond female rep stood across their table from a pair of pale, pudgy men in their fifties who were speaking a foreign tongue I could narrow down only to Eastern European. One of them was translating for the other. The blond rep seemed eager to punt them along to someone who could speak their language. When the two men looked where she pointed toward an Asian KSI rep, she sidestepped away from them and stopped opposite me.
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