Castigo Cay

by Matthew Bracken

  “Okay, Mr. Bloomfield, why is your agency interested in Dan Kilmer?” He was at least twenty years my senior, so I mistered him.

  “Not the whole agency, that’s a very big organization. Just my department.”

  “So, what does your department want?”

  “I won’t bullshit you, Dan. We’re meeting today because you could be an asset to us. But it wouldn’t be a one-way arrangement. It would be quid pro quo all the way.”

  Now he had moved to calling me by my given name. To check my reaction? “How do you know who I am?”

  “Hmm…how indeed. Believe it or not, Dan, you have some fans in my department. Especially among a few of the, uh, females. Can’t call them ladies anymore, or girls, God forbid. They might take offense. Anyway, they seem to find your case interesting. They passed their interest along to me, and then I became interested as well—but for different reasons, I’m sure.”

  “How the hell would they even know me?”

  “It’s simple, really. Digital photographs are forever, Dan. Especially the ones zipping between this or that country of interest. Our programs are very good at skimming off the cream of the internet traffic. Photos and everything else. Data-mining, or whatever the term of art is today. Some of the girls in my office say you take a good photograph. But that’s not why I’m talking to you. In fact, making contact with you here today was entirely my decision. I was already scheduled to attend the conference. Meeting you now is just serendipity.”

  Serendipity, my ass. Serendipity didn’t happen in my universe, not when some spook walks up and blows through my cover like a bullet through smoke. Coincidences like that were enemy action until proven otherwise. The only thing I knew was what his name was not. His name was not Frank Bloomfield, and Southern Maritime Associates was either wholly fictitious or a front company. I gazed out across the vast room from my corner seat by the window wall, looking for other interested parties looking back at me, but didn’t notice anyone.

  “Dan, I’ve studied your record. Your military record, and later. One semester at Oregon. Then the boat thing. You’ve been around, so we can skip the shadowboxing. I believe you can be an asset to us, and you’ll be helping your country and yourself at the same time. I want you on the team, on a contract basis.”

  “On the team? Except you won’t tell me what team you’re playing for. So who else is on the team, Frank? Are they here today? Don’t worry; I’ll skip the shadowboxing too. Let’s cut right to my end. What’s my part of the quid pro quo? Tell me that first.”

  “Well, for starters, we can make the IRS lose interest in you.”

  “And why should the IRS care about me? I don’t have any money.”

  He chuckled softly. “When did that ever matter to the IRS?”

  “You can make the IRS lose interest in me? Or you will?”

  “Let’s just say we have a lot of influence over there.”

  “But you can’t promise anything. Frank, that’s known as buying a pig in a poke, and that’s what idiots do.”

  “Yet here we are, are we not?” There was an arched eyebrow and that sardonic smile again. “You’re not charged with anything, Dan, so it’s not an immunity situation. I don’t work for the DOJ and I could care less about your tax problems, but we do have influence.”

  Thinly veiled threats from the world’s biggest protection racket. “Am I free to walk out of here, right now?”

  “Of course you are. It’s still a free country…more or less. But you never know. You might be arrested for tax evasion down the block. Or for entering the country illegally. Who knows what might happen? It’s your call. But I think you should hear me out.”

  I stared at him and he stared back, no smile on his face. He was holding all the cards, and I hadn’t even figured out the game.

  “Okay, I’m still listening.”

  “We have a little maritime operation lined up, but somebody dropped out and we need a new man for the job. This operation’s not even a stretch for you, and you’d be helping your country at the same time.”

  I slowly shook my head no. “Frank, I’ve heard this pitch before. Usually it turns out the real cargo is dope or guns. I don’t play that game.”

  “This operation is a walk in the park. It’s a simple beach extraction of a willing party from a low-threat environment. In and out. Nothing to it. We just don’t have anybody local who can do it on short notice. Not the way we want to do it: low profile.”

  “And you won’t know me if it goes south.”

  “Why would it go south? This job is a piece of cake. We just don’t have anybody in the area available on short notice who can do it the way you can. No airport videos, no credit card records, no phone records. No signature at all. An over-the-horizon job. In and out. One night, finished and gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Not far. The Caribbean.”

  “Cuba?”

  “I can’t be more specific until I know you’re on board.”

  “So let’s say I do this simple beach extraction, and it goes according to plan. Then the next thing you know I’ll be meeting some square-jawed guys who are coming onto my boat to do a little sneaky-Pete work for Uncle Sam. Then it’ll turn out that they outrank me and I can’t refuse their orders. Then I’m not the skipper anymore, I’m just another hired hand. I’m back in somebody else’s chain of command. I’m sorry, Frank, but I don’t work for other people anymore. Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Once you know the whole story, you’ll want to help. You’ve done this type of job plenty of times to…help people. It’s the kind of thing you’d do on your own, it really is.”

  “Oh, I seriously doubt that.”

  “Hear me out. Let me tell you the whole situation. But not here. We can do dinner. Someplace nice. Then at dinner—”

  “I don’t want to hear the whole situation, Frank.” I started to get up.

  He touched my knee briefly, a plea to remain. “Hear me out.”

  “You just said it’s still a free country.”

  His face tightened. “I’m not sure how free it is for people who sneak into the country without clearing Customs and then wear badges with false names to infiltrate closed events. The FBI would give you a rectal exam all the way up to your sinuses if they knew how you came to be here today. Then they’d ship what was left of you over to the IRS. I’d really hate for that to happen. I like you much better on the outside, sailing free. You can’t be an asset to my team if you’re locked up. You wouldn’t like it either.”

  He had me in a polite, fatherly choke hold, and we both knew it. I sighed, and half-turned to stare out at the ocean. A red tanker was working south, staying on the land side of the Gulf Stream to avoid the north-flowing current. My freedom was lying at anchor four hundred miles beyond that horizon.

  ****

  After a quiet period he said, “So, where’s the Donzi?”

  I tried to deadpan it. “What’s a Donzi?” I could only guess how much he knew about my visit to the country. My goal was to give away nothing for free or by accident, and then try to wriggle out of his unwanted embrace.

  “The black speedboat, Dan.”

  The Pantera wasn’t made by Donzi Marine, but that was an uncomfortably close guess. Some people called all of the small ocean racers with that profile Donzis. I wasn’t sure what Frank knew about boats, or my particular boat. And it was blue, not black, so they hadn’t gotten a very close look at it. I told him the literal truth. “I’ve never been on a Donzi in my life.”

  He didn’t press the issue, but tried a different approach. “Then how are you getting back to the Bahamas?”

  Just how much did he actually know? He hadn’t asked me how I was getting back to Great Exuma or Acklins Island. I guessed that he was just fishing for new information by throwing out pieces of what he did know. Interrogation tactics 101. The Bahamas were a thousand islands covering a million square miles, so he had a long way to go. “Who said I was going there?”

 
“Your other boat is there. The big one. Stop being foolish about this. Be realistic. We’re on the same side, even if you’re too stubborn to admit it.”

  It wasn’t that I was trying to gratuitously piss him off by being obtuse. I was just testing his desires against his limits. “Frank Bloomfield” hadn’t met me today with a backup team of feds all badging me. Or with a needle in the neck on the sidewalk, followed by sleepy time in a white van and waking up in a strange room surrounded by goons.

  This was a very gentle approach. Plenty of KY Jelly on the old bohica. Then we’d do dinner…and meet some other members of his team, or his department, or his agency. At dinner I’d see heartbreaking photographs of a muy simpatico family that desperately needed to be rescued from some godless hellhole of eternal torment. Almost certainly Frank genuinely did want something from me, something that I had to decide to give to him more or less freely. Hence the flowers and candy instead of brass knuckles and chains. At least before the first date.

  But to make it all come together and happen in Frank’s official bureaucratic world, I’d probably have to sign on a few dotted lines. Get fluttered on the polygraph box. Fill out endless forms and questionnaires for their background investigators. Then I’d exist somewhere on the official-unofficial spook employment continuum. But where on the continuum they said I existed and where I would actually be might be oceans apart. That’s just how these things worked. Other terms for “contract agent” were patsy and dupe. Kite and cutout were kinder expressions. I understood all of this, but I was still in Frank Bloomfield’s choke hold. I decided to move the conversation sideways.

  “Let me ask you something, just as a professional matter. Why me, why now? I don’t belong to any organizations, and I’m not political. I don’t even have a college degree. I’m nobody. So what put me on your radar today?”

  “It’s not complicated. You have a desirable skill set, local area knowledge and a boat that can go anywhere. Basically, you’re good at getting in and out of countries, and you’re already familiar with my department’s area of operations.”

  Skill set. Hadn’t heard that term in a while. That covered some ground. But what did he really want: my import/export skill set, or my previous stalking and sniping skill set? It might have been in Frank’s mind to recruit me for the former and then slide me over to the latter. Sure, I’d shoot some dirtbag who needed killing. But not on somebody else’s orders, for pay. I was all done with that.

  “That’s not what I meant, Frank. How did you find me here today? Give me a little advance on the quid pro quo. I try to keep up with the technology. I’d like to know what alarms I tripped. Call it a professional courtesy to tell me. A little honesty about how you found me today would make me more favorably inclined to believe we could ever work together on the same team.”

  He hesitated a few seconds. “Okay, why not? You were filmed by a federal law enforcement agency coming into Port Everglades, and your picture entered a facial recognition process. No action was taken then, it was just filed somewhere for cross-reference. You might say that your ‘interest quotient’ was low at that point. You’re not ‘wanted’ per se, and border protection is not our area of responsibility. But you might say we get to look over their shoulders, and our programs are more…selectively focused than theirs. You’ve been on one of my department’s watch lists, so last night our machine put a little asterisk next to your name. And then your face was spotted here today, in a conference with a restricted audience and a lot of distinguished guests, and, well, I guess the data-mining program did backflips and shot your name right onto a computer screen in my office. Then one of my girls texted me, and here we are. That’s how it works today. It’s basically automated. I was already here. You were just a bonus. Somebody I’ve wanted to meet for a long time.”

  “Serendipity.”

  He smiled broadly and clapped his hands down on his knees. “There it is.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  He put his hands up, dismayed, and shook his head. “But it’s the truth.”

  “It’s still bullshit.” I didn’t think it was complete BS, but I wanted to draw him out. I wanted to know how he’d found me so that I could nail those trapdoors shut.

  “Here, look. These were sent to me when I was texted.” He played with his phone and then handed it to me with nine thumbnail photos on top. I spread them open, one at a time. The Pantera, coming through the inlet at Port Everglades, seen from a low angle. A close-up of my profile and several quarter-shots, not hi-def but evidently usable by the face recognition programs. Or were they? With sunglasses and a ball cap pulled low, I wasn’t sure about that. Then a few pictures of me walking into the Fontainebleau and at their security table while my valise was checked. There were no shots of Kelly’s GTI—which did not mean they didn’t exist.

  And an hour later I’m talking to a spook in a gray suit. I handed him back his phone. There was no point in wondering if my voice was being recorded or if videos were being made. Those were simply givens. In a place like the Hotel Fontainebleau, if somebody wanted to film you, they could. Coming here was looking like a bigger mistake by the minute.

  “Now, Dan, while we’re speaking candidly, tell me…how did you wind up wearing somebody else’s badge today?”

  “Friend of a friend.” I wondered if Kelly’s GTI was already under surveillance, or if the gap in their coverage ran all the way from Port Everglades last night until I walked into this hotel complex today, as Frank’s pictures had implied.

  He smiled, seemingly accepting my reticence. He didn’t care about my badge; he just wanted me to agree to dinner, to move his sales pitch to the next level. He said, “Listen, personally I find it resourceful of you. I was just curious. I’d guess you hacked it online. That’s how we’d do it. Don’t worry, that kind of ingenuity is very highly regarded in my department. But the DHS and the FBI…let me tell you, they go ballistic over things like expats slipping back into the country and assuming false identities. So be careful. You can’t be useful to us if you wind up getting yourself arrested. You get dragged in by the DHS, and there’s nothing I can do for you after that. They have their own protocols to follow, and it can be a real meat grinder.”

  ****

  Frank was a likable man. After each of my little digs, he’d returned with another pleasant offer or suggestion. I found it difficult to keep my armor all the way up. I began to believe in his sincerity, a little, and that scared me more than anything else. I wasn’t buying a timeshare condo or a used car here. This was serious, like agreeing to work for the mob. Once in, never out. The handcuff ratchets worked one way: tighter.

  “So, besides getting the IRS off my case—I mean like getting my tax file permanently deleted, with guarantees in writing signed by real people with the proper authority—what else is in it for me? What about payment for my time and expenses, and so on? And I won’t ever use my own boat for anything operational.”

  “We can talk about that later. Let’s take it a step at a time. So, yes to dinner?” He had difficulty hiding his smile, probably believing that I was slowly caving in and taking the first step to ultimate agreement.

  “I’ll have to think about it, Frank. Maybe dinner. Maybe.” I had to give him a definite maybe to get out of his range. I didn’t want to meet any other federal agents ‘down the block’ after backhanding him with a firm refusal. But there was no way I was going to work for any part of any government. Never again. Not in this life, not on this planet.

  “I’ll take a maybe for now. I’m not in a position to make promises today anyway. It has to be kicked around, your status and compensation and so forth. Believe it or not, this initial meeting really was my idea. There’s every reason to think that the various parties will be favorably disposed, since I’ll be speaking on your behalf. I’ll contact you. What’s your number?”

  “I don’t have a number.” I stopped there. I hoped he had no way of detecting the phone in my pocket. I knew that every tiny detail about m
y life that I uttered to him would go into my master file somewhere. My opsec-minded goal was to break contact with him without telling him anything of significance he didn’t already know. My emotional, optimistic side wanted to tell him about a girl being held prisoner on a megayacht by a twisted millionaire just a few miles away. Quid pro quo could begin today. But I had just met this Frank Bloomfield. For all I knew, he was working for Richard Prechter, or a drug cartel, or a foreign intelligence service.

  “No cell phone? What, are you a technophobe or something?”

  My new phone was turned on, and I wondered if his smart phone had captured its number and contacts. There were some spooky smart phone apps for exactly that. We were sitting only a yard apart. I had even held his damn i-phone just a few inches from my own cell, with a mere layer of cloth separating them. Stupid! They might as well have been connected by a cable. I said, “I only hate the technology that lets you follow me around and listen to every damn word I say.”

  He ignored this comment and moved on. “Well, where are you staying? How do people get in touch with you?”

  “By VHF radio, mostly.”

  “Be serious, Dan.”

  “I am serious.”

  “We can find out.”

  “I know you can. So find out.” I wasn’t going to volunteer to put their collar around my neck. They’d have to work for it. Expend the resources. I guessed that even the CIA wouldn’t have unlimited manpower in South Florida, and they wouldn’t request help from the FBI or local law enforcement while stomping around inside one of the fifty states. Or did the CIA operate freely on American soil now?

  All the federal agencies try to give off an aura of omnipotence, which usually causes the subjects of their attention to roll over and comply with every demand. But in reality, assuming he was CIA, how big was Frank Bloomfield’s local office? Actual boots on the ground. How many chiefs, how many Indians? Enough troops to put a tail on me? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But physical surveillance meant less and less in the digital world, where most of us emitted a digital scent and left an electronic trail through the overlapping web of security cameras.