The Eurasian had come to the party on Richard Prechter’s dinghy. He had worked in tandem with Trevor Ridley while searching for me at the Fontainebleau. Prechter might have spotted me from the balcony of the mansion before I saw him come down to join the senator. Not good. Then the Eurasian had penetrated my danger radius unnoticed. Double not good.
Why had he left the dinghy? Prechter had probably sent him ashore to find me and get rid of me once and for all. But if the Eurasian was one of Prechter’s hired men, did he also have a working relationship with the senator’s bodyguards? Was he just hired muscle with tunnel vision, or did he have the savvy to network with the other security pros? Private hit man, or Homeland Security?
With this many VIPs present, there would be plenty of undercover bodyguards, not only the senator’s. Would the Eurasian enlist their help in trapping his boss’s stalker? Did I need to worry about evading only one shooter, or were three or even more after me? And I hadn’t forgotten that two off-duty but in-uniform police officers were guarding the only street exit from the property. Shit. Not good at all.
Escaping from multiple armed pursuers would be extremely difficult. I glanced behind and saw the tall, slim Eurasian slip from the crowd to follow me into the narrowing space between the house and the property wall. I had to make the choice easy for him. I wanted him to have no reason to feel that he needed backup from the senator’s bodyguards, the police or anybody else. From his point of view, enlisting their aid would mean elevating the incident to an official status that he could not stage-manage or control. Better to do this dirty job alone, I wanted him to think.
The left-side gate into the refuse containment area was open a foot. I slid through the gap into the darkness and then darted to the right. I peered out through a crack between planks and saw him ten yards away, screwing a suppressor onto the end of a black pistol. He held the pistol in his right hand, so I’d guessed correctly when I’d turned to the right inside the gate.
No one behind him could see him holding the pistol, and he must have felt confident of making an easy kill of a cornered, unarmed man. I drew my purloined knife and flattened myself against the fence on the far side of a vertical support timber. The Eurasian approached the gate carefully, grasped the handle with his left hand and pulled it wider, then jumped inside and covered the open space with his sweeping barrel.
After only a perfunctory glance to his right he swept his weapon in a rapid arc toward his left, toward the house. Right-handed shooters will move this way most of the time when entering a room, especially if the hinges are on the left side of an outward-opening door, as was the case here. Just like in blackjack and other games of chance, you play the odds. The stakes were higher in this contest, but the principle still holds, even when the game is CQB. Close Quarters Battle doesn’t get much closer.
In the darkness of the fenced trash area I saw a brilliant green laser dot shine on the side of the white-painted mansion. A half second later his shoulders and the laser dot swung back in my direction, but that was a quarter second too late. He held his pistol in a two-handed isosceles grip, too far from his body for the close work required in the dumpster corral. I charged into him before the muzzle of his suppressor reached me, sweeping both of his arms up and to the side and then going for his pistol with my left hand. A muffled shot discharged into the air. I grasped the top of the pistol behind the silencer while he tried to force its muzzle back down.
The next shot was close enough to my face to feel the pop of its subdued muzzle blast. This time my grip on top of his pistol kept the slide from returning all the way into battery, disrupting the feed cycle. I drove into him until we were chest to chest. Close enough to smell peppermint and garlic on his breath over the smell of the garbage. He was nearly as tall as I was, but my momentum carried us both toward the house just a few steps behind him.
A hundred feet beyond the fence, dozens of couples were dancing to a Tony Marcello hit and I was dancing with a killer in a dumpster corral. Unwilling to risk losing control of his pistol, he still had both hands on it. He finally wrenched it away from my left hand and tried to use it as a hammer. He needed enough open space to turn the suppressor-lengthened pistol toward me for another shot and was trying to bash me with it to back me off.
My left hand snaked around his neck, pulling him back in, head-butting close as we slammed then rolled against the side of the house. Our knees fought their own battle, jabbing upward while also protecting our groins. We were too close together for him to get much force behind his downward swings at the top of my head, but one impact from the butt of his pistol did strike like a hammer and my vision was lost as an instant wave of nausea washed over me.
The carving knife was already clutched in my right hand, now behind his back. Working only by feel, I stabbed him just beneath his back ribs while directing the eight-inch blade upward. Upward because I didn’t want to discover that his torso measured less than eight inches back to front while we were pressed together. I forced the blade in until my right fist was solidly jammed against his flank as I tried to fend off his continued blows to the top of my head with my other hand.
He inhaled suddenly with my knife’s thrust, his eyes and mouth gone wide, his body so rigid it was almost vibrating against me. I had plunged the long blade through his kidney area and up into his diaphragm. His eyes were as wide as eggs, shining at me in the moonlight. I used the knife’s handle as a lever to twist the long, thin blade inside his body, trying to sever his aorta and the other primary blood vessels descending from his heart. With the strain of engaging in mortal hand-to-hand combat, his heart kicked into overdrive and speeded up his demise. His last dose of adrenaline would do him no good.
His arms relaxed first, and then his entire body slumped against mine. The pistol fell to the ground. Our dance over, I turned and lowered him onto his back between the side of the house and the side of the dumpster. His eyes narrowed and went flat, his muscles slackened, and I was able to withdraw the blade.
From the time he entered the trash area until I stabbed him, only a few seconds of normal time had passed. But what a few seconds!
And I was still alive, man, I was still alive!
****
I closed the gate until it latched behind me, and then grasped the Eurasian by his ankles and dragged his body all the way behind the dumpster. The senator’s bodyguards or a caterer or anybody else might have opened the gate at any second, so there wasn’t time for even the quickest search of his body, not even for a wallet.
The Eurasian was bleeding surprisingly little, externally at least, but what he did bleed would be a vivid red if anyone came back here with a flashlight, or if there was a light to switch on once the party was over. I used the tip of my knife to take some folded newspapers from a recycling bin and spread them over his blood trail, shiny black in the moonlight reflecting off the white house. Newspapers scattered on the ground would be ignored during the party, but fresh spilled blood probably would not.
The lid of the dumpster was flipped open to make garbage runs easier for the caterers and the wait staff. I lifted his limp body beneath his shoulders and hips, slung him against the edge of the steel, and rolled him into the bin. It was already a third full, and only a man nearly as tall as me could look right over and down inside. The average Hispanic waiter would just heave trash over, not knowing or caring what lay below.
I spread more old newspapers over him. By the end of the party, with any luck, he’d be buried deeply under new trash and garbage. After a big blowout like this, Marcello’s staff was likely to call for the dumpster to be emptied the very next morning. There was a second wooden fence and another double gate for the truck that would come to empty the dumpster. The blood would be brown and unrecognizable by the time daylight returned. It would be hosed away with the rest of the greasy party mess. With any luck, in twenty-four hours the Eurasian would be sleeping in a landfill.
I kept his suppressed pistol; I might need it if anybody got in
my way while I was leaving North Sunset Isle. A compact laser the size of a square lipstick was fitted onto the rail beneath the barrel. I switched it off and jammed the pistol’s suppressor and barrel beneath my belt on the right side. I didn’t want the knife but I couldn’t leave it either, so its blade went under my belt on the left side.
I climbed up onto the side of the dumpster nearest the property wall, using only my fists and the sides of my hands, to avoid leaving bloody finger and hand prints. The dumpster elevated me high enough to reach the top of the property wall with just an easy jump. The rest of the technique had been hardwired into me on a thousand obstacle courses and Iraqi garden walls. I was extremely thankful that the top of the wall was smooth cement and not studded with broken glass set in mortar in the Latin American fashion.
When I dropped down, I expected no more than a ten-foot fall and was unprepared to crash into shrubbery that cracked and slashed at me until I came to a stop with my head at an awkward angle and my legs twisted around branches above me. I worked myself free and removed a few shrubbery fragments from uncomfortable places. But at least it was dark beneath the foliage on the other side of the wall from the loud party. No security lights came on, and no alarms shrieked. No sound of panting Rottweilers rushing over to play bite-the-intruder.
The carving knife was still beneath my belt on the left side. I checked for wounds, but it hadn’t even scratched me, hadn’t even torn my pants. It could just as easily have twisted around in my fall through the shrubbery and plunged into me. How ironic if a body had been found on either side of the wall, just yards apart, dead from the same blade! Tran Hung would just say it was a lucky knife, a very simple explanation and a hard one to refute. Lucky for me, anyway.
On the other side of the property wall, a greatly amplified Tony Marcello was singing a duet in Spanish with a Latina vocalist. I hugged the line of bushes at the base of the wall and trotted down to the water in a crouch, then slid into the waist-deep water. I stayed low and waded along the seawall until I was beneath their dock and invisible from any direction. I pulled the ziplock bag from my pants pocket, shook the water from my hands and removed the cell phone. I flipped it open and called Nick.
He answered on the second ring. “Zulu here.” Tonight Nick was Zulu, for Zodiac. It might be a corny system, but it works when you don’t have time to make elaborate plans and commit them to memory.
“Hey Zulu, where you at, bro?” I didn’t hear his outboard motor, so he must have been anchored.
Nick said, “Between the hotel and Mike.” That meant between Hibiscus Isle and Tony Marcello’s.
“Can you see the party at Mike’s?”
“Sure can.” He had my eight-power pocket binos.
“Can you see the big cat next door to Mike’s?”
“I see it.”
“Well, come and get me. I’ll be waiting by the back.”
“How many am I picking up?”
“Just me.” I put the phone back inside its plastic bag and pocketed it. I was still flushed with adrenaline, but as it washed out a sick feeling of defeat seeped in to replace it.
The big cruising catamaran was tied alongside the dock, her twin bows just a few yards beyond my hiding place. The warm seawater came up to my chest as I took cover below her deck and waded between the narrow hulls toward her stern. She went fifty feet, easy. Somebody’s expensive toy that was mostly forgotten.
19
The Zodiac nosed between the catamaran’s twin sterns. Nick had approached along the shoreline of North Sunset Isle, staying out of possible sight from the party. I set the carving knife on the inflatable’s floorboards, followed by the pistol. Then I threw a leg over the side tube and dragged myself into the rubber boat on my belly. Another minor miracle: both of my boat moccasins were still attached to my feet.
“Where to, Chu-tau?”
“Topaz, as fast we can get there.”
“Roger that.” I felt a slight course correction while the boat got up on plane. With two men in the small inflatable it wouldn’t be half as fast as the white tender with its 150-horsepower Yamaha. They had more than a ten-minute head start, and we were at least ten minutes from getting to Hibiscus Isle. But how many final preparations would they need to make for Topaz to be ready for the open ocean?
I unbuttoned my guayabera and peeled it off, revealing a black under-armor T-shirt that would dry quickly. Then I kicked off my sodden leather boat shoes and khaki slacks. I already had my swim trunks on beneath them. They were just black nylon running shorts and would also dry in no time. Nick sat on the port tube near the transom board so that he could handle the throttle on the outboard’s tiller control. I sat on the opposite tube and a little forward, to balance our weight. I leaned close to him and asked, “Did you see the white inflatable that left the party about ten minutes ago?”
He shook his head no. The half-moon provided enough illumination for safe navigation, but Biscayne Bay was miles wide. You could see red, green and white navigation buoy lights on the water and make out the general shape of a vessel, but that was all. Nick steered a path near the Miami Beach side, just beyond the docks and mansions on the ends of the other Sunset Isles, and soon we were slipping beneath the high Venetian Causeway Bridge.
We emerged from under the bridge with the luxury condo towers of Belle Isle on our right and Miami Beach on our left. The combined beauty of the electrified towers, waterfront mansions and docked megayachts was visually exciting, but I was in no mood to enjoy it.
Eyeball steering on moonlit water is no problem, once you learn to sort out the navigational aids from all types of shore lights at various distances. The lights of Hibiscus Isle were just a mile ahead across open water. Only five minutes away. A little hope crept back into my gloom.
We both saw Topaz about the same time. She was under way, showing only her running lights. The red light on her port side indicated her course. She was leaving Biscayne Bay, turning south for the ship channel and the ocean. We both muttered heartfelt curses. Too late! We were always too late!
“What now?” Nick finally asked.
I stared at Topaz until only her unblinking white stern light was visible. “Follow her.” Our little Zodiac with its fifteen-horse outboard motor was a laughably pathetic vessel for chasing a megayacht equipped with a pair of 4,000-horsepower German turbo diesels. But for the next mile, until she reached the ship channel, Topaz would need to hold her speed down. We might even gain some ground on her.
Nick suggested, “Maybe Topaz leaving port is a diversion and they’re still back at his place on Hibiscus Isle?”
“Nope. They’re all on Topaz. No wives, no paparazzi.”
We passed beneath the MacArthur Causeway Bridge and saw Topaz’s white stern light disappear as she turned out Government Cut, the ship channel from the Port of Miami to the open Atlantic. The tide was running out, forming downstream eddies against the bridge’s massive concrete pilings.
I called Kelly on the cell phone. Nick slowed down so I could hear over the outboard’s noise. I said, “Top Hat is leaving port. We missed her.”
I heard her exhale loudly, almost a whistle. “Where do you want to meet?”
“At Sierra Poppa.” This was South Point Park at the bottom of Miami Beach. The park was along the Miami Beach side of the ship channel.
“Okay, I’m heading there now.” I picked up the pistol and its suppressor. By feel and by night sight I guessed it was a SIG 226. I dropped the magazine; the cartridges were fortycaliber hollowpoints. I tossed the mag overboard and ejected the round from the chamber into the water too.
Nick yelled, “Where the hell did you find that?”
“I’ll tell you later.” One way or another, the handgun would be traceable to the Eurasian. To be found with it in my possession would be as good as a murder confession. Same with the suppressor, and even the tiny laser, which would also have serial numbers. I field-stripped the SIG down to its barrel, grip, slide and springs on my lap. I wiped the kitche
n knife and each gun part on my khaki pants to get rid of fingerprints, and threw them in different directions spread over a half mile as the Zodiac slid down the bay.
I especially hated to lose the suppressor and let go of it only with reluctance. My last good suppressor was currently in the custody of the Nicaraguan federal police, and it was unlikely they were going to FedEx it to me anytime soon. The suppressor and the other scattered gun parts would disappear into the Biscayne Bay muck, silt and sand. Nobody snorkels or skin-dives in an area crisscrossed by propellers 24/7.
Then I called Kelly again, and she reported that she was already at Sierra Poppa and waiting for us. My boat moccasins, long pants and blue shirt went over the side next, to be carried seaward on the tide. I couldn’t keep anything that might tie me by blood evidence to the Eurasian’s body.
After passing the Miami Beach Marina on the left we beached the Zodiac at South Point and didn’t bother to tie it up. It would be gone soon after we were, and better luck to its next owners. All of our other possessions were already in a few gear bags and tackle boxes. We carried them a hundred yards and spotted the GTI in the parking lot of South Point Park. Just another pair of jetty-hopping fishermen or beachcombers, unnoticed by dog walkers and joggers on the well-lit footpaths.
We popped the rear hatch open and threw in our stuff. There was a lot more room in the back without the Zodiac, the engine and the fuel tank. I found my daypack and pulled on the green-and-white Hawaiian shirt from my RASE Conference escape, belted cargo shorts and running shoes. I put them on right over my still-damp black T-shirt and running shorts.
Castigo Cay Page 38