"You weren’t followed," said the well-groomed, nattily attired man on the other side of the back seat.
Martinez made no reply; it was not a question, but a statement of fact. He put his newspaper into the pouch on the seat-back in front of him and fastened his seat belt, waiting.
"What did you learn in Martinique?" the man asked him.
"It is true. What we have been told is correct. I have seen one, with my own eyes, but it is nothing like the ones in the movies, or on television."
"How was it different, Martinez? You must tell me everything, please."
"First, it was utterly passive. It moved only in response to commands from the master, and it showed no ability to anticipate what the next command might be. This is unlike the aggressive, dangerous monsters that popular culture in America finds so fascinating."
"I see. And did it smell or look dead? Was the flesh decaying?"
"No. Not at all. I asked the houngan about that. This notion of them being raised from the dead goes back to the days of slavery. The houngan or the mambo administered drugs to induce a death-like state and then the body was buried, but carefully, so as not to asphyxiate the victim. Then a great deal of foolery went into making the victim appear to be raised from the grave but still dead. This was mostly showmanship, to strike fear into the hearts of the ignorant and ensure compliance with the wishes of the houngan. This initial dose of drug destroys some of the nervous system, so the victim is alive, but with no mind, no will. Then the drug is changed to something that keeps the victim docile and craving the drug, so that he is obedient to the commands of the one who has trained him."
"As we have heard, then?"
"Yes. Exactly."
"And could one of these creatures, these zombies, could it blend into a crowd here in the States, in a city, let us say?"
"I am sure of it. The one I saw could have been any burnt-out druggie or wino that you might see on Collins Avenue late at night. Unremarkable in appearance -- just another bum. But he was seriously spaced out. Someone will have to be there, giving step by step instructions. Perhaps some small radio could be used. I don’t think it would be possible to program one of these creatures to carry out a task of any complexity. A separate command is required for each step, almost."
"I see. That is perhaps different than we thought it would be, but I think this still could work, from what you have told me. You agree?"
"Yes, but there is another problem."
"And what is that?"
"I don’t think we could safely bring these creatures into the country. Each one would require an escort, and I’m thinking it would attract far more attention than we wish. I have a solution, though."
"Tell me."
"We bring the houngan into the country and have him create these creatures for us here. I believe there are sufficient candidates among the street people. If a few of them disappear for a while, no one will notice. And there’s another benefit to doing it this way, as well."
"I think I know what you mean, but go ahead, Martinez."
"If one of them should be captured, or its remains are left behind after one of the actions…"
"Yes! I like it. They will have an existing history, a real background, for the Homeland Security fools to find. There will be nothing that points to us. This is brilliant."
"There is more, if you will permit me," Martinez said, a hint of a smile playing over his lips.
"Of course. Tell me."
"We can create an artificial ‘movement’ among the dispossessed of this evil nation, and make them think that it is their own homegrown, homeless have-nots who are responsible for the acts of terror. Done properly, this can shift the blame for the ‘problem’ to the conservative political forces, and keep the weak-minded liberals in power. This will make it far easier for us to deal with the U.S., will it not?"
"Absolutely brilliant, Martinez. If you can do this thing as you say, there will be an important place for you in Caracas when we are finished."
"Thank you, Mr. Ambassador," Martinez’s smile of gratitude never reached his eyes, but the Ambassador didn’t notice.
****
Vengeance was coming to life, rising and falling in an easy rhythm as she responded to the building swell coming from the open sea to the east. She surged along at eight knots under full sail, silent but for the creaking, swishing sounds of a ship in harmony with the sea. The professor was below, braced in the corner at the desktop in the nav station working away at his laptop computer. Liz was in the forward stateroom that she and Dani shared when guests were aboard. She was sketching idly, thinking that she should soon head for the galley to make a salad and some sandwiches for lunch. Lilly was sunbathing in the cockpit, face down on the cushion on the leeward, downhill side, and Dani was lost in thought. She was braced comfortably behind the helm, leaning back, arms spread along the varnished teak perimeter of the cockpit. One leg was extended along the seat, the foot inches from Lilly’s shoulder; the other was bent sharply at the knee, its bare foot resting lightly on one of the spokes of the helm. Eyes closed, head back, face into the 15-knot breeze, Dani was sailing purely by feel, lost in her oneness with Vengeance and the sea.
"This is why I’m here," she thought.
"Why’s that?" Lilly asked, raising her head to look at Dani.
"What?!" Dani said, coming upright, both feet on deck, hands flying to the rim of the helm.
"You said something," Lilly said, settling down again.
"Sorry," Dani said. "Thinking out loud, I guess. I didn’t mean to wake you."
"Oh, I wasn’t asleep. Just completely relaxed, thinking of how lucky you and Liz are, living like this all the time."
"It’s not a bad way to make a living," Dani said. "I was just thinking something similar, myself."
"You said, ‘This is why I’m here,’ I think."
"Hmm, could be. I can lose myself in the boat when she’s sailing like this. Life doesn’t get much better."
They passed a few moments in comfortable silence, Dani thinking that maybe Liz was right about Lilly. Dani didn’t know much about the purpose of the professor’s summer visit to the islands. He had been referred by the charter broker, and he had exchanged a few brief emails with Dani as they made the arrangements. She remembered that he had mentioned a research project, but she didn’t think that he had disclosed any particulars.
"Liz told me that you’re working on a Ph.D. in anthropology," she said. "Is there a connection to the islands, or is this mostly a holiday for you?"
"Oh, no. It’s no holiday. The focus of my dissertation is the evolution of the tribal religions that were brought from West Africa by the slaves in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It’s fascinating. You see, there was an influence from Islam in West Africa before the Europeans got involved in the slave trade, but it seems to have been relatively benign. Once the Europeans came along, though, there was the forced conversion to Christianity, particularly Catholicism. That had some interesting results."
"Was this a ‘convert or die’ thing, like with the Jews in Spain?" Dani asked.
"Could have been, I guess, but it didn’t turn out that way. The African religions weren’t as rigid as Christianity or Judaism, and they absorbed the Christian doctrines and melded them with their own beliefs in a seamless, synergistic fashion. Saints were readily accepted as embodying some of the loa, the lesser spirits that were the interface between man and the Supreme Being, for example. Elements of ritual were accepted and absorbed, too. The missionaries were quick to rationalize all this as evidence that the fundamental beliefs were essentially the same and that the backward Africans just needed a little guidance. The Jesuits, in particular, wrote endless convoluted texts on this topic, as you might imagine. Of course, they were all quite mistaken."
Dani decided that Liz was right. This woman was bright and articulate; she was clearly passionate about her interests. Dani was conscious of a shift in her opinion of Lilly, but she still wondered what the girl
saw in the professor.
"I’m sorry, Dani. Ask me a simple question and I fall into lecture mode. I’ve intruded on your enjoyment of a nice sail on your lovely yacht. How did you come to be in this business?"
"Oh, I suppose I was born into it, Lilly. My father has always been a sailor, and he owned charter yachts in the Med when I was growing up. I worked summers as deck crew from my early teens through my university years, and discovered that my passion was sailing in the ocean."
"What did you study at university?"
"Finance. My mother’s family is in banking. I tried it for a while, but this is what I love. Your thesis sounds interesting. Is that the professor’s background, as well?"
"Yes, it is," Lilly said. She went on to explain his qualifications and his fame in the field of cultural anthropology at some length. "I’m fortunate that he saw fit to serve as my advisor. The fact that he’s single and such a gracious lover is just a fringe benefit," she said, with a hard smile. "Just so you don’t misunderstand, our extracurricular relationship is purely my doing. I think he’s cute and it keeps everything focused on my goal. Neither of us is under any illusions about the long term. When I finish my degree, he’ll go back to being the heart throb of all the undergrad women and I’ll move on. For now, it suits."
The predatory glint in Lilly’s eye struck a chord with Dani. Although their arenas and weapons of choice were different, she recognized a kindred spirit. She wondered if the professor shared Lilly’s attitude, as she consciously avoided smiling. Doubting that he did, she decided to change the subject.
"Can you tell me a little about the plans for this summer?" she asked. "All I know is that you two have booked us through the end of October, and that we’re headed for Martinique after you spend a few days relaxing in the Grenadines."
"Well, my own plan is to absorb as much of the culture and history of the islands as I can. Everything I know about this part of the world is from textbooks. I want to feel it, to gain some perspective that will let me evaluate what I’m learning as I study the folklore. I know I can’t really experience total immersion in the island life; there are just too many barriers. I want to come as close as I can, though. As for Chuck, if he has a plan, I’d be surprised. Did he tell you about the grant?"
"Grant? No," Dani said, shaking her head. "What grant?"
"Oh, it’s disgusting, but it pays the bills. It’s tough to get funding for projects in our field – the perceived value thing, you know – so you take money where you find it and do the best you can. He’s got a grant from – don’t laugh – Living Dead Productions. LDP is a consortium put together by a guy called Roberto Davis-Fennimore. Have you ever heard of him?"
Dani shook her head.
"He does these reality television shows. Pure sensationalism, but he has a knack for it. Anyway, he’s planning to do one called ‘Zombie Next Door,’ or something like that. A weekly television series, some kind of theme resort, the whole thing. He plans to cash in on the zombie craze, and he’ll probably succeed. He’s got a track record of doing this kind of thing. Rumors have surfaced over the years about real-life zombies down here in the islands, you know. There was a rash of reports in the 1980s coming from Haiti, and now RDF – that’s what he calls himself, a play on the opposite of FDR, which he thinks is funny – has heard that there’s something fishy going on in Martinique."
"So I’m sailing you two to Martinique to look for zombies?"
"Yep," Lilly said, a conspiratorial smile on her face.
"How can there be real-life zombies?" Dani asked.
"Well, Voodoo isn’t just one religion. It’s a whole collection, and there are some branches that embody black magic in the rituals. One is called Petro, or Don Pedro, and the priests are called bokors. They’re more like witch doctors, and they created zombies. Aside from a lot of ritual, they drugged their victims. There was a famous case in the 1980s. A Haitian man named Clairvius Narcisse showed up claiming to have been a zombie for 20-odd years. He had been pronounced dead in 1962 at Albert Schweitzer Hospital in the town of Deschapelles, Haiti, after having been attended for a period of time by several doctors, at least one trained in the U.S. Scared hell out of his family when he resurfaced after all that time."
"That’s spooky," Dani said. "Are there other cases?"
"Yes. That one is probably the best known and most studied, but there are others."
"So do the people recover?" Dani asked.
"There’s not a lot known about it. Apparently some recover more fully than others. Narcisse was one who did. The drugs are neurotoxins; aside from possible damage to the nervous system, there has to be a pretty serious psychological impact. Besides, they aren’t usually well-treated while they’re in the semiconscious state, so I wouldn’t think a full recovery happens often."
"Why would anyone do such a thing?" Dani asked.
"You mean now?"
Dani nodded.
"Well," Lilly answered, "first off, you shouldn’t think of this as specific to Voodoo. Voodoo is a benign religion; this is a malignant offshoot. It’s like a black magic subculture that exists among some of the same people who practice Voodoo, but otherwise it’s not related."
"Like the Inquisition and the Roman Catholics?" Dani asked.
"Not quite. That happened under the banner of Catholicism, unfortunately, but it isn’t a totally erroneous comparison. The mainstream Voodoo practitioners have never condoned the more extreme offshoots. Zombies were created to make people slaves of the bokor, for all kinds of reasons. Some of the black magic rituals included human sacrifice, and the potential victims were valuable property of the slave owners. A bokor could make a potential victim appear to die, and then resurrect him to use for sacrifice, and the master was none the wiser. There has also been speculation that after slavery ended in Haiti with the slave rebellion, some of the people used this as a way to enslave others. Most of the people who ‘came back’ from being zombies had been made to work at various things while they were drugged," Lilly said.
Chapter 3
Martinez was listening to what he referred to as ‘Radio Free Redneck’ as he sat in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. He was headed out into the Everglades, where he planned to drive around for a few hours. He wanted to get a sense of the area before he started looking for a suitable location for his training camp.
Listening to Senator Rufus O’Rourke’s cracker-accented diatribe coming from the premium sound system in his Lexus strengthened his resolve to disrupt the man’s presidential campaign. Surely, O’Rourke was a dark-horse candidate, but he was rising in the polls every day with his Bible-thumping, "Amer’ca for red-blooded, Christian, God-fearin’ Amer’cans" rhetoric.
"The firs’ thang, by God, the onliest thang the Fed’ral Gummint got any bidness doin’ is to perteck our borders, an’ they cain’t even do that. We bein’ overrun ever’ day by them forran people what cain’t speak, I mean to tell ya, they don’t even want ta learn ta speak, good ol’ Amer’can English. You know what I’m sayin’. You know who I mean, too. All you gotta do is look at ‘em to know they ain’t like us. And them socialists that we done let get they hands on our gummint in Washington is bent on he’ppin’ mo’ of ‘em come here ever’ day, payin’ ‘em to breed, lettin’ ‘em vote. It’s high time we, I mean all us real Amer’cans, rise up an’ stop this foolishness…"
Martinez turned the radio off. He would be doing this country a favor by taking O’Rourke out of the game. This was ironic, he realized; Martinez considered himself to be apolitical. He was the ultimate mercenary, serving only his own interests, although Chavez and his henchmen had no idea that he was anything but a loyal agent of their policy.
Without the distraction of O’Rourke, he turned his thoughts to his current project. The Ambassador had wanted to give it the code name ‘Walking Dead,’ after the popular show on cable television, but Martinez had persuaded him not to do that. Referring to the front-line participants as ‘zombies,’ even among themselves, would make lig
ht of what they were trying to accomplish.
The American people weren’t fools, even if they did occasionally succumb to the temptation of an O’Rourke. Most of them wouldn’t believe that zombies were blowing up buildings and killing elected officials. In his own mind, Martinez had adopted the term ‘operatives’ to describe his drugged, mindless agents. With the right publicity, people could be made to believe that hungry, homeless, out-of-work street-people were rioting, demanding their piece of the American dream. Properly interpreted, such a movement could serve to keep the current liberal administration in power, which was what he had been employed to do. One of his minions had proven herself adept at using social networking to spread just the sort of propaganda that would take root in America’s mindless mass media. She was a genius at manipulating the talking heads who turned mundane current events into the sensationalism that kept television audiences ‘informed." It was through some of her social networking that she had found Jerry Smith, who had actually led Martinez to the houngan.
Martinez had a talent for organization, and had fate set him on a different course, he would have been successful in constructive endeavors. As it was, he was satisfied to be a well-paid, anonymous provocateur; he was excited at the prospect of destabilizing the government of the mighty United States. He focused his attention on the obstacles to achieving his goal.
Bluewater Voodoo: Mystery and Adventure in the Caribbean (Bluewater Thrillers Book 3) Page 2