His strategy was simple and straightforward, but he had some critical tactical problems to resolve. First, he needed to bring in a few trusted lieutenants to recruit and control the operatives. He would select these people from his already-established cadre of agents, all of whom were living in Florida and were in deep cover. They were all native-born American citizens with first generation Venezuelan parents and most had extended family still living in Venezuela. He decided to exclude any who didn’t have close relatives in Venezuela. That would give him one more bit of leverage to ensure their compliance with his plan.
His second tactical requirement was for a concealed base of operations that would be close to a major airport, hence his present excursion into the Everglades. Airport access was necessary for him and his lieutenants, even though he envisioned using vans for most of the actual operations. The base would serve to house those members of his cadre who were involved in recruiting and processing the operatives, as well as serving as a supply depot and a place to keep the operatives themselves until they were deployed on their missions. It was convenient that his first target, Senator O’Rourke, lived in south Florida. His future targets wouldn’t be as easy to reach from a geographic perspective, but the excellent interstate highway system meant that he could have a team from the Everglades in any of the major metropolitan centers in the eastern U.S. within 24 hours.
He needed a fleet of vehicles that were nondescript, reliable, and could carry three or four people with their luggage and their equipment. He was leaning toward vans that could be equipped with signage for a company that provided contract construction services for public utilities. He had originally thought to disguise the vans as vehicles belonging to the utility companies in his target cities, but quickly realized that would attract attention if the vehicle ventured outside the appropriate metropolitan area. The solution had presented itself when he had moved into a new apartment and ordered high-speed Internet service. The installer had shown up in a generic white van with signage for Jackson & Wirth Engineering.
Martinez had queried the young female installer as she worked, plying her with coffee and sweet rolls. He learned that her employer handled all sorts of contract installation and maintenance for a number of public utility companies all over the country. She lived on the road, rarely spending more than a few weeks in one place before being dispatched elsewhere, and she travelled in the company van. He reasoned that painting a similar company name and some descriptive advertising on the side of late model white vans would provide the ideal camouflage. Such vehicles would be a common sight at the kinds of events and venues that he planned to target.
Martinez had initially thought that he could pay the houngan to create as many of the zombies as he needed. After his visit to Martinique, he saw that securing the houngan’s participation would be more complicated. There was the issue of the victims. Even with his brief exposure to the houngan and his people, Martinez recognized that there was a bond of mutual affection holding them together. The houngan would not be willing to perform his ritual on one of his flock, Martinez thought. The creature that he had shown to Martinez was a stranger, an outsider. This, together with the problem of how to get the creatures past immigration into the U.S., had compelled Martinez to come up with the plan for using street people. Now he must find a way to persuade the houngan to come to the U.S. and work his ‘magic.’ He needed to know more about the houngan to find his vulnerabilities; only then would he be able to manipulate the man.
Martinez had originally thought that he could send a few men to Martinique to pick up a shipment of operatives and escort them back into the country. That was before he had realized how truly mindless the houngan’s victims were. Now he saw that as a major hurdle. There was no way one of the creatures could get past an immigration officer without attracting attention. He had considered bringing them in illegally, which could certainly be done, but it would be risky. When he finally came up with the idea of taking street people and drugging them, he realized how much better that could be.
Many of the street people were military veterans, he knew, suffering from a variety of physical and mental disabilities. Using such a person as a human bomb offered perfect fodder for the public relations effort that Martinez envisioned. After one of these operatives destroyed himself and wreaked havoc on all around him, Martinez could exploit the operative’s background to make him an object of pity rather than scorn, to illustrate that the government needed to be more liberal in helping America’s own underclass. He could readily come up with a story as to why one of these people would want to kill O’Rourke, for example.
****
The houngan studied the woman who sat across the table from him. She had once been beautiful, he thought. Not beautiful in the way the women in the white men’s magazines were beautiful, but beautiful in a spiritual sense. He could see that, but only by looking deeply into her eyes and knowing the miserable series of disappointments that had brought her to this point. He felt a wave of empathy for her; the misery that passed for her life was the story of the Haitian diaspora. "And she’s one of the lucky ones," he thought.
The lucky ones were the ones who had somehow escaped Haiti. Here in Martinique there was work to be done. Hard work, and not well paid, but still enough to buy food. The children didn’t starve, most of the time. There was a dry place to sleep, most of the time. But they were not welcome here. They were tolerated, because they would work diligently at tasks that the local people didn’t want to do: the menial, the dirty, the dangerous jobs that nevertheless must be done by someone.
Martinique had its own poor, though they were far better off than the illegal Haitians. They got a subsistence allowance from the government, so that they could afford to turn up their noses at the jobs that the Haitians were glad to get. They had access to medical care, and their children went to school.
Still, they resented the Haitians. The houngan understood the source of the resentment, and he knew that it was inevitable. As a houngan, he was the spiritual leader of this small enclave of displaced people, and he had seen human nature at its least attractive. Lacking any other leader, his people looked to him for guidance in all problems, temporal and spiritual.
"So, your husband, is he able to rest now, with the potion for pain?" he asked the woman. She nodded uncertainly.
"What else can I do for you, then?" he asked. "He will recover from the beating in time. We will help until he is able to work again. You must not worry."
She nodded again. "I haven’t any money, and only a few chickens…"
Guessing at what was troubling her, he said, "Don’t worry. We must all help each other. When your husband is well and able to work, then we will think of how you can repay the community. Is that all that is vexing you?"
She shook her head this time. "A fétiche," she said softly. "I was hoping…"
"You wish a fétiche to help him heal?"
She shook her head. "To keep us safe from those who did this. For our home," she said, a pleading look in her haunted eyes.
The houngan nodded. "Come tomorrow evening after work, Marie. I will make the fétiche. Now you must go and care for those beautiful children of yours."
After she left, he busied himself at the stove for a few minutes, heating a pan of peas and rice.
"Come," he said loudly to the empty room as he scooped the food out onto two chipped plates.
The dazed, bedraggled white man came through a curtained doorway from the back of the little shack. He shuffled to a stop near the houngan and stood.
"Sit," the houngan ordered, putting a plate in front of the man as the creature settled himself awkwardly at the table. He took his own plate and sat down across the table from the white man.
"Eat," he said. The white man began feeding himself clumsily, using his fingers to pick up the greasy rice.
The houngan shook his head, wishing he had known some other way to deal with this problem, thinking back to the time before he had done this thin
g. He began to eat slowly, remembering. When the man had been brought to him, he was delirious. The people of the bateye had all helped to nurse the man back to health, but as he recovered, the man became insanely violent, his temper flaring unpredictably. They had tried to expel the man from the bateye, their own little ghetto in the hills south of Fort-de-France, but he kept returning like a stray dog, a rabid stray dog, the houngan remembered.
With no recourse to the authorities and no other way to control the man, the houngan had reluctantly fallen back on his training in the Don Pedro, the dark, violent version of Voodoo. Don Pedro, named for its first proponent, had emerged as black magic to support the rebellion of the slaves in Haiti in the late 18th century, taking its name from an escaped African slave who came to Haiti from Jamaica. It was a subculture within the Voodoo faith that was responsible for most of the negative and frightening images associated with the religion. He had discovered not long after his initiation into that dark priesthood that he was by nature more suited to the constructive elements of Voodoo, and he had ceased practicing the darker ceremonies. In this situation, though, he had been compelled to go against his conscience for the good of his people. He had reluctantly mixed the potion and administered it to the man with a minimum of fuss, reasoning that it would be better for everyone to keep the man alive but subdued. He could be of some use to the community, and he wouldn’t bring harm to himself or any of the houngan’s flock.
Inevitably, word of the zombie had spread, just as the houngan had feared it would. Finally, Marie, the woman whose husband had been beaten by the police, had come to him. She worked as a maid at a resort near Marin, and she reported that a guest at the hotel, a Venezuelan, was asking questions about Voodoo and zombies. Specifically, he had heard rumors that a zombie was being kept somewhere in the hills near the hotel. The houngan wasn’t surprised, but he was worried.
The houngan had reasoned that once rumors of a zombie began to circulate, there would be two types of reactions. The authorities, being educated in the sciences and oriented in a secular direction, would discount the rumors as mere superstition among ignorant Haitians. People who believed otherwise would be too frightened to do anything. That had been the case for as long as anyone could remember, even going back to the era of slavery and beyond.
He had reluctantly agreed to meet the inquisitive visitor. After discovering that the man was respectful and that he was not a journalist or an academic, the houngan had relaxed somewhat. The man had explained that he was studying the efficacy of bush medicine in its various forms, looking to isolate substances that might have medicinal value. He had offered a sum of money in exchange for information that was large enough to tempt the houngan without being large enough to make him suspicious. He weighed the good that the money could do for his people against the potential harm and decided to show the man his patient, as he preferred to think of his charge.
Now, after some time to consider the reactions of the man called Martinez, he wasn’t sure that he had made the correct choice. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure how much of a choice he actually had. He knew that Martinez would be back, and he worried about what would happen when he returned. A cautious man, the houngan had met with Martinez in an abandoned shack in a cane field some miles from the bateye. Martinez had been blindfolded and led through the woods for three hours en route to the shack, so the decision to meet again would be the houngan’s, but his sense of Martinez was that the man would not be easily put off.
Chapter 4
Vengeance was at anchor in the Tobago Cays. The professor was sitting in the cockpit in the shade of the awning, a rum punch in his hand. He gazed out over the reef off the bow. There was a gentle, long-period ocean swell rolling in from Africa and breaking on the reef. The breeze carried the spray from the breakers into the air, cooling it and creating a hazy transition from the turquoise water in the anchorage to the dramatic indigo of the deep water on the other side of the reef. He was alone on the boat. Some distance away, he could make out the dinghy, bobbing in the waves where the three girls had tied it to a mooring on the edge of the reef. They were snorkeling, admiring the clouds of brilliantly colored fish swimming around the coral, although they were too far away for him to spot them as they floated above the reef.
The insistent chirp of his satellite phone interrupted his idle thoughts. He sighed and put the drink down, picking up the phone to examine the display. He wasn’t surprised to see the three initials, flashing in time with the chirping. He pushed the connect button as he raised the phone to his ear.
"Good afternoon, RDF."
"Afternoon, Professor. How’s it going?"
"Oh, it’s beautiful. Vengeance is a gorgeous boat, and the two gals that run her aren’t hard to look at, either."
"Behave yourself, old man. I’ve got a feeling you’d better not cross that grad student babe of yours. She’s not like those undergraduate gals you’re used to messing with. You aggravate her, she might put a hurtin’ on you."
"Can’t believe you’re giving me advice on women – you, the queen of reality TV."
"Hey, I tried women when I was young and foolish; nice to look at, but more trouble than they’re worth. Just that some people don’t outgrow it, I guess. I’ll stick to boys. How’s your plan coming? Still thinking we can avoid having to shoot the show in Haiti?"
"Yeah, I think so, RDF. Martinique or Guadeloupe would be better places to work, I think. Difference between them and the other eastern Caribbean islands is dramatic – they’re pretty much part of the first world, and the others, well, let’s just say they’re quaint. Then you look at Haiti. Hell, Haiti is prehistoric. On TV, they’re all gonna look alike, anyway."
"So what’s the plan, then?"
"We’ve got two days of easy sailing to Martinique. I’ll have all this data collated by the time we get there, and we’ll start out by playing tourist. Get the lay of the land; ask lots of questions. See if I can turn up anybody that’ll talk about Voodoo. Martinique may be part of France, but it’s still a Caribbean island. It’ll take a little time for folks to warm up to an outsider, like anywhere. We’ll see how it goes. If it doesn’t look promising in a week or two, we’ll go check out Guadeloupe. As best I can tell from the immigration data, there are good-sized communities of displaced Haitians in both places. ‘Course, there are probably more illegals than there are people with papers. There are also enough indigenous white people so that Lilly and I won’t stick out as much as we would on the other islands."
"Yeah. Sounds like tough work, Professor. Stay out of trouble with those women, and check in with me every so often. I got some folks doing a little research myself. I’ll call you if we find anything."
****
Jerry Smith parked his Porsche 911S and set the alarm. He glanced back at it lovingly as he walked to the elevator lobby in the parking garage a couple of blocks from Lincoln Road Mall. He was in his late 20s, but looked a decade younger, thanks to his oily, pimple-infested skin and his choice of clothing. Skinny, clad in a dirty T-shirt and grimy, ragged jeans, flip-flops on his feet, he shrugged his lanky blond hair out of his eyes as he waited for the elevator. Once on the sidewalk outside the garage, he pulled his iPhone from his pocket and checked the time. It was just 5 o’clock; he was running early. His friends wouldn’t be at the bar yet, so he decided to find a shady spot on the pedestrian mall where he could watch the girls. He turned the phone off before returning it to his pocket.
He didn’t want it ringing while he was out with his buddies. If they knew he had an iPhone instead of the regulation, hacker-approved Android, he’d never hear the end of it. The fact that his iPhone was running his own, home-brewed operating system wouldn’t matter. Unlike most of his cronies, Jerry had a graduate degree in electrical engineering and a deep appreciation for the superiority of Apple’s hardware. He could argue them down and make them see things his way, but it wasn’t worth the effort to him. They were fun to hang out with, but they were too sheep-like for him to ma
ke that kind of investment. It was easier just to keep quiet about his perverted taste in telephones.
He found a bench in the shade across from the sidewalk bar where they gathered every evening and settled down to admire the scenery walking past. Soon, he was lost in a fantasy involving an animated, octopus-like alien with a sex organ on the end of each tentacle. The creature was engaged in some incredible act with the girl sitting at the table a few yards away, and Jerry was busy figuring out how to code the creature’s astonishing series of eight climaxes. Code to animate the girl was no problem. That was practically off-the-shelf, but this liquid metal octopus would have to be programmed from scratch. He was surprised when someone shook his shoulder and called his name.
"Man, you were zoned out, Jer. C’mon over to the table. We got a cold one coming with your name on it."
"All right, Henrietta," he agreed, as the graphic images and tables of ones and zeros faded from his mind.
They sat down with the others, and Henrietta started relating her week’s adventures in the IT department of one of Miami’s international banks. After she described how the code she had written facilitated the untraceable transfer of large sums of money and answered a few technical questions from the others at the table, all eyes turned to Jerry.
"So, Jer, who’ve you been working for this week?" Henrietta asked.
"You know my rule, Hen. If I tell you that, I can’t tell you what I’ve been doing. Believe me, 'what' is way better than 'whom,' this week."
"Okay, so give us the ‘what,’ then."
"Well, I got this really mundane job; no real technical challenge, but this guy’s paying me big time. I’ve turned my little herd of search robots loose looking for all references to…anybody wanna guess?"
Bluewater Voodoo: Mystery and Adventure in the Caribbean (Bluewater Thrillers Book 3) Page 3