Wildcase - [Rail Black 02]

by Neil Russell

  In the U.S., we’re used to uninterrupted electrical current. In Asia, two weeks of continuous juice would trigger a national holiday. Multiple dedicated lines are also unheard of, and microelectronics are the first victims of power anomalies. Whether it was the shorting out of the electrical fence or just a run-of-the-mill deviation, it appeared one of Markus Kingdom’s chips was running hot.

  I turned to Birdy. “See if you can find a hair dryer and some ice.”

  It took her a few minutes, but she came back with a pro model Conair and a glass champagne bucket half-full of cubes. I plugged the dryer in, turned it on high, and held it near the depression.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, but wouldn’t it be faster with a lighter? There’s a bunch of them lying around.”

  “No, it’s a fingerprint sensor, and they shut down in a fire. But if the temperature is raised internally, sometimes you can reset them. I’m trying to help it along.”

  “Where did you learn this?” She swept her arm around. “I mean all of this?”

  I ignored the question and put my finger near the sensor again. The heat coming off it was now much hotter than the dryer. I turned off the Conair, cupped my hands and out of the bucket scooped ice, which I held against the depression. It melted rapidly, and I took another scoop. This time, it took longer to turn to water.

  I wiped the depression dry with my sleeve. “Give me your right index finger.”

  Birdy extended her hand, and I pressed it into the cavity. “Why mine?”

  “My hands are cold. If this is going to work, it needs a normal body temperature.”

  I held her finger in the depression for sixty seconds as timed by Bert’s watch, then pulled it away and waited another sixty. “Okay, put your finger back in the slot.”

  She did, and after a moment, the limestone block suddenly began to move. I saw no track, but it glided over the hardwood soundlessly, revealing a stainless steel plate. The plate then slid under the floor, and light burst from the hole. Birdy and I peered in.

  A rolling, mahogany library ladder reached twenty feet to the bottom. Running from just below to beyond my range of vision were neatly organized shelves of DVDs, videotapes and 16mm film cans, the labels under them coded. It was, almost certainly, a pornography and violence collection of epic proportions, probably containing things most imaginations couldn’t conceive. Down there would also be the last hours of Lucille Brando’s life ... set to music. And Sherry Huston’s unfinished tape. I preferred not to contemplate what else.

  I turned to start down the ladder. “I want to go too,” Birdy said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said softly. “In the garage, there’ll be gasoline for the gardening equipment. Bring as much as you find.”

  She waited until I got to the bottom, then turned and disappeared.

  The room opened into a broad V with separate racks of shelves laid out in a maze filling the additional space. I made my way through them, noticing that many of the containers were very old. I opened one that looked like a nineteenth-century ledger box and found a stack of stereopticon slides. From the moment man invented a way to record images on film, he has been using it to make erotic pictures. This particular unclad drama was entitled Afternoon with a Horse, and I didn’t need a viewer to see that it offered little new. I tossed the box on the floor.

  When I passed the last rack, the lights ended, and it became quite dark. There was a door on the wall at the end, and I assumed it was another entrance to the upstairs. I was wrong. It was a walk-in freezer. I pulled on the heavy latch, and stepped forward, reaching along the inside wall to my right for a light switch. I found it just as I felt a presence against my face.

  I jammed my forearm up to defend myself at the same instant the light came on. It took a second for my brain to process what I was seeing. I was nose to nose with a Siberian tiger. Its head was three times the size of mine, and my face was halfway into its wide-open mouth. Fortunately, it was also dead, suspended from the ceiling on hooks and frozen solid.

  The carcass swung back and forth in a kind of icy ballet while I got my heart restarted. The freezer was packed out with heavy plastic-wrapped bundles of what I presumed were tiger organs and various other identifiable and not-so-identifiable pieces of yet more tigers, all considerably smaller than the behemoth on hooks.

  I was caught off guard by my own disgust. I remembered reading that all pathological behavior is rooted in sex. Serial murder, thrill arson, compulsive theft. I didn’t know if anyone ever thought about including the killing of endangered species, but it seemed to apply here. This wasn’t just illegal, it was demented.

  * * * *

  Birdy had found two ten-gallon jerry cans of gas. I emptied the first into the repository. The second, I fed slowly through the house to the makeshift film studio, where I doused the two bodies liberally, leaving a small amount in the can. When I was ready to leave, I had to shake Birdy out of a trance. Even then, she couldn’t tear her eyes off the steel rack.

  On our way out, I tore down two of the silk panels, grabbed a butane lighter and went back to the subterranean vault. I crumpled the silk and poured half the remaining gas on it. It flared as soon as the lighter flame touched it, and I kicked it into the hole. The concussion from the whoosh pushed me back a step.

  In the doorway, I poured the rest of the gas on the remaining sheet, turned and handed the lighter to Birdy. She bent and flicked it once.

  * * * *

  When we reached the bottom of the mountain, a fire engine passed us going up. His lights weren’t flashing, and he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I didn’t see any others. Apparently, the locals weren’t anxious to save the Kingdom place either.

  I dialed Brice Fleetwood. Not confident of the privacy of any cell conversation, I told him Regina had joined my father.

  He was shaken. “Quite an accomplished young lady,” he finally managed.

  “Quite. I’d like to see her honored for her service. Personally.”

  “I’ll have someone meet you. Unfortunately, we’ve done this before.”

  “Thanks, Brice. I’m also going to need you to arrange a flight back to the States for someone. She seems to have misplaced her passport.”

  “Happens all the time. The consul is a personal friend.”

  The young man who took the car in front of Black House was businesslike. “Mr. Fleetwood wishes to know if he can be of any further service?”

  “I’d like to know where you’ll take her,” I said. “Someday, I want to visit.”

  “The Gallant Garden, sir. Arbor of Heroes. It’s not marked, but the caretaker can direct you.”

  I thanked him, and he drove away.

  Showered, fed and dressed in warm bathrobes, Birdy and I stood on the third-floor balcony. She held a cup of coffee, I a glass of wine. We watched the orange spot on the Peak glow and recede, then rise again. “It seems like a long time ago,” she said. “No, that’s not right. It seems like it happened to someone else.”

  I didn’t tell her that wouldn’t stay the case. I put my arm around her and drew her close. Tomorrow, we would each begin the rest of our journey, but there was nothing either of us could do tonight except not be alone.

  Life-altering events always affect intimate relationships. Sometimes they are intensified, more often, not. Birdy and I would never be more than friends again. We both knew it. And so, I stayed with her until she went to sleep, then got up and went into the living room.

  * * * *

  44

  Even the Dead Can Be Wrong

  It was late afternoon when we tethered our rented Chris-Craft cruiser on the opposite side of Vuku from the abandoned submarine refueling installation. Even though the Chris’s glory days were a long time past, the choppy, fifty-five-mile run over from the nearest inhabited island of the Tongan archipelago had presented no problem for her, and it had felt good to bang her into the swells. The fishing gear was pretty good too, and we’d stopped twice to put lines in the
water just to make sure we weren’t being followed.

  I couldn’t say the same for the chart the rental agent had sold us. Nothing on it conformed to the coastline we encountered, so we systematically probed the meandering inlets until we found a secluded lagoon with a rock overhang that would keep the boat out of sight from the air.

  Over his protests, we’d left Jody at the row of seaside shacks that had been our hotel the previous night. If things went bad, somebody had to be healthy enough to fly us the hell out of Dodge, and no one wanted that to be me. Jody had known his role going in, but I admired his pluck.

  Eddie, Coggan, Fat Cat, Wal-Mart and I checked our weapons: five AR-15s and five Colt .45s, that they had picked up during a quick stop in Samoa and a night of roast pig and Vailima with Fat Cat’s extended family. Separately, I was carrying a Benelli M4 with six extra cartridges Velcroed to the barrel. I like a 12-gauge for close-in work, and choking it gives me as much knockdown as I usually need. The boom is also disorienting to the uninitiated, which can be the difference between your enemy’s getting off an aimed shot or wincing as he pulls the trigger.

  Special ops guys love Benellis, especially this one, but the simpletons running Sacramento wet their diapers if somebody mentions “pistol grip” on anything but a dildo. As a result, Joe Citizen can’t legally shore up his home defenses with one. I suggest the legislature go on a field trip to a major drug deal and see what the gangbangers are carrying. I keep one behind a false panel in the BBJ and another on my boat that’s easier to reach. I’ve had pirates approach me on both vehicles, and just seeing that piece of black steel made them change their minds. As for those who recently spent several days debating a bill that would regulate my tire pressure, I’ll take my chances.

  “You let me run a few shells through that when this is over?” I looked over at Wal-Mart, whose Mississippi drawl was as thick as his forearms. His massive bald head blocked out the sun and still seemed small on a body wider than a Kenworth’s grille.

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll give it to you.”

  “No, shit?”

  “No shit. I appreciate having you here. My back feels safe.”

  He took a long, loving look at the M4 like only a country boy could. “Fuckin’ ducks better leave early this year. Right along with the animal rights assholes who’ve been springing my beaver traps.”

  Eddie broke out the food and bottled water, and we dug into crab sandwiches and Evian while Coggan and Wal-Mart went over the Sony ENG cameras again. Wal-Mart was in charge of the wide-angle, so all he had to do was make sure the tripod didn’t get bumped and replace the battery pack when necessary. Coggan would be doing the close-ups, taking special care to get as much coverage as possible of our star, Markus.

  We were going to be recording onto flash drives and simultaneously uploading to my London offices. When the participants arrived, every one of my media properties would break into whatever they were covering and go to Kingdom’s auction. Wes’s audio would go out separately, and Black Group technical people would marry it to the video with less than a ten-second delay. Conservatively, the event would be available to half a billion people as it was happening, and I expected that number to triple almost immediately. I was also willing to bet that they wouldn’t get through the bidding for the first animal before somebody called Kingdom and told him he’d gone global. Just in case, I had the cell number for the ship’s captain.

  The lenses Coggan unpacked from their specially reinforced cases were wider, longer and far heavier than standard commercial barrels, and even someone as strong as Wal-Mart had to be careful of how they unbalanced the unit. “Any chance you’re going to tell me where you picked those up?” I asked Coggan.

  “Sure, right after you tell me about that kidnapping in Cuba a few years back.”

  “Didn’t happen.”

  “Neither did these.”

  I set up a rotating watch, and we each grabbed a comfortable piece of deck and slept until midnight. I’d wanted to scout the island first, but I couldn’t risk Kingdom’s having posted a lookout.

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The last people to live on Vuku had gone home to their farms and taxicabs in 1945, and the footpaths they’d left behind had fallen victim to erosion and overgrowth. Nothing without feathers had walked them for decades.

  We humped our gear five very rough miles up the low bluffs to a line of a tree-shrouded caves at the highest point on the island. Despite the cool night breeze, every one of us sweated through his clothes, and even I was winded.

  Once we were settled into the largest cave, Coggan and Wal-Mart went to work setting up the cameras, and I crawled to the edge of the ridge, where I could scan this side of the island with my field glasses. I was helped by a full moon, which periodically disappeared behind some of the large white clouds the South Pacific is famous for.

  The mile-wide, crescent-shaped harbor was two hundred feet down the cliffs and five hundred yards distant. On the left and right sides of the U, the verdant jungle grew to the water’s edge, but in the bowl, thirty yards of white sand beach buffered the tree line from the surf. A long, coral reef two miles out to sea formed a natural breakwater, and even from this distance I could hear waves thundering against it.

  Not including two rusting submarine hulks in the collapsed navy pens, I counted seventeen derelict ships anchored in an uneven line to my left. The four in the worst shape were WWII leftovers: a pair of LSTs, a mine layer and a destroyer escort. The rest were abandoned freighters of varying ages, creaking and groaning as they rode their chains. Vuku was apparently where the elderly went to die.

  At the end of the line and closest to our position sat the Resurrection Bay II. At more than nine hundred feet and another seventy up to her deck, she looked like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Though not in a state of total decay, other than the fresh paint used to change her name, she wore her years of tropical neglect openly. Her twin cranes were minus hooks, her decks piled high with battered containers, some overturned, others crushed. Seaweed and mold crept up her sides, and the forty-foot gash the previous captain had scratched just above her waterline was wide enough that I wouldn’t have trusted it in the Central Park Lagoon. I ran my binoculars over her carefully and saw no signs of life.

  Fifty yards from the Bay sat an eighteenth vessel with a familiar paint scheme. She was clearly anything but a derelict, and her name followed an established theme:

  Kingdom of Scunudra

  This was almost certainly Cheyenne’s Kingdom of Sam, and it was confirmed when I saw the seam where a section of the hull opened. She was a custom-built four-hundred-foot research vessel with an exceptionally wide beam. Antennas of every description poked at the sky, while lights flooded her capacious afterdeck, revealing red and white helipad markings. The high, sharp, reinforced prow had been built to both run fast and break ice, and the boom extending from her bridge would handle several tons.

  I counted four men with automatic rifles patrolling the deck. They wore blue jumpsuits and flak jackets, and the yellow embroidery on their baseball caps read kingdom starr defense. I had no illusions that they were the only security. And somewhere in the big ship’s bowels, nine tigers prowled their cages, sensing the tension, perhaps even aware of us.

  * * * *

  Jackie Benveniste had texted me once saying he was having trouble reaching his contact. Now, in the dark recesses of the cave, away from the bats, I checked my cell again. The message was short: an international number and the note, 24/7 Good luck. JB. I didn’t recognize the 268 country prefix, but 24/7 or not, I needed the information now. I told Fat Cat I’d be back and left the cave with my Benelli.

  I headed back the way we’d come in, and after what I estimated to be a mile, I found a spot where the hillside had collapsed into the sea several hundred feet below. I was well around the island from the harbor, and my phone had a clear 180-degree throw, so I turned it on again and dialed. There was some crackling, then it smoothed out i
nto a sequence of three short rings followed by a long silence, then repeated. Perhaps thirty rings later, a female voice answered, The language was English and the accent African with south continent inflections.

  “This is the Solomon Lubombo home, who is calling?”

  “Rail Black. Jackie Benveniste gave me this number.”

  I heard her cover the receiver and speak to someone. Then, there was rustling, and a halting male voice come on. “This is Solomon Lubombo. Can you please tell me something about Mr. Benveniste.”

  I’ve dealt with most types of verification, but this was the first time I’d ever been asked to make up my own questions and answers. I hoped they’d given this guy the right cheat sheet.

  “He’s Corsican and Jewish.”

  “Go on.”

  “Bad knees. Hazard of being a paratrooper.”

  “Anything else?”