by Ed Baldwin
Boyd answered the phone as Lt. Kelly hurriedly left the room. Donn had missed the entire exchange and sat, face lined with fatigue, eyes on the horizon out the window. He needed a haircut.
“Boyd, I heard you were shot. Are you OK?” Ferguson’s voice was surprisingly clear, considering the call was patched through two operators, a satellite and the ancient telephone at the nurse’s station.
“They tell me I’ll recover. Donn was just telling me what happened after I fell overboard. Is this line secure?”
“No. Consider this a social call. We’ll set up a secure line later. When will you be well enough to talk? We’ve got problems.”
Looking at Donn, Boyd felt tired. The momentary improvement he’d felt when Lt. Kelly entered had passed. He looked at his watch and realized it was just 24 hours since he’d been pulled from the ocean, and he’d been in surgery for part of that time. “Give me until tomorrow. I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“That’s good. I’ve talked to the wing commander there, told him to treat you guys like kings.”
“They’ve done that already. We’re in good shape.”
Ferguson wished him well and broke the line. Boyd was alone with a sleeping Donn Wilde. In moments, the oblivion of sleep closed around him, too.
********
Smoke curled up from a cigarette as Pamela Prescott read a magazine, seated in the big chair in the corner. She wore faded pink cotton hospital pajamas with a drawstring at the waist. The window was open by her side. It was dark. She looked up as she blew smoke toward the window and saw Boyd watching her.
“Welcome back from the land of the damned and the dead.”
“Thanks. You’re looking buff today. Donn asleep?” He rolled partially to his right side, coughing, looking down at the blood draining out.
“Yeah, he’s in the other room. They won’t let us leave here. I told them you were a smoker and would want one when you woke up, so they’d let me smoke in here. Want one?”
“Not the thing to do with one lung,” Boyd said with a little laugh that made him cough. “Actually, I don’t feel too bad, considering.”
“I guess Donn told you about Wolf and Neville?” She shifted, sitting up straight and taking another deep draw before stubbing out the cigarette in the ash tray on her lap.
“Yeah. Are you sure they’re dead?”
“I’m sure Wolf is. I heard the bullets hit him, and he fell over the side like you did. He must have gone straight down. We looked but there was no sign. We even took a quick circle after they picked us all up in the helicopter. Nothing.”
Boyd shook his head. He’d not been friends with Wolf, but his passing seemed sad. He’d felt a kinship with the big bodyguard. They were a lot alike. Neville’s face appeared in his mind, creased face squinting into the horizon, smoke trailing off from his pipe.
“How come they won’t let you guys leave?” Boyd asked, shaking off the melancholy.
“Ferguson called from the states right after we got here. It seems someone in South Carolina has Ebola. The whole East Coast is in an uproar. The doc said the base is going to get us a house tomorrow and keep us away from the rest of the populace here until they’re sure we don’t have it.”
“So Constantine, if he isn’t dead, loaded the virus and vaccine up into his fishing boat and took off, presumably with Mikki, though maybe not.”
“She jumped over to his boat while we were jumping into the water.”
“So, even if they did get Constantine, she still has the virus.”
“Yes.”
“Was that just jealousy that motivated Constantine to go out there with his crew and a case of dynamite? Was he planning to kill all of us and blow up Chardonnay just because I punched him in the nose and took off with his woman?”
“No. There’s more to the story. Something you don’t know.”
Pam got up and took the straight-back chair next to the bed.
“Now listen, I’m going to tell you this because it’s part of my job, sort of. But, it’s got to be just between us. And here’s why. Though it may sound a little strange to you just now, considering Donn’s behavior with our recent hostess, bunking with her and all, we’d made some plans. There’s a bank in Wewoka, Okla., for sale.”
“Ha! You jumped his bones before you put him in the pen. I know you did,” Boyd said, laughing, coughing and wincing with the pain it caused.
“Quiet! Dammit, you adolescent boys are all alike. You think your little dicks are at the center of the universe. He’s just in the next room, and that stupid nurse may still be awake down the hall. This is important, and I’m not gonna tell you if anyone comes in here.”
She spoke in a loud whisper.
“OK, I’m listening.”
“Mikki paid $5 million, in gold, for Ebola. She used Chardonnay for the Atlantic crossing to circumvent the laws on carrying that much cash and to get it back across the Atlantic without having to explain what was in those funny cases. She’s known Constantine since they were kids, and she’s hired him to smuggle the virus into Africa.”
“Wow! How did you find that out, and what makes you think it’s the truth?”
Pam leaned into Boyd’s face, hers just inches from his.
“Mikki plays girl games,” Pam whispered, eyes flicking toward the door. “It’s a completely different scene than the one you guys are so familiar with. She sees something she wants, and asks for it. She expects a negotiation.”
Boyd turned on his side to see her better. Her face was flushed, eyes moist.
“She asked the first day out. I said I wasn’t interested, didn’t do that sort of thing. She took Donn, thinking the price could be to give him back. I ignored her offer to send him back and began asking banker questions about her business dealings with Planter’s National Bank and Lymon Byxbe. She gave vague answers. She thought I wanted a job and offered me one. I turned her down but gave a little sample of what she wanted.”
“When was that?” Boyd asked.
“Before Bermuda.”
“Sample?”
“None of your business,” Pam said sternly. “I flirted with her is all. She had already seen the merchandise.”
“OK.”
“I asked her what her business was with Lymon Byxbe. She began giving me bits and pieces of it. She thought she had given me enough and was going to get her reward the night after you threw Wolf overboard.”
“Did she?”
“No. The bitch was lying.” Pam’s face grew hard, her jaw tightened.
“Oh,” Boyd said, not really understanding.
“She’d cashed in all her fun tokens by the time the storm was over, and she was looking at a week to the Azores without anything.”
“Fun tokens?”
“Sure. Each game is set up, plays to a climax, and is over. You noticed that, surely,” she said impatiently.
“Well, I admit I expected our little … thing, would, ah, go on longer than it did,” Boyd said, embarrassed that Pamela saw his wrenching emotional pinnacle as just the climax of a game.
Pam shook her head, frowning in disbelief.
“She really was nearly dead,” Boyd retorted defensively.
“True.”
“So, what happened?”
“It came down to a show-and-tell in her room, the night after you slept with her. She pulled out the suitcases and offered to show me what was inside. I agreed to consider her offer. She opened the cases. In one there were small vials of yellow powder. She said that was a vaccine for a tropical disease she’d never heard of and said it was only enough to vaccinate a few hundred people, but that more could be made from that. The other one had larger vials of white powder and she said that was the freeze dried virus itself. I asked her who it was for, and she said she couldn’t say. I was sure we had enough to make a federal case for conspiracy to commit murder, currency violations, customs, enough to keep her in jail until she was old and gray.”
“Sounds like enough.”
; “Then it got weird. I still don’t believe what she told me. It’s all about the diamond cartel and the price of diamonds in equatorial Africa.”
“Diamonds in the Congo? That’s where the virus came from initially.”
“It seems alluvial diggers keep the price low.”
“Alluvial diggers?”
“Poor dumb fucks who muck around in the mud along the Congo and its tributaries, looking for diamonds. The small operators sluice along the rivers just like the gold miners in the Rocky Mountains did a hundred years ago. Those diamonds find their way to India and Pakistan or China to be cut, and it undermines the diamond cartel. Mikki’s grandfather has been working with some fool who wants to spread Ebola around Africa to scare off or kill alluvial diggers just to raise the price of diamonds.”
“That’s sick,” Boyd said, disgusted. “They don’t have enough money, they need more? You sure she wasn’t lying, stringing you along to get what she wanted?”
“I kept my end of the bargain. We cozied up. She wasn’t in a hurry. She opened a bottle of champagne, and then brought out a bottle of vodka.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah. With a couple of drinks the bartering seemed to be over. She admitted the whole virus thing was a harebrained scheme and that her grandfather is probably senile and shouldn’t be trusted to run a trillion dollar bank. She took the lead and got what she wanted. I had another couple drinks, just to unwind. Then, she turned the tables on me. She said she planned to get rid of the virus at the next stop. I told her that would be the smart thing to do. She stood up, blond and tall and proud, with a wicked grin on her face, and said we weren’t through.”
Pam sobbed.
“You don’t’ need to tell me what you did.”
“I know. Round 2 was very different, and included her asking me a bunch of questions. It was over! We had what we needed.”
“And more.”
“Yeah. Then I told her I was an FBI agent.”
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
Savannah, Georgia
Mysterious Illness Kills Savannah Man
The Associated Press
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Memorial University Medical Center here reports that a 47-year-old man from Savannah died today after a brief illness. The man’s name has been withheld pending notification of family. Physicians at University Hospital say he was seen in the emergency room early in the morning of Sept. 14 with high fever and flulike symptoms and was admitted to an isolation ward. Later in the day, he developed unexplained hemorrhages and died before a diagnosis could be made. His medical records are being requested to see whether he was taking any blood-thinning medications. A team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has arrived from Atlanta but has not released a statement.
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
Red Eyes
Two red eyes glared from the blackness of the other bedroom. Lymon Byxbe had heard it breathing for some time now but had been unable to move, much less try to escape. The eyes were at least two feet apart. No wonder the breathing seemed to take the air from his room and return it hot and fetid – the thing was enormous. Is this how death came, to sit by its victim, watching? Would it squeeze through that door and, what, just grab him and it would be over? He was ready.
He’d lost 20 pounds in a week. He hadn’t eaten or taken water in four days and, in the past 24, hours he’d shit blood until he couldn’t make it to the bathroom anymore. His nose dripped blood constantly onto the pillow, and the wheezing, racking cough brought up thick clots of black, metallic-tasting blood.
The wind rustled the branches of the old cypress in the yard, heavy with Spanish moss, and he remembered why he had bought this house. Sugar Landing had been a smuggler’s rendezvous for years. The creek behind the house was deep enough for a cabin cruiser or blue water fishing boat and fed into the Ashley River by Charleston and the Intracoastal Waterway. He had liked the thought that if isolation in the swamp south of Charleston failed him, he could slip away into the maze of creeks and saw grass at his back, and they’d lose him again.
Was that really death in the other room, waiting? With the next gust of wind, a floorboard creaked. Maybe that was something else in there.
The $5 million dollars in gold, stacked now in neat uniform rows on the dresser, had seemed a burden from the first. Charles Meilland had insisted on his taking gold, said it was safer to transport because it didn’t take up the smell of drugs like paper money did. He’d taken his boat out 50 miles into the Atlantic to meet Michelle Meilland to exchange the money for the virus and vaccine. Five million bucks worth of gold turned out to weigh nearly exactly what he, Lymon Byxbe weighed: 185 pounds. Well, had weighed. He was down to nearly 160 now.
Money had never been the attraction for him that it had been for others, like Cooper Jordan. Yet, here he was, dying a rich man. He’d wanted fame and the thrill of discovering something no man had ever known, which had made him change his mind and lie low, buying groceries from a small mom-and-pop country grocery on the Savannah highway instead of running with his money. He wanted one more grab at the brass ring. He already had a half a dozen pigtail Macaques in a monkey house. He’d set that up when he bought this property two years before. The temptation to play with death one more time had seemed to pay off. He’d vaccinated the monkeys three weeks before he delivered the vaccine and virus to Michelle Meilland. He’d exposed them, being careful in his hazard suit, and none died, though several were pretty sick for awhile. He’d had two weeks of robust health to enjoy the triumph of creating a vaccine for an evil disease. Then, only six days ago, he’d noticed in the mirror that his eyes were red.
It slid over the floor, and boards creaked. Byxbe strained to raise his head to see it as it squeezed through the door. A gasp escaped his parched lips as it came into the moonlight and was, for the first time, clearly visible. Nothing in science, or myth, or his religion had prepared him for this. The red eyes were wise and knowing.
Insight, as clear as any knowledge he had ever gained, flooded him in the last moments of his life. He didn’t get Ebola from a monkey or from carelessness in handling the virus. Lymon Byxbe got Ebola from a mosquito.
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
Luxembourg City
Flinging white spray across blue water, the swordfish leaped, and the ecstasy of his strength and determination to be free thrilled Charles Meilland. Line sang out of the reel as the tan young man leaned back with the rod, testing his mettle against that of a magnificent fish. Two hours they had fought, and quit had not occurred to either.
“Grande espada!” the swarthy Azorean crewman cried out as he brought some water from the pilot house of the stubby fishing boat. Its undersize diesel putted relentlessly, pulling the fish through the pristine waters of the Princess Alice Banks.
Charles heaved again, holding the rod high above his head and, for the first time, felt the fish weaken and slide sideways momentarily before regaining composure and pulling back.
“I’ve got him!” Charles shouted. “He’s coming in.”
A glass slipped from his grip and fell to the floor, breaking with a loud tinkle. The scene of the North Atlantic blurred, and the fish, cut into steaks and fried for a festival 50 years before, was gone again. Long dead, too, were the Portuguese crewmen who witnessed the battle and took the prize home in pieces at the end of the day.
Only a rheumy old man remained, drool dripping from his chin as he returned to the present and the broken glass, and his library, grown cold and dark at the end of the day. Brandy soaked into the pale green wool of the Chinese rug, a simple geometric design cut carefully into the pile.
Meilland rose and brushed aside the broken glass with a slippered foot. He turned on the reading lamp by his head and shuffled to the sideboard and selected another crystal brandy snifter, holding it to the light to be sure it was clean. He poured 2 ounces of Cognac into it and returned to his chair. The fish wouldn’t come back. Instead, a little girl, blond and blue-eyed, ran across that same rug
to jump into his lap. He sipped the Cognac, and the memory flowed over him. The first tears in three-quarters of a century slithered down his flaking, age-speckled cheeks and fell onto his smoking jacket.
A sob escaped as his head dropped to his chest and his shoulders shook. His misery was made complete by the knowledge that the loss of his granddaughter was entirely the result of his own greed and the abandonment of the values and teachings that had been the foundation of a family business, prosperous since the time of King David.
Candido Mendes’ telegram had come after a week of calling the bank trying to reach Meilland. The language barrier, and the assumption by his middle managers that nothing of interest could come from a Portuguese fisherman, had insulated him from the news that his beloved Chardonnay had blown up and sank with his only granddaughter.
He that exacted punishment from the generation of the Flood, and the generation of the dispersion will exact punishment from him who does not abide by the spoken word.
Charles had not read the Talmud since his early 20s, yet now that quotation would not leave his conscious mind. Honor, without the need for written contracts, had been the basis of commerce in precious stones. Where Jews were welcomed, the diamond trade had flourished, and the Jewish bankers who served the brokers, judges, artisans and smugglers had prospered. His father had left him a prosperous bank that had catered to the diamond trade. Under his leadership, it had become something entirely different.
CHAPTER FORTY SIX
Quarantine
The waves marched in to the island from the northwest in half-mile-long rows, cresting as they crossed some unseen ledge out from the shore, and crashed into a carpet of foam and spray before the swells rode a dozen feet up the 100-foot-high cliff. The spray became mist, and the wind carried it up and across the pastures, brilliant green in the sunlight and surrounded by carefully built rock walls. Black-and-white Holstein cattle grazed peacefully.
Sheltered from the breeze by a rock wall of volleyball-size black lava stones, Boyd was comfortable in shorts and no shirt. An empty longneck lay in the grass beside his lawn chair, and Donn and Pamela played Frisbee below him in the yard. They’d been given a vacant Air Force housing unit in which to live out their quarantine. It had three bedrooms, a full kitchen and the best view of the ocean on the whole base. Food and beer had been dutifully delivered daily, making their stay as pleasant as possible.