by Tom Clancy
He waved over a skycap to take their suitcases and then guided them through the terminal’s entrance, where a driver stood waiting by a gray stretch limo. As he opened the trunk for their bags, Nimec paused in the hot sun to admire the car’s gleaming body.
“A Jankel Rolls-Royce,” he said. “Pre ninety-eight.”
Murthy smiled.
“You know your automobiles.”
“Some,” Nimec said. “This one’s a classic.”
“It’s been refitted with the latest modifications and vehicle technology,” Murthy said with a nod. “You should enjoy chatting with Mr. Beauchart, who is quite an afficionado, and can better discuss its features… but come, I see your luggage is in the boot.”
They climbed into the limousine’s rear, Annie first, then Nimec, Murthy following to take the jump seat opposite them.
“I hope you won’t mind my pointing out a scenic highlight or two as we go along,” he said, another smile flashing across his dark Asiatic face.
Nimec leaned back without response. Although his irritation at being stood up by Beauchart had faded under the bright tropical sun, he wasn’t really in the mood for sightseeing. But what could he say? He was going to be here awhile and wanted to be courteous.
“Above all else, our planners have made it simple to orient oneself on the island,” Murthy was explaining. “This road leads north from the airport, as the signs generally indicate, and will take us beyond our commercial shipping facilities into the resort areas. The area to our south, over a third of the island, is an environmental preserve and wildlife refuge… forty miles of mangrove forest, coastal plain, and tidal waterways explicitly prohibited from development by the national government’s land use charter.”
“Does that mean no guests allowed?” Annie said. She smiled. “I like to explore.”
“Their safety requires that access be restricted… a decision that ownership left to our security team. But we understand its appeal to nature lovers, and have worked with the recreational staff so that they can conduct guided boat and walking tours,” Murthy said. “It may interest you to know there are active sugarcane fields and fruit groves at the jungle’s fringes. These belong to local growers descended from freed African slaves who have an economic reliance on the crops. Their claims to the land are also protected by law.” He paused a moment. “The villagers of Umbria tend to be reserved and mistrustful of outsiders, but in recent years a significant number have come to Los Rayos seeking employment opportunities, and their initial opposition to sharing the island with us has eased.”
Listening to him, Annie seemed intensely fascinated.
Nimec, meanwhile, had studied the interior of the Rolls with a more measured sort of interest before he turned to look out at what clearly had to be the island’s main harbor — a bustling complement to the airport. As they drove by, he could see four long quays and a great many smaller docks reaching out over the water. There were ramps, bridges, floating cranes, storage and handling areas with enormous freight containers stacked like building blocks, a lighthouse tower at the channel entrance, and all kinds of barges and ferries coming and going, or in the process of being loaded or offloaded by dock personnel.
The heavy activity surprised Nimec a little at first, although after a moment’s consideration he guessed it shouldn’t have. A resort the size of Los Rayos would have supplies flowing in continuously, and generate a high volume of waste that he assumed accounted for much of what was hauled off on the ships. Some of the produce grown by those local villagers Murthy had brought up might also leave the island by way of the harbor. Seemed pretty likely, in fact.
Though tempted to ask him about it, Nimec decided the timing wasn’t right. He’d been thinking about Megan’s mysterious e-mail informant, and felt it would be best to sit on his questions about the harbor traffic for a while.
He watched in silence as they left the docks behind and began driving past some of the island’s far more attractive visitor spots.
As threatened, Murthy called attention to them like an enthusiastic tour bus operator.
He pointed out a golf course that came up on the left side of the road, elaborating that it was one of two eighteen-hole championship greens available to guests. He pointed out tennis courts and horseback riding paths, casinos and nightclubs, cabanas and oceanside swimming pools. And he pointed out beach after sweeping beach as the road striped up along the ocean shore.
Nimec gazed out at the shiny white sand and emerald water, quietly succumbing to the serene beauty of the place… and the funny thing was that the deeper this almost hypnotic calm settled in, the more he realized how hard he’d been trying to resist it.
“Look, Pete.” Annie tapped his arm to get his attention, then motioned to her right. “That’s fantastic!”
Out beyond the shore, a tanned, toned couple attached to colorful kiteboard sails was riding the wind with happy abandon.
“I thought about giving that a shot once,” Nimec said. “Had to be fifteen years ago, before I got too busy.” He shrugged. “The job, you know.”
Annie had kept her hand on him.
“We should do it together,” she said, rubbing his shoulder. “It’s really a kick… a lesson or two should be enough for you to get your wings.”
His forehead creased with surprise. “You’ve done it before?”
“Sure,” she said. “In Florida. When we’d have downtime at Canaveral, I’d try to find ways for my training groups to unwind.”
Nimec grunted, still looking out at the airborne couple. Then he saw something else against the blue sky, much higher and further off, a sleek flying object that reflected bright sparkles of sunlight as it needled south toward the harbor and airport.
“That an Augusta one-oh-nine?” he asked, turning to Murthy.
For a moment the security man’s expression almost seemed startled. “You have an eye for both air and ground vehicles.”
“I’ve seen a few of those choppers… UpLink’s designed avionics for some of the custom Stingray versions,” Nimec said. “The body’s pretty recognizable. With how its nose is so sharp, and that frame kind of flaring out between the doors and tail boom.”
Murthy produced another smile.
“We have a fleet of four in constant operational readiness,” he said. “At least one patrols our airspace round the clock and, your alert eye aside, their fly patterns are charted out to be inconspicuous.” He paused. “The goal at Los Rayos is to make our guests feel secure without their being conscious of security, if my meaning is clear. These are men and women who run nations, global business empires. They come here to escape and relax. To temporarily step free of the lifestyle constraints that go hand-in-hand with their positions, and at the same time have confidence they and their families are well protected. To create this environment requires a delicate balance. Our vigilance must be constant and multilayered. It also must be unobtrusive or the island will seem to them like an armed camp.”
Nimec tugged his ear. He’d noticed that the chopper had sped out of sight.
“I can see how it’d be a challenge,” he said. “The Augs… how’ve you got them configured?”
“Variously.” Murthy said. “Here again, I’m not one for technical specifications. I know they are fast and mobile, but will defer to Mr. Beauchart’s thorough expertise for the rest.” He looked at Nimec, his smile grown bigger than ever. “I’m increasingly certain you and he will find no lack of conversation at dinner tonight.”
Nimec guessed that was Murthy’s politely professional way of suggesting they move on to other subjects, and couldn’t blame him. It would be up to his boss to decide which of their trade secrets to share, the details of how their choppers were loaded among them.
Whatever Murthy’s reason or reasons, Nimec didn’t want to be pushy.
He fell silent, and after a minute or two realized Annie had taken easy hold of his hand on the seat between them, her fingertips so light against his palm it kind of tickled. S
he really seemed to be enjoying herself as they viewed the passing sights, and that made him glad.
Then the Rolls turned onto a drive branching off from the seaside road, and slowed, and Murthy pointed ahead at what he announced was the villa that had been reserved for them.
Annie’s fingers squeezed Nimec’s hand more tightly. There beyond a courtyard lined with palmettos was an expansive, Spanish-looking structure — all railed balconies, wide columns, arched windows, and sunwashed adobe under a red tile roof. Nimec saw a swimming pool at the end of a fieldstone path on one side of the place, and spread across the grounds, spacious gardens with bright exotic flowers and thick green hedges.
“This location is rather secluded, as we thought you might prefer,” Murthy was saying. “We hope you won’t hesitate to let us know if anything fails to meet your satisfaction.”
Nimec looked over at Annie, saw the barely contained excitement on her face, and then turned back to Murthy.
“I think it’ll be perfect,” he said.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Andrew Reed Baxter had dreaded checking his morning voice mail. Three days in Palm Springs had notched the term long weekend into a depressing context for him and he’d known there would be a carryover before leaving for the office… shit, one stiff hand after another, how much cash had he lost? He didn’t need a certified accountant to tell him it was a whole fucking lot — no wonder his reflux was giving him a terrible time this morning. It was doubling down on those soft counts that had killed him, screw those variations; he should have just played his usual game. Next time he’d remember that before deciding to take anybody’s so-called expert advice about systems and strategies, stick to what he knew and watch the dealer go bust.
Next time, for damned sure, he’d bring his winning game to the table.
Baxter sat with the phone’s handset cradled between his neck and shoulder, listening to the beep-beep-beep of the stutter dial tone that indicated he had messages. Then he reluctantly keyed the access number and spoke his password, bringing his antacid mints out of a desk drawer, peeling open the foil wrap with his thumb.
His ex-wife’s screeching message was the first to come up.
Shit, shit, Baxter thought, and popped a couple of the peppermint antacid tablets into his mouth.
She was, predictably, calling to remind him the alimony check was late. With her it always started out with a complaint about the alimony. Then the rest of the litany would follow. Alicia’s school in New York City had contacted her. The tuition was overdue, why hadn’t it been paid? Forty-four thousand dollars a year to keep the kid on an LD track; Baxter knew he should have insisted on being the one to decide where to send her. Failing that, he should have had his lawyer insist on rolling the cost of Alicia’s education into his child support, let her mother have to budget it from the blanket payments. Maybe then she’d have found a special ed program that didn’t bleed him dry. He’d heard there was a boarding school right next door in Virginia that cost half what he was laying out — why not that one? Everybody knew who ran things down there in New York. Fucking kike moneygrubbers. They didn’t nail you to the cross, they hung you from it by your purse strings.
Baxter listened about halfway through her message and then pressed the keypad button to skip to the next one. No break from his misery here; it was old man Bennett—“King Hughie”—on a harangue of his own about the new investment deal Sedco’s partners in that Kazakhstan project were negotiating with Beijing. The Chinese, he reminded Baxter, were set to import twenty million tons of oil a year from that Caspian pipeline; how much more were they going to gobble up? Western Europe was already starting to get paranoid about their out-of-control acquisitiveness and consumption, even rumbling about economic sanctions if they didn’t curb their appetite. And then there were Dan Parker’s opponents in the senate race batting the issue around on the Sunday news shows, wondering aloud where the hell he’d been when the Chinks made their move to buy up those stakes. King Hughie didn’t intend to see Sedco’s reputation, or his favorite son’s election campaign, besmirched with charges that he’d gladhanded former Soviet pawns to the detriment of America’s traditional allies. He wanted to call a special meeting of the company’s directors and major shareholders, insisting they would have to put on the brakes or else.
If King Hughie only knew the reality of what was happening in his own boardroom, Baxter thought. The old man could still bark with the loudest of them, but he wasn’t the watchdog he used to be.
Baxter crunched down his antacids, put a couple more onto his palm, and tossed them into the chute. His eye had been on the Caribbean operation, what he’d gotten going there over the past year. But he knew Parker had been involved with behind-the-scenes talks to rebuff the Chinese proposal and convince the Kazakhstanis it wasn’t in their long-term interest to feed another hungry giant on their borders. They were accustomed to handling things quietly in that part of the world and Parker hadn’t wanted to throw pie in the faces of his working contacts… though the general public wouldn’t appreciate these subtleties, would just see Parker having to defend himself over and over against accusations they barely understood. And Baxter hoped he went ahead and knocked himself out. Whenever he heard some politician or other talk about the wisdom and sound judgment of the average American voter, he’d wonder how the son of a bitch didn’t bust a gut in midspiel. Man for man, woman for woman, the average American voter was a half step from brain-dead.
Baxter jabbed at the keypad button again to cut off King Hughie’s inflamed rant. It was followed by a series of relatively innocuous messages — a PR assistant with questions about Sedco’s latest corporate media packet, the president of a greenie advocacy group who wanted to discuss the impact of offshore wells on the Louisiana crawfish population, those contractors he’d hired to renovate his Chesapeake beach house letting him know they’d prepared a final estimate. Baxter paid the least possible attention to them, thinking emptily about that last night at the casino… actually the last hand he’d played on the last night. He’d been at the no limit table, three hundred grand’s worth of chips in the circle, holding a soft fifteen — an Ace and a four — with the dealer showing five up. His instincts had been to stand pat, but instead he asked for the hit and caught a deuce.
The dealer had stood on a soft seventeen, and that was that for Baxter. He’d been beaten, and badly, according to house rules. Three hundred thou to their coffers, added to the six hundred thousand they’d taken from him earlier in the weekend… a loss of almost a million dollars.
The realization slapped him hard.
Baxter had headed for the elevator almost as his cards were being swept off the table, weak in his knees, a little faint, afraid he might be physically sick right there in the casino’s gambling room. This was yesterday, Sunday, just hours before his flight back to D.C. The previous night he had taken an even bigger loss, but it hadn’t seemed that discouraging when he got back to his room. Not once he’d phoned out for that blonde, a couple bottles of wine, and a tin of expensive Petrossian caviar. By morning he had cleared out the negativity and was full of restored optimism, sure he would be able to recoup, or better yet head home a triumphant winner. And he still believed he would have if he’d done a gut check and stuck to his customary game.
Next time, Baxter promised himself. Next time it would be the tried-and-true, and with any luck a different fucking outcome…
He suddenly heard Jean Luc’s recorded voice in the earpiece and sat up straight. What was that he’d said?
He punched in the playback code and listened. The time/date stamp told him the call had come in Friday afternoon. Then, again, the terse message:
“We need to talk about the deleted file, Reed. The one that almost crashed our system. Get in touch with me as soon as you can.”
Baxter sat behind his desk a moment, unsettled. Those words had shot through his thoughts like bullets, propelled by the level but unmistakable urgency of their tone.
; He hit the phone’s disconnect button, started to key in the country code for Trinidad from memory, and then reconsidered. Although the office telephone line was supposed to be secure, Baxter wasn’t so much the gambler that he’d bet his entire future on it.
Reaching into the inner pocket of his suit jacket for his handheld satphone, he placed the call on it instead.
“Hello?”
“Jean Luc,” Baxter said. “It’s Andrew.”
“Reed, I’ve been wondering when you’d get in touch.”
“I was out of town.”
“So your admin informed me,” Jean Luc said. “I’d hoped you might check your messages remotely while you were gone.”
Baxter cleared his throat.
“I took a long weekend and I’m back,” he said. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“How openly can you speak?”
“We’re on a crypted line, but I’m at the office, so take that for what it’s worth,” Baxter said. “I need to know about the file you mentioned.”
Silence.
“There was another attachment,” Jean Luc said after a moment. “One that wasn’t wiped.”
Baxter felt his stomach tighten.
“You didn’t know about it?” he said.
“We didn’t know of its connection to the original,” Jean Luc said. “By the time that became apparent we’d lost it.”
“Jesus Christ.” Baxter thought about those crates that had arrived at the Florida airport. It had been all over the news. The human remains found in them were unidentifiable… but still, he didn’t need something like this on his head right now.
“Listen to me, Reed,” Jean Luc was saying. “There’s no cause to be too concerned right now.”
“No?”
“Not to where either of us overreacts. We aren’t positive what’s in the other file. It might not contain anything that could cause further damage. Very likely, it doesn’t. And in any event, it’s bound to turn up. We’ve got our top men working to trace it.”