by Tom Clancy
The tightness across Baxter’s middle became a hot coil of pain.
“Goddamn it, Jean, I warned you,” he snapped. “How long ago? Months? Years? Hire those fucking jungle bunnies and situations like this are inevitable.”
Another silence ensued. It dangled across the thousands of miles between them.
Baxter wished he hadn’t let his temper get the better of him.
“Jean, look, I apologize. It’s early and I’m feeling a little raw—”
“Never mind.”
“You sure? I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, good… I’d hate to think you clammed up because you’d gone PC on me,” Baxter said with a strained chuckle. His chair creaked as he leaned forward to reach for his antacids. “The file you’re tracing, does it have a name?”
“We all have names,” Jean Luc said. Whatever that meant. His tone remained oddly chill; Baxter guessed he was still a little annoyed. “This one’s called Jarvis Lenard. He’s a groundskeeper from the village.”
Which in Baxter’s mind meant trouble, no doubt about it, considering how those people stuck together. This time, though, he didn’t allow himself to get frazzled.
“Eckers is on the job?”
“I told you we were going with our best.”
“That you did.” Baxter put a mint in his mouth, decided to add another. Clearly Jean was miffed. “Look, I’ll take it on faith you’ve got this covered, and figure you’ll keep me posted on any new developments. What do you say?”
“I think that’s a sound option,” Jean Luc said. “And while I’m offering advice, here’s another piece… wherever you’ve been, it’s not healthy for you. Take it from a friend, Reed. Next time you decide to get away for a few days, consider going someplace that gives more than it takes.”
Baxter frowned, not sure how to reply. But then the click in his ear rendered that moot.
Jean Luc had hung up at his end of the line.
SOUTHWESTERN TRINIDAD
In his study at the Bonasse estate, Jean Luc held the telephone’s cradled receiver in his fist a moment, then slowly relaxed his grip and stood from behind his desk. Probably he’d gotten angrier at Reed than his comments warranted; the man was what he was. The penultimate WASP, inescapably cloistered and ignorant despite his Ivy League education, a hopeless product of his genealogy and upbringing who couldn’t see past the tip of his patrician nose.
Expelling a long breath, he went across the wainscoted room to the side table on which the cubical walnut-and-glass display case had rested for as long as he could remember… his first look at it, in fact, had come while he was perched on his father’s shoulders. Even older than the case, the antique table dated from the early colonial period and had a blend of stylistic influences in its design — the curved, graceful elegance of its legs showing the hand of a Basque artisan, its ebony marble surface distinctly French in its proud Old World solidness.
Here on the islands things had always mixed together, until their origins almost couldn’t be sorted out.
With its clear top lid, clear glass front and side panes, and mirrored back, the case allowed the flintlock pistol it contained to be viewed from many angles. It was a striking weapon, passed down through the generations of his family from male heir to male heir… Jean Luc’s was a strongly patriarchal bunch, one in which women had often been seen as property, acquired to serve the needs of the men whose beds they readied with their hands and warmed with their bodies.
He looked down at the pistol nestled there in its fitted dark blue velvet riser, carefully preserved for almost two and a half centuries. The chased and engraved gold cartouches along its long nine-inch barrel, the cocking mechanism shaped like a gape-jawed serpent or dragon, the grinning gold demon’s head on the pommel — these had not dulled in the slightest with the years, surpassing in durability the lineage of the man who had first possessed it, and given it to his fourth great-grandfather as a seal of alliance.
On occasion when Jean Luc studied the weapon, he would find himself overtaken with visions of wooden pirate ships with broad sails and skull-and-crossbone banners, of naval battles with dueling cannons. Now it took him several minutes to become aware that his eyes had moved from the gun to center on his own reflection in the mirrored backing.
Reed was what he was, yes. In all his effete, degenerate weakness.
And he… he himself was passing. Always had been passing.
Jean Luc Morpaign did not want to look too deeply into his heart to ask which of them carried the greater freight of shame, or was the uglier within.
TERRITORIAL TRINIDAD
Hidden in the reeds, he watched the fowl from perhaps a yard away, grateful the thick, lazy air was without any hint of a breeze to carry his scent toward it.
He recognized it as a female whistler, plump with a wide black beak, long neck, reddish breast, dabs of white around her middle, and dark rump and tail feathers. When the tide had gone out and dusk lifted the afternoon heat, he had seen her venture a short distance from her nest among the mangrove roots, wading through the weeds to the brackish water on stilt legs, standing there in position and occasionally bobbing for small fish, crabs, and insects.
He stood perfectly still and watched, his bare brown feet in the cloying mud, his fingers clenched around a heavy wooden stick that measured about four feet from end to end. He had fashioned the stick from a tree limb, snapping it off a large drooping bough and cleaning the rough bark of spindly branches and leaves with a flat, sharp-edged stone. His shell windbreaker had been folded and knotted into a kind of improvised waterproof sling sack for holding the food supplies that he meant to bring back to his shelter. He wore this against his side, its sleeves tied together at the elasticized wrist openings to form a strap that looped around his neck. Right now it was lightly filled with the plants and such he’d gathered for tonight’s supper. There were young cattails and bulrushes he had uprooted from the mud, stripped of their tough, fibrous leaves, and cut down to their edible shoot stems with the same stone tool that had yielded his heavy stick. There were patches of green moss and leathery rock tripe he had soaked in the channel to cleanse them of the toxins that might otherwise wrack him with explosions of vomiting and streaming diarrhea. There were some clusters of wild berries, and even cockle leaves from the thorny clumps that grew in the drier soil inland. The leaf stalks, though bitter on the tongue, were said to ward off the fevers and skin infections with which a man could be stricken in the marshes, and would be more palatable once he peeled away their rinds.
He had survived on slim pickings before, though this particular assortment of food was a lower mark than he could remember.
In the deep poverty of his childhood, the mainstay of his diet had been pap, a thin, simple porridge of stale bread or cornmeal boiled in water. At breakfast his grandma, who had raised him and his two younger sisters since the death of their mother, would sweeten it with honey, or brown sugar, or the pulp of guava or pawpaw or coconut. When the family came together for their evening meal, the pap would be heartened with turnips and carrots and boiled bits of fish or chicken and their broths, and seasoned with the herbs grown in the tiny plot of a garden beside the single-room shack they all occupied. As he approached his teenage years and took on a variety of jobs for the well-to-do — quick to learn how to bring in a wage, he’d worked as a repairman, groundsman, whatever he could do with his hands — they had been able to improve their housing conditions and expand on the staples of their daily meals. And though Grandma Tressie had passed on long ago, he had continued sharing a portion of his income with his sisters after he went to live and work at Los Rayos, setting aside their money for his regular visits to the village.
Whether or not he had made his final visit… that was the difficult question, right and true.
Now he saw the whistler make a sudden jab at something she must have spotted in the shallows, her bill coming up quickly,
a lump sliding down the sinuous tube of her neck. She would stay only a short time, not journeying too far from the nest she had built in the tangle of mangrove roots on the riverbank behind her, ready to defend her newly hatched ducklings against raiders. The best chance to steal up on her would be as she dabbled for food, dividing her attention between the shapes that flitted past her keen eyes below the water’s surface and the sounds that came from the direction of the nest. Should he fail to take her by surprise, the likelihood was that the bird still would not allow herself to be sundered from her young. She would fight to protect them from him, as from any threat, rather than attempt to flee.
This would make his task easier if no less regretful, for Jarvis Lenard hated to kill any living, breathing creature.
He moved toward her, threading a silent path through the eight-foot-tall reed stalks. Jarvis was a Spiritual Baptist by upbringing who, while not a churchgoer, considered himself a man of deep Christian faith. He had, though, sometimes joined friends and relatives at nyabinghis, ceremonies of music, religious philosophy, and politics organized by the mainland’s Rastafarian community — drawn to these at first by the reggae, the lovely girls with whom he would laugh and dance, and, in his younger years, the free and easy abundance of ganja. At these gatherings the Rastas had introduced him to their ideas about livity, a natural way that forbade the eating of flesh, eggs, or dairy in favor of a vegetarian diet, and it had taken hold in his mind and soul. He had come to believe that it was against God’s will, even parasitic, to sustain his own body with the meat of animals the Almighty had brought onto the earth, or with anything that carried their lifeblood inside it.
But Jarvis Lenard was a practical, reasoning man as well as a spiritual one. Already today the helicopters had made three passes of the wetlands and bordering jungle — just an hour ago one of them had flown above the wall of trees outside his shelter, blowing a tempest of foliage through its entrance — and their attempts to close in on him would not end when a heavy curtain of darkness fell over the island and they could put their nightseeker equipment into play. The sky would be patrolled day and night, as would the ground. And the village would be watched, and searched, and watched some more, and searched again with sinister, devious eyes.
Jarvis was unsure how long it would be before he might get to a safe place, or even where such a place might be. In the meantime he would need to hide for what could be days, perhaps weeks, and could not be falling short of food. It would hardly be enough for him to scrounge lichen and berries and the pulp of cattails. However much it troubled him, he would have to resign himself to killing if he meant to keep his strength.
He moved on the fowl with two hurried strides and, as he raised his stick with both hands, saw it snap its head up from the water to look around at him. Its display of aggressive defiance was instantaneous — a shrill cry, a puffing out of feathers, a spreading and flapping of wings. Jarvis took another step forward and brought the stick down on it with a hard swing, trying for the long neck or head. But the whistler partially eluded him with a shrieking, fluttering hop and was instead struck on its right flank at the base of the wing. It fell onto its opposite side and slushed about in the marsh, the one broken wing dangling with shoots of bone sticking up through the skin at its base, the other thrashing like a paddle in the water, flinging up clumps of mud.
Jarvis Lenard clubbed the body again, felt the crack of ribs transmitted to his fingers through his stick, saw bright blood splash from underneath its plumage. The crippled bird dragged on its side with its good wing still paddling and scooping mud, and Jarvis stood over it with his stick up over his head for the deathblow. But then his teeth clenched at its dying cries and he knew he could not take a chance that it would not finish the job. The creature had suffered enough.
He lowered the stick across his chest and, gripping it at either end, bent to press it down against the base if the whistler’s skull. Then he put one knee heavily on the stick to hold it firm, snatched the bird’s legs into his fists, and pulled back with a hard jerk to break the neck apart from the spine as he had seen Grandma Tressie do to the live chickens she would occasionally bring home from market.
The bird quivered as if with a surge of voltage and kept beating its one unbroken wing into the muck for almost a full thirty seconds before its nervous system shut down and the twitches stopped.
Jarvis took his knee off the stick and rose, lifting the warm carcass, standing there a little while as some of the blood and water dripped off. He felt tired, desperate, and sorrowful.
“I beg your forgiveness, little mother, and am deeply obliged for yer sacrifice,” he said. His arm and voice shook. “Doan’t know if yah would care why I done as I ’ave — an’ need yet do — but there are those who must be held accountable fer what’s goin’ on t’ruout this island, and my intention’s ta stick around and see justice done fer a fact.”
Jarvis waited another moment, silent and thoughtful, drops of blood and water spilling from the limp bird in his hand. Then he put it in his makeshift sack and turned toward the mangrove thicket where he had spotted its nest.
Without their mother to feed and protect them, the hatchlings would face either starvation or eventual discovery by predators.
He could do no less in his guilt and gratitude than give them the mercy of a faster end.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA
It was half past noon when they met as planned at the Valley Fair Mall on the border of San Jose and Santa Clara.
Megan Breen had exchanged a Louis Vuitton Suhali handbag that she’d purchased the week before, her eye having discriminated a flaw in the stitching of an inner zipper compartment once she got it home. At the price she paid for the bag, this seemed a shameless crime.
Julia Gordian had come for an advertised sale at the aromatherapy and herbal cosmetics boutique. She liked using the tea tree antioxidant facial scrub, lavender and ylang oil body lotion, and rosewater skin restoration gel with “bio-intrinsic essences,” whatever that meant. All she really knew was that the products made her feel fresh and clean out of the shower and didn’t contain too many artificial ingredients, or so their labels said.
Now Megan sat keeping an eye on their shopping bags and other personal articles at the table they had pulled up to in the mall’s big, sunshiny food court after doing their errands. In front of her were two cranberry scones, a paper cup of dark Italian roast coffee, and a stack of napkins. The coffee was piping hot and tasted good and had been served with one of those cardboard sleeves that slid around the cup so you didn’t have to double it.
She sipped and looked around for Julia, whom she’d last seen getting in line behind her for a garden salad. Then she located her in the crowd of shoppers, leading with a plastic tray as she pushed toward the table. On it was a flat mini-pizza box and some paper plates.
“Sorry it took me a while.” Julia said, putting down the tray. “Hot stuff.”
She sat opposite Megan. Her black hair cut short and deliberately mussed, she wore avocado-and-cream striped lowrise bellbottoms, a black midriff blouse, and white lace-up Keds sneakers. The blouse was loose and sleeveless with a flared lapel and some kind of complicated sash tied above her exposed navel. On the right lapel was a silver marcasite brooch shaped like a gecko. On her left shoulder was a small dark blue tattoo composed of a pair of stylized kanji ideographs: Ji, which means “oneself,” and Yuu, which roughly translates into the word “reason” or “meaning.”
Together they form the traditional Japanese symbol for liberty and freedom.
“Changed your mind about that salad, I see,” Megan said.
Julia got comfortable at the table, flapped open her pizza box, and pointed inside. The pie was cut into four slices and topped with a huge pile of onions, peppers, mushrooms, and sausages.
“Wrong,” she said. “I just decided it would look better on runny mozzarella, hot tomato sauce, and crust. A nice, thick carbohydrate-ridden crust.”
Megan lo
oked into the box.
“No arugula?” she said, straight-faced.
“Or sprouts.” Julia smiled. “Those little pieces of spiced ground pork stuffed into intestinal lining do more to zest it up.”
Megan cocked an eyebrow with amusement. She had come from the office in a charcoal gray blazer with the Chanel logo on its penny-colored buttons, a matching skirt, an ice blue blouse, and gray mid-heel dress shoes.
“I can’t believe you intend to consume that whole pie,” she said.
Julia shrugged. She reached for a napkin, put it in her palm, took a wedge of pizza out of the box, put it on the napkin, and bent it slightly along the middle to form a sort of runoff channel for the excess grease. Careful not to lose any of the topping, she tipped the slice down to let the grease drip onto the foiled cardboard liner that had been underneath it. Then she pushed the pizza box toward Megan.
“Mangiare bene,” she said. “Take one.”
Megan shook her head.
“I already bought these scones.”
“Eat ’em afterward.” Julia pushed the box closer to her. “Go on, be a lioness.”
Megan smiled.
“No, thanks, really,” she said. “I have a conference at three o’clock and would rather not belch my way through it.”
Julia gave another shrug. “Your loss,” she said, starting in on the pizza.
Megan carefully broke a piece off her scone and looked over her business suit for stray crumbs. At the table to her right, a plump woman shopper and her tyke-ish, buddingly overweight daughter had reached the conclusion of their fast-food pit stop. As the little girl started gathering their crumpled waxed wrappers, empty paper cups, and used napkins into the tray between them, Mom admonished her to leave it, somebody who worked in the mall would clean up. Megan saw them stroll away out the corner of her eye, wondering if the kid also caught heat for scrubbing her teeth before bedtime.