He decided to play along. “And what might that be?”
“Please don’t play us for fools. We know what you’ve been doing. Very smart, really,” he said, and blew a smoke ring towards Norm.
“So why not stop me?” Norm asked.
“The players were of no consequence. If you had gone after bigger names we would, of course, have been forced to put you out of business, but the men you chose had no risk of embarrassing us. We chose to sit back and watch, especially your rise within the organization.” He paused and blew another smoke ring. “Very impressive. You Americans are not known for your patience.”
It was all out in the open now and Norm needed to find out what they wanted from him. “And how may I be of service to you?”
The general smiled, taking the bait. “I don’t expect your government will appreciate what you have done like we do. You could make a case for helping political refugees escape our tyrannical government, but there is the matter of the money. I can see you sitting in front of one of those witch hunts your press calls Congressional investigation panels. Those grandstanding politicians will be waiting in line for a piece of your hide.”
Norm looked down, no longer interested in either the conversation or the cigar. He just wanted to find out what they wanted from him and to get out of there. “So, general…”
The general paused again, chewing on, trimming, and then relighting the cigar. This was clearly a tactic to annoy Norm, and he should have known it for what it was, but instead he pushed. “What do you want from me?”
“My grandson, Armando Cruz.”
The name took him by surprise. He knew he had made a mistake and also knew there would be no negotiation.
“You have two days. The inaugural voyage of the Key West to Havana ferry leaves then. There are many people - some high up in the Cuban Government - that are against these new relations between our countries. I am one of them, but am willing to sacrifice the cause to get my grandson back. You deliver him to me and the boat will make its voyage.”
The threat was clear.
EIGHT
“Where is he?” One of the men leaned forward and checked his watch. “Jules would have been here on time. She had a lot more respect than this new sheriff.”
The five heads comprising the ethics committee appeared to nod, but not one lifted their head from the screen of their phones. The blinds were closed to keep the morning sun out, the group happy to trade comfort for the view of Boot Key Harbor.
“I have surgery in an hour,” a woman chimed in. “Can we get started? He doesn’t need all the details.”
“Probably wouldn’t understand anyway,” another voice added.
The man at the head of the table opened a folder, lifted a page and started reading aloud. “Patient is Melanie Woodson: admitted by medevac approximately forty-eight hours ago. Patient had severe head trauma and water in her lungs after surviving a boating accident.” He thumbed through several more pages. “The latest prognosis is bad. She has been unresponsive and in a coma since she got here, and she meets several of the criteria for brain death.”
“Insurance?”
“We located a Blue Cross account through a computer search. They have a rep coming down from Miami now.”
The hospital administrator tried to hide her smile with the revelation that at least the hospital would not be on the hook for the cost of the medical care.
“Next of kin or living will?” someone asked.
“The only family I know of was her dad, Bill Woodson. Wood lost his wife several years ago. He is deceased as well.”
The group was silent for a minute as they remembered how Wood had died exposing a corrupt presidential candidate and saving South Florida from a nuclear blast.
The man cleared his throat, clearly growing impatient. “Does anyone know anything? And where is that sheriff?”
“I knew her dad pretty well, used to fish with him,” one of the doctors said. “He built the dock on my house too.” Eyes turned to him and he handed a piece of paper to the man at the head of the table. “She used to work for Bradley Davies in DC. I called the firm and they sent this over. It appears to be the only document they have.”
The man took the paper and started reading. Just as he was about to speak, the door burst open and a heavy man in a tight-fitting uniform entered. He mumbled something and went to an empty seat, his coffee spilling as he sat.
“Good afternoon, Sheriff,” the doctor said.
The sheriff looked at his watch. “Still morning by my clock.”
The others suppressed giggles as the sheriff missed the barb.
The man stopped reading and looked up. “OK. The first decision maker was her dad, now deceased. The next is Mac Travis, currently missing by the last reports I heard. I’m not sure how long until he is assumed dead.”
All eyes turned to the sheriff.
He cleared his throat. “Ms. Woodson and the Cuban fellow were rescued. We haven’t found any sign of Travis, although we’d surely like to beat the feds - dead or alive, makes no difference to me.” His radio squelched causing several in the group to jump. “Y’all got any food at these meetings,” he asked after turning his radio off, dismissing the call.
The head man ignored him. “After Travis, the executor of the will is Bradley Davies.”
“That old boy’s shacked up in some country club prison in Virginia.” The sheriff said.
A new voice chimed in, “Is there any precedence in a convict making medical decisions?”
The room was quiet for a minute. “Yes,” the administrator said. “If that’s all we have, I suggest we contact him.”
The leader closed the file and turned to the man who had handed him the paper. “OK, you contact Davies.” He turned to the sheriff, his look clearly contemptuous, “And you find Travis. We will meet again after the insurance rep gets here.”
***
Mac moved the anchor line to the bow cleat, fighting as the boat spun against the strong current until it was tied off. The tidal force sounded like a river as it moved against the stationary hull, but they were secure. They were less mobile to pursue the CIA man with the hook set, but the current in the narrow cut forced his hand. Under power, they would burn precious fuel, fighting the current to remain in the center of the cut. He looked over at Trufante’s prone body laid out on the deck, asleep.
Might as well let him get some rest, Mac thought.
He had no idea how long the watch would last, or if the man would even come back this way, but it was the only card he had left.
He thought about Mel in the hospital and hoped she was all right, but as much as he wanted to be there, he knew there was nothing he could do until he cleared himself. The only thing he had left was his name, and right now it was as mucky as the bottom underneath the boat. He looked up as several fish jumped pursuing a school of baitfish past the boat. It had been a half hour since they had freed the boat and several boats had passed at a distance, including some bigger charter boats probably heading for Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. He wondered where Norm could have gone - and why. The rental boat didn’t have the range to get to the Tortugas and back. The only thing that made sense was some kind of clandestine meeting, and he thought the Marquesas Keys would be the likely place for that.
His head bobbed as sleep tried to take him, but the wake of a passing boat snapped his neck erect. This was starting to feel pointless, sitting here. If the man chose to return even a mile further offshore, he would be invisible without binoculars. Maybe heading back to Key West and scouring the bars would be more productive. Either way, finding the man was going to be like catching a single minnow in the ocean. He started the engines and went to the bow to release the anchor. Trufante stirred and he thought about waking him on the way back to the helm, but he remembered his promise to let him sleep.
Hand over hand, he pulled the boat closer to the anchor until the line was perpendicular and the hull was right over it. With a quick jerk
he yanked the hook from the bottom and brought it aboard, careful to dip it several times to clear the muck from the flukes and chain. Once secured, he moved back to the helm where he corrected the drift and steered the boat back into the middle of the channel. Something glimmered in the distance - the unmistakable shine of sun on bright metal - what he guessed was a quarter-mile offshore. He shielded his eyes from the sun, once again wishing for binoculars, and studied the outline of the boat. Without hesitation he pushed down on the throttles and sped out of the cut.
***
Bradley Davies sat in front of the warden, working hard to conceal the smirk on his face. Aside from the orange jumpsuit and the two-star rating he would give the kitchen, his stay here had been anything but hard. Female companionship was even scheduled after he faked a marriage license with a call girl and petitioned a judge he knew for conjugal visits. He was living large on the government’s dime. Gardening and tennis had to substitute for golf. His trimmer waistline was the only benefit of his forced lifestyle. He sighed.
“Someone actually left you as executor on their will?” the warden asked.
If not for his years of putting on a game face in front of juries, he would have laughed out loud. “Why the hate? You don’t need a license for that. And some people trust my judgement.”
He had been the head of one of the biggest firms in DC, before his fall from grace after it was revealed, partially through Mel’s efforts, that some old terrorist clients had blackmailed him into setting up the President for an assassination attempt. Near the end of his first year at the old country club, as his fellow inmates called it, he was ready for a divorce and getting fidgety for the comforts of the outside world. He often wondered how he would survive the hardships of the remaining four years of his sentence.
The warden knew Davies had the upper hand although he tried to humble him with his patented look over his reading glasses.
“Oh, stop it. You know as well as I do that this is a game and I just got dealt a winning hand.” More than anything else with prison life, it infuriated him that he was controlled by men so inferior to him.
The warden stared at him as if he knew what was coming.
“Of course, I’ll need to travel to Marathon to see the condition of the girl first-hand. This is a grave matter and must be handled in person.” This was so easy he had to steel his face again. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t do my due diligence.”
“Get a judge to sign it and I’ll work out the details,” the warden said and rose.
The meeting was over. Davies got up fighting the urge to extend his hand. Surly as he was, he still needed the warden to be his pawn, and although it tore him apart, he had to show the man respect. He turned and walked to the door, where a guard waited to take him to his tennis match.
***
The hull smashed through the wake again, causing Mac to duck behind the windscreen. Instinctively he turned his head to avoid the spray and watched the sea water covering Trufante who stirred and sat up. Mac turned back to the bow, found the rental boat, and made a correction to their course until the other boat appeared to remain in place on the horizon.
“You’re on a collision course,” Trufante said. He shook out his hair and ducked behind the windscreen beside Mac.
Mac’s fingers tightened on the wheel. “I’m tired of chasing him. I think it’s time we had a face-to-face.”
“Shit, that’s a roll of the dice, and being CIA and all, he’s bound to have them rigged.”
“Got no choice.” He focused on the chase. He estimated they would be on him in five minutes. He watched the gap close and steered straight for the other boat. Talking points swirled around his mind. Provided he could signal the man that he wanted to talk, and didn’t get them both shot, he needed a very persuasive argument to force the man to do what he needed. He had little to offer other than his silence, and Armando, but he knew the man could easily kill them, dump their bodies in the ocean, and find the Cuban on his own. That would be ironic, Mac thought, as he was already assumed drowned.
He adjusted course to put him slightly in front of the other boat and pushed down the throttles to the stops. He needed to use the speed of the boat to his advantage to throw the other man off guard. They closed to within a quarter mile and watched. The man realized what was happening and tried to turn behind them. Mac countered and the gap closed to two hundred yards. He could clearly see the man reach behind his back and pull a gun. They were a hundred yards away and he saw the man flinch with only a split second to make his decision. Mac steered wide and circled the boat. The other boat slowed and the man lowered the weapon.
Mac dropped the speed to an idle and coasted to a stop in front of the rental boat. He stayed behind the windscreen, hoping its tempered glass would stop the bullet he thought was coming, and raised his hands. “Just want to talk,” he yelled over the engines. “Gonna throw a line over.”
Trufante tossed a line to the man while Mac maneuvered the boat alongside. The man put the gun in his waistband, caught the line and tied it off to a cleat. Both men put their engines in neutral, neither willing to shut them off, and went to the adjacent gunwales.
“What can I do for you?” the man called across the gap.
Mac stuttered, his rehearsed lines fading from memory. “Let’s end this. I got no war with you.”
The man stared back, clearly more comfortable in this kind of situation. “Relax, Travis. You need me more than you know.”
NINE
Mac followed the rental boat into the channel between Man and Crawfish Keys, careful to follow in the wake of the other boat. He had already experienced what could happen without a GPS and depth finder in these waters.
Norm was arrogant enough that he didn’t even look back to see if they were still behind him. He knew Mac was like a gut-hooked fish and there was no place else to get help.
It went against Mac’s grain to deal with people he knew he couldn’t trust, but desperation makes people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.
The other boat reached the backside of a mangrove-covered island and dropped anchor. Mac idled over and they tied the boats together.
The men faced off, each standing by the gunwale of their boats, neither willing to share the same deck.
“Why the look, Travis,” Norm said. “It’s not like you have anywhere else to turn. I hear your girl’s in the hospital too.”
“Leave her out of this,” Mac growled.
“Suit yourself. Just saying it might be nice to be able to visit.”
“Let’s hear it. I need my name cleared and I’m thinking you’re the fastest way to get that done,” he said with his head down, fumbling with the lines that held the boats together and thinking about the tenuous tie between them. There had to be something the CIA man wanted from him if he was willing to help. “Bait’s in the water. You wouldn’t be sitting here if you didn’t need me for something - so spit it out.”
The other man thought for a minute. Mac held the lines tighter as if clinging to his best hope.
“Truth, Travis, I like your style. No screwing around.” He paused. “You get me the Cuban out of the Krome. You know that place up in Miami, used to be called a detention center, now they’ve got on the politically correct bandwagon and call it a processing center. Anyway, you do that for me and I’ll see what I can do for you.”
“You can do that with one phone call,” Mac said.
“If it was only so easy; you see, the Cubans want him back.”
Mac suspected there was something else. “That can’t be all of it. With your connections …”
“You want my help or not, Travis? I’m losing patience here.” His voice rose and he paused. “The man trusts you, and with all the publicity about the new diplomatic and trade relations with old Raul, it wouldn’t look good for the media to get a hold of a story like this.”
Mac tried to process this and run it through his BS detector. He’d been around the transi
ents that passed through the Keys for years, each bringing their own story of how the world had wronged them. Trufante was a prime example, as his own past changed with each telling and the number of beers he had. This had a ring of truth to it, and that small nugget was enough to hold Mac’s interest. And the man was right. Armando might trust him.
“So I get him out of Krome and bring him to you - that’s it?”
“Almost; you need to repatriate him.”
“Repatriate what?” Mac heard Trufante mumble behind him.
He ignored him. Something was not right here. Once Mac had the man, he had all the cards. He could hide him somewhere, leaving the CIA man powerless. Then he realized they would be at a stalemate. There had to be some leverage here, he thought.
“Deal, but I’m going to need some official papers or ID to get him out of Krome.” The processing center resembled a jail and in fact, the old name might have been more accurate.
“I’ve got an associate that can help you out. You got a phone?” Norm asked.
“Lost it somewhere in the wreck,” Mac answered and flinched as the man reached into his bag, but what he thought was the black handle of a gun turned into a phone.
“It’s a burner. When we’re done, destroy it. My number is programmed into it. As soon as we get back to Key West, I’ll set things up on my end. Be expecting a call tonight,” he said and tossed Mac the phone.
“Tell me what time and I’ll have it on,” Mac said, looking the plain black, old-style flip phone over. He suspected at the least it had some kind of tracking device in it, maybe even a camera or listening device. He would remove the battery once the other boat was out of sight.
“Seven,” Norm responded.
Wood's Harbor: Action & Sea Adventure in the Florida Keys (Mac Travis Adventures Book 5) Page 5