by Nick Carter
He also noted two banks, a post office, a large and neat-looking hospital, and the large pink cinder-block building with enormous dish antennas on the roof, a microwave telephone installation. That meant he could check in at the AXE nerve center and talk to David Hawk.
Driving on, Carter saw another of the ubiquitous signs, this less ambitious and cruder than the others: Belize Center for The Arts, 10 kms. Six miles to the south. The sign contained information in English and Spanish about the Spring Festival of the Arts.
Carter parked and approached the inn, thinking to find a beer and a room. If Zachary were on schedule, he should be there.
He had no sooner entered the lobby when a familiar voice greeted him. "Just in time for a nightcap, Carter. I'm buying." Sam Zachary lifted a glass in salute.
Thirteen
They sat in the small cafe area, drinking beer. "I think I had a run-in with Samadhi," Carter said. "In Belize City. He took off. Lost me. But there's a lot of activity around here that validates our suspicions. I'm pushing to get out to that arts center. I just know that there's a connection between Samadhi and the LT that we're not seeing and I won't rest until I get it."
Zachary ran through his experiences before leaving Mexico City. "I went to see the people Chepe Muñoz interviewed. They swore they didn't turn him in. They said there'd been people watching their home since Bezeidenhout had been there."
"You believed that?" Carter asked.
"I pressed them, and got them to tell me what Bezeidenhout had talked to their group about. I got stuff that backs up your theory, Carter. Bezeidenhout was trying to sell shares in an organization that would become a multinational political arm, beholden to no one. They intend to work it like a law firm: you've got the money to pay their fees, they're on your side and won't sell you out to another client."
Carter's anger dropped a notch. The story made a grim kind of sense. "It's like paying a yearly retainer fee for terrorism."
"Son of a bitch," Zachary said, standing. "When you put it that way, the hell with sleep. Let's go."
"You might as well grab a few hours. I've got an errand and it may take me some time."
After Zachary had ordered another beer and taken it off to his room, Carter headed to the nearby Belmopan hospital. His gunshot wound in the shoulder needed looking at and there was yet another angle he wanted to check out.
Within fifteen minutes of his arrival at the hospital, he was in a clean consultation room, stretched out on a table as a registered nurse, a stately dark Belizian, removed the old bandage and began to ask Carter questions about allergies to various antiseptic and antibiotic substances. Her plastic name badge said she was Rose Cole.
"Fortunately for me, no allergies," Carter said.
"If I be any judge, you be very fortunate because it sure looks like you get shot at a lot." Rose Cole began to swab on an antiseptic cream, her strong fingers tracing the extent of Dr. Hakluyt's suturing. "It also look like you heal pretty good too. This one not going to leave a big scar."
Carter laughed. Scars were the least of his problems. They were his campaign badges. "Do you treat many gunshot wounds here?"
Rose Cole reflected for a moment. "We see more than we ought. What peoples about here got to shoot at each other for?"
"Is there some local feud?"
She chuckled. "Only feuds we be having is when some man don't marry that gal he be sleeping with for two, three years, and they have a few kids. Then her family be offended and there be threats back and forth about what happen if there be no ceremony and all. Stuff like that. But they too smart to go round settling things with guns. They use a witch."
"Do you believe in witches, Rose?"
"Well, we got two, maybe three gifted witches in the area, maybe one or two men who know their way around. So what happen, the offended gal's family, they pay a witch to make a spell that work so good, the man" — she gave a healthy chuckle — "the man can't have no truck with no other woman. He might just as well give up all thought of a sex life unless he marry that gal he start out with."
"So your feuds are fought with witches and spells?"
"That's the way with us," Rose Cole said. "We may not be high-tech, but a lot of us be happy."
At her direction, Carter sat. "I be removing these sutures now. They done their work and now you ready to mend on your own." She was an attractive woman, perhaps in her early thirties. Beginning to work on Carter, she watched him with an interest that went beyond the merely professional.
As she bandaged and taped, Carter pursued his line of questioning. "If the people around here are so peaceful, what accounts for the bullet wounds you've been seeing?"
"What I think, Mr. Carter, is dat they be lots of men like you hereabouts. They be playing soldier, and some of them just be plain silly or can't hit nothing."
"Where is all this taking place? Do you know?"
The nurse applied a final strip of adhesive. "I do it nice and tight, just like you say, so you can shower and bathe to suit you."
"You're not answering my question," Carter persisted.
She sighed and faced him, vexed. "You be a fine man, Mr. Carter. I can see how the ladies would be taken with you. But you sure do push." She handed him his shirt. "I see so many men with guns in the last ten years, how the hell do I know where they come or go? Some of them sweet-looking boys, trying to make a name for themselves. Some of them as mean and macho as you could want, and a lot of 'em like you, they seem easygoing enough if you don't push em, but plenty professional on the inside."
"Just one more thing," Carter said.
She smiled directly at him. "They be only one more thing you could give me any interest in."
The Killmaster met her gaze and smiled. "What can you tell me about that Center for the Arts?"
She humphed. "I should know you come here to get fixed up and go play soldier yourself instead of being interested in playing a more fun game, the basic boy-girl stuff," she said dryly. "That arts center, they be there five or six years. Before that, the buildings they be empty for maybe three or four years. Long enough for the jungle to start growing back in on it. Some peoples from the Bahamas and Mexico, they run a kind of resort where people come, eat silly little diet meals, and gamble. When that arts center start up, you hear all kinds of stones. I myself was called out there to help in some surgery. Surprising what an operating room they had."
Carter started to feel the excitement of a possible connection. "What kind of surgery?"
"I think they be calling it blunt trauma. That the way it seem to me. Some man, his face be moved around quite a bit, they want to make sure he look all right, I guess. We work and work on him."
"Do you happen to recall the name of the doctor who did the surgery?"
Rose Cole smiled. "He be a strange man they all call Dr. Smith. Now, I may be a small-town gal, Mr. Carter, what you might call a hick. But I seen enough movies, read enough things. When a man from America call himself Smith, that mean his real name ain't none of your business."
Carter thanked Rose Cole. She'd had more information for him than he'd really expected. It had been a good break that she'd been on duty, and the results were beginning to make him eager to get moving. At the desk he was given a hefty but fair bill, which he paid, then he drove back to the inn. He was given a small, clean room next to Zachary. It seemed to him like a monk's cell in a monastery. The walls had been freshly whitewashed. The bed was a cot made of reject mahogany saplings and substantially laced with tanned leather strips.
As he ran a security check, Carter discovered that someone had been in the room during his absence. His bag wasn't squared with the edge of the bed as he'd left it. The drawer to the small writing desk had been closed flush against the frame, and Carter had deliberately left it ajar about a quarter of an inch. The pile of towels in the closet had been searched — and replaced with the manufacturer's label showing as opposed to the way Carter had left things.
He spent the next half hour checkin
g for booby traps — innocent things that might be fatal for the unwary. At length he discovered that nothing had been rigged. Someone had merely wanted to check on him. Or perhaps someone had wanted Carter to know he was under surveillance.
Sinking into a soft but lumpy mattress, Carter felt frustrated, impatient. This entire business with LT reminded him of blood spreading in shark-filled waters. The renegade Prentiss starts the whole thing by a big discovery. Maybe he'd tumbled onto some of the Lex Talionis planning meetings. Then Cardenas, the Grinning Gaucho, gets into the picture. Possibly out of boredom with his laundered life in Phoenix. Possibly he sees a way to get back into a life-style that was more exciting. And now this business with Piet Bezeidenhout. A man who has power, prestige, and enough security to satisfy the ordinary wealthy individual. But Bezeidenhout maybe has a bigger dream, one that takes him into power and influence on a global scale, and so what if he has to burn his former employers?
The difficult thing to piece into the puzzle now was Samadhi and his place in things.
Well, the hell with it. Carter was on the trail and he promised himself that tomorrow he'd be closer.
* * *
Nick Carter awakened to the sound of a distant rumble. He listened. Wilhelmina in his hand. He got up and moved out to the front porch. In the distance he saw headlights. A lot of headlights, moving in the night. A moment later Zachary appeared, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "I figure they truck in a lot of supplies around here, but that's more than a lot of supplies. That sounds like troop transports," he said. "A big convoy."
"Sure sounds like it," Carter agreed.
The rumbling continued, and in a few moments Carter returned to his room and began dressing. He fit Pierre into place carefully, strapped on the chamois sheath for Hugo, and holstered Wilhelmina under his left armpit. He took an extra clip and shoved it in his jacket.
Minutes later the two were in Carter's rental car, heading out toward the main highway, following the distant convoy on the road heading south.
They'd driven less than two miles when another vehicle, a restored World War II Jeep painted in jungle camouflage, loomed before them, its parking lights suddenly coming on. The Jeep was parked squarely in the middle of the road.
Carter had to jam on the brakes to avoid a collision.
One man in khakis and carrying an AK-47 at port arms shouted at them to turn around and go back. He pointedly shouted in English, Spanish, and French. Because of the man's ease with languages, Carter wondered if it were Unkefer, but there was no getting close enough to tell. Another man, his handgun holstered on his hip, made exaggerated movements that were impossible to misjudge. They were to turn around right now. No delay. No room for discussion.
"What do you think?" Zachary asked.
"I think we'll get a warning blast in another moment," Carter replied, shifting their Toyota into reverse. "And if we even look like we'd try to go around them, it won't be a warning anymore."
The shouted order to go back was repeated, followed immediately by a warning blast from the automatic weapon.
Carter spun the car around and headed slowly back toward Belmopan. They were followed for about a mile when the lights on the vehicle behind them went out.
"Old trick," Carter said. "They could still be in back of us or they could have pulled off and returned to the convoy. In either case, I think this is as far as we go tonight."
"Where do you suppose that convoy was headed?" Zachary asked. "I've checked with my people and we're sure not sponsoring anything around here."
"I'm not sure what this is yet," Carter said. "That was heavy equipment and we're close enough to Guatemala and Honduras to suspect possible contra activity, but I'm betting on Lex Talionis."
* * *
Nick Carter and Sam Zachary were up early the next morning, dressed in casual clothing and ready for the run out to the Belize Center for the Arts. They were going to play the role of intellectuals, and do some rubbernecking at the poetry festival.
Zachary ordered a breakfast of fried bananas, black beans, fish, and fruit. Carter had other things on his mind; he was eager to get going. He decided to take advantage of the microwave relay station. He left the room, found an isolated phone booth, and called David Hawk.
"Where the hell are you, N3?" The crusty director of AXE fired up a cigar. "We've got to see some results. The LT have been at it again. They've made a big score. They've taken three Japanese investment bankers."
"You're sure it's LT?"
"Damn sure," Hawk rasped. "They're taking credit for it, the bastards. They've already described things the bankers were wearing."
"Shit," Carter muttered. "I was just starting to think I had a line on how this worked. What kind of leverage could they get with Japanese investment bankers?"
"Try this, Nick. Money. A huge ransom."
"Of course," Nick Carter said. "Operating capital. The ransom is for operating capital."
"Find them, Nick. And soon."
* * *
The road to the arts center was well marked with more of the same hand-painted signs, the grading and paving different from the state roads. "They must build and maintain their own roads," Zachary said.
As they approached the center, they stopped at the point where they had been confronted the previous night. There were a few tread marks remaining in the surface dust of the roadbed, but scant other clues. They saw footprints, large enough to be a man's, probably wearing boots.
"Not one shell casing in sight," Zachary observed. "When we left, they probably combed the area and picked up the shell casings they fired at us."
"Either that," Carter suggested, "or the locals have the equivalent of a great lost golf ball business. They collect the casings and know where to sell them back."
He got out his notepad and sketched the patterns of the two distinctive tire-tread markings. One was a thick Crosshatch, the other a large diamond pattern. Neither was notably unique. Carter looked at the footprints as well, finding one good set that had a new pair of Cat's Paw heels. Judging the size against his own foot, the Killmaster estimated the wearer of these boots was a size twelve, a beefy individual or one who carried a good deal of equipment.
Driving on, they began to notice a difference in the mountainous terrain. On either side of the road were broad savannas, lined by stands of trees in the distance. A semblance of landscaping began to appear, evidenced by symmetrical clumpings of bushes and arrays of wildflowers. A large stucco arch spanned the road, timeworn and cracked, but notably kept in some state of repair. In flowery letters was the logo for the Belize Center for the Arts. A cardboard sign welcomed all to the Spring Festival of the Arts.
As they continued, they saw a pond with a number of birds and fountains. Soon the road broadened into a one-way drive circumnavigating a large bed of flowers and tropical plants. Now buildings began to appear, small, ornate outbuildings and then a larger two-story construction with covered porches. Most of the buildings were made of plaster and adobe slapped on heavily over lath. The large, two-story building had been put together by seasoned professionals. The buildings appeared completely out of place, in some state of shabbiness but still rather elegant and ornate, with designs at the tips and bottoms of decorative pillars. A freehand sign directed those who wanted the campgrounds to the rear, adding that there were electricity and water hookups.
Carter remembered what Rose Cole had told him about the place having once been a large gaming casino and fat farm. Now it was a center for performing and visual arts. Or was it?
Another sign directed them to a parking area, where yet another sign carried the designation Registration. The obvious place to go for that purpose was a smaller building with a Quonset hut roof and an identification plaque describing it as the administration area.
"Looks like a campus," Zachary said. "Feels like a campus."
The two men parked and walked toward the administration building, noting a steady hum of generators. A scattering of young men and women
, looking much like students, moved in apparent leisurely purpose.
Five minutes later, for ten dollars American, Carter and Zachary were welcomed by some enthusiastic young men and women, signed up for the arts festival, and directed to another building, student housing, for their accommodations.
"You're in luck," a stout young woman with a New York accent said. "I have two single-room accommodations left."
Carter and Zachary were parted from more money and sold a meal ticket that entitled them to use the cafeteria. The young woman gave them a photocopied map of the center, marking the cafeteria, bookstore, and gift shop, where they could buy the distinctive Belize Center for the Arts sweatshirt or T-shirt. They were told that an orientation tour was under way in the central courtyard, and they could join it if they wished.
Zachary spoke under his breath to Carter. "Looks like we're going to learn more about the Center for the Arts than we ever wanted to know, but we've got to check the place out.
As they headed toward the courtyard, they noticed a group of young men and women congregated in a group and Carter heard a distinctive voice with a touch of ethnic Pennsylvania in it. "There was a famous school in the U.S. in the forties," James Rogan said. "It was very famous because it produced a group of men and women who became the mainstream of poetry, writing, and teaching in this country for a long time. It was called Black Mountain. Our library has a lot of the work done by the Black Mountain people. I've consciously tried to model this place after Black Mountain. Hey, we're really going for a worldwide reputation here. We can be as good as we want to be."
Rogan, clad in a black turtleneck sweater and denims, made a broad, sweeping gesture to impress the group as a piercing whistle came from beyond the large complex buildings.