Redoubled

by Warren Esby

  He laughed as I said, “Aha. I was right. I thought you would play ball as they say in America. But I will need one additional item of proof before I decide to trust you further. If you are who you say you are, only you can provide me with the name of the individual who the drone operating plans were turned over to, and where the transaction took place. I received that information from my Russian counterpart, and I will know if you are telling me the truth.

  I turned to Anya and nodded at her. She said, “It was that buffoon Boris, the big oaf who works with the Mexican police in Rosarito Beach south of Tijuana. He is a fool and he shouldn’t have told anyone we were the ones who gave it to him.”

  Noorzai smiled and said, “He is a dead fool. The Americans took him out with a drone strike for turning over that information.”

  Anya said, “Good. I didn’t like him.”

  “So. Your terms are reasonable to me. But you will have to work outside the United States at our offshore location. Are you willing to do that?”

  “Depends where it is,” I said. “I don’t want to go to the Mid-East.”

  “How about somewhere in this hemisphere?”

  “Not Cuba or Venezuela. That would cause too much suspicion for us.”

  “I understand. Well, I will tell you that it is an island in the eastern Caribbean, but I will not tell you where, only that you can get there by first going to the Bahamas which should not arouse suspicion.”

  “Well, we don’t want to be stuck on an island endlessly. Do we get time off the island, say on weekends?”

  “No, most of our people get off the island only once a month.”

  “I would go crazy being isolated for that long. Anya and I like to go out and enjoy ourselves. Life is not all work. How about every other weekend off.” I could tell he was not happy. We were typical Americans in his mind, selfish and interested in self-gratification. I wanted him to believe that because it went with our willingness to sell ourselves and our loyalty for money.

  “I will be willing to let you off the island after three weeks, to begin with. Depending how the work goes, maybe we can shorten it to every other week after that as you requested.”

  “Okay. Three weeks on to begin with and then after that, every other weekend off. I’m sure we will make the progress you want.”

  “Okay, provided we have the progress.”

  I thought for a moment and then said, “Will we be able to water ski at this location? Anya loves to water ski. It is one of her favorite activities and it would be important to us if we could do that while we work at this location of yours, especially if we have to stay there for two or three weeks at a time.”

  The reason I said this was that I was concerned about being on an island without access to transportation. At least if we had access to a boat, no matter how small, I would feel a lot more comfortable about going to an isolated island. I had no illusion about the danger. I was sure that we would not be allowed to go there armed, so we needed a means of escape. I decided to make it part of the deal. I glanced over to Anya as I continued so she would understand the importance of what I was about to say. She is very intuitive in that way.

  “In fact, it will have to be part of the deal. She will be bored there while I work and needs to have something to look forward to in order not to be unhappy, and keeping her happy is something very important to me.”

  I smiled at her as I said the last, and she responded,

  “Yes. I love to water ski, and if we are going to the Caribbean, I will want to ski.”

  Noorzai thought about it, and finally said, “Okay. I will see you have access to water skiing.”

  “And I want to bring my dog,” added Anya.

  “Isn’t your dog a dangerous attack dog?” Noorzai asked. Sick Sikh Singh apparently had told him that.

  “Oh no. She isn’t dangerous unless someone should try to do something to me. She is very gentle as long as she is under my control.”

  “Okay,” he finally conceded. “Having your dog will also be part of the deal. I will work it all out. How long before you think you can start?”

  “Give us about two weeks to make arrangements in Charleston, and then any time after that.”

  I wanted to make sure we had adequate time to plan with the CIA about following us and to formulate an escape plan in case we got in trouble. With that we told Noorzai we had to leave because Anya was scheduled to go water skiing, which she fortunately had made arrangements to do before our lunch together.

  Chapter 34

  I contacted Tom, who was the permanent captain of the yacht that Anya and I owned in the Cayman Islands. The one I had called to have the yacht renamed Muffy as I mentioned earlier in this narrative. He takes care of the yacht for me and has a crew of two consisting of his wife and nephew. I really know nothing about yachts except that they are expensive, but Tom has a lot of experience to go along with his captain’s license having sailed the Caribbean his entire life, and his nephew is learning quickly. His wife does all the cooking and cleaning. As a result, they do everything and all Anya and I have to do is enjoy the trip. But we all get along, and Tom and his wife and Anya and I play a lot of bridge in between ports and in between Tom’s time on the bridge, although sometimes we play bridge on the bridge.

  I often think of Tom as Tom Cruise because whenever I am with him, we are generally on a cruise. But Tom Cruise is not his real name, nor is he a short Cruise like the other Tom Cruise, although we have been on a short cruise or two but more often on a long cruise. So I told Long Tom Cruise, who I will now refer to him as, so as not to confuse our Tom Cruise with the short Tom Cruise and to disguise his name which is not a long name, to prepare for a long cruise. In fact, we had taken a long cruise with Long Tom Cruise around the Caribbean a few years before and had ended in the Bahamas, where Anya and I had spent some time with my family on vacation before returning to the Caymans. So Anya and I were familiar with that part of the Caribbean as well as Grand Bahama and Abaco islands in particular.

  I told Long Tom Caribbean Cruise to do what he had to do get the Muffy ready and to set out once again on a long cruise for the Bahamas and to make it as short a long cruise as possible, the shortest long cruise he could. I knew that time and distance, either short or long, would not confuse the Long Tom Cruise on the short long cruise he would take to Nassau, although I don’t know whether the short Tom Cruise would understand the long and the short of what I have been saying, and maybe I don’t either. But nevertheless, I told Tom I would get in touch with him after he arrived to give him further instructions if he hadn’t heard from me prior to his arrival. To make a long story short, I told Cap’n Tom to go Nassau and wait.

  Now Tom didn’t know about my involvement with the CIA, but that wasn’t necessary at this point. If we were going to be isolated on an island, I wanted to have Tom and our yacht cruising nearby in case we needed it and could get to it, especially if the CIA couldn’t reach us first. I thought the CIA would do what they could to protect us, but it never hurts to have your own resources, if you can afford them, and we could. And I have known the CIA, especially their drone operators, to get distracted when on a mission and stray off course, and I didn’t want that to happen when it was our lives that were on the line.

  Ben and Edy decided to come to Charleston, and we met them at a Baskin Robbins outside of the Charleston peninsula in an area called West Ashley, which surprisingly enough was west of the Ashley River. What a coincidence. Now if you want to go west out of Charleston, which is a peninsula as I already mentioned, you have to go west over a bridge over the Ashley River, and you have to do this to get to West Ashley. Now whenever anyone crosses the Cooper River, which is east of the peninsula, they go over the Cooper River Bridge, and when they leave Charleston in that direction they say they are going east of the Cooper. But if you go east of the Cooper, you don’t end up in East Cooper, you end up on a mountain that isn’t there. How strange. Why they didn’t name Mt. Pleasant, East Cooper is beyond
me. I guess because it would have made too much sense to have done so.

  Getting back to our meeting with Ben and Edy, I knew that we would be isolated and probably on our own for the first three weeks on the island. I was sure we would not be able to communicate for security reasons, at least until Noorzai or those in charge decided we could be trusted, and probably not even then. But I didn’t like the idea of not having backup nearby or having someone know where the island was in case we didn’t return after three weeks. Ben said he would put a tail on us and have us followed to whatever transportation we would be using to get to the island, presumably a boat but possibly a plane or helicopter. He also suggested that he put a transmitter on one of us. I felt there was a good possibility that they might search us before we got on board and find the transmitter, and that would screw everything up and might get us killed.

  I then asked if he could get a transmitter with an on/off switch built into a dog collar. I thought that they would be unlikely to search Muffy, and if they did I could tell them that she was a valuable dog to us, and we wanted to be able to find her if she got away. A lot of people put identity chips in dogs in case they get lost and need to be identified, and this would be our reason if they detected a transmitter on her. It might not convince them, but it had a better chance if a transmitter was found in the dog collar and not found on us. I figured Noorzai would not let us take our iPhones or any kind of communication device with us, so I decided it would be best if we didn’t take anything with us at all. I expected he would confiscate anything along those lines if we did take them, and he would hold onto them, at least while we were on the island.

  We hoped that the CIA would be able to follow us at least to the ship. I was depending on us being safe until the first scheduled break, but if they didn’t allow us to leave, which was a possibility, I hoped that the CIA would be able to locate us from the dog collar’s transmission or by following and/or by intercepting the ship if we didn’t come back after three weeks as scheduled. Depending on the situation, when we did come ashore for our break, if we didn’t think it would be safe to return because they were suspicious of us, we would have to decide, based on whatever information we had about the island, where it might be located.

  While we were there, the CIA would have drones traveling over the island chain to search for likely locations while trying to pick up on the dog collar’s transmissions, which would have signal limitations due to the small size of the collar’s transmitter. We didn’t intend to turn it on until we got there and only have it on at night when the drones would be in the air in order to conserve the battery life. Ben and Edy would remain at whatever island we departed from until we met them during our first shore leave. We just hoped there were enough ice cream shops to satisfy them during that three week period.

  Once we had agreed to go, I arranged through Sick Sikh Singh and Noorzai to ship some retroviral vectors to the island laboratory so I would have something to work on when I got there and to give them something that would be valuable to them and indicate that I was to be trusted. The vectors, in fact, were the ones the CIA prepared. They replicated the vectors we had originally obtained from Dong, but they had been slightly modified in the CIA laboratories so that they would appear to have been developed independently by me. Although you could consider them to be weapons of mass destruction being supplied to our enemies, they weren’t anything that Al Qaeda didn’t already have, and it wouldn’t be the first time we had supplied our enemies with the means of our own destruction.

  They then gave us tickets to Freeport, and I had to call Long Tom and tell him to change his plans and go to Freeport instead of Nassau. I told Noorzai that, since we were taking Muffy, I preferred to take a high speed ferry from West Palm Beach to Freeport rather than fly, and that we would meet him there. When we arrived, Noorzai met us and told us that, after dinner that night, we would board a supply boat that would take us to our destination.

  Over dinner, he told us how he expected us to behave once we got to the island. He said armed men of Muslim descent guarded the island. Aside from Anya, there were five additional females on the island, four Muslims, and a Chinese woman, and they all wore burkas, even while working in the laboratory. He said, he expected Anya also to be completely and discretely covered at all times so as not to upset anyone’s sensibilities. He said there were also some non-Muslims, Chinese and Russian nationals, but all the females adhered to the strict dress code so as not to upset the Muslim workers, especially the armed guards.

  I asked him about going water skiing, since I couldn’t see Anya wearing a burka while she skied, and he said that he would expect her to cover up until we were at an appropriate distance from the island, and we were not to ski close to shore. That suited me fine for something else I had in mind. I asked about Internet and cell phone service. He told us there was a secured Internet and that we would only have access to it from their facilities and our communications would be monitored. There was also no cell phone service from the island so any cell phones we brought with us would not work. He also said that he intended to take any computers and cell phones from us before we went as I had suspected he would. I told him that we didn’t intend to bring any with us and he looked pleased.

  Noorzai told us the island was completely self-sufficient with electricity produced by its own generators with fuel regularly delivered by the supply ship that was to take us there, and that the water was supplied by a reverse osmosis desalination plant on the island. Communication was by satellite Internet and available to us for legitimate purposes and entertainment, but not for our communication with the outside world. In addition to armed guards, they had a radar installation and could monitor surrounding areas for unusual activity.

  That night, after dinner, we went on board the small supply ship. We were to sail at night so we wouldn’t know where we were going. We were screened and searched before we went on board as was our luggage, but they didn’t detect anything on us, and the dog collar transmitter was turned off and went undetected. It was the first time for Muffy on the open water as far as we knew. She didn’t seem to mind, and we didn’t think she would have any interest in jumping overboard, but we were told to stay in the cabin during the voyage. With the cabin lights on, we couldn’t see anything outside, only our own reflections in the port holes. We got to the island after midnight. It had a long dock and the supply ship pulled up and tied up. We were to see the next morning that the dock had been extended so that a boat of its size could do just that. We couldn’t see much else. There did seem to be a large house and several smaller buildings along the water-front.

  We would see in the morning that the large house was the original main estate house and the smaller buildings were little cabins on the beach that would have served as guest quarters when the original estate had been a private secluded residence. Noorzai escorted Anya and me to one of the cabins, and he told us that we would have that cabin to ourselves. He would meet us in the morning and we would talk further over breakfast because it was so late. After he left and our suitcases and other belongings were delivered, I stepped outside and motioned for Anya to follow. She came with Muffy on a leash, and we walked along the beachfront and gave Muffy a chance to do her business while we talked. It was warm and balmy. I told Anya, in case she didn’t suspect it, that the cabin was certain to have hidden cameras and wiretaps throughout, and that it would be best not to say anything except banalities except when we were outside and away from any building.

  “What about having sex? You know I hate to be celibate for very long, but I’m not an exhibitionist.”

  “Me either. It will either have to be outside on the beach at night, or maybe when we go water skiing.”

  “Ooh. That sounds like fun. We haven’t done it on the beach since we were in the Caymans. But the boat sounds better. You don’t have to worry about all that sand.”

  I kissed her goodnight and we went in and went to bed.

  Chapter 35

  T
he next morning I got up at dawn. Without waking Anya, I put a leash on Muffy and took her for a walk. I wanted to get a good look at our new, hopefully temporary, prison. It was a pretty little island whose name I never was to learn. In addition to the large stately home that was set back from the beach, there were three smaller cabins closer to the beach, one of which was now ours. There was also a plain-looking building that resembled a much larger version of the cabins and turned out to be a guest house. In back of the main house and about a hundred yards away was a large, metal-sided commercial looking building that was all out of whack in appearance with the rest of the island. It was surrounded by a chain link fence, and the front double gate was shut. It looked like someone had taken a building from the industrial section of a city and set it down in paradise. How incongruous it looked, but aesthetics was not something that I’m sure my new employers were concerned about, nor was resale value, and a good thing too as it turned out.

  Muffy and I walked along the beach and shortly came to the end of that side of the island. We went up on a high point of land and looked back at the rest of the island. It appeared to be only about a mile to a mile and a quarter long and no more than a half-mile wide at its widest point. We turned around and walked back. As we got back towards the buildings, a bearded male with dark skin and carrying an AK-47 approached us. I told Muffy to sit as he came up. As he got close, she growled softly. He heard her and stopped a few feet away.

  I said, “I’m Dr. Astrov in case you haven’t heard.”

  “Ah. I suspected,” he said in an Indian or Pakistani sounding accent. “Do you have permission to wander about?”

  “I didn’t know I needed permission.”

  “Most people don’t wander about without permission, and I have not heard if you are permitted to do so. I could have shot you.”