by Tom Clancy
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.”
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 a
t 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.