The big one said, "So tell us, Thorn. Who the fuck is Broom?"
CHAPTER 38
Sean Marie Farleigh tightened her seat belt as the helicopter tipped to the side and began a sharp-angled turn, taking aim on a blue-steel mountain range to the east. After leaving the city, they had traveled for half an hour, moving south, roughly following the Brunei River into the Tutong district, the pilot staying low over the jungle treetops.
Patrick was strapped in beside her while the pilot operated the controls from a single front seat. Patrick wore camouflage pants, khaki shirt, brightly shined military boots. Sean was in jeans and a long-sleeved black-and-white checked blouse. The back of her blouse was glued to her seat cushion. Even with the rush of air into the cockpit, sauna sweat poured from her. Not from the jungle humidity or the airless heat alone, but a feverish flush born of the hot brew of hate that was thickening her blood.
In a clumsy lurch, the helicopter canted left, then right, moving swiftly toward a notch in the mountain range. As they passed across the narrow plateau, the pilot swung the chopper hard to the right, then halted its forward motion to hover just beyond the mountains.
The pilot glanced back at Patrick, some signal passing between them, then the ungainly bird tipped forward so that Sean was abruptly presented with an unobstructed panorama. A dramatic trick like flinging aside the curtain. No doubt something the two of them had perfected on previous flights, bringing the sultan or the ministers out here to witness the progress.
At first Sean saw only a vast construction area. A dusty parking lot filled with giant orange earth-movers, dump trucks, rows and rows of pickups and front-end loaders, cranes, scoops, and a vast array of other heavy machines. As if a year's output from the assembly line at a Caterpillar factory had been airlifted to Brunei and set down in neat tiers in the middle of a virgin rain forest.
Patrick spoke a short burst of Malay into his helmet microphone, and the pilot answered him and leveled out the copter, heading south again. A minute or two later he swung them around once more so they could have another clear view, this time of an expansive prairie filled with dozens of concrete buildings, each of them two stories high, and each completely encircled by scaffolding. Snaking between the buildings was a wide, freshly paved road, and alongside the road ran a collection of immense cement columns arranged in an elaborate jumble like the pillars of Stonehenge.
"That will be the monorail." Patrick's voice spoke into her earphones. "The quietest and fastest railway in the world. Moving around the entire two hundred square miles of the preserve in less than an hour. Nothing like it anywhere. The technology is totally new, decades ahead of the Japanese, the French. A great many people will come here simply to marvel at that alone."
Sean was silent, scanning the distance. As far as she could see in every direction there were cranes and earthmovers, long lines of dump trucks, bulldozers, an enormous mobile-home park, the workers' ghetto, dozens of concrete buildings in various stages of completion, lakes, and rolling meadows, a complicated city materializing at the jungle's core. Workers and machines moved at a frenetic pace. The whole scene looked to Sean like those renderings of Egyptian chain gangs hauling inconceivably huge stones up the steep sides of pyramids.
Since Patrick's confession the night before, Sean had been mute with rage, horrified beyond language. But now she struggled to fill her lungs, muster the words. And finally they came, bitter in her mouth.
"What is it?" she said. "What is this goddamn place?"
"It is," he said, smiling to himself as he gazed down at the activity, "the largest, most extraordinary animal preserve the world has ever known."
"A zoo?" Sean said. She turned to face him. "That's why Winslow died? Because you were building a goddamn zoo?"
He stared at her, shook his head sorrowfully.
"Not a zoo," he said. "Far, far more than that."
"What?"
Patrick gave the pilot a short, grumbling order, and the man nodded in reply and brought the helicopter back to horizontal. A moment later he was easing them slowly down onto a football field of asphalt behind several windowless buildings, vast warehouses.
When the engines were shut off, Patrick climbed down, held a hand out for her, but Sean turned her back, used the rope ladder.
He led her across the tarmac into the shade of one of the warehouses, where a guard at the door came to stiff attention. The air outside the building was thick with the musky flavors of a barnyard. And as they passed through the door into the cool twilight of the huge room, the odors ripened drastically. A nearly stifling blend of shit and disinfectant, animal fur and human sweat.
Patrick said, "We are gathering here in this one place, Sean, the most unique collection of animals ever assembled. All of them are on the brink of disappearance. We will perfectly recreate their natural habitats, matching their homeland's flora and fauna precisely."
The room was packed with stalls and cages. Men in gray lab coats and others in jumpsuits of orange and red moved up and down the aisles carrying on their work amid the squalls and barks and hoots and whinnying screeches.
Patrick was smiling broadly.
"This is only one of our twenty-five storage barns. The animals we are amassing will be housed here until their activity areas are completed."
"I don't get it," she said. "What's the big deal?"
"What is the big deal, Sean?" Patrick shook his head and smiled wanly. "Already, only in the last year, we have put together the largest collection of rare creatures ever gathered in one place. This is an historic operation, nothing on this scale has ever been attempted before. Soon we will possess what no one else possesses, what would otherwise be forever lost. By the time the preserve is opened a few years from now, most of the animals before you will be found nowhere else on earth. Except for the ones here in Brunei, they'll be completely extinct."
"You actually think tourists will come to this wretched country to see these animals? Bring their dollars, keep the good times rolling?"
"Wretched, Sean?" He smiled bleakly. "Yes," he said. "I know they will come. Zoos are the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and our preserve, when it is finished, will have no rival. If someone wants to see a manatee, a white-cloud tiger, they will have no choice, they must come here."
Patrick nodded hello to a group of men walking past in white smocks. Clipboards, portable phones, stethoscopes.
He said, "We are saving these creatures, Sean. No one else is even attempting to breed most of these species in captivity. Everyone is so caught up in the politics of the animal-rights groups, international charters and agreements. So frightened of organizations like the one your mother controls. But the attempt to save the world's habitats is failing, and one after another species disappears every few seconds. What we are doing here is a noble service to the world. A bold and gallant effort to change the course of evolutionary history."
"Bullshit," she said. "The only reason you're breeding these things is so you'll have replacements when yours die. That's all. To keep the money flowing."
"Sean, Sean."
"And this is all courtesy of Rantel? My father? Everybody getting rich off this crack-brained scheme."
She waved her hand at the convention hall, the bam, whatever the hell it was.
"Your father was a great help. Yes. Your mother, too, though she doesn't realize it."
"And the sultan? He approves of all this, your methods?"
"Actually, the sultan shows little interest in the particulars of the project, which is probably better for all concerned."
Patrick halted before a tall cage where two white-faced gibbons were housed. One of them was swinging rapidly from one side of the cage to the other, hooting and singing, while the second huddled in a corner, holding a branch with a few parched leaves to its nose as if it were trying to catch a fading trace of its perfume.
Patrick stepped close to her, reached out, swept her hair back, touched a hand to the side of her face. She cr
inged and twisted away.
"Sean," he said. "I must impress on you how crucial this project is to our country's survival. It will be the cornerstone of our new tourist economy. If De Novo were to fail, the results could be cataclysmic for the region. Believe me, I have consulted with the wisest men of my country and we have all spent a great deal of time considering how best to plan for the next generation of our people, and the generations after that. At present there are a quarter-million citizens in Brunei. When the oil fields are dry, we will have no natural resources to fall back on. We import almost all our commodities.
"Of course, we have investments, a healthy national treasury. But how long could that last, draining away the principal year after year? And we could cut down our forests, yes, despoil our own land for a few years of profit. But that is no long-term answer either. We need De Novo and other things like this. It is critical that we find new ways to capitalize. It is absolutely essential."
"And Allison and Winslow just stumbled into the path of this enormous machine."
Sean was peering out at the cavernous hall, eyes roaming the stalls and cages, catching glimpses of larger animals, tusked creatures, water buffalo, rhinos.
As she gazed out at the animals, she had a quick, herky-jerky image of herself escaping. Sprint down the main aisle, dodge his men, straight-arm them, kick, scratch, throw open cage doors as she went. Leave a wake of raucous cries behind her. Disappear behind the herds and swarms and flocks and tribes of escaping animals. But then what? Where to? Half a world from home.
She shuddered, drew a difficult breath, closed her eyes.
"We should be getting back," Patrick said. "We have another long journey ahead of us. It is finally time that your mother and I resolve our difficulties. If we are to be a family, Sean, you and I, produce a family of our own, it is essential that no impediments to our happiness remain."
Sean felt a catch in her breathing. Her disgust sent a violent flutter through essential valves, a bayonet rammed down the throat.
"I badly want your mother's blessing, Sean," he said, gazing at her with the same naive longing he had had as a boy. An expression that only a few days ago had helped to soften her natural restraint. Part of his charm. But now it seemed to her that all that blind hunger for some girl-child of long ago was no more than the diseased fetish of a stunted boy.
Patrick lay his arm across Sean's shoulders, snugged her near, began to steer her gently toward the bright, open doorway.
"It is my wish," Patrick said, bringing his mouth close to her ear, "that when Allison stands before her almighty God, she will be comfortable in the knowledge that her daughter has passed into the best possible hands."
CHAPTER 39
As Allison and the taxi driver were leaving the house, the phone rang. A reporter from the Miami Herald wanted to know if she had any comment to make.
"Comment about what?"
The reporter cleared her throat and said, "Your husband's apparent suicide."
An hour later the Haitian driver was watching the evening news when the police arrived. Allison brought them into the living room, watched them slosh their Styrofoam coffees.
"I know already," she told them. "Jacqueline Bristol called."
They glanced around at the Farleighs' living room, looked curiously at the taxi driver. And one of them asked Allison if her husband had been depressed. Money problems, home life bothering him, anything like that?
"He had plenty to be depressed about," Allison said. "But no, he wasn't. He wasn't capable of it."
The cops slurped coffee, looking at each other through the rising steam. Then one of them stared down at his pad and informed Allison there were signs at the scene that suggested foul play. Did she know anyone who might want to do harm to Harry Farleigh?
Me, she wanted to say. Only if I'd done it, I wouldn't have let him off so easy, such a quick flight, instant carnage. Instead she shook her head, and to her great surprise she felt her mouth twist, and she began to weep.
But the crying jag lasted only a minute or two, then she choked it off, looked up at the two suited men, the one uniform. Backhanded her eyes. The lieutenant asked a few more questions, going through the motions. Nothing here. Woman as batty as everyone said. And they left. Three Styrofoam cups on the mantelpiece.
She had the taxi driver take her downtown to Harry's building. She saw the yellow tape, the last of the cleanup crew just leaving. In the basement garage she located Harry's Porsche, paid off the taxi man, and took the Porsche west out of the city, heading to the Shack, the one place in the world where she'd known some meager contentment.
***
Saturday she woke early to the blare of dirt bikes. The Indian boys roared around her house, out into the western fringe of her property. After she straightened the furniture and swept up the broken glass, she sat out on the porch and rocked, watched the clouds form and reform, moving across the Everglades sky. She sat out there most of the day and watched the shadows stretch and pull at the trees and then shrink into nothing. She rocked and held her father's Zippo in her palm, a cool, heavy chunk of him.
That night she slept deeply, dreamless. Woke on Sunday, lay still and listened to the chiding cries of an osprey, coming far inland for a freshwater meal. She rose, found a pair of pinking shears, stood before the bathroom mirror.
She took hold of a strand of her long hair, drew it out from her skull and began to slice the years away. Cut and cut until it was three inches long, a pixie. Using the comb, a smaller pair of scissors, a second mirror, checking her profile, she tried to style it. Not self-mutilation. But feeling a need to simplify. Start over.
She liked what emerged. Trim, honest. Joan of Arc with crow's feet. A little ragged around the ears maybe, a cowlick in back, but still, it highlighted her cheekbones, enlarged her eyes, seemed to brighten them. She felt a vain and foolish spasm in her chest, a flashback of schoolgirl pride. A new look for a new school year. Maybe this was the year the boys would notice. Maybe now the cloaks would fall away from all the mysteries.
She swept up the bathroom floor, dumped the mound of curls in a grocery sack. Showered again. Doing her makeup, a few final snips to her hair. A fresh bandage for her nose. Dressed in the same jeans, a salmon-colored cotton jersey, moccasins. Feeling younger. Healthy, free.
She ate some cheese and bread, a green apple, drank a club soda. Felt eighteen. As fresh and clear as if she were her own daughter. A feisty calm. Like coming off a three-week binge, hangover finally gone, headache subsided, the world a crystal place. Grateful for every breath, each simple motion a pleasure. Drawing air as if it were pure oxygen.
She sat in the rocker on the front porch all morning, watching the bright spill of daylight ignite the saw grass, the palmettos, the mahogany hammock. Watched a five-foot alligator bask for hours fifty yards east of the porch, a leather log, pebbled, dead. She looked away, then back, and the gator was gone, submerged again in ooze.
A yellow swallowtail twirled past the porch like crepe paper torn loose in the wind, the honks of Canada geese soared overhead. It was morning, it was noon, it was twilight. Her mind transparent. Nothing to rehearse, no speech to prepare, no diagram of action, no plan B. Allison was there, but not there. Like the wind, the gator; like the osprey, the heron, the diamondback. Like the trees and the shadows, the stunning silence. A mirror. Drowsy from the sun, hair-trigger alert.
In the final moments before she drove back into town, she dealt out the stack of Winslow's photos from Borneo, examined each one. Sean's candid looks, pinched smiles, exaggerated pouts as Winslow took yet another snapshot of her little sister. The cheap exoticism of Kuching, food stalls, trash clogging the river, longhouses. And then the jungle shots. Two men aiming their rifles into the trees. Patrick Sagawan and Raimondo White.
She put the prints back in the packet, set it on the porch table. Picked up the Zippo again, opened it, flicked the wheel. She watched the orange flame, a blade of fire wriggling in the easy breeze. She snapped the li
ghter shut, slid it in her pants pocket. Allison rocked, ran a leisurely hand through her new hair, listened to the nagging cries of a great blue heron. Then the ache of silence filled the distance again. Rich twilight.
***
She'd been coming to Parrot Jungle for many years. Miami's first tourist attraction had outlived all the rest with its lush landscape, flagstone paths winding through thick stands of bamboo and palm and bushy native dogwoods and mahogany, oaks and ferns, walkways running across coral archways, high bridges.
Even in the total dark Allison knew her way through the maze of walks and pathways. Knew a direct route to the orangutan cages at the westernmost edge of the park. All around her the birds were quiet, mynahs and starlings, parrots and macaws, their cages covered. No breeze, hardly any moon. An occasional passing car out on Red Road left behind the rumble of its exhaust, but that was the only sound. That and the quiet swish of her soft-soled moccasins.
Only a single, distant security light cast its yellow sulfur glow on this part of the grounds. Allison halted behind the stone wall that separated the primate area from the parrots and the cockatoos. In the faint light she saw Sean and Patrick standing arm in arm in front of Broom's cage. The great ape was awake, sitting on top of his broken perch, staring down at these humans who had interrupted his sleep.
When Allison stepped into the patio, Broom coughed and snorted, and with a trumpeting hoot he came swinging down to the floor of his cage.
Patrick was wearing creamy trousers and a white turtleneck, stylish loafers that were a mustard color in the sulfur light. Sean had on blue jeans and a dark crew-neck top, white running shoes. Her short blond hair was rumpled, eyes worn and sleepless, moving like an invalid, each fragile step heroic. She stared at Allison, holding fiercely to her eyes, awaiting some crucial signal.
"Ah, Allison," Patrick said. "How pleasant to see you again."
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 38