by K. T. Tomb
Cat pushed Lacy out in front, holding the pistol on her as we started our parade. I used the pistol to motion for Stone to follow Cat and Ishi fell in behind me with the pack containing the map on his back.
We started down the same corridor that I’d been sent to explore earlier, though it could have been any one of them for all that I knew. They all looked pretty much the same and had the exact same features: none.
How many similar corridors had I walked down while someone else was pointing a gun at my back? How many situations had I been in where it was pretty unclear whether I would survive? Though, for the moment, I felt like I was in control, something was nagging at the back of my mind. Even though I was holding the gun, it really felt like I was the captive. My thoughts and the silent corridor were getting to me.
“How you getting along back there, partner?” I called back to Ishi without turning around. Chatting with someone was the best way to keep from thinking too much.
“I’m good,” he said.
“That thing is pretty heavy. You just let me know if you want to trade, alright?”
“I’ll be fine,” he answered.
“Don’t wear yourself out without saying something or taking a break, okay?”
“Though I be small, I be fierce,” Ishi replied.
“Shakespeare, huh?” I laughed.
“Who?” he replied.
“Never mind.”
We followed along the corridor for much longer than I had when I’d been sent to explore it and I figured that we had to be getting close to wherever Stone and Lacy had come in. My mind wouldn’t let go of the fact that the government agency, for which Stone and Lacy worked, knew way too much about Ishi and me. That meant that they’d had their eyes on us, at the very least, before we went to Scotland. Had we drawn that much attention or had it been Marie?
It was because of our association with Marie that PGE had started to pay attention to us. According to Agent Jacobs, we’d been small time and, essentially, not worth bothering until we joined up with Marie. Were we being kept out of the game for another reason or were we being groomed for something else? If Stone and Lacy’s agency had been watching us, perhaps they had wanted to scoop us up as well.
I hated the cloak and dagger shit. Things had been much simpler when Ishi and I were only in danger because we’d wandered into a place where somebody was protecting a relic or an artifact. That sort of danger was easy to deal with. It was, for the most part, right in front of you and you knew, exactly, who was going to try to kill you. My Tawankan partner and I had just graduated into an entirely different league. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to play anymore.
“How you doing, Ish?” I asked again. “You want to switch out?”
“I’m okay, but I could use a breather for a minute or two,” he said.
“Cat,” I said. “Can we hold up a minute?”
When we’d play hide and seek as kids, whoever was “it” always let us know that the game was on by yelling, “scatterbeans” and then start counting. Well, when I’d asked Cat if we could take a breather, I might as well have yelled “scatterbeans,” because both agents darted in different directions. Stone shoved me hard and ran back to an intersecting tunnel before I could recover myself and Lacy sprinted forward, ducking and dodging in front of Cat until she came to an intersecting tunnel.
Cat fired several shots, which nearly split our eardrums, but given poor lighting and the way that Lacy moved, she’d missed her shots.
“Shit!” she exclaimed, undoing the very last bit of that girly-girl persona for me. “Now we’re screwed. They know the way out. We’ve got to find them.” She started to where Lacy had disappeared, but I stopped her.
“We’ll never find them, Cat,” I called out.
“So, we just let them go?”
“Look, we’ve been walking a long time and this island isn’t that big. We’ve got to be close to an exit, probably on the other end of the island, or close to it. Besides, we were going to have to figure out what to do with them whenever we got out. They sort of solved that problem for us.”
Chapter Nineteen
There had been some discussion about what to do next, but there wasn’t really any point in stretching things out by talking and we decided to keep going in the direction that Lacy had been leading us. Evidently, she had been playing it straight, because it wasn’t long before we came to an opening that led to the surface.
“I better go have a look,” Cat suggested. “We have no idea where we are or what might be waiting for us when we come out of here.”
She was right, of course, and she was certainly more apt to be able to figure out where we were than either of us would, so, Ishi and I stayed back from the cave entrance and waited.
“You think that agent was right about her?” Ishi asked. It had been the first opportunity that we’d had to have a private discussion about it.
“I don’t know, Ishi,” I replied. “I don’t like any of this, but, up to this point, we have no reason to doubt her.”
“We have no reason to doubt her?” he asked with wide-eyed surprise at the statement. “She definitely is more than she’s telling us. You can’t tell me that you don’t see that.”
“She told us who she was. She’s remained pretty consistent with someone who has been trained to infiltrate a subversive organization.”
“Yeah, and a hell of a lot of other things too. How do we know that she didn’t just abandon us here to go set us up?”
“Because she’s coming back, right now,” I replied, hearing her call.
“We’re clear,” she said when she came back to us. “We’re on Islote Cordoba.”
“We’re on an island?” It was my turn to widen my eyes in surprise. “Wouldn’t we have had to go underneath the water to get here? Weren’t we above the waterline when we started through the cave?”
“We must have descended and ascended gradually. And, you’ll notice that we’re climbing up to come out of here,” she smiled. The shadow that I’d seen in her eyes while we were dealing with the agents was gone and she was more like the girly-girl scuba instructor with the lemon-yellow Amigo.
“Okay, so, if we’re on an island, then how do we get back to San Andrés Island?” It seemed strange to be on an island off of an island.
“We came up inside the property of the San Andres Aquarium,” she laughed.
“It should be interesting explaining things if someone sees us, don’t you think?” I asked.
“And the agents must have known someone who permitted access too,” Ishi added.
“Leave that up to me, Nicky.”
“Nicky?”
“Of course, baby, we’re about to play a role that the both of us will enjoy.”
Her plan worked perfectly and carrying it out had been one of the hottest diversions that I’d ever been a part of. I was still feeling its effects long after the three of us boarded the ferry that would take us back to the main island.
We hid Ishi near the entrance to the restricted area that we were in while Cat and I went to a place where we could easily be discovered and started making out. Cat played her role to perfection, even to the point of stripping down the top half of her wetsuit while we made out. Our moans and groans, which we exaggerated a little, drew the attention of the guard that had been assigned to the area and he opened the gate, saw us and came toward us, asking what we were doing in a restricted area and telling us that we were going to be arrested. While he was paying attention to us, Ishi slipped out through the gate and into the public area.
Cat and I, on the other hand, were escorted back out into the public area, but because of some really fast sweet talking by Cat and, no doubt, because he’d gotten a good look at what was under her wetsuit, we weren’t arrested nor did he call anyone in to help remove us. The only problem with the whole thing is that I couldn’t concentrate on anything, but continuing where we’d left off, for the rest of the evening.
We decided that returning to our
cabana for the night would be much too dangerous, but I wanted to stop in, get the few things that we had there and check things out a little bit. I went in alone, so as not to attract too much attention and noticed the instant that I entered that someone had gone through our stuff. It really wasn’t a surprise. No doubt, Stone and Lacy had gone there looking for some clue as to where we had disappeared to after they’d tried to snag us the first time.
“Just as I thought,” I said, when I joined Cat and Ishi at the restaurant where we’d had our dinner that first night. “They went through our stuff.”
“Anything missing?” Ishi asked.
“Not that I know of, but here’s your bag; you can see if everything is there.”
After a few minutes, he looked up at me. “My folding toothbrush and the trial sized toothpaste isn’t here.”
“I’m sorry, Ishi,” I replied. “I didn’t take the time to get the stuff out of the bathroom. I’ll buy you new stuff.”
“But they could get my DNA.”
“They already know everything about us. What would be the point of a getting your DNA?”
We were engaged in that conversation when my sat-phone started to ring.
“That’ll be Spence,” I announced. I decided to mess with him a little bit before pressing the button to connect the call. “This is Scuba Diver. Go ahead, Big Ship.”
“Knock it off,” he growled. “Just listen and only respond with yes or no, got it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you do what I asked?”
“Yes.”
“I will call you tomorrow with further instructions, understand?”
“Yes.”
The call disconnected and I looked at Cat and Ishi, who looked like they’d blow up if they weren’t allowed to laugh, and soon. “What?”
“Scuba Diver?” Ishi laughed.
“Big Ship?” Cat added, almost before he finished his question.
It wasn’t funny enough for us to have laughed as hard as we did. It was one of those moments when something touched off a release of tension and the stupidest of things kept it going. We ate, drank and laughed until we couldn’t take any more of any of it. It was well after midnight when we left the place and caught a cab for the ride back to Cat’s hideout.
When we arrived at her place, Ishi, who had for the first time ever outdone me on drinking, collapsed on the bed in the spare room without bothering to undress or even take his shoes off. Then Cat and I restarted where we left off at the aquarium.
The awesome thing about it was that I wasn’t so blitzed out of my mind that I wouldn’t remember it; in fact, quite the opposite. Cat did things that I never have nor probably will ever have done to me again. She was a savage in bed that night. By the time she was done with me, I was so exhausted that I passed out just like my partner.
***
“The battle of Panama was the climax of Captain Henry Morgan’s career,” my uncle would say whenever I would ask him how the pirate’s life had turned out. “It was a great victory for him and his crew and it was also the point at which Henry came to the conclusion that he didn’t want to be a leader of men all his life.”
“I’m not sure I want to lead people either, Uncle,” I’d responded once when I was about thirteen years old.
“I realize that, Nick,” he said, patting the seat beside him. “That’s why I’m going to tell you this part of the story one more time. I only hope you’ll be able to make the decision when the time comes, like Morgan did, no matter how hard it might seem at the time.”
“I hope so too.”
“On January 8, 1671, Morgan had left 130 pirates behind to garrison St. Catherine, and led an army of 1,200 remaining pirates into the Panamanian jungle. But the Spanish forces had anticipated Morgan’s desire to get to Panama City. Spanish soldiers and native Indian mounted several ambushes which prevented the pirates from foraging for food and supplies in small groups. Also, the villages they came across were deserted and stripped of anything valuable; word had gone out among the settlements to retreat behind the city walls ahead of the pirates’ arrival.
“By the fifth day, there were some crew members who were complaining of Captain Morgan and his conduct for the first time. They were even some who wanted to return home to Jamaica. Despite the hard time they had of it in the jungle, the renowned charm of Morgan’s personality and the irrefutable power of a pirate’s greed played huge roles in the eventual success of the march.
“On January 17, the ninth day since they had set out on land, the pirates encountered a few horses and cattle left behind by the Spaniards and the village people and they were finally able to feed themselves properly. That night, they camped comfortably and ate voraciously, all within sight of Panama City. Morgan, however, was concerned about launching an attack on the city. He had become dependent on using captives from the surrounding areas as a source of intelligence, but the Spaniards’ evacuation of the villages had ensured that the pirates found not a single prisoner during their advance towards Panama.
“On the morning of January 18, 1671, 3,600 Spanish troops marched out of the city of Panama to meet Henry Morgan and his pirates. It was one of the most extraordinary armies ever assembled. On the other side of the field were 1,200 criminals, a mixed bunch of Englishmen, Dutch, French, blacks, Indians and even a few renegade Spaniards. At their head, there wasn’t a prince or a general; only a former Welsh farmer’s son and one-time indentured servant. Henry Morgan was determined to take the city of Panama.
“Henry’s men fought as pirates were apt to do and after two hours, most of the Spanish cavalry had been cut down and the few remaining survivors had fled. When they saw that their mounted forces had deserted them, the Spanish infantry fired one final volley of bullets at the pirates, then set down their muskets and fled as well. Their dead totaled some 600, with many more Spanish wounded or taken prisoner. Henry Morgan’s pirates had lost many men as well, but they were nevertheless determined to press home their attack and seek out their long awaited victory.
“That afternoon, the pirates attacked the city itself and within three hours, the exhausted Spaniards were overrun. Panama City, the second largest in the Western Hemisphere, had fallen into the hands of Henry Morgan and his crew. As was expected, they immediately began pillaging it. Fire broke out in several parts of the city soon after the looting began and it continued to burn for four weeks.”
Chapter Twenty
“Where’s Cat?” Ishi asked, stumbling into the bedroom, rubbing his eyes and looking worse than I’d felt the morning before.
“Probably in the shower,” I muttered. “Something you’ll probably want to do in a minute. Wake me up when you’re done.”
I heard his feet shuffling on the floor, then a pause, and then his announcement that she wasn’t in the shower. I wasn’t very concerned. She might be one of those people that like to go for a jog in the morning or a swim. She didn’t have that incredible body by laying around in bed in the morning. Thoughts of what that incredible body had me smiling as I replayed the events of the previous night in my mind. I was enjoying the moment thoroughly when I was brought fully awake by a shriek that was all too familiar from our wild ride in the Land Rover.
“It’s gone!”
I didn’t have to ask what was gone. I already knew and, instinctively, I also knew who had it. I scrambled out of bed, pulled on some shorts, slipped into some flip-flops that were way too small and flew out the door and up the trail to the Quonset hut. Shoving the door open, I saw exactly what I thought I’d see: nothing. Cat was gone and with her, the map.
“Shit.” I scrambled back down the trail, nearly falling and rolling to the bottom several times before I got rid of the flip-flops and finished the rest of my dash back to the house in bare feet.
“She’s gone,” I announced to Ishi, whose hangover was going to have to wait, because he was already dressed and scrambling around to put his things in his bag.
“We’ve got to go after her,�
� he said. “Our asses are on the line.”
“She’s gone, Ishi,” I repeated. “We don’t have the first idea where to even start looking for her.”
“We have to try.”
A sudden realization hit me in that instant. If we were in a safe-house, then our little taxi ride would have blown its safety. Colombian cab drivers not only have loose lips, especially after the display that Cat put on for him in the back of the cab, but they would sell out for a $5 bill, unless they thought they could get more.
“This place is blown and we’ve got to get out of here.”
“What are you talking about?” Ishi asked, watching me scramble to find my clothes and get dressed.
“Instead of just watching, you can start stuffing some of my things into a bag.”
I had on pants and shoes and was reaching for a shirt before Ishi zipped the bag closed when I heard a rock or something break loose on the trail behind the house and go rolling down.
“They’re here,” I whispered, grabbing the bag, moving to a window and quietly trying to slide it open. “We run and we just keep running, got it?”
Ishi nodded and slipped through the window. I tossed our bags through and was halfway out when I heard whoever was chasing us open the front door. I dove the rest of the way out the window, rolled over and took my bag from Ishi as I hit my feet running. Within seconds, we were among thick cover and picking our way around trees and bushes with no sense of where we were going, but plenty of motivation pushing us from behind.
“You can’t run forever, Caine!” I heard Stone’s voice call out.
We ran until we heard the sound of surf coming up onto the beach and then we hid in the dense foliage along its edge and waited a very long time to see if anyone was looking for us. There were several people casually going about their daily routines: walking, jogging, exercising dogs, swimming or just soaking in the morning rays. There didn’t appear to be anyone waiting to kill two people; however, I had arrived at a point where I wasn’t sure if anyone or anything was really what it appeared to be.