Alibi Island

by SLMN

  The corridors of the hotel were deserted. He passed the occasional hotel worker pushing a room-cleaning trolley, but saw a scant few hotel residents. Perhaps most were down at breakfast, or had taken themselves downtown for business meetings or a little sightseeing. Whatever, it didn’t matter.

  Huey reached the suite, and keyed the door open with the card. Inside, the connected set of rooms were dark, the drapes still closed and Huey had to reach to the side of the door to turn on the main light. The tastefully concealed lighting flickered on and the extent of the suit, all curved wood with sumptuous 1920’s styling came into sharp relief.

  As did the two men standing there.

  “Surprise!” Crane smiled, and Myer raised his gun.

  “Did you really think that we don’t know every move you make, who you talk to and who you plan to meet?”

  Huey took a step back, the shock of the raised gun and the unexpected presence of the two men almost taking the strength from his legs.

  “You’ve bugged my phone?”

  There was a warm laugh beside him as Jerome stepped from the bathroom, followed by Cal. “No,” said Jerome, “they bugged your friends.”

  Passion knocked on the apartment door, keeping Mary-Joy in front of her—enclosed in her arms, looking around to see if they’d been followed into the building.

  Sven, bleary-eyed, which seemed to be his default state whenever Passion came to his apartment, opened the door with a puzzled look, which was followed by his hand going up to scratch his head. “Miss…Durant…?”

  “I need your help.”

  Passion could see from Sven’s reaction this was not the words he was expecting to have come from her mouth, but with a shake of his head he opened the door and let them into the apartment.

  In the few days since she’d last been there, Passion could see that Sven had not made many more additions to the home. There was at least a sofa now, and a TV—men did like to get the important stuff out of the way first when making a new home—and there were bags of groceries on the kitchen surfaces waiting to be unpacked.

  “What is the help you need? It is late. I am tired and to be perfectly honest with you, I am confused.”

  So Passion told him.

  When she’d finished she thought she was going to have to pick his jaw off the floor for him. Mary-Joy had long since curled up to sleep on the sofa, her knees drawn up in a fetal position, her head protected beneath her horrifically scarred arm. This was a girl used to sleeping anywhere and any way she could. A skill forged in the Filipino slums.

  “They must have tracked the Hyundai to the derelict lot outside Montgomery. That’s why I never saw anyone following. They didn’t need to. I left Mary-Joy there while I went to steal a car. I was an idiot. I thought they’d been tracking my telephone, but I’d dumped that miles back. Mary-Joy managed to find me in the motel parking lot, told me about the guys with guns rolling up to the Hyundai and we lost them, and came straight here.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re the only person right now that I know who isn’t in this up to their necks. They’re inside Houston PD, they’ve blocked my access to my employers. Whatever phone I use, I can’t get through. It’s like the Agency has been taken off the grid permanently; all my credit cards have been cancelled, and I dare not go back to my hotel to get my stuff. Now they really can’t track us, I can’t risk going back there.”

  “I need more coffee. You’re speaking so fast, I think you need less.”

  “Will you help?”

  Sven went to the kitchen to refill his cup. “Help how?”

  “Let us stay here a while. They can’t track us here now. I’ve dumped the phone and the Hyundai, so that gives us some breathing space. I’ll try to make contact with some of my mom’s old colleagues in the Canadian SIS. I think I’m going to have to take this outside the US. Whoever is running the island, and the operations Stateside have octopus arms. I don’t know who I can trust right now. Except you.”

  Sven nodded, and sipped from his refreshed cup, running his fingers through his hair.

  “I have heard some sick things in my time. But this island is the sickest. It must be exposed. It cannot be allowed to continue.” Svan sat down again, still shaking his head, his eyes conveying his shock. “And you are sure Alaina is there?”

  “Yes. Mary-Joy saw her. For sure. Heard Lainey shouting out her own name. One hundred percent.”

  “We must get there. Find her. I was very foolish. I should have protected her better. I should not have thought of myself. This is unfinished business for me.”

  Passion could see that Sven was a proud man, one who hated leaving a job half finished, especially one he’d contributed to going wrong. Sven set his shoulders and nodded to himself.

  “This I must do.”

  “Thank you.”

  As the lights went out and the frame charges blew the windows in on a gust of black smoke and glass, Passion spun away and hit the wall hard with her head. She heard the clunk of the stun grenades hitting the floor before the flashes and the bangs blinded and then deafened her.

  23

  They sat in a semi-circle of canvas chairs. Their wrists and ankles bound with zip-ties. Mary-Joy, Sven, Passion, and on the end of the line…Huey Ralston.

  The room was wood-paneled and smelled of fresh varnish. Two huge picture windows showed the island and a sky that looked like an old bruise.

  Passion could see way beyond the compound across the fields to the forest. They’d been transported there from Houston in a headlong rush that felt more desperate than planned. First they’d been hustled into the Gulfstream, which they’d met at Roman Field, kept face down on its plush carpet, covered by armed guards in their faux SWAT uniforms the whole time. Passion had not seen any evidence of Mary-Joy’s murder spree in the aircraft, so either the organization had a spare, or they’d gotten this one fixed up by PDQ.

  After the three-hour flight, they were picked up from the jungle airstrip by a black Bell 206 JetRanger, flown just under two hours to the island to land next to this central building in the walled compound on a helipad. Then they were dragged and pushed inside the building and upstairs to the stateroom. They had not had time to breathe, and their feet didn’t touch.

  The sky was glutted with clouds, and the journey in the JetRanger had been bumpy and erratic with blustery crosswinds whipping up off the white-crested waves below. In the helicopter, the SWAT team was having edgy conferences over weather RADAR readouts, looking with concern at the tumbling sky, and didn’t seem at all happy to be flying in these borderline conditions. One of them, green-faced with bulging eyes, threw up into a bag. It wasn’t a good journey.

  The weather on the island now was worse and matched Passion’s mood as she looked out at the island. Beyond the compound walls a black Humvee was patrolling between a putting green and the fields. Passion could just see through the mile of heavy rain to the wooded slopes of a mountain which rose from the center of the island.

  The forest that squatted there at the base of the black rock didn’t make sense to Passion. It looked all wrong. The woodland seemed to be comprised of broad-branched oaks and looked utterly incongruous next to the jungle that comprised most of the rest of the island’s flora. It was as if Sherwood Forest had been torn away from Robin and Marion, and dropped onto a Caribbean island.

  The forest had the look of artificial creation, like a film set or a theme park. It added greatly to the unreality of the situation. Nearer to the central building in which they were zip-tied and seated, Passion could see the higgledy-piggledy collection of Olde Worlde chalets, like an assortment of huge cuckoo clocks just as artificial and curated as the forest. Passion studied the chalets and their ludicrously quaint design, but found she had to look away as her eyes picked out two guards dragging a semi naked teen towards a chalet, up some stairs and through the front door.

  For all the artifice of the Robin Hood forest and the Smurf Village chalets, there was nothing artificia
l about the horror of this place. That was all too real and upsetting. Passion’s guts turned. If she could have gotten free she would have taken as many of these motherfuckers with her as she could. Passion tried to again quell the anger clouding her thinking. If she was going to survive the next hour, let alone the next few years, she was going to have to be prepared to move on them whenever an opportunity arose. Feeling sorry for the kid being dragged into the chalet and allowing herself the luxury of anger, was not going to get anyone saved, least of all the girl in the chalet.

  Focus, Passion.

  Focus.

  Get back in the room. What do you see? What can you use?

  Stephen Crane was there standing next to a statuesque blond woman dressed like she was attending a cocktail party. Behind them, five black uniformed SWAT guards armed with shoulder-strapped Heckler & Koch G36’s.

  There was an empty chair in front of the guards and the way the blond was looking at the watch on her wrist, she was expecting someone soon to fill it.

  Sven’s face was bloated with bruises. The fake SWAT team, who had blown the windows with frame charges and thrown in the stun grenades, had judged him to be the major threat given his background in Swedish Special Services. They had kicked and pistol whipped him into unconsciousness even as he’d tried to get up on his knees to respond to their attack.

  Passion and Mary-Joy had been thrown face down and zip-tied before they’d had a chance to recover any faculties. They had been carried from the apartment block, out into the street and thrown into the back of a caged van. It had taken four of the black uniformed SWAT fakes to carry Sven given his size, and as well as being cable tied, he’d been handcuffed with his legs shackled. He was bundled into the cage beside Passion, his face bloody and swelling, one eye already closing.

  Five and a half hours later, they were on the island.

  Passion still had no idea how the assholes had found them. No phone, no car tracker. Unless they were psychic, they couldn’t have known that she’d try to elicit Sven’s help.

  Passion tried to go back over the hours since they’d first been attacked in the north Houston parking lot. Trying to think about anything or anyone that could have tracked them, but she could not think on one moment where they’d been under surveillance. It was as if these people could just flick a switch and be told exactly where Passion and the girl were at any moment.

  It was a handy trick if you could pull it off, and now she was sitting here on the island, captured all to hell, impotent and blind-sided.

  The door to the stateroom opened, and an old woman, dressed like a fucking hobbit shuffled in. She wore a cloak, brown britches, and leather boots. Her face was straight from a Fantasy Movie Central Casting, and her white hair followed the turns of her head like smoke from a steam train’s smoke stack.

  Her hands were gnarled like roots, knuckles were arthritic and swollen to the size of walnuts. Her eyes though, they didn’t match the frailness of her hands and body. They were not an artificial affectation like the clothes or the chalets or the forest below the mountain. Her eyes were bright and alive, her stare firm and unblinking. They were the eyes of a hunter in the pinched face of a fairytale witch. Hansel and Gretel’s captor made flesh, the Childcatcher’s mom. A wolf in Disneyland clothing.

  The old woman sat in the empty chair, her mouth moving but no words coming out. It was the soft mouth of your grandmother, pink and dry, run with cracks and crevices, like two pink soft tortoise feet coming together in front of brown-stained teeth. There were no words coming out because the movements of the lips were like the palsied undulations of someone whose thoughts were played out on their face before they ever became communication.

  Passion suspected the woman was reaching up to a shelf in her mind, choosing the jar with each correct word and then sending it towards her mouth in an orderly line. This was a woman who didn’t waste a moment on ephemera that didn’t matter. Her eyes showed the urgency of that.

  When she spoke, it was with a sense of commanding stillness. “My name is Rosa González. I am the representative here at Enchanted Holdings, Owners of La Isla Encantada. It is my domain and I have been given carte blanche to run it as I see fit. I answer to the highest authority in this matter. Please be aware that I have the power of life and death over all of you. The island is nearly three hundred nautical miles from the coast. An inhospitable coast for jungles and swamps. Even if you made it there, you would die before you reached civilization—well what passes for civilization in this part of the world. In the 25 years we have been open, we have had one escape. Just one. Well done, Mary-Joy. You have impressed me a great deal.”

  Mary-Joy averted her eyes, looking down at her bare knees. She said nothing since they had arrived back on the island, her face a mask of fear.

  “But as you all can see, that one escapee is back here already. Our reach is long, our resources infinite, and our revenge biblical. I assure all of you that procedures and security measures have all been tightened, and the method by which Mary-Joy left the island is impossible to replicate.”

  Rosa turned her gaze to Huey. “Oh Mr. Ralston, how you have disappointed me.”

  “Not as much as I’ve disappointed myself.”

  Rosa smiled, showing more stained teeth than should have been able to fit in one mouth. “I doubt that very much, indeed. Stephen and I always calculated there would be a chance that you would have an attack of conscience, even if we did hold your daughter…”

  “Where is Lainey? I want to see her!”

  “All in good time, Mr. Ralston, all in good time. Your daughter is here, she is as well as can be expected, and as of an hour ago she is still, shall we say a virgin intact. Only you have the power to maintain that state of physical wellbeing in your child, Mr. Ralston. I trust I shall be able to count on your continued cooperation in this matter.”

  Ralston strained at his bonds, standing up from the canvas chair. A guard stepped forward and punched him hard in the stomach. With a groan, Ralston fell to his knees and the guard was joined by another. They dragged the Texan politician back to the chair, where he grunted and coughed, unable to hold his stomach because his hands were still zip-tied behind his back.

  “Well perhaps you’ll come around eventually. I understand one of my guards, Karpov I believe…”

  The blond nodded.

  “…thank you Carla, yes, Karpov is particularity keen to spend some time alone with your daughter, Mr. Ralston. As I said, your continued cooperation is essential in this matter. Is that understood?”

  Ralston nodded, a streamer of spit hanging from the corner of his mouth and dripping onto his pants.

  “And you…you, I’m not sure about…”

  Rosa had turned her attention to Sven, whose blackening, swollen face was looking ripe enough to burst.

  Carla leant in and offered, “Sven Wikström, erstwhile bodyguard and butler to Ralston.”

  Rosa was suddenly delighted. She clapped her hands and her dry lips drew back to a wet gummed smile. “So you’re Sven? I’ve heard about you from Mr. Crane here. You’re the big Swedish lurch who was outsmarted by an itty-bitty girl. How did that feel, big guy?”

  Sven said nothing, just glowered at his shoes through the bruises, and then as if to underline his anger, he spat a bloody gob of saliva onto the floor.

  “Do you mind?” Rosa’s indignation smashed through her delight and twisted her face into a mask of cruelty. “We’ve just had this fucking room varnished! If you do that again, I’ll tear off your cock with my teeth and make you fucking eat it!”

  The threat hung in the air for seconds before anyone dared breathe. Through the windows, the glowering clouds were thickening still. The weather was doing its best to match the tension and bubbling energy in the room.

  Rosa breathed deeply, in an attempt to calm herself. She smoothed the material of her britches and composed her mouth back into the soft sham grandma thing it had been when she had entered the stateroom.

  Rain wa
s lashing against the windows like thrown gravel. Rosa’s eyes narrowed. “Are we prepared, Carla?”

  “We have all contingencies in place, Owner.”

  Contingencies?

  Passion’s curiosity immediately piqued. The clouds and the rain outside the picture window didn’t need a meteorologist to tell Passion that filthy weather was coming in. The helicopter ride has been enough rollercoaster evidence too. But contingencies suggested something more than a thunderstorm and a few skitters of lightning. Contingencies spoke of hatches being battened down, aircraft grounded, and enough confusion to put a plan into action.

  Passion had a plan. She’d been formulating it even before the windows in Sven’s apartment had been frame charged. Way before she’d been zip-tied and thrown into cages by the Fake SWAT team.

  It was just basic training and self-preservation. Make sure you have a plan if the worst happens and the bad guys get you. Always be ahead of the curve. Passion didn’t feel that far ahead of the curve right now, but what she did know—that Rosa and the others didn’t—was enough.

  Rosa turned her head to the occupant of the final canvas chair. “And you, Ms. Durant. Or should I say, Valdez?”

  “I answer to either on days like this.”

  “If only Alaina hadn’t changed her identity on social media to cover up who her parents were. If only my operative Daniel hadn’t mistakenly identified her and taken her to be a choice addition to the elite harem on the island. If only Mr. Crane knew of that foul up before he suggested to Mr. Ralston that the Agency would offer him the best chance to get his daughter back from the kidnappers. If only Mr. Ralston didn’t need to maintain the pretense of his happy and above all voteable family in the eyes of the good people in Houston. If it hadn’t been for that entirely avoidable chain of events, then you wouldn’t be sitting here now, about to die. Such a shame.”

  “I get the impression that you never think it’s a shame when you decide someone should be dead. You look the type who would enjoy that immensely. Anyone who talks about murder, kidnap, and the trafficking of children for their systematic exploitation by the rich and powerful, suggests to me someone who only has a passing acquaintance with the concept of shame.”