Paradise Interrupted

by Penny Mickelbury

  “The bastards! They set it up to look like Henri was a bigger dealer than Manuel Noriega. If there ever were any glitches, he’d be the guy on the point. No DEA involvement whatsoever. And since there never was a dime in U.S. aid, he couldn’t claim that’s why he let himself be set up to look like a drug dealer. So, he quit. He sent for Collette and told him everything, but he made Collette promise not to honor any pre-existing arrangement with the DEA as a condition for handing over the reins of government. I was here the night four boats from Trinidad arrived, loaded with Colombian coke. They slid into a secret cove on the north coast, and right into the arms of the U.S. Coast Guard. Twenty-five kilos of cocaine. The dealers thought it was a DEA set-up.” He released a short bark of bitter laughter. “Henri LeRoi’s revenge. The next morning, he’s on a plane to Paris, Philippe Collette is the new head of state, and he tosses the DEA guy out on his ass when he shows up to complain.” Denis managed a real grin this time, a brief one, before it faded and he resumed his story. “I never successfully convinced them that I hadn’t known what the CD was planning and that I wasn’t a part of it. So, when I got back to D.C., they kept me on ice for a while. Then I was activated for this sting. Same kind of deal as before...”

  “Only this time, they left you holding the bag,” Carole Ann finished, “as pay-back for the screw-up here. And Steve Campos didn’t know he was supposed to set a low bond, one that a working woman like your mother could make.”

  “As I said before, you catch on fast.”

  She leaned back in her chair and looked up at him. He met her gaze calmly and steadily. “So Henri LeRoi made your bail after it got reduced...but how’d it get reduced?”

  “Well, there did occur something just a little bit underhanded...”

  “Something like what, Denis?”

  “Something like simultaneous calls were made to the DEA and to Judge Campos, the result of which was that when the DEA tried to make a back-door overture to Campos, suggesting that they wouldn’t object to a reduction in bail, he smelled a rat and got really pissed off—and you know how pissed off he can get. He threatened to expose the DEA for dealing dirty.”

  “But he ultimately reduced your bail,” she said musingly, “which he most definitely wouldn’t have done without a compelling reason.” She leaned back in the chair, propped her feet on the corner of the desk, and contemplated the possibilities. It would take a personal request from the United States Attorney General to make him reverse himself and reduce the bail of somebody like Denis St. Almain. Or the belief that an agency of the Federal Government had behaved badly or illegally. Despite his exile, Henri LeRoi obviously still wielded a pretty big club against the DEA. Why would he risk his own safety if, as Denis had described it, going public would expose him as a drug dealer? “I need to be in touch with Henri LeRoi, Denis, as soon as possible, and I need the names of your DEA supervisors and contacts.”

  He walked to the edge of the desk, rested his hands on it, and leaned his torso toward her, all but putting his face in hers. “Who are you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You must be some kind of spook or something, because you’re not just some security expert here to help Philippe Collette figure out to run the government.”

  “That’s exactly who I am,” Carole Ann replied. “I’m the ‘Gibson” in Gibson, Graham International.”

  “That might be who you are now, or who you’re pretending to be, but it’s not who you are deep inside, and I’m not sure...I don’t know how I feel about trusting you.”

  She stood up and leaned across the desk toward him, mimicking his action, his forcing him to back up. “You don’t have much choice, Denis. In fact, you’ve got no choice. You can walk out of here right now and have the dubious distinction of being the second guest in Isle de Paix’s brand new jail while you wait for extradition back to D.C., or you can help me help you. OK, so you do have a choice: There it is.”

  He walked around the room in ever widening circles, first worrying the hair that needed cutting, then rubbing his eyes like a kid needing a nap. “I tell you how to contact the CD and then what?”

  “Then you go take a nap while I talk to my partner. Then I cook dinner, then we eat, we talk some more. And we wait.”

  “I wait here, with you? Locked in like a prisoner?”

  “Unless you like sleeping and eating in the woods. And unless you prefer a real prison.” And she gave him a pad and pen and, after a long hesitation, he provided the information she requested and reluctantly turned it over.

  “He’s a good man, Miss Gibson.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Denis.”

  Past being surprised or amazed at anything she said, he exhaled deeply. “Why not? You don’t know him.”

  She smiled a real, if brief, smile. “No, but I know his mother and his sisters.” She picked up the phone and he headed toward the door. “Denis. One last question,” she said as he turned around, an expectant look barely creasing the fatigue on his face. “What were you doing in that marijuana field?”

  He grinned a lopsided grin. “I wondered when you’d get around to that. Pure dumb luck. I was checking out the fire scene, the stories I was hearing sounded suspicious, so I came for a look-see. I angled up through the woods from the air strip and almost wet myself when I saw that stuff.”

  “So you don’t know who our Farmer Brown is?”

  He shook his head. “Not a clue. When I was in business with the Feds, we imported the stuff, we didn’t grow it.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She struggled to the surface of consciousness, groggy and incoherent, and for a moment, she could not place herself. Then, when she could, in that instant, she was fully awake and fully alarmed. “Who is it?” she demanded into the telephone.

  “We got trouble.” Jake’s voice was quiet the way it was when there was trouble. She sat up and swung her legs around and dropped her feet to the floor, not speaking, knowing that he wanted her to listen. “The CD is broken,” he said, and lapsed into silence.

  She emptied her mind, then allowed to return only those thoughts that would help her understand his meaning. ‘The CD is broken.’ The commie dictator. “Beyond repair?” she asked, holding her breath in anticipation of the answer.

  “Don’t know yet. C.A.,” he began.

  She cut him off. “I know, Jake. I know. I’m a shit magnet.”

  “Well, if you say so; but I was going to compliment you on your nose,” he replied with a soft laugh. “You sure know a dung heap when you smell one.”

  “Just one of my many talents,” she responded, only partially in jest, wishing for once that it weren’t; wishing, as he had wished, that this could have been a simple, easy, lucrative job. Instead, it had turned into something as yet undefinable, but certainly ugly.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “That we’re talking as if one of our lines isn’t secure, and that I’ve got to do something with the CD accessory that I have, and that both thoughts make me nervous.”

  “I think the lines are probably OK,” he said, and to prove it, offered a detailed explanation of how the Paris associate GGI had hired to talk with Henri LeRoi had interrupted the attempted assassination of the former dictator. “If we hadn’t sent somebody to talk to him, he’d be history and we’d probably never know what the hell is going on down there.”

  “Who do you think went after him, and why?”

  “Whoever killed Campos, and because he knows the “who” and the “why.” Now, how’re you planning to get rid of your house guest and do you need me to come down there and help out?”

  “No, I do not,” she answered testily, and then told him in detail her plan for getting Denis St. Almain off the island.

  “You don’t know how to drive a boat, C.A.” was his response after a moment of silence.

  “I know,” she replied. “I also don’t have a boat to drive,” she added, and hung up the phone. She dressed quickly— as quickly as possible
in the dark, in a room that still was unfamiliar. Then she turned on the bed table lamp and angled the neck as far down as it would go, providing just enough light to find the door. She slowly opened the door and eased out into the hallway and bumped into a fully dressed Denis St.Almain, holding his shoes in his hand.

  “What the hell are you doing?! You scared the poop out of me!” she hissed at him.

  “It’s never good news when the phone rings in the middle of the night,” he whispered back, “and I’m relieved to know that something scares the poop out of you. What’s wrong?”

  “Come in and sit down and be quiet for a moment. I’ve got to slow my heart rate.” She stood back and let him enter the room.

  He brushed past her with a smirk and settled into an armchair in the darkest corner of the room. She closed the door and went to stand beside him. She put a hand on his shoulder and told him what had happened to the man he believed was his father. She tightened her grip when he began to tremble, and talked to him about what she and Jake believed had happened and why, knowing that he blamed himself and hoping to alleviate his guilty feelings. “It still comes down to being my fault. He tipped his hand to get me out of jail.”

  She squeezed his shoulder again. “Your father made his deal with the devil long before you were part of this, Denis.” The momentary funny feeling she experienced referring to LeRoi as his father vanished quickly. Certainly it was more natural than calling Philippe Collette his father. “Surely you don’t think for a moment that whoever set up the game forgot who all the players were? They’d have gotten around to him eventually.”

  He nodded, accepting the truth, though not liking it. He continued to nod his acquiesce if not his excitement, as she described her plan to spirit him off the island.

  “So this guy in Anguilla where you want to send me, Jennings? He’ll take me in just because you ask him to? And the yacht captain, Metier, he’ll take me to the guy in Anguilla, just because you ask him to? Lady, who the hell are you?”

  “I told you: I’m the ‘Gibson’ in Gibson, Graham International.”

  “Right. And you’re just doing what’s best for your company and your contract with our little slice of paradise,” he said sarcastically. And when she didn’t respond, he hissed at her, “I don’t believe you!”

  “I don’t care what you believe, Denis, just don’t get in my way.”

  Jake called again at eight o’clock with the news that Henri LeRoi was still living and breathing, and he won the argument, for the second time, that prohibited her from telling his mother and sisters. “Whoever’s behind this needs to think they still have something to worry about,” he growled. “If they think LeRoi is dead or dying, they might go into hiding and we’ll never find out who they are.”

  “And if they know he’s not dead, and they think they’ve got something to worry about, they’ll come after whoever can leverage him.”

  “But they can’t get to St.Almain because you’ll have him under wraps...”

  “They can get to Simone, though.”

  “Nope,” he answered smugly. “Already got her picked up and in hiding.”

  “Then at least let me tell Philippe,” she countered, and when he didn’t respond, she pressed her argument: “He knows enough of the story to be in danger, Jake.”

  “Yeah, but who else knows he knows?”

  She paused. “Well...Denis...”

  “And who do you think he’s told? Other than you? Look, C.A., telling Collette will either just give him more stuff to worry about, at best, and worst case scenario, put him in unnecessary danger. Why not just hold this close to your chest until we see how it goes with LeRoi, and until you get St.Almain off the island?”

  She finally agreed, able to find no fault with his reasoning, and hung up, after writing down messages to deliver to Roland Charles and David Messinger and relieved to note that the both of them would be kept too busy today to want or need to interact with her: Roland, worrying about where to store the sand and gravel that was on its way to him, along with the mini-paver; and David, finalizing the police procedures manual for Isle de Paix. She left a note for Denis with the updated information on Henri LeRoi’s condition and reminding him that he was locked in, and walked to Government House. She needed the time to think, to figure out how to implement her plan for getting Denis to Anguilla on Lionel Metier’s yacht. And, she admitted to herself, she needed to be alone. Having another person in the house unnerved her. She’d been uncomfortable with other people in her space since Al died, her mother and brother being the two exceptions. And maybe Warren...

  She quickly dismissed that thought and replaced it with a mental exercise that required all of her attention: She attempted to draw relational lines between all the players in this drama. She called up the name and face of every person she’d encountered since her arrival, scrutinizing the linear connections. And she found that some people didn’t fit as neatly within the lines as she’d hoped. Paul Francois, for instance. She knew nothing about him, except that Philippe Collette had found him on the spur of the moment to replace the construction boss who belonged exclusively to Hubert de Villages. How had Philippe found him? Then there was the man she had seen with both Denis and Marie-Ange, the handsome drug dealer direct from central casting. Who was he, dammit! She stopped in her tracks and, for a moment, seriously considered going back to ask Denis, annoyed with herself not having asked before. How could something so potentially important have slipped her mind? “You’re losing your touch,” she muttered to herself. Then, realizing she was standing in the middle of the road talking to herself, she sighed and walked on. She could ask him later; he wasn’t going anywhere.

  There were few tourists little activity in the Square; it was early in the day, and early in the week, and she found the relative calm as enjoyable, in its own way, as the energetic crush of the teeming crowds. Even the craft moored in the harbor appeared somnolent. She’d been in such a hurry to leave that she hadn’t made coffee, so she spent forty-five minutes in Le Bistro over coffee and fresh-baked brioche and reading the National Edition of the New York TIMES an even earlier diner had left. It was just past nine-thirty when she entered her office, and the door hadn’t closed fully behind her when there was a knock and it swung open again. Roland Charles rushed in. “I’ve been waiting for you!” He closed the door and hurried over to her, practically wringing his hands. “I saw him!” he hissed in an exaggerated stage whisper that would have been humorous were it not for the fact that he was seriously agitated and upset.

  “Who, Roland? Who did you see?”

  “From the boat! The pirate! I saw him!”

  Truly taken aback, she pounced on his words. “Where? When?”

  “This morning, at breakfast, of all places! That...that hoodlum was having breakfast at Le Bistro just like a normal human being! I was appalled, I can tell you.”

  Had he been there, at Le Bistro, when she was there and she’d not seen him? Was he on the courtyard, having coffee and brioche and reading the newspaper, while she was inside, doing the same thing? “What time was this, Roland? And was he alone, or was he with someone?”

  He began shaking his head vigorously back and forth, something like panic spreading over his face, the agitation that had subsided once again directing him. “Nonono! He was not alone, and that is what is so disturbing, Carole Ann! We must tread very carefully—”

  “Roland, Carole Ann, good. You’re both here.”

  They whirled around, as if caught in the act of some misbehavior, to see Philippe Collette in the doorway.

  Roland recovered himself quickly. “Good morning, Sir. You were looking for me?” He sounded almost guilty and Carole Ann, stealing a quick look at him, was surprised to see that he looked guilty.

  “Both of you, actually, yes. Am I interrupting?”

  “Not at all,” Carole Ann interjected quickly, “and good morning. Would you like to talk here, or would you rather that we come to your office?”

  “
No, here is fine,” the president replied, looking as harassed and uneasy as Roland looked guilty. “I just want to be certain that you’re both comfortable proceeding with the road construction under the circumstances. I don’t want you to feel obligated to place yourselves in danger.”

  “We feel no obligation at all,” Roland replied stiffly, squaring his shoulders and sticking out his chest. “And I think I speak for Carole Ann as well when I say that we will not be intimidated by thugs and outlaws. We are committed to doing whatever is necessary to ensure the effective operation of this government. That is our commitment to you, Sir.”

  Philippe raised an eyebrow and looked toward Carole Ann. She kept a straight face. “I concur wholeheartedly, and though you probably don’t know it yet, Roland, that resolve will be tested very shortly. A barge with your name on it is on its way here—”

  “My paver?! My sand and gravel and asphalt?!” Without waiting for an answer, he hurried to the door, brushing past his boss. “Then I have work to do!” And he was gone.

  For a brief moment, the island president relaxed his face and body and smiled a real smile. “Roland is a marvel,” he said, affection filling his voice. “His enthusiasm really is infectious, and I have you to thank for that, Carole Ann.”

  She started to protest but he waved away her objections before she could voice them, and the action served to restore the heaviness he carried when he entered the office. He paced a few steps away from her, then turned back. “Is something bothering you, Philippe?”

  “Yes, Carole Ann, quite a few things, none of which I’m able to resolve at the moment.” He ran his hands through his hair, standing it on end, then smoothed it back down; a well-worn habit. “But you could help me sort out one problem, I think. About the DEA.”

  “What about it?” She’d spoken too quickly, she knew, and she covered herself just as quickly. “Don’t tell me they’ve somehow gotten wind of the marijuana?”

  “No, no, not that. Another matter...an old matter...” And his shoulders sagged and he swatted at the air in front of him, as if warding off an insect swarm. “But perhaps now is not the time...”