Doc Ford 19 - Chasing Midnight (13 page)

At the time, I perceived nothing sinister in the exchange. Densler, Kahn—the entire group—struck me as trivial people whose egos hungered for a celebrity status that their small talents could not earn. They were unhappy people—as the Michael Moores of the world invariably are—and sitting among them had caused me to feel a shabbiness that didn’t match my mood.

What was to be gained by watching the inevitable confrontation when Kazlov reappeared and ordered them off the island? There would be shouting, threats and more pious spouting of the Third Planet party line.

It was a waste of time. I scooted my chair away from the table and stood there, waiting for Tomlinson.

Finally, my pal noticed I was standing. When he got up, I shook hands as if we were strangers, saying, “Nice meeting you, Professor Tomlinson. Hope I didn’t spoil your evening.”

Tomlinson replied, “Then we must have a serious talk about it later, Dr. Ford. Around midnight, possibly?” which was all he could tell me before slipping back into his stoned-hipster disguise. “We’ll smoke a joint. Get crazy.”

Now, as I sat aboard
No Más
, measuring out liquids, pouring small amounts into jars, the man’s reference to midnight had far more significance. And he had no doubt sent other cloaked messages as well. But if Tomlinson had sensed danger, why hadn’t he taken me aside and warned me? It would have been easy enough to excuse himself from the table for a few minutes or he could have followed me to the marina.

The answer was, he
would
have warned me if he’d anticipated real trouble. Particularly if he’d known that people might be shot and killed.

There was another, disturbing possibility, though: what if Tomlinson
had
warned me and I’d somehow missed it?

What if?
It is among the most popular games played by our species. The wistful scenarios form our favorite fictions—happy endings that give us hope or burden us with guilt and regret.

I played the game as I finished mixing liquids, and screwed the lids tight on the jars. What if Kahn and Densler, and fellow members of 3P2, were behind this insanity? It meant that I had misread them badly—even after seeing so damn many red flags. But who in their right mind would suspect a group of highly educated people—however abrasive and neurotic—of being violent sociopaths?

That’s another popular fiction: the belief that mass murderers behave differently than the rest of us. Some expert, some perceptive neighbor, should have recognized the killer’s aberrant behavior and stopped him in advance of his bloody deed. Right?

The question is motivated by our deepest fears and our most optimistic hopes: they are different from us, right? They must be different from us. Right?

A single mocking word blurs the demarcation but also addresses both poles of the question, our hopes and our fears.

The double-edged answer is,
Right.

B
efore exiting the cabin of Tomlinson’s boat, I gathered my gear, extinguished the lamp and ducked outside onto the afterdeck. The thermal monocular clipped onto a headband, which took only a few seconds to adjust. Soon I was using the TAM-14 to search for body heat, near and far, and also trying to mesh my experience in the bar with the disturbing video I’d just seen.

Usually, a lapse in concentration is also a lapse in judgment. Maybe that’s why I didn’t spot the man who was watching me through a rifle scope, although he would make his presence known soon enough.

To my right, mangroves were a reef of gray trees, leaves still aglow, warm from the afternoon sun. Among the limbs were sporadic coals of fluorescence—roosting birds. If Vladimir had been executed, his body, even if he was dead, should have produced a heat signature, too. But I found none.

Surprising. It was unlikely anyone would have moved a man his size—not from swamp that dense. But I also knew that deciphering
the subtleties of thermal imaging takes time. I’d had the unit only a couple of days, so I might be misreading what I was seeing.

Atop the TAM-14 unit were a series of pressure switches. I touched magnification as I scanned the mangroves again, then turned my attention to the island.

That’s when I spotted the guy who came way too close to killing me a few seconds later.

More than a hundred yards away, a lone figure was standing in the shadows of a ficus tree. A man, as evidenced by the absence of breast tissue. A dot of oscillating heat told me he was smoking a cigarette. He was on the north end of Vanderbilt Island where, I had been told, the Iranian, Abdul Armanie, had rented a large house.

I panned the monocular to the south.

Darius Talas, from Turkmenia, had taken a beach house near the southernmost point, at the end of a walkway that islanders called the Pink Path. Because of a few scattered cottages near the marina, though, Talas’s portion of the island was screened from my view.

The same was true of the fishing lodge. It was mid-island, built upon the highest remnants of the shell pyramid. As I adjusted the monocular’s focus, though, I realized that my view wasn’t entirely blocked. I could see a wedge of balcony on the building’s fourth floor, where an American flag stirred in the night breeze.

The porch was empty. But a heated corona within told me that someone had lit an oil lamp or candle.

My main concern wasn’t the lone figure standing beneath the ficus tree. It was the trigger-happy gunman who’d shot Vladimir and had tried to kill me. Using the monocular, I searched for the guy, panning from one end of the marina to the other.

Near a maintenance shed, and beneath a wooden water cistern, families of four-legged creatures foraged. They looked like furry balls
of light—raccoons. Atop a roof gable, a glowing statue pivoted its black eyes toward me—a great horned owl.

No human beings, though, that I could see, aside from the man in the far distance, now lighting another cigarette.

As I searched the area—no doubt because I was on the stern of Tomlinson’s boat—I suddenly realized that I had overlooked another method of signaling for help. Possibly a workable method. The device was staring me right in the face, literally. Secured next to the sailboat’s helm was a U-shaped flotation ring, on a hundred feet of line. It was a man-overboard harness, designed for throwing.

In one of the pockets was a waterproof electronic beacon called an EPIRB. Activate the beacon and it would transmit emergency GPS coordinates, and a unique serial number to satellites in space. The satellites then beamed the information to the nearest U.S. Coast Guard stations so that rescue choppers and boats could be launched.

The portable jammers I had used were calibrated to interrupt all but the very highest and lowest radio frequencies. Maybe the EPIRB was immune.

Without further thought, I pulled the beacon’s emergency ring… which also activated a blinding strobe light, as I should have anticipated.

Damn it!

In a rush, I used my hands to try to muffle the light. Impossible. So I gathered the harness, rope and all, and tossed the whole mess overboard. Seconds later, someone smacked the hull of Tomlinson’s sailboat so hard with a sledgehammer, I felt the fiberglass tremble beneath me.

That’s what it sounded like, anyway.

For an instant, I was stunned, even though I knew what had happened. It was a gunshot, and the simultaneous impact of a slug hitting
the cabin bulkhead behind me. A rifle, probably. Something heavy caliber, and the shooter was using a scope. Unlike the trigger-happy gunman, it was doubtful that he would miss again.

No Más
was moored with her transom to the dock. I had thrown the EPIRB strobe off the starboard side, where the light blazed once every second.

Without hesitating, I tumbled over the port side, holding fins and waterproof pack to my chest. As I crashed through the water’s surface, I was imaging the man I had seen beneath the ficus tree toss his cigarette away and shoulder a rifle. The angle seemed right. From the north end of the island, a shooter had a clear view of the marina. And the distance wasn’t a challenge if he was using a scope.

It was a close call, but I had learned something. The Iranians were housed on the north end. Talas, the Turkmenian, was housed on the southern tip. Suddenly, I was less suspicious of Tomlinson’s eco-activist friends. Members of Third Planet Peace Force—even if they were a bunch of pissed-off neurotics—weren’t the type to use sniper rifles.

Abdul Armanie, though, had a bodyguard with him, presumably a well-trained man. And Armanie himself was a cutthroat businessman who sometimes used Islam and the Koran to justify his methods—particularly when dealing with non-Muslims. That’s why he preferred to go by his last name only when doing business in the United States.

In the bar, Densler, Kahn and I had butted heads, true. But, as I was already aware, they weren’t the only enemies I had made during my short time on Vanderbilt Island. The Iranian was furious at me, too. Possibly angry enough to kill me, if he got the chance. It was because, earlier that afternoon, I had embarrassed the man badly—Armanie and Talas both, in fact. I had done it knowingly, intentionally, and then had laughed in his face.

Abdul Rahman Armanie, as I already knew, was not the sort to allow a slight to go unpunished.

W
hen Tomlinson and I arrived on Vanderbilt Island, I’d had no intentions of alienating almost everyone I met—but that’s what happened. Which is unusual for me. I’m generally a quiet, private guy who, long ago, learned that a man can’t learn anything while his mouth is open.

Even so, people are chemical-electrical beings, and sometimes our polarity swings inexplicably to the negative, inviting all kinds of trouble. In the space of a few hours, I’d invited more than my share by opening my mouth too much and too often.

It happens. In my case, though, there was a purpose. When it comes to the wealthy Eastern Europeans, behaving like an asshole is sometimes the only way to force information out of them.

That morning, I had introduced myself to Darius Talas first, then, an hour later, to Armanie, as a marine biologist who was working on sturgeon aquaculture with Mote Marine. My slanted honesty hadn’t been well received, so I’d been forced to reply to indignant accusations. No, I hadn’t lied to get an invitation to the caviar forum. Yes, I was a primary investor in two flourishing restaurants, as the forum’s rules required. But my primary interests were fish, in general, and sturgeon in particular. All true, of course.

So far, so good.

After getting that settled, my questions had been straightforward enough. They reflected my honest interest in the Caspian Sea’s declining sturgeon population. Even so, neither man was willing to talk about how he acquired the caviar his company sold discreetly through
an international network of distributors, some of them “legitimate,” others gray market wholesalers.

No problem. I already knew too much about both men to expect honest answers. So I had parted from each of them on cool but civil terms. Later that afternoon, though, everything changed.

I had gone out to explore, got lucky and found both men at a table next to the pool, so I had taken a seat before they could protest. Talas and Armanie had been arguing about something, judging from Iranian’s expression and Talas’s flushed pumpkin-sized face. So I had put an end to the uneasy silence and attempted to ingratiate myself by saying, “The three of us need to get something straight. I’m not a federal agent, I’m a biologist. There’s no reason we can’t talk openly. Maybe we have more in common than you realize.”

Armanie had looked at his watch and asked Talas, “What time is Kazlov serving hors d’oeuvres tonight? Knowing him, it will be potato vodka and that disgusting caviar he’s pedaling. Awful peasant-raised shit, have you tried it?”

I had taken that as my opening to say, “Caviar and aquaculture—what a coincidence. Those are the very things I’d like to talk about. For instance, Kazlov’s hybrid sturgeon idea—the idea has merit, I think. But, before I can decide, I need to understand what’s going on in the Caspian region. Has the fishery gotten as bad as some say?”

Silence—that was my reply. Which I had interrupted by waving to a waiter and ordering a Diet Coke before I pressed ahead, saying, “A good place to start would be to explain how your fishermen get around the ban on catching beluga. Why’s it so easy? I’d rather hear the truth from experts—men like yourselves—than get secondhand information. And it’s all confidential, of course.”

The way Talas had chuckled and demurred reminded me of a Muslim Pillsbury Doughboy. Armanie had smirked and shrugged,
like the condescending prick he is, and asked me, “Do you know who killed the cow to make the shoes you’re wearing? It is a ridiculous question for a man who claims to be a biologist—but perhaps that delightful dolphin show we attended pays staff with bogus dolphin doctorate titles.”

The man had a gift for cutting insults, but I didn’t mind. Armanie and Talas were confirming what I already knew about them. And I knew far more than they suspected through my intel sources in Colorado and Maryland. Both men were smart, unscrupulous and rich—very different in terms of style and behavior, but they were also both killers if business required it.