Dust Up: A Thriller (13 page)

I had to find Charlie and get out of there the way I came in: by air. And I realized I probably wasn’t going to be headed home, either.

I was pausing to catch my breath behind a Dumpster at a Gator Express gas station when I saw Taste of the Everglades, the restaurant, diagonally across the street.

I ran across to the parking lot and hid behind a massive pickup truck with a Confederate flag in the back and huge, coal-roller exhaust pipes sticking up over the bed. When I was sure there was no sign of Axe-Man or his pal, I slipped in the front door.

The hostess seemed startled, and I opened my mouth to describe Charlie, but I knew there wasn’t time for that. Instead, I ran past her. The place was sprawling, and I hurried across the deck, through the screened-in porch, into the dining room. There was only a handful of people, and they stared at me like I had two heads. It wasn’t until I got to the bar area that I realized I was still wearing my Miriam disguise.

I pulled off the shades and wig as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. The bartender and his lone customer were already staring at me.

“Carrick?” Charlie said, snorting as he looked me up and down and turned back around on his barstool. “Whatever, dude. Don’t matter to me what you’re into.”

The bartender seemed more judgmental, trying hard not to say anything more than “What’ll you have?” Even that sounded like he wasn’t just asking what I’d like to drink.

I ignored him.

“We need to get out of here,” I whispered tersely to Charlie.

The bartender raised an eyebrow and looked at Charlie differently after that.

“Dude,” Charlie said, leaning back and waving his hands over the large glass of beer and the platter of fried seafood in front of him. “I’m eating dinner. I’ll get you home soon enough.”

I grabbed him by the collar, and he turned to me, a look of anger on his face until he saw the look on mine.

The bartender wandered down to the other end of the bar.

“We have to go to Haiti,” I said.

He screwed up his face. “Bullshit we do.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Sable’s taking the girl to Haiti. I’m taking you back to Philly. That’s the plan.”

“The plan’s changed. Sable’s hurt.”

“What do you mean?”

“The guys after Miriam found her. Sable came in to extract her, in some crazy little plane that dropped out of the sky like a helicopter.”

He smiled. “That’s the Helio Courier.”

“He got away, but they shot him.”

The smile disappeared. “How bad?”

“I don’t know. But the guys who shot him are about five minutes behind us.”

I almost said
me
but figured saying
us
might incentivize him. It did.

“Fuck,” he said, sliding off the barstool and tossing two crumpled twenties on the bar. He downed his beer, then we went outside to the giant pickup truck.

“This is you?” I asked as we got inside.

“Don’t judge. Belongs to a friend of mine who works at the airport.” He looked around as we drove. “I thought you said guys with guns were right behind us.”

“They were,” I said, looking around myself. “Maybe they left, or maybe they’re waiting for us at the airport. I don’t know.”

“Excellent.”

As it turned out, they weren’t. Or they weren’t fifty yards from the gate. That’s where Charlie stopped and said, “Get out here.” He pointed at the dirt road where Sable and I had come out. “Go back that way, meet me at the end of the runway. I’ll pick you up where I dropped you off, okay?”

I got out and ran past the spot where Sable had picked up the car. I squeezed around the end of the fence and waited in a clump of bushes near the end of the landing strip.

Ten minutes later, I heard the turboprop approaching. As it neared the end of the runway, I ran toward it. The hatch fell open, and I climbed in, pulling it shut behind me. Before I was buckled into my seat, we were rocketing back down the runway, tipping up into the sky.

36

Charlie was worried about Sable—that’s the only reason he agreed to take me—but he was worried about himself, too. He was angry about the idea of flying into Haiti on what he considered a whim. He said I hadn’t thought it through. It didn’t help when he found out I didn’t have my passport.

“We’ll just do the thing at the end of the runway,” I said, “like we did in Everglades City.”

He shook his head and let out an exasperated laugh. “Not for international flights, man. And not for international airports. Even in Haiti, there’s going to be customs and immigration, cops all over. It’s a big airport, with big fences and lots of guards. You’re going to get taken in. And I’m going to get into trouble for helping you. Have you thought about this at all? Do speak any Kreyol? Do you even speak French?”

“A little,” I said, exaggerating.

The truth was, I was as alarmed as he was. But even after I realized I totally hadn’t thought it through, I couldn’t think of anything I should have done differently. I needed to follow Miriam and Sable, to make sure they were okay, to help Miriam if Sable wasn’t okay, and to help get those files to Regi Baudet.

Ron Hartwell had been convinced that whatever was in those files was explosive, and he had died trying to expose them. I needed to do what I could to help Miriam get them out.

Once we were in the air and I had a moment to think, panic flooded through me once more at the potential danger I had just faxed to Nola.

I glanced out the window, at the land sliding into the distance behind us, and I took out my phone.

Nola answered breathlessly on the first ring. “Doyle! Where are you? What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m in Florida.” I glanced back out the window. I could still
see
Florida.

“Florida? What are you doing there? How did you get there so fast?”

“It’s a long story. I was meeting with Miriam Hartwell. Look, I sent you a fax at work. It’s important and it’s dangerous. I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“It’s okay. What is it?”

“It’s what Ron and Miriam uncovered, files and memos. I need you to get it as soon as possible, but you need to be really careful, okay?”

“Sure, okay.”

“Make a copy and put it somewhere safe. Send the other copy to Gregory Mikel, urgent, from Miriam Hartwell. Look up Mikel’s corporate address in New York—”

“Wait, you mean Gregory Mikel the Beta Librae guy?”

“You know about them?”

“The environmental group? A little. You know Mikel is a billionaire, right?” The signal was starting to break up.

“Yes. Beta Librae—are they for real?”

“Yeah, I think so. What about them?” Her voice cut in and out.

“Look, I’m losing your signal. I shouldn’t have sent it to you, I just needed to send it out before—”

“Before what?”

“You need to get out of the house.”

“
What?!
Doyle, what are you talking about?” She let out an exasperated sigh. “Laura just left. Can’t I just be alone in my home for a moment?”

“The guys who tried to kill Miriam in North Philly found her down here.”

“Jesus, is she okay?”

“I think so. She got away. But this is serious.”

“You think they could come here?”

“I just want you to be safe.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll go get the fax. Then I’ll … go somewhere.” I could hear her moving about, grabbing her keys. “When are you coming home?”

“Not just yet.”

There was a burst of static, and I thought I’d lost her. “You’re staying down there?”

“I think Miriam went to Haiti. I have to go after her, make sure she’s okay.”

“
Haiti?
Doyle, are you serious? Do you even have your passport?”

“Um … No, I just…”

“Then how … you going … into Haiti? How are … get back home?”

“I’ll figure something out. I’ll see you soon. I love you.”

“I … too, but…”

And then she was gone. Outside the window, there was nothing but ocean.

Now that I was off the phone, I could hear Charlie, still muttering obscenities in the cockpit.

I took out the files I had faxed to Nola. There were a dozen pages, three or four of them stamped
CONFIDENTIAL
. A lot of the pages were almost duplicates, and none of them were all that scintillating to read in the first place, not even the secret ones. I kept reminding myself,
This is what Ron Hartwell was killed over, and he was bringing it to me when he died
.

I pored over each page looking for something, anything that stood out as a clue.

There were several abstracts of scientific reports that were so technical they were indecipherable. There were also a handful of inventory or production reports, lists of quantities of various agricultural products, or forecasts or plans for future production. They included several different varieties of modified corn, sugar beets, alfalfa, soy, and, at the bottom of the page, Soyagene.

There was a distribution memo marked
CONFIDENTIAL
. It seemed pretty innocuous stuff, talking about the phase-two rollout of Soyagene that Miriam had mentioned, set to start in a couple of days. There was an impressive list of markets, including the United States, broken down into six regions, and two dozen countries around the world, and a calendar of launch dates, stretching over the next six weeks.

There was a sales memo with a list of about a dozen crops, including Soyagene and something called Early Rise corn, as well as a couple of hybrid and genetically engineered sugar beets, two alfalfas, and a bunch of other stuff.

The last item was a production memo, also marked
CONFIDENTIAL
, that proposed reallocating production resources to accommodate an increase in Early Rise corn production from forty thousand tons to four hundred thousand tons. That was pretty much all it said.

I looked back at the sales memo. The Soyagene was new, so there was no historical data, but all the others, including the Early Rise corn, showed only gradual increases in production over the previous five years. Nothing to suggest an explosion of demand. Seemed like a bold increase in production, but I guessed Energene was an aggressive company.

The thing that stood out most was a secret memo that talked about allergenicity. It was mostly unintelligible, talking about target allergenicity, factor density, and minimum parts per million for symptomology. But it seemed relevant to whatever Miriam and Ron had suspected was happening.

I stared at the documents for the rest of the flight, but I didn’t come up with anything remotely like a clue, not even in the high school slang sense of the word.

When I finally put down the files and rubbed my eyes, we were circling in a slow descent over the Haitian coast. Two hours had passed.

We came in over a small mountain. It was peppered with tiny houses, getting denser and denser toward the bottom. Then I saw Cap-Haïtien International Airport. Charlie had said it was much bigger than the airport back in Everglades City, but at first, it looked about the same. As we descended, though, it grew bigger and bigger, and I realized he was right.

The runway was surrounded by a wide, grassy field. A meandering path worn across it continued unimpeded through the surrounding fence and out into the countryside. I tried to memorize its location as the plane descended and the landscape flattened out around us.

I poked my head into the cockpit. “So how long are you going to be here?”

Charlie pulled up one of his headphones, turning to look at me like I was crazy. “Are you kidding me? I’m out of here, man. I’m not hanging out. I’m going to fuel up enough to get home, and then I’m gone.”

“What if I need—”

He shook his head. “Unless the Haitians detain me for aiding and abetting an asshole, I’m out of here, man. If Sable needs me, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, you’ll never see me again.” He put the headphone back over his ear and went back to landing the plane.

The touchdown was smooth as silk. Things got rougher after that. I could hear Charlie talking to the tower, trying to keep the stress out of his voice. The runway seemed to extend almost to the horizon. What little I knew about turboprops included their efficiency on short runways, their ability to use reverse thrust to stop short. But the plan was for me to slip out at the end of the runway. Charlie had already delayed touchdown until we were a third of the way down the runway, but even so, he had to keep the throttle up, or we would have run out of momentum before the end, even without the reverse thrust.

I couldn’t hear what the tower was saying, but I could hear the agitated tone, and Charlie, increasingly defensive as they continued to tell him he was doing it wrong. At one point, he turned and glared at me, furious at having to pretend to be a lesser pilot in order to accommodate my half-baked plan.

Finally, we reached the end of the runway and halfway through the turn, we came to a stop. As Charlie looked at me, I could hear the tinny sound of the tower nattering away at him through the headphones down around his neck.

“Okay,” he said to me. “Get the fuck out.”

I gave the hatch a push and stepped out before it was fully open.

“And Carrick,” he called out after me.

I paused and looked up at him.

“Good luck, man.”

37

I closed the hatch and started running. The air was thick and hot, and the land fell away from the tarmac at an excruciatingly gentle slope. Running flat out, I’d almost given up hope of finding the path when I realized I was already on it. Not much of a path.

Up close, the grassy area was vast, probably five times the size of Everglades City Airpark. It was also parched. Behind me, clouds of dust hung in the air, kicked up by my feet. Hope was dimming that I would ever reach the fence, much less get through it, but I kept running and the fence drew slowly closer. And no one stopped me.

I was worn out and starting to wonder if I’d have to take a break along the way, and then I saw a little dip in the dry soil, under the fence.

By the time I reached it, I was so out of breath I would have been on my hands and knees even if I hadn’t needed to crawl under the fence. Once on the other side, it took a great effort to get back on my feet.