Off the Chart (30 page)

“I can live with that,” she said.

Sugarman pushed back his chair and was reaching for the touch pad to disconnect when there was a tiny pop and Janey's ghostly face materialized on the screen.

“Holy shit.” Sugarman sat up straight. “Janey?”

“I've been trying,” she said. “The battery's beeping, it might go out. But I had to try.”

“What is it, sweetie? We're about to leave. We know where you are now, we're on our way.”

“Thorn's here,” she said.

“What?”

“He's in a cage, hanging from a tree, Daddy. It's Thorn. I looked at him in the binoculars. He's hanging from a limb. I don't know if he's still alive.”

And she was gone.

Sugar was getting into Alex's car when he heard his phone ringing. He sprinted back, got the door open, made it to the phone, ripped it up. Dead.

He punched in the star code to callback and got a young man's voice.

“Who is this?”

“Who is
this
?” the young man said.

“This is Sugarman. You just called me.”

“Oh, yeah, hello. This is Special Agent Meeker. I was told by Agent Sheffield that you needed a call trace on a satellite phone.”

“Already did it,” Sugar said. “The old-fashioned way.”

And hung up and sprinted to the car.

Anne Bonny Joy was lying on the mattress she and Daniel had shared for so short a time. His scent was gone from the pillow. Replaced now by a musty scent and the tang of wood smoke from the dying bonfires. Only the last wisps still rose from the embers.

Outside, men were sprawled in the shade on blankets and in bed-rolls; the ones she supposed had more status were crammed into a few of the cabins. She'd seen a couple of women, too, as she and Vic and Thorn and the others had tramped up from the marina a while ago. Prostitutes, from the look of them, small half-naked Mayan women curled close beside the sleeping men. The gagging stench of sweat and putrid food filled the camp.

Whiskey bottles littered the grounds; automatic weapons and handguns lay close beside the sleepers; machetes had been stuck deep into several trees. Everywhere she looked there were scraps of bread and tortillas, chicken bones, and the charred remains of greasy meat hanging from spits. There were even some fast-food Styrofoam containers scattered about, as if some of the men had made a quick stop
in San José or Puerto Limón to pick up food along with the women before finishing the last short leg to the jungle.

Two small planes were parked on the short asphalt runway. Several boats and a small trawler were tied up at the marina. Anchored a half-mile offshore she'd seen three heavily chromed sportfishing yachts. Boats that cost millions, though more than likely their current owners had not paid a cent for them.

She'd counted maybe thirty men as she picked her way to the cabin and found it empty. Reserved for Vic and his entourage.

Now she was alone, lying flat on her back, staring up at the naked rafters, listening to the rain forest. That at least had gone unchanged, the clamor of the jungle, the songs of insects, the hiss and shriek and cawing of dozens of hidden creatures, flittering and darting just beyond the range of sight. Listening to it. As she listened to the bright noise, the screams of ecstasy and terror, her head gradually cleared. The dense mist parted. And without warning, all her senses seemed to clear. She saw and smelled and heard everything, absolutely everything. No thoughts, no worries, no grief, no confusion.

Just this! This place in the wild. The reek of the moment. Only those noises and the perfume of wood smoke. No Anne Bonny. No Antoinette and Jack Joy. No Harlan. Nothing but the sag of the mattress beneath her weight, the rising light, the voices waking outside, men stirring.

It felt religious. Like incense in a cathedral, and sunlight fractured through stained glass, and organ music swelling in the enormous sanctuary. The holiness. A vast opening inside her, filling with light, filling with sacred oxygen. Like nothing mattered. Like she didn't matter. For the first time. For the first time since before she could remember being alive. Way, way, way back before anything. Before galleons, before the dreary, ridiculous pirate novels, before breath itself.

Just this. Just this place, this mattress and this cabin and this body.

Drunk, stoned, ecstatic, swimming beyond herself, rising through an airless grave to break through to the oxygen, the holy air. It didn't matter. It truly didn't. None of it. Loving, hating. Living, dying. Every touch, every word and gesture. It was just flux. Simply the endless ticker tape of trivia.

Anne stood up. She walked without knowing where she was headed. To the heavy oak dresser that stood against the west wall. Looking at it for a moment, then reaching out and opening the third drawer. In a swoon, a dreamy wakefulness, she pulled out the empty drawer. Turned it over. Carried it back to the cot.

Peeled off the adhesive. Held the cool weight, the mechanical beauty of blued steel. Fit her hand to it. No need to check the magazine. She knew it was loaded, she'd watched Daniel do it, watched him tape it there so many ages ago. The Beretta .25-caliber. Perfect for the purse. Perfect for her hand that curled around it and hefted it like some hallowed stone, some bright precious gem full of luxurious light, richly bright, terrible and mighty and utterly without meaning. That's where everything had led. To this wild place. This Eden where everything had started, where everything was about to end.

Just this!

 

Okay, so maybe Thorn was still alive, maybe he wasn't. At that second, he didn't know. All he knew was that his brain was busy with a vision of a few hours earlier when he'd first arrived at Vic Joy's compound and Vic had examined his body so carefully. Like a slave trader at auction. And now Thorn knew what that was all about. Measuring him for his new suit, all this thought out in advance. Giving himself plenty of time to construct this metal cage that Marshall and the other biker had hauled out of the rear of the floatplane, clanking and rattling, then lugged it up the hill to the campground.

When he'd seen what was coming, Thorn had chosen that precise moment to move. Swiveling on Marty, he'd popped him once in the point of his jaw and sent him reeling backward into the two bikers. But Vic's silent rage at Thorn had given him hair-trigger reflexes.

Vic clipped him hard on the skull, and as Thorn wavered, watching a flock of toucans fluttering into the sky, Vic cracked him a second time and sent him down into the splintered darkness.

When he woke, he was suited in the armor, suspended ten feet off the ground. Still alive, maybe, but it was taking a while to be absolutely sure. The sensation bleeding back inch by inch, fingertips, toes,
joint by joint, lips and tongue, the soft tissue parts of him.

A good view of the grounds from up there. Ten cabins, a dining hall. Men gathering around the tree branch to horse around and punch one another in excitement and celebration. A giant party favor hung out for their amusement. Thorn, the piñata.

Either he was alive or else in the first few minutes of death some lagging senses still operated and allowed the freshly departed one final glimpse of the world's harsh beauty.

Thorn scanned his body. Felt the throbbing crack in his skull, worked lower through his neck and chest and torso, where the twin wounds from Vic's fountain pen had begun to fester, then went guardedly down to his crotch to see if there was deadness there or the warm flow of blood, or any sign that Vic had completed his castration. But he felt nothing, and with a heave of relief, he sent his mind down each leg. Both of them were numb but with growing twinges of awareness, the creak and swell and bruised tenderness of kneecaps and shinbone and the other dozen parts that apparently had been well scuffed as he was locked inside that custom-fitted cage.

Flexing his parts, he was surprised to discover there was give in the metal. Softer than steel. Tin perhaps. He could twist his foot to the side, wriggle it a half-inch against the bite of the bands, and feel some elastic movement. He tried his wrists, up and back, bringing sudden blood to his arm and waking a hundred needles that poked in unison into his flesh.

Some of the men below him had started dinking pebbles at him. Bits of food. A rabble collecting, other men waking their brethren from slumber, gabbling at them and pointing up at Thorn. Oh, what fun. A man hanging from a tree in a metal suit. Still half-dark, a cloudy twilight, a hot storm building in the western sky. Pebbles struck his belly and his arms and one sharp stone drew a trickle of blood from his cheek. A couple of tall Hispanic men stood aloof at the back of the mob, watching carefully with the cold disdain of professionals.

Small dark women joined the fray, flinging whatever they could grab in wild pitches that mostly missed. The high, wailing jibber of another continent, another race. Thorn was feeling oddly detached. Working his wrist against the supple restraints. Feeling the pressure
on the arches of his feet and his crotch, a pinching at both his armpits. Tailored a bit too tight across the chest. That suit would need some letting out if he was going to wear it in polite gatherings. Which this gang assembling below him most definitely was not.

He'd spotted a cabin off to one end of the encampment. Boards nailed across its windows and a couple across the door. A prison cell. And though he had no more than that to go on, it seemed ample evidence to assume that this was where Janey Sugarman had been stashed.

Which gave new energy to his rocking movements, done in full view of the crowd below but no doubt mistaken for the flinching of panic. Thorn could feel the metal at his right wrist already on the verge of parting, so he began to work on a fresh band at the other wrist. Back and forth, trying to duplicate the motion exactly, making a crease and working it till the soft tin began to split.

Changing his focus, Thorn peered at the two strips of metal that were only inches from his eyes and detected the silver puddles where the separate bands had been fused. The end of one band overlapping the end of another, the joints held together by a simple dot of solder, not welding at all. Like those plastic straps used to seal cardboard boxes. Impossible to break with a tug, but pry a fingernail under the juncture, they popped easily apart.

What it looked like was that all Thorn had to do was work his hands free, then reach up and peel apart each and every seam. The soldering would have been sufficient if the frame held a corpse, but for a live man, a man brimming with fury, the gibbet wouldn't last a day of serious testing. If he had a day. If he had an hour. He wasn't sure. Hadn't heard that part of the plan.

Beyond that, the physics of his situation were sketchy. He was having trouble feeling how his weight was distributed, some on his lower parts, some on his crotch. It would seem like the helmet should be taking most of the stress, except that's not how it felt. There were chains connecting the helmet directly to his lower parts, and when he jiggled the few inches he could manage, shifting slightly off-center, he felt the pressure mostly on his feet. Which was excellent. He sure as hell didn't want to peel out of the suit only to find that he'd suddenly shifted his entire mass to the band around his throat.

On the flight he'd had Marty on the run, milking him for the facts, but he hadn't thought to question him about how they planned to extort the code from Anne. They'd hinted torture, but Thorn had been imagining a gun at his temple, and in his scenario Anne had immediately wilted. Without consciously realizing he was doing it, Thorn had pictured that moment as his best chance for escape. The split second when the gang of pirates turned to the computer and tried out the code and showed it off to the others, he'd make his break.

But he hadn't pictured the gibbet cage. Had underestimated Vic Joy's devotion to the outrageous. Thorn's mistake. He wouldn't do it again. If there was an again. If there was an hour. Or ten minutes.

He worked his wrists against the pliant tin and ducked and cringed as the hail of pebbles continued.

 

The cigar was for show. Vic didn't like the taste, but it gave him a certain gravity, which he felt he needed in this situation, so he lit up and took a puff or two, but after five minutes he dropped the stinking thing on the plank floor of the screened-in dining hall and stubbed it out with the heel of his boot. They'd only been at this for minutes, barely gotten past the howdy-dos, and already things had tightened up. Language barrier for starters, not to mention the culture gap.

In all there were four of them, the leaders of the rabble hooting outside. Three Chinese guys who between them controlled hundreds of ships in the Far East. Two of the Chinese guys were so indistinguishable to Vic, it would've taken him a week with a microscope and color chart to tell them apart. The fourth man was a tall, slender, bearded Latino who resembled the ancient news photos of a young Fidel coming down from the hills in triumph. That was Ramon Bella, a Venezuelan who'd been buying most of the yachts and sailboats Vic had commandeered in the last few years. His phone pal till today.

Ramon was businesslike, razor smart, and though this was the first time Vic had met the man in the flesh, he felt the beginnings of rapport. But the Chinese fucks were another story. Snippy little men who twittered incessantly to one another, then shook their heads at once like three toy monkeys on a stick.

Side by side they sat in stiff-backed wooden chairs. One medium height, while the twins were barely five feet. Those two short ones wore dark pajama pants and white blousy shirts, and the third guy, the bigger one who spoke a few words of English, had on a dark blue jumpsuit like a paramedic.

Ad lib time hadn't gone well. Nobody talking. Vic doing all the adding and libbing, floundering around, trying to warm them up, get them to laugh, anything. Without planning it, he'd started telling them about the movie he was planning. A full-length feature film. Lots of action, derring-do, pirates as heroes, get the facts right for once. But they'd looked at him blankly, not saying a word, so he decided, fuck it, it was time to deliver the pitch.

Vic stepped in front of them and looked at each up close—the Chinese guys stared back at him as coldly as three slit-eyed copperheads.

He started his spiel with a little history, talking about Sir Francis Drake. A guy empowered by the queen of England herself to attack the Spanish Main. Vic reminding the Chinese guys how Drake had taken the
Cacafuego
near Cape San Francisco just north of the equator, not all that far from where they stood right now. A ship laden with gold and silver bars, silver coins, tons of bullion. The greatest pirate haul of all time. Drake went on to sack cities, plunder cathedrals, pillage and more pillage. Even got knighted for his efforts, retired to the English countryside. Maybe, just maybe, they'd get that lucky themselves, find a country that valued their hard work, rewarded them with that nation's highest honor. He knew it was a little extreme, but it had happened once; why not again?

The Chinese guys looked puzzled or bored, so he brought the speech to a close, saying that all Sir Francis Drake had done was nothing compared to what they were going to accomplish, with their concerted efforts, their joined forces, their synergy. And of course with Vic Joy's leadership.