Orchid Beach (24 page)

“Why don’t you bring them out to Ham’s?”

“Okay. What time?”

“Whenever you finish work. Bring some steaks, too, and a decent bottle of wine. All Ham ever has is beer and bourbon.”

“Will do.”

As Holly drove up to Ham’s house, Daisy bounded out to meet her, making yelping noises and laying her head onto Holly’s body, which was Daisy’s version of a hug. Holly knelt next to her and let the dog lick her face. “Hi, there, girl,” she cooed. “Yes, I’m glad to see you, too.” Daisy had spent several days with Ham.

Ham came out of the house. “That dog has really missed you,” he said.

“I’ve missed her, too.”

“I guess you two have really bonded. She wasn’t exactly unhappy with me, but it always seemed like there was something I was supposed to do or say that I wasn’t doing or saying.”

“I won’t leave her for so long again,” Holly said, rubbing the dog’s flanks and accepting the outpouring of affection. “Got a beer in there?”

“Sure, come on in.”

“Jackson is coming over and bringing some steaks; I hope that’s all right.”

“Sure, I’ll be glad to see him.” Ham got them both a beer from the fridge. “You know, I haven’t spent this much time alone for a long, long time—maybe never—and I’m really enjoying it. All I’ve done is read and watch sports on the satellite.”

“That’s all you ever did anyway, isn’t it?”

“Well, I worked, didn’t I? You forget I was in the army?”

“Why haven’t you played golf?”

“I haven’t had anybody to play with. You and Jackson have been so busy.”

“I’ll play with you this weekend, then.”

They sat down and watched Tiger Woods sink a forty-foot putt on TV.

“Holy shit,” Ham said.

Jackson arrived at half past six, loaded with groceries and a cardboard tube. “I’m starving,” he said. “Can we eat before we do anything else?”

Ham warmed up the grill and put on the steaks Jackson had brought.

“Oh, Ham,” Jackson said, “I’ve got something for you.” He handed Ham a sheet of paper. “It’s your application for the Dunes Country Club. The committee meets later this week, so fill it out and I’ll get it over there tomorrow.”

“That’s fast work,” Ham said, finding a pen and going to work on the form.

“Glad to do it.”

They finished dinner and cleared the table, then Jackson opened the cardboard tube he had brought. “Get me some transparent tape and some thumbtacks,” he said. He pinned rolls of photographic paper to the dining table and taped the seams. “Okay,” he said, “there you have it: Palmetto Gardens.”

Holly pointed to where Jungle Trail met the fence. “I was here this afternoon,” she said. “There’s a double fence here with a plowed strip in between and signs about high voltage.” She pointed elsewhere on the photographs. “Look, it goes all the way around. In front, the wire is obscured by the high hedges.”

“Here’s the building with all the antennas,” Jackson said, pointing.

“What are these buildings here?” Holly asked, pointing to a series of parallel structures.

“Looks like housing of some sort—for staff, maybe.”

“You think all the employees live on the place?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve never met anybody who worked there, so maybe.”

“What do you suppose they do for R and R?” Ham asked.

“They’ve got an airfield. Maybe they fly them to Disney World or something,” Jackson offered.

“Hey, look at this,” Ham said, pointing.

“Looks like vegetation,” Holly said.

“That’s not vegetation, it’s camouflage netting.”

“Are you sure?” Holly asked, peering at it.

“You think I’ve never seen that stuff? I lived under it for two years, in ’Nam. I’ve seen a lot of it in photographs,
too. Look, here’s another patch, and another.” There were half a dozen patches, scattered over the area, and two more near the airfield.

“What would they be covering up with camouflage netting?” Holly asked.

“Antiaircraft-gun emplacements?” Ham offered. “Ground-to-air missiles?”

“Come on, Ham, we’re not in Vietnam. It must be something else.”

“What else would you need to hide from overflights?” Ham asked. “That netting doesn’t work if you’re on the ground, you know.”

Jackson spoke up. “Does it strike anybody that this place looks more like a military installation than anything else?”

“Yeah,” Ham said. “I mean, there’s lots of big houses and the golf courses, but if you don’t count those, it looks military to me.”

“Look,” Jackson said, pointing. “Radar at the airfield. Orchid Beach Airport doesn’t have radar.”

“Ham,” Holly said, “if you had to take Palmetto Gardens, how would you do it?”

Ham looked at the photographs again for a moment. “I’d chopper in a regiment of airborne, take the airfield and overwhelm the rest of the place in a hurry.”

“How would you do it if you were the cops, instead of the military?”

Ham shook his head. “I wouldn’t,” he said.

CHAPTER
39

H
olly started the next day by asking Jane Grey to run all the employees of Palmetto Gardens who were licensed to carry firearms through the state’s criminal records section.

A couple of hours later, Jane came into her office. “Not one of them had anything on his record more serious than a juvenile offense or a speeding ticket,” she said.

To Holly, that meant one of two things: either they had screened every applicant for a record and discarded those who had one, or they had cleaned up the records of some of their employees. There was no way to judge, from the state’s records, which was the case. And, if they had done some record scrubbing, there was no way to determine for which employees, except the five that Jackson knew about. There was another way, though.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate today, Holly. Is there anything else you need?”

“No, Jane, and thanks. You get back to work.”

Holly turned to her computer and logged on to the national crime computer, in Washington. One by one, she entered the names from the list she had run through the state computer, printing out individual files. It took her a couple of hours, but when she was done, she was astonished at the results.

Holly picked up her private line and called Jackson. “Can we meet at Ham’s?” she asked.

“What’s up? Why don’t we go to my house?”

“Just meet me there as soon as you can.”

“I’ll see you around six.”

She called Ham and told him they were coming.

“You young people sure like it here,” Ham said, as Jackson arrived. “Holly’s already here.”

“What’s going on?” Jackson asked her.

“I didn’t want to meet at your place or mine, because I thought there was an outside chance that one or both of them had been bugged.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just feeling paranoid.”

“Tell me about it.”

Holly took the stack of criminal records from her briefcase and laid them on the dining table. “This morning I ran all the gun-toting employees of Palmetto Gardens through the state crime computer. They were all clean. This afternoon I ran them through the national crime computer. Of a hundred and two, seventy-one had criminal records, lots of them for serious crimes.”

“That many?” Jackson said, sitting down.

“That many.”

“And all of them clean with the state?”

“All of them.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I guess they couldn’t fix the FBI records.”

“I guess not,” he said.

“I don’t know what to do, Jackson,” Holly said. “There’s something going on at Palmetto Gardens, but I just don’t have the resources to figure it out.”

“Maybe it’s time for the feds,” Jackson said.

“Maybe so, but I’d like to feel them out informally, if I can.”

“Like I told you, I know an agent in the Miami office; he’s in the organized crime division.”

“Let’s talk to him.”

Jackson dug an address book from his pocket, looked up his friend, and looked at his watch. “He’s probably on the way home from work. I’ve got a cell-phone number.” He dialed it. “Harry? It’s Jackson Oxenhandler. Yeah, pretty good, how about you? Listen, Harry, can you call me right back from a land line? Yeah, here’s the number.” Jackson gave it to him and hung up.

“What’s his name?” Holly asked.

“Harry Crisp. He’ll call us back soon. If you’re worried about bugging, I thought a land line would be better.”

“What are you…” The phone interrupted her.

Jackson picked it up. “Thanks, Harry. Listen, I’m in Orchid Beach with the local chief of police, a lady named Holly Barker. She’s stumbled onto something extraordinary that I think you ought to know about, and I don’t think we should talk about it on the phone. Could she and I come to Miami to see you? Where? What are you doing there?
Well, great. Yeah, I’m buying, and I’ll put you up for the night. You got a pencil? I’ll give you directions.” He dictated directions from A1A. “See you later.” Jackson hung up. “He was at a filing in Fort Pierce, less than an hour away. He’s coming up here for dinner.”

“Great,” Holly said.

“I’ll make some spaghetti,” Ham said, and headed for the kitchen.

Jackson looked at Holly. “What’s the matter? You look worried.”

“I just hope I’m not making an ass of myself,” Holly said.

CHAPTER
40

H
arry Crisp looked less like an FBI agent than Holly had imagined. He was fairly tall and skinny, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. She thought he looked more like a bank loan officer than a lawman. He shook everybody’s hand and sat down to dinner, declining wine.

“So what’s up, Jackson?” he asked, twirling spaghetti on his fork. “What’s so mysterious we needed a land line?”

“We’re just being careful, Harry,” Jackson said. “Holly is beginning to worry that there might be bugs at both our houses, and…well, maybe we’re just paranoid.”

“Paranoid about what?”

“Holly, you tell him.”

Holly put down her fork. “Orchid Beach has a lot of upscale residential developments—houses, tennis courts, golf courses, polo, the works.”

“I’m familiar with the type of thing,” Crisp said.

“We’ve got one that’s unusual.”

“How so?” Crisp asked, munching.

“Well, it’s on a good fifteen hundred acres, but it’s only got a couple of hundred houses, and it appears to be already fairly fully developed.”

“Sounds expensive,” Crisp said.

“Extremely,” Holly replied. “It’s also got three eighteen-hole golf courses and its own six-thousand-foot airfield.”

“For two hundred households?” Crisp asked.

“That’s it. And the airfield gets a lot of international traffic. They have some sort of deal with customs and immigration to clear arrivals on the spot.”

“A
private
airport of entry? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Neither have I,” Jackson said.

“Tell me more.”

“The place is surrounded by a ten-foot-high double fence with razor wire on top, and the inner fence is electrified.”

“Security conscious, huh?”

Ham spoke up. “We tried to get a look at their marina the other day, and they threatened us with automatic weapons and threw us out in a hurry.”

“Touchy.”

“You could say that.”

“There’s more,” Holly said. “The place is nearly completely cut off from any local services, except maybe the food supply. It has an electricity generating plant, its own water and sewage system, and the houses were built by labor imported from somewhere else. Only the basic infrastructure was built by locals.”

Crisp finished his dinner and pushed his plate away. “What else?”

Ham got up and started clearing the table.

“The employees seem all to live on the grounds,” Jackson said. “No locals were hired. We estimate there’s housing for four hundred employees.”

“They’ve got two thousand telephone lines and a communications center you won’t believe,” Holly said, bringing out the aerial photographs and spreading them out on the table.

“How the hell did you get this?” Crisp asked. “This looks like a satshot.”

“Old-fashioned aerial photography,” Jackson replied. “Friend of mine does it for a living.”

Holly pointed out the building with the antennae.

“Anybody got a magnifying glass?” Crisp asked.

Holly found one on Ham’s desk and handed it to him.

Crisp peered closely at the communications equipment. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “This is more stuff than the bureau has on its roof in Miami.”

“Check this out,” Holly said, pointing at place after place. “We think this is all camouflage netting.”

“Covering what?”

“Use your imagination.”

“That’s asking a lot of an FBI man,” Jackson said.

“I’ll do my best,” Crisp said. “Okay, I give up. What could be under there?”

“Ham is ex-army. He says maybe antiaircraft guns or even ground-to-air missiles.”

“Whoa,” Crisp said. “Let’s try to keep both feet on the ground, here.”

“Harry,” Jackson said, “everything about this place defies the imagination.”

“Yeah,” Holly said. “State licensing records show that a hundred and two employees, including a security force of fifteen, have licenses to carry weapons.”

“That’s a lot,” Crisp said.

“Jackson recognized five of the names on the security force as having criminal records, but when we checked the state computer, they were all showing as clean.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Crisp said.

“There’s more,” Holly said. “Today, I ran all one hundred and two gun-toters through the state computer, and they all came up clean. Then I ran the same names through your national computer, and seventy-one of them turned up with convictions ranging over most of the spectrum of criminal activity.” She placed the files on the table.

Crisp looked at a few of them, then looked up at Holly. “That’s unbelievable,” he said. “You’ve got a very serious problem at the state level. Have you reported this to Tallahassee?”