Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (23 page)

“Stop.”

Bailey stopped, turned back. He looked the man over. No evidence of injury.

The man stared him down, said, “I had a nosebleed.”

“Right.”

“Just get us out of here, fast.”

“Fast or quiet,” said Bailey. “You can’t have both.”

“Fast.”

“You got it.” Bailey climbed up the ladder to the flybridge helm. “Hang on.” He jammed the throttles forward and the twin diesels roared up from idle. His blood-splattered passenger grabbed the ladder for support, but stayed down on the aft deck.

As they came around the reef, automatic weapons fire rang out from shore.

Pap-pap-pap-pap-pap-pap.

The man who called himself Diego flattened against the deck, but the gunfire sounded more like protest than attack, and it died rapidly. At this distance, with only dim starlight and no moon, with the boat running dark at thirty knots, the men on shore must’ve known they couldn’t hit anything. They’d be aiming at the sound of the engines and their bullets would be well off the stern. Still, Bailey felt adrenaline leak into his bloodstream, and blew out a long breath.

Haiti had a meager Coast Guard and Bailey didn’t think they’d be able to scramble a boat out in time, but he stayed up on the flybridge where he could spot any unwelcome company, just in case.

No boat appeared.

Outside the protection of the reef, the sea rose up and the
swells grew to about seven feet. No challenge to the stability of the cat, but Bailey wondered if an unexpected storm was in their future. He’d checked the marine forecast earlier in the day, but conditions change quickly in these parts.

He switched on the radio. No storm on the way. Small consolation.

No moon.
I leave nothing to chance.
Damn. Bailey had noticed that it would be a moonless night when he’d checked the tide calendar. It should’ve raised a red flag, but he’d been too busy thinking about the ten thousand dollars. Too busy chasing his dream.

And now everything had gone to dog shit.

Bailey told himself to take it easy: cut out the self-flagellation and focus on the present situation. Yes, his client was wearing someone else’s blood, and yes, there’d been men with automatic weapons on the beach. But automatic weapons were relatively easy to come by in Haiti; the men on the beach could’ve been gangsters as easy as cops.

And then the radio rendered Bailey’s rationalizations impotent.

The Caribbean News Agency was reporting that Dominic Martel—the leader of Haiti’s pro-democracy movement—had been shot to death that evening as he dined with his family in a restaurant in the town of Cap Haitien. Cap Haitien was only six miles southeast of Labadee Beach.

Shit. Bailey felt his stomach turn over. His client was an assassin.

Still no boat appeared, and he realized that there would be none. They’d gotten away clean. But now he had bigger things to worry about. Now he had to worry about his client. It was time to start being active, instead of reactive. Time to put the old skills to work.

There was no boat giving chase, but down on the aft deck, the man who called himself Diego could not see over the swells. Bailey set the autopilot, grabbed the flashlight and moved to the ladder, as if in a hurry.

“We got company,” he called down to the man. “Get inside.” He came down the ladder at speed and ushered his client into the pilothouse. The man didn’t argue.

Bailey opened a trapdoor in the cabin floor and climbed down a steep set of metal stairs into the port hull, just ahead of the engine room. It was hot and loud down there. He flipped a switch and fluorescent lights flickered to life in the ceiling.

“Come on, come on,” he said, waving at the man. He pressed on a false wall and it opened, revealing a small padded closet just large enough for one person. There was a built-in seat, also padded.

The man came down the stairs, clutching his case. He looked dubiously at the custom-built people-hider.

Bailey said, “It’s safe. It has its own ventilation. If we get boarded, they won’t find you.”

The man stepped inside, but he didn’t look happy about it.

Bailey pushed the false wall back into place. He climbed up the stairs, got a water bottle and a box of extrastrength Gravol from the galley, returned and pressed on the wall.

“Here,” he said, and handed the bottle to the man. He held the box of Gravol up for the man to see, then popped a couple of pills free of their blister pack. “Take these.” The man did not reach for them. “Listen,” Bailey said, “I’m gonna have to cut across the swells to lose these guys and it’s gonna get rough down here. You don’t take these, you’re gonna be puking all over yourself in about ten minutes. I can’t afford to have you choking on your vomit while I’m up top.”

The man swallowed the pills. Bailey shut the secret door.

At the lower helm station, Bailey shut off the autopilot and switched on the running lights. He turned the wheel and pointed the boat so that the swells hit sideways instead of head-on. The boat rocked side to side.

Then he reached forward and flipped a toggle switch, shutting off the ventilation to the people-hider.

He thought things through. The man who called himself Diego had taken a brief nap after Bailey had picked him up at the marina, but had not slept on the overnight journey from Long Island to Haiti, and Bailey doubted that sleep had been on his agenda during his time ashore. So he’d been awake at least thirty hours.

Shutting off the ventilation wouldn’t kill the man, but the oxygen level in the people-hider would deplete. Between that and the extrastrength Gravol, Bailey figured the man would be unconscious within the hour.

Bailey pressed on the secret door and eased it open. He was greeted by a beautiful sound. Snoring. The man who called himself Diego was asleep, reclined on the seat, his head resting against the padded wall. The Pelican case had slipped from his grasp and lay on the floor.

Bailey took the case, and gently closed the door.

Up in the lounge, Bailey flipped the latches and opened the case. He withdrew a map that showed a section of Haiti’s north shore, from Labadee to the town of Cap Haitien. Beneath the map was a semiautomatic pistol. He lifted the pistol from the case, smelled it. Cordite. He put the recently fired pistol aside. There was money in the case. American money, about $30,000. Bailey fished around under the cash, found a passport. A U.S. passport. He took it out of the case and opened it.

His blood ran cold. Staring back at him was the standard passport photo of the man who called himself Diego. But the name on the passport was Tom Bailey.

I leave nothing to chance.
So the man who called himself Diego wasn’t done killing.

Or thought he wasn’t. Bailey could take care of this threat
without breaking a sweat. The man was asleep and Bailey had his gun. Easiest thing in the world, to walk downstairs and put a bullet in the man’s head with his own gun. End of threat. He could weigh down the body with an anchor and some line. Dump the body at sea, along with the gun. Done. Finished. Pretend it never happened.

But then Bailey thought about it from the other man’s perspective. A change of identity would mean relocating. It was an expensive proposition. It would mean a significant sum of money waiting for him in his new destination. Had to. But there was nothing else in the case to say where.

And that led Bailey on a new train of thought. Was this a crazy idea? A reckless bet? No, he decided. It was time to go legit—now—and this could set him on his new path. The man had an ego problem; he would play on that.

This was a calculated risk.

He would have to put the case back the way he found it—passport under the money, gun on top and the map covering the gun. Then return the case to the people-hider with the man and switch the ventilation back on.

Sunrise was breaking over a calm sea when the man emerged from below. The case was in his left hand. The butt of the pistol peeked out from his waistband.

“Good morning,” said Bailey. Cheerful.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Almost home. We made it.” Bailey gestured out the windows, to a speck of land on the horizon.

“That’s Long Island?”

“Yup. I’ll have you back on dry land in half an hour.”

“You got an extra shirt I can have?”

“No problem.” Bailey got a T-shirt from the stateroom in the starboard hull. When he returned, the man was pointing the gun
at him. He tried to look surprised. “Take it easy, Diego,” he said. “If you don’t like the shirt, I’ll get you another one.”

“That’s actually very funny,” the man said. He was no longer affecting an accent. He gestured with the barrel of his gun to the aft deck. “Outside.”

Bailey put his hands up, even though the man hadn’t asked him to do so. He walked out to the aft deck, sat down hard on the portside bench, braced his hands on his knees and shook his head.

“Diego, I delivered my end of the bargain. You don’t have to do this. It’s not the smart play.”

“Actually, it is.” The man kept the pistol aimed at Bailey’s chest.

“I’m an accessory, before
and
after the fact—you know I won’t talk.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Killing me is only going to raise questions. I turn up dead, it’ll only bring more heat. You’re making a stupid move, here. Really stupid.”

The man smiled. A cruel smile. “But you’re not going to turn up dead. You’re just making a move.”

Bailey shook his head like he didn’t understand, and leaned back with his hands planted on the bench behind him. “I don’t understand. Where am I moving?”

“Grand Cayman. It’s lovely there.”

“They’ve got private banking in Cayman.”

The man’s smile broadened. “I know.”

“Please, you really don’t have to do this.”

“No, I really do have to do this.”

“I’m telling you. Don’t be stupid.”

The man pulled the trigger.

Click.

The man snorted derisively. “Clever,” he said. He dropped the
pistol on the deck and reached behind his back and came up with a throwing knife, as Bailey slid his hand under the bench cushion and came up with the preloaded spear gun he’d stashed there a couple hours earlier.

Both men froze.

“Mexican standoff,” said the man who called himself Diego.

“Not really,” said Bailey. “You may be good, but no arm can match the velocity of this thing. You’ll lose.” He locked eyes with the man, but instructed his peripheral vision to watch for any twitch in the man’s knife hand, poised to throw.

“What do you propose?”

“I’ll give you a choice. If you really think you can beat me, fire away. Or, you can take a swim.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll never make it to shore.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll tread water for a while, then you’ll get tired and drown. You could get lucky, a boat may come along and pick you up. But that’s unlikely. You have a choice to make. Either way, it’s a calculated risk.”

The man thought for a second, nodded to himself.

The knife hand moved forward. Bailey pulled the trigger. The knife clattered to the deck at Bailey’s feet.

The man groped for the metal spear sticking out of his chest. He made a horrible gurgling sound, staggered backward. His arms flailed in the air as he toppled over the gunwale and into the Caribbean Sea.

Bailey crossed over to where the man who called himself Diego had stood, picked up the gun and tossed it overboard. He stuck his hand in his pocket, pulled out the bullets and dropped them into the sea.

Then he went inside and poured himself a long drink of rum.

Cayman. That’s where he’d find the money. It would be wait
ing for him in a bank account in his own name. He plotted a course for Grand Cayman and sipped his drink.

A calculated risk. And it had paid off.

Spanish writer Javier Sierra is known for seamlessly weaving history and science together in stories that not only entertain, but which attempt to solve some of the great mysteries of the past. His meticulous research has taken him across the globe, and his knowledge of faraway places and forgotten cultures is abundantly clear in “The Fifth World.”

When murder and mysticism meet, Tess Mitchell is left with only a yellow butterfly found at the feet of her slain professor. The Mayan Calendar and its prophecies had always seemed academic to the young woman, but in Javier’s chilling and believable style, they come alive in uncertain, frightening new ways.

“Y
ou’ve gotten yourself into a quite a mess, young lady.”

Tess Mitchell’s blue eyes flashed at the precinct commander as he entered the interrogation room where she had been placed in isolation. She had seen his face before on the local TV in Tucson.

“My name is Lincoln Lewis and I’m in charge of this precinct,” he said with a sneer. His overall manner, however, was entirely professional. “I know you’ve spoken with some of our agents already, but it would be a real help if you could clear up a couple of things from your statement.”

“Of course.”

“For one thing, I need you to tell me what, exactly, you were doing at four o’clock this afternoon in Professor Jack Bennewitz’s office.”

“You mean, when I discovered…the body?”

The policeman nodded. Tess swallowed hard.

“Well, we had been working together on a project connected to his field of investigation. I was doing research for him and this
morning I came across some data that I thought would interest him. Observational data. Technical things.”

“I see. And what was it that Professor Bennewitz taught?”

“Theory of the solar system, sir.”

“Did you have an appointment with him?”

A blush suddenly came over Tess’s cheeks and, unable to conceal it, she cast her eyes downward at the steel-and-wood table.

“To be honest I didn’t need one,” she explained. “He let me come and see him whenever I had to, and since I knew that he had office hours for his students around then, I just decided to go by. That’s all.”

“And what did you find when you got there, Miss Mitchell?”

“I already told your colleagues—the first thing I noticed was how silent it was in Building B. Jack always spoke in such a loud voice. Whenever he yelled—which was often—you could practically hear him at the other end of campus. He was a very intense kind of person, you know? But I noticed something else, too—there was a very odd smell in the waiting room. It even drifted out into part of the hallway, a very strong, acidic odor, really awful.” Tess made a face at the thought of it before continuing. “So I went in without knocking.”

“And what did you find?”

Tess Mitchell closed her eyes, trying to conjure up the scene in her head. The image of her friend Jack Bennewitz lying back in his leather armchair, his face contorted and his eyes fixed on some indeterminate point between the plaster ceiling and the case filled with his chess trophies, flashed through her mind for a brief moment. Despite the fact that his jacket was fully buttoned, there was no way to miss the chocolate-colored stain that had soaked through the shirt underneath. There was no sign of a struggle. Books and papers were meticulously organized, and even the coffee that he must have poured himself shortly before ending up in that gruesome state remained in a mug on his desk, cold and untouched.

“Did you touch Professor Bennewitz’s body? Did you make any attempt to revive him?” Officer Lewis insisted.

“Good God, no!” the young woman exclaimed. “Of course not! Jack was dead, dead! Don’t you get it?”

“Didn’t you notice anything at all out of the ordinary? Something that might have been missing from the office?”

Tess Mitchell pondered these questions a few seconds before shaking her head no. There was no way, she thought, that the wooden box containing a butterfly with giant yellow wings that she had found at Jack’s feet could be of any use to the investigation. She had put it in her bag almost instinctively; she had no idea why a prominent theoretical physicist like Bennewitz would have been an insect collector, even though she herself was a real aficionado.

“May I tell you something, miss?” Officer Lewis said, in a conspiratorial tone of voice. “Jack Bennewitz’s death is one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. And since you were the person who phoned it in, I’ll have to ask you to remain in the precinct a while longer. You’re our only witness.”

“Is it absolutely necessary?”

“I’m afraid so, Miss Mitchell. You may not know this, but the majority of all crimes are solved using information gathered in the first few hours of the investigation.”

No one would ever recommend the area around the Museo de América in Madrid as a place for a midnight stroll. Francisco Ruiz glanced at the dark pathway that stretched out from the Moncloa tower and checked his watch. Realizing that it was already past 11:00 p.m. he stepped up his pace, so that he could get across that part of the walkway as fast as possible. Neither the empty echo of the Christmas carols nor the distant Christmas lights that framed the entrance to the city could dispel the pervading sense of total solitude that surrounded him. Temperatures
had dropped considerably and almost instinctively he pulled up his coat collar and began walking even faster.

“Where are you going in such a rush, Professor?”

Ruiz recognized the voice right away. Of the many places to be caught by surprise in Madrid, this was by far the most forbidding. The man speaking to him had the same Central American accent as that of the individual who had been making threatening phone calls to his house for the past two weeks.

“You…!” he said, in a distressed whisper. Despite his arrogant facade, Ruiz was a coward. “Are you going to tell me for once and for all what it is that you want from me?”

“Don’t play tough with me, man. Not with me.”

The shadow that had intercepted him took a few steps forward, and was now standing directly beneath the only streetlamp that shed any light at all on the area, and Ruiz was perplexed by the image that now stood before him. The man was far shorter than he had imagined, and his face was graced by the most perfect Mayan features: aquiline nose, sharp cheekbones, tanned skin and a braid of hair so black that it blended right into the wretched night. A row of exceedingly white teeth glinted in the middle of his dark eagle’s face. He went on:

“I saw that you didn’t listen to me, Professor. The article you were working on came out in the paper….”

“And why would you care about that?”

“Oh, I care a lot, Professor. More than you imagine. In fact, you know what? The reason I’m here now is to make sure that you don’t publish the second part of that article you mentioned. You made the same mistake before, about nine years ago. You know, I’m amazed. In all this time you haven’t learned anything, have you?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Francisco Ruiz clung tightly to the folder in his hands, which contained the documents he needed to finish the groundbreak
ing article he was writing on the Soho Project. In the past few days he had met with several experts in pre-Hispanic history in an effort to lend his piece, which was purely scientific in nature, a more startling angle. That was why he had gone all the way to the Museo de América…but now that he thought about it, the harassment had begun at the same time that he’d started meeting with these historians. This little Mayan man with the fierce gaze, barely five feet tall, had really managed to make him nervous. By now he was within inches of Ruiz’s face, so close that if Ruiz took two steps forward, he would bang right into him. His hands, buried deep in the pockets of his polar fleece jacket, seemed only to confirm Ruiz’s hunch that he was up to no good.

“You must be the worst journalism professor in the entire university,” said the Mayan man. His accent was getting stronger and stronger, his voice becoming increasingly vehement. “Or have you already forgotten about Y2K, Don Francisco?”

A lightbulb suddenly went off in his head. So that was what this was all about? A reader who had been disappointed by an article of his? Ruiz had been one of Europe’s fiercest proponents of the hypothesis that after midnight on December 31, 1999, computer systems the world over would simultaneously collapse because their internal calendars would be unable to make the leap from 1999 to 2000. Since the very earliest computers used two-digit date formats—1997 was 97, 1998 was 98, and so on—some people became convinced that at the dawn of the year 2000 operating systems would identify “00” as the year 1900 instead of 2000, which would, in turn, cause everything to go haywire. In his columns, Francisco Ruiz had envisioned a kind of cyber-apocalypse: airports and hospitals in total meltdown, bank accounts and transactions on the blink, pensions unpaid, power stations, nuclear plants, and gas and oil lines completely cut off by the dysfunctional computer system, to say nothing of world
financial systems, satellites, nuclear weapons and streetlights, which would all become deprogrammed at the very same instant. Caught in the throes of his millennium fever, he had actually advised his readers to stockpile extra cash and provisions before New Year’s Eve…just in case.

But of course, January 1, 2000, had come and gone, and none of the predicted calamities ever came to pass. Francisco had moved on to other topics in his columns, and quite soon the world forgot about the crisis that never was.

“Soho is different,” he found himself saying. “It’s quite a bit more serious.”

“Yes, I know it’s serious!” retorted the Mayan. “Everything that has to do with the sun is serious. That’s why I’m here.”

Soho, shorthand for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, was one of the technological playthings that had recently given NASA and the European Space Agency some of its most promising moments. From the day it was launched in 1995, Soho had sent the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland literally billions of data regarding the sun, its magnetic storms, sunspots and coronal mass ejections. Soho had even found the time to identify no less than 1,500 comets that were not visible from Earth. The sinister-looking Mayan, however, did not seem the least bit interested in these achievements.

Before Francisco Ruiz could change direction and escape, his inconvenient interlocutor suddenly pounced upon him like a bulldog. The impact, which caught Ruiz totally by surprise, sent the two men rolling downhill. The Mayan’s determination to immobilize him, along with his quickened breathing, now had Ruiz scared for his life. The next thing he felt was a hot sensation in his chest followed by a dreadful noise, like a drain gulping down the last mouthfuls of filth spilling out from a broken pipe. It took a few moments for Francisco to realize that the noise was, in fact, emanating from him. From his solar plexus. Then ev
erything felt cold, as if someone had taken off his coat. A sharp pain followed. Cloudy vision. Darkness.

Then, everything went black.

The precinct commander at the Stone Avenue station in Tucson, Arizona, served himself another cup of coffee from the vending machine in the corridor without taking his eyes off of Tess Mitchell. The young woman with the blond braids and frightened eyes couldn’t stop fidgeting in the uncomfortable metal chair.

“You sure you wouldn’t like something to drink, young lady?”

She shook her head. Lincoln Lewis had just informed her that federal agents were going to take over the case of Jack Bennewitz’s death. Apparently, on his computer, they had found some interesting links between her physics mentor and various university professors in Central America, the Middle East and Europe. One of them, Juan Martorell, from the University of Mexico, had been murdered not twenty-four hours earlier in Mexico City, his body thrown from the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Reforma. In the best interests of his investigation, the police chief withheld this last bit of information.

“You and Jack were close?” he asked.

Tess nodded. They had known each other for four years. Together they had visited the most important telescopes in the U.S., and had even made a few trips out of the country, to Arecibo, in Puerto Rico and Mexico City, just a month earlier. Together they had gone to the pyramids at Teotihuacán, “the oldest astronomical observatory in the Americas,” as Bennewitz had admiringly called it.

“Did they tell you how Jack died?”

At this point, Tess had been in the police station for five hours, answering the same questions over and over again to a parade of different agents. It was clear that they had no leads. Just
her. And she also knew, as the policeman she had seen on TV seemed to suggest, that they were prepared to put her through hell for as long as they could.

The young woman shook her head in response.

“A gunshot fired at him point-blank?” she guessed aloud.

“I’m afraid not, Tess. They tore his heart out, in one fell swoop. They did it with some kind of very sharp object, a blade or a prod that they sunk into him in a single motion, slicing directly through his arteries.”

The young woman’s eyes widened with fright. Now she understood that dark stain on Professor Bennewitz’s shirt.

“We know it wasn’t you,” the police chief assured her. “You wouldn’t have the strength for something like that. Plus, Jack Bennewitz died at least two hours before you got to him. In all likelihood the murder did not even occur in that office. We found no traces of blood whatsoever there, except for the stains on his clothing. They must have brought him there after they did it, sat him down and left him for someone else to find him.”

“Really?”

The police chief nodded.

“Tell me, where were you at two o’clock this afternoon?”

Tess didn’t hesitate. “I had just left the Kitt Peak observatory,” she said, swallowing air as if muffling a sob. “I was there all morning, gathering information from the main telescope. When I found what I was looking for, I went to Jack’s office to show him. From the observatory it takes about ninety minutes to get to Tucson, so I would have been on the road at around that time….”

“Right. Now, since you weren’t on campus when the crime occurred, I wonder if you could tell me if you or any of your friends saw anything unusual on campus today, either this morning or later this afternoon. Anything at all that struck you as unusual?”

Tess said nothing. She bowed her head, as if trying to extract a memory, any kind of recollection at all that might offer the police some kind of clue to aid their investigation. The matter of the butterfly seemed irrelevant and anyway, she was too embarrassed to admit that she had taken something from a crime scene, so she just put it out of her mind. In a matter of seconds she replayed her arrival at the university, the ham-and-cheese sandwich she’d eaten in the Building B cafeteria, her thoughts about the university lecture they would be attending that afternoon…“Of course!” she suddenly exclaimed. “The university lecture, that’s it!” Suppressing an incipient smile, she searched the police officer’s eyes.