Tampa Burn (32 page)

I whispered two words. Two soft profanities. Then I stood slowly and walked on shaky legs to the lab station. I removed my glasses and ducked my head beneath the gooseneck faucet, and let the cold water run. I turned, buried my face in a towel, rubbing hard, drying hair and face, feeling a bizarre sense of unreality, seeing swirls and starbursts of color behind my eyes.

I said another whispered profanity—a rhetorical question—then returned to the computer and read portions of the letter again.

Who in the hell was Tinman? And why hadn't this woman—a person whose ethics I'd admired for years—had the decency to tell me that such a thing was a possibility?

I didn't feel betrayed. There has to be a covenant before there can be a betrayal. Pilar and I had none. What I felt was a terrible sense of potential loss. I was already fighting to save my son. Now these new, outrageous circumstances were threatening to take him in a way that was beyond any hope of change or my control.

Slightly more than a year ago, someone had shown her files concerning my work in Central America. She'd learned the truth about Marion Ford—or believed she had. That had changed everything, as far as she was concerned.

In my mind, I replayed the first minutes that we'd been alone together; could hear Pilar saying, “Do you know what concerns me the most since I found out? That Laken calls you ‘father.' If he believes your blood runs in his veins, will he try to emulate you? Already, he's becoming more and more like you. At night, I go to sleep worrying about it. Will that part of you be in him? That gene, that kind of . . . of evil? Is there a killer inside of my child, waiting?”

Her odd wording now made sense.

I could also hear her say, “You're not the good man I fell in love with. You couldn't be. How could you have done those things?”

Did she really believe this guy could be Lake's father? Or was it simply because she now preferred to believe that it was true?

I knew I'd want to read the letter later, study the nuances, so I saved the e-mail to my computer's personal files. I then moved the cursor so that I could read the second e-mail she'd written
Tinman.
It was sent on Sunday, the night before she left for Miami.

It was as shocking as the first:

I'D recently taken delivery of the finest microscope I've ever owned. It's a Leica Selectra Trinocular, with extraordinary resolution, variable zoom, and a vertical photo tube. I turned away from the computer and seemed to float across the room, where I reached out to the microscope as if it were a lifebuoy.

I removed the scope's cover and found a glass slide on which I'd already mounted a cross section from a piece of loggerhead sponge. I'd found the sponge while collecting on the flats a few days earlier. I fixed the slide on the scope's stage plate, touched the light toggle, and removed my glasses. Then I leaned toward the viewing head's eyepieces, eager to escape into that bright world of exacting focus.

I had to have a break. My brain was so fogged by what I'd just read, I felt dizzy, even nauseous. It couldn't be true, but it
was
true. Pilar had become friendly with me, and then ingratiated herself, in order to gather information about my covert work. So she
had
known. Or, as she'd told me, at least suspected—but not the extent of the things I'd been ordered to do during the revolution that was going on in her country.

Tinman had done the same thing—whoever the hell Tinman was. He, supposedly, was also a friend. At least, that's the way her letter read.

I'd gone over the sentences only a couple of times, but they'd already been seared into my memory:

Yeah, there was no room for doubt.

But which of my male friends? I'd had several good ones during my time there. At least, I'd thought of them as good friends.

 

 

That certainly narrowed it down.

If Lake and Tinman actually did resemble one another, then Tinman also had to be distinctly non-Latin-looking. In his photos and in person, Lake could pass for a Midwestern farmboy.

The possibilities made me feel wobbly. I needed an emotional retreat. The microscope awaited. I touched my eyes to the twin eyepieces and was instantly transported. I took one . . . two . . . and then a third full breath.

Magnified by the fine optics, the protein fibers of the sponge's osculum—its excurrent water opening—seemed large enough so that a model city could be erected within its perfect convexity. There were vast corridors and safe hideaways that, to me, were alluring. I longed to climb inside.

I touched the glass plate, and the view changed. There was a curling flagellum, a hairlike paddle that pulls in water . . . and the crosshatched symmetry of the animal's silicate skeleton. The skeleton was an intricate pattern of fluted ramps on a curving honeycombed infrastructure. I increased magnification until the sponge fibers became an extraordinarily modernistic sculpture. A single filament might have been a stairway designed by Dalí.

I was looking into a world that was no less chemically complex and biologically diverse than my own. Sponges consist of cooperating communities of different cells. We have counted as many as sixteen thousand animals, and many species, living in the canal systems of a single sponge.

Complex, yes. But not nearly so complicated.

My mind cycled away from this articulate microuniverse, back into the murkier world that was my own. I stood suddenly, and lowered my glasses.

I'd scanned my memory synapses over and over, and the results were always the same. During that general time period prior to Lake's birth, there were only two men whom I considered friends, who'd also known Pilar in Masagua, and who were unmistakably Anglo-Saxon.

One was my old partner, Thackery, the crazed Australian surfer and SAS operative. I remembered that he had a Ph.D. in oceanography, was a passionate environmentalist. Part of his cover was that he'd infiltrated an ultra-left-wing environmental group that was helping to fund the guerrilla fighters. Or supposedly infiltrated them. Could Thackery actually have been working for the enemy? Could he, in fact, have been a double agent, fighting for the other side?

I hadn't seen the man in years. Wondered how I could track him down. And if he was Tinman, I would have to find him . . . or at least make certain that people in the American intelligence community knew about him. Even though several years had passed, it was still a serious security breach, and it would have to be dealt with.

Yet, the truth was, I hoped that Tinman
was
Thackery.

There was only one other possibility. That was Tomlinson.

 

 

AT a little after four in the morning, I opened the screen door and stepped into my little house to see Ransom curled in the chair, still holding Crunch & Des. But instead of sleeping, her eyes were open wide, staring at me. She looked alarmed.

She yawned, stretched, still staring, and said, “My brother. I just had me a witchin' dream, and you was in it. Now I open my eyes, and here you are in front of me lookin' so pale, like you just seen a ghost.”

I told her, “In a way, I just did.”

I've spent a lifetime maintaining my own counsel, and keeping secrets. Even if I believed in the value of psychoanalysis, emotional purging—name a popular term—I swore an oath to a covenant long ago that bars me from any such therapy. So, after living such a long and solitary internal existence, I discovered something new in Ransom. She's become a friend and confidante who, because she actually does treat me with the unconditional love of a sister, has earned my unconditional trust.

So I told her. Told her about Pilar's e-mails, and that I might not be Lake's father. Without getting into my clandestine activities—information I can never divulge—I told her all that I could about Thackery, and then added, “The only other possibility is Tomlinson.”

I'd felt sick. But the expression of outrage on her face rallied me. “You
serious.
That ol' hippie-stork needs someone to tie his cock in a knot. Or throw a potion on him that makes his Willie Johnson limp as boiled yarn. Maybe tha's just exactly what I'll do. Came close to doin' it back the time we dated those few times and I found out he was already diddlin' other womens.”

I nearly smiled.

I said, “The thing is, the timing with Tomlinson and Pilar doesn't work out quite right. He was in Masagua with me before Lake was born, but it was only five or six months before he was born.”

Sounding cynical, Ransom asked, “Were you there when that baby born?”

“No.”

“Know anybody who was?”

“I didn't even know she was pregnant.”

“Uh-huh. Sometimes a woman lie about when a baby come out when she not sure who the daddy be. Who the one that told
you
about the child?”

I had to think back. The answer surprised me. “It was . . .
Tomlinson?
. . . Yeah, it was. He brought me a newspaper that had a photo of Pilar and Lake. It was taken not too long after she gave birth. He had blond hair back then, so I just naturally assumed . . .”

Ransom was nodding, still saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh . . .” Then she asked, “When did the woman tell you that you was the daddy?”

I had to think about that, too. “Because of where they lived, Masagua, I couldn't go back to that country for a long time. There were . . .
reasons.
On my end, not hers. So I guess it would have been in phone conversations. I remember waiting for her to mention it; figuring that she would. And she finally did. When Lake was maybe three or so, she said something like, ‘He's at an age where he's asking about his father. So we need to have a talk.' She put it like that. She said she thought I'd be a good father when the time came for us to be together.”

Ransom said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” in the same knowing tone. “Why you think the timing's so far off with that ugly Stork Man, Tomlinson?”

I said, “It might not be. There's a chance Pilar met Tomlinson before she met me.”

To explain, I had to tell her things about the man that I'd never shared with anyone.

 

 

AS far as I know, even Tomlinson isn't aware how far our relationship goes back.

There's a good reason for that. But because of things that I'm obligated to keep confidential, I couldn't lay it all out for Ransom. I had to blur the edges. I tried to say little but imply a lot.

Ransom has a first-rate intellect and great intuition. She seemed to understand that I was constrained by something, and she reacted to those limitations with only the occasional, careful question.

Stroking the black cat's ears, she listened intently as I told her that not so long ago, in this same room, nearly in tears, Tomlinson had confessed to me that, many years before, he'd participated in a crime that had killed a friend of mine.

I told Ransom, “I already knew. I pretended like I didn't. But I'd found out long ago that Tomlinson was involved. Even before I came back to Sanibel and started leasing this place.”

I could see that she wanted to ask,
How?
Instead, she just nodded.

Tomlinson, I told her, had been a member of a political extremist group responsible for sending a bomb to a San Diego naval installation. The bomb had killed three people and injured another.

One of the sailors killed was a naval Special Warfare officer. The officer had been a good friend. He'd had a wife and a child. I took it personally.

I couldn't tell Ransom that I was a member of an organization that also took the murders very personally. A secret organization so small and select that we took orders from three or fewer people at the very top of the political ladder, and conducted operations that were never officially documented or acknowledged. Not that we knew where our orders originated.

I found that out much later.

Our group had exceptional resources, and few legal or political boundaries.