Wild Card pp-8 Read online

  Now, at half past eleven that night, Nimec was in the chair by the bedroom window again, his robe belted around him, wondering what had happened to the blissful guy with his face who’d sat in that spot not too many hours earlier. He’d tried referencing the various thoughts and events that had brought about his calmly untroubled state of mind, but they hadn’t helped him settle back into it. And, most irritatingly, he just couldn’t get any shut-eye.

  Filled with tension, Nimec had briefly considered a stroll through the villa’s sculpted gardens, then decided against it — walking without a clear sense of purpose and destination never relaxed him. He thought about taking a swim in the big tiled pool across the grounds, but bumped the notion for similar reasons. The reality was he felt derelict. A splash under the full moon would only compound that feeling and frustrate him with more self-disapproval.

  Nimec shifted restlessly, thinking he could use something to help him unwind. Roaming about downstairs yesterday on a minor expedition of discovery, he’d stumbled upon what he supposed was called an entertainment room, with a high-def flat-screen television and a wet bar. The bar had a refrigerator that he’d found stocked with beer, wine, and soft drinks. A beer would go down nicely, he concluded. If all the amenities went to type, there might be satellite TV feeds from the States. The difference in time zones between Trinidad and California made catching a West Coast baseball game a distinct possibility… some late innings, at least. Maybe the Mariners were pounding Oakland tonight. Or better yet, Anaheim. Though, given the injuries they always got from plowing into bases, walls, and opposing players like fools, Nimec figured it might be best leaving the Angels alone to pound on themselves.

  He stood in the darknened room, turned from the window, and carried his chair over to the little table nook from which he’d taken it. Then, as he was starting toward the door, he saw Annie sitting up in bed.

  Nimec looked at her with mild surprise in the moonlight coming through the parted blinds.

  “Didn’t know you were awake,” he said.

  She shrugged, leaning against a mound of pillows, her shoulders bare, the covers pulled just above her breasts.

  “I haven’t been for very long,” she said in a quiet voice. “You?”

  “Awhile,” he said.

  Annie was watching him.

  “I kind of guessed,” she said. “Can you tell me why?”

  Nimec hesitated, produced a breath.

  “You know,” he said.

  “Work,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I’ve been having a great time here, enjoying every minute of it,” he said. And paused. “I love you, Annie.”

  She watched him another moment and suddenly chuckled.

  “Something funny?” he said.

  “Remembering our shower this afternoon,” she said, “I was left with the distinct impression that you might like me some.”

  Nimec massaged his chin, feeling a little stupid.

  “Is it still Ricci?” Annie said.

  “No,” he said. “I promised myself I’d put that away for a while, and I did.”

  “So it’s about Megan’s tipster.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m supposed to be finding out about it,” he said. “And I feel I’m losing time.”

  Annie was silent.

  “What is it you want to do?” she said.

  Nimec rubbed his chin thoughtfully again.

  “I want to head over to that main shipping harbor we passed on the way in from the airport,” he said. “And I want to have a look around.”

  Annie was silent again, her eyes steady on him. “Go,” she said. “Do what you have to.”

  Nimec stood there near the foot of the bed for perhaps a full minute.

  “You sure you’re okay with me leaving?” he said at last.

  Annie looked at him from where she sat against the headboard, then gave him the slowest of nods.

  “As long as you always make sure to come back,” she said.

  * * *

  Out in the garage, Nimec opened the front door of his Mustang loaner, but stopped himself before climbing inside. He’d recalled something Beauchart had told him over their dishes of curry duck and roti at the previous night’s dinner reception.

  A thin, hatchet-faced man with a broad expanse of forehead and smoothly combed gray hair, the onetime GIGN chief had, as advance-billed, matched Nimec’s fondness for vintage cars and shown a keen interest in discussing them. He’d also been quick to talk shop about how the expensive vehicles in his fleet were adapted for extreme high security usage.

  “The Jankel Rolls you sent to pick us up almost had me fooled,” Nimec had said. “I wouldn’t have known it was armored except for the weight of its door. Then I noticed the flashers, and the extra buttons on the rear consoles, and those speaker covers for the P.A. And I guessed it had a full package.”

  Beauchart had nodded.

  “For me, retrofitting the older model passenger cars is an enjoyable challenge,” he’d said. “As an enthusiast I don’t want to compromise their luxury and style. Even so, I insist they meet or surpass NATO Level Seven standards of protection.”

  “Hard to improve on armor that can stop AP rounds and take the brunt of a mine or grenade blast.”

  Again Beauchart had nodded.

  “I admit to being a compulsive tinkerer,” he’d said.

  “All the work is done at our own armoring plant on the mainland. And with an open-ended budget, which is far too great a temptation.” Beauchart had smiled. “The first question I’ll ask myself about a vehicle is,

  ‘Would I be at ease having a Forbes Top Ten business leader ride in it?’ Then I ask, ‘What about the American president?’ Last, I ask, ‘What about the bloody pope?’ ” Beauchart’s smile had grown wider. “If there’s any hedging in my mind, I’ll order added upgrades that cost a small fortune… and will be unnoticeable to the casual eye.”

  He had eagerly compared notes about specific shielding materials, and Nimec had found his preferences not unlike UpLink’s standard high-sec configuration, a multilayered system of ballistic laminate inserts and flexible nylon floor armor, coupled with steel panels and anti-explosive engine, radiator, and fuel tank wraps. Beauchart had also gone on to mention loading his VIP sedans with options such as automatic fire controls, run-flat tires, hidden ram bumpers… and real-time satellite tracking units with remote door lock and ignition disconnects.

  Now Nimec couldn’t help but look at the Mustang and wonder. A sports convertible was too light to be armored without having its balance thrown dangerously out of whack. But there wasn’t much of a trick to putting in GPS acquisition hardware its driver couldn’t see. Assuming for a moment that was somebody’s goal. Even if it was just hidden for aesthetic reasons.

  Was he too suspicious? Could be, he decided. But what was the harm in playing it safe?

  Nimec turned to the Vespa. Less likely that it would have a built-in tracking device. The object of installing one on this island would not be to locate a stolen vehicle, which couldn’t go further than the island’s shores without being loaded onto a boat, but to get a bead on a person who’d been snatched when driving or getting into or out of it. In the case of a grab taking place while somebody was out with the little scooter, the abductor would want to ditch it as fast as he could and then make a getaway with his victim, eliminating any use in having a tracker aboard.

  Or so Nimec figured his good hosts would figure. Unless, of course, their goal was to keep tabs specifically on him, which would leave his feet as his only safe mode of transportation. Except that the harbor was miles away… twenty or thirty miles, he guessed.

  A bit much for that midnight stroll of his.

  Nimec sighed. In the absence of any other ideas, it looked like the scooter was his best bet.

  He got on, pressed its electric starter, and sped from the villa’s grounds into the tropical night.

  * * *

  Just under two hours
later Nimec was looking out at the harbor with a pair of high-magnification Gen 4 night vision binocs, the Vespa leaning on its kickstand where he’d stopped it in the roadside darkness. He had been wishing that nothing out of the ordinary would turn up. When you saw a single unusual sighting or occurrence, it was often a strong hint that other oddball things were happening out of sight — once these affairs got going, there hardly ever seemed to be a simple explanation. The further you went beneath the surface, the more you seemed to find that begged closer inspection. And like bugs and rodents lurking under the floorboards, they tended to be the sort of discoveries you would rather not have made.

  Right now Nimec wasn’t optimistic about tonight’s foray being an exception to that unhappy rule. When he thought about it, though, it had really started with those e-mail messages to Megan. He’d viewed Rayos del Sol with a probing eye from the moment of his arrival yesterday, already one layer deep into a mystery. What he was doing here at the waterfront was just following through. Burrowing down to the next level, you might say.

  From the little he’d seen thus far, Nimec got the sense he might be in for some nasty business.

  He stood in the shadows amid a grove of tall royal palms and gazed steadily through the lenses of his binoculars. They represented five thousand dollars’ worth of sophisticated viewing power, their filmless, auto-gated electron plates channeling and amplifying the ambient light through thousands of fiberoptic tubes to give their image greater clarity than any previous generation of night vision device had afforded… and there was plenty of light available, between what was emanating from the harbor’s terminals and berthing areas and the full moon and stars shimmering in the sky.

  Maybe, Nimec thought, they would show him something in the next few minutes that would justify their expense and put his peculiar observations into an explainable context. Something out on the quays across the road, or in the open water beyond the inlet channel and lighthouse, where he’d seen the feeder barges and immense box boat converge. At any rate he hoped some sort of evidence would reveal itself to him, in complete defiance of all his presuppositions. Then his suspicions might quiet down for a time, and he could return to the villa, and slip into bed with Annie. Possibly they could even pick up where they had left off that afternoon, get back to the pleasureful exertions of trying to make the baby they’d decided to have. It could happen — why not? But instinct and prior experience told him that babymaking would have to wait.

  Nimec drew his focus in from the vessels he’d been tracking to the nearby waterfront. He hadn’t had a whole lot to notice there since the last of the three feeders had been pulled away by tugs, and that continued to be the case. The crane operators and other shipyard workers who had lowered numerous forty-foot containers onto the barges had come down from the loading bridge. The heavy-load forklifts and straddle carriers that had hauled the containers to the bridge had mostly rolled back to a storage terminal across the yard, and then parked among the stacks of forty-footers still awaiting transport to off-island or interior destinations. A handful of longshoreman had remained on the quay to supervise the movement of trucks toward the terminal, but the occasional directions they were giving through their bullhorns had a perfunctory sound now that the shipment had departed.

  Though Nimec’s knowledge of dockside transport practices was limited at best, he believed what he’d seen in the yard to this point was probably S.O.P. Had that been all he’d seen, in fact, he very well might have shot away on his scooter over an hour ago.

  It was the deepwater rendezvous that had gotten him wondering. Or what happened during the rendezvous, to be entirely accurate.

  Nimec decided it might be time to check on the freighters again, and was shifting his glasses with that in mind when he heard the unmistakable whap of helicopter blades slicing the air. The noise was coming from a moderate distance to his right, and seemed generated by more than a single chopper.

  Eager for a look, he angled his binocs up at the sky just as a pair of birds appeared above the dark wall of trees marking the northern edge of the island’s wilderness area. They were clipping along in tandem at an altitude of less than five hundred feet, heading northward almost perpendicular to the shoreline. As they reached the harbor, their flight path took a sharp westerly turn away from shore, coincidentally or not toward the anchored box boat and its feeders.

  Nimec studied them through his eyepieces moments before they angled seaward. Like the helicopter he had seen the day before, they were Aug 109’s… and now, staring at their magnified images in shades of green, he could definitively tell they were examples of the Stingray patrol variant he’d mentioned to Murthy, conforming to specs that had become thoroughly familiar to him when UpLink had outfitted an entire fleet for U.S. Coast Guard antiterrorism and drug interdiction units. Both had multiple-tube rocket pods under their flared “wings,” FLIR housings for heat-seeking search equipment above their noses, and open port and starboard gunner posts behind the pilot cabin. The pintle guns themselves, he noted, appeared to be Ma Deuces or some lighter weight.50-calibers. Formidable weaponry for safeguarding paradise.

  Nimec sighed thoughtfully. What had Murthy said while driving from the airport? The goal at Los Rayos is to make our guests feel secure without their being conscious of security, if my meaning is clear.

  It couldn’t have been clearer, Nimec reflected. But he didn’t have to reach further back in his memory than that afternoon and evening for instances on which the security net around the island had been evident to his trained eye. This was his third helicopter sighting, his last one having occurred as he’d piggybacked to shore on Blake the Bronze’s jet ski after his kiteboarding lesson. And later on, when he and Annie were at the beachfront café where they’d gone out for Creole food, he had paid close attention to a Land Rover with black-tinted glass windows that had gone cruising past the parking area, and discerned that it was not only armored but armed… or ready for armaments. There were well-camouflaged firing ports on its side, and the rooftop hatch had been set above its rear seat rather than in front, indicating to him that it was likely equipped with interior machine gun mounts.

  Nimec grunted to himself, lowered his binoculars. The Stingrays having tailed off over the water, he wanted to resume monitoring the cargo vessels. They were, he’d estimated, somewhere between a quarter and a third of a mile from his position, almost at the limit of his viewing range. The box boat’s enormous bulk was visible in silhouette to his naked eye — probably a thousand feet from stem to stern, with four towering jib booms lined along one side of the deck. It had dwarfed the three- or four-hundred-foot-long feeders as they’d approached it soon after leaving the quay.

  Nimec had watched them begin the process of transferring their containers, a feeder barge pulling up under each boom, the larger vessel dropping its cables, the barge crews securing the containers to their lifting slings, the crane teams hoisting them from the feeders onto the box boat’s sizable payload areas. There again, he’d considered none of it exceptional. Even the late hour at which the job got started had seemed normal to him, since commercial harbors commonly operated round-the-clock and had longshoremen working in rotations.

  It had been the running of what might have been fuel supply lines from the huge container vessel to the barges midway through their freight transfer that had perplexed Nimec. Hardly anything to make him cry out from the hilltops about demons and goblins spreading wickedness under the full moon, true, but it still struck him as a little conspicuous. Once the hoses were reeled out from hatches in the hull of the box boat and connected to their opposite numbers on the sides of the feeders, he’d heard a sort of dim, mechanical pumping sound echo over the water in the post-midnight silence. And though he couldn’t claim to know what it sounded like when boats fueled up, Nimec had been around enough airports and landing strips to immediately compare it to the rhythmic pulsations of a jet having its tanks refilled.

  His problem with this was that feeder ships didn’
t need fuel. Or shouldn’t need it. They didn’t have any means of onboard propulsion. Meaning no engines. Granted he was far from a maritime expert, but to his understanding it was why they were attached to tugboats. And say for argument’s sake he was mistaken… Nimec had never heard of a container vessel that could double as a tanker and carry fuel for ship-to-ship resupply.

  He’d been anything but done pondering that apparent anomaly when a couple of closely related ones had started to crop up in a hurry minutes ago. As the unladen feeders disengaged from the box boat, they proceeded to move on past it rather than make a return trip to the harbor. And watching the water, carefully following their progress, Nimec had seen them go outside the effective range of his G4 lenses and disappear into the dark horizon.

  But the tugboats hadn’t. To Nimec’s utter bafflement. On the contrary, they were growing larger in his binoculars at that very moment, plying through the channel, returning to port without the barges.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t make sense of that. And the more he thought about it, the more it threw him.

  Plain and simple, it defied logic.

  Nimec frowned. Speaking of returning to port, he was sure Annie would be worried about him by now. He’d seen things here that had added all kinds of questions to those he’d had before, and knew it would absolutely pay to get some of them answered before he went ahead with his snooping.

  Reluctant as he was to do so — or part of him was, anyway — he needed to call it a night.

  Still frowning slightly, Nimec brought the binocs down from his eyes and climbed onto the Vespa, suspecting he’d have a great deal to occupy his thoughts on his way back to the villa.

  * * *

  Its bark-colored housing placed just below the crown of fanning leaves at treetop level, the thermal imaging camera that had picked up Nimec where he’d stood was one of a great many like it carefully hidden at outdoor and indoor locations throughout Rayos del Sol — under four ounces in weight and small enough to sit on a man’s palm, with a lens that could be covered by the fleshy part of his thumb. Its chip-based microbolometer sensor technology operated coolly, efficiently, and unnoticeably on an internal low-voltage power supply that required infrequent recharges and allowed it to transmit a continuous gray-scale digital feed across the island using a network of compact microwave amplifiers. From the central observation post where the video feed was initially received and processed, it could be relayed to both fixed and mobile secondary monitoring stations via secure wireless internet at a speed almost indistinguishable from real time — blink twice and it would measure the difference between a captured event and its detection by human observers.