Authors: James Grippando
Black Horizon (26 page)
“Tell me about it,” said Jack. “Thanks, Cassie. Thanks a million.”
“I think you mean a billion.”
“We shall see,” said Jack.
H
is flight on Bahamasair left Miami International Airport at four p.m. The flight attendant invited him and the other passengers to sit back, relax, and enjoy the fifty-minute flight to Nassau.
Relax.
The operative word. Mission accomplished.
The most important part of the trailer-park “meeting” with Bianca could not have gone better. Perfect execution, actually. His every word mattered, and it was vitally important that she live to pass them on, in detail, to Swyteck, along with the letters from Rafael. Bianca had been sufficiently frightened, at times petrified. But she’d never really lost her head—never screamed, kicked, clawed, or done anything totally stupid. Predicting how a woman will react when threatened was always difficult. Every person was different, and even the same woman might react aggressively under one set of circumstances, passively under another. Any level of resistance from Bianca could have put the outcome—life or death—in question. Luckily, she was the compliant type. Not weak, just not one to put up a physical fight.
Bianca Lopez was no Josefina Fuentes.
He poured himself a scotch. It was well deserved.
He’d handled the one and only glitch beautifully. It had always been his plan to release Bianca so that she could deliver his message, but he could not ignore the risk that she might see through his disguise to some extent. The benzodiazepine injection was his safety net. Without it, Bianca would have lain awake until her roommate’s return from work. For hours, Bianca would have played the attack over and over in her mind, combing through every detail, trying to figure out who he was. Rendering her unconscious for a few hours had been his answer to that problem. He’d played it safe, medically speaking, administering less than half the dosage he’d given Swyteck and his buddy. But it was still too much. Bianca barely had a pulse. Her breathing was too shallow. After several minutes of slow but steady decline, the possibility of losing her had become all too real. He’d found her keys, put Bianca in her car, and started toward the hospital. The impromptu plan was simply to pull her car up to the ER entrance and leave her there, if necessary. Halfway to the hospital, however, Bianca’s pulse and breathing returned to normal. She was still unconscious, but it was too dangerous to take her back to her trailer. He parked her car in a lot near the hospital and left her there.
There had been no way of knowing how quickly the police would find Bianca. It might have taken three minutes. Or she could have sat there all night. He knew, however, that as soon as they revived Bianca and learned of her attack, the roadblocks out of the keys would be traps waiting to be sprung. At Miami International Airport, baggage checkers, gate attendants, TSA personnel, immigration authorities, and a host of federal agents would be on alert for any suspicious character traveling alone to the islands and possibly on to Havana. Neither Swyteck, prior to his release, nor Bianca, before hers, had managed a good look at his face, but the safe thing was to assume that law enforcement would have at least a minimal physical description: over six feet tall, two hundred pounds, dark eyes, solid build, strong as a bull. Of course the authorities would be smart enough to monitor the circuitous routes to Havana through Cancún, Kingston, or Nassau.
The upshot was that it had been best to wait a day for things to cool off. His business with the bank in Nassau could wait that long. He needed a place to put ten million dollars, but he didn’t need it yesterday. Time was on his side. The closer the oil got to Florida, the more pressure the government would feel to pay an informant.
To the spill
, he told himself in a silent toast, raising his glass of scotch, but it was empty already.
He ordered another from the flight attendant and drank more slowly, listening to two guys from Nashville in the seats in front of him. He sized them up in ten seconds. Clowns like them were all over Cuba. Two married guys flying Miami to Nassau, leaving their wives at home to go fishing in the Bahamas—
I’ll be out on a boat, honey. You can’t reach me by cell”
—only to hop another plane to Havana and roll with the
jineteras
. Their conversation turned to the spill.
“Honestly, who gives a shit about a little oil in the Gulf Stream? Nothin’ but a bunch of homos in Key West, anyway. A month from now it’ll all be in Newfoundland or Iceland or some other who-the-fuck-cares country.”
The man may have a point.
He emptied the rest of his second scotch from the minibottle and checked the specs. Fifty milliliters. It had taken just one bottle that size to get his message across on the bathroom mirror. One bottle of Josefina’s precious blood.
Drop it.
His point, he assumed, had been made. He didn’t need the likes of Jack Swyteck poking around for evidence in a lawsuit, stirring up the media, trying to find out what had really happened on the Scarborough 8. That was valuable information. Ten million dollars, payable by the United States government. Maybe he was asking too much. Maybe not enough. He could really name his price. Only he knew the cause. Only he.
He squeezed the empty bottle in his hand.
And all pretenders will pay in blood.
J
ack hated to turn on the television. The footage on the five o’clock news was worse than the so-called experts had predicted. The middle Keys were awash in Cuban crude. Overnight, Boot Key Harbor had transformed into
Black
Boot Key.
“Perfect,” said Theo, shaking his head. “Sir, how would you like your Florida snapper tonight? Grilled, fried, regular, or unleaded?”
They were downstairs at Jack’s B&B, watching television in what was originally the smoking room in the Victorian mansion of a nineteenth-century treasure hunter.
Action News
was reporting live from Marathon, where pristine waters and priceless coastline bore the unmistakable scars of a massive spill. Oil-covered pelicans floundering in black goop. Manatees washing up dead on the beach. Coral rocks along the shoreline resembling giant lumps of coal. Cleanup crews worked frantically to protect the tangled and sensitive root system of the mangroves, as their booms and vacuum hoses battled huge black blobs floating on the oil-stained surface.
The young reporter on the scene was wearing a white hazmat suit and protective gloves, but somehow her hair and makeup still looked perfect. Jack turned up the volume for her report on “Keys outrage” over Washington’s inability to convince the Cuban government to allow U.S. vessels to enter Cuban waters so that American cleanup crews and technology could get to the spill at its source. “Until that happens,” she reported, “the United States has no way of knowing how much oil is actually gushing from the mile-deep well, no way of knowing if the proper emergency response is in place, no way of knowing how much longer the spigot will remain open . . .”
Theo pushed himself up from the couch and headed to the door.
“Where you going?” asked Jack.
“Work,” said Theo. “I’m sure Rick can use an extra bartender at the café. Gonna be a lot of down and depressed citizens of the Conch Republic drowning their sorrows tonight. And with this much shit hitting the middle Keys, it’s obvious we ain’t leaving Key West anytime soon. I can use a little extra dough.”
“Okay. Catch ya later.” Jack watched a little more news, channel surfing. His phone rang, and he checked the incoming number.
Speaking of disasters
, he thought, but he took the call.
“Agent Linton, what can I do for you?”
“We’re running out of time, Jack.”
It sounded as if Linton was shouting via Bluetooth from the driver’s seat of his car. Jack would probably need to talk louder than normal to be heard, so he stepped outside to the front porch, where his voice wouldn’t carry all the way up to the rooftop widow’s walk of the old B&B.
“Time for what?” asked Jack.
“To rethink the direction of your lawsuit. I promised to give you until the end of the day to back off the sabotage angle. Guess what? It’s the end of the day. I wanted to take one last shot before I tell the U.S. Attorney that there’s no choice but for the government to intervene and ask the judge to put your case on hold.”
“Intervene on what grounds?”
“National security.”
Jack walked to the porch bannister, looking out onto the street. “Oh, well, national security. Why didn’t you say that in the first place? I’m glad you brought it up, because that changes . . . not a damn thing.”
“I had a feeling that would be your response.”
“Thanks for calling.”
“One more thing, Jack. We haven’t forgotten about that trip you and Theo Knight took to Cuba last week. Totally illegal. I understand that you’re of Cuban descent, but visiting relatives was not the purpose of your trip. And Theo Knight is just a blatant violation of the trade embargo. I didn’t bring this up before. That was out of professional courtesy to your wife, since she’s an FBI agent and all.”
“Am I supposed to thank you for that?”
“Thanking me would be premature. You see, Andie told me this morning that she wants you treated fairly as a victim of a kidnapping. But the way I deal with Jack Swyteck, attorney at law, is strictly up to me. So I’m taking her at her word. No more favors because you’re married to the FBI. You got it?”
“Are you actually threatening to prosecute me for violating the embargo?”
“We can start with prosecution. From there I was thinking that we might move on to suspension from the practice of law. Maybe disbarment.”
“This is outrageous.”
“Make no mistake, Jack. The investigation into sabotage on the Scarborough 8 is a matter of national security on the highest level. It’s absolutely critical that the criminal investigation proceed without interference and public distraction from your civil lawsuit. So here’s the deal: you can either find your way onto the bus, or you can be under it. Your choice. I’ll give you until tomorrow at noon. Have a good night.”
The call ended with a click, which triggered a replay of Linton’s buzzwords, if only in Jack’s mind:
national security
.
Jack was so angry he could barely think. He went back inside to watch the news, gathering images from every south Florida station. It was all about the local disaster. A few angry residents called it a national disgrace. Not a word about national security.
Until he switched to cable news.
Printed in bold letters in the banner at the bottom of the screen were the very same words that Agent Linton had just uttered in his threat, and they were even in quotation marks: “A MATTER OF NATIONAL SECURITY ON THE HIGHEST LEVEL.”
Jack’s phone rang. It was Theo. He ignored the call and focused on the news coverage.
“Shocking rhetoric out of Washington about the Cuban oil disaster,” the anchorman reported. “Minutes ago, thirteen congressional leaders gathered in the rotunda on Capitol Hill to condemn what they call an egregious breach of our national security.”
Jack’s phone rang a second time. Theo again.
Give it a rest, dude.
“Speaking for the group,” the anchorman continued, “was senior senator from Utah Robert Orville. Here’s what he had to say.”
The scene shifted to inside the Capitol, where a man stood before a bouquet of microphones, flanked by other men in suits. The clip picked up somewhere in the midst of his impassioned plea:
“We are calling for a special investigative committee to convene immediately,” said the senator, “and to invoke all of its powers to get to the bottom of what caused this unspeakable disaster. Security on U.S. oil rigs is tighter than ever since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, making them difficult targets for terrorists. The same cannot be said of the Chinese oil rig in Cuban waters.”
A reporter in the galley interrupted. “Senator, are you saying that the Scarborough 8 explosion was the work of terrorists, such as al-Qaeda?”
“Nothing has been brought to my attention that would link this act to any specific terrorist group,” he said. “But it’s essential that this inquiry consider all possibilities. And I do mean
all
. For example, we do know that certain left-wing elements fully expected that offshore drilling would stop after the Deepwater Horizon. It has continued to grow, both in sensitive areas off the Florida coast and in the Arctic Sea above Alaska.”
“Excuse me, Senator,” the reporter followed up. “Are you suggesting that the Cuban consortium’s oil rig was the target of antidrilling left-wing extremists who are trying to create negative sentiment against offshore oil production?”
He raised his hands, as if to absolve himself. “I’m not making any accusations. Like I said, it’s important to consider all possible angles. Thank you very much,” he said as he stepped away from the podium.
Jack could hardly believe what he was hearing. Two decades wasn’t really that long, but things that passed for reasoned political discussion in modern-day Washington would have been dismissed as lunacy when Jack’s father had run for governor. Linton’s words echoed in his mind:
This is not about politics. It’s about national security.
Jack accessed the Web on his iPhone and instantly put those words to the test. His suspicion was quickly borne out. A search of “Senator Robert Orville” and “Barton-Hammill” pulled up over five hundred hits. A political action committee funded by defense contractor Barton-Hammill was Senator Orville’s largest political donor.
Surprise, surprise.
Jack thought about calling his father for some political insights, but he resisted the impulse. Jack had made a promise to himself and to his stepmother after the trip to the emergency room, and he’d assiduously avoided putting any more stress on his old man. He made a quick call to Cassie in New York. She’d seen the same news from the Capitol, and she’d already made the same link between the senator and the defense contractor.
