Blackmail Earth (16 page)

“Is this a nice way of asking if I want him put down?”

“It’s as delicate as I can be.”

“Save him. I don’t care what it costs.”

“I can’t promise you that he’ll live. He could get sepsis and—”

“Do it,” Dafoe interrupted. “Whatever you can.”

Dr. Berkley shouted for her assistant, then turned back to Dafoe. “We’ve got to get started right now. You should wait outside.”

“I’m going over to ER to see Forensia.”

*   *   *

A young doctor had just finished putting sixteen stitches into Forensia’s left forearm when Dafoe walked in. She had seven more in her leg.

“You okay?” Dafoe asked her.

The physician started to answer. Forensia cut him off: “I’m fine.”

When Dafoe heard that she wasn’t about to let anyone, including a doctor, speak for her, he figured that she really was doing a lot better.

The physician left them alone.

“Christ, Dafoe, I really went insane when I saw those coyotes ripping up Bayou. I haven’t hunted since I turned vegan at fourteen, and there I was gunning them down. The biggest coyote took it personal and tore into me. I had to use your rifle like a club, and when I got him down I really went crazy. Beat him halfway to death before I thought to shoot him and put him out of his misery. It makes me wonder who the hell I really am.” She winced and shook her head as she finished, and he knew she needed reassurance.

“The person who saved Bayou’s life, that’s who. They’re operating right now, and he’s got a good chance of making it, thanks to you.”

Forensia burst into tears of joy and stood up, hugging him. Dafoe held her till she steadied. Then he helped her check out of the hospital, gather up her prescriptions, and get into his pickup.

*   *   *

Tears of rage came hours later, after Sang-mi hiked to a remote meditation cabin with a simple meal for GreenSpirit. She found the Wiccan leader murdered, mutilated, her body drenched in blood.

Sheriff Walker rushed out there as soon as the breathless, hysterical Korean acolyte called 911.

“A ritual murder, that’s what we’ve got,” the sheriff later told a large, tightly pressed crowd of journalists who’d raced up from the city. He described the lurid pentagrams that had been carved into GreenSpirit’s chest, cheeks, and belly, and promised a “full and complete investigation, no matter where the evidence leads.” The comment immediately sparked speculation that GreenSpirit’s vicious demise was linked to the one man who might have the most to gain by her silencing: presidential candidate Roger Lilton.

But every witch and Pagan in the region feared that a witch hunt—in the most horrific sense of the words—had begun.

CHAPTER 11

The presidential palace gleamed white as sugar under the glaring sun, a promise of shade and drink amid marble and silk. A mere block away, Rick Birk, seventy-four-year-old investigative reporter, fanned himself furiously as his rickshaw driver made his way through the crowded streets. Despite his discomfort, Birk loved breaking out his tropical-weight safari suits—custom tailored with high collars to hide his sagging neck—for equatorial forays that reminded viewers he was still a dashing, war-torn foreign correspondent.

Decades ago he’d draped his fit young frame in khaki every morning, and he could still wax nostalgic for the years when he wore his bwana garb to cover the Vietnam War for the Associated Press. Especially alluring were his deeply cherished memories of dropping his soft cotton drawers for nights soaked with gin and tonic and sex with a staggering array of Saigonese women. That’s if they were women. They were so goddamned teensy that it had been hard to tell in his nightly stupor, so Birk made a point of preserving his upright sense of self by
never
asking their age. Just grab two, three, four of them and go. Break out opium, hash, and Thai sticks, and share the smoke with his newest nubile friends. And then cavort for hours in petite fields of firm flesh. Ah, those
were
the days.
Don’t let anybody kid you.
Christ, he was glad to have been alive when you could wet your wick and not get sick. At least not with anything truly ghastly.

His Vietnam reporting earned him a Pulitzer before he jumped the Good Ship Print for the greater fame of television, where he was lauded for possessing the pluck of Morley Safer, the unmitigated gall of Mike Wallace, and the sangfroid of Peter Jennings—all names that meant less and less with the passage of every hour in the fiercely burgeoning multimedia universe of the twenty-first century.

Birk’s highest accolades had come decades ago. These days, he was even scorned in his own newsroom. No less than Jenna Withers could hang up on him with outrageous impunity. It helped to know that there had once been a much sweeter time when she would have done penance on her knees for that impropriety—or been out on her ass.

Intimations of his glory days often crept up on Birk when he found himself, as he did this afternoon, on his way for drinks. Or as he preferred to call it, a “briefing from a high government official.” In this case, the Maldivian minister of defense.

That these randomly cast, largely forgotten islands should even need a minister of defense would have struck the world as ludicrous, until the second terrorist bombing in a year tore apart a street no more than three blocks from where Birk ambled along …
so
slowly that he had to actively resist an urge to slip off his fine alligator belt and flog the little brown bugger hauling him along.

No one but idiots was impressed with his television appearances these days. He ascribed this to the decline of “traditional media,” rather than his ravaged looks—the pits and craters from the removal of numerous precancerous skin growths. The relentless sun, not his withered organ, had humbled him most visibly. In bad light, Birk looked pocked with shrapnel, and when he appeared on camera, he layered on more pancake than a drag queen with a five o’clock shadow.

What with the toll of alcohol and the faulty scribes of memory, he honestly couldn’t recall the last time he’d been laid; and self-pleasuring—a miserable tonic for the palsied and lame—had been but a limp handshake for as long as he could remember.

In the end, drink became his favorite friend, and the tang not of flesh but of Schweppes and Bombay gin all but came alive on his tongue a half block before he arrived at the palace gate.

Amazing what anticipating a stiff one can do for you, how it can tease with a single imaginary scent. After all, look what poured out of Proust after tasting a simple madeleine. Birk figured the juniper flourish of gin might serve him equally well, if he ever picked up the pen again. He supposed he could give the world of letters a real boost, if he were of such a mind; they were in need of his reserves.

Meanwhile, his driver, sweat spilling off his back in disgustingly swollen streams, brought the rickshaw to Birk’s destination. But the man had the ill grace to pant like a cart dog.
A tip, a tip, that’s what he wants. Well, fuck me.

Birk groaned loudly as he lifted his calcium-sapped bones from the thinly padded seat. He paid and even tipped handsomely, leaving the little native smiling. But then all those rickshaw drivers in Saigon had flashed rows of betel-stained teeth before blowing you straight to hell.

“Rick Birk,” he announced dramatically in his sonorous voice at the palace gate, giving an imperious flick of his hand to the guard. His name ought to have guaranteed admission. But this slack-skinned brown man wasn’t impressed. Almost as bad, he wore what could plausibly have been a bunny suit. The one-piece design seemed more appropriate for toddler wear; it was the color of cheap Easter eggs and had epaulets as large and floppy as rabbit ears. The man raised his hand to keep Birk at bay. Then he entered a gaudily decorated guardhouse with a pink roof, turquoise door, and glass so old and heat-stricken it looked like it would shatter if you sneezed. Birk watched him place a call on a landline. After a few moments he nodded and hung up before returning to send Birk, without escort, to the towering porte cochere where another bunny-suited brown bugger opened the door to the palace’s impressively large reception room.

A wonderfully lithe Indian woman in a red sari led the reporter up a winding staircase to the minister’s office. The rear view was enticing as the rounded cheeks of her bottom glanced temptingly against the shiny fabric. Never had Birk felt so strongly that youth was wasted on the young. What he wouldn’t give to be thirty-five again, with a broad, brilliant smile. Back in the long ago, women like Miss Sari had led him on just such a meandering path to their bedrooms in just such a flirty manner.
Just once more, for God’s sake.

At least she was eye candy. The minister’s office lacked all appeal. The walls were white and stark, no more encumbered with style or flourish than the sapped religion they believed in. Wait, he spotted a crescent and a star, and some mumbo-jumbo lettering that might have been Maldivian in origin—or from the moon, for all Birk knew or cared. These Muslims were a boorish lot, positively thirteenth century.

Another look around was a cause for real grief: not a drop of gin. No tonic. Not even a single lonely lime in the minister’s office. Water? She offered
him
water?
Whales
shit
in water.

“The new austerity?” he asked Sari archly, who might have been a secular holdover in her sleek red dress. But she didn’t favor him with so much as a smile as she left.

Birk was old school enough to carry a silver flask neatly curved to fit an aging gent’s not-so-nimble frame. And as soon as the door shut behind his comely escort, he nipped the elixir that he loved so much.

He’d no sooner felt the gin’s first soothing effects when Minister of Defense Hassan Darby entered, a short man with a long beard and the faltering steps of a rickets-stricken midget. His excessively large brown suit didn’t help, cuffs overrunning his wrists like starving tribesmen laying siege to the gates of a refugee camp.

“Mr. Birk. So sorry to keep you waiting. It seems we have so many luminaries today that I have only ten minutes for you.”

“Luminaries?” It didn’t pass Birk unnoticed that he hadn’t been included in that breath, but mostly he was gobsmacked that the little brown fucker had the temerity to cut short the forty-five minutes that he’d been promised. Bad enough that he hadn’t permitted Birk to bring along a cameraman. “What other luminaries are you expecting today?”

Birk’s question appeared to flummox the minister, but briefly: “Surely, you must know about the arrival of the
Dick Cheney
.”

The former vice president?
“No, I didn’t know. When’s he coming?”

“He? No, no.”
Ho-ho-ho.

What an annoying laugh.

“It is the ship the
Dick Cheney
. A giant tanker ship. It is in our Maldivian territorial waters even while we waste Mr. Birk’s precious time. Goodness, we are down to six minutes.”

The tanker, right. He knew about that. Didn’t know it was named the
Dick
fucking
Cheney.
And if the
Dick
fucking
Cheney
was plodding along in local waters, then Senator Gayle Higgens couldn’t be far behind. Birk would have to act fast.

“Tell me, Mr. Minister, how serious is your problem with homegrown terrorists?”

“No, Mr. Birk, you must not say … what is that word? ‘Homegrown’? They all come from far away. No proud Maldivian would ever take the life of his brother or sister. You must get that right in your reports. We insist.”

“What about your homegrown jihadists? They’re not so proud, are they?”

“Ah, look at this, Mr. Birk.” He pointed to his gold Rolie. “Time for you to go. Me, too. A luminary is coming.”

*   *   *

Adnan sat in the small fishing boat, squeezed below the gunwale with four jihadists from Waziristan. They’d arrived on his island at dusk last night, minds laden with the schemata of the tanker they planned to hijack, eyes gleaming with paradise. All of them knew death was imminent, either from seizing the vessel or from the detonation of the bomb that Adnan had become.

Last night Parvez had strung a large black Islamic flag between two trees. Then he’d brought out a video camera.

“Adnan, you are a martyr…”

Recording Adnan’s final statement had always been part of the plan. Even so, when Parvez said those words, Adnan’s spirits soared as surely as if he’d been praised by Allah Himself.
Martyr.
The highest honor—and it had been bestowed upon
him.
How great to have lived to hear such praise. The supreme leaders of Islam would know of him, and of Parvez, too, for he was the orchestrator of a martyrdom so great that billions of people would bear witness.

His friend went on: “Do you wish to say anything before you start on your path to martyrdom?”

“I wish to say that I’m doing this,
inshallah,
to make retribution for the Christian and Jewish pigs who are killing my country…”

Parvez nodded approval of every word. Then, on cue, the jihadists rushed up from the beach and flanked Adnan for the camera with their guns and heavy cartridge belts and RPGs. Their shoulder-mounted weapons pointed straight to the heavens, and Adnan had been startled to notice for the first time that the rockets were shaped like the minarets of Malé. Surely chance alone could not explain such a blessed coincidence: The unholy who dared to ban the most sacred towers would be answered with minarets of steel and explosives that would claim them in storms of fire and death.

Those weapons now lay hidden beneath layers of netting thick with the rotting smells of the sea. The fisherman who had sailed them past dozens of the country’s tiny islands now trailed the
Dick Cheney
and the five Maldivian Coast Guard boats that were escorting it.

Adnan had been approved for duty on the supertanker. Given his experience, training, and seaman’s papers, his employment had never been in question. He would be welcomed when he walked onto the wharf, his fully packed vest covered by a layer of clothes.