Doc Ford 19 - Chasing Midnight (5 page)

From the instant I saw Vladimir mounting a sound arrester on his weapon, that possibility had been in my mind. There are at least three foreign governments, and two foreign black ops organizations, that would me shoot on sight, given the opportunity. It was not improbable that one of those groups had been tracking me for a while and had chosen Vanderbilt Island because the caviar gathering provided plausible cover. After all, that’s what had brought
me
here.

How much did the bodyguard know? That’s what I had to find out. And I would—as soon as the man regained consciousness.

How I handled the situation depended on how he answered my questions. I didn’t want to go to extremes—in fact, dreaded the tight-sphincter complexities of disposing of a body or staging an accident.

If the man posed a threat to my career, my group or my freedom, however, I wouldn’t hesitate.

A
s I swam Vladimir into the shallows, I heard more gunshots in the distance. Someone was burning a lot of ammunition. Because the reports lacked the distinctive give-and-take rhythm of enemies trading fire, the random bursts suggested chaos… or panic. It was as puzzling as it was surreal.

Nor did my interrogation of Vladimir go as smoothly as expected. I discovered that I hadn’t kept the man underwater long enough to confirm he was unconscious. The instant our feet touched bottom, he surprised me by hammering me in the ribs with his elbow, then caught me with a right fist to the forehead as he turned.

It was a glancing blow. I was wearing fins, though, which put me at a disadvantage. As if wearing clown shoes, I went stumbling and splashing sideways, struggling to keep my balance. When I finally went down, Vladimir was charging me through knee-deep water to continue the fight—a mistake on his part.

The man should have run for shore and escaped into the shadows. It might have saved him from what happened minutes later.

I was wearing old-style Rocket fins. They’re heavy, but I like them because they don’t float, and because they’re big enough to allow me to wear jungle boots rather than booties, if the situation requires.

Tonight I was wearing worn-out Nikes, not boots, but that didn’t make it any easier to pry the fin straps over the heels of my shoes. That’s what I was trying to do when the man threw himself on me, yelling something in Russian.

As he clubbed at me with his fists, I managed to get one fin off and toss it toward the dock before deciding I’d better fight back. If he connected solidly, knocked me out, he might be able accomplish with his hands what he’d failed to do with the pistol.

I became an armadillo—pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms over my head for protection. It gave the bodyguard enough confidence to do what I anticipated. I waited until I felt the man’s body weight move to my shoulders as he tried to get a clean shot at my face. He was riding too high, in wrestling jargon, something he wouldn’t have understood. That subtle change in balance allowed me to crab-crawl backward from beneath his legs and escape behind him. Out the back door—more wrestling jargon.

That quick, our positions were reversed—me on top, him on his belly in the water. Twice, he tried to slam the back of his head into my face, but I was pressed too close for him to connect. The positioning allowed me enough control to free one hand, pry off my second fin and lob it close to where the other fin had landed.

When I did, he attempted to elbow me. I caught his left wrist and levered it up between his shoulder blades. At the same time, I grabbed his throat with my right hand, lifted his face out of the water and leaned close enough to his ear to whisper, “Why are you doing this? I didn’t shoot Kazlov, damn it!”

Struggling to breathe, Vladimir made a guttural sound of pain but didn’t answer.

I jammed the man’s face into the water, pushed it to the bottom and held him there while I refueled with ten deep breaths. As I did, my eyes scanned the docks, then moved to the island. The bodyguard had been in contact with someone before he’d had radio problems. Soon, they would come looking for him.

I leaned and squinted, trying to discern details. Was there someone in the shadows, moving toward us? My glasses were still on the fishing line around my neck, so I couldn’t be sure.

I watched for a couple of more seconds, then returned my attention to Vladimir. After levering the man’s head up, I waited until he was done coughing water before I tried again.

“Tell me what the hell’s going on and I’ll let you go.”

When he refused, I pushed his face to the bottom for another ten count, as my head swiveled toward the island. Yes, there had been someone standing near a tree—possibly the shooter’s ally. I knew for certain only because the blurry shape I’d seen was now gone.

Where?

I couldn’t risk remaining in the open, an easy target. Not with so many trigger-happy people around. So I grabbed the bodyguard’s belt and dragged him closer to the dock in case I needed cover… or a safe exit.

Then I waited as Vladimir tried to stand. He was so winded and disoriented that he staggered and fell before finally making it to his feet. For several seconds, he stood at leaning rest, hands on his knees, fighting to get his breath.

There didn’t appear to be much fight left in the guy, but he had fooled me before. By the time he’d recovered enough to stand erect, and look at me, I was holding my dive knife, palm up, because I wanted him to see it.

“You didn’t try to kill me because of explosives,” I said in a low voice, straightening my glasses. “Or because Kazlov was shot. This has something to do with his boat being robbed, doesn’t it?
Doesn’t it?
”

The man snorted as if I was too stupid to understand, his eyes moving from me to the Russian’s yacht moored at the T-dock, seventy-some yards in the distance. His contempt caused me to think of another explanation for why the night had suddenly turned violent.

No… there were several possibilities, in fact—explanations that were as varied as the three powerful men who had come to Vanderbilt Island as Viktor Kazlov’s guests.

E
arlier in the day, Kazlov had told me he was disappointed in the turnout for his caviar party. I doubted that, considering the difficult time I’d had finessing invitations, but hadn’t challenged the point. The Russian claimed he had invited experts from around the world, but the only notables who’d showed were his three most powerful rivals, an Iranian, a Turkmenian and the millionaire from China.

Later, I had made it my business to meet them all—introductions filled with meaningless niceties to deflect conversation. It is a device that powerful people use to keep their inferiors at a respectable distance.

Lien Hai Bohai was Chinese, but he had been educated in Hong Kong, so his English was as polished as his manners. He owned a fleet of fishing boats that were actually floating fish factories. Bohai also owned three aquaculture facilities and was among the primary reasons that China is now the world’s leading exporter of farm-raised caviar. Since China began encouraging private enterprise and entrepreneurialism
more than a decade ago, men like Bohai had turned the behemoth’s economy around.

The surname of Kazlov’s Iranian competitor was Armanie. Because I’d done research, I knew Armanie’s given name was Abdul, but the man rarely used it.

The third man, from Turkmenia, was Darius Talas—a massively fat man whose first name stuck with me because I associated his silver hair and mustache with the fictional Dorian Gray.

Like Kazlov, his guests had spent the previous two days gambling, partying and watching dolphins humiliate themselves at the resort across the bay—a spectacle Tomlinson and I had intentionally missed.

“Bonding,” the Russian called it.

Like Kazlov, both Caspian neighbors had brought a security “assistant” to the island—high-stakes businessmen hire bodyguards for a reason. Unlike Kazlov, his competitors had business interests that included more than caviar and black marketeering. Talas and Armanie were also making a fortune drilling for oil in the Caspian Sea, so caviar wasn’t their primary source of income.

Lien Hai Bohai was different from his rivals in several ways (although he, too, had enjoyed the casino, I’d been told). Kazlov and Armanie were seldom separated from their bodyguards while Bohai, a frail man, in his seventies, seemed unconcerned with security. He was traveling with two women, no security guys. And, unlike the others, he had made his fortune stripping the sea bottom of life rather than probing it for fossil fuels.

All three of Kazlov’s rivals were rich—an important similarity, if one of them had something to do with breaking into the Russian’s yacht. If they’d done it, they weren’t looking for money.

“Someone stole information,” I said to the bodyguard, as we stood facing each other in thigh-deep water. “That’s what this is all
about. You didn’t ask me anything about what was stolen, so it has to be data of some type. The thieves were after something that had no value once it was compromised. That’s why you don’t care about recovering it.”

I made sure he saw my knife before I said, “That’s why you didn’t ask me about the robbery before you tried to shoot me. Nothing else explains it. What did they take, a computer? A hard drive?”

Photographs were another possibility, but I was thinking about Kazlov’s claim that he had discovered a way to create a hybrid caviar using DNA from beluga and Gulf sturgeon. The Russian had explained the process to me, but in vague terms, when I’d met him earlier.

Vague or not, I understood more than Kazlov realized, because sturgeon aquaculture was another subject I had researched. In fact, I had spent a couple of days in nearby Sarasota, at Mote Marine Laboratory’s seventeen-acre research facility, talking to experts. There, Jim Michaels, one of the world’s leading authorities on sturgeon farming, had provided me with the latest data.

Thanks to Michaels, I had learned more from what Kazlov
didn’t
say, during our half-hour conversation, than from the few details he provided. I had come away from the talk convinced that Kazlov, and his aquaculture specialists, were working on something unusual. A unique protocol, possibly, that had more to do with manipulating chromosomal sets in sturgeon than disguising beluga DNA. Research on transgenic fish has been around just long enough to earn the process an acronym: GMOs. Genetically modified organisms. And also long enough to prove its profitability.

The fact that I knew this in advance caused me to suspect that Kazlov was lying about developing a sturgeon hybrid. Why would he bother? More important, why would Kazlov’s three powerful competitors pretend to be interested? They were knowledgeable men.
They had to know already what I myself had only recently learned. According to the experts at Mote Marine Lab, there are only two true holy grails in the world of producing beluga-grade caviar.

If Kazlov had discovered either of these holy grails, his research was well worth stealing. It would be worth
billions
, not millions of dollars. And it
could
be stolen—if the Russian’s research was incomplete and not yet patentable as an exclusive intellectual property.

I didn’t consciously think about all this as I stood, holding the knife, questioning Kazlov’s bodyguard. I had been going over it in my mind all afternoon. Genetic engineering, in all fields, requires exacting protocols if the results are to be duplicated. If Kazlov had made an unprecedented breakthrough, his beluga protocols and research records had to exist. Which is why I immediately suspected that a computer hard drive had been stolen

Kazlov’s research data would have been backed up in many places, of course, so it was pointless to recover a missing hard drive or to question the thief who’d stolen it. But killing the thief before he shared data worth billions of dollars made good business sense—to a black marketeer like Kazlov, anyway.

Once again, I said to Vladimir, “Someone stole a hard drive. Or a computer. Nothing else adds up. But why suspect me?”

I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach when the bodyguard
shrugged and said, “I once work for Russian State Security Committee. For man who does not exist, you are very famous, Dr. Ford. Of course you are first person I suspect.”

Russian State Security Committee and the KGB—the same organization.

I replied, “That doesn’t mean I shot your boss or rigged an explosive device—or broke into his damn boat.”

Probably fearing I now had reason to kill him, Vladimir offered me an alternative, saying, “You come to fishing lodge and help me find Mr. Kazlov, if you don’t believe. We in same work line, you and me. Tonight”—the man took a look over his shoulder before continuing—“tonight, everyone go crazy. Never seen such craziness. Maybe you need our help. Maybe we need yours.”