Hurricane Fever (21 page)

Once she’d checked his neck, she gave him a few painkillers for the soreness. “I haven’t done a pick-up like that since training,” she chuckled. “Wasn’t sure if the nose would hold the wire.”

“Comforting,” Roo said, clambering through the interior of the small propeller plane to sit in the copilot’s seat. Angela normally took skydivers up in it; there was room for a few people in back and a large door to let people jump out.

Angela’s small company took adventure tourists up in the air over the islands for jumps. But she also worked with the Caribbean Intelligence Group, training young recruits just as happily as she did the adrenaline seekers, which is how Roo first met her.

“So what’s in Barbados?” Angela asked. “I’ve heard some rumors that you have a vendetta against some industrialist. Thought you had put those kinds of days long behind you. And when you went quiet on all of us, I thought you’d retired to your boat.”

She’d known Roo a long time. There was a lot of gray in her tightly kinked hair. But for Angela the sky always called, Roo knew. Always would.

“I retired. The world didn’t,” Roo said as they flew south over the ocean.

“Ah.”

Angela gave him his silence until somewhere east of Grenada. “I have a parachute in the back,” she told him.

“No,” Roo said. “Land at Grantley Adams. They know I’m coming.”

“I thought you were trying to get away,” Angela said.

“Changing location to get closer to the action,” Roo said. “The last time I charged in without support, I almost died. This time, I want the CIG at my back. Or at least, I want to help them.”

*   *   *

They surrounded Angela’s plane with police Land Rovers, flashing lights, Barbados Defense Forces: everything. Roo was hustled off in the back of an armored vehicle while police questioned Angela.

The local CIG head, Anton Rhodes, sat in the back of the utilitarian vehicle with Roo. “The last thing we need are headlines that say ‘Rogue CARICOM secret agent arrested over connection to terrorist attack on Aves Island.’ What were you thinking?”

The train of cars, lights flashing, flew down the highway past a rounded patch of green in a roundabout with a great statue of a bronze slave breaking free of his shackles, face lifting up toward the sky. “Do you love this island, Mr. Rhodes?” Roo asked.

“What?”

“Do you love these hills, these people, the beaches, heading down to Lawrence Gap to go party? Because if Beauchamp is on your island, all of that might be gone.”

“You’ve been watching too much Hollywood,” Rhodes said. But he looked thoughtful.

“Beauchamp wants to cull the world population,” Roo said. “He thinks it’s the responsible thing to do. Too many of us starving. With fewer of us, there will be more to go around. That’s what he said to my face. I think he might be planning to test his plague on an island first.”

“And you think he’d really commit murder on such a scale?”

“He lost family. Losing family will make you crazy.”

Rhodes scratched his chin. “Family is everything.”

*   *   *

Police escorted Roo deep into a bunker underneath a nondescript government office building. More CIG people trickled in. Phone calls were made, and hasty teleconferences went on in offices. Across the breadth of the Caribbean, it seemed, decisions were being made about Roo’s future.

But, Roo knew, those decisions were about all their futures, not just his.

Rhodes returned to the conference room Roo had been locked in under guard. He carried a tray with a carafe of coffee and some donuts. A minor peace offering.

He poured a hot cup for himself and leaned back in one of the plush leather chairs. “Beauchamp arrived on a private jet. Hardly a reason to be suspicious of the man.”

Rhodes half turned in his seat and waved at the wall. It glowed to life. Rhodes pulled a series of grainy images up onto it with a few gestures of his hand.

“Based on word from Aman Constantine we pulled surveillance of the airport,” Rhodes said. “Here is Mr. Beauchamp, of course.”

Roo nodded, his jaw clenching.

Rhodes continued. “It was his luggage that caught our interest.”

On the wall, three large men slid a five-foot-wide case right from the cargo area of the plane into the back of a truck with a ramp. Four more large cases sat inside the plane.

“We don’t know what is in those cases, but…” Rhodes waved at the air, and another picture slid into place. “We have surveillance from Aves. Same cases. So whatever is in those, they came from his lab. And they’re undeclared. So that’s illegal. Let’s assume what you told Constantine, as wild as it sounds, is true: they have weaponized plague here on the island.”

Roo leaned forward. He’d said nothing. He’d been expecting hassle. More SIS and CIA. But instead, Rhodes and the CIG were taking him very, very seriously.

Rhodes saw his expression. “Roo, I’m not sure what’s going on here. I am listening to you because the last time you reported something this insane, no one listened. Then we all watched a nuclear bomb go off in the Arctic and you went dark for all these years. Now you come back out of nowhere, with a warning. And the old hands who worked with you back then: they telling me I should be taking you deadly serious. That’s why I’m still here.”

Roo relaxed. “Thank you,” he said, a heavy weight he hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying fading away.

“This man might not be able to attack the whole world. But if he tries to release some plague, and it is here in Barbados, then forget SIS and the CIA. Because it’s our problem. We have to move against this man now, no matter how powerful he is. And trust me, he is very powerful. Many of us risk our careers. If we’re wrong, it is over for us. You understand that?”

Roo nodded. “I understand. Look, Beauchamp tried to kill me the last time he saw me instead of turning me over to the police…”

“Yeah.” Rhodes swiped the surveillance photos away and replaced them with a new wall-sized display of assembled photos prepared by some staffer somewhere.

“What’s this?” Roo asked, looking at another lavish party photo.

“The man in the center is the Right Honorable Havish Lamity, the ambassador to America. The party is something that began only recently here on Barbados, though I understand there are others up and down the islands. This isn’t a post-hurricane charity, but a Hurricane Ball.”

Roo stood up and looked at the high-definition images. “I see a lot of jewelry and expensive tuxedos.” And marble columns, ice sculptures, attendants with silver trays.

Rhodes put his coffee down and stood alongside Roo. “It’s only been in the last decade that the hurricanes have gotten bad enough to start hitting as far south as Barbados. The Hurricane Ball is a new thing. They often get together before they all fly out to safe places, throw a magnificent party. For the Hurricane Ball, they stay put for the storm and enjoy it together.”

“And Beauchamp is going to this Hurricane Ball?”

“The guest list is … exclusive,” Rhodes said. “But we got a peek at it. What we want you to do, now, is go there.”

Roo looked over. “You know what happened the last time I showed up to a party. He tried to kill me.”

“Yes. Right now we are counting on it. We’re tossing you in, Roo. A live grenade. Because we need something to happen so we can come down on this man like lead brick. Right now, all we know is that you claim he has this virus, but we have nothing concrete.”

“You’re hoping he’ll kill me.”

“Try,” Rhodes said. “Or, to be honest, even succeed. Either way, we get what we need. We’re going to mic you up, add some video, and turn you into our very own human ROV. You are going in to poke the bear, Mr. Jones.”

“Good,” Roo said. “How do I get in? The list is exclusive?”

Rhodes pulled a gold-leaf ticket out of the inner pocket of his jacket. “Call me your fairy godmother.”

Roo examined the ticket. “Who’s August Charleton?”

“The sponsor of this latest Hurricane Ball. A financier for one of Barbados’s more interesting projects, the Verne Plus.” A picture of a long artillery barrel replaced the glittering party scene. Roo looked at it for a while, and then realized his sense of scale was all wrong. There were tiny people down at the base of the barrel, which was suspended by cables inside of a long bridge-like structure. It was an easy quarter of a mile long.

“That’s a big gun,” Roo said.

“It’s the resurrection of an old project. In the 1960s a Canadian-American research team used U.S. Navy guns to try to build a system to shoot small satellites into orbit. It was called Project HARP. Barbados was a great launch point, as it aimed east out over the Atlantic. They shut it down, and the inventor later tried to build a supergun for the Iraqis. Either the Israelis, the Americans, or Iranians assassinated him in 1990; none of them wanted a dictator with the ability to shell their countries from hundreds of miles away.”

“And Charleton’s building a successor?”

“They’ve built a twenty-inch-bore cannon. Longer. Project HARP shot a mini-satellite a hundred and twelve miles up. The Verne Plus puts five hundred pounds into orbit. For a fraction of the price of a rocket. Fairly clever. The government helped co-fund the plan; the idea was to make Barbados a center for space launch activity around the project. What didn’t raise alarms at the time was that Charleton turned down the offer to use the old HARP facility near the airport and Barbados Defense Forces training grounds; he purchased tracts of land near Hackleton Cliff, and a lot of land downrange of it, to build the complex. Guess he and Beauchamp didn’t want the BDF being close by.”

“They plan to launch people?” Roo asked in amazement, looking at another picture of the barrel. It pointed up into the air at a forty-five-degree angle in this shot, explosive gases gushing out from the end.

“No, you’d end up meat-flavored toothpaste, so it’s just satellites and equipment. Fuel,” Rhodes said. “But it stands to make Charleton a very, very rich man.”

“Do I get a gun?” Roo asked.

Rhodes snorted. “No. See, this is a party full of dignitaries and very—and I want to stress this—very, rich people. You go on, you get your response, and we go from there.”

“Right. I’m human chum,” Roo said.

“Exactly.”

Rhodes swapped back to a photo of the exclusive partygoers.

“We’re going to have to dress you up. A tailor will be in tomorrow,” Rhodes said.

“When’s the ball?”

“Just before Okath’s landfall. Two days. Time enough to get you tailored up, mic you up. Hopefully no one gets it into their head to try and stop this.”

“Just two days,” Roo said. “Been one after another.”

“Heavy weather,” Rhodes said.

22

The limousine whined along as Roo looked at the beaches passing by. Villas crowded the white sands, their foundation pillars raising them up off the ground so that storm surge could sweep under them. A whole generation of beachfront property had long since been battered away by hurricane-force weather. Insurance companies no longer insured houses that sat on ground level on a coast anywhere in the world.

But the mansion they pulled into the driveway of was built right on the land, like an inland house. But it hid behind protective walls. The outer perimeter of the property had fifteen-foot stone walls as thick as any ancient fort, with gates of steel so thick they could have worked in a canal.

In the heart of the hurricane fortifications, the marble pillars of an overly art deco mansion were braced by angular statues of Titans holding fast, their grim faces lifted up toward the skies.

As they passed through the giant steel gates, Rhodes looked out at the cars lined up in front of them. “I think some of those are running on gas; they haven’t been converted,” he said.

They both stared at a Porsche 911’s muffler for a moment.

“Hell of a statement,” Roo said. “Literally have money to burn for fun.”

“Many of these guests probably do,” Rhodes said. “You have your ticket?”

It was the third time he’d asked. Roo didn’t bother to respond. He unzipped a small bag at his feet and pulled out a pair of new work gloves he’d overnighted to the office Rhodes had kept him in.

“What are those?” Rhodes asked.

“Every well-dressed man needs a pair of gloves,” Roo replied.

“Those are work gloves.”

“They sometimes come in handy for just that,” Roo said. He opened the door, not willing to wait for the car to make it all the way to the polished stone steps leading up to the entryway.

Rhodes grabbed his shoulder. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

Roo slid out and shut the door. It was raining, the hurricane beginning to make itself felt. But the tuxedo slicked the rain away with its hydrophobic fibers.

Security guards with portable scanners checked him over and took the ticket. A computer verified its unique RFID signature. “If you did not make arrangements to have valet parking, and you need to return to your home, we have tornado-armored Humvees available to take you wherever you might need,” one of the guards said. He pointed at one of the vehicles, parked outside by a clump of coconut trees. It was black and massive, covered in slabs of thick impact armor and with small slits for windows. “Would you like to reserve one for a return trip right now?”

“No,” Roo said.

Inside the great ballroom Roo paused a moment. There were models of large rockets hanging from the ceiling, a sign of Charleton’s influence on the party. But the rest of the decoration was hurricane-chic. The walls danced and flickered with images of windswept ocean east of Barbados. The cliffs on the east coast had dramatic footage: cameras up at the top showed massive waves thundering against the rock.

Step into the right spot, and tight tunnels of audio would fix on a person’s location. The hum of the party dipped away. Roo found himself briefly standing in a spot where the thud of waves striking pounded his chest and the hiss of spray drifting in the aftermath filled his ears. Wind howled.

He stepped out and back into the snatches of random conversation.

Roo drifted into line at a small temporary bar. “Hi,” said an intense man with silvered hair. “I’m Gregor Upton, I don’t think I’ve met you before. What’s your line of work?”