James Patterson (8 page)

Hill was haunched awkwardly over loose-fitting Top-Siders that night; just sweating nicely; starting to enjoy the exercise—the warm itch in his palm under a Rawlings catcher’s mitt.

Suddenly he was called to the house by his wife, Carole. “Long distance calling,” she shouted from the porch in an Alabama accent she hadn’t lost while living in eight different countries. “It’s Brooksie Campbell.”

Hill excused himself to his son, then jogged up toward the big Colonial-style house. On the way inside, forty-four-year-old Harold Hill started to feel a little turmoil in his stomach.

Brooks Campbell just didn’t call you at home. Not to shoot the bull, anyway. There was something about this terrorism bullshit—Campbell’s so-called specialty—that didn’t sit well with Harold Hill.

Terrorism was something for the Arabs and Israelis. The Irish. The Symbionese Liberation Army. Something for the little people who
had
to play dirty. Terrorism just wasn’t something Americans should be getting involved with.

Inside his den, Hill dialed an eight hundred number on a phone he kept in a locked desk drawer.

What would happen—he continued his thought from outside—if a major power started playing dirty pool on a regular basis? All-out, no-holds-barred dirty? What would happen if America found a real “guerrilla” war? Shee-it! is what would happen. A return to the Dark Ages.

Hill punched an extension button, and the call from the Caribbean was switched onto a safe line, a scrambler.

He could still see Mark outside. Throwing high pop-ups over an old spruce. Catching them basket style like Willie Mays. The boy had an incredible throwing arm. Incredible.

Just as he began to think that the telephone switch-over was taking too long, he heard Brooks Campbell’s voice.

“Hello, Harry.” A slightly muffled Campbell— his deep stage voice sounded a little muddy. “The reason I’m calling, Harry—”

Harold Hill let out a short, snorting laugh meant to slow down the younger man. “I think I’m going to sit down for that. For the reason you’re calling.”

“Yeah, sit down. It’s not good news…. It turns out, uh, that Rose was seen by a man at Turtle Bay yesterday. How about that? We buy someone
even we haven’t seen,
a fucking genius, supposedly, and he’s immediately made by somebody else. Shit, Harry, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that somebody is fucking around with us. At any rate, I don’t want to take any chances with this.”

“Does Rose know he was seen? Tell me the whole thing, Brooks.”

“Basically, he knows his situation,” Campbell said. “He called us today. At least his wife did. She said they want to take care of it themselves. Cute?”

“Terrific.”

“The man who saw him is a nobody, thank God. American, though…. By the way, Rose shot and cut up the president of ASTA this morning. Harry, they’re freelancing like crazy now. I don’t even remember the original plan we were shown. He skipped a meeting with me last night. They’ve gone fucking nuts on us.”

Harold Hill closed his eyes and visualized Campbell. Brooks Corbett Campbell. Princeton man. WASP from New London, Connecticut. Slated for big things at the Agency. Neo-Nazi, in Hill’s humble opinion. Kind of guy who always thinks he knows what’s best for everybody else.

“Well, uhhh … I think we have to go along with them a while longer. Don’t you? Maybe
you
ought to lay hands on this witness. It seems to me that we may need him to identify Rose. Eventually, anyway…. I have no intention of letting them leave the island after this is over. That’s an obvious stroke.”

“Sounds good.” Brooks Campbell raised his voice above some transatlantic chatter. “That’s pretty much the way I see it right now.”

Hill paused for a moment. He thought he ought to try to cheer Campbell up a bit. S.O.P.

“All right. Okay on that,” said Harry the Hack. “Now let me have the bad news.”

Young Brooks Campbell tried to laugh. Your basic combat camaraderie. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said.

Coastown, San Dominica

“Let’s try to look at this shitty mess logically,” Jane suggested.

Peter didn’t answer. He was way off someplace else. At the artillery range outside Camp Grayling in central Michigan. Shooting tin cans off Brooks Campbell’s head. With a bazooka.

At ten mat night the two of them were out on the dark patio of Le Hut Restaurant, trying to comprehend mass murder. Occasionally picking through a stew pot of oily bouillabaisse. Both of them about as hungry as the shrimp in the pot.

Peter finally raised his puppy-dog brown eyes to her and shrugged. “Who could come up with that kind of idea? … Slicing up two nineteen-year-old kids like Jack the Ripper?”

Jane sat with her chin in the palms of thin hands. Serious, she looked like an older version of Caroline Kennedy. She was catching the eye of all the black waiters.

“Probably the same kind of creep who would make two little kids watch their own father die,” she answered. “It just makes me feel so awful. Creepy and sick. Really shitty—besides being scared.”

Thinking back on the scene at the American embassy, Peter began to feel a little useless, motelike. Little Mac fucks it up again…. Maybe he just hadn’t explained himself well enough, he thought.
Something
sure had gone wrong at the embassy. Because the tall blond man
was
important one way or the other. He had to be.

Jane pointed out to the street. Playful grin on her face; premachete smile. “I didn’t know one of your brothers was down on the island. Heh, hen.”

Right in front of Le Hut a street clown was entertaining a small crowd. The scruffy clown was white. BASIL: A CHILDREN’S MINSTREL said his hand-painted sign.

Basil was a young man behind all his Indian and clown paints. Around the eyes he seemed very serious about the show, even a little sad. Only dressed the way he was—raggy canary-yellow pantaloons, an outrageous pastel nightcap—the man also seemed pixilated.

“Love is the answer,” he said to natives and a few tourists walking past him on Front Street. “Love is the answer,” he whispered to the people eating and drinking in Le Hut.

“Ahhh,” Jane whispered to Peter, winked, talked like Charlie Chan. “But what is question?” She saw that he was still partially lost in his own thoughts. Turtle Bay. What had upset him at the U.S. embassy?

“Do you know any children’s tricks? Children’s minstrel tricks?” she whispered across the table. “Macduff? Are you there? Are you here with me? Or are you Sherlock Holmes off solving great murders?”

Peter smiled and blushed. “Sorry. I’m here. Hello!”

He traveled back to the cafe from faraway places: Vietnam; his parents’ house up on Lake Michigan, where every summer for six straight years Betsy Macdonald came and dropped another brown-haired, brown-eyed baby boy. The Super Six.

“Children’s tricks?” Peter grinned. Had a rush of feeling for this eccentric plains girl from Dakota.

He thought for just a second. Remembered something his brother Tommy used to do for his kids.

Peter picked up his Le Hut paper napkin. Twisted it tight and held it under his nose. The napkin looked like a droopy mustache. Greasy. Full of fish scraps. “You must pay the rent,” Peter said in an obvious villain’s voice.

He switched the napkin to the side of his hair. It became a girl’s ribbon. “I can’t pay the rent,” he said in the falsetto of a heroine in distress.

Mustache voice: “You must pay the rent!”

Ribbon voice: “I can’t pay the rent!”

He switched the napkin under his chin, where it became a puffy bow tie. Peter spoke in a voice like Dudley Do-Right.
“I’ll
pay the rent!”

Ribbon voice: “My hero.”

Mustache voice: “Curses, foiled again.”

“I wish it was that easy,” Jane said.

She kissed his paper mustache. Laurel and Hardy-ha-ha. Neither of them quite full-fledged adults, yet. Not in all ways. Lots of good intentions to grow up, though.

That night they slept together for the last time. Ever.

Crafton’s Pond, San Dominica

Meanwhile, the first meeting between the Roses and Colonel Monkey Dred was close to its very shaky start.

Motors off, four cars sat on opposite sides of a flat, narrow field near Nate Crafton’s rat-infested pond in the West Hills District. The field’s regular use was for prop planes coming from, and going to, New Orleans with shipments of ganja and cocaine.

This particular night it was misty up around the pond itself. The wet grass was full of long, husky water rats.

By mutual agreement each side had brought only two cars. There were to be no more than two passengers in either auto. Since there seemed to be no way to prevent them, guns had been permitted.

Shortly before starting time, a
third
vehicle appeared on the horizon on Dred’s side of the field. At 1:00
A.M.

The first violation of the treaty for this evening.

As Monkey Dred was driven forward in a noisy, British-made van, the twenty-seven-year-old Jamai can- and Cuban-trained revolutionary saw that the secret airfield was dark, without motion. Quite pretty, with a pale quarter moon set over the surrounding jungle.

The van stopped with a jolt at the edge of the field. Dred’s driver flashed his headlights on and off. On-and off.

Across the moonlit darkness, another set of car lights switched on, then off. Rose.

Watching the scene through a cloudy, bug-smeared windshield, Dred started to nod and smile. Rose was already accepting compromises: the
third
car. “Goan to be easy, mon,” he said to his driver.

Two of the five cars then drove halfway out onto the landing field. Once again, the agreed-upon procedure. The Roses were very keen on orderly procedures, Dred was beginning to notice. Like the British in the American Revolution.

Before his van had fully stopped, the colonel jumped out and stood at rigid attention in the tall grass. Less than forty yards away, he could see Rose climbing out of some kind of American pleasure car.

The white man wasn’t as big as Dred had expected. Not bigger than life, certainly…. He was wearing a light-colored suit with a big Panama-style hat. Very flashy. Absurdly so.

On signal, the headlights of both vehicles were turned off. Then the two started to walk toward each other in the dark. In less than thirty seconds they were only a few feet apart. The smell of some kind of fertilizer met that of a strong French cologne.

“Yo’ hab dose guns for me?” The revolutionary spoke with a heavy island patois.

Carrie Rose took off the floppy yellow hat. She smiled at Colonel Dred. “You’re a dead man,” she said. “My husband has you in his sights on an M-21 sniper’s rifle right now. The rifle has a night sighting device, so he’s watching us in a pretty green light. Care to wave?”

“I don’t believe dat.” The black man remained calm.

Carrie put her hat back on, and a powerful rifle shot kicked up a clod of grass not three feet away from the guerrilla.

The lights on all the cars around the field shot back on again. The black man froze. Threw a hand up to keep his people in place.

“Our intentions are good.” Carrie talked as if nothing at all had happened. “But we wanted you to know that you mustn’t try to do anything other than what we agreed on. We agreed only
two
cars apiece. Not three.
Two.

“If you’re still interested in guns,” the tall woman continued, “you’ll come to the Charles Codd estate. Tomorrow evening at ten o’clock. Similar arrangements.
Two
cars.”

“Why yo’ doin it?” the black man finally asked. He folded his arms; stood his ground.

“We want to help you take over this island,” Carrie said to him. She shrugged. “We’re being paid to do that. Come to the Codd estate tomorrow. You’ll find out everything you want to know. You’ll even meet Damian.”

Carrie Rose then turned away. She left the guerrilla leader a little dumbfounded. Beginning to wonder how it happened with Castro up in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Who had come to set him up with guns and bombs?

“He’s just a boy,” Carrie said to the Cuban as she got back inside the dark American car. “Isn’t it funny that they would be interested in him?”

“Solamente tres dias mas,”
is all the Cuban said.

Just three days more.

May 4, 1979, Friday

45 U.S. Marshals Arrive

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

We’d carefully plotted out a funhouse maze of confusion. Confusion on all fronts. Like a blizzard in summer, where it’s never even snowed before….

By May 4, ordinary farmers wielding machetes in their fields stimulated heart attacks. A black man wading in the surf— even an unfamiliar black lifeguard— was enough to send piggy little whites scurrying inside their expensive straw- roofed huts. Fishing boats that drifted too close to shore were waved away by private guards with rifles. No one shut their eyes sunbathing on the beaches…. And countless tourists spent their suntime in dingy prop airline and government offices. Pan Am, Eastern, Prin-Air, BOAC, all put on extra flights, but even these couldn’t accommodate the exodus…. So far, we were pretty much on schedule.

The Rose Diary

The fourth day was much quieter—four island deaths reported. All of them grisly machete murders, however.

Early in the morning, forty-five United States federal marshals were flown in to help keep order in the larger cities of San Dominica. Some of these same State Department marshals had been used during the American Indian uprising at Wounded Knee.

Eight Vietnamese-style HSL-1 helicopters came in from Pensacola, Florida, to help with surveillance and search work.

Because they’d been painted with green-and-brown combat camouflaging, the helicopters provided one of the scarier sights for the remaining tourists. Suddenly it looked and sounded as if they were in the middle of an undeclared war zone. Army helicopters were continually swooping down out of the lush green hills, as in the opening scenes in
M*A*S*H.