Seven Grams of Lead (28 page)

Ten minutes later, he met an almost unrecognizable Mallery around the corner. They proceeded onto Broad Street, one of the city’s main drags, thick with people and vehicular traffic, all of the cars in need of new carburetors. Steel bands competed from either end of the block.

Over the commotion, she asked, “So where to?”

“Good question,” he admitted. “I’m hoping that
the answer leaps out at us while we’re walking around, and if it doesn’t, that we’ll at least have some candidates.”

The signs they passed offered no help.
BC
.
LOWE & CO
.
DOLLARWISE
.
UNITED SERVICES
. Any of these names might uniquely resonate with locals or in fact front Littlebird Central. A narrow gap between the three-story Dollarwise building and its four-story neighbor revealed a stripe of tropical sky, the first bit of sky Thornton had seen in a while. He glumly realized that he’d underestimated the scale of the city. He turned to Mallery, whose bright expression lacked only the proverbial lightbulb.

“In my experience, voice recognition software is problematic at best,” she said. “Which has me thinking: So many organizations now get their podcasts converted into transcripts by offshore services staffed by human transcribers. Maybe this is as easy as looking up transcription companies.”

Could be, Thornton thought. “The thing is, our gang wouldn’t need or want new business other than their own. A big CIA listening post in Berlin was fronted for years by a generic College of Religious Studies. Other operations don’t even bother with a sign.”

“Those would just whet our transcribers’ curiosity—in which case, maybe the cover is a generic tech company.”

“Good thinking.” Thornton kept to himself that,
unfortunately, of the last four businesses—BC, Lowe & Co., Dollarwise, and United Services—she had eliminated only Dollarwise. The best field officers, he reminded himself, had a knack for adapting a plan when things went wrong. The problem was, those were the best field officers. He didn’t know what to do in order to adapt.

But he could try something different. That notion alone sparked a new idea. “They might want to be on a busy thoroughfare like this,” he said, “but there are lots of reasons a quieter street would make sense.”

They turned onto Pine Street. Still crowded, but smaller, narrower, and cheaper. On the sliver of a sidewalk, a man rushed past them shoving a squeaky shopping cart full of fish, some still quivering, the stench so strong Thornton half expected to be able to see a shimmer in the air.

“I like this block,” he said.

But by the end of it, he had counted another fifteen signs for businesses that could front the listening post, and at least that many offices without signs.

“How about we stop in there?” Mallery waved at a café on the far corner. “Get ourselves a cold drink, then look on the Web or at the local yellow pages, make a list, and work our way down it?”

“Or we could just ask him.” Thornton pointed to a FedEx truck down the block. A sweat-soaked deliveryman sat smoking a cigarette on the steel ramp extending to the street.

Mallery walked down the street, trying to neaten hair that the dye and sea air had nearly turned to plastic. She succeeded only in clearing her eyes. Thornton had her back from the café. Still she felt naked. Her checkbook was useless now. Without a support staff at her beck and call, or even a smartphone, she was on her own, reduced to old-fashioned smarts. Well, that and her smile.

As she approached the FedEx man, she faked a genuine smile to the utmost of her election-campaign-honed ability, the one that reached all the way from the mouth to the eyes and wrinkled the skin on the outer corners of the eyes. The man was overweight, in his thirties, with no hair other than thick eyebrows turned down toward a don’t-mess-with-me countenance. He smiled back, his eyebrows relaxing to a straight line. He tapped his cigarette ash on the dolly ramp, stood, and took a step toward her.

She had to play a role now: island-hopping party girl. A bartender in Woodside she knew was a good case study. Or, rather, inspiration. A guy, but his qualities might translate: He lived for the day and was overly trusting, flirty, and naïve. Slipping into character, she felt a refreshing measure of release from her other worries.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m hoping you can help me out.” She added a self-conscious giggle.

“That makes two of us,” he said with a thick Bajan accent.

She laughed as though he’d said something funny. “I made friends in Montego Bay with this girl, Mary, who said I could crash at her place when I made it to Barbados. Now, here I am, and I’m supposed to meet her at her office, but I forget the name of it. And there are
so
many offices …” Another giggle.

Prompting one from him. “What kind of office?”

“They do stuff with computers.”

He whistled. “That’s a lot of places, honey.”

“Right, right, I knew that. She’s in some kind of data entry. They probably have huge computers, lots of high-tech stuff. She said she has a couple friends there who do the same job she does.”

This was enough for the FedEx man to rattle off the names and addresses of two transcription companies, three translation services, an accounting firm, and four other businesses. Mallery memorized them.

“You know what, I’m pretty sure it’s Stillman,” she said of the accounting firm. She actually had a strong hunch it was Bridgetown Data Entry.

He tapped the cell phone clipped to his belt. “How about we find out if they’ve got a Mary working there?”

“Nah,” she said as casually as she could manage. “I want to surprise her.”

“I’d for sure give you a ride, but Stillman’s on Swan Street. No cars and trucks allowed.”

Thank God, Mallery thought. “You’re so sweet,” she said.

He gave her directions, then dug a curled business card from a shorts pocket. “Use this in case you can’t find Mary, or if you do find her and you girls want to know about some cool clubs or whatnot,” he said, scrawling his name and number on the back of the card.

“Goodwyn.”

“How are you, Norm?”

“You tell me.”

“Unfortunately, sir, SOLAS, the Safety of Life at Sea organization, requires lifeboats on both sides of a boat—”

“In case the boat is, say, turned onto her starboard side on the sea bottom, blocking our submersible system’s view of the empty lifeboat davits on that side? So I guess you’re calling to say that we spent a million taxpayer dollars to blow up the wrong Zodiac.”

“I imagine Murphy has a law that predicts this?”

“Murphy wrote a list of lucky breaks compared to the chain of events up to now. But this development isn’t that bad, because we’re getting to know our enemy: They’re sharper than we thought, with greater
operational know-how and better ability to execute. They scuttled the fishing boat, right?”

“The second pass of the submersible suggests that, sir.”

“So they’re hunting for us. Which means we now have a very good idea of where they’re headed.”

While Mallery went
to look at Bridgetown Data Entry, Thornton set off for their other leading contender, EB Data Storage, two blocks away. As he walked, the cafés and boutiques gave way to simpler stores now closed for the night, low-end hotels and the sort of bars no one bothers to name. He turned onto a stretch of Pine Street that was a collection of office buildings put up on the cheap, including the pink concrete box at number 122 whose third-floor tenants theoretically included EB Data Storage.

EB’s listing in the Barbados telephone directory had seemed to be the extent of their marketing efforts. The top floor had no company signs, but the streetlamps allowed Thornton to read a handwritten
EB
in a plastic slot on the buzzer panel. He continued past the building, his motion causing the security
camera mounted above the door to pivot, its red bulb flashing on. Widely available online at around ten bucks apiece, fake cameras with realistic motionsensitive lights were becoming a main line of defense for small-business owners the world over. Even if the camera were real, he thought, it was unlikely that anyone at EB Data Storage was monitoring its feed right now, at six
P
.
M
. Unless EB was the Littlebird front. In that case, it was possible that another camera, concealed among the buzzers perhaps, was currently transmitting real-time video of him.

He kept going, trying not to look back. But 122 Pine Street’s front door jerked open, loosing a shaft of cool air onto the street. He turned and looked because it would have been unnatural not to. The man exiting the building in turn looked at him. Would have been odd if he hadn’t. He was a serious-looking big guy, maybe 225, most of it muscle, topped by a shaved head so large that in the glare of passing headlights, it looked like he was wearing a football helmet. He clambered down the steps and made a beeline toward Thornton. Thornton’s fight-or-flight synapses exploded.

Needlessly. The man turned away, opening the driver’s door of a fifteen-passenger van with a fiery Emery Brothers logo painted onto its side, prompting delighted hoots and shouts from the fifteen or so boys inside, all wearing orange soccer jerseys with
EB
on the fronts.

The big man—their coach, Thornton guessed—turned
on the van and zoomed off, allowing Thornton to see another young man stepping out of a lime green office triplex two down from EB Data Storage’s building. This guy was tall, white, with short white-blond hair. He wore standard tourist garb—polo shirt, Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, a baseball cap. Despite a fake mustache, Thornton recognized FBI Special Agent Warren “Corky” Lamont.

Resisting the urge to hide, Thornton maintained a steady pace, crossing Pine Street at the next corner. He watched Lamont’s reflection in the broad storefront windows. Following the agent out of the small office building was a man whose brawn and upright bearing defied his sixty-some years. He wore a custodian’s uniform, but he had the flinty face of a cop. Ex-military maybe, Thornton thought. Serving as building security now, perhaps. Which would be odd in a part of town where none of the businesses had security beyond fake cameras.

Holding the door open, the man said to Lamont, “You might try Islander Actuarial over on Swan Street instead, sir. They are usually not as busy as we are.” The lines sounded stilted, Thornton thought. Delivered before many times.

“Thank you, sir,” Lamont said, walking off, head down.

The guard watched him go, then darted back inside the building, whipping a phone from his overalls and speed-dialing before the door closed, blocking Thornton’s view.

This was the place, Thornton thought. Had to be.

He made out
WINDWARD ACTUARIAL
engraved on a brass placard by the door, between similar signs for
LM INSURANCE
and
SOFTEC
. SofTec had been on the list the FedEx guy gave Mallery.

Thornton returned his attention to Lamont, who yanked open the passenger door of a car idling at the corner, a dark blue, late-model Lincoln that screamed
U.S. Embassy.

Lamont grumbled to the driver, “Looks like we’ll need to get together with our liaison agency after all. It’s going to take a warrant to get in there.”

Exactly why, Thornton reflected, he’d been averse to going to the Bureau. Any warrant request would serve as a tripwire, causing Littlebird to close shop posthaste. Thornton considered chasing down Lamont, making an appeal to his reason. But that would bring his driver—CIA, possibly—into the game. Even if the driver were another FBI agent, the Bureau always slowed things down with red tape. Better, Thornton decided, to go to Windward Actuarial himself.

Catering to the
big resorts, Margarita Island was a bamboo-faced restaurant with a faux-straw roof. Surfboards, life rings, and beach toys hung from the inside walls, along with starfish or blowfish filling the gaps. Seated at the bar, which was constructed from a cross section of a dune buggy, Thornton watched a tiny, dilapidated Peugeot ascend the sandy driveway. The Peugeot’s dashboard lights showed him its driver, the FedEx deliveryman—Ferdinand, he’d scrawled on the back of the card he’d given Mallery. The Peugeot was a problem. Thornton and Mallery had been hoping for the FedEx truck, so that he could make a delivery to Windward Actuarial.

The back bar mirror revealed another problem. Ferdinand, now extracting himself from the Peugeot, wasn’t wearing the FedEx uniform Thornton also
needed. The FedEx man had opted for a satiny collared shirt in spite of Mallery’s bubbly mention over the phone of her affinity for men in uniform.

“Okay, slight change of plans,” Thornton said.

“What do you have in mind?” asked Mallery, perched on the next barstool.

“We add a second round of drinks.”

“I’ll need that anyway. What else?”

“During the first round, find out where the truck is, where the keys are, and where his uniform is.”

“That should naturally work into small talk.”

“Do your best. Other than that, same plan as before. Either I, from here, or you, from your table, will take care of his second drink.” They each had a cigarette whose filter he’d replaced with four capsules’ worth of powdered chloral hydrate. In countries like Barbados, you didn’t need an appointment with a psychopharmacologist—or even a prescription—to get the potent sedative. You just walked into a drugstore and bought Benaxona, the Mexican-made insomnia remedy. Thornton had calculated that four doses ought to put Ferdinand out for ten to twelve hours.

As Ferdinand bounded into the restaurant, Mallery sprang from the bar, embraced him, and exclaimed, “You came!”

The hostess, in bikini top and grass skirt, sat them in a booth. Watching via the back bar mirror, Thornton found it hard to hear their conversation over the music, but he made out
FedEx
and
truck.
Good.

After about thirty minutes, Ferdinand drained
the last of whatever had been in his ceramic coconut, rose, and lumbered toward the
CABANA BOYS
room.