Shadow of Power (29 page)

I drive until after dusk, checking with Harry and Herman every few hours. They are having the same success I am—none.

By nine that night, we are back in the hotel. Harry and I are dead on our feet, jet-lagged and suffering from lack of sleep. We each grab a light meal in our rooms and collapse.

We do it again the next day, Friday, early morning until dark, and come up with nothing. We are beginning to wonder if Ginnis’s wife may have rented the house under a different name, either because she knew he was in trouble or to keep the press away while he was recovering from surgery.

Saturday morning we pick up again where we left off. The morning passes with nothing. And then about one o’clock, the cell phone on my belt vibrates. It’s Herman.

“Where are you?” He’s excited.

I look at my map. “A wide spot on the road called Salina.”

“The south end of the island?” he asks. “Good. Look at your map.”

“I am.”

“See a place called Jan Thiel? It’s on the ocean, southwest edge of the island. I found Salina on my map. It’s just south of where you are.”

I search the map with my finger and find it. “I see it.”

“Head there,” he says. “What time have you got?”

I look at my watch. “A few minutes past one. What’s happening?”

“All hell’s breaking loose here,” he says. “Government square inside the fort. Media, American news crews with cameras. They’re all over the place, asking questions about Ginnis. Why the local government on the island doesn’t know there’s a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court vacationing here.”

“They didn’t know?”

“No,” says Herman. “According to what they told the press, not a clue.”

I knew the cameras would all show up, but I was hoping they would give us one more day.

“How do you know he’s at this place, Jan Thiel?”

“I don’t,” says Herman. “But his clerk, Alberto Aranda, swims there every day about noon.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because his girlfriend back in the States told one of the reporters. I heard the newsies talking about it. He calls her every day about noon from the beach. She says he swims somewhere near a sunken tug. Get your ass down there. You don’t have much time.”

“Harry is at the north end of the island,” I tell him. “He’ll never make it in time.”

“I know that.” I can hear him breathing heavily, running. “I’m catching a cab. Be there as fast as I can,” he says.

Even though I’m only a short distance away, it takes me more than twenty minutes to find the brackish backwater of the inlet and the dirt road that leads to the beach at the place on the map called Jan Thiel. The road forks at a steep hill. I take the left fork and go up and around. On my right as I skirt the hill, I can see a circular, fortresslike tower, old stone, probably planted on the top of the hill three or four centuries ago and now abandoned.

As the wheels of my car hit pavement again and I get past the brush blocking my view, I see the small harbor. There is a cargo ship of some kind tied up at one dock and a large four-masted schooner—more than a hundred feet in length, I would guess—tied off at another. There are several other, smaller sailing vessels moored in the harbor, one of them a party boat. Passengers in swimsuits are swinging from ropes out over the bow, doing dives and belly flops into the water.

I keep driving maybe a quarter of a mile, until the road I’m on dead-ends in a parking lot. Directly in front of me, tied up at the dock, broadside, is the large schooner. I turn right, into one of the open parking spaces. That’s when I see the beach, a broad shelf running down to the water maybe two hundred yards long. There is a line of shacks and huts behind it, bamboo and palm leaves for shelter, what looks like a take-out counter for food, and an outdoor tavern for drinks.

Midday Saturday, and there must be more than two hundred chairs and lounges spread out along the arc of the beach, and every one of them is occupied. Kids playing in the water, couples holding hands, bodies slick with tanning oil. Finding Aranda here is not going to be easy.

I turn off the engine and step out of the car. I see a couple of divers with tanks and wet suits heading the other way, out toward the dock and the schooner.

“Excuse me.”

One of them turns to look at me.

“Either of you know anything about a sunken tugboat around here?”

They keep walking, hauling their heavy gear, but the guy looking at me waves his left arm as if to point, in the general direction they’re going. So I follow.

We walk through the lot, past parked cars toward the schooner. Just off to the left, toward the bow of the vessel, is a small building with a white metal roof and a sign over the door that says
DIVE SHOP
. I follow the two guys toward it, and just before I get there, I see a large boulder, a jagged piece of gray basalt the size and shape of a headstone. It is painted red with a white diagonal strip running across it from top left to bottom right, the international symbol for a dive site. Across the stone at the top right is the word
TUGBOAT
painted in black letters.

As I look off to the left past the stone, I see a small cove, no sand beach but a shelf against the cliff, covered by broken pieces of gray coral. There are maybe eight or ten plastic chaise lounges set out on top of the coral, a few with towels on them. Two at this end, closest to me, are occupied by a couple readying their masks and fins for a snorkel adventure. Farther back in the cove, perhaps forty yards away, is a solitary figure, a guy sitting sideways on the lounge, facing me. He is talking on a cell phone.

I’ve never seen a picture of Aranda, but the man’s appearance fits the bill. He looks to be in his early thirties, short-cropped dark hair, well built, broad shoulders and narrow waist. With him seated, I can’t tell how tall he is, but he is lean and appears very fit.

I keep checking my watch every few minutes, hoping that Herman will get here.

If the man sitting on the chaise lounge is Aranda, I know that he is not going to talk on the phone for long, not with roaming charges just
off the coast of Venezuela. And when he hangs up, he’s going to either hit the water or head back to wherever it is he came from. I could approach him and try to talk to him, but I’m afraid he would simply get up and run, in which case I would have to track him in the car on winding dirt roads through clouds of dust. And you could be sure that he would not go anywhere near Ginnis until he was certain he’d lost me.

Once Herman gets here, we can take our chances. Herman can block him with his girth while I talk. Herman always packs a folding knife. If we have to, he can punch one of the tires on Aranda’s car and we can trap him in the lot until we talk his ear off. Give him a ride and let him show us where Ginnis is.

I check my watch again. Herman should be here any second. Then I see it, a cloud of dust, a fast-moving vehicle coming this way from the land side of the hill with the towered fortress. Herman to the rescue. When the large, dark SUV comes out of a line of brush and turns this way, it’s moving so fast that the rear end fishtails on the sand and loose gravel.

As soon as they stop and two of them get out, one of them with a good-size camera, I know I’m in trouble. Part of the media mob has found its way to Jan Thiel, and they’re ahead of Herman.

Now there’s no time to waste. I head directly toward the man on the phone, long strides, my shoes digging into the broken pieces of coral. As I walk right up to him his head is down, he’s smiling, talking on the phone. When he sees my feet stop a yard or so in front of him, he finally looks up.

“Are you Alberto Aranda?”

The expression in his eyes is one I have seen before, whenever I am forced to surrender a client to be taken into custody by police in my office.

“Sweetie, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.” He snaps the clamshell phone closed. “Who are you?”

“My name is Paul Madriani. I’m a lawyer from San Diego—”

Before I can even finish the sentence, he slips rubber thongs on his feet, grabs his snorkel gear, gets off the chaise lounge, and brushes right past me.

“You better not go that way. The media is waiting for you with cameras in the parking lot.”

This stops him like a bullet.

He turns and looks at me. “What do you want?”

“I want to know where Arthur Ginnis is.”

At this moment his expression is a mask of anxiety. He thinks for a second, then looks toward the parking lot again. “Are you with them?”

“No. I just want to talk to you. All I want to know is where Justice Ginnis is.”

“Get me out of here,” he says, “and I’ll take you to him.”

A towel over his head for shade, carrying his gear, and me walking beside him, we draw little or no attention. We head back through the parking lot. By now the cameras have swelled to two crews, who are gathering their equipment. One of the reporters is scanning the forest of chaise lounges and oiled bodies on the beach at the other side of the parking area. Their vehicles, two full-size SUVs, motors still running with drivers behind the wheels, are parked not in spaces but behind other cars, blocking them. One of these is mine.

I’m a step or so ahead of Aranda, wondering how we’re going to do this, finesse our way past them. I’m hoping that they don’t have a picture of him, when suddenly I realize he is no longer behind me.

By the time I turn and look, Aranda is ten feet away. He has the door open, and before I can take two steps, he slides into the car, a compact rental, slams the door, and locks it. As I reach the car and grab the handle on the outside, he already has the engine started and he’s rolling, shooting gravel at me from under the rear wheels as he pulls out. I have to throw my body onto the hood of the vehicle behind me to keep from being crushed as he does the turn, pulling out.

I’m up on the hood of the vehicle on my back watching as he jams the car into first and guns it straight ahead through the parking lot. Of course, the screeching tires and the sound of flying gravel draw the attention of the cameras like bees to honey.

By the time he tears past them and I’m back on my feet running toward my car, the obstacles blocking my vehicle are gone. The two camera cars with lenses protruding from the rear passenger windows pull U-turns, and within seconds they’re in hot pursuit.

As I get in and start the car, I’m guessing that I’m already a quarter of a mile behind Aranda. Turning to exit the parking lot, I see their dust ahead of me as Aranda goes straight, taking the road I came in on. One of the camera vehicles follows him. The other cuts off to the left on another road. I don’t follow it. I stay with Aranda.

A few hundred feet up, there is a bend in the road, and I see a large cloud of dust. As I enter it, I’m forced to slow down. When the dust begins to settle, I see the car with the cameras off in a ditch on the right and what appears to be a taxi with its nose stuck into the side of the hill on my left. I know it’s a taxi because Herman is standing just next to it talking with both hands, Italian style, to guys crawling out of the SUV.

I slow down and get a mouthful of dust as I open the window and wave him toward me. The instant he sees me, Herman stops talking and sprints to the passenger side of my car and gets in. Before his feet even hit the floorboards, we’re moving again.

“It’s Aranda up in front of us,” I tell him.

“Damn near killed us,” says Herman. “I thought we were clear till the other car nailed us. Couldn’t even see ’em in the dust.”

“I had him in the parking lot. He got away. The press showed up.”

“As soon as I saw the cameras in the car, I figured,” he says.

We are racing, bouncing along in ruts on the unpaved road. Herman hits his head on the roof of the car and finally gets himself strapped in.

Heading down the grade on the other side of the hill, I can see Aranda’s car moving at speed now, on pavement. The other SUV is behind him, less than fifty yards back, with a camera all the way out the window, trying to get film of the chase. There must be another way around the hill on the other side. Their vehicle has now closed the distance. The clerk in his small rental car is not going to be able to stay ahead of them for long, not on pavement.

Herman and I struggle to catch up. When we reach the pavement, I put the pedal all the way to the floor. Down on the flatlands, we can no longer see them. The two cars have disappeared. For a while, more than a mile, there are no intersecting roads, so I race at full speed, taking some dogleg turns and fishtailing.

As I negotiate one of these, I see the SUV. It’s turned around, facing the other direction on the wrong side of the road. Its rear end is up
against a metal light standard, with a good wrinkle in the bumper and the rear hatchback. All four of the occupants are out, stretching their legs and checking their body parts to see if they’re still working.

Up ahead I can see a traffic light where the road dumps into the main highway. The light is red in our direction. There’s no sign of Aranda’s small car. He has made it to the main highway and merged with traffic. With dozens of roads to turn off onto and probably more than a mile ahead of us, there’s no way we’re going to catch him now.

Herman and I cruise the back roads along the coast on this end of the island for the balance of the afternoon and into the early evening, looking for any sign of Aranda or the small car he was driving. Herman calls Harry and tells him what has happened.

Just before dark we arrive back at the hotel and end up out back on the veranda of the Gouverneur de Rouville.

By now Ginnis will know that the world has found him. He and his entourage will be making plans for a quick exit off the island.

Harry suggests that we stake out the airport. It’s a thought, but the chances are slim. You can be sure that a member of the Supreme Court—and there are only nine of them in the world—can call in one of the sleek white government passenger jets anytime he needs it, so that even if he leaves from the main airport, he won’t be going through the terminal. They would take him out through one of the private hangars, guarded and behind locked security gates. We wouldn’t even be able to get within two hundred yards of him.