The Scorpio Illusion (22 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. Some trees survive, some don’t. So what?”

“These are on fairly high ground, the cove’s lower.”

“Freaks of nature,” explained Poole. “When Lake Pontchartrain blows, all kinds of crazy things happen. One time the whole left side of our summer place was ripped off, but a doghouse right in front of it wasn’t touched. No accountin’ for nature.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Come on.” They threaded their way through the thick fan-shaped trees until they came to a small promontory that overlooked the cove. Tyrell removed the pair of night-vision binoculars from his belted pouch and brought them to his eyes. “Come here, Jackson. Look through these—directly across, near the top of the hill over there—and tell me what you see.” Tyrell gave the younger man the binoculars and watched him as Poole scanned the ground above the cove.

“Hey, it’s weird, Tye,” said the air force officer.
“There’s a few blurred lines of light through the trees, goin’ straight across a long way and angled down, but no source.”

“Deep green hurricane shutters, camouflaged. No one’s ever designed the perfect machinery for exterior ‘hurricanes’; the slats haven’t been invented that close perfectly every time, every inch. Your beeping machines were on the mark, Lieutenant. That’s one big mother of a house over there, and inside is someone very important to this insanity, maybe the bitch herself.”

“Y’know, Commander, don’t you think it’s about time you told the major and me what this whole goddamned thing’s about? We hear things like ‘that bitch’ and ‘terrorists’ and ‘disappearin’ secret papers’ and ‘international chaos,’ and we’ve been damn well
ordered
not to ask questions. Well, Cath won’t say it ’cause she’s by-the-book Neilsen, and like me she’s doin’ what she’s doin’ because of Charlie, but here I part company with her. I don’t give a fiddler’s fart about orders. If I’m goin’ to get my precious body blown away, I want to know why.”

“Good heavens, Lieutenant, I didn’t know you had so many words in you.”

“I’m one bright son of a bitch, Commander. Now, what the fuck is this all about?”

“Insubordinate too. All right, Poole, I’ll level. It’s about the assassination of the President of the United States.”

“
What
…?”

“And the terrorist is a woman who might just pull it off.”

“You’re out of your mind! That’s plain crazy!”

“So were Dallas and Ford’s Theatre … The word we’ve received from the Baaka Valley is that if this assassination takes place, there are three other targets—the Prime Minister of England, the President of France, and the head of the Israeli government. All to follow quickly. The signal is the killing of the President.”

“it couldn’t happen!”

“You saw what happened on St. Martin’s, what happened to Charlie and your plane despite guaranteed maximum security on one of our most classified tech-weapons. What you don’t know is that a team of deep-cover FBI agents was massacred in Miami while on surveillance relative to this operation, and I was nearly killed on Saba tracking down an unrelated situation because somebody learned I’d been recruited. There are leaks in Paris and Washington that we know about; London is still an enigma. In the words of a friend of mine, who I hate to admit is a terrific intelligence officer with MI-6, this woman and her people have resources no one ever dreamed of. Does that answer your question, Lieutenant Poole?”

“Oh, my God!” came the scratchy voice of Major Catherine Neilsen over Poole’s radio.

“Yeah,” said the lieutenant, glancing down at the pouch that held the radio. “I had it on, hope you don’t mind. Saves you from repeating it all.”

“I could break you both down to privates for that!” exploded Hawthorne. “Did it occur to you that whoever’s in that house might have a frequency scanner?”

“Correction,” said Neilsen’s voice over the radio. “This is military-direct, off frequency within two thousand meters. We’re secure.… Thank you, Jackson, I think we can proceed now. And thank
you, Mister
Hawthorne. Sometimes the troops have to have a clue, I’m sure you understand that.”

“I understand that you two are impossible! The end of tolerance.… Where are you, Cathy?”

“About four hundred feet west of the cove. I figured you’d be going back there.”

“Head into it, but stay submerged at least forty feet from shore. We don’t know the capability of the trip beams.”

“Right on. Out.”

“Out,” said Poole, reaching down into his pouch and snapping off the radio.

“That was a dirty trick, Jackson.”

“Surely was, but look how much we got cleared up. Before we had Charlie, now we got even more.”

“Don’t forget Mancini, your ersatz pal, Sal. He would have had you blown out of the sky without thinking twice.”

“I don’t want to think about him. I can’t handle it.”

“Then don’t.” Tyrell pointed below to the cove. “Let’s go.” The two black-suited figures moved like roving silhouettes, zigzagging down the incline to the cove. “On your stomach,” Hawthorne whispered into the radio as they reached the beach. “We’ll crawl up to that stretch of flat bush. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a wall.”

“Well, I’ll be a shorn possum!” exclaimed Poole when they had crept to the sheer vine-laden embankment and he thrust his hand through the foliage. “It
is
a wall, pure concrete.”

“With more steel struts than an airport runway,” added Tyrell. “This was made for bombs, not little typhoons or mere hurricanes. Stay low!… Come on, I have an idea we’ll find a few more surprises.”

They did. The first was a layer of green Astroturf that covered an ascending row of stone steps leading to a break in the hill just below the top. “We’d never spot this airborne,” said the lieutenant.

“That’s the point, Jackson. Whoever it is doesn’t roll out a red carpet, he rolls down a green one.”

“Must be a very private kind of individual.”

“I’d say you’re right. Stay to the left and slither up like a snake.” The two men made their way up on their stomachs step by covered step, slowly, silently, until they came to a break in the stone staircase that seemed to lead to the outlines of a palm-covered structure beyond. Hawthorne lifted the carpet of green, revealing a flagstone path. “My God, it’s so simple,” he whispered to
Poole. “You could do it with any house in the countryside or at the shore and never spot it from the air or the water.”

“Sure could,” agreed the air force officer, impressed. “This grass stuff is a snap, but those palm trees, they’re a whole whale of a lot of difference.”

“What?”

“They’re fake.”

“They
are
?”

“You’re no country boy, Commander, at least not one from Louisiana. Palms sweat in the early morning hours; it’s the change in temperature ’cause they’re alive. Look, there’s not a glisten of moisture on those big leaves. They’re nothin’ more than big dead cotton flowers, also too big for the trunks, which are probably plastic.”

“Which means they’re mechanized cover—camouflage.”

“Probably computerized, easy to do if you access-code your radar to your machinery.”

“Huh
?”

“Come on, Tye, it’s simple. Like garage doors that open when headlights hit the receptors; this is just the reverse. The sky and sea sensors pick up the unfamiliar, and the equipment goes to work. They close up the shop.”

“Just like that?”

“Sure. A plane or a boat that comes too close, say three or four thousand feet up or a couple of miles out on the water, the disks send the information to a computer and the machines are activated, like garage doors closin’ down by remote. I could design a system like that for a few thousand bucks, but the Pentagon doesn’t want to hear my figures.”

“You’d bankrupt the economy,” Hawthorne whispered.

“That’s what my daddy says, but my little sister agrees with me.”

“The young shall inherit the earth and all its buttons.”

“What do we do now? Walk through those big cotton leaves and announce ourselves?”

“No, we don’t walk, we crawl very silently around those big cotton leaves and do our best not to be announced.”

“What are we lookin’ for?”

“Whatever we can see.”

“What then?”

“Depends on what we see.”

“You’re filled with all kinds of plans.”

“Some things you can’t put into a computer, young man. Come on.”

They crept over the hard, sharp zoysia grass, a favored ground cover in the Caribbean, and swept around the uprooted false palms, both men peering down into the machinery and touching the “bark” of the first “trunk.” Poole nodded in the moonlight, as if to confirm his previous guesswork that it was a thick tube of mottled plastic, indistinguishable from the real thing but a far lighter load on the mechanism. Hawthorne gestured at a low break in the greenery, indicating that the lieutenant should follow him.

One behind the other they crawled through the tunnel of dyed cloth to a point directly below a line of light from a parted slat. Both quietly stood up and looked inside; there was no activity to be seen, so Tyrell separated the shutter strip an additional inch for a better view. What they saw was astonishing.

The interior of the house had the appearance of some doge’s Renaissance villa, huge arches leading from one area to another, gold-flaked marble everywhere, and on the white walls tapestries of a quality usually inherited or on loan to museums. A figure came into sight, an old man in a motorized wheelchair. He was crossing under the archways from one room to another. He disappeared from view, but following him was a blond-haired giant, his massive shoulders stretching the cloth of his guayabera
jacket. Hawthorne touched Poole’s shoulder, pointing out the length of the house, and by his gesture telling the air force officer again to follow him. The lieutenant did so, each man sidestepping his way, silently pushing the huge cloth palms away as he progressed, until Tyrell reached what he estimated to be the area where the old man in the wheelchair had gone. The hurricane shutters emitted no light in this stretch of the wall, so Hawthorne grabbed Poole’s arm, pulled the lieutenant beside him, and parted a slat at eye level.

Inside was the unbelievable, a fantasy created by a gambling maniac. It was a miniature casino designed for an emperor, an emperor racked with insomnia. There were slot machines, a pool table, a very low, curved blackjack table, and a wheel of fortune, all waist level for the wheelchair, the flat surfaces covered with stacks of paper money at the edges. Whoever the old man was, he was betting both for and against the house. He couldn’t lose.

The blond bodyguard—he couldn’t be anything else—stood beside the gaunt, balding white-haired man in the wheelchair, yawning as the old man put coins into a slot and laughed or grimaced at the results. Then a second man appeared, wheeling in a cart of food with a carafe of red wine and placing it alongside the invalid. The old cripple scowled, then shouted at his second guard-cum-chef, who instantly bowed and removed a dish, apparently stating it would be replaced immediately.

“Come on!” whispered Tyrell. “There won’t be a better time. We’ve got to find a way in while that other gorilla is gone!”

“Where?”

“How do
I
know? Let’s go!”

“Wait a minute!” whispered Poole. “I know this glass, this window. It’s a dual pane with a vacuum in between, and once the vacuum is filled with air, you can break it with a heavy elbow.”

“How do we do that?”

“Our guns have silencers, right?”

“Yes.”

“And when a slot machine pays off, bells ring, right?”

“Sure.”

“We wait till we see he hits a big one, then poke two holes on either side and break the damn thing in.”

“Lieutenant, you may be a genius after all.”

“I’ve been tryin’ to tell you that but you won’t listen. You hit the low right corner, I hit the low left. We give the glass a couple of seconds to fog up, then smash it in. Actually, with a cushion of air it should make less noise than a regular window.”

“Whatever you say, General.”

Both men stripped open their Velcroed holsters and whipped out their weapons.

“He’s hit one, Tye!” cried Poole as the old man inside began waving his arms in front of the blinding lights of the blinking, glittering slot machine.

Both fired their weapons and pushed up the exterior shutters as the mistlike vapor filled the glass, then crashed through the window while the slot machine was still blinking and spewing out coins, its bells clamoring, echoing off the marble walls. Amid the shattered glass they crouched on the floor as the stunned guard spun around and reached into his belt.

“Don’t even try it!” Hawthorne said in a strident whisper as the deafening slot machine grew silent. “If either one of you raises your voice, it’ll be the last sound you make. Trust me, I really don’t like you.”

“
Impossible
!” screamed the old man in the wheelchair, in shock at the sight of the two invaders in their black wet suits.

“Oh, it’s real possible,” said Poole, getting to his feet first and leveling his gun at the invalid. “I speak a little Italian, courtesy of a guy I thought was my friend, but if you and he had Charlie killed, you’re not gonna need that wheelchair a second more.”

“We want him alive, not dead,” broke in Tyrell. “Cool it, Lieutenant, that’s an order.”

“It’s a tough one to obey, Commander.”

“Cover me,” said Hawthorne. He approached the blond guard, yanked up his guayabera, and slipped the revolver out of his belt. “Get by the side of the archway, Jackson, and hug the wall,” Tyrell continued, his concentration on the now furious, agitated guard. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,” he snapped at the man, “reevaluate. I said I wanted Methuselah here alive. You I couldn’t possibly care less about. Move between those two slot machines,
now
. And don’t figure you can risk jumping me. Thugs don’t interest me; they’re expendable.
Move
!”

The huge guard squeezed between the lowered machines, sweat rolling down his forehead, his eyes on fire. “You don’t get outta here,” he mumbled in broken English.

“You don’t think so?” Hawthorne walked rapidly to the side of the adjacent slot machine, switching his weapon to his left hand and removing the radio from his pouch. He snapped on the transmitter, brought the instrument to his lips, and spoke quietly. “Can you hear me, Major?”