The Trust (30 page)

“Hold this,” she said, cutting me off and handing me her Corona. “Coast Guard, starboard bow.”

“Got ’em.” The captain’s reply came back slow and steady. But an undercurrent of tension gripped the boat.

Girl Louie scurried into the cabin and returned with four stout fishing poles. There was a massive brass reel on each, the Shimano brand etched on every one. She planted the poles in stainless-steel holders and disappeared into the cabin again.

When she reappeared, she was holding a white bucket. It smelled like fish.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Squid.”

“What for?”

“Swordfishing.”

“Okay.” I spoke with “huh” intonation.

She gestured toward the Corona. “Slug some down. I want you stinking like a six-pack if they board.”

Ricardo checked me from above. The captain throttled down the MAN engines. Girl Louie pulled off her faded T-shirt to reveal an unsettling bikini, half rubber band and half dare. Nothing hard around the edges about how she looked from five feet now.

“Smile and wave.” She threw her hands over her head and cocked her hip, provocative, inviting. But nobody on our boat was thinking sex. This was Hollywood. We were putting on a show. I noticed that Ricardo had rolled up his pant legs and taken off his shoes.

Slowly, the Coast Guard passed off to our left. A beam of light raked across the gentle night swells and onto our boat. Girl Louie waved, beer in one hand, shoulders thrown back, posture chirpy and erect. The Coast Guard’s crew, all guys, snapped back two-finger salutes—more lecherous than reverent. And I could feel the tension ease from our deck like air hissing from a balloon.

“Works every time.” Girl Louie punctuated her words with a swish of the hips. She disappeared into the cabin again, before returning with a fresh Corona. Though the air was warm, even for an October night off the Florida coast, she pulled her T-shirt back on.

The captain, no longer concerned about the wake, gunned the MAN engines. We were flying at thirty-four knots. Miami’s lights vanished behind us, the loom along with them. And after a while, the black sky morphed into the black ocean.

It became impossible to distinguish between air and water, and our world turned into an illusion. Except for the thump of the bow against swells, we were hurtling through space, traveling into infinity. I could almost reach out and touch the stars, our mission to find JoJo the one thing keeping me alert.

“What kind of banker are you?” Girl Louie was now onto her third beer, while the guys up top were still working on number two. The engines droned on and on.

“I’m more of a money manager.” My reply seemed innocuous enough.

“That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Why Bong brought you along.”

I glanced at Ricardo in the control tower. He was swigging his Corona, surveying the horizon, and chatting with the captain. “What do you mean?”

“He used to be a banker.”

“Oh, right.” I pretended to know, but her revelation surprised me.

“Bong never actually managed money. That’s probably why he needs you.”

“What did he do?”

Girl Louie eyed me warily. “You don’t know?”

“He plays it close to the vest.”

“Amen to that. He worked in operations for a branch bank in Manila.”

Agent Torres, I realized, was right. Ricardo possessed the perfect résumé for laundering money—a procedural background that included opening bank accounts and reviewing suspicious activity reports. He had also enjoyed access, as an employee, to sensitive personal information like where wealthy clients were wiring their money. “You know which bank?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Not important.” I backed off.

“But he was pissed.”

“About what?”

“Bong discovered that his bank was moving pesos overseas. You know why that’s a problem?”

“What makes you think it’s a problem?”

“He told me his boss passed him over for a promotion and shipped him off to another department.”

“Beats the shit out of me.”

Actually, I had a good idea what had happened. Through the years, the Philippines limited foreign-exchange transactions. The government, especially during the Marcos era and the years immediately following, made it difficult for wealthy Filipino families to invest abroad. American dollars and overseas currencies were thought to be safe, at least for those living in that politically fragile land. And techniques, all of them illegal, surfaced for getting money out of the country. Ricardo had probably discovered his bank’s participation in the lucrative black market.

“You sure you don’t want a beer,” she offered.

“No thanks. You make this trip much?”

“All the time.”

“What about Ricardo?”

“Who?” she asked.

“I mean Bong.”

“Why did you call him ‘Ricardo’?”

“Long story.”

I kept telling myself,
Less is more.

“This is Bong’s run.” Girl Louie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“‘Bong’s run’?” Repeating phrases is an old trick known to brokers worldwide. I was treating Girl Louie like a prospect, trying to extract information, anything that might help later.

“He needs an escape hatch in his line of work.”

“‘Escape hatch’?”

“The same reason I drink beer. You want one?”

“No thanks.”

Girl Louie grabbed number four, and I decided the coast was clear. “Where are we going anyway?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m along for the ride.”

“You ask a lot of questions,” she said.

“Trying to pass the time. We’ve been out here over an hour.”

“Great Harbour Cay’s worth the wait.”

Bingo.

“I’ve never been.”

“The town’s a little too Dodge City for my taste.” Girl Louie took a big gulp from her longneck. “But the harbor will take your breath away.”

“Why’s that?”

“The color for one. Gin blue. There’s nothing like it.”

“Bong come here much?”

“You ask too many questions.” She eyed me, grabbed two beers, and ran them up the ladder to Ricardo and the captain. This time, she stayed in the tower.

Uh-oh.

I spent the next hour by myself, propped up in the fighting chair, listening to the drone of the engine, fighting to stay awake. Over and over I played back my conversation with Girl Louie, assessing whether any of my comments would create a problem with Ricardo later. And if I told myself Great Harbour was our final destination—the other side of his escape hatch—I was mistaken.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

INSIDE RICARDO’S ESCAPE HATCH

“There’s an FBI agent riding my ass.”

In the black of that Wednesday morning, under the stars and surrounded by the sea, I remembered my comment inside the Palmetto Foundation’s conference room. I blew it yesterday morning. I tipped off Ricardo. Not on purpose. But it was my fault all the same. And now I was watching the action from my deck chair on the
Titanic.

No wonder he nabbed me.

The way Ricardo saw it, the authorities were turning up the heat on his operation. He fled the country because arrest and twenty years in prison were his alternatives to a quick getaway. I may have feared the consequences of tax fraud and Patriot Act violations. But his penalties would surely dwarf mine.

As the first hints of dawn cracked through the blackness of night, I bobbed in and out of consciousness, my drowsy thoughts always circling back to JoJo. Call it a hunch or innate stockbroker skepticism. I doubted we would find her in the Caribbean. The abduction—goons spiriting her out of the country while avoiding detection—struck me as too complicated.

But it was possible. JoJo had been gone almost forty hours.

Sometime after four
A.M.
, that’s my best guess, I drifted into a fitful sleep. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been forty-five. I have no idea how long I was out.

When the engines throttled down, I snapped awake to Girl Louie and the captain barking information back and forth. The seconds ticked like hours as my eyes focused. The deep space, I slowly realized, was behind us. We were passing through a cut in limestone and coral rock, maybe thirty-five feet wide. The bluffs on either side soared twenty feet high.

Our boat measured sixteen feet wide, meaning there was nine and a half feet of clearance on either side. Not much leeway, despite how it sounds. I could hear our wake slapping craggy walls. I could smell the low tide, the salty whiff of barnacles and decayed shellfish. I had no idea whether the water’s depth reduced our margin of error, whether we would scrape the crusty walls or run aground. But the captain and Girl Louie were tense. That much I knew. Here in the dark, they treated our passage like we were threading a needle. The jagged rocks would open nasty gashes in our hull.

Up top, the captain scrutinized his navigation equipment. The scopes glowed red and green, their eerie luminescence piercing the claustrophobic gloom. And just for a moment, I thought he resembled a Wall Street trader checking his screens.

Every so often the captain called below, as though uncomfortable with the sonar, “How we looking?”

“Steady off the bow,” came Girl Louie’s reply.

Back and forth they pinged. Their consistent rhythm reminded me of Marco Polo, the kids’ swimming game. And when we finally passed through the tight quarters, I heard a collective sigh of relief.

“This is why I pay you the big bucks,” Bong whispered, his voice raspy from beers and lack of sleep.

He probably assumed I couldn’t hear. But I heard all right, and his words were troubling. “They” was the right pronoun. He should have said, “This is why they pay you the big bucks.”

He didn’t.

He said “I.”

“Get ready,” barked Girl Louie, interrupting my thoughts about our joyride into hell. “You too, Bong.” Whereupon, shoes in hand, Ricardo wedged the ladder between his stocking feet and slid down the rails like an old sea dog.

Girl Louie scrambled to the front of the
Blue Pearl.
She swung the davit, a sea crane holding an eleven-foot Boston Whaler, over the bow rail. The electronic winch whined as she lowered the Whaler into the ocean and kicked a rope ladder overboard. “Let’s roll.”

The three of us boarded the boat, and she gunned the small outboard. In the distance, I could make out a seaplane rocking with the swells. We approached from the port side, four hundred yards, then three hundred, then two hundred. The plane’s small door flipped open, and Ricardo growled at me.

“Get in.”

*   *   *

Our plane had been a Grumman Goose once. Now the wings and fuselage looked like a Rorschach test of rust, rivets, and third-rate repairs. Only a whisper of the paint job remained. Every square inch of metal had been dinged or scratched or hammered or shot at or duct-taped or scraped against something. I had serious doubts whether this bird could get airborne.

The cabin was a joke. There were two columns, one consisting of three chairs on the left, the other two chairs on the right. A hole gaped through the floor and out the skin where the third had once been. The ocean water, still black from the night, glinted every so often as swells caught the Goose’s landing lights. The sea smacked against our pontoons. And I could feel the updraft of fresh air from outside.

The haphazard ventilation, however, offered no reprieve. An unholy odor wafted through the cabin, the air rank yet sweet, a chemical mix of engine oil and corrosion. I detected vapors from battery acid and vomit crusting somewhere. The remnants of nausea were hardly a surprise. This aircraft would reduce even the most intrepid fliers into jittery white-knucklers.

Our captain—mid-fifties, all muscle, no fat—wore his hair long and left it greasy. His beard was shaggy, his skin as beaten and weathered as our rust-riddled plane. In his tie-dyed T-shirt, he looked like a throwback to the sixties, an LSD flashback around every bend.

I thought Ricardo might join me in the cabin. Instead, he tossed his blue canvas bag onto the copilot’s seat and disappeared into the cockpit. For a while, I strained to hear what the two men were whispering. But they kept their voices low, leaving me to wonder.

It was after 5:15
A.M.
when the captain sparked the engines, first the starboard, then the port. There was no door separating the cockpit from my hell in the back, and I could hear him yell, “Clear,” before we gathered speed.

The plane bounced along the water, thumping against gentle swells. And suddenly, mercifully, we were airborne, barreling through the night and leaving Great Harbour Cay like thieves forgetting a jewel. To this day, I can’t believe we ever made it off the water.

Ricardo strode back into the cabin twenty minutes after we hit cruising altitude. He was drinking from a jug of bottled water and handed one to me. “Drink this. It’ll clear your head.”

“Thanks.” I wrestled off the lid, thinking it unreasonably tight. I was eager to slake my thirst and chase the cabin’s fumes.

“Get some sleep. We have a three-, maybe four-hour flight.”

“Do you know where we’re headed?”

“Only the flight time. And tomorrow’s a big day.”

“More travel?”

“Who knows?” He smiled, his eyes wide and alight with unknown meaning. But the disturbing expression disappeared when our plane thudded into a pocket of air turbulence.

“Shit.” I grabbed the rails of my chair while checking the hole in the floor. A body could be wedged through the opening.

“Jumpy?” Ricardo shook his head in a tsk-tsk manner.

The chop stopped, and I said nothing.

“Jake knows what he’s doing.”

“Who’s Jake?” I asked.

“Our pilot.”

“It’s not Jake I’m worried about. It’s this Cooked Goose we’re flying.” I pointed toward the hole in the floor for emphasis.

“That’s nothing. He’s flown worse for the Company.”

“Who?”

The plane shuddered, more turbulence. Ricardo steadied himself, bracing against the cabin ceiling with the butt of his hand. He had discarded his clerical collar, not to mention the constant references to Maryknoll. “CIA.”