Pulling on the sweatshirt, she grinned. “Because it says Barbados on the back of this boat?”
“Among other reasons.”
Pointedly, she raised an eyebrow. “Would people from a secret operation paint their secret location in big letters on the back of their boat?”
“If they needed the boat to blend in, sure. By the way, I don’t think they planned on either of us seeing the letters on the back of the boat, or at least living to tell anyone about it. But even if we did, what more would we make of it than there’s a black site near Barbados and a local fishing boat used for prisoner transport?”
“So then why have we made more of it than that?”
He pulled a T-shirt over his head. “If you’re going to run an offshore business and hide in plain sight, Barbados is your island. It’s a haven for human trafficking. Offshore banks — which, as you know, aren’t the sort where Grandma keeps her Christmas club account — have been going up on Barbados as fast as the plaster can dry. Also, Andy Nolend told me he’d heard of an American black op with a listening post there. The key is the island has virtually no electronic eavesdropping regulations, creating a loophole for American intelligence operators who are prohibited by law from wiretapping Americans: They can transmit the audio directly to people on Barbados, who send back written transcripts. If the Littlebird operators believe we’re in Davy Jones’s locker, they won’t be expecting us in Barbados. If we can get a place for you to lay low, I might be able to find Littlebird Central.”
“How would you do it?” she asked. “Barbados isn’t exactly a one-horse island.”
He put on a baseball cap embroidered with an anchor. “All of the towns there are one-horse compared to Bridgetown, the capital. I’m thinking Littlebird Central would have a lot of computer hardware, power usage, maybe a mess of antennas. Outside the city, people would sure as hell notice that. In the city, probably not. Maybe I can access utility-company data, or land a source at the utility company and find out who has the highest power bills. On account of the computers, Littlebird Central’s bill should be up there.”
“Wouldn’t nosing around like that raise red flags?”
“Good question. If it’s shaping up that way, Bridgetown’s still small enough that I could canvas it on foot in half a day. Instead of a storefront, they’re probably using an office that’s on an upper floor or tucked away, with an innocuous name designed to dissuade people, like Acme Sewage Consultants.”
“But even if they’re fronted by a candy store that you can waltz right into, their systems will have electronic security, right? You would at least need pass codes and, probably, an electronic evidence retrieval team.”
“That was my thinking in going to Trinidad and Tobago. I figured we would turn over what we’d come up with to the FBI, let them hit Barbados and bag the evidence. In retrospect, the problem with that plan is the gauntlet of red tape between an electronic evidence retrieval team and Littlebird Central. On top of that, the Bureau is almost certainly searching for us now for the wrong reasons, so we’d need to take a leap of faith that our contacts there could keep our reappearance on the QT. Also, to take action on Barbados, they would need internal approval, then have to bring in the CIA — probably State, too. By the time an electronic evidence retrieval team made it to Barbados, Littlebird Central will have been long since cleaned out. But if we play dead, the Littlebird operators will think they’re in the clear.”
Mallery gazed through a porthole. “Suppose I could get you an electronic evidence retrieval team?” she asked.
Even with her extraordinary wherewithal, this didn’t sound possible. “How?” he asked.
“Take me with you.”
37
“Goodwyn.”
“Sorry if I woke you, Norm.”
On a jet that appeared to be racing the sun across the Atlantic, Canning sighed. “If only you had.” That would mean he’d been able to sleep on the flight; Thornton and Mallery’s continued existence jeopardized his entire operation.
Rapada said, “The latest is the fishing boat’s lying on her side on the bottom of the sea, about a quarter mile from the wreck of the helicopter.”
“But there’s no sign of the lifeboat.”
“How did you know?”
“Murphy’s twenty-fourth codiciclass="underline" When a slice of toast falls on your white carpet, the probability it will land jam side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet. But this isn’t bad news.”
“Why not?”
“In a lifeboat, they’ll be easy prey for a drone.”
The fourteen-foot Zodiac lifeboat sliced through waves at twelve knots, or about fourteen miles per hour. Sitting by the tiller, Thornton saw no other crafts of any sort, just the still-dark sea and the tip of the sun spraying violet into a cold gray eastern horizon. For the eighth time in the four hours since scuttling the fishing boat, he took up his crude astrolabe — he’d made it by cutting a paper plate in half, adhering one end of a shoelace to the half plate’s center point, and weighting the other end of the lace with a hexagonal nut. As he aimed the flat edge of the half plate at the fading North Star, the shoelace fell on a line between the seventy-five- and eighty-degree notches on the round edge of the plate, slightly closer to seventy-five, meaning the North Star was seventy-seven degrees above the horizon. Accordingly, the Zodiac was traveling along a latitude of thirteen degrees north, or right on course for Barbados. Thank you, Cub Scouts.
He and Mallery took turns sleeping beneath the red waterproof boat cover that transformed the bow into a low-slung cabin, giving the Zodiac the appearance of carrying only one passenger.
Toward the end of his next shift at the tiller, Thornton squinted through a noon haze at what appeared to be a blue whale on the horizon. Given the distance, he ruled out anything smaller than a cruise ship. As the Zodiac drew closer, the blue mass grew, and browns and greens emerged, along with inequities on its surface. It was Barbados, he realized. Soon he made out high cliffs of sandstone and jagged coral, with towering waterfalls pounding the bay and raising a mist that blurred a forest of every conceivable shade of green. There was no maritime activity on this side of the island; the sheer cliffs precluded landing. Closer still and the vapor subsided to reveal trees dotted with oranges, lemons, and limes. Hundreds of varieties of flowers covered the hillsides and meadows.
For some reason, Thornton had an edgy sense but dismissed it. In the absence of scientific evidence to the contrary, he believed premonition to be purely psychological. And, in this case, perhaps, a function of too much Red Bull.
They say that after twenty years of service, a Special Forces veteran will have a topaz ring, a Harley, an ex-wife, and a job as a Walmart greeter. Carlton Busby thought he was way ahead of the game. Just a year out, and he already had a hot second wife, Ryota — he met her at the bar she was tending on Koh Samui — plus a gig with Macedon, the private military company, at fifty grand more than what old Uncle Sam had been paying him, plus a complimentary three-bedroom condo in a sweet gated community in Boca de Río, Venezuela, just a few clicks from the base.
Most of Macedon’s business was assisting the Venezuelan Army and the Fuerza Aérea in Operación Centinela, the fight against drug smugglers from Brazil and Guyana. But sometimes the private military company’s clients were American services with operational objectives identical to the Venezuelans’: deploy a drone and turn a cigarette boat into ash. Today the client was the DEA. Or so they said. Someone pays you a million bucks to play a video game, the right question is, Who do you want shot? Today the answer was a Brazilian couple with a boatload of meth they’d cooked out on one of the uncharted rocks east of the Caribbean. What’s more, the meth heads had raped and murdered a kindergarten teacher.