“What’s he saying?” Annie said.
Nimec took a glance back over his shoulder as the Skyhawks swept in, then shrugged.
“Don’t know,” he said. “But for some reason or other, I’m sure we’ll find out before too long.”
EPILOGUE
“Oil,” Vince Scull said.
“Rogue oil,” Nimec said. “Lots and lots of it.”
“Going to Cuba and North Korea,” Scull said. “Two countries on the government’s long-term embargo list.”
“And they were just the biggest customers,” Nimec said, nodding. “There are others that’ve had temporary sanctions against the import of U.S. fuel products slapped on them. Foreign policy and national security reasons.”
Scull put his hands over his ears.
“Enough, Petey,” he said. “Here I am thinking it’s love that makes the world go ’round, when you’ve got to show up and murder the idea.”
Nimec gave him a faint smile. They were sitting in Scull’s office at UpLink Sanjo, a medium-sized room adorned with photos of Vince at some of the many corporate sites where he’d been stationed over the years. Here he was with the founding crew members in Johor, here with his arm around a pretty female staffer in snowy Kaliningrad, there posing beside a pack mule against the mountain spires at Ghazni… Scull was well-traveled to say the least, his footloose leanings having very possibly worked to the extreme detriment of his three marriages, all of which had come to their crashing ends in acrimonious divorce proceedings.
Nimec had long wondered about the pictures of Vince’s three ex-wives in a heart-shaped frame on his desk, each a smiling head shot. Was their sharing space in a single heart an example of typically crooked Scullian humor? Or could it be a window into something deep and sad?
One of these days, Nimec figured he’d find a tactful way to ask.
“It was some racket,” he said now, and glanced at Scull across his desk. “A fifteen-hundred foot long oil tanker disguised as a container ship sets out from the oil field at Point Fortin with millions of gallons of refined aboard, anchors there in the water near Los Rayos to wait for feeders that’ve been converted to smaller oil barges. They get their fill-ups and head off to banned ports, or to rendezvous at sea with other smuggler ships.” He paused. “We still don’t know how often those runs were made, or exactly how long the operation was going before we caught onto it, or how much oil was moved in total, but the word is that it was all done on a scale nobody’s ever seen. Not from a single producer.”
Scull grunted.
“Gonna make a whole lot of high-priced international lawyers happy for a while,” he said. “Nothing puts smiles on their faces faster than a big cloud of stink in the air, and the fumes from this scam reach from Washington across the Caribbean.”
Nimec rubbed his chin, thinking about that. An oil field holder in Trinidad, members of the Trinidadian parliament, and a top Sedco Petroleum exec… these were just a few of the parties under investigation or indictment in the scandal, and more names were surfacing every day. The facts and figures relating to specific transactions had come from the records of Udonis Roberts, the Los Rayos shipping accountant who’d tipped off Megan in a sudden fit of conscience and gotten murdered for it during an attempt to flee the island… a hack job that left him and the Trinidadian runners he’d paid to take him away by boat stuffed into some Florida-bound air transport crates. The body parts had turned up at Miami International in an episode that made for some lurid tabloid headlines a while back, but it had taken the rogue oil discoveries for authorities to eventually tie the case to Los Rayos. And the connection still might never have been made if it wasn’t for Roberts’s cousin, Jarvis Lenard, hiding out there in the mangrove forest with his knowledge of where Roberts had stashed his evidence. Impressively to Nimec, he’d not only been able to elude the island’s entire security force for weeks, but also a sort of elite ghost squad that did its dirty work — apparently the same group that had tried to off him, Annie, and Blake, then stage the pontooner’s crackup. The information about this so-called Team Graywolf, as well as many of the key names attached to the oil scam, had been provided by Henri Beauchart after his arrest, when he’d immediately started singing to prosecutors in two countries with hopes of cutting deals.
Behind his desk, Scull sucked thoughtfully on his inner cheek a minute or two, then smoothed a hand over the crown of his mostly bald head.
“The thing I keep wondering about is that invite you got to Los Rayos from those Trinidadian officials,” he said. “Between the e-mail to Meg and that islander being on the run from Beauchart’s security goons, it couldn’t’ve come at a worse time for the pols involved in the oil scheme. Or for the guy who gave Sedco distribution rights to what came out of his wells, and is supposed to have cooked up the smuggling operation with his pal on the Sedco board… Jean Claude Whatsisname.”
“Morpaign,” Nimec said, nodding. “I’m with you, Vince, the timing would be some coincidence. And who knows, maybe it is. On the other hand, it could be the invitation came from parliament members that weren’t in the mix, and had an idea what was happening at Los Rayos, and maybe even got the same tip-off Meg did sent to their Inboxes. With all the high level government and industrial types involved, and a corruption investigation sure to come, I can see how they wouldn’t want to be known as finger pointers, and might decide it would be better for their careers setting me up to pull off the lid.”
Scull chortled.
“No good for a politician to have a rep for honesty with his cronies, huh,” he said.
“Either that or have somebody get even with him by looking into his rotten business affairs,” Nimec said, and shrugged. “Hard enough finding a straight shooter in our own government, Vince. How much do we really know about what goes on behind closed doors in Trinidad?”
Scull looked at him a moment, then grunted again.
“Fucking Trinidad,” he said. “You and the new missus take a boat ride and almost get turned into guppy food… helluva way to remember a vacation.”
Nimec was silent. He thought about that long afternoon in the villa with Annie after he’d gone kite-boarding, thought about her lying with her head on the pillow beside him, both of them out of breath, their bodies relaxed and coated with sweat. I think we did it, Pete, she’d whispered in his ear. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve carried two children in my belly, and think I feel that we did.
No, he told himself, Vince was wrong. Whatever bad had happened to him on Los Rayos, Nimec believed he would always remember it more for something else.
He rose from his chair now, stretched, and cracked his knuckles.
“Taking off on me so soon?” Scull said. “Where’s the love gone, handsome?”
Nimec gave him a look. “Got a meeting with Rollie and Meg later,” he said. “I need a chance to prepare.”
Scull snorted.
“Your meeting about Ricci by any chance?” he said.
“Yeah,” Nimec said, “Ricci.”
He stood there a second, hoping Vince would leave it alone, thinking he really did want to ponder the matter some more before he talked about it with anyone.
“So’s it gonna be thumbs-up or thumbs-down for your boy?” Scull said.
Nimec looked at him again, released a fatalistic sigh.
“Before this morning I’d pretty much decided we needed to cut him loose… he’s going to stay out of touch, what can we do?” he said. “Then I see he left a voice mail on my cell phone last night, called right out of the blue, and I’m practically climbing right back on the fence.”