Eriq shook his head and said into his headphones, “Go, do as she says.”
Lansing lowered and came in hard toward the lone craft, and Jessica became excited for a moment, seeing a large T figuring in the lettering of the name. But it was the Trinidad, and there were two men above deck and a third who came rushing out when the chopper careened by.
More racing ship crewmen were alarmed now by the buzzing chopper, as if it were some enormous albatross that had invaded their space, a few of them sending up hand gestures to make their minds known. This only made Lansing more daring, and he began driving the chopper between boats that were a mere fifty or so yards apart.
While Lansing was having his fun, whooping like a cowboy, Jessica saw a ship to their extreme right which Don had not seen. The boat moved swiftly and its sail was clean, bright, a beautiful sundial image reflecting back at her. There were no rents in the sail. It looked different from the other ships only in that it was in too good a repair.
“ Don. turn us around. There’s one at just past three o’clock you missed, and I want to go in low over it.”
“ The sundial?” he asked.
“ Yeah, that’s the one.”
“ Give it up, Jess,” Eriq said into his headphones.
Lansing did a complete turnaround and circled high over the craft.
“ Bring us in,” she instructed as Eriq now studied the clean, teakwood lines of the sundial ship, his eyes growing larger.
“ She’s got the teakwood veneer we’ve heard so much about,” he granted. “Get us in a bit closer, Lansing,” he unnecessarily added. “Will do.” They lowered at an alarming rate, causing Eriq to grip the back of Jessica’s seat. “Damn, take it easy,” he shouted. They came in fast and low across the bow of the ship and sped by her. “You see anybody aboard?” asked Jessica.
Lansing shook his head. “Not a damned soul.”
“ Take us around again. This time approach the aft. I want her name.”
Eriq’s curiosity was piqued, but he cautioned Jessica with regard to the scarcity of crew members, saying, “They could all be below, eating or ill. Don’t get your hopes up.”
Coming in low again, they saw someone poke a head from the cabin and appear to shout back down to others. Then this figure waved for his comrades to come out and have a look, and next he warmly waved up at the folks in the chopper in a friendly gesture, unlike the angry other boaters they’d seen. Jessica could not clearly make out the man’s features, except to say his hair was a sandy-blond shade. She instead concentrated on the stenciled name of the boat at the rear, as did Eriq, who read aloud, “Smiling Jack and blond hair. That’s a far cry from the Tau Cross, Jess.”
They buzzed off from the boat again, Lansing saying, “What now?”
“ Take her around again for a closer look. I only saw one man.”
“ Jessica, I could swear I saw someone below. This manhunt is getting us nowhere. It’s simply futile.”
“ It’s the name: Smiling Jack\ Remember Kim Desinor indicated we should take care to look as much for the symbolic as the literal meaning in things dealing with the Night Crawler?”
“ I seem to recall something of the like, yes.”
“ His Union Jack and Smiling Jack could be one and the same. What symbol is as strong as a flag? And Jack has, over the years, been used to refer to the Devil, and a smiling Jack could well mean the Devil’s grin. And C. David Eddings told us that if the killer is into e. j. hellering’s poetry, he might well also begin to quote e. e. cummings.”
“ I don’t get the connection.”
“ I took a little time one night with cummings and stumbled over a particularly nasty little limerick called ‘jack hates all the girls.’ “
“ You think he’s gone to all this trouble to change the name of the boat only to leave such glaring Freudian slips behind?”
“ I don’t know, but I want another look. Besides, there’s something queer about that boat and about the man’s behavior.”
“ What?” asked Eriq.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what. I just have a feeling, an instinct.” Her darkest instincts, she thought. “Bring her around for another look, then, Mr. Lansing,” Eriq relented. “Aye, aye, Chief.”
TWENTY-THREE
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
Back on Grand Cayman Island, Ja Okinleye, taking no chances, ordered his entire force to be on the lookout for any suspicious-looking ships entering the ports around his three-island nation. In the easy rhythms of the Dutch- French language which Ja and his men often reverted back to when talking with one another, his officers crowded the airwaves with questions: “What is meant by suspicious- looking boat?”
“ How is a boat going to be looking like that? To look suspicious?”
“ What do you mean, Chief Inspector?”
“ I never heard of no seventy-foot boat being operated by one man.”
“ Fully automated ship?”
“ Wouldn’t someone in port authority know about such a ship?”
Ja angrily stared at the radio mouthpiece where he sat in his car, still at the airport in front of his cousin’s island helicopter business. “Do I have to think for all fifteen of you? Anyone new coming into port, particularly alone, a lone visitor. That is suspicious. What kind of man is he who comes to Cayman without a woman? A ship with a registry outside our waters. Use your heads! Use your eyes and ears! Damn your lazy asses.”
Ja Okinleye had never been involved in a case as large, and with such international roots, as this: a killer who was wanted not only in America but in Great Britain as well. Whenever he did have a bigger than usual case to coordinate, he found it best to be on hand, at the forefront, and so he operated now out of his limousine. This case could cement his career.
It had occurred to him that catching the now-infamous Night Crawler would mean a great deal to him politically, and he had for a while been giving some thought to running for higher office-to get away from being so directly involved in law enforcement. It would make Aliciana and her whole family happy. It would mean more time with his children, not to mention his own sanity and peace of mind. Over the years, he had managed to engender a lot of enemies who would be only too glad to see him placed in higher office, where he might do them less harm.
The island was teeming with underworld activity, much of it stemming from various gambling casinos and smuggling and money-laundering operations, especially in the drug trade. Cayman intermediaries helped mask the route of shipments pouring into the U.S. from such places as Colombia. Customs officials were notoriously easy to bribe, and replacing them again and again hadn’t changed the “island habit” or the morals of the men involved. In the midst of such expected third-world palm greasing, Ja was all too well aware of certain facts of island life. In order to coexist, law enforcement, as much as Ja personally hated the drug trade, pretty much looked the other way save for the occasional good-faith show of a raid now and then, typically as a result of an informant in the drug trade wishing to quell a move by newcomers to the business. It was all so sordid, and Ja was sick of police work, where the investigator’s hands were tied by the very people who charged him with doing his duty. It was, he assumed, the same in most third world countries and communist countries and cities across the world, including America.
Being a cop in Cuba must be the worst kind of hell, he imagined. Handcuffed by one’s own bureaucratic nightmare-like here, he thought. Here the balance wasn’t set so much by a corrupt government as by the powerful men of the island who ran everything, both legitimate and illegitimate and everything in between, including some of the giant casinos and tourist centers. Such powers expected Chief Ja to keep the peace for them and to know where certain lines were drawn, to know where his jurisdiction ended. Sometimes it was at a given door, sometimes at a given street, sometimes at a given level of intervention. It all depended upon the who- the players. He must be ever vigilant about whom he was dealing with and what their connections were and how much political clout they brandished.