Reluctantly, Jason made a show of turning the contraption off.
He put it in the seat pocket in front of him. His fingers went to his own pocket. The matchbook he had taken from the assassin in Durham.
He pulled it out, examining it. HOTEL EL CONVENTO, 10 °CALLE CRISTO, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO was embossed on its cover.
What was the connection between a Spetsnaz killer and a hotel in San Juan? Not much of a clue, but the only one Jason had.
35
Jason had been disappointed to learn that Thomas, Roosevelt, Captain, United States Marine Corps (Ret.) had checked out. In fact, the bachelor officers’ quarters seemed deserted. There had been nothing to do but take his single bag to his quarters and retrieve the package he had left before flying to London: the Glock, two clips, and a box of ammunition. He could have checked the gun in a bag on the plane but that would have required waiting at a baggage carousel, risking delay, and becoming a stationary target. Plus, there was also the risk the British might discover the weapon, subjecting him to criminal penalties at worst and lengthy questioning at best.
He took the opportunity to stop by the base clinic to have a doctor look at his shoulder’s healing gunshot wound.
The doctor was a woman. She wore no makeup. Thick black-framed glasses, blond hair pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck, white lab coat at least two sizes too big. Her name tag labeled her as Ferris, J. The bronze oak leaves on her collar denoted her rank as a major.
She pulled off the bandage, gently pressing around the area. “Hurt?”
“Not as much as it did last time I was here, a couple of days ago.”
She cocked her head, still staring at the shoulder. “Looks like a bullet wound.”
Jason said nothing as she perused his brief chart. “Says here it is a bullet wound, sustained outside the country.”
Again, Jason said nothing.
“Also says here you’re retired Army. If you’re retired, how come somebody shot you?”
“Accidentally, self-inflicted.”
She made no effort to conceal her incredulity as she taped a new bandage into place. “As an Army officer you should know how to handle firearms safely.”
“The human mind is always capable of learning. And make that a former Army officer.”
She snipped the last bit of tape. “Hopefully quickly. The next ‘accident’”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“might be fatal.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Doc.”
She stood. “For that bit of advice, Captain, I’ll allow you to buy me a drink at the officers’ club at, say, twenty hundred hours?”
“As long as the sun has gone down, Doc.”
“Captain, somewhere on this old earth the sun has always gone down.”
It was not until he was walking back to his quarters he had realized he had something very much resembling a date.
Well, why not? Maria was still in Iceland with her damned volcanoes, too busy to call or even text these last couple of days and …
Not her fault she’s in Iceland, the small voice in his head argued. She’s there ’cause you let Momma manipulate her so you could take the assignment she had for you.
Maybe. But I didn’t stop her from even so much as an e-mail. I mean, what’s she doing with this guy …?
Sevensen, Pier Sevensen.
Yeah, him. What’s she doing with him that’s so important she can’t stay in touch?
You got problems with the global chip in your own BlackBerry?
Well, it’s really not a date, anyway. Just two officers having a drink.
The internal argument came to an end as Jason passed the officers’ club. He went inside to the room where he had seen the computers. Calling up Google, he entered “Hotel El Convento.” He was rewarded by a picture of a pale-yellow stucco Spanish colonial building. An adjacent map located it in the middle of Old San Juan. A brief read informed him the place had, as the name suggested, begun life as a convent, specifically of the Carmelite order, in 1561. Later years had been anything but benign, turning the structure into a dance hall, a casino, a flophouse and, finally, a parking area for garbage trucks. The renaissance of Puerto Rican tourism began shortly after the end of World War II and the old place had been restored as a hotel, one visited on at least one occasion by Ernest Hemingway and an impressive list of other luminaries.
Interesting, but what connection did a former nunnery have with Grünwelt? Perhaps the Greenies had an interest in Puerto Rico’s rain forest. But wasn’t that already a national park, protected by federal law? Another Google excursion confirmed that the El Yunque pre-dated American possession, having been set aside as a national park by the Spanish Crown in 1876. The place had been off-limits to development for nearly a century and a half.
Swell, but what interest would a radical and potentially violent conservationist group have in an area already protected?
The only answer Jason could come up with was none. There was some reason other than global warming why the persons Jason believed had been sent to England to kill him would have been at that hotel in San Juan. The problem was finding out what that reason was.
So far, he had a strong suspicion Professor Cravas had been right to the extent that this environmental group, Grünwelt, was behind the attacks. As far as specifics, he had only two clues: the name Uri and this hotel in San Juan.
Not a whole lot.
Unaware he was tapping his lips with a ballpoint, Jason reached into a pocket for his super low-tech address book. He was unwilling to entrust years of telephone numbers to a computer system that could — and frequently did — swallow them at will. He flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. Then he entered a number in his BlackBerry.
“Sybil? Jason Peters here. Will you be available day after tomorrow? No, I’m not sure of the time yet, I’ll have to check the airline schedule.”
A few minutes before eight, he was sitting at the bar at the officers’ club, toying with a short glass of single-malt scotch, regrettably not Balvenie, on the rocks. The bartender, a chief master sergeant, was polishing glasses. A comradely hum of conversation formed an audio backdrop for soft instrumentals of long-ago showtunes.
Then it all came to a stop. Except for the recorded music. The talk ceased abruptly. The barkeep put down the glass in his hand and stared at a point over Jason’s shoulder.
Jason swiveled his bar stool around and had to stop himself from gawking.
Ferris, J., had undergone a metamorphosis that even Ovid could not have contemplated. The lab coat had been replaced by a red dress that did nothing to conceal a figure most eighteen-year-old girls would have killed for. The blond hair had been unleashed from its knot and hung in bountiful waves to just above her bare shoulders. The heavily rimmed glasses had disappeared in favor of artfully applied eye shadow.
She walked into the room and climbed onto the bar stool next to Jason’s. He found the whisper of her stockings as she crossed her legs very, very sexy.
“Buy a girl a drink, Captain?”
A stemmed martini glass appeared on the bar as if by magic. She nodded her thanks to the sergeant as she withdrew a toothpick upon which a pair of olives were impaled. Putting it to her mouth, she used her tongue to remove the olives.