“I share my plans on a need-to-know basis. I’ve already explained that. A few details at a time, that’s all. It’s a standard security measure.”
With exaggerated patience, I said, “I need to know the boat’s destination because I will soon be sitting where you’re sitting and I will be steering, not you. Which means we will be going in a straight line, not zigzagging, or making little tiny circles on the great big ocean. So why not tell me the destination now, before we switch places? Give me something to aim for… Sam.”
The man softened. “Am I that bad? Or are you in a pissy mood?”
I said, “Both.”
He laughed. “Know what? You’ve got a point. I try to pick the best people available and let them do their jobs. No second-guessing, ever. Out here, Doc, you’re the expert. And you’ve had a long night.”
He said it so amiably, I felt bad for snapping at him. But I also realized that by challenging me, then deferring, he’d created a sense of indebtedness-the precursor to loyalty. The man knew how to leverage, pushing, then backing off.
But he was right. I’d had a long night.
On Ligarto, agent Wren had insisted on escorting the former president to his cabin. That left me alone, waiting in swamp and mosquitoes, unsure what to do. Leave or stay?
I stayed… stayed for two miserable hours before Vue returned. “President be here soon,” he said, then surprised me by adding, “He is sick. How sick is he?”
Vue didn’t know-my first revelation of how private and stubborn Wilson could be.
I evaded, telling him I knew nothing about Wilson’s health.
Vue’s reaction was strange. He sounded pleased. “Already, you are lying for him. Good. I lie for him many times. I would die for President Wilson, he is such a friend. That how I know he must be very sick or he would not be determined to do this thing.”
I said, “Determined to do what?”
It was Vue’s turn to lie. “How would I know? I am his bodyguard. If I could travel, he maybe tell me. For all these years, I go everywhere with him. That’s why I must stay here. It is the only way to fool Secret Service. But there’s something I want to ask you. ” He was eager to change subjects. “Where that knife you say you take from those men?”
I found the knife and handed it to him. He used his penlight to inspect it, then shook his head solemnly. “I believed what you tell us before, but I believe more now. This is knife, very rare. It called a ‘ badek,’ some places; Indonesia. Or a ‘khyber’ in Burma and the Himalayas.” He touched the knife’s edge. “Very best steel, hand-forged, and sharp. It curved for this”-Vue swiped a finger across his throat-“You don’t have weapons. How you take this knife from a man?”
He seemed impressed when I told him, but it didn’t make him any more talkative. He shrugged when I pressed for details about Wilson’s travel plans. When I asked for an update on the men in the inflatable, his answers were vague; he seemed preoccupied. He kept returning to the subject of President Kal Wilson.
“This very hard for me ’cause I used to taking care of the man. Dr. Ford, you must be his bodyguard now. When you return safe with the president, you and me, we meet privately. I expect you give me full report.”
He spoke unemotionally, but there was an implicit threat.
Less veiled was Vue’s interest in the electronics I was carrying, or had aboard. I told him I had a GPS, and a cell phone, adding, “My VHF radio’s broken and the cell phone’s worthless. I can’t get a signal out here.”
I was lying about the VHF-I’d dropped the damn thing overboard when I was loading the canoe. But the man’s interest wasn’t conversational, I discovered.
“You very sure that all you have?”
“Yep. Very sure.”
Without warning, he took my wrist. “What about your watch? They lots of electronic watches now.” I was wearing my old stainless Rolex Submariner, something I rarely do, but it seemed to fit the situation.
He inspected both sides of the watch, then said, “No laptop? iPod? No personal data file?”
“In a canoe? Nope. Canoes and electronics don’t mix. Plus, I don’t own any of that crap, anyway.”
Vue didn’t see the humor. He held out his hand. “You give me GPS and cell phone. President be here soon and you go.”
That made no sense. “Why would I leave the GPS? There’s still fog out there. And it’s my personal cell phone.”
His hand didn’t waver, nor did his tone. “You give me all electronics. President’s orders. I keep them safe ’til you get back.”
“But why?”
Vue shrugged, another lie. “I dunno. He call these things blind horses. Maybe he want you to use your own eyes.”
I felt like telling him to spare me the aphorisms. Instead, I said, “He’s worried about being tracked. Why don’t you just say so?” I handed him my phone and little GPS, finally grasping why Wilson had refused to let me use my twenty-one-foot Maverick flats boat. I could have poled in just as quietly, and the skiff was specially rigged for night travel-tactical LED lights mounted beneath the poling platform; a spotlight, with an infrared lens, mounted above. The Maverick will do fifty knots in a foot of water -only a helicopter could have caught us.
But Wilson had demanded I come by canoe. Less chance of hidden electronics, I realized.
Before Vue left me, he loaded the president’s bags into the canoe, saying, “I am from the snow mountains, Burma, near the Chinese border. There are men in my village who think they know of you. You had many friends, some with green faces. And yet, our men say, you always traveled alone.”
I waited. He was talking about Indochina.
“You not traveling alone now. Understand? You never leave the president alone. Not for a minute, because he die soon, I think. In my village, when a great man dies we place his body on a platform where the wind can take it. President Wilson, he is a great man, and he must not die alone.”
Vue, I was guessing, came from one of the many tribes that inhabit mountainous regions from Afghanistan to Nepal, from Burma into Southeast Asia. Like Great Britain’s infamous mercenaries the Gurkhas, the tribesmen are known for their loyalty and their fearlessness. According to legend, they are the descendants of mountain gods, but the ethnic majorities of Burma, Cambodia, and Vietnam refer to them as “Mois”- a racial slur that means “savages.”
I said, “I’ve been in those border areas. I attended a funeral like you’re describing. It was for the father of a friend, a member of the Hmong tribe. You call it a ‘wind burial’?”
“Yes. Put the body high among the trees, so the spirit flies.”
As he added, “ Mong, that word mean ‘brave,’ ”I was remembering a line of mourners in colorful dress, winding up a hill with a red coffin, and chanting as vultures cauldroned overhead. There was the smell of incense and ox dung.
“The burial ceremony is important. But it more important how a great man dies. Do you understand? There must be wind and light so the sky can take him.”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t understand.”
Vue shrugged his massive shoulders, then turned, done with it. I watched him disappear into the darkness of the shell ridge.
The former president arrived an hour later, carrying a backpack. “Secret Service thinks I’m locked in my cabin,” he whispered. “Let’s get our feet wet.”
At 4 A.M., wind freshened off the Gulf of Mexico; heat radiating from the Everglades was siphoning weather from the open sea. I was in the stern, paddling toward the Gulf, using the October moon as a beacon. It was desert yellow, gaseous. It cast a column of light broad as a highway.
When we’d traded seats, Wilson finally revealed our destination. We were bound for the southern point of Cayo Costa, an isolated barrier island three miles southwest of Ligarto. There was a settlement of shacks and beach houses on the point that were only occasionally inhabited by the eclectic mix of beach bums, hermit entrepreneurs, and hippie dropouts who owned them. There were no roads on the island, no landing strips.