When he got to where the Chris-Craft had turned around, there was nothing but open sea. Cooper flipped off the MerCruisers and let his Apache drift while he took a look at his charts. He checked his GPS-11, marking his position precisely, examined the relevant blown-up satellite photograph, and cross-referenced the GPS numbers with the notes he’d taken. When he was through with all this there was no question about it: he was exactly where the spy satellite had registered the Chris-Craft at its journey’s farthest point from Jamaica.
Cooper’s depth finder told him the water here was 210 fathoms deep. He cruised around for the better part of two hours, continuing to read the depth finder; the numbers fluctuated between 190 and 220 fathoms, about 1,100 to 1,300 feet deep. There was no shoal or sandbar, no way anyone was out here diving on a reef, Cooper beginning to think he was wasting his time, that he should have shot dead the captain of that goddamn boat and pulled the wino back up the ladder when he’d had the chance.
Since he’d already come all the way out here, he decided to take another look at the navigation charts he kept aboard and see whether it made any sense to nose around. The nearest land was just under four miles to the east, where a small island chain, geopolitically part of Martinique, occupied a ten-mile crescent of sea. The main island lay at the northwest end of the chain, closest to where he now drifted on the open water.
Cooper rode over to the archipelago. It was conceivable, he thought, that the mystery boat had zipped over to one of the islands, then quickly returned between successive satellite photographs, but the positions of the boat in the two shots, taken one hour apart, were virtually identical, and the boat hadn’t shown it could move fast enough to make it there and back in much less than an hour, no matter which neighboring island it went to visit.
He found the chain’s main island to be a steep chunk of land rimmed by cliffs and similarly steep terrain, with dense vegetation spilling from the lip of the cliffs. When he reached it, he was facing the eastern side of the island; there was a fine mist, even in the hot afternoon sun, covering somewhere around two-thirds of the land mass. To Cooper the place looked to contain five or six square miles of forest, maybe more. There was a small dock at the base of one of the cliffs that faced him, but no visible structures above. He made a wide swing around the island, keeping an eye on the depth finder-you weren’t wary of reefs in these parts, your boat would wind up as another underwater home for prowling barracuda and maniacal free-divers seeking to hold their breath like the kids of the South Pacific. As he reached the leeward coast, the depth finder started to bleep-five fathoms, three, two, one. The sand was coming up on him through the clear blue water, and Cooper could see rocks poking at the surface a few meters away.
On this, the western side of the island, there lay, some six hundred yards from his boat, a protected lagoon. Cabanas, a white sand beach, an artificial preponderance of coconut palms amid the indigenous Caribbean forest, a few tourists in the sun. He saw a pair of float planes moored in the lagoon, but no boats, Cooper thinking the planes provided the only access to the shallow lagoon-that no fifty-foot Chris-Craft would be pulling in there. But then again, he thought, there were other ways of getting a mummified wino off a boat and onto an island.
For the hell of it, he snapped a few pictures. He used his Nikon’s big zoom lens but still couldn’t see much through the viewfinder, not from this far out. He didn’t really care about getting close-ups of sunburned fatties lying around like beached whales anyway. What he could see looked no different from any of the usual Caribbean corporate retreats: guests lounged around the bar and the beach, drinking, eating, a couple of them knee-deep in the water of the lagoon.
Cooper poked around the rest of the chain, made up of three smaller islands, two of which were small and barren enough to be uninhabitable, though Cooper had seen beachfront bed-and-breakfasts built on worse. The bigger of the three displayed a handful of private homes, some rickety docks, but little else besides trees and rock.
He popped off enough shots to fill out the remainder of the memory card and powered back to the mystery boat’s holding spot. Seeing nothing further that convinced him to stick around, he whacked the Apache’s twin throttles all ahead full with his elbow and shot a rooster tail of whitewater out behind the boat as he hauled some westward ass on a course for the Virgins.
31
Spike Gibson peered through a set of Xenon binoculars from his suite in the Greathouse. His massive biceps twitching lazily, he watched the Apache speed away until the racing boat was a speck appearing above one swell, then another, and then could no longer be seen.
He wondered whether this was another round in General Deng’s charade. In the past five days there had been four other passing boats and one private plane, meaning that in the span of less than a week, Mango Cay had seen a three hundred percent increase in casual passersby as compared to the entire last two and a half years. Gibson knew this had nothing to do with coincidence: while the increased traffic flow, arriving at the worst possible time for the project, might have been the result of a leak from one of the general’s guests, or even a freak occurrence of chance, the more likely scenario was that Deng had planned it. Either the general was conducting a test or, Gibson thought, worse.
This latest drive-by felt different, though. It wasn’t Deng’s style. This one felt to Gibson like a visit from some dumb, oblivious asshole in a noisy speedboat snapping random shots of a beautiful tropical isle, or better yet, the opposite: a visit from somebody who knew exactly what he was doing and just happened to be acting like a dumb, oblivious asshole.
Gibson deposited the binoculars on the bar between the lounge and the kitchen in his suite and fired up a Black & Decker blender. The blender was racked full of sliced fruit, which the maid, whose name was Lana, knew to leave for him three times a day. He shoveled six ounces of creatine powder into the blender along with ice, nonfat milk, and the fruit, downed the protein shake in three tremendous gulps, stretched his massive arms above his head, and flipped off the kitchen’s ceiling fan on his way out of the room.
It was time for a workout.
In a meticulously designed circuit, iPod blasting N.W.A. in his ears, Gibson pumped iron for ninety straight minutes. He worked with massive stacks of weight in endless sets. While he pumped, he cleansed his mind of impurities and focused solely on the dumb asshole in the Apache racing boat.
While he was fully capable of detecting and tracking such passing boats anywhere within miles of Mango Cay, he was generally forced to allow these visitors to take their look and move on. It was only when he suspected something sensitive had been revealed-say, for instance, the dozen fucking commie pinkos funding the whole project being photographed frolicking together in the water of the lagoon-that Gibson was forced to take additional measures. He always made sure the additional measures took place back on the visitors’ home turf-as far away from the island as possible.
The pilot of the Apache, whoever he was, had taken photographs of people who could never be photographed together, and that meant that Gibson would now have to deal with the man.
He hit the climax of his workout with a series of lat pull-downs, veins nearly popping from his arms as he mimicked pull-ups in a seated position with over two times his body weight. He polished off the last rep with ease, stretched on the aerobics mat he kept in the corner of the room against a mirror, then made his way through a set of double doors at the back of the weight room. It was necessary for him to punch in an entry code to pass through the doorway.