“You should.” Kathleen held out her glass for more champagne. “Hammond and his bunch do.” She was brittle. “It doesn’t matter if they confirm me or not. They’ll get somebody else.” “Don’t be silly, Kirk. You’re the best DCI there ever was. It’s only the idiots who don’t know it yet.” A dark cloud passed over her. “But once you’re there, even your friends will try to cut you down.” Then she smiled. “Isn’t that so, Dick?” “It’s part of the job, Mrs. M.,”
Yemm answered. He was glum. “Do you think someone will shoot him?”
Kathleen asked. The question startled everyone. Ensign Dietrich almost dropped the champagne bottle, and the pilot looked over his shoulder through the open cockpit door.
“Come on, Katy, we’re supposed to be on vacation.” McGarvey tried to stop her, but she held up a hand.
“No, wait. Let him answer my question. I have a right to know if someone out there wants to make me a widow.”
“There’s a lot of them want it,” Yemm said. He glanced at McGarvey, who shrugged.
“But will they go for it?”
After a moment Yemm nodded. “I think so.”
“Well,” Kathleen said. She looked at the others. “Isn’t that peachy.”
They landed on St. Thomas when the sun was low on the horizon. By six it would be dark and after the stress of Washington, Kathleen admitted that she was too tired to eat out. She wanted to get directly over to the house on St. John, sit on a veranda with a cup of tea and look at the tropical stars. Captain White taxied over to the private aviation terminal. When the engines spooled down, Ensign Dietrich opened the hatch. A pleasant, soft-spoken immigration official in short sleeves came aboard and checked their papers and aircraft registration. Even though these islands were a U.S. Territory, the formalities were still observed. When the man found out who he was dealing with he practically fell all over himself with hospitality. Drug trafficking throughout the Caribbean was a big problem; that, along with money laundering and gun running had corrupted officials all the way up to the USVTs governor’s office. It made the people here very nervous.
Yemm took the man aside. They would be here only for the weekend. They did not want to read about the director’s visit in the newspaper or hear about it on the radio. There would be no meetings with territorial officials. The CIA would take it unkindly if the news were to leak. “Do you think that he’ll tell anybody?” McGarvey asked.
Kathleen was in the Gulfstream’s head, touching up her makeup. “The first man he sees,” Yemm said. “But he’ll pass along my warning, too.
We’ll be okay.” The crew would stay at a nearby hotel for the weekend.
They were busy securing the aircraft’s systems. Even here at the airport, security was a problem. Yemm made a brief call with his cell phone. “Island Tours is sending over a helicopter,” he told McGarvey when he was done. “It’ll be faster than the boat.”
“Good idea,” McGarvey said. He, too, was tired after the busy week.
The Island Tours Bell Ranger helicopter came over and settled down on the tarmac twenty yards from the Gulfstream. McGarvey glanced out the door. It was just the pilot in the blue-and-white machine. He wondered how fast news traveled in the islands, if the pilot knew who his passengers were. He and Yemm gathered up their bags, and when Kathleen was finished in the head they walked across to the chopper. He wondered if two days was going to be anywhere near enough time for them to come down. McGarvey and Kathleen rode in the back while Yemm rode shotgun next to the pilot. They headed immediately over Lindbergh Bay, then Water Island, skirting the south coast of St. Thomas. The sun had just dropped below the horizon, but already it was dark, and the hills rising up behind the city of Charlotte Amalie were studded with lights. Three cruise ships, lit up like store windows at Christmas, were getting under way from the main docks east of downtown. The entire harbor was filled with more than one hundred boats of every size and description; most of them cruising sailboats escaping the northern winter. Traffic along the waterfront and commercial docks in town was heavy. This was a weekend at the height of the season; everyone in the islands played. Pillsbury Sound, which separated St. Thomas from St.
John, was only three miles wide. As they rounded Long Point, the smaller island came into view, as did the British Virgin Islands of Tortola and Jost Van Dyke to the north. All of the islands, including dozens of smaller ones, many of them uninhabited, rose out of the sea like something out of a James Michener South Seas adventure. McGarvey had been here before, but he never got tired of the scenery. He could feel his tension beginning to subside. Kathleen was looking out the window, her shoulders hunched forward as if she were carrying a huge weight on her back. She was strangely silent. McGarvey touched her arm. “Are you okay, Katy?” “They don’t have a clue,” she said. “Most of them. This is where they come when they want to climb off the real world. Tune out.” She sounded tired and bitter. He studied her profile. An unaccountable sadness rose up inside of him for all the years that they had lost together. But it was getting better, and he would make sure that they stayed on track. His premonitions of disaster were nothing more than the result of a guilty conscience. For years he had gone to sleep every night dreaming about the people he’d killed in the line of duty. Those dreams were coming back to haunt his waking hours now.
Yemm motioned for McGarvey to put on a headset. “The pilot wants to know if you’d like to do a little sight-seeing tonight.”
“No. We want to get settled in.”
“There’s no staff, so we’re on our own for dinner.”
“Just what the doctor ordered, so long as the kitchen is stocked.”
“It is.”
“How about tomorrow, sir?” the pilot came on. “Would you be needing our services? Perhaps an air tour of the islands. The Baths are a little crowded, but still nice. Or perhaps a picnic on Hans Lollick.
No one lives over there, and I can guarantee you a deserted beach.”
“The picnic sounds good,” McGarvey replied. “Let’s make it for lunch. Eleven o’clock.”
“Very good, sir. And we will even provide the picnic lunch.”
McGarvey heated a can of tomato soup and made BLTs. He brought their supper along with a pot of tea for Kathleen and a beer for himself on a tray out to the long veranda, which stretched the length of the main house. Kathleen sat in a tall wicker chair, her bare feet up on the rail, her eyes half-closed. “Penny,” McGarvey said, setting the tray on the low wicker table next to her. “I never want to go back,” she replied dreamily. “It’s a thought. But I think we’d get tired of the isolation after a while.” “Do you want to bet?” She sat up and looked at the tray, her eyes bright. “He can run the CIA and cook.” “The bacon is burned on one side and raw on the other. But if you don’t mind, I don’t mind.” She poured a cup of tea, and McGarvey opened the can of Bud. The house was perched on top of a steep hill that looked southeast across Coral Bay toward the open sea. The sky was filled with stars, but the horizon where the sky met the sea was impossible to make out. The trade wind breeze had died to a whisper, bringing with it smells of the lush jungles on the islands. The air was as soft as lotion, in the mid to high seventies. The television and phones in the house were shut off. They would remain that way. Yemm had retired discreetly to his wing of the house. Liz and Todd had arrived safely at Vail. And Washington and Langley were an entire universe away.