“That’s Long Island?”
“Yup. I’ll have you back on dry land in half an hour.”
“You got an extra shirt I can have?”
“No problem.” Bailey got a T-shirt from the stateroom in the starboard hull. When he returned, the man was pointing the gun at him. He tried to look surprised. “Take it easy, Diego,” he said. “If you don’t like the shirt, I’ll get you another one.”
“That’s actually very funny,” the man said. He was no longer affecting an accent. He gestured with the barrel of his gun to the aft deck. “Outside.”
Bailey put his hands up, even though the man hadn’t asked him to do so. He walked out to the aft deck, sat down hard on the portside bench, braced his hands on his knees and shook his head.
“Diego, I delivered my end of the bargain. You don’t have to do this. It’s not the smart play.”
“Actually, it is.” The man kept the pistol aimed at Bailey’s chest.
“I’m an accessory, before and after the fact-you know I won’t talk.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Killing me is only going to raise questions. I turn up dead, it’ll only bring more heat. You’re making a stupid move, here. Really stupid.”
The man smiled. A cruel smile. “But you’re not going to turn up dead. You’re just making a move.”
Bailey shook his head like he didn’t understand, and leaned back with his hands planted on the bench behind him. “I don’t understand. Where am I moving?”
“ Grand Cayman. It’s lovely there.”
“They’ve got private banking in Cayman.”
The man’s smile broadened. “I know.”
“Please, you really don’t have to do this.”
“No, I really do have to do this.”
“I’m telling you. Don’t be stupid.”
The man pulled the trigger.
Click.
The man snorted derisively. “Clever,” he said. He dropped the pistol on the deck and reached behind his back and came up with a throwing knife, as Bailey slid his hand under the bench cushion and came up with the preloaded spear gun he’d stashed there a couple hours earlier.
Both men froze.
“Mexican standoff,” said the man who called himself Diego.
“Not really,” said Bailey. “You may be good, but no arm can match the velocity of this thing. You’ll lose.” He locked eyes with the man, but instructed his peripheral vision to watch for any twitch in the man’s knife hand, poised to throw.
“What do you propose?”
“I’ll give you a choice. If you really think you can beat me, fire away. Or, you can take a swim.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll never make it to shore.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll tread water for a while, then you’ll get tired and drown. You could get lucky, a boat may come along and pick you up. But that’s unlikely. You have a choice to make. Either way, it’s a calculated risk.”
The man thought for a second, nodded to himself.
The knife hand moved forward. Bailey pulled the trigger. The knife clattered to the deck at Bailey’s feet.
The man groped for the metal spear sticking out of his chest. He made a horrible gurgling sound, staggered backward. His arms flailed in the air as he toppled over the gunwale and into the Caribbean Sea.
Bailey crossed over to where the man who called himself Diego had stood, picked up the gun and tossed it overboard. He stuck his hand in his pocket, pulled out the bullets and dropped them into the sea.
Then he went inside and poured himself a long drink of rum.
Cayman. That’s where he’d find the money. It would be waiting for him in a bank account in his own name. He plotted a course for Grand Cayman and sipped his drink.
A calculated risk. And it had paid off.
JAVIER SIERRA
Spanish writer Javier Sierra is known for seamlessly weaving history and science together in stories that not only entertain, but which attempt to solve some of the great mysteries of the past. His meticulous research has taken him across the globe, and his knowledge of faraway places and forgotten cultures is abundantly clear in “The Fifth World.”
When murder and mysticism meet, Tess Mitchell is left with only a yellow butterfly found at the feet of her slain professor. The Mayan Calendar and its prophecies had always seemed academic to the young woman, but in Javier’s chilling and believable style, they come alive in uncertain, frightening new ways.
THE FIFTH WORLD
“You’ve gotten yourself into a quite a mess, young lady.”
Tess Mitchell’s blue eyes flashed at the precinct commander as he entered the interrogation room where she had been placed in isolation. She had seen his face before on the local TV in Tucson.
“My name is Lincoln Lewis and I’m in charge of this precinct,” he said with a sneer. His overall manner, however, was entirely professional. “I know you’ve spoken with some of our agents already, but it would be a real help if you could clear up a couple of things from your statement.”
“Of course.”
“For one thing, I need you to tell me what, exactly, you were doing at four o’clock this afternoon in Professor Jack Bennewitz’s office.”
“You mean, when I discovered…the body?”
The policeman nodded. Tess swallowed hard.
“Well, we had been working together on a project connected to his field of investigation. I was doing research for him and this morning I came across some data that I thought would interest him. Observational data. Technical things.”
“I see. And what was it that Professor Bennewitz taught?”
“Theory of the solar system, sir.”
“Did you have an appointment with him?”
A blush suddenly came over Tess’s cheeks and, unable to conceal it, she cast her eyes downward at the steel-and-wood table.
“To be honest I didn’t need one,” she explained. “He let me come and see him whenever I had to, and since I knew that he had office hours for his students around then, I just decided to go by. That’s all.”
“And what did you find when you got there, Miss Mitchell?”
“I already told your colleagues-the first thing I noticed was how silent it was in Building B. Jack always spoke in such a loud voice. Whenever he yelled-which was often-you could practically hear him at the other end of campus. He was a very intense kind of person, you know? But I noticed something else, too-there was a very odd smell in the waiting room. It even drifted out into part of the hallway, a very strong, acidic odor, really awful.” Tess made a face at the thought of it before continuing. “So I went in without knocking.”
“And what did you find?”
Tess Mitchell closed her eyes, trying to conjure up the scene in her head. The image of her friend Jack Bennewitz lying back in his leather armchair, his face contorted and his eyes fixed on some indeterminate point between the plaster ceiling and the case filled with his chess trophies, flashed through her mind for a brief moment. Despite the fact that his jacket was fully buttoned, there was no way to miss the chocolate-colored stain that had soaked through the shirt underneath. There was no sign of a struggle. Books and papers were meticulously organized, and even the coffee that he must have poured himself shortly before ending up in that gruesome state remained in a mug on his desk, cold and untouched.
“Did you touch Professor Bennewitz’s body? Did you make any attempt to revive him?” Officer Lewis insisted.
“Good God, no!” the young woman exclaimed. “Of course not! Jack was dead, dead! Don’t you get it?”
“Didn’t you notice anything at all out of the ordinary? Something that might have been missing from the office?”
Tess Mitchell pondered these questions a few seconds before shaking her head no. There was no way, she thought, that the wooden box containing a butterfly with giant yellow wings that she had found at Jack’s feet could be of any use to the investigation. She had put it in her bag almost instinctively; she had no idea why a prominent theoretical physicist like Bennewitz would have been an insect collector, even though she herself was a real aficionado.