Nimec massaged his chin, feeling a little stupid.
“Is it still Ricci?” Annie said.
“No,” he said. “I promised myself I’d put that away for a while, and I did.”
“So it’s about Megan’s tipster.”
He nodded.
“I’m supposed to be finding out about it,” he said. “And I feel I’m losing time.”
Annie was silent.
“What is it you want to do?” she said.
Nimec rubbed his chin thoughtfully again.
“I want to head over to that main shipping harbor we passed on the way in from the airport,” he said. “And I want to have a look around.”
Annie was silent again, her eyes steady on him. “Go,” she said. “Do what you have to.”
Nimec stood there near the foot of the bed for perhaps a full minute.
“You sure you’re okay with me leaving?” he said at last.
Annie looked at him from where she sat against the headboard, then gave him the slowest of nods.
“As long as you always make sure to come back,” she said.
Out in the garage, Nimec opened the front door of his Mustang loaner, but stopped himself before climbing inside. He’d recalled something Beauchart had told him over their dishes of curry duck and roti at the previous night’s dinner reception.
A thin, hatchet-faced man with a broad expanse of forehead and smoothly combed gray hair, the onetime GIGN chief had, as advance-billed, matched Nimec’s fondness for vintage cars and shown a keen interest in discussing them. He’d also been quick to talk shop about how the expensive vehicles in his fleet were adapted for extreme high security usage.
“The Jankel Rolls you sent to pick us up almost had me fooled,” Nimec had said. “I wouldn’t have known it was armored except for the weight of its door. Then I noticed the flashers, and the extra buttons on the rear consoles, and those speaker covers for the P.A. And I guessed it had a full package.”
Beauchart had nodded.
“For me, retrofitting the older model passenger cars is an enjoyable challenge,” he’d said. “As an enthusiast I don’t want to compromise their luxury and style. Even so, I insist they meet or surpass NATO Level Seven standards of protection.”
“Hard to improve on armor that can stop AP rounds and take the brunt of a mine or grenade blast.”
Again Beauchart had nodded.
“I admit to being a compulsive tinkerer,” he’d said.
“All the work is done at our own armoring plant on the mainland. And with an open-ended budget, which is far too great a temptation.” Beauchart had smiled. “The first question I’ll ask myself about a vehicle is,
‘Would I be at ease having a Forbes Top Ten business leader ride in it?’ Then I ask, ‘What about the American president?’ Last, I ask, ‘What about the bloody pope?’ ” Beauchart’s smile had grown wider. “If there’s any hedging in my mind, I’ll order added upgrades that cost a small fortune… and will be unnoticeable to the casual eye.”
He had eagerly compared notes about specific shielding materials, and Nimec had found his preferences not unlike UpLink’s standard high-sec configuration, a multilayered system of ballistic laminate inserts and flexible nylon floor armor, coupled with steel panels and anti-explosive engine, radiator, and fuel tank wraps. Beauchart had also gone on to mention loading his VIP sedans with options such as automatic fire controls, run-flat tires, hidden ram bumpers… and real-time satellite tracking units with remote door lock and ignition disconnects.
Now Nimec couldn’t help but look at the Mustang and wonder. A sports convertible was too light to be armored without having its balance thrown dangerously out of whack. But there wasn’t much of a trick to putting in GPS acquisition hardware its driver couldn’t see. Assuming for a moment that was somebody’s goal. Even if it was just hidden for aesthetic reasons.
Was he too suspicious? Could be, he decided. But what was the harm in playing it safe?
Nimec turned to the Vespa. Less likely that it would have a built-in tracking device. The object of installing one on this island would not be to locate a stolen vehicle, which couldn’t go further than the island’s shores without being loaded onto a boat, but to get a bead on a person who’d been snatched when driving or getting into or out of it. In the case of a grab taking place while somebody was out with the little scooter, the abductor would want to ditch it as fast as he could and then make a getaway with his victim, eliminating any use in having a tracker aboard.
Or so Nimec figured his good hosts would figure. Unless, of course, their goal was to keep tabs specifically on him, which would leave his feet as his only safe mode of transportation. Except that the harbor was miles away… twenty or thirty miles, he guessed.
A bit much for that midnight stroll of his.
Nimec sighed. In the absence of any other ideas, it looked like the scooter was his best bet.
He got on, pressed its electric starter, and sped from the villa’s grounds into the tropical night.
Just under two hours later Nimec was looking out at the harbor with a pair of high-magnification Gen 4 night vision binocs, the Vespa leaning on its kickstand where he’d stopped it in the roadside darkness. He had been wishing that nothing out of the ordinary would turn up. When you saw a single unusual sighting or occurrence, it was often a strong hint that other oddball things were happening out of sight — once these affairs got going, there hardly ever seemed to be a simple explanation. The further you went beneath the surface, the more you seemed to find that begged closer inspection. And like bugs and rodents lurking under the floorboards, they tended to be the sort of discoveries you would rather not have made.
Right now Nimec wasn’t optimistic about tonight’s foray being an exception to that unhappy rule. When he thought about it, though, it had really started with those e-mail messages to Megan. He’d viewed Rayos del Sol with a probing eye from the moment of his arrival yesterday, already one layer deep into a mystery. What he was doing here at the waterfront was just following through. Burrowing down to the next level, you might say.
From the little he’d seen thus far, Nimec got the sense he might be in for some nasty business.
He stood in the shadows amid a grove of tall royal palms and gazed steadily through the lenses of his binoculars. They represented five thousand dollars’ worth of sophisticated viewing power, their filmless, auto-gated electron plates channeling and amplifying the ambient light through thousands of fiberoptic tubes to give their image greater clarity than any previous generation of night vision device had afforded… and there was plenty of light available, between what was emanating from the harbor’s terminals and berthing areas and the full moon and stars shimmering in the sky.
Maybe, Nimec thought, they would show him something in the next few minutes that would justify their expense and put his peculiar observations into an explainable context. Something out on the quays across the road, or in the open water beyond the inlet channel and lighthouse, where he’d seen the feeder barges and immense box boat converge. At any rate he hoped some sort of evidence would reveal itself to him, in complete defiance of all his presuppositions. Then his suspicions might quiet down for a time, and he could return to the villa, and slip into bed with Annie. Possibly they could even pick up where they had left off that afternoon, get back to the pleasureful exertions of trying to make the baby they’d decided to have. It could happen — why not? But instinct and prior experience told him that babymaking would have to wait.
Nimec drew his focus in from the vessels he’d been tracking to the nearby waterfront. He hadn’t had a whole lot to notice there since the last of the three feeders had been pulled away by tugs, and that continued to be the case. The crane operators and other shipyard workers who had lowered numerous forty-foot containers onto the barges had come down from the loading bridge. The heavy-load forklifts and straddle carriers that had hauled the containers to the bridge had mostly rolled back to a storage terminal across the yard, and then parked among the stacks of forty-footers still awaiting transport to off-island or interior destinations. A handful of longshoreman had remained on the quay to supervise the movement of trucks toward the terminal, but the occasional directions they were giving through their bullhorns had a perfunctory sound now that the shipment had departed.