Doc - 19 - Chasing Midnight Page 4

  That quick, our positions were reversed—me on top, him on his belly in the water. Twice, he tried to slam the back of his head into my face, but I was pressed too close for him to connect. The positioning allowed me enough control to free one hand, pry off my second fin and lob it close to where the other fin had landed.

  When I did, he attempted to elbow me. I caught his left wrist and levered it up between his shoulder blades. At the same time, I grabbed his throat with my right hand, lifted his face out of the water and leaned close enough to his ear to whisper, “Why are you doing this? I didn’t shoot Kazlov, damn it!”

  Struggling to breathe, Vladimir made a guttural sound of pain but didn’t answer.

  I jammed the man’s face into the water, pushed it to the bottom and held him there while I refueled with ten deep breaths. As I did, my eyes scanned the docks, then moved to the island. The bodyguard had been in contact with someone before he’d had radio problems. Soon, they would come looking for him.

  I leaned and squinted, trying to discern details. Was there someone in the shadows, moving toward us? My glasses were still on the fishing line around my neck, so I couldn’t be sure.

  I watched for a couple of more seconds, then returned my attention to Vladimir. After levering the man’s head up, I waited until he was done coughing water before I tried again.

  “Tell me what the hell’s going on and I’ll let you go.”

  When he refused, I pushed his face to the bottom for another ten count, as my head swiveled toward the island. Yes, there had been someone standing near a tree—possibly the shooter’s ally. I knew for certain only because the blurry shape I’d seen was now gone.

  Where?

  I couldn’t risk remaining in the open, an easy target. Not with so many trigger-happy people around. So I grabbed the bodyguard’s belt and dragged him closer to the dock in case I needed cover… or a safe exit.

  Then I waited as Vladimir tried to stand. He was so winded and disoriented that he staggered and fell before finally making it to his feet. For several seconds, he stood at leaning rest, hands on his knees, fighting to get his breath.

  There didn’t appear to be much fight left in the guy, but he had fooled me before. By the time he’d recovered enough to stand erect, and look at me, I was holding my dive knife, palm up, because I wanted him to see it.

  “You didn’t try to kill me because of explosives,” I said in a low voice, straightening my glasses. “Or because Kazlov was shot. This has something to do with his boat being robbed, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?”

  The man snorted as if I was too stupid to understand, his eyes moving from me to the Russian’s yacht moored at the T-dock, seventy-some yards in the distance. His contempt caused me to think of another explanation for why the night had suddenly turned violent.

  No… there were several possibilities, in fact—explanations that were as varied as the three powerful men who had come to Vanderbilt Island as Viktor Kazlov’s guests.

  Earlier in the day, Kazlov had told me he was disappointed in the turnout for his caviar party. I doubted that, considering the difficult time I’d had finessing invitations, but hadn’t challenged the point. The Russian claimed he had invited experts from around the world, but the only notables who’d showed were his three most powerful rivals, an Iranian, a Turkmenian and the millionaire from China.

  Later, I had made it my business to meet them all—introductions filled with meaningless niceties to deflect conversation. It is a device that powerful people use to keep their inferiors at a respectable distance.

  Lien Hai Bohai was Chinese, but he had been educated in Hong Kong, so his English was as polished as his manners. He owned a fleet of fishing boats that were actually floating fish factories. Bohai also owned three aquaculture facilities and was among the primary reasons that China is now the world’s leading exporter of farm-raised caviar. Since China began encouraging private enterprise and entrepreneurialism more than a decade ago, men like Bohai had turned the behemoth’s economy around.

  The surname of Kazlov’s Iranian competitor was Armanie. Because I’d done research, I knew Armanie’s given name was Abdul, but the man rarely used it.

  The third man, from Turkmenia, was Darius Talas—a massively fat man whose first name stuck with me because I associated his silver hair and mustache with the fictional Dorian Gray.

  Like Kazlov, his guests had spent the previous two days gambling, partying and watching dolphins humiliate themselves at the resort across the bay—a spectacle Tomlinson and I had intentionally missed.

  “Bonding,” the Russian called it.

  Like Kazlov, both Caspian neighbors had brought a security “assistant” to the island—high-stakes businessmen hire bodyguards for a reason. Unlike Kazlov, his competitors had business interests that included more than caviar and black marketeering. Talas and Armanie were also making a fortune drilling for oil in the Caspian Sea, so caviar wasn’t their primary source of income.

  Lien Hai Bohai was different from his rivals in several ways (although he, too, had enjoyed the casino, I’d been told). Kazlov and Armanie were seldom separated from their bodyguards while Bohai, a frail man, in his seventies, seemed unconcerned with security. He was traveling with two women, no security guys. And, unlike the others, he had made his fortune stripping the sea bottom of life rather than probing it for fossil fuels.

  All three of Kazlov’s rivals were rich—an important similarity, if one of them had something to do with breaking into the Russian’s yacht. If they’d done it, they weren’t looking for money.

  “Someone stole information,” I said to the bodyguard, as we stood facing each other in thigh-deep water. “That’s what this is all about. You didn’t ask me anything about what was stolen, so it has to be data of some type. The thieves were after something that had no value once it was compromised. That’s why you don’t care about recovering it.”

  I made sure he saw my knife before I said, “That’s why you didn’t ask me about the robbery before you tried to shoot me. Nothing else explains it. What did they take, a computer? A hard drive?”

  Photographs were another possibility, but I was thinking about Kazlov’s claim that he had discovered a way to create a hybrid caviar using DNA from beluga and Gulf sturgeon. The Russian had explained the process to me, but in vague terms, when I’d met him earlier.

  Vague or not, I understood more than Kazlov realized, because sturgeon aquaculture was another subject I had researched. In fact, I had spent a couple of days in nearby Sarasota, at Mote Marine Laboratory’s seventeen-acre research facility, talking to experts. There, Jim Michaels, one of the world’s leading authorities on sturgeon farming, had provided me with the latest data.

  Thanks to Michaels, I had learned more from what Kazlov didn’t say, during our half-hour conversation, than from the few details he provided. I had come away from the talk convinced that Kazlov, and his aquaculture specialists, were working on something unusual. A unique protocol, possibly, that had more to do with manipulating chromosomal sets in sturgeon than disguising beluga DNA. Research on transgenic fish has been around just long enough to earn the process an acronym: GMOs. Genetically modified organisms. And also long enough to prove its profitability.

  The fact that I knew this in advance caused me to suspect that Kazlov was lying about developing a sturgeon hybrid. Why would he bother? More important, why would Kazlov’s three powerful competitors pretend to be interested? They were knowledgeable men. They had to know already what I myself had only recently learned. According to the experts at Mote Marine Lab, there are only two true holy grails in the world of producing beluga-grade caviar.

  1. Develop a female sturgeon that will produce preovulated eggs, on a regular basis, that can be removed without killing the female. As an analogy, Michaels had used dairy farms and milk cows.

  2. Develop a female beluga that will mature in five to ten years instead of twenty years and thus take the deadly pressure off the world’s wild brood stock
population.

  If Kazlov had discovered either of these holy grails, his research was well worth stealing. It would be worth billions, not millions of dollars. And it could be stolen—if the Russian’s research was incomplete and not yet patentable as an exclusive intellectual property.

  I didn’t consciously think about all this as I stood, holding the knife, questioning Kazlov’s bodyguard. I had been going over it in my mind all afternoon. Genetic engineering, in all fields, requires exacting protocols if the results are to be duplicated. If Kazlov had made an unprecedented breakthrough, his beluga protocols and research records had to exist. Which is why I immediately suspected that a computer hard drive had been stolen

  Kazlov’s research data would have been backed up in many places, of course, so it was pointless to recover a missing hard drive or to question the thief who’d stolen it. But killing the thief before he shared data worth billions of dollars made good business sense—to a black marketeer like Kazlov, anyway.

  Once again, I said to Vladimir, “Someone stole a hard drive. Or a computer. Nothing else adds up. But why suspect me?”

  I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach when the bodyguard shrugged and said, “I once work for Russian State Security Committee. For man who does not exist, you are very famous, Dr. Ford. Of course you are first person I suspect.”

  Russian State Security Committee and the KGB—the same organization.

  I replied, “That doesn’t mean I shot your boss or rigged an explosive device—or broke into his damn boat.”

  Probably fearing I now had reason to kill him, Vladimir offered me an alternative, saying, “You come to fishing lodge and help me find Mr. Kazlov, if you don’t believe. We in same work line, you and me. Tonight”—the man took a look over his shoulder before continuing—“tonight, everyone go crazy. Never seen such craziness. Maybe you need our help. Maybe we need yours.”

  The man couldn’t be serious. It was a ploy to lure me back to the enemy’s camp. Even so, I was willing. Judging from all the gunfire, the enemy’s camp was a hell of a lot safer than standing in the water out in the open.

  I used the knife to point toward shore, telling Vladimir, “You lead the way. I’ll buy you a vodka or two—we’ve both earned it.”

  I would have preferred to watch cops handcuff the big hairy bastard. But first I wanted to humor the guy because there was a lot I wanted to know—including what Tomlinson had said to convince the bodyguard or Kazlov that I’d broken into his yacht. First, my old pal somehow helps a group of eco-extremist trespassers, then he implicates me in a crime? I wanted some answers.

  Instead of moving, though, Vladimir stood motionless, his attention fixed on something ashore. Because it was so dark, and because my glasses were hazed with salt, I was slower to figure out what he was looking at.

  Someone was standing beneath trees near the reception office. That’s what had caught his attention. No… not standing. It was the vague shape of a man dressed in dark clothing, his face covered with maybe a scarf, walking toward us. He was carrying what looked like a professor’s laser pointer. The pointer slashed a red streak on the ground with every swing of his arm.

  Instantly, I stepped behind Vladimir, using him as a shield because I knew it wasn’t a laser pointer. Too many shots had been fired tonight. It had to be a laser gun sight, probably mounted on a semiautomatic pistol. But maybe the situation wasn’t as threatening as it seemed.

  The man coming toward us was inexperienced, that was obvious. No pro would give away his position before he was ready to fire. The guy was probably nervous, unknowingly activating the laser’s pressure switch, his fingers too tight around the pistol grip.

  Vladimir realized what we were seeing, too, because he said something in Russian that sounded like “Piz-do-BOL!” and crouched low. I did the same because the laser was suddenly a smoky red cable that panned across the water, then painted a shaky Z stripe on my chest.

  I was diving toward the dock when the first round was fired.

  5

  Three pistol shots later, I was hiding under the dock, near where I had tossed my Rocket fins. As I used feet and hands to search for the fins, my attention shifted from the dark shoreline, to Vladimir, who had been hit at least once.

  He lay thrashing on his back, then managed to get to his knees. His face was featureless in the darkness, blank from shock. His left arm dangled in the water, a useless deadweight.

  I wondered if he’d been hit anywhere else.

  The man’s head turned toward the gunman, then to the dock, where I was crouching. Vladimir’s brain was still working, at least, because he began to crawl toward me. Not crawl, actually. Because of his dead arm, he had to lunge forward, find his balance, then worm his knees beneath him before lunging again—pathetic to witness.

  I should have kept moving—especially after I found one fin, then the second, lying on the bottom nearby. With fins, the dock became an effective exit tunnel into deeper water. From there, I could transit beneath a couple of nearby boats to the freedom of open water. Or I could hide until the gunman tired of searching and then maybe use a VHF radio on one of the boats to call for help.

  I couldn’t bring myself to leave, though. It wasn’t because I felt any allegiance to the wounded man—why would I? But I was adrenaline drained and suddenly indecisive—a by-product of fear. Until I understood what was happening, it was impossible to know what to do next or who to trust.

  It had been a confusing night, but now I was completely baffled. Had Vladimir just been shot by one of his own people? Or were Kazlov, his two Caspian competitors, or possibly even Lien Bohai, engaged in a private war?

  Bohai could be eliminated, I’d decided—the man was in his seventies and he’d arrived without a bodyguard. It was plausible, though, that the men from the Caspian Sea—Talas, Armanie and Kazlov—had squabbled and were now shooting it out.

  Black marketeers of Eastern Europe don’t get as much publicity as Mexican narco gangs, but they are as murderous, and markedly more dangerous, because they operated on a more sophisticated level. Circumventing international laws requires political connections, money and brains.

  Caviar traffickers commonly recruit key people from special ops teams around the Caspian Sea. It explains the trade’s reputation for precise and ruthless action against anyone who crosses them.

  As Vladimir dragged himself toward me, I got an answer to one of my questions—maybe two answers—when the gunman opened fire again.

  The pistol didn’t have a silencer, and I ducked instinctively as bullets slapped the water nearby, WHAP-WHAP-WHAP-WHAP.

  Four quick rounds… then two more, all hitting close enough to Vladimir to confirm that he wasn’t the victim of friendly fire.

  Yes… Kazlov’s people were being targeted. It suggested that his Iranian or Turkmenian competitor—maybe both—had decided to stop the Russian’s work on beluga sturgeon or to steal his methodology… or they wanted to settle some old debt.

  When the gunman fired twice more, however—and missed both times—I began to doubt my own theory. How could a trained professional score only one hit out of twelve or thirteen rounds? True, it was dark. Yes, the gunman was twenty-some yards away—a very long shot for a pistol—and he was moving. But thirteen rounds?

  It caused me to reconsider another possibility—an explanation I had already contemplated but didn’t like because it implicated old enemies… or maybe even an old friend.

  Tomlinson.

  Exhausted, Vladimir dropped to his belly in water too shallow for him to submerge. When a bullet plowed a furrow near his head, though, he got to his knees and lunged again, landing only two body lengths from where I was hiding.

  The gunman was closer, too, but I didn’t know exactly where. Soon, he would be on the dock, probably with a flashlight. I’d been through that once tonight, and once was more than enough. I couldn’t delay my escape much longer.

  Intellectually, I knew I should put on my fins and head for deeper wat
er. I hadn’t learned all I wanted to know from the wounded man, but I had seen enough to be convinced there was no safe place on the island. Risky or not, I had to contact law enforcement. Then I had to find Tomlinson and try to help him and anyone else who had been caught in the middle of this lunacy.

  Yet, instead of escaping, I remained hidden as Vladimir collapsed on his belly again only yards away. In the sudden silence of wind and lapping waves, I realized the gunman had stopped firing.

  There had to be a reason. Had his weapon misfired? Or was he reloading?

  Reloading, probably. There are semiautomatic pistols with extended magazines that hold thirty rounds or more. Most, though, have half that capacity. If the gunman was changing magazines, it would take only a few seconds.

  I decided to risk a quick look.

  Hooking an arm around a piling, I poked my head above the dock for a couple of seconds, then ducked back into the shadows.

  The gunman was at the water’s edge, fifteen yards away, his back to me. The way he was hunched over, concentrating, gave the impression that his gun had jammed. Or maybe he didn’t have a second magazine so was now reloading one cartridge at a time.

  If I’d been sure that’s what he was doing, I would have charged the guy. It was tempting. The only way to find out, though, was to actually try it. I decided to take another look to confirm.

  That’s what I was getting ready to do when I realized that Vladimir was floating facedown, head bobbing in a freshening breeze, his body very still.

  Without thinking, I took a long, silent step and grabbed the back of the man’s shirt. As I dragged him under the dock, supporting his head, he inhaled several deep breaths, still alive and possibly conscious.