Doc - 19 - Chasing Midnight Read online

  Lien Bohai was a different story. A man who could rationalize a scorched-earth policy at sea was capable of just about anything. The same was true of the Eastern Europeans. Armanie and Darius Talas were Viktor Kazlov’s associates, Vladimir had told me, but also his enemies. Any of those men might be behind what was happening tonight, yet my focus kept returning to the members of Third Planet. They had already shown their indifference to the law by trespassing, and only they had been privy to Tomlinson’s Internet isolation theory.

  As badly as I wanted to dismiss it, though, I couldn’t disassociate Tomlinson from what was happening tonight on Vanderbilt Island. Even if he was the unknowing contributor to someone’s lunatic plan, the man was too damn perceptive not to suspect he was being used.

  As I swam the last few yards to Tomlinson’s sailboat, Vladimir’s words continued to bang around in my head.

  “Your longhair friend told me,” he had said, as if I should have already known.

  Maybe he was right.

  8

  I was in the water, hanging off the stern of Tomlinson’s boat, when I heard a gunshot from somewhere near the mangroves. Then a second shot.

  Vladimir. It was the first explanation that came to mind.

  After so much wild gunfire, the two shots, spaced seconds apart, sounded workmanlike and purposeful. They were of similar caliber as the rounds that had chased the bodyguard and me from beneath the dock. A semiautomatic 9mm or something close.

  After the second shot, I spun around and took a look. The mangrove point was an elevated darkness backdropped by stars and the silence of empty houses. There was no telltale corona from a flashlight, no streak of a red laser.

  Even so, I guessed that Vladimir had been found and executed. Soon, the gunman would be looking for me. Before that happened, I wanted to get what I needed from Tomlinson’s boat and be gone.

  Because I couldn’t risk showing myself on the dock, it took more time than it should have to get aboard.

  When it comes to utility, sailboats present too many design challenges to name. High on my list of dislikes is, they are pains in the ass to board from the water. Tomlinson’s old Morgan is rigged for single-handed blue-water passages to Key West and the Yucatán. When the skipper of a vessel is often drunk and/or stoned, safety gear must be rigged accordingly.

  In the case of No Más, it means the deck is fenced with lifeline cables, three high, on thirty-inch stanchions. Less chance of the man tumbling overboard in a heavy sea. So I grabbed the lowest cable, did a pull-up, then slapped a hand around the top cable. I hung there for a moment, then managed to get my left foot through the lifeline gate onto the deck—not easy when you’re wearing swim fins.

  A minute later, I was aboard, swinging down the companionway into the heat, the darkness and familiar odors of the vessel’s cabin. Tomlinson’s floating Zendo, his students call the boat. The space smelled of kerosene, teak oil, electronics, sandalwood and the musky odor of marijuana. I reached, closed the hatchway, then pulled the curtains tight before I found a jar of wooden matches above the stove and lit a lamp.

  First thing I did was open the icebox and chug a bottle of water. I was trembling from dehydration. I also forced myself to chew a handful of dried apricots even though I wasn’t hungry.

  With a second bottle of water, I sat for a few seconds at the settee table, then went to the VHF radio mounted above the navigation station and quarter berth. I switched the radio on, reduced squelch, and a familiar warble told me that a jamming device was, indeed, somewhere on the island. Even so, I switched to channel 16 and transmitted a series of Mayday calls, complete with location.

  No response.

  During my swim, I had also reviewed my options. One option was to cut the lines, fire the sailboat’s little Yanmar diesel and attempt to navigate the shallow waters on my own. When No Más was out of jamming range, I could try the radio again.

  Or… I could board the neighboring power vessels, one by one, in the hope their owners had left keys in the ignitions. Because most of the winter residents had pulled their boats, though, there were only a few possibilities. There were two small trawlers, buttoned up tight for the summer. There were two shabby rental boats—one of them an eighteen-foot Boston Whaler—that had probably brought Densler and her group to the island. And there was Viktor Kazlov’s black-hulled Dragos Voyager, which was moored off by itself, isolated at the end of the basin. The vessel was sleek as a stiletto, all teak and glass, with a cabin that swept aft toward a massive afterdeck, where there was a swim platform that doubled as a loading elevator. The yacht was still umbilicated to shore power, but its emergency generator had a bad switch, apparently, because it had yet to start itself. The groups from Iran, Turkmenia and China hadn’t come by private yacht, so that was it—only a couple of usable boats.

  The Whaler was my best possibility, I had already decided—but was there time for me to swim over and take a look?

  I checked my watch: 10:30. Damn.

  Maybe I had time, maybe I didn’t. The midnight deadline was unambiguous, if Vladimir was right. He was convinced the danger was real, I didn’t doubt that. Someone here, on the island, had intercepted an e-mail, or had been made aware of an e-mail, that contained the threat. The trail of logic told me the person was a reliable source of intelligence, and that Kazlov trusted him.

  But who? It had to be one of the man’s caviar competitors, but why shield his identify? It was pointless, particularly when it came to an outsider like myself.

  There was a more compelling question, though: did such a device exist?

  “Everything will die,” Vladimir had told me, which, to him, meant a bomb or gas device had been hidden somewhere in or near the fishing lodge. Considering Vladimir’s probable background, he had been right to assume an IED—an improvised explosive device—had been planted somewhere where it would do the most damage. The explosion that had knocked out the power had been set by someone savvy enough also to seal off the island with a jamming device. It wasn’t much of a stretch to suspect they had also wired explosives or canisters of poison gas to a timed detonator set for midnight.

  But what kind of timing device? And had the wiring been exposed to the recent rainstorm? If wet, something homemade might jump ahead an hour or be delayed. Or it might fail to join the polar contacts, which was the best possible outcome—but I couldn’t count on that.

  The spot where an IED would cause the most casualities was the fishing lodge, which I had known all along.

  The lodge. I had to get inside, assess the situation and then do some improvising of my own. The possibility that someone had rigged the building with an explosive was bad enough. But the prospect of poison gas was chilling. Even if they had managed to smuggle a detonator and military-grade C4 into the place, an explosion affected a limited area. The right poison gas, though, could kill everyone and everything on the island.

  In that instant, I realized I might have overlooked yet another important subtlety.

  “Everything will die,” Vladimir had said, not, “Everyone will die.” The man’s English wasn’t good—there was no guessing how badly he had mistranslated Kazlov’s message. But the bodyguard had repeated the phrase at least twice, so maybe the distinction was important.

  Vladimir had been right to assume the worst. So I did the same. I told myself that, at midnight, either lethal gas would be released somewhere on the island or a bomb would detonate somewhere inside the fishing lodge. I had to do whatever was necessary to stop it from happening.

  The human brain is a remarkable organ, but it becomes a jumbled mess when responding to danger. The primitive brain takes control of our involuntary systems, oblivious to signals from the highly evolved neocortex. The result is either chaos or catatonic inaction.

  In my life, I’ve dealt with enough risky situations to understand that the brain responds to danger emotionally. It’s not until a threat is reduced to some basic linear form that it becomes a solvable problem. The human intellect is
fearless—if we ignore the ancient alarms. If we stay calm long enough to access a functional cerebral pathway.

  I’m no different than anyone else. I had to think it through. The process took only a few seconds, but the decision provided clarity and the direction I needed.

  I turned from the navigation station and went to work.

  Because Tomlinson is Tomlinson, there were no firearms aboard, of course. And I am not a gun hobbyist who packs a weapon just for thrills. I own three handguns because my work requires it, but they were all back at my lab, locked safely away, with the state and federal permits that allow me to carry them.

  But I had my knife. And I had been trained to make and use unconventional weapons. My main reason for returning to the sailboat, though—aside from trying the VHF—was to retrieve a piece of equipment that would finally give me an advantage over the man, or men, determined to kill me.

  By coincidence or good luck, the day before Tomlinson and I had left for the island, a package had arrived from a friend who works for Nivisys Industries, Tempe, Arizona. The company maintains the same low profile as the military and State Department types who are its devoted clientele. It’s tough to find information about the products even on the Internet, because if you aren’t already familiar with Nivisys, there is probably no reason for you to know that it exists.

  The company designs and manufactures some of the world’s finest tactical hardware. Esoteric items such as tactical illuminators, laser-aiming systems and superb night vision binoculars and rifle scopes. The company’s slogan is Don’t Fight Fair, and they take the mission seriously enough to trust operators versed in the craft to test the hell out of their newest creations.

  Which is why I had received the package in the first place. And why I wasn’t surprised the enclosed note had read simply, “What do you think? Bob Alexander.”

  Inside was a canvas pouch about the size of a standard flashlight. Inside the pouch was a new-generation TAM-14—a thermal acquisition monocular. Which is tacticalspeak for thermal vision. It is a device that sees what the human eye cannot, day or night, because it is ultrasensitive to heat.

  Body heat—its specialty. The unit was unlike any night vision system I had ever used before.

  With the TAM, I could track a man by following the warmth of his footprints after he had crossed a stretch of cooling sand. An unwanted visitor’s handprints were visible on walls and doors long after he had fled. With this newest generation of optics, I could observe targets through smoke, fog, dense foliage and even walls.

  The TAM-14 translated subtle changes in temperature—metal, wood, vegetable or flesh—and sent the information straight to the viewer’s eye.

  Thermal night vision also recognizes channel markers no matter the weather, so it was ideal for night navigation, which is why I had brought the unit along. And why I had left the TAM stored in a locker beneath No Más’s navigation station.

  I knelt, retrieved the thermal monocular, tested it to make sure the batteries were fresh and placed it on the settee table. Then I went to work searching the boat for materials necessary to make a weapon.

  Or weapons.

  Even though it was only ninety minutes until midnight, it would be stupid to venture onto the island unarmed. Or without a plan of attack.

  The reason I took the threat of poisonous gas so seriously is because, unlike explosives, poison gas is easily made. Vanderbilt Island had a swimming pool. In the pool pump house, anyone versed in the field could find most of the chemicals required. The one or two missing ingredients would be available in the restaurant kitchen.

  Building a detonator and a bomb wasn’t out of the question, either. Private islands, just to function, must have well-equipped machine shops and maintenance sheds. All the parts could be found there and assembled in an hour, probably less.

  Not that any untrained dweeb could make it happen. It’s an urban legend that the average household contains items as lethal as any gun. The fiction is based on Hollywood films and a left-wing manifesto called The Anarchist Cookbook. The book, in fact, is as amateurish as anything ever published on the subject and taken seriously only by the dilettante revolutionaries who bought it. And Hollywood filmmakers, of course.

  But it can be done.

  My knowledge isn’t extensive but it’s functional. I learned what I know from one of the very few experts in this unusual field. He was a Delta Force specialist assigned to something called “The Funny Platoon” out of Fort Bragg. Not that the man had a bubbly sense of humor—just the opposite. But he knew how to jury-rig weapons, both offensive and defensive. And when it came to psy war ops—psychological warfare—he had accumulated a masterwork of dirty tricks.

  Only once did I ever need to create a makeshift explosive while on assignment. It required mixing wood charcoal, potassium nitrate and sulfur with some other common materials, then rigging what’s called a pull-loop switch to a battery. Thanks to him, the damn thing worked better than expected, which provided me with confidence now. Not that I intended to build an explosive. If I had to, I could. But I had two very different weapons in mind.

  I’d brought a waterproof bag with my scuba gear. I opened the bag and began selecting items from Tomlinson’s storage lockers. Among them was a common fungicide, a commercial rust remover, the jar of wooden matches, Ziploc baggies, three glass pickle-type jars, which I had to empty. It was harder to find three glass bottles small enough to fit into the jars, but I finally did. Then I added a box of ammonia inhalers and several replacement wicks for oil lamps. Tomlinson is a hot sauce snob, so I had a sizable selection to choose from. From it, I bagged two bottles of his hottest Amazon Habanero from Colombia.

  I added a few other items, too, during my search—including a professional-grade first-aid kit that had been upgraded with painkillers, syringes and sutures for emergencies at sea. Because my BUD S swim shorts had only a small back pocket, I also rummaged around until I found an old photographer’s vest that Tomlinson sometimes wears.

  As I went through the vest, I wasn’t surprised to find a wad of hundred-dollar bills, a big roll of five-hundred-euro bills, three baggies loaded with grass and a sheet of faded Halloween stamps that, I suspected, was a blotter of some kind of hallucinogenic. It seemed likely because there were several missing stamps, all removed in an unsystematic pattern that was telling—and oddly irksome to me.

  I expected to find a working battery-operated flashlight and did—one with a corroded switch and another with a bad bulb maybe. The only working lights on the boat, though, were a twelve-volt Q-Beam and a wireless Golight that was mounted atop No Más’s cabin—both useless to me.

  Something I didn’t expect to find was Tomlinson’s tiny MacBook Air computer, which I’d assumed he had taken to his room at the fishing lodge. The man loved the thing. He carried it everywhere. The computer was forward, in the master stateroom, with enough battery remaining for the screen to flash to life when I bumped the bed. The only reason I saw the open file was because I leaned to confirm there was no wireless signal.

  Tomlinson had been watching a video about Third Planet Peace Force. The screen’s frozen frame was a close-up of 3P2’s Winifred Densler, Tomlinson’s irritating new friend.

  I checked my watch, then pressed the space bar, anyway. Instantly, the cabin was filled with a chorus of hysterical weeping people as Densler and several others, all kneeling in a forest, caressed and embraced a fallen tree.

  Mourning a dead tree? Yep… but more than that, too.

  “We beg the Earth’s forgiveness!” I heard Densler moan toward the sky. “We are the disease—us. The toxic rich. Animal slavers and leeches. A tribe of cancerous pigs who…”

  I hit the space bar before the woman could finish.

  The Toxic Rich, spoken as if capitalized. It was an interesting term, which I had heard Densler use earlier in the evening. Yet, had I not seen similar videos attributed to a group called Earth First, or met the woman, I would have thought it a parody attacking the env
ironmental movement and all the good it has accomplished.

  But the video was real. The hysteria and Densler’s rage were genuine. Even watching for just a few seconds keyed a visceral alarm inside me.

  The evidence against the eco-activists—Tomlinson, too, although I still couldn’t let myself believe it—was now even stronger.

  9

  If I had misjudged Third Planet Peace Force’s potential for violence, it wasn’t because I found any admirable qualities in the members I’d met earlier that night. I’d disliked them from the start, and the dislike was mutual. Fact was, I’d managed to piss off several people during my short time on the island, but Densler was at the head of the list.

  I thought about our first encounter as I returned to the sailboat’s galley and placed the empty jars on the counter, then organized the ingredients within easy reach so I could mix them. I had to hurry, but I also had to get the proportions right. They didn’t have to be exact, but they had to be pretty damn close.

  Tomlinson had been sitting at a table with Densler and a guy named Kahn when I had entered the bar earlier that night. Markus Kahn? I couldn’t remember. My pal had been smiling as he waved me over, while his two companions sat grim-faced, irritated by my intrusion.

  In my experience, there have been a few rare occasions when I knew within seconds of meeting a person that I would trust him with my life or that I should avoid him for life. Densler registered a polar negative on the scale.

  The woman had confirmed my first impression by talking loud enough for everyone in the room to hear as she told me that, as officers of Third Planet, she and Markus Kahn had started a special branch unit called Huso Pelagius Patronus International.