The smaller man and his thug checked each bag and both crates before Riley and Tim loaded them aboard. The thug held a clipboard, which the smaller man took from him and wrote upon following his examination of each bag. It looked to Cooper as though he didn’t trust the bigger man to get it right.
Twenty-nine minutes after the plane had pulled in, the last garment bag was stuffed into the belly of the plane. Without another wasted gesture, the smaller man climbed the plane’s stairwell; the thug followed and closed the door behind them. Riley leaped aboard the luggage train and sped back to the terminal, Tim following in hot pursuit with the forklift.
The propellers rose in pitch and threw down against the humidity in their distinctive, baritone wail, and then the ATR 72-500 was taxiing away from the terminal and off into the darkness. Cooper counted a hundred and twenty-five seconds before the plane sped into view again, appearing in the splash of light from the terminal, nosing up and shooting from the runway and into the night.
He counted another nine seconds before the plane could no longer be seen, swallowed whole by the deep black of the Caribbean night. Cooper heard Cap’n Roy make a cluck-cluck sound of some sort, and as he turned, he found himself forced to field another toss from the chief minister.
This time Cap’n Roy was throwing a few bricks of cash at him.
He caught the money, shoved most of it in the pockets of his swim trunks, and, offering no parting gesture whatsoever, started back for the terminal. He had made it about halfway there when a stinging sensation pricked him in the corner of his eye. He waved it off, intending to shoo away whatever bug had stung him, then realized it hadn’t been a bug at all. Instead, turning his head in the direction of the source, he realized it had been a visual sting-a sharp burst of light in the distance which, in the time it took him to turn, had already expanded into a blinding cotton ball of orange. He found the lack of noise accompanying the ballooning burst of light odd, since what he was seeing came with the one-word translation of explosion-
At which point the sound waves came along, and the out-of-sync crack and bass-toned voom completed the translation.
Once it had sunk in, Cooper let his eyes fall to Cap’n Roy, who had stopped, bent over the two bags, frozen in the motion of lifting them from the tarmac.
Cap’n Roy stared at Cooper, and Cooper stared back at Cap’n Roy.
While it seemed a bit of a stretch-a stupid set of acts, were Roy to have committed them-Cooper’s game of connect-the-dots matching Cap’n Roy up with the murder of Po Keeler, and now the detonation of the plane, remained too easy to play. He took the theory for one last spin. Had Roy gone completely off the deep end? Offed the yacht transporter or had him offed, and then, deciding he’d got away with that, gone ahead and blown the plane out of the sky, post-exchange, post-sale, that plane going up in a ball of flame that took out the people inside too-the only people besides himself and Roy’s own band of merry men who might otherwise identify the corrupt Virgin Islands cop who’d sold the stash of gold?
Staring at the chief minister, Cooper considered it would also be logical for Cap’n Roy to experience a moment of hesitation and suspect him. He knew, though, that once Cap’n Roy considered things, the good chief minister would conclude there was nothing in it for him-as he, unfortunately, found himself concluding with regard to Cap’n Roy. There were much easier ways for Roy to keep things quiet-plus, Roy wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, at least not according to Cooper’s experience with the man.
Cooper looked at the bags in Cap’n Roy’s hands. In case Roy couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness, he jutted his chin in the direction of the bags.
“Be good to get that money out of here,” he said to the chief minister.
Cap’n Roy held his eyes.
“Where this money goin’,” he said, “nobody be findin’ it anytime soon.”
Cooper, still looking at him, turned his shoulders, kind of pivoting at the hip until he had himself squared up with the islands’ top cop.
“We need to get something straight,” he said.
Cap’n Roy watched him.
“If you had anything to do with this,” Cooper said, “even indirectly, I will find out. Understand, I chewed up a pair of favors arranging the buy. People know I set it up-people who aren’t such good people. The kind of people you like to think I know so well. My guess is these people, or some of their friends, or somebody they work for, will be coming down here when they find out about that plane blowing up. They’ll be coming down to pay me a visit and find out what this little airborne conflagration was all about.”
Cooper rolled a shoulder, easing a crimped nerve with a little stretch.
“What I’m saying is, if you did this, Cap’n, it’s you who brought that on me.”
Cap’n Roy stared at him, Cooper surveying the look but unable to read it. Back held ramrod straight, face all but blank, Cap’n Roy’s eyes were saying something, but it wasn’t anything Cooper could read. He knew enough about the man to know Roy would work hard to avoid giving him any response or reaction-Cap’n Roy’s way of telling him to fuck off.
Go fuck yourself, Cooper. Figure it out for yourself, mon.
Cooper tried to get his mind to do some more quick work on the matter at hand-to think about who might be behind all this crap if Cap’n Roy wasn’t the man. He didn’t like the place his mind went: while there were people like Susannah Grant who knew something or other about the shipment, the fact of the matter was, the Keeler murder, and now the detonation of the plane, had come, first and foremost, following a bust by the U.S. Coast Guard…
He came out of this brief mind-drift to realize that Cap’n Roy appeared to be waiting for something. It looked almost as though the chief minister of the British Virgin Islands, in fact, was seeking Cooper’s permission to depart. Then Cooper realized Cap’n Roy wasn’t looking for that at all.
He isn’t waiting for permission to leave-he’s waiting for reassurance that he won’t be the next to go.
“Watch your back, Cap’n,” Cooper said.
Cap’n Roy turned and walked away. As he watched the man turn the corner around the terminal, it appeared to Cooper that Cap’n Roy had been swallowed by the night precisely the same way the plane had a few minutes before.
15
Laramie loaded up on coffee with Sadie, Bill, and Sid in a place called the Circle Diner, to which Bill had driven them in one of the black-on-black Suburbans. The diner was four miles up the two-lane highway from headquarters, and Laramie took note of the fact there was actually some activity here-customers, waitstaff, people eating and serving dinner to the clink of dishes and silverware.
While Sid and his senior staff were perfectly polite and informative, Laramie learned little at the caffeine-intake session outside of the fact that the task force meeting in the ballroom of the Motor 8 Luxury Motel had more or less been staged for her benefit, at the order of some senior administration official or other. Admitting as much, Sid told her the bottom line on the progress made by the task force since their last fully attended session was close to zilch: they were pretty much where they had been a week ago, when they’d stood pretty much where they had one week before that.
Enter me, Laramie thought-emissary from God knows where, here to show these twenty-year veterans of counterterrorism how it’s really done.
Following a lift back to the Motor 8 in Bill’s urban assault vehicle, Laramie retreated to her room, where, just after dark, a series of files was delivered to her. She answered a knock at the door and a young male agent, clean-cut and suited up like everyone else, wordlessly handed over a tall stack of three-ring binders. He withdrew something resembling a UPS man’s delivery pistol and, with it, swiped the bar-code sticker affixed to the spine of each binder. Laramie waited calmly; the little gun beeped each time it got a reading, and then the agent departed without so much as a nod. Laramie was quite familiar with the classified-intel-logging device; it was used in Langley too.