The Gulf Lady came home across a bright and glittering sea an hour before the sun went down. Julio Gomez sat forward, his ample rear end supported by the cabin roof, his moccasined feet upon the foredeck. He drew contentedly on one of his Puerto Rican cheroots, whose foul odors were blown away across the uncomplaining Caribbean waters.
He was, in that moment, a truly happy man. Ten miles behind him lay the underwater drop-off, where the Great Bahama Bank falls into the Santaren Channel; where the kingfish run with the wahoo, and the tuna hunt the bonito, who in turn hunt the ballyhoo and all on occasions are pursued by the sailfish and the big martin.
In the scarred old box astern of the open fishing deck lay two fine dorado, one for him and one for the skipper, who now held the tiller and steered his game fisherman home to Port Plaisance.
Not that two fish had been his entire day’s take; there had been a fine sailfish that had been tagged and returned to the ocean; a mess of smaller bonito that had been used for baitfish; a yellowfin tuna that he had estimated at seventy pounds before it dived so hard and so deep he had had to cut line or see his reel stripped before his eyes; and two big amberjack that he had fought for thirty minutes each. He had returned the big fish to the sea, taking only the dorado because they are among the finest eating fish in the tropics.
Julio Gomez did not like to kill. What brought him on his annual pilgrimage to these waters was the thrill of the hissing reel and the running line, the tension of the bowed rod, and the sheer excitement of the contest between air-breathing man and monstrously strong fighting fish. It had been a wonderful day.
Far away to his left, way out beyond the Dry Tortugas, invisible well below the western horizon, the big red ball of the sun was dropping to meet the sea, giving up its skin-flaying heat, conceding finally to the cool of the evening breeze and the oncoming night.
Three miles ahead of the Gulf Lady, the island straddled the water. They would berth in twenty minutes. Gomez flicked the stub of his cheroot to a sputtering grave in the water and rubbed his forearms. Despite his naturally saturnine complexion and olive skin, he would need to apply a good layer of after-sun cream when he got back to his boarding house. Jimmy Dobbs on the tiller had no such problem: He was an islander born and bred, and he owned his boat and chartered it for the visiting tourists who wanted to fish. On his deep ebony skin, the sun had no effect.
Julio Gomez swung his feet off the foredeck and dropped from the cabin roof into the stern.
“I’ll take over, Jimmy. Give you a chance to swab down.”
Jimmy Dobbs gave his ear-to-ear grin, handed over the tiller, took bucket and broom, and began to swab the fish scales and fragments of gut out through the scuppers. Half a dozen terns appeared from nowhere and took the floating scraps from the wake. Nothing goes to waste in the ocean— nothing organic, that is.
There were, of course, more modern charter fishing boats plying the Caribbean—boats with engine-linked power hoses for cleaning down, with cocktail bars, with television and even video shows; with banks of electronic technology for finding fish, and enough navigational aids to go around the world. Gulf Lady had none of these things. She was an old and chipped clinker-built timber vessel powered by a smoky Perkins diesel, but she had seen more white water than the smart boys from the Florida Keys could shake a radar scanner at. She had a small forward cabin, a tangle of rods and lines, redolent of fish and oil, and an open afterdeck with ten rod-holders and a single fighting chair homemade in oak, cushions extra.
Jimmy Dobbs had no silicon chips to find the fish for him; he found them himself, the way his father had taught him, with eyes for the slightest hint of change in the water color, the ripple on the surface that should not be there, the diving of a frigate bird far, far away; he had the gut instinct to know where they were running this week and what they were feeding on. But find them he did, every day. That was why Julio Gomez came every vacation to fish with him.
The sheer lack of sophistication of the islands pleased Julio, the lack of technology of the Gulf Lady. He spent much of his professional life handling America’s modern technology, tapping queries into a computer, steering a car through the tangled traffic of central Miami. For his vacation, he wanted the sea, the sun, and the wind—those and the fish, for Julio Gomez only had two passions in life, his job, and his fishing. He had had five days of the latter, and just two more to go, Friday and Saturday. On Sunday he would have to fly home to Florida and on Monday morning report for work with Eddie. He sighed at the prospect.
Jimmy Dobbs was also a happy man. He had had a good day with his client and friend, he had a few dollars in his pocket to buy a dress for his old lady and a fine fish to make supper for them both and their brood of kids. What more, he reasoned, had life to offer?
They berthed just after five at the rickety old wooden fishing quay that ought to have fallen down years ago but never had. The previous Governor had said he would ask London for a grant to build a new one, but then he had been replaced by the present man, and Sir Marston Moberley had no interest in fishing. Nor in the islanders, if the bar talk in Shantytown was to be believed—and it always was.
There was the usual scuttling of children to see what the catch had been and to help carry the fish ashore, and the usual banter in the lilting, singsong accents of the islanders as the Gulf Lady was made fast for the night.
“You free tomorrow, Jimmy?” asked Gomez.
“Sure am. You wanna go again?”
“That’s what I’m here for. See you at eight.”
Julio Gomez paid a small boy a dollar to carry his fish for him, and together the pair walked off the dock and into the dusky streets of Port Plaisance. They had not far to go, for no distance was far in Port Plaisance. It was not a large town—more a village really.
It was the sort of town found in most of the smaller Caribbean islands, a jumble of mainly wooden houses painted in bright colors with shingle roofs and lanes of crushed shells between them. Along the seashore, around the small harbor bounded by a curving mole of coral blocks against which the weekly trading steamer berthed, stood the more resplendent structures—the custom house, the court house, and the war memorial. All were built of blocks of coral, cut and mortared long ago.
Farther into the town were the town hall, the small Anglican church, the police station, and the principal hotel, the Quarter Deck. Apart from these and an unsightly corrugated-iron warehouse at one end of the port, the buildings were mainly of wood. Along the shore, just out of town, stood the Governor’s residence, Government House, all white and walled in white, with two old Napoleonic cannon by the front gate and the flagpole in the middle of the carefully cultured green-grass lawn. During the day the British Union Jack fluttered from the mast, and even as Julio Gomez made his way through the small town to the boarding house where he lodged, the flag was being ceremoniously hauled down by a police constable in the presence of the Governor’s adjutant.
Gomez could have stayed at the Quarter Deck, but he preferred the homey atmosphere of Mrs. Macdonald’s boarding house. She was a widow, with a cap of snow-white frizzy hair, as amply proportioned as he was himself, and she made a conch chowder that was to die for.
He turned into the street where she lived, ignoring the garish election posters clipped to most of the walls and fences, and saw that in the dusk she was sweeping down the front steps of her neat, detached residence—a ritual she carried out several times a day. She greeted him and his fish with her usual beaming smile.
“Why, Mistah Gomez, that is one very fine fish.”
“For our supper, Mrs. Macdonald, and enough, I think, for all of us.”
Gomez paid off the boy, who scampered away with his newfound wealth, and went up to his room. Mrs. Macdonald retired to her kitchen to prepare the dorado for the grill. Gomez washed, shaved, and changed into cream slacks and a bright short-sleeved beach shirt. He decided he could use a very large, very cold beer and walked back through the town to the bar of the Quarter Deck.
It was only seven o’clock, but night had come and the town was quite dark, save where it was lit by the glimmer from the windows. Emerging from the back streets, Gomez entered Parliament Square with its neat, enclosed patch of palm trees at the center and three of its sides garnished respectively by the Anglican church, the police station, and the Quarter Deck Hotel.
He passed the police station, where electric lights, powered by the municipal generator that hummed away down on the docks, still burned. From this small, coral-block building Chief Inspector Brian Jones and an impeccably turned-out force of two sergeants and eight constables represented law and order in the community with the lowest crime rate in the Western Hemisphere. Coming from Miami, Gomez could not but wonder at a society that seemed to have no drugs, no gangs, no muggings, no prostitution, no rapes, one bank (no robberies therefrom), and only half a dozen reportable thefts a year. He sighed, passed in front of the darkened church, and entered the portico of the Quarter Deck.
The bar lay to the left. He took a corner stool at the far end and ordered his large, cold beer. It would be an hour before his fish was ready—time for a second beer to keep company with the first. The bar was already half full, for it was the town’s favorite watering hole with tourists and expatriates. Sam, the cheerful white-jacketed barman, administered his nightly array of rum punches, beers, juices, Cokes, daiquiris, and soda-mixers to help down the fiery shots of Mount Gay rum.
At five to eight, Julio Gomez reached into his pocket for a handful of dollars with which to settle his bill. When he looked up, he stopped, fixed rigid, and stared at the man who had entered the bar and was ordering a drink at the far end. After two seconds, he eased back on his stool so that the bulk of the drinker sitting next to him blocked him from view. He could hardly believe his eyes, but he knew he was not wrong. You do not spend four days and four nights of your life sitting across a table from a man, staring into his eyes, and seeing hatred and contempt corning back at you—and later forget that face, even eight years on. You do not spend four days and nights trying to get a single word out of a man and get absolutely nothing, not even a name, so that you have to give him a nickname just to have something to put on the file—and later forget that face.
Gomez gestured to Sam to refill his glass, paid for all three beers, and retired to a corner seat in the shadows. If the man was here, he was here for a reason. If he had checked into a hotel, he would have a name. Gomez wanted that name. He sat in the corner, waited, and watched. At nine the man, who had drunk alone, always Mount Gay rums, rose and left. Emerging from his corner, Gomez went after him.
In Parliament Square, the man climbed into an open Japanese-made jeep, started the ignition, and drove away. Gomez looked desperately around. He had no transportation of his own. Parked near the hotel entrance was a small motor scooter, its key still in the ignition. Wobbling precariously, Gomez set off after the jeep.
The jeep left the town and drove steadily out along the coast road—the only road—which went right round the entire island. Properties situated in the hilly interior were all reached by individual service roads, dusty tracks, that ran down to the one coastal highway. The jeep passed the island’s other residential community, the native village known as Shantytown, then went on past the grass strip airport.
It kept going until it reached the other side of the island. Here the road flanked the expanse of Teach Bay—named after Edward Teach, Blackboard the Pirate, who had once anchored and victualed here. The jeep pulled off the coast road and up a short track to a pair of wrought-iron gates that protected a large walled estate. If the driver had seen the single wobbling headlamp that had been behind him all the way from the Quarter Deck Hotel, he gave no sign of it. But seen it he surely had.
At the gates a man stepped out of the shadows to open them for the jeep driver, but the driver slowed and stopped. He reached above his head to the rollbar and detached a powerful hand-held spotlamp. As Gomez rode past the entrance to the track, the beam of the spotlamp swept over him, came back, and held him in its glare until he passed out of sight down the road.
Gomez returned the scooter to its place outside the hotel thirty minutes later and walked home. He was deep in thought and deeply worried. He had seen whom he had seen, and he knew he had not been wrong. He now also knew where the man was living. But he himself had been seen. He could only pray that after eight years, in the darkness of a Caribbean night, sputtering past for a few seconds on a motor scooter, he had not been recognized.
Mrs. Macdonald was perturbed at his failure to arrive for supper until almost two hours late, and said so. She served the dorado anyway and watched her guest eat it with no pleasure. He was lost in thought and only made one remark.
“Nonsense, man,” she chided. “We don’t even have them things in these islands.”
Julio Gomez spent the night lying awake and considering his choices. How long the man would remain in the islands, he did not know. But his presence here was something the British ought to hear about, he thought, especially his actual location. Surely that was significant. He could go to the Governor, but what could that official do? The man probably had no cause to be arrested. He was not on U.S. territory now. Nor did Gomez believe that Chief Inspector Jones, with his toy town force, would have any more weight than the Governor. This would need an order from London, following an extradition request from Uncle Sam personally. He could telephone in the morning—then he discarded that thought. The island’s communication, for public use, was an old-style open phone line running to Nassau, the Bahamas, and thence to Miami. He had no choice; he would have to return to Florida in the morning.
That same evening, a Delta Airlines flight from Washington touched down at Miami Airport. Among its passengers was a tired British civil servant whose passport said he was Mr. Frank Dillon. He had other papers—which he had no need to show on arrival from an internal American flight—that specified he was on the staff of the British Foreign Office and asked all whom it might concern to foe as helpful to him as possible.
Neither his passport, which he had no need to show, nor his papers revealed that his real name was Sam McCready. This was known only to the group of senior staff members of the CIA at Langley, Virginia, in whose company he had spent an intensive week attending a seminar on the role of the intelligence community of the Free World in the forthcoming decade of the nineties. It had meant listening to a raft of professors and other assorted academics, none of whom favored using one simple word where ten complicated ones would do.
McCready hailed a cab outside the airport terminal and asked to be taken to the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne. Here he checked in and treated himself to a lobster supper before retiring for a deep and untroubled sleep. He faced, or so he thought, the prospect of seven days of toasting himself by the pool, working his way through several light-hearted spy novels, and occasionally raising his gaze from a chilled daiquiri to watch a Florida girl sway by. Century House was a long way away, and the business of Disinformation, Deception, and Psychological Operations could remain in the capable hands of his newly appointed deputy, Denis Gaunt. It was time, he thought as he fell asleep, for the Deceiver to get a suntan.
On Friday morning, Julio Gomez checked out of Mrs. Macdonald’s boarding house without asking for a rebate for his unused two days and with profuse apologies. He hefted his suitcase and walked to Parliament Square, where he took one of the town’s two taxis and asked to be driven to the airstrip.
His ticket was for the Sunday-morning scheduled flight by BWIA to Nassau, with a connection to Miami. Although it was actually a shorter distance direct to Miami, there were no scheduled nights on the direct run, only via Nassau. There was no travel agent in town—bookings were always made right at the airstrip—so he could only hope that there was a Friday-morning BWIA flight. He did not notice that he was being watched as he took the taxi out of the square.
At the airstrip he was disappointed. The airport building, a single long shed containing a customs area and little else, was not closed, but it was almost deserted. A single passport officer sat in the morning sun reading a week-old Miami Herald that someone, probably Gomez himself, had left behind.
“Not today, man,” he replied cheerfully. “Never on a Friday.”
Gomez surveyed the grass field. Outside the single metal hangar stood a Piper Navajo Chief. A man in ducks and shirt was checking it over.
Gomez moved across. “You flying today?” he asked.
“Yep,” said the pilot, a fellow American.
“Available for charter?”
“No way,” said the pilot. “This is a private plane. Belongs to my employer.”
“Where you heading? Nassau?” asked Gomez.
“Nope. Key West.”
Gomez’s heart rose. From Key West, he could take one of the frequent scheduled flights up to Miami.
“Any chance I can have a talk with your employer?”
“Mr. Klinger. He’ll be here in about an hour.”
“I’ll wait,” said Gomez.
He found a shady spot near the hangar wall and settled down. Someone in the bushes withdrew, took a motorcycle from the undergrowth, and motored away down the coast road.
Sir Marston Moberley checked his watch, rose from his breakfast table in the walled garden behind Government House, and sauntered toward the steps that led up to his verandah and his office. That tiresome delegation was due anytime.
Britain retains very few of her former colonies in the Caribbean. The colonial days are long gone. No longer called colonies—an unacceptable word—they are today classed as Dependent Territories. One is Montserrat. Another is the Cayman Islands, known for its numerous and very discreet offshore banking activities. In a referendum, the people of the three Cayman Islands, when offered independence by London, voted overwhelmingly to stay British. Since then they have prospered like the green bay tree, in contrast to some of their neighbors.
Another obscure group is the British Virgin Islands, now a haven for yachtsmen and anglers. Yet another is the small island of Anguilla, whose inhabitants conducted the only known revolution in colonial history in order to stay British rather than be forcibly amalgamated with two neighboring islands, of whose prime minister they had the most lively and well-founded suspicions.
Even more obscure are the Turks and Caicos, where life proceeds on its somnolent way beneath the palm trees and the Union Jack, untroubled by drug peddlers, coups d’état, and election thuggery. In all cases, London rules with a fairly light hand, its principal role in the case of the last three territories being to pick up the annual budget deficit. In exchange, the local populations appear content to have the Union Jack run up and down the flagpole twice a day and the insignia of Queen Elizabeth on their currency notes and policemen’s helmets.
In the winter of 1989, the last group was the Barclays, a collection of eight small islands situated at the western edge of the Great Bahama Bank, west of the Bahamas’ Andros Island, northeast of Cuba, and due south of the Florida Keys.
Why the Barclays were not amalgamated into the Bahamas when that archipelago secured its independence, few can recall. A wag in the Foreign Office suggested later they might simply have been overlooked, and he could have been right. The tiny group had no more than twenty thousand inhabitants, and only two of the eight islands were inhabited at all. The chief island and home of the Government rejoiced in the name of Sunshine, and the fishing was superb.
They were not rich islands. Industry was nil, and income not much more. Most of that came from the wages of the young people who left to become waiters, chambermaids, and bellhops in the smart hotels elsewhere and who became favorites with visiting European and American tourists for their sunny good nature and beaming smiles.
Other income came from a smattering of tourism, the occasional game fisherman who would make the pilgrimage via Nassau, aircraft-landing rights, the sale of their very obscure stamps, and the sale of lobster and conch to passing yachtsmen. This modest income permitted the importation by weekly steamer of some basic commodities not available from the sea.
The generous ocean provided most of the food, along with fruit from the forests and gardens tended along the slopes of Sunshine’s two hills, Spyglass and Sawbones.
Then in early 1989, someone in the Foreign Office decided that the Barclays were ripe for independence. The first “position paper” became a “submission” and went on to become policy. The British Cabinet that year was wrestling with a huge trade deficit, slumping popularity polls, and restiveness over a divided mood on European policy. The bagatelle of an obscure island group in the Caribbean going independent passed without debate.
The then Governor objected, however, and was duly recalled and replaced by Sir Marston Moberley. A tall, vain man who prided himself on his resemblance to the late actor George Sanders, he had been sent to Sunshine with a single brief, carefully spelled out to him by an Assistant Principal Secretary in the Caribbean Department. The Barclays were to accept their independence. Candidates for Prime Minister would be invited, and a general election day was set. After the democratic election of the Barclays’ first Prime Minister, a decent interval (say, three months) would be agreed to by him and his Cabinet, after which full independence would be granted—nay, insisted upon.
Sir Marston was to ensure that the program went through and another burden removed from Britain’s exchequer. He and Lady Moberley had arrived on Sunshine in late July. Sir Marston had set about his duties with a will.
Two potential candidates had soon presented themselves for the office of Prime-Minister-to-be. Mr. Marcus Johnson, a wealthy local businessman and philanthropist, had returned to the islands of his birth after making a fortune in Central America. He now resided on a fine estate the other side of Sawbones Hill and had formed the Barclays Prosperity Alliance, pledged to develop the islands and bring wealth to the people. The more rough-hewn but populist Mr. Horatio Livingstone, who lived down in Shantytown, of which he owned a substantial part, had formed the Barclays Independence Front. The elections were but three weeks away, scheduled for January 5. Sir Marston was pleased to see that vigorous electioneering campaigns were under way, with both candidates earnestly canvassing the islanders for support with speeches, pamphlets, and posters on every wall and tree.
There was but one fly in Sir Marston’s ointment: the CCC, or Committee for Concerned Citizens, which was opposed to independence. It was led by that tiresome man Reverend Walter Drake, the local Baptist minister. Sir Marston had agreed to receive a delegation from the CCC at nine that morning.
There were eight of them. The Anglican vicar—a pale, washed-out, and ineffectual Englishman—he knew he could deal with. Six were local worthies—the doctor, two shopkeepers, a farmer, a bar owner, and a boarding-house keeper called Mr. Macdonald. They were all elderly and of rudimentary education. They could not match Sir Marston for fluency in English or persuasiveness in argument. For each one of them, he could find a dozen who were in favor of independence.
Marcus Johnson, the “prosperity” candidate, was supported by the airport manager, the owners of dockside property (Johnson had promised to build a thriving international marina in its place), and most of the business community, who would become richer with development. Livingstone was securing backing from the proletariat, the have-nots, to whom he had promised a miraculous rise in living standards based on the nationalization of property and assets.
The problem was the CCC delegation leader, Reverend Drake, a big black bull of a man in a black suit who now wiped perspiration from his face. He was a compulsive preacher, lucid and loud, who had secured an education on the American mainland. He wore the small sign of a fish in his lapel, a born-again Christian. Sir Marston wondered idly from what previous state he had been born again, but it never occurred to him to ask. Reverend Drake thumped a pile of paper on the Governor’s desk.
Sir Marston had ensured there were not enough seats for all, so they had to stand. He stood himself—it would make the meeting shorter. He glanced at the pile of paper.
“That, Governor,” boomed Reverend Drake, “is a petition. Yes, sir, a petition. Signed by more than one thousand of our citizens. We want this petition conveyed to London and put before Mrs. Thatcher herself. Or even the Queen. We believe these ladies will listen to us, even if you will not.”
Sir Marston sighed. It was all going to be—he searched for his favorite adjective—more tiresome than he had expected.
“I see,” he said. “And what does your petition require?”
“We want a referendum, just like the British people had over the Common Market. We demand a referendum. We do not want to be forced into independence. We want to go on as we are, as we have always been. We do not want to be ruled by Mr. Johnson or Mr. Livingstone. We appeal to London.”
Down at the airstrip, a taxi arrived, and Mr. Barney Klinger stepped out. He was a short, rotund man who lived in a substantial Spanish-style property in Coral Gables, next to Miami. The chorus girl who accompanied him was neither short nor rotund; she was stunning, and young enough to be his daughter. Mr. Klinger kept a cottage on the slopes of Spyglass Hill, which he used occasionally for discreet vacations away from Mrs. Klinger.
He intended to fly to Key West, put his girlfriend on a scheduled flight to Miami, then proceed home in his own plane, clearly alone, a tired businessman returning from a commercial visit to discuss a boring old contract. Mrs. Klinger would meet him at Miami Airport and note that he was alone. One could not be too careful. Mrs. Klinger knew some very fine lawyers.
Julio Gomez heaved himself to his feet and approached.
“Mr. Klinger, sir?”
Klinger’s heart jumped. A private detective? “Who wants to know?”
“Look, I have a problem, sir. I was vacationing down here, and I just got a call from my wife. Our kid’s had an accident back home. I have to get back, I really do. There are no flights today. None. Not even for charter. I was wondering, could you give me a lift to Key West? I’d be forever in your debt.”
Klinger hesitated. The man could still be a private eye hired by Mrs. Klinger. He handed his grip to a baggage porter, who began to load it and the rest of his valises into the hold of the Navajo.
“Well,” said Klinger, “I don’t know.”
There were six people grouped around: the passport officer, the baggage porter, Gomez, Klinger, his girlfriend, and another man who was helping with the luggage. The porter assumed this man was from the Klinger party, and the Klinger party assumed he belonged to the airstrip. The pilot was out of earshot inside his cabin, and the taxi driver was relieving himself in the vegetation twenty yards away.
“Gee, honey, that’s dreadful. We’ve got to help him,” said the chorus girl.
“Okay,” said Klinger. “So long as we take off on time.”
The passport officer quickly stamped the three passports, the baggage locker was closed, the three passengers boarded, the pilot revved up both engines, and three minutes later the Navajo lifted off Sunshine with a filed flight plan for Key West, seventy minutes’ cruising time away.
“My dear friends, and I do hope I may call you friends,” said Sir Marston Moberley. “Please try to understand the position of Her Majesty’s government. At this juncture a referendum would be quite inappropriate. It would be administratively complex to an impossible degree.”
He had not become a senior diplomat with a series of Commonwealth postings behind him without learning to patronize.
“Please explain,” rumbled Reverend Drake, “why a referendum is more complex than a general election. We want the right to decide whether to have an election at all.”
The explanation was simple enough, but it was not to be mentioned here. The British government would have to pay for a referendum; but in the election, the candidates were paying for their own campaigns though exactly how, Sir Marston had not inquired. He changed the subject.
“Tell me, if you feel this way, why not stand for the post of Prime Minister yourself? According to your view, you would have to win.”
Seven of the delegation looked baffled. But the Reverend Drake stabbed a sausagelike finger in his direction. “You know why, Governor. These candidates are using printing presses, public address systems, even campaign managers brought in from outside. And they’re offering a lot of cash around among the people.”
“I have no evidence of that—none at all,” interrupted the Governor, now a shade of pink.
“Because you won’t go outside and see what’s going on!” roared the Baptist minister. “But we know. It happens on every streetcorner. And intimidation of those who oppose them.”
“When I receive a report from Chief Inspector Jones to that effect, I will take action,” snapped Sir Marston.
“Surely we need not quarrel,” pleaded the Anglican vicar. “The point is, will you send our petition to London, Sir Marston?”
“Certainly I will,” said the Governor. “It is the least I can do for you. But it is also, I fear, the only thing I can do. My hands, alas, are tied. And now, if you will excuse me.”
They trooped out, having done what they came for. As they left the building, the doctor, who happened to be the uncle of the police chief, asked, “Do you think he really will?”
“Oh, certainly,” said the vicar. “He has said he will.”
“Yes, by surface mail,” growled the Reverend Drake. “It should arrive in London around mid-January. We have to get rid of that Governor and get ourselves a new one.”
“No chance, I’m afraid,” said the vicar. “Sir Marston will not resign.”
In its continuing war against the narcotics invasion of its own southern coast, the American government has resorted to using some expensive and ingenious surveillance techniques. Among these is a series of covert balloons, tethered in out-of-the-way places, owned, bought, or leased by Washington.
Suspended in the gondolas beneath these balloons are an array of extra-high-technology radar scanners and radio monitors. They cover the entire Caribbean basin, from Yucatan in the west to Anegada in the east, from Florida in the north to the Venezuelan coast. Every airplane, however big or small, that takes off within this bowl is spotted at once. Its course, height, and speed are monitored and reported back. Every yacht, cruiser, freighter, or liner that leaves port is picked up and tailed by unseen eyes and ears high in the sky and far away. The technology in these gondolas is mainly made by Westinghouse.
When it lifted from Sunshine Island, the Piper Navajo Chief was picked up by Westinghouse 404. It was routinely tracked across the ocean toward Key West on its course of 310 degrees, which, with the wind drift from the south, would have brought it right over Key West’s approach beacon. Fifty miles short of Key West, it disintegrated in midair and disappeared from the screens. A U.S. Coast Guard vessel was sent to the spot, but it found no wreckage.
On Monday, Julio Gomez, a detective on the force of the Metro-Dade Police Department, did not show up for work. His partner, Detective Eddie Favaro, was extremely annoyed. They were due in court together that morning, and now Favaro had to go alone. The judge was scathing, and it was Favaro who had to bear her sarcasm. In the late morning he got back to the MDPD headquarters building at 1320 Northwest Fourteenth Street (the force was then on the threshold of moving to its new complex in the Doral District) and checked with his superior officer, Lieutenant Broderick.
“What’s with Julio?” asked Favaro. “He never showed up at court.”
“You’re asking me? He’s your partner,” replied Broderick.
“He didn’t check in?”
“Not to me,” said Broderick. “Can’t you get by without him?”
“No way. We’re handling two cases, and neither defendant speaks anything but Spanish.”
Mirroring its own local population, the Metro-Dade Police Department, which covers most of what people know as Greater Miami, employs a wide racial mix. Half the population of Metro-Dade is of Hispanic origin, some with a very halting command of English. Julio Gomez had been of Puerto Rican parentage and raised in New York, where he had joined the police. A decade ago, he had re-migrated south to join Metro-Dade. Here nobody referred to him as a “spick.” In this area, that was not wise. His fluent Spanish was invaluable.
His partner of nine years, Eddie Favaro, was an Italian-American, his grandparents having emigrated from Catania as young newly weds seeking a better life. Lieutenant Clay Broderick was black. Now he shrugged. He was overworked and understaffed, with a backlog of cases he could have done without.
“Find him,” he said. “You know the rules.”
Favaro did indeed. In Metro-Bade, if you are three days late back from a vacation without adequate good reason and without checking in, you are deemed to have dismissed yourself.
Favaro checked his partner’s apartment, but there was no sign that anyone had returned from vacation. He knew where Gomez had gone—he always went to Sunshine—so he checked the passenger lists on the previous evening’s flights from Nassau. The airline computer revealed the flight reservation and prepaid ticket, but it also showed the ticket had not been taken up. Favaro went back to Broderick.
“He could have had an accident,” he urged. “Game fishing can be dangerous.”
“There are phones,” said Broderick. “He has our number.”
“He could be in a coma. Maybe in a hospital. Maybe he asked someone else to phone in, and they didn’t bother. They’re pretty laid back in those islands. We could at least check it out.”
Broderick sighed. Missing detectives he could also do without.
“Okay,” he said. “Get me the number of the police department for this island—what do you call it? Sunshine? Jeez, what a name. Get me the local police chief, and I’ll make the call.”
Favaro had it for him in half an hour. It was so obscure, it was not even listed in International Directory Inquiries. He got it from the British Consulate, who rang Government House on Sunshine, and they passed it on. It took another thirty minutes for Lieutenant Broderick to get his connection.
He was lucky—he found Chief Inspector Jones in his office. It was midday.
“Chief Inspector Jones, this is Lieutenant of Detectives Clay Broderick, speaking from Miami. Hallo? Can you hear me? ... Look, as a colleague, I wonder if you could do me a favor. One of my men was on vacation on Sunshine, and he hasn’t showed up here. We hope there hasn’t been an accident. ... Yes, an American. Name, Julio Gomez. No, I don’t know where he was staying. He was down there for the game fishing.”
Chief Inspector Jones took this call seriously. His was a tiny force, and Metro-Dade’s was enormous. But he would show the Americans that Chief Inspector Jones was not half-asleep. He decided to handle the case himself and summoned a constable and a Land-Rover.
Quite rightly, he started with the Quarter Deck Hotel, but there he drew a blank. He went on to the fishing quay and found Jimmy Dobbs working on his boat, having no charter that day. Dobbs related that Gomez had not shown up for their Friday charter, which was odd, and that he had been staying with Mrs. Macdonald.
The landlady reported that Julio Gomez had left in a hurry on Friday morning for the airport. Jones went there and spoke to the airport manager. He summoned the passport officer, who confirmed that Mr. Gomez had taken a lift with Mr. Klinger to Key West on Friday morning. He gave Inspector Jones the aircraft registration. Jones telephoned Broderick back at four P.M.
Lieutenant Broderick took time out to phone the Key West police, who checked with their own airport. The lieutenant summoned Eddie Favaro just after six. His face was grave.
“Eddie, I’m sorry. Julio made a sudden decision to come home Friday morning. There was no scheduled flight back, so he hitched a lift on a private plane for Key West. It never made it. The plane went down from fifteen thousand feet into the sea, fifty miles short of Key West. The Coast Guard says there were no survivors.”
Favaro sat down. He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”
“I hardly can myself. Look, I’m terribly sorry, Eddie. I know you were close.”
“Nine years,” whispered Favaro. “Nine years he watched my back. What happens now?”
“The machine takes over,” said Broderick. “I’ll tell the Director myself. You know the procedure. If we can’t have a funeral service, we’ll have a memorial. Full departmental honors. I promise.”
* * *
The suspicions came later that night and the next morning.
On Sunday, a charter skipper named Joe Fanelli had taken two small English boys fishing out of Bud ‘n’ Mary’s Marina on Islamorada, a resort in the Florida Keys well north of Key West. Six miles out beyond Alligator Reef, heading for the Hump and trolling as they went, one of the boys took a big bite on his line. Between them the brothers, Stuart and Shane, hauled in what they hoped was a big kingfish or wahoo or tuna. When the catch came up in the wake, Joe Fanelli leaned down and hauled it aboard. It turned out to be the remnants of a life-jacket, still bearing the stenciled number of the airplane to which it had once belonged, and some scorch marks.
The local police sent it up to Miami, where the forensic laboratory established that it had come from Barney Klinger’s Navajo Chief, and that the scorch marks bore traces not of gasoline but of plastic explosive. It became a Homicide investigation.
The first thing Homicide did was check on the business affairs of Mr. Klinger. What they discovered caused them to think the case was a dead end. They had, after all, no mandate on the British territory of Sunshine, and little confidence that the local force would get to the bottom of what had to be a professional hit.
On Tuesday morning Sam McCready eased himself onto his poolside lounger at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, settled his second after-breakfast coffee on the table by his side, and opened the Miami Herald.
Without any particular interest, he scanned the paper for international news—there was precious little—and settled for local affairs. The second lead concerned fresh revelations in the disappearance of a light airplane over the sea southeast of Key West the previous Friday morning.
The news sleuths of the Herald had discovered not only that the plane might well have been destroyed by a bomb inside it, but that Mr. Barney Klinger was known as the uncrowned king of the illicit trade, theft, and laundering of spare aviation parts in South Florida.
After narcotics, this abstruse area of illegal behavior is probably the most lucrative. Florida bristles with airplanes—airliners, cargo freighters, and private aircraft. It also contains some of the world’s major legitimate companies in the provision of constantly needed new or reconditioned spare parts. AVIOL and the Instrument Locator Service supply replacement parts on a worldwide scale.
The illegitimate industry, on the other hand, specializes either in commissioning the theft of such parts for no-questions-asked sales to other (usually Third World) operators, or in the even more dangerous purveying of parts whose operational life is almost expended, selling them as reconditioned parts with most of their operational life still left. For the latter scam, the paperwork is forged. Since some of these parts sell for a quarter of a million dollars each, the profits for a ruthless operator can be huge.
Speculation was running high that someone had wanted to remove Mr. Klinger from the scene.
“In the midst of life,” murmured McCready, and turned to the weather forecast. It was sunny.
Lieutenant Broderick summoned Eddie Favaro on that same Tuesday morning. He was even more grave than he had been the day before.
“Eddie, before we proceed with the memorial service with full honors for Julio, we have to consider a troubling new factor. What the hell was Julio doing sharing a plane with a sleazeball like Klinger?”
“He was trying to get back home,” said Favaro.
“Was he? What was he doing down there?”
“Fishing.”
“Was he? How come he was sharing the same week on Sunshine with Klinger? Did they have business to discuss?”
“Clay, listen to me. No way—no way in this world—was Julio Gomez corrupt. I won’t believe it. He was trying to get home. He saw a plane, he asked for a ride, is all.”
“I hope you’re right,” Broderick said soberly. “Why was he trying to get home two days ahead of schedule?
“That’s what puzzles me,” admitted Favaro. “He loved his fishing, looked forward to it all year. He would never have cut short two days of fishing without a reason. I want to go over there and find out why.”
“You have three reasons for not going,” said the lieutenant. “This department is overworked, you are needed here, and any bomb—if bomb there was—was certainly aimed at Klinger. The girl and Julio were accidents. Sorry, Internal Affairs will have to check out Julio’s financial situation. It can’t be avoided. If he never met Klinger before Friday, it was just a tragic accident.”
“I’ve got some leave time due me,” said Favaro. “I want it, Clay. I want it now.”
“Yes, you’ve got some leave time. And I can’t deny it to you. But you go there and you’re on your own, Eddie. That’s British territory—we have no authority there. And I want your gun.”
Favaro handed over his police automatic, left, and headed for the bank. At three that afternoon, he landed on Sunshine’s airstrip, paid off his chartered four-seater, and watched it leave for Miami. Then he hitched a lift with one of the airstrip staff into Port Plaisance. Not knowing where else to go, he checked into the Quarter Deck.
Sir Marston Moberley sat in a comfortable chair in his walled garden and sipped a whiskey and soda. It was his favorite ritual of the day. The garden behind Government House was not large, but it was very private. A well-tended lawn covered most of the space, and bougainvillaea and jacaranda festooned the walls with their brilliant colors. The walls, which surrounded the garden on three sides—the fourth side was the house itself—were eight feet high and topped with shards of glass. In one wall was an old steel door, seven feet tall, but it was long out of use. Beyond it was a small lane that led into the heart of Port Plaisance. The steel door had been sealed years before, and on its outer side two semicircular steel hasps were secured by a padlock the size of a small dinner plate. All were long fused by rust.
Sir Marston enjoyed the cool of the evening. His adjutant was somewhere inside his own quarters at the other end of the house; his wife was out on an errand visiting the local hospital; Jefferson, his chef/steward/butler, would be preparing dinner in the kitchen. Sir Marston sipped his whiskey with appreciation, then almost choked when his ears were assailed by the scream of rending steel. He turned. He had time to say, “I say, what on earth—Now look here—”
The roar of the first bullet shocked and stunned him. The slug went through a fold of loose fabric in the sleeve of his cotton shirt. It hammered into the coral-block wall of the house behind him and fell back onto the path, misshapen and twisted. The second hit him full in the heart.