Dust Up: A Thriller (29 page)

My timing was almost perfect. The oar rang with a hollow wooden tone, but a microsecond later there was a loud splash on the other side of the boat, followed by the sound of multiple footsteps and hushed but urgent voices.

I grabbed the railing on the side of the yacht and pulled myself aboard, almost stepping on the guard I had just knocked out. I grabbed a towel the size of a bedspread from one of the lounge chairs and threw it over him.

The decks receded like steps, and at the back of each one, I could see one or two guards peering out at the water on the other side of the vessel. The searchlight came on, knifing out into the darkness on the other side of the boat.

Directly in front of me was an open sliding glass door leading into a wood-paneled room bathed in the bright, warm light of obscene wealth.

I scanned the scene in front of me, but there was no time to pause and figure out what it meant or what I was walking into. I was on the move before I even knew what I was doing.

72

“I thought that was you out on the road,” Archie Pearce said, taking the cigar out of his mouth and cackling with something like glee. His other hand held a snifter, the amber liquor sloshing up the sides as he laughed. Even across the room, I could see the liquid coating the inside of the glass. “I had a feeling I hadn’t seen the last of you.”

He didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by the gun I was aiming at his head. I hoped he was faking it. I also hoped I seemed just as unintimidated by the dozen guns now pointed at me.

Bradley Bourden seemed definitely intimidated, and he didn’t have any guns pointed at him. Maybe he had some idea of why I was there.

“Carrick?” he said, alarmed, looking around at the men pointing guns at me. “What are you doing here?”

“Yes, tell us, Mr. Carrick,” Pearce said, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “Why are you here?”

The room was as solidly luxurious as anything I could have imagined on dry land. Rich wood everywhere, crystal chandelier, oriental rugs. I almost laughed out loud at the stone fireplace.

Pearce and Bourden were sitting across from each other in massive green leather armchairs. Bourden had a snifter and a cigar just like Pearce, but he didn’t seem to be enjoying either quite as much, squinting in the smoke.

I could imagine what the room had been like before my arrival—Bourden and Pearce collegially sparring with each other, negotiating the terms of some deal while their men eyed each other up, like an old mob parlay or a presidential summit. I hoped things were about to get a little less friendly.

A quartet of men stood behind each of them. Four more posted in the corners of the room. The ones behind Pearce and those posted in the corners were prime examples of Darkstar private soldiers—solid, chiseled, and handsome, like some kind of genetically enhanced Aryan-dream assholes, complete with the sort of dead lethal eyes that had seen horrible things and wouldn’t flinch at seeing them again. And might even look forward to it.

Bourden’s men I recognized individually. To his right, Royce and Divock glared at me, Royce’s head quickly turning red from the neck upward and the ears inward. To his left were Axe-Man and Old Spice, registering a smoldering recognition, not quite cool enough or dead enough inside to pull off the dead-eye stare.

“I’m just here to talk to Mr. Pearce.” I held up my hands, the gun and the burner phone in one hand. “I want to tell him some of the interesting things I’ve discovered about what’s been going on around here these last few days.” I made a show of putting the gun and the phone on the table next to me, the phone facedown, disarming myself of both of them as if they were equally dangerous. I pulled the sheaf of papers out of my waistband and held both hands up in the air. “There’s something you need to know, Pearce.”

“Get rid of him,” Bourden snapped. His face was turning red too, although Royce was standing close enough, it could have just been reflecting off him.

Royce smiled thinly and tilted his head at Axe-Man and his pal. They moved toward me, but Pearce held up his hand and said, “Wait.”

The Darkstar clones bristled to a higher degree of attention, and the atmosphere in the room changed. The angles of the guns changed, enough that Axe-Man and his sidekick paused, aware that their place in the power dynamic had changed, or at least revealed itself to be different.

“I’d like to hear what he has to say,” Pearce said, his eyes once again twinkling with equal parts good humor and malice. He took a sip of brandy and nodded toward one of his men, who stepped forward and patted me down, thoroughly but efficiently. I handed him the papers, and he put them on the side table next to Pearce, who didn’t look at them, instead taking a long draw from his cigar. The tip of it glowed red for a moment before he released a dense, languid curl of smoke that unfurled around his head. “Go on.”

Bourden’s eye twitched as he glanced at the papers, trying to see what they were.

“I know you two are up to something together,” I said. “Working together to change the regime down here, get rid of Cardon.”

“He knows,” Bourden hissed. He turned to Axe-Man. “Shoot him!”

Axe-Man stepped uncertainly toward me but froze when Pearce barked, “No. Shut up, Bradley. I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

Bourden paled.

Pearce turned back to me, the veneer of amusement thinning considerably.

“Energene is working on a plan of its own,” I said. “Something that will hurt a lot of people, including you and your shareholders.”

Pearce raised an eyebrow at that and smiled. “I doubt that very much.”

Bourden shook his head and rolled his eyes, like this was nonsense. He took a deep drink, hiding his face in his snifter.

I nodded. “They’re coming after you. Coming after your lucrative Stoma-Grow corn market.”

Pearce laughed, but Bourden just stared at me.

“Of course he is,” Pearce said. “He’s just doing his job, Mr. Carrick, the same as countless others. They’re all after my market share, and I would be too. But none of them have a hope of succeeding.”

“Oh, this time they might. If you look at those papers, you’ll see. They’re using a specially modified Soyagene—”

Bourden shot a hard, urgent glare and a nod at Axe-Man, who abruptly raised his gun in my direction and even more abruptly staggered sideways with a small, black-red hole in the side of his head.

73

Bourden and his remaining men gasped but didn’t move. Neither did Pearce’s men, except the one who had shot Axe-Man. Royce, for once, went pale, the redness draining from his face as if someone had flushed his head.

“Jesus, Archie,” Bourden exclaimed softly, looking pretty pale himself.

Pearce ignored him, gesturing two of his men toward Axe-Man’s body. “Get that off the rug before it stains.”

They hustled forward and lifted the body, maneuvering it so that the thin trickle of blood from the hole in Axe-Man’s temple came down the front of his shirt and not onto the floor.

They dumped the body onto the deck outside, where any blood could be hosed off. As they came back in, I realized how much things had changed. Two of Pearce’s guns were still pointed at me, but the rest were on Bourden and his remaining men.

Pearce turned to me. “Continue.” The sparkle in his eyes was gone, replaced by a sharp, black gleam. I was reminded of a predator, its senses sharply accentuated as it closed in on its prey.

For a moment, looking at those eyes, I almost didn’t tell him. I thought about all the people who might suffer and die if Bourden’s plan succeeded, but I wondered how many more would suffer and die if Pearce and Stoma remained unchallenged at the top of the heap, tightening their control on the world’s food supply, up to God knows how many evil plans of their own. It sickened me to be helping him retain his control, but I knew it was what I had to do.

“Energene has a secret version of Soyagene. It contains modified Stoma-Grow corn proteins, making anyone who eats it severely allergic to Stoma-Grow corn. They’re releasing it into the food supply. They’re going to make Stoma-Grow virtually inedible around the world.”

Pearce stared at me expressionlessly for a moment.

Bourden’s face was equally still, except for his eyes scanning the place as if he were looking for a way out.

“They’re already ramping up production of their Early Rise corn to fill the void. The two of you are trying to topple the Cardon regime, right? Control Haiti’s vote in tomorrow’s trade vote?”

Pearce stared at me blankly. “Perhaps. Why?”

I pointed at the papers on the table next to him. “As soon as it’s a done deal, Energene is going to start releasing their modified Soyagene, bit by bit, all around the world. It will start as a mysterious respiratory disease, first in the world’s poorest countries, like Haiti, so no one will care too much about it. But then they’ll release it everywhere else. Their secret schedule is right there in those papers. You can see for yourself.”

Pearce looked down at the papers, flicking through them one by one as if he understood each of them in an instant. He had a lifetime in this area, and I had told him what to look for, but I was still struck by the strong sense that I was witnessing a truly formidable intellect absorbing everything on each of those dense pages in an instant before moving on to the next. Putting it all together.

“Some of it already got out,” I said. “Stolen. Two entire villages were sickened because of it, but Energene and their friends put out a story that it was Ebola, then they wiped out both villages to hide their tracks.”

Pearce looked over at Bourden with restrained anger and something else, something I was horrified to recognize as admiration.

The room was silent except for the lapping of the water outside. I heard a faint wooden bounce as the skiff gently connected with the hull of the yacht. I felt an almost irresistible desire to be out there in it, getting away from this place, from these people.

Finally, Pearce put the papers down and smiled. It was a chilling thing to see a smile under those gleaming eyes. I was relieved that they turned to look at Bourden and not me.

“Not bad, Bradley,” he said. “I’m impressed. Really. Shame you can’t use those smarts for more productive purposes.” He laughed. “You too, Carrick, for putting everything together once again. You’re smarter than you look. Shame you’re wasting your life in civil service.”

He turned back to the papers, thinking. “Well,” he said finally, folding his hands across his midsection and sitting back in his chair. “Looks like we have a long night ahead of us, rounding up all this”—he looked at the papers again—“‘Soyagene GES-5322x.’ Making sure no more of it gets out. Ever.” He turned to the henchman standing directly beside him. “We’ll need to prepare secure quarters for our guests.”

I didn’t know if he was referring to me as well as Bourden’s men, but I couldn’t risk staying the night. I’d been dying to ask Pearce how it felt not being the most evil man in the room, but as his men moved to disarm Royce and Divock and Old Spice, I turned and bolted.

That bullet had been let loose pretty casually in there, and I fully expected another one to follow me outside.

But it didn’t.

I ran low and aimed for the railing, placing one foot between Axe-Man’s body and the guy I had knocked out with the oar. As much as I wanted to keep my head down, as I approached the railing, I looked up and out into the night, trying to spot the skiff before I went over. Luckily, it had only drifted ten feet, and I landed close enough to it that my hand grazed the side as I went under. My head scraped the bottom as I passed underneath and came up the other side. I braced my elbow on the side of the boat and frantically grabbed the pull cord, expecting a hail of bullets to turn both the boat and me into a churning froth of blood and splinters at any moment. As I tensed to pull the cord, the searchlight flashed on and found me immediately.

Just before I pulled the cord, I heard Archie Pearce’s voice saying, “Let him go.”

The angles and ergonomics were all wrong, but with the help of terror and adrenaline, I ripped the cord as hard as I could. The motor almost came off the boat entirely, but the engine engaged, and the boat slid forward.

I hung on to the side with one hand and rested the other on the tiller, in the back of my mind hoping my iPhone case was still water resistant. The boat was listing at a crazy angle, and water sloshed in as I went, but I was relieved to be shielded from Archie Pearce and his men. At least I wouldn’t see it coming.

On the softly lit docks of Labadee, a cluster of guards had assembled to see the commotion. But the action was over, and it hadn’t involved them directly. They stood there and watched me put-putting around the spit of land that separated the fake Labadee from the village of Labadie. Soon they were out of sight.

By the time I was halfway back to shore, I realized the searchlight wasn’t even on anymore. I made sure the iPhone was secure and hoisted myself into the skiff and then grabbed the oars and started rowing along with the outboard. As I nudged the tiller with my foot to keep us on course, I felt an odd assortment of unfamiliar muscle pains in my core from having pulled the cord in such a contorted position. I couldn’t tell if my rowing was making the boat move any faster, but I wanted to do everything I could to get away from there as fast as possible.

A few seconds later, the cabin from which I had just escaped lit up with a muzzle flash. A gunshot rang out over the water, followed by an agonized scream.

I found a little more strength in my arms, rocketing the boat through the water. I didn’t stop until the oars dug into the semidry sand on the beach.

74

Toma was waiting for me on the beach, towering over Claude. They each took an arm and helped me out of the boat. My arms were trembling, but I couldn’t tell how much of it was from the rowing and how much from the nerves.

“I’m okay,” I told them. As soon as I was on dry land, I checked the iPhone. It was still recording.

There were five missed calls—two from Regi, two from work, one from Nola. She’d left a message.