Fallen Angel: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 9) (8 page)

When she looked up, she smiled. “Yes, sir,” she replied in lightly Swiss-accented English. “Will you be opening an account today with the wire transfer?”

“No, thanks,” I replied, lifting the aluminum briefcase I’d dug out from under the forward bunk’s storage compartment on the
Revenge
. “I’d like it in American hundred-dollar bills.”

“I see,” she replied. “There is a two-percent charge for that.” Though her smile never wavered, the sparkle in her eyes diminished slightly. Bankers prefer you bring money into the bank, not take it out. The briefcase was dented and scratched, and there were a number of fishing, diving, and boating-related stickers on it. My and Art’s appearance was very similar—scraggly beards, tee shirts, and well-worn boat shoes.

“That’ll be fine,” I said, handing her the briefcase as she came around the counter. “Don’t lock it, though. I forgot the combination.”

“Please have a seat,” Audrey said, extending a hand toward four chairs arranged around a low table in the waiting area. “I’ll return in just a moment.”

Art and I sat down, looking around the two-story-high lobby as Audrey’s high heels clicked on the tile floor. My eyes followed the sound as Audrey walked toward the stairwell with my briefcase. She wore a tight skirt that fell to only mid-thigh and I couldn’t help watching.

The upper floor had a balcony around three sides, with a wide stairwell at the far end of the lobby. Glass-fronted offices and conference rooms ran along both sides on each floor, and there were cameras just about anywhere you looked. Two armed and very serious-looking security guards sat at desks on either side of the stairs. Above them on the second floor were three heavy-looking ornate doors, probably the offices of the bank’s officers. Directly behind the guards, I could see the door of a huge vault against the far wall, below the stairs.

Audrey’s heels clicked up the steps as I watched her hips sway with each step. I realized it’d been a couple of months since Linda and I had ended our relationship. I really thought we had a good thing going, and very well might again one day, but the demands of her job, and another promotion, sent her to Tallahassee. I knew she hated accepting it. Not just because it would put a few hundred miles between us, but she’d once described the capital as a frat house, no girls allowed.

Audrey disappeared through the middle door on the second floor. A moment later, it opened and she and a man in an expensive-looking suit came quickly down the steps to one of the guard’s desks. The suit said something to the guard, who rose and the three of them walked toward us.

“How do you do, Mister McDermitt. I am Henri Lachance, the bank’s manager. Will you come with me, please?”

Art and I followed the manager to the rear conference room on the left side, the guard following behind us. In the conference room, Audrey closed the blinds and door, while the guard waited just outside.

“Would either of you gentlemen care for a cup of tea?” Audrey asked. “Coffee, perhaps?”

“Coffee would be great,” I replied.

She left the room, and Mister Lachance waved a hand to the table in invitation. “Please, have a seat. I will need to see your passport and another form of identification, Mister McDermitt.”

Taking my passport from my back pants pocket, I handed it to the man, then fished out my wallet and gave him my driver’s license. “Will this take very long, Mister Lachance?” I asked.

“Not at all, sir,” he replied, looking at my passport and license. He looked up at a camera in the corner and nodded, saying, “Identification visually confirmed.” Placing both of them facedown on a scanner, Lachance pressed a button on the machine and it began to make a soft whirring sound.

“Audrey said that the lock on your briefcase is disabled?” he asked.

“Not really disabled,” I replied. “I just forgot the combination.”

The door opened and the guard held it to allow Audrey to push a small coffee cart into the room. “Audrey will put your funds in a lockable box that will fit inside your briefcase, Mister McDermitt. Please make yourselves comfortable until she returns.”

Lachance returned my credentials, then he and Audrey left, taking my briefcase with them, leaving Art and me alone in the conference room. I poured a couple of mugs and we sat down to wait.

“He kinda handled your briefcase like he was holding a day-old dead fish,” Art said.

“Form follows function. It gets the job done for me.”

Our wait wasn’t nearly as long as I’d thought it was going to be. I’d just poured us both a fresh mug of coffee when Audrey opened the door. This time, she held it as the guard pushed another cart into the room with my briefcase riding on it.

“I just need you to verify that the funds are correct, Mister McDermitt,” Audrey said with an inviting smile. She opened the briefcase and handed me a key on a sturdy-looking keyring.

The strongbox inside the briefcase nearly filled it. I lifted it out and, turning it around, I used the key to unlock and open it. Audrey removed a file from the box, revealing the neatly stacked bundles of hundred-dollar bills. I picked one up and fanned it, visually counting the stacks. There were forty-nine bundles, totaling $490,000.

“All there,” I said, taking the file from Audrey and signing the receipt inside it. She tore off the second copy and handed it to me, which I placed in the box, then closed and locked it.

“Is there anything else that UBS can do for you today, sir?”

“Thanks, Audrey,” I said with a smile, closing the briefcase and picking it up. “I think we’re all set.”

She opened the door with what I took as a seductive smile. The guard stood just outside. “If there’s nothing else I can do for you, Jefferson will escort you to your car.”

I’m kind of a dolt, where it comes to women. So I tend to err on the side of caution and assume I’m wrong when I think a woman might be coming onto me. But even a dolt carrying half a million dollars might be attractive to some women.

“Thanks, Audrey,” I said. “You’ve been very courteous.”

“Well,” she said, smiling brightly. “If you’re ever back in Nassau.”

Ten minutes later, the cab driver dropped us off at the marina and we were underway, less than forty minutes after arriving in Nassau.

I
t was nearly noon as we approached the southern tip of Cat Island once again. Taking my satellite phone out, I called Chyrel’s number. She answered on the second ring.

“Hey, Jesse. We’re almost finished here. Maybe another hour.”

“Are you at a point where you can connect me with this Claude Whyte?”

“Sure, I don’t need Henry’s computer to do that,” Chyrel replied. “He’s such a sweet old man, by the way.”

“When we do this, Whyte will call Cross on my sat phone. Can you make it look like the call’s coming from Cat Island?”

“Child’s play,” Chyrel replied.

A moment later, I heard a click and then a ringtone. “Want me to disconnect?” Chyrel asked over the ringing.

“No, record it if you can.”

A man with a Jamaican accent answered the phone. “Who dis?”

“Name’s McDermitt,” I replied. “Captain of
Gaspar’s Revenge
.” There was silence for a second and I thought he’d hung up. “Still there, Claude?”

“Wha yuh want? An how yuh know my bumbaclot name and numbuh, white boi?”

“You know who I am?” I asked in a cordial manner.

“I
and I know who yuh ah. I evah see you ’gain, I gwon cut out yuh haht, mon.”

Ignoring his threats, I continued in a cordial tone. “I want to meet with you, Claude. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

Most of what he said next, I was unable to decipher, as his voice went off the scale in pitch. I did pick up a few curse words, though. Finally, he asked, “Wha yuh wanna see I for, white boi?”

“I know all about the kidnapping, the plan to murder the two women, and who paid you to do it.”

There was silence again for a moment. “So, yuh tink yuh know it all?”

“I also know you can’t contact the guy who hired you and you’re out the rest of the money for the job.” That got his attention.

“Who duh blood clot are yuh?”

“Meet me at Hawk’s Nest Marina in half an hour. There’ll be three of us on the restaurant deck. Come with more than four men and the deal I’m about to make you is off. Play ball and I can make it so your week isn’t a total loss. To the tune of a hundred thousand dollars American.”

“An jest wha do I and I gotta do for dat?” Pat was right. They were easy to buy. Now it was just a matter of negotiating a price for the service.

“A hundred grand and all you have to do is make a phone call.”

“Call who, mon?”

“I give you the money and you call Nick Cross.”

“I and I been callin’ him all day, always a engaged signa’.”

“I’m blocking all calls from the islands to D.C. and Beaufort.”

He paused for a moment, but I could hear his heavy breathing after his enraged tirade. “Wha yuh want I tell dis mon?”

“Tell him we failed in getting the women back and we’re dead. Then tell him the price is double what you agreed on for trying to double-cross you. Then you’ll tell him he has to meet you in person, two days from now. In Beaufort. Think you can handle that?”

Slowly bringing the
Revenge
down off plane, I idled into the channel where we’d blown up a boat the day before. Andrew was standing at the forward rail of the bridge, in front of the forward bench seat, and Tony and Art were on either side of the foredeck, windbreakers hiding the machine pistols they carried. Though the lightweight jackets might look conspicuous in June in the tropics, we’d agreed that it was less so than carrying weapons in the open.

“An yuh gwon be heah in half a hour?” Claude asked.

“I’m here now,” I replied, shifting to neutral. His question told me that he didn’t have anyone watching the marina approach.

“Yuh a fool, McDermitt. Whut stop I and I from jes coming dere an taking yuh money?”

“One, you know our firepower and you’ll sure as shit die trying something that stupid. And two, the hundred grand is just a down payment.”

“An di rest of di payment?”

This was almost too easy. “Another hundred thousand after you make the call.
If
you make it believable.”

I heard nothing for a moment. Andrew went down and watched from the starboard-side deck as Tony and Art tied us up at the dock.

“Tree hunder,” Claude said.

“Deal. Half when we meet as a good faith deposit and the other half if you make him believe you. Then your part in this is done and you can bury your dead.”

“Left dem mons to di shahks,” Claude said heartlessly. “I be dere in twenny minutes, mon.”

The line went dead. Climbing quickly down to the cockpit, I told Andrew to keep a sharp eye out and went into the cockpit. Opening the briefcase on the couch, I took out thirty of the bundles of hundreds and split them between two empty reel cases. I find fly rod cases and reel cases very unnoticeable in most of the places I travel.

Back on deck, Andrew and I stepped up onto the dock with Tony and Art. “Tony, you go ahead of us. Find a spot on the corner of the deck with a good view. We’ll be along in five minutes and take a table in the center.”

“Roger that,” Tony said, then turned and walked casually toward the restaurant, his MP5K hanging from a sling under his arm completely hidden by the oversized
Rusty Anchor Bar and Grill
zip-up windbreaker he was wearing.

With Andrew and Art, I walked around toward the front of the Marina, entering the restaurant from inside the main clubhouse. A young island woman stood at a podium and smiled brightly as we approached.

“Yuh heah fa lunch, Cap’n?”

“Yeah,” I replied with as disarming a smile as I could muster. “We’ll need a big table. We’re meeting friends.”

“How many in yuh pahtee?”

“Seven,” I replied.

The young woman picked up the appropriate number of menus and said, “Dis way, Cap’n. It not ver busy right now. Yuh want a table inside, or outside wit a view of di marina?”

“We’ve been on the water for two days,” I replied. “How about a table in the middle of the deck outside?”

She led the way out to the deck, weaving between the many tables toward a large one in the center. Tony sat at a table by the rail, with his back to the wall of what I guessed to be the kitchen area. There were only three other people on the deck, obvious tourists seated together near the steps down to the dock area.

Once we were seated, a waiter came over and took our drink orders, leaving a tray of glasses and two large pitchers of water. Before he left, I told him to just bring fish sandwiches and chips for the three of us and he hurried off.

“We’re ready to record,” I heard Deuce say over the tiny earwig receiver I was wearing. “Just say the word and we’ll start.”

Each of us had one, but without the bone mics attached. Andrew had a single powerful mic, disguised as a fishing lure and clipped to an old
Gaspar’s Revenge Charter Service
hat. It was connected wirelessly to my laptop on the boat, beaming a signal to a satellite directly above us.

Claude was early, and he didn’t look very happy. “You can start now, Deuce,” I said to Andrew.