Hurricane Fever (15 page)

At three in the morning, Roo’d felt comfortable turning them southwest toward Aves and letting out some sail. By five he was letting the autopilot take control again.

At sunrise Roo washed his face with some freshwater via a deck hose in the corner of the cockpit, scrubbing away caked-on salt and letting the cold water shock him.

There was a danger in sailing. The ocean looked infinite from the cockpit. The horizon hundreds of miles away. But the truth was that you were only actually seeing a few miles in any direction. With radar, a camera at the tip of the mast sweeping for objects, and modern collision alarms plugged into a distributed navigation system, the chance of stumbling over something was small.

But you still needed to stay alert. For other small craft. For something floating in the water.

Yes, you could let your eyes sink closed for a few minutes. And open them to find something large coming over the horizon. No alarms because the software was glitched.

Container ships couldn’t swerve to avoid you, even if they wished they could.

So after washing his face Roo got back into the chair and kept on for Aves, leaving Kit downstairs.

By the afternoon the sunlight glinted off the waves and the rhythm of the swells changed. They weren’t in the deep ocean anymore; the depth finder was able to find the bottom underneath them.

The first hint of Aves were the tops of the office buildings. Communications equipment and whip antennas appeared, as if floating on the ocean surface. A distant helipad rose from the horizon.

As they got closer, the glinting metal windows of the main cluster of high-rises loomed over a tiny spit of sand.

Roo made a phone call. “Hey, Elvin! It’s Roo.”

A moment on the other side. “Prudence?”

Roo made a face. He wasn’t sure if Elvin had refused to use his nickname to keep needling him, or just out of a strange sense of formality. He’d last sat on the deck of the
Spitfire
with Elvin a few years back when he’d sailed around St. Vincent a bit. Helped Elvin fix a broken 3-D printer.

He kept in touch because Elvin worked private security gigs up and down the islands. The kind of person you wanted to know, because Elvin knew who was up to what in terms of larger corporations. It was an old habit, because Roo wasn’t in the game anymore. But he couldn’t help himself when it came to collecting contacts like Elvin.

And now … it came in handy.

“Been a while,” Roo said. “But I need to ask you a favor. I’m coming into Aves. Need your help feeling my way around.”

As he talked to Elvin about what Elvin had been up to since they’d last seen each other in general terms, the expanding lower mass of Aves filled out. A horizontal blotch of a city on stilts, surrounded by more sturdy platforms rising out of the sea on rusted, rotund legs. Some of them oil platforms, moved to create more open space where the sand no longer existed. But later, the floating piers and homes systems had been added to Aves that were commonly found in more and more coastal cities throughout the world.

No one on Aves ever planned to try and keep the roaring seas back. It was a futile gesture. Instead they used the tip of the island peeking up from its submarine mountain range as a base to bolt everything to.

Even the sand around Aves’s pylons was a fiction. The original Aves Island had long since been swallowed by rising seas. The sand had been imported to continue the fiction that Aves Island was still a
thing
. A physical spit of
something
that people could continue to threaten a war over, countersue about in courts, and generally get upset about or use.

Twenty thousand people lived out here, naked to the ocean’s power, clinging on stilts to what lay underneath.

“So, you need a favor?” Elvin asked. He didn’t know much about Roo. Roo figured he suspected Roo worked Caribbean Intelligence, though that hadn’t been true since he’d left the Arctic. But the impression meant that Elvin wouldn’t turn him down.

“You willing to let me buy you a meal?” Roo asked.

“I’ll send you the location,” Elvin said. “Let me know when you feet hit ground.”

Roo saw several ships thrown up onto the floating docks and barges around the outer ring of Aves now. Many more shattered and half afloat inside the hundreds of thick stilts.

A beautiful house leaned dangerously over, its legs half knocked out from underneath. Some of the roads between the apartment complexes and barges had collapsed.

But Aves was already buzzing with activity. Large oil tankers were docked near the industrial section, vomiting their liquid black gold into barges that would be using it to spit out plastics that could be airlifted by low-cost blimp throughout the Caribbean basin. A hydrofoil ferry from somewhere down island was docked on the main floating dock, people in bright white shirts walking up a steep ramp to get into the main thoroughfares of Aves, high off the water and safe.

Aves was less a tourist attraction, more of a manufacturing and industrial park. The sort of metallic carbuncle of density and frenetic human energy created by trade, oil, and power. But like every Caribbean island, there was somewhere to dock and for sailors to gather. Roo eased them into a harbor created out of a large concrete floating barge that trailed docks behind like squid’s tentacles.

Once secured, he checked on Kit. She was asleep in the spare cabin, her arms wrapped around one of Roo’s old tablets, snoring softly. There was a big bruise on her forehead from a violent toss from sometime in the night.

He closed the door quietly.

*   *   *

Elvin had gained heft, the result of desk jobs and easy consulting gigs. But he wore the extra weight well, particularly in his sharp, shiny black Gucci suit, silver Oakley glasses, and vaguely cowboy-ish looking boots. His shaved scalp beaded with sweat as they met for a late lunch.

“This is a view to kill for,” he said, sweeping gently between chairs and tired-looking business types hunched over mutual paperwork. The smooth movements seemed at odds with Elvin’s frame, but he’d spent years working front lines before moving his way away from the action.

A dancer often kept their grace, an athlete a banked fire at their core.

Elvin picked out a table near the glass railing at the edge of the open-air restaurant. “We’re getting good at this,” he told Roo.

“What?”

“Recovery. Just this morning Aves is hit by a powerful hurricane, and by late afternoon, here we all are.” He swept a hand around the business lunch crowd. “When I was kid, each storm would destroy everything. Billions of dollars lost, homes, people’s lives. In some places, it’s still a catastrophe. But Aves is built from the start assuming we’ll get hit by several a year. The new normal.”

The restaurant perched on a half side of an open floor area three quarters of the way up one of the handful of twenty-story core buildings clustered at the heart of Aves. A small botanical garden wafted the smell of fresh flowers at them. Birds of paradise, ginger, and lots of hibiscus. Thick plastic windows had rolled out from tracks to protect them from the storm, and had been rolled back into place afterward.

From here they looked out South over all of Aves.

And Elvin was right. Roo had seen the worst of the damage on his way in. In fact, that damage had been swept by the surge and sea under the city into its pilings. From up here, Aves was streets and buildings.

The core lower areas assumed flooding and battering seas. The pedestrian walkways and bikeways weaved in and out of carefully maintained greenspace. Most of the roofs had gardens and more greenspace, making Aves look like more of an island from above than it had from the gritty, rusty forest of pillars at sea level that Roo had seen as they approached.

Some of the island’s walkways were at the same height as the top of
Spitfire
’s mast.

And already the cleanup of downed trees and solar shingles knocked loose was finishing up.

It was survival of the fittest, really. Buildings not able to handle the hurricane-force winds were not even allowed to be built. Add near-bulletproof glass in windows. And anyone building new construction out here demanded roofs with wingtips designed to shove them down harder onto their houses, rather than flip up and fly away into the wind.

Other designs had long since been swept away and given up on as useless for survival here in Hurricane Alley.

With Caribbean basin oil money, a lot of rebuilding for rising oceans had been done. Rebuilding that would have bankrupted the small Caribbean nations back when Roo was little.

“The green tower,” Roo said, pointing out the newest, almost thirty-story spiral to the north.

“That’s a Beauchamp vertical farm,” Elvin said. “Beauchamp Holdings is all over Aves now. They’re trying to wrangle their way into building another farm specializing in hard-to-grow fruits, and then supplying the nearby islands from here.”

“They have one on St. Thomas,” Roo said. Some islands had room for agriculture and markets fresh with produce. But lots of things had to be shipped in. Used to be everyone just shouldered the doubled cost of basic foodstuffs. The vertical farms dropped the price slightly and kept the food locally made.

Roo slid the passport he’d stolen across the table to Elvin once their drinks arrived. “You’re working security for Aves now, right?”

Elvin flipped through the passport with a single hand and sipped at an alarmingly yellow-colored Carib beer with the other. “Who’s this?”

“The favor I was talking about. Delroy’s dead. This was one of the crew that did it. They’re Golden Dawn leftovers, or maybe just more generic general Eastern European neo-Nazi types. I’m not sure which. They passed through here. I’m hunting them down.”

Elvin wiped his scalp with a napkin and then used his glasses to snap a photo of the passport for reference. He tapped the frames, then bobbed his head around as he navigated data only he could see.

“I’ll pay,” Roo said. “Gold. You work Aves Security. I need to know where your cameras have seen them, who they talked to on the island. Anything. They killed my nephew, Elvin. They killed Delroy.”

Elvin put the napkin away in a pocket, and look at Roo over the rim of his glasses. “It’s an ethics violation. The contract I have, I don’t have no room for playing around.”

Roo sat back and made a disgusted sound.

Elvin raised his hands. “Look, man. For real, the way you get around this is to get Interpol to call me. Or even Caribbean Intelligence…” He let that hang. “Go official.”

“I’m hunting these fuckers down, Elvin,” Roo said levelly. He couldn’t play the CIG card. And now Elvin knew that. His position had just weakened.

“If you come causing trouble on Aves, it’s not just me that’ll be crawling down you throat. There is an actual CARICOM garrison still on the island.”

Roo leaned forward. “I have a French DGSE agent working with me,” he said.

“Official?”

“Big enough player for you?” Roo asked. “Katrina Prideaux.”

Elvin rubbed his temple and twitched his head. Searching. “DGSE. Here from Guadeloupe?”

“She came to St. Thomas to see me.” Roo squinted. “Look, I won’t lie, Elvin. I’m here for revenge. I’m following this chain, and I’m going to pull the house down around me to bring pain upon whoever did this. I don’t expect it will be a good thing. I’ll give you three years’ income. If it blows up, you take a vacation and wait until it dies down and you can work again. If you manage to stay out of the mess I want to bring and don’t get fired, keep the gold for retirement. Or whatever you want.”

“Three years?” Elvin asked, looking around.

“Three.”

Elvin sighed and pushed his glasses up. “Fuck it. I’ll run facial recognition; see how well I can still manage old-school detective work. I’ll come down to the docks to see you. Still the
Spitfire
?”

“Still
Spitfire,
” Roo confirmed.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

17

Someone knocking on the side of the hull snapped Roo awake. He sat up, the net strung between the front section of the two hulls creaking as he got to his feet. Water lapped away underneath him, and the sun had been burning away at him. Or at least, it had.

Now it was gloomy dark outside. The sun nowhere to be found, just the last wisps of red and purple in the west.

“Prudence?”

It had been comfortable to lay there, soaking in the warmth and succumbing to a sleep deep enough he didn’t keep surfacing to listen for something that wasn’t ever going to come back to the
Spitfire
’s hull: the sound of Delroy’s voice.

“Jones!”

Roo had a gun just by his hip. Fingers still tight around the grip. He frowned at it, surprised he hadn’t dropped it into the water when he fell asleep. He barely remembered getting it. But apparently he couldn’t sleep without one in his hand now.

“Jones!”

Elvin stood on the end of the dock, even more sweaty than before. His nice shirt was blotched with wet stains. He fidgeted, moving from foot to foot, jaw clenched.

Roo moved across the webbing to the main cabin. “Come aboard.”

Elvin hopped onto the side of the catamaran and over the railing. He followed Roo in and shut the door behind them.

When Roo set the gun on the galley counter, Elvin stared at it for a moment.

Roo opened the fridge and looked down. “Beer?” He was hungry, too.

“Oh good, you’re up,” Kit said, coming out of the port hull’s corridor and climbing up into the main cabin with them. “I didn’t want to bother you. You were very asleep, and very armed.”

Elvin swiveled her way. “You’re the DGSE agent?”

Kit shrugged, visibly annoyed. “Apparently.” She grabbed one of the beers, wiped the condensation off on her shorts, and cracked it open.

Roo pulled out some cheeses from the back of the fridge: gouda, a sharp cheddar, some mild goat cheese. He looked at Elvin’s reflection in the window over the galley as he quickly cut the bricks into slices and spread them out on a wooden platter. He also palmed a small wireless-spectrum sniffer as he did it, checking to see if Elvin was wearing a wire.