Hurricane Fever (3 page)

“Something I have to do,” Roo said.

“Right now?” Delroy’s face twisted with incomprehension. “Makila coming for us … and we heading for Tortola?”

“It’ll take four hours,” Roo said.
Spitfire II
made good time. It was four already. “We get there at seven or eight, depending. Makila won’t hit until late tomorrow.”

Delroy stared at Roo. Normally Roo lectured him about being calm, not taking risks. Roo knew he was having trouble processing this sudden tack in behavior.

“Look,” Roo said. “You can stay on land in Tortola at a hotel, if you want. But I need to get there quick.”

“Take the damn ferry,” Delroy said.

“No. No, not a good idea.” There’d be more sophisticated people-scanning equipment taking a close look at everyone passing through customs, even in little old Tortola. Iris scanners, gait recognition cameras feeding patterns into central databases.

It was safer to get in after hours. Go into town with the dinghy without passing by anywhere official. Give him the time he needed. Then Roo could slip out in predawn. Clear customs at Jost Van Dyke, where it was all real old-fashioned paperwork and he would be in a better position if people were looking for him.

It was a touch of paranoid thinking. But it had never hurt him before.

Not with a call like that.

“It’s just a PO box,” Zee’s voice had told him. It was a recording that had been triggered. Maybe a piece of software on a site sitting somewhere, scanning the news for a death notice. Or that hadn’t been reset by a called-in password check, thus triggering out a message. “There’s something waiting for you in there. I need you to keep it safe. It’ll help you, or whoever you think it’s safe to give it to, find my killers. Revenge from beyond the grave … you know? You’ll know what to do.”

Roo rubbed his forehead. “Just get up on deck, Delroy, and start hosing off the chain.” He didn’t want the nasty mud that would be coming up on the chain getting sucked into the anchor locker stinking up the starboard hull of the catamaran.

*   *   *

It had been a sunny week and the solar panels on the top of the main cabin had filled up the ship’s batteries to capacity. Roo gunned the two electric engines to swing them out past Cabrita Point, crammed with its multicolored hotels and upscale condos that looked out from their perches over the sea toward St. John, squared architecture’s corners clashing with rolling hills.

Pretty real estate, but Roo could always move to
anchor
his home off any of the sparkling white beaches they saw in the distance. Hell, he could even anchor right in front of those expensive condos.

The farther away from Red Hook and into the ocean, the taller the swells grew. And the wind kicked up nicely.

Roo let the mainsail out from the cockpit, motors whining slightly as winches spun to pull the sail out from inside the mast where it was neatly rolled up. The
Spitfire
leaned only just slightly as she caught the wind. Unlike a monohulled ship, there would be no dramatic pitch as the sails filled out.

They were moving along nicely now. Roo cut the engines off and unfurled the jib. The great triangle was yanked smoothly all the way back down just past the mast and the mainsail. He trimmed it all with a few more corrections of the electric winches.

“Watch the wheel,” Roo said to Delroy when he got back in from scrubbing the muck off the decks the chains had dragged up. He set the autopilot and checked the blips and projected paths of other ships in the area on his windscreen. The autopilot would handle most situations, steering around other ships and avoiding reefs. If Roo really wanted to, he could probably ignore sailing the little catamaran until they reached Road Harbour. It would maximize speed, trim the sails, all while guiding them along the edge of St. John and then tacking out for Tortola.

Hell, he’d even once fallen asleep with the autopilot on and been woken by its “destination reached” bleat of an alarm on a trip to Virgin Gorda. Roo’d opened his eyes, blearily, staring at a beach just a hundred yards away from the bow of the ship as the autopilot kept the catamaran paused, pointed into the wind.

It was a long way from the old days, where you’d sit at the wheel and adjust the sails, aiming the ship yourself for hours on end with nothing but your thoughts and the wind in your face.

Roo ducked down into the galley and made turkey melt sandwiches. Fresh French bread, organic turkey, crisp lettuce, all of it grown at the new fifteen-story vertical farm in the unlikely location of Bolongo Bay.

Outside the large oval windows located just over the galley’s stone countertops, the crisp, white sandy St. John beaches passed by on the port side of the catamaran. Solomon Bay and Caneel. Tourists splashed around in the clear water or beached themselves on colorful towels like contented seals. They’d jet out before Makila hit and leave the cleaning up after the storm to everyone who actually lived here. The tourists would come back once the beaches were sparkling again.

Maybe he was no different. Living on the boat, never fully engaging with everyone on land. Separate somehow.

“Uncle Roo!”

Roo realized he’d been standing at the galley, staring out the window. Just letting the boat rock under his heels, swaying with it as it moved over and through the swells.

“Roo, man, I’m hungry,” his nephew complained.

The sandwiches had been finished a long time ago. Cut into pairs of neat triangles with cheese dripping over the sides.

What the fuck was he thinking, actually going to a dead drop when he’d been out of the system for so long? A dead man’s dead drop.

That was spy shit.

Roo had left that spy shit behind.

He wasn’t hitting the gym every day. Wasn’t training hand to hand. Wasn’t running any cells or playing any networks. No, he spent his time reading books and keeping the old catamaran in good shape.

And making sure Delroy made it through high school.

But he’d taken that kid out at the grocery store easily enough, right?

But that was just a kid, Roo,
he told himself. He lifted the lid of the fridge built into the counter and pulled out two sodas.
A kid not much older than Delroy.

*   *   *

Delroy looked him right in the eye. “What got you all moody, Uncle? What’s all this about?”

“I…” Roo squinted. “I have to do a favor for a very old friend.”

“Right now. Before the storm? On Tortola?”

“Yeah.” Saying it made it real for Roo. He put the can down and looked out over the side of the rear cockpit toward St. John as the catamaran’s autopilot skirted the lighter-colored water of the reefs. “Fifteen years ago the Caribbean Intelligence Group formed up. All the islands pooling resources. We tried to create a network to stop the big countries pushing us around. But there wasn’t money for all of us to create some super spy agency. In the beginning we had to go and ask for help. Seventeen of us analysts went to train in London with the SIS, what everyone usually calls MI6. Known Zee ever since I met him at Gatwick Airport, waiting to get picked up. Ended up figuring out how to use the bus together because they forgot we were coming.”

They’d both been wet, cold and shivering, pulling their luggage around annoyed commuters.

Roo looked over and saw Delroy smirk. He didn’t really buy much of the “uncle as ex-spy” stories Roo occasionally let slip. Roo knew the boy figured him for a desk jockey trying to puff his chest and talk things up.

“He was the closest thing I had to family for five years,” Roo said. “Before I went north.”

“North to the U.S.?” Delroy asked. He’d taken a few massively open online courses from star professors and was curious about living on a campus in a new country. Roo had been, carefully, encouraging the notion. No one in their family had ever even gotten to college. Not Roo, not his brother.

“No, not America,” Roo said. “The North Pole.”

Roo’s family had lived on Anegada, the only island in the Virgin Islands that sat on a flat bed of coral. The rising ocean had swallowed it, leaving it as what it had been hundreds of thousands of years ago: little more than a submerged reef north of Virgin Gorda.

The family had scattered. Roo, rootless and wandering. His brother, Vincent, to try and build a house on a bad piece of land in Virgin Gorda, looking for just the opposite. Vincent hunkered down for hurricane after hurricane as the summer seasons grew more intense.

Rescue workers found Roo’s brother in the remains of the house along with his wife, both their backs broken by the debris of cement and roof beams, with baby Delroy sheltered between them.

Delroy sighed. “So why can’t your friend from Intelligence just go do his own damn favor? Why he causing trouble for us now?”

“He said he was dead,” Roo said.

“He said he was dead?” Delroy’s face screwed up, squinting as he absorbed that.

“He left me a message,” Roo said. “So I’m going to Tortola.”

4

The sun had long since slunk over the ocean’s horizon. The sloping hills around Road Town glittered with light and activity that Roo paid little attention to. Instead he stared at the mailbox center across the road from the restaurant and absentmindedly picked apart a chicken roti with a fork. He could see through the glass front to a large desk, with hundreds of keyed mailbox slots on the wall behind. Displays of packing material dotted metal grids in the lobby area. A trickle of people on electric mopeds coasted down the street, engines adding a random background whine to the air.

“You want more coffee?” The young woman who had served up the quick meal from the counter was outside, washing down the plastic tables with a rag. “We almost closed, and I’ll go toss it out soon.”

Roo shook his head. “Thanks.”

“All right. After we lock up you can sit out on the chair, we don’t bring them in.”

She left a trail of lemon-scented cheerful weariness in her wake.

The mailbox store would also shut down any moment now. Open late for an average mailbox center here, but they seemed to have a large business going. Lots of shorts-wearing live-aboard yacht types from Road Town harbor were meandering in and out.

And at least one sharp-looking man in a suit. No doubt fresh off a private jet.

That was the real moneymaker for these mailbox centers here: offshore companies. There were probably a hundred corporations living inside the small office across the street. Western companies claiming headquarters here using just a PO box.

Westerners, oil rich sheiks. Criminals.

Money moved around between PO boxes to different tax regimes. And ended up wherever a CEO needed it, so that companies could choose the tax rate they paid at, if at all.

If there was an address at the bottom of a piece of Viagra spam to legally detail the company that had sent it, it was probably really just an address shared with hundreds, or thousands, of other companies: an address just like the one Roo was staring at right now.

To be fair, there were people who didn’t have postal addresses just because they were on the move. Like Roo. Living aboard a boat, coming into shore to get mail. Or even neo-tribal homeless moving across the world with their antimicrobial tents and flat-pack composting toilets. They had their physical mail sent here, scanned and e-mailed to them. They had boxes held until they knew they’d be holding a position for more than a few days and then triggered forwarding.

But mailboxes for people like Roo were probably more incidental than the core business of offshoring business.

Roo sipped badly burnt coffee and grimaced as he continued watching the street. Looking for rhythms out of place. People like him. Trouble.

Of course, the real trouble could be a tiny camera somewhere he’d never see. He could use a sniffer to look for telltales: wireless, heavily encrypted video feeds. But encrypted Wi-Fi was getting better and better at blending in with background radiation, or piggybacking other data to burrow inside and hide. It would take days to certify the area as clean.

Roo didn’t have days.

He sighed. Twenty minutes before closing time now. A sparrowish woman with her hair pulled back in a wavy bunch was tidying up and looking at a wall clock.

The doors behind Roo locked shut. The cook, a thick-armed man, with his hair tied back into a hairnet when Roo’d only briefly glimpsed him in the back kitchen, squeezed past him.

“Evening, man,” he said, nodding at Roo. Then behind, in a flirting tone, “’Night, Mary. You going out? Going wok-up on anyone special now?”

“Man, I’m too tired for that. I’m going home.”

“Let me come home and relax you good,” the cook said with a smile.

“Quit vexing me and go home to you wife,” Mary shouted back at him.

“Hurricane coming. You want someone good to keep you warm at night,” the cook tried.

Mary laughed. “You don’t have what kind of heat I need,” she said in a rising tone.

The cook mock-staggered back and spread his arms to Roo as if to say ‘see, I tried,’ and then turn to walk up the road. “One day, Mary.”

Mary ignored both Roo and the cook to walk in the other direction back toward town. Roo watched them go, then turned back to the mailbox company front.

Was he going to risk going in?

Two questions gnawed at the back of his brain. One was: who killed Zee? And the other was: how much trouble was Roo inviting by coming here?

He and Zee had joined the Caribbean Intelligence Group when it was just starting to roll. The CIG had initially bloomed down south, with Barbados cozying up with Trinidad and Guyana to deal with the increasing Venezuelan naval hostility. And then the CIG had become necessary when news broke about the big oil finds in the Caribbean basin.

There were large nations out playing for blood when it came to easy natural resources. CIG formed up to give the South Caribbean information about who was up to what. At the very least they all needed protection against the last gasps of petro-corporations struggling to keep the old high-profit days going.

Barbados, one of the few islands with a standing professional army in the southern Caribbean, albeit a small one, fielded the equipment and muscle to get CIG agents where they needed to be.