Presidential Deal (24 page)

Chapter 36

Billy had been fighting a bothersome stutter in the starboard engine of the Cessna for most of the last leg home. If he’d known it was coming, he could have made the adjustments while he was laid over at the untended airstrip in Bimini, waiting for a break in the weather and the onset of dawn, when his return to the mainland was less likely to draw attention. But he hadn’t known, of course, and even though he should have gone over the plane while he was on the ground, instead he’d taken the opportunity for a tiny sip or two from his pocket flask and a few hours of sleep, upright in his seat.

The stutter was nothing of major concern, a chronic problem that he’d experienced before with that particular engine. But it, along with dodging the patchy weather, had kept him busy, constantly adjusting the fuel mixture, lean to rich and back again, trying to find a setting that would keep the beast happy, let him settle back into Billy-pilot mode, the state where he simply existed as a part of the machinery, a nudge of the stick here, a glance at the dials there, but essentially just another cog in an interlocking set of gears.

It hadn’t been until the last fifteen minutes that he’d managed to achieve that near-satorial state. He’d broken into the clear just east of the Gulf Stream, and the engine had evened out about the same time. He’d finally gotten the opportunity to zone out the way he liked: wrap himself up inside the drone of the engines, stare out mindlessly at the view while he glided home.

He still loved to fly after all these years, all these bends in the road. Ferrying passengers, running dope, smuggling Vernon Driscoll into the Bahamas, it didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t have chosen to make this evening’s run, perhaps, but now that it was almost over, he didn’t begrudge it, either. He smiled, thinking of the look on Driscoll’s face when he’d dropped them down through the chute toward the golf course landing. “What trees?” he’d said to Driscoll. He’d been down that tunnel of trees fifty times, at least. The perfect setup. A perfect moment.

He was still chuckling about it, so lost in his reverie that he very nearly missed the fighter’s approach. Not that he’d have had much chance to react anyway. He was flying low and slow, doing his best to stay off the radar screens—maybe a hundred and fifty feet up, about the same in air-speed—and the jet had to be coming at him at four-fifty or five. He had a moment’s glimpse of the jet’s underbelly as it screamed overhead, the sound rattling him in his seat.

Billy pulled back hard on the stick, lifting the Cessna’s nose against the sudden cyclone that wanted to send them hurtling down to that black water. The plane rocked crazily in the downdraft, its balky engine coughing in protest, but in the next instant they were through it, and steadying once again.

Billy glanced over his shoulder in the direction the fighter had taken, hoping it had been chance, a near-miss, two disparate ships passing by accident in the starry night. Maybe the pilot was one of the rocket jockeys from the Naval Air Station in Key West out there practicing his fuck-you-Fidel moves, hadn’t even noticed him.

But then he saw the glow of the jet’s afterburners soaring up in a graceful loop behind him, and he knew it wasn’t going to go down that way. He sighed and goosed up the volume on his radio, and heard just what he’d heard the last time he’d taken a big fall:

“…request you identify yourself, repeat, identify yourself at once.”

Billy shook his head sorrowfully, picked up the microphone, keyed in. “Captain Michael Cudahy here,” he said. “Bound for Tamiami Field from Key West.” Maybe they’d let him pass, Billy thought. Fly on, Captain Billy. But given recent events, that was likely a forlorn hope. They’d check Key West, the inconsistency would be noted, he’d find himself flying on in with an escort, probably find a few hundred security types waiting to talk to him at Tamiami. His philosophy on the beauties of flight took a sudden downturn. Goddamn Vernon Driscoll anyway.

“You are in breach of United States airspace,” the pilot’s voice came. “You have ignored repeated warnings. Repeat. You have ignored our warnings. You must turn back at once.”

Billy stared at the radio. “What the hell are you talking about,” he shouted into the microphone. “This is Billy…” He broke off, cursing himself. “This is Captain Michael Cudahy. Repeat, Michael Cudahy. Cessna aircraft, tail number Beta Charley Alpha seven niner six. Do you read me?”

“…a breach of United States airspace and refusal to acknowledge repeated warnings,” the pilot’s voice droned.

“Wake up, you asshole,” Billy shouted, keying and unkeying his mike. “This is Michael Cudahy…”

He broke off, staring in astonishment as the fighter reached its apogee and began a dive toward him. He saw a spark of light beneath one wing of the fighter, then a matching spark from beneath the other.

Missiles? The asshole was firing fucking missiles at him? Impossible. A dream. A bad, bad dream.

He sent the Cessna into a dive toward the black water, pulled into a roll just above the wave tops, dropped back on his speed, tried frantically to kick the pilot’s door open. He glanced up as the fighter screamed past, its wingtips glinting silver as it peeled off toward the moon.

“You sonofabitch,” Billy screamed. He would have screamed something more, would have squeezed off rounds with a sidearm if he’d had one, would have chunked a few rocks as well, but he did none of those things.

For the Cessna had ceased to exist. It transformed first into a brilliant blossom of fire, and then a hail of molten fragments that disappeared hissing into the dark water, and finally it was only a plume of dark smoke that rose lazily into the purpling sky until even that was gone.

Chapter 37

“I can confirm that incident, sir,” the general said. His posture was erect, frozen, his gaze evasive, darting everywhere in the room but at his audience.

“You can relax, general,” Chappelear told him. “This area’s been swept by the best we have. This is just you and me here.”

The general didn’t seem reassured. “We can confirm the crash of a civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits at approximately oh-six-hundred hours,” he said, his eyes fixed on a spot high on the wall while he recited.

“Warning shots fired. Subject aircraft lost due to mechanical failure while fleeing lawful interdiction. Debris recovered suggests subject aircraft payload consisted of baled cannabis in an amount exceeding recommended payload for the craft and which in all likelihood contributed to the crash. No survivors, no bodies recovered. Aircraft registered to Pan-Aeronautica of Bogata, leased by Vernon Driscoll, a private investigator and former Metro-Dade homicide detective, and piloted by one Michael Cudahy, also known as William ‘Captain Billy’ Nolan. Nolan a known drug trafficker who avoided sentencing via plea bargain in the Colombian Airlift sting in 1989, and now a contract pilot for BahamasAir.”

“Very good,” Chappelear said. “Of course, we’re going to sit on this report for the time being, General.”

“Yes, sir,” the general said.

“One more drug runner gone south, that’s all it is. But any incident in this arena could become a distraction. We don’t need anything like that, do we?”

“Absolutely not, sir.”

“So we understand one another, do we?”

“We do, sir.”

He turned, just to be sure there wasn’t anything of riveting interest that had appeared high on the wall behind his desk. “And what has become of this Vernon Driscoll?”

“We’re not certain, sir.”

“We were following him at one point, but lost track of him when he left the airport?”

The general cleared his throat. “He was under surveillance by another agency, sir. The plane filed a flight plan for Jacksonville, as I understand it. Driscoll was a low-priority target. Jacksonville was alerted. But there seemed no reason to continue surveillance to the destination.”

Chappelear nodded. “We can’t confirm he was on board the aircraft when it went down?”

“We cannot.”

“And the third man involved?”

The General shrugged. “A petty criminal named Ray Brisa. Driscoll had him manacled. We don’t know why. Driscoll was in contact with some individuals prior to his departure from MIA. We have our own people looking into those contacts as we speak.”

Chappelear tented his fingers, thought for a moment. “We’ve alerted our people in Nassau, have we?”

The general nodded. “There’s been no commercial air traffic outbound from any port in the Bahamas since late yesterday afternoon. But the storm’s turned northward and that’s about to change.”

“Very good, General,” Chappelear said. “You’ll keep me informed.”

“Yes, sir,” the general said. “And one more thing, sir. Who
is
Angel Salazar?”

“A product of someone’s imagination,” Chappelear told the general. “Angel Salazar has been dead for fifteen years.”

The general nodded. “I see,” he said. But the look on his face suggested he actually saw nothing at all.

Chapter 38

“You are hurt,” the mate said, watching Angel step stiffly from the crumbling concrete dock onto the rail of the boat.

The mate hurried to extend a hand, but Angel lowered himself onto the deck without assistance, dropping the bowline as he came. He steadied himself at the rail, waiting for the streaming constellations above to steady themselves.

They were tied off at an abandoned ferry stop just off the cut between old town and the island where the new tourist hotels had been built. A mile or two behind him, the privileged and beautiful were gathered. Music. Torchlights. Food. Flowers. Ease.

Here was darkness. Above him, pilings and battered oil drums lined the docks, their shadows looming like abandoned spirits waiting to be beckoned aboard.

“Is it done?” the mate asked him.

Angel turned from the dock, from the still-throbbing stars, to regard the man. Over the man’s shoulder, across the broad cut, glittered the lights of old town. Roberto this mate’s name. One he had brought with him from Salvador many years before.

“There is no one left here,” Angel said evenly. “And nothing left to find.”

Roberto nodded. After a moment, he turned to the controls of the boat, and the engines thundered to life. He ran to the stern and cast off the last line that held them, then returned to the wheel.

Angel raised a hand to the wetness beneath his shoulder. Too much blood, he thought. Blood everywhere.

He had recognized the man who’d shot him. From where, it was impossible to know just now. Only a scrap of memory, and that the most essential: an airless room, and others there, and Angel’s eyes locked with that man’s in the elemental bond of hatred. A moment impossible to forget. Timeless. And time come around again, he thought.

“We will go south now,” Roberto said, turning as they approached the mouth of the channel and the broad cut opened out before them.

Angel shook his head. “Not south,” he said. “Not yet.”

Roberto hesitated, turned to him. “Then where?”

“Something yet to do,” he said, pointing in the direction that had brought them here.

Roberto shrugged and turned the wheel, urging them on toward the open channel. The engine coughed, and the mate worked the throttles. Another cough and a lurching beneath their feet as the swells from the open water caught the boat and threw them.

The mate glanced at Angel, then throttled back. The engines held there, and the mate left them nosed at near idle against the swells, and went to check the engine compartment. He raised the hatch, ducked his head inside the compartment, waved his light about, then came up again, motioning Angel forward.

“Have a look,” he said to Angel.

Angel came toward him, uncertain. Roberto gestured toward the open compartment, guided the torch beam downward. Angel was about to lean inside himself when he saw the glint of steel at his side and lurched away.

The blade in Roberto’s hand dug into the underside of the engine hatch and snapped in half. Roberto glanced at the ruined blade and cursed.

Only a moment’s distraction, but enough. Another person might have scurried backward, fighting for distance, but Angel knew that such instincts would have doomed him.

He stepped forward instead, shot his elbow out, felt the crack as it struck Roberto’s cheekbone. Roberto staggered backward, his head twisted aside with the force of the blow. Angel hit him again, this time with the heel of his hand.

The blow caught Roberto at the hinge of his jaw, lifted him off balance, up against the transom, and over. He teetered for a moment, his hands clawing as if at invisible ropes. Then he toppled backward, into the dark water that boiled with the action of the props.

There was a sharp cry, cut off as Roberto was jerked under. Another lurch of the engines, a shudder as the props struck, then struck again. Angel steadied himself at the rail, saw something pale shoot to the surface, float away in the wake of the boat: Roberto’s hand, floating free, palm up—a grotesque flower thrown up from the depths.

Angel turned away from the sight, picked up the tumbled flashlight, bent into the compartment to find the fuel valve Roberto had tightened nearly to full stop. He opened the valve and the roar of the engines grew steady.

He raised his hand absently to the wound beneath his shoulder, felt the wetness and the fiery pain. Perhaps he’d made it worse when he’d struck Roberto, he thought. But no matter.

Nor did he feel any real sense of betrayal as he stared out over the now-blank waters behind the boat. He might have expected it of his employers. No loose threads, no unfinished business, was that not the law in affairs such as this? He who tidies up, survives. He who does not, dies.

Angel nodded and went to the wheel of the boat. He pushed the pain from his mind. He gripped the twin throttles tightly. He aimed himself where fate decreed. He drove.

Chapter 39

She awoke, unable to catch her breath, her hands clawing the air as if she were trying to pull herself up through dark water. It took her a moment to shed herself of the dream…though she would never leave it behind, she thought.

She sagged against the rough-hewn wall of rock at her back, felt the drip of water cool against her skin. She was slick with sweat, the air still and stifling. And a quiet so total that her ears rang.

She swallowed and felt a soreness in her throat and heard tiny popping sounds in her ears. She blinked and realized that the darkness had taken on a different character…as if light might be drifting down from somewhere, but nothing definite, only the vaguest hint of other-than-darkness.

She remembered running from the storm, remembered tumbling down the crevasse to land somewhere deep in the jumble of rock with her head below her feet. She had still been trying to right herself when the water cascaded down and covered her. The buoyancy of the water had allowed her to right herself, but then, when she’d clawed her way up toward the surface, there’d been no surface to find.

Her head had cracked painfully against a ceiling of rock, and her hands had thrashed in a panic, finding nothing but rock and more water. She’d been certain that she would die in that liquid darkness.

And then, just as she felt her lungs about to explode, her face burst up into a pocket of damp, salty air and she could breathe again.

She’d clutched herself against the rough wall in a panic, waiting for the next wave, the next surge of water that would swallow her, but even though the wind outside continued its roaring and rain sluiced down through the rocks in torrents, the next wave of seawater never came. After what seemed like hours, she’d relaxed enough to sink down against the rocks again, where she lay and listened to the howling of the storm and tried not to wonder what had happened to John Deal, nor what she would do if she lived through this night, nor how she would stay sane if she were in fact alone.

She’d found herself dozing off in fits and starts after that. Not really sleeping. More like periods of blackout that she’d willed upon herself. Something to do with exhaustion, surely, but just as much a way of refusing to consider what might lie ahead.

She wiped at her sweaty face then, and reached out, searching for a handhold to pull herself into an upright position, felt her fingers brush against something wet and warm and yielding. She sensed movement, something alive there, something looming up in front of her face. She jerked her hand back, her throat locked. In the next instant she was screaming, the sound redoubling inside the tiny chamber.

There was an answering roar that had her screaming even louder, trying to escape the hands that clutched her shoulders, shaking her, and that other voice roaring in her ears…

…until finally she heard her name, “Linda…Linda…”

John Deal, she realized, crammed into that tiny, stifling space with her…

…she felt relief flooding over her, warmth that touched her to the core…she let herself go into his arms…could find comfort there at last.