Seven Grams of Lead (29 page)

Mallery shot to the bar. “Good news is he has the keys on him, the truck is parked at his house, and his uniforms are in his dresser,” she said. “Bad news is he wants to get out of here now—it’s too pricey.”

“Did you try a free drink?”

“I offered to buy another round, of course.”

“You paying probably doesn’t count as ‘free’ to him. I’ll try and get the bartender to bring you over two more drinks ‘on the house.’ People often have a hard time letting anything go to waste that they’ve gotten for free.”

“Worth a try.” Mallery hurried back to the booth, sitting just in time to light up at Ferdinand’s return.

Thornton ordered another daiquiri for Ferdinand and a second bottle of beer for Mallery. He deployed the rapidly dissolving chloral hydrate into the ceramic coconut while the young woman tending bar turned around to change his $100 bill.

She delivered the drinks to the booth along with the news—which cost Thornton an extra twenty—that Margarita Island was having a buy-one-get-one-free special tonight. Ferdinand pumped a fist in response.

Toward the end of the round, he began to teeter. Mallery suggested she drive him home, pantomiming the operation of steering a wheel. Ferdinand appeared to protest but fell from his bench in midexplanation.

Playing the Good Samaritan, Thornton hurried
to assist the young woman in getting her date off the floor and outside for some fresh air.

The parking lot had no resuscitative effect. “So far, so good?” Thornton asked.

“Not exactly.” Mallery helped him shoulder the deliveryman’s weight. “The last thing he said was he wanted to go to a hotel.”

“Let me guess. A wife and kids at home?”

“Just one kid, a newborn.”

“What a guy. Time for Plan C.”

“What’s Plan C?” she asked.

“We need to work on that.”

They dragged Ferdinand to the Peugeot. Thornton fished through the FedEx man’s pockets until he found a wallet with a driver’s license. He stabbed a finger at Ferdinand Ring’s home address. “Plan C.”

After a twenty-minute drive to 1032 Palm Forest Road, he left Mallery and the dozing Ferdinand in the Peugeot on a dark roadside, then hiked fifty yards up a rocky driveway. This sparsely populated part of the island was illuminated only by the starlight trickling through the dense canopy of leaves and branches. At the top of the driveway, he came to an old chattel house, the rot in its frame evident in silhouette. A faint light and a flickering television screen shone through a window, beside which the FedEx truck was parked. Thornton was tempted to simply drive it off, but if whoever was watching TV reported the theft to the police, the jig was up.

There was no doorbell, no light above the stoop. Thornton climbed the steps and knocked on the door, which was eventually thrown open by a small, dark-skinned young woman with delicate features. The dim light made it hard to peg her age, but there was no doubt about her emotion: fury. But apparently intended for someone other than Thornton. Taking him in, her face softened to wariness. Withdrawing a step, she looked poised to slam the door and lock it.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Hi, Mrs. Ring. I’m Gartland Fredericksen, Fed-Ex’s regional vice president for operations.” He flashed Ferdinand’s business card, which only listed, in mouse type, the address, phone number, and e-mail address of the Bridgetown FedEx depot. “First, let me assure you that Ferdinand is fine.”

The woman put a hand to her heart, without sincerity.

“I should add, ma’am, that it’s my pleasure to meet you.” He extended a hand.

She accepted, shaking limply, apparently bewildered.

“FedEx won a last-minute contract to service the Realtors’ convention here on the island tomorrow,” Thornton went on. “We need Ferdinand along with every other warm body we’ve got to sort packages through the night. That’s the bad news. The good news is the shift pays double overtime.”

The woman smiled. A forced smile, Thornton
thought. Was she buying the act? Because if she were, she ought to have asked him in. Or maybe she simply didn’t want to wake the baby.

“I just need to pick up a uniform for Ferdinand,” Thornton said. “And take the truck back to Bridgetown.”

The narrow Pine Street
building consisted of three stories of cement painted a faded tangerine, with three rows of hurricane shutters. Painted over the old name on the sign was
DELUX INN
, along with five stars. Thornton and Mallery maneuvered their drugged 250-pound captive into the diminutive white-tiled lobby, which smelled vaguely of a locker room. Draping Ferdinand’s arms around their shoulders, they gave him the appearance of staggering.

The sallow night clerk avoided eye contact. He’d seen stranger, Thornton guessed. Probably he knew that no good could come of getting involved. The question of passports was never raised. Paying cash, Thornton had a room key in hand in sixty seconds. Then he and Mallery hauled Ferdinand up the stairs,
the drinking song warbling from a second-floor room drowning out their clatter.

The third-floor room was just large enough to contain a dresser missing one of its five drawers and a concave queen bed, onto which they lowered Ferdinand.

“This room is perfect,” Thornton said.

“What exactly are your criteria?” asked Mallery.

He steered her two steps toward the window and pointed through the louvers at Windward Actuarial, on the other side of Pine Street.

Pleased, Mallery set about making a bed on the floor from the sheet and blankets Ferdinand wouldn’t need because the only air-conditioning was a creaky ceiling fan that barely stirred the muggy air.

Thornton sat against the wall by the window. Propping the
Mermaid III
binoculars on the sill, he began his surveillance. For five and a half hours, he saw no sign of life. Then, at eight thirty, a sleepy-eyed young woman got off a municipal bus and climbed the steps to the Windward Actuarial building. An employee, he guessed, based on the utter lack of joy with which she punched five buttons of the numeric keypad above the door handle: 5-1-9-4-7, he saw through the binoculars.

An hour later, he drove the FedEx truck up Pine Street. He wore a FedEx uniform shirt that was too big by a couple of
X
’s but terrific in terms of hiding his physique. His disguise also included the FedEx ball
cap, wraparound sunglasses, and a wad of chewing gum swelling his cheek. The pièce de résistance was a shaving cut on his chin, bleeding through the small square of toilet paper. Someone seeing such a unique feature, according to spook wisdom, would fixate on it rather than him.

Pulling the truck parallel to the curb in front of Windward Actuarial, he opened his door and started to jump to the street. Remembering that such a move could wreak havoc on the safety-pin rigging taking in Ferdinand’s purple uniform shorts by eight inches, he carefully lowered himself from the driver’s seat to the curb. Pushing the door shut behind him, he hurried around the truck, lifted the rear gate, extended the ramp to the street, and wheeled down a dolly with a crate addressed to Windward Actuarial.

He climbed the stoop and pressed the buzzer. In response, evidently, someone hurried downstairs. Opening the door, the flinty security guard didn’t appear at all surprised by the sight of the new FedEx man. But he should have been. For one thing, Thornton was white, unlike the islanders who constituted the entirety of Bridgetown’s workforce. Thornton hoped the guard’s familiarity resulted from a security camera preview before opening the door, as opposed to a brief sent by a Littlebird operative.

“How are you this morning, sir?” Thornton asked.

“You people finally get rid of Ferdinand?”

So that was it. “No, sir, he should be back tomorrow.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing a little rest won’t take care of.” As soon as Thornton finished here, Mallery would wake Ferdinand, thank him for an unforgettable night, and send him on his way.

Looking over the guard’s shoulder and into the small vestibule, Thornton asked, “Do you have a service entrance or an elevator, sir?” He already knew the building had one other entrance, in the back, leading in from a onetime delivery area now reduced to a narrow alley by a new construction opposite it.

The guard turned toward the stairs. “Ain’t no elevators in none of these buildings.”

While the man’s head was turned, Thornton looked for the alarm control box. Mounted on the wall just inside the front door was a Chamberlain model A200, a high-end unit typically found in businesses at much higher risk of break-in, like jewelry stores.

The guard looked back to Thornton, who shifted his gaze and pretended to admire the foyer’s diminutive crystal chandelier.

“You can just leave this right here,” the man said, tapping the box, his eyes lingering on the shipping label, which specified Dell Computer in Austin, Texas, as the sender. Thornton had filled the label out himself, having taken it from the stack of blanks in the truck. He put the new label on the heaviest carton he could find, which contained a window air-conditioning unit bound for a bank.

Thornton scowled. “Please don’t tell me Ferdinand doesn’t carry up your deliveries for you.”

The guard shrugged. “The boxes have to go up two flights.”

“Relax, it’s FedEx,” Thornton said, quoting the motto painted on the sides of the truck. “Also we can’t ask our customers to do our jobs. I will personally make sure that Ferdinand brings up your boxes from now on, no matter how heavy they are.”

Even if the guard didn’t mind carrying the box himself, Thornton hoped, he would be averse to any external inquiry.

“If you just set it on the third-floor landing,” the man said, “that’d be great.” He started up the stairs.

Thornton handed him a pen with a form to sign. The pen was out of ink in order to delay the guard. Straining beneath the weight of the carton, Thornton jogged past him, aiming to put enough distance between them so that he could “mistakenly” enter Windward Actuarial.

He reached the third-floor landing well ahead of the guard. But the windowless doors on either side of the landing—one labeled
SOFTEC
, the other labeled
WINDWARD ACTUARIAL
—were both shut. A key card was required to work the levered handles.

Hoisting himself up to the landing, the guard handed over the form he’d managed to sign. “Just set the box right here, man,” he said by way of farewell.

On his way down the stairs, Thornton took in motion
detectors fronted by wall sconces and, in some cases, mirrors. He also noticed an active infrared system, the sort that picked up the discrepancy between the body temperature of an intruder and the temperature of the room. The stairwell was also armed with passive infrareds, optical systems that detected
any
changes in ambient infrared radiation. Approaching the second floor, he spotted another mirror, which, when he looked at its side, revealed the reflective glass to be a façade for a continuous-wave radar motion detector, a device that used microwaves to detect changes in anything’s position. On the way out, he saw what he believed to be an ultrasonic motion detector, which emitted sound energy in waves from quartz crystal transducers—any disruption in these waves caused the alarm to sound.

He’d read that to thwart an active infrared system, you cranked the heat in the building to the nineties, 98.6 ideally, and the human body essentially became invisible to the sensor. But like most buildings in the tropics, this one had no heat. As for the other systems, he hadn’t a clue.

He had some serious planning to do before breaking in.

Lamont loved the
beach, and this one was beautiful beyond belief. If he’d seen it in a movie, he would have thought the effects people had gone over the top in boosting the greens and blues and whitening the sand. From a chaise, he admired the model—she had to be one—gliding into one of the infinity pools. It had been his good luck that, until tourist season hit full stride, the resort cut the embassies amazing deals. The problem was, he didn’t want to be here. He burned to get back to the noisy diesel-reeking city down the coast and find out what the actuarial firm was hiding.

He went back to his room for the fifth time that morning to check for a reply to the EC he’d sent last night. To his surprise, he found what amounted to
an approval. The Bureau would permit him to ask Mitchell Firstbrook, the CIA’s Barbados chief of base, to broach a joint operation with Colonel Marston of the Barbados Defense Force.

Lamont squeezed into his tiny rental car and sped down a magnificent coastal road to which he paid little attention. Eventually he pulled up to a modern three-story office building painted mustard yellow.

Firstbrook didn’t keep him waiting, which Lamont took as promising. The position of base chief on such islands was often bestowed upon veteran desk jockeys as a reward for a couple of decades of toeing the line, meaning they could barely get dressed in the morning without using red tape. Although forty-nine years old and just sixteen months shy of eligibility to retire with full benefits, Firstbrook approached the job with the zeal of a rookie. He wore a crisp, tropical-weight khaki suit. His gray hair was closely cropped above a ruddy, pleasant face. Lamont liked him on sight.

“I lobbied for this posting,” Firstbrook said, leading Lamont back to his office. “Barbados has eighteen billionaires and many more aspiring to that position with plans that hinge on getting away with something. It’s not Moscow or Geneva, but it’s a place where one man can make a real difference.”

Lamont asked how, and Firstbrook modestly substantiated his claim with his reply: In just over a year on the job, he had single-handedly caught two men who were laundering money for Hezbollah, he’d
brought down a bank whose management had just embezzled $270 million from pension funds, and, for good measure, he’d saved a local girl from drowning at the municipal pool where he swam laps every morning. He might have worked out at the posh private club available to embassy staffers, but he preferred public pools because they enabled him to befriend locals, and thus collect intelligence.