Takedown (An Alexandra Poe Thriller) (11 page)

“If Valac is hot for these codes, why the face to face?” she said. “Why doesn’t Favreau just transfer them electronically? Wouldn’t everyone be safer that way?”

“The answer’s dead simple. Valac’s old school. He doesn’t trust the Internet. Or Favreau.”

“Okay, so what’s the method of delivery, then? Data chip? Thumb drive?”

“We don’t know.”

“
What?
”

“That’s something you’ll have determine before they finalize the deal. Once Favreau arrives on the island, Valac will likely want to keep him at arm’s length until he’s sure Favreau isn’t up to anything that might compromise him. So hopefully you’ll have a couple days to figure it out.”

She looked at him. “You’re not asking for much, are you?”

“If I didn’t think you were up to the job, I wouldn’t be asking at all.”

She huffed. “I thought my participation was a condition of the deal?”

“I’m trying to give you a compliment, Alex. Can’t you be gracious enough to accept it?”

“That would require me to pretend I like you,” she said. “And I don’t.”
 

“I’m painfully aware of that fact.”

Key West International Airport, Florida

I
T
HAD
BEEN
only a few days since Istanbul, but it felt good seeing Deuce again. There was always a certain comfort in that big, goofy grin of his.

He was waiting for Alex on the tarmac outside the Key West airport terminal, standing under a sign that read
GOLD KEY CHARTERS
. He wore a yellow and blue Hawaiian shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts, his pockets loaded down with photography gear and peripheral equipment. A bulky Canon 5D camera hung at his neck and two large packing cases sat at his feet. Alex assumed they contained video and lighting gear.

During a telephone briefing with McElroy and Cooper, they had all agreed to travel in character in case anyone was watching, and Deuce was playing his part to the hilt.

After giving him a hug, Alex asked, “Do you even know how to use any of this stuff?”

He shrugged. “What’s to know? It’s like a gun. Point and shoot.”

“Come on, Deuce, this has to be convincing or it’ll never work.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’ve been studying the manuals. Besides, nowadays, anyone sees me hefting anything bigger than a cell-phone camera, they’ll figure I
must
be a pro. Otherwise, why bother?”

True enough
, she thought, wishing she had some kind of prop that would sell her role in this as easily.

A full day had passed since her early morning meeting with McElroy. She had spent a lot of that time going through the rest of the junk in the Shimmy Shack’s storage shed, trying to decide what to keep and what to toss, half wondering if she’d stumble across another mysterious gift.

She didn’t, but then one such gift was already more than enough.
 

She had watched the video at least ten times since the first viewing, and still couldn’t fathom why her parents had never told her about the marriage, or why whoever had planted the box wanted her to know. It was obvious her mother had a whole other life prior to coming to America that she had kept a secret, but what did that have to do with Alex all these years later?

Repeated viewing had not yet produced an answer.

Alex had been in the middle of one of those viewings when Thomas Gérard called her, wanting to know why she had sneaked out of his hotel room. He thought they had “found a connection” and wanted to see her again.

Exactly what she’d been afraid of.

“Will you meet me tonight?” he asked. “We could actually have dinner this time.”

Alex struggled to find a way to let him down easy. She carried way too much baggage for the average relationship. Instead, she said, “As much as I’d like to, I can’t. I’m leaving the country tomorrow.”

“Oh?” He sounded surprised and disappointed. “Where will you be going?”

“Stockholm,” she lied. “I’ve got some business to take care of.”

“Bounty hunting business?”

“Fugitive retrieval, remember?”

“Yes, that’s right, you’re a specialist.” She could almost hear the smile in his voice. “You seem to specialize in a number of things.”

It was a pointed remark and felt a little out of character for Gérard, but she didn’t make an issue of it. He was, after all, a man. And no matter how refined, men always want to talk about it afterward, most often in the form of ham-handed innuendo.
 

It wasn’t a game Alex had any interest in playing. “Have you heard from your client yet?”

The abrupt change in subject distanced him. “Yes. I have. He hasn’t had a chance to look at the photographs, so he promised to call me back tomorrow.”

“I’ll be gone by then.”

“So you said.” Another pause. “Alex, did I do something wrong?”

It’s not you, it’s me
, she almost told him, a worn cliché that so often proved true in her case.
 

“No, of course not,” she said. “I’m just a little distracted right now, trying to get ready to go. I’m switching phones for the trip, so I won’t be available at this number. Why don’t you e-mail me when you’ve heard from your client?”

An even longer pause. “Of course.”

“Thanks, Thomas. It was great meeting you. We’ll talk soon.”

“I hope we do,” he said quietly, then hung up.

Now, standing outside
GOLD KEY CHARTERS
with Deuce, she felt like a jerk. Why couldn’t every relationship she had be as easygoing as the one she had with Deuce? He was an unpretentious guy who rarely expected anything of her except that she pull her weight, which she was more than happy to do. Sure, there was no romance, but maybe she was better off avoiding those kinds of entanglements entirely.

“You ready?” he asked.

She was traveling light, told by McElroy that all necessary wardrobe needs would be waiting for her in St. Cajetan. Cooper and the new guy, Warlock, had flown to the island the night before to secure a room as close to Frederic Favreau’s as possible and begin preliminary surveillance. Favreau had reportedly landed first thing that morning and had gone straight to the hotel.

“I’m not sure,” she said, in answer to Deuce’s question. “I’m still trying to get a handle on who Alexandra Barnes is supposed to be. How do I play this?”

“Think of yourself as the travel industry’s answer to Lois Lane.”

“So what does make you? Jimmy Olsen?”

Deuce winced and said, “Let’s just get on the plane.”

They flew to the island on a De Havilland Otter DHC-3 floatplane. Alex and Deuce were two of eight passengers strapped into narrow seats, all with clear views of the cockpit.
 

Looking around, Alex guessed there was enough jewelry in the cabin to fund a small war, which wasn’t surprising given that St. Cajetan was known for its luxurious accommodations.
GOLD KEY CHARTERS
, on the other hand, favored function over luxury. While the plane appeared perfectly maintained, it had a vintage, pre-sixties vibe to it that clashed with the haute couture of its passengers.
 

Deuce spent most of the hour-long flight dozing as Alex pulled out her computer tablet and once again fired up the wedding video. Each time she watched it, one thing became clearer and clearer: Her mother was not your typical blushing bride. The look in her eyes suggested she didn’t even want to be there.
 

Alex ran it through again, and this time, something new caught her eye. She had been concentrating so much on her mother and the man beside her that she hadn’t noticed it before. As the camera panned past the bride and groom for a brief shot of the attendees, she was surprised to discover that one of the men in the crowd looked familiar.
 

More than familiar.

She froze the video and stared at the fuzzy image of a man with curly blond hair who seemed out of place in the sea of Iranian faces. A foreigner. An American.

An American she knew.

She found she had to reach into the memory banks to place him, but it didn’t take long. He had been to their house when she was a child. And not just one time, but many.
 

Uncle Eric.

Not a real uncle, but one of her father’s oldest and closest friends. He called her Allie Cat, and had dubbed her brother Dan the Man, a name that had always provoked laughter from Danny. And there had been magic tricks, too, a new one every time he came to visit.

Alex hadn’t thought much about him since her mother died, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him.

Could this really be him?

And if so, what the hell was he doing at her mother’s Iranian wedding?

“Who’s the guy with the bad seventies haircut?” Deuce asked. He was awake now, sitting across the aisle from her, his eyes on the computer tablet. “I don’t remember him from the briefing.”

“He’s not,” she said. She put the tablet to sleep before he could get a good look, and tucked it into her backpack.

“So, who is he?”

“Somebody I knew when I was a little kid. Friend of my parents. I’m trying to remember his last name.”

“Why?”

“I’m thinking of sending him a postcard. ‘Wish you were here.’”

“Then you’ll need more than a last name,” Deuce said. “An address might help, too. Who is he really?”

Alex usually told Deuce everything, but wanted to keep the events of the last couple days private for a while. Until she could figure it all out.

“He’s got nothing to do with us,” she told him. “I promise.”

“In other words, mind your own business, Deuce.”

She smiled. “You catch on fast, don’t you?”

From the air, the island of St. Cajetan looked like a deformed pear.
 

The floatplane approached from the Southeast, giving them a view of the uninhabited side of the island and its jungle of coconut palms and casuarina trees growing out of a thick, vibrant green undergrowth that would take a finely sharpened machete to hack through.

The plane banked left and began to circle toward the far side of the island, and as they approached civilization, Alex was struck by the notion that it looked very much like the photographs she’d seen of 1950s, pre-Castro Havana.

But as the plane continued to descend, she could see that this initial impression wasn’t quite true. The Hotel St. Cajetan and the buildings and city surrounding it seemed to be part of a faux, manufactured replica of a bygone era, like an Art Deco Disneyland, or a massive outdoor movie set at Warner Brothers studios—every speck of dirt, every luxurious pool, every sweaty cantina likely the product of a Hollywood production designer.
 

Now she understood why this plane hadn’t been modernized. It wasn’t out of place. It was just another part of the image and illusion of St. Cajetan.

Alex knew from the Stonewell briefing that at eighty miles long and thirty miles wide, St. Cajetan was one of the larger of the seven hundred islands that made up the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, and had been sold to a private developer in the early eighties for a rumored five hundred million American dollars. It was now a sovereign state with its own government and paramilitary police force and economy. Over the last three decades, the developer, an egocentric billionaire named Leonard “Leo” Latham, had built the place into the exclusive tourist mecca it was today, and had reportedly tripled his investment and then some.

Over the intercom, the pilot welcomed them all to “paradise.” The floatplane made its descent and landed smoothly on the glassy surface of the water in Latham’s Cove—yes, the developer had named it after himself—and cruised toward a large wooden dock. Several hundred yards beyond a wide stretch of sand, the Hotel St. Cajetan greeted them in all its Habana-wannabe glory, while dockside, a cadre of smartly uniformed bellboys waited with their suitcase carts as the plane came to a stop and cut its engine.

“Welcome to paradise” was repeated several times as Alex, Deuce, and their jewelry-jangling fellow passengers unstrapped their seat belts and stepped onto the dock.

Alex knew she was supposed to have her game face on, but she was distracted by lingering thoughts of Uncle Eric and his presence in the wedding video. It bothered her that she couldn’t remember his last name. She knew it was sitting somewhere at the periphery of her mind, but until it came forward, she wouldn’t be able to run a check on the guy. She had considered using Stonewell’s facial recognition software, but knew the video was too old and fuzzy for reliable results.