The Devil on Chardonnay (25 page)

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

Luxembourg City

Flinging white spray across blue water, the swordfish leaped, and the ecstasy of his strength and determination to be free thrilled Charles Meilland.  Line sang out of the reel as the tan young man leaned back with the rod, testing his mettle against that of a magnificent fish.  Two hours they had fought, and quit had not occurred to either.

“Grande espada!”  the swarthy Azorean crewman cried out as he brought some water from the pilot house of the stubby fishing boat.  Its undersize diesel putted relentlessly, pulling the fish through the pristine waters of the Princess Alice Banks.

Charles heaved again, holding the rod high above his head and, for the first time, felt the fish weaken and slide sideways momentarily before regaining composure and pulling back.

“I’ve got him!” Charles shouted. “He’s coming in.”

A glass slipped from his grip and fell to the floor, breaking with a loud tinkle
.
 The scene of the North Atlantic blurred, and the fish, cut into steaks and fried for a festival 50 years before, was gone again.  Long dead, too, were the Portuguese crewmen who witnessed the battle and took the prize home in pieces at the end of the day.

Only a rheumy old man remained, drool dripping from his chin as he returned to the present and the broken glass, and his library, grown cold and dark at the end of the day.  Brandy soaked into the pale green wool of the Chinese rug, a simple geometric design cut carefully into the pile.

Meilland rose and brushed aside the broken glass with a slippered foot.  He turned on the reading lamp by his head and shuffled to the sideboard and selected another crystal brandy snifter, holding it to the light to be sure it was clean.  He poured 2 ounces of Cognac into it and returned to his chair.  The fish wouldn’t come back.  Instead, a little girl, blond and blue-eyed, ran across that same rug to jump into his lap.  He sipped the Cognac, and the memory flowed over him.  The first tears in three-quarters of a century slithered down his flaking, age-speckled cheeks and fell onto his smoking jacket.

A sob escaped as his head dropped to his chest and his shoulders shook.  His misery was made complete by the knowledge that the loss of his granddaughter was entirely the result of his own greed and the abandonment of the values and teachings that had been the foundation of a family business, prosperous since the time of King David.

Candido Mendes’ telegram had come after a week of calling the bank trying to reach Meilland.  The language barrier, and the assumption by his middle managers that nothing of interest could come from a Portuguese fisherman, had insulated him from the news that his beloved Chardonnay had blown up and sank with his only granddaughter. 

He that exacted punishment from the generation of the Flood, and the generation of the dispersion will exact punishment from him who does not abide by the spoken word.

Charles had not read the Talmud since his early 20s, yet now that quotation would not leave his conscious mind.  Honor, without the need for written contracts, had been the basis of commerce in precious stones.  Where Jews were welcomed, the diamond trade had flourished, and the Jewish bankers who served the brokers, judges, artisans and smugglers had prospered.  His father had left him a prosperous bank that had catered to the diamond trade.  Under his leadership, it had become something entirely different.

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

Quarantine

The waves marched in to the island from the northwest in half-mile-long rows, cresting as they crossed some unseen ledge out from the shore, and crashed into a carpet of foam and spray before the swells rode a dozen feet up the 100-foot-high cliff.  The spray became mist, and the wind carried it up and across the pastures, brilliant green in the sunlight and surrounded by carefully built rock walls.  Black-and-white Holstein cattle grazed peacefully.

Sheltered from the breeze by a rock wall of volleyball-size black lava stones, Boyd was comfortable in shorts and no shirt.  An empty longneck lay in the grass beside his lawn chair, and Donn and Pamela played Frisbee below him in the yard.  They’d been given a vacant Air Force housing unit in which to live out their quarantine.  It had three bedrooms, a full kitchen and the best view of the ocean on the whole base.  Food and beer had been dutifully delivered daily, making their stay as pleasant as possible.

“Who said you could drink beer?”

Boyd turned to see Angela, the nurse from the hospital, who had volunteered to come out each day to change Boyd’s dressing.

“Who said I couldn’t?”  Boyd retorted, rolling from the lawn chair to his knees and standing with some difficulty.  He’d been out of the hospital for only one day, and three days ago still had the chest tube.  It hurt like hell to move quickly, but he tried to make it look effortless.

“Dr. Abbot was very clear about keeping that dressing on your back in place,” Angela said. “If that comes off, your lung might collapse again.  Come inside and I’ll change it.”

She wore jeans and a white sweatshirt with “Lajes, Crossroads of the Atlantic” printed on the front. 

“Agent Prescott, could you help me?”

Boyd was amused at this situation, where Angela was so careful about any appearance of impropriety when she came to change his dressing.  Being alone with him in his bedroom seemed so innocent, especially in light of the routine on Chardonnay.  Gamely, Pamela broke off her game with Donn and followed.

“There, you see that hole?  That’s bone at the bottom of it.” 

Angela was absorbed in changing the dressing and kept pointing out anatomical points of interest in Boyd’s back.  Boyd was prone on his bed in the downstairs bedroom. 

“I’m going back outside if you show me any more internal parts,” Pam said, holding a basin of warm soapy water while Angela washed off the accumulated blood and drainage.

“Who shot him?”  Angela asked innocently.

Curiosity could be dangerous in this game, Boyd thought, and he stiffened for a moment, and then relaxed.  Angela was read into their mission and had the security clearance, so keeping her in the dark wasn’t necessary.

“Constantine Coelho,” Pam said simply, reading Boyd’s body language.

“Dr. Abbot said most men would have died.  You were … uh … stronger, I guess.”

Boyd knew she was blushing; he didn’t need to turn over to see it.

“He kept bleeding all night, but it was mostly from the muscle around that hole,” Pam said. “Just before dawn, we thought we’d lost him.”

Pam had seated herself beside Angela on the bed and was pointing at the exit wound in Boyd’s back.

“Shock?”  Angela was fascinated now, no longer playing the role of expert.

“He’d been shivering and moving.  He got blue and cold and just … laid there.  He had a pulse, but it was slow.”

“What did you do?”  asked Angela, who had been slowly washing the same spot during the conversation.

“We had this silvery plastic bag.  It’s supposed to conserve heat.  We stripped off his wet clothes and put him in there.  When he didn’t warm up, I stripped off and got in there with him.  We zipped it up and gradually he warmed back up and started moving again.”

“Oh.  All your clothes?”  Angela asked her voice very small.  The washing continued in the same spot.

“Angela, you’re even more naïve than he is,” Pam said. “This man jumped in front of that gun and saved my life.  Getting naked isn’t even interest on what I owe him.” 

Pam laughed to break the tension of her suddenly passionate answer.  “Besides, we didn’t have any secrets, did we big boy?”

“That explains my dream,” Boyd said quickly.  “I dreamed I was in a hot tub with Betsy Rhoades, my best friend’s wife.  She kept wrapping her legs around me and covering my face with her boobs.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” Pam laughed.

“Angela, some people were killed out there, and this mission is still hot.  Get too close to us, you may have to join us for the next phase.  Remember security,” Boyd said, sounding like Ferguson again.

“Oh, of course. I mean, if you need anything, please, anything.  I could go if you need me.”

“Is that hole back there clean yet?  I think I can feel wind blowing through it all the way to the front.”

“Oh, yes.  Here, I’ll put some gauze back on it.”

Angela busied herself with Vaseline, gauze and paper tape. 

Boyd rolled over, raised his right arm as far as he could and the left one over his head and stretched.

“What about this one?”  he asked, pointing to the entrance wound over his right nipple, now pretty much healed. 

Angela looked at the wound and then, unavoidably, into his eyes.  The closeness was too intense, her blushing deepened and she stood.

“Well, that one looks good.  I mean, better.  I won’t need … uh … well, to put anything there,” she stammered, backing up.

“We’d better clean up this mess,” Pam broke in. “We got blood on his sheets there.  If you’ll help me, Angela, we can change this bed.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

“As long as you’re here, why not stay for dinner?” Pam said, winking at Boyd as she bent to pull the corner of the sheet out. “We don’t get many guests. You know, isolation and all.  We have some spaghetti on.”

*******

“The shit has really hit the fan back here, Boyd,” Joe Smith said a week later during a daily phone update. “We’ve got cases of Ebola springing up in Charleston and south toward Savannah.” 

“Joe!  Good to hear from you.  Ferguson’s getting a little hard to take,” Boyd replied good naturedly, pulling the phone cord of his secure phone line into the bedroom and closing the door. 

Angela had just returned from a shopping expedition and was spreading lace and linen over the kitchen table.  She and Pamela were comparing pieces and trying to explain to Boyd and Donn the importance of such handmade items. 

“Don’t tell me about hard to take,” Joe said. “Ferguson’s holding us – that is, me and you – responsible for this thing getting out.  He said we’ve dropped the ball and let Ebola get away.”

“Oh,” Boyd responded. A vision of Ferguson scowling made his mind focus on the issue more clearly.

“The Centers for Disease Control is in charge now.  They’ve got Charleston and Savannah closed down tighter than Aunt Tillie’s knickers.  The airports, interstates, harbor, nothing’s getting out of there.  The Global Surveillance Response Team, at least the military part of it, is no longer in charge.  That takes the heat off me for a while.”

“Sounds serious,” Boyd said, looking out the window at the ocean and counting off the days until his quarantine would be over.

“It is.  The CDC has been working round the clock.  We’ve gone back to basic epidemiology on this, sticking pins in a map to figure out how it spreads.  It’s all centered on the swamp south of Charleston, and it looks like it’s being spread by a mosquito vector.”

“Uh oh.”

“It’s always been spread by contact before, and it was bad enough then to be the most feared disease in the world.  Either it always had the capability, or it developed the capability to live in the acid environment of a mosquito’s stomach.  That’s horrific unless we can find some way to vaccinate or stop it.”

“Well, Jacques thought he created a vaccine.”

“Yes, and we wish we had some of it.  CDC is trying to duplicate what Jacques did.  I’ve got some ideas, too.  I’m leaving for China tonight.”

“China?”

“Yeah.  Hubai Pharmaceuticals has been working on an antibiotic for viruses.  It’s similar to ribaviron, one that’s already been used a lot, and it might work on Ebola.”

“So, how’d it get into mosquitoes along the South Carolina coast?”

“Latest theory is that there were two customers for the virus, Meilland and someone else.  They’re working off of a terrorist scenario, expecting to get a ransom demand.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Boyd retorted.

“You got any better ideas, from your vantage point there at vacation central?” Joe asked, frustration and anxiety revealed by a hostile tone. 

“Hey, lighten up.  Three days, and I’m out of here, back in the saddle.”

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

Ferreira

A cigarette dangling from his lips, his gray eyes scanned the inside quickly when Boyd opened the door.  A leather jacket was draped over Ferreira’s shoulders.

“Boa tarde. I am Ferreira.  My English is not so good.”  He offered his hand.  He made no effort to enter.  “We go.” 

Ferreira turned and nodded toward his car, an old Toyota, still running at the gate.  His face was long and more heavily lined from sun and cigarettes than one might have thought for a military officer in his mid-40s.  He was taller than most Azoreans, but only average by American standards.  Turning to the street, he showed a bulging belly in an otherwise trim physique.

Glad to dispense with formalities and get out of quarantine after three weeks, Boyd grabbed his jacket and followed.

“You’re gonna like this guy,” Gen. Ferguson had said less than an hour before.  He’d called to officially call off their quarantine and put Boyd back on the case.  “Col. Ferreira is the chief of security at the base there.  Everyone says he’s the guy to help you with the local picture.”

“You sure we want some worn out old fart? How about someone younger, with a bit of fire?”

“Ferreira’s not some worn out old fart.  He’s the toughest guy on that island.  He’s been fighting the wars for 20 years.”

“What wars?”

“You need to study some history, Boyd.  The Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, in southern Africa, broke away from Portugal in the '60s, but the Portuguese Army has been stuck there fighting guerrillas ever since – Cubans, South Africans, mercenaries and communists of various stripes.  They’ve had no help from the UN or anyone else.  It’s been a nasty, lethal, crippling war.  Ferreira knows how to keep his eyes open and his head down.”

Boyd rushed to catch up as Ferreira strode through the gate to his car and got in, waiting only until Boyd’s door closed to gun the battered machine to life and make a U-turn in the middle of the street.  They careened down the hill toward the main base.  Boyd scanned the flight line, counting a couple of transient aircraft, two Puma helicopters and a Casa 212.  He figured the usual flight-line tour would take about half an hour.