Authors: Scott Mariani
‘What?’
‘It’s not here,’ she said. ‘It’s not giving me anything.’
Ben stepped up behind her chair. ‘Try the previous day.’
Tamara keyed in the date July 22 and hit Enter. Almost instantly, the video footage appeared onscreen: a high-resolution digital image of a line a line of passengers waiting to board. Most of them were wearing shorts and T-shirts, floppy hats, dark glasses, cameras on straps. A little girl was skipping up and down dragging a teddy by the leg.
Tamara stopped the playback. ‘Let me try again,’ she muttered, typing July 23 back in and stabbing the Enter key.
Nothing. Blackness.
She turned to Ben. ‘It’s been deleted,’ she gasped.
‘Who else has had access to the system?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Are you sure?’
Ben walked away from the desk, thinking furiously. In his mind’s eye, he played back his memory of the pretty blonde who’d been arranging flowers in the CIC lobby the day before. He remembered the curious way she’d watched him leave.
Shortly after that, the black Chevy Blazer had seemed to pick up his trail. Almost as if it had been waiting for him. The same black car that might, just might, have picked Bob Drummond up from his place several days before and magicked him away somewhere.
‘What about Jennifer?’ Ben said.
Tamara looked taken aback. ‘Jennifer Pritchard? The temp?’
‘Where is she now?’ he asked.
‘She called in sick first thing this morning.’
‘How long has she worked here?’
‘Only since July 22. She came through an agency.’
‘The day before the crash. CIC had been advertising a vacancy?’
Tamara nodded. ‘Like I said, business had been picking up like crazy. She came with all the right paperwork, Ben. References, qualifications, the works. We knew all about her.’
Ben shook his head. ‘You don’t know anything about her. If you don’t believe me, call her at home, right now.’
‘Now? To say what?’
‘I’ll talk to her,’ he said. ‘Just make the call. Go ahead.’
Tamara got the number from the files and picked up the phone. She dialled. Waited a moment, then looked at Ben. ‘There’s no dial tone.’
‘That’s because the number doesn’t exist,’ Ben said. ‘Call the agency. They’ll tell you they never had a Jennifer Pritchard on their records.’
‘This is insane,’ Tamara said.
She checked. Ben had been right.
‘You’re never going to see her again,’ he said. ‘She was planted here to delete information from your system. Now she’s gone.’
‘But then why was she still here until yesterday?’
‘Because of how suspicious it would’ve looked if she’d upped and vanished right afterwards,’ Ben said. ‘And because it takes a few days for a new story this big to die down to nothing. They might have been worried about somebody like me turning up asking questions. They needed someone to listen at doors, to call in the troops to check out anyone who might still be snooping around.’
‘Who’s
they?
’
‘That’s simple enough,’ Ben said. ‘The same people who don’t want it known that the crash flight had a thirteenth passenger,’ Ben said. ‘Namely a Mr L. Moss.’
Tamara gaped at him. She shuddered. ‘Oh, my God. What do we do?’
‘First thing, you need to get off this island. It’s dangerous for you here. Go and get your kids from your mother’s place in Miami and take them on a holiday somewhere. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Okay?’
She hesitated, then nodded sullenly. ‘Okay.’
‘Call me when you get there. Don’t use your regular phone, use the secret one you used for calling Nick.’
‘What about you?’ Tamara said, looking at him with big eyes.
‘I need to borrow a couple more things from Dwight,’ Ben said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The lawyer’s fifty-foot motor yacht, the
Santa Clara
, was moored at Harbour House Marina a few miles from George Town, off North Sound Bay. Tamara had been quite happy to let Ben have the keys to her husband’s pride and joy, and after returning to his hotel to grab a couple of hours’ sleep and a shower, Ben made his way to Harbour House, strolled out along the jetty where scores of gleaming boats and yachts rocked gently on the swell, and climbed on board.
In the handsome wheelhouse, he quickly familiarised himself with the controls and set the GPS navigation system on a course for Little Cayman. The twin 500-horsepower engines fired up with a throaty burble. He slipped the moorings, the stern and bow thrusters pushed the boat away from its dock, and they were off.
Ben crossed the calm blue waters of North Sound at a steady fifteen knots cruising speed. His course took him through main channel between the northern tip of the island and the jagged outcrop of Fisherman’s Rock, after which he was in open sea. Once Grand Cayman had disappeared entirely over the southern horizon, Ben was able to let the motor yacht more or less steer herself. Now and then he sighted another vessel, mostly smaller boats, apart from the cruise liner that passed by, huge even at more than a mile off.
He’d had two main reasons for wanting to cross over to Little Cayman by sea rather than by air. The first was the advantage of being able to land wherever he wanted on the shores of the smaller island, free from the snooping eyes of anyone who might be watching his movements. The second was that the other items he’d borrowed from Dwight Martínez couldn’t be so easily carried on board a public shuttle flight. The Highway Patrolman revolver was inside Ben’s green canvas bag on the bunk in the main cabin, next to the semi-auto Remington home defence shotgun from the lawyer’s gun cabinet. Dwight was turning out to be a handy supplier.
As to Ben’s reasons for wanting to visit Little Cayman in the first place: he figured that just because the enigmatic Mr Moss had been conveniently deleted from CIC’s computer files, it didn’t mean that all trace of him could be erased from existence. If the guy had boarded the flight on Little Cayman, there’d be a trail, however obscure, leading back from there. All Ben had to do was find it.
For a long time, the
Santa Clara
burbled on alone across the empty sea. Only the slightest breeze ruffled Ben’s hair as he stood at the deck rail, smoking a cigarette and gazing out across an endless expanse of the most vivid blue water he’d ever seen, so clear that shoals of colourful fish were visible now and then beyond the ripples from the
Santa Clara
’s hull: thousands of them, moving in one coordinated mass just a few feet below the surface.
Then a dark shape flitted up from the depths and the shoal of fish he was watching scattered in panic.
Tiger shark, all twelve or thirteen feet of him. Ben recognised the wedge-shaped head and dorsal stripes all too well from an uneventful but memorable encounter during joint underwater combat training with New Zealand SAS near Auckland a couple of years earlier. As he watched, the shark’s fin split the water momentarily, disappeared below the surface; and with a flick of his tail he was gone.
Just a reminder not to trail one’s fingers and toes in the lovely refreshing water.
After a few hours, the shores of Little Cayman came into view. As the
Santa Clara
motored towards a tranquil little cove, Ben reflected on how tiny the island seemed, a cockleshell surrounded by endless ocean. Little Cayman’s highest point was just forty feet above sea level, but the strong likelihood of the entire place being swept clean away in the event of a Tsunami obviously hadn’t been enough to dissuade the 175 or so permanent inhabitants that Ben’s guidebook told him lived and worked there.
One of those was Maurice – or Maur
eece
, as the all-smiling, dreadlocked owner of the car hire place near the bay pronounced it. Maurice’s speciality was banged-up old nails, and for thirty dollars he offered Ben a day’s rental on a Toyota four-wheel-drive that looked as though it might have done service in the Iraqi desert at some stage of its very long life. No paperwork, and Maurice didn’t take any notice of the object, wrapped in a blanket, that Ben had brought with him from the moored yacht and loaded into the back of the Toyota. Ben was liking the guy already.
‘Visiting someone on the island?’ Maurice asked with a beaming smile, pocketing Ben’s cash.
‘Old pal of mine lives here,’ Ben said. ‘We lost touch a while back, but I thought I’d drop by.’
‘I know most folks on this island. What’s his name?’
The list of what that L initial could stand for had been growing in Ben’s head: Lionel, Louis, Lucien, Luther, Luke, Lloyd … ‘We called him “Mossy” in the army. Mossy Moss,’ he said, playing it safe.
Maurice reflected for a moment. ‘Name don’t ring no bells. You sure he lives here? Lot of people come and go.’
‘Maybe he moved away,’ Ben said. ‘No worries. All I want to do is chill out for a while.’
‘You sure come to the right place for that. Nearest thing to Paradise on earth.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ Ben muttered to himself as he drove away in a cloud of dust.
On an island no more than ten miles long by one mile wide, it was only a short drive to the first of the hotels on Ben’s list. There were just three on the island, which made his process of elimination a good bit easier.
His routine was the same in all of them: ‘Hi, I’m looking for a friend of mine, Mr Moss. I think he might have checked out, and wondered if he’d maybe left a forwarding address?’
Three attempts, three blanks, and the day was wearing on. No Mr L. Moss appeared on any of the hotel registers. Once his list was exhausted, Ben climbed back in the beaten-up Toyota and decided to pay a visit to the Little Cayman airport. Maybe he’d find someone there with a memory to jog.
Or maybe that was just a desperate long shot.
At the end of a dusty road flanked by grass-roofed huts, open-air bars and beachside villas, Ben reached the island’s only airfield. Now he could see what had made Nick’s mini-squadron of Trislanders so perfect for their purpose. Few other commercial aircraft could have made use of the short runway, which was no more than a strip of patchy grass, burned into yellow stubble by the sun.
The airport complex looked more like an old-fashioned filling station. A prefabricated building served as a check-in lounge and waiting room. An adjoining lean-to housed an ancient fire engine that probably hadn’t been driven in years. But what could have been a cheerful, laid-back environment was still clouded by the gloomy memory of the CIC air crash. A desultory queue of just seven passengers hung about in the check-in area waiting for the next shuttle flight. Which, the dour woman at the check-in desk informed Ben, was due in twenty minutes’ time.
He was beginning to realise he had a lot to learn about the detective business. What had started out feeling like a rich source of potential information was already crumbling away to nothing, and one look at the woman’s dull face told him there wasn’t much point in probing her with discreet questions. Forget playing the reporter card.
Behind the check-in counter was a small office scattered with the usual computer terminals and screens. He wondered if Jennifer Pritchard, or whatever her real name was, had been able to hack into the Little Cayman end of the computer system and make the footage from the day of the crash disappear from here too.
She probably had.
But it was still worth checking out. Heading casually into the men’s toilets, Ben closed himself in a cubicle. After a moment’s pause for the sake of realism, he worked the flush. While the pipes were groaning and gushing, he quickly stepped up on the toilet lid, reached up to the grimy window overhead and undid the window catch, so that it would be easy to slip through from outside. That part would have to wait until after dark.
There was the whole rest of the day to kill first. Just half a mile from the airport Ben found a little bar called Claude’s, parked the Toyota under some trees and wandered into the lazy atmosphere of the bar-room, where a few drinkers were sitting round playing cards and sweating in the heat. The radio was playing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s cover version of
Voodoo Chile
. The most active guys in the place were the two workmen who were busy mounting a large mirror on the wall behind the bar.
The barman was a chunky, fleshy white guy of around fifty, in a flowery short open halfway to the waist. He turned away from surveying the workmen and greeted Ben with a surly nod. ‘I’m Claude. What can I get you?’
‘Whisky.’
‘Whisky it is. You want the regular or the expensive?’
‘That one,’ Ben said, spotting the half-full bottle of eighteen-year-old special cask strength Islay malt on the counter.
‘The hard stuff,’ Claude said, reaching for the bottle.
‘Make it a double,’ Ben said. He perched on a stool and laid a twenty dollar note on the bar. When Claude set the glass down in front of him, he drained it down in one gulp. Feeling better already, he lit a cigarette. The ashtray on the bar read ‘Quint’s shark fishing’.
‘I’ll have another double,’ he said to Claude.