The Scorpio Illusion (5 page)

T
he tall, unshaven man in white sailing shorts and black tank shirt, his skin burned to a deep bronze by the tropic sun, raced across the walkway and up the pier containing slips for the powerboats. He reached the end of the wooden planks and shouted at the two men on an incoming skiff.

“What the hell do you mean, I’ve got a leak in the auxiliary? I used it in dead air and it was perfectly fine!”

“Look, mate,” replied a British mechanic, his voice weary as Tyrell Hawthorne grabbed the rope thrown at him. “I don’t give a shit if it’s a newborn babe of a motor. You ain’t got an ounce of oil in your crankcase; it’s all soiling our lovely little refuge here. Now, if you want to take that mother out, and you hit some more deaders, go right ahead and blow the engine. But I’m sure as hell gonna make my report. I ain’t gonna be responsible for your stupidity.”

“All right, all right,” said Hawthorne, grabbing the man’s hand as he climbed up the ladder to the dock. “What do you figure?”

“Rotted gaskets and two ruined cylinders, Tye.” The mechanic turned and secured the second line around a pylon so his companion could climb up on the dock. “How many times have I told you, laddie, you’re too good with the clouds and the windies. You’ve got to use your metals more; they dry out in this fuckin’ sun! Now, haven’t I told you that a couple of dozen times?”

“Yes, Marty, you have. I can’t deny it.”

“You couldn’t! And with the prices you charge, you
sure ain’t worried about fuel costs, that even I can figure.”

“It’s not the money,” protested the skipper. “Except for prolonged dead spots, the charters like to sail, you know that. When can you have it fixed—a couple of hours?”

“Over your life, Tye-Boy. Try tomorrow noon—if I get the proper bore grinders flown in from Saint T. in the morning.”

“Damn it! I’ve got some good repeats on board, and they expect to hit Tortola tonight.”

“Get ’em a few rum-punchies, Gordie style, and get ’em rooms at the club. They’ll never know the difference.”

“I don’t have a choice,” said Hawthorne, turning and starting down the pier. “A hundred-and-ten-proof Overton coming up.” The charter captain hastened his pace past the slips.

“Sorry, mate,” Martin the mechanic said to himself as he watched his friend turn left on the walkway. “I hate to do this to you, but I’ve got my orders.”

Darkness enveloped the Caribbean. The hour was late as Captain Tyrell Hawthorne, sole owner of Olympic Charters, Ltd., U.S. Virgin Islands Registry, led his clients, first one couple and then the other, to their accommodations at the yacht club’s beach hotel. Their rooms were not what either twosome expected to wake up in, but going to sleep was no problem; the bartender had made certain of that. So Tye Hawthorne returned to the deserted open-air bar on the beach and rendered his thanks to the man behind it in more concrete terms. He gave the black bartender fifty American dollars.

“Hey, Tye-Boy, you don’t have to do this.”

“Then why are you gripping it so tightly in your fist?”

“Instinct,
mon
. You can have it back.”

They both laughed; it was a ritual.

“How’s business, Captain?” asked the bartender, pouring Hawthorne a glass of his customary white wine.

“Not bad, Roger. Both our boats are chartered, and if my idiot brother can find his way back to Red Hook in Saint T., we could even make a profit this year.”

“Hey,
mon
, I like your brother. He’s a funny guy.”

“Oh, he’s a real cartoon, Roge. Did you know that kid is a doctor?”

“What,
mon
? Alla times he comes here, I got aches and pains all over me, and I coulda asked him?”

“No, not that kind of doctor,” broke in Tyrell. “He has a doctorate degree in literature, just like our dad.”

“He don’ fix bones and aches? So what good is it?”

“That’s what he said. He said he broke his ass for eight years to get the damn thing and ended up making less money than a garbage collector in San Francisco. He was fed up, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” replied the bartender. “Five years ago I hauled fish off the charters and cleaned the throw-ups of the tourists an’ put ’em to bed when they drunk. No life,
mon
! So I bettered myself and learned how to
get
’em drunk.”

“Good move.”

“
Bad
move, Tye-Boy,” said Roger, suddenly whispering and reaching below the counter. “Two
mon
walkin’ down from the path. They lookin’ fer somebody, and you are the only somebody here. Also, I got a feeling—I don’ like ’em; they keep checkin’ their jackets, their sleeves, an’ they walk too slow. But don’ worry, I got my gun.”

“Hey, come on, Roge, what are you talking about?” Hawthorne turned on the barstool. “Geoff!” he cried. “Is that you, Cooke?… And Jacques, you too? What the hell are you guys doing here?… Put away the hardware, Roger, these are old friends of mine.”

“I’ll put it away when I learn they got no hardware of their own.”

“Hey, fellas, this is another old friend—and the is
lands have been a little rough lately. Just hold out your hands and tell him you haven’t got any weapons, okay?”

“How could we possibly have any weapons?” said Geoffrey Cooke contemptuously. “We both flew over on international flights where metal detectors are very much in evidence.”

“
Mais oui
!” added Ardisonne, code name Richelieu.

“They’re okay,” said Hawthorne, leaping off the barstool and shaking hands with both older men. “Remember our sail through the—oh, oh, why
are
you here? I thought you were both retired.”

“We have to talk, Tyrell,” said Cooke.

“Immediately,” said Ardisonne. “There is no time to waste.”

“Hey, wait a minute. Suddenly my perfectly okay engine doesn’t work;
suddenly
, out of a quiet night on the beach Cookie arrives with our old pal Richelieu from Martinique. What’s going on, gentlemen?”

“I said we had to talk, Tyrell,” insisted Geoffrey Cooke, MI-6.

“I’m not sure we do,” replied former Lieutenant Commander Hawthorne, U.S. Naval Intelligence. “Because if what you want to talk about has anything to do with the crap Washington is laying on me, forget it.”

“You have every right to abhor Washington,” said Ardisonne in his heavily accented English, “but you have no reason not to listen to us. Can you think of a reason? You are correct when you say we should be retired, but ‘suddenly,’ to use your own word, we are not. Why is that? Is it not reason enough to listen to us?”

“Hear me, and hear me well, fellas.… What you represent cost me the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. The goddamned games killed her in Amsterdam, so I trust you can understand when I say I don’t care to talk to you.… Give these ‘secret agents’ a drink, Roge, and put it on my tab. I’m heading out to the boat.”

“I submit, Tyrell, that neither I nor Ardisonne had
anything to do with Amsterdam,” said Cooke. “You know that.”

“The fucking games did, and you know
that.
”

“Far removed,
mon ami
,” said code name Richelieu. “Could we have sailed together otherwise?”

“Listen to me, Tye.” Geoffrey Cooke clamped his hand with a great deal of force on Hawthorne’s shoulder. “We were good friends, and we really must talk.”

“Holy
shit
!” Tyrell grabbed his arm. “He used a needle on me—it was a
needle
! It went through my shirt! Get your gun, Roge …!”

Before the bartender could retrieve his weapon, Richelieu raised his arm and leveled it at his target. He snapped his index finger; a narcotizing dart flew out of his sleeve into the neck of the man behind the outdoor bar.

Sunrise. The images came into focus but they were not what Hawthorne’s flashes of recollection projected. Neither face hovering above him belonged to Geoffrey Cooke or Jacques Ardisonne. Instead, they were the familiar features of Marty and his sidekick, Mickey, the cockney dock mechanics of Virgin Gorda.

“How’re you doin’, bloke?” asked Marty.

“You want a touch of gin, mate?” said Mickey. “Sometimes it clears the head.”

“What the hell happened?” Tyrell blinked his eyes, trying to adjust to the bright sunlight that streamed through the windows. “Where’s Roger?”

“In the next bed,” Martin replied. “We kinda commandeered this villa—we tol’ the front desk we found a nest of snakes crawlin’ into the place.”

“There are no snakes on Gorda.”

“They don’t know that,” said Mickey. “They’re mostly loser ninnies from London.”

“Then where are Cooke and Ardisonne—the guys who freezed us?”

“Right over there, Tye-Boy.” Martin pointed at two straight-backed chairs across the room. Strapped into them with towels wrapped and tied around their mouths were Geoffrey Cooke and Jacques Ardisonne. “I tol’ the Mick here that I had to do what I did ’cause they said the bloody crown demanded it, but nobody said nuthin’ ’bout what I do
after
that. You ain’t been out of our sight. And if those bahstards had done you any real damage, they’d be floatin’ bait without a hook on Shark Island.”

“Then there was nothing wrong with the engine?”

“Not a thing, chappie. The head boy at Government House called me personally and said it was for your own good. Some fuckin’ good, huh, mate?”

“Some fucking good,” agreed Hawthorne, elbowing himself off the pillow and looking at his former friends.

“Hey,
mon
!” came the throated cry from Roger, on the next bed, his head thrashing back and forth.

“Check him out, Marty,” ordered Tyrell, pulling his legs over the mattress to the floor.

“He’s okay, Tye,” said Mickey, kneeling beside the black man. “I made that old Frenchie tell us what he did to you two—it was that or his balls in a cylinder—and he said the whatever-it-was would wear off in five or six hours.”

“The six hours are up, Mick. Another six, or however long it takes, are about to begin.”

The woman helped the young man to secure the hull of the sloop in the sand by looping the bow line over a protruding rock in the breakwall beyond the short beach, a breakwall concealed behind a profusion of vines and creeping foliage. “It won’t move now, Nicolo,” she said, studying what was left of the boat. “Not that it matters. We might as well use the damn thing for firewood.”

“You are mad!” The muscular adolescent started to
yank a few supplies, including the rifle, from the deck of the beached sloop. “But for the grace of Christ we would be dead, our bodies at the bottom of the sea.”

“Keep the rifle but leave the rest,” ordered Bajaratt. “We won’t need any of it.”

“How do you know? Where are we?… Why did you
do
it?”

“Because I had to.”

“You don’t give me an answer!”

“Very well, my lovely child, I suppose you’re entitled to one.”

“
Entitled
? Three days of not knowing whether I’d live or die, frightened out of my mind? Yes, I think I’m entitled.”

“Oh, come now, it was never that bad. What you didn’t realize was that we were never more than two or three hundred meters offshore and always to the leeward of the winds; it’s why we came about so frequently. Of course, I could not control the lightning.”

“Insane, you’re insane!”

“Not really. Not too long ago I sailed these waters for nearly two years. I know them very well.”

“Why did you
do
it?” he repeated. “You nearly killed us! And why did you shoot the black woman?”

Bajaratt gestured at the corpse. “Take her weapon; the water rises halfway up to the top of that hidden breakwall. She’ll be carried out to sea during the night.”

“You tell me nothing!”

“Let’s be clear about that, Nicolo. You have a right to know only what I care to tell you. I saved your life, young man, and at great expense hid you for days on end from waterfront scum who would have killed you on sight. Further, I have deposited many millions of lira for you in the Banco di Napoli, and for these acts I have the privilege of withholding whatever I care not to discuss.… Pick up the weapon.”

“Oh, my God,” whispered the young man, bending over the uniformed body of the dead woman and wincing
as he removed the gun from her hand; the small waves lapped over her face. “There’s no one else
here
?”

“No one who counts.” The woman’s eyes strayed up to the island fortress as the memories swept through her mind. “Only a retarded gardener who controls a pack of mastiff attack dogs, and he himself is easily controlled. The owner of this island is an old friend, an old man who needs medical care. He’s in Miami, Florida, for radiation treatments. He goes there on the first of every month for five days. That’s all you have to know. Come, we’ll go up the steps.”

“Who is this man?” asked the boy, staring at Bajaratt in the sand.

“My only real father,” answered Amaya Aquirre-Bajaratt softly, dreamily, as they slogged across the beach, her abrupt silence signaling Nicolo not to interrupt her thoughts. And such thoughts they were! The happiest two years of a life consigned to hell. The
padrone
, the
vizioso elegante
, was the man she admired most. At twenty-four years of age he had controlled the casinos in Havana, the tall, blond golden boy of Cuba with the ice-blue eyes, chosen by the dons from Palermo, New York, and Miami. He had been afraid of no one, instilling fear in everyone who opposed his decisions. Few had dared, and those who did disappeared. The Baj had heard the stories—in the Baaka, Bahrain, and Cairo.

The
capo dei capi
of the Mafia had chosen him, believing he was their most talented acolyte since Capone, who had ruled the American city of Chicago by the time he was a mere twenty-seven. But it all had collapsed for the young
padrone
when the crazy Fidel came down from the hills and ruined everything, including the Cuba he vowed to save.

Nothing, however, stopped the golden
vizioso elegante
, the man some called the “Mars of the Caribbean.” He went first to Buenos Aires, where he built an organization second to none, working with the generals, of course. Then he moved to Rio de Janeiro, building fur
ther, exceeding his superiors’ wildest dreams. Consolidating his efforts from an estate exceeding a hidden ten thousand acres, he brokered death throughout the world, recruiting an army of former soldiers, experts in the killing skills, outcasts from the militaries of many countries, and sold those skills for unheard of sums of money. Assassination was his product, and there was no end of buyers in a politically turbulent world.
La nostra Legione Straniero
the dons called it, roaring with laughter as they drank their
vino
in Palermo, New York, Miami, and Dallas, accepting their percentages of each expensive kill. Indeed, the
padrone
’s silent, unseen army was their own Foreign Legion.