Hurricane Fever (20 page)

“Angry?”

“I want Beauchamp dead. He killed Delroy. I wanted to hunt him down and make him pay. So I refused to give up. I got to the surface, I remember that.”

He remembered moving up and down in the large swells, kicking off his shoes and jacket so that he could float in the water, his face turned up to the stars.

Just float.

“She gave me the jacket. Stayed with me,” Roo murmured.

“And slipped away at the docks when we came and took over,” Aman said. He held up his phone and turned the screen to Roo. “You said Katrina Prideaux?”

There she was. Younger, in a tailored dress that shimmered blue cut just above the knees. The diamond brooch on her collar looked fake, merely because the stones were too large.

“Who the fuck is she?” Roo asked.

“Katrina Prideaux,” Aman said. Roo relaxed slightly. “Originally … Beauchamp.”

“I don’t…” Roo looked out toward the window, not quite able to process that. Beauchamp?

“She’s his daughter,” Aman continued. “And a recent widow. She used to be DGSE. They haven’t been able to bring her in.”

That didn’t make any sense. Or had it? She had been using him to hunt something down. Hunt down Zee’s information. Shit, she still had the tree frog drive, Roo realized, his hand automatically moving up to the empty space over his chest where the necklace had been.

Had she been trying to get at that for her dad?

No. Roo shook his head. She’d risked her life back on Aves. And in the storm. And while escaping her father’s neo-Nazi gunmen. There had to be something else going on. “Widow? She didn’t say anything about a husband.” But she’d acted so grieved back in St. Thomas. He’d marked it as good acting, as she pretended to be Zee’s sister. What if it had been something true?

“Two months ago, her husband, Hamid Prideaux, and his family went on a retreat in the French countryside. They all died of…”

She’d risked her life to get into the helicopter. She’d wanted to get word out. Wanted to stop her father. Roo looked at Aman as his words clicked into place for Roo. The French countryside. “Her husband died of hemorrhagic fever, didn’t he? The plague her father designed.”

She hadn’t gone up to the party with him because she hadn’t wanted to be spotted by her father. She’d chosen to wait in the shadows. To save him. Because she could have run with the drive if that’s all she wanted. Left him to die outside the lobby of Beauchamp Labs.

Aman sucked his teeth. “If that was your friend, then yes. Her father killed her husband and his whole family. Left them to bleed out the eyeballs. Some cold-ass shit, Roo.”

“Yeah. And she found out. You want Beauchamp, you go looking for Kit,” he said to Aman. “She wants his head. Give me CIG clearance, a few agents, and some server cycles, I’ll hunt Beauchamp down. They’re going to turn up in Guyana, Florida, or Barbados.”

“Why those three places?”

“We need to find out,” Roo said. “That’s where Zee was looking. Get agents out to those places, activate anything you can already out there. Get some computers searching through pictures tourists take, and get me in the game.…”

Aman was shaking his head. “You can’t leave.”

“What?”

“You’re one of our cards. We keeping you close. And away from all this. You too close and personal, Roo. He got Delroy killed trying to come at you. You went after him. Blew up his boat. But remember, Beauchamp is filthy with coin. And we don’t have anything for sure. So there are other men in suits, and politicians, pressing down hard on all of us.”

“They want you to stop looking at Beauchamp?”

“Exactly. So we go look harder. Also, we got some others involved. People Beauchamp owns. We can’t have you blowing them up. So we keep you under wraps from the higher-ups above CIG. Look for the surgical strike.” Aman put a finger to his lips. “All hush hush. Besides, you in no shape to be gallivanting around.”

“I feel fine.”

Aman put a hand on Roo’s shoulder. “That’s just the good drugs. Roo, you under house arrest. Freddy here,” he pointed at the soldier, “will be right up against you hip, watching you. Along with a few others scattered in the hotel. No phones, no computer. Even the TV in your room won’t let you check e-mail or browse. That’s my orders from above. Understand?”

Roo folded his arms.

Aman shrugged. “Take a few days, focus on getting better. Enjoy the unlimited bar tab. Look at them sunsets. Rumor say the weather will turn soon enough. It’s hurricane season: enjoy the calm between the weather.”

“There’s no calm for me, Aman.”

Aman reached into his jacket and pulled out a yellow box. He slid it across the table to Roo.

“Chocolates?” Roo asked, looking down.

“An assortment. A little gift. Glad to see you alive. I missed you, boss,” Aman said.

“Haven’t been your boss since I got sent north.”

Aman smiled and got up. “Still miss you at the office. Enjoy the chocolate, Roo. I picked them out special for you.”

Roo watched him leave, then tossed the box of chocolates onto the couch. Freddy closed the door behind Aman. As they’d been talking he’d gotten out of his body armor and khaki uniform with the Caribbean Curve insignia over the shoulder. He was wearing white shorts and a floral shirt.

“Casual Friday, Freddy?” Roo asked.

“Ready for dinner when you are, sir!” came the reply.

Roo sighed and put his head in his hands. I’m letting you down, Delroy, he thought. This is not vengeance. This is an unraveling mess that Roo had only managed to muddy up even further.

Maybe he should have stayed for the funeral. Passed on what he knew as he knew it. Not worked with Kit.

Who was Beauchamp’s damn daughter
.

Roo groaned.

“Sir?” Freddy responded.

Roo looked up at him through his fingers. “I want a drink, Freddy. And steak.”

*   *   *

A dry, hot wind swept through the restaurant, which was perched on a deck over the concrete wall of the quay. Roo looked down the long pier thoughtfully as he drank a Red Stripe.

Freddy suddenly excused himself to the bar with a smile. He sat on a stool, looking up at the mirror to keep watch on Roo as a woman wearing a loose wrap over her bikini sat down in the chair he’d just left. Freddy must have seen her approaching.

She pushed her thin, mirrored sunglasses up into her hair. “Hi,” she said.

Roo put the beer down. Smiled. He was about to tell her he needed his space, but then she set her phone down on the table between them. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Roo.”

“Natalia,” she said. “Are you staying here on vacation, too? Or do you live here?”

“Hotel.” The phone was only a year old, in a battered case with what looked like diamonds on the edge. An expensive accessory.

“Well, we picked a horrible time to go vacationing, didn’t we?” she asked, and waved at the bartender. A glass of white wine appeared seconds later.

“Why?” Roo asked.

“The hurricane?” she said. “I know my parents said coming down in the summer was not smart. Heavy weather, east coast, Florida, the islands, all hellish. Megastorms. They just come and come and come. But, this one. They say it will be a category six. They’ve been saying, one day, it will come. All that heat in the atmosphere. It was just a matter of time.”

Roo looked up from the phone. “Category six…” Zee had been focused on that.

“It’s going to be a big, powerful storm,” Natalia said. “My friends are all telling me I should fly home right away. But I thought, here in this solid building, I should see something like this. I haven’t made up my mind, though. I have just a few days to do that, I guess.”

“What’s the name?” Roo asked.

“The hurricane?”

“Yes.”

“Okath,” she said.

“Okath.” Roo glanced back down at her phone, lost in thought.

She sighed. “I think you’re more interested in my phone than me. Is it the diamonds?”

A spell seemed to have dissolved, Roo realized. He was so caught up in his own little world. She was a tourist, here hoping to have some sort of fling before jetting back to whatever world it was she inhabited.

Maybe Roo could have used that. They could have used each other.

Never too late. “Natalia,” Roo said. He pulled his sleeve up to show the scars on his arms. “The man by the bar is not just a friend, he’s keeping me under custody. And watch. I’m not under arrest … but it’s complicated.”

The less he explained, the more she’d fill in.

Roo smiled. “Let’s just say, I have other things on my mind besides a storm. And I’d really, really like to use your phone. But I need you to lean in a bit closer.”

She did, a faint excited smile on the edges of her lips. Danger in paradise, Roo thought, as he tapped her phone around to face him.

“They won’t let you have a phone?” she asked, eyes twinkling. “Am I participating in something illegal?”

“Most definitely,” Roo said. “Now lean in closer so that man at the bar can’t see me using your phone, and keep talking to me.”

“Ooh.”

After several drinks together, she trailed him back up to his room.

“This whole room is under surveillance,” he told her at the door.

“I don’t care.”

“Freddie’s not going to leave,” Roo said, opening the door.

“He can watch,” she said, leaning in to kiss him.

Roo laughed and pulled back slightly. Natalia looked in at the medical equipment. “What is all this?”

Roo pulled his shirt back. “I got shot,” he said, showing her the recently healed shoulder.

“Recently?” She raised a hand, then thought better and lowered it.

“Yeah, a few days.”

“It looks almost healed.”

“Modern medicine. And with thanks to U.S. research. They know more about how to heal gunshot wounds than almost any other nation.”

Natalia snorted. “How did it happen?”

“I don’t want to think about that,” Roo said. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else for too long. I need to escape.”

“I can help,” Natalia said.

Freddie slipped between them and shook his head. “Far enough,” he said.

“Apparently,” Roo said, “I’m allowed a little flirting, but my captors say no more.”

Disappointed, she turned back down the corridor. Roo watched her keep walking then stop and look down. She looked back over her shoulder at him quizzically, and he bobbed his head and smiled.

“Thank you,” he mouthed.

She shrugged a bare shoulder and kept walking.

*   *   *

Freddie followed him at early dawn down the stairway. “Breakfast?” the soldier asked, smiling.

Roo took the steps quickly. That was damn amazing. They’d peeled open his legs, wrapped the bone in a scaffolding of bone substitute that would dissolve as his own grew back in, and sealed him back up. Now all he had was a slight limp and dull pain. “No, there’s something I want to see.”

He skipped down past the restaurant and bar and to the lower level of the hotel, which hadn’t been altered in decades. He walked out onto the pier. “What time is it, Freddie?”

“Six fifty in the a.m.”

Cutting it close.

A boy stood at the end of the pier flying a kite. The bright red, boxy thing was a few hundred feet up in the air already and the boy was playing out the line further and further. Good.

Roo walked past the boy to the trash can at the very end of the pier.

“Come, Freddie. Look at that ocean,” Roo said enthusiastically.

Freddie eyed the blue-gray ocean mildly, while Roo casually reached into the trash can.

Instantly the soldier had a pistol in hand. “What’s that?”

Roo slowly raised a harness into the air. Then started to shrug it on.

“Mr. Jones, what is that for?”

“Freddie, you can take a shot and stop me. But that is your only choice,” Roo said. “And I have a feeling that if Aman Constantine finds out you shot me, you will have a very, very bad day. Also, don’t scare the young boy.”

Freddie looked at the wide-eyed boy with the kite staring at him, and slid the gun back away. “I’m a soldier,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Roo finished snapping the harness and stepped over to the boy. “It’s okay, son, I’ll hold your kite. You go now.”

The boy ran down the pier.

A plane skimmed over the green coast, engines a growing buzz. Freddie looked up at the kite. “
Ras
 … you arranged all this with that woman’s phone, yeah? You know how much trouble you causing me?”

Roo clipped the kite’s carbon filament wire to the back of his harness. He held out a hand to Freddie. “Good-bye, Freddie.”

Freddie ignored the hand. “The woman you looking for? She is in Barbados.” He shrugged. “If trouble is coming, I might as well go all the way.”

Then he shook Roo’s hand. He frowned and looked down at the case-less phone Roo had slipped him. “Give that back to Natalia, please,” Roo said. “Thank her for letting me use it to arrange all this.”

The plane swept overhead and the nose caught the kite. Roo sat down and bent forward. The dock accelerated away from him in a rush of back-pounding, neck-stretching air. It felt like he’d been swept into a cyclone.

Freddie dwindled away on the pier as Roo rose higher and higher. Roseau’s plastic and concrete buildings, brightly colored against the dark green of Dominica’s hills, slowly shrank back away like a receding postcard from paradise.

21

Barbados, on the southern reach of the Caribbean’s bowed curve, rarely suffered the destructive battering of hurricanes. Much like Grenada, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago, it lay south of the usual paths. But that had been changing over the last few decades as more hurricanes ventured farther south as well as farther north.

Okath swelled as it spun. Computer algorithms smart enough to outwit any average weather person predicted the curving arms of the superstorm would sweep through the southern Caribbean.

No one was safe.

The pilot of the plane that had just snatched him up, Angela Assim, pulled Roo into the plane herself and checked him over with a tiny first-aid kit while the plane flew itself on autopilot.

“Tomorrow they’ll be shutting Grantley Adams Airport down,” she told Roo when he told her he wanted to be dropped off in Barbados. “Preparing for the storm of the century. Hopefully what you need is there, because chances are, we ain’t leaving the island tomorrow until the storm passes.”