The Gift of the Dragon (17 page)

“So, the mighty Apple Creek Security Chief wants us to stay out of the way while his people take out one of our most wanted targets!”

“Two and one, I gather, sir. I got this message from McAlister.” Price fiddled with his phone and then held it up again. Price could hear the scratchy squeak of the message but could not make out the words. This message sounded shorter. This time Stoddard actually looked happy.
 

“Ah, I feel better now. So we have our asset in place?”
 

“Yes sir, he is just waiting for the right time to activate and bring her in. The plan is to get her and number one together on Northwin’s boat.”

“Good. Hey, Price, you are what old G.W. would call a “turd blossom,” you know that?”

“Not sure what you mean, sir.”

“Just that you deliver the bad news first.”

The Director smiled, something Harry had only seen a few times before. It made him uncomfortable.
 

“You keep this up, Price, and you may just get Malcolm’s chair permanently! Now, you head on home. We’ll be busy tomorrow!”

 
“Yes sir.” Harry said as Stoddard waved and walked off toward the showers, whistling.

Harry shook his head and headed back toward his car.

Laird

He sat in the elevated captain’s chair in the circular bridge of his ship, looking her over. She rested easily at the large yacht quay at the Epoch Marina on the Miami River, but Laird Northwin did not sit at the helm of a yacht. Originally built by Germany as an Albatross class corvette, Laird had purchased the ship from the Bundsmarine and undertaken an extensive refit to rebuild her to serve as his mobile headquarters. That had cost a great deal of money, but it cost less than maintaining large, secure offices in Washington, New York, London, and so on. A former Navy captain himself, Laird knew the value of these fast attack craft hulls: sturdy, speedy, with good seakeeping ability, built for the wild North Sea. His boss, Apple Creek CEO Robert Brandon, called it Laird’s Sea Beamer. The extensive reconstruction with modern electronics and next generation materials had cost nearly thirty million dollars. On the outside, she looked like most other bubble yachts of the idle mega-rich, with large windows and plenty of lounge chairs, but inside she was the high-tech, mobile center of his operation. When the conversion was complete, he had given the ship a new name:
Endurance
.

Laird looked out of the one-way glass at the Miami shoreline. Seventeen top-ranking security officers lived on the ship full-time, and they commanded nearly ten thousand people around the world.
Endurance
also carried eight well-trained armed guards, along with the small crew needed to oversee the upgraded ship’s automated systems. Laird worked for Robert Brandon first and the board of Apple Creek second. Apple Creek spent more on its security arm than any other firm on the planet and, indeed, more than many medium-sized nations. Keeping Apple Creek’s secrets safely hidden was acknowledged as mission-critical work. And Apple Creek hid many secrets. Laird had thought he had known them all. The killing of Peter Moore did not have an entry in his books, so it became an obsession of his as soon as he had learned of it.

Robert Brandon’s mind seemed to work faster than that of an ordinary man. When he talked with Laird, he would rattle off a series of tasks that needed done, almost too fast to be heard. In their early years working together, Laird would feverishly scribble notes down trying to keep up while Robert expounded. As Laird pushed the button on his digital recorder to review their last conversation, he let out a grateful sign for technology that made it easy to keep up with Robert’s machine-gun mind. As he had many times before, Laird would review the conversation and convert it into an action plan, which he would send to Robert for review and then transcribe it into marching orders for the five-thousand-man-strong Guardian Security force.

“We have to talk more about Peter’s death, Laird. You have been trying for years to find the man, you finally locate him, and suddenly an assassin comes out of nowhere and takes him out. What gives? How did this guy find him so quickly when it took you years?” Laird could hear a loud tapping sound on the recording. Robert often punctuated his thoughts by beating his desk with a pencil. When he was angry, the taps got louder. Laird listened to his reply to Robert.

“This proves that theory of yours. Peter’s location must have been given to his killer by someone inside our operation. There is no other way he could have found Peter. I wanted to bring Peter in right away when I found him. Get him in the brig here on
Endurance
, and then decide what to do with him.”

“And I told you to leave him in the wild until we found out where he kept his files. And the old man’s logs!” After Sam’s death, when Moore ran, he took a copy of the old man’s logbook. They both knew that contained everything about Apple Creek. Tap tap TAP! “But you had people watching his every move. He should’ve been safe!”

“Yes, two teams of Guardians were watching him in Tampa. They watched him bring in many clients to his ‘medical’ lab. You know what he was selling.”

“Right. I am in Montana at a hunting lodge.” Robert’s non sequitur was code for the line not being secure enough to go into what Moore had been selling to these customers.
Dragonaris!
Now Thorn would need to hunt them down and give them the opportunity to join Apple Creek. Or die. The tape was silent for a long moment. He could hear Robert breathing.

“Yeah, I know, Laird, more messes for you to clean up. Who killed him? You said it looked like a professional hit, so it wasn’t an accident or random act of violence. We’re the only ones with a reason to want him dead, so who ordered it?”

“I am working on that. He had Sam’s files, so maybe someone else wanted them also.”
 

“Who else knew about Sam’s files?”

“The board. The senior officers. Their immediate staff. One of his customers might have had a reason to kill him also, some of them were underground figures. Drug lords. Gun runners. It seemed as though he would take any customer with money at the end. I’m working on a few different leads.”

“And how is that coming?”

Northwin heard himself sigh on the tape, and he sighed again listening to it. “We searched Moore’s offices in Tampa. We didn’t find much, just some personal items. No files and no evidence other than Moore’s blood. We left a photograph, one I hoped would lead anyone poking around the scene into a trap we set, using Tomas Guzman for bait.”

Northwin heard Robert draw in his breath.

“That is what I called you about. Guzman just contacted me, saying that Moore’s killer was coming to visit him.”

Robert’s voice sounded excited. “Tomas is the one who used to work for Moore? Used to manage his security?”

“Yeah. He’s set up a new operation outside of Apple Creek. A bar and a restaurant he uses to launder money for some of the South Americans. Moore’s former customers. We let him do that to try to lure in the killer, hoping he would want to finish off Moore’s lieutenant. I sent you a memo about it.”

“Offer Guzman the complete package, Laird. Bring him back inside, full re-instatement, vice-president title and salary. If he brings us Moore’s killer.”

“That’s more than I’d give, Robert. He broke his oath. Just letting him live is very generous.”

“I know, Laird, but it’s my decision.”

That conversation had happened yesterday. Guzman had liked the offer and said he would bring the killer to Laird in exchange for the agreed-upon status change. Laird had sent two of his own men to help with the recovery. Something had gone wrong, the men had been shot, and the supposed assassin was gone.
 

Laird punched the arm of his captain’s chair.
If I knew Guzman was going to try to bring in
Alice Sangerman
, I would have sent a dozen men!
Guzman is lucky to be finally dead, with several bullets in the head, too many for even the Dragonaris to save him.
Laird was angrier with himself. He should have pressed Guzman harder for the identity of his target.
 

He was not sure Alice Sangerman was Moore’s killer, anyway. Moore was one of her dead father’s oldest friends, and when you were talking about Sam Sangerman, that meant something.
 

Laird thought it more likely that Moore’s killer was Callan Grant, number one on Laird’s personal most-wanted list. Laird knew that the FBI wanted Grant also.
Well, they can have what is left of him when I am done!
 

However, Alice Sangerman had now crossed his trip-line, and Laird’s duty was to bring her in.
Then
I’ll
decide what to do with her.
 

There was one consolation to the disaster outside Guzman’s building. An unmanned drone had been set to watch over the operation, and that drone had recorded a boat leaving a dock near the Harbor Tower just after the failed ambush.
 

He glanced at the time on the digital readout of the ship’s instrument cluster. The time had come for his meeting with Michel Thorn, Laird's most difficult yet often most effective man.
 

The briefing room reflected his nineteenth-century taste. The decor would give an animal lover a heart attack. The dark, oak-paneled walls were hung with the stuffed heads of a grizzly bear, a huge Alaskan wolf, a Barbary lion, a Florida panther, a snow leopard, a great white shark, and a bull shark, and above Laird’s usual seat reared the head of an orca with its toothy mouth agape. The long, scarred wooden table held a computer and a lamp and was attended by several chairs. Below the dead heads were pictures of his children, his wife, and a scarred old side-wheel warship. Laird himself furthered the nineteenth-century theme by wearing a great coat perched on his shoulders like a cape, with a white shirt beneath, the top several buttons open and showing a wealth of dark, graying hair. The hair on his head fell to his shoulders. While that was mostly black, his full beard was shot with white. Beneath his bushy brows, gray eyes peered out with the sharpness of flint.
 

As he entered the room, Laird checked the temperature on the wall-mounted thermostat as was his habit. Sixty-seven degrees. This room was the coldest one on the ship, being cooled by the same climate control system that kept the large electronics bays of the computer room from overheating. The cooling and ventilation system had been an important part of the refit. To reduce the power required to keep the racks of computers from overheating, the engineers had run ducts all along the ship’s hull, using the difference in temperature between the air and the water to assist the conventional air-conditioning systems. The fuel saved resulted in a several-hundred-mile range increase.
 

Precisely one minute late, the broad frame of Michel Thorn banged into the room. He had a long scar running from below his left eye to the corner of his mouth. The scar flushed red when he was upset, ruining Thorn’s poker game. Right now, it was a lighter shade of pale.

Thorn thumped down in the chair next to Laird, placing his muscular elbows on the ridged table top, and glared at the aerial photos laid out there.

“The western Keys.” Michel Thorn opened only one side of his mouth when he talked, usually the left side.
 

Laird’s fingers were marked by years of battles. His right forefinger looked as it had stopped a knife by itself at least three times. The cuts had healed, but the scars remained. With this finger he pointed out a red line, snaking west from east of Key Largo.
 

“Our drones tracked a boat from the snafu at Harbor Tower to this location.” Laird’s finger stopped at an island circled in blue.
 

“No Name Key,” Thorn said. “They probably will fuel up on Big Pine, and then they could go anywhere in this mess!” Thorn’s arm waved at the open sea, bisected on either side by the Gulf of Mexico.

“Mess? This mess, Mister Thorn, is the sea. The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe. Breathing its air will make even you feel pure and healthy. It is the great desert where man is never alone, for there is life on all sides. It is the place where enantiodromia rules, where water dries to salt, where calm becomes tempest, where blue skies turn red, where the greatest castles rot to sand.”

Laird laughed inwardly as Thorn flinched. Michel could face rocket-propelled grenades, air-to-ground missiles, and hails of bullets from armed gangs like the ones the Mayor of Miami had hired Northwin to eliminate, but talk of the grandeur of nature scared him. Thorn listened better when he was nervous, and he needed Thorn to listen closely now.

“I’ll just need to know who and where, Laird, and I’ll get him, even if he’s headed for Castro’s whorehouse.” Thorn spoke from the right side of his mouth when he was paying attention. Laird knew he couldn’t have gotten Thorn’s focus by yelling or screaming, but he had it now.
Paraphrasing Verne usually does the trick.

“We make it a twenty-five, maybe thirty-foot boat. Catamaran. Two hulls, two motors. We had an Aerostar drone up and followed the boat on infrared all night. We sent another one when the fuel got low on the first one. I’ll keep following them with the drones until you make contact. They might be able to make Havana, but I doubt it.”

“Got it. So I’ll take the boys down there and pick up our friends.”

“Yes, you’ll fly into Marathon. Your plane leaves as soon as we are done here and you can get to the airport. There will be a fast boat waiting for you at Marathon Boat Yard.”

“What do we know of the targets?”

Laird leaned back in the high-backed wooden chair and gazed at Thorn for several breaths. Thorn’s quizzical face turned to annoyance, and he spread his hands.

Having gotten Thorn’s full attention again, Laird spoke, “We know that one of them is Alice Sangerman.” Laird enjoyed seeing Thorn’s jaw drop open. Thorn leaned forward and crossed his arms, shaking his head.

“I don’t believe it. She’s dead.”

“Well, you know how tough Sangermans can be to kill.”