Hurricane Fever Read online

  “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.”

  Once she’d checked his neck, she gave him a few painkillers for the soreness. “I haven’t done a pick-up like that since training,” she chuckled. “Wasn’t sure if the nose would hold the wire.”

  “Comforting,” Roo said, clambering through the interior of the small propeller plane to sit in the copilot’s seat. Angela normally took skydivers up in it; there was room for a few people in back and a large door to let people jump out.

  Angela’s small company took adventure tourists up in the air over the islands for jumps. But she also worked with the Caribbean Intelligence Group, training young recruits just as happily as she did the adrenaline seekers, which is how Roo first met her.

  “So what’s in Barbados?” Angela asked. “I’ve heard some rumors that you have a vendetta against some industrialist. Thought you had put those kinds of days long behind you. And when you went quiet on all of us, I thought you’d retired to your boat.”

  She’d known Roo a long time. There was a lot of gray in her tightly kinked hair. But for Angela the sky always called, Roo knew. Always would.

  “I retired. The world didn’t,” Roo said as they flew south over the ocean.

  “Ah.”

  Angela gave him his silence until somewhere east of Grenada. “I have a parachute in the back,” she told him.

  “No,” Roo said. “Land at Grantley Adams. They know I’m coming.”

  “I thought you were trying to get away,” Angela said.

  “Changing location to get closer to the action,” Roo said. “The last time I charged in without support, I almost died. This time, I want the CIG at my back. Or at least, I want to help them.”

  * * *

  They surrounded Angela’s plane with police Land Rovers, flashing lights, Barbados Defense Forces: everything. Roo was hustled off in the back of an armored vehicle while police questioned Angela.

  The local CIG head, Anton Rhodes, sat in the back of the utilitarian vehicle with Roo. “The last thing we need are headlines that say ‘Rogue CARICOM secret agent arrested over connection to terrorist attack on Aves Island.’ What were you thinking?”

  The train of cars, lights flashing, flew down the highway past a rounded patch of green in a roundabout with a great statue of a bronze slave breaking free of his shackles, face lifting up toward the sky. “Do you love this island, Mr. Rhodes?” Roo asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you love these hills, these people, the beaches, heading down to Lawrence Gap to go party? Because if Beauchamp is on your island, all of that might be gone.”

  “You’ve been watching too much Hollywood,” Rhodes said. But he looked thoughtful.

  “Beauchamp wants to cull the world population,” Roo said. “He thinks it’s the responsible thing to do. Too many of us starving. With fewer of us, there will be more to go around. That’s what he said to my face. I think he might be planning to test his plague on an island first.”

  “And you think he’d really commit murder on such a scale?”

  “He lost family. Losing family will make you crazy.”

  Rhodes scratched his chin. “Family is everything.”

  * * *

  Police escorted Roo deep into a bunker underneath a nondescript government office building. More CIG people trickled in. Phone calls were made, and hasty teleconferences went on in offices. Across the breadth of the Caribbean, it seemed, decisions were being made about Roo’s future.

  But, Roo knew, those decisions were about all their futures, not just his.

  Rhodes returned to the conference room Roo had been locked in under guard. He carried a tray with a carafe of coffee and some donuts. A minor peace offering.

  He poured a hot cup for himself and leaned back in one of the plush leather chairs. “Beauchamp arrived on a private jet. Hardly a reason to be suspicious of the man.”

  Rhodes half turned in his seat and waved at the wall. It glowed to life. Rhodes pulled a series of grainy images up onto it with a few gestures of his hand.

  “Based on word from Aman Constantine we pulled surveillance of the airport,” Rhodes said. “Here is Mr. Beauchamp, of course.”

  Roo nodded, his jaw clenching.

  Rhodes continued. “It was his luggage that caught our interest.”

  On the wall, three large men slid a five-foot-wide case right from the cargo area of the plane into the back of a truck with a ramp. Four more large cases sat inside the plane.

  “We don’t know what is in those cases, but…” Rhodes waved at the air, and another picture slid into place. “We have surveillance from Aves. Same cases. So whatever is in those, they came from his lab. And they’re undeclared. So that’s illegal. Let’s assume what you told Constantine, as wild as it sounds, is true: they have weaponized plague here on the island
.”

  Roo leaned forward. He’d said nothing. He’d been expecting hassle. More SIS and CIA. But instead, Rhodes and the CIG were taking him very, very seriously.

  Rhodes saw his expression. “Roo, I’m not sure what’s going on here. I am listening to you because the last time you reported something this insane, no one listened. Then we all watched a nuclear bomb go off in the Arctic and you went dark for all these years. Now you come back out of nowhere, with a warning. And the old hands who worked with you back then: they telling me I should be taking you deadly serious. That’s why I’m still here.”

  Roo relaxed. “Thank you,” he said, a heavy weight he hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying fading away.

  “This man might not be able to attack the whole world. But if he tries to release some plague, and it is here in Barbados, then forget SIS and the CIA. Because it’s our problem. We have to move against this man now, no matter how powerful he is. And trust me, he is very powerful. Many of us risk our careers. If we’re wrong, it is over for us. You understand that?”

  Roo nodded. “I understand. Look, Beauchamp tried to kill me the last time he saw me instead of turning me over to the police…”

  “Yeah.” Rhodes swiped the surveillance photos away and replaced them with a new wall-sized display of assembled photos prepared by some staffer somewhere.

  “What’s this?” Roo asked, looking at another lavish party photo.

  “The man in the center is the Right Honorable Havish Lamity, the ambassador to America. The party is something that began only recently here on Barbados, though I understand there are others up and down the islands. This isn’t a post-hurricane charity, but a Hurricane Ball.”

  Roo stood up and looked at the high-definition images. “I see a lot of jewelry and expensive tuxedos.” And marble columns, ice sculptures, attendants with silver trays.

  Rhodes put his coffee down and stood alongside Roo. “It’s only been in the last decade that the hurricanes have gotten bad enough to start hitting as far south as Barbados. The Hurricane Ball is a new thing. They often get together before they all fly out to safe places, throw a magnificent party. For the Hurricane Ball, they stay put for the storm and enjoy it together.”