Orchid Beach

CHAPTER

49

Rita Morales showed up at the service gate to Palmetto Gardens at six forty-five the following morning in the rusting 1978 Impala the Bureau had furnished her. She was wearing old, baggy khakis and a South Beach sweatshirt, faded and full of holes. She parked her car, walked up to the security shack and rapped sharply on the glass. The guard, who had been dozing, nearly had a heart attack.

“Hey,” she said in a pronounced Cuban-American accent, “I’m here for the cleaning work.”

The guard got hold of himself and picked up a clipboard. “Name?”

“Rita.”

“Rita what?”

“Garcia.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, checking her off. “The bus will be here in a few minutes. Just wait in the parking lot.”

Rita walked back to the parking lot, where other women were gathering, most of them being dropped off by relatives. Time to go to work, she thought. She approached an ample woman who had gotten out of a pickup truck. “Buenos días,” she said, and continued in Spanish. “I’m Rita. This is my first day. What sort of work is it?”

“It’s cleaning work,” the woman said. “I’m Carla.”

“Yeah, Carla, I know about the cleaning. I mean, is it a good place to work?”

“It doesn’t get any better around here,” the woman said. “The pay is twice what you’d get working some lady’s house, but you have to work hard. They fire you if they catch you grabbing a smoke or loafing.”

“That’s okay, I guess. I don’t mind working hard if the money is good. What sort of places you been working in there?”

“I’ve worked everywhere at one time or another. I’ve cleaned houses, I’ve cleaned shops, I’ve cleaned the country club.”

“Where will they start me out?” Rita asked.

“You never can tell. You’re just a number to these people. They don’t care about your name, or anything. It’s just ‘Hey you, clean that house.’ They’ll drop you off with a partner, and the two of you will do the place. You get half an hour for lunch. You bring lunch?”

“No,” Rita replied. “Nobody told me.”

“Tell you what, you stick with me today. I’ve got enough food for the two of us. I’ll show you the ropes.”

“Thanks,” Rita said. She turned to see a white school bus drive out of the gate and stop in the parking lot. The workers started to get on.

“You just sit next to me,” Carla said, “and they’ll put us together. That’s how they do it.”

Rita gave her name to a man with a clipboard, who checked off her name, compared her face to a Polaroid photograph that had been taken when she applied for the job and gave her a polyester jump suit and a security pass, which had her name and photograph on it. She sat down next to Carla.

“You should change now,” Carla said, “and leave your clothes on the bus. It will pick us up later.”

Rita went to the back of the bus, took a seat, changed clothes, aware of the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and returned to her seat next to Carla in the middle of the bus.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get office space to clean,” Carla said. “That’s why I sit in the middle of the bus. The people up front get the houses, where you have to do laundry and clean up after parties and all that. The people in the back get the shops.”

“Thanks,” Rita said. “I’m lucky I met you.”

“You sure are,” Carla replied, patting her on the knee.

The bus stopped half a dozen times to let off people. Finally, it drew to another stop, and a security guard got on. “You two,” he said, pointing to Carla and Rita. “Come with me.”

The two women got off the bus, and it drove away, leaving them with the guard at the side of the road. Rita could not see any buildings.

“Hands on top of your head,” the man said.

Rita followed Carla’s example and allowed herself to be searched. The guard got a good grope of her breasts and leered at her. She tried to appear demure.

“Get in the car,” he said, pointing to a Range Rover.

Rita opened her mouth to ask where they were going, but Carla grabbed her arm and shook her head. She kept quiet, as the Range Rover drove down a thickly wooded lane for a quarter of a mile and pulled into a parking lot. Rita’s heart leapt. Ahead of her she saw a huge satellite dish, and to her left was a two-story building with very narrow windows. It looked like a cross between an office building and a jail, she thought.

“Everybody out,” the guard said. He led the two women through the front door of the building and into a small reception room. A hard-looking man in civilian clothes checked their names on a list and looked carefully at their ID cards, comparing their faces to their photographs. That done, they were buzzed through an opaque glass door and into a hallway. “You cleaned here before, didn’t you?” the guard said to Carla.

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

“You know the drill, then. You tell the new babe here what to do. I want you done in two hours.”

“Yes, sir,” Carla said. She turned to Rita. “Come with me.” She led the way down the hall to a utility closet and handed Rita a roll of plastic trash bags. “There’s offices up and down this hallway,” she said. “You start at this end, and I’ll start at the other. Empty all the trash cans and shredders into the bags and bring them back here to the closet. I’ll show you where to put them then.”

“Shredders?”

“Shredding machines, for papers, you know?”

“Okay,” Rita said. She went to the nearest door, which was open, and rapped on the jamb. “Cleaning lady,” she said.

A man was working at a desk; he waved her in.

Rita found the wastebasket, emptied it, then went to a shredder, which sat on top of a plastic bin. She removed the top, set it on the floor and empted the bin into her bag. “Thank you,” she said, smiling.

The man didn’t even look up, just waved.

She repeated the process up and down the hallways. The offices were all identical—a steel desk, a filing cabinet, a chair, a wastebasket and a shredder. Each had a phone on the desk; some had copying machines. There was nothing on the walls of any of the offices, no pictures, no diplomas, no calendars, nothing. She went back to the utility closet and Carla showed her to an outside door with large plastic garbage cans outside. They dumped the trash bags, then each got a vacuum cleaner, and they vacuumed the offices and the hallway.

“Now, upstairs,” Carla said. She led the way up the staircase through a door and into a large room that appeared to cover the whole of the second floor, with a row of offices along one side.

Rita’s mouth fell open, and she closed it quickly, heading for the nearest wastebasket. The room was full of desks, each with a computer terminal. At the rear, reaching across the width of the room, was a row of large computers. She reflected that the computer room at the Miami field office of the FBI was a third the size of this. As she emptied each wastebasket she glanced at the computer screen on the desk. There was no time to read anything, but she saw, on various screens, spreadsheets, documents being written, columns of figures, and, on one desk, a full-color Mercator projection map of the world with red dots placed on at least two dozen spots around the globe. What appeared to be satellites were superimposed on the map. She noted the absence on every screen of anything resembling a market tape running. No commodities were being traded here.

Rita and Carla took out the trash bags, then returned with the vacuum cleaners. As Rita pushed hers around the floor, she began looking at the men at the desks. Each of them wore a telephone headset and a pistol in a holster. When they had finished vacuuming, Carla gave her a dust cloth, and they went from desk to desk, office to office, wiping down every surface. Each room was nearly identical to the ones downstairs—same furniture, same lack of anything personal on the desks or the walls. The windows were no more than six inches wide and tinted green. Carla estimated that the glass in each was at least two inches thick.

As they left the second floor, Rita noticed a bulletin board with work schedules posted on it, but she could get only the briefest of glances at it.

They returned to the ground floor. Rita turned a corner and came up against a steel door. Next to it was a keypad and a glass surface with the outline of a hand drawn on it. A sign on the door read, ACCESS TO THE LOWER LEVELS IS BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. ARMED RESPONSE.

Rita and Carla were picked up on time and taken to the country club, where they cleaned the men’s locker room, but Rita saw nothing out of the ordinary there, except for four or five men carrying weapons. They had their lunch outside, and Rita gently pumped Carla for information about what she had seen while cleaning there. At three o’clock, the bus returned the workers to the parking lot, searching each of them as they got off.

Rita drove away in her terrible old car, checking her mirrors and driving an erratic pattern to be sure she wasn’t followed. Finally she allowed herself a deep breath and a smile. She had gotten away with it.