Black Widow

13

Shortly after landing at a private airstrip on Saint Lucia, two hundred miles off the South American coast, I rented a boat and made the short water crossing to Saint Arc.

Now I was working my way down a rain-forest mountainside toward the rental house where Shay and her bridesmaids had stayed. Occasionally, I got a glimpse of the place through trees alive with orchids and canoe-sized leaves.

Shay had picked it as the ideal spot for a women’s getaway. As I got closer, I understood the appeal.

It was a Tahitian-style house on stilts, built of tropical wood so rich with natural oils it glowed amber in the lavender afternoon light. The house sat among coconut palms, overlooking a lagoon on its own little cusp of beach. A wicked beach for topless sunbathing, Shay had described it.

There were people on the beach now. Four stretched out on towels. Women, probably, but I was too far away to be sure.

Palms and a rock ridge screened the house from a longer beach and a resort hotel a quarter mile away-a busy place with umbrellas and Jet Skis. Here, though, the house and lagoon were quiet, a private island on a larger island. It looked idyllic, safe. An inviting rental-also an alluring trap for blackmail.

I spent another five minutes descending the hillside, the forest floor spongy underfoot as parrots and macaws quarreled in a tree canopy that filtered sunlight, so it was a little like being underwater-darker, cooler, until I stepped into a clearing a hundred yards above the beach.

Yes… women. All topless; two of them nude. Seen from above, their bodies mimicked the curvature of wind sculptures; skin dark against white sand that edged the lagoon. I’d studied the nautical charts. The lagoon formed the upper basin of a canyon that descended to the sea bottom several hundred feet below. Water was Jell-O blue in the shallows, then dropped vertically in black shafts of light.

I stood for a moment, feeling uneasy and ridiculous-a reluctant voyeur unaccustomed to imposing on the privacy of women. I hadn’t known the house was occupied.

I ducked into the forest, moving quietly downward. Soon, I was close enough to see the swimming pool behind the house. The pool was kidney-shaped with an adjoining Jacuzzi built into a stone deck. There was patio furniture, a grill, and a bar. The area was unscreened, but hedged by bougainvilleas in pale yellow bloom. Hedges gave the illusion of privacy, but they were trimmed low, so my view was unobstructed.

It had to be close-the place where a cameraman had set up equipment and filmed Shay, Beryl, Liz, and Corey with the islanders. If the girls were random victims, there wouldn’t be much to find. But if the rental house was designed for blackmail, there would be a fixed place for filming.

I found it. The camera blind was so well-camouflaged with netting and branches that I nearly passed it. The netting covered a structure built of bamboo and lumber, open on all sides, and roofed with palm thatching. Like a hunter’s blind.

The entrance was a slit in the netting. I found a stick, broke it, then used it as a probe to check for booby traps. I tossed the stick away, then stepped through the opening.

It was a cozy little place: two folding chairs; an Igloo cooler beneath a table where there was an ashtray, and a plastic box-the kind you burp to seal. Inside were a couple of French magazines, a crumpled blue pack of Gauloise cigarettes, and several minicassettes, unopened. Panasonic DVM-60s-like the one used to film the girls.

I picked up a magazine. Paris Match, logo in red.

On the cover was an attractive middle-aged woman, looking good in a two-piece swimsuit, hands combing her hair back as she exited the water-a candid shot.

I don’t speak French, but I understand a little. The headlines were easily translated; the woman’s name was familiar to anyone who follows world events via shortwave radio. I do.

The woman was Senegal Firth, a candidate for British Parliament, favored to win until she withdrew one month prior to the election. Controversial. I didn’t remember details.

I checked the date of the magazine. Seven months old. Ms. Firth had been vacationing on Saint Arc when the photo was taken. It was an unflattering shot of a photogenic woman: late forties, interesting eyes, brown hair, very fit in a navy blue two-piece that clung.

I flipped inside. More candid swimsuit photos. I read enough to understand that Ms. Firth was outraged by the breach of privacy and was threatening to sue.

Sniper photographers were welcome, apparently, on Saint Arc.

The other magazine, also French, was for orchid aficionados.

An odd combination.

The front of the blind looked down onto the pool, only fifty yards away, but it was insulated from the property by a sheer ledge that dropped a hundred feet onto lichen gray rocks. The ledge rimmed the mountain, so it was a quarter mile or more to the house on foot.

As I closed the magazine, two women who’d been on the beach came into view, very tall, bony, towels over their shoulders. They were so close, I could hear bits of conversation-American women, middle-aged, Midwestern accents.

As one of them leaned to step out of her bikini bottoms, I felt a creeping revulsion. I reached to drop a curtain that covered the viewing window. This cozy little camera blind was a nasty little place. Violence can be done in silence. I’d come to gather intel and evidence, not to ogle unsuspecting women. Let the ladies swim in private.

I opened the cooler-several champagne bottles inside, two empty, all of them warm. A thread of spider’s silk angled from the table to the window frame. It takes a spider several hours to construct a web, but this lone thread was older-no spider in sight.

No one here today. That might soon change. Women were renting the house, and tomorrow was Sunday. I remembered Shay telling me there was nothing going on at the nearby resort the night the men showed up-a Sunday night.

I got busy.

I pulled on surgical gloves. One by one, I opened the videocassettes and used a pocket knife to cut the magnetic tape where it bridged the rollers. If the camera’s computer didn’t flash an alert-media error-the cassette spools would turn, the tape would not.

I left two cassettes intact, securing them separately in plastic bags. If the day came when I needed fingerprints, they might be useful. I also bagged several cigarette butts-DNA. A roach butt went into another baggie. If it had been infused with a synthetic drug, forensics labs could identify it.

From a waist pack, I removed one of two tiny digital recorders I’d brought, then a remote microphone the size of a pencil eraser. The recorder was voice-activated. It had enough memory to record twelve hours of conversation.

After several frustrating minutes, I figured out how to reduce microphone sensitivity-I wanted conversation, not twelve hours of birds chirping. I tested it, sealed it in its case, and hid the recorder under moss along the inside wall. I’d just found a spot to clip the microphone when I heard leaves rustling… the crack of a branch… another… then a muffled male voice, very close.

Visitors.

I knelt and parted the netting: two men coming from the north, where the road angled close to the forest. White guys, early twenties, with tangled black hair. Each carried a backpack. One also carried a tripod; the other lugged a bag of ice.

They were twenty yards away, facing the blind’s entrance, making it impossible to leave the way I’d entered. Instead, I took a last look at the microphone, then burrowed under the netting at the south wall and crawled on my belly into some ferns.

I gave it several seconds, then turned and faced the camera blind, pulling leaves closer for cover. I also unholstered the palm-sized Colt. 380 clipped inside the back of my pants. I confirmed there was a round in the breach, then held the pistol ready as I waited.

I couldn’t see the men as they entered the blind, but I could hear them whispering in patois French. I caught a few words, but understood little. I heard the ice chest open; heard the measured, metallic sounds of a tripod being set up.

Fifteen minutes later, they were joined by a third man. After that, they whispered in English-islander English, which was only slightly easier to understand than French, and almost impossible to hear.

I was getting them on tape, but I didn’t want to wait. I decided to risk it. I left my soft spot in the ferns, crawled to the blind, and put my ear against the netting. There was the flicking sound of a lighter lighting a joint, and the clink of a bottle.

I found a hole in the webbing wide enough for one eye, and took a look. The third man wore a red bandanna tied pirate style, blond dreadlocks spilling out from beneath. Open white shirt with cuffs, hairless chest, skin tanned butterscotch. Shay’s guy in the video. He stood smoking a cigarette while the others shared the joint and drank beer, in no hurry. The impression was they were done for the day even though there was no camera mounted on the tripod.

They’d rolled up the canvas curtain and were watching the women. I couldn’t see the pool, but I knew what the men were seeing from their whispered jokes and laughter. I could read their facial expressions-distaste; pained locker-room grimaces at the sight of forty-year-old women swimming naked. They traded clinical assessments. Made cruel and graphic comparisons. But they watched, anyway.

Pointless cruelty invites a violent response.

I had the pistol in my right hand. I slipped it under the netting, then touched the gun sights experimentally to each man’s head, one by one- an adolescent demonstration that a professional wouldn’t do. Stupid. This was personal business, not an assignment. I couldn’t go running to the U.S. Consulate in Grenada if local law enforcement came after me. But it was so damn tempting.

The three continued to joke about the women as I lowered the Colt and turned my eye away from the netting. Listening was bad enough without seeing their facial theatrics.

It was another ten minutes before they tired of the subject and said something useful.

I heard, “Mon, do you really ’spect me to screw them women tomorrow night? Put our hands on them ol’ ladies? I goan have to drink myself blind first.”

Translation: I’ll have to drink myself blind first.

In the same dialect, the man with the pirate bandanna-Bandanna Man-whispered, “Then you better start drinkin’ ’cause those ladies are the golden egg, what you’re seein’ down there. Them women are rich.”

“Okay, man, okay. I’ll do it, but I ain’t likin’ it.” Laughter.

The third man’s accent was more French than islander. “Then what we sittin’ here for? We’ll be seeing them too soon as ’tis. Burnin’ up all our drinkin’ time tonight don’t make no sense. Dirk?”

“Yeah, man.”

“Wolfie’s comin’ with the camera tomorrow. That right? You tell that pompous fool be on time. We meet him at the Green Turtle, six o’clock. You hear me?”

“Yeah, man, doan worry. It takes a bottle of rum before I go blind and deaf.”

They were laughing as they left, one by one-a standard security precaution that told me they’d done this before. I crawled to the edge of the camera blind and got a good look at them sneaking away through the rain forest toward the road.

Beryl and Shay had given me descriptions of the men who’d lured them into the swimming pool. Two looked European, possibly Dutch, jet-setter Shay had told me, but they were locals with French-West In-dies accents. She’d also described the butterscotch islander with blond dreadlocks, but I would’ve recognized him, anyway. Shay’s partner.

These were the guys. They’d be back tomorrow night.

So would I.

I gave it five minutes, then took another look inside the camera blind. It was now supplied for tomorrow night’s filming. Snacks, Red Stripe beer wedged around a block of ice, the tripod, and a sleeve of three new videocassettes. Would Wolfie, the cameraman, notice broken cellophane wrappers?

My guess: Wolfie was the bagman I’d followed from the Bank of Aruba to the waterfront bar they’d mentioned, the Green Turtle. If true, Wolfie was fifteen years older, a big, round man, wore expensive Italian sunglasses, and drove a nice car-a man competent with money and cameras. Wolfie might be a pompous fool, but he wasn’t the one who’d lugged all this gear up the mountain.

Wolfie was the man in charge. Maybe the blackmailer. If he wasn’t, he was better connected than the other three.

Below the blind, a third and fourth woman had joined the others. Two wore gauzy beach kaftans. One had pulled on a man-sized T-shirt, Michigan, in blue and gold. Moneyed ladies on vacation-but their faces didn’t have the glossy angularity I associate with face-lifts and wealth. They looked cheerful, full of fun, as they made a pitcher of margaritas and kibitzed about where they would go for dinner.

Four old friends, comfortable with themselves and their age, their flaws-my read. They didn’t deserve the ambush that awaited.

I popped the cellophane and disabled the new cassettes. If the cameraman noticed, so be it. If he carried fresh cassettes, there was nothing I could do.

I confirmed the recorder was working, then slipped through the opening into rain forest. I scouted around until I found a good viewing platform of my own: a rock ledge to the south. If I sat on the ledge, the camera blind’s viewing window was uphill, to my right. The swimming pool was downhill to my left.

From my pocket, I took a roll of special reflective tape. Hit it with a regular flashlight, it resembled green ribbon. Use infrared light, though, in combination with night-vision optics, it glittered. Because I might have to find this ledge at night, I tied a couple of pieces on nearby foliage, then used four-inch lengths to mark an escape route.

I chose a trail that ran along a rock ridge. At a couple of spots, the ridge dropped off fifty or sixty feet onto rocks below-okay for a man wearing night vision; dangerous for a man who wasn’t.

At the narrowest section, I thought about stringing a trip wire. Wrap it with the special tape-I would see it. Anyone chasing me would not. But if an innocent hiker came tromping along this path…?

Couldn’t do it.

I continued walking… then froze as parrots flushed from trees to my left, screaming an alert. I stood there for a long minute, searching the shadows. Something, or someone, had spooked the birds.

I pocketed the marking tape, and slipped the Colt from the back of my pants. Slowly, I started uphill toward a grove of traveler’s palms where the parrots had been. The leaves of the palms fanned out like a green wall… but the wall was moving-something in there.

I had the little semiautomatic palmed, not showing it but ready, when two iguanas came snaking out-miniature dragons, skin iridescent green, reptilian tongues probing. They were the size of small dogs.

I watched, focusing on the green wall. Iguanas eat birds’ eggs, and sometimes birds. Parrots would flush at their approach and scream an alert.

So why did I suddenly feel as if the jungle had eyes? That I was being watched?

Ridiculous. A cliche from cowboy movies; folklore from childhood. I don’t believe in such things.

I holstered the pistol and moved on.