Caribbean Gold

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Key West sits at the southernmost tip of the Florida Keys, popular for its Duval Street attractions, its port and its blood-red sunsets. Alicia had initially felt gratified when Crouch called in the authorities and gave Jensen over to them; now as she walked the hot, tropical sidewalks of Key West, she found several moments of second-guessing. And when she voiced her concerns to Crouch the look he gave her only spoke to the fact that he shared her misgivings.

Still, the mission at hand was an attractive one. A quest that they had thought over still held promise. It wasn’t unusual for newer versions of old tomes to be edited, cut down and repackaged. Publishers tried to make them more marketable, easier on the brain. Jensen had taken the time to research Henry Morgan to the full, but clearly hadn’t trusted any one of his lieutenants enough to send them on this mission.

A small light bulb went off.

Where were his lieutenants?

They hadn’t been present at the Viejo battle. Why not? Something more important was afoot. And Jensen himself had sent the Gold Team on this diversion. Still, they were here now and she wanted to see the outcome.

Time enough to worry later.

Tourists thronged the streets, aimlessly wandering between shops and bars, and trying to fit their cars into the tiny parking areas. Palm trees swayed happily in a light breeze. The smell of salt was in the air, tinged by diesel fumes. Colorful music spread from all corners and through shop doors, merging with the colorful locals and besotted tourists. The atmosphere galvanized a smile even from Russo.

“Feels like we should stay and play,” he said in a rare moment of levity.

Alicia slapped his back. “There we go. I knew there was a party animal under that rough and ready exterior.”

“Less animal.” Russo had never been more flippant with her. “More warrior.”

“The Party Warrior?” Alicia said. “You could probably market that.”

Crouch led them down a side street and stopped in front of a pair of canons and a clean, tall gray building with lots of windows. Alicia remembered this place from a few years ago when she’d been flirting with the enemy. The memories weren’t happy; the days since much better than those long past. She was thankful now for the change. She’d turned her life around and stuck with the motto: One life, live it.

We might all be dead tomorrow.

If she had learned one lesson, achieved one instant of enlightenment, that was it. They were living, they were there right now, so make the most of every moment in which you lived and loved and breathed.

Because death didn’t care one bit. It didn’t care who you left behind, who cried and who laughed, who missed you every single day. It didn’t care who raised a glass or drove a mile or played a song for you. Alicia had stared death in the face a hundredfold, and told it to go fuck itself every time. She would do so again until that fateful moment finally came when she no longer wished to escape the cold embrace.

Crouch led the way up the steps and into the cool interior of the museum. In addition to its books it carried one of the largest collections of seventeenth-century shipwreck and pirate artifacts in the world. Just what they were looking for. Crouch nodded in satisfaction as he read as much aloud.

“We came to the right place.”

“Or were directed here,” Alicia said.

“Don’t be a pessimist. This is all part of the hunt. Be excited.”

“Oh, I’m excited.” Alicia sniffed as she looked around the well-presented and purposely shady interior. “Can’t you tell?”

Artifacts gleamed from glass cabinets and low, polished pedestals. Maps and manuscripts glowed on the walls. Huge canons pointed the way to more impressive treasures. Crouch sought out the solitary guide among the numerous rooms and asked about the book they had come to see.

“Yes we have the book, The Pirate King,” the guide, a fifties-something woman with short hair and stern eyes, said. “But we don’t generally lend it out. This is a museum, not a library, sir.”

Crouch took the acerbity well. “But surely it is an artifact of sorts and could still prove useful. We could go straight to the right page. We’d wear gloves. You don’t even have to move it.”

“I don’t know…”

“How about a donation?” Caitlyn asked. “Cash.”

“You mean to the museum?”

Crouch shrugged indifferently. “We only need five minutes.”

“I’ll need to get back to the front.”

They were taken through a high, dark opening into a small room where the walls were all glass cabinets and the spotlights shone down with bright abandon. Many volumes lay within the cabinets, all open and all covered in an ancient, spidery brown script. The guide led them straight to a corner, stopped in front of a chest-high row and produced a key. Alicia smelled polish in the air and some kind of cleaning chemical.

“Five minutes,” the guide said. “Be cool. I’ll be back.”

Crouch opened the glass door and reached right in. Caitlyn had worked out the page number and location of the deleted passage, but hard reality was a little different to theory. It took Crouch two minutes of squinting and careful flicking back and forth to find what they were looking for. Pages rustled and creaked rather alarmingly and he had to fight twice with the glass door which kept wanting to close. “Nothing worth doing,” he said as he worked, “is ever easy.”

“A guy told me that once,” Alicia said with mock glumness. “Didn’t know whether to thank him or hurt him.”

“Does this sound right to you?” He stood back.

Caitlyn moved in. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

Healey read the passage out: “And though he traveled often and tarried little, Henry Morgan did find himself a stronghold. Not a refuge but a fastness. It lay between Haiti and Panama and Port Royal, spoken of as a large mountain surrounded by a ribbon of beach with an unusual feature atop. A wizened, crooked, bent old tree, a hundred foot tall. A marker of passing time. No leaves, no branches, nothing but a stark, warped trunk. Why was it here? It was there to speak to the fanciful mind of the Pirate King. ’ ”

“Interesting,” Crouch said. “And yet I can see why they deleted it from the book. It really adds nothing of interest.”

Alicia frowned. “To be fair — not even a location.”

“Exactly. It’s pretty vague in more ways than it’s helpful. But…” Crouch turned with a smile. “A man of the seas, a sailor, a—”

“Pirate?” Caitlyn interrupted with a smile.

“Well, yes, whoever sails these Caribbean seas would know that island. All we have to do is find the right person.”

“You’re buying in?” Alicia asked.

Crouch grinned. “Who wouldn’t?”