Patriot

CHAPTER 17

And so it was that Alex Hawke and his octogenarian valet temporarily abandoned Teakettle Cottage and installed themselves aboard the gracious seventy-foot ketch Santana. After that first week of living aboard, he felt tanned and rested. He spent lazy days wearing nothing but his bathing trunks and catching fish off the stern. One evening, sipping a Dark ’n Stormy up on deck as the sun sank, Hawke had a revelation of sorts. He decided it would be hard to imagine a more pleasant place to spend one’s days and nights than on a beautiful boat moored at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club.

The salmon-colored clubhouse, surrounded by swaying royal palms, was situated on the famously beautiful Hamilton Harbour, right in the heart of the charming old town. And the club’s cedar-paneled bar was among the coziest spots on the planet, he thought, smiling at the barman as he strolled in for his evening restorative.

Horace Spain, known since memory as “Cap,” was a twelfth-generation Bermudian and had been behind that lovely old mahogany bar since Hawke could remember and — someone was smiling and waving madly at him from across the room — who she was, he hadn’t the foggiest.

“Hey! If it ain’t my old buddy himself, Lord Hawke,” said an amply curved blonde in a tight silk blouse. She was hailing him from a small corner table. “Come sit down and let me buy you a drink, honey. Dark ’n Stormy, if I remember right?”

“Crystal?”

“Hell, yes, son!”

Crystal Methune, from Louisville, Kentucky, Hawke’s memory registered. He’d met her two nights earlier at the club’s Annual Regatta Committee cocktail reception. An altogether alluring package, she was a newly minted divorcée. She had arrived in Bermuda on Sunday aboard Celestial. The spectacular 250-foot motor yacht had been awarded to her, she claimed, by a benevolent judge in her hell-to-pay-honey divorce in Palm Beach.

Hawke had liked her instantly. And it wasn’t the champagne courtesy of the Regatta Committee. There was something about her saucy sense of humor that reminded him slightly of his mother; she was also a southern belle, but born on the Louisiana banks of the muddy Mississippi rather than Crystal’s red clay topsoil of Kentucky horse country. She’d let it drop that she was the owner of the Horse of the Year, a spectacular racehorse named Buckpasser.

The Englishman had always found women from the American southland to be both funny, wise, and, beneath a brave facade… somewhat sad and vulnerable, a combination that equaled charm… in his mind anyway.

Hawke looked at the woman and her attendant cleavage and then smiled at Cap, the old black barman, shrugging his shoulders in the what the hell are you going to do? manner that all men instinctively understood, and pulled out a chair.

“Crystal,” he said, “I thought you were sailing on the morning tide for Nantucket.”

“Decided to stick around, darlin’. Fishing’s pretty good here right about now. Especially around the docks. Know what I mean?”

“Ah, I fish, too,” Hawke said, brightening.

“Not the way I do, honey.”

“Sorry?”

“I mean I never stop. Until I got ’em hooked, gaffed, and thrashing around in the bottom of the boat. Trick is not to marry ’em.”

Hawke, amused by the image of a woman marrying a cold fish, laughed, took a sip of his drink, and turned the high beams on her. A little female companionship might do him good. It had been a long, long time. Besides, why the hell not?

“You have plans for dinner tonight, Crystal?”

“Listen, honey, I hope to hell I do.”

“I make a mean spaghetti bolognese. It’s simmering away down in the galley aboard my little boat as we speak. Hope you like garlic.”

She looked him up, down, and back again. Then she reared up at the table and mimed hauling back and reeling on a deep sea fishing rod. She said: “And so the gleaming sunlit trophy fish, twisting and writhing on my silvery hook, rises majestically to the bait…”

“And yet you seem like such a nice girl, Crystal.” Hawke smiled.

“Pure as the driven slush, honey,” she replied.

Hawke laughed, a portion of his beloved Dark ’n Stormy going down the wrong way.

Aboard Celestial, the crew was going about its duties. Colonel Beau Beauregard, the soldier of fortune who was the 250-foot yacht’s owner, was in his quarters. He had asked not to be disturbed. He’d informed the steward in the galley that he’d be dining alone tonight in the owner’s stateroom.

He was stretched out on the oversized round bed, naked beneath his black silk-paisley dressing gown from Charvet. He was a big man, heavily muscled but sleek and quick, with a steely intelligence belied by his overpowering aspect and athletic appearance.

His eyes were so dark that many people thought they were black. Black with startling glints of red when he was angry, they said, fierce fits of rage that occurred with ever increasing frequency since his public humiliation and fall from grace. The colonel tried to mask his anger with the courtly manners of a southern gent, but it was far too intense for him to cover up. He literally seethed anger.

And woe unto those who crossed him. Here was a man who had won worldwide fame and amassed a vast fortune by killing for money. Look in the dictionary under “mercenary”? You see his picture. Now only one thing motivated Colonel Beauregard and it wasn’t money: it was a bottomless pit boiling in his soul, filled to overflowing fiery hatred and the overwhelming need to exact revenge.

The stateroom was nearly black, only a few hidden lights in the overhead giving a soft pearly glow.

He was staring at a dark blue ceiling pinpointed with lights depicting in real time the shifting positions of constellations, a pair of high-tech headphones covering his ears. He pressed a hidden button and a wall-sized mirror behind his bed slid silently back into the bulkhead.

Revealed were the winking red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. It was a mainframe IBM computer linked to a massive telecommunications system with global satellite capabilities similar to the one that afforded U.S. presidents worldwide links aboard Air Force One.

He knew what was back there. His company, Vulcan, which, before his epic fall from grace, had been the worldwide leader in mercenary troops and weaponry for hire, had helped design both systems for the United States Air Force.

His headphones crackled and his ears perked up. He was now privy to anything being said or done aboard Lord Hawke’s yacht, Santana. What he hoped, what he really wanted, was for his favorite gun-for-hire, Crystal Meth, he called her, to fuck the guy before she delivered the lethals. Yeah, that would be good. Like that drunken CIA dickhead she did in Paris at the Bristol in the spring. And it was icing on the cake she’d been able to team up with Spider Payne, who had his own agenda in that escapade. What a hoot.

His headphones went live again, so clear and static free: “Miss Crystal Methune is arrived back on deck, m’lord,” he heard an elderly Englishman, obviously a butler, say. “I offered her champagne but she asked for our best bourbon, sir.”

“Ah, good. What do we have on board?” he heard Lord Hawke reply.

“I suggest the Knob Creek, sir. She says she is formerly from Kentucky. Louisville, I believe.”

“Make it so, dear soul. And inform our lovely guest that I shall be with her momentarily.”

“Indeed, sir.”

Beauregard clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back against the pillows, and smiled as his favorite constellation, Orion, arced overhead across the twinkling ceiling. His “Furies” as he called Crystal Meth and his stable of female assassins, were the best in the world. Relentlessly seductive, they found ever more inventive ways to kill without a trace; ways that could never, ever, be traced back to him.

“This is going to be good,” Beauregard whispered to himself, a wide grin spreading across his bronzed face. Besides money and women, nothing held more appeal for the Texan than ice cold revenge.

“I’ve got you, you rich, MI6 fuck,” the colonel said aloud, savoring the sounds of his words.

And he was just getting warmed up. Sooner or later, the whole damn world would feel his wrath, his terrible vengeance. Like his old daddy once said during the Texas High School Football Championship when he knocked a big tackle from Lubbock unconscious, “People got to learn sooner or later, Beau, you fuck with a truck, you get run over. You’re a truck, boy, and don’t you ever forget it.”