Pinnacle Event

3

The rear wheels spun, trying to gain purchase on the gravel. He knew if he took his foot off the accelerator, the Cherokee would quickly slip backward and go over the side to crash on the rocks by the sea.

Then suddenly the Jeep lurched forward and he pressed down harder on the pedal. As happened when he was nervous, Dugout began narrating his life in real time to himself, his mind racing. He thought of the story that would have run in his hometown paper: “Douglas Carter III, known to his friends as Dugout, was killed in a Caribbean car crash.” If that happened, his mother would be surprised and upset when she learned he was to be cremated. He had never shown her his will.

Then the road shifted left at almost 90 degrees and the grade shot up farther. And he was on the left-hand side of the road. Why the shit, he wondered, did they drive on the wrong side when this was part of America? We had bought it or stolen it years ago, from the Danes or the Brits or Spanish or somebody, probably before there even were cars.

Surely there were rules, he thought, regulations, about how ridiculous a hairpin turn could be. Sweet Jesus. And then the road switched right and climbed some more, just as one of those absurd Jeepney things came crashing down hill. Stretched, open-air buslike Jeeps, he had only ever seen them before in the Philippines and some places in Central America. But America was not supposed to be a third world country. Right now was the exception. This Jeepney looked like it had been painted in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s by Peter Max. “Ayyyah,” a passenger cried as the thing missed him by inches and went on cascading down the road.

What was this road like when it rained, which the guy at the car rental place had told him it does every day? What if you had popped a few before driving? He made a mental note to find out the fatality figures.

Then, finally, the road, if you could call it that, began to descend gradually and flatten out. He felt himself exhaling, loosening his grip on the wheel. It will be just as bad going back, his interior voice said to him in that maddening way it had of providing a running commentary on his life.

Now, there was civilization up ahead. Or, at least, there were buildings, small colorful houses, and a little town. He passed a concrete schoolhouse, painted in pastels, on the left. On the right was a tiny firehouse, too tiny for what sat outside it. What looked like a Book-Mobile truck, but with lots of antennae, was on the side of the road, its Day-Glo yellowy green paint job shining in the sun. USVI MOBILE COMMAND POST were the words painted in large letters on its side. It proved his theory that everyone but him had been given a mobile command post by the Department of Homeland Security. And he was probably one of the few people who would know what to do with one.

This mobile command post could never make it on those roads. It must have arrived by barge to sit here until discovered by archaeologists in some future era. Whatever would they think of it, he wondered. Then he spotted what he assumed was his destination.

The parking lot had a half dozen or more cars scattered in it, indicating, no doubt, that this shack was the bar, Skinny Legs. The online guide had said it was “seedy but charming.” The first descriptor was self-evidently true. A chicken walked in front of him through the dusty lot and he found himself wondering what they served here for lunch. He realized that it was after eleven in the morning and all he had eaten so far was a donut he had grabbed in Red Hook on St. Thomas before getting on the water taxi.

The low ceiling in the shack would have been oppressive if there had been walls, but Skinny Legs was a kind of open-air sports bar. Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots banners and memorabilia hung from the ceiling and covered the walls. Boston in the tropics.

He sat on a barstool and waved at the woman behind the bar. “What’ll yah have, hun?” she asked in a voice that indicated to him either Dorchester or Southie.

“Margarita.” Then he had to ask. “Dorchester or Southie?”

“Dot. You?”

“Belmont.”

She screwed up her face. “Rich kid, huh? Belmont Day School or BBN?”

“Belmont High, actually,” he said and smiled in the way that usually worked, that made him seem sweet and innocent, or so he had been repeatedly told by now ex-boyfriends.

“That was before he went to MIT, Joannie,” Ray Bowman’s voice said from behind Dugout. “I’ll serve this one. We don’t actually do margaritas here, ’cuz we don’t have a blender. So how ’bout a Painkilla?” Bowman moved behind the bar.

Bowman looked smaller, Dug thought. Maybe it was the flip-flops. Or maybe it was the Hawaiian shirt. And there was a surprising amount of gray speckling his three-day beard.

“As long as it’s not too sweet,” Dug replied.

“I knew it would be you. No one else could have found the trail,” Ray said, handing him the plastic-covered menu. “Want food?”

“You know what Vela is?” Dug asked.

“Some sort of cheese you squirt? Don’t have any. Get the fish tacos.”

“What kind of fish is it?”

Ray smiled, “No one knows. It’s white. Not bony. Probably cod, but, no one knows really.”

“Okay, but hold the fries. Is there a fruit cup instead?”

“You serious?” Ray laughed. “You bring me any Havanas as an inducement?”

“I did,” Dug said reaching into his backpack. “Inducement to do what?”

“Whatever stupid shit task they sent you here to get me to take on for them,” Ray said reaching for the Cohiba.

“So, once again, did you ever hear of Vela?”

Ray lit the cigar and took a drag, letting a large cloud of smoke flow over the bar. “Coits?” he said, walking out from behind the counter.

“As in interruptus?” Dug asked.

“No, that’s coitus,” Ray said, pushing Dug off the bar stool. “Let’s go outside. Come on.” Dug looked at him oddly, but followed Ray out into a sandy backyard and the noonday sun.

Ray Bowman grabbed four heavy, iron horseshoes and handed two to Dugout. “Best three outa five. Let’s start at the end under the tree.”

“Whooah. This can’t be regulation length. It’s like a mile to that little post,” Dug said.

“Its regulation, all right. I’ll give you a break, though, I’ll go first.” Ray’s first toss landed eight inches to the right of the post. Dug had been watching Ray’s style of motion and imitated it perfectly, landing his iron standing up, two inches to the right of the target. Then, it slowly fell backward, leaning against the post. “Leaner,” he announced.

Ray Bowman scowled and then stepped into his toss with determination, his horseshoe knocking the leaner off and then bouncing and landing three feet behind.

“Mutually assured defeat, huh?” Dug asked as he stood in. He paused, stared at the target, moved his arm back, stepped forward, and launched. “Ringer,” he said as the cling rang out from the horseshoe hitting the post. He pushed his Maui Jim’s up on his head and said. “Vela was a constellation of satellites launched in the 1970s. Simple birds with one purpose, to detect nuclear explosions aboveground.”

“Okay,” Ray said as he relit the Cohiba.

“In September 1979, Vela detected an explosion off South Africa,” Dug continued.

“So?”

“South Africa later admitted having made nuclear weapons,” Dug explained.

“Didn’t know that.”

“And, before ending apartheid and handing control over to Nelson Mandela, the white government reported to the UN that it destroyed six nuclear weapons. End of inventory,” Dug said.

“Ancient history then,” Ray said and waved at the waitress inside Skinny Legs. “Two Red Stripes, please Joannie.”

Dug looked Bowman in the eyes. “We have reason to believe that white South Africans just sold nuclear weapons.”

“To who?”

“To whom,” Dug corrected. “That’s what they want you to find out.”

“Christ, I’d forgotten how pedantic you could be,” Ray Bowman said as he took the two beers from Joannie. “Come on, Dugster. Let’s walk down to the water.”

They passed a dozen or more boats that had been brought up on the land, apparently a while ago, their paint faded, tropical vines gradually covering them. The beached boats gave the little harbor town a sense of insouciance, of the pressure to “do something” having lifted and drifted off. “Up there,” Ray said pointing to one of the steep, verdant hills behind the town. “That’s where my cottage is. But then you know that, I assume.”

Dug took a swig of the Red Stripe. “Let’s just say I haven’t been looking in every sleazy bar in the Caribbean.”

The two men walked up on to a brightly painted, little restaurant on the water’s edge. They helped themselves to an outside table under the sign SERAFINI’S CARIBBEAN-ITALIAN. A grandmotherly woman quickly appeared from inside.

“Hi, Robbie. Need a menu?” Mrs. Serafini asked.

“Robbie?” Dug asked when she’d left them.

“Well, I did take some measures to cover my tracks, but, since you’re here, obviously not sufficient ones.”

Dug buried his face in the menu. “I always knew where you were. Never lost track. Don’t ask how.”

“Well, I guess in a way that’s comforting,” Ray replied, scanning the boats on the water. “Although it was nice to pretend to myself that I was free.”

“You are free. They can’t make you come back. It’s just that they’re stumped. And scared. When Dr. Burrell tells the President he has his best people on it, he knows it isn’t true. His best guy is bartending on St. John.”

“And painting. Watercolors initially, but I’m experimenting now with oils and acrylics.”

“Who are you, George W. Bush? Nuclear bombs could ruin the country in a way that we could not ever fully recover from,” Dug said putting down the menu.

Mrs. Serafini reappeared and interrupted. “Here’s a pitcher of the sangria you love, Robbie. The special today is the grilled grouper.” They both ordered the special.

“The special every day is the grouper, but she does change the sauces. Tell Winston Burrell to cool his jets. Bombs made over thirty years ago are not going to work,” Ray insisted.

“These ones will.”

“How do you know that, Einstein?”

Dug leaned forward across the table. “They tested one of them in the middle of nowhere, in the southern Indian Ocean. The replacement for Vela, a package on the new Milstar, picked it up, the telltale double flash of a nuke going off. Radiation detectors on Diego Garcia confirmed. Later, Australia did, too.”

Ray put down his glass of sangria. He pulled on his stubbled chin with his right hand, a mannerism Dugout knew well. It meant Raymond Bowman was pausing, processing.

“We think the explosion was required by the buyers before they paid up for the rest of the lot. Proof that what they were buying worked.”

“‘We’?” Ray asked.

“PEG still exists. It didn’t go away just because you quit. Grace Scanlon is running it. The Policy Evaluation Group still sits up on Navy Hill and still answers the National Security Advisor’s questions, does his special tasks.”

“And what’s this special task?” he asked.

Before Ray’s question could be answered, Mrs. Serafini brought out two plates of fish. “Careful, boys, the plates are hot.”

“Simple,” Dugout replied. “Find out who bought the nukes. Find the bombs before they get them into the U.S. Grab the bombs. Oh, and, make sure there aren’t any other bombs left over somewhere else.”

“That all?”

“Easy for you to do. You’ll be back bartending at Skinny Legs for their New Year’s party. I hear it’s a hoot,” Dug said with his mouth full of grouper.

“It’s better than the scene at Jost Van Dyke’s,” Ray said.

“Who’s he?” Dugout asked.

“Eat your fish. Then we’ll go somewhere private and talk. You need to tell me a lot more.”

“So you’ll help?”

“No, I didn’t say that,” Bowman replied. “You came all the way down here. You might as well tell me your whole story. I like to hear stories.” He refilled their glasses with the fruity red wine.

After lunch, having consumed two beers each and a pitcher of sangria between them in two hours, Ray led Dugout down the road and through some high grass to a small cove. On the little beach in a boat cradle, sat what appeared to be a wreck, a twenty-four-foot wooden sailboat, paint peeling, sections of the hull missing.

Ray pointed to the boat, proudly. “She’s mine.”

“What happened to it, a hurricane sometime in the last century?”

“It’s only been out of the water two years,” Ray replied. “It’s a project. Everyone needs a project. Besides, when I am here, I am alone. Nobody ever comes down here.”

“Did you ever stop to wonder why?”

“When did this supposed nuclear explosion take place?” Ray began, as he lowered himself to the sand under a palm tree on the shore of the cove.

“Nine weeks ago.”

“Well, then, it probably wasn’t what you think it was, because by now any terrorist group worth its salt would have turned some city somewhere to radioactive ash,” Ray said.

Dugout has assumed a yoga position on the sand. “Maybe, but the bomb experts at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos are pretty certain that the double flash was a nuke going off. The air samples they got later were a ninety-six percent positive match. And besides, then there were the murders.”

“Ah, murders. This gets better. Do tell.”

“Six days after the double flash, several expat, white South Africans either murdered or died in suspicious circumstances. Tel Aviv, Vienna, Dubai, Singapore, Sydney. Turns out they all had connections back to the South African bomb program, either themselves or their fathers.”

“Who killed them?” Bowman asked.

“Dunno, but just before they died they each got about a half billion U.S. dollars deposited into accounts they controlled. Thousands of money transfers, from a rat’s nest of hawalas, Bitcoins, anonymous offshore accounts, stolen credit cards, stock sales, you name it.”

“So, you of all people ought to be able to trace through that and find out the origin,” Bowman said.

“Tried. Still trying. No joy. It was very well done. Dead ends everywhere.”

Bowman squinted and shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense to pay a guy and then kill him. Why pay him? How’d you get on to all this anyway?”

“Minerva, the big data analytics package you bought me, was running a scan looking for interesting money laundering and found the thread. When I pulled on it, I found almost two and a half billion bucks had run around the world and then ended up in these accounts.” Dugout was getting excited telling the story, his words coming increasingly faster. “Checked the owners and found dead guys, all of whom had died within hours of each other, spread out all over the world. Asked what did they have in common and, bingo, they all go back to the Apartheid nuke program. And when I check the database on that program, I find that there is an open investigation about a double flash in the Indian Ocean just days before these guys got popped.”

“The flash Velveeta detected?” Bowman asked.

“Vela, but yeah. So I tell Winston Burrell over at the White House and he goes all sorts of ballistic and says it’s an al Qaeda plot to blow up American cities just before the presidential election and he thinks these guys are slowly smuggling the bombs in and getting them in place.”

“What guys?”

Dugout came out of the cross-legged lotus position and stood up. “That’s just it. I have no clue. Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, North Korea? I struck out. So did everybody else. So Burrell sends me here, to get you on a secure video link with him.”

Bowman got up off the sand so he could look Dugout in the eye. “No way. There is no secure video at Skinny Legs or anywhere else on this rock and I am not going off island to talk to Winston.”

Dugout smiled back at him, then bent over and unzipped his backpack. He removed what looked like an iPad. Then he extended a black tube that looked like a Pringles can. Ray guessed it was a satellite antenna. Dugout plugged it into the iPad and tapped at an on-screen keyboard. Quickly a face appeared on screen.

“Situation Room. How can I help you, Dr. Carter?”

“Dr. Carter?” Bowman repeated, laughing.

“I need to speak to the National Security Advisor. He’s expecting my call,” Dugout said to the screen.

“Yes, sir, let me patch you through to Dr. Burrell,” the man on the screen said.

“He’s expecting your call, is he?” Bowman frowned at Dugout. “You working directly for Winston these days?”

“Grace doesn’t mind. Grace, the person who took your job when you disappeared? Anyways, Winston gives me special projects. I usually meet him at the Cosmos Club, in a private room, for dinner,” Dugout admitted.

“How nice for you.”

Dugout then plugged red Beats earphones into the iPad.

The image that then appeared on the screen looked like it came from a camera behind Winston Burrell’s desk on the first floor of the West Wing. The National Security Advisor could be seen sitting down and adjusting the lens, zooming in on his own face. Dugout passed the modified iPad to Bowman, who put on the earphones and sat back down on the sand, looking at the screen.

“I would have thought the beard and hair would be longer,” Burrell began.

“And a happy Monday to you, too, Winston,” Bowman shot back.

“Long time no talk and all that. Look, Ray, what Dug Carter has told you is all true and then some. The Agency has been on to the government in Pretoria and they know these dead guys as the Trustees, the heads of an expat network of South Africans who all had connections to the Apartheid government’s defense industry and their nukes.

“The Intel Community is all agreed that these South Africans must have kept some bombs, tested one to prove to a buyer that they worked, then sold the buyer the others. Problem is that the Intel Community has no idea who bought the bombs or where they were, let alone where they are now. My assumption is al Qaeda and that some of them are already here, probably got one a few blocks from the White House.”

Bowman frowned, skeptically, at Dugout. Winston Burrell continued unabated. “You may not have noticed down there in the Caribbean, but we are in the end stages of a presidential election. Imagine if they blow up a city and then make a demand of the two candidates to pull all our forces out of the Middle East or they will blow up another two cities. Both candidates will agree to pull out, do whatever they demand. Hell, I don’t even know if we could go ahead with an election after even one city had been nuked,” Burrell concluded. “It would be a constitutional crisis.”

“So, what do all the nice departments and agencies suggest you do, Winston?” Ray asked.

“Homeland Security wants to launch a search with radiation detectors. Trucks and helicopters running around in DC and New York with scanners. They want to stop any cargo from entering the U.S. unless it’s been searched first overseas.”

Bowman scowled at the screen. “You can’t do that, Winston. There would be a general panic. Everyone would flee the cities.”

“I know. Self-evacuation is what the FBI calls it. Sounds like a laxative. But seriously, if we do that everyone will leave town and no one would vote. The economy would tank,” Burrell said. “But if we do nothing and a city blows up? Then it turns out we knew about the threat and didn’t warn the public?”

Burrell looked more agitated than Bowman had ever seen him, the usual confidence bordering on arrogance was gone. Burrell continued to pour out his concerns, “My fear, as I said, is they blow up one city and then make demands and say they will blow up more cities unless we meet their demands. The election would be a few days off and there would be huge pressure on the President and the two candidates to give in to their demands. But at this point we don’t even know who they are.”

“What have you told the President?” Bowman asked.

“It’s more like what he’s told me. He wants to seal the borders and start searching for the bombs. Of course, then the bombers would know we were on to them and probably blow up their first nuke. Besides, we can’t survive as an economy if we stop and search everything. We only look at about one or two percent of containers entering this country now. If we looked at all of them, the country would grind to a halt. Everybody is on ‘Just In Time Delivery’ from China or wherever.”

Bowman could see where this conversation was going and he felt his back muscles tightening. “Well, Winston I will give it some thought here with Dugout and send him back to you with some ideas.”

“The fuck you will. The election is November eighth. I got POTUS to agree to give you two weeks to find out who these bombers are and snatch them, grab their nukes. After two weeks, if you can’t find them, we institute Operation Rock Wall, close the borders, and search for the nukes. Then everything will go to hell in a handbasket,” Burrell told him.

“Excuse me,” Ray Bowman replied. “I am a private citizen. This is not my job. I tend bar.”

“I told POTUS last night that I would ask you, on his behalf. He remembered how you stopped the attacks on the subways and the drones. He agreed to the two-week delay only if you were running an operation in parallel to the Intel Community. He said they’ll never crack this, but you might. You could name your terms. Dugout could get you started and he will give you top cover from cyberspace. You know everybody around the world who you would need to work with. Look, think about it overnight and then say yes in the morning. Don’t make the President call you himself.”

The screen went to black. Raymond Bowman sat on the sand in an old bathing suit, stained Skinny Legs T-shirt, and faded Red Sox cap. He knew that the world he had built for himself was fragile, maybe artificial, but he had wanted it to go on longer. He wasn’t healed yet from all the killing on the last job and he certainly wasn’t ready to do it all over again.

“Top cover from cyberspace?” Bowman repeated. He turned and looked out at the turquoise water. “What have you been feeding him?”

“I suppose you could say no.” Dugout was standing behind him.

“And I will, tomorrow morning,” Ray insisted, “and I won’t take any calls from the Oval. Thank you so much for visiting, by the way. You have really made my day.”

“Right. So where do I spend the night? I was planning on going back today.”

“I can hook you up at Gallows,” Ray replied as they headed back up to the Jeep.

“Hook me up to the gallows, hang me just because I did my job and found you?”

“Don’t be a literalist tool, Duggie. It’s a nice resort on the harbor side in Cruz Bay. The only hanging done there is at the bar. Come on, get a move on, I have to get some Champagne before the store closes at six. This is not Manhattan.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

On his way back from Gallows Point, Ray Bowman took a right up a steep driveway to a gated villa. He knew the camera in the stone wall holding the gate would let the people inside see who he was. It took about two minutes and then the gate swung wide. A tin-sounding voice came from a little speaker under the camera, “Come on in, Ray. Just in time for cocktails.”

The cocktails were mojitos. They were always mojitos, which Ray didn’t mind because Dr. Sidney Rosenthal made such good ones, with fresh mint from his own herb garden. Rosenthal said his retirement job was as an herbatologist.

They sat looking across at Tortola and the scattering of small islands that dotted the Sir Francis Drake Channel. Sailboats and ferries were making their way back to ports and the sun was moving toward the horizon in the sky right in front of them. In another hour it would be gone below the waves and would color the few clouds that special Caribbean pink orange.

“How are you sleeping these days, Ray?” Dr. Rosenthal asked.

“Like a rock, except when Cody jumps up on the bed in the middle of the night.” He paused. “Cody is our dog.”

“I know.”

“Well, he’s more Emma and Linda’s dog than mine, but he sleeps in my cabin.”

“What’s up? You’re nervous today.”

“Rosy, you have been really helpful and I think it’s all behind me. I haven’t had the dream in weeks. I am enjoying bartending. I love my ladies. Emma’s having our kid in the spring. The watercolors are getting better. This may be what contentment looks like.”

Rosenthal looked at Bowman and then out at the sea below them. “What’s happened, Raymond?”

“They want me back. Just for a short time, just for a special job.”

Rosenthal shook his head. “It would ruin everything you have achieved, no matter how short the job. The PTSD will return. You might not be able to get that contented state back and, if you do, it will take a long time.”

“I can’t tell you what it is, the job, but it is very important, not just important for The Man, but for all of us.”

“Raymond, you have PTSD for god’s sake.”

“We could all end up with PTSD if somebody doesn’t do this job and do it right,” Bowman shot back. “And quickly.”

“And you’re the only man who could, huh?”

Ray Bowman exhaled and looked at his old canvas boat shoes. “Seems unlikely, I know.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Ray, I’m sorry. If The Man is who I think he is and he has confidence that only you can do it, well, I accept that.” Sid Rosenthal emptied his mojito.

“If I go, will you help me when I get back?”

“I’ll double my rates,” Rosenthal insisted.

“My math was never great, Rosy, but I think doubling zero is still nothing.”

“I’ll make you bartend at all my parties.”

“I do that anyway.” Ray stood up to leave. “I’ll let you know what I decide.”

“Sounds like you already have.”

Ray laughed. “Let’s see how tonight goes.”

The sun did disappear below the waves as Ray drove back to Coral Bay and then up the winding, rock-studded road to the hillside complex of brightly colored little buildings and shacks he had made his home.

He walked in carrying two bottles of Perrier-Jouët that he had persuaded his friend Tommy, the bartender at Gallows Point, to add to the bill for Dr. Carter’s suite. On an island as small as St. John, there was a conspiracy of bartenders.

“Oh, shit, something’s happened,” Emily Sullivan exclaimed when she looked up from her canvas. “Or gonna happen? But it’s something you have to apologize for, Ray, isn’t it? No other reason you’d be comin’ home with the bubbly on a Monday.”

“Em, Em, it could be just because I want us to celebrate your finishing your latest masterpiece,” he responded.

“It ain’t anywheres near finished and you know it, arsehole,” Emily countered as she hugged him. “Besides, you oughta know I can’t drink that stuff now.”

“Did someone say we have the bubbly tonight?” Linda Fazio asked, emerging with her arms covered in clay. “Emy’s painting is not done, but I have just thrown a magnificent little vase and we can damn sure celebrate that. Pop one open there, bow man.

“Bring the bottles to the pool,” Linda said and threw her red sports bra across the patio.

Ray and Linda managed to empty both bottles of Champagne and even persuaded Emily to have a little taste. And somewhere along the line before they all went into Emily and Linda’s bed, it had come out that Ray had to go away for a few weeks to help out an old friend who was in trouble. “Less than a month, really, not even that long.”

It read 0317 on his watch, as Ray stood alone and naked on the little brick patio of his yellow and purple cottage, which had originally been the garage and toolshed of Emily and Linda’s hillside house. Cody had followed him home and curled up inside the cottage, as he always did. “The girls have the house, the boys have the doghouse,” Linda was fond of telling the few visitors they allowed to join them for feasts on the lush hill, usually after long hikes in the National Park that backed up to their property.

He looked down on the handful of lights still on below in Coral Bay and felt once again that warmth and satisfaction of being home, being grounded, settled, centered. It was a new feeling for him, one that he had not really known before in his adult life. This was where he belonged, in a little compound, half overgrown with jungle, hanging on the side of a hill, on an island without an airport, half off the grid. Whatever he did on this new job for Winston, he had to keep foremost in his mind that he had to limit his risks, he had to get back here. He heard something and turned to see Emily holding a Sig Sauer P290RS in her hand.

“I thought you’d need the gun you gave us.” To attract women to guns, Sig had made a version of the P290 with a pink stock. It looked like a toy or some sort of ice cream treat. Ray had bought it for “his women” as a joke, but they had loved having it. Seeing it now in the hand of a beautiful, naked woman, made him laugh aloud.

“No, you guys keep it. I’m clumsy, but I’m not the Pink Panther, not Inspector Clouseau.” He put his arm around her. “Come on and help me pack. I haven’t done that in a while.” They wandered together into Ray’s little cabin, essentially one room dominated by a bed.

“Are you running away, now of all times?” Emily asked, as he threw a suitcase on the bed. “I thought you were finally calming down, that you had found your place in the universe and it was here.”

Ray walked around the bed and embraced her, feeling her bulging belly against his flat abs. “Emy, I’m not running away. I just have a job to do, just one more job, and then I’m back here, back here for good.”

“Bowman, we don’t just want you in our lives, Lin and I need you in our lives. We’re better together as three and we’ll be even better together as four.”

Ray sat on the edge of the bed and, tugging lightly on her arm, he pulled Emily down to sit next to him. “I feel like I have a stake in the future now, Em, our future, together. That little one we created,” he said, caressing her belly, “I need to do this for her. It’s part of my role, making sure she’s safe.”

“It could be a him, you know,” Emily said.

“Either way, there may be something about to happen that would set us all back, collapse the global economy, create chaos. It could even affect us here. If I can help in some small way to stop it, as my last job in that business, I need to do it,” Bowman said, softly, and then lightly kissed Emily’s stomach. “And I promise I won’t put myself at risk. And I will be back in plenty of time to be here for the fun part when she starts kicking.”

Linda stood in the doorway. “You’d better be back soon, asshole, because I am not building the nursery addition all by myself. I need a carpenter’s assistant and that would be you.”

Soon after sunrise, Ray found Emily’s mobile phone, called Gallows Point and was put through to Dugout’s room. “I want you to meet me in half an hour. There’s a little beach.”

Bowman drove down the hill and got back on “The Road,” as the locals called the loop around the island. He passed Cinnamon beach and Trunk Bay, Peace Hill and Hawksnest Beach. They were all still empty. It was early and the tourist season did not really start until Thanksgiving. He abruptly pulled off the road into a parking area big enough for two, maybe three, Jeeps. Dugout was already parked there.

Bowman jumped out of his open-top Jeep and walked through a small iron gate into what seemed like a tunnel through a rain forest. The descending path was covered by a canopy of trees and vines. Dugout followed, stumbling over tree roots and rocks, balancing his backpack. In a few minutes the verdant tunnel opened onto a small, white sand beach and a turquoise cove. No one else was there.

“My private beach,” Ray said, “most of the time.” There was a boarded-up cinder block house, but none of the picnic tables and showers with which the National Park Service had dotted the other beaches on the island.

Bowman stood and faced him. “You know what they call this beach?”

“Ray’s Hideout?”

“It’s named after a guy who bought it in the fifties, built that little shack over there. He was trying to get away from his past, from the killing he had been involved in. Kinda like me. But he was also haunted by images of a future in which cities went up in flames from nuclear bombs.” Bowman walked away from the beach, toward the shack.

“In the end, it didn’t work for him. Being here. He went back to the mainland, back to work,” Bowman said, looking at Dug. “He was the man who built the H bomb.”

“Who the hell lived here?” Dugout asked.

“Oppenheimer. This is called Oppy’s Beach.”

Dugout wasn’t sure what Ray Bowman was telling him.

“So you’re in?”

“You’ve ruined it for me. You and Burrell. I can’t sit down here in paradise thinking about cities being nuked, not any more than Oppy could. But if I’m doing this thing, so are you.”

“Sure, but remember we only got two weeks. Then it’s Rock Wall,” Dugout replied. “They close the ports, the borders, they start looking everywhere with Geiger counters.”

“And if Winston’s right, when he starts Operation Rock Wall, the bad guys will respond by nuking the first city. And even if they don’t, the country will tear itself apart in panic.” Ray Bowman began walking toward the path to the road. “How were you planning on leaving the island?”

“If I am leaving with you in tow, I can call in a Coast Guard helo from Puerto Rico. It can be here in two hours. In the meantime, I can teach you how to use the iPad.”

“However much of a Luddite I may be compared to you, I do know how to use an iPad,” Ray said taking the device. “My three-year-old niece knows how.”

“You’ve never seen one like this. I designed it myself.”

“Oh, good. I kinda liked the one Steve Jobs designed,” Ray shot back.

“This one is secure, encrypted, has a telephone and video phone function and connects to an Air Force communications satellite.”

“That’s nice, Duggie, but I’m going to need identities, passports, credit cards, cash. And I’ll need Winston’s office to phone ahead and open the doors I can’t open by myself. Occasionally, I may need help from the Fort, the Bureau, or the Agency.”

“All of whom, as I recall, were great friends of yours.”

“Don’t be a wise ass. It’s unbecoming,” Ray replied. “Look. I’ll always let you know where I am and what I am up to.”

Dugout had a wide grin. “Don’t worry. I’ll know.”