3

Aleksandr Solayev bit down on the Bacon Mega Double Whopper and felt the extra mayo he had ordered dribbling down his fingers and on to the plastic tray. The burger tasted like heaven. He followed it with a handful of French fries, and sat there for a moment, holding the last mouthful between sticky fingers, reluctant to complete the meal. He wondered how the Soviet Union could ever have hoped to win the Cold War.

The last mouthful went down, thrilling his taste buds, and he let the flavours linger on his tongue for a few seconds before reaching out a hand for the triple-thick strawberry shake. It was so thick that he almost pulled a lip muscle trying to suck it up through the straw.

Three children walked past his table, all screaming at the tops of their voices. Their parents followed, apparently oblivious to the noise, and herded the whole brood out of the restaurant, across the parking lot and into a large blue Nissan Maxima. Solayev could still hear the children yelling as the car slipped down the ramp and back on to the interstate.

He belched softly, took another draw on the straw, and examined his surroundings again. The restaurant looked as good as the food tasted. Everything was so pleasant on the eye – the printed menu above the servery, the brightly coloured furnishings, the mosaic floor . . . And all of it bathed in the bright Florida sunshine that came pouring through the panoramic windows. There was nothing drab here, nothing grey, nothing . . . like home.

He smiled at the thought that this place was also called St Petersburg. It was a long way from the one he had been born in.

The shake seemed easier to draw on now. He removed the plastic lid to investigate and discovered that the ice-cream around the edges was melting quicker than that in the centre. He gave the whole thing a stir, and tried again. This time less effort was required. Learning to live in America, Solayev decided, would involve the mastering of many such minor techniques.

He began tidying up his tray, and noticed the three unused ketchup sachets. They must have given him four, he realized. Surely no one could use four. And there had been six napkins – he had counted them. Such plenty. It was incredible.

The previous evening, in the motel outside Orlando, he had worked his way through the channels on the TV in his room. There had been cop shows, quiz shows, comedies, music, sports of every kind, people talking about God, people selling jewellery. It had reminded him of the first time his father had taken him inside the special Party shop in Leningrad – there were just too many riches to absorb in one go.

Like the Florida women. All those young girls in shorts. He had a better idea now of what dogs on heat felt like. Well, now that he had all the money at last, some female companionship was one of the things uppermost in his mind. Once he was down in the Keys his new life could begin in earnest.

But not Key West, he reminded himself. At first he had thought the guy was kidding him – a town full of queers! – but someone else had confirmed the story. And looked at him strangely. There were some things about America he would have a hard time accepting. And this unhealthy tolerance of perverts was definitely one of them.

His straw gurgled and struck air. Solayev thought about ordering another shake, his third of the day, but one glance at his waistline dissuaded him. It was partly the light summer clothes, he thought: in Murmansk everyone had needed to dress like a bear, and he had hardly noticed the growing paunch.

But it was also about being forty-five. He had to be careful of his diet now – there was no point in striking it this lucky and then immediately keeling over with a coronary.

He carried his tray to the disposal bin, tipped its contents away, and looked around for someone to say goodbye to. But the woman he had spoken to earlier was gone. He remembered the feeling in the motel room, the sense that the room was too big for just him, and that watching TV was something you did with others. The old Russian habits would die hard, he thought.

He walked out to the car, carrying the brown leather attaché case, and climbed in behind the wheel. He placed the case on the seat beside him and opened it, not so much to check that the money was still in it – the case had never been out of his sight – but simply to enjoy the view. A quarter of a million dollars looked back at him.

He smiled to himself, re-locked the case, placed it on the floor behind his seat, and started the Toyota’s engine. The two years he had spent as a naval attaché in Cuba in the early eighties had certainly paid off, albeit in a way that he would never have imagined in his wildest dreams. Back then Raul Ochoa had always behaved as if the sun shone out of Fidel Castro’s arse, and in between chatting up girls at Havana’s tourist hotels the two of them had argued about the relative merits of the Cuban and Soviet roads to socialism.

Solayev snorted with amusement as he pulled out on to the interstate and headed south out of St Petersburg. The collapse of the Soviet Union had been the first of several big surprises in recent years, but all the others had paled before the sudden appearance of Raul Ochoa at his apartment in Murmansk. Ochoa had not only known the details of the small submarine research programme he had been running, but had also been able to confirm the rumours of the programme’s imminent cancellation. Solayev was apparently about to join the rapidly swelling ranks of the post-Soviet unemployed.

But not necessarily, Ochoa had told him. Solayev’s government might not want his submarines, but the Cuban knew someone who did. Not his own government, with whom he had come to a reluctant parting of the ideological ways, but a private businessman.

Ochoa also had a plan for getting both Solayev and the submarines out of Russia. There would be a $250,000 fee for facilitating the export process and instructing the new owners in how to use the craft, and then Solayev could begin a new life in the West. What did he have to lose?

Quite a lot, if the new crime-busting KGB had caught him, but the whole plan had gone like clockwork. In Yeltsin’s Russia a few dollars bought a lot of silence.

He was driving out on to what looked like an endless causeway. ‘The Sunshine Skyway’, a plaque announced. Ahead of him the concrete roadway swept across the bay in a graceful curve on its line of cylindrical pilings. A couple of miles away, somewhere close to the midpoint, a strange-looking bridge reared up against the blue sky.

This is America, he thought. This was something that had been built by people who had confidence in themselves and the world. It was like something out of a science fiction novel. As he neared the bridge it became apparent that it comprised two huge stanchions, which rose soaring out of the centre of the highway, and from which were suspended two vast triangular fans of suspension cable.

The genius of simplicity, Solayev thought, and with all the beauty which that implied. He wanted to stop, but as usual there was nowhere to pull over, so he drove on down the causeway, hoping to find somewhere from which to take a photograph.

He had just sighted the lay-by up ahead when a car cut across in front of him and slowed, siren wailing and red light flashing.

Solayev looked at his speedometer. Perhaps he had been a bit over the limit, but only a bit. Still, what did a twenty-five-dollar fine matter to him?

The police car pulled over into the lay-by and Solayev followed. A flicker of doubt passed through his mind, but was quelled by the sight of the uniformed officers emerging from the car. And in any case, cars seemed to be going past all the time.

Both officers seemed to be Hispanic. One leant nonchalantly against the bonnet of the Toyota while the other asked for his driver’s licence.

‘Was I going too fast?’ Solayev asked, his Russian accent still strong.

The officer continued looking at the licence, as if it fascinated him.

‘Es claro,’ the other man said.

The officer returned the Russian’s licence, and pulled the gun from his holster. The last thing Solayev saw was the man’s brown finger clenching on the trigger.

It was just after six when Franklin arrived at Suzie’s Bar, and Jimmy Durham was still in the process of opening up for the evening.

‘Mr Worrell, sir,’ Jimmy greeted him sardonically. ‘Don’t anyone in that clinic of yours know that alcohol is bad for you?’

‘Only in large doses. Give me a Pils.’

Jimmy retrieved a bottle from the refrigerator. ‘Hot day,’ he said cheerfully.

‘They’re all hot,’ Franklin said. He might have been born in Jamaica, but he had left for England before he could walk or talk, and contrary to white public opinion, black people were no more imbued with a tolerance of extreme heat than they were with natural rhythm.

‘The trick is to sleep by day,’ Jimmy confided, drawing a circle with the drops of beer on the bar.

‘Right. Was Nick in here yesterday?’

‘Yep. Not for long, though. Why – you checking up on your employees?’

‘He’s gone missing.’

Jimmy’s doodling finger came to a stop. ‘What – really missing?’

‘Looks like it.’ Franklin was reluctant to go into the business of the chloroform, though he had little doubt the story would be all over the island before too many more hours had gone by. ‘Did he talk to anyone in here last night?’

‘Only me. He was asking about that boat moored next to his – can’t remember the name. The one Fidel Arcilla owns.’

‘What was he asking?’

‘Just that. Who owned it. Oh, and he said something about a submarine . . .’

‘A submarine?’

‘A small one. You know, the kind they use for treasure hunting. And research. One of those.’

‘This Arcilla involved in treasure hunting?’

‘Seems like it.’

‘But Nick didn’t know about him?’

‘Nope. I told him about the man’s sister. She picks up tourists for a living, screws each one every which way for a few days and then goes back for another.’

Franklin raised an eyebrow. ‘And where do they live?’

‘The restored plantation villa at the end of Long Bay – the last one you come to on the road. Or the first one on the path from the Caicos Marina. But the man’s hardly ever there – spends his time in Miami, they tell me. Just his sister giving it away like there was no tomorrow.’

Franklin grimaced. ‘Is that all?’

Jimmy grinned. ‘Yep. Total Recall is my second name. Second and third names, I suppose.’

Franklin took a last satisfying swig from the bottle of Pils, thanked his informant, and walked back across to the minivan. Once behind the wheel he sighed loudly, ran a hand through his hair, and started up the engine. A few minutes later he was pulling on to the track which led down to the Caicos Marina, and listening to the minivan’s suspension beginning to complain. It was only a four-mile walk, he decided. And the evening breeze was beginning to blow.

His long strides ate up the ground, and not much more than forty minutes had gone by when he walked down the final slope to the channel’s edge. He and Nick had often gone out diving together in the early days – Nick the teacher and he the pupil – and Franklin knew where the Foxy Lady was berthed.

But it was fully dark now, the moon yet to rise, and he had to strain his eyes to be sure he had found the right boat. Having done so, the first thing he noticed was the absence of the boat Nick had mentioned to Jimmy. On one side of the Foxy Lady a small yacht was tied, one of its sail cords tapping against an aluminium boom in the breeze. On the other side were two empty berths. Arcilla’s boat had gone. Treasure hunting, maybe. With Nick on board, maybe.

Franklin clambered aboard the Foxy Lady in search of clues.

He found none. The local ocean charts had been generously augmented with felt-tip, but the markings seemed nothing more than a record of Nick’s reef explorations. The small cabin below was locked, but Franklin felt no scruples about breaking in. After all there was no need for any damage – picking locks was one of the few skills he had learned before joining the army, from the least reputable of the five uncles on his mother’s side of the family.

But there was nothing inside the cabin either. An old Walkman with a Doors tape in it, a couple of private-eye paperbacks, a copy of Teach Yourself Chess and a book of tropical fish, and Nick’s diving gear.

Franklin re-locked the door, climbed back on to dry land and walked up to the marina office. The man in charge was closing up. He hadn’t seen Nick since the previous morning. And the big boat – he seemed reluctant to mention the owner’s name – had left before sunrise that morning. Headed west, he’d been told; aiming to do some treasure hunting with their submarine on the Cay Sal Bank.

Franklin thanked him and walked slowly back down towards Nick’s boat, wondering what to do next. Then abruptly he reversed course and walked back up to where the footbridge crossed the channel beside the marina office. On the far side he struck off up the path which ran around the headland towards Long Bay.

He had only been walking ten minutes when he rounded a bend and saw the old plantation house, perched on a slight rise above the beach. There were lights burning in several windows, but he could see no movement.

There were two single-storey buildings behind the main two-storey house, and the property as a whole was surrounded by a high wall, along the top of which Franklin could just make out the glint of razor wire. The only break in these perimeter defences was a pair of colonial-style gates, adorned with post-colonial video surveillance equipment.

The plantation house had verandas on three sides of each storey, and as Franklin watched a woman came out through a door on to the upper deck and stood at the railing, looking out to sea. She seemed to be wearing a T-shirt and tight trousers, but as Franklin soon discovered, the trousers were only in his imagination. As she flicked on the lighter for her cigarette, he could see that she was naked from the waist down.

The flare died away, and he stood there staring at the distant silhouette, thinking that a painter or photographer would find it hard to come up with a purer image of loneliness.

*   *   *

Nick Russell’s watch, which he had forgotten to take off in his drunken stupor the previous night, told him it was seven forty-five. The lack of light from the small window high in the wall told him it was evening. Assuming he hadn’t been out for two days, it was the evening after the one he had spent with Missie.

He forced himself into a sitting position, and had the distinct feeling his brain was slopping around inside his head. He held his head in his hands and took several deep breaths.

He was still sitting in that position when the key clicked in the door. He looked up suddenly, hoping to see Emelisse Alabri again, and felt his head swim. When his eyes cleared he found a black man standing over him, a gun sticking out of his waistband.

If I was compos mentis, Russell thought, the man would be without the gun by now. But he wasn’t. And there would probably be other chances to indulge in empty heroics later.

He grinned, and even that seemed to conjure up a desire for sleep.

‘You walk?’ the man asked in English with a marked French accent.

‘I don’t know,’ Russell said mildly. ‘Are we going for a stroll?’

The man smiled. ‘Something like that. The commandant wants to see you.’

‘I’ll be home all evening.’

The man grasped Russell roughly under the arm and pulled him to his feet. His brain rocked to and fro, and settled down once more. Maybe he was getting the hang of it.

‘Enough joking,’ the man was saying.

It seemed like good advice. Russell tried a couple of paces and found he could just about walk. The man prodded him in the direction of the door.

Outside he found a short passageway. To the right were more doors, to the left an opening on to the outside world. The man prodded him again, towards the latter.

He emerged from the doorway into a world not that dissimilar to the ones Hieronymus Bosch had painted several centuries before. It was a darkness split by fires, full of reeling shadows, with hanging bodies swaying in the breeze. Bosch had never made movies, but if he had ever needed a soundtrack then the ominous, overlapping rhythms of different drummers would probably have been just what the doctor ordered.

As his eyes gradually focused, Russell could see that the fires were mostly surrounded by people cooking, the shadows were tall palms waving in the breeze, the hanging bodies long garments drying on a line. The drums, though, still sounded ominous.

‘Who are the drummers?’ he asked his escort.

‘Just voodoo priests,’ the man said. He sounded bored by the idea.

There were buildings all around them, Russell realized. In fact the place didn’t look that dissimilar to the place where he lived and worked. There were several low buildings grouped in a rough square which could easily be hospital wards. Or barracks, he thought, as they emerged from under a group of palms and a tall watch-tower loomed into view against the night sky. It wore a radar dish on its roof, which made the whole structure look like one of H. G. Wells’s Martian war machines balancing a plate on its head.

But if it was a barracks, then who were these people grouped around the fires? They looked more like refugees than soldiers. And in fact most of them seemed to be not much more than children.

Russell began to feel very tired. ‘I can’t walk much farther,’ he said.

‘We are almost there,’ the man told him, gesturing towards the building directly ahead of them.

What seemed like an hour later they reached the door. Inside the furnishings were smarter than Russell had expected, and had a distinctly military feel to them. It reminded him of the Admin block back in Poole.

The next thing he knew he was coming back to life in a chair, with a new throbbing pain in his head. Since there didn’t seem much profit in anyone hitting him again, he assumed he must have collapsed.

‘Mr Russell,’ a voice addressed him. With a supreme effort he managed to refocus his eyes. The man who had spoken was sitting opposite him, behind an office desk, leaning back in his chair with hands behind his head, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. There was more American than French in his accent, but the face, though African, had a Gallic quality to it. The nose was decidedly Roman, the mouth almost thin-lipped, the hair lustrous and wavy. The eyes, though, were what drew Russell’s attention. They seemed to be straining at their sockets, as if eager to leap out and devour the world.

For the first time in an often dangerous life Russell had the sense that he was in the presence of evil.

‘Who are you?’ he asked quietly. The words seemed to boom inside his head.

The man smiled, ‘I am Toussaint Joutard. Colonel Joutard. But . . .’

‘Of the Haitian Army?’ Russell interrupted him.

Joutard didn’t seem to mind. ‘I am the leader of an organization known as the Sons of the Motherland. We work closely with the army, of course. Most of the time we share the same objectives.’

His English was perfect, Russell thought, and said so.

‘I lived in America for several years.’

Bully for you, Russell thought. The man was probably another CIA-trained fascist gone bananas in his own country. ‘Why have I been brought here?’ he asked.

Joutard smiled again, but it wasn’t the sort of smile which engendered bonhomie. ‘You could say this was a job interview . . .’

‘I already have a job.’

‘No longer. You will either take the job I am offering you, or you will be killed.’ His lips creased in response to some inner amusement. ‘Either way I shall make an excellent profit.’

The last sentence passed Russell by. ‘What have I done to you?’ he asked.

Joutard looked at him for a few seconds. ‘You don’t know?’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps you don’t. It doesn’t really matter any more.’ He slapped the desktop suddenly with the palm of his hand, and then seemed to examine the backs of his fingers. ‘You are an extremely lucky man, Mr Russell,’ he said. ‘We lose the services of one of our doctors, and, hey presto, here you are. I’m told you’re a paramedic, which I assume is a step up from being a nurse. Well, here you’ll take another step up – to doctor.’

‘I don’t have that sort of training . . .’ Russell said.

‘You will get it here. A man with your experience will have no difficulty learning the techniques required – the operations performed here are simple enough.’ He smiled yet again. ‘We’re not doing brain surgery yet.’

Russell felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. ‘What sort of operations are you talking about?’

Joutard told him.

Russell just shook his head.

‘Of course, if you refuse you will be killed and your body harvested. Being British, you might think that seems a jolly noble sort of thing to do. But you must also understand that these operations will be performed with or without you, and that the patients’ chances of survival will no doubt worsen dramatically if they are performed by people with inferior skills. So it might be more noble to stay, n’est-ce pas? And of course if you accept – not that I imagine such matters interest you – you will earn an extraordinary amount of money in a short space of time.’ He paused for effect and then looked up and said: ‘So you can either leave the sick to fend for themselves or die a useless death.’

Russell just looked at him.

‘I will give you until tomorrow morning to decide which.’ His eyes moved across to Russell’s escort by the door. ‘Take him to the late Dr Barlow’s bungalow,’ he said. ‘And tell Dr Alabri I want to see her.’

Franklin got home soon after ten, and found Sibou waiting anxiously for him.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked angrily. ‘Why didn’t you phone?’

‘I . . .’

‘Your best friend vanishes off the face of the earth, and then you take five hours over a trip to Suzie’s and expect me not to worry?’

He reached out for her hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘So I should think.’ She burrowed into his arms, and they held each other tight for a while. Eventually she disentangled herself. ‘Where have you been then?’ she asked.

He told her what he had learned at Suzie’s Bar and the Caicos Marina, and of seeing Arcilla’s sister. ‘When I got back to the marina I had another talk with the guy there. He told me Arcilla has a private helicopter, and that he heard it taking off in the middle of the night.’

‘So Nick could have been taken away by air or by boat.’

‘Yep. He could be anywhere by now – the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, you name it. And we still haven’t got a clue why he was taken.’

‘Maybe they needed another diver for this treasure business,’ Sibou suggested.

Franklin thought about it. ‘You could be right there. Though I don’t see why they couldn’t just hire one. There’s enough of them around.’

‘I suppose.’

Franklin sat down on the sofa, laid his back against it and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know what else we can do,’ he said.

She sat down next to him. ‘Put pressure on Oswald,’ she said. ‘If that doesn’t work, go to his superiors on Grand Turk.’

‘And if they can’t find him?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. It was too much to accept – that a friend could disappear in such circumstances and that nothing could be done to find him.

The late Dr Barlow’s bungalow turned out to be as comfortable as Russell’s own on Providenciales. The screening seemed to be in good repair, and the air-conditioner, though somewhat noisy, was an efficient enough cooler. There was a refrigerator in the kitchen, a working shower in the bathroom. The furniture was somewhat sparse, but did include a functioning cassette player. The doctor’s tastes had apparently been somewhat different from Russell’s – Handel rather than Hendrix.

Having concluded this brief tour, Russell sank back exhausted on to the large bed. He could still hear drumming in the distance, and see the reflected light of the fires dancing in the trees outside. It occurred to him that Colonel Joutard had not bothered to warn him against trying to escape.

From what he could remember the Ile de Tortue – or Tortuga, as the English called it – was several miles off the northern coast of Haiti. In the old days it had been used as a base by French and English buccaneers for raiding the Spanish gold traffic which passed through the nearby Windward Passage. Russell had no idea who lived on the island now, or whether the writ of the Haitian Government – such as it was – extended this far. It seemed much more likely that Joutard had turned the place into a semi-private fiefdom.

Escape should be possible. Russell’s expertise as a diver was common knowledge on Providenciales, but his background in the Marines and SBS was known only to very few, and Joutard had given no indication that he was aware of this pre-medical career.

Still, as of that moment he was in no condition to walk round the bungalow, let alone make a break for the Turks and Caicos Islands. He would need to be fully recovered from the effects of the chloroform, and to know a lot more about exactly where he was, before seriously contemplating escape. One such attempt, he suspected, was all he was likely to be allowed.

And in the meantime he had Joutard’s offer of employment to consider. Not that there seemed to be much choice.

He wondered if there was anything to drink anywhere on the premises. Levering himself gingerly off the bed, he was halfway to a promising-looking cabinet when there was a rap on the outside door.

Maybe room service, he thought wryly. He tried to shout ‘come in’, but could manage little more than a loud croak.

Whoever it was seemed to hear. He heard the door open and close, and there she was standing in the doorway of the room, still wearing the white coat. She looked just as lovely as before. But then she had seemed like a ministering angel; now he knew her to be one of Joutard’s ‘doctors’. And maybe she had been sent to him as a further inducement to sign on the dotted line.

‘I thought I’d better check up on you,’ she said.

‘I’m OK.’

She walked forward and took hold of his wrist, the way he had seen Ching Ling do with patients back at the clinic.

‘You do Chinese medicine?’

She concentrated on his pulses. ‘Only a little,’ she said, taking the other wrist. ‘One of my grandmothers was Chinese.’

That explained her extraordinary face, he thought.

‘Your pulses are better,’ she said. ‘You should be back to normal in a couple of days. But you should be in bed,’ she added.

‘OK, doc,’ he said, expecting her to leave.

But instead she stood there, obviously uncertain about something.

Russell found himself wondering what Joutard had wanted with her.

As usual she seemed to read his mind. ‘The colonel wants me to persuade you to work for us,’ she said.

‘With what?’ he asked wryly.

Anger flashed in her eyes. ‘By appealing to your better nature,’ she said sarcastically.

‘Not my nose for profit?’ he replied in kind.

‘I may be mistaken in your case,’ she said slowly, ‘but nursing isn’t usually the sort of career someone enters with money in mind.’

Russell looked at her. ‘I may be mistaken in your case,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think doctors signed on for Joutard’s sort of operation with anything else in mind.’

Her whole body seemed to tense, and for a moment he thought she was going to hit him, but then she let it all out in a long sigh. ‘How would you know?’ she said, looking at the floor.

‘Explain it to me.’

She looked him in the eye, and for a moment he felt uncomfortable, as if she was seeing right through him. ‘The world doesn’t always work the way you want it to,’ she said. ‘Especially in Haiti. There are two hundred young people here who have no parents, and no matter what I do they will suffer. But I can lessen that suffering; I can see that they lead a healthy life after they leave here.’

‘Are you here willingly?’

She shrugged. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Could you walk out of this place, and take a boat across the strait, and tell the authorities in Port au Prince what is going on here?’

She sighed again. ‘You don’t understand. There are no authorities in Port au Prince who would care a damn about what’s happening here. And even if there were, do you think Joutard would throw his hands up in the air and promise not to do such things again? Of course not. He’d just find another base, another corrupt government.’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘This is the Third World in 1994, for heaven’s sake – where have you been?’

Exploring coral reefs, was the answer that came to mind. It didn’t seem the sort that would appeal to her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, unexpectedly. ‘This is not your country, and you have been brought here against your will. There’s no reason why you should want to help me.’

‘There’s no reason why I should want to help Joutard. Except that he’ll kill me if I don’t.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. If there’s some sort of principle at stake here that you think is worth dying for, then there’s nothing more I can say. Except that if you do decide to live, then your skills will make a difference to the children here.’

Russell bit back the retort that was on his tongue. ‘There’s no principle,’ he said. ‘Nothing that grand. And I have no desire to die, or to be “harvested”. I’ll work for Joutard. But I’m not going to kid myself into thinking that I’m doing something that’s morally acceptable.’

She smiled for the first time, but Russell found it unsettling rather than comforting, for in it he seemed to see his own pomposity reflected.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But after you’ve been here a while you may decide that morality is just one more luxury no one can afford.’