Afterward
O’Hara felt like he stood at the edge of an abyss, peering into the planet’s future. Most of the bridge was gone. Choppers circled overhead, sirens shrieked, the mouth of the bridge was jammed with vehicles, first responders, survivors of the catastrophe. He watched the bedlam from one of the ferry docks while Annie paced back and forth, texting and calling her mother and Sheppard.
She trotted over to him, alarm scrawled all over face. “They aren’t responding. I’m going down into the crowd, they might be there.”
Unless they died when the bridge collapsed. Neither of them said it, but he knew they both were thinking it. Annie spun away from him and started down the steep hill toward the mouth of the bridge. O’Hara ran after her, his shoes knocking loose pebbles and rocks. “Hey, wait for me.” He caught up to her, grasped her hand, and they made their way down the twisting, narrow path, knocking loose stones, dirt, prickly shrubs, and reached the bottom.
The chaos of terrified, traumatized people was so extreme they couldn’t get near the mouth of the bridge. Just the noise level felt like a violation. But Annie charged on through the crowd and he gripped her hand more tightly so they wouldn’t get separated.
Then O’Hara spotted Sheppard, a giant in the crowd, and made his way toward him, pulling Annie along behind him. She kept shouting, “Mom, Shep!” But her voice was swallowed by all the noise and then they were stopped by a wall of cops, yelling at them to get back, get back.
“We’re with FBI agent Sheppard,” O’Hara shouted. “He’s right over there.” He stabbed his hand toward Sheppard and Mira, one of the cops glanced in that direction, and Sheppard saw them.
He and Mira pushed their way toward him and Annie. The reunion was so powerful and strange and overwhelming that for the first time in his life, O’Hara understood what family meant.
Sheppard pulled him to one side. “We’ve got a body to take to Ian’s.”
“The woman who destroyed the bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“We want to be there for the autopsy report.”
“We’ll meet you at Ian’s tomorrow morning. I’ll text you.”
2
They got home around 4:30 the next morning. Mira showered, then collapsed on her own bed, in her own home, next to Sheppard, already snoring. She stared at the ceiling, disjointed images cascading through her.
Videos of what had happened on the bridge had gone viral within minutes of being posted on social media. Florida’s governor called it a “terrorist attack.” But that conjured images of planes slamming into buildings on 9-11 by Mideastern men, a lousy attempt to distract from the truth—that the woman on the bridge with lightning shooting from her hands was something else entirely.
First, Stoner, then Lightning Woman. 2144. Not science fiction. In a few hours when Rincon conducted an autopsy on her, Mira felt sure he would find an identifying chip in her.
Mira rolled onto her side and reached for Sheppard’s hand. His fingers twitched closed around hers. Can you forgive me? In all their years together, he never had said that to her, never apologized to her for anything. It changed things on a personal level and did so within the context of a broader, more dangerous change. Tango Key was under attack and invasion by people from the future who possessed extraordinary powers.
She pulled a pillow over her head and shut her eyes.
The autopsy room in Rincon’s office felt colder today than it had yesterday, Mira thought, but maybe it was due to her exhaustion, lack of sleep, the uncertainty of everything. They were all here—Sheppard, Delgado, Annie and O’Hara—sitting around the room, staring at the body of the lightning woman. In the bright overhead lights, Mira thought the woman looked vastly diminished from how she’d appeared on the bridge with that lightning pulsing through her.
Yet, her wild, curly hair still held a shine. Those powerful hands that burned with lightning lay motionless at her sides, fingers long, nails short, neatly clipped, no polish, the hands of a pianist or a sculptor. Her expression in death seemed startled, mouth slightly open, as though she had uttered something as she died.
“She looks human enough,” Rincon remarked.
Sheppard nodded. “Yeah. But how does a human possibly do what she did?”
“Maybe like an electric eel,” Rincon replied. “I’ll know more when I autopsy her.”
“Can you explain about the eel?” Mira asked.
Rincon ran his hand over his bald head and paced as he spoke. “My grasp of marine biology is limited, okay? But my understanding is that an eel has three pairs of abdominal organs that enable it to generate two kinds of electricity—low voltage and high. But like I said, I’ll know more once I do the autopsy.”
“Mom, when you were reading the stone woman, you said something about how the dolphins would know,” Annie said. “About fifteen minutes before stuff started happening on the bridge last night, Jon and I were at the center for the last feeding. The dolphins went batshit.”
“In what way?” Delgado asked.
“They were frantic, ramming the walls of their tanks, just freaking out.” Annie’s hands moved around as she spoke, describing the event in gestures. “Two of them escaped into the canal. Then we heard the first explosion.”
“So maybe they really are our early monitoring system,” Mira said. “How’re you keeping tabs on them, Annie?”
“App on my phone. Security cams. My boss is headed here with some marine biologists.”
“The ferries are packed,” Rincon said. “It may be a while before they get here.”
“So where do we go now?” Mira asked.
“X-rays,” Rincon said. “An autopsy. And first, a reading, if you’re up to it, Mira.”
Forget it. That was what she wanted to say. But it was too late for that. She was involved, immersed. “I’ll try.”
“After that, we need a plan,” Sheppard remarked.
“Hey, there’s an exodus underway,” O’Hara said. “And not just snowbirds. Is that what we should do? Get out? People have been emailing me, asking.”
“No way I’m going anywhere,” Delgado said. “Tango is my home, my family is here.”
“I think that’s how we all feel,” Sheppard said.
“Jon’s column about the bridge tragedy went up early this morning and already has been picked up by every major newspaper in Florida and the TV networks,” Annie said. “Nearly all of them are calling it a terrorist attack.”
“That started with the governor,”Mira said. “It’s ludicrous unless ISIS now has super powers.”
“Hey,” Sheppard said, holding up his cell. “It’s not just the media. I got a text from Goot. Within the next hour or so, the governor’s going to declare a state of emergency in the keys and inform us that two thousand National Guard troops are headed here.”
That would mean a run on food and supplies, Mira thought. Like before a hurricane. “No one’s going to believe this terrorist attack routine. Social media has it all—photos, videos, closeups,”
“Regardless,” Delgado said. “Everything here is about to go haywire. The panicked buying, ferries crowded beyond capacity, the airport closing, a curfew.”
“Shit. So it’s like another Hurricane Danielle,” Sheppard said. “That kind of panic.”
Rincon nodded. “We all remember, Shep. We were living here. We’re the old-timers.”
“I’m not,” O’Hara said. “Fifteen years ago I was a kid In Fort Lauderdale with my own ghost hunting group. My parents were riveted to the news about Danielle. My dad wanted to evacuate because at one point her predicted landfall was between Miami and Lauderdale.”
“Did you evacuate?” Mira asked.
O’Hara shook his head. “My mom refused. She said she had a gut feeling. She used to have a lot of those. And they usually were right. It hit Tango and in Lauderdale we didn’t feel a thing.”
Right then, Mira decided she liked O’Hara. And since he would become her daughter’s lover—or already was—she really had wanted to like the man. Now she did.
“I’ll see what I can pick up.”
Mira slipped off her shoes, got up, and started twisting her bare feet against the floor. She deepened her breathing. Then she walked around the autopsy table, surveying the woman from different angles, and grasped the sides of her head. She didn’t pick up anything, didn’t feel anything. She removed the dead woman’s shoes, ran her hands over her feet. Moved to her arms and shoulders. “Nothing’s here. Or I’m just not seeing it.”
“Is it because she’s dead?” O’Hara asked.
“Maybe. But it feels like… it requires skills I don’t have.”
Rincon said, “It’s probably for the best right now. We all need to stock up on gas and supplies.”
“Let’s touch base after the governor’s announcement, see where things stand,” Sheppard suggested. “Ian, text us if the autopsy turns up something unusual.”
“I’m going to stick around and help Ian with the autopsy or whatever he needs,” Delgado said.
While the others gathered up their things, Mira leaned in close to the lightning woman, whispered to her. “What is it I don’t have that would break through that wall around you? What is it I have that I’m not using? Huh? Because I feel like that’s what’s going on here.” She stroked the dead woman’s cheeks with her knuckles and clearly heard four words: Hal fucked me over.
Surprised, Mira cupped the woman’s face in her hands and spoke to her again. “Who’s Hal?”
No voice this time, but her head exploded with a vision.
Inside a warehouse in the dome, a handsome biracial man speaks to several dozen people who listen with rapt attention. Mira hears only a white noise, a low static that keeps her from discerning speech. But the members of the audience line up, all of them holding an object of some kind. One by one, they come forward and demonstrate an ability. Telekinesis. Invisibility. Fire starter. Chameleon. Shape shifter. There are more, but these shock her so deeply she snaps out of it and wrenches back, away from the body drawer.
“Jesus.”
She turned quickly, anxious to get away from the body, and found all the others still in the room, staring at her. “What happened, Mom?”
She thought the information might slip away from her if she didn’t say anything, and blurted out what she’d seen. “Their powers… the ones I saw… are… staggering.”
“What kind of staggering?” Sheppard asked. “Like what we’ve already seen?”
“Stephen King staggering?” Annie asked. “Or like the monster in Stranger Things?”
“Both. More.” And she told them.
“Fuck,” O’Hara said.
3
O’Hara and Annie made their way to the parking lot. He’d crashed on her couch after they’d reunited with Mira and Sheppard at the decimated bridge, and right now, he didn’t have any desire to go back to his place alone. When they reached her car, he felt as awkward as a teen on a first date.
“How’re you set for supplies and food?” he asked.
“Good, I’m good.” Then she suddenly blurted, “Hey, you want to come to my place again? I’ll fix us omelets. Or something. I’m a basic cook, but my fridge is full, and mi casa es tu casa. And honestly, I don’t want to spend any more time alone in my apartment, waiting for the fucking Apocalypse.”
He laughed. He had his iPad, a pack in the trunk that held essentials—toiletries, a change of clothes, chargers, extra cash. “Me, either. I’ll follow you.”
And just like that, it was decided. Everything with her felt easy, comfortable.
Her apartment lay a couple of miles from the Dolphin Research Center, a one-bedroom place above a barn on an old equestrian estate. He hadn’t noticed details earlier, he’d been too wiped out. Now he realized the estate covered several acres and most of the windows looked out onto a training ring, pasture, trees, conferring a sense of spaciousness. It was colorful and haphazardly furnished—Offerup, eBay, flea markets—but felt strangely comfortable to him.
“You can set up over there,” she said, pointing at a desk in front of the window. “I’ll get started on those omelets.” She dropped her bag in a chair and headed for the kitchen.
O’Hara set his iPad on the desk, next to her MacBook Pro, dropped his pack on the couch, sat down and went to work. This column would be his second about the bridge fiasco, with a focus on the aftermath. But halfway through it, the smell of food drew him to the kitchen doorway. Annie chopped up veggies and wore earbuds, her slender hips swaying to whatever she was listening to. Now and then she bopped from the counter to the fridge and back again, everything about her rhythmic, beautiful, natural. But beneath it rippled an undercurrent of wildness, as if at any second her body might explode into some mind-blowing dance performance.
The small kitchen table held four bamboo placemats, one in front of each chair, and a fifth placement in the center with a ceramic dolphin on it. There was a basket of warm rolls, butter, jellies, honey. She grabbed paper napkins from a holder on the counter, pulled open the silverware drawer and brought out four forks and four knives, and turned to put them on the table and saw him. She popped out her earbuds. He heard Taylor Swift.
“Nearly ready,” she announced. Take these….” Napkins, silverware. “And tell me what you’d like to drink. Coffee, lemonade, water, beer…”
“Beer with omelets?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Okay, beer.” He started setting out the napkins and silverware. “Who’re the other two settings for?”
“The head of the table, to the north, is for my great-grandmother, Nadine. The south end is for my dad. They drop in sometimes.”
Oh. Shit. “You see them?”
“Not like my mom does. I mean, she has regular conversations with Tom and Nadine. But sometimes, I see vague silhouettes of one or the other and if I really focus, I can sort of see them.” She set two beers on the table, Tango Tasters, from a local brewery. “I’m better at talking with animals.”
“And the fifth setting with the dolphin sculpture on it?”
“That symbolizes dolphins in the wild. They don’t belong in captivity. When I started working at the center three years ago, I was just out of college and needed a job. I was assigned to Boss, Prissy and Rose, our newest rescues, babies. The four of us got close and I promised them that when they were old enough to survive in the wild, I would free them. Free all of them.”
“Are they old enough now?”
“Yup.”
“And?”
“I’d been planning how to do it, but then all this chaos happened. But the chaos might actually make it easier.”
She planned to free captive dolphins. Right then, whatever residual affection he held for his ex-partner evaporated.
Annie returned to the stove and started whipping up the omelets. He turned his head to the north end of the table, the south end, didn’t see or sense anything. “So you always keep these places set for your dad and Nadine?” he asked.
“Yeah. I don’t really remember much about my dad. He died when I was three and for most of my life, Shep has been my dad. But I feel like I should have a place for him, you know?”
O’Hara suddenly wondered where the hell she’d been most of his life. He walked up behind her, slipped an arm around her waist, took the spatula out of her hand and flipped the omelets. Then she turned and they stared at each other and she touched her finger to his mouth and said, “Holy shit,” and he kissed her.
After that, it was all animal instinct and hormones. They tore off each other’s clothes and before they stumbled toward the bedroom, one of them had the presence of mind to move the frying pan from the burner and turn off stove. They fell back onto the softest bed he’d ever known.
Making love to Annie ended whatever nostalgia he still felt about his ex, their fucked up marriage, its lingering aftermath. He felt like he’d come home and didn’t have any idea what that meant. Afterward, they lay on this incredibly wonderful bed, fingers threaded together, and whispered in the dark.
“What was your marriage like?” she asked.
“Awful. We were mismatched from the start.”
“Hmm. I’ve had relationships like that. As soon as I mention stuff like what we’ve talked about the guy is gone.”
“I’ve been writing about this weird shit all my life, but when I saw that stone woman, Annie, I knew I wasn’t ready to confront or experience the things I write about.”
“Yeah?” She lifted up on her elbow and leaned down and kissed him. “And look where you ended up.”
They made love again, then she poked him in the side. “Let’s go polish off those omelets. It’s, like, nine in the morning and I have to get to the center after we go to Dr. Rincon’s.”
“And I need to finish my article and get it uploaded. But I’d like to hear more about your plan to free the dolphins.”
“Yeah? It’s illegal, but frankly, I don’t give a shit about that anymore. When I’ve freed the dolphins at this center, I’d like to do the same for the facility in Key Largo. They at least take in injured dolphins and nurse them back to health until they can be released. But the center here keeps them for entertainment.”
She was sitting at the edge of the bed then, pulling on her clothes, and glanced back at him, the wash of light from the kitchen capturing her determined expression. “Annie Morales, rogue,” he remarked.
“And who will then be unemployed.” She shrugged. “I guess I’ll go back to work at the bookstore.”
“Unless they toss you in jail.”
“Not likely. It’s going to look like a weakness in the fence that separates the main tank and the canal.”
“Count me in.”
“Really?” She looked delighted—and surprised, and leaned toward him and kissed him.
It didn’t even matter to him if the Apocalypse happened in the next five minutes. Right now, at this instant as he pulled on clothes, he felt happier than he had in years.
5
By noon, commercial flights into and out of Tango Key had been cancelled, all private planes were grounded, and the airport was still closed to everything except military transport planes. Sheppard’s federal ID got him into the terminal, deserted except for a handful of local cops, and now he stood at the large front window, watching a military transport plane on final approach.
As it landed, another plane circled the airport and touched down minutes later. Both of them taxied to the far side of the airport. Humvees, Jeeps, and a tank drove off, followed by several hundred National Guard troops. Sheppard spotted Gutierrez hopping into a Jeep with a soldier. It sped across the runway and swerved to a stop in front of the terminal.
Gutierrez got out. He had ditched the suit and tie he’d worn in Miami and now looked like a Tango Fritter, island casual in jeans, a cotton shirt, and windbreaker. His bulging pack, slung over his shoulder, bounced against his hip. Sheppard walked out to greet him and Gutierrez, true to his Cuban roots, gave him an abrazo, the male version of a hug.
“Amigo. Getting here was iffy. Had to show my ID probably half a dozen times.”
“The National Guard is acting like the Gestapo. Weird, seeing you with all those soldiers.”
“It was weird flying here with them. They seem to think this is an Orson Welles broadcast and it’s all bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit.”
“So your skeptic demon took a hike, Shep?”
“After what I saw on that bridge, Goot, I’m in the school of anything is possible.”
“Well, goddamn. Never thought I’d hear that. There may be hope yet for you and Mira.”
“Very funny.”
“Has she filed for divorce yet?”
“No. But she probably should have.”
“Damn straight.”
It was like something Nadine would say, Sheppard thought, a dig at him, at his skepticism. “Hey, I get it, okay? I fucked up. All along.”
Gutierrez made a hasty sign of the cross in the air, muttered something in Spanish that roughly translated to, All is forgiven, son.
Sheppard laughed. “Yeah, right, Padre.”
They went through the terminal, out the front door, and headed to the parking lot. “So what’s going on, Shep?”
Just then, a lean man in camouflage clothes trotted up alongside them. Short graying hair, dark sunglasses. “Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen. I understand you’re FBI?”
Sheppard and Gutierrez introduced themselves. “And you’re…?” Sheppard asked.
“Frank Keel, head of these troops, and I believe you’re my contact, Agent Sheppard.”
“Right. My most recent text from the Miami bureau office said we’d be meeting at our office here on Tango in an hour. Glad we don’t have to wait.”
“I’d like to make my position clear.” Keel tugged at his shirt as though it didn’t fit comfortably. “The governor can call this whatever he wants, terrorist attack or invasion by Martians. But we’ve all seen the videos. It’s considerably stranger. And more dangerous.”
Gutierrez snorted. “I don’t think that’s how your troops feel. I just flew over here with a bunch of them. They seem to think it’s all fake news, a joke. But I gotta tell you, amigo, to me this looks like a sci-fi movie—an invasion by powerful weirdos who may have come from nearly two hundred years in the future, where the planet has been fucked by climate change.”
“It’s not a movie, Sergeant Gutierrez.”
“Agent. I’m Agent Gutierrez. With the FBI.”
“Whatever. Their intentions aren’t good.” Keel stopped in front of a black SUV with an ID tag tucked under a windshield wiper. “Here I am.”
“We’re headed over to the coroner’s office first to get the results of an autopsy on the lightning woman,” Sheppard said. “Why don’t you follow us?
“Sounds good.”
“We’re a row behind you,” Gutierrez told him.
“See you at the coroner’s office,” Keel said.
Sheppard and Gutierrez hurried on toward Sheppard’s car. Gutierrez glanced back at Keel. “Uh, Shep. He’s a strange dude. Are they in charge or are we?”
“That’s part of what we’re going to clarify.”
“Saw the videos, your report, Delgado’s report, Rincon’s report, and Jon O’Hara’s piece. What defense do we have against something like this?”
Ask me something simple. “Guns? Grenades? Tanks? Nukes? I don’t know. But dolphins may be our early warning system. The ones where Annie works were freaking before the events on the bridge. When they go nuts, it apparently means more of these Crows have arrived.”
“I don’t suppose they give us geographical coordinates or any indication of how many.”
“Annie’s our interpreter. So far, it’s just an arrival warning.”
Gutierrez looked skyward as another transport plane circled. “Don’t know why, Shep, but the fact that Keel is in charge of two thousand troops disturbs me.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
They got into Sheppard’s Highlander. “Your car died on the bridge?” Gutierrez asked.
“The bureau’s car died on the bridge. My car needs a new battery. This is a rental.”
“Battery dead? Doesn’t that qualify as something significant in Mira’s scheme of things?”
Sheppard often wondered if Gutierrez was the brother he’d never had, the believer to his skeptic, the mystic to his give me the facts. “Probably a synchronicity. The inner reflected in the outer. Or, more specifically, we nearly got killed on that bridge and the battery in my car is dead.”
“Better the battery than you and Mira, amigo. Among Cubans, those moments are called, el voz del alma, Shep. The…”
“… voice of the soul.” Sheppard didn’t feel like going into the mystical shit. “Yeah. I’m fluent, remember?” Sheppard knew he sounded defensive.
“Hey, I’m not Nadine. In fact, I bet she now regrets her bias against you.”
“Yeah? She learned something after she died?”
“So say the Cuban Santeros.”
As they headed toward Rincon’s office, they passed long lines at gas stations and convenience stores and jammed supermarket parking lots. Gutierrez whistled softly. “The island is locked in panic mode, Shep. Just like it was before Danielle hit.”
“You’re welcome to stay with us. Mira is restocking the cabin.”
“Probably safer than either of our houses. More remote.”
“After what I saw last night, I’m not sure anywhere is safe.”
6
The lightning woman lay on the autopsy table, stitched up from head to toe. The shine in her hair had vanished, Mira thought, and nothing about her looked special. She was as dead as a fallen leaf.
Rincon brought up the autopsy images on his iPad, and they all looked on—Mira, Sheppard, Gutierrez, Keel.
“First off, she has a chip in her arm—white crow 919, May 2134. She has two hearts, the right one smaller than the left. She has three pairs of abdominal organs, like I suspected, same as an electric eel. But for an eel, those abdominal organs comprise most of its body. Not so for her.” He paused, glanced up at each of them. “I don’t have any idea how this would work in a human. I’m just telling you what I found.”
“Hold on.” Sheppard held up his hands as if to ward off something threatening. “Are we supposed to believed her DNA was fiddled with? Is that how this electrical thing originated?”
Keel looked amused. “That’s one possibility, Agent Sheppard. But it’s more likely to be the result of a rapid evolutionary change. Recent research tells us that environmental changes trigger these evolutionary changes in a matter of generations instead of millennia. I think that’s what we’re seeing here.”
Rincon nodded in agreement. “Based on what Mira has told us so far my guess is that on that decades-long journey inland from the coasts, infants were born with these abilities. By 2144, the date Mira pinpointed, these Crows were fully established, powerful. But they were badly outnumbered by the Normals, who subdued them with drugs and any other means they had.”
“They’re refugees,” Mira said. “Like your grandparents, like mine. But they intend to seize Tango, establish a colony here. And then move on out to the rest of the planet.”
Keel looked at her, his expression one that Mira had seen throughout her life—of skepticism, incredulity. Then he laughed. “And you know this how?”
Right then, she didn’t like Keel at all. He challenged her to prove herself in the way skeptics often did, like Sheppard initially had about all this. It felt like some ancient episode of Dragnet. Just the facts, ma’am.
So she gave him facts. “I know this the same way that I know your ex-wife is bearing the brunt of responsibility for your autistic son, who feels his dad is so emotionally absent that he…”
“You made your point.” He cut her off quickly. “I thought you had to touch something or someone to pick up information.”
“Sometimes the information is so close to the surface it’s like skimming cream off milk.” Something else about Keel bugged her, but it lay deeper inside him and she couldn’t define it. At some point, she would have to touch him to find it.
“I’d like copies of your findings, Dr. Rincon,” said Keel.
“Everyone will get copies.” Rincon brought up another set of images. “Her hippocampus is huge. That part of the brain is the source of psi. Hers is twice as large as that of an ordinary human. Yours is probably similar, Mira.”
“I’m sure mine shrank during the last six years. And compared to what we’ve seen these people do… mine is microscopic.”
“It doesn’t matter what your ability is,” Rincon said. “If you have something, it shows up here.”
Gutierrez shook his head. “My hippocampus is probably the size of a microbe. How do we defend ourselves?”
“Right now, we use what we have.” Mira pulled a nine-millimeter out of her bag. “I’m no gun advocate, but I think we all need to be armed.”
Keel nodded. “We’ve got two thousand troops, armed and ready, divided between here and the rest of the keys.”
Just the number of National Guard troops made Mira uncomfortable. And that discomfort escalated when Keel added, “It would be terrific to capture one of these Crows.”
Sheppard laughed, a sharp biting sound. “Considering their abilities, that might be impossible.”
“Not with tranquilizing darts,” Keel said.
“One step at a time. We may have a tool that’s going to help.” Sheppard reached into his bag, brought out a smaller pack, set it on the counter. “I found this pack on the bridge last night, next to the crow. With everything that went on, I forgot about it until I woke up.”
Gutierrez ran his hands over the pack. “Looks like something from Old Navy,” he remarked.
“No zipper,” Mira said. “Just buckles. Feels like it’s made of heavy fabric.”
“So here goes.” Sheppard opened the pack, brought out a drawstring bag and a snow globe. “I found these wrapped in some clothes.” He opened the drawstring bag and poured what looked like gold nuggets into his palm.
“Wow,” Mira exclaimed.
“Coño, hombre. Gold,” Gutierrez said.
Keel picked up a nugget, bit into it. “Could be. The only reliable test is nitric acid. How many ounces are there?”
“It’s six pounds,” Sheppard replied. “Ninety-six ounces.”
Rincon looked shocked. “Holy shit. Gold is going for, like, fifteen or eighteen hundred an ounce, maybe more. If it’s really gold, that bag is worth at least $144,000.”
“There’re two bags,” Sheppard said. “Same weight. So we’re talking a minimum of $288,000.”
Keel whistled softly. “You sending it to the Miami office for analysis?
“I’ll be delivering it in person and sticking around for the analysis. But not until this is all over.”
“Good call,” Keel said. “It could easily end up in someone’s pocket.”
Sheppard looked disgusted. “That’s a damning indictment, Frank.”
“But probably true.”
Mira picked up the snow globe. “This looks like it came from the Target toy department.”
“If this little globe exists anywhere, it’s in fiction.” Sheppard shook the globe. A perfect replica of Tango Key appeared inside—marina, ferry, docks, the bridge, trees.
Mira had never seen anything quite like this. “It’s like seeing a Google Earth image of Tango in 3-D.”
“The island was their initial target,” Rincon said.
Sheppard nodded. “Exactly. Now watch this.”
He shook the globe again and the wilderness preserve took shape inside, everything lush and green. Mira saw that it even had a suggestion of running trails and she pointed them out. “Where the stone woman appeared.”
“Uh-huh.” Another shake and the bridge between Key West and Tango Key took shape, the rendition so perfect the intricate design of the suspension cables was visible.
“So Harry Potter played with this sucker as a kid,” Gutierrez remarked. “Shit, this is an agenda.”
“Any idea how it’s controlled?” Keel asked.
“Nope.” Sheppard shook it again. “Here come their next two targets.”
The globe revealed a restaurant with an open deck, a view of water, and on the other side of a railing, a wishing fountain brimming with coins. Mira recognized it. “The Island Grill.”
“And now this,” Sheppard said. “Something we all recognize.”
The fifth shake brought up the Tango lighthouse.
“So if this thing is a road map for these freaks, then we know where we need troops,” Keel said. “Unless it’s a trick.”
“Pretty elaborate trick.” Sheppard returned the snow globe to the smaller pack. “Let’s stick to what it shows. We need troops there, but not hundreds at once. We need troops inside and out that are hidden.”
“We’ve taken over the airport terminal as our command center and the preserve campground for tents and supplies,” Keel said. “We’ve extended the curfew to nine p.m. so the ferries can get in here with supplies. It’ll be dark before the curfew starts. But we’ll be in place.”