29 May
Casa Grande Brugg
Dunmore Town
North Eleuthera
Bahamas
The stone steps were cut out of sedimentary rock and led down in a rough circular pattern into the darkness. Barnaby had remembered to bring along a handheld fire stick used to ignite Sterno fuel under the chafing dishes.
The duchess’s Yorkshire terrier seemed content to lead the way, and the tiny candle flame gave him enough light to see a few feet in front of him. The reverberating sound of the music from the orchestra slowly diminished to nothing as he reached a depth of twenty feet below the main floor of the mansion. He could hear water dripping from the rock ceiling as he found the bottom step. There was a dank smell in the air.
The dog seemed to know where it was going and it pulled him ahead into the gloom.
A solid steel door emerged in the flame of the fire stick. The door was embedded in the rock wall. There was no keyhole. If it was locked from the inside, there would be no way for him to open it. While he waited uncertainly, the dog went into a crouch and peed on the rock floor.
Come what may, there was no alternative but to find out what was behind it, he decided. He slowly turned the large brass knob and pulled on it. The door came open soundlessly on well-oiled hinges. Beyond the opening was only more blackness.
When he took a step forward, an automatic switch suddenly bathed the room in brilliant light, and Barnaby could only stand dumbstruck. The enormous chamber was as big as an NFL locker room and both clean and dry. He could feel fresh air flowing into his face from a source that apparently kept the chamber at a constant temperature with controlled humidity.
It wasn’t a torture chamber as Bob Littlefrost had thought. It was a vast exhibition hall, and all the exhibits were exotic birds, each one mounted in situ in its own glass resting place. Some display cases held ten or more birds of the same species. Engraved brass nameplates identified not only the species, but the date of their capture and subsequent stuffing by Juwan Brugg.
It struck Barnaby as ludicrously ironic that many of them bore the same names as the ones he had seen in the photographs in the great hall, including the Kirtland’s warbler, the West Indian tree duck, and the Bahama swallow. If the visual evidence was to be believed, Brugg was a one-man destruction squad for the cause they were celebrating upstairs.
Barnaby took the time to explore the rest of the chamber, looking for other passageways that might lead to where Carlos was confined. The one room was all there was. When he looked around for the Yorkshire terrier, he saw that it had lain down on the carpeted floor and was fast asleep. Barnaby left him there.
• • •
It was getting too dark for Chris Kimball to see any distance with his binoculars from the reclining chair on the foredeck of Trader’s Bluff. Harbor activity had remained quiet through the afternoon and the evening.
At one point, a local police boat had slowly crisscrossed the harbor checking the hull numbers on each craft and doing random inspections aboard some of the vessels. They stopped briefly alongside the Island Time but ignored Trader’s Bluff. Otherwise the only activity close by had consisted of the ten-year-old boys hawking coconut juice from their old skiff.
They were on their way back again. As he watched through the binoculars in the rapidly falling darkness, the boy manning the oars rowed it over to the Island Time. It was moored only thirty yards away from the Hatteras and Kimball thought about shouting to them that no one was aboard.
Then it struck him that the boys already knew there was no one aboard. They had been working the yachts all afternoon and their supply of coconuts was gone. Kimball had bought one himself.
When the skiff pulled alongside Island Time, one of the boys climbed onto the stern deck and raised the lid of the stern locker. A few moments later, he tossed something to the boy on the skiff.
The boy on the boat disappeared into the darkness under the roof of the wheelhouse. Kimball hoped that Carlos had secured the hatchway down to the cabin as he decided to use the boat’s portable air horn for a few seconds to frighten them off.
Kimball was raising the air horn to issue a quick blast when Island Time disappeared in a blinding flash of brilliant light. A searing wave of heat hurled him backward into the front windshield of the Hatteras.
The explosion silenced any sound in his ruptured eardrums. He tried to sit up. A shard of metal, maybe six inches long, was embedded into his left arm. Still in shock, he glanced down at it, wondering how it had gotten there.
He could see small objects raining down from the sky and landing all over the deck. His arm began to pulse with pain, then his flash-burned face. As he sat immobilized against the cracked windshield, he looked back at the mooring where Island Time had been tethered.
There was nothing left of it or the boys’ skiff.
• • •
Lexy stood in the bedroom shared by Varna and Juwan and stared at the photographic reproduction of a young Juwan on the cover of Sports Illustrated that filled one entire wall. Varna was explaining to the tour guests the manufacturing effort that had gone into constructing their ultra-king-size bed.
“Looks rather inviting, doesn’t it?” whispered the duke of Lancaster in her ear.
Gently removing his hand from around her waist, she walked across the room and stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the compound. In the distance, she could hear what sounded like police sirens out in the harbor. The fourth-floor balcony ran ten feet in both directions, and she quickly moved away from the opening.
Emile Bardot watched her disappear into the dusky evening. It was clear to him now that she did not enjoy the inebriated groping of the old royal. What she probably needed was some French persuasion. He was about to follow her out when he felt his smartphone begin to silently vibrate in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
Turning away from the tour guests, he looked down to see the text message from Sir Henry Pindling in Nassau. Chinese arrive in thirty minutes—North Eleuthera airport—Private jet—Zhou’s son plus twenty commandos—see data link.
The data link consisted of descriptions of the three people being sought by the Chinese oligarch Zhou Shen Wui. There were grainy photographs of two of them. The retired air force general looked very young to have earned the rank. Bardot thought he bore a possible resemblance to one of the bartenders he had noticed downstairs. He wasn’t sure about the second man, who was identified as an English archaeologist. The third photograph was crystal clear. The subject in it was standing thirty feet away from him.
Bardot pulled Juwan aside for a few moments.
“From Sir Henry . . . the Chinese will be here shortly,” he whispered. “They are accompanied by a military team.”
Juwan nodded and turned back to his guests.
• • •
From the bedroom balcony, Lexy looked down at the lushly landscaped compound. She had gone out there in the hope that the balcony would provide a vantage point for observing the guard barracks. None of the other rooms they had visited on the tour permitted a view of it through the dense foliage surrounding the house.
The balcony rose far above the trees and Bob Littlefrost had told her where the guard barracks was located in relation to the house. She found it immediately. The brick building was two stories high and hidden from the mansion by the dense screen of banana trees, coconut palms, and eucalyptus trees.
Gazing down at it, she could see a small cone of light at the front entrance and a second at the rear. Three guards in shorts and T-shirts were standing outside the front entrance smoking marijuana. The distinctive smell of it wafted over the trees.
Behind her in the bedroom, she could hear the other tour guests leaving.
“Thank you for taking the time to join us on the tour of our modest home,” she heard the little partner of Juwan Brugg say. “Dinner will now be served in the great hall.”
She wondered if the duke would come out to retrieve her from the balcony and hoped that the duchess might have reined him in when she saw two figures at the rear of the guard barracks move into the cone of light.
The first person was enormous, almost as broad as tall. The second one was wearing one of the red-and-white security guard uniforms and he was carrying something over his shoulder.
It was covered by a sheet, but at one point the cloth dropped away and she saw that it was another man. He appeared to be naked and was clearly overweight. It couldn’t be Carlos, she thought, as the two figures merged into the darkness for several moments, only to reemerge into the dim lights of the barracks parking lot.
While the first figure went on ahead, the guard carrying the body opened the rear hatch of a black panel van and dumped the man inside. After closing the hatch, he followed the first figure toward the mansion house.
“I could not allow you to miss the most exciting part of the tour, mademoiselle,” said a voice behind her.
She turned and saw the man in the white suit with the scars on his cheeks.
“I was just admiring the lovely view,” she said, smiling at him. “I lost track of time.”
“I doubt that, Dr. Vaughan,” he said.
“You must have me confused—”
“Hardly,” he said, holding up his smartphone. “The photograph does not do you justice. Please know that I have no interest in harming you. I simply wish to know why you and your colleagues are so incredibly valuable to our Chinese friends.”
Pulling out a slender object from his side pocket, he pressed down on it and a stiletto blade snapped into position.
“If you will follow me, Dr. Vaughan,” he said.
They descended the staircase to the third floor with the knife held flat against her back and he led her down a side passageway. At the first door they came to, he stopped to unlock it with a key from his chain and nudged her inside. The fluorescent ceiling lights came on automatically. He locked the door behind him.
To Lexy, it looked like nothing more than a large storeroom. Aside from a table and chairs, it had shelves on two walls filled with canned goods and bottles. A stainless steel commercial refrigerator unit occupied most of the back wall.
“Please sit down and enjoy the view,” said Bardot, motioning her toward one of the chairs.
Stepping to a circuit breaker panel behind him, he flipped one of the switches. A floor panel made of solid steel began to slide back to reveal a four-foot-square opening. She leaned forward to look down through it. The room was directly over the saltwater aquarium.
“A bit melodramatic, I will admit,” said Bardot. “Juwan was inspired to build the aquarium after watching an early James Bond movie. No one thought about how the creatures were going to be fed until it was finished. This is their supply room. You would be quite amazed at the quantity and variety of the meals they consume every day.”